(February 6, 2016 at 2:43 pm)Jenny A Wrote:(February 6, 2016 at 2:18 pm)abaris Wrote: I don't know as much about the Japanese war as I do about Europe. In Europe, the US airforce was less indiscriminate as the British. Harris' outspoken goal was to unleash terror on civilians. The American goal was precision bombing, whatever that meant with the equipment they had back then. Yes, the participated in the bombing of Dresden, but they weren't the ones working on the firestorm, which killed most of the civilians. That again was a british recipe.
I think the difference was in part racism. The Japanese weren't white. The Japanese were also racist. The Japanese rules of engagement were more brutal than those in Europe. It was a nastier war in the Pacific, on both sides.
This, exactly! It was actually racism, which had festered under too many decades of Japanese isolationist policies (the US was like that prior to WWI) plus delusions encouraged by emperor-worship which gave them the balls to take on the US military at Pearl Harbor. They found out that white US soldiers could be just as racist and nasty with them, and then more so when they had the badder weapons. The lesson is if you are going to attack a foreign nation just because you think your people are racially better, you still would do better to make sure you have the most effective weapons as well, plus smarter strategies than suicide kamikaze morons who can't even fly their death-planes well enough to kill anyone other than themselves.
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