Why was the US so nice in World War II?

Great Debates
1

As World War II wound down, German soldiers were rushing to surrender to the Americans than the Soviets. Even the Okinawans, all but ordered to jump off cliffs by the Japanese, were suprised the US didn’t massacre them after surrendering.

While war is hell, we generally behaved during World War II, compared to Germany, the USSR, and Japan. We took good care of the POWs and civilians caught behind our lines. We didn’t rape Nanking, massacre Poland’s intelligencia, or kill off over 50% of our POWs.

The firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombs were very horrific, but they arguably had military applications. I do accept that we did those to avoid a Japan invasion (which would’ve had far more atom bombs and casualties). We still showed some restraint: Kyoto was unbombed due to cultural reasons, and Tokyo’s Imperial Palace was off-limits to bombers. The Manila Massacre, the Nazi atrocities in Belorussia, and the Soviets raping their way across Germany had perhaps less military application.

West Germany and Japan did not really suffer during the American occupation, compared to Poland under the USSR, China/Philippines under Japan, and Russian territory under the Germans. Even if the vicious nature of the Eastern Front almost encouraged cruelty, the Nazi and Soviet mistreatment of occupied Poland started well before Barbarossa.

I’m sure some will point out some US atrocities, like cutting off ears of dead Japanese soldiers, collecting skulls, and murdering Dachau concentration camp officials. But seriously, they were nothing close to Unit 731, Burma road, Lidice, and Katyn. Geez, and that’s leaving out the Holocaust.

Maybe this sounds a little to rah-rah enlightened democratic USA-USA! But we certainly did seem and act like good guys during and after World War II.

2

One WAG: other than Pearl Harbor none of the violence was committed on our homeland or against our civilians. That tends to cut down on the level of retribution. Nor did we have a long and bitter history towards any of the other combatants.

3

Note that it’s not just the US. Other countries such as Canada and the UK behaved the same way.

I’d chalk it up chiefly to enlightened self-interest, the impact of the Enlightenment on leaders and citizens and a free press.
What Jas says is true. Although even after the Germans had bombed civilian targets in England, the British did not seek to take it out on the German population once they had conquered them.

4

Three hypotheses:

  1. The US (and the other Western powers) anticipated that there was going to be a post-war conflict, primarily non-military, against the Soviet Union, and had a strong interest in keeping the general population of Germany and Japan more or less on our side. Relatedly, pre-WWII, the US had always maintained a tiny active military and had a deep-seated tradition of demobilizing as quickly as possible, and obviously wanted to avoid doing anything that caused large numbers of soldiers to be involved in any sort of protracted guerrilla conflict in the occupied countries.

  2. The Germans and Japanese were occupying large numbers of countries whose populations were (to put it mildly) not remotely thrilled about said occupation. Some of the atrocities that were committed were reprisals for partisan/resistance activities, and even the Holocaust was partially “justified” in the context of Nazi racial mythology due to the belief that Jews (and others) were implacable racial enemies of Germans in general and German militarism in particular. By the time that Germany and Japan were occupied, the median German or Japanese civilian just wanted the damn thing over with.

  3. As bad as the Blitz was, and as horrible as the occupations of places like France and the Low Countries were, there was nothing in the experience of people in the Western Allies that compared to the savage conditions of the Eastern Front. There were plenty of Soviet soldiers who had been on active duty (with no leave) for months or years at a time, under inhuman conditions, facing combat (or at least the possibility thereof) on a more or less daily basis, knowing that there was a good chance (particularly if they were from Belarus or Ukraine, doubly so if they were Jewish) that their families had suffered horribly (at minimum) at the hands of the Germans. This is a set of conditions that would lead to something like a psychotic break in the most well-adjusted of people, so even if there hadn’t been a deliberate policy of cruelty on the part of the Soviet leadership – well, you don’t have to condone their behavior, but I feel like it’s possible to understand.

5

Our “niceness” is overstated. One of the reasons Japanese troops got a reputation for not being taken alive is that American troops were killing any that surrendered, even when ordered not to by their superiors. And there were plenty of rapes of French women by the Allies after the Normandy landings.

6

FWIW, Allied war crimes during World War II

7

A large reason is racial hatred, or lack of it. There was little hatred between Americans and Germans (in no small part because so many Americans had German ancestry) and both sides treated prisoners as fairly as they could. Generally the Germans treated non-Jewish Westerners well. However, there was a long standing animosity between Germans and Slavs that got ugly on both sides. Near the end Germans surrendered to Americans because they knew they wouldn’t get fair treatment from the Russians.

In the Pacific we (Americans) were not as fair to the Japanese. While we were better than the Japanese there was some racism involved. The “sneak” attack on Pearl Harbor and the atrocities of the Bataan Death march only increased the anger.

8

I don’t think the Americans ever rose to the level of atrocities their justifiable enemies engaged in during WWII…YMMV.

9

Sure, but that’s not much of a slogan: “America - we’re not as bad as the other guys.”

10

And? Considering how nasty they were, it was perfectly possible to be very nasty indeed and still not sink to their level. That’s like standing up in court at your murder trial and using “well, at least I didn’t eat them like Jeffrey Dahmer” as your defense.

11

Yes, I alluded to some of them, adding that they paled in comparison to the Germans, Japanese, and Allied Soviets.

12

Bullshit. Cite?

13

I disagree (to a point). Nobody should expect a nation of 100’s of millions of people to be perfect and free of blemish. Being better than everybody else is a worthy goal, as long as that’s not the only one. I think the American response in WW II was overall laudatory.

14

It’s not really an issue of why the United States was so good as it is of why some of the other powers (Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan) were so incredibly bad. If you look at other serious wars like World War I or the American Civil War or the Napoleonic Wars, you don’t see any country committing the level of atrocities that were routine among some nations during World War II.

The explanation seems to be that most countries maintain some standards of civilized behavior, even against their enemies during wartime.

15

I’m not familiar with the second allegation, but if you click on the wikipedia link already given you’ll come across plenty of evidence for the first.

16

Hubzilla already provided one; if you scroll down you’ll even see a picture of an American cheerfully posing with his trophy Japanese skull. Here’s another.

[QUOTE=BBC]
Even more feared, of course, was the crime of rape - and here too the true picture has arguably been expunged from popular memory.

According to American historian J Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war.

“The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common,” writes Mr Hitchcock.

“It also shows that black soldiers convicted of such awful acts received very severe punishments, while white soldiers received lighter sentences.”

Of 29 soldiers executed for rape by the US military authorities, 25 were black - though African-Americans did not represent nearly so high a proportion of convictions.
[/QUOTE]

17

And rapists were usually punished unlike the Soviets.

The US was nice because of its constitutional liberal government which it maintained throughout the war, alone among the major powers other than the UK. It was fighting not simply to crush the enemies as badly as possible but to create a new, better tomorrow with a lasting peace.

18

Rape in WWII France Yes, rapes occurred, but not in greater frequency than elsewhere in wartime.

Japanese Soldiers Surrendering in WWII

Surrendering many years after the war indicates that they weren’t holding out due to fear, but fanaticism.

I doubt that a long-winded ‘Cite’ war will change anyone’s opinion. I’ll leave you to your delusions and ignorance.

19

Not massacring civilians isn’t a very high standard, the ‘niceness’ is more a reflection of the scale of atrocities committed by the Axis and how the Allies look in comparison than any inherent niceness. It’s only in comparison to these horrors that you can so casually dismiss collecting skulls, ears, gold teeth, and other body parts of the enemy dead. Germans weren’t rushing to surrender to the Western Allies because they were so decent, they were running away from surrendering to the Soviets because of how they had treated Soviet prisoners and civilians. Considering that over 2 million Soviet prisoners died in German captivity, they had good reason to fear. One could even be casually dismissive of the Soviets ‘raping their way across Germany’ in comparison.

Killing those rendered hors de combat was sadly a common practice of both sides in the Pacific. For example, from History of United States Naval Operations in World War II volume five: The Struggle for Guadalcanal in the aftermath of the naval battle of November 13th, while towing the stricken cruiser Atlanta

20

Let’s not try to make villians out of our soldiers. The reason that very few if any Japanese prisoners were taken alive was because you could not trust a Japanese soldier that was surrendering. Too many Americans trying to do the right thing and treat these prisoners with compassion and caring ended up dead. The Japanese were notorious for hiding a grenade in their hands while holding them behind their heads or hiding them in their loin cloths only to detonate them when an American soldier would approach to capture them. There was absolutely no way to tell which Japanese soldier that was surrendering was going to commit suicide and take you or your fellow soldiers with them. After witnessing a few of these suicides the general attitude of the average American was take no prisoners. In fact, I have read many accounts of Americans surveying a battlefield after the battle and putting a bullet into the corpse that didn’t show obvious signs of death to make sure. It wasn’t uncommon for a wounded Japanese to place a grenade underneath them so that when our medics would pick them up for treatment it would detonate and kill the Japanese and the medics attempting to help him. What would you have done in that situation? I can’t blame them in the least for killing every single one they saw. They wanted to go home and not in a body bag. The Japanese soldier of WWII did not follow the “rules” of war and paid the price for not doing so. Our soldiers were correct and just for doing what they did.

As far as why were the Americans for the most part nice? I think it comes down to the character of the average American. We are by nature a caring and compassionate people. It was not unusual at all for our soldiers to treat both the Germans and Japanese (the ones who surrendered successfully) with great care and understanding. There have been many written accounts by the enemy of their surprise at being taken care of after capture. We are unique in this world, even today our primary goal is to resolve a conflict with as few casualties as possible. Why do you think that we spend billions developing smart weapons capable of precision strikes instead of weapons geared toward taking out huge areas. Something tells me that designing a weapon to take out a city block is much easier than designing one to take out one room in a building. We do it because we care about human life. The American soldier has no equal in this regard. I am very proud of our soldiers past and present and am disgusted by those who will take one or two examples (there are bad apples in every bunch) and try to apply it across the board.