Give WW2 150-200+ million casualties

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Is this even possible? An invasion of Japan would probably add 10 million at the most, and a larger Middle East Front could probably add a few million as well.

Rules:
WW2 starts on the same date
You may include the Second Sino-Japanese War into WW2, but it is not compulsory
 
Is this even possible? An invasion of Japan would probably add 10 million at the most, and a larger Middle East Front could probably add a few million as well.

Rules:
WW2 starts on the same date
You may include the Second Sino-Japanese War into WW2, but it is not compulsory

By casualties, do you mean deaths caused/related to the war or actual casualties? If it includes all manner of injuries, then it might be possible to acheive those numbers.

If you mean deaths, then what you're asking for is something between at least a doubling and at most a tripling of OTL's body count, which would be ASB.
 
Well, operation vegetarian in europe and unit 731 release a massive virus in china during world war II, combine this two things and you can pass the 200 million casualties (depending of the effectiveness of the virus)
 
The wind changes when the us drops fat man and little boy or the japanese dont surrender after they are dropped.
 
After some quick number crunching, it looks like for every military death, there were two additional military non-fatal casualties. Assuming civilian casualty/death ratios are similar, 70 million total deaths * 3 = 210 million global casualties both lethal and non-lethal for all military and civilians.

So already, OTL fulfills your minimum requirements.
To up the figures to 300m, this requires 150% of casualties that occurred in OTL.

*edit: I forgot that your proposed range was 150m-200m, not 200m-300m. Looks like you underestimated OTL :p*

All we have to do it make it half as much more bloody than it already was.

Low hanging fruit:


countryside starvation is easy if infrastructure goes to shit and concentrated urban areas are the equivalent of having lots of eggs in one basket - very vulnerable to short spurts of sudden brutality, especially if an army has the city surrounded, making escape impossible.

So my advice is to simply increase the number of cities that are being invaded, especially in places where food is grown and exported such that hunger problems are exacerbated.

TLDR: screw over highly populated areas that weren't as affected by the otl war, such as the Americas and India.

While the bloodiest places in the war were in East Asia and Eastern Europe, I'd say open up new fronts instead of trying to squeeze more out of already screwed regions (sorry guys, but no Japan/China screw).

Perhaps have India have a massive revolution that quickly turns into an extremist genocidal clusterfuck. Think French Revolution * 100. Have Spain join the war directly, opening up new battlefields in western Europe. Have a general war in Latin America get included as part of WW2.

The prize would be having US cities themselves be attacked, but considering the PoD that would be ASB.
 
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Have the Germans launch a seamammal that scares the Brits enough to use chemical weapons as Churchill treatened. With the genie out of the bottle have the Germans go wild and use it on the Soviets and everyone else
 

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
Relevant;
Worst case, realistically, is based on the study William Shockley did for Henry Stimson. Fatalities directly from fighting were estimated at 5-10 million Japanese and 400,000-800,000 Americans, on top of casualties of 2 million and ~700,000 from the war to date. Call it a total 7 million Japanese and 1.25 million Americans.

Japanese planning called for cutting rations to the civilian population, accepting that this would mean allowing a significant proportion of civilians to starve, in order to maintain fitness of the fighting forces. I think the expected casualties were of the order of 20% of the population. Given 70 million prewar and deducting the above, that's another 12.6 million casualties, leaving 50.4 million Japanese at the time of their inevitable collapse in early 1946.

After all the fighting, with extensive use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, a famine in Japan is all but certain. IOTL, it took herculean efforts by the US military to avert one after the poor rice harvest in 1946 - ITTL, they've just bombed, poisoned and burnt what crops did grow, and destroyed the transportation infrastructure. And, after the viciousness of the fighting, it's unlikely the US will be in a mood to be as generous. Historically, casualties from a severe famine can run to about two-thirds of the population between starvation and disease. There go 33.6 million more.

After the fighting subsides and the famine (which will probably last several years) ends, the remaining 16-17 million Japanese will be disproportionately between the ages of about 3 and 18. Most of the military age population, including virtually all males, will have been killed fighting. There will be virtually no elderly people, the famine will have seen to that.

In short, Japan will be a depopulated agrarian wasteland with no cities, littered with unexploded ordnance, abandoned military equipment, and contaminated by radiation and CBW. The demographics will be a complete disaster. The surviving population will be scarred - PTSD will probably be near-universal, and there'll be a pervasive attitude of 'do whatever it takes to survive.

But the fighting and deprivation will have allowed the more depraved human instincts free rein. There may be war crimes trials for some of the more egregious violations of common human decency, but a lot of atrocities will go unremarked and unpunished. Veterans of the Japan Campaign would be ubiquitous - somewhere in the region of two million injured, not to mention the uninjured. Their experiences wouldn't be dissimilar to those of Vietnam veterans, but a generation earlier and an order of magnitude more of them.

There would be less questioning of why they went to war, but the US would be left with a huge scar. The baby boom would be dialled right back thanks to the loss of life, if nothing else. There would be more working women in 1950s America, purely out of necessity, and a lot of war widows raising children alone.

With Japan virtually annihilated as a country, occupation is inevitable. Guerilla warfare will probably continue indefinetely, but uncoordinated and ineffective. The Home Islands may be divided, or entirely an American affair - in either case, the occupying powers will have virtually a free hand and Japan will be a de facto colonial possession, with all that implies. Division between the USA and USSR seems both most probable and most unpleasant.

Korea is almost certainly occupied by the USSR, and will be handed over to a single (Soviet-approved) Korean government postwar. This probably won't be as bad as the OTL DPRK, but I wouldn't rule it out either. I'm not too clear on China, but I'd expect the continuation of the war to have some effect - the KMT will have retaken more of the south, but the CPC will have had more chance to build strength in the north. Soviet attitudes are probably key here.

Atop this:

I make no hyperbole or exaggeration in saying that if the Morgenthau Plan was backed to the hilt, then it would have been among the most blatant and horrifying crimes against humanity ever enacted in human history.

The plan effectively calls for the complete destruction of the German state and its potential to wage Armed conflicts through gutting of German industry, be it through annexations or internationalized of major mining and industrial regions of Germany, and the destruction and dismantling of all heavy industry, with attempts to utilize what was left heavily restricted, aiming to reduce the German peoples living standard to what was referred to as a "Pastoral State". Herbert Hoover, talking about the plan and the effects of it's limited enactment following his tour of Germany to report of the conditions of occupied Germany, is quoted as saying: "There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a 'pastoral state'. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it." And Hoover is right; the complete de-industrialization of Germany combined with the strict food restrictions, atop the issues of German Agriculture being unable to support her large population, now hampered by the earth having been salted and most the labors dead, as well as the issues of food and economic aid in the immediate post-War period, would result in the mass starvation of tens of millions of people and the destruction the mere concept of Germany as a Nation through sheer death count.

So yes, the Morgenthau Plan would have been an act of Genocide if enacted as planned, and the millions of deaths would have been justified as for 'The greater good of humanity', a notion I find nightmarish and horrific.

(The WAllies backing JCS 1067 to the hilt also creates this effect)
 
Have the Japanese fight to extermination. In August 1945 Hirohito orders that every Japanese fight to the end against the Allies taking as many of the enemy with them as possible. Unit 731 and the 10-odd other such facilities get carte blanche to go ape sh** and the Allies are forced to kill off the 8 million man Japanese military throughout Asia one by one. That might produce the ~70 million deaths needed for such a scenario, though it is a long shot.
 
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