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Originally Posted by peteratwar
besides what exactly is the difference if they are vapourised in a firestorm or blown to pieces by high explosive.
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Very little. I don't support carpet bombing civilians either.
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Remember this was war between nations not a nice pretty little battle between two groups of soldiers set in a remote desert area.
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Right, the Pacific is sparsely populated islands until you approach Asia.
Maybe we don't need to make omlettes to be a superpower.
With respect to my claim of racism figuring in I would submit that the dehumanizing of the Japanese was very different than the way Germans were portrayed. We were fighting the Nazis in Europe, we never charaterized the German people as sub-human. We decribed the Japanese people first as "Japs" and later as "the Jap", along with monkeys, rats and other terms of endearment. IMO the American people would not have approved of an A-bomb drop on a European country when some feeling of kinship persisted. Not so with Japan despite numerous immigrants. Well, you know how we treated these U.S. citizens.
We all understand who writes the history now, don't we?
Maybe I'm wrong but I think many don't appreciate just how racist we were in those days.