75 Year Anniversary of the Bombing of Dresden, justified or not?

[dylanredefined]

all's fair in love and

 

[Doodler]

Quite. As to Japan, when I was a boy I lived next to a Burma railway survivor. Japan treated POWs like animals, indeed, worse that animals. The people on the railway worked until starvation and exhaustion killed them.

One of my uncles was a POW in a Japanese camp. In the 1970s my dad bought a Datsun and this caused a huge falling-out within our family. Being a kid I was shielded from all the details at the time. I learned later that my uncle had nightmares during which he would cry out almost up to the end of his life.

The war was a factor for at least some car buyers' choices for a long time.

 

[Doodler]

Video (c. 24 mins long) from historian Mark Felton on the background to the Japanese surrender and a mooted third A-bomb attack.




ETA: Now that Felton has emerged from his mortgage-paying phase of making videos aimed at World of Tanks enthusiasts, his stuff's pretty good imo. Tiny budgets can make for documentaries with more information than lavishly-funded ones of the 'Can a duck swim? To find out I've come to Tahiti' variety.

 

[Doodler]

Something of a racist lie has been propagated about Japan in order to justify the brutality - that they were fanatics (just look at the kamikaze pilots!) who would never surrender, who would blow themselves up rather than surrender. It was never true, and Japan had been seeking a way to surrender with terms for some time at the time of the A-bombs.

An interesting list can be compiled of non-German things admired by the Nazis: the fighting ability of Finnish soldiers, the British public school system, Turkish nationalism, the Hindu caste system, the demolition of Native American societies by Europeans.

Among those was the level of regimentation and obedience among the general Japanese population, for example see German Perspectives on Japanese Heroism during the Nazi Era by Gerhard Krebs.