Posted on 07/28/2006 8:20:58 AM PDT by mjp
Another condition that is always overlooked: while the Japanese MILITARY surrendered to the Allies, the Japanese GOVERNMENT did not. That is an important distinction to make.
No truer words were ever spoken!!
Questions to contemplate: How did we get to this concept of fight antiseptic, politically correct wars and WHY do our leaders continue to be blind to the futility of fighting wars in that manner?
Superb - thank you.
AND...kill the attacker when attacked. Do it by the most self-preserving way.
world, that is a politically-correct fallacy in many, many ways.
There are important distinctions to make, especially within the context of the Second World War, in this regard. The Germans and Japanese, infected with a brand of fascism which was heavily impregnated by racial bigotry and antiquated notions of national greatness. But the Allied side also had it's share of questionable cultural traits, prime amongst them the idea that Empires created by force should last forever see DeGaulle, Halifax, Stalin, et. al.).
Never heard that before! Didn't even know that they had a bomb program.
Whoops, let me finish the thought (posted too soon)!
The point I'm trying to make is that the (mental and intellectual) validity of one's culture is directly proportionate to the extent to which one's mind and heart are dedicated to his cause.
So, while a Japanese of the Second World War would see nothing wrong with executing prisoners under the cultural influence Bushido code, a Westerner would have no problem justifing the same action in the light of the Malmedy massacre. Your justification always depends on your point of view to the exclusion of all others.
I'd say neither response (in the example above) is moral, or culturally superior. They are just differents sides of human nature, which can usually be depended upon to be wholly disgusting.
The simple fact is they were mean little bast*rds with a high sense of invulnerability and it required extreme measures to bring them back to earth. Like everyone else, I don't approve of making war on women and children but .....
Hogwash.
1. In the entire war, not one single Japanese officer had surrendered the troops under his command. Surrender was not and never would have been an option. Furthermore, the home island was no more outmanned that Iwo Jima. How many Japanese surrendered there?
2. We had broken their code, and were listening to them. No Japanese official was discussing surrender, despite whatever fairy tale you have bought into. And, finally, Sherman deliberately avoided military targets and attacked civilians. Give me an example of one MILITARY target that he attacked.
"President Truman demonstrated his willingness to the Japanese out of existence if they did not surrender. The Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945 is stark: "The result of the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan . . . Following are our terms.
We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay . . . We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces . . . The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."
Harry, we could sure use ya' now. This speech should be made to the Islamic regimes, before thousands of lives are wasted in the meatgrinder.
Just about all the major combatants of the Second World war (with the exception of the Italians) had atomic bomb programs, in some form. The "secret" of the bomb was not the science (the foundations of which had been laid out decades before) but in the creation of a stable bomb, and the methods of mass production, of same.
The Germans are usually thought ot have "missed" getting thebomb because of a mistake in process or proceedure, or because their scientists were starved of resources, etc. The real problem is that German scientists were aioming higher than the relatively puny A-bombs, and shooting straight for an "H-bomb" with few or no intermediate steps.
The Japanese handicaps were simply that the Japanese economy could not support the effort required for the basic research and infrastructure and that the Japanese mentality believed that victory in war came from spiritual, not material, means. That does not mean the Japanese did not make efforts to produce or acquire better weapons, but that once they had reached a certain level of technical proficiency, the will and means to carry it to it's next logical step often fell by the wayside. The Japanese were innovative, but certainly not INVENTIVE enough. That sort of mentality was almost-foreign to Japanese culture which prized conformity to originality(those who often were inventive were treated as one would treat nails that are sticking up: you hammer them down).
My contention, and I'll admit it's wholly academic, is that another way could have been found.
Your comments are chillingly arrogant. US invasion casualties were forecast to be over one million men.
Donning flamesuit
Easy arguments to counter;
1. While no Japanese officer of note ever surrendered his troops, starving, ill-equipped Japanese troops with inadequate weapons may have stayed in their foxholes to die valiant deaths,their defeat was a foregone conclusion. If you measure war simplitically in terms of how many of the enemy you kill, you would be inclined (as you are) to build the Japanese of 1945 up into a major power.
I remind you that at the time of surrender, 2/3 of the Japanese army was still in the field,totally unengaged by any Allied force of consequence and cut off from the Home Islands, unable ot come to their defense, and incapable of offensive action. You cannot fight wars defensively, so the Japanese were done. Through and through.
Starvation was an even more critical factor. It was known (form the same code intercepts that you cite) that Japanese food shortages were crippling the country. SO were shortages of critical materials (iron ore, brass, oil, bauxite, aluminum, etc, etc). The capacity to continue to feed the population, supply the military, and continue war production were approachiing nil. Once the ready-to-hand stockpiles of materials were used up, Japan would be defenseless. The question in this reagrd was how long the US Navy (which had Japan completey bloackaded) could continue out against the Kamikazes, while waiting for the Japanese to finally run out of the means to continue fighting.
2. No fewer than THREE Japanese surrender offers were tendered from May to July, 1945. One through Moscow (which never passed it on), one through Switzerland and another through Sweden (and the Magic intercepts show all of these, in minute detail, as well). The reason why they were not entertained (or entertained seriously in the case of the negotiations in Bern with Allen Dulles) was because the terms under which these surrenders would be effected would make a shambles of the united Allied front and the concept of "Unconditional Surrender".
If anyone was really interested in ending the war free of political constraints (that is, just for the sake of ending the conflict), a Japanese surrender was possible months before Hiroshima.
Going back to Sherman, if you don't consider rail lines and hubs, ports, bridges, shipyards, armories, farms and factories to be legitimate military targets, then I'd be interested in just you think are legitimate military targets. The point is that while Sherman inflicted devestation, there was no policy of deliberately killing civilians in order to "degrade the enemy's war effort" or "break his morale".
Don't bring up the WTC, SFC. I walked out of 1 WTC on September 11. You may think you're making a valid point, but not to one who was actually there and survived.
While nuking Mecca or Tehran may be satisfying, it does nothing to mitigate the cause of Islamofascism, which is a mindset incapable of dealing with the modern world. So,what is your ultimate goal here; destroying people because they happen to Muslim or destroying a culture which produced a poisonous ideology? I'd opt for #2, and while that does involve military action, it does not require that we slaughter a billion people.
My contention, and I'll admit it's wholly academic
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