It is impossible to avoid noticing that the European theater is much more popular a subject of study in the US than the Pacific theater. There are more web pages, computer games, books, and movies dedicated to the European theater than the Pacific theater. Yet during World War II most Americans were far more passionate about defeating the Japanese than the Germans. Why was there a complete reversal of relative interests since then?
This is a question that I have carried with me for some time, and to be honest I don't have an answer. However, I do have several possible reasons.
1. Germany had more interesting equipment. The very fact that the Germans were the first to develop cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, jet fighters, and some of the best tanks of the war makes for interesting reading. The Japanese had a stellar navy, but otherwise its equipment was rather light and uninteresting in comparison to the Germans'.
2. The Germans have had a Western culture for centuries. They produced Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Beethoven. The Japanese have only been Westernized and modern since around 1860 when they first made cultural and economic contact with the US. Because of this it is shocking and fascinating that a country as modern and well cultured as Germany would commit genocide against the Jews, but not as shocking to the Western observer that the Japanese would be as cruel to their prisoners and the Chinese. It seems like a study in contrasts to observe the Germans, while the Japanese have no other standard for us to judge them by in our short history with them.
3. The Pacific war was confusing. I have read several books on the Pacific war, and it is still difficult to picture many of the battles. The war was waged over thousands of miles of ocean with key events occurring on small islands few Westerners have ever heard of (apart from the battles themselves!) nor seen. Other than the critical battle there, who has heard of Guadalcanal? For the same reason few know of specific events on the Soviet front. Who reading this has any appreciation for the city of Kiev?
4. We won the Pacific war with methods that have been labeled as dishonorable since. The merits of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been debated for over five decades. This victory created few heros but many villains.
After Germany defeated Poland and changed its thrust Westward towards France it conquered France in a month and a half. Germany, at this point, was the world's most powerful nation. Hitler had problems looming that were caused by his own success. Though he was still at war with Britain his massive armies could not reach the island fortress. The economy mobilized for war and his armies growing restless, Hitler made the worst mistake of the war. He decided to utilize his armies against the Soviet Union while his Luftwafe and navy slowly wore Britain away. He predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse before winter, after which time he could again aim his military completely towards England.
Catching the Soviet Union off guard in a massive sneak attack, Germany reached to within 10 miles of Moscow. Winter set in, the terrible cold arrived, and Germany's vaunted "blitzkrieg" ground to a halt. Suddenly a war of mobility and encirclement became a war of attrition. Calling on massive reserves, the Soviet Union could simply field more men than Germany. In my opinion it is at this point that the war was lost by the Germans.
I find the genocide of the Jews in World War II to be one of the most philosophically intriguing aspects of the war. Germany was one of the most, if not the most, advanced societies in the world. During the war they developed the first space vehicle (V2 rocket), the first cruise missile (V1), the first jet airplane, etc. Germany also had a flourishing art society at the time, including my favorite composer Richard Strauss.
At the same time that these startling technological advances and beautiful works of art were being made, Germany liquidated practically all of its minorities. This included six million Jews, thousands of Gypsies, and known homosexuals.
Germany also attempted to kill by starving approximately 20 million Soviet citizens through the invasion and occupation of the Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. It was the method by which Hitler hoped to permanently cripple Russia, since his armies obviously couldn't occupy all of that huge nation.
So how could a nation that was so technologically advanced and which had a living art industry do such an evil thing? Was it a case of racist leaders and unwilling soldiers who were simply following orders?
At the Nuremburg trial (By the way, those who say that the O.J. Simpson trial was the "trial of the century" sure put the Nuremburg trials in a different light!) it seemed that everyone was saying "no one here but us anti-Nazi's". Everyone and their brother seemed to have helped out in the plot to overthrow Hitler, and all of the blame for Germany's war crimes were pinned on those leaders already dead.
The US and other nations helped in this subduing of the blame. For instance, despite the slave labor used at Peenemunde that killed approximately 6000 people, all of the scientists involved in the development of the V2 rocket were cleared of any wrong doing. This was orchestrated by the US who wanted to use their knowledge in their own rocket programs. This was in spite of some glaring faults in these scientists, such as **** being an SS officer. Perhaps a more pointed example was that **** was deported from the US in 1984 for the war crimes he had committed fourty years earlier.
Despite this pinning the blame on already dead German officers, I would suggest this problem was found throughout German society. German soldiers throughout the war committed atrocities, most against the "subhuman" slavic Soviets.
Recently I found an excellent view of what may have happened had D-day failed. It is from the book Monty: The Lonely Leader written by Alistair Horne with David Montgomery, pg xx. This is all a direct quote, none of it being my work. It summed everything up so succinctly that I thought I could not possibly do better.
"Consider the consequences of defeat on D-Day. The Allies would have lost their almost irreplaceable fleet of landing craft, in which even by June 1944 the margin was uncomfortably small. Britain would have sacrificed her last available army. It would have taken at least another year, well into the summer of 1945, before another invasion attempt could have been mounted; and that would then have had to be manned largely by Americans.
"In the meantime, Hitler would have been developing his deadly jet aircraft, and new technology would have enhanced the striking power of his U-boat fleet. Possibly (though improbably) his scientists might have developed an atomic bomb. But, with certainty, Britain would have been hammered mercilessly by Hitler's V-weapons, constantly increasing in numbers in the Pas de Calais and the Low Countries, and largely immune to air attack.
"By late summer of 1944, under the rain of the V-1 'doodlebugs' and after nearly five years of war, British morale was already shakier than it had been at any time in the Blitz; could it have held up after another devastating defeat, and for another year? WHat if the national hero, Monty, repulsed on the shores of Normandy, had joined the long, lugubrious ranks of the defeated and sacked British generals?
"In the US, a tremendous head of idealism had built up to smash Hitler, as the number one priority; yet with a bloody catastrophe on the Normandy beaches, could the restless Americans have resisted the pressures of Admiral King and the 'Pacific Lobby' to transfering their main effort to defeating the hated Japanese enemy?
"There then remains the unpredictable Russian card. In the course of their smashing spring offensive of 1944, which brought the Red Army sweeping into Poland, the Soviets looked irresistable, but supposing the bulk of the sixty German divisions pinned down in the West by OVERLORD had been released to hold the Eastern Front? Might they then have been able to to fight the Russians, with their already colossal losses in men, to a bloody standstill?
"Since the glasnost opening of the Soviet archives in 1990, we are now aware, in addition to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, of at least two (previously unknown) overtures for a seperate peace from Stalin, giant with feet of clay, to Hitler in the terrible autumn of 1941. With the ALlies defeated in the West in 1944, such a desperate remedy, though improbable, would not have been inconceivable.
"Certainly this was the hope that bouyed up Rommel and its probability would have been vastly increased had ROUNDUP, the invasion of Normandy scheduled for the summer of 1943, been attempted then, rather than a year later. This is what Roosevelt and Marshal had wanted, and what would have resulted in a premature effort with green troops doomed to almost certain failure, averted only under heavy pressure from Churchille and his prudent CIGS, Brooke- who, a year later, was still privately wondering whether OVERLORD 'may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war'.
"Thus, if an Allied repulse on D-Day did not actually lead to some form of victory for Hitler, at best it would have meant another bloody year of war, ruinous for Britain, the extinction of the last surviving remnants of European Jewry through completion of the FInal Solution, culminating almost certainly with the employment of the first atomic bombs in the summer of 1945 on Germany, not Japan. Sweeping through a 'nuked' Germany, the victorious Red Army would have stopped nowhere short of the Rhine. Lost to Communism, Europe, and the world, would have been a very different place today.
Until recently I was aware of some war crimes committed by the Japanese among the upper ranks. I had heard of the "Death March" used on the prisoners (both American and Filipino) from the Phillipines, but that was the extent of my knowledge.
After reading a book on the Japanese army (Soldiers of the sun, Harries, Meirion and Susie) many more crimes came to light. Crimes that were probably well known about 50 years ago as they happened, but which have quickly faded from memory since.
For instance, there was an event known as the "Rape of Nanking". It was named this for several reasons, both literal and metaphorical. Nanking was the capital of China, holding the seat of power for Chiang Kai-Shek. On December 10, 1937, Japan began their attack on the capital. Within two days the Chinese were routed, and the Japanese had taken the city captive.
Not wanting to hastle with prisoners, the Japanese killed all soldiers as well as people who were suspected soldiers. Chinese authorities placed the total murdered (as in killed after they surrendered, not killed in the actual fighting itself) at 250,000. Of this, 22,000 were Chinese soldiers. The rest were civilians. The quantity of those murdered is even more shocking when the method of execution is taken into account. Bodies were found burned, missing ears, beheaded, etc. Compare this number to the 60,000 killed at Hiroshima.
In addition to the murder was an incredible amount of pillaging and destruction of property, but what really makes this escapade seem terrible in Western eyes was the raping of the women. German representatives of the International Committee estimated that 20,000 women were raped in the first two weeks, while the British estimated 8,000. These were individual rape incidents that actually involved multiple rapes per incident. Groups of 5 to 7 men would gang rape a given woman.
The Rape of Nanking is perhaps the worst case of Japanese war crimes in terms of magnitude, but is certainly not the only case. Similar events happened in Pingting, T'ai-yuan, Wuhu, K'ai-feng, Kihrien, Hangchow, and many other cities.
So why are the crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army so much less known than those committed by Nazi Germany? Probably because China is a country very different than the US, and our people do not tend to empathise with them as much as we would for other, more Western nations.
I find this very question to be most greivous. It is often asked in the context of America's fear of the spread of Communism and of our supposed need to scare the Soviets into respect for Democracy.
Let me point out a few things. First, the bomb was developed during the war in the assumption that it would be used against the Germans. At one point the Germans were working on the bomb themselves but they gave up early in the game, assuming it an impossible task. In fact, at one point the Japanese looked into the possibility of making an atomic bomb, but they fell short of even the German effort.
Second, the Cold War didn't begin until after World War II was over. Sure, Churchill was distrustful of the Soviets, but Roosevelt thought that he understood the mind of Stalin. I would have to say that Truman was much less trusting of the Soviets, but this arose through post war events like the Berlin Blockade.
Let me ask the skeptic of the use of the bomb one question: If our main reason for dropping the bomb on Japan was to scare the Communists, why did we demobilize so far and so fast in Europe? Shouldn't we have kept a strong physical presence there to keep the Soviets in check? The answer is that we had no reason to distrust the Soviets (Except for the incidents in Finland and Poland at the start of the War) until after they grabbed power for themselves in Eastern Europe in the form of the Soviet Bloc. This was well after the dropping of the bomb.
The real reason for our use of the bomb was the tenacity with which the Japanese fought. They knew they could not win a war, but they hoped to crush our will to fight. They wished to incur such casualties that we would not desire to bring the war to the main Japanese islands.
An example of this philosophy can be found in the battle for Okinawa, where approximately 120,000 military and 42,000 civilian Japanese lost their lives but only 10,755 were captured. Why are these statistics so grim? Because the Japanese soldiers refused to surrender. Another example can be found in the Kamikaze pilots that the Japanese used to great effect against our ships during the war. Would a sane nation suing for peace ask its young men to kill themselves purposefully?
No, it was only through the atomic bombs and on 14 August 1945 that Hirohito stopped the wrangling of his politicians and finally ordered that the war should end.
I have so much more to say, I feel so vehement on this topic. Still, I will try to keep concise.
We had no idea that radiation would prove so deadly. Why else would we have done so many experiments after the war with American soldiers nearby?
America is seen now as the big bully of World War II, picking on the poor defenseless Japanese. The "proof" is found in the use of the atomic bomb and through our "concentration camps" of Japanese Americans. Yes, these intern camps were racist and unnecessary, but no one died because of them. As far as war crimes go this was quite tame.
May I point out that the Japanese started the war through Pearl Harbor? How about the fact that General Yamashita, and many others, were condemned to death after the war as war criminals for their maltreatment of prisoners? What about the "March of Death" that began on 9 April, where thousands died due to maltreatment? The Rape of Nanking?
I am now finished with my rant.