I know that the Japanese military could be quite ruthless. The average career soldier of the empire considered surrender to be dishonourable, and their reputation for brutality was well deserved. What happened to POWs and civilian prisoners was inhuman, and their treatment of the population of cities such as Shanghai was one of the darker chapters of the 20th century. Undoubtedly, defeat in the second world war removed that air of invincibility that had existed for centuries and made the country rethink its place on the world stage.
But (and there's always a but):
High and low ranking Germans and Japanese were put on trial and convicted of war crimes after hostilities had ceased. The Germans had made it clear that, had they won the war, Churchill would have been executed for war crimes (basically for continuing the war when it was already lost and the various bombing raids on civilian areas---ignoring the fact that they had done likewise with many British cities). Do you think that an act which vapourised or burned 100,000 people at a stroke and caused lingering deaths through cancers of tens of thousands of others would have gone unpunished in the event of a Japanese victory? War crimes, like views of history itself, tend to be dictated by whoever won.
As far as the world is concerned, things turned out all right. The war ended, Japan and Germany had been humbled, and the atomic bombs had been a pointed lesson to Russia. All the same, the people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in the main, non-combatants. There is a word for picking an undefended civilian target, and that word is atrocity. Okay, they were just people who believed their leader was a god, and probably deserved to die for such ignorance---but if ignorance was worthy of punishment, we'd be dropping atomic bombs to this day.
Don't get me wrong, WillieBo, the second world war had to be fought---the death camps proved that. But I just wish it hadn't been necessary for us to be so merciless in achieving victory. I'm still someone that believes we in the west are basically the good guys, and therefore we should be wearing the white hats and upholding the rules of civilised society, not reinforcing the view that might is right.
I'd be interested in any arguments or comments.
Days That Changed The World
Re: Days That Changed The World
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Re: Days That Changed The World
'But I just wish it hadn't been necessary for us to be so merciless in achieving victory.'
I think war and mercy rarely go together. I know what you say about the moral high ground and I suppose we still believe that with regard to WW2. But the Germans would (and still do) see themselves as the defenders of Western Civilisation (whatever that is) against their perceived and real enemies during this period.
Sometimes you have to be utterly ruthless in war. After all it's about killing and territory. By the same token as the Allies would have been seen as war criminals in the event of an Axis victory, they (the Axis Powers) would also claim the moral high ground.
History is often written by the reflection of victory. I would not claim any moral superiority about dropping nuclear weapons but at the same have no qualms about the ends which were justified by the means. It was harsh and ruthless and ultimately necessary. It would be feasible by definition to call every death in war an atrocity.
But unlike terrorism, at least those nations involved in WW2 formally declared war and knew that this was a total war. Which unfortunately is a concept that meant the involvement of civilians. Those who prosecuted the war did not believe every civilian 'innocent'. Although one would be foolish I think to ascribe to the sort of rabid nonsense spouted by revisionists such as Daniel Goldhagen in books like 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' wherein he damns the whole of the German people during the Third Reich as fanatic Nazis and anti-semites covered in blood.
I think war and mercy rarely go together. I know what you say about the moral high ground and I suppose we still believe that with regard to WW2. But the Germans would (and still do) see themselves as the defenders of Western Civilisation (whatever that is) against their perceived and real enemies during this period.
Sometimes you have to be utterly ruthless in war. After all it's about killing and territory. By the same token as the Allies would have been seen as war criminals in the event of an Axis victory, they (the Axis Powers) would also claim the moral high ground.
History is often written by the reflection of victory. I would not claim any moral superiority about dropping nuclear weapons but at the same have no qualms about the ends which were justified by the means. It was harsh and ruthless and ultimately necessary. It would be feasible by definition to call every death in war an atrocity.
But unlike terrorism, at least those nations involved in WW2 formally declared war and knew that this was a total war. Which unfortunately is a concept that meant the involvement of civilians. Those who prosecuted the war did not believe every civilian 'innocent'. Although one would be foolish I think to ascribe to the sort of rabid nonsense spouted by revisionists such as Daniel Goldhagen in books like 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' wherein he damns the whole of the German people during the Third Reich as fanatic Nazis and anti-semites covered in blood.