World War II, The anti-US version Options

When will Oberiko and his group stop?

He's won just about every argument he's had, and still keeps going.

He's got the article under constant semi-protection.
He's deleted the American picture from the lead montage, and now there are 2 Soviet, 2 Commonwealth, and 2 Japanese.
The Intro and infobox refuse to say that the war started in 1939, and the 1937/39 debate continues.
The Intro and infobox don't list the major combatants
The major commanders aren't listed anywhere in the article. (For fun, try to find "Eisenhower" or "Zhukov" anywhere on the page using Edit --> Find on this Page.)

The entire article is written in Oberiko's weird wiki-summary style where the proper names of events are hidden within Wiki-links. See the Normandy Invasion coverage, in its entirety:

In June, 1944, the Western Allies invaded northern France

And check my favorite passage:

The Soviets decided to make their stand at Stalingrad which was in the path of the advancing German armies and by mid-November the Germans had nearly taken Stalingrad in bitter street fighting when the Soviets began their second winter counter-offensive, starting with an encirclement of German forces at Stalingrad[94] and an assault on the Rzhev salient near Moscow, though the latter failed disastrously.[95

I've been following the article for years now, and seen people come and go but basically anyone who doesn't agree with Oberiko gets frustrated and leaves. He's not afraid to swing his administrator status and have people blocked who edit war with him or Parsecboy.

I could go through line by line and point out not only anti-Western and anti-American bias, but also outright errors. Take the first line of the Background section:

In the aftermath of World War I, the defeated German Empire signed the Treaty of Versailles.[7]

How does anyone not notice this for months and months? I've been watching it as an experiment to see if Wikipedians will ever get a clue, but, well, you see. Later in the background you'll find out that Germany's goal with Austria was to make it a "satellite state". Both of these statements are referenced too?

Insult to injury: the Holocaust is described as "the systematic purging of Jews in Europe". Well I'm pretty sure English isn't Oberiko's first language, but then why doesn't anyone help him? Oh right, because it's so obvious that the article is Owned that you'd be an idiot to try to help.

I know this breaks my rule of thumb not to help Wikipedia myself, but it is the number one search result and I'm feeling a bit of remorse just letting it fester, with it being around D-Day this week and having just recently talked to guy who was a B-29 pilot based in Saipan. I can't believe a generation of kids might be seeing their first encyclopedia article about WWII on Wikipedia.

This post has been edited by Emperor: Tue 10th June 2008, 9:40pm

This article does have a non-American POV, but I did not read anything that would be in my opinion be an error.

It was the Soviets who defeated the Germans. Before June, 1944 that vast majority of the allied forces fighting against Germany were from the Soviet Union and before the Allies opened up another front in Normandy in June, 1944 it was already certain that the Germans were going to be defeated.

This article does have a non-American POV, but I did not read anything that would be in my opinion be an error.

It was the Soviets who defeated the Germans. Before June, 1944 that vast majority of the allied forces fighting against Germany were from the Soviet Union and before the Allies opened up another front in Normandy in June, 1944 it was already certain that the Germans were going to be defeated.

Is it not equally obvious that had the war involved only Germany and Russia, leaving Germany access to world trade, that Russia would have been soundly defeated?

This post has been edited by Proabivouac: Tue 10th June 2008, 9:48pm

This article does have a non-American POV, but I did not read anything that would be in my opinion be an error.

It was the Soviets who defeated the Germans. Before June, 1944 that vast majority of the allied forces fighting against Germany were from the Soviet Union and before the Allies opened up another front in Normandy in June, 1944 it was already certain that the Germans were going to be defeated.

Is it not equally obvious that had the war involved only Germany and Russia, leaving Germany access to world trade, that Russia would have been soundly defeated?

The Russians get the credit for doing a large fraction of the fighting and most of the military dying in the European theater of WW II. But yes, if the Germans had captured Moscow and the oil fields, it would have been all over for the USSR, and with those oil fields, the Germans would have (temporarily) won the game of RISK.

Until we atom bombed them sometime after August 1945, that is. But that was a wild joker nobody really knew would or could be played, until the previous month.

As it was, the USSR came within a hair's breadth of losing it. And that's with massive Allied material aid, and a fair amount of Allied pin-down of German armies in Africa and Italy, which otherwise would have been decisive in the East. Much as in WW I, it really did take everybody to beat the Germans in "conventional" war.

Unlike WW I, however, if everybody had not been able to win conventionally, the US still would have atom bombed the Germans into glowing embers, no matter how well they'd done, sometime in 1946. The Germans just could not reach the US with anything damaging, and would not have been able to, for some years. They had no aircraft carriers, and their plans for ultralong-range bombers were going to carry what? Nothing of consequence can be carried 3000 miles, except a nuke. But with an atom bomb, you can reach a long way and touch someone. If we assume Germany had totally won in Europe (including against the UK), we could not have used the B-29 against them (no place to base it), and the bombs of 1945 couldn't be dropped from anything else. But smaller bombs dropable from carrier-launched B-25s would have been available within another year, and that would have been it, for Germany. It's well that it didn't end that way, but it could have. And certainly would have.

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: Tue 10th June 2008, 10:11pm

If we assume Germany had totally won in Europe (including against the UK), we could not have used the B-29 against them (no place to base it), and the bombs of 1945 couldn't be dropped from anything else. But smaller bombs dropable from carrier-launched B-25s would have been available within another year, and that would have been it, for Germany. It's well that it didn't end that way, but it could have. And certainly would have.

The fire-bombing of Dresden was pretty awful, and as close to atomic weaponry as conventional bombs can be. I drove through there right after the wall fell, and it was still pretty much of a mess, as were the highways which didn't see repairs the entire 50 year period.

Is it not equally obvious that had the war involved only Germany and Russia, leaving Germany access to world trade, that Russia would have been soundly defeated?

You mean if they were the only two countries in the world? Really, you cannot conjecture thus, or you have an entire new framework to add to ex post facto history. The US entry to the war was incredibly important. This was the frame of reference for the first 50 years after the war's end.

If there are anti-American, or US-minimization elements on those articles, my guess is that they are twenty-somethings. There seems to be a sort of generational Euro-youth backlash against the pro-American gratitude of their parents. I've seen that myriad in the past 10 or so years.

The fire-bombing of Dresden was pretty awful, and as close to atomic weaponry as conventional bombs can be.

The death toll was substantially greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The death toll was substantially greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yes. That doesn't get a lot of historical attention as it is somehow overshadowed by other events (Normandy, atom bombs, etc). I saw a documentary on it for the first time when living in Europe, and I thought I'd read tons on WW2 and seen tons of biopics when back in the US. I had no idea what the firebombing did there. Apparently anyone in some certain radius got fried. There was simply no place to hide. If you were in a bomb shelter underground, that wasn't safe. The only way to survive was to not be there, period.

When I drove through there immediately post wall-came-down, the town was so undeveloped that there was only one hotel for like 400 dollars a night, and really nothing else in terms of small hotels. And the city was still a mess. I've been back and it's totally different. The post-unification German government poured millions into reconstruction in the past 10 years.

Here, editors from ex-Soviet states still stick to the near 50-year USSR doctrine that the Pact never existed and was a Western fabrication.

Thats strange. I wonder what is the editor demographic of that ilk. I've never met an Eastern European who had that position. Maybe a Russian or two, but they were hooked in to the old appararichnik system by family (usually parents), and they were somehow obligated to speak so, and so arguing with them would have been almost rude. You know, those just-nod-and-smile-why-argue conversations.

This post has been edited by Disillusioned Lackey: Wed 11th June 2008, 7:10am

The death toll was substantially greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yes. That doesn't get a lot of historical attention as it is somehow overshadowed by other events (Normandy, atom bombs, etc). I saw a documentary on it for the first time when living in Europe, and I thought I'd read tons on WW2 and seen tons of biopics when back in the US. I had no idea what the firebombing did there. Apparently anyone in some certain radius got fried. There was simply no place to hide. If you were in a bomb shelter underground, that wasn't safe. The only way to survive was to not be there, period.

The most horrifying feature was that Dresden had no military significance. The bombing was carried out as a macabre experiment in psychological warfare, by the Strategic Bombing Survey (see this article.)

A major reason why there is little attention to this in the Allied countries is because it was a deliberate attack on a civilian population, and widespread recognition of that would sully the idea that our side was always fighting the good fight.

Yes, but by that metric, Hiroshima and Nagasaki should also be unmentionables. I had the impression that at that point, strategic attacks such as the three aforementioned were not politically-incorrect, given the vast desire to end the war. Or.... if that's true, then why were N and H ok, but D not?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not "OK," either. The emperor of Japan had already made a back-channel offer of surrender, under the same terms that were later agreed to on the USS Missouri. His overture was rebuffed, because a faction in the civilian leadership of the US was eager to try out atomic weapons, on civilian targets, in order to create a certain psychological effect on the rest of the world.

The most horrifying feature was that Dresden had no military significance. The bombing was carried out as a macabre experiment in psychological warfare, by the Strategic Bombing Survey (see this article.)

Sorry, I stopped reading that article when I saw this: "hit the nation's that might sponsor them". What motivates writers to put in a possessive apostrophe when they simply mean to construct a plural noun?

Not so fast on Dresden. It all depends on what you consider "military significance". That is disputed. I'm not trying to gloss over the human disgraces that took place at Allied hands during World War II -- quite the contrary. But it is also worth considering that some portion of the Dresden story is based on a heap of post-war mythology.

That being said, my undergraduate honors thesis on the broader subject is available for reading if you're ever in the stacks at Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. (U4.5 .K65) Maybe you can get it through inter-library loan. It's only "magna" cum laude quality, though. Don't knock yourself out.

The most horrifying feature was that Dresden had no military significance. The bombing was carried out as a macabre experiment in psychological warfare, by the Strategic Bombing Survey (see this article.)

Sorry, I stopped reading that article when I saw this: "hit the nation's that might sponsor them". What motivates writers to put in a possessive apostrophe when they simply mean to construct a plural noun?

I agree, that sucks. The original article is not available on the web -- the site to which I linked is someone's hasty transcription. I found a more grammatically acceptable transcription of the article on other sites that were unfortunately too wacky and conspirophilic for my liking.

I should also add that, based on the military and civilian death tolls on Okinawa (the Japanese lost 90,000 troops on an island only 460 square miles in area), the U.S. estimates for Japanese home island casualties (were the war brought to a conclusion through traditional amphibious invasion (Operation DOWNFALL)) numbered at least in the several millions. Certainly far fewer died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This is the common rationalization, and it is utter fraudulent, because no amphibious invasion was necessary. Japan was blockaded tighter than a drum -- all the allies had to do was wait as Japan ran out of supplies. However, waiting was also unnecessary, because the offer of surrender had already been made. Here is another article that is germane to the topic, this time with good grammar.

I should also add that, based on the military and civilian death tolls on Okinawa (the Japanese lost 90,000 troops on an island only 460 square miles in area), the U.S. estimates for Japanese home island casualties (were the war brought to a conclusion through traditional amphibious invasion (Operation DOWNFALL)) numbered at least in the several millions. Certainly far fewer died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This is the common rationalization, and it is utter fraudulent, because no amphibious invasion was necessary. Japan was blockaded tighter than a drum -- all the allies had to do was wait as Japan ran out of supplies. However, waiting was also unnecessary, because the offer of surrender had already been made. Here is another article that is germane to the topic, this time with good grammar.

There is a pretty good Wikipedia article on all this, BTW, called Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The short answer is that starving Japan to death was not very tennable while they held thousands of US prisoners (if you think they'd have starved, while feeding prisoners-- you have the wrong guys in mind). Japan also was in control of hundreds of thousands of what were essentially slave laborers in various terrritories they still controlled: were we to go around all these, one-by-one, and take them against suicidical defenses, while each of the others starved?

Perhaps atomic bombing per se was not necessary-- we could have simply continued to firebomb Japan to nothing, just as effectively. But the difference is being burned to death slowly or more quickly, or else just as fast. There are a few effects of radiation that are unique, but none of them are particularly more horrible than other effects of war. Being one of the the thousands of Chinese woman in Nanking who had a Japanese soldier thrust a bamboo stake into your vagina (a standard procedure) must have been unique also, if you survived it. But how do you compare one type of unique post-war injury with another?

One more thing needs to be noted. I happen to believe that since empathy is distance-dependent, that there's a difference between somebody who kills an infant child with a bomb, far away, at the press of a button, and a man who bayonets an infant like a pillow, up close and personal. The reason is that more human inhibitions need be overcome, in the second case (even hungry housecats and wolves will stand by while their young eat-- and not only their own personal young; calling the Japanese soldiers "animals" in such circumstances is an insult to many animals). The Japanese attrocities of WW II have far more of the second-case character, if you know anything of their treatment of the Chinese, and their live-human bio-warfare and munitions experiments, using prisoners (which outclassed in scale, and equaled in inhumanity, anything Mengele ever did). So what does one do in the face of that?

By all means, let us have an exhibition of atomic bombings and aftermath. But some % of the exhibit needs to be devoted to putting them into context, without which they are meaningless. For example, along with your photos of radiation burned civilians, keep in mind this image of a Japanese soldier about to decapitate a captured Austalian prisoner of war, just for the hell of it.



This post has been edited by Milton Roe: Thu 12th June 2008, 7:33pm

I should also add that, based on the military and civilian death tolls on Okinawa (the Japanese lost 90,000 troops on an island only 460 square miles in area), the U.S. estimates for Japanese home island casualties (were the war brought to a conclusion through traditional amphibious invasion (Operation DOWNFALL)) numbered at least in the several millions. Certainly far fewer died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This is the common rationalization, and it is utter fraudulent, because no amphibious invasion was necessary. Japan was blockaded tighter than a drum -- all the allies had to do was wait as Japan ran out of supplies. However, waiting was also unnecessary, because the offer of surrender had already been made. Here is another article that is germane to the topic, this time with good grammar.

The short answer is that starving Japan to death was not very tennable while they held thousands of US prisoners

Well, as I mentioned, this point is moot, because the offer of surrender had already been made.

Perhaps atomic bombing per se was not necessary-- we could have simply continued to firebomb Japan to nothing, just as effectively.

Military leaders proposed dropping a nuke on an uninhabited island, and inviting Japanese leaders to observe, as a "warning shot." But civilian leaders, who wanted to deliver a traumatic psychological shock to the entire planet, insisted that the bombs be dropped on civilians.

Well, as I mentioned, this point is moot, because the offer of surrender had already been made.

Well, as I didn't mention, that offer had too many conditionals in it for the US to accept. The US had publically committed on Dec. 8, 1941 to an unconditional surrender. Keeping one's word publically in ONE war helps to prevent the NEXT war. Those people who claim that the US ended up accepting basically the same offer, are just wrong. The US accepted an offer whereby surrender was unconditional, but it was understood (under the table) that the Emperor would be allowed to retain title and role at total U.S. sufference. What the Japanese had offered was that this would be a matter of negociated treaty. Just a matter of face-saving, you say? Yes, but an important matter for those who were willing to start and end wars themselves over such quibbles. It was felt as necessary to break Japan psychologically as physically. Else, where is the guarantee they won't decide they the right to do it again?

Perhaps atomic bombing per se was not necessary-- we could have simply continued to firebomb Japan to nothing, just as effectively.

Military leaders proposed dropping a nuke on an uninhabited island, and inviting Japanese leaders to observe, as a "warning shot." But civilian leaders, who wanted to deliver a traumatic psychological shock to the entire planet, insisted that the bombs be dropped on civilians.

Hmmm, due to practical considerations, there was never much of a real push for a demo-bomb by anybody, much less generalized "military leaders." Gen. LeMay, who was in charge of the bombing, was gungho for the atom bomb. But of course it wasn't up to him. The Targetting Committee considered various options but the real problem is how do you demo an atom bomb? You can blow up all the islands you like, but until you blow up a city, there's no demoing what it will do to a city. A flash and a bang are all you get, otherwise.

The other big problem with a demo bomb is what happens if you set it up to demo it, and it doesn't work? They'd only tested one plutonium bomb, and only had enough plutonium for one more (the demo) and more would not show up for a few more weeks. So this would mean 3 weeks' delay. They'd never tested the uranium bomb and would never have enough uranium for another one, so that was out as a demo. So that causes a problem. The people at the time thought under the circumstances, and with not a lot of confidence, it was best to drop things without warning, and if they don't work, say nothing about that little smoke-poof in the sky, and that tiny bit of radiation that shows up later.

As for civilian vs. military targets, there weren't any isolated military targets worthy of a bomb left in the Japanese empire, in late 1945. The Nagasaki bomb did take out the torpedo works which had produced the bombs which struck the ships at Pearl Harbor. And there was a troop garrison destroyed in Hiroshima, right at the hypocenter. But the Japanese had mixed military and civilian production together most carefully. Had they deliberately separated it, those who didn't follow the line would have been more culpable. They chose not to. Their problem. You don't use your own civilians as live-hostages, then complain that they're collateral damage.

One option that NOBODY thought of at the time (it's mine, he said modestly ), but which would have given everybody what they wanted, is that the bomb could have been fully demoed by dropping it at the waterline of a harbor, thereby taking out a half-circle. This would have provided full demo (since the Japanese were fully capable of multiplying by two) at the same time as halving the casualties. But as I say, I can't say that this was rejected, because it just was never brought up. Even Oppenheimer, who was on the targetting committee (and who did recommend the bomb be used on on a city), didn't think of doing it this way.

That said, Hiroshima served as a demo, did it not? The Japanese still said "no," even then. So as it turns out, any lesser demo would have been totally wasted.

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: Thu 12th June 2008, 11:40pm