November 12, 2026: During World War II, several opportunities to shorten the war were missed. In Germany, a committee selected the types of targets American and British bombers would hit. As the war went on, the committee changed the primary target several times. But they missed the most vulnerable targets, Germany’s electricity power plants. It was falsely believed that Germany had a national, interconnected electrical power network that could quickly reroute power to affected areas. It was learned, after the war, that no such capability existed and that if Allied bombers destroyed most of the power plants, German industry, not to mention the military and government, would be crippled. Key components of these power plants took up to a year to build, and the factories that did this could also be bombed. Without sufficient electrical supply, Germany could have been defeated by 1944.

In the Pacific, a similar situation existed because the Japanese government was controlled by the politician and General Hideki Tojo. He served as Prime Minister of Japan from October 1941 to July and was also Minister of War from 1940–1944 and held multiple other ministerial posts, including Commerce and Industry. The army was responsible for the war in China and elsewhere in Asia. Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Navy and planner of the Pearl Harbor attack, was more realistic about the war's progress and likely outcome. He believed that the Japanese Navy, especially its carrier force, could gain a series of victories for about six months, but after that the U.S. GDP, 70 times that of Japan, would be decisive. It was widely known that America was building more than two dozen Essex-class aircraft carriers and new generations of carrier-based bomber aircraft.

Yamamoto was dead by 1943. American codebreakers found that Yamamoto would be visiting frontline Japanese units and, at one point, would fly within range of American P-38 fighters. An ambush was planned, and Yamamoto’s transport was shot down, and he was killed. This mattered because Yamamoto was known as one of Japan's most rational military leaders and as someone who could make the American advance much more costly. Killing Yamamoto in 1943 removed a man who had spent many years in America and knew that any military success against the United States would be short-lived, something he had warned the Japanese government about. Less well-traveled Japanese army generals were more likely to believe their own press releases. Throughout the war, the Japanese army and navy had avoided cooperation, preferring to fight with their own resources even if that meant fighting at a disadvantage. Any cooperation between the army and navy was usually hammered out back at general headquarters in Tokyo. Even then, local commanders often dragged their heels when ordered to deal with the other service. Yamamoto was known to be very persuasive in getting the two services to cooperate and fight the Allies more effectively. With the removal of Yamamoto, the Japanese military slid back into their ineffective strategic planning habits, saving thousands of American lives.

But what if Yamamoto was not killed and the April 1942 Doolittle bomber raid on Japan targeted General Tojo and his staff wherever they were meeting in Tokyo? That attack force consisted of 16 twin-engine B-25B bombers carrying sixteen tons of high-explosive bombs. The U.S. Navy had broken Japanese codes and could obtain a lot of information about Japanese operations and where General Tojo and his staff spent most of their time. If the raid killed Tojo, the U.S. could use diplomatic or other means to contact Yamamoto and ask if he was interested in ending the war in 1942. That would be a big ask because senior Japanese officers were fiercely loyal to their chain of command and their Emperor. But with Tojo dead, the emperor, although mainly a figurehead, might be open to the possibility of stopping the war and the certain defeat of Japan. No one knew about the Atomic Bomb yet, or the chemical warfare horrors of Japanese Army Unit 731 in China, or the atrocities the soldiers were committing throughout the Pacific and China. Quite possibly, the army would have remained in control, and Yamamoto would have been executed as a traitor to the Empire. That’s a lot of what-ifs, and if some of them were true, the Pacific War might have been a lot shorter.

James F Dunnigan