Didn’t the USA make up for that ‘niceness’ in Vietnam and elsewhere?
Or maybe, more generally, the victor reports the enemy’s evilness more than his own.
That scene in one of the Spielberg films of a US soldier shooting German prisoners always felt incongruous to me, it doesn’t adhere to the standard narrative.
Yay! Ignorant people talking about war! Again!
I’m sorry, but to try and make a case that American soldiers have no equal, that Americans are unique in their compassion, really is just ‘USA! USA!’. Plenty of countries can say the same of their armed forces and national character, Americans aren’t unique for showing compassion.
And most countries do. It’s part of any national narrative.
Germany’s treatment of Belgium in WW1 comes close, only not rising to the same level because Belgium is so small. The systematic and planned kidnapping and massacre of civilians on little or no pretext and the destruction of cultural heritage would be more widely remembered as the horror it was if it took place on the same scale all throughout France, for instance.
I don’t know how true it is, but I saw a documentary a few years ago about WW2 that claimed german soldiers themselves were not really that bad, it was the SS, gestapo and other security officials who did all the killing. The average german soldier was not doing the same kinds of things the soviet and japanese soldiers were doing.
As far as the US being nice, I think most allied western powers (the UK, France, Canada, Australia, etc) behaved in a reasonably civilized fashion during the war.
Not to mention that the Japanese weren’t known for their kind and generous treatment of Allied prisoners.
Yeah, but you also like to use the Jeffrey Dahmer outliers as the standard by which all of America should be judged.
Unless you are dead. In which case you might get peed on!
Iran hails American naval forces as a credit to the Great Satan for rescuing fishermen!
I think it has more to do with effectively killing what you’re trying to kill instead of just blowing up the whole area. It’s very expensive and inefficient to carpet bomb.
In all fairness, a lot of soldiers are dumbasses.
Comments like this don’t contribute much to the thread (although I saw that chacoguy did post some cites). If you want to participate in the discussion, please do. If you don’t, then don’t post things like this. It’s pretty much threadshitting.
Some random factoids on the topic:
During the war, bread was not a rationed item in Britain. After the war it went onto the ration list, so that occupied Germany could be fed.
German POW’s faced starvation in post-war camps run by the Americans. Eisenhower just didn’t have the food for them as well as the civilian population, so he let them starve. Nothing personal.
As thorough the retribution inflicted on the Japanese Empire (except, for some reason, that one guy), the post-war generation of Japanese was taller and more robust than any previous.
On the other hand, The US killed a larger percentage of the population of the Philippines than the Japanese. The hunters and herdsmen of Siberia and Central Asia did not experience the same fate as their counterparts in North America.
Looking at Eastern European history, the constant theme of “If we could finally kill all of them, we’d habe happy at last” isn’t found in the US. We hated, say, the Comanche, for half a century, utterly defeated them, and then moved on.
In war being a humanitarian is a luxury item that not everyone can afford. If you are winning the war, you have more resources to be compassionate to your enemies, and can afford to maintain your humanity and civility. But if you are on the losing side struggling to survive, then you will take every avenue open to aid tip the scales in your favor, be it torture, execution of prisoners, subjugation of civilians. Also being frustrated, stressed and demoralized your troops are more likely to take their aggression out on their enemies and civilians around them.
Also there is the fact that the winners write the history books, so the victors troops and ideals are put in a better light than the losers.
At the policy level, I think the Soviet threat pursuaded the US government that it needed to get Germany and to a lesser extent Japan, on its feet as soon as possible.
On a personal level, American troops had been fighting the war on foreign soil and just did not have the same level of hatred to Germany as did Europeans who had seen their cities occupied by Germany. There seems to have been more animosity by Americans towards Japan; we did, afterall, imprison our own citizens of Japanese anscestry.
This above all has got on my goat. The US are so good so angelic…
After reading this thread through and understanding all the different opinions and understanding of the different subscriber I cannot get over this crap.
As said earlier - Vietnam. the US where such Good Guys…
How about they way they treated the Native Americans - Good Guys…
Total American bull shit. Remember the history was written by the victors - After all if the US got their way they would have won the war single handed - wait was that not how Hollywood portraid it - the US single handedly wone the war???
War is hell and if you are brought up in a culture that is different then you will have no understanding of it - the Japanees soldier did not understand what was wrong with trying to take as meny of the enemy as possible with him when he died - the Boshido code (I am not Japanees so may have got this wrong so forgive any mistakes) thought it was a dishonour to surrender and to do so was to show weakness. When they say enemy soldiers surrender they saw them as weaklings or sub-humans. If they surrendered they would have expected the same treatment.
Yep, I made the point about who writes history. Perhaps more importantly, who makes the movies that portrays history, and those people include Johns Wayne and Ford, Audie Murphy, Errol Flynn…
My father and several other relatives of mine served in the military. They are not blood thirsty monsters now, and I doubt that they were during their military service, either. The idea that military training is intended to instill a psychopathic mentality is beneath contempt.
That’s apologetics, the Wehrmacht was intimately involved in the holocaust and other German atrocities. No, not every or even the average German soldier was a death camp guard, but trying to pass it all off on the SS, Gestapo, etc as doing all of the killing is unmitigated nonsense. What exactly do you think Soviet soldiers were doing that makes them worse than the Germans and on par with the Japanese? As bad as captivity in the hands of the Soviets was, it pales in comparison to what the Germans did on the Eastern front; the USSR didn’t let 2 million German prisoners die from starvation and neglect. When they invaded Germany the troops weren’t followed right on their heels by extermination groups that proudly boasted of killing over a million undesirables in mass shootings.
Well, only if linking to Google-vomit is an actual cite.
Speaking of linking to Google-vomit, linking to the search terms “eisenhower starved germans” in Google isn’t an actual cite. It’s also complete and utter garbage and the brain child of one man’s (James Bacque) conspiracy theory. The criticism section on wiki of his book Other Losses is quite extensive. Suffice it to say that Bacque insists a million Germans were murdered without leaving behind so much as a single body.
The last sentence contradicts the rest of the paragraph. If the average Wehrmacht soldier was so fuhrer-lovin bloodthirsty, they wouldn’t have needed the SS Einsatzgruppen.
But to be fair to the Soviets, a lot of the carnage and rape was done by occupation troops rather than front-line troops.
This is another meme I really get tired of. The American Indian tribes frequently fought each other over hunting grounds and farming land and resources such as water. When Europeans arrived, the various tribes were perfectly happy to ally themselves with the whites against other tribes, and the whites had no problem with allying themselves with Amerind tribes against other Euopean nations (e.g. the French and Indian War). The red man was playing the same game as the white man, it’s just that the white man played it better. And even with all this fighting, the vast majority of Amerinds died not from bullets but from diseases which the Europeans inadvertently introduced into the Americas.
If only for the sake of variety, could you please come up with other excuses for despising Americans? And what does your comment have to do with the Second World War in which many Amerinds fought for the United States military?
The Japanese militarists bastardized the traditional Bushido code of the Samurai for propaganda purposes. A Samurai was expected to be prepared for death to come at any moment. He was not expected to seek out death, and he certainly wasn’t expected to engage in wanton slaughter. But even if pre-militarist Japanese culture was as barbaric as you portray it, why would that make their brutality any less unacceptable? Why is brutality when practiced in the context of some other culture supposed to be understandable and not so bad, whereas similar brutality by Western nations is unforgiveable?
Minor hijack: This claim is in error.
While most humans are not “wired” to engage in murder, (the killing of an individual for personal gain of some sort), as primates, humans have a long history of engaging in the killing of other humans who are outside one’s own group. Beginning with endogamous and exogamous, (in-family and out-family), bands and extending up to the level of the nation state, humans appear to be very much “wired” to inflict death on those who are perceived as “not us.”
(I mention primates, because research in the last 20+ years has discovered the same phnomena among multiple primate species, including chimpanzees, baboons, and orang-outangs.)
In what possible way? The existence of Einsatzgruppen (who were heavily recruited from outside the SS) in no way prevents the Wehrmacht from having any complicity in atrocities. You’ll also note that I said that the average German soldier wasn’t a death camp guard. From the cite provided on Einsatzgruppen:
Order Police were also directly involved in the holocaust, see for example Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Then of course there is the Commissar Order issued to the German Army:
Again, trying to pass off all of the blame to the SS is apologetics of the worst sort.
To be fair, most of the people discussing this ARE ignorant of the realities of any kind of war, from any side of the conflict. To add to this ignorance, This thread is about a war that was not only enormous, throwing out most generalities, but a bare minimum of one, probably two generations removed from the participants of said discussion.
That’s not even touching the “reputation” some of the participants have for willful ignorance and hatred of all things military.
It wasn’t a threadshit, I promise. It was a commentary on the perpetual nature of people backseat driving, armchair generaling, and Monday morning quarterbacking. 
