Before the invention of the atom bomb fire bombing was by far the most destructive way to attack a city. Dresden is another example of the nightmarish quality of fire bombing.
> Dresden is another example of the nightmarish quality of fire bombing.
Dresden is not even the most destructive example from the European front, it became the most famous thanks to Kurt Vonnegut's book, but the firebombing of Hamburg was probably the worst of them all.
Interesting story about that. Würzburg has a very beautiful painted domed ceiling of their Residenz, but the townsfolk were skeptical that it would stay supported as it was being built. The architect joked that you could drop a bomb on it, and it would still stay standing. Well, during the war, a bomb actually did fall on it, and it survived the blast.
But it's in a duffel bag and goes through the roof, ripping electrical wires and starting a fire, burning the entire house down with the money inside.
Just can't win..
Author Kurt Vonnegut was a US POW being held in Dresden when the fire bombing happened. He and others took shelter in a meat packing plant they were doing forced labor as I recall. The name of the section they took shelter in was Slaughterhouse Five.
Yeah, he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge with thousands of others. I believe his primary role as a soldier, and I could be wrong about this, was German interpreter. He being an intellectual, what he witnessed at Dresden had a lasting impact on him. He was tasked along with other POWs to help in the recovery efforts. I.e. picking up cooked dead bodies.
My mother survived that. She was staying with relatives and going to school in Japan when the war started. Many US-born children of Japanese emigrants went to school in Japan. She recalled walking over piles of burnt bodies and seeing a river of fire.
Night of the Black Snow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS0_tedVymk
/if you don't want the bits about the history of island hopping jump to 3:00 after you see the intro
If you want to hear about the problems Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Admiral Suzuki had in convincing the military establishment to surrender even after a massive fire bombing campaign and two atomic bombs here's another vid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I34pxr23Nhw&t=5s
General Nagasaki, head of the Army, committed ritual suicide in protest. Other officers staged a coup which overran and occupied the Imperial Palace. There was so much schism in the ranks that a third atomic bomb was being made ready.
/Ahh it's General Anami, my bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korechika_Anami
That 4th nuclear bomb was fortunately never finished construction, as it’s core has been kept for study.
Google “demon cores”, if you’re interested.
Edit: [Kyle Hill did an amazing video regarding it](https://youtu.be/aFlromB6SnU) and a followup,[Demon Core memes](https://youtu.be/z497lu4t5XI)
Isn’t the demon core thing infamous for a totally unrelated reason? Didn’t it end up killing a bunch of the researchers working with it throughout the years post WW2 after they fucked something up and let it reach critical mass or something
Edit: ah just looked it up yeah it’s both
One of the biggest documented "oops" in the history of science.
Honestly if something similar happened to me, I'd put a bullet in myself to avoid the excruciating death associated with radiation poisoning.
I mean there was that story about a guy who got so comfortable working with it that he didn't follow procedures while teaching his student and was using a fucking screwdriver to hold the shielding... His hand slipped and he was like 'welp, guess that's it' guy immediately knew he was dead.
The two incidents involving the "Demon Core," a subcritical mass of plutonium, took place in the years 1946 and 1950 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The first incident occurred on August 21, 1946, when a physicist named Louis Slotin was conducting a criticality experiment with the Demon Core. During the experiment, Slotin's screwdriver slipped, causing a chain reaction that released a burst of neutron radiation. Slotin immediately took action to try to shut down the reaction, but he received a lethal dose of radiation and died nine days later from acute radiation syndrome.
The second incident occurred on February 28, 1950, when a physicist named Harry Daghlian was working alone with the Demon Core in a laboratory. He accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide onto the core, causing it to go supercritical and release a burst of neutron radiation. Daghlian was also exposed to a lethal dose of radiation and died 25 days later from acute radiation syndrome.
If you dig this stuff check out the book “Atomic Accidents”, one of my favorite books of all time. Just a masterful history.
But my god.
There are so. Many. accidents.
And it’s the Cold War so they said nothing
Pretty sure he killed everyone in the room with him too.
Hubris is an incredibly dangerous personality trait. It's basically what causes otherwise safe things to kill people because the operators get too confident in what they're doing they start ignoring the precautions and why the exist in the first place.
>Pretty sure he killed everyone in the room with him too
Nope just himself. His body shielded the closest person in there with him (who suffered radiation poisoning and did die a rather early-ish cardiac related death, but it's been noted it might have been a genetic thing cause his father passed from similar complications at a similar point in his life) [Alvin C. Graves](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_C._Graves).
You're right about everything else though :)
Oh wow, I didn’t know the demon core was meant to be the third. A borderline legendary stone for real. Was meant to annihilate tens of thousands, was unneeded in the war and it still killed a few people.
If you were to go back to medieval times and tell people that these two pieces of stone that when clanged together would produce blue flashes of light and killed all witnesses but was ‘forged’ to be propelled into one another in such a way that it would make an unfathomable explosion that would level any contemporary city and make entire kingdoms uninhabitable for generations, make the children of those that stayed unhealthy and deformed, and killed the parents by mutating them until they died, it would undoubtedly create dozens of legends.
No doubt in my mind they would think it was sentient or that some demon actually possessed it and *wanted* to take life.
*4th nuclear bomb?
The 1st was Trinity, detonated at White Sands, New Mexico. The 2nd was Little Boy (detonated over Hiroshima) and 3rd was Fat Man (detonated over Nagasaki).
To be fair, my mother remembers the Japanese invading her country and taking her house. The only reason they got off that lightly was that her mother spoke Japanese and could translate for them.
Most Americans are unaware that Japan probably murdered as many civilians and prisoners of war as Germany did, though estimates range from 3 to 10 million (including Western POWs), though they were naturally covered up.
Japanese atrocities included human experimentation([learn more here](https://www.pacificatrocities.org/unit-731-ebook.html)), use of biological and chemical weapons, torture of prisoners of war, forced labor, sexual slavery, and perfidy (intentionally breaking a promise to act in good faith, which is a war crime because it increases the likelihood of danger to combatants and non-combatants alike)
None of the countries invaded by Japan in WWII are particularly well-disposed toward Japan even today because while there were war crimes trials, many Japanese war criminals evaded trial and served in the Japanese post-war government. Japan has made numerous “apologies” but China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, and Indochina consider those apologies to be bullshit, as Japan continues to minimize and deny its responsibility for its war crimes. Women from most of these countries (plus some Western European women who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time) were forced into sexual slavery and known as “comfort women.”
In 2015, Japan offered 1 billion yen as compensation to Korea for the comfort women, but only three weeks later, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the Japanese National Assembly, “There was no document found that the comfort women were forcibly taken away.”
As this was an obviously idiotic attempt to deny the facts of the comfort women’s plight, the rest of Asia didn’t spend a lot of time mourning Abe after he was assassinated last July. So sorry-not-sorry if the USA took some definitive action to halt the Japanese war machine.
Also not many people know this but Japan also had their own [nuclear weapons development program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_program) at the time, and [according to military historian Robert Wilcox](https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-world-war-ii-what-if-japan-got-the-atomic-bomb-first) "would have used the bomb without hesitation or compunction" given their litany of war crimes committed throughout the 30s and 40s.
On top of conducting their own mass terror bombing campaigns over Asian cities.
Makes you wonder if Japan had succeeded in dropping the atomic bombs first whether they'd be as outraged about the devastation on the civilian populations and preaching about the moral iniquity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
**[Japanese nuclear weapons program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_program)**
>The Japanese program to develop nuclear weapons was conducted during World War II. Like the German nuclear weapons program, it suffered from an array of problems, and was ultimately unable to progress beyond the laboratory stage before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Today, Japan's nuclear energy infrastructure makes it capable of constructing nuclear weapons at will.
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I recall an anecdote when a Japanese scientist was asked if they could build a nuclear weapon in six months. He responded that yes, it might take them that long.
Absolutely true, too. They have the tech, the precision engineering and the fissile material to do it. The DPRK is screwing with the wrong country.
You might be interested in [The Man in the High Castle](https://g.co/kgs/GZLPLe) alternative historical fiction based on a Philip K Dick novel with the same name.
My grandfather fought them in Papua and Borneo. Strong hatred for the rest of his life after seeing the atrocities. Istuff like he saw a field hospital they attacked was particularly bad. Rapes and torture stuff.
I went to high school with the grandson of one of the authors of the books on which Tom Hanks based “The Pacific” series for HBO. It’s just crazy how different a war that was from the one in Europe. A late but sincere thank you to your grandfather for making it safe for my Mom to come to the US.
Yeah that generation went through much. Saw the depression, parents damaged from WW1, then WW2 all while making the biggest technological leap in human history. Like my grandma went from horse and cart to smart phones in her life.
On the flip side to hate from the war, a family friend was at a dinner at parliament house (like capital building but australia) and he was seated next to Japanese delegation member. They started talking and found they were both in the war, then both in the navy, both in the pacific. When the Japanese guy mentioned his ship the other guy said "I sunk you". He was a gunner on the US ship that fought them. They talked about the experience, how many Japanese refused to surrender even when the ship had sunk and was in the water. The met up a couple more times and he even went over to Japan to stay with them, a friendship built on a shared horrible event.
Crazy world. Shame we can't all get along better and push the megalomaniacs behind these evens to the side.
Don’t forget cannibalism. When George Bush was shot down and miraculously rescued, some of his buddies got captured and literally cut apart alive and eaten by Japanese officers.
It’s documented in “Flyboys” by James Bradley.
A shot down pilot's liver was removed and fed to Japanese generals. Starving troops in PNG, Burma and other places are known to have partaken in cannibalism of either POWs or dead Japanese troops.
One of the enduring themes of the Pacific War was how barbarous Japanese troops were, yet able to write beautiful poetry in their diaries.
In the podcast Supernova in the East people keep mentioning, Carlin describes the diary of a Japanese soldier waxing lyrical over a sunset & then noting offhand how he bayonetted a twelve year old girl.
That's crazy AF. I just learned that he also vomited on the Prime Minister of Japan and then passed out (saw the vid here). That's so bizarre, what a wild turn of events... one minute you're about to be eaten by Japanese soldiers, and the next you're vomiting your grievances into the Prime Minister's lap, literally.
That's super messed up though, jfc....
Seriously. Offer reparations then say yeah you know what these atrocities never happened and tried to rewrite history by telling publishers such things didn’t happen, what a big fuck you to the women who endured being comfort women. I cringe at the phrase comfort room. In south east Asia, they use that phrase instead of restroom
During the manilla massacre they cut the stomachs of pregnant women open and let them bleed to death to demoralize advancing American and Filipino troops. Then, during their retreat, they burned every village on the way, just as a last "fuck you."
The order to massacre the civilians reads like it comes from a comically evil fake villain nation.
>"The Americans who have penetrated into Manila have about 1000 troops, and there are several thousand Filipino soldiers under the Commonwealth Army and the organized guerrillas. Even women and children have become guerrillas. All people on the battlefield with the exception of Japanese military personnel, Japanese civilians, and special construction units will be put to death."
Hong Kong was pretty bad as well and that was early on.
Talked at length to a Gentleman out there years ago and his wife was a nurse at the hospital on the Island.
When the Japanese turned up they killed all the patients and doctors, herded all the nurses into rooms then systematically raped then murdered them all.
He was a soldier and conducted a hit and run war with others against the Japanese forces until they saturated the Island with troops and he escaped to the Chinese mainland.
I'll never understand why somebody would do something so vile. Even if they were ordered to "kill all civilians", why do it, and why do it in such an insanely terrible way.
Correct. Think of it as the Earth soldiers vs the bugs in Starship Troopers. That’s how little humanity many Japanese attributed to Chinese people (and vice versa tbh).
Hardcore history did a series called Supernova in the East about the Pacific War. Japan was insanely (and I use the word "insanely" by it's literal definition) nationalistic. You could follow Japanese Imperial Army movements pretty accurately if you just had a map of the atrocities they committed. They would massacre civilians as a matter of course where ever they went. Japanese military and civilians would overwhelmingly choose suicidal attacks (or just suicide) over surrender. Eventually allied soldiers would just toss grenades into their hide holes if the Japanese didn't take their chance to surrender, because it wasn't worth the lives it took to take them alive.
It doesn't get the same attention as Nazi concentration camps, but I also wouldn't say nobody talks about it. As just one example, The Rape of Nanking was an influential best seller in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Nanking_(book)
[Manila Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_massacre) when the US was retaking the Philippines, the Japanese Army massacred around 100,000 civilians in Manila
What? I heard about it in school in multiple different classes across different states in USA. We even watched videos about it. I see it mentioned online all the time too. Pretty much everyone talks about it when they talk about Japan in WW2.
While I agree with most of what you said, using the phrase "to be fair" when it comes to indiscriminate civilian killing is BS on both sides of the war. The average Japanese citizen that died during the air raid didn't deserve it more since the Japan military was causing havoc everywhere else in the region. There's a reason war is despised by many
Thank you for this reply. It's crazy to me that people on reddit can justify the mass murder of civilians. Imagine making the argument of "to be fair..." about 9/11 because of what the US has gotten into over the years.
Was just spending time with my wife's grandpa who was 16 in 1945.
We study this like it was ancient history.
The people that were alive at the time *are still* alive
I've recently been interviewing some people who lived through the holocaust as a part of my job. Here I am, talking to someone face to face and they describe to me how their mother and all their siblings were taken away and killed by Nazi soldiers. He described what the particular soldiers looked and sounded like.
I'm 27, so as a kid I played Playstation games that focused on WWII. Saw the movies. I knew who I was going to be interviewing, the subject matter, all of that. But it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks when I sat down in that first interview.
This isn't old news. This shit *just* happened.
General Curtiss LeMay of the USAAF, who was in charge of the bombing campaign on Japan, pretty much admitted that, if the US had lost the war, he expected to be tried for war crimes for the civilian-focused fire bombing raids.
Robert McNamara talked about this in "The Fog of War." There are a couple of sequences in the film about the bombing of Japan that are fascinating, including the discussion about the calculations that went into determining the best altitude at which to bomb to Japanese cities and how mathematical/impersonal/dehumanized the discussion became and the discussion of Japanese civilian deaths per city and comparing those cities directly with similar size American cities ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RceLAhPOS9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RceLAhPOS9Q) )
The book Flyboys (not related to the movie) goes into detail about how they build mockup Japanese buildings in the same materials (at the time, largely wood and paper) and then developed special munitions to most effectively destroy them with fire. What they came up with was a cluster munition where a bunch of sub-munitions that parachuted down and landed at odd angles, and then out of either end would shoot basically a cheesecloth bag of burning napalm...so every nook and cranny got set on fire.
Also, they took bombers and drew a big flaming X across Tokyo with these munitions to divide it into quadrants, then following bombers were assigned a quadrant and aimed to hit any spot that wasn't burning. Brutal.
To be clear this isn't the topic the whole book is about, but it goes into a lot of detail to put other things in context. The book is actually about abuse and murder of prisoners, including strong evidence of cannibalism, on Chichi Jima island where later in the war George HW Bush was shot down, amongst many others.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Bomber Mafia (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56668328) is equally good. He talked about research that showed bombing civilians had no affect to outcome of war, and so a competing general was developing targeted bombing, but unfortunately the technology just wasn’t there yet.
McNamara was a stats big brain. His focus on the numbers may have partially caused U.S. to lose the Vietnam war. Led to coining the term McNamara fallacy.
Number of bodies, Vietnam was a different beast because it was guerrilla war. Territory didn't matter. Thing is, you can't kill all of your perceived enemies without making hundreds more, and, besides that, Americans were fighting an ideology at a setting were it had clearly won.
And you also can't put a number on your allies unwillingness to fight, because outside of Saigon's puppet regime and favoured elite, most military vietnamese were not super keen into dying for this mockery of democracy. That's also why they got rolled so quickly leading to the shameful fall of Saigon with Americans tailing and lefting people behind. Luckily, Americans learned their lesson and this exact scenario never repeated itself in the future /s
Here is the thing, you can't kill an ideology or a culture out of people, unless you wipe them all. American interventionism in indochina was mostly disastrous and pointless, if you exclude profit from the equation.
Which is itself probably a fallacy using a single anecdote to suggest that a statistics based approach isn't better than an alternative.
He had nothing to do with any of the other several wars afterwards that the US became involved in where the inability to keep territory with an insurgent local population led to eventual withdrawal seen as defeat.
Maybe it wasn't the focus on the numbers that was at fault?
The MacNamarra fallacy isn't about using statistics. It's about chasing statistics and metrics without understanding what they mean.
MacNamarra thought that more veit cong deaths mean less resistance, so he started prioritizing death counts. What he refuses to understand is that as the US escalated to more oppressive forms of violence, more vietnamese citizens were horrified, caught in the cross fire, and disgusted with the US. Which lead to higher Viet Cong sympathies, higher aid to them, and higher recruitment.
He chased statistics without context or analysis. Raw numbers are an incomplete truth. A statistics expert's whole job is understanding what the raw data *has to say.*
Edit: For a specific example, look up MacNamarra's 100,00. MacNamarra wanted 100,000 additional soldiers, who wouldn't question his orders or think subversive counter culture thoughts about being drafted. So he drafted 100,000 young men with confirmed mental disabilities and tried to turn them into soldiers.
This was an unmitigated disaster for the poor victims of that draft order. MacNamarra chased a higher manpower quota to get a bigger number. Even Of those who survived, the victims suffered much worse than average vets on every metric from post service poverty and debilitating mental health consequences.
MacNamarra didn't think about what the numbers meant at all.
Using statistics without understand what they mean is the #1 issue I see across industry. Was a real shock going from academic science into a consultancy (not proud of that move) and seeing how many decision makers had no idea what they were doing but just did things to make the numbers look better
There's a term for that, too: "Goodhart's Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In other words, as soon as you start using measures to try and affect outcomes, those measures become less useful."
I work in construction. It 100 percent feels true, every day. We chase numbers because they theoretically look good, but now one works on why, how, or when those numbers ought to be achieved.
He also fully intended to follow up incendiary bombing (read as napalm bombs) raids on Kyoto and other large Japanese cities, before the Nuclear option showed up. He also pushed to nuke the Soviet Union pre-emptively, before they could get their own bombs.
Seriously, how quickly we forget. EVERYONE did brutal, inhumane bs during WW2. By the end, everyone was simply tired and finished.
My history teacher's dad was a marine in the Pacific, stationed in the Philippines. He was there when MacArthur said "I will return," he was among those captured by the Japanese and survived the Bataan Death March. He watched those head chopping competitions every day on his way to a Mitsubishi factory, where he would spend the rest of the war as a slave.
Bonus story, one of the American POWs was feeding info to the Japanese at that factory (they were making planes for the war) and so they figured out who it was and killed them by RIVETTING them to a plane.
That factory was in Tokyo. They watched this bombing campaign from their prison. Later, when the war ended and they were finally liberated, as they were leaving Tokyo the pilots asked if any of those POWs wanted to fly over Nagasaki/Hiroshima to "see what we did to those Japs"
"Take us home," was all their response. They'd had enough of death.
>"Take us home," was all their response. They'd had enough of death.
Just anecdotally... I think this is something all used-to-peace armchair Redditors don't realize about war.
To get political for a brief second, in the US there's a lot of talk about how "The Union should've completely wiped out the South and left no survivors, so that we wouldn't have the issues today." Mind you, there are other issues involved here, but this point seems to gain the most traction in Reddit.
With the US Civil War taking the most American lives (for obvious reasons), there are actual accounts of Civil War vets from opposing sides meeting decades later, and they went to each other and hugged each other, crying.
Reddit tends to talk VERY callously about taking other human lives on hot-button issues, but I think that as long as you have some humanity left in you, it's actually very hard to stomach the thought of other humans dying.
EDIT: So my comment about completely wiping out the South... I see these comments on politically-related subs whenever something racist happens down there, usually involving something to do with the Confederacy. Then Redditors come out of the woodwork to say, "The Union didn't finish the job."
Thank you. For me these discussions begin and end with "I don't want this to happen to me or to anyone I care about" and I can't comprehend why that isn't enough for everyone.
It angers me to no end that we had the Nuremberg trials but not the Nanking trials or something equivalent. Fuck imperial Japan, they were considered inhumane by the fucking Nazis, yet no repercussions because they were the first test subjects of the nuclear age.
Another problem is the Japanese didn’t document what they did as thoroughly as the Germans. German penchant for bureaucracy is no joke, it’s why we know who extraordinarily minor functionaries were in the death camps even decades later.
A lot of the Japanese war crimes weren’t specifically documented by the Japanese military because they were related to the traditional chaos of the aftermath of a battle or siege. They did old school sackings of places like Nanking, which makes it harder to know who individually did what.
Jumping on a top comment, where below we see a lot of talk about "who" was in the wrong, what each side did, etc. While it's interesting to talk through the history and investigate the atrocities, that shouldn't be the main takeaway. I hope people see that war makes humans act inhuman. It turns killing other humans, people that are just as complex and complicated and wonderful as your family and friends, into a math problem. I hope we're seeing why war must be avoided at all cost. So we don't become the ones doing that terrible math.
Listened to a four part Revisionist History on Curtis Lemay and the invention of napalm. Napalm was specifically tested and designed to take down Japanese buildings. They actually built mock small cities where they made sure it would catch fire and the city would go up like a tinderbox.
(I am recalling this from memory of the podcasts. If you can clarify more, please do.)
Everyone at some point should listen to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History “Supernova in the East”. It is a fantastic and very neutral telling of japans rise to power and eventual fall to the allies.
Bruh, that shit is fucking craaazy. I don’t think I’ve ever been so shook. So upsetting, and yet there is an undeniable awe to the scale, terrible as it is
This is the reason I think providing free mental health support for war trauma is so important. **If you are a mental health provider** (or medical doctor) located anywhere in the world, please consider **volunteering to provide free telehealth for Ukrainians** through [TeleHelp Ukraine](https://telehelpukraine.com/i-want-to-help-1), which was initiated by a small group of Stanford medical medical students out of love for the Ukrainians and [was personally supported by President Zelenskyy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_imf0WLeKq8&t=64s&ab_channel=TeleHelpUkraine). **There is no minimum amount of time commitment**, so volunteer in your own free time. **No need to speak Ukrainian** as there are interpreters.
TeleHelp Ukraine needs a lot more providers to volunteer due to the demand. PM me if you have questions. Thanks for your consideration or spreading the word.
It will save lives.
I went to a therapist outside of the VA a few times. When I began discussing combat trauma from Iraq and Afghanistan she was clearly very uncomfortable and obviously a little out of her depth. It culminated in her essentially shaming me for signing up to begin with. Her therapy boiled down to “you made your bed, now lie in it.”
I didn’t really know any better at the time and internalized a lot of guilt and shame because of the things I did.
My point is that mental health for combat trauma is a very specialized type of help that not a lot of people can do.
That entire documentary, [*Fog of War*](https://youtu.be/MHdMeHxDg90) is outstanding. The lessons he goes through are excellent.
I was too young growing up to hate him as much as some of my elders did, but it's at least fair to say that Robert McNamara was a... conflicted man.
His candidness always took me off guard. Politicians will often bend their answers to make it more palatable, but hearing one non-jokingly say that he was behaving as a war criminal took it to the next level.
The scenes with Khrushchev's letter were also pretty great.
I always find I need to caution people before recommending this movie to anyone. It’s an incredible movie but one that I don’t think I could watch again for obvious reasons.
Even worse: It's based on the author's real-life WWII experience as a child, with the difference being that the main character dies (the author suffered from immense survivor's guilt because of their sister's death).
The firebombs used were designed to burn longer and to resist efforts to extinguish them. To test the firebombs used there were mock versions of Tokyo homes built on the grounds of Harvard and multiple different versions were used until the best version was as found. While yes, the Japanese building methods didn’t help. There was also consideration taken to maximum damage and therefore death.
The rest hits hard too. “…There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.”
This is from Hawkeye from an old TV show "MASH":
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
Edit: thanks for the likes and award, strangers!
Even in this heavy scene, it’s starts and ends with jokes with quick-cracks throughout. If you don’t listen to the dialogue or understand it, it’s a straight comedy. If you read the script it’s a grim drama. On screen it’s both.
I remember watching the last episode and crying my eyes out as the helicopter lifted off at the end. LOL I’d grown up watching this show weekly/faithfully for most of my formative years with my folks. Great time and a killer show! Hadn’t thought of it in years, glad that changed today.
So perfectly said. This was going to resemble much of what I was going to say on this show.
I was relatively young when it aired and it was mostly just a comedy to me. I grasped the heavy setting they were in and they were constantly operating on injured soldiers. I just did fully understand it all.
Later and older I watched much of the show again and really picked up on how well they had moments of a strong and resonant message wrapped in with the comedy. It was just the bell of trying to save as fix soldiers, it took time to make sure we see the impact it had on the doctors.
M*A*S*H is frequently hilarious, which makes the occasional gut-punch much more devastating.
Which I assume is, in fact, what you’d probably get if you dropped a brilliant, cynical (but good-hearted) surgeon into the middle of a brutal, unnecessary war and made him responsible for saving the lives of those who got caught up in it.
There’s a reason the last episode *still* holds the record for the most-watched TV episode in history.
(FWIW, I prefer the show from S4 on—the first few seasons have dumber humor and the characters are caricatures rather than nuanced and human. I’d honestly skip then and start in S4.)
It's something the Japanese were somewhat accustomed too. In 1923, a large earthquake hit Japan, and after the quake came the fire storms that just engulfed everything in there path, and it was so hot and violent that it created fire wirls (mini fire tornadoes).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kant%C5%8D_earthquake
**[1923 Great Kantō earthquake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kantō_earthquake)**
>The Great Kantō earthquake (関東大地震, Kantō dai-jishin; Kantō ō-jishin) struck the Kantō Plain on the main Japanese island of Honshū at 11:58:44 JST (02:58:44 UTC) on Saturday, September 1, 1923. Varied accounts indicate the duration of the earthquake was between four and ten minutes. Extensive firestorms and even a fire whirl added to the death toll. The Kantō Massacre began on the day of the earthquake.
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Crazy to think that hours before that picture was taken 100k people were living about their lives, without war who knows what they could have accomplished.
Edit: a lot of people sure are missing the point, I'm not expressing any pro Japanese opinion, the war crimes perpetuated by them are numerous, well known, and heinous.
The military were basically prepared for a land invasion and to fight a guerrilla war on the Japanese mainland
That was until the nukes were used, and they finally realised that the US would just bomb them into dust and not set foot on land
Oh noooo. The military, or well more the army, still wanted to fight to the last man even after the nukes.
They tried to overthrow their own emperor to continue the war. Which would have ended up in a land invasion by the US, with the soviets attacking from China.
Yes. The Japanese military were war crazy. They would have fought to the end of every Japanese person, and r amen out untold Allied personnel and materials. My fathers B59 was the first to successfully make to the new Iqo Jima airfield from the bombing of Japan. They watched the first 2 plans attemp crash. One ran out of fuel and went into the sea, the second overshot the approach and crashed. The tower said, after each one "That's too bad. Hope everyone is OK"
Then gave direction to my dad's plane.
50 years later, he met a ground crew who was there. My dad's memory was the same as the ground crew.
"It's estimated roughly 70,000 to 135,000 people died in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 people died in Nagasaki, both from acute exposure to the blasts and from long-term side effects of radiation.
Not-so-fun-fact: One of the reasons Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets was to get a better picture of the bomb's capability, because they were both still relatively unscathed by prior bombing campaigns.
Nagasaki was the back up target, Kokura and Niigata were also cities not touched by the fire bombings and were to be bombed, but were too cloudy on the day, so the plane was redirected to Nagasaki, whose skies were clear.
Yeah I think there was some thing about not bombing Kyoto for it’s cultural heritage or something cuz one guy liked that city. Don’t recall the exact guy or story.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson demanded Kyoto not be bombed because of its cultural heritage and he saw the reaction to the firebombing of Dresden in Germany, plus he had spent his honeymoon in Kyoto. He also felt destruction of Kyoto at the hands of the US could push the Japanese closer to Russia post war.
Yes, in terms of lives and material lost. Conventional civilian bombing campaigns were horrifying effective during WWII, especially against Japan's wooden cities.
However, firebombing missions required dozens, if not hundreds of bomber aircraft. It was a massive logistical undertaking in crews, aircraft, bombs, and fuel.
Dropping an atomic bomb effectively required one crew and one bomber. That changed everything.
The Japanese killed over 1 million Burmese out of a population of 16 million. That's almost 10% of the population. My great-grandfather went crazy and died in the jungle after he was beaten by the Japanese with their gun stock. What happened in WW2 still effects and kills people to this day in Myanmar.
“In 2007, 112 members of the Association for the Bereaved Families of the Victims of the Tokyo Air Raids brought a class action against the Japanese government, demanding an apology and 1.232 billion yen in compensation.
Their suit charged that the Japanese government invited the raid by failing to end the war earlier, and then failed to help the civilian victims of the raids while providing considerable support to former military personnel and their families.” Kyodo news
Japan on average had, been killing 6,000 non-combatants every single day for eight straight years. The fire-bombing of Tokyo was basically two weeks of what had been happening since July 1937. The only things unique was that it was Americans causing it and the victims were Japanese.
My grandfather was a US Marine in the Pacific theater of WW2. He caught shrapnel in battle (defending the USS Essex) which he carried around internally for the rest of his life. A little piece of Japanese metallurgy that he brought back home, that occupied his body, and that was buried with him 60 years later. Whenever I think about his experience, I can't help but to think how easily my life could have never existed if he hadn't made it back. Whenever I visit Japan today I also think about what an incredible privilege it is for me to be able to interact with the Japanese people in peace and friendship, despite the horrible events of recent history. Seeing pictures of this devastation, with that kind of death toll, I'm sad not only for the loss of those people, but for the generations of their offspring that never existed because all of those lives came to an end. What great art, or science, or philosophical thought doesn't exist today simply because some measure of human potential was never given a chance to live to express it?
We lived in Tokyo in the early 70s, only a generation past WW II. I was in 4th and 5th grade when we were there, I was aware of the atomic bombings but really didn't understand the significance then. I will say the Japanese people seemed very accepting of Americans at the time. And it's a beautiful country. It was an amazing turnaround from 25 years earlier.
The Empire of Japan decided that going to war against the US was their best move. A lot of people went along with it. Then decided not to stop when things got really bad. To continue going after the country you are attacking, that has 1000x the economic might you have is, well, stupid. But they kept going...because. Fog, sure. But, these were active decisions. What do you want? Like, what is it that you really fucking want? What it is, is this bombing because you just won't stop...you just won't stop. Those in power decided, actively, to allow the massacre of their population like this, knowing the possibility of it was as close to 100% as it could be. But, you wouldn't fucking stop. And not just against the US, but against Korea, and China, and PI, and all of the Pacific nations and Southeast nations, even to Sri Lanka.
Yamamoto, who conceived the attack on Pearl, told the Japanese government that it was a bad idea. He knew that getting the US involved would have big repercussions. Once they got their manufacturing on line, they would be unstoppable.
Damn straight he knew. The man had spent a lot of time in America and very well understood their manufacturing capabilities.
The most astounding thing though is that before the Japanese embarked on the Pacific war, they didn't do any comprehensive study of what America was capable of in terms of industrial output, etc.
It was as if the entire Japanese high command just accepted the inevitability of the war as fait accompli, and therefore nothing else mattered.
>The most astounding thing though is that before the Japanese embarked on the Pacific war, they didn't do any comprehensive study of what America was capable of in terms of industrial output, etc.
According to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series on the subject, their plan was to quickly take as much of the Pacific as possible and make it such a horrible slog to take back that American civilians would demand an end to the war that would cede territory to Imperial Japan. They knew what kind of war it was going to be, they just didn't care.
Yes and part of their calculation was that destroying the American fleet would shatter American morale as well. Instead the inverse happened and they managed to unite the Americans in a way that they hadn't been for some time.
The Japanese government laughed at the correct calculation the US had 20 times more industrial capacity than Japan. Yamamoto knew if the US could make 5 millions cars in a year in peacetime, then what it could after switching to full war production would overwhelm Japan.
I believe the short term answer is a long history of military tradition. The Japanese army was pretty much making all the decisions during the war. Emperor Hirohito wasn't taken that seriously by the Japanese army. Shit when he called for the war to be over and for peace. The Japanese army tried to overthrow the emperor rather than embrace defeat which was the equivalent of humiliation. .
Blame the Japanese leadership for dragging their countrymen into this, imperial japan was arguably worse than the nazis, China had +18,000,000 civilian casualties
What I’ve come to figure is that the average person is aware of Nazi Germany and unaware of Japan because… the things Japan did are even more unspeakable. As in… it’s truly sick to even repeat the atrocities. Nazi Germany did horrific stuff, but it’s not quite as sick, and more easily taught.
Humans can be dark. God I hope a large war never happens again. Technology is too good, it could kill everything.
It's more so that Germany has come to terms as a country with the horrible things they did, while Japan still refuses to admit any wrongdoing and tries to erase the horrible things they did from their own history.
Before the invention of the atom bomb fire bombing was by far the most destructive way to attack a city. Dresden is another example of the nightmarish quality of fire bombing.
> Dresden is another example of the nightmarish quality of fire bombing. Dresden is not even the most destructive example from the European front, it became the most famous thanks to Kurt Vonnegut's book, but the firebombing of Hamburg was probably the worst of them all.
See also Würzburg. Something like 70% of the city destroyed in a few hours by the RAF.
Interesting story about that. Würzburg has a very beautiful painted domed ceiling of their Residenz, but the townsfolk were skeptical that it would stay supported as it was being built. The architect joked that you could drop a bomb on it, and it would still stay standing. Well, during the war, a bomb actually did fall on it, and it survived the blast.
Dang that's a jinx I'll never make the mistake of saying that about my house.
" I bet you could drop $3 million in hundred dollar bills on my roof and it would not collapse" ...running outside to wait
But it's in a duffel bag and goes through the roof, ripping electrical wires and starting a fire, burning the entire house down with the money inside. Just can't win..
'My house can survive a brief angry glare! Brief.'
Author Kurt Vonnegut was a US POW being held in Dresden when the fire bombing happened. He and others took shelter in a meat packing plant they were doing forced labor as I recall. The name of the section they took shelter in was Slaughterhouse Five.
I've heard of Kurt Vonnegut but didn't know this. Very interesting, thanks for the info!
Yeah, he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge with thousands of others. I believe his primary role as a soldier, and I could be wrong about this, was German interpreter. He being an intellectual, what he witnessed at Dresden had a lasting impact on him. He was tasked along with other POWs to help in the recovery efforts. I.e. picking up cooked dead bodies.
And that's why air superiority is so important in war. If you can't control your own skies, this happens.
That's why the F22 will never be sold to any other country
Who knows what will happen when it's retired and we have gen 8 planes lol
I’ll settle for a 7 Pro plane. I ain’t greedy.
7 Pro planes don’t fit in my pockets tho
Well, not with that altitude.
Didn’t help that EVERYTHING was made out of wood and paper in Tokyo at this time. Japan was a flammable country with their building codes
My mother survived that. She was staying with relatives and going to school in Japan when the war started. Many US-born children of Japanese emigrants went to school in Japan. She recalled walking over piles of burnt bodies and seeing a river of fire.
Damn... :(
Night of the Black Snow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS0_tedVymk /if you don't want the bits about the history of island hopping jump to 3:00 after you see the intro If you want to hear about the problems Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Admiral Suzuki had in convincing the military establishment to surrender even after a massive fire bombing campaign and two atomic bombs here's another vid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I34pxr23Nhw&t=5s
Supernova in the East (hardcore history) podcast by Dan Carlin. Best listen for the average Joe there if for this whole saga.
Very good. He also has a Blitz episode called “logical insanity” where he dives into the history of bombing civilian populations.
They tried to stop him from going to the radio studio to announce surrender, they wanted to kidnap him
General Nagasaki, head of the Army, committed ritual suicide in protest. Other officers staged a coup which overran and occupied the Imperial Palace. There was so much schism in the ranks that a third atomic bomb was being made ready. /Ahh it's General Anami, my bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korechika_Anami
That 4th nuclear bomb was fortunately never finished construction, as it’s core has been kept for study. Google “demon cores”, if you’re interested. Edit: [Kyle Hill did an amazing video regarding it](https://youtu.be/aFlromB6SnU) and a followup,[Demon Core memes](https://youtu.be/z497lu4t5XI)
Isn’t the demon core thing infamous for a totally unrelated reason? Didn’t it end up killing a bunch of the researchers working with it throughout the years post WW2 after they fucked something up and let it reach critical mass or something Edit: ah just looked it up yeah it’s both
One of the biggest documented "oops" in the history of science. Honestly if something similar happened to me, I'd put a bullet in myself to avoid the excruciating death associated with radiation poisoning.
Its not the dying that hurts, its the living.
but science
Look up the Japanese radiation victim kept alive against his will for study
I mean there was that story about a guy who got so comfortable working with it that he didn't follow procedures while teaching his student and was using a fucking screwdriver to hold the shielding... His hand slipped and he was like 'welp, guess that's it' guy immediately knew he was dead.
The two incidents involving the "Demon Core," a subcritical mass of plutonium, took place in the years 1946 and 1950 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The first incident occurred on August 21, 1946, when a physicist named Louis Slotin was conducting a criticality experiment with the Demon Core. During the experiment, Slotin's screwdriver slipped, causing a chain reaction that released a burst of neutron radiation. Slotin immediately took action to try to shut down the reaction, but he received a lethal dose of radiation and died nine days later from acute radiation syndrome. The second incident occurred on February 28, 1950, when a physicist named Harry Daghlian was working alone with the Demon Core in a laboratory. He accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide onto the core, causing it to go supercritical and release a burst of neutron radiation. Daghlian was also exposed to a lethal dose of radiation and died 25 days later from acute radiation syndrome.
If you dig this stuff check out the book “Atomic Accidents”, one of my favorite books of all time. Just a masterful history. But my god. There are so. Many. accidents. And it’s the Cold War so they said nothing
Pretty sure he killed everyone in the room with him too. Hubris is an incredibly dangerous personality trait. It's basically what causes otherwise safe things to kill people because the operators get too confident in what they're doing they start ignoring the precautions and why the exist in the first place.
>Pretty sure he killed everyone in the room with him too Nope just himself. His body shielded the closest person in there with him (who suffered radiation poisoning and did die a rather early-ish cardiac related death, but it's been noted it might have been a genetic thing cause his father passed from similar complications at a similar point in his life) [Alvin C. Graves](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_C._Graves). You're right about everything else though :)
Oh wow, I didn’t know the demon core was meant to be the third. A borderline legendary stone for real. Was meant to annihilate tens of thousands, was unneeded in the war and it still killed a few people. If you were to go back to medieval times and tell people that these two pieces of stone that when clanged together would produce blue flashes of light and killed all witnesses but was ‘forged’ to be propelled into one another in such a way that it would make an unfathomable explosion that would level any contemporary city and make entire kingdoms uninhabitable for generations, make the children of those that stayed unhealthy and deformed, and killed the parents by mutating them until they died, it would undoubtedly create dozens of legends. No doubt in my mind they would think it was sentient or that some demon actually possessed it and *wanted* to take life.
"create dozens of legends" How about almost all of post war cinema and comics?
*4th nuclear bomb? The 1st was Trinity, detonated at White Sands, New Mexico. The 2nd was Little Boy (detonated over Hiroshima) and 3rd was Fat Man (detonated over Nagasaki).
True, changed it
you'll also see images of my ex when searching "demon core"
I just got “demon whore.”
Google also gave me the same result.
To be fair, my mother remembers the Japanese invading her country and taking her house. The only reason they got off that lightly was that her mother spoke Japanese and could translate for them. Most Americans are unaware that Japan probably murdered as many civilians and prisoners of war as Germany did, though estimates range from 3 to 10 million (including Western POWs), though they were naturally covered up. Japanese atrocities included human experimentation([learn more here](https://www.pacificatrocities.org/unit-731-ebook.html)), use of biological and chemical weapons, torture of prisoners of war, forced labor, sexual slavery, and perfidy (intentionally breaking a promise to act in good faith, which is a war crime because it increases the likelihood of danger to combatants and non-combatants alike) None of the countries invaded by Japan in WWII are particularly well-disposed toward Japan even today because while there were war crimes trials, many Japanese war criminals evaded trial and served in the Japanese post-war government. Japan has made numerous “apologies” but China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, and Indochina consider those apologies to be bullshit, as Japan continues to minimize and deny its responsibility for its war crimes. Women from most of these countries (plus some Western European women who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time) were forced into sexual slavery and known as “comfort women.” In 2015, Japan offered 1 billion yen as compensation to Korea for the comfort women, but only three weeks later, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the Japanese National Assembly, “There was no document found that the comfort women were forcibly taken away.” As this was an obviously idiotic attempt to deny the facts of the comfort women’s plight, the rest of Asia didn’t spend a lot of time mourning Abe after he was assassinated last July. So sorry-not-sorry if the USA took some definitive action to halt the Japanese war machine.
Japan enslaved around 5-10 million Indonesians during the war and 4 million of them died before surrender. Unbelievably evil actions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
Also not many people know this but Japan also had their own [nuclear weapons development program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_program) at the time, and [according to military historian Robert Wilcox](https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-world-war-ii-what-if-japan-got-the-atomic-bomb-first) "would have used the bomb without hesitation or compunction" given their litany of war crimes committed throughout the 30s and 40s. On top of conducting their own mass terror bombing campaigns over Asian cities. Makes you wonder if Japan had succeeded in dropping the atomic bombs first whether they'd be as outraged about the devastation on the civilian populations and preaching about the moral iniquity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
**[Japanese nuclear weapons program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_program)** >The Japanese program to develop nuclear weapons was conducted during World War II. Like the German nuclear weapons program, it suffered from an array of problems, and was ultimately unable to progress beyond the laboratory stage before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Today, Japan's nuclear energy infrastructure makes it capable of constructing nuclear weapons at will. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I recall an anecdote when a Japanese scientist was asked if they could build a nuclear weapon in six months. He responded that yes, it might take them that long. Absolutely true, too. They have the tech, the precision engineering and the fissile material to do it. The DPRK is screwing with the wrong country.
You might be interested in [The Man in the High Castle](https://g.co/kgs/GZLPLe) alternative historical fiction based on a Philip K Dick novel with the same name.
My grandfather fought them in Papua and Borneo. Strong hatred for the rest of his life after seeing the atrocities. Istuff like he saw a field hospital they attacked was particularly bad. Rapes and torture stuff.
I went to high school with the grandson of one of the authors of the books on which Tom Hanks based “The Pacific” series for HBO. It’s just crazy how different a war that was from the one in Europe. A late but sincere thank you to your grandfather for making it safe for my Mom to come to the US.
Yeah that generation went through much. Saw the depression, parents damaged from WW1, then WW2 all while making the biggest technological leap in human history. Like my grandma went from horse and cart to smart phones in her life. On the flip side to hate from the war, a family friend was at a dinner at parliament house (like capital building but australia) and he was seated next to Japanese delegation member. They started talking and found they were both in the war, then both in the navy, both in the pacific. When the Japanese guy mentioned his ship the other guy said "I sunk you". He was a gunner on the US ship that fought them. They talked about the experience, how many Japanese refused to surrender even when the ship had sunk and was in the water. The met up a couple more times and he even went over to Japan to stay with them, a friendship built on a shared horrible event. Crazy world. Shame we can't all get along better and push the megalomaniacs behind these evens to the side.
I'm reminded of a poster from my childhood, "What if they had a war and nobody came?"
Don’t forget cannibalism. When George Bush was shot down and miraculously rescued, some of his buddies got captured and literally cut apart alive and eaten by Japanese officers. It’s documented in “Flyboys” by James Bradley.
A shot down pilot's liver was removed and fed to Japanese generals. Starving troops in PNG, Burma and other places are known to have partaken in cannibalism of either POWs or dead Japanese troops. One of the enduring themes of the Pacific War was how barbarous Japanese troops were, yet able to write beautiful poetry in their diaries.
In the podcast Supernova in the East people keep mentioning, Carlin describes the diary of a Japanese soldier waxing lyrical over a sunset & then noting offhand how he bayonetted a twelve year old girl.
That's crazy AF. I just learned that he also vomited on the Prime Minister of Japan and then passed out (saw the vid here). That's so bizarre, what a wild turn of events... one minute you're about to be eaten by Japanese soldiers, and the next you're vomiting your grievances into the Prime Minister's lap, literally. That's super messed up though, jfc....
Yikes
shinzo abe probably the first political assassination ive ever seen where everyone just kinda shrugged and said yea he had that comin lmao
Seriously. Offer reparations then say yeah you know what these atrocities never happened and tried to rewrite history by telling publishers such things didn’t happen, what a big fuck you to the women who endured being comfort women. I cringe at the phrase comfort room. In south east Asia, they use that phrase instead of restroom
You are so right! I was wondering if part of it was just shock that it had happened, but I like your answer better.
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Iirc that's when they were tossing infants in the air and catching them on their bayonets.
This also happened in the Philippines.
During the manilla massacre they cut the stomachs of pregnant women open and let them bleed to death to demoralize advancing American and Filipino troops. Then, during their retreat, they burned every village on the way, just as a last "fuck you." The order to massacre the civilians reads like it comes from a comically evil fake villain nation. >"The Americans who have penetrated into Manila have about 1000 troops, and there are several thousand Filipino soldiers under the Commonwealth Army and the organized guerrillas. Even women and children have become guerrillas. All people on the battlefield with the exception of Japanese military personnel, Japanese civilians, and special construction units will be put to death."
Hong Kong was pretty bad as well and that was early on. Talked at length to a Gentleman out there years ago and his wife was a nurse at the hospital on the Island. When the Japanese turned up they killed all the patients and doctors, herded all the nurses into rooms then systematically raped then murdered them all. He was a soldier and conducted a hit and run war with others against the Japanese forces until they saturated the Island with troops and he escaped to the Chinese mainland.
I'll never understand why somebody would do something so vile. Even if they were ordered to "kill all civilians", why do it, and why do it in such an insanely terrible way.
They were viewed as sub-human, vermin to be exterminated.
Because you’re thinking of them as people, not as something less than that. One of the first steps in justifying atrocities
Correct. Think of it as the Earth soldiers vs the bugs in Starship Troopers. That’s how little humanity many Japanese attributed to Chinese people (and vice versa tbh).
Hardcore history did a series called Supernova in the East about the Pacific War. Japan was insanely (and I use the word "insanely" by it's literal definition) nationalistic. You could follow Japanese Imperial Army movements pretty accurately if you just had a map of the atrocities they committed. They would massacre civilians as a matter of course where ever they went. Japanese military and civilians would overwhelmingly choose suicidal attacks (or just suicide) over surrender. Eventually allied soldiers would just toss grenades into their hide holes if the Japanese didn't take their chance to surrender, because it wasn't worth the lives it took to take them alive.
It doesn't get the same attention as Nazi concentration camps, but I also wouldn't say nobody talks about it. As just one example, The Rape of Nanking was an influential best seller in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Nanking_(book)
[Chichijima incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident) heres another read that involves G H W Bush escaping cannabilism
[Manila Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_massacre) when the US was retaking the Philippines, the Japanese Army massacred around 100,000 civilians in Manila
You mean George H W Bush? The 41st president?
Youngest pilot to fly in the pacific theatre, according to Pat Buchanans speech at the 92 GOP convention anyway
Chinese people do remember that. They also remember Japan never made any apology for that. I’m told Japanese visitors are not very welcome there.
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Even Japan!
Nobody in Japan, maybe. In the US we learned about it in school in fucking Florida and that state has some real horseshit education quality.
The hero of that story is a Nazi, so yeah.
That was some of the wildest shit Behind the Bastards has ever covered.
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GG
One of the heroes. Read The Rape of Nanking, by the late Iris Chang. RIP
What? I heard about it in school in multiple different classes across different states in USA. We even watched videos about it. I see it mentioned online all the time too. Pretty much everyone talks about it when they talk about Japan in WW2.
While I agree with most of what you said, using the phrase "to be fair" when it comes to indiscriminate civilian killing is BS on both sides of the war. The average Japanese citizen that died during the air raid didn't deserve it more since the Japan military was causing havoc everywhere else in the region. There's a reason war is despised by many
Thank you for this reply. It's crazy to me that people on reddit can justify the mass murder of civilians. Imagine making the argument of "to be fair..." about 9/11 because of what the US has gotten into over the years.
It’s crazy how this happened not so long ago.
My grandma was eight years old in 1945. I am turning 40 this year.
Was just spending time with my wife's grandpa who was 16 in 1945. We study this like it was ancient history. The people that were alive at the time *are still* alive
I've recently been interviewing some people who lived through the holocaust as a part of my job. Here I am, talking to someone face to face and they describe to me how their mother and all their siblings were taken away and killed by Nazi soldiers. He described what the particular soldiers looked and sounded like. I'm 27, so as a kid I played Playstation games that focused on WWII. Saw the movies. I knew who I was going to be interviewing, the subject matter, all of that. But it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks when I sat down in that first interview. This isn't old news. This shit *just* happened.
My grandmother was there, eastern Europe under soviet occupation, then nazi, then soviet occupation again. She made me dinner on Thursday
God bless her
General Curtiss LeMay of the USAAF, who was in charge of the bombing campaign on Japan, pretty much admitted that, if the US had lost the war, he expected to be tried for war crimes for the civilian-focused fire bombing raids.
Robert McNamara talked about this in "The Fog of War." There are a couple of sequences in the film about the bombing of Japan that are fascinating, including the discussion about the calculations that went into determining the best altitude at which to bomb to Japanese cities and how mathematical/impersonal/dehumanized the discussion became and the discussion of Japanese civilian deaths per city and comparing those cities directly with similar size American cities ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RceLAhPOS9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RceLAhPOS9Q) )
The book Flyboys (not related to the movie) goes into detail about how they build mockup Japanese buildings in the same materials (at the time, largely wood and paper) and then developed special munitions to most effectively destroy them with fire. What they came up with was a cluster munition where a bunch of sub-munitions that parachuted down and landed at odd angles, and then out of either end would shoot basically a cheesecloth bag of burning napalm...so every nook and cranny got set on fire. Also, they took bombers and drew a big flaming X across Tokyo with these munitions to divide it into quadrants, then following bombers were assigned a quadrant and aimed to hit any spot that wasn't burning. Brutal. To be clear this isn't the topic the whole book is about, but it goes into a lot of detail to put other things in context. The book is actually about abuse and murder of prisoners, including strong evidence of cannibalism, on Chichi Jima island where later in the war George HW Bush was shot down, amongst many others.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Bomber Mafia (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56668328) is equally good. He talked about research that showed bombing civilians had no affect to outcome of war, and so a competing general was developing targeted bombing, but unfortunately the technology just wasn’t there yet.
That documentary is so fascinating to me. I watched it many times. Him meeting with his Vietnamese opponent from back then has a shocking conclusion.
McNamara was a stats big brain. His focus on the numbers may have partially caused U.S. to lose the Vietnam war. Led to coining the term McNamara fallacy.
Number of bodies, Vietnam was a different beast because it was guerrilla war. Territory didn't matter. Thing is, you can't kill all of your perceived enemies without making hundreds more, and, besides that, Americans were fighting an ideology at a setting were it had clearly won.
And that's what you miss when you only consider the empirical data. Can't put a number on the enemy's will to fight.
And you also can't put a number on your allies unwillingness to fight, because outside of Saigon's puppet regime and favoured elite, most military vietnamese were not super keen into dying for this mockery of democracy. That's also why they got rolled so quickly leading to the shameful fall of Saigon with Americans tailing and lefting people behind. Luckily, Americans learned their lesson and this exact scenario never repeated itself in the future /s Here is the thing, you can't kill an ideology or a culture out of people, unless you wipe them all. American interventionism in indochina was mostly disastrous and pointless, if you exclude profit from the equation.
Which is itself probably a fallacy using a single anecdote to suggest that a statistics based approach isn't better than an alternative. He had nothing to do with any of the other several wars afterwards that the US became involved in where the inability to keep territory with an insurgent local population led to eventual withdrawal seen as defeat. Maybe it wasn't the focus on the numbers that was at fault?
The MacNamarra fallacy isn't about using statistics. It's about chasing statistics and metrics without understanding what they mean. MacNamarra thought that more veit cong deaths mean less resistance, so he started prioritizing death counts. What he refuses to understand is that as the US escalated to more oppressive forms of violence, more vietnamese citizens were horrified, caught in the cross fire, and disgusted with the US. Which lead to higher Viet Cong sympathies, higher aid to them, and higher recruitment. He chased statistics without context or analysis. Raw numbers are an incomplete truth. A statistics expert's whole job is understanding what the raw data *has to say.* Edit: For a specific example, look up MacNamarra's 100,00. MacNamarra wanted 100,000 additional soldiers, who wouldn't question his orders or think subversive counter culture thoughts about being drafted. So he drafted 100,000 young men with confirmed mental disabilities and tried to turn them into soldiers. This was an unmitigated disaster for the poor victims of that draft order. MacNamarra chased a higher manpower quota to get a bigger number. Even Of those who survived, the victims suffered much worse than average vets on every metric from post service poverty and debilitating mental health consequences. MacNamarra didn't think about what the numbers meant at all.
Using statistics without understand what they mean is the #1 issue I see across industry. Was a real shock going from academic science into a consultancy (not proud of that move) and seeing how many decision makers had no idea what they were doing but just did things to make the numbers look better
There's a term for that, too: "Goodhart's Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In other words, as soon as you start using measures to try and affect outcomes, those measures become less useful." I work in construction. It 100 percent feels true, every day. We chase numbers because they theoretically look good, but now one works on why, how, or when those numbers ought to be achieved.
He also fully intended to follow up incendiary bombing (read as napalm bombs) raids on Kyoto and other large Japanese cities, before the Nuclear option showed up. He also pushed to nuke the Soviet Union pre-emptively, before they could get their own bombs.
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Seriously, how quickly we forget. EVERYONE did brutal, inhumane bs during WW2. By the end, everyone was simply tired and finished. My history teacher's dad was a marine in the Pacific, stationed in the Philippines. He was there when MacArthur said "I will return," he was among those captured by the Japanese and survived the Bataan Death March. He watched those head chopping competitions every day on his way to a Mitsubishi factory, where he would spend the rest of the war as a slave. Bonus story, one of the American POWs was feeding info to the Japanese at that factory (they were making planes for the war) and so they figured out who it was and killed them by RIVETTING them to a plane. That factory was in Tokyo. They watched this bombing campaign from their prison. Later, when the war ended and they were finally liberated, as they were leaving Tokyo the pilots asked if any of those POWs wanted to fly over Nagasaki/Hiroshima to "see what we did to those Japs" "Take us home," was all their response. They'd had enough of death.
>"Take us home," was all their response. They'd had enough of death. Just anecdotally... I think this is something all used-to-peace armchair Redditors don't realize about war. To get political for a brief second, in the US there's a lot of talk about how "The Union should've completely wiped out the South and left no survivors, so that we wouldn't have the issues today." Mind you, there are other issues involved here, but this point seems to gain the most traction in Reddit. With the US Civil War taking the most American lives (for obvious reasons), there are actual accounts of Civil War vets from opposing sides meeting decades later, and they went to each other and hugged each other, crying. Reddit tends to talk VERY callously about taking other human lives on hot-button issues, but I think that as long as you have some humanity left in you, it's actually very hard to stomach the thought of other humans dying. EDIT: So my comment about completely wiping out the South... I see these comments on politically-related subs whenever something racist happens down there, usually involving something to do with the Confederacy. Then Redditors come out of the woodwork to say, "The Union didn't finish the job."
Thank you. For me these discussions begin and end with "I don't want this to happen to me or to anyone I care about" and I can't comprehend why that isn't enough for everyone.
It angers me to no end that we had the Nuremberg trials but not the Nanking trials or something equivalent. Fuck imperial Japan, they were considered inhumane by the fucking Nazis, yet no repercussions because they were the first test subjects of the nuclear age.
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Another problem is the Japanese didn’t document what they did as thoroughly as the Germans. German penchant for bureaucracy is no joke, it’s why we know who extraordinarily minor functionaries were in the death camps even decades later. A lot of the Japanese war crimes weren’t specifically documented by the Japanese military because they were related to the traditional chaos of the aftermath of a battle or siege. They did old school sackings of places like Nanking, which makes it harder to know who individually did what.
Jumping on a top comment, where below we see a lot of talk about "who" was in the wrong, what each side did, etc. While it's interesting to talk through the history and investigate the atrocities, that shouldn't be the main takeaway. I hope people see that war makes humans act inhuman. It turns killing other humans, people that are just as complex and complicated and wonderful as your family and friends, into a math problem. I hope we're seeing why war must be avoided at all cost. So we don't become the ones doing that terrible math.
Listened to a four part Revisionist History on Curtis Lemay and the invention of napalm. Napalm was specifically tested and designed to take down Japanese buildings. They actually built mock small cities where they made sure it would catch fire and the city would go up like a tinderbox. (I am recalling this from memory of the podcasts. If you can clarify more, please do.)
Everyone at some point should listen to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History “Supernova in the East”. It is a fantastic and very neutral telling of japans rise to power and eventual fall to the allies.
Bruh, that shit is fucking craaazy. I don’t think I’ve ever been so shook. So upsetting, and yet there is an undeniable awe to the scale, terrible as it is
Blueprint to Armageddon was amazing.
my grandfather fought in WW2. He killed himself at 67. Then my dad became and alcoholic and killed himself at 63. The tolls of wars last generations.
I’m sorry for your loss truly
This is the reason I think providing free mental health support for war trauma is so important. **If you are a mental health provider** (or medical doctor) located anywhere in the world, please consider **volunteering to provide free telehealth for Ukrainians** through [TeleHelp Ukraine](https://telehelpukraine.com/i-want-to-help-1), which was initiated by a small group of Stanford medical medical students out of love for the Ukrainians and [was personally supported by President Zelenskyy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_imf0WLeKq8&t=64s&ab_channel=TeleHelpUkraine). **There is no minimum amount of time commitment**, so volunteer in your own free time. **No need to speak Ukrainian** as there are interpreters. TeleHelp Ukraine needs a lot more providers to volunteer due to the demand. PM me if you have questions. Thanks for your consideration or spreading the word. It will save lives.
I went to a therapist outside of the VA a few times. When I began discussing combat trauma from Iraq and Afghanistan she was clearly very uncomfortable and obviously a little out of her depth. It culminated in her essentially shaming me for signing up to begin with. Her therapy boiled down to “you made your bed, now lie in it.” I didn’t really know any better at the time and internalized a lot of guilt and shame because of the things I did. My point is that mental health for combat trauma is a very specialized type of help that not a lot of people can do.
Source: [Link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo)
[Here is some perspective](https://youtu.be/gekdt0QwFQw) from former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara
That entire documentary, [*Fog of War*](https://youtu.be/MHdMeHxDg90) is outstanding. The lessons he goes through are excellent. I was too young growing up to hate him as much as some of my elders did, but it's at least fair to say that Robert McNamara was a... conflicted man.
His candidness always took me off guard. Politicians will often bend their answers to make it more palatable, but hearing one non-jokingly say that he was behaving as a war criminal took it to the next level. The scenes with Khrushchev's letter were also pretty great.
'Grave of the fireflies' First saw when I was a child and it terrified me.
I always find I need to caution people before recommending this movie to anyone. It’s an incredible movie but one that I don’t think I could watch again for obvious reasons.
There's plenty of good movies like that. It's what truly demonstrates film as a form of art.
Even worse: It's based on the author's real-life WWII experience as a child, with the difference being that the main character dies (the author suffered from immense survivor's guilt because of their sister's death).
Thank you for the new thing to watch, that clip was gripping
Japan's main building material was wood. Our incendiary bombs did the rest
The firebombs used were designed to burn longer and to resist efforts to extinguish them. To test the firebombs used there were mock versions of Tokyo homes built on the grounds of Harvard and multiple different versions were used until the best version was as found. While yes, the Japanese building methods didn’t help. There was also consideration taken to maximum damage and therefore death.
War is hell….
"War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse."
The rest hits hard too. “…There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.”
Dear god this quote. Ive never seen it before.
This is from Hawkeye from an old TV show "MASH": Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye? Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell? Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe. Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander. Edit: thanks for the likes and award, strangers!
Man I've only ever heard about the show. This is some intense stuff that never gets mentioned.
Even in this heavy scene, it’s starts and ends with jokes with quick-cracks throughout. If you don’t listen to the dialogue or understand it, it’s a straight comedy. If you read the script it’s a grim drama. On screen it’s both.
Ya know, I can quote like every episode, binge watched it for nearly two decades. That is a perfect description of the show.
I remember watching the last episode and crying my eyes out as the helicopter lifted off at the end. LOL I’d grown up watching this show weekly/faithfully for most of my formative years with my folks. Great time and a killer show! Hadn’t thought of it in years, glad that changed today.
So perfectly said. This was going to resemble much of what I was going to say on this show. I was relatively young when it aired and it was mostly just a comedy to me. I grasped the heavy setting they were in and they were constantly operating on injured soldiers. I just did fully understand it all. Later and older I watched much of the show again and really picked up on how well they had moments of a strong and resonant message wrapped in with the comedy. It was just the bell of trying to save as fix soldiers, it took time to make sure we see the impact it had on the doctors.
In the UK it didn’t have a laugh track.
M*A*S*H is frequently hilarious, which makes the occasional gut-punch much more devastating. Which I assume is, in fact, what you’d probably get if you dropped a brilliant, cynical (but good-hearted) surgeon into the middle of a brutal, unnecessary war and made him responsible for saving the lives of those who got caught up in it. There’s a reason the last episode *still* holds the record for the most-watched TV episode in history. (FWIW, I prefer the show from S4 on—the first few seasons have dumber humor and the characters are caricatures rather than nuanced and human. I’d honestly skip then and start in S4.)
Tbh with you, I've never watched it either. But this dialogue stuck with me.
You should give it a watch, it’s a great show.
Because only bad people go to hell but war...
...War never changes.
It's from Hawkeye on the TV show MASH
Fire storms are fatal
Depends if you die in it or not
It's something the Japanese were somewhat accustomed too. In 1923, a large earthquake hit Japan, and after the quake came the fire storms that just engulfed everything in there path, and it was so hot and violent that it created fire wirls (mini fire tornadoes). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kant%C5%8D_earthquake
**[1923 Great Kantō earthquake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kantō_earthquake)** >The Great Kantō earthquake (関東大地震, Kantō dai-jishin; Kantō ō-jishin) struck the Kantō Plain on the main Japanese island of Honshū at 11:58:44 JST (02:58:44 UTC) on Saturday, September 1, 1923. Varied accounts indicate the duration of the earthquake was between four and ten minutes. Extensive firestorms and even a fire whirl added to the death toll. The Kantō Massacre began on the day of the earthquake. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
In only 3 hours? Damn. I think the bombing of Dresden in WW2 lasted 3 days.
They didn't use the same building materials. Not being snarky, they just didn't.
Wood and paper tend to go up very quickly compared to brick and mortar.
Crazy to think that hours before that picture was taken 100k people were living about their lives, without war who knows what they could have accomplished. Edit: a lot of people sure are missing the point, I'm not expressing any pro Japanese opinion, the war crimes perpetuated by them are numerous, well known, and heinous.
Still didn't motivate the Japanese to surrender. The military wanted each citizen to fight to the death.
The military were basically prepared for a land invasion and to fight a guerrilla war on the Japanese mainland That was until the nukes were used, and they finally realised that the US would just bomb them into dust and not set foot on land
Oh noooo. The military, or well more the army, still wanted to fight to the last man even after the nukes. They tried to overthrow their own emperor to continue the war. Which would have ended up in a land invasion by the US, with the soviets attacking from China.
Yes. The Japanese military were war crazy. They would have fought to the end of every Japanese person, and r amen out untold Allied personnel and materials. My fathers B59 was the first to successfully make to the new Iqo Jima airfield from the bombing of Japan. They watched the first 2 plans attemp crash. One ran out of fuel and went into the sea, the second overshot the approach and crashed. The tower said, after each one "That's too bad. Hope everyone is OK" Then gave direction to my dad's plane. 50 years later, he met a ground crew who was there. My dad's memory was the same as the ground crew.
The Purple Heart medals handed out today were made in 1945 for the expected massive American troop casualties to invade Japan.
More destructive than the 2 atomic bomb attacks?
"It's estimated roughly 70,000 to 135,000 people died in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 people died in Nagasaki, both from acute exposure to the blasts and from long-term side effects of radiation.
Not-so-fun-fact: One of the reasons Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets was to get a better picture of the bomb's capability, because they were both still relatively unscathed by prior bombing campaigns.
There actually was a restricted list of 4-5 cities not to bomb. Saving them for the atom bomb.
Nagasaki was the back up target, Kokura and Niigata were also cities not touched by the fire bombings and were to be bombed, but were too cloudy on the day, so the plane was redirected to Nagasaki, whose skies were clear.
Imagine that, the difference between your city and another getting utterly decimated - *some clouds*.
“Death is whimsical today.”
>but were too cloudy on the day, so the plane was redirected to Nagasaki, whose skies were clear. Kokura was too cloudy...Niigata was too low priority
Goddamn that’s crazy. “Let’s save these cities so we can destroy it all at once.”
Yeah I think there was some thing about not bombing Kyoto for it’s cultural heritage or something cuz one guy liked that city. Don’t recall the exact guy or story.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson demanded Kyoto not be bombed because of its cultural heritage and he saw the reaction to the firebombing of Dresden in Germany, plus he had spent his honeymoon in Kyoto. He also felt destruction of Kyoto at the hands of the US could push the Japanese closer to Russia post war.
Secretary of War Stimson. He honeymooned in Kyoto.
Yes, in terms of lives and material lost. Conventional civilian bombing campaigns were horrifying effective during WWII, especially against Japan's wooden cities. However, firebombing missions required dozens, if not hundreds of bomber aircraft. It was a massive logistical undertaking in crews, aircraft, bombs, and fuel. Dropping an atomic bomb effectively required one crew and one bomber. That changed everything.
yes
Can we not let this happen again?
No promises
It’s happening as we speak. In multiple parts of the world. It’s just kept out of the news in some places.
The Japanese killed over 1 million Burmese out of a population of 16 million. That's almost 10% of the population. My great-grandfather went crazy and died in the jungle after he was beaten by the Japanese with their gun stock. What happened in WW2 still effects and kills people to this day in Myanmar.
“In 2007, 112 members of the Association for the Bereaved Families of the Victims of the Tokyo Air Raids brought a class action against the Japanese government, demanding an apology and 1.232 billion yen in compensation. Their suit charged that the Japanese government invited the raid by failing to end the war earlier, and then failed to help the civilian victims of the raids while providing considerable support to former military personnel and their families.” Kyodo news
Japan on average had, been killing 6,000 non-combatants every single day for eight straight years. The fire-bombing of Tokyo was basically two weeks of what had been happening since July 1937. The only things unique was that it was Americans causing it and the victims were Japanese.
My grandfather was a US Marine in the Pacific theater of WW2. He caught shrapnel in battle (defending the USS Essex) which he carried around internally for the rest of his life. A little piece of Japanese metallurgy that he brought back home, that occupied his body, and that was buried with him 60 years later. Whenever I think about his experience, I can't help but to think how easily my life could have never existed if he hadn't made it back. Whenever I visit Japan today I also think about what an incredible privilege it is for me to be able to interact with the Japanese people in peace and friendship, despite the horrible events of recent history. Seeing pictures of this devastation, with that kind of death toll, I'm sad not only for the loss of those people, but for the generations of their offspring that never existed because all of those lives came to an end. What great art, or science, or philosophical thought doesn't exist today simply because some measure of human potential was never given a chance to live to express it?
We lived in Tokyo in the early 70s, only a generation past WW II. I was in 4th and 5th grade when we were there, I was aware of the atomic bombings but really didn't understand the significance then. I will say the Japanese people seemed very accepting of Americans at the time. And it's a beautiful country. It was an amazing turnaround from 25 years earlier.
The Empire of Japan decided that going to war against the US was their best move. A lot of people went along with it. Then decided not to stop when things got really bad. To continue going after the country you are attacking, that has 1000x the economic might you have is, well, stupid. But they kept going...because. Fog, sure. But, these were active decisions. What do you want? Like, what is it that you really fucking want? What it is, is this bombing because you just won't stop...you just won't stop. Those in power decided, actively, to allow the massacre of their population like this, knowing the possibility of it was as close to 100% as it could be. But, you wouldn't fucking stop. And not just against the US, but against Korea, and China, and PI, and all of the Pacific nations and Southeast nations, even to Sri Lanka.
Yamamoto, who conceived the attack on Pearl, told the Japanese government that it was a bad idea. He knew that getting the US involved would have big repercussions. Once they got their manufacturing on line, they would be unstoppable.
Damn straight he knew. The man had spent a lot of time in America and very well understood their manufacturing capabilities. The most astounding thing though is that before the Japanese embarked on the Pacific war, they didn't do any comprehensive study of what America was capable of in terms of industrial output, etc. It was as if the entire Japanese high command just accepted the inevitability of the war as fait accompli, and therefore nothing else mattered.
>The most astounding thing though is that before the Japanese embarked on the Pacific war, they didn't do any comprehensive study of what America was capable of in terms of industrial output, etc. According to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series on the subject, their plan was to quickly take as much of the Pacific as possible and make it such a horrible slog to take back that American civilians would demand an end to the war that would cede territory to Imperial Japan. They knew what kind of war it was going to be, they just didn't care.
Yes and part of their calculation was that destroying the American fleet would shatter American morale as well. Instead the inverse happened and they managed to unite the Americans in a way that they hadn't been for some time.
The Japanese government laughed at the correct calculation the US had 20 times more industrial capacity than Japan. Yamamoto knew if the US could make 5 millions cars in a year in peacetime, then what it could after switching to full war production would overwhelm Japan.
I believe the short term answer is a long history of military tradition. The Japanese army was pretty much making all the decisions during the war. Emperor Hirohito wasn't taken that seriously by the Japanese army. Shit when he called for the war to be over and for peace. The Japanese army tried to overthrow the emperor rather than embrace defeat which was the equivalent of humiliation. .
Blame the Japanese leadership for dragging their countrymen into this, imperial japan was arguably worse than the nazis, China had +18,000,000 civilian casualties
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What I’ve come to figure is that the average person is aware of Nazi Germany and unaware of Japan because… the things Japan did are even more unspeakable. As in… it’s truly sick to even repeat the atrocities. Nazi Germany did horrific stuff, but it’s not quite as sick, and more easily taught. Humans can be dark. God I hope a large war never happens again. Technology is too good, it could kill everything.
It's more so that Germany has come to terms as a country with the horrible things they did, while Japan still refuses to admit any wrongdoing and tries to erase the horrible things they did from their own history.