Show Your Thanks to World War II Vets by Watching This 2-min Video

Show Your Thanks to World War II Vets by Watching This 2-min Video
http://media.causes.com/1060527?p_id=175378540

I think that one of the most important things to remember when it comes to veterans is that there are people alive today who fought against Britain, America, France, Canada and all the Allies, and they too deserve our respect. They weren't any different than our own soldiers.

Except the ones who committed war crimes, of course.

Yes, because no Allies committed war crimes, no way!

Not on a genocidal scale they didn't.
....
Nuclear bombs aside.

Firebombing of Dresden...

Anyways, it wasn't regular troops who were ordering genocides. Soldiers weren't the ones who ordered the Holocaust to happen, soldiers never ordered the destruction of the Aral Sea, and soldiers never ordered the razing of Carthage.

Neither Dresden, Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were calculated acts of genocide. All had legitimate military ends.

Military officers are regular soldiers, too. Soldiers sure as hell ordered Nanking.

Those events were unnecessary. You could argue Nanking had legitimate military ends. You could argue that perhaps the Romans had a proper casus belli in wiping out Carthage simply because they defended themselves against hostile African tribes. You could argue that, by destroying the Grand Library of Baghdad and destroying irreplaceable works of unmatched intellect, the Mongols were reducing Islamic power, forcing the Ottoman push into Eastern Europe and changing European history.

Few events in history are objectively wrong or objectively right. Some are just harder to justify and defend than others.

Not that I believe any of the above events were at all good, though.

Consider the alternative to the atomic bombs, though - amphibious landings on the Japanese home islands and an overland offensive all the way to Tokyo and beyond. Squadrons of suicide planes were being held at the ready to attack the invasion fleet. Kyushu and Honshu had been turned into bunker-studded fortresses manned by thousands of well-acclimatized crack troops, not to mention an entire civilian population exhorted to resist the invaders tooth and nail. One million Allied casualties were predicted; the Purple Hearts they made in preparation for the fallen numbered enough to supply the US military to this day. Your average Allied Pacific War veteran gives incalculable thanks for the atomic bombs. I tend to agree with him.

By the time the Japanese waltzed into Nanking, the city had already fallen. Chiang's men had withdrawn. No more military ends there. The rapine and massacre that ensued was the true definition of 'unnecessary', with the gatecrashing troops pointedly going out of their way to target helpless civilians.

Let's look at Dresden. It harbored aircraft factories, munitions factories, a poison gas refinery, barracks, depots and railroad marshaling yards. Also, triple A emplacements everywhere. Far from an innocent target. There was a lot of cloud cover the night of the raid and most of the bombing was done via radar - hardly an accurate exercise. The dead of Dresden were collateral damage, hardly in the same category as the dead of Nanking. I cannot consider the pilots and bombardiers to be vicious murderers.

I fully support the use of atomic weapons on Japan for a number of reasons. As Nachtsider stated, a land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would have killed probably tens of millions of Japanese. The entire nation was geared to commit ritual suicide and had stockpiled significant "kamizkaze" weapons for that purpose. And I fully believe our occupation would have been relatively brutal in retaliation for all of those attacks - there would be no such thing as a "civilian" - every Japanese national would be viewed as a combatant and treated as such.

I also believe that Hiroshima and Nagasaki played a direct role in Korea and Cuba not going nuclear. Seeing the effects of two extremely crude and low-yield nuclear weapons on a population center were enough to keep the politicians in both the US and the USSR sober enough to not let that genie loose.

It's a more complicated issue than "to invade or not to invade (then nuke)?"

The Japanese were all ready to stop fighting after VE day (really after they lost Iwou Jima)... but naturally being very defensive of their core culture they did not want to unconditionally surrender and have the Americans do to them what France did to Germany after WWI...

But keep in mind, it was not just us fighting the Japanese. The Soviets were preparing an invasion into Manchukuo and Korea, the former they once owned and lost in the Russo-Japanese war, and the latter they've had their eyes since long before that war. The Russians still control a series of islands north of Japan that was traditionally theirs.

Even if we had accepted their conditional surrender and left them alone, the Soviets likely would have tried to move in themselves, possibly invading the main islands. Truman did not like the Soviets, so we wanted Japan to surrender to us and come under our thumb under the policy of containment. Afterward it became more or less a waiting game, that summer we pressured the Japanese (who had all but stopped fighting entirely) to unconditionally surrender, something they were still reluctant to do. When the Soviets started gearing up for a full-scale invasion, we dropped the bombs to force their surrender to US.

And the results could be said to have been favorable, as Japan quickly rebuilt and re-asserted itself as a capitalist world power. Did we have to drop the bombs? No, in fact we could have gone home and let the Soviets take care of an old score they've been wanting to settle. But by dropping the bombs we not only convinced Japan to surrender fully to the US, AND we scared Stalin. It was a win-win in Truman's book.

For crying out loud take your war crimes debate to another thread.
And take your posts with you.


PLEASE.

SSgtRobertMorris wrote:For crying out loud take your war crimes debate to another thread.
And take your posts with you.


PLEASE.

threads rarely stay on topic for long here

Thanks a lot.