Obama in Japan

[idun]

A couple of things have come up recently. Saw a bit, but not all of a documentary about WW11 in Asia and specifically about Vichy and their agreements with the Japanese.

And then I was talking to a friend of my Dads whose husband had been a japanese POW. She started telling me about him, she had a little cry and said that he had never been the same after he got back, initially he was in a terrible physical state and mental mess.  Eventually he became physically better,  but seemed haunted for the rest of his days and would not talk about it. She said that she had been lucky to get him back anyway as there had been orders to kill all POWs.

So that was a few weeks ago and on the news I see that the Japanese have called the nuclear bomb war crimes. However what really annoyed me was that there was no mention of the treatment of POWs or those orders, not one mention and I find that appalling.

[Rabbie]

I quite agree. The Japanese treatment of POWs was terrible. Given what the allies knew at the time and the fact that the Japanese had stated they would not surrender then the decision to use the A-bomb was justified to save lives which would have been lost in a non nuclear invasion of Japan. A choice between two evils but justified given the knowledge at the time.

It is too easy to make judgments based on hindsight.

[suein56]

[quote user="Rabbie"]The Japanese treatment of POWs was terrible.

[/quote]

There is no doubt about that, as there is no doubt as to the treatment of many Jews by the N a z i s, and especially people detained in the so-called work camps aka as concentration camps.

 

As regards the Japanese it is IMHO their culture. They cannot envisage anyone allowing themselves to be caught and, even worse, to surrender. If they themselves were caught then they would kill themselves, or at least make every effort to do so. Because their view is that it is totally shameful to surrender they regarded the prisioners they took as shameful for not killing themselves, or trying to, when in danger of being caught. So that they believed them beneath contempt.

It doesn't excuse, in our eyes, their behaviour towards the prisioners of war but it is their culture and they no more understood our culture than we did theirs.

Sue

[PaulT]

They were not really POWs but to the Japanese an expendable workforce that could be starved and brutally treated and required to carry out heavy manual work.

If the two bombs had not been dropped then the ill treatment would have continued along with many deaths trying to defeat them. Given the two choices the right one was made.

[lindal1000]

It's hard to judge with the attitudes of the time. My view is that if the Americans really knew that the effect of the atomic bomb would kill, in such a painful and drawn out way, all those innocent civilians and pollute the area for centuries, then it was a war crime, regardless of the fact that it effectively ended the war. It was at the end of a period when unarmed civilians, women and children were not considered legitimate targets, whereas soldiers were considered to be engaged in duty. That doesn't justify the treatment of POWs, but two wrongs don't make a right. The extent to which the Americans were clear that would be the outcome is not know, but it certainly wasn't clear to the guys who dropped the bombs, and suffered a lifetime of remorse and psychological trauma afterwards.

[PaulT]

So do you take this in isolation? The Germans, British and US had, for many years, been involved in bombing cities thus killing and maiming civilians. If the dropping on A bombs on civilians was a crime then so must all the sorties flown on cities also have been.

So how do you judge what was a war crime? A sortie that, say killed a hundred civilians but had no real effect on ending the war - times those by the number of sorties to come to the total death toll or two raids that killed many thousands but ended a war thereby saving many millions of soldiers? Also who were the soldiers apart from civilians ordered to fight.

[idun]

My only regret in this was that no journalist mentioned that there had been an official order to kill all POW's if the japanese mainland was invaded. And that I feel is pertinent.

 The americans are being blamed for all the world's ills at the moment, and in this case, they were just fighting back. And that is what people do in war.

Wonder what the world would be like IF the japanese had not attacked Pearl Harbour. 

[andyh4]

Lindal1000

The dropping of the atomic bomb may in 50 or 100 years be judged as a war crime, but if so, then there are many, many other attacks that would have to be equally treated:

London Blitz

Coventry

Hull

Hartlepool (WW1)

Dresden

Hamburg

Warsaw

And if we go back on time, the list becomes nearly endless.

War is abhorrent, the killing of civilians the more so. Sometimes it seems it becomes unavoidable and we ALL have to live with the consequences.

[lindal1000]

I don't disagree with you there and is there anything to be gained by declaring it a war crime anyway? Those involved are long dead.

I did some work at Coventry Uni several years ago and the memorial to the victims of Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima etc in the ruins of the old cathedral is very moving (and I am not easily moved). It is just a simple plaque with the words 'forgive'. We could all learn a lot from that.