Who did you think is the more cruel nation?during ww2.. Japan,USA,Germany?

Question

i just read flyboys by James Bradley also the writer of Flag of our Fathers...his dad was in the picture of Marines putting up the flag on Iwo Jima

anyway the truth Bradley, theauthor sympathises with the Japs coz he mentions the " Fire War"..the bombing of Japan before a-bombs were dropped he calls it " the largest slaughter of humans in world history to take place"
Amer and Brit bombs killed more than 650,000 german civ (in compar US combat deaths in ww2 were abt 400000)- 20%- 130,000 were German kids...additional 800000 German civi's were maimd..homes burned to he ground millions fled for their lives.....many flyboys perished in the bombings...18,369 planes and 79,265 casulaties...in european theater alone....britan had 80,000 flyboy casualties..in comparion, the entire us marine corp and 75,000 casualtie in ww2....but jap cities had more ppl per sq mile than German....thus the Japanese casualty figure was far worse...and napalm bombs...on Mar 9 1945...334 b-29 bombers winging 3,334,000 pounds of deadly napalm....for 2 hrs and 40 mins...the largest single-dat killing in world hist more than Nagasaki only Hiroshima.slightly..

Wow - i didn't expect such a response...i totally forgot Russia!? hmmm...all i knew till now was Stalingrad...and i heard abt the Gulag term somewhere...so the russians were as bad..eh...i guess...we should change the question to which country acte the most honorably during and AFTER the war? how's that...proabably a very short list - like the Swiss maybe who avoided getting into it?

Answer 1

Of the ones you named Japan was by far the worst. One statistic alone is enough 17,530,000 civilians killed by the Japanese military. check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Nanking

BUT you forget the second worst.
RUSSIA:
Soviet atrocities were committed against various groups.
After the initial revolution, the Soviet Union under Lenin denied peasants food; forcing millions onto collective farms to provide it for industrial workers. During World War II, to boost war production and resist the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the Soviets also worked many of Russia's peasants to death in factories, gulags, and other work camps. The Soviet government also denied food to non-military personnel to keep up the war effort, leaving thousands of civilians to starve. Estimates put the death toll in the millions. The USSR committed numerous atrocities against the citizens of Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, and other Eastern Bloc countries whom the Soviet Union wanted as territory. For example, most of the Polish population was sent to camps in the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian populaiton was culled by artificial famine.
German sources listed below estimate that at the end of World War II, Red Army soldiers raped more than 2,000,000 German women, an estimated 200,000 of whom later died from injuries sustained, committed suicide, or were murdered outright. After June 1945 the Soviet high command imposed punishments for rape ranging from arrest to execution. Estimations of rape victims are distributed as follows: Eastern Provinces: 1,400,000; zone of Soviet occupation excluding Berlin: 500,000; Berlin: 100,000. The 2,000,000 rape victims estimate is also supported by the research of historian Norman Naimark. In addition, many of these victims were raped repeatedly, some as many as 60 to 70 times. During the occupation of Budapest (Hungary) it is estimated that 50,000 women were raped. Fleeing from the advancing Soviet forces, possibly more than two million people in the eastern provinces of Germany (East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania) died, many of cold and starvation, but many were murdered by Soviet forces, or killed while being caught up in combat operations.

WHY DOES EVERYONE FORGET RUSSIA???

Answer 2

I think Japan was more cruel to both POW's and conquered people - the Bataan Death March, Nanking, and the sexual slavery of women in Korea being good examples.

The Germans were odd in this respect. They treated western POWs well and generally left conquered groups alone in the west - unless they were Jews, other enemies of the state, or made trouble. Many of the smaller Eastern European countries like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were German "allies" and had their own fascist parties in power. But in Poland and Russia the Germans ran amok. If you were a Russian pow you were toast. And the Germans industrialized murder which cannot ever go unmentioned.

I guess I would say the Japanese were more generally cruel and the Germans more calculated.

That said - of the 95,000 Germans taken prisoner at Stalingrad only 5000 came home, and when the Russians entered Germany they raped every woman they found, pillaged, murdered wholesale, and took many German citizens into the Gulag system. It took West German Chancellor Adenauer years to get the Soviets to account for, or repatriate German ctizens held illeagally after the war.

The US firebombed Dresden (which has been well documented as excessive and needless, which we knew at the time) and dropped the atom bomb - afterwards Cutis Le May (I believe) said that if we lost the war our generals would have been hung as war criminals.

I know the French used German POWs repatriated from America as slave labor after the war - my grandfather was one of them.

Granted it is difficult to have a lot sympathy for Germany or Japan. They insitgated the war and brought the destruction upon themselves. However, it is also untrue to say the Allies always acted within the rules of war or international law.

Answer 3

US Marine casualties were far higher than 75,000. Maybe 75,000 dead, that seems rather low however. In a couple battles alone the Marines took close to that many dead.

As for who was crueler. Japan I think. All the major sides in WW II bombed civillian areas. It started with an accidental attack on a German residential area by UK bombers. The Germans retaliated and it was on from there. Japan very early on bombed Chinese cities so in the Pacific it was always a factor.

The Germans had concentration camps and were ruthless against civiillians. Allied forces not counting the Russians occasionally commited small scale attrocities. German, Japanese and Russian troops commited large scale mass murder on a very personal level. There are rumors of Japanese soldiers parading down Chinese streets with Chinese babies spitted on their bayonettes. Not sure how much truth there is to that, however that the Japanese committed genocide on a large scale in China and the Philipines is widely documented. The treatment of POWs is again widely documented as cruel and murderous. Japan was not as methodical as Germany. The average German soldier didn't execute any civillians. That was left to special squads. The average Japanese soldier probably killed at least two or three civillians. Very few Allied troops other than Russians killed civillians at all. If they did it was most likely accidental. In WW II civillians were targeted in bombing raids and civillian casualites were not factored into whether or not to shell a city held by the enemy. Compared to wars from 50 years prior WW II was actually on the humane side when it came to treatment of civillians. Was not until the last 500 years that civillians had any expectation to survive being taken as a city at all. Often through history the entire population of conquered cities were put to the sword or sold into slavery. Entire ethnic groups have been erased as armies marched back and forth through the regions they populated.

The Japanese were the harshest on civillians in my opinion. That is why I give them the nod. America didn't even compare. If you add up every Japanese and German killed by US air raids it does not equal just the civillians directly executed by Japanese soldiers. Then you have to factor in those intentionally starved or worked to death. Those killed in Japanese bombardments and air raids. Those executed for political or other reasons. I'm just talking about those killed by Japanese soldiers mostly for sport.

Answer 4

OK ok OK ok
So the Russians committed mass scale slaughter. Their primary targe was Germany. Please do remember that Adolf and pals invaded Russia and committed attrocities in Russia first. Joseph committed his attrocities against his own people. He had been doing it Before WW II started and kept up even after WW II.

In the Pacific... Japan committed its attrocities against fellow Asians. Which they had been doing since time began. Korea, Japan, China ... All have been fueding with each other forever...

Germany ??? Well now Germany went out and killed over 90 million folks with little or no provocation. Jews ?? Well Adolf didn't liek them so out they must go. Gypsys ??? Well Adolf didn't like them either so out they must go. Adolf and company went into overtime, first rounding them up and making them live in squallid conditions then he goes out and kills them. Burying them in mass graves till there is no place left to bury them, Then they exhume the bodies to burn the evidence. Stealing everything of value that the carcasses could possibly have.

No Germany was the most cruel Nation of its time. The Atomic bomb being dropped actually saved lives and made Japan capitulate otherwise the body count would have run several million more.

Of course this is just my Humble Opinion.

Answer 5

Japan killed innocent civilians as indiscriminately as the Nazis did. They killed millions of Chinese, from Mongolia to Shanghai; raped and pillaged the Korean peninsula, and even great mistrust between the Korean nations and Japan still exists. They tortured and killed from Malaysia, to Burma, through the Philippean Islands, and remember December 7, 1941. The Japanese empire could have possibly killed more innocents than even the Nazis did. But, the Germans were relentless killers, too, not even in consideration of what they did to the European Jewish population. (Yes, Iran, the holocaust DID happen!) They aided and abetted in the killing of 20 million Russians during WWII. Granted a vast number of those who shed their blood for the Russian homeland were from the hands of Stalin himself. If it wasn't for the USA, I could only imagine how prolonged WWII would have been. The world would have become 4/5 enslaved by those who both considered themselves as being of a "master race". In summary, both governments were indiscriminate killers and slaughtered millions, and were ultimately responsible for the all the casualties in WWII.

Answer 6

Any one who says the USA was cruel is delusional.

German’s had their concentration camps and extermination squads. Japan had slave labor camps and biological testing on POWs and civilians.

Hell you can even put the Russians on that list as being one of the cruelest. Why do you think the German troops and civilians ran to the Americans when Berlin began to fall.

Americans and Brits (and the common wealth troops) were the only ones not know for wide spread Rape, pillage, murder and destruction.

Answer 7

Germany tops the list for me, but that's probably because I know the most about them.

I too read Flags of Our Fathers; it was interesting how Bradley wrote that the Fire Bombs caused more deaths than the A-Bombs we dropped.

Answer 8

Germany and Japan had death camps and human "medical experiments" as grotesque and cruel as anything anyone has ever seen.

Having said that, I'm reminded of the words of General Sherman (US Civil War): "War is Hell."

Sherman also said that war is not to be resorted to lightly. He said the purpose is not to win the hearts of the enemy, but to so brutalize them that they lose the will to fight and even their grandchildren should be afraid to pick up arms.

The saturation bombings of German and Japanese cities killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, as did Axis bombings of Allied targets.

We were defending ourselves. We should have no apologies.

If a woman's being raped, can you blame her for gouging the attacker's eyes out to get away?

Answer 9

Death camps,the blackest point in european history,were instituted by germans...ditto with einstzatz gruppen respossible for killing millions of Jews and Russians alike...Germans tried to remind us with their actions the invasion of Mongols in early 13th
century Europe.-Therefore Germany

Answer 10

None of the above. They were equally cruel. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the USA Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Germany the Holocaust. War is hell.