Sabotage operations against Japan possible?

[tallwingedgoat]

In WWII there were OSS and SOE operations even within Germany but no direct action operations were carried out against Japan. Granted it was harder to impersonate Japanese subjects, but surely it was not impossible given the large numbers of Japanese in America and perhaps Chinese and Korean recruits who had lived in Japan.

They would be able to infiltrate and sabotage Japanese factories and depots much the way the Germans blew up factories in America during the First World War. This would provide at least a means of striking at the Japanese industrial machine that was not possible until late into the war.

 

[Flocculencio]

The Japanese war machine was in deep trouble from 1942, in any case. One suspects it wouldn't have been worth the trouble of doing anything more than the bombing that was carried out IOTL. Japan had zero chance, in the long run, of winning even the war they started in China- attacking the US and Britain merely hastened it's defeat.

 

[Cook]

While not against the home islands, plenty of sabotage operations were carried out on Japanese targets throughout their South East Asian and Pacific empire; the Z Force operations being particularly successful.

 

[Gridley]

The OSS was quite active in the Pacific - among other things, they worked with this guy named Ho Chi Min. You might have heard of him.

Remember, the US put its ethnic Japanese in internment camps. The Nisei units were all sent to the ETO so they wouldn't have a chance to defect (probably just as well for them - I doubt any of them would have survived Japanese POW camps had they been captured, and the potential for friendly fire...). The US DID NOT TRUST its ethnic Japanese.

Note I'm not saying they were right (IMO they were quite wrong - the Nisei units in particular demonstrated that), but that was an overwhelming cultural bias at the time.

So, we've established that it is approaching ASB territory for them to have been sent. Let's flap some leathery gray-green wings and say they were. What would their target be?

Sabotage? Of... what? Japanese industry was so distributed that machine tools were often found in individual houses. True, there were only a handful of major shipyards... and by 1943 they were chasing their own tails so hard that almost none of the hulls they put in the water contributed ANYTHING useful to the war effort. Aircraft? The Japanese produced so many that by the middle of the war pilots were being sent to the front with less than a hundred hours of flight time - often MUCH less. Destroying a handful of aircraft might IMPROVE the quality of the IJA and IJN aerial forces!

HUMINT? The US has usually been weak on that true... but it was getting so much valuable SIGINT that it is hard to see a few shallowly placed agents generating much useful info. Remember these guys aren't going to be Tojo's secretary, or one of Yamamoto's code clerks. Such a job requires too much background. Maybe someone planted in early 1942 could be well placed by late 1944... by which time what does the US need HUMINT for? The Japanese are on the ropes and their intentions are mostly irrelevant.

 

[MerryPrankster]

There were at least some Nisei in the Pacific Theater--in The Good War by Studs Terkel, a man being interviewed remembers a Japanese-American telling a Japanese tanker in Japanese to open the hatch to his tank and then drops a grenade inside.

Large-scale deployment is out of the question, for the same reason the Nisei units went to Europe, but occasional shenanigans were permitted OTL.

 

[tallwingedgoat]

The OSS was quite active in the Pacific - among other things, they worked with this guy named Ho Chi Min. You might have heard of him.

Remember, the US put its ethnic Japanese in internment camps. The Nisei units were all sent to the ETO so they wouldn't have a chance to defect (probably just as well for them - I doubt any of them would have survived Japanese POW camps had they been captured, and the potential for friendly fire...). The US DID NOT TRUST its ethnic Japanese.

Note I'm not saying they were right (IMO they were quite wrong - the Nisei units in particular demonstrated that), but that was an overwhelming cultural bias at the time.

So, we've established that it is approaching ASB territory for them to have been sent. Let's flap some leathery gray-green wings and say they were. What would their target be?

Sabotage? Of... what? Japanese industry was so distributed that machine tools were often found in individual houses. True, there were only a handful of major shipyards... and by 1943 they were chasing their own tails so hard that almost none of the hulls they put in the water contributed ANYTHING useful to the war effort. Aircraft? The Japanese produced so many that by the middle of the war pilots were being sent to the front with less than a hundred hours of flight time - often MUCH less. Destroying a handful of aircraft might IMPROVE the quality of the IJA and IJN aerial forces!

HUMINT? The US has usually been weak on that true... but it was getting so much valuable SIGINT that it is hard to see a few shallowly placed agents generating much useful info. Remember these guys aren't going to be Tojo's secretary, or one of Yamamoto's code clerks. Such a job requires too much background. Maybe someone planted in early 1942 could be well placed by late 1944... by which time what does the US need HUMINT for? The Japanese are on the ropes and their intentions are mostly irrelevant.

You're over selling your case. There's nothing ASB about this at all. Hawaii, the state where Japanese-Americans were most numerous had no internment. Not surprisingly Hawaii was a main source of Nisei volunteers. Japanese-American participation in the war also extended beyond the two Nisei combat formations. They served as interpreters and interrogators for army intelligence in Burma for example.

While Japanese industry devolved to a state of cottage industry later in the war, this wasn't the case in the beginning. This kind of industry was only suitable for component suppliers. Heavy industry has to be centralized. You can't have cottage oil distillation, manufacture of explosives and munitions propellants, steel and aluminum alloy production, etc. Disruption to power generation, blowing up of railway bridges and tracks were standard sabotage operations carried out on the Asian mainland but not in the home islands.

Furthermore Japan had specific vulnerabilities. For example the coal from Hokkaido was delivered to Honshu via train ferry of which Japan had only four and all were imported because Japan had no capacity to make them. All four were operational throughout the war.