Why Japanese leaders attacked Pearl Harbor

https://www.timeline.com/stories/pearl-harbor-was-attacked-because-it-would-have-been-rude-not-to

by log-fire • 11 years ago

205 129 11 years ago

rquantz• 11 years ago

And untold millions died because of Japanese leaders' cautious stupidity. It seems like there are lessons to be learned here? Let's start with, whenever there are positions that are culturally unspeakable, you have a problem. Perhaps another is, whatever idiocy a foreign nation's leaders are spouting, it's a good bet nobody actually wants war (cough cough Putin)

hasenj2• 11 years ago

You only know the results in hindsight. When you make a decision, you can't guarantee what would happen next.

SolarNet• 11 years ago

Yes, but you can use history to make an educated guess about what will happen.

hebdo• 11 years ago

Not for the first time, and perhaps not for the last time, these words are so relevant.

A war that need not have been fought was about to be

fought because of mutual misunderstanding, language

difficulties, and mistranslations.

Why did America drop the two bombs? Why did it not drop the first one over the Tokyo bay? Why Japanese leaders hesitated so much to surrender, despite being so much overwhelmed by foreign power? Why nobody managed to stop Hitler from inside Germany? Why all the genocides in the history had to happen?

The world is complicated, it does not always choose the right path. Decisions of even the greatest importance are sometimes made with insufficient information, and are subject to all kinds of cognitive failures. It's easy to judge after you know all the facts.

krapp4• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokusatsu

rui314• 11 years ago

One thing we could learn is that the pre-war Japanese Constitution had a serious problem. The Constitution gave all powers to the Emperor and let him govern the country through the parliament, cabinet, courts, army and navy. That was interpreted to mean the army and navy did not have to obey the cabinet as long as they obey the Emperor. The Emperor didn't actually govern just like UK, so there was no head of the country. Japanese leaders had variety of opinions, but once the atmosphere that a war was inevitable was made, no one had authority to stop that.

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

This is a pretty interesting point because Germany had the exact same problem - with Hitler able to have the Enabling Act passed. It's a more extreme example because it allowed the Reichstag to vote themselves out of power in favour of Hitler, but it's interesting that Japan similarly had a constitutional power balancing problem.

hga6• 11 years ago

Not exactly. For example, you couldn't form a government without one member each from the Army and Navy, and the Army grossly abused this power.

And as I noted elsewhere, a culture of acceptable political assassination was well established by then, so e.g. being too strongly anti-war would only get you killed.

hibikir• 11 years ago

This is a problem in all organizations, not just governments. Few things predict failure better than an environment where criticism and negative feedback are suppressed, often because it's seen as not nice, or uncivilized. I've seen startups fail because big problems were readily visible and understood by most of the staff, but people were terrified to talk about them. By the time people were aware of how widely shared the suppressed opinions had spread, the damage was done. Just this week, I talked with employees of another high profile startup that claim they are heading in the very same direction, because discussing the technical problems in their platform leads to social ostracism.

It's not as if there's only one way to et into an unsafe culture: I have seen situations where people were intimidated by using abusive, aggressive behavior, and others where the same things were accomplished through smiles and backstabbing.

If you are leading a startup and you don't see dissent in your organization, beware, because what it means is that it's been forced to go underground.

So yes, we should learn from imperial japan that every organization needs ways for people to safely and politely express unpopular, honest opinions.

usrusr• 11 years ago

Or to phrase it in a slightly different way: followers ignoring their own judgement to root for ideas they think their leaders might like, combined with leaders trusting an overwhelming agreement between their followers more than their own initial opinion. It's a feedback loop than could even pick up random noise and amplify it to the level of ideology, if it wasn't for preexisting cultural seeds that have a headstart over that random noise. It would not even need the often cited climate of fear to work, even though that would certainly "help" a lot (and should therefore certainly be avoided): a uniform wish to get ahead, strictly positive reinforcement, should already be sufficient to make an organization collectively believe funny stuff none of the individuals would ever believe on their own.

simonh• 11 years ago

I'm wondering to what extent the same social and linguistic issues might be behind Japan's political and economic policy paralysis over the last 20+ years.

mikeash3• 11 years ago

I'm more wondering what sort of similar things are happening in my (USA) government that I can't perceive because I'm too immersed in it all.

threefour• 11 years ago

This timeline seems to put all the blame on Japan. No doubt they had over-militaristic tendencies. But let's also take the long view on America from Japan's perspective:

* Settlers displace native peoples in the north east of North America and the Caribbean.

* The first Americans kick out the British.

* Americans move west, killing more native peoples.

* Americans take over land from Mexico.

* "Manifest Destiny"

* Americans topple the Hawaiian monarchy and take over Hawaii.

* Americans go to war with the Philippines, killing tens of thousands.

It doesn't seem unreasonable for Japan at this point to feel threatened by America or compelled to take action to protect themselves.

krapp4• 11 years ago

I doubt Japan felt threatened by the US because of manifest destiny or the American revolutionary war. I think you're going a bit too far trying to paint the US as appearing unusually hegemonic or aggressive for the time.

jkyle2• 11 years ago

Japanese culture perceives time differently than western culture. For example, a train in London is considered "on time" as long as it's within 14 minutes. In Japan, a train is considered late if it's not within 1 minute of schedule. Those perceptions of "lateness" permeate throughout the culture.

I don't claim any authority, but it's important not to project our own views of cultural permanence onto other cultures. Japan has businesses that have spanned over a 1000 years contiguously. I would not be surprised if Japan had a view that spanned much further into the past (particularly during the days of the Emperor).

Oh, just another side. Those are only a couple of examples of Western aggression in the previous century. Europe and the U.S. had been quite active in South East Asia. There likely would have been Japanese alive at the time who had a living memory of events like the colonization of Vietnam.

mc32• 11 years ago

Considering the US was way undermilitarized after wwi compared to European nations, it's hard to think Japan would consider the US as an immediate adversary. Specially considering a growing USSR.

Mostly they hoped to take out the US naval fleet and have their way in the pacific while Germany kept the allies busy, and then eventually win in Europe creating a world wide axis.

ctrager3• 11 years ago

I don't know what the Japanese felt, but I think the US maybe was about as hegemonic as Japan, Britain, Russia, Germany, France. It wouldn't hurt for US citizens to know these bullet points in their history that relate to Japan's neighborhood: Perry's expedition to Japan, the Spanish American war, but especially the Phillipine Insurrection, the Anti-Imperialist League, the Boxer Rebellion, the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and the Yangtze Patrol, and its context.

skeolawn• 11 years ago

Well I guess Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, while the US was attempting to find a peaceful solution, so Japan gets the blame.

mikeash3• 11 years ago

And let's not forget spending a decade rampaging about China raping and murdering.

So, yeah, it turns out that when a country goes out and commits mass murder for ten years then carries out a surprise attack against another country who thinks they should maybe just cut back a bit on that whole raping-and-murdering thing and has otherwise stuck to their own borders for a couple of decades, the first country gets the blame for the ensuing war. Go figure.

baddox• 11 years ago

It's fair to point out American imperialism and colonialism in the past, and even ongoing to a certain extent in the 1940s, but leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor it hardly matched the intensity or blatantness of Japan's own imperialism and colonialism, particularly in Manchuria and the Pacific.

ajmurmann• 11 years ago

Let's not forget the black ships forcing Japan to open up. Many right wing Japanese still link the entire war period back to that and they do have somewhat of a point.

I strongly recommend Ian Buruma's "Inventing Japan"

damienkatz• 11 years ago

So if a convicted murderer moves in beside me, it's partially his fault if I attempt to murderer him in his sleep

woah• 11 years ago

It is if there are no legal authorities more powerful than the both of you (as was the case). Actually, your use of the word "convicted" is nonsensical in this case.

The more accurate analogy is if a murderer murders your neighbor, and then moves into his house, and the police don't exist.

chrisfosterelli• 11 years ago

I think this may be an unfair metaphor, because we have a police force and laws that give us incentive to not murder our neighbours in their sleep and give us assurance that we will be protected while we sleep ourselves.

On the world scale, this doesn't exist. If there was no laws, police, or government and a serial murderer moves in beside you, you may very well try to murder him in his sleep.

trynumber92• 11 years ago

That's ridiculous. Let's take a long view on China from Japan's perspective:

* Han Chinese displaced people in every direction, throughout what is now China and even into Malaya.

* Chinese moved south & west, killing native peoples. (numerous Mongol, Dzungar and Tibetan elimination campaigns)

* China takes land from Tibet (1930-1932).

* "Chinese unity" includes a lot of places that aren't Han Chinese. (routinely interfering in Mongolia)

* China previously demanded tribute from Japan.

* Republic of China oppressed the Manchu, killing hundreds of thousands.

* China wanted to kick Japan out of the mainland.

It was only logical to feel threatened by China. If properly unified it would outclass and defeat Japan. They had a momentary advantage and felt compelled to take action to protect themselves against a hostile China.

knughit2• 11 years ago

Where is the ridiculous part?

Aside from aspect that many national governments were expanding and conquering, as they are wont to do.

cgriswald• 11 years ago

I'm going to be a little imprecise here, but hopefully accurate:

1853: Commodore Perry shows up on the shores of Japan with shiny ships and cannons and says "You're gonna trade with the world." It worked, but Japan didn't like it. Japan spent its time buying ships from Great Britain and sending its young people to school in the United States to learn what it could about empire building.

Late 1800s: The United States, wanting to be seen as a world power, attacks and defeats the world's weakest "World Power" Spain, both in Cuba and in the Phillipines. Japan had been helping the Phillipines achieve independence and the United States basically stole the Phillipines out from under them.

Early 1900s: Japan fights and wins against Russia in the Pacific. They basically destroyed Russia at Port Arthur (using the same tactics as were used at Pearl Harbor). To retaliate the Russians had to send their Atlantic fleet the long way around the world. By then Japan had rebuilt from the battle at Port Arthur and defeated the Russians again. The lesson: Defeating a world power only requires you to be powerful within your sphere of influence.

Shortly before Pearl Harbor: U.S. cuts off oil supply to Japan. Japan needs the oil in the Phillipines and also wants to take the Phillipines back which they felt were stolen from them. Pearl Harbor was their attempt to recreate the Battle of Port Arthur and wipe out American presence in the Pacific, leaving Japan the most powerful entity in that sphere of influence.

The long view of Japan and the United States is that we kind of grew up together, but we were the bullying older brother. They grew up to emulate us and when they got big enough... they punched back.

powera4• 11 years ago

You seem to completely ignoring Japan's wars of invasion against China, Korea, Indochina, and basically every border other than "America" first. Or for that matter, the rest of World War II which had been going on for over a year.

sirkneeland• 11 years ago

2 years, really. It kicked off in late 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, subsequent declarations of war by Britain and France, and then an awkward months-long period of shuffling about known as the "Phony War".

</pedantry>

JackFr• 11 years ago

* The first Americans kick out the British.

That really doesn't capture the flavor of it. In a very real sense, the first Americans were British -- they just refused to pay taxes to a government thousand of miles away.

qbrass• 11 years ago

It also skips over the part where they failed to kick the British out of Canada.

protomyth7• 11 years ago

... Without representation. The taxes weren't the whole problem.

ZeroGravitas• 11 years ago

Major General Smedley Butler predicted a war with the Japanese in his book "War is a Racket":

Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.

Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.

The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.

The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.

merpnderp9• 11 years ago

Wikipedia says that the US genocide of Native Americans numbered somewhere between 30-50K people over 120 years, some of those in military conflicts. In comparison in the Rape of Nanking, the Japanese murdered 50-300K. And averaged 300-500K civilians murdered per month between 1937 and 1945.

By 1941 Japan had no reason to believe the US was in any way expansionist. There had been 20 years of isolationist rhetoric from both political parties and almost no public support for intervention in wars abroad.

novaleaf• 11 years ago

The Manifest Destiny doers didn't know it, but most of the Americas had been cleared a hundred years earlier by disease. Some estimate 95% fatality rates.

protomyth7• 11 years ago

If that is what Wikipedia is claiming then it is off by orders of magnitude on the the Native American genicide.

joshmaker• 11 years ago

Interesting read, but there is something a little odd about an article that describes Emperor Hirohito as "merely a figurehead" but later casually mentions that Hirohito had the power to surprise General Tojo by naming him prime minister and spends a good deal of time talking about how Hirohito could have potentially prevented the war due to how much influence he had.

powera4• 11 years ago

The article appears to be of the belief that literally nothing the Japanese government could have said or done was a sign they wanted war.

mcguire• 11 years ago

The article appears to be of the belief that no one in the Japanese government wanted war but they were all bumbling fools who couldn't say they didn't want war.

rangibaby4• 11 years ago

The "merely a figurehead" part is post-war propaganda. Too bad that it's verboten to discuss in Japan.

hga6• 11 years ago

It's really complicated. Many centuries before the Emperor had became a token, if you held him (I think it was all men by then), that helped your case for legitimacy. The Emperor got a bit of a rehabilitation in the downfall of the Tokugawa Shogunate ("military government"), the other side rallied around the name of the Emperor, and I guess he was given something of a position in the following fatally flawed constitution; things were so fluid then any strong man could make a difference.

Fatally flawed in that you couldn't form a government without a member each from the Army and Navy, and the Army abused this. Plus in the 20s or so a culture of acceptable political assassination developed.

In this context, I'm sure Hirohito, who would have much rather focused on marine biology, knew very well something unpleasant would happen to him if he didn't go along with the ultranationalists, there's way too much old and new Japanese history telling him exactly that.

I seriously doubt he could have prevented the war, especially since the genesis was so long in forming, e.g. without their depredations in China stretching back years, and of course the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, it's very unlikely things would have come to a head like they did. And why not go back to their turn of the century war with Russia and occupation of Korea? Not all that many people are upset with the former, even today, although it helped set the stage for the Bolsheviks and most of the bloodletting of the 20th Century.

Repeating a bit about what I've read especially in Hell to Pay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10685585), while we can debate his being able to influence things earlier, we, the peoples of East Asia, etc. can be very thankful that he was able to throw his weight behind surrender after the two bombs and the Soviet entry in the war, in a situation where the cabinet was still bloody minded enough to stay the course. And I'm not so sure they wouldn't have "won", they were quite willing to sacrifice 20 million of their own people in the process, a mere 1/5-1/4th.

Counterfactuals to that could include Hirohito trying earlier and being replaced by a pliable Emperor who wouldn't have dared try or have had the stature to make that utterly critical move when it most counted.

dctoedt5• 11 years ago

The headline doesn't square with everything I've ever read about the attack. Embarrassment was at best a minor factor in the Japanese thinking. The major factor, IIRC, was that certain military officers -- many of them belonging to (or fearful of) a murderous ultranationalist faction -- had come to dominate the Japanese government [1]. These military men:

+ wanted to strike south to secure desperately-needed sources of oil, rubber, and other resources for their war machine (an alternative they debated was to invade Siberia);

+ felt that for a strike south to succeed, they had to neutralize both the U.S. Pacific Fleet and the American bases in the Philippines, from which the U.S. surface fleet, submarines, and air forces could have caused serious problems for Japan's maritime supply lines from Southeast Asia; and

+ perhaps most importantly, were out of their depth when it came to assessing a political risk, namely the extent to which a surprise attack would bring down on them the implacable fury of an enraged and industrially-powerful United States.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism

oblio• 11 years ago

an alternative they debated was to invade Siberia

You're too polite. They did try that. There were minor skirmishes along the Soviet-Japanese border before WW2, they were close to an actual war. But the Japanese Army got smashed so that idea was scrapped.

The other faction vying for power then gained favor and they headed south.

jordanb• 11 years ago

I've read the linked book[0] and you're right that the headline gets it wrong. It should have said that the decision to attack Pearl Harbor was the result of Face-saving among the Japanese military leadership. To summarize:

The US had embargoed Japan and was demanding that the army (IJA) withdraw to its pre-war Manchurian borders in China. The IJA needed American goods to prosecute the war but such withdrawal would result in an utter loss of face for the IJA.

The IJA instead proposed that the US and Dutch be attacked and goods be secured from American and Dutch colonies (Philippines and Indonesia) to fight the war in China. This would chiefly be a Naval war and thus executed by the IJN.

The IJA hoped to force the IJN to share in its loss of face by admitting it wasn't powerful enough to fight the USN. But the Admirals refused to publicly admit that they couldn't fight the USN (privately they lobbied the Emperor and his subordinates to intervene). Through this impasse between the service branches the Japanese government drifted towards a war they knew they couldn't win.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Japan-1941-Countdown-Eri-Hotta/dp/0307...

duaneb• 11 years ago

I've been reading Dower's"Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II" and I think embarrassment is a significant factor, though this is not exclusive with your explanations. While the nation as a whole may not exhibit signs of shame, the Japanese culture at the time seemed to encourage the direction of moral responsibility upwards.

So while (particularly) the need for oil can't be overstated in this case, I think that there was a degree of self-consciousness that DID characterize the actions of the upper military acting on pressure from those "beneath" them. I don't think the pressure was directly to attack, but there was enough power concentrated in the hands of the few that their decisions were allowed to be implemented rapidly and without much resistance.

rangibaby4• 11 years ago

They did try invading Soviet territory, but got slapped so badly by Zhukov that they gave up. Permenantly; the Soviets were able to send all of their military forces west when their spy in Japan confirmed that the latter had no plans to attack them.

Some important Japanese politicians did anything they could to stop war with the USA (Mamoru Shigemitsu, a pacifist, and Fumimaro Konoye, who considered an attack on the USA to be a very bad idea) but the militarists had the ear of the emperor, and kool aid was drunk.

PhasmaFelis3• 11 years ago

+ perhaps most importantly, were out of their depth when it came to assessing a political risk, namely the extent to which a surprise attack would bring down on them the implacable fury of an enraged and industrially-powerful United States.

By "out of their depth" do we mean "dumber than six pounds of gravel"? I admit that the fantasy that slapping someone in the face will instantly cow them, instead of provoking angry retaliation, is a common one in history, but I don't think that makes it any less stupid given the historical evidence.

(See also Every Terrorist Ever, with the exception of the ones who want to provoke angry retaliation.)

dctoedt5• 11 years ago

By "out of their depth" do we mean "dumber than six pounds of gravel"?

There's no excuse for the Japanese militarists' infliction of millions of deaths and untold suffering, but please keep in mind that they were doing the best they knew how at the time with the hand they were dealt (genetics, education, training, experience, social pressures, etc.), in a situation with enormous risks for their nation, which they believed to be on their shoulders. I'm curious what if anything you know of such pressures.

lsc4• 11 years ago

(See also Every Terrorist Ever, with the exception of the ones who want to provoke angry retaliation.)

I don't pretend to know what a terrorist's goals are, but my observation, as a US civilian is that our responses to terror have harmed us a whole lot more than the terror attacks themselves, so assuming that a terrorist's goal is to maximize damage to my country, it would be rational for them to focus not on how many people they kill, but on how big and self-destructive of a response they can provoke.

(the counter-argument, of course, is that I don't know how many terror attacks would have happened without our massive reaction.)

Spooky23• 11 years ago

The article and the commenters here vastly underestimate the weakness of the US strategic position and the initial advantage that the IJN had. They institutionally understood and embraced the new reality of carrier and air warfare.

The reality is that the Philippines were incredibly vulnerable and run by a General who was not so effective. Ditto the fossils living in WW1 dreadnought world on the Navy side.

Had fate turned ever so slightly at Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, or Midway, the great gamble made by the Japanese would have been genius.

The embarrassment and face saving nonsense killed them not in 1941, but in 1943, when they followed through on a fools errand instead of settling for peace. Once the US industrial power was mobilized, the result was pretty certain.

hga6• 11 years ago

Had fate turned ever so slightly at Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, or Midway, the great gamble made by the Japanese would have been genius.

Disagree strongly. The way those battles turned just sped up the destruction of Imperial Japan---and if you expect every battle to go your way, you're a damned fool.

The surprise attack, their brutality in war, plus our memory of how WWI did not end in a lasting peace, made sure settling for a peace was not an option by 1943. By the time we were focusing on the home islands with Operations Starvation and Downfall, plus the fruits of the Manhattan Project, the details of the Bataan Death March unquestionably revealed by the liberation of the Philippines ... well, it really sucked to be Japanese by then. But not hardly so bad as the subject people in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which they were killing at a rate of 400,000 per month by then.

I'm finishing reading Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947 http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-1945-1947/... and it's really sobering. Olympic as planned, the invasion of southern Kyuushu, wasn't going to work, and with Marshall pushing for all nuclear weapons after Nagasaki to be earmarked for it, and liberal use of poison gas, it would have made Okinawa look like a walk in the park. And there's no way Coronet, the planned March invasion of the Kanto plane in Honshu that includes Tokyo would have happened on schedule before the weather made it impractical. Yet we were absolutely determined to see it through, one way or another, with as many as a million of our men dying the process.

cam-• 11 years ago

The US would have been able to replace their aircraft carrier losses pretty quickly, far quicker than the Japanese. By the end of the war the US had close to thirty carriers IIRC.

dang• 11 years ago

Ok, we changed the headline to the more generic HTML doc title.

nkurz• 11 years ago

For future reference, the previous title was "Japan attacked Pearl Harbor to avoid embarrassment", which is the title that appears at the top of the linked story. While clearly a proposition rather than a solid fact, I think it's an accurate summary of the thrust of the article.

awfullyjohn• 11 years ago

I completely agree. The title is reductive.

powera4• 11 years ago

The tone here is incredibly biased towards "nobody in Japan wanted war". Apparently nobody in Japan wanted war, but they somehow kept invading countries?

And the claim that "Japan had planned to declare war shortly before its planes bombed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, but a series of errors by typists and translators prevented the Japanese embassy from giving Washington the declaration in time." is beyond absurd.

rntz• 11 years ago

And the claim that "Japan had planned to declare war shortly before its planes bombed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, but a series of errors by typists and translators prevented the Japanese embassy from giving Washington the declaration in time." is beyond absurd.

It appears to be the truth, or pretty close to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Japanes...

powera4• 11 years ago

I think it's far far far more likely that they intended for the declaration to arrive after the attacks, but with some amount of plausible deniability.

apsec112• 11 years ago

"Pundits have long puzzled over why Japan, embroiled in an unwinnable war in China, attacked a country that supplied most of its oil and had an economy 70 times its own."

That's off by like an order of magnitude. Numbers like this are never exact, but no way was the difference 70x. Wikipedia's numbers have it at ~5.5x: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...

merpnderp9• 11 years ago

By the end of the war, the US was producing as many light aircraft carriers per month as Japan had produced over the entire war. Whatever the exact numbers were, it was silly lopsided.

protomyth7• 11 years ago

Or the speed at which the US was producing ships. It was beyond lopsided.

Also, I seem to remember reading Canada had a part in the pre-war story (very anti-Japanese PM), but I don't remember the source.

Cieplak2• 11 years ago

"Instead of being tried for war crimes, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for their data on human experimentation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

A bit off topic but perhaps interesting to some.

Cieplak2• 11 years ago

"During the final months of World War II, Japan planned to use plague as a biological weapon against San Diego, California. The plan was scheduled to launch on September 22, 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Biological_warfare

rangibaby4• 11 years ago

Cf. Operation Paperclip, Klaus Barbie

merpnderp9• 11 years ago

An absolute disgrace that so many monstrously evil war criminals were let off after the war.

But the US is currently shipping weapons and money to brutal dictators in several countries in a horrible display of RealPolitik, so not much has changed.

twoodfin• 11 years ago

I'm genuinely curious: Which brutal dictators are currently receiving U.S. arms? With Mubarak gone I can't come up with any. The Saudis? Hard to describe what they're running (or at least barely managing) as a dictatorship.

prodmerc• 11 years ago

Well, what's the alternative?

"Yeah, these guys have some impressive technology and ideas that can revolutionize our world. But they killed a lot of people, so we're gonna just kill them"

Very rarely those who take the absolute high road win...

_nedR3• 11 years ago

Not just Unit 731, but a lot of America's rocketry experience was imported wholesale from Nazi Germany. We are talking 1500 scientists, technicians and engineers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip) including Wernher Von Braun, the designer of the V2. Indeed , Von Braun had been advocating space flight since the very beginning- all the evidence suggests that his tryst with the Nazi weapons program, was merely in order to further his ambitions for human space flight.

Where would America be in the space race, had they not done this? I think in hindsight, it was a pretty clever decision - these people were probably the most valuable war bounty America got out of the whole deal.

scott_karana2• 11 years ago

Unlike Unit 731, the scientists in Operation Paperclip were just that: scientists. Their complicitness in the war, while definitely non-zero, was markedly less.*

Unit 731's doctors were more akin to Mengele: personally hacking off living humans' half-frozen arms to see how they reacted in the cold, experiments with gangrene, etc...

Every single concentration camp "doctor" was deemed a war criminal. We didn't import them as a war bounty. Too bad we never did the same for Japan.

----

* The only two exceptions seem to be Kurt Blome and Hubertus Strughold, both brought over in Paperclip, who probably perpetrated some nasty shit but were "tried" and given a pass.

ctrager3• 11 years ago

Prescient New York Times article about Japan and oil, 1935: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9F02E1D6123DE53...

And the US military was busier in China that you might think: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9803E1D6163BE43...

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9D0DE2DF1E38E43...

MichaelMoser123• 11 years ago

WW II was probably the last big colonial war - where the objective of the warring parties/world powers was to gain or defend direct control over territories and natural resources. I find it is such a pity that the world did not figure out a couple of decades earlier that it is cheaper to buy raw materials rather than to kill dozens of millions in a war over those damned resources; so many lives would have been saved;

What have the Americans ever done for us? Post WWII American leadership brought us decolonization; i think that this was a really significant change; one of the biggest changes of the twentieth century...

bawana• 11 years ago

Will the election of Donald trump allow the cultivation of such nationalist behavior here in the U.S. ?

Why Japanese leaders attacked Pearl Harbor

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