Get your history straight.
Who declared war on UK ? not Hitler.Hitler wanted peace with British,he even spared 120.000 British soldiers at Dunkirk.Churchill that fat pig wanted war with Germans and he declared it along with the French.
Biggest threat to Europe and World was communism ,and Hitler wanted focus all his might on them.
Whatever
In my immediate family, there’s not a hatred of the Japanese people, just a hatred of things made in Japan. Why?
My uncle was captured when Corregidor fell and spent more than 3 years on the Bataan Death Marches. I won’t go into the details of his captivity, but they were pretty brutal. He lost so much weight that when he came home his own mother (my Grandmother) did not recognize him.
He was pretty messed up from how he was treated. You couldn’t touch him while he was sleeping; he would beat the shit out of you in his sleep. Due to his injuries, he couldn’t become a major league baseball pitcher, nor could he become a father. He turned to drinking, and if it hadn’t been for the love of my Aunt (a divorced barmaid with 5 children), I think he would have died well before I was born. He was like a Dad to me.
Well, the difference being that xenophobia and discrimination is at the individual level by a minuscule minority in western nations, while it is institutionnalized in Japan… I could take for example what kind of reactions these western nations would have to quotes from the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara (very popular guy over there…) or point to:
http://www.hrdc.net/sahrdc/hrfeatures/HRF56.htm
Again, Japaneses being polite they are not going around with klanhood or bashing on minorities (for now), but it is even worse because it is so widespread, deeper and subtle - a racist easy to manipulate by politicians if they eventually find it convenient to do so because shared by a majority.
:eek:
What a nice guy.
Atypical for the European USAAF. I believe I’d already mentioned the firebombing of Tokyo, at least once - and the fact that for all the alleged restraint of the USAAF in Europe, there was none of that over Japan.
Yeah - I skimmed, sorry (I hate it when other people do that, Mea Culpa!)
I don’t buy “restraint” though, look how heavily various French towns were bombed by the allies (inc the USAAF) after D-Day, killing many French civilians (and not doing a lot to dislodge the German troops in them IIRC).
There was a great drive to get the war over with as soon as possible and destroying Germany’s ability to function as a country was seen by many as the best way of going about that. Some differed on that, preferring other targets, but I doubt “restraint” figured in anyone’s calculations.
We have the luxury of being able to look back and play “what if” games:-
What if the A-bombs hadn’t been dropped in Japan? Would the projected 1M US troops and God knows how many Japanese have died, or would Japan surrendered sooner than was thought anyway? I have no way of knowing, and neither does anyone else on this board.
yeah, this one of the things that really bugs me about the "They shunna dropped the Bomb crowd – they’ve got that 20/20 hindsight going for people who were fighting the worst bunch of assholes and bastards – and I mean the leadership and the PEOPLE of Germany and Japan during WWII – the world has ever seen.
I give 'em a complete pass on dropping the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the fire-bombing of Dresden and a lot of stuff. Not because I don’t think those were Godawful things to do, but because I recognize that the people who had to make those decisions were dealing with some very, very, very evil people and didn’t have the luxury of “playing nice” with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The U.S. HAD to win, or the world was headed for some major shit – something that might have made WWII itself look like a walk in the park.
Who said anything about them being first? If they apologized yesterday it still wouldn’t be soon enough for them to be anything but last in the “apology race”.
Although they have made some admission about the Korean “comfort women”/institutionalized rape victims, they haven’t admitted it in regards to China or anyone else.
Let’s see … we sent our own people in to render aid and help rebuild. We brought them food and water. My uncle Bernie’s leukemia, which eventually killed him, might well have resulted from his radiation exposure during his time on the clean up crew. We brought Japanese victims to the US for reconstructive surgery from our best doctors - and we paid all their expenses, too. In fact, arguably more was done for the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagaski than for the survivors of the numerous fire-bombings of the rest of the country. What more would you like us to do? Resurrect the dead?
Apologizing isn’t just about words, it’s also about actions.
And in any case, I wasn’t talking about apologies, I was talking about admitting one’s country did terrible things.
Personally, I think “apologizing” for war crimes is a bit pathetic. As if words could make it all better. I’ll settle for folks be truthful about their actions instead of constant denials and silence.
Prosecuting the guilty isn’t enough of a demonstration that they had overstepped the bounds of morality, even the rather tattered morality of war? Do you honestly think that their victims would prefer words and to have the guilty walk free to having those who tormented them imprisoned in their turn?
Ah, yes, America as the great evil… when the truth is that we commit no more atrocities in war than anyone else, and on some occassions less.
As I stated, a fundamental difference between the US and Japan regarding their conduct in WWII is that the US has admitted wrong-doing in several instances, whereas the Japanese barely concede Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack. In fact, I’ve heard claims from Japanese that we somehow “provoked” Pearl Harbor, which is ridiculous.
I would also think that the difference in how conquered territory has been treated in the 20th Century also illustrates a considerable difference between the two. Japan subjugated anyone they overcame militarially and, in addition to plundering the countryside and raping the women in a systematic and institutionalized manner, also suppressed the language and customs of the conquered. When the US took over Japan the killing stopped, rape of Japanese civilians by the US military was (and still is) prosecuted as the crime it is, and after a seven year occupation we gave them their country back. Japan is NOT part of the United States, and they are free to oppose us - as they frequently do in matters both large and small. Does anyone here harbor the illusion that the Japanese would have treated any conquered foe so moderately?
And, contrary to the drum-beat refrain, no, I don’t think the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were some sort of ultimate evil. In addition to avoiding a land invasion of Japan - were even the most conservative estimates were looking at one million casualties on the US side, and at least 3 million on the Japanese (not including civilians who would, presumably, would suicide rather than surrender, as had happened in other areas of the Pacific), after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the other fire-bombings stopped… and those raids had killed more than the two atom bombs combined. There were plans to increase the napalm drops by ten-fold if the a-bombs weren’t workable weapons. I am NOT saying they’re a good thing - I can’t see how killing people is “good” on any level - but the reality is that without the a-bombs the death toll most likely would have been much, much higher for WWII in the Pacific than it actually was.
Gee, which is better - a quarter of a million people dead, or 4+ million dead?
Wasn’t the death toll for all of WWII something like fifty million world-wide?
Call the dropping of the a-bomb the lesser of two evils. Nor would I use that particular instance to ever claim any other other use of them could be justified, but WWII was a war very different from, say, Vietman. Or today’s Iraq. Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, Korea… they were all limited wars, where the combatants observe some rules of conduct, such as “don’t nuke the enemy, even if you can” and “don’t use nerve gas” and “don’t perform fatal medical experiments on prisoners”. WWII was total war, where there are really no meaningful rules, especially in the end game where the losers are getting desparate, and the victors, bitter from years of fighting and dying, are only marginally less despicable in their actions.
And as his first act against communism, he captured Alsace-Lorraine, a communist section of France. Then, he captured the Sudeten, a communist section of Czechoslovakia. Following that, he annexed Austria, a communist country. It was only when he made the fatal mistake of invading Poland, a communist country with a mutual defense treaty, that the imperialist warmongers of the U.K. and France realized they must take steps to protect Russia.
You call that a little bit of xenophobia? You’re talking about a country where the prime minister can publicly visit the shrine where WWII war criminals are honored. Where the police issues a press released saying crime by foreigners is up this year, and half of them by the Chinese - even though most of those crimes are visa violations, and the increase is a result of stricter enforcement of immigration laws. The governor of Tokyo actually denied an armed invasion of Korea ever took place, and he still got reelected with 70% of the vote. Does that sound like a normal amount of xenophobia to you?
A good read for anyone interested might be Prof. Saburo Ienaga’s The Pacific War: 1931-1945. He tends to lean a little too much toward the hand-wringing “make love, not war” side at times, but the book is pretty informative. As for the author’s background, he recently won a 30-year lawsuit with the Japanese government over the practice of censoring war atrocities from school textbooks, and his work has been officially denounced by Gov. Ishihara.
One interesting point he makes was that the military was already starting to run wild (in terms of authority within the government) 50 years before the war started, meaning that by 1931, pretty much everyone in the country had been raised in a state of near-constant military indoctrination.
BTW, there is an excellent movie by Akira Kurosowa with the rise (and fall) of fascism as a background for those interested:
Waga seishun ni kuinashi aka No Regrets For Our Youth
Very touching.
No problem.
There’s a reason that I put the word in quotations. I tend to agree with most of the arguments you’re presenting, really. And, I’m aware that the general policy I’d been talking about was just that - a general policy, not something written in stone.
Actually, the problem is that even before the bomb was dropped that was something of a debate. According to R. Adm Daniel V. Gallery, in his autobiography, he claims that there were some lone voices pointing to the inability of the Japanese industrial complex to continue the war - regardless of use of the A-bomb, or an invasion. Certainly, post war analysis of the remaining industry makes it rather clear this was true.
However, I don’t think that this invalidates the concerns about US casualties for an invasion. The people who refused to look at what Germany and Dornitz’ U-boats nearly did to England during the Battle of the Atlantic were mistaken - when a nation is collecting the pots of their population to get the metal to make destroyers there’s something seriously wrong with their ability to continue on a war footing. But a hostile invasion of the Japanese islands would have been a bloodbath - the idea of non-combatants was not something that was part of what the US was encountering on Saipan, or Iwo Jima.
The Army, in particular, could not accept neutralizing an enemy without taking control of the territory involved. Look at the difference between the general Marine campaigns across the Pacific - island hopping, and MacArthur’s intent to liberate every island in the Phillipines. I am aware the two situations are not precisely parallel - but it is illustrative of the differences on a philosophical level that the Joint Chiefs were facing.
I’m not going to say I completely agree with Evil Captor’s arguments about fighting evil as and how one can.
Having said that - I have far less concern about the use of the atom bomb over Hiroshima or Nagasaki than I do with many other actions taken during the war. Honestly, I think that the firebombing of essentially civilian districts of Tokyo is far more offensive - and less defensible - than these attacks. But this is a different thing from saying that even those actions were indefensible. I simply have never seen a moral difference between a child being killed in a firestorm started by so-called conventional weapons, and a firestorm started by an atom bomb. Or even a child being killed by debris from a precisely laid bomb that hit the targetted factory in a city.
It should also be remembered, whatever the reality of the ability of the Japanese to continue the war by that time, even before the Hiroshima bombing the rhetoric that Togo was putting out was still very hard line - and indicating a complete willingness to fight until there was no one left alive on any of the Japanese islands before they’d give up the fight. After the Hiroshima bombing, they wasted a week trying to insist on a negotiated surrender, still.
I just realized that in all this time, I’d forgotten to actually answer the OP. :smack:
I tend to think that there really isn’t a single global reputation for Japan - Americans are not the only chauvinists out there. China and Korea certainly have a strong, and legitimate, complaint with Japan. And I suspect that the Phillipines are just as hostile, if not quite as vocal about it.
Here in the States, there is still some lingering mistrust IMNSHO. I know my mother (b. 1936) is pretty antagonistic towards the Japanese. I don’t really know why - but I suspect part of it is related to the death of a cousin during the Korean War. She doesn’t like to talk about it, though.
On a more general level most people of my parents generation have had contact with people who have personal knowledge of the Bataan Death March, or similar events. For my mother, an RN, she remembers attending a birth where the woman involved still had her Auschwitz tattoo. But it’s far easier for her to distance the actions of Germany 1933-1945 from the inherent nature of all German peoples. Her father left German in 1933, in part because he didn’t care for the politics of the Nazis, after all.
???
Actually shift bombing was 3 fold:
Ensured 24 hour (around the clock) bombing.
Daylight bombing for the Americans assured greater accuracy in hitting targets.
Daylight bombing for the Americans assured lesser civilian casualties.
Of 2 and 3…2 was far more important. 3 was a bonus. Yes the planners valued the lives of the civilian constituents of its enemies, but not to a point that military objectives are compromised. They simply mitigated the effect.
Wow. I’d like to know how you straighten your history. Soldiers weren’t spared at Dunkirk…they escaped. It was kind of a reverse D-Day. The German Army attempted to kill or capture as many as possible; but due to one of many, many German strategical blunders and decay of communication, occuring throughout the war, many escaped. Also, France and England were ally-bound to declare war. I could be wrong; but you seem more hateful than informed.
Hitler himself ordered his troops to stop any further advance to Dunkirk, that is a fact.Luftwaffe could easilly decimate British/French soldiers on the beaches.His generalls were stunned when they were ordered to stop.(check any GOOD book on WW2)
Why Hitler did that, well… he tried to make peace with British,but war monger Churchil had his mind made up.That is all High Cheese.
For the record: I’ve read more “good” (as you say) books on WWII than the number of keystrokes it took you to compose this post.
His generals were stunned? Wrong. Von Rundstedt practically demanded Hitler halt the armored pursuit of the retreating French/British until more divisions could join the fray to give the German forces a higher probability of success…and Hitler agreed. Hitler’s decision was strategic, not humanitarian (as you contended). Hence the blunder I mentioned.
Hitler tried to make peace with the English? Of course! He feared the British…rightfully so. Also he had bigger fish to fry, as we later found out, and didn’t want to fight two big dogs at one time.
I can’t believe I’m debating these well known prinicples with you. If you’r e reading “good” World War II books, may I suggest some bad ones?