YouBet said:

---

outofstateaggie said:

---

"With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa" is one the best books I've ever read. Incredible battlefield memoir. Definitely not the romanticized portrayal of World War II. The Pacific was an absolute brutal meat grinder.

---

Finishing up Supernova in the East which is Dan Carlin's podcast focused on the Japanese in WWII and he mentions this memoir as the best and most brutal one he's ever read.

It's really interesting that we don't really teach the Pacific War like we do the European campaign. Probably for obvious reasons. It was stunningly horrific and makes the European campaign look quaint in comparison.

---

The Pacific was more like the Eastern Front of WWII than the Western Front. Like the Eastern Front, it was an ethnic war with two sides who absolutely hated each other, which dramatically increased the brutality involved.

YouBet said:

---

Agree with all of that. Fighting the Japanese must have been like fighting radical Islam that was centralized and organized. Utterly irrational and suicidal culture and populace. The more you learn about it the more you realize why we used nukes.

The Japanese would murder and suicide their own families instead of surrendering to US soldiers. Just wild *****

It was also surprising to learn that the size of the naval forces we amassed to start attacking the home islands and Japan was larger than D Day. Most people don't know that.

---

People always forget the Americans at the time HATED the Japanese. The idea that it was only the Japanese that did brutal things or were irrational on the battlefield is false. We returned that brutality in equal force with numerous war crimes of our own.

Wars where actual hatred are involved are much much worse. Rules of engagement and decorum go out of the window and it becomes a war where the goal is to kill all of the enemy, soldier or not. Make no mistake about it, we would have genocided the Japanese if that was the only option to end the war.

This hatred ran very deep, which is why many from that generation refused to buy anything Japanese for much of the rest of their lives.

I'm not sure people can understand the hatred. My great uncle was killed by the Germans and his sister my grandmother honored him we heard about him as kids she never had a bad word to say about the Germans Grandfather fought the Germans as well and nothing. But they both carried a hatred of the Japanese to the grave. As a kid I never understood it, why the hatred for one enemy and not for the one we fought and died. These were good polite southern folks but you weren't welcome to drive a Japanese car to their house.

Saw a few seconds of a WWII veteran interview on Facebook Reels or some other short video site. The Pacific War veteran says that wounded Japanese soldiers would play dead, then try to kill Americans when they came close to search or move the bodies.

So his unit would designate one guy to go around the battlefield and shoot every Japanese one more time, in the head.

Quote:

---

It's an interesting conversation and one I've had many times. What I think it boils down to, IMO, of course, is that the Euro campaign for was always a largely regimented and even formulaic war of good vs evil. Especially afterwards once the Nazis were finally defeated and able to be fully analyzed. We could hold our heads high and use our good guy methods (bombing campaigns notwithstanding) to ultimately triumph. It's the American Way ^TM.

---

Very well thought out answer.

But I wonder if there is one other factor. The Press. I wonder how many reporters volunteered to go to Jolly Old England and sit in pubs with lonely British women, vs. how many volunteered to go to Guadalcanal or other South Pacific hell holes.

And of course, the logistics of getting film and dispatches from the South Pacific vs. England