A Question For Historians: Anything New About WWII?

Factual Questions
41

I’ve never heard of either being used as justification; not much was known about the Bataan death march at the time and most Americans had never heard of Nanking. It was the IJAs determination to fight to the death and the first surviving encounters with the IJA that set the pace; the Goettge Patrol where only 4 survived from a 25 man patrol when they mistakenly believed the Japanese were trying to surrender, and the first real fight with the Ichiki Detachment at the Battle of the Tenaru which left 777 Japanese dead where wounded Japanese shot at or threw grenades at Marines attempting to provide them medical treatment in the aftermath of the battle. Feeling that these were acts of perfidy by the Japanese, Americans stopped trying to provide aid to the Japanese wounded and simply shot them instead.

Yeah, that there was widespread starvation and resultant cannibalism in the Pacific is pretty well known. The IJA was notorious for being horrible at logistics and repeatedly sending its troops on offensive operations where it couldn’t even feed them. Most casualties from the invasion of India at Imphal-Kohima in 1944 were from starvation and malnutrition. The ideograms used as shorthand for Guadalcanal, Ga-To, had a darkly ironic double meaning; they could also be taken to mean “Starvation Island”. Although the Japanese were able to evacuate most of their remaining troops from Guadalcanal under the noses of the US Navy, they were so malnourished as to be essentially useless.

42

Yeah, I knew about the cannibalism before - it isn’t all that unusual, in extreme situations, for cannibalism to happen when mass starvation occurs. That Japanese soldiers occasionally, in extreme situations, resorted (as others have done) to cannibalism is no secret of WW2. It was even depicted in the 1959 Japanese movie Fire on the Plain.

It was the part about deliberately “rearing and slaughtering” POWs that surprised me - makes it sound like the Japanese soldiers were running some sort of human meat farms.

43

Several Japanese were executed for it, but their specific crimes were hidden. You don’t let American Mothers know that their children may have been eaten.

44

Let’s not get carried awy. First Stalin was perfectly capable of planing such a thing. Next, The Soviets very well could have destroyed any evidence for it. Zhukov admitted suggesting such an attack.

There’s a lot of controversy over this, and it cant be swept away with *“there is no evidence whatsoever that Stalin was planning to invade Germany. The idea that it was a pre-emptive strike by Germany was nothing more than gross Nazi propoganda …”
*

since there is evidence.

Mostly the historians agree that if Stalin had planned to attack Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941 the USSR was not well prepared for such an offensive. That doesnt discount a offensive later, or that Stalin was simply wrong on how well prepared his armies were.

And it’s more thatn just Rezun: *Nevertheless, studies by some historians, e.g., Russian military historian Mikhail Meltyukhov (Stalin’s Missed Chance) gave partial support to the claim that Soviet forces were concentrating in order to attack Germany. Other historians who support this thesis are Vladimir Nevezhin, Boris Sokolov, Valeri Danilov, Joachim Hoffmann[22] and Mark Solonin.[23] Offensive interpretations of Stalin’s prewar planning are also supported by Sovietologist Robert C. Tucker and Pavel Bobylev.[24] Moreover, it is argued by Hoffmann that the actual Soviet troop concentrations were near the German-Soviet border in the former Poland, as were fuel depots and airfields. All of this is claimed to be unsuitable for defensive operations.[25]…While Western researchers (two exceptions being Albert L. Weeks[48] and R. C. Raack[49][50][51]) criticised Suvorov’s thesis,[52] he has gathered some support among Russian historians, starting in the 1990s. Support in Russia for Suvorov’s claim that Stalin had been preparing a strike against Hitler in 1941 began to emerge as some archive materials were declassified. Authors supporting the Stalin 1941 assault thesis are Valeri Danilov,[53] V.A. Nevezhin,[54] Constantine Pleshakov, Mark Solonin[23] and Boris Sokolov.[55] As the latter has noted, the absence of documents with the precise date of the planned Soviet invasion can’t be an argument in favor of the claim that this invasion was not planned at all. Although the USSR attacked Finland, no documents have been found to date which would indicate 26 November 1939 as the assumed date for the beginning of provocations or 30 November as the date of the planned Soviet assault.[56]

One view was expressed by Mikhail Meltyukhov in his study Stalin’s Missed Chance.[57] The author states that the idea for striking Germany arose long before May 1941, and was the very basis of Soviet military planning from 1940 to 1941. Providing additional support for this thesis is that no significant defense plans have been found.[58] In his argument, Meltyukhov covers five different versions of the assault plan (“Considerations on the Strategical Deployment of Soviet Troops in Case of War with Germany and its Allies” (Russian original))[dead link], the first version of which was developed soon after the outbreak of World War II. The last version was to be completed by May 1, 1941.[59] *

At best what one can say is that the exact nature of Stalin’s plans to attack Germany is unknown and controversial.

45

well, if by “two way street” you mean a one lane unpaved road one way and a six lane superhighway the other- yeah. :dubious:

46

If it happened it wouldn’t have been a response to starvation. Humans are like any other meat animal - you have to feed them more calories than you get out of eating them. Raising animals (or humans) for meat is something you can only do when you have an excess of food. If you’re short of food, you eat the food yourself rather than feeding it to your “herd”.

47

:rolleyes:Try reading your own cite; it relies on exactly two sources for this horseshit claim: Nazi propaganda and Vladimir Rezun.

Rezun, pen name Suvorov, has been thoroughly discredited. He deliberately misquotes, quotes out of context, ignores contrary evidence, relies on circumstantial evidence or no evidence at all or simply creates evidence or flat out lies. (Claiming conscription only started in the Red Army in 1939 when it in fact started in 1925 or that “Stalin had made no major defensive preparations” which is a flat out lie, see the Molotov Line.)

48

Yes, that is true, the behaviour and tactics of the IJA made it problematic to take prisoners in the first place (but of course, this, too, was a two way street & a vicious circle : Marines would routinely shoot surrendering Japanese because they were afraid of suicide attacks (or as revenge for such) ; non-suicidal Japanese soldiers wouldn’t let themselves get captured because Marines didn’t take prisoners and shot the wounded or worse…) ; but that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about surrendered soldiers, ones that had *already *been captured, disarmed, secured and what have you being marched back to HQs behind the lines by handful of privates, to be processed & debriefed and from then sent to POW camps stateside ; getting routinely “lost” somewhere along the way.

[QUOTE=DrDeth]
well, if by “two way street” you mean a one lane unpaved road one way and a six lane superhighway the other- yeah. :dubious:
[/QUOTE]

If you *really *looked into it, you might be surprised.

49

Read the cite again:
Russian military historian Mikhail Meltyukhov , Vladimir Nevezhin, Boris Sokolov, Valeri Danilov, Joachim Hoffmann, Mark Solonin, Sovietologist Robert C. Tucker and Pavel Bobylev, Albert L. Weeks, R. C. Raack, Constantine Pleshakov.

That’s more than ten respected historians, authors & Sovietologists.

The “Molotov Line” in your cite is referred to as the “so-called Molotov Line” as it was never actually built.

50

First cite doesnt work.

And there’s a huge difference between taking gold teeth or other parts off men already dead- as opposed to the systemic and authorized torture, killing and eating POWs. Especially as from your cite: The behavior was officially prohibited by the U.S. military, which issued additional guidance as early as 1942 condemning it specifically…“Stern disciplinary action” against human remains souvenir taking was ordered by the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet as early as September 1942…In a memorandum dated June 13, 1944, the Army JAG asserted that “such atrocious and brutal policies” in addition to being repugnant also were violations of the laws of war, and recommended the distribution to all commanders of a directive pointing out that “the maltreatment of enemy war dead was a blatant violation of the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Sick and Wounded…"

About the difference between* one lane unpaved road one way and a six lane superhighway the other*.

51

Oh, the brass issued directives for the practice to cease, repeatedly. But since no “stern punishment” ever materialized and the field commanders were OK with it for the most part…

Why do you assume they were already dead ?

52

[quote=“Dissonance, post:41, topic:720370”]

I’ve never heard of either being used as justification; not much was known about the Bataan death march at the time and most Americans had never heard of Nanking.
I remember the gossip columnist Liz Smith (born 1923) once commented that she heard about Nanking and was shocked. The Japanese she knew at the time was the family gardener and she couldn’t understand how a nation could do such a thing when the one Japanese she knew was a kind man.
I don’t know how many Americans actually knew about Nanking but it was a time when Americans felt China and America had a special relationship, that China liked Americans more than other Westerners. It probably didn’t hurt that Madame Chiang Kai-shek graduated from an American college and spoke excellent English with a Georgian accent. Americans also hoped Chinese would buy American textiles (accept a couple extra inches on their shirt tales) and there were a number of Christian missionaries in China.

53

That’s exactly why it surprised me.

Cannibalism when starving = horrible, but happens all the time in extreme situations, as a response to starvation. No particular reflection on the people who did it - any group of people subject to such stress, you will get some percentage who turn to cannibalism. Not surprising.

Raising human meat animals = really, really twisted and psychotic. The implication is that you have enough food, but for some reason want to eat human meat. Worse, that it was an organized, communial activity on the part of the perpetrators. Very surprising.

54

Is (or was) there some aspect of Japanese or warrior culture that caused this, or were those particular fellows just mean sons of bitches?

55

I have no idea - I just learned of the allegation that this ‘rearing POWs for food’ thing happened in this thread.

Just guessing here, but maybe it was something that happened when Japanese units came to be isolated and cut off, allowing some Kurtz-like psycho commander to rule as he saw fit. That is, if it happened at all.

56

This incident occurred because the senior staff was hungry.

I wonder if this iswhy President Bush threw up a a Japanese dinner party.

57

FWIW I think the allegation stems from a misunderstanding or overstatement - the Japanese, at times, did kill prisoners specifically for the purpose of eating them, and there have been reports (well, one dude saying so AFAIK) that instead of killing them outright they (or at least the specific unit observed) would chop up bits then nurse the victim back to health until bit-chopping time came up again, so as to keep the meat fresh throughout the process.
There are also allegations that some guerilla-type units engaged in combat and took prisoners specifically for the purpose of later eatage. Which is still kind of fucked up.

I never ran into any allegations of straight up “people farming” however. The only item approaching this is, yeah, Tashibana Yoshio, who reportedly had a thing for liver sushimi as part of a macabre ritual and talked his staff into it. But going from there to “the Japs did this !” is a bit of a stretch, innit ?

[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
Is (or was) there some aspect of Japanese or warrior culture that caused this, or were those particular fellows just mean sons of bitches?
[/QUOTE]

(emphasis mine)
Not really, the “bushido” aspect is something of a red herring. Most of the field officers, and notably those that were typically at the heart of the worst excesses, were not former-samurai-caste. Bushido never applied to them.

But there was a strong conformism streak within the Japanese army. It’s not that the soldiers all believed in this or that, but they were told by their superiors to believe this or that or act this or that way, with a strong emphasis on unit-wide punishment and/or ostracism if one member of the unit did “wrong”, or stood out if you prefer. Or, to put it another way, if the commander says the sky is green, you damn well say the sky is green too if you know what’s good for you. This social structure made it easier for soldiers to fight to the last (a positive military value, sort of) or engage in suicide missions (also a positive military value, also sort of) ; but it also made the excesses of individual commanders more likely to spread down or go unchecked.

I strongly suggest watching the Chinese movie Devils on the Doorstep for an example of this in practice. It’s straight fiction, but the social dynamics portrayed seem close to what really happened (as far as Japanese soldiers go). The book I linked to earlier (The Anguish of Surrender by Ulrich Straus) also explores the behavioural psychology of Joe Japanese Schmoe (along with that of Joe Marine Schmoe). It’s a fascinating read.

58

Good lord. :eek:

Okay, that Bush Sr. narrowly escaped being served up as a delicacy is definitely something about WW2 I had not previously known.

59

Wow. Do you take your cues for citing from Rezun? Your “more than ten respected historians, authors & Sovietologists” didn’t say Stalin was going to launch a pre-emptive attack Germany and agree with Rezun, they “gave partial support to the claim that Soviet forces were concentrating in order to attack Germany”, emphasis mine. You’ll also note the paucity of evidence they use to arrive at poor conclusions ala Rezun – “As the latter [Sokolov] has noted, the absence of documents with the precise date of the planned Soviet invasion can’t be an argument in favor of the claim that this invasion was not planned at all.” That at least is a step up from Rezun who claimed to know the exact date of the planned Soviet invasion was July 15, 1941 based upon no evidence whatsoever.

As to your nonsense claim that the Molotov line was never built because the first sentence refers to it as the “so-called Molotov Line”, you’re really channeling Rezun by quoting out of context. Try reading the rest of the cite, the rest of the paragraph or even the rest of the sentence. Here’s the full sentence and next three paragraphs:

It is the so-called Molotov Line not because it didn’t exist, but because the Molotov Line wasn’t its official name.

I take it you’ve never read E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed. He describes in quite gruesome detail a Marine slicing open the cheeks of a still living Japanese soldier with his K-bar to knock the gold teeth out of his still living mouth with the butt of the knife.

60

To the OP’s question - I was surprised to discover (in the recent movie about it) that when the German codes were broken, the Brittish actually decided to allow certain German army movements and attacks to occur, because they didn’t want the Germans to know their code had been broken. I gather that’s not the first, or last time that had happened, and I’m hardly a historian, but I was surprised that the “good guys” permitted what was clearly intended to be lethal attacks, for the sake of the larger strategy. I don’t know when that fact was eventually revealed to the public.