Lets look at the American atrocities on Japan

syllee,

Written like someone who proudly attended community college and majored in something especially academically "challenging," like urban studies. (The learned Rev. Al Sharpton's degree at CCNY, I believe).

When I graduated from college, I worked for a man, who had served as a sergeant in General Patton's Third Army during WW II. I remember him telling me of how outraged he and his fellow G.I.s were after learning of how the SS had slaughtered American soldiers, who had surrendered to the Germans at Malmedy. (Maybe you learned ALL about that specific war crime after seeing Henry Fonda and James MacArthur in the film, "The Battle of the Bulge"?)

As a result, this man related that the Americans were SO "ticked-off," that whenever they took German prisoners, they would make the German sit on the hood of the jeep they were riding in, and make the German sit there with his hands clasped together behind his head.

Now, the Americans would tell the German that if he put his hands down on the hood of the jeep to steady himself as they drove over the rough terrain, they would automatically assume that he was trying to escape and shoot him in the back of the head, which they actually did to many of their German prisoners, particularly the hated members of the SS.

I could go on about how my own late father also saw many atrocities committed by the Germans while he was a first lieutenant in the infantry, serving with the famed Texas 36th Division in Tunisia (at the Kasserine Pass), Algeria, Italy (at the first Allied landing of Nazi-occupied Europe on the beach at Salerno, and at the long and bloody taking of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino), France, and Germany (Oberhoffen, where he told me he saw more dead Germans and Americans than he had seen previously in North Africa, Italy and France).

Yet, the incident that he told that he would never forget was when his regiment was sent in to liberate and evacuate the surviving prisoners at Landsberg Prison. Now, Landsberg Prison was also the penal institution where the maniacal Adolf Hitler had been imprisoned years before the war and had penned his "opus," entitled "Mein Kampf."

By the time my father's regiment had reached Landsberg Prison, the Germans had been using the former state prison as a concentration camp, for Jews, intellectuals, gypsies, homosexuals, and other segments of the German population whom the Nazis considered "undesirable."

I will never forget my father relating how unbelievably horrible it was to see the bodies of so many people, whose corpses had been tossed into open freight cars like garbage after having been either being shot or lynched, and just decaying and rotting in the hot sun. "I couldn't eat for a week after witnessing that Hell," my father told me years later.

Unfortunately, several weeks after witnessing that horrific scene at Landsberg Prison, my father was severely wounded by a German artillery shell fragment, which left him 60% disabled, with the loss of one of his lungs, and would ultimately shorten his life greatly. (Oh yeah, my dad was also awarded two Bronze Stars for his bravery in action during the fighting in the E.T.O.)

Gee, I don't know, but in addition to studying about World War II in high school and in undergraduate school, reading so many excellent books on the subject, and having been privileged to discuss the war with World War II veterans like my late father, my four uncles (who served as soldiers and sailors battling the equally evil Japanese in the Pacific), and many older men I know who had served during that all-too-bloody war, I think I have a "slightly" better understanding, appreciation, and knowledge of that conflict than an apparently presumptuous popinjay like you.


Attillio

lexyladyjax,

In the book "Enola Gay" (which was the name of the Hiroshima-bound B-29 bomber piloted by Col. Paul Tibbetts and also Col. Tibbetts' mother's maiden name), the author points out that Col. Tibbett never had any doubts about flying the Enola Gay over Hiroshima on that bombing mission.

In fact, after visiting Japan after the surrender in 1945, Col. Tibbett was even more convinced that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroahima and Nagasaki were necessary to force the Japanese to quit the war. Col. Tibbett witnessed many of the gun emplacements and booby traps that the Japanese had prepared for when the Allied soldiers hit the beaches of Japan.

My own late uncle, who was a sailor in the US Navy during World War II, related to me how he and thousands of other American sailors, soldiers and marines walked through the devastated streets of Hiroshima only weeks after the city had been leveled. And those men were thankful that President Truman had made the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. In fact, the late Margaret Truman once related, that in the years following the end of World War II, many American veterans would come up to her to thank her late father for deciding to authorize the two atomic bombings, and, thereby, probably saving their lives.

It is unfortunate that my father never had the great pleasure (no doubt) of making your acquaintance at Festung Landsberg back in 1945, you diminutive guttersnipe.