Reply To: A Somber Anniversary – August 6, 1945

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@torros – my paternal grandfather was a medic slated for either the Kyushu or Honshu invasions.  Japanese snipers were specifically trained to shoot medics first.  Its not out of the realm of possibility … that if not for the atomic bomb, my whole family doesn’t exist.

Thanks, @warzan !

Indeed, @tankkommander , atrocities in the Pacific War were absolutely horrific.  While not as widespread as some of the worst European examples, many Pacific ones are somehow more barbaric.  Swords, bayonets, death marches, American pilots tied to weights and thrown off Japanese warships, mothers throwing their own babies off the cliffs of Saipan, biological and chemical weapons tested on Chinese POWs as part of Unit 731 (Google that shit, but not right before bed, Josef Mengele would be ashamed), heroin / opium trade funding part of the Japanese Army (and to be fair, the Kuo-min Tang Chinese Nationalist Army as well – this was basically the start of what we’d see with the “Golden Triangle” after the war).   And of course the OSS were no angels in French Indochina, either.

Also in regards to the conduct of the war, again to be fair, are American submarines during the war.  This included sinking of Japanese troop transports and then machine gunning Japanese survivors in the water.  American submarines devastated the Japanese naval and merchant fleets so badly that by the end of the war they were torpedoing wooden junks in Japanese estuaries.

In fact, when the Nuremberg Trials were wrapping up, and Admiral Karl Dönitz was initially sentenced to death for the “war crimes” of his U-boats, Admiral Chester Nimitz, CinC of US Pacific Fleet, wrote the tribunal and said (paraphrasing): “You’d better string me up too, because we’ve done far worse over here.” Dönitz’s sentence was reduced to 10 years if memory serves (slave labor in building U-Boat pens, political connections, he was the Second Führer, after all).