These Were The United States' Plans If Japan Hadn't Surrendered In WWII

Today, with decades of history at our backs, it may seem like the end of World War II was a foregone conclusion. After all, by early August 1945, the Axis powers in Europe had been defeated. With some of its most important supporters left reeling, surely Japan would soon surrender and the war would be over. But military strategists weren't quite so sure. The Battle of Iwo Jima had made Japan's drive to keep fighting painfully clear. When U.S. forces attempted to take the small Japanese island...

While most people are aware of the human experimentation carried out by the Nazis in World War II, the human experimentation done by the Japanese is less notorious but just as horrifying. During World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army undertook a variety of experiments on people, with biological warfare at the forefront of their endeavor. Imprisoned people were electrocuted, shot, frozen, and even put into pressure chambers. In addition, the Japanese experimented with a variety of diseases, including anthrax and bubonic plague, in the hopes of creating a devastating biological bomb.

The most well-known of these soldiers is Hiroo Onoda, who was finally convinced to surrender after spending three decades on an island in the Philippines where he had previously been joined by three other soldiers. According to The Guardian, Onoda, a soldier highly devoted to the Japanese government who even considered the emperor to be a god, was only convinced to formally surrender when his former commanding officer visited him on the island and assured him that the war was over. While Onoda's story went on to become the most famous instance of a Japanese soldier not officially surrendering, it's just one instance of quite a few that occurred in the years after the Japanese government's official surrender.

Not all attempts to strike fear in the hearts of the Japanese involved bold military operations, as reported by the National WWII Museum. The strangest ones came out of the OSS and involved exploiting everything known about Japan and its people, including mythology. The perfect motto for the OSS would be: "All's fair in war." Especially when it came to inflicting physical and psychological harm in the name of a speedier victory. So, OSS agents got busy, planning out the improbable and the impossible ... like flooding Japan with mythological creatures, representing "omens of doom."

It almost didn't matter where you lived in the 1940s, the world was a terrifying place to be. World War II reached every corner of the globe, and sure, people were scared. But people also made a lot of bizarre decisions, starting at the top. We're all familiar with Germany's concentration camps, where people who were deemed undesirable or a threat were sent to live... and oftentimes, die. That's awful, but surely, that was something that only the bad guys did, right? Right?