Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jun 29, 2013 20:50:36 GMT -5
The peaceful people of the USA when left to their own devises have a tendency to plot the demise of other people , Yamamoto had the misfortune of popping up on the radar , Admiral Halsey said lets kill that fellow he has been a pain in the ass , where is he anyway ? Coast Watchers from OZ said he is in Rebaul with their help and a little fine tuning on code breaking , some call it the murder of Yamamoto some call it the killing of Yamamoto and others call it a bad day to go flying .
|
|
|
|
Post by Sir John on Jun 29, 2013 20:54:12 GMT -5
He was fair game!
|
|
|
|
Post by Sir John on Jun 29, 2013 20:58:15 GMT -5
....and the Coast Watchers saved Guadalcanal remember!
SJ
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jun 29, 2013 21:01:29 GMT -5
The Coast Watchers when sober were a great help otherwise not so much .
|
|
|
|
Post by Sir John on Jun 29, 2013 21:03:19 GMT -5
They say Kava is a nice drop, they use it as rocket fuel now.
|
|
|
|
Post by Sir John on Jun 29, 2013 21:04:53 GMT -5
|
|
|
|
Post by boxcar on Jun 29, 2013 21:13:42 GMT -5
|
|
|
|
Post by Swampy on Jun 29, 2013 21:13:53 GMT -5
Of course he was. But, if he had lived, would he have been a force for an earlier surrender? He knew what was going to happen to the Japanese military. |
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jun 29, 2013 21:24:33 GMT -5
Swampy that's a very good point and after the fall of Okinawa he might have been able to reason with the Japanese Military and maybe no need to drop the bomb , another one of those what if's .
|
|
|
|
Post by Sir John on Jun 29, 2013 22:55:37 GMT -5
Doubt it!
They were arguing among themselves for months and weeks before the Emperor finally cut the Gordian Knot.
They even had a go at a coup at that time.
SJ
|
|
|
|
Post by mcnoch on Jun 30, 2013 1:33:33 GMT -5
1.) I think political and military leaders are a much more valid target than the civilian population in cities or factories, so if you can end a war or speed up its end by killing them that is the way to go.
2.) The Japanese opposition faced the same problem as the German. Faced with the unconditional surrender policy of the Allies, it made simply no sense to remove the government by a coup as the Allies won't negotiate, so no better outcome could be expected. In conditions like this all you can do is to kill as many enemies as possible. The “unconditional surrender” strategy was later removed silently from NATO and all other military handbooks as a strategy as the Game Theory showed that it costs more than it brings.
|
|
|
|
Post by Swampy on Jun 30, 2013 1:41:40 GMT -5
We wanted unconditional surrender because we had to destroy the evil that existed in both regimes. We simply cannot allow the Nazis and Japanese militarists to remain in power after what they did.
|
|
|
|
Post by mcnoch on Jun 30, 2013 1:46:40 GMT -5
That is a typical ex-post view. The Holocaust was not known in its scale at this time, so it was not really factored into the strategy of the Allies. And from a military point of view, the Japanese and German military didn't behaved much differently as similar military/occupation forces behaved over the centuries. I would presume that Europe saw the worst atrocities of its cruel history during the Hundred Years War between France and England.
|
|
|
|
Post by Sir John on Jun 30, 2013 1:56:27 GMT -5
"The Holocaust was not known in its scale at this time,"
Sorry, but I do not believe that.
SJ
|
|
|
|
Post by mcnoch on Jun 30, 2013 2:28:05 GMT -5
Go look for the newspapers of that time, look for the military reports and reconnaissance analysis. While it is hard to understand and accept that such a large scale crime could be committed without the world knowing it, it is what happened. The USAAF photos of the KZs showed the gas chambers as "cantinas" as the analysts had no other clue to why so many people were standing there in line. Many politicians in the USA and UK even refused to believe that when they saw footage, some had to come to Germany to see for themself. Until the end of the war the real dimension of the Holocaust was not known, only some facts like that the Jews were badly treated in Germany and that many had left Germany and the other were now living in Ghettos (as happened repeatedly in the European past).
In the decades after the war the inconceivable fact, that something like this could happen without being noticed lead to an overemphasis of each single, small hint that something like the Holocaust was happening and over time the public perception did a complete switch to the opposite of the historic truth, today everybody believes that everybody knew about that and that it was the real motivation for the war. Simply because it can't be that such crimes go unnoticed.
The real horror of the evil that caused the Holocaust in Germany is that it can happen under the “right circumstances” everywhere and anytime again, not only Germany in the 30s/40s. It showed us how evil we humans can be. Most people try to cordon off this as something that could happen only in Germany at that time, but that is not true and we have seen many developments around the world which were or are close to the conditions that made the Holocaust possible. I don’t want to play down the German responsibility or the Holocaust, but don’t give in to the easy solution that it was a one-off event that will never repeat itself.
And Japan behaved exactly as it did in the past wars on Korean and Chinese soil. Go, read the books. Nothing new under the sun.
|
|
