The good nazi nakes Japan take notice

[Taro Toporific]

China Hails a Good Nazi and Makes Japan Take Notice
New York Times, by Howard French, March 15, 2006
NANJING, China ---From the outside it does not look like much: the shell of a two-story brick building with scaffolding running up its sides and, on a drizzly winter day, a pair of construction workers kicking around in a courtyard littered with building materials.
But 69 years ago the courtyard was filled with hundreds of Chinese seeking refuge from Japanese troops who were rampaging through the city....
....The property was the home of John Rabe, a Nazi Party member and employee of Siemens. In addition to sheltering people in his own compound, Mr. Rabe led a score of other foreigners in the city to form an international safety zone that shielded more than 200,000 Chinese from the Japanese.
Despite his heroism, Rabe was for decades all but forgotten here. Even the location of his house, today all but swallowed up by the sprawling campus of Nanjing University, was unknown....more...

[amdg]

[Socratesabroad]

With regard to preservation of historical sites in China, Rabe shouldn't feel bad. Here in Tianjin, schools attended and housing used by CP luminary Zhou Enlai were only recently preserved.

The saddest sight is pell-mell 'renovation,' i.e. destruction, of older buildings - Tianjin used to have a sizeable foreign population, as reflected in a variety of Russian and European architectural styles - to be replaced by slick concrete and granite structures.

As for the WWII issue, Chinese and Japanese youth both have a case of selective historical amnesia. The Japanese are befuddled by anti-Japanese animosity since their troops only killed Chinese troops and the Chinese are convinced that they alone threw out the Japanese devils before beginning a glorious march to independence thanks to the CCP .

Luckily, the older generation isn't as easily swayed. I've written quite a bit about this, but many of the older generation here in China remember that the Cultural Revolution wasn't as marvelous as the history books portray it to be.

[cstaylor]

[Greji]

You'll hear all sorts of crazy stuff sometimes. Killing civilians is a big part of warfare, since they are the means for production.

It is exactly that! "Crazy stuff". No civilized country targets civilians, but in the attacks on factories, production centers of military goods, or enemy strongholds, that are in or near civil centers, there are going to be citizens collaterally killed. Hence the infamous word Collateral Damage. This is an unfortunate fact of war. Probably the greatest example of this is the so called "Tokyo fire bombings", which were attacks primarily aimed at war material and munition factories in the Tokyo and Kawasaki areas. The collateral fires from these killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Yet it was the fires from the bombs in the wood and rice paper home areas that created the major fire storms that devasted large parts of Tokyo as if, unfortunately, they had been the target.

There is no way you can fit the mass killing of civilians by the militaries of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan into the collateral area in any way shape or form. Perhaps they believed this source of production theory, but I doubt it. It was more the annihilation of what was considered inferior beings for whatever reasons they used to "justify" it.

The younger generation of Japan at the least, has little to no knowledge of the war, to include the attrocities. Obviously, education comes in here and although the right wing gets credit for keeping this portion of history out of text books, I wonder if this is altogether the facts of the issue. Most older Japanese are aware and pretty much ashamed of this part of their history and would rather not relate it onward for that reason. Yet, as J-educators tend to be more liberal than their countrymen in the soundtrucks, you would think they would want to do more to see this history exposed. However, each time the new textbooks come out, you again find only a few educators or school groups in opposition and where they are usually from the younger generation itself, most of the older educators who obviously are aware of history tend to shy away from taking a side. The result is we tend only to hear from the right leaners in boring chants about how Japan is being picked on.

These leaves the young J-generation who are rightfully proud of their country and its economic developement, without a clue as to why their counterpart young Chinese are incinerating everthing and anything that resembles Japan, or a J-product during their demos.
Just my two sen worth!

[blackcat]

the young japanese are totally ignorant about this..not thier fault because thats what they have been TOLD and told is the way it is in Japan...no questioning of why,,how,,etc. I taught at one ofthe "best high schools" in my region and none of the students knew where Manilla was!! if they didnt learn about it in Geography then it should have rung a bell in history?
Rape of Manilla? Bataan death march?
pigs arse they will never learn that, the old war criminals that got into power after WWII would never let the truth be known...too shameful.

When Rabes dairy was found a Japanese reporter for one of the major newspapers wanted the story front page...suddenly he was told to to a story OS...a rare situation for him...while he was overseas the paper ran his story.....page 10 or thereabouts!!

never underestimate the JAPANESE DENIAL SYNDROME

they simply CANNOT accept any negatives about themselves.

[Ptyyxx]

Yet it was the fires from the bombs in the wood and rice paper home areas that created the major fire storms that devasted large parts of Tokyo as if, unfortunately, they had been the target.

I hope you doesn't believe that the people that planned those bombings were not aware of this. Those were FIRE bombs for a reason. Civilians might not have been the primary target but they were part of the objective.
I don't think it was "unfortunate" at the time for the american forces to have burned to the ground 16 square miles (41 km²) of the japanese capital city.

[Greji]

I hope you doesn't believe that the people that planned those bombings were not aware of this. Those were FIRE bombs for a reason. Civilians might not have been the primary target but they were part of the objective.
I don't think it was "unfortunate" at the time for the american forces to have burned to the ground 16 square miles (41 km2) of the japanese capital city.

They were required to and did drop leaflets in advance of the "block" bombings warning civilians and non-combants to vacate the areas targeted or adjaecent thereto. Block bombing was the actual term and fire bombing came out coined in the press from the obvious fire and damage. You also have to consider that you are dealing with a time when one bomb in fifty hit its target. I obviously wasn't around for the planning of those missions, but I do know from somewhat later times, there is no where in US Air Force mission planning doctrine for large scale bombing missions i.e. ARC light in Vietnam, or even in minor local sorties, where civilians are considered part of the objectives and whoa be you if you broach the subject in anyway offensively.

But, I belive you are around the figure with the 16 square miles, although I think the figure given in Comand and Staff College was over 20 (I'm to lazy to look for it in notes). Here is a net map of the area involved in Tokyo.

Another thing that came in to play besides bombing inaccuracy even with the so called "miracle" bombsights shown in all the movies, was the fact they used a new geletan-like substance in the M-69 containers for the incindary devices on March the 10th. You guessed it. The fore-runner of nepalm as we know and love it today. The reaction of these devices in a tactical strike was totally unknown, so this, coupled with inaccuracy led more to the vast fires and some 80,000 killed, than if it could have actually been planned. Given the war fever at the time, this huge "collateral" damage was glossed right over. Gen. Curtis LeMay and his people just took it forward in the war effort as "right as planned", as if they knew it would be that way all along.

It might give you some more food for thought is that one of the one of the people in on the planning for these missions and also, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a certain Robert S. McNamara (where have we heard that name before).

In short, making a long post longer. I do not believe they intentially aimed at civilians, but having said that, I have to add that I don't believe many tears were shed outside of Japan, for the unfortunate victims who got in the way.

[cstaylor]

It is exactly that! "Crazy stuff". No civilized country targets civilians

There's nothing civil about war. Maybe at the opening of a conflict do governments follow peace-time treaties, but the gloves come off when they're backed against a wall.

I never understood the mental separation of combatants and non-combatants, although "pacifying" a country's civilian population during occupation is guaranteed to forment civil unrest. Some examples: German-occupied Belgium during WW1, Japanese occupation of China during the Sino-Japanese conflict, and the American occupation of Iraq.