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Sorry, I guess I didn't make my point as clearly as I should have. I'm not saying we should have let Japan keep ANY of her ships post-war; I'm saying that I would have loved to see a few of them preserved as museums. I would have brought them to America and let the people see just what it was that they had defeated. Only later, much later, would I have SOLD them back to Japan -- again, only as museums.

Incidentally, most of Japan's surviving handful of warships were merely scrapped. Nagato was sunk by atomic bombs at Bikini. Katsuragi was used for repatriation duties and then scrapped. I think a few of the destroyers were given to China. IIRC, the U.S. did not keep any of the ships as prizes, as we could have done had we so desired.

Hindsight is always 20/20. I would have preserved Japanese warships, aircraft, tanks, weapons, archives, based on my perspective of looking back seventy years at a war fought before I was even born.

Movie makers have been kicking themselves ever since.

Guess I was wrong about some of the warships. Of course, just imagine if for example the Nagato were preserved. Nowadays it would be a floating shrine on the scale of the Yasukuni memorial, which angers Chinese & Koreans to this day.

The two white painted Bettys had tremendous historical value but they wound up crashed & burned. One Navy vet who was there remembered boarding one of the Bettys after the Jap delegation was transferred to C-54s for the ride to Manila. He found the cabin floor strewn with documents & later wished he had gathered up as many papers as he could for their archival value.

My Dad was infantry & went in on D-Day. He later told me how he gave away a whole footlocker full of Lugers, P-38s, & Mauser pistols surrendered to him by German officers.

My face fell & he said, “I didn’t know at the time that I would someday have a son who was interested in guns!”

Then there was all the neat stuff I saw in Vietnam....