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Nenonen posted:who other later famous people were members of the Hitler Jugend/Bund Deutcher Mädel?
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Dec 3, 2012 20:30
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The de-nazification of Germany post ww2 was a complicated and fraught business. Do you err on the side of thinking anyone who had anything to do with the nazi regime should be punished? Or the the more pragmatic approach that you still need to keep the country functioning. Finding problems with people being in the hitler youth seems a bit excessive. Interestingly enough, out of all the professional groups ( including navy, airforce and army officers ) doctors seemed to be the most enthusiastic nazi party members.
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Dec 3, 2012 21:57
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I don't see how you can blame people for being in the Hitler youth seeing how it was mandatory.
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Dec 3, 2012 22:28
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General China posted:Finding problems with people being in the hitler youth seems a bit excessive. I don't see that as a problem, rather it can be interesting to study. For instance, Günter Grass came out not many years ago about his experience as an SS man. This isn't shocking at all by itself, but that he kept this secret for so long while criticizing Germans in general for supporting the Nazi regime caused a bit of a scandal. Whatever his WW2 experience was, it had a tremendous effect on his literary career. I don't know if Grass himself participated in HJ activities. But it'd be interesting to know how known HJ/BDM members later felt about it. Or if it's something that Germans talk about at all. But it's also interesting because the NSDAP youth organizations had very specific purposes - to raise obedient and healthy national socialists. How well did they manage that? Angela Merkel for instance was a member of the DDR socialist youth organization, like most East German children. She grew up to be Angela Merkel, so no points for East German indoctrination. Lord Tywin posted:I don't see how you can blame people for being in the Hitler youth seeing how it was mandatory. I'm actually blaming the Hitler Jugend for the holocaust. Those monsters.
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Dec 3, 2012 22:42
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DasReich posted:So how did the Norden stack up by the standards of the times? I know high altitude bombing was relatively inaccurate anyway, but did other nations do any better? Well, the British did night bombing so they didn't give one gently caress after say 1940, the Germans developed a pretty similar device, the Soviets weren't that in to strategic daylight bombing and neither were the Japanese. The US was really the only country that actively pursued mass daylight high altitude strategic bombing raids where a sight of that kind would be potentially useful. The Norden's reputation was pretty much propaganda, though. SABS (the British equivalent) accomplished the same thing but wasn't used due to strategic imperatives and the fact that it was handmade, and the Lotfernrohr 7 was pretty much an improved copy with some tech cribbed off the Norden. You could make the argument that the Norden was the best, or at least progenitor, but it's ignoring the fact that most other nations used night bombing, or medium bombers at typically lower altitudes, and the fact that US strategic bombing initiatives were rather inaccurate anyhow.
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Dec 4, 2012 01:09
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Nenonen posted:But it's also interesting because the NSDAP youth organizations had very specific purposes - to raise obedient and healthy national socialists. How well did they manage that? Angela Merkel for instance was a member of the DDR socialist youth organization, like most East German children. She grew up to be Angela Merkel, so no points for East German indoctrination.
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Dec 4, 2012 11:09
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:Her father was a theologian (who specifically moved to the East in the fear that religiosity would be stamped out by communism) Moving your family directly into a repressive state, in order to protect what you believe in? His balls must loving clank.
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Dec 4, 2012 13:43
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MrYenko posted:Moving your family directly into a repressive state, in order to protect what you believe in? His balls must loving clank. It's not clear, reading from the wiki, but it seems to me that her father had merely accepted a post in East Germany, they didn't actually become East Germans and were free to travel back and forth between East and West.
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Dec 4, 2012 14:17
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I know this thread kind of frowns on alternate history but would Operation Downfall really been as big of a blood bath as the article and number of Purple Hearts stamped in preparation would lead you to believe?
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Dec 4, 2012 17:49
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DarkCrawler posted:I know this thread kind of frowns on alternate history but would Operation Downfall really been as big of a blood bath as the article and number of Purple Hearts stamped in preparation would lead you to believe? Probably. It would have been pretty drat bad if the Japanese fought as hard as we thought they were going to, and especially if it came down to street-to-street fighting. It is, of course, hard to tell, exactly how effective all the ad hoc units the Japanese were throwing together would have been, and really the Japanese army was pretty thoroughly broken at that point, but it would have been an incredible waste of life. More than that, I shudder to think about what might have happened during the campaign. Frankly I would not be surprised if there had ended up being mass rape a la the fall of Berlin.
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Dec 4, 2012 18:13
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DarkCrawler posted:I know this thread kind of frowns on alternate history but would Operation Downfall really been as big of a blood bath as the article and number of Purple Hearts stamped in preparation would lead you to believe? Well the guys who came up with the numbers were pretty good at what they were doing so it certainly wouldn't surprise me, the first landing would have been loving horrifying seeing how the Japanese had thousands of kamikaze plans which they were going to use against any invasion of mainland Japan. That combined with the massive firebombing campaign and starvation on the Japanese islands would probably guarantee a casualty rate for Japan landing in the millions.
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Dec 4, 2012 18:44
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Chemicals, aka, "slime that town, major!"
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Dec 4, 2012 20:33
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LimburgLimbo posted:More than that, I shudder to think about what might have happened during the campaign. Frankly I would not be surprised if there had ended up being mass rape a la the fall of Berlin. By who?
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Dec 4, 2012 20:45
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Since this didn't get noticed in the Historical Questions I thought I'd ask it here:Professor Shark posted:I've been listening to the [fantastic] audiobook version of The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, which is a collection of biographies from various authors starting with William the Bastard to the House of Windsor.
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Dec 4, 2012 21:01
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SO ANGRY posted:By who? I'd assume Americans and other allied forces. Who knows if it would've happened, but when you're fighting a tenacious enemy for years on end followed by brutal street to street fighting combined with the knowledge of some atrocities(obviously nothing on the scale of what Germans did to the Soviets, but at this point it was known as our POWs were being treated by a lot of the Japanese) may make the soldiers go on a looting and raping frenzy. Or they might not, who knows, it's alternate history. It's not out of the realm though, it's not like Americans and Brits were the ultimate honorable soldiers while the Soviets entering Berlin were just rape machines. I think our bone to pick with Japan so to say was a hell of a lot larger for a variety of reasons than we had with Germany, so who knows if American soldiers after a battle for Tokyo would've done a repeat of what the Soviets did in Berlin.
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Dec 4, 2012 21:15
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Amused to Death posted:I'd assume Americans and other allied forces. Who knows if it would've happened, but when you're fighting a tenacious enemy for years on end followed by brutal street to street fighting combined with the knowledge of some atrocities(obviously nothing on the scale of what Germans did to the Soviets, but at this point it was known as our POWs were being treated by a lot of the Japanese) may make the soldiers go on a looting and raping frenzy. Or they might not, who knows, it's alternate history. It's not out of the realm though, it's not like Americans and Brits were the ultimate honorable soldiers while the Soviets entering Berlin were just rape machines. I think our bone to pick with Japan so to say was a hell of a lot larger for a variety of reasons than we had with Germany, so who knows if American soldiers after a battle for Tokyo would've done a repeat of what the Soviets did in Berlin. IIRC, there was a very high number of rapes by US troops after the battle of Okinawa, as well as during the occupation of Japan. So I can imagine the situation being even worse if the US had invaded the home islands.
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Dec 4, 2012 21:25
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Amused to Death posted:obviously nothing on the scale of what Germans did to the Soviets, Uh, China would like a word with you.
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Dec 4, 2012 21:29
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Blckdrgn posted:Uh, China would like a word with you. Yes, but we're not China and were talking about possible American/allied soldier actions in Japan. I don't in any way want to compare the experience of China and Chinese people during the war with Japan with that of America and Americans because they're vastly different down to how it could affect a soldier's psyche once in the streets of Tokyo or wherever.
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Dec 4, 2012 21:41
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LimburgLimbo posted:More than that, I shudder to think about what might have happened during the campaign. Frankly I would not be surprised if there had ended up being mass rape a la the fall of Berlin. One of the main reasons that the mass rapings and atrocities got so bad was because soviet troops were downright egged on to commit atrocities to the german civilians as they advanced into germany. There were even records or lists written up by the soviets about german atrocities, wich they in turn made sure to enact upon the german populace in kind. I doubt the american army would be capable of atrocities on that kind of scale, no matter how hard the fighting got.
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Dec 4, 2012 22:06
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And also, America hadn't suffered beyond Pearl Harbor. Soviet Union West of Urals was as close to being burnt down as a country can get...the need for revenge was a little larger on the Eastern Front.
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Dec 4, 2012 23:10
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Nimitz actually had an interesting plan for dealing with the thousands of kamikazes that the Japanese were planning to use against the invasion fleet. By that point the Japanese had changed their doctrine away from targeting Aircraft Carriers and other warships to instead target the lightly armored troop ships coming close to shore. Obviously this was a far better way to inflict massive amounts of casualties and ruin morale at home in the US. In response to this Nimitz planned to assemble a massive fleet of troop ships and with a skeleton crew fill them to the brim with every single anti-aircraft weapon possible. Some time prior to the actual invasion Nimitz would send this fleet out to bait the Japanese into launching all of their kamikazes on their one way mission thinking that this was the real invasion. It would have been interesting to see how effective it would have been.
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Dec 4, 2012 23:17
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Rookie pilots in lovely aircraft versus a floating anti air fortress? You should be able to figure this one out.
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Dec 4, 2012 23:33
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DarkCrawler posted:I know this thread kind of frowns on alternate history but would Operation Downfall really been as big of a blood bath as the article and number of Purple Hearts stamped in preparation would lead you to believe? Yes. The Japanese accurately guessed the landing zones and prepared their defenses accordingly. These were prepared taking lessons from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, forming a combination of extensive defense-in-depth with a number of strong reserve units for counterattacks. Just securing the beachheads properly would have been a horrible meatgrinder. And after that, you get to basically try and take the country town by town against both a military and a civilian population offering fanatical resistance. It'd have become a horror story the likes of the biggest battles on the eastern front. They also had something like five times as many planes for kamikaze attacks ready as allied planners assumed were there. Oh, and about a day or two after the landings, the beachheads would have been hit by a typhoon which no weatherman at the time had predicted. Talk about the literal kamikaze.
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Dec 4, 2012 23:36
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Not to mention that after the invasion and subsequent battles up the home islands, the country would probably resemble a blasted wasteland reminiscent of no mans land on the western front in WW1.
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Dec 4, 2012 23:43
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Let's also not forget the fun of transporting fuel, food, ammunition, replacement troops, supplies, for all those Allied soldiers across the Pacific, then across the Home Islands, to whereever people are fighting. Even if the US sent up relay stations and launched all the supplies from China, it'd still be absolutely daunting.
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Dec 4, 2012 23:51
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So, the Soviets steamroll in from the north then.
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Dec 5, 2012 00:27
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Retarded Pimp posted:So, the Soviets steamroll in from the north then. And *that* is certainly to be a pleasant thing for the civilian population.
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Dec 5, 2012 01:11
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Retarded Pimp posted:So, the Soviets steamroll in from the north then. That was pretty much a given. Wasn't the US gonna provide them with transports even?
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Dec 5, 2012 01:14
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Nimitz actually had an interesting plan for dealing with the thousands of kamikazes that the Japanese were planning to use against the invasion fleet. By that point the Japanese had changed their doctrine away from targeting Aircraft Carriers and other warships to instead target the lightly armored troop ships coming close to shore. Obviously this was a far better way to inflict massive amounts of casualties and ruin morale at home in the US. In response to this Nimitz planned to assemble a massive fleet of troop ships and with a skeleton crew fill them to the brim with every single anti-aircraft weapon possible. Some time prior to the actual invasion Nimitz would send this fleet out to bait the Japanese into launching all of their kamikazes on their one way mission thinking that this was the real invasion. It would have been interesting to see how effective it would have been. Well the problem I see with the plan is that the Japanese was planning to send several waves of attacks during several hours, so the moment they notice that the entire sea is a floating anti-air craft fortress they would just stop sending up planes.
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Dec 5, 2012 01:14
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DarkCrawler posted:I know this thread kind of frowns on alternate history but would Operation Downfall really been as big of a blood bath as the article and number of Purple Hearts stamped in preparation would lead you to believe? Bear in mind that all of the responses are assuming that the Japanese resist for a prolonged period of time, which isn't necessarily going to be the case. So if Downfall goes off like it was predicted, then there would have been a horrible bloodbath. But the predictions involved were made without any real knowledge of internal Japanese opinion. The US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that if the US had not used its nuclear weaponry, had not launched Downfall, and the USSR had not launched August Storm, Japan would have definitely surrendered by the end of the year and would probably have surrendered by the start of November. (p. 26) But they based this heavily on postwar interviews with Japanese commanders and officials. Would things have looked the same without the hindsight provided by August Storm and the nukes?
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Dec 5, 2012 03:29
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Effectronica posted:Bear in mind that all of the responses are assuming that the Japanese resist for a prolonged period of time, which isn't necessarily going to be the case. So if Downfall goes off like it was predicted, then there would have been a horrible bloodbath. But the predictions involved were made without any real knowledge of internal Japanese opinion. The US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that if the US had not used its nuclear weaponry, had not launched Downfall, and the USSR had not launched August Storm, Japan would have definitely surrendered by the end of the year and would probably have surrendered by the start of November. (p. 26) Putting aside the problems with the US strategic bombing survey, note the rate at which Japanese civilians were dying at that point in the war, multiply that by the time until the end of the year (or the start of November, if you like). Don't you think that in itself constitutes a horrible bloodbath?
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Dec 5, 2012 03:50
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Phanatic posted:Putting aside the problems with the US strategic bombing survey, note the rate at which Japanese civilians were dying at that point in the war, multiply that by the time until the end of the year (or the start of November, if you like). Don't you think that in itself constitutes a horrible bloodbath? Yes, but not in the context of "Would Downfall necessarily have killed as many people as it was estimated to", where "bloodbath" was used to refer to the death estimates for Downfall. After all, the post-surrender Japanese situation was also downright horrific, considering millions lived on the edge of malnutrition for years after the war. But we don't typically figure that into the moral cost of any of the involved actions, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Do you have some good articles on methodological problems with the USSBS? Apart from the basic issues of potential confirmation bias and hindsight-based interviewing, I mean.
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Dec 5, 2012 04:05
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It wouldn't be the first time that the Strategic Bombing Command vastly overestimated its effectiveness.
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Dec 5, 2012 04:57
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:It wouldn't be the first time that the Strategic Bombing Command vastly overestimated its effectiveness. True, but by this point in the war, B-29s could rampage all over the home islands with near impunity. And if the Soviets get involved, their militant disregard for human life spells "atrocities r us" until one side is totally destroyed. Surrender would have been the least destructive path for the Japanese, the question is not if but how soon the government caves and under which demands.
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Dec 5, 2012 05:28
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How war-crime filled was August Storm? The average guy in the soviet union probably didn't have anywhere near as much animosity towards the Japanese as they did the Germans. Barring the fact the soviets don't really have any amphibous capability, I don't see why an invasion by them would be any worse than any result of operation downfall.
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Dec 5, 2012 06:27
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I thought the centerpiece of Soviet military thinking was "build up enough artillery both tube and rocket to blot out the sun"? Maybe that won't work so well if you have to transport the artillery and ammo across oceans.
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Dec 5, 2012 06:41
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Throatwarbler posted:I thought the centerpiece of Soviet military thinking was "build up enough artillery both tube and rocket to blot out the sun"? Maybe that won't work so well if you have to transport the artillery and ammo across oceans. I thought that was the American way of war.
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Dec 5, 2012 07:14
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Veins McGee posted:I thought that was the American way of war. It's the smart way of war.
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Dec 5, 2012 07:40
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Beats "fanatical determination" 100% of the time.
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Dec 5, 2012 07:49
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LimburgLimbo posted:It is, of course, hard to tell, exactly how effective all the ad hoc units the Japanese were throwing together would have been, and really the Japanese army was pretty thoroughly broken at that point, but it would have been an incredible waste of life. It's worth noting that the army wasn't that broken. In fact, they had spent some significant resources shipping back forces from Manchuria and China in 1945. While the supply situation for the army wasn't good, they still had significant manpower.
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Dec 5, 2012 11:13
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