Could Emperor Hirohito Have Prevented His Country from Entering World War II?

[nightbird47]

Originally Posted by OpanaPointer

The Emperor was, insofar as I've seen from the records, indispensable in both making the Big Six agree to surrender and making the troops actually lay down their arms. No lesser authority could have prevent a guerrilla war in Japan after the Allies arrived. That would have been costly for Japan. As for being a war criminal, I can make a case either way, depending on which sources I cite.

And a short while later, the communists became the number one bad guy, and we needed Japan as a cooperative aly. Just as there are/were as they are dead by now 'good' germans who were overlooked in condemning the holocaust, since we had the Russian menace to deal with now. The Japanese also gained in the Nuremberg trials as they were last, all the German trials first, and by then the public was ready for something else, and these men looked and sounded foreign, those Japanese convicted were not by the same degree as the Germans. Sometimes it was simply because the Japanese covered their tracks and no victums were left to testify. Sometimes it became a political contengency.

If the course it was bound to take without these considerations was followed, this would be a different world.

[509]

Originally Posted by OpanaPointer

The 68% came from here: Index of /pha/Gallup

Thanks for the link...I will have to explore that.

I suspect that people at a gut level really do know what is going on. The higher up you are in the food chain, the less the ability to understand how things really work.

Both my parents were in Germany during WWII as slave laborers. Thanks to the Soviet Revolution they never spent a day in a classroom. They had very hard time writing and reading in any language.

In the early 1940's they were living in Germany, having ONLY lived under Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler. You can imagine the information they were fed on a daily basis from those three leaders.

I asked my mother one time how she felt when she watched US Air Force planes dropping bombs around her at night. Her reply was that "the US planes represented my only hope for the future so I was scared and hopeful at the same time".

My follow up question....was "how did you know that America was your hope". And her reply was "everybody knew".

So my question is how you get a 19 year girl from "Belorus" KNOWING that America was her only hope, when all she heard was from Stalin and Hitler since her birth.

[southwest88]

Yah, IJN & IJA were excellent forces @ the beginning of WWII. Officers were highly trained, & survivors of their service academies - which had a high washout rate (& failures - in the IJN, @ least - meant death, usually in training exercises). IJN was excellent in night fighting (without radar), gunnery, ship handling in general. They also had excellent maps & depth soundings, good intel on their targets (very long-term planning), routes, the enemies' order of battle.


Japan was weak on infrastructure, logistics, first-aid/clinic/hospital care for sick/injured/wounded, they never had enough cargo ships (no glamour in that, apparently). They didn't have the population nor natural resource base for a long war, & so they convinced themselves that they would knock the US out of the war quickly, in a decisive long-range gunship battle.


Shipboard damage control & fire fighting were apparently deemed to be dangers to morale. & so they didn't train hard, nor was initiative a value in IJN damage control & fire fighting. I don't know that IJN ever learned to purge avgas lines before an attack on their carriers.


Neither IJN nor IJA rotated veterans home to train the next cohort, TMK. & they lost pilots & aircraft carrier aircrew in heaps, & never made good their losses in pilots/crew. The same was true of their army veterans - & pilots & aircrew there, too. Japan couldn't develop radar, they looked @ nuclear weapons but thought they wouldn't pay off in results, & the Japanese economy/resources/high-energy physics talent couldn't be spared for the development work.