My God.
My dad served in the Philippines. His division - the 760th Field Artillery - was in battle for 99 straight days against the Japanese. He never said much, but the little he told us of what he had seen - what Japanese soldiers did to people - was horrible.
People who object to the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagosaki should read this article.
"People who object to the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagosaki should read this article. "
The atrocities of the Japanese were well known in US intelligence circles and there is no doubt that it affected the scale of violence that the US thought appropriate.
In many histories I have read, the mentality by the end of the war was that "we fought Germans, but we kill Japanese."
Before I get set upon by the FR hordes, let me say that I don't think that was unreasonable given the steady ramp-up of brutality throughout the war, and that ramp-up was initiated by the Axis. They sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind.
Far as I'm concerned they could have dropped a third and fourth one if that's what it took to get to surrender.
Anytime someone bring up this drivel, my immediate reponse is, "Too bad we didn't have 10 more A-Bombs so we could have bombed those inhuman murderers and torturers into the stone ages."
If you hadn't lived under Japanese occupation, you wouldn't understand why I say this.
My dad was in Korea and he never really talked about the war, but years after he died, my mom told us that he said that after what he saw there, there can be no God. And he was there for only a few months.