Less interest in the Pacific?

Hmm. Looks like I was wrong about the level of emotional involvement that people have, at any rate. Personally I still think the whole Pacific theatre was a giant slaughterhouse that had relatively little significance for those not immediately involved. For the poor SOBs that were, it was hell on earth and literally a matter of life and death, but all wars are like that.

Could Japan concievably threaten any part of the Americas or knock the UK or USSR out of the war? No
Could it take over India? Never, it couldn't even hold down China.
Could Japan pacify China? Almost certainly not, it was just too big.
Could it take over Australia? Vanishingly unlikely.
Did Japan have the capability to develop and deploy weaponry that might enable it to overcome its strategic weakness? No.
Was the outcome a foregone conclusion beyond any shadow of a doubt? Yes, IMO.

Japan expands massively due to mind-boggling ineptitude on the behalf of the British and US, then Japan is steamrollered by the US (which is only fighting left-handed while putting most of its efforts into the ETO and assisting its allies with Lend-Lease). The details are interesting, but then so is some of the stuff that happened in e.g Norway and Iraq.

 

I find it hard not to agree with bones conclusions in the main. Nothing in that post takes away from units or individuals involved.

 

I find the PTO fascinating for manner in which the US went about it. It is everything the USA is good at. Firstly think BIG, first rate Planning and Organisation dare I say like running a massive, successful company. The number of ships making up the various Battle Groups and the ever rotating supply fleets. Such will never be seen again. This was Corporate Thinking on a vast scale from digging iron ore and enlisting men to the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay.

However without the men, who bravely fought in some of the worst conditions of the war and those who did all the boring but so very necessary jobs, it would all have been pointless.

Sideshow is one of those words academics like to use when refering to something they have no real knowledge of. If you are at the sharp end nothing is a sideshow, its a battle for life and death.

Great Respect to " Those Rascals in Paradise ".

 

Another great post rhs. The thread is certainly throwing them up here.. Wtid45 got it in the neck for defending our own "side show" in burma.. So it is indeed interesting to see a whole strategic theatre described as such.. It hurts doesnt it chaps? Especially if you have family involvement to have the words side show thrown at them.

 

I personally have always taken less interest in it because of how the Allies fought it, yes the Japanese were brutal to say the least, but the allies in that theater were just as bad in allot of cases (all glossed over of course).

then of course we come to a certain pair of bombs, which history conveniently forgets were dropped after Japan first surrendered, but there terms were refused, then they were dropped and told to surrender (talk about kicking someone when there down), and we have to remember, were the bombs needed?, Japan had no supplies at this point, few troops left willing to fight, no navy, no planes, no pilots and by this point no allies.

The allies could of choked Japan of supplies and forced them to surrender without bloodshed, but a certain bloodthirsty president wasn't happy with that.

for those reasons, for these obviously ignored allied war crimes, I cannot take an interest in the pacific theater, and have now more respect for the Japanese soldiers, than I do for the allied.

 

And then you get that..

 

This is bunk, the surrender of the Japanese was to be WE (the victors) dictate the terms, as we did for Nazi Germany, and for Italy. That doesn't mean NO terms, it means they are not negotiated on. Accept them, or fight on. The Japanese might not exist as a culture if the allies had taken your tack. Starvation is not a good way to die, and it takes years for them all to die, or enough of them so that surrender is accepted.

Truman's actions were as far from "bloodthirsty" as they could be under the circumstances. His actions saved more Japanese lives than it cost, it also saved the lives of thousands of American, British, Chinese, UK Commonwealth, Dominion, and Soviet lives as well. Don't use the lens of hindsight to look back on the atomic bombs and judge them using today's knowledge. That is the height of hypocracy. And the use of coventional bombs against enemy populations is not a war crime. Atomics were only looked at and viewed as "bigger explosions".

 

Although this post is more carefully worded than your initial commentary, I agree with Lou that you are looking at circumstances in reverse order. Certainly there were few on the West Coast of the USA who felt safe from invasion in the early days of the war. Indeed, the Rose Bowl was moved from Pasadena to North Carolina after Pearl due to fears of invasion or at least interference. As for the USA not being threatened, both our soon to be 49th and 50th states were either attacked (Hawaii) or even occupied (the Aleutian islands of Alaska) during the first months of the war. A Japanese submarine also shelled a refinery in California.

Japan made mistakes, just as Germany did, and that allowed the US and its allies to gain the upper hand much more quickly than they might have if the war had more intelligently been fought by the Axis.

Back to your original point, however, you referred to the PTO as a sideshow. That was the cause of the emotion that you stirred. A sideshow does not take the lives of so many people. Tarawa was not the Axis incursion into Iran. Iwo was not similar to Axis activity in Palestine. If you could ask all of the US troops who served in WWII whether they would have preferred serving in the ETO or the PTO, I suspect more than 99% of them would have taken the ETO hands down -- because survival was much more likely. Had you asked those same soldiers whether they would have preferred being stationed in Iraq or Italy/France/anywhere else in the ETO, a great many would have chosen Iraq or one of the other generally inactive areas.

 

IMHO the Pacific Theater is a confusing study. One can't look soley to the army in the PI or the marines doing most of the island hopping but the cold reality is that more navy saliors died at sea than marines on land. The confusing nature of naval battles, diffrent termanology, weapons, tactics, etc. You need to take the time to understand some of these things. or your left just as clueless as you were before you read up on the subject (it took me months to figure out that the forecastle and a fo'c'sle were indeed the same thing). However that very same nature is what appeals to me. Two great ships, sailing majesticly over the ocean, firing on the open seas, 10-20 miles distance. Rolling sea's, rain, hundreds of men working in tandem for the right to live. Admirals leading there fleets into battle, unlike what became the norm on land. No, a war at sea has very little in common with a war on land, and in that, it's very nature, is why the Pacific war gets tossed to the back burner. No great tank battles, just ships doing what they were designed to do.

 

Sources? Where did you read that it was an Allied practice to starve PoW's, or murder, rape, and rob civilians? Was this an Allied practice?

Ah Yes, those rose tinted glasses are being used again. In 1945 no one had any idea about radiation or the long term effects of an atomic bomb. Hmm. We can drop one bomb from one plane and get the same results as thousands of bombs dropped from hundreds of planes.

This is the statement of the uninformed. I recommend Downfall by Richard Frank.

Ah yes, because starving tens of millions of people to death is much more human than killing a few hundred thousand to end the war Japan started.

Bloodthirsty? Again I ask for a source.

I'm glad you have more respect for a group of people that would bayonette your testicles just for fun, over your own countrymen, who fought the war with dignity by the way.

 

You may be entitled to your opinion but I assure you, I have no respect for you or your opinions at this point. You are displaying a callous disregard for the documented atrocities that the Japanese military as a whole committed against prisoners, civilians and other non-combatants. You seem to have no concept of the history of the PTO or the suffering that the Japanese military caused and a general ignorance of how the American and Allied troops conducted themselves. More to the point, you are offensive to the name of each of our fellow Rogues who served in the PTO.

 

I must have been about nine or ten years old when those great documentaries Victory at Sea and the World at War were first shown on TV in the UK. Apart from John Wayne films I new little about a war in the Pacific. The two series had me hooked in my younger years. I read and watched everything I could find and knew a lot more about it then than now. Its possibly twenty years since I last did really deep reading.The Pacific War and the way it was carried out by both sides was clearer to me than the war in Europe which was also muddied by politics.

 

Better words than im thinking dg... So i will refrain.

 

I think there's a simplistic public view that WW2 was ended by the D-Day landings, where they just turned left and drove towards Berlin and BINGO we'd won. It's no surprise some of that has either leaked or been reflected here. Personally I'd not start a Pacific thread here as the focus, quite reasonably, would be USN, USAF and USMC. I would start one over at ww2talk though, because that'd reflect my personal interest which is more Malaya and Burma.

What does that even mean? If it's "all glossed over" how do you know about it and we don't?

Offering to surrender, but having your terms refused doesn't mean you've surrendered, unless when you say did you actually mean did not.

Probably just as well you don't have an interest then, esp. as you seem to have confused so few facts.

I know it says England for location but where do you hail from?

cheers,

 

Mabe it would be considered a 'sideshow' if your a person who served the ETO and not the PTO. That conversation should be between two WWII vets that served in each theatre, giving each other 'hell ' over a cold beer at the VFW. They both fought and suffered and have earned the right to bicker. We (those of us not there) should never make such a statement, we were not in either theatre.As a child I remember my great uncle who was on Luzon. The troubles he had with life and night terrors after surviving Zig Zag Pass I would not wish that on anyone. Wish he was around to respond to this.

"I personally have always taken less interest in it because of how the Allies fought it, yes the Japanese were brutal to say the least, but the allies in that theater were just as bad in allot of cases (all glossed over of course)."

M10 Wolverine, Please share your vast ammount of documentation.


"for those reasons, for these obviously ignored allied war crimes, I cannot take an interest in the pacific theater, and have now more respect for the Japanese soldiers, than I do for the allied."

There are veterans of the PTO on here, what a slap in the face to the brave men who served there. Take a look at 'Flyboys' by James Bradley. I don't recall any allied troops eating Japaneese flesh or any other body part just for the hell of it.

Flyboys: a true story of courage - Google Books

put the words 'human flesh' in the search function for this book and see what comes up.

 

Not exactly what I had in mind when making this thread.... I certainly expected more respected for the servicemen who fought and died there, and posts which had been properly researched.

 

I dont think this is going anywhere good now