Lest We Forget: August 6 and 9 1945: Part III

Hmm no. Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S., the U.S. did not declare war on them.

To be absolutely technically precise, Frmrsldr is correct in saying the Germany declared war on the USA, and then the USA declared war on Germany by passing the "War Bill" in Congress, giving the executive powers for using federal funds to prosecute the war.

Sure he did. Once they declared war on the U.S.A., he did them the honor of returning the 'favor'. It's proper diplomatic form. Even the Japanese government attempted to declare war on the U.S.A. before the Pearl Harbor attack. The declaration was delayed by Japanese Embassy staff in Washington D.C. trying to decode their orders from Tokyo.

Only nazi Germany (and possibly fascist Italy) was the "baddie" in this regard, invading other countries without a formal declaration of war.

It was not diplomatic protocol. Roosevelt needed money from Congress to fight the war.

The idea that Yamamoto stood alone among the Japanese general staff in having a gloomy assessment of war with the USA. Indeed, the entire premise of Japanese war planners was that any protracted war with the USA was a lost cause -- therefore they all favoured a short war. Once, the decision to go to war was made, it was Yamamoto who enthusiastically advised a direct strike against the USA at Pearl Harbour in order to knock out the Pacific Fleet, and this was actually a late addition to the overall war plan, and one that Yamamoto insisted on, on threat of his own resignation, precisely because of his high estimation of the latent power of the USA. It was the army that opposed war against the USA, prefering to let the USA take the plunge.

Japan's Decision for War

Politically, Japanese war planners thought would be difficult for Roosevelt to justify making all out war with Japan, "on behalf of others", such as the colonial possessions of the Dutch in Indonesia, and the British in Singapore, it was Yamamoto's impetuous intervention that gave the Roosevelt just the card he needed to commit to total war in Asia.

Of course financial matters (funding the war and getting the economy on a war footing) and fine legal ease points of politics and government had to be taken into consideration. After all, the U.S.A. was a "democracy" with a Constitution.

ETA:

Germany did not attack the U.S.A., Roosevelt did not have to declare war on Germany but could have ignored Hitler's declaration of war against the U.S.A.

As soon as the Philippines were attacked, the U.S.A. would enter the war. The Japanese leadership knew that (including Yamamoto.) A strike first at the Philippines would warn the U.S. government and the fleet at Pearl. Hence the attack first at Pearl.

The army plan was to avoid attacking the Phillipines, as I pointed out before. The plan as enviasaged by the political war planners was to avoid war with the USA for as long as possible, and force the USA into making the decision. The concept was that war for the sake of other imperial powers (Britian and the Netherlands) would be harder to justify domestically than an direct attack on the USA, and since the attack was intended primarily as a kind of high stakes negotiating strategy where the ultimate end was a negotiated settlement with the USA, the strike on Pearl Harbor defeated the political intentions of the Japanese war plan:

An introduction to the causes of war: patterns of interstate conflict

Y'know, I've talked to Canadian infantrymen, tankers, sailors and bomber crews who fought in WWII, civilians who lived in occupied Europe (and the Canadian home front, of course), as well as Germans who were pressed into the Hitler Youth, then given Schmeissers and pointed in the direction of the US Army.

They all said the war was a waste.

Really? Because all the ones Ive talked to said war is a waste but this one had to be done

Well except the nazi ones, they just said the war was a waste with the occasional sprinkling of 'gee too bad we lost"

My wife asked my friend who was in Vietnam if he had any stories and all he said was that he can't remember any of it when he is awake.

I have an uncle who was the pilot of one of those patrol boats in the river (ala apocolypse now) and many a time he came back the only one alive. He doesnt talk about it at all.

Got me.  They all said war is a waste.  The Canadians said WWII was horrible, but they'd have done it again since it had to be done.

Then there was my grandpa, who was a zombie and not ashamed to admit it. He didn't see the war as part of his world, he just wanted to take care of his family.  He always talked about how stupid the army was (he was a highly-skilled aircraft welder before the war, then was drafted and drove truck in the army, even though he was asked to be a sniper because he was such a good shot) and how it messed up his life.

That's quite a wager with no guarantee that the U.S.A. would not enter the war. Even if Japan had attacked all the other European colonial possessions and not the Philippines, here's how Roosevelt could (and probably would) have played it:

1. Japan's decade old war in China. It was the U.S.A. that came up with the idea of "open cities" in China, where foreign powers essentially 'owned' Chinese cities where their capital exploited China - cities were foreign owned 'free trade zones'. For the past 50 years or so, there were American missionaries and their families in China. There were also U.S. Navy, Army and Marine personnel and their families in China - remember the Panay? They were writing to family back in the U.S. describing the war in China and the terrible things the Japanese were doing there.

2. With the Japanese capturing the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, French Indo-China, Burma and Thailand and with the fortified Pacific island bases Japan held for the past 20 years, Roosevelt could warn the American public that there also were U.S. Army, Marine, Navy and Air Force personnel and their families as well as American missionaries and their families in the Philippines (just like in China) and that an invasion of the Philippines was imminent and that their lives, well being and security were at stake.

This might just have been sufficient to convince most Americans to go to war against Japan.

lest we forget..

WWI and WWII were started because of the break down in world capitalism. Meaning that it had to be restructured.

German capitalism was rising while British and French was in decline.

American Capitalism was rising as well.

Germany knowing full well that they would be competing against America, tried to control Europe and important trade routes under the rule of German capitalism.

Strategicly the American bourgeoise stayed out of the war untill they felt they could win it. Their idea won, beeting out Germany.

American Capitalism winning was the only real outcome anyways. They had advanced management techniques and developed the assembly line. Resulting in the ever increasing productivity and extracting large surplus value, that needed to, and was used to, reform European capitalism. Bringing world capitalism into a long period of stability.

That stability ended by the 1960s and new forms of capitalist accumulation was needed. The Chinese, eastern Europe and other third world working class was brought on board to increase the extraction of surplus value.

At the same time American capitalims was taken over by financial vultures that preyed upon everything that the American industrialist of the early 1900's developed. Also they turned American capitalism into financial market speculation.

Since all market financial speculation is directly related to the surplus value extracted from the working class, the financial speculation of the capitalist vultures exceded all realistic equvilence between financial markets and supr plus value accumilated. Casing a major world capitalist melt down.

The only thing left is for the realignment of world capitalism through new wars and massive human slaughter.

I am just trying to point out the rationale for war, and the plan as far as the political leadership was concerned. What is interesting about it this to me is that the "political" object (negotiated settlement in a limited war) was undermined by Yamamoto's mini/max analysis of the "best chance" scenario based in purely military factors.

1) Objectively, Yamamoto is right in strictly operational terms, attacking the fleet at Pearl Harbour is safer because it delays US operational ability in the immediate frame.

2) Those operational imparatives end up contradicting the political object, because they hand Roosevelt his best case domestic political context for prosecuting all out war against Japan: An "unprovoked surprise attack against the US".

The plan takes shape first with a view towards a limited war, a kind of game of chicken in the Pacific, based in a specific political view, but "mission creep" takes over.

welcome to the new world order.....

You said it!

History is repeating itself.

This time, instead of the German, Italian and Japanese Empires, perhaps it will be the American Empire that is destroyed.

War is like that, it has a way of getting out of hand. Hitler, Mussolini, Yamamoto and other Japanese military and political leaders found that out to their chagrin after about mid 1942.

Bush and Obama have found that out for Iraq after 2004 and Afghanistan after 2003.

And it's the millions of schmucks like the families of the Frmrlsldrs, trippies, Qa'bongs and cueballs who get butchered in the process.

Yes, and the so-called democratic western countries at the time were still supporting the fascist kuomintang in China. Their friendly dictator Franco was in firm control of Spain after overthrowing democracy in that country with help from Hitler, Mussolini, Ford, GM, Studebaker, and other western world fascists. And workers of the world were in awe of the Russian people and Red Army as they stood alone against Nazi Germany for over two years when Hitler poured two-thirds of the corporate-sponsored military machine into the heart of Russia and Ukraine.

Hi, Fidel. Re your post #20, on the Americans' "slow boat" to the second front:

I'm not by any means well-read on WWII, but picked up 2 volumes of Lord Alanbrooke's war diaries from a charity book-sale and recently began reading them. (Alanbrooke became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1941.) Here's the editor, Arthur Bryant: "On April 1st, 1942, the American Secretary for War, Henry Stimson, and the Chief of Army Staff, General George Marshall, presented President Roosevelt with a plan for an early Anglo-American invasion of northern France. It had been drafted by...Major-General Dwight Eisenhower....its objects were to keep Russia in the War by drawing German ground and air forces from the eastern to a western front, and to provide a theatre where American forces could be employed at once to destroy the Axis in Europe before turning against the Japanese aggressor in the Pacific." (Emphasis mine) It was thought that if Russia started to wobble (remember, their pact with the Nazis was only a few months dead at the time), Operation Sledgehammer would have to be launched, a landing in France in summer 1942. "It was recognized that this would have to be carried out mainly by British troops and that its cost would probably be sacrificial."

Alanbrooke found the early invasion plans hair-raising, though they reflected the Americans' desire to hit back at someone after Pearl Harbour. Meeting Marshall for the first time "was an eye-opener...he had not studied any of the strategic implications of a cross-Channel landing....We should be operating with forces intially weaker than the enemy and, in addition, his rate of reinforcement would be at least twice as fast as ours....His formations were fully trained and inured to war whilst ours were raw and inexperienced. I asked him to imagine that his landing had been safely carried out, and asked him what his plans would then be...I found that he had not begun to consider any form of plan of action or to visualize the problems that would face the army after landing." There was also the problem that U-boats were roaming the North Atlantic at will in that period, making resupply chancy.

Roosevelt, Marshall and Eisenhower were all keen to invade northern France in 1942 if that meant keeping Russia onside. Alanbrooke, who had served at Dunkirk, wisely dissuaded them. It's hard not to think the result would have been a Dieppe writ large.

Good God, am I turning into one of those History Channel people, obsessing about whose tanks had the bigger guns? Back to Victorian novels for me.

In relation to the main topic of this thread it is perhaps more relevant to mention that the anglosphere Allies (US, UK, etc) made a very large effort long before August 1945 to draw the Soviets into the war in the Pacific. The Soviets had, in fact, a treaty with the Japanese (not unlike the non-aggression treaty with the Nazis between late August 1939 - June 1941 that was much better known) for the purpose of NOT getting sucked into fighting on 2 fronts. When it did come, Operation August Storm was a critical plank in the Allied success against Japan and in getting a speedy surrender.

Yes, all good points, F-P. I've read different points of view on the American, British and Canadian government strategies then. I think the Americans and British(and western industrialists and financial elite driving government interests then) were somewhat pre-occupied with the Pacific theater and in hacking off pieces of China for themselves in the 1930s and 40s. But as far as re-supplying by sea was concerned, US industrialists were doing a job on maritime workers wanting better pay and working conditions. Many US and Canadian seafarers saw frontline action in the Atlantic where regular naval forces just never saw up front and close. The seafarers wanting recognition were labelled communists and even spat upon by regular enlisted men in pubs and diners back home in North America. I think the re-supply had isssues with German U-boats for sure, but maritime workers were also under attack on a political front at home as well.

And then there is the issue of Stalin's pact with Nazi Germany. There has been in-depth discussion of that issue by various historians and essayists. I think pacts of one sort or another were not so uncommon then with the Munich agreement in 1938 an example. Like European leaders claimed at the time, agreements with Germany bore advantages and disadvantages for each country involved. While the Russians sent raw materials and energy to Germany, the Germans returned the favour with sending various goods to Russia that aided both the civilian and military economies. The main aim of any national leader, remember, is to avoid war and conflict, which is what Molotov-Ribbentrop II was mostly about according to the Russians themselves.

Of course Fidel, the smart play was to turn on Chiang and give China to Japan, or better, force Chiang into the fascist camp, but this would never happen because Soviet aid (Operation Zet) to Chiang dwarfed anything sent by the Americans until the end of the war. But don't let that stop you from re-writing history so that it fits in with your preconcieved notions of good guys and bad guys.

And the Russians realized the advantages for not fighting on two fronts since Lenin's pact with the Germans. Stalin would later discount the notion that Hitler might chance fighting on two fronts, which is what lost WW I for Germany. Stalin guessed wrong. Hitler had designs on Russia all along. Stalin would later refer to Dieppe and Italian fronts as "the sideshow in the Mediterranean."

That is incoherent and a total non-sequitur, Fidel. Didn't your English teacher teach you to put one subject in each paragraph that you write?

Anyway, carry on.

During the Cassablanca Conference, Prime Minister Winston Churchill raised the issue with Roosevelt of landing British and American forces in Yugoslavia after they had swept the Wermacht out of North Africa. The objective was to keep the Red Army within Russia and out of any other countries.

What came out of this were not landings in Yugoslavia but the Sicily and Anzio etc., landings in Italy. The closest the Western Allies came to landings in Yugoslavia was "The Man Who Never Was". An intelligence ruse hoped to draw Wermacht troops from the West, the Eastern Front and from Italy.

Churchill later made his reasoning behind this public in his post war "Iron Curtain" speech.

Your super-secret information source makes no mention of the Soviets supplying Chiang Kai-shek. After 1945, the Sovs helped Maoists give Chiang and KMT the heave-ho from China, as in mainland China and not Formosa and later "Taiwan."

Same to you.

You were talking about the period 1942. While you are all about distorting history, why not also distort the meaning of your posts in this thread? In for a penny, in for a pound... eh?

What is your point? What is it that you think your source reveals to us? Air America and CIA worked with Chiang's gangsters after 1945 to export opium over the Himalayas and westward in aiding the finance of Chiang's anti-Maoists and WACL wackos, anti-communist Tibetan theocratic feudalists and so on. I don't see where youre going with that link at all.

That the truth is that Stalin and Mao didn't get along. The Soviet Union had a long standing relationship with Chiang Kai Shek, and that support for the Communist insurgents was tepid at best. After the war they had no confidence in the Chinese CP and continued with the policy of backing a government of national unity between the KMT and the CPC, and it was only after this effort failed, and the US bought Chiang's alliegience that they supported the Maoist forces unconditionally.

The Soviet Union did not care who it had influence with in China, as long as they had influence.

Reds under their beds even then.

 I'm looking for where I said something to the contrary and can't find it, mr scarecrow. But carry on anyway as you're on a roll at this point.

Russia supplied Chiang's China with combat aircraft from 1937 to 1941. Russian ground and air forces even directly clashed with Japanese ground and air forces in Mongolia in the Second Nomonhan Incident in 1939 (the First Nomonhan Incident was in 1936.)

During 1939-40, Russia was introducing new combat aircraft into the Red Air Force. When the nazis invaded in June 1941, Russia stopped exporting combat aircraft and began rationalizing their fighter and bomber fleets, phazing out old models and stepping up production of new ones. Communist Russia needed all the combat planes it could manufacture in its life or death struggle against nazi Germany. During the 1941-45 War, Chiang's China was left with ageing obsolescent Russian aircraft.

Since 1937, the AVG (American Volunteer Group, these were regular U.S. Air Force airmen, but Roosevelt wanted to create the fiction that they were 'volunteers' or mercenaries who were not connected to either the U.S. government or U.S. Air Force. Remember, Roosevelt wanted American public opinion to turn in favor of war, without being seen as having a hand in this 'turning' of opinion), was operating three squadrons in China. By the start of 1942, they had been formally 'amalgamated back' into the U.S. Air Force.

From 1941-45, the Chiang government did get a lot of money from the U.S. government and Chiang's army got a lot of ammunition and small arms from the U.S. By the last year of war, Nationalist China got some interceptor/ground attack aircraft like late model Spitfires from Britain and some Mustangs from the U.S.A.

During 1942-45, the U.S. Air Force clandestinely operated a secret airbase out of China, where B-17, B-24 and later, B-29 missions were flown against Japan.

Those were the contributions of the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. to Nationalist China during 1941-45. From 1945-49, the U.S.A. financed and armed Chiang's forces, while the U.S.S.R. financed and armed Mao's forces.

I should have posted these sites much earlier, but I have to work around time constraints. I think these will be useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_in_the_East

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_and_Japan [37]

http://www.rapeofnanking.info/JapaneseAtrocities.html [38]

I was well aware of all that before we started this conversation. I had hoped evidencing my familiarity with the subject by laying out and referencing in detail the historical record would disabuse you of the notion that I haven't studied this issue in depth. The fact is that I have.

I have never once said the Japanese did not commit atrocity, as you seem to be saying. Nor have I denied that the firebombing of Dresden was a war crime. I just reject the idea that all imperial policy is the same,  just by benefit of the fact that it is imperial.

Nothing you have said has changed my view. My discussion of the actual Japanese war aims is intended to show that their aims as discussed in the highest levels of the Japanese cabinet were entirely different than those held at the highest levels of the German war leadership.

When I took Diplomatic History way back in the dark ages we had to read Richard Storry's (sp) A Short History of Japan. Is there a more recent work you might reccomend Cueball that covers Japanese diplomatic history in the first half of the twentieth century?

I don't know about a comprehensive book on that subject specifically. Most of what I know about Asian politics of the period is put together from several sources, everything from "The Morning Deluge" by Han Su Yin, to Angus Smedley's "The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh [42]", to "Ho Chi Minh: A polictical biography [43]". I have of course read "Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbour [44]", which I regard to definitevly show that the US intended without a doubt start a war with Japan, even if I am no 100% convinced that Peal Harbour was total set up. As for the actual decision making process of the war itself, "An introduction to the causes of war: patterns of interstate conflict from WW2 to Iraq [45]", which I referenced above was a real eye-opener for me. As well, I found "Japanese Destroyer Captain [46]" by Tameichi Hara to be a fascinating book that really humanized the Japanese side of the conflict in way it had not been done for me before -- Hara was the commander of the squadron that ran over PT-109, and in the destroyer right behind the one that almost killed John F. Kennedy.

There are others, such as Hiroshima [47] by John Hersey but those are some notable ones.

But I would say the single most important book I have read about the Pacific War, though it is more sociological than historical or political was "War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War [48]" which is perhaps more pertinent to this thread.

Thanks for the recommendations, Cueball. I may see if I can scare up a copy of the last.

ETA: Campus library has a copy. Will check it out this morning.

Where have I said that all colonial/imperial policy is the same? What fascist Italy did in Tripolitania (Libya), Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Italian occupied Yugoslavia from 1920 - 1945, what nazi Germany did in regards to the war on the Eastern Front and the Holocaust and what fascist Japan did in Asia and the Pacific Theater, if it is to be considered colonial/imperial policy, pales what the European and American colonialists/imperialists did from the late 19th Century to the end of World War II, even when compared to the worst case scenarios of the Indian Wars in the U.S.A. in the late 19th Century and the cultural genocide of the reservation and residential school system in the U.S.A. and Canada and the treatment of Africans by Belgians in the Congo from 1875 - 1915.

The only thing nazi Germany did that was worse than fascist Japan was the Holocaust and, as I said before, that was a difference in degree, not in kind. When it comes to atrocities, everything else fascist Japan did, equaled or was worse than what nazi Germany did. The 1937 Rape of Nanking, although of shorter duration than the nazi policy in the East from 1939 to 1942 of marching or driving in trucks to isolated fields, having people dig their own mass graves and then gunning those people down with pistols, rifles and machine-guns then burying them, was roughly equivalent, but with one significant difference: the nazis overwhelmingly targeted Jewish people. The Japanese fascists indiscriminately raped and murdered any Chinese person who had the misfortune of being unable to escape from the Japanese soldiers.

Those the nazis did not gas and incinerate, they worked to death - so the death camps were also 'labor' camps. Just like the nazis sending people by the thousands on trains from the occupied countries and territories (both West and East) to work as forced labor in Germany (i.e., non Jews working in war factories, etc.), the Japanese fascists sent on boats to Japan or Thailand or marched from one part of an occupied country to another. Only these ocean voyages and marches weren't as pleasant as the German train rides. See the Bataan Death March, the Sandakan Death Marches and the "Hell Ships", ships where prisoners were overcrowded, starved and dehydrated and were not marked with Red Cross flags so Alled warships sank them as merchant ships. Both the nazis and fascist Japan ran labor camps where people by the hundreds of thousands to millions died.

The nazis conducted unethical scientific experiments on live subjects. So did fascist Japan with Unit 731 and its subunits. The Japanese used biological and chemical warfare against both Chinese soldiers and unsuspecting Chinese civilians - something the nazis did not do.

Vietnam and Indonesia were major rice growing countries. Fascist Japan caused "preventable" famines in these countries in 1944-45 (sorry, I got the date wrong earlier.)

The nazis looted and burned Russia for all they could. But they were only there for about three years. The Japanese fascists looted and burned China for all they could. They were there (especially in the Northeast) for up to fifteen years.

The Japanese fascists forced app. 200,000 Asian and Pacific and even some European women to be military "comfort women" - i.e., forced them to be sex slaves for the fascist Imperial Japanese Army - again, something the nazis did not do (or, at least nowhere near that scale.)

Forget about what I have said.

Did you read the quotes and go to the sites I provided links for and do research to acquire more detailed information on specific subjects you might find interesting under the topic of Japanese war crimes, I provided in post #35?

If you did, then how can you possibly say that?

In light of the facts I have provided, this claim fails categorically.

The more of the stomach turning details I read about the way the fascist government and Imperial Japanese Army and Navy prosecuted the war, the more it looks to me like the Japanese fascists were the nazis of the Asia-Pacific War.

What do you think, that the war aims of fascist Japan were solely to get their hands on oil and rubber and other strategic resources from China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Indochina, Burma and Thailand, etc?

Just as Hitler and the nazis intended to make Russia (not Germany) the heart of the Third Reich, the Japanese fascists, realized that Japan could not meet the nutritional, resources and financial needs of its people and intended to make China the "new Japan" - i.e., the heart of the Japanese Empire.

Just as the nazis realized that physical and population size would make it a Herculean task to conquer Russia, so too the Japanese fascists and military realized that physical and population size would make it a Herculean task to conquer China. That is why Adolf Hitler made the oath sworn by the Reich's armed forces a personal oath of loyalty sworn to him by name, that is why the nazis referred to Slavs as subhuman (untermenschen) and adopted a scorched earth policy in the East and did it in the name of Der Fuerer and the glory of the fatherland, in order to have any hope of conquering Russia. That is why the Japanese fascists made the Emperor a god, Imperial Japanese Army soldiers referred to Chinese as subhuman ("bugs") and adopted a scorched earth policy in the East (China) and did it in the name of the the Emperor and the glory of the Empire, in order to have any hope of conquering China.

If in the history books about fascist Japan's prosecution of the war, war aims and atrocities, there is a dearth of letters, orders, communiques, telegrams, correspondence, communications, etc. from the government to the highest Imperial Japanese Army and Navy commanders in the field and out on the high seas, then compare the Nuremberg trials with the Tokyo trials:

Notice how far more German nazis were executed and received harsher sentences than their fascist Japanese counterparts?

The reason for this is American rewriting of history by suppressing such fascist Japan documents. When Harry Truman became President, he realized that there were two Superpowers: the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. The U.S.S.R. was the evil communist empire that in the next World War (if it came to that) the U.S.A. would end up fighting against. That is why the use of the two atomic bombs; so the War in the Pacific would be wrapped up as quickly as possible to prevent the U.S.S.R. and allow the U.S.A. to be the sole occupying power in Japan.

Truman was already viewing the world through the lens of the Cold War. The reason why so many Japanese war criminals received reduced sentences and got off so lightly, and the reason why documents that show Emperor Hirohito's and fascist Japan government's culpability for war crimes committed in the prosecution of the war, was due to the fact that the de facto governor of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur and the Truman administration saw Japan as a valuable bulwark against the spread of communism in Asia.

Documents and communications that establish fascist Japan's culpability concerning development and use of biological and chemical agents in World War II were also suppressed because the U.S. military viewed such information as useful and beneficial in a future war against communist U.S.S.R.

In contrast, the U.S.A. had to share occupation of Germany with (most importantly) the U.S.S.R., the U.K. and France. The other countries, especially the U.S.S.R., would not allow the U.S.A. to "pull the sort of stunt" it did in Japan. Hence that is why far more documents of communications between the nazi government and "the highest levels of German war leadership" were "allowed" to surface than in the case of Japan.

The atrocities the fascist Japanese government and Imperial armed forces committed in World War II was shameful and inexcusable. The covering up of these atrocities and the widespread protection of Japanese war criminals by the highest levels of the U.S. government and military afterward was also shameful and inexcusable.

Just like many Jews, and the state of Israel, successive Chinese governments and many Chinese survivors of fascist Japan's war atrocities have neither forgotten nor forgiven.

Dude, there is no difference.

This is just polemic. There isn't anything in it that directly deals directly with the evidence I presented.

The problem is, your evidence is only the tip of the iceberg.

Look into the Tokyo Tribunals, follow the links provided by the wiki sites, get a hold of the books and reference material in the footnotes sections of the wiki sites, check out books and documentary DVDs that interview Japanese soldiers who witnessed and were involved in the crimes and the survivors who were their victims.

Learning new things is not something to be afraid of.

The problem is that other peoples posts are really only device for you to make your polemic. You have repeatedly assumed I have been saying things that I have not said, over and over again, launch into your tirade and consitently misread whatever is being said, only so you can launch into the statement you want to make.

You have maintained over 4 threads, that I defended the bombing of Dresden. That I said the Japanese were the "good" guys, that I felt the Japanese occupation of China was justified and that I ignored US imperial interests in the prosecution of the Pacific war, and in particular its aftermath. None of which I said. In fact, I said exactly the OPPOSITE, on several occassions, even in the posts that you have quoted from me which you used to launch your ridiculous attacks.

Again, I cited specific examples of how the Japanese and German war planning differed, and you have not yet, not even ONCE confronted my points on evidence, at all ever in these threads.

Being lectured about the Rape of Nanking as if you just informed me of it in these threads is just fucking stupid, when obviously I am welll enough read on this subject. I learned about the Rape of Nanking 30 years ago, and details of it from various perspectives are in some of the books I mentioned up thread. For example the Agnes Smedley book is based on her experiences in the Chinese Communist zone during the war against Japan, and is filled with all kinds of material on the Communist insurgency and the "100 Regiments Offensive", which led to the implimentation of the "Three Alls Policy" by the Japanese.

The "Rape of Nanking", the Burma Road and the "Three Alls" is pretty much ABC's of the Japanese war in China, and not some kind of closely guarded secret kept from the public domain by the CIA, because the American's had uses for Hirohito after the war.

Indeed, my study has led me away from the conclusion you have come to, because I have actually been reading more recent material that comes directly from the source, material that has been missing for the public domain in the west since the war. You seem unaware of this material.

Indeed it doesn't seem to matter how much I reference sources at all. You simply are not listening, because all you are looking for is an opportunity to lecture.

Corporations Profit from Permanent War: Memorial Day 2010

And they continue to be sucked into and arms twisted into waging expensive taxpayer-funded wars. What a string of bad luck. What are the odds? Inconceivable!

Why We Fight [55]

Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies [56]

Cueball, what part of...:

... did you not read?

It seems all of it except the Rape of Nanking references.

There's more in there than just the Rape of Nanking. The Rape of Nanking is but a part of the overall fascist Japan government's political influence on the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy's military strategy.

There's links and references provided and comparative statistics on the numbers of people the German nazis and the Japanese fascists murdered on ethnic grounds when it came to prosecuting their wars.

Information that categorically and diametrically challenges your claim that the German nazi government politically influenced the professional Wermacht's military strategy whereas (emphasis on this comparative word) the Japanese fascist government did not politically infleunce the professional Imperial Japanese Army and Navy's military strategy.

And again, you bring up mountains of internet based "articles" such as Wikipedia to establish your case that the Japanese committed atrocities.

And again, I never said the Japanese did not commit atrocities.

You seem to think that quoting statistics (especially ones with many zeros in them), many of which were compiled at the behest of agencies whose explicit mission was to attribute essential and unparalled blame solely to the Japanese, and remove blame from other parties, such as the United States. Asserting that starvation in Asia was a deliberate policy of the Japanese government aimed at exterminating peoples with the explicit purpose of committing genocide, is a highly tendentious claim, in the face of the fact that it is quite clear that the Japanese tried to establish functional puppet governments to manage their empire, and the fact that the Japanese army itself was starving in the regions you are talking about at the time you are talking about them, directly because of the US efforts to isolate the Japanese garrisons by interdicting their supply.

No. I am not going to play the numbers game with you, that has nothing to do with what I said. Simply repeating over and over again that people died under the Japanese occupation does not establish that this was a deliberate policy of genocide. For example upon the Vietnamese people in 1944/45 as you suggest. Indeed, the Vietnamese only began to starve at the end of the war, at around the time that the empire was defunct, after three years of war, occupation and Allied blockade.

On the other hand, the very first thing that the Nazi's did in Poland, and then in Russia two years later was to begin deliberate ethnic cleansing on racial lines of Jews, Roma, and Slavs. Not only was there a government instituted program of extermination, including an entire administrative apparatus devoted to extermination for the sake of extermination, including specially trained and military units whose sole purpose was to carry out the extermination specific people. As well, the detailed journals of the leadership of OKW in Russia explicitly outlined the standing orders for destruction of Slavic society in detail, through policies intended to cause disruption and starvation such as depopulation of urban centers -- the impact of this in the Ukraine, and other areas under German occupation was immediate, when the Germans were still winning the war, and fully capable of supplying their forward areas.

This isn't about Wehrmacht not abiding by the Geneva convention in the treatment of Russian POWs, as is the case with the IJA not according those same rights to the Chinese.

Again, you have yet to show examples of an coherent and organized policy of extermination for the sake of extermination by the Japanese government and document it. All you have come up with statistics of the numbers of people who died under Japanese occupation for various reasons, reprisals, collapse of the food supply, and so on. On the other hand there is absolutely no question at all that the Nazi's planned and undertook a policy of racial extermination in the Slavic regions as soon as they were able, as the army moved forward, and this is supported not only by the forensic evidence but through the documents from the German state that link together to show that the chain of command was engaged in extermination for the sake of extermination as a matter of state policy.

Your polemic states, as follows:

However, you have not provided one shred of documentary evidence that this "scorched earth" policy was a pre-planned policy aimed at racial extermination. As I pointed out the Japanese did not institute the "Three Alls" policy in northern China until 1941, four years after the Marco Polo incident, under the order of General Okamura, in the immediate aftermath of a succesful peasant uprising led by the Communist Chinese called the "100 Regiments Offensive".

Please understand that this is not to say the the Japanese occupation was "nice" or a "good thing", just to say that the Japanese pursued their goals using a different playbook than Germany under the NSDAP. As far as I can tell your theory is just a "theory" that you pieced together based on a general reading of the basic facts, without attention to detail.

Indeed, it is entirely clear that the Japanese solution to the "Herculean" task of subjugating large number of people, was not first and foremost immediate mass extermination, but the attempt to set up local interlocutors as their puppet agents in the occupied territories. This is something that the Germans did not do in Eastern Europe. German efforts to create local puppet authorities in the east were perfunctory and symbolic at best. There is no German example of a puppet Slavic state, such as Manchoukou that fielded hundreds of thousands of men to serve the emperor. They also had a large puppet Chinese army operating under the auspices of their own "Nationalist" Chinese government.

It was only after this policy had failed to pacify northern China, and revolt broke out that the Japanese instituted the "Three Alls" policy four years after the occupation of Shanxi and Shandong began.

This is quite other than the German modus operandi in Eastern Europe, There the Germans immediatly undertook a campaign of genocide as an intrinsic part of their occupation policy, right from the start as territories came under their control, even though resistance from the occupied peoples was very slight -- this policy in the east is strikingly different even than their own "kid gloves" policies in the occupied territories of Western Europe, such as France and the Benelux countries.

71 years ago today the Germans attacked Poland, starting in motion the war that killed over 60 million human beings and which gave new meaning to words such as Nagasaki and holocaust.

Happy anniversary.

I believe that the Nazis knew well before the start of barbarossa that there would not be enough food in Russia and Ukraine to feed the German army and civilians due to disruptions in civilian economies. And it's now known that Nazi logistics was hopeless from the beginning. There was looting and pillaging of their own supply lines as to undermine the German's own civilian and military supply lines. The Germans knew it would be a war of annihilation from the very beginning.

I don't believe the final solution in Russia and Ukraine was focused on any one ethnicity - although Jews were at the top of Hitler's list of people to exterminate - the final solution in Russia and Ukraine was to murder all non-German ethnics inclusive by whatever means. The purpose of lebensraum from the beginning was to make living space for Germans and no one else. It was Hitler's Darwinian view of evolution. The strategy for achieving results favourable to Germans only was open ended one as far as Hitler was concerned.

Ignorance of the law is said to be no excuse, and it is a given law of every land that people need to eat to survive. Neither the Japanese nor Germans could claim ignorance of this basic fact common to every living thing on earth.

The Vietnamese apparently do not observe the 1945 famine on a day of remembrance. And some commentators suggest that they should. John Pilger writes that Vietnam did not really win the war with US invaders if we consider how Vietnam was laid siege to for years after 1975 by embargos and financial warfare waged against them by the US and its powerful multinational corporations. Vietnam has been forced down the road of capital and having to pledge allegiance to certain WTO obligations to export food to "the market" over and above its own needs if ever those needs should need to be addressed as so many chronically-hungry nations have had to follow the diktats of a merciless global market in food. Whether Japanese imperialists or an invisible hand market ideology causes millions to suffer agonizing deaths by starvation, the results are clearly the same. The free traders have been blackmailing whole countries into starving their own people for a long time. The justifications given for it are only sligthly different today than during WW II.

What is the significance of these quotes?

They establish a number of things:

1. The war crimes perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, were clearly, unquestionably and categorically linked to orders and directives of the Emperor and the fascist government.

2. The Japanese fascist government and Imperial military had a systemic racist policy toward the Chinese, exactly like the German nazi government, SS, Einsatzgruppen, specially detailed police etc., had a racist policy toward the Jews.

3. The politics of the Japanese fascist government affected military policy.

The rounding up, screening, transportation and murder of Chinese in the Sook Ching (Singapore) Massacre is exactly the same as the rounding up of Jews in Poland, Holland, France, Italy, etc., transporting them elsewhere and murdering them.

Cueball makes the argument that the Rape of Nanking was the reverse of the politics influencing military strategy hypothesis - where actions by the Imperial Japanese Army influenced the policies of the fascist government, resulting in the "Three Alls Policy".

Well guess what? The German nazi government went through the same learning curve. The nazis who murdered masses of innocent unarmed civilians during 1939 to 1942, realized that rounding up masses of people, marching or trucking them to an isolated spot, then killing them with small arms was inefficient and uneconomical.

Hence the Wannsee Conference in 1942 where Himmler, Heydrich and other top nazis met with industrialists who manufactured and operated industrial ovens and crematoria. This is where the Holocaust as it is most widely understood began. The Holocaust actually wasn't running at peak efficiency until 1944, when the nazis were clearly losing the war.

Earlier, Cueball made the claim that having personnel involved in the rounding up, transporting, running of the camps, gassing and incinerating Jewish people negatively affected the course of battles and ultimately the war for the nazis.

An example of where a policy of war crimes based on systemic racism was hurting fascist Japan's war effort was the "Hell Ships". One would think that after late 1942, Japan would increasingly rely on its merchant marine importing strategic resourses and labor to run its war factories.

Not so, the overcrowding of the ships, the starving and dehydrating of the prisoners and failing to do something as simple as carrying Red Cross flags on these ships suggests the Japanese fascists would rather see the prisoners dead and the cargo at the bottom of the ocean than assist Japan's war effort.

Something also worth looking into is the Tanaka Memorial:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/01/tanaka.htm

http://www.mailstar.net/tanaka.html [62]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanaka_Memorial [63]

And fascists tend to think alike when planning false pretexts for war. Remembering the 9/18 incident Remembering destruction of the "Liutaio bridge" in Manchuria

Why We Fight is a good series.

The most appropriate for this thread are:

Prelude to War

Battle of China

War Comes to America

Some very good Hollywood films about the war made during the war are:

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

Back to Bataan

Destination Tokyo offers the movieviewer a fantastic mission. If you don't know what it is, you'll have to see the movie - I don't want to spoil the fun!

quote Hence the Wannsee Conference in 1942 where Himmler, Heydrich and other top nazis met with industrialists who manufactured and operated industrial ovens and crematoria. This is where the Holocaust as it is most widely understood began. The Holocaust actually wasn't running at peak efficiency until 1944, when the nazis were clearly losing the war. quote

Himmler wasn't at that conference. It was totally a Heydrich performance

I'll admit I haven't been following the minutiae of this thread in great detail; but let me get this straight.

The Germans and Japanese did some nasty stuff in the war, right?

http://www.suite101.com/content/the-wannsee-conference-1942-nazi-germany...

You're right. Thanks, Bacchus.

I knew that Hitler, Goering and Goebbels hadn't attended. I assumed that Himmler (naturally) had.

Why do you suppose that is?

Was it an 'insurance' policy? Were the top nazis thinking that should they (unthinkable, I know) lose the war, their not attending Wannsee would provide them with future 'plausible deniability'?

Do you suppose this was Heydrich's little pet project? Something he just went ahead and did on his own to suck up to his bosses in the hopes of a rapid rise up the 'corporate ladder' (i.e., nazi hierarchy)?

It's poetic justice that pig Heydrich the "Protector of Czechoslovakia" later died of injuries he received from the explosion of a bomb hurled by a Free Czech SOE agent.

FormerSoldier has tried, without success, to equate the deliberate and calculated genocide against Jews and Slavs by the Hitlerite regime with the terrible atrocities of the militarist regime in Japan. Cueball has, quite rightly, torn him a new one on this issue. . They are not the same.

Hmm Im guessing iot was totally Heydrichs pet project. He did his job with great Zeal and Himmler preferred to be a great 'military' leader at the time, obsessing over Waffen SS units and tactics/Strategy. He left all the SS/SD stuff to Heydrich

They've both made some excellent points and know the history of war really well. I tend to lean toward Former Soldier's analysis of Japanese atrocities. Apparently some of us have a difficult time understanding how it was all just a war between fascist nations for resources in Russia and China and Asia in general. The good guys didn't necessarily win the war. The good guys certainly did fight the war, but they were fascists and elites who collected the spoils and profited after all the blood, sweat and tears were spilled for them on their behalfs. We still have wars for resource grabs today. Fewer people are killed because of the technically advanced nature of modern weaponry, but the intent is still the same as it was when Eisenhower made his speech warning against MIC. And we have malnutrition and related diseases killing tens of millions of people every year just as surely as any other fascist atrocity. And there are a handful of rich and powerful nations ignoring the basic human right to food and to exist still. This is an ongoing crime against humanity as diabolical as any plan for organized murder by open warfare.

Excellent comments were made by both Cueball and FrmrSldr. I have to side with FrmSldr on this one though and not his worthy opponent in the mini debate.

That is utter befuddled nonsense. The 'agencies' you are referring to are agencies that represented and the governments of China, Korea, the Philippines, Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, Malaya/Malaysia/Singapore, Indochina/Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos, Siam/Thailand, Burma, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, France(?), Britain and other countries and individuals from those and other countries, who were the victims of Japanese fascist war and human rights crimes. These governments, agencies and people had every right to attempt to bring Japanese fascist criminals to justice, just as Jewish and other people who were victimized, and the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation had/have every right to see that justice is brought to nazi war criminals.

The reason why General Douglas MacArthur and the Truman administration reduced so many executions and reduced so many prison sentences handed out at the Tokyo Tribunal to so many Japanese fascist war criminals was NOT out of any sense of guilt or to cover up war and human rights crimes committed by the U.S.A. The U.S. felt little shame and plenty of justification for Dresden, the fire bombing of Japanese cities and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As for how some American GIs treated Japanese soldiers who surrendered, were injured or the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers (in the persuit of looting) well, it was par for the course in light of the way the Japanese fascists treated Allied soldiers in the field and Allied PoWs. The same case can be made for any atrocities Russian soldiers commited upon nazi soldiers and German civilians in light of how they were treated by the nazis.

No, the reason why MacArthur and the Truman administration were so soft on the Japanese fascist government and military was due to the fact that Japan was seen as a valuable bulwark against the spread of communism in Asia at the end of the "hot" (World) War and the start of the Cold War. The U.S. military also felt that Japanese experiments with biological and chemical agents would be useful in a possible future war against communist U.S.S.R. and China. In fact, these actions by the U.S. government and military denied justice to American citizens who were victims of Unit 731 and other Units that conducted unethical scientific experiments on live human subjects, the Bataan Death March, PoWs, forced or slave laborers on the Death Railway (Thai-Burma Railway), prisoners on the "Hell Ships", etc.

Vietnam and Indonesia were rice exporters. This was a preventable famine, meaning that there was enough rice to prevent people from starving. The fact that millions of people died of starvation was from human action. 2 million Vietnamese and 4 million Indonesians died. You're telling me there were 2 million Japanese soldiers in Vietnam and 4 million Japanese soldiers in Indonesia?

Oh! So the lives of hundreds of thousands and millions of Jews, Roma and Slavs are 'worth' more than the lives of hundreds of thousands and millions of Chinese, Koreans, Philippinos, Indonesians, Malayans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Thai, Burmese, etc.?

DO I NEED TO SPELL IT OUT TO YOU WHAT THAT SOUNDS LIKE?

There's two problems with your extermination for the sake of extermination:

1. There was a purpose to the extermination. In the nazi propaganda film, "The Eternal Jew" the nazis likened Jews to rats. Rats are vermin. Vermin, in this case rats, spread disease. In the nazi mind, Jews infected, weakened and destroyed the Aryan body politic. Put another way, the purpose then of the "Jewish or Final Solution" was extermination for the health of Aryans and non-Jews. The nazis viewed Jews as a "disease", they viewed themselves as "health care professionals" and "the Final Solution", the Holocaust as the "cure". Although they viewed Slavs as inferiors, they DID NOT view them the same as Jews, and thus they, unlike the Jews, were not singled out for the "Final Solution".

2. Therefore the Holocaust and the Scorched Earth policy on the Eastern Front are categorically different. The Holocaust was not military strategy, "How could exterminating Jews because they were Jews be a military strategy that would win the/a war?", at best it only contributed, among other things, to the nazis losing the war and may have contributed to the nazis losing particular battles in the last year of war, although to empirically establish this argument in specific cases is extremely difficult.

Unlike the Holocaust, the Scorched Earth policy did not affect military strategy, it was military strategy. Those who were killed died incidentally as a result of the prosecution of this military strategy. You cannot put those who died in the Holocaust in the same category as those who died in the Scorched Earth military strategy because the two are categorically different.

As for starvation in Russia, I have read about starvation in the cities Leningrad, Sevastopol (I believe) and Stalingrad because they were under siege and it was either impossible or difficult for food and fuel to be brought to these cities. As for starvation elsewhere in Russia, you will have to show me the proof.

As for the Ukraine, many Ukrainians are blond, blue eyed and fair skinned. So much so that high ranking nazis (correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Himmler himself went to the Ukraine) featured them on propaganda posters, argued they were Aryans, praised and studied Ukrainian dress, customs, folklore, etc. Ever heard of the Waffen SS Foreign Divisions? Yes, for the Ukrainians, there was the Waffen SS Galizien Division. For the Russians, there was the Waffen SS 2nd Russische Division and the Russian Liberation Army commanded by General Andrei Vlasov. The nazis saw Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians as valuable allies to fight against and (it was hoped) defeat Russia. As part of this effort, the nazis went to great lengths to remind Ukrainians that the Ukraine was independent from 1917 to 1921, just twenty years before their (nazi) 'liberation'.

Concerning the "large Chinese puppet army operating under the auspicies of their own 'Nationalist' Chinese government", I assume you mean the Chinese or Manchurian army in Manchukuo under the Japanese puppet Emperor Pu Yi? Otherwise the "Nationalist Chinese government" would be Chiang Kai Chek's Kuomintang government and armies. Did this (paper) 'army' ever engage in combat with any Nationalist or communist Chinese armies, what was the size of this Manchurian Army? Please tell. The Japanese fascists had no more intention of giving Manchukuo ("real") independence than the nazis had of giving Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine any ("real") independence.

Again, as to your claims that the nazis caused preventable starvation and genocide/Holocaust against Slavs from the start of the first shots fired in the invasions of Poland and Russia and then thereafter, please do provide forensic evidence that shows the number of people who starved, the number of people rounded up, the number of trains that transported them West, the death camps they were sent to, and the number of (NON-JEWISH) ETHNIC SLAVS who died in this manner. A pretty amazing feat for the period 1939 - (end) 1941 considering there were no (factory of) death mass gas and cremation camps prior to (the start of) 1942 Wannsee Conference.

In fact, the September 1 to 30, 1939 Battle of Poland was fought as a blitzkrieg military strategy just exactly as the Battles of Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, France, the (air war) Battle of Britain, the North African Campaign, Yugoslavia (in 1941), Greece and Crete.

Although the nazis may have begun rounding up and shooting Jews in the thousands in 1939 after the fall of Poland, they also allowed a large Jewish population to live in the Warsaw Ghetto. There were still large numbers of Jews not in death camps but living in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944 who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising along with non-Jewish ethnic Poles. That was mighty sloppy of Uncle Henry (Himmler), the SS and the Einsatzgruppen, wasn't it?

The Scorched Earth military strategy didn't begin until Hitler personally instructed his Generals to wage a war of "give no quarter, take no prisoners" on June 22, 1941 - Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. Even then, in terms of how Wermacht officers and men treated Russian soldiers and prisoners, it seems not all officers and men acted upon Hitler's instructions in the year 1941.

To make a statement that the nazis treated Western Europe with kid gloves, while although generally true, is an overstatement. By 1944, the nazis sometimes let the pleasant mask they were wearing slip. They were committing reprisal killings whenever a German soldier was killed by a partisan. French villages where the populations were wiped out were Ascq, Clermont-en-Argonne, Maille, Robert-Espagne, Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane. In Oradour-sur-Glane, the nazis rounded up all the men, women and children, separated the men, put the women and children in a church, shot the men, then burned the church, wiping out the entire village. In Norway, the village Telavag was wiped out in reprisal. Also in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg the nazis had razas where they sealed off city blocks, then entered every building to round up Jews, suspected members of the resistance and to round up forced laborers to be sent to Germany and possibly as soldiers to fight on the Eastern Front.

I agree with you former soldier. The two regimes were pretty identical. The main difference being the Japanese didnt want to just exterminate people but use them up in that extermination(experiments, work to death, bayonet practice, cannablism etc)

All the fascist regimes had their genocidal, Scorched Earth, "Three Alls". For the nazis, it was the activities of the SS and Einsatzgruppen in the East during 1939 to the end of 1941. For the Japanese fascists, it was the Rape of Nanking and other similar Sinophobic (racist hatred against Chinese) atrocities and acts of genocide. For the Italian fascists, it was the murderous assault, rape, bayoneting and gunning down of hundreds of thousands of persons and the wanton burning and destruction of their property in the Italian assistance of the nazis in occupying Yugoslavia from 1941-1943.

The nazis had their equivalents to working people to death and experimenting on them:

Before they were gassed, or those who avoided being gassed, were worked to death, or nearly worked to death, in the death and concentration/labor camps. If you see photographs of death camp inmates, they are clearly emaciated.

The nazi equivalent to Unit 731 was SS Dr. Joseph Mengele who conducted unethical medical experiments on live human subjects in the Auschwitz death camp.

In fact, the only significant difference between the German nazis and the Japanese fascists was the nazi Holocaust. The only thing the Japanese had that came close to it were the "Hell Ships", where due to the lack of the simplest precautions that would have increased the chances of the "labor" (i.e., human beings) and strategic resources (including foodstuffs) making it to Japan and the overcrowding, starving, dehydrating and heat exhaustion conditions of the ships, suggested that they were intended as instruments of murder rather than war and home front supply ships for Japan and its people.

As I have said in previous posts in this and the earlier thread, in the eyes of universal morality, law and justice, this difference is only one of degree (quantitative) rather than in kind (qualitative).

An atrocity is an atrocity. Although we have been largely concentrating on the atrocities committed by the Axis powers, we must not forget that the Allies committed war time atrocities as well. That is what Hiroshima and Nagasaki were: war crimes and crimes against humanity. As they were committed by a civilian government and authority - the U.S. government and Harry Truman as President of the United States of America and the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces - I consider it to be a case of a political policy/decision that affected/influenced (a) military strategy.

For those of you interested in the human rights crime of unethical medical experiments on live human subjects in popular culture, there are the DVDs:

The Boys From Brazil A loosely based semi-fictional, semi-biographical depiction of Josef Mengele conducting his experiments in 1970s Brazil.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS

And, not to be outdone, there is Ilsa running a gulag in Siberia in Stalinist Russia in the early 1950s titled - Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia

For the Japanese fascists and Unit 371, there is the Men Behind the Sun series.

Warning: This stuff is not for the feint of heart.