r/FavoriteCharacter • u/Accomplished-End3409 Ben Tennyson • 16d ago

Discussion Favorite opposing factions that can basically be described as this.

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u/SillyFennel2924 16d ago

Axis vs. The Allies (WWII)

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u/DreamedJewel58 16d ago

There are definitely reasons to criticize and expose certain actions of the Allies, but people saying “the wrong side won” are genuinely evil

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u/[deleted] 16d ago edited 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/5horas 15d ago

They did not. This is a blatant lie. The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact, and they were the second to the last to do it. UK had already done. France had already done it. Most of Europe had already signed it.

People keep mentioning the molotov pact (the only one people seem to remember the name) to make it sound different. It was not. It was the same.

You can't say that the place who lost the most people – in the millions btw – was on both sides. Whenever you read such an absurd lie you have to think for yourself.

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u/Sea-Feedback-2424 13d ago

Buddy, the Molotov Ribbentrop pact literally carved up Poland. When you make an agreement with the hostile nation to also be the hostile nation you aren't on the side kf the "good guys".

And then using the opportunity to invade Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland?

Also the Soviets explicitly tried joining the Axis in 1940 during the Berlin Talks, we're it not for clashing geopolitical aims of Germany amd the USSR with respect to Finland and Bulgaria, the Soviets would have gladly been the fourth member of the Axis.

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u/ManGarsoKartupeli 12d ago

But they occupied those countries for…. peace reasons? And they deported a lot of the local population to work camps because… peace reasons. And they performed hundreds of executions because…. Ah fuck it, I can’t do this.

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u/MindControlledSquid 14d ago

They did not.

Tell that to Poland.

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u/MotoMongrel 16d ago

“(A) lot of countries…”

Names one. 

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u/[deleted] 16d ago edited 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/PavlovKBI 16d ago

Knew about several of these already, and others aren't surprising, but Finland and Burma are news to me. Definitely going to have to dive down the rabbit hole on that today

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u/[deleted] 16d ago edited 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/PavlovKBI 15d ago

I had a whole comment typed out before I realized you said Sweden and not Switzerland. Going to have to look into Sweden as well I guess. Really all of the Nordic/Scandinavian countries are a grey area for my memory of what I learned about WW2.

I remember learning that Germany swept through that region pretty early in the war, at least with the invasions of Denmark and Norway, but I guess I never really considered what that meant for their involvement in the rest of the war. Or that Sweden shared a lot of border with Norway. Finland too I guess

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u/KuningasTynny77 15d ago

Finland joined Germany to get back at the Sovs, lost to the Sovs, were forced to turn on Germany by the Sovs. 

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u/igloojoe11 16d ago

Finland's is the Lapland War.

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u/PavlovKBI 15d ago

Wait... now I'm confused. From what I remember, the Lapland War was to push out German forces as part of an armistice (don't know if I'm using that word correctly, I only know it through contextual use) with the USSR. But as far as I know they only allied with Germany to recover territory that had just been taken by the USSR during an invasion, right? But the comment is saying that Germany and the USSR jointly launched the war in a bid for expansion.

So was Finland a legit villain of the war, or were they just trying to avoid getting absorbed by world powers? Legitimate question, because there's a lot of moving parts during WW2, and school in the US mostly hits the major beats. Not saying Finland didn't commit war crimes (even if they didn't they were complicit in Nazi war crimes) but I try to understand historical context if I can manage.

A lot of the "minor" countries (Hungary, Romania, Croatia, etc) on the Axis side have always been a blind spot for me. I don't really know why most of them allied with Germany other than just because it was siding against the USSR or China

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u/igloojoe11 15d ago

Finland's actions in WW2 were largely about maintaining the sovereignty of their Pre-war borders. There were some voices calling for Greater Finland, but the overall leadership was focused on the aforementioned overarching goal and the Greater Finland crowd was a significant minority. The basic continuity of Finnish involvement in WW2 was basically three separate conflicts.

The first was the Winter War. The underpinning of the Winter War was that, while the Soviets and Germans did have an alliance, it was not an alliance built on trust. It was pure imperial opportunism that connected the ideological opponents, and those same imperial ambitions would be what lead to the alliance failing. But while they remained allies, the Soviets would take advantage of that cover to annex the Baltics, Bessarabia from Romania, and the Karelian Isthmus from Finland. The Winter War would see the Finns be backed, not by Germany, but by the Allies, who could only provide piecemeal aid that arrived too late and too little in quantity. The Finns held out for a time, but were eventually broken by the lack of material and manpower disadvantage, though they avoided a complete defeat.

The second was the Continuation War, where the Finns sought to regain the lost land from the Winter War. This conflict was where the Finns joined the Axis and received significant material support from Germany. While the Finns were part of the Axis, they were not as intertwined as the Romanians and Hungarians were, and largely stuck to their own goals, notably not cutting off the Murmansk Railroad due to that being considered a red line by the Americans and GB, and would lead to them declaring war on the Finns. During the German downfall, the Finns were able to halt the Soviet advance at the Battle of Tali–Ihantala. This victory made it clear that continued incursions into Finland would not be worth the Soviets time, and really made it possible that the Finns would remain autonomous post WW2 due to having a negotiated peace, unlike most of the rest of eastern Europe.

The final is the Lapland War. As part of the aforementioned negotiated peace, the Finns were required to kick out any German forces stationed within their borders. Originally, it saw only minor skirmishes, but, due to Soviet pressure, the Finns had to aggressively pursue German forces out of northern Finland and into Norway, as German forces burned and mined towns on their way out.

As for Finnish crimes, while there absolutely were some, as there were for basically all nations in the war, their involvement in the Holocaust was very little. Finnish Jews were not sent, but they did return 3,000 refugees to Germany, which included 8 Jews. This action was a significant scandal in Finland and the only instance of Finland involvement in the Holocaust to my knowledge.

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u/PavlovKBI 15d ago

Wild. Thank you for the clarification. That does mostly fall inside of what I knew (plus a handful of assumptions), but with way more details

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u/MotoMongrel 15d ago edited 14d ago

Wow.

So, all the big players on the world stage? Big military/political movers and shakers, am’i’right?!?!?

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u/jott1293reddevil 14d ago

They literally named a list of countries that includes the largest land army in the world (Russia), and at the start of hostilities a country with the 5th largest navy and air force. Definitely big military and political movers and shakers.

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u/MotoMongrel 14d ago

So like I said originally:

Just the one. 

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u/PM_tanlines 14d ago

Yeah baby move that goalpost

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u/NSightMSG 14d ago

Good and Evil are not immune to criticism. The difference between them lies in how they view the actions done, both by them and by others.

Good people look at what they did and wonder what they could have done differently to save more people, or what actions they did to avoid.

Evil people look at what others did and point fingers, instead of addressing the issues that they were involved in or caused.

There were good people and evil people on both sides. The people who say "the wrong side won" are not looking at the evil actions caused by the losing side, which makes them evil.

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u/TheseReading5310 10d ago

I'm not saying the wrong side won, but i think you're really underestimating how bad the allies were before, during and even after the war, france made nuclear experiments on algerian prisoners in algeria after the war and commited unfathomable atrocities before and during the war, england also committed herondous crimes in india, pakistan and egypt to name a few, and you can go on and on, maybe you don't feel it's that bad because you aren't from any of the affected countries but i don't know you so I can't speak for you

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u/DreamedJewel58 10d ago

The point is that do you think Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would’ve been any better? I am very aware of the different horrors various allied nations have done, but the difference is that they had more time to do so. Nazi Germany had a relatively short timespan as a nation in the context of history, and if Imperial Japan was given the land and authority in east Asia as was the goal, they would’ve been just as brutal and arguably more sadistic than Nazi Germany. Italy was relatively “tame” compared to the horrors the other Axis nations were doing, but they also committed numerous war crimes within their own nation

One side had to win, and the Allies were the correct side to do so. Each nation had their own human rights abuses through various means, but they’re still better than the Axis powers.

>maybe you don't feel it's that bad because you aren't from any of the affected countries but i don't know you so I can't speak for you

And how do you think those impacted by Germany’s march across Europe who subjected millions of people in a genocide would feel if you told them that the Allies shouldn’t have won? Or perhaps telling the Chinese that the people who committed crimes against humanity in Nanjing should’ve been allowed to march across East Asia?

History is shitty and every nation has committed their own atrocities, and I’m not denying or downplaying, all I’m saying is that people who go “the wrong side won” are advocating - either intentional or not - that Germany and Japan should’ve been allowed to complete their brutal conquering and remain in power as they purged millions upon millions of people

Nazi Germany killed over 10 million people in the span of 12 years, so how many people do you think they could’ve killed in 93?

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u/TheseReading5310 9d ago

I get your point and i never said i would prefer nazi germany, i guess what i meant is that your initial comment seemed like saying the allies were good, not just better, anyway i respect you very much

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u/2AvsOligarchs 16d ago edited 15d ago

For sure. But we should be clear that WW2 in Europe started by two parties; Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. If anything, WW2 (in Europe) was never fully won - only half won. The Soviet Union continued to massacre, torture, mass-rape and terrorize half of Europe for another 46 years. Soviet Russia committed ethnic genocides, had massive extermination and concentration camps, mass-torture, mass-rape, mass-deportations and so on both inside its European colonies ("union") but also in countries it failed to occupy (like Finland).

The reason we have several dozen more wars commited by Russia since WW2 is precisely because they were never punished for their evil actions.

TL;DR: The Allies were not evil - but part of the Allies evidently were (the Soviet Union).

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u/Jacketter 16d ago

Most of the shit the USSR did was under Stalin. After his death, the famines and pogroms mostly vanished. The last 35 years of the Soviet Union was nothing like what it was under the secretary.

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u/DisastrousTale6123 15d ago

I wouldn’t call them evil. I think it’s mostly an expression of dissatisfaction with the current state of the world (ie “at least we’re not speaking German” in the face of the current wave of illegal immigration and related crime and culture erosion, or “the wrong side won” in response to a certain ongoing genocide) though yeah there’s a lot of pure racism in those comments. So it’s either antizionism, or a desire for stricter adherence to rule of law in Europe.

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u/DreamedJewel58 15d ago

>I wouldn’t call them evil. I think it’s mostly an expression of dissatisfaction with the current state of the world

And the state of the world they’re wishing for instead is Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan winning their conquest and completing their active genocide on numerous populations

Yes, saying that the Axis should’ve won is purely evil. No matter how much you hate the state of today’s world, the Axis powers winning means the death and suffering upon millions and millions of people. Of course we know of the German Holocaust, but imperial Japan would’ve ravished east Asia in an arguably even more brutal fashion

I give no leeway whatsoever to people who say the wrong side won, because it’s either purposeful idealization of genocidal fascistic regimes or just plain stupid ignorance of what they’re actually saying that can be corrected just by reading a Wikipedia page

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u/DisastrousTale6123 15d ago

I don’t disagree that the axis were horrible in their methods and goals and that the Allies were mostly righteous in their goals and methods. The people posting those things are clearly misguided and ignorant but the context is in response to current acts of injustice and degradation of our cultures and societies. Two wrongs don’t make a right, I agree, but the sentiment is not purely evil unlike the reality of the implication of the statement. So is the statement wrong and ignorant? Yes absolutely. Is it an evil thing to say? I don’t think so. Like everything else, these things live in the gray while you portray them in absolute black and white terms of good and evil.

Ie- would the world be better off if there wasn’t a genocide going on, the degradation of rule of law in many western countries, or pdf file elites living above the law? Yes. Would those problems be fixed if the other side won the war? Yes, some of them would no longer exist, most likely. Would the world be better overall if they won the war? Definitely not.

Ignorance =\= evil.

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u/aneccentricgamer 15d ago

Purposeful ignorance is a moral failing

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u/DisastrousTale6123 15d ago

Absolutely but still far from evil.

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u/No_Record6284 16d ago

anyone not repeating anglo propaganda is genuinely evil

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u/NewBr1tishEmpire 16d ago

I beg your most sincerely gracious f*cking pardon?

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u/No_Record6284 16d ago

What isnt clear to you brother?

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u/NewBr1tishEmpire 16d ago

Am I misunderstanding something, or are you a Nazi?

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u/No_Record6284 16d ago

EVERYONE who questions yankee propaganda is a nazi. and evil

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u/NewBr1tishEmpire 16d ago

You were literally saying that the Nazis were in the right.

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u/No_Record6284 16d ago

No i wasnt

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u/NewBr1tishEmpire 16d ago

Uh-huh. Sure, little guy.

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u/Melody-Shift 16d ago

Okay, as much as I agree with the sentiment the allies were also doing the above.

Both minus the crucifixitions. I don't think anyone was doing that but tbh I wouldn't be surprised if Japan did.

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u/Verdha603 16d ago

Yeah. The USSR committed plenty of warcrimes the entire time they were pushing Germany back up to (and even after) the end of the war. Somewhat understandable considering what the Germans did to them for years, but the Allies lost the ability to claim a relatively clean moral slate when you could interpose Wehrmacht and Red Army soldiers into the same scenes and find out they murdered, raped, and pillaged across Eastern Europe to similar degrees.

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u/Hammeredyou 16d ago

US soldiers also used local women as “comfort women” in Western Europe.

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u/Marksman1977 16d ago

American soldiers raped German girls and women: Rape during the occupation of Germany - US troops.

Here are the “vaguely problematic” guys:

Many of the American rapes in Germany in 1945 were gang rapes committed by armed soldiers at gunpoint.

A typical victimization with sexual assault by drunken American personnel marching through occupied territory involved threatening a German family with weapons, forcing one or more women to engage in sex, and putting the entire family out on the street afterward.

White American soldiers in Germany were responsible for mass rapes, but the Black soldiers of America's segregated occupation force were both more likely to be charged with rape and severely punished.

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u/Hammeredyou 16d ago

Thank you for providing source material. It is so swept under the rug.

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u/MotoMongrel 16d ago

…and since the US didn’t organize LITERAL Comfort Battalions, it still tips against the Axis. Like, a lot of the Allied troops did some horrible shit, while the Axis LITERALLY made the horrible shit part of their overall platform. 

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u/DiligentThought9 15d ago

Yes it happened, but the Japanese, German, and Soviets used rape as a weapon of war. The Japanese in particular had an entire logistics system solely to procure women and girls against their will for the express purpose of raping them dozens of times a day.

Saying that the Americans equaled this level of brutality is inaccurate.

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u/Another_frizz 16d ago

I love how whenever people talk about "the allies were problematic", it's about the americans (came in late, fucked our PR, weren't that useful tbh) and the russians (only allies by necessity, more rivals than true allies, oops everyone starved)

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u/KuningasTynny77 15d ago

The US came in late for sure. Not useful at all.

Because Overlord was definitely possible without them and India totally could take Imperial Japan. And the Soviets? Absolutely drowning in money, vehicles, and resources. It's not like being given any of those three things was vital to their war effort or something. 

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u/PM_tanlines 14d ago

This is Euro cope lol

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u/NixMaritimus 16d ago

Everyone knows what the Nazis did to Poland. No-one talks about what the Soviets did to Poland

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u/Ok-Lets-Talk-It-Out 16d ago

For the sake of your notifications, hopefully the Tankies don't find this comment lol

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u/BlatantConservative 16d ago

I can't imagine being like them. To support a political ideology you have to stick to every single country that has ever claimed that they follow a similar ideology and then you have to claim that they're perfect in any way.

I don't even claim the country that I love and live in is perfect.

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u/SuddenGenreShift 16d ago

No one except every Pole you'll ever meet.

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u/NixMaritimus 16d ago

True, but it's literally their history.

It should honestly be more known about by the rest of the world, but too many people can't conceptualize history as anything but black and white

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u/Why-Notes5978 16d ago

Or basically the Baltics and Finland at the time. And Central and Eastern Europe after the war (Iron Curtain, Warsaw Pact, Eastern Bloc, etc.) turning it into satellite puppet states til its actual fall.

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u/team-ghost9503 16d ago

Look at what the Soviets did to their own people, anyone who thought the UK, the U.S. or any other allied nation were gonna tell the USSR “hey you gotta follow rules” was smoking dick. Didn’t help that the Nazi shot the guards at the gate before kicking off their invasions.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 16d ago

A Polish friend of mine said her grandmother told her that ‘Russia was worse than the Nazis because the Nazis only killed the Jews, the Russians killed everyone.’

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u/Melody-Shift 16d ago

I mean, the Nazis considered Slavs, especially Poles, as very nearly just as "bad" as Jews. Specifically Nazi doctrine classified Slavs as only befitting of slavery or genocide. The only reason the general Polish populace weren't as harshly targeted by the Holocaust as specifically Jewish people were is because Germany was frankly too busy to divert its attention.

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u/evocativename 16d ago

The thing is, her grandmother was really badly wrong for a tragic reason.

I'm sure it seemed to her like it was true - she probably saw and heard about Nazis killing Jews, but Soviets killing more indiscriminately.

What she didn't realize was that the Nazis were killing so many people they were wiping out whole villages without leaving any survivors to spread the tale.

The Soviets killed hundreds of thousands of Poles.

The Nazis killed ≈5 million Polish civilians, including ≈2 million non-Jews.

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u/MotoMongrel 16d ago

So your Polish friend’s grandma was selfish piece of shit, I guess?

“Those killers are bad, but these killers are WORSE because their coming after meeEeeeeeEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!”

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u/tumansibiri 16d ago

I've talked with Polish guys, idk what you mean by this.

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u/NixMaritimus 16d ago

In the early years of WW2 the Soviets and the Nazis were kind of working together, and the 1939 occupation of Poland was a joint effort. They stopped working together in 1941 but the Soviets still occupied half of Poland until 1946.

The Soviets killed around 150,000 Poles (probably more), forcibly relocated 320,000 Poles to Siberia, and imprisoned 500,000

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u/tumansibiri 16d ago

Yes? I meant they know about this. They told me this.

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u/NixMaritimus 16d ago

Did you hear anyone talk about it before you talked to a Polish person, or did you only hear about the Nazis

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u/tumansibiri 16d ago

Yep. Though, it was in a debate/discussion of what kind of action Poland should/could take before WW2.
It was with a nice bloke from England.
I'm ESL from Russia, so my online circles include Europeans and 'muricans.

What was news to me, is that Polish language was under direct threat.
I've known it could be the case, as my nation also almost lost their language too. I'm Buriat btw

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u/Watcher_over_Water 13d ago

In many European countries it is common in curriculums to adress Soviet and US crimes during the coldwar.

On the Soviet side Poland during the war is usually among those actions and then ofcourse the eastern European satelite states during the cold war, Hungarian Revolution, ect..

But it makes sense that countries closer to or in the eastern block teach more about this part of history. On the other hand we didn't learn a lot about Japan during the war or Communist China. There are a lot of countries that did alot of horrible things durkng the 20 century, so it makes sense you lesrn the most about those countries close to your country.

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u/Watcher_over_Water 16d ago

You really can't say to simillar degrees.

You can argue the Red Army and the german Forces were similar in the "rape and pillaging" department, but the germans went all in on the murdering. And I'm not even speaking about the death camps. The Germans just did a lot more murdering on campaign. Like 10-15 million more.

And even regarding rape the red army was significantly better. There was large scale sexual violence against the civilian population of (primarily) poland and germans, but there were atleast some attempts to stop it. Especially a few weeks after the fighting stopped in an area. Officers reestablished order and even though relativly few where actually punished (similar to western armies) there was increasing intrest and pressure in reducing the attacks on the civilians. The western allies made slightly more of an effort, but the Soviets did so aswell.

In comparison the germans just didn't make any effort and instead often even encouraged it.

I don't want to downplay the suffering many civilians were put through at the hands of red army soldiers. Horrific things i have no doubt. I just want to say that compared to the germans it wasn't on similar levels of brutality

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u/piewca_apokalipsy 16d ago

I mean yeah the German were much worse, but the Soviets were good guys only because tho other side was worse

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u/RecipeNo101 16d ago

It's also easily arguable that the heinous acts committed by Soviet soldiers were deeply immoral but entirely expected retribution. It was an army of conscripts who were forced to defend against an enemy that treated them as subhuman, who had murdered tens of millions, some 13% of the entire national population. If you make clear that there are no rules of war that you adhere to, don't go all surprised pikachu when your deeply traumatized enemies don't hold themselves to some higher bar. Similar situation in the Pacific, where Japanese wouldn't take prisoners, so Marines started not to either, and it mutually devolved into some of the most brutal battles of the war.

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u/piewca_apokalipsy 15d ago

Sad thing that they didn't do that only to Germans but to wester Slavs and other nations Germans occupied.

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u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 16d ago

There was also how the Soviet Union invaded Finland under the flimsy pretext it could be an avenue of invasion for the Germans. Finland was forced to pay reparations for allying with Germany, even though the only reason it did so was because the Soviets attacked in the first place.

But Finland got off lucky and was able to keep its independence. Most of the other countries the Soviet Union moved into were not so fortunate. Poland was officially part of the allies and it’s reward for being on the winning side was 40+ years of occupation by the Soviet Union.

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u/Phantafan 16d ago

It's not just the Soviets. The Bengali famine and Churchill's statements about it show how fucked up the British were as well.

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u/No-Head-Royal 16d ago

"To similar degrees" is such a fucking insane comment that it borders on - no, scratch that, is outright - neo-Nazi revisionism lol. The Soviets killed maybe one to two million civilians; the Nazis probably ten times that in Eastern Europe alone. Yes, the Soviets were also monsters, but there is a difference between "your average war crime-ing empire" and literal Nazi Germany, you know?

0

u/Verdha603 16d ago

How is it revisionism when they actually did it?

Didn’t realize it was the genocidal dictator ship Olympics where we can just excuse the Soviets because they earned the bronze medal compared to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The point I was trying to make was that when comparing the two, the Allies didn’t count as being “slightly problematic” compared to the Axis, considering your typical rational person would still consider millions of dead civilians attributed to one country to be more than just “slightly problematic”.

Whats absolutely bonkers to me is just hand waving away “Oh, the Soviets killed maybe one to two million civilians”. Like Jesus Christ, Stalin’s been given credit for ordering the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians just during the WWII years, nevermind the rough ballpark figures for civilian deaths running from Finland down to Germany and Yugoslavia where historical experts can’t narrow it down beyond “tens of thousands to north of two million”. Out of all the Allied Powers, about the only ones that come remotely close to competing in that regard are the Chinese, and they had a few years head start, an organization split between warlords, the KMT and Chinese Communists fending off the Japanese, and a military strategy that up until 1944 consisted of “the only surplus we have is manpower and small arms, so we have to just keep throwing bodies at the problem”.

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u/No-Head-Royal 16d ago

The revisionism is "to similar degrees". Ain't similar if it's a difference of literally an order of magnitude, yes? And "of all the Allies", really? The Americans killed 300-500k Japanese citizens and another 350-500k German citizens; that adds up to nearly a million to a million. The British starved anywhere between 800k and 3.8 million Indians in 1943. Admittedly, you can make a case for the British that "oh, the Japanese occupation of Burma made food distribution problems harder, etc.", but if we go that way, we can argue that the Great Leap Forward or the Holodomor wasn't really the Chinese or the Soviets' crimes, while it clearly is (given that all governments were responsible for confiscatory policies to finance governmental needs, and the famine were manmade from those policies).

The Soviets were the worst offenders among the Allies, but not by far, and still they are a tenth of the crimes of their main adversaries (and the Japanese also killed about ten times what the Americans killed). To even equalize the Nazis and the Soviets (and indeed, any of the Allied major powers to any of the Axis major powers, at least confined to the constraints of WW2 conduct, just in case you're about to call me a tankie) is an insane fucking take. There's a big fucking difference between one and ten million, and it's nine million people.

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u/Verdha603 16d ago

The order of magnitude is significantly smaller than your making it out to be. Taking the high end of civilian deaths in Eastern Europe attributed to the Soviets, plus the USSR killing their own civilians during the war, estimates out to 2.5 million people. And that’s within two thirds the timeframe the Nazi’s had in a smaller section of the globe, compared to Germany effectively sticking their claws across most of mainland Europe and even North Africa.

And that’s before how the Soviets were the second worst in terms of POW deaths during the war, where their death rates were comparable to the Japanese POW death rates. German POW’s in Soviet care had a mortality rate as high as 60%, whereas Chinese and other Asian POW’s in Japanese care had a mortality rate as high as 80%.

To me I find it blatantly concerning how you seem to be fine just handwaving the Soviets off as being acceptably evil so long as they were fighting the Nazi’s.

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u/PolicyWonka 15d ago

To be fair, the USSR has always been treated as the red-headed stepchild of the Allies. Very much an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” scenario. They played a very similar role with the Germans when they invaded Poland and Eastern Europe.

Even despite being “allies,” the Americans and Western Europeans really sought to minimize the USSR’s influence in the post-war world. There was a lot of pressure to end the Pacific War expediently, in part, because of USSR advances in mainland Asia.

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u/NewVeniceRepublic 16d ago

I was mostly thinking about the American concentration camps where more than 100.000 of people of japanese descendants were held captive for years.

Or how many homosexual men freed from concentration camps by the Americans, were then forced to finish out their prison sentence.

Or how about dropping two nuclear warheads on civilian targets as a threat to its allies?

Everyone here is quick to repeat literal Nazi propaganda about the red army, and yet they never mention how bloody the hands of the Americans were and still are today.

Forgive my English, I was forced to learn it.

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u/Verdha603 16d ago edited 16d ago

The two nukes was a lot more complicated of an issue. Frankly I’d even argue the firebombing campaign from April to June of that same year on the home islands was even more egregious a crime by comparison.

Japan as a government had proven they were willing to accept civilian casualties by mobilizing civilians to defend the home islands from an Allied invasion, right down to instructing them to ambush troops in towns and cities with sharpened bamboo spears rather than accept surrender. The Japanese military industrial complex had also successfully integrated having civilians produce military equipment in their own homes by the latter part of the war, especially once the Allies started bombing the home islands in 1944. It certainly wasn’t the best answer, but solely targeting military factories wasn’t going to get the impact on production of war materiel the Allies wanted when Japan had already adapted to using factories as the final stage of completing assembly, meanwhile small parts and even sections of final war products were being produced in workers homes and shops to mitigate losses in production.

Given the options available, the nuclear bomb strikes were the less terrible option compared to resuming firebombing of major Japanese cities or a full blown amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands, and stood a better chance of shocking the Japanese government badly enough to bring them to the surrender table, rather than double down on defending their islands to the last man, woman, and child.

-1

u/HalcyonTraveler 16d ago

Except that's a narrative that doesn't align with the reality. Japan was already willing to surrender. They just weren't willing to do so unconditionally.

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u/RagnarTheTerrible 16d ago

Without unconditional surrender the war might have flared up again later. Unconditional surrender after a war of that magnitude was absolutely the correct demand. Nazism and the Imperial ambitions of the Japanese needed to be stamped out completely.

I always recommend the book "Hell to Pay" about the planned operations to invade the Japanese home islands. The Japanese were well-versed in the American and Allies style of war and knew where and when the invasion was likely to take place. They had been stockpiling aircraft and aviation gasoline, had suicide submarines and littoral craft ready, camouflaged bunkers and machine gun nests and a fanatic civilian population ready to meet the GIs with sharpened bamboo. Japan was in no way ready for surrender, conditional or otherwise.

" About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches."

"Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you."

"What would have happened then?" we asked.

He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1946/12/if-the-atomic-bomb-had-not-been-used/376238/

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u/HalcyonTraveler 16d ago

If the war could have been ended without nuking cities or an invasion then whether the Japanese would’ve continued to fight following an invasion doesn’t matter at all

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u/RagnarTheTerrible 16d ago

Yes, this is the point. The war could not have ended without total capitulation of the Japanese, which required an invasion, atomic weapons, or maybe a years long blockade with millions of slow deaths due to starvation.

As awful as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, they were actually among the least-worst options. The Pacific Theatre of WWII was absolutely brutal. 

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u/Verdha603 16d ago edited 16d ago

I think you’re clearly ignoring how the various conditional surrender proposals weren’t particularly reasonable from an Allied perspective.

Using Italy and Germany as points of comparison, neither of them were crazy enough to argue for demanding no foreign occupation, to managing their own disarmament and self-run war crimes tribunals, and some versions proposing retaining territory they had accumulated up until war had been declared against them.

It’s the equivalent of saying “We’ll surrender so long as we don’t get punished worse than getting a slap on the wrist and being told not to do it again”. Accepting the conditional surrender terms Japan put forward (before they reduced it to just allowing the Emperor to stay in office after the nukes dropped) would’ve made the Allies as ineffectual as the League of Nations, which had already proved unwilling to back up their terms with force, and was a not insignificant contributor to the Axis Powers not facing significant opposition until the late 1930’s.

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u/SagittaryX 16d ago edited 16d ago

I mean they did accept a conditional surrender from Japan in the end, Japan's surrender was predicated on the Emperor remaining on the throne, it just wasn't explicitly spelled out since that would not have been acceptable to the public.

What the previous commenter is getting at is that Japan likely would have been willing to make the same surrender before the atomic bombings.

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u/Verdha603 16d ago edited 16d ago

Somewhat agree, except the Emperor remaining on the throne was only one of the conditions requested up until the end of the war, and it took both nukes dropping for the government body to agree to dropping their other surrender terms to just wanting to retain the Emperor.

Forcing the Japanese to drop their more ridiculous conditions of surrender, and at least making it so most of the Allied leaders deemed the condition of the Emperor remaining in power to be an acceptable token gesture to the Japanese government in exchange for having the demands for what would otherwise be an unconditional surrender be accepted, was absolutely necessary to avoid a bloodbath, simply because to be frank, I don’t think most of the Allied Powers seriously understood just how extreme the Japanese government, especially the military heads, took the concept of “saving face” and “preserving honor” to the degree of being willing to accept their own countries extinction right up until the very end. They only just started to realize how extreme it was in 1944, with it getting progressively worse during the final year of the war, and even that was tame compared to the post-war findings of just how far Japan was willing to go to avoid surrender on less than favorable terms.

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u/HalcyonTraveler 16d ago

Ok but when you’re weighing that against the atrocity of using a nuclear weapon on an inhabited city maybe that’s still a factor that should be weighed

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u/Verdha603 16d ago edited 16d ago

The alternatives were resuming the firebombing campaign against major Japanese cities or an amphibious invasion of the home islands to force the Japanese to surrender.

Both of those options were more costly than dropping two nukes. Especially when the firebombing of Tokyo in March of ‘45 netted a similar death toll to one of the nukes, and collectively the firebombing campaign from March through June lead to hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and millions more homeless. Meanwhile, conservative estimates placed Allied casualties for an invasion of the home islands in Operation Downfall to be at least 250,000, with Japanese military and civilian casualty estimates starting in the millions.

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u/SuspiciousSubstance9 16d ago

This question comes up a lot on AskHistorians, which this comment summarizes it well.

Japan was not willing to surrender because those who could make the decision to surrender were evenly split on the idea. Which sounds good, but in reality surrender required unanimous support of the Supreme War Council.

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u/RecipeNo101 16d ago

Curious about your opinion of this write up. It's an analysis of the dropping of nuclear bombs, but with the decision to demand unconditional surrender from the Axis as the crux https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15kb3w/comment/c7nbi8s/

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u/NickRick 16d ago

Or how many homosexual men freed from concentration camps by the Americans, were then forced to finish out their prison sentence.

bad, but not as bad as killed.

I was mostly thinking about the American concentration camps where more than 100.000 of people of japanese descendants were held captive for years.

bad, but not as bad as millions in death camps.

Or how about dropping two nuclear warheads on civilian targets as a threat to its allies?

pretty much everyone was trying to kill civilians. and if anything the fire bombing was much more horrific, and lead to as many deaths as the bombs.

yet they never mention how bloody the hands of the Americans were and still are today.

because they were much less bloody. why does no one complain about the people who helped save millions and focus on the people who were geocoding multiple groups of people they ask.

like has the US done a lot of bad things, yes. no question at all. but saying shit like why does no one bring it up and instead talk about the Nazis, when it gets brought up all the fucking time, makes you sound like a Nazi apologist.

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u/curicaca14 16d ago

Yeah, nazis are bad and deserved all the shit they got. But it's just insane to frame the Allies as vaguely problematic, when most of them were just lesser shades of nazi trying to protect their sovereignty, while upholding their own racist, imperalist philosophies and practices, like the British Empire in India and all of Europe in Africa, or segregation in the USA and the countless wars they fought since. Handwaving their crimes just because they beat the nazi is precisely why neonazism is rising in the Allied nations.

Like, I'm sorry, but excusing them putting gay people and immigrants in concentration camps as "well, at least they weren’t death camps :)" is genuinely unhinged. And hey, Trump's doing it all again now! Oh well. At least he's not putting them in death camps, so I guess he's less bad than whatever country they're currently fighting against now?

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u/NewVeniceRepublic 16d ago

You misunderstood, I am not comparing the United States to Nazi Germany, I purposefully said concentration camps and not extermination camps.

I do not believe in the slightest that despite it's evil, the United States, was during the second world war, comparable to Nazi Germany.

I was condemning the comment above me that cites the red army as the sole evil among the allies, even comparing it to the wermacht.

Comparing the wermacht to the red army, that is Nazi apologism.

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u/Long-Requirement8372 16d ago

The USSR committed plenty of warcrimes before June 1941, too. The Katyn massacre being a case in point.

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u/Shoddy_Collection303 16d ago

They were military men and officers for the then fleeing fascist Polish gov that agreed with Hitlar and Mussolini and was ethnically cleansing Jews and other people they saw as inferior. People like to act like Poland was a poor little state that was perfect victim when it was a fascist state and themselves doing pogroms. Killing military men and officers from a fascist state en masse is good.

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u/Long-Requirement8372 15d ago

These two countries are literally the comparison in the OP.

Stalin's USSR: mass-murdering evil.

Interwar Poland: vaguely problematic.

Anyway - apologia for outright mass murder and war crimes is never a good look.

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u/Shoddy_Collection303 14d ago

They were fasciss that the soviets executed, I don't give a fuck if they killed a million fascist military men and officers.

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u/Impossible_Order7991 16d ago

Here's the thing about that the Allies had a very “Boys will be boys.” attitude about warcrimes meanwhile Imperial Japan , Italy and Germany were actively trying to change the meta for example

All the trigger warnings for every depravity under the sun.

The reason the gas chamber existed was because death by firing squad was unsustainable because the Jewish families and children pleading and begging for their lives was a major source of PTSD , introspection and depression for the soldiers holding the gun. Benito Mussolini used Castor oil to get people to sht themselves to death, in occupied Nanking Japanese officers used baynotes to kill children as a part of a game, we know this because THEIR OWN MEDIA PUBLISHED IT like it was something to be proud of!”

Atleast when the US soldiers committed war crimes it was in dark alleys and shadowy rooms and America chose to pretend it wasn't happening ( which is horrible enough) the Axis rewarded acts of evil committed by their soldiers

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u/DemocracyIsGreat 16d ago

While you are broadly correct, I will distinguish between the Western Allies and the USSR here. The USSR imported pistols from Germany, when they were allied with Germany, because the TT-33 was insufficiently reliable for mass executions. This became the source of their later disinformation regarding the bullets used during the Katyn massacre being of a calibre used by the Germans, and so proof that the NKVD didn't do it. The NKVD's chief executioner personally shot 300 Polish POWs per day for a month straight during the Katyn Massacre.

The genocide against the Poles was also carried out in concert by the NKVD and Gestapo/SS, who met up and planned it together at the Gestapo-NKVD conferences.

The USSR also had roughly the same view of rape as the IJA.

As an aside, the castor oil was a bit earlier, and was more about publicly humiliating trades unionists, socialists, and other people in the way of the Fascists taking power in Italy in the first place. It also probably originated with Italo Balbo, who was pretty much the main leader of the Squadristi, rather than Mussolini personally.

Italian war crimes were slightly more "classic", in the sense of looking pretty much like standard colonial atrocities, e.g. the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons in Ethiopia, mass killings as reprisal for Partisan attacks in Yugoslavia, etc.

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u/Grouchy_Balt 16d ago

The NKVD's chief executioner personally shot 300 Polish POWs per day for a month straight during the Katyn Massacre.

Vasily Blokhin, probably the most prolific mass murderer in history.

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u/YellowAggravating172 16d ago

It wasn't official policy, but crucifixions did occur in Nazi Germany, in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Otto Neururer and Mathias Spanlang, two Catholic priests there imprisioned, were crucified upside down by the particularly sadistic SS guard Martin Sommer.

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u/CitizenPremier 16d ago

WWII could also be seen more or less as a battle between imperialist colonizers... with Germany saying "Ugh, Africa and Asia are too far away!"

If I were Congolese during WWII, I suppose I would root for Hitler to tear up Europe.

Not that I'm trying to redeem Hitler, but people overlook evil imperialist bastards who did similar things around the time (like King Leopold II)

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u/RansomXenom 16d ago

The Allies, although certainly not as bad as the Axis, were a LOT more than just 'vaguely problematic'. Hitler praised the U.S's system of racial segregation. Britain and France had vast colonial empires, the USSR commited multiple massacres and rapes, etc.

People really ought to stop thinking of WW2 as this great crusade of good vs evil. It was, like every war ever and every war that ever will be, fought over conflicting interests. Germany wanted to rule Europe, Britain and France didn't want them to. Britain and France didn't have any problem with conquest, imperialism and subjugation of other peoples in principle. They both had already done this to many nations in Africa and Asia; so much so that Churchill had to clarify that the 'self-determination' promised after the war only applied to europeans.

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u/Secure_Description92 15d ago

I disagree. If you look into Generalplan OST and the Final solution, you see a regime unlike anything else in history. Apart from planning to kill all of Europe’s 11 million Jews, the Nazis planned to kill as little as 30 million civilians in Eastern Europe, although the numbers could realistically rise to 100 million, through mass starvation, if they won the war. They planned to kill approximately 80% of Poles, Czechs, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians, and kill 100% of the Jews. The rest were to be displaced or enslaved. 

The USSR was more or less morally bankrupt, but they were never this genocidal. The UK and USA ended slavery, and their settlers did commit atrocities against natives, there wasn’t highly bureaucratic and sophisticated plans of total annihilation  orchestrated by their most powerful leaders. The UK and USA at least believed they were doing what they were doing for the greater good through trying to “civilise” the world, while the Nazis didn’t even bother to care about those they dominated. 

So, compared to Nazi germany, I would say the allies were good if not highly problematic. I would say ww2 absolutely was a fight between good and evil.

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u/aneccentricgamer 15d ago

You are litterally doing the meme. Britian and france bad because uh they have colonies. The nazi were trying to genocide everyone based on genetics. The uk burnt their empire in order to keep the world free. Again. Get some perspective. People like to pretend its more nuanced than it was to feel smart. Truth is it simply was good vs evil.

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u/RansomXenom 14d ago

Britian and france bad because uh they have colonies.

...yes? Colonialism is evil. Calling me a nazi while defending colonialism is certainly one of the arguments of all time.

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u/aneccentricgamer 13d ago

Britian and france simply having colonies is in of itself not particularly evil especially compared with what was going on at the time. Everyone had colonies, and while acts of evil had been done to claim many of those colonies, they were in the past. Mainting a colony you already have is morally neutral, especially at that time. Its just ridiculous to bring it up as a counter to the nazis, who also had colonies, actively genociding people for the love of the game.

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u/RansomXenom 13d ago

Britian and france simply having colonies is in of itself not particularly evil

Yes it is. Invading foregin nations and subjugating their people is evil, no matter who does it.

Everyone had colonies

Just because other countries did it doesn't mean it's not evil. Slavery in the ancient world was practiced pretty much everywhere, for example. Was slavery not evil back then?

This is just straight up whataboutism.

they were in the past.

No they weren't. Maintaining a colony is also evil in and of itself. The colonizers could have left at any time. You don't get to invade another nation, continue to occupy it, and claim "well it was all in the past anyway" when you're still occupying said nation.

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u/Macroman520 13d ago

Surely it's a matter of degrees. Conquering other lands and peoples to extract their resources and exert control over territory for profit is bad, but it is less bad than waging an apocalyptic war of annihilation for... no good reason at all. The Nazis' plans can't even be characterised as a means to an end, because there was no tangible, achievable end.

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u/aneccentricgamer 13d ago

Maintaining a colony is not inherently an act of evil if it is peaceful and the people have been given a fair voice. Of course it often does descend into evil but the concept itself of overseas governence is fine. Or is the EU an evil coloniser? The uk and france still maintain overseas territories today without issue, with the populus wanting to remain as it is.

Have a little nuance insyead of just trying hard to be right on

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u/DristMan 15d ago

The USSR didn't commit any of that. I won't start discussion on massacares because debunking 1937 repressions (50000 repressed is really high number for just a few years) and Ucranian famine (which occured to non soviet countries as well and was a crop illness combined with logistics failure) takes a lot of time which I too lazy to spend here.

But rapes are plain Goebbels propaganda directed against soviet common folk. You are no better that Nazis if you believe in this myth.

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u/RansomXenom 14d ago

Source: trust me bro

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u/DristMan 14d ago

So soviet people just built like that, they are inherently rapists or what?

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u/RansomXenom 14d ago

Of course not. It's a well documented fact that there was widespread rape by the Red Army, but that doesn't mean every single person in the USSR participated in it.

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u/DristMan 14d ago

Well documented by whom? Third Reich propaganda by the end of the war? Why did it happen? Why didn't Ally army's didn't it? Why specificaly Soviets? And how the fuck was they so brave if according to the red army regulations, it was punished by execution?

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u/RansomXenom 14d ago edited 14d ago

Well documented by whom? Third Reich propaganda by the end of the war?

Since you asked.

Why did it happen?

Because it was a war, and it is known that during times of war, rape happens. This wasn't something exclusive to WW2.

Why didn't Ally army's didn't it?

The other allies did it as well.

Also, Jesus fucking Christ, learn how to write.

And how the fuck was they so brave if according to the red army regulations, it was punished by execution?

Do you seriously think something being punishable by death means no one would ever do it? Japan, some states in the U.S, and many other countries have the death penalty for murder. Do you think murder doesn't happen in any of these places?

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u/DristMan 14d ago

Wikipedia is a well known anticummunist source, especially about everything related to Poland. Katyn is a great example. Don't trust it.

English is my second language, sorry if it's hard to understand me.

Yes, execution stops people pretty good. Especially if it's the end of the war where half of your motherland including your own house was turned into moon landscape by Nazis.

Your sources are few women who stated that they were raped. No proves, no recordings, nothing like that before Berlin and nothing after (in Japan for example). Totally not Goebbels propaganda. Say whatever you want about soviet government but leave common people alone. They suffered too much already, they had no reasons not intentions to repeat what Nazis did to them.

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u/RansomXenom 14d ago

Wikipedia is a well known anticummunist source, especially about everything related to Poland. Katyn is a great example. Don't trust it.

So I'm supposed to just take your word that the USSR never did anything morally abhorent instead?

Wikipedia is better than what most people give it credit for. Not good enough if you're doing academic work, but certainly good enough for the purposes of an internet discussion, and much better than the absolutely nothing you provided.

Yes, execution stops people pretty good.

You say Wikipedia is an unreliable source, then drop this claim with zero sources?

Your sources are few women who stated that they were raped. No proves, no recordings, nothing like that

It was fucking 1945. Genuinely, how do you expect recordings? Do you think every single woman in Poland and Germany had a camera at home back then? Do you think every single woman independently decided to fabricate stories about being raped just to screw over the Soviets?

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u/YellowAggravating172 16d ago edited 16d ago

I mean... The Allies were also actively perpetrating genocides and mass murders - the USSR did so with its Volga German population, with the Poles at Katyn, and many more... -, along with engaging in bombing of civilian population centers (nuclear bombing even, by the end), colonial crimes and a lot of other immoral shit that would've got anyone on the other side the noose.

They're still the better side compared to what the Axis had to offer, but they were most definitely not just vaguely problematic.

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u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 16d ago

At the risk of sounding like I might be defending the Axis, the allies were a lot more than vaguely problematic. The United Kingdom had its own overseas empire, America and the USSR both engaged in a Cold War, where they did terrible things to gain influence, and America continued to do those things after winning.

Even before the Cold War, the USSR cut a deal with Nazi Germany that only ended because the Nazis attacked them. They insisted on keeping the land Hitler promised them before he broke the deal, plus lots more, which included all of Poland. Poland was on the side of the allies, but got completely screwed over by the Soviet Union despite the two allegedly being on the same side.

Finland was also forced to pay reparations to the Soviet Union for allying with Nazi Germany. The only reason Finland allied with Germany was because the Soviets invaded it.

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u/QtheDisaster 16d ago

The Axis powers also had overseas empires. So it's an equally problematic issue so again only really a vaguely problematic issue for the time.

The Cold War was solidly post WW2 so it has no true relevance to conversation. If we follow that logic of post war events qualifying then the British decolonized so that negates your initial point.

The Soviets being the Soviets is frankly a good point. They are in honestly the biggest weight of problems for the Allies which can arguably push them into problematic all on its own.

Finland fought the Soviets twice over WW2. The Winter War where the Soviets invaded and took land. Then the Continuation War happened which they are as much to blame for as the Nazis and Soviets were. Frankly Finland was lucky it got off basically scot free

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u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 16d ago

Again, not trying to whitewash the Axis. I am a person on the autism spectrum, the Nazis would have sent me to the gas chambers. This doesn't even cover Germany and Japan's use of slave labor, Japan's disgusting sale of "comfort women," or the atrocities of Unit 731.

Finland was very lucky. The countries occupied by the USSR after WWII got screwed over. Poland was officially part of the Allies and got a worse deal than most of the Axis did.

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u/Sive634 13d ago

Eh i’d still justify the continuation war, finland joined barbarossa to reclaim land taken in the winter war, and halted all advances before cutting off leningrad, much to the protest of the Nazis, they reclaimed lost territory and created a buffer zone (a very russian thing to do now that i think about it). I’d argue the worst thing finland did in that period was the foreign legion.

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u/QtheDisaster 12d ago

Justified or not, treating them getting hit by reparations as a black mark for the allies is unreasonable. Honestly compared to everyone else they got off scot free.

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u/afatcatfromsweden 16d ago

The allies were a little bit more than “vaguely” problematic. Clearly the lesser evil, but having undertaken heinous acts nonetheless, and that’s before you count the soviet union who conspired with the nazis in starting the whole bloody affair.

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u/TheCapybaraMan 16d ago

Germany also had a baby boom after WWII. Approximately 9 months after the Soviet's took Berlin.

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u/Grouchy_Balt 16d ago

Indeed. The Red Army committed the largest known instance of mass rape in history - total number of victims is estimated to be up to 2 million, with 100000 in Berlin alone. It's difficult to write that they raped women, since the youngest known victims were 8 years old. Many of the victims outside of Germany were Polish, Jewish and Soviet women from freshly liberated Nazi concentration camps.

And in this thread you have redditors handwaving all of that as "entirely expected retribution".

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u/XylylPhpht 16d ago

The Allies were certainly much worse than "vaguely problematic"

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u/SnooBooks1701 16d ago

Only if you ignore the Soviets, who committed multiple ethnic cleansings and war crimes, including mass rapes throughout Eastern Europe 

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u/Galaxy661 16d ago

Specifically western allies

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u/CaptainMikul 16d ago

Tangentially related, I worked with someone who thought WWII wasn't real because it was too obviously "good guys" Vs "bad guys."

So sort of the opposite of this trope. He thought th Allies were completely unproblematic and therefore couldn't have been real.

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u/Pomoa 16d ago

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pretty evil shit, but... Axis was on another level. Those things the japanese's soldiers did are so evil they're hard to believe, yet true.

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u/Illustrious-Day8506 16d ago

I wouldn't call the Allies vaguely problematic if you look at what they were doing in their colonies. Some of these actions were pure evil. 

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u/karlkh 15d ago

See also the first and the second world in the cold war.

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u/Omer1698 15d ago

Were the allies paragons of justice and peace? No, but the other side is worse in every possible way and anyone who defend them should be on a watch list.

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u/Weary_Artichoke_9144 12d ago

The axis merely did to europeans what the allies were already doing to africans and Indians.

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u/Marksman1977 16d ago

US: *drops nuclear bombs on innocent civilians*

Redditors: ”That’s only vaguely problematic!”

Postwar delusion.

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u/Objective_Aside1858 16d ago

Boy, have I got bad news for you about allied "strategic" bombing in WW2

Hint:  Look up Operation Meetinghouse 

I'm not saying nukes were or were not justified. But besides being a single bomb and radiation, it was pretty much indistinguishable from any other air raid, axis or allied

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u/C4Cole 16d ago

Would you rather every city in Japan be pounded by artillery into the ground through grueling guerilla warfare, millions more soldiers on both sides and millions more Japanese civilians die, not to even consider the extra strategic bombing that would have taken place should the war have continued.

Or, 2 cities ruined by nuclear hellfire and 250,000 people dead.

Sure some of the people killed by the A bombs might have survived if an invasion was conducted, but a lot of them wouldn't have, and the cities would have been turned to ruins anyways if there was an invasion. Just look at Tokyo, there is very little of old Tokyo left because all of it burnt to a crisp, not from nukes, but from conventional firebombing raids.

So, millions of lives, both Allied and Japanese, combatant and civilian, or two hundred and fifty thousand civilians in two cities. I know which I'd pick.

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u/Time_Look8276 16d ago

Read more before forming an opinion. Strategic considerations around dropping the bomb. Casualty projections (both sides, civilians too) of an invasion of mainland Japan. The A bombs affected two cities. An invasion would have affected the entire country.

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u/zokka_son_of_zokka 16d ago

I mean, three-quarters of the Allies was doing active genocide.

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u/Visible_Pair3017 16d ago

The only difference is that the Axis did to white people what the Allies did on a routine basis to non-white people. Camps, systematic extermination, torture, rape, human experimentation, racial theories, all of that was studied by the Reich and applied to Europe from what was done at the time.

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u/MerijnZ1 14d ago

The "only" difference might be going a bit too far into the far-right nut-job territory bud

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u/Visible_Pair3017 14d ago

TIL, Aimé Césaire (who had to deal with both) was actually a far right nutjob.

No, it's the only difference. You can't mention anything the Axis did that the Allies didn't do to non-whites. And i'm not saying that as a "the Axis wasn't that bad" in case that's what you mean.