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Originally Posted by atari 2600
True, as devoted through fear as the Nazis were to Hitler and the Third Reich, they had nothing in this department on the Japanese.
What many people do not know is that as a last-ditch effort in fending off bombing raids into Germany, Hitler, taking a page from the Japanese, formed an aerial suicide squad called the ELBA whose mission was to take their fighters and ram U.S. bomber planes. But it was much too little much too late to possibly have much effect. We had more planes, better pilots (most of their better pilots were already spent thanks to the RAF) and better technology. Nazi engineers developed the first jet fighters, but again, they were too little too late. Our tech included radar developed with British engineers and other advances that allowed fighter planes to engage at night as well. Many American troops didn't know the extent of what was going on in the death camps, but when they arrived in Germany, they were horrified. In most cases, the Americans forced the nearby townspeople and villagers around the death camps to clean up the atrocious messes of corpses not yet incinerated or buried, and rightfully so.
Now the Japanese were very ruthless in their determination to fight at any cost. Everyone knows about the Kamikaze attacks on U.S. warships, but few know that they had a reserve of 10,000 Kamikaze Zeroes that they were saving for when the attack on the Japanese mainland finally came. After seeing the indescribably inhumane effects of the Kamikaze raids in the Pacific, we weren't about to subject troops to the same sort of thing again. The A-bomb came along right around that same time and Truman decided to use two of them, as everyone knows, on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Further testament to the Japanese ruthlessness are the invention of the Ocha and their Bonzai ground tactics.
The Ocha was essentially a large missile that was dropped out of a Japanese bomber with a pilot in it. It was invented because Kamikaze Zeroes and other fighter planes had difficulty sinking larger warships like Destroyers and Aircraft Carriers. The tactic was extremely effective, but again, it was too little too late to ward off our invasion. As elucidated upon in the recent Ken Burns documentary series The War, Bonzai troops consisted of everyone that was available. The Japanese would send wave after wave of any warm bodies at American trenches to be slaughtered. Many were old men, and many had nothing for weapons besides stones or clubs. Whenever Americans would win battles and advance, the Japanese would round up all the women and children in the area and take them to an adjacent countryside to hide out. They would tell them not to ever talk to us and to kill themselves if they were ever captured. Again, as The War reveals, the straggling Japanese infantry would actually execute the women and children if their enclave of hiding was about to be discovered. Honestly, these tactics scared us shitless as we simply realized that "we were not like them...truly," at least in this peculiar and horrible psychological sense, and that overwhelming knowledge, coupled with the sheer insanity of the bravura the Japanese displayed with contemporary attacks on China, the (then) Soviet Union, and America with Pearl Harbor, I'm sure, played a large part in why atomic bombs were used on Japan.
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