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Post by okla on Jun 3, 2013 19:48:34 GMT 8
Hey Darth....Did this particular person mention the fact that the POWs were, in many cases badly under nourished, diseased in need of medical attention, etc. I have viewed photos, where in many instances, the guards were mounted on bicycles, not walking, but always sporting their rifles and its' "pig sticker" bayonet. There is an account, I think on the Bataan/Corregidor Defenders website, where some twenty some year old Japanese woman said that she had walked the route of the "Death March" (in a cooler part of the year) and it was not so difficult. Of course she was healthy and had all the water she needed, etc. She also wasn't being prodded along by some sadistic little guard with the preiously mentioned "pig sticker" bayonet. How in the Hell somebody could make that outlandish statement, I will never be able to fathom. All my attempts to make sense of this kind of reasoning drive me crazy.
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Post by darthdract on Jun 3, 2013 21:02:45 GMT 8
Hey Darth....Did this particular person mention the fact that the POWs were, in many cases badly under nourished, diseased in need of medical attention, etc. I have viewed photos, where in many instances, the guards were mounted on bicycles, not walking, but always sporting their rifles and its' "pig sticker" bayonet. There is an account, I think on the Bataan/Corregidor Defenders website, where some twenty some year old Japanese woman said that she had walked the route of the "Death March" (in a cooler part of the year) and it was not so difficult. Of course she was healthy and had all the water she needed, etc. She also wasn't being prodded along by some sadistic little guard with the preiously mentioned "pig sticker" bayonet. How in the Hell somebody could make that outlandish statement, I will never be able to fathom. All my attempts to make sense of this kind of reasoning drive me crazy. The fellow I talk with denies the fact that the guards randomly beats the POWS. or the fact that most of POWS are already exhausted and suffering mall nutrition even before the death march started. Its War they where figthing desperately just before the surrender its not like the Japanese arrived at their barracks and interrupted a feast and made them walk from Bataan to Cabanatuan.
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Post by xray on Jun 4, 2013 13:47:14 GMT 8
Hey All....Pertaining to the bombings that led to hundreds of thousands of German civilians being killed, I believe that RAF Air Marshall "Bomber" Harris" summed it up rather well when he said, "sow the wind and reap the whirlwind", or course referring to the senseless Nazi bombing of civilians in Warsaw and Rotterdam in 1939-40. Most present day Germans have enough "moxie" to realize that these early WW 2 actions led to the horrific saturation bombings of Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and many other cities later in the Air War. Maybe two wrongs don't make a right, but that's how it played out and the Germans know it, for the most part, thus the absence of "whining" or denying. Just my humble. I, myself, will belabor the point no further. Cheers. Point taken, Okla. No sympathy for blown up Germans/Japs then, not much now. I don't think its correct that if only the Germans didn't bomb Warsaw & Rotterdam, they never would have got bombed themselves - I sure would not take the word of a personality such as Harris on the matter. Our design and production of heavy bombers obviously started well before those events, and these aircraft weren't meant to drop daisies. True, they were conceived as pinpoint strategic bombers, able to fight their way to and from high value target areas ,, But it sure didn't take much doing to covert them to wholesale city destroyers. The German bombing force on the other hand was largely tactical in nature, and wholly incapable of delivering the mass destruction from the air that Allied forces did routinely and repeatedly at 100's of locations. In the end, I think we did it just because we could ,,, Culminating in the Dresden raids, which were conceived and carried out with the sole purpose of creating as much civilian carnage as possible. Japanese bombing raids almost from the start had the same goal, to the point where aircraft were stripped of turrets and other defensive gear to load them up with more fire bombs to create civilian infernos. Even Churchill wrote in later years that he was wondering at this point if we were in danger of becoming the same or worse of that which we were fighting against, and those are words from a man not easily dismissed. [He wrote that in his memoirs, don't know if you've ever read them].
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Post by buster on Jun 4, 2013 18:22:17 GMT 8
When it comes to considering the efforts of Bomber Command, one matter which is of prime importance not to overlook was that the bomber offensive was, for a considerable time, the only offensive action which England was capable of taking against Germany. Certainly, after Germany invaded Russia, and England came under pressure from Stalin to open a "second front", the bomber offensive was claimed by England as the only means that it had to render assistance and pin down German personnel on their Home Front. An interesting rule of thumb was that until Stalingrad, the Allies never had a win, whereas after Stalingrad, they never had a loss. It is a rule of thumb, as near enough as good enough, so to speak, but it does go to indicate that it was a necessary campaign and had fulfilled an important purpose.
A full analysis of the respective merits and morality of the aerial campaigns is something that has resulted in the publishing of whole library shelves of books. For all of them, the issue still isn't final.
Churchill may have expressed reservations concerning the campaign, post war, but earlier, during the darker days, he was as supportive of it as anyone could have been. He was not immune from changing his viewpoints in retrospect, particularly when he came to write the history of the war. Ah, the benefits of hindsight! ( "History shall be kind to me, for I intend to write it" and “I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself," are both quotations attributed to WSC.)
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Post by okla on Jun 4, 2013 20:53:27 GMT 8
Hey Xray/Buster....I can't argue with your well expressed points. The RAF wasn't willing to accept the high losses that went with daylight strategic bombing as were the Americans, so they attempted to accomplish the knocking out of key factories,etc by blanketing the whole area. Again, I think it was Marshall Harris who said, "if we can't kill the workers at the lathe,etc we will kill them in their beds at home" or some such statement and that's just what they did. As for the Rotterdam, Warsaw, Bombings. I believe that these acts were a handy excuse for the later saturation bombings by the RAF. In fact, if memory serves, a few stray German bombs that were dropped by accident in a civilian area of London during a Luftwaffe daylight raid, gave Churchill his justification to plaster the center of Berlin shortly thereafter. The tit for tat was on from that point on. The 8th USAAF taking high casualties during daylight hours, attempting pinpoint bombing on key industrial targets, and the RAF taking out whole sections of German cities in hopes of destroying targets located therein. The argument goes on as to how effective each method was, but a Hell of a lot of civilians paid a price. I won't argue that this course would have been followed Warsaw, Rotterdam, London or not. As the brutal war wore on with horrendous losses being suffered in ground and naval combat, the Air War naturally followed suit in time, being just as ruthless as any eyeball to eyeball combat that was taking place on the beaches, in the foxholes and on the water. Civil War General Sherman said it best, "War is Hell".
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Post by xray on Jun 5, 2013 11:01:49 GMT 8
Well said ok, I agree with most ... With the exception that, especially towards the end of the war, there was often not even a pretext of trying to hit a factory or rail yard, but rather the only goal was civilian carnage, and they certainly accomplished that. US command thought that they could succeed in daylight with the mighty B-17, but that illusion was pretty much shattered at Schweinfurt, where we suffered staggering and unsustainable losses in both men and machines. We were forced to adjust our tactics until enemy defenses could be worn down, and long range fighters were able to come on the scene, whereupon we were able to relentlessly pound enemy cities almost at will. That goes to my original point that with all this wholesale death and destruction around the globe, apologies/acknowledgements/restitution to Korean comfort woman should not loom large in anyones thoughts. Might sound harsh to say it, but they were destined for a menial, humiliating existence with or without the Japs, and the fact that some are still alive to complain shows that they were not mistreated as badly as many who didn't make it out alive. I would bet that some volunteered to go, seeing it as a possible way out of a bad situation. Asians were not known to wage war cleanly or by any conventions, and should not be judged by our modern standards.
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Post by okla on Jun 6, 2013 8:47:34 GMT 8
Hey Xray...Not to beat a dead horse into oblivion, General Curt Lemay, initially attempted a bit of high altitude precision bombing with the new B-29 SuperFort, but the newly discovered Jet Stream whipping down from Siberia over the Japanese homeland made this task rather more difficult than originally envisioned, so 'ole Curt said "to Hell with it and switched to the strategy of literally "burning Japan to the ground" and pretty well succeeded. There was no pretense involved in attempting to limit civilian casualties, The FEAF B-29s "let it all hang out" as the saying goes. I have heard that in a few instances that leaflets were dropped saying, in effect, "get out of Dodge" because we are coming with a terrible resolve. By 1945 there wasn't too much mercy in the hearts of the obvious victors. I think history shows that the Atomic Bomb, certainly shortened the war, saving thousands upon thousands of lives, both Allied and Japanese, but between the B-29s and the American Submarine campaign Japan could have been brought to her knees by starvation alone, however unsatisfying and lengthy that would have been. We wanted blood, whether by Atomic means or conventional.
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Post by Registrar on Jun 6, 2013 17:38:58 GMT 8
One of the items in the atomic equation, the number of lives that the foreshortening of the war actually saved, is often wildly underestimated, because many folk are unaware of the immense numbers of casualties which were occurring in the fighting in China. I do not have the figures at my fingertips, but we are talking of deaths in the order of fifty thousand Chinese alone, per week, being killed by the Japanese. Then add to this the number of deaths which would have occurred in the event that the Russians had have taken on the Japanese directly, as they were about to do.
My point is that in weighing up these factors in the debate, all to many people (you are not included in this) tend to overlook the fact that we, the western nations, essentially suffered minimally during WWII, in comparison with Russia and China. It is estimated, so I am told, that the Chinese lost 32 million persons. We do not know the true extent of the bloodbath, for the Japanese have not admitted it.
When I met Paul Tibbets, I shook his hand. I had the honor to be in his ground crew when he was being given his 1980 FAA check ride in a B-29. My job was to extinguish any engine fires which might have broken out during the start-up of his B-29. Looking up at him in the left seat of a B-29 was a sight I should hope I never forget.
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Post by xray on Jun 8, 2013 15:34:20 GMT 8
I also met Tibbets, was in the mid 1970's and I was just a kid. Already a budding military historian though, and I was awed.
I have no problem with the atomic bombings. It was a tool at our disposal, our enemies would have undoubtedly used it on us if able, and they did shorten the war and ultimately reduced casualties on both sides. Limitless treasure & man hours were put into developing these weapons, I doubt if any single man could have prevented their use. Truman was fresh in office after the sudden death of FDR and was feeling his way around in what must have been a very bewildering and intimidating situation. One would think being the VP you are pretty much in the loop, such was not the case, as so he relied in the extreme on FDR's close advisers to prosecute what remained of the war. While he did formally sign the order to use them, their use was pre ordained.
There was some talk of using the 1st one as a demo of sorts in an unpopulated area of Japan, followed by a warning that the next one would be detonated in a populated area. It was however far from certain if the thing would even go off as planned, and it would leave us looking pretty goofy if the demo failed ... So it was decided that Hiroshima would take the hit with no particular warning.
Many folks don't know that Nagasaki was not the primary target for the 2nd mission, Kokura was. The atomic armed B-29 group actually made 3 runs over Kokura and cloud cover prevented them from acquiring their aiming point, so Nagasaki it was.
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Post by okla on Jun 8, 2013 21:34:45 GMT 8
Hey X....Can you even imagine, in present day America, a situation where the VP wouldn't know of the existence of our nation having the Atomic Bomb in production and plans on its use as soon as practicable. It's inconceivable that Joe Biden or Dick Cheney would be in the dark about such Hush Hush goings on. Times certainly have changed, the role of the Vice President included. Didn't FDR's first VP, John N. Garner, supposedly say in regard to that Office, "it wasn't worth a pitcher of warm spit" It's an entirely different situation these days, obviously. Cheers.
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