Now it's quite possible that some of that was exaggerated and history as written by the victors. (authors like Leckie, Sledge, Jones ... have their books but didn't get too far)
But if your opponent is willing to surrender, it's generally a better tactic to let them surrender, than to have a no-prisoners policy that means their only hope for survival is to defeat you.
Not saying there was no racism, no brutality, no war crimes from the American side, but would need to see more evidence that the relative lack of prisoners was 100% due to American war criminality vs. how Japanese fought.
https://www.quora.com/Are-educated-Americans-no-longer-taugh...
Not even the German government, engaged in attempting to exterminate the undesirable population of Europe? Or the German treatment of Soviet prisoners? Or Soviets of German prisoners?
Certainly, there was a lot of hatred and racism on the Allied side. (And then there the allegation of Patton's famous disinclination to accept the surrender of German soldiers who had just fired single-use anti-tank weapons at American forces.) But I think you're getting hyperbolic there.
Do you have a source for the hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers being tortured, mutilated, decapitated, and turned into war trophies?
They weren't more racist than the US/British. You could argue they were as racist since they modeled their racial ideology from the US/Britain.
> Or the German treatment of Soviet prisoners?
The german treatment of soviets and the soviet treatment of the germans were horrific. But nowhere close to the level of depravity that the allies in the pacific sunk to. The allies didn't just kill japanese POWs. The allies tortured and mutilated and decapitated hundreds of thousands of japanese soldiers. There are countless japanese skulls and all kinds of mutilated japanese body parts in the US because the GIs did so much mutilating in the pacific. No fighting force in ww2 engaged in such disgusting behavior.
> Do you have a source for the hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers being tortured, mutilated, decapitated, and turned into war trophies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes...
It was so prevalent that LIFE magazine ran a cover story on it...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b5/LIFE_May_1944...
It was so prevalent that FDR, the leader of the free world, was fiddling with the bones of a tortured japanese soldier in the oval office.
"On June 13, 1944, the press reported that President Roosevelt had been presented with a letter-opener made out of a Japanese soldier's arm bone by Francis E. Walter, a Democratic congressman.[4] Supposedly, the president commented, "This is the sort of gift I like to get", and "There'll be plenty more such gifts"
"In 1984, Japanese soldiers' remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands. Roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls"
More than 70,000 japanese were killed in marina. If 60% were missing their skulls, that means more than 42,000 skulls sent to the US. That's just one island campaign...
You don't learn about this in school. As I said, evil won ww2 and evil lost ww2. There was no good guy in ww2.
When, exactly, would that be?
That is the propaganda/"history" that I am talking about. If you look at previous battles/wars, the japanese soldiers did surrender. The japanese soldiers did surrender in the beginning of the pacific war to the allies and they were brutally slaughtered, tortured and mutilated. It was part of the racist "no prisoner" policy by the extremely racist allied soldiers. That's why the japanese stopped surrendering.
The myth of the "unsurrendering" japanese was created after ww2 by "historians" to justify the absolutely absurd casualty rates that the japanese endured. Many of these battles in the pacific had deaths rates of 100%. That's unheard of in wars, unless one side was completely genocidal. Meaning there were 0 wounded 0 japanese POWs. What this means is that the allied soldiers simply massacred the japanese soldiers and went around killing wounded japanese soldiers. We know this happened because we have video footage of allied soldiers killing wounded japanese soldiers.
> and had been taught to expect mistreatment from Americans similar to what Japan dished out on e.g. the Bataan Death March.
The Bataan March was "myth". Hundreds of thousands of japanese POWs were tortured and mutilated and massacred by american soldiers. Maybe 100 americans soldiers were killed in the bataan march. Maybe. The propagandist myth of the bataan march certainly influenced the savage behavior of allied soldiers, but the allied soldiers in the pacific were from some of the most savage and racist societies on earth. We pretend that nazi germany and imperial japan were "racist", but we were just as racist as they were and much of axis racial ideology was copied from US/British racial ideology.
> But if your opponent is willing to surrender, it's generally a better tactic to let them surrender, than to have a no-prisoners policy that means their only hope for survival is to defeat you.
Right. Unfortunately, racist hatred wouldn't allow the allied soldiers to let the japanese surrender. That's why the japanese soldiers fought so hard. That's why the kamikazes only came into existence against the allied soldiers. The japanese never exhibited that behavior against the russians, chinese, etc.
> Not saying there was no racism, no brutality, no war crimes from the American side, but would need to see more evidence that the relative lack of prisoners was 100% due to American war criminality vs. how Japanese fought.
"American soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World...
"But the Japanese wasn't dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath... "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes...
"In 1984, Japanese soldiers' remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands. Roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_and_Palau_Islands_camp...
If you do the math, pretty much all of the japanese on these islands were killed ( 70K+ ) and tens of thousands of these soldiers were tortured, decapitated and had their heads boiled for war trophies.
In ww2, you can objectively say that pure evil won and that pure evil lost. We love to pretend that the nazis were evil or the japanese were evil, but the most evil societies on earth was britain and the US and had been the most evil for nearly 150 years before ww2. We love to ignore the historical fact that Nazi Germany modeled their ideology after the racist ideology pioneered by britain and the US.
There are people who say the German concentration camps were 'myths' too. There are memes that propagate because they serve someone's agenda... maybe the same applies to the narrative that the "allied soldiers [i.e. Americans] in the pacific were from some of the most savage and racist societies on earth."
Fortunately, there are professional historians that try to sort through this stuff.
"100–650 American prisoners of war died on the march before they reached their destination."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March
I'm not saying the march didn't happen. I'm just saying that the propaganda surrounding the bataan "death" march is a myth. Growing up, you'd think it was worst thing in the world. But then you learn that hardly any americans died and that those americans who died were invaders/colonizers of the philiphines themselves and just as evil as the japanese invaders. That's what I'm getting at.
> There are people who say the German concentration camps were 'myths' too.
Okay? What does that have to do with what is being discussed?
Revisionism FTW.
If both sides are equally evil in your view, would you say you are indifferent to which side ended up winning WWII? Is it a mistake on my part to assume you would be indifferent had the Axis powers achieved complete and utter victory over the Allies? After all, they are both equally evil.
Seeing as you seem to be claiming that both sides were equally evil, I'm very interested in your views on how you think the victorious Axis powers would have treated those they defeated.
Whatever may be said of the crimes committed by both sides during the war, it seems to me that both Japan and Germany fared rather well after surrender considering they were both completely defeated. We are not all that far removed from WWII and yet today Japan and Germany are both overwhelmingly populated by the descendants of Germans and Japanese, not the descendants of foreign conquerors, and enjoy some of the highest qualities of life in the industrialized world.
I'm curious how you think Jews in Germany, or Europe, or indeed the rest of the world would have fared under an Axis victory. Do you think there would be any meaningful Jewish community left in Germany or Europe? How do you feel the Roma, or Slavs or homosexuals would have fared? How would the populations of the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, China, the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia have fared in the subsequent decades of a Japanese victory in the Pacific? Would these communities have fared as well in defeat as the Germans and Japanese have?
As an american, of course I'm glad the US won. All I'm saying is that the US wasn't any better than anyone else. We weren't saints. And certainly the brits, who had been brutalizing africans, indians, chinese, aborigines, etc for centuries weren't saints either.
> Is it a mistake on my part to assume you would be indifferent had the Axis powers achieved complete and utter victory over the Allies? After all, they are both equally evil.
As an american, of course I would care. The point is whether one was more evil than the other?
> Seeing as you seem to be claiming that both sides were equally evil, I'm very interested in your views on how you think the victorious Axis powers would have treated those they defeated.
Pretty much exactly the same as british treated their colonies? You do realize that europeans had been raping, pillaging and exploiting much of the world before ww2 right?
> it seems to me that both Japan and Germany fared rather well after surrender considering they were both completely defeated.
Initially no. Japan, especially, were brutalized by the allies after ww2 because of racial hatred while germany was built up because of racial "pride". Lets not forget that we destroyed japanese infrastructure and pretty much starved them for years before the korean war broke out. While white europe god the marshall plan, asiatic japan got starvation.
> We are not all that far removed from WWII and yet today Japan and Germany are both overwhelmingly populated by the descendants of Germans and Japanese,
What's your point?
> I'm curious how you think Jews in Germany, or Europe, or indeed the rest of the world would have fared under an Axis victory.
Not too well. Just like the natives in the US/canada and the aborigines in australia. I bet every palestinian wishes that the axis had won...
> Do you think there would be any meaningful Jewish community left in Germany or Europe?
No more than there are meaningful natives in us/canada or aborigines in australia.
> How do you feel the Roma, or Slavs or homosexuals would have fared?
The roma/slavs would have been germanified. The homosexuals would be brutalized like Alan Turing was by the british.
> How would the populations of the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, China, the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia have fared in the subsequent decades of a Japanese victory in the Pacific?
They would have been japanofied and not much would have changed since most of asia had been under brutal european domination anyways.
> Would these communities have fared as well in defeat as the Germans and Japanese have?
You are making arbitrary assertions just to push your agenda.
If the axis had won, there would have been WINNERS and LOSERS. Just like if the allies had won.
Yes, the jews would have suffered. But the arabs/palestinians and most of the world suffering under european colonization would have rejoiced.
After all, many people around the world supported japan and germany. Much of the independence movements throughout the middle east and asia was supported by japan and germany. Not only that, in asia, the japanese soldiers even stayed behind after ww2 ended and joined independence movements to fight the returned savage european colonialists.
For the japanese military in WWII, rape was normal. Butchering civilian populations wholesale was normal. The Americans and British did not play by those rules, even though we did a lot of killing. This was not two equivalent evils.
Also, regarding "butchering civilian populations wholesale" see [1], [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
To me there's not greatest lack of honour than committing perfidy in war.
The japanese started suicide runs because the allies had a no prisoner policy.
"American soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World...
Not only that the allies were tortured, mutilating and decapitating hundreds of thousands of wounded/surrendered japanese soldiers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes...
That's why the japanese didn't surrender. What the allies were doing in the pacific war is something that even ISIS would view as deranged.
If false surrendering is a war crime, then so is torture, mutilation and "no prisoner" policy.
Why did the japanese soldiers stop surrendering? You have to look at the context. Would you surrender to someone who is going to torture you, mutilate you and decapitate you and boil your head so that your skull could be sent to the US as a war trophy? Of course not.
Most american POWs survived ww2 under japanese control. Almost no wounded or surrendering japanese survived ww2 under American control.
There was brutality on both side for sure. But the allies were especially racist and especially brutal. What the allies did in the pacific has no parallels in human history in terms of brutality and savagery on the battlefield.
Hundreds of thousands of japanese were tortured and mutilated. Hundreds of thousands of japanese were decapitated and their heads were boiled to make war trophies.
It is the ugly side of history hidden from view because the winners get to write the histories.
As I said, evil won ww2 and evil lost ww2.
> Many Americans considered them killing machines without heart with whom it was impossible to reason.
That doesn't explain the mutilation, torture and other depraved behavior by the allies. America was the most racist society on earth during ww2. The nazis modeled their racial ideology on the US for a reason.
The brutalizing of nonwhites has a long history in the US. The propaganda about the japanese being "unreasonable" or "suicidal" are lies we invented to hide our savage behavior. No different than our excuses for mutilating native americans and blacks.
FYI: The mutilating of non-whites continued in the korean war and the vietnam war. I guess they were "unreasonable" too... I guess all the blacks that were tortured and lynched were "unreasonable" as well.
Or maybe the US was just extremely racist.
Well, I can think of a few things that are way worse. Like torture and mutilation.
Perhaps you are not aware of the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, where as many or more civilians died as in the nuclear bomb detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which perhaps you also forget.
The book makes a lot more sense once you understand Vonnegut's history with the bombing.
Systematic? Is that a joke? Millions more german and japanese women were raped by the allies than vice versa.
Lets not belittle the german and japanese women who were raped.
I'd be very appreciative if you could link to a source for this claim.
Millions of german women were raped by the allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...
Tens of thousands of japanese women were raped after ww2. The only reason that more japanese women weren't raped was because the japanese government provided "comfort women" for the allied troops.
Both my parents were in their early teens in Malaysia during the Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation. The both lived near (different) POW camps, and yes, they both agreed that the treatment of the British & Aussie POWs in those camps by the Japanese guards was brutal.
But they both say that when the roles were reversed and the Allies took back Malaysia, the treatment by Allied soldiers of the Japanese prisoners was equally as horrific. Call it 'revenge mentality' or anything else, but the truth is that it happened and they saw it happen with their own eyes. It is just not documented in the history books we read today.
My father had his bicycle commandeered by a Japanese soldier when the Imperial forces walked into Kuala Lumpur unopposed. The soldier politely asked to 'borrow' it and my dad's family knew better than to refuse. At the end of the war however, the same soldier knew defeat was coming so he actually sought out my father's family and returned the bike. It was a lot worse for wear, but he got it back.
Another Japanese officer gave my grandfather one of his ceremonial swords as a gift because he was going to go down to the river to commit seppuku rather than be captured by allied forces. Bushido or not, that sort of cultural belief was the norm back then.
My mother still speaks fondly of British POWs who she said were just young boys that she felt sorry for. She and her mother used to go down to the camp to collect the clothing of the POWs and the guards so they could mend them. Some of the English soldiers taught her to make toy bunny rabbits out of socks and she still remembers how to make them to this day.
She speaks of the sorrow of going down to the camp one day to return some uniforms only to find the place deserted. A remaining guard told her that the Allied POWs had been shipped off to Burma to build a railway. She cries even now when telling the story.
My mother actually still has some of the 'banana money' that was used by the Japanese in Malaysia during the occupation. Both my parents said that any actual fighting done by the Japanese forces was precise and directed against military installations in order to minimise civilian casualties.
My father's best friend lived among the labour camps on the ground of the KL railway station. When the initial Japanese air attack on the railway yards came, they bombed a few cars/buildings and shot out the clock tower (after dropping leaflets explaining that they would demonstrate their superiority by shooting out all the clock towers in KL). There were hardly any civilian casualties.
Conversely when the allied forces later counter attacked KL, they carpet bombed the railway yards, killing almost all the civilian labourers living there (including my dad's friend).
Perhaps it is because I heard all these first hand witness accounts while growing up that I always listen to any official war reports with a grain of salt. War is hell, and makes monsters of ALL the participants.
These stories are worth retelling... again and again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
"The media seems to be right" until the war comes to you.
What racist gibberish. It was "normal" just like it was normal for the allies. The allies did a lot more raping than the axis...
> Butchering civilian populations wholesale was normal.
And it was not normal for the allies? The allies murdered a lot more civilians than the axis.
> The Americans and British did not play by those rules
Is that a joke? Intentionally burning of millions of innocent women and children are what? The nuking of cities full of innocent civilians are what? We intentionally murdered a shitload of innocent civilians too. Lets not pretend otherwise.
> This was not two equivalent evils.
You could argue that the british/americans were more evil than the japanese/germans. I prefer to say evil is evil.
The fact that you think we were any better just shows that you are an unthinking person who mindlessly swallows propaganda. Or that you don't know what really went on in ww2.
The british were some of the worst genocidal maniacs in humans history ( aborigines, indians, africans, etc ). And we did our fair share of genocides ( native americans, inuits, etc ). We didn't go from mass lynching of blacks to turning into saints overnight. The US and Britain were two of the most racist and evil societies on earth in the 1940s. There is a reason why the nazis modeled their ideology after the british/american racial ideology.
You don't win wars without killing people, and therefore all sides are evil by definition.
The little process of judging "war criminals" after the war is over is just for one's good conscience. If the Allies had lost they would have been judged as war criminals by the victors too.
Also don't think that anybody in WW2 cared about the Jews. There are enough stories about Jewish refugees being rejected at borders and sent back to face certain death because nobody believed them or cared about them. Hating Jews was socially acceptable everywhere until the Nazis showed what that kind of thinking can lead to in a modern society (with the technical and political means to actually round up and murder people at scale).
The US only got directly involved in WW2 when it had no other choice (technically, Germany declared war on them after the US declared war on Japan). Britain only declared war on Germany because it had a pact with Poland which Germany invaded -- Germany had already annexed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia at that point.
Heck, Italy and Hungary were allied with Germany for a significant part of the war. Not to mention various countries like Spain and Finland that fought alongside or at least supported Nazi Germany.
WW2 was a world war. It's called that because it involved so many countries that were at war with each other throughout the entire world at once over an extended amount of time. There were many reasons for each individual conflict and WW2 itself is just the aggregate of all of these (with the two major ones of course being the attempted domination of Europe by Nazi Germany and the attempted domination of East Asia by Japan).
It wasn't about ideals or principles. It was about power and territory. And for the Allies it was mostly about survival: a German victory would have meant vassalage for Western Europe and annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go).
TL;DR: While halting the genocides was a nice side-effect of defeating Germany, the Allies weren't in it to save the Jews.
> annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go)
Where is the axis hiroshima/nagasaki? Where is the axis firebombings of japan and germany?
> the British Buchenwald?
Go look up bengali holocaust where millions of indians were starved to death by the british. It's also funny that you would bring up death camps ( which were invented and pioneered by the british ). The germans modeled their death camps after the british death camps of south africa...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/LizzieVa...
Looks like a holocaust picture right? Wrong. It was from a british concentration camp in south africa during the 2nd boer war.
> WWII was against genocidal maniacs who starved entire countries and destroyed Yiddish speaking culture.
WW2 was about one group of genocidal maniacs fighting against another group of genocidal maniacs for resources/power/wealth.
I don't think the allies ( US, Britain, Soviet Union ), the KINGS of genocide are any better than germany or japan when it came to genocide. As bad as the destruction of yiddish culture may have been, it pales in comparison to what happened to the natives, aborigines, inuit, pacific islanders, africans, siberians, circassians, etc.
As I said, in ww2, it was evil vs evil. Evil won and evil lost. If both sides had somehow lost, then you could argue that the good won.
I am not sure what measure anyone would use to compare war crimes etc., but if you are talking about pure body count, then the number of civilians killed during (a) the Rape of Nanking and (b) the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atomic bombs run about the same...
The bombing raids against Tokyo alone almost certainly killed far more than Hiroshima throughout the war.
And it included the most destructive single bombing raid of the entire war. Operation Meetinghouse [1] burned a quarter of Tokyo to the ground in a single night, and may have killed as many as 100,000 - more than is believed to have died in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima (though possibly fewer than the total Hiroshima death toll, depending on which estimates are right).
[1] http://www.wired.com/2011/03/0309incendiary-bombs-kill-10000...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX61.h...
And his own story is Hellish by any standard. In the third volume particularly, his group gets caught by enemy fire and are presumed dead. When he makes it back to camp, they has already reported them as dead. This turns out to be an embarrassment and they are effectively told to go back into the jungle and die. Some do.
After public protest and court ruling, it is now admitted it was the Japanese army which ordered people to kill themselves and even killed them:
"Orders from Japanese soldiers led to Okinawans committing group suicide," and, "The [Japanese] army caused many tragedies in Okinawa, killing local civilians and forcing them to commit mass suicide." [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa#MEXT_controv...
That's a bit of revisionism as well. The reason why many okinawans killed themselves was because the allied soldiers were raping and killing okinawan civilians.
From your own wikipedia link...
"There was some return fire from a few of the houses, but the others were probably occupied by civilians – and we didn't care. It was a terrible thing not to distinguish between the enemy and women and children. Americans always had great compassion, especially for children. Now we fired indiscriminately."
The nonsense about "distinguish between the enemy an women and children" is just egotistic nonsense. We have a long history of butchering women and children ( especially non-white women and children ). All we have to do is review US treatment of natives, blacks, etc throughout US history to see how compassionate we were.
The reason why the okinawans killed themselves was because of the brutality and savagery of both sides ( americans and japanese ).
Japanese soldiers' "fighting to the death" nonsense was myth invented many years after WW2 by allied "historians" to justify the mass murder of japanese soldiers by the allies.
It's not that the japanese weren't willing to surrender. It was that the allies ( unfortunately out of extreme racism ) wouldn't allow japanese soldiers to surrender.
If you dig a little past the history/propaganda and look at the raw data/facts/etc of the pacific war, you will learn how brutal the pacific war was. And how racist the allies were towards the japanese soldiers. Nearly every japanese soldier who was wounded was butchers and killed as were nearly all japanese POWs.
It was called the "no prisoner policy" of the allied soldiers. And if you want to read about some more base aspects of the pacific war, go read about the mutilation of the japanese soldiers by the allied soldiers. Some real sick shit.
The more you learn about the real nature of ww2, you realize that there was no good side in that war. Just two evils fighting each other.