It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were.
The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs.
The Japanese used PoWs for chemical and biological weapon testing and vivisection, and they would find the most depraved ways to draw out mass torture of PoWs.
For example, they would do things like put US soldiers into baskets so small PoWs could not move at all inside them, load them into unventilated railroad boxcars with no water, then load them into ships, sail out to sea, and drop them overboard into shark-infested waters.
Then there's the Nanjing Massacre where in a matter of days Japanese soldiers slaughtered something like 300,000 Chinese civilians at a rate of around 7,000 civilians a day. That was just one of the more than a dozen massacres. It's widely believed that Japan slaughtered more civilians than the Germans.
The sheer level of depravity is astounding. And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.
from a warfare perspective, this is really bad strategy. it strikes fear into your enemies, but it's massively outweighed by making your enemies fight to the absolute last to not be captured
It was deeply ingrained by their internecine conflicts. When factions would fight in their internal wars, they would expect the losing side to commit suicide if they happened to be defeated and not dead by enemy hands. Their military class was not introspective enough to consider that implication of this, if applied to its logical end in a conflict with an out-group, would be the total extinction of their ethnic group.
It's pretty classic in-group / out-group conditioning. In fact, incentivizing your enemies to also commit their own atrocities incentivizes your own to fight to the absolute last. The depravity and feedback loop is intentional for these kinds of extremely ideologically motivation groups.
Indeed. Modern warriors understand this concept. This is why Al-Julani of HTS (the group that has prevailed in Syria) has emphasized that he supports 'diversity' and that the Kurds and so on will be recognized. There were various forces at play in Syria and he'd be in a war with all of them if he was hardline right at the start. The constraints of peace apply to all, violent or not, and to win it's better to not be religious about your violence.
The idea was that the Japanese soldiers would see the atrocious that they were doing, realize that the Americans would want revenge, so the Japanese better fight to the death, since that's better than what the Americans would do to them in captivity.
It ends up that the Americans weren't too in to revenge, so the captured Japanese were surprised.
Japanese soldiers fought to the death because they knew that their families would be punished if they didn't.
In Japanese culture at the time the sins of the father are inherited by the sons and daughters.
If you surrendered you would be dooming your entire family to a life of poverty and shame. To most decent people that would be worse than death.
And even before that, burned > 500 square miles of Japanese urban areas to ash.
Granted, by the last weeks of the war, the USAAF was dropping leaflets warning they'd be back with incendiaries in a few days, a masterstroke in psychological warfare.
Hot take, but Japanese civilians (all civilians, not just men) were to fight American soldiers if they invaded Japan. We'll never know what would have happened if America invaded, but Japan certainly was not making civilian evacuation plans. So maybe innocent-ish civilians?
Many wars would be cut short if the winning side offered amnesty. I suspect that Germany would have surrendered a year earlier if the Allies had offered some version of amnesty rather than unconditional surrender.
The Nazis fought to the bitter end because they knew that unconditional surrender meant there would be hell to pay. And there was.
You run the risk of the old regime continuing in some form and a repeat in a decade of the same war. Germany surrender in The Great War and the world was back at it again 15 years later.
This played a big part in the attitude of do it right this time.
So many people died... yet, people are still voting for the AfD, and the idea of the Final Solution[0] is still somewhat alive under the Master Plan name[1]. I love Germany, but as a migrant living here, this is a "bit" uncomfortable. I lived here 15 years and paid more than a million in taxes, then suddenly a "Start Remigration Now" poster appears[2]. Not cool.
> and the idea of the Final Solution[0] is still somewhat alive under the Master Plan name[1].
Sorry, but that's utter bullshit. Also, I wonder how you feel about Turkey's plans to remigrate Syrian refugees back to Syria now that Assad has been deposed.
No that's just a fact. It's the same ideology, trying to be sold under "more acceptable" terms. The BS part is people trying to make it sound milder than what it is. It even wants to deport German citizens who they claim to not have integrated well. More details on similarities: https://www.socialeurope.eu/when-never-again-becomes-again-a...
I don't support any forced relocation of groups of people and find even very long prison sentences debatable. I'm also a big proponent of forcing Turkey to recognize the Armenian and other genocides. Nice try to poison the well though.
People build their lives somewhere, relocating them usually means many steps back. If you ever migrated into a complete new country with different values and language, you would understand.
Have you missed the last ten years worth of radicalization in the AfD? They started out as what appeared to be a relatively normal fringe party under Lucke, and then over the years the far-right managed to shed ever more layers of the onion.
Particularly Höcke, a man who you can legally call a fascist, gives me the chills. And the party youth manages to be even more radical than him, enough to scare the adults into attempting to clean up shop before the youth organization gets banned.
None of the leaders of Germany in WWI were still in power by the time WWII started.
The exact opposite lesson was in fact learned by the Allies from WWI: instead of crippling Germany and the other Axis powers like the French did after WWI, they went with the Marshall plan, rebuilding their economies and making sure they have an actual future.
The Kaiser wasn't the problem after WWI, it was poverty that allowed the Nazis to rise to power.
After Germany surrendered and the war in Europe was over, America began systematically dismantling West Germany's industrial capabilities. No aid was to be given save the absolute minimum needed to prevent starvation, all the work of rebuilding Germany was to be left to the Germans. The Red Cross was forbidden to visit allied camps of German POWs to provide food or aid. It was even forbidden for Americans to send packages of food to Germans.
Over the next two or three years these orders were one-by-one rescinded and reversed, mostly for national security reasons when the Soviet threat was acknowledged and Germany's role in countering that Soviet threat was understood. But even then, in the end only a small portion of the Marshall plan went to West Germany. Most of it went to the rest of western Europe.
>None of the leaders of Germany in WWI were still in power by the time WWII started.
This isn't really true. Hindenburg was instrumental in Hitler's rise to power. Ludendorff was the de facto dictator during WWI and proceeded to create the stab-in-the-back myth and to fight for the Nazis. There is absolutely lots of continuity between the WWI regime and the Nazis.
Hardly. A handful of very high ranking Nazis were tried and hanged. Many of them escaped via ratlines. Nearly all the mid-level officers and civil authorities escaped any sort of punishment or justice, and continued happily serving in the West German state.
A handful of very high ranking Nazis were tried and hanged.
This is a misconception. As a result of the "Nuremberg Trials" which concluded in 1946 and focused specifically on high-level defendants, 11 people were hanged. But there were numerous other trials, including what were called the "Nuremberg Military Tribunals" from 1946-1949, the Bergen-Belsen trials, and so on, as a result of which scores of people of decidedly lesser status were executed, easily some 200+.
Nearly all the mid-level officers and civil authorities escaped any sort of punishment or justice, and continued happily serving in the West German state.
An amnesty for what, mass murder, a policy of multiple genocides?
Also the Nazis claimed the German army was not losing WW1, but were betrayed by politicians. Perhaps WW2 would not have started if WW1 ended in unconditionally surrender?
Also worth noting that along with Operation Paperclip, where the US recruited Nazis to bootstrap their space program, the US also recruited Japanese war criminals to continue their experimentation in torture and chemical and biological warfare, which led to (among other things) MKULTRA.
And in Bluebird and Artichoke the US directly continued that work, and not in some kind of "generic spirit" way, but in literal extensions of existing programs using people gathered via Paperclip. And in Korea the US used bioweapons developed by the Japanese during a retreat in late 1952.
The Japanese were indeed horrible during the war. The take that the Germans and the US treatment of "expendable" humans during and after these wars was somehow more justified or less horrific is a uniquely horrible and ahistorical take.
Mostly pilots of planes that ended up in Switzerland. Without GPS or mid-air refueling that did happen a lot. Swiss neutrality meant shooting at any military that entered their territory, no matter which side they were on, and taking anyone who surrendered captive.
Anything else could be seen as helping one side or the other, which wouldn't be very neutral. Not that they were always above helping them in non-military ways
I don't think they "shot the PoW", and I don't even know if they emprisoned them. Feels very weird how the original comment put it (why link the Swiss to the Germans like this?).
But I know that German planes ended up in the Swiss airspace. The Swiss told them to land (like "we will now escort you and you will land on our soil, and if you don't comply we shoot you down"). They refused and got shot down.
But it's very different from shooting a pilot that would be in a state of PoW.
I seem to remember that navigation systems existed during WWII for both taking bearings and computing your actual location, albeit in a wide margin of error. The British apparently jammed some well enough that Nazi pilots just landed somewhere in the Northern part of the UK
Dead reckoning while flying is hard even today. If you are flying under IMC (instrument meteorological conditions, pilot slang for "bad weather/can't see shit"), you generally have to trust that your meters and instruments are working. Without GPS (or ground based triangulation methods), you generally have to guess where you are. It's very easy to accidentally end up in a small country like Switzerland.
If anyone's looking to build a startup in aviation, try building an alternative to pitot tubes. It's pretty much the last remaining vacuum instrument that hasn't been replaced by a solid state/MEMS alternative. And vacuum instruments are about as reliable as Windows Vista.
>> It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were.
>> The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs.
Not to take anything away from the Japanese, and the Soviets, who were also horrible to POWs, but I'm pretty sure that the WWII Germans are charter members of the Hall of Fame for crime against humanity. They just didn't do most of it specifically to POWs.
(And if you want a good history of horror in broadly-speaking early-middle 20th century Eastern Europe, I suggest reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.)
Not to take away from the depravity of Japanese violence in WWII, but 300,000/7,000≈43. The rate was either higher, or “a matter of days” is probably the wrong term.
> And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.
This is still a hot issue in Japanese Buddhism and demonstrates the difference between the sects:
Consider Soto and Rinzai Zen, vs Jodo Shinshu. Leaders from both supported the war efforts and nationalism, but since Soto and Rinzai teachers are supposed to be enlightened, the Soto and Rinzai authorities have not been able to apologise for their support. On the other hand, since in Jodo Shinshu everyone, including the head of the school (monshu), is on the same spiritual level (there is no attainment in Jodo Shinshu), they were easily able to apologise for the acts and ideas of the WW2 monshu.
The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs.
The Japanese used PoWs for chemical and biological weapon testing and vivisection, and they would find the most depraved ways to draw out mass torture of PoWs.
For example, they would do things like put US soldiers into baskets so small PoWs could not move at all inside them, load them into unventilated railroad boxcars with no water, then load them into ships, sail out to sea, and drop them overboard into shark-infested waters.
Then there's the Nanjing Massacre where in a matter of days Japanese soldiers slaughtered something like 300,000 Chinese civilians at a rate of around 7,000 civilians a day. That was just one of the more than a dozen massacres. It's widely believed that Japan slaughtered more civilians than the Germans.
The sheer level of depravity is astounding. And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.