Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII

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gf0012-aust Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII 6/5/2004 5:08:51 AM

Interesting scenario 1) The carriers would still have been loose - and air power as we all know changed the value of battleships 2) The loss of Pearl would have been a strategic and psychological loss - but the US would still have been able to effect a pincer response if they moved some of their Carriers to Australia 3) US submarines could have helped to neutralise a captured fleet. I imagine that this would have been directed to occur within days of the loss of such capital vessels.

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Strangelove RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII 6/7/2004 3:54:40 AM

1. U.S. Carriers would still be available, but would have to base from San Diego or Australia; Midway Island most likely would have been captured in this event, giving Japan total control of the Pacific, as well as the massive quantities of oil stored at hawaii. Given U.S's inability to deploy from anywhere but SD, Japan certainly would have focused on bombing / intercepting anything coming from there. 2. Pincer attacks could have been effected later in the war, but in '41 we had, I think, only 3 carriers in the pacific. If Japan had seized Pearl, they could have added 7 battleships to their fleet, which probably could have bullied their way into sd harbor and destroyed the remanants of the us pacific fleet. 3. I don't know what the U.S. submarine fleet looked like that early in the war. But I do know that until late in '44 their torpedoes were largely ineffective, running too deep and very often not detonating on impact.

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Ozamist RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII 11/8/2004 2:50:43 PM

if japan would of done that California would be a infested colony of hte bubonic pleague what htey had used in china usa would of been dead crippeld the soldiers would of still ben out to sea but them halfe way ther knowing ther fighting for a dead country loosing batttel no food no weapons no planes usa would of died

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bsl RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII 11/9/2004 12:52:12 AM

No. Assume the worst, the facilities are still intact. At that time, it was easier to replace the trained manpower than the dockyards and tank farms of Oahu. There is no long term contamination. The residue washes away with the rains and some hosing down and all those facilities are intact, as is a major battleship force.

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bsl Ozamist 11/9/2004 12:55:54 AM

Try to restrain your enthusiasm. The conditions you seem to assume didn't exist. Japan had no such capacity to devastate America. It wasn't a question of will. It was a lack of actual capacity. For that matter, you appear to have grossly misunderstood the nature of the plagues they worked with, how they are spread, what their natural limits are, etc.. Give Japan all the hardware you want, all the germs, all the ability to deliver them, it wouldn't have killed America. It wouldn't even have killed the west coast of America. Biowarfare has been exhaustively studied both in military projects and in civilian studies in both NATO and the USSR for literally generations. There is actual information out there, should you care to look it up..

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Worcester RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII- China 1933 1/24/2005 4:27:16 PM

Interesting thread especially since the Japanese used gas in significant quantities in China in the early 1930s. Interesting to note the Italian used gas against the Ethiopians at the same time, Mussolini's son-in-law writing a poem about how his gas bombs from his aircraft burst among te horse borne tribesmen "like flowers blooming in the desert"...charming as dinner company too, I'm sure. The question is how aware were we in the US of the gas threat? Could we cope? Better still, could we retaliate? The guys who seem most alive to gas warfare were the Brits. People forget that in 1940 when delivering his "we will fight them on the beaches etc." speech, Churchill finished with "we will flood the beaches with gas" (or similar words if you'll excuse my memory). Indications are he meant phosgene or di-phosgene a heavier than air gas useful for "pouring" down hill and floating across land and water. The effect is to cause the breather to "drown"; like very rapid pneumonia. The Brits were so aware of the Japanese use of gas that they moved in summer 1941 an entire Chemical Warfare battalion in a 14 ship convoy with their mustard and phosgene to Rangoon where they spent a lot of time running around the city wearing gas masks so the word would get to the Japanese: "you use gas, we use gas". This engineer batallion was allocated as army corps troops and equipped for deployment tactically by combat engineers using large mortars and katyushka multiple rocket launchers. Equally they could have filled a few bombs for the air force. Oddly I can find no evidence at all for US preparation of gas supplies or specialist troops for handling the filthy stuff. I have checked the US Army Corps of Engineers (who would be responsible for both tranpost/storage and tactical use by pipe/mortar or filling the shells for artillery and aircraft) and cant find a lead until April 1942 and this batallion was earmarked for later use in the Torch landings. It appears as though our "gas" strike capability was zero. Given our general unpreparedness (read Stilwell's memoirs for a sobering commentary) this is not surprising. It seems as though both Japan and Italy viewed gas as something to use against unprepared tribesmen up to and including Chinese soldiers and civilians. Neither seems to have though of using it against Britain or the US, in the former case because of clear retaliation, in the latter because they suspected the same. If anyone has any details of CW circa 1940/1 in the US I'd like to see it.

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Worcester RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII- China 1933 1/24/2005 4:28:30 PM

P.S. Odd that the Brits in the UK thought the Japs serious enough to send gas to Burma, while the Brits in Singapore....

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Worcester RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII- Taranto, shells, effect and clean up. 1/24/2005 4:45:25 PM

Excuse me hogging this thread but I should mention Taranto, shells, effect and clean up. 1. Yamamoto emulating his alma mater (he was trained as a young officer at Britannia) studied the British 1940 aircraft carrier attack on the Italian naval base of Taranto and devised a daylight version on a larger scale. 2. His targets were the fleet capital ships. The Japanese went to a lot of trouble converting naval shells into bombs which would pierce deck armor and training coordinated attack. 3. A chemical attack would not have sunk ships. It may have caused larger short term casualties but so what? There was never a land invasion. 4. If a land invasion had been planned then (a) the fleet would have had to be destroyed AND (b) there would have been widescale gas bombardment both (a) and (b) being beyond the means of the Japanese carriers. 5. If (a) and (b) had been achieved then the occupation would have been very difficult. A gassed area requires extensive clean up. The Germans and Russians preferred "Bomb Z" (hydrogen cyanide) because it evaporates after 15 minutes. Mustard and phosgene can linger for weeks - in fact mustard soaks into wood and has a nasty habit of reappearing when warmed by people sitting on chairs for example. You have to burn all wood, textiles etc...a lengthy process to make any gassed place habitable. 6. The aerial bombing was very well planned and executed as it was. The mystery is why the Japanese didn't try a landing. No need for gas. They could have taken Hawaii as it was.

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bsl RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII- Taranto, shells, effect and clean up. 1/24/2005 7:56:59 PM

We might note that, essentially, all the Western paeticipants in WW2 knew very well of the threat of gas warfare and had prepared, to some degree, to fight a war in which gas was used. It's easy to overlook, but it wouldn't take deep reading to see that when fighting began - actually, at each of the early stages of the European War - the local media wrote of the danger of gas attack and in many cases there were extensively publicized civil defense plans. There are literally hundreds of published pictures from 1939 and 1940, in the UK, of uniformed personnel, civil defense workers and civilians wearing gas masks, for instance. It actually surprized many that Hitler never used gas on the battlefield. America was equally alert and prepared. Literally thousands of American servicemen had suffered injuries in WW1 gas attacks, after all. Again, if you check major papers of the era - 1941, even before Pearl Harbor - you'll find open references to the threat of gas attack. Local American civil defense workers were, at the very least, warned of the possibility. The atomic bomb was a general shock to the world. Gas was not.

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elcid RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII 1/25/2005 5:40:41 AM

Nonsense. Gen Short would look good in history if Japan attempted to land on Oahu. And Japan was not in a strong position with chemicals in 1941. Nor was the navy equipped or trained to use them in an attack. Chemicals would not have disabled the fleet, and amphibs don't do well in the face of battleships. The distances make the logistics really hard - almost impossible. I did it once in a sim - and actually won the battle - but lost the war because I sent too much shipping to the central Pacific!

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jlb RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII 5/12/2005 8:44:17 PM

The Japanese wouldn't have done much damage. Two strikes by roughly 200 bombers each carrying 500kg of bombs means roughly 50 tons of agent delivered on a hot, windswept island. That's about the amount of killing power the Red Army thought necessary to overwhelm a single Nato battalion in Germany under much better climatic conditions. And it's definetely not true the US Army was poorly prepared for chemical warfare. It was the only army in the world to rank the chemical troops as a service on the same footing as infantry, cavalry, etc... It had a large number of chemical battalions equipped with the 4.2" mortar that was initially designed to deliver chemical shells. Since nobody used chemical weapons during WWII, those battalions were used as regular mortar battalions instead.

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neutralizer RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII 5/31/2005 6:34:03 AM

As a point of fact, the Japanese did use chemical wpns in WW2, well a wpn. It happened in Burma after Imphal-Kohima when the Brit 2 Inf Div were advancing down the Tiddim Rd supported by Indian tanks in Jul 1944. It appears the weapon was a glass grenade, probably filled with hydrogen cyanide. It was very effective in that it instantly killed an entire crew of tank. The thrower was LCpl Uehara. The device is described as 'one of the few examples of useful military collaboration between Germany and Japan'. (No doubt the usual conspiracy theorists will disagree with this) This is reliable information (Louis Allen, 'Burma: the longest war', chap 5 The base, section 'Uehara's poison gas, for those who don't know, Allen was an academic when he wrote this book but in WW2 was an Int Offr at 14 Army HQ and interviewed many of the Japanese comds that survived Burma), which is more that can be said for the post about Brits deploying chem to Burma in 1941. I'm reasonably well read on the that campaign and have never seen a reference to it. More to the point at that stage of the war Brit chem wpns were mostly WW1 stock, and for 6-inch How. 25-pdr stocks were being built up. More to the point the RE did not have 'engineer battalions', they did have CW Coys equipped with 4.2-inch mortars but these do not seem to have appeared until 1942 (their first outing seems to have been Alamein in late 1942 when 1 coy fired the entire theatre stock of 4.2-inch HE. They didn't have very many coys and sending them to Burma would have made absolutely no strategic or tactical sense in 1941. So, sources please.

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Desertmole RE:Chemical First Strike by Japan: WWII 6/1/2005 8:29:32 AM

Oof! Where to begin. First, what are you trying to achieve with this strike? Incapacitation of the fleet? Casualties? A hope of capturing the fleet? The reason I ask is that it is a big factor in deciding which agents to use. By the way, only the Germans had Nerve Agents. The Japanese were limited to the various blister agents of WWI (H series and L), Phosgene and IIRC, Hydrogen Cyanide (AC). First, let?s talk about US capacity. The US capacity for Chemical Warfare was quite extensive. We were one of the leading developers in agents, particularly blister types. We were manufacturing large quantities at the beginning of WWII, and had developed a fairly extensive plan for both chemical protection and decontamination by the beginning of WWII. While we may not have had an extensive amount of equipment on hand, we had the know-how to practice CW. (Source: Gas Warfare, BG Alden Waitt) The Japanese were studying both CW and BW at this point in the war. Their Unit 731 (BW) and their CW unit (forgotten the designation, sorry) had been in operation in Manchuria for a couple of years at this point. While they were pretty advanced in the areas of development and production, their attempts to use either tactically or strategically had been pretty unspectacular. In fact, the Chinese failed to notice that BW agents had even been employed. (Source: Unit 731, sorry forgotten the author) Employment: This is an interesting to ponder. I will first put forth my credentials, as a trained nuclear and chemical target analyst, compliments of the US Army. My guess at a scenario would run something like this: First Wave: The only differences in loadout would be for the Kates in this wave. Reason being is that you still need to take control of the air, and that means all the Vals targeted at the airfields still need to go after the same targets. While I might load a few with chemicals (primarily blister agents) the bulk would still be to destroy the aircraft. Adding the blister agent would only serve to create confusion and slow down the response. Don?t kid yourself, you cannot achieve the killing of significant numbers of airmen or ground crews with chemicals. Hydrogen Cyanide is not a good candidate unless you can deliver it in huge quantities, as it does not hang in the air well, and dissipates quickly. Its only benefit is that if you plan to occupy the ground quickly, it does not present a persistency problem. The problem is that if you are only using your Kates, you cannot deliver enough AC to have a significant effect. A 250 Kg bomb would only hold about 25 Kg of agent. You would want to use smaller bombs for better dispersion, so, assuming the bombs were 60 Kg, like the frag bombs normally used on the Kate, your loadout would be something like 10x60 Kg bombs (that?s only about 60 Kg of agent). Even if all the Kates were so equipped, that?s not a lot of agent. Ship targeting: pasting the battleline (or any other ships) will not kill all the crews. US Navy of the period had been designing their ships for the possibility of chemical warfare for almost two decades. You may kill crews above decks, and cause some casualties below, but once the alarm spread, most of the casualties would cease. The one advantage would be flak crew suppression. Pasting the ships, particularly with blister agent, would slow the response. More so if you used Lewisite, since the effects are fairly quick. Mustard type agents cause casualties more slowly, with the onset of effects being 2-6 hours after exposure. Now for the good news, cleaning up a lot of blister contamination will be a real pain in the ass, and all operations by the ship?s crews and any repair or salvage personnel will be hampered by the need to use protective clothing. Second Wave: You now have an alerted enemy. Further casualties are going to be limited. You may as well start using more HE. By the way, the good thing about the weather is that in early morning the weather is most conducive to chemical attacks. At this time of day you will more than likely encounter lapse or neutral weather conditions, where the air holds the agent close to the ground. Conditions are also cooler in December, so rapid breakdown of agents due to heat are unlikely to occur. Okay, well, there is a quick first thought about using chemicals. Let me throw out a couple of other considerations: Handling of chemical weapons is not as neat and easy as some would think. The risk of accidents is pretty high, especially if the ordnance handling crews of the carriers were not familiar with it. Among other things, chemical agents are very corrosive, and munitions will leak over time. How would you like your flagship tide up in port for several weeks awaiting decontamination. It would likely take that long, since you have to achieve an exceptionally well cleaned vessel. Any contamination is almost permanent, and even very low levels of residual contamination would cause a few casualties for a long, long time. Oh, and remember, if you open this Pandora?s Box, you will be subject to being on the receiving end. And remember, in a case like this, the US population would be calling for like use in a heartbeat. Can you imagine the B-29 fleet of 1945 dropping blister agents on Tokyo instead of incendiaries? I?ve worked with this stuff, and I shudder the thought.

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