History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII

[Mouthwash]

How accurate is this article? It mostly takes aim at Las Casas, but also seems like a general apologia for Spanish colonialism in the New World (or at least the parts the Church was involved in).

 

[sophie]

seems like a general apologia for Spanish colonialism in the New World (or at least the parts the Church was involved in).

Well, the author is a Robert Novak Journalism fellow, and the article is published in First Things, so, without reading the article itself, this take seems extremely likely.

 

[Masada]

How accurate is this article?

It's slanted. I'll just quickly look at the train wreck that is this sentence: His [Las Casas] disastrous Cumaná venture lasted only a few months, his posting as Bishop of Chiapa, [lasted] a little over a year. The context of the first part of the sentence is that Las Casas had sold the King on establishing a colony in Venezuela. The venture failed. Spanish slaving and a punitive expedition had made the Indians hostile before he arrived. Nobody was particularly surprised when the colony was burned to the ground. Las Casas least of all. This context is only selectively presented. For example, the author has Las Casas blame unnamed "traders and soldiers who had refused to recognize his authority" for the destruction of Cumaná... without mentioning that those traders were also slavers who had practiced their trade extensively in the areas Las Casas wanted to settle in and that the soldiers in question had mounted a punitive expedition into the interior which made relations even worse. Las Casas' Cumaná troubles are also contrasted with Hernán Cortés a "more decisive man" who had just won himself "undisputed mastery of the Aztec empire". What. The sentence itself is used to as part of a paragraph that tries to establish that Las Casas had no idea what he was talking about because he was in the Indies for only a short time. His short tenure as Bishop of Chiapa is presented as evidence of this. The issue is that he was Bishop of Chiapa for such a short time because he had tried to had taken a hard line on slavery. Among other things he threatened to excommunicate people who mistreated Indians and refused absolution to slave owners. The local landowners hated him and in a heated moment fired shots at Las Casas. When a summons to appear in Mexico City appeared, he wisely answered it and never returned to Chiapa.

It mostly takes aim at Las Casas

It's not wrong about Las Casas being unlikable. Most of his contemporaries hated him. His views were totally at odds with how they saw the world and he didn't care. Even his nominal allies usually had little time for him. He just rubbed people the wrong way. This comes up again and again with Las Casas. It was the author of so many of his problems.

also seems like a general apologia for Spanish colonialism in the New World (or at least the parts the Church was involved in).

It's much more interested in making general apologies. It's not that interested in making the Church look good. If you want to do that, you usually put Las Casas front and centre.

 

[caketastydelish]

This is a somewhat silly (stupid?) question but it piques my curiosity:

What did German soldiers in WW2 think of Japanese American soldiers fighting against them? Did they find it demoralizing since the Japanese were "supposed" to be on their side? (serious question). How big a role did the Japanese American soldiers play? I know we deliberately kept their involvement at a minimum in the Pacific for obvious reasons but how much did they do in the European theater? How were they treated, both by our own American government and how did the Axis powers in Europe perceive them?

 

[r16]

sent to 36th Division , formed from mostly Texans , so like automatically fully racist or whatever , because newly built Pentagon had a couple of good guys or whatever that knew the Japanese fighting qualities would soon re-assert themselves in those Americans with not round eyes and they would no longer be embrassed by the camps , so much Nazi like . 36th had a bad start in Italy , massacred by the Germans in the typical ways , but anyhow one day a battalion of good old White boys were cut off by the Germans and Nisei went forward and MG-42s typically butchered them and no good old White boy , at least in that division had anything against them . Made into some Hollywood movie , apart from the Karate Kid's Mr. Miyagi , and of course , Dachs will naturally will provide a fuller answer , in the proper traditions of the Subforum . Am ı the only one who misses the days when there would be 10 new threads every week ?

 

[caketastydelish]

Are you saying the Japanese-american soldiers used Karate and Kung-fu fighting/asian martial arts against the Nazi soldiers?

edit: back to being serious:

I've also heard that a lot of German soldiers/officers were anticipating that America would fight the soviet union next. And that in many cases after surrendering they even offered to defer to help the Americans fight the Russians (only to be disappointed by the apparent answer). How much truth is there to this?

 

[r16]

many of them born in the US , they certainly didn't lack the guts to charge straight on and similar stuff that regularly got you cut in half by machine gun fire , or something similar . Similarly done by good old white boys ; Japanese acceptance into US (especially after Pearl Harbour) was paid in galloons of blood .

entirely true . Quite amazed to discover it wouldn't be the case . Here , you would need to discuss whether the likes of Henry Ford funded the Nazi Party to kill them Commies all .

 

[Dachs]

This is a somewhat silly (stupid?) question but it piques my curiosity:

What did German soldiers in WW2 think of Japanese American soldiers fighting against them? Did they find it demoralizing since the Japanese were "supposed" to be on their side? (serious question). How big a role did the Japanese American soldiers play? I know we deliberately kept their involvement at a minimum in the Pacific for obvious reasons but how much did they do in the European theater? How were they treated, both by our own American government and how did the Axis powers in Europe perceive them?

There weren't that many Japanese-Americans in the prewar military. Recruitment stepped up in 1940 focusing on men who could serve as interpreters or military intelligence personnel, but numbers were still low before Pearl Harbor.

Hawaii's territorial government raised a few home-guard units in the panic of 1941-42 that were partially recruited from Japanese-Americans, but the federal government was mostly interested in its internment program and not in recruiting Nisei, either as volunteers or draftees. For about a year, the Nisei of the Hawaiian 100th Infantry Battalion were pretty much the only serving combat troops, and they didn't even get to see combat.

Eventually, the War Department and the White House decided to allow the Japanese-Americans to participate in combat to stave off Axis propaganda about Allied racism. Recruitment was obviously difficult among the denizens of the West Coast concentration camps, but Hawaii's Nisei were not rounded up and had, after a fashion, been on the front lines. They enlisted in significantly larger numbers. About 33,000 Japanese-Americans served in the US military by the end of the war, including over a hundred WACs and about 6,000 interpreters.

Their combat formations were segregated, because this was the pre-Truman US military, and they were small: one infantry battalion (the 100th) and one infantry regiment (the 442nd RCT), with one (often) attached field artillery battalion (the 522nd). Eventually, the 100th was actually folded into the 442nd. Famously, the 442nd was the most-decorated formation in the history of the US military of its size and length of service. It was a crack outfit.

However, that reputation (and those awards) were earned because of their dedication to completing missions regardless of casualties. A lot of that came from the soldiers themselves, who adopted "go for broke" as their slogan to prove everything that they could do. And a lot of it came from their white general officers, not necessarily because of anti-Japanese racism but because the 442nd fought in Europe's "forgotten theaters" - Italy and southern/eastern France - where higher commanders pushed men to try to accomplish increasingly difficult objectives to make up for strained resources and a relative lack of media attention. Combining those two things - young Japanese-Americans burning to prove themselves and officers disinclined to be overly concerned about long casualty lists so long as objectives were reached - was a great way to get lots of young Nisei killed...and to turn the 442nd into one of the best in the US Army.

The fact that the unit was segregated meant that, when in Europe, the troops were...less concerned about racism than they might otherwise have been. I'm hardly an expert, but for the most part, 442nd memoirs and oral histories emphasize the awkwardness of segregated society in the continental US, in California and in Mississippi where they trained before going to Europe. And after the war, Nisei veterans played an important political role in trying to end the treatment of Japanese-Americans as second-class citizens. Many of them were elected to statewide and national office, especially in Hawaii. When they were in Europe, though, the pressures of combat and their universally acknowledged status as a top-notch outfit meant that a lot of them didn't really recount much nastiness - not compared to what it was like in America. The number of deferred military decorations handed out decades later, however, indicates that they still weren't necessarily treated as equals.

Did the Germans notice them? Not on a macro level. One regiment - less than ten thousand men in an apocalyptic struggle of millions - didn't make much of a splash on a European level. The German battalion- and regimental-sized formations opposite the 442nd knew them as a crack unit, which they were - but that was about it.

sent to 36th Division , formed from mostly Texans , so like automatically fully racist or whatever , because newly built Pentagon had a couple of good guys or whatever that knew the Japanese fighting qualities would soon re-assert themselves in those Americans with not round eyes and they would no longer be embrassed by the camps , so much Nazi like . 36th had a bad start in Italy , massacred by the Germans in the typical ways , but anyhow one day a battalion of good old White boys were cut off by the Germans and Nisei went forward and MG-42s typically butchered them and no good old White boy , at least in that division had anything against them . Made into some Hollywood movie , apart from the Karate Kid's Mr. Miyagi , and of course , Dachs will naturally will provide a fuller answer , in the proper traditions of the Subforum . Am ı the only one who misses the days when there would be 10 new threads every week ?

Aw, thanks. I miss those days, too.

Yeah, the 442nd's most famous exploit was the rescue of the "Lost Battalion", during the course of which they took absolutely horrifying casualties. What a lot of people remember about the 442nd's attack was actually what came afterward, when the 36th ID's CO, MG John Dahlquist, berated 442nd officers for the small number of troops in formation before he was told to his astonishment that these were all that were left unwounded. The whole story was made into films as early as the 1950s.

36 ID was a hard-luck unit for the first part of its career, but eventually, during Sixth Army Group's big offensive in the early winter of 1944, it shaped up into a formation that was on par with the rest of its stablemates.

I've also heard that a lot of German soldiers/officers were anticipating that America would fight the soviet union next. And that in many cases after surrendering they even offered to defer to help the Americans fight the Russians (only to be disappointed by the apparent answer). How much truth is there to this?

A lot of German officers liked to indulge in wishful thinking. It was, after all, the reason why they went to war.

Some of them did manage to delude themselves into thinking that the Americans would join them against the Communists. I think most of them did manage to avoid that delusion. There was no serious prospect of the US fighting the USSR.

 

[innonimatu]

I've also heard that a lot of German soldiers/officers were anticipating that America would fight the soviet union next. And that in many cases after surrendering they even offered to defer to help the Americans fight the Russians (only to be disappointed by the apparent answer). How much truth is there to this?

Yes, there was an amazing level of delusion among the germans. This document on a report from 1945 is quite interesting in what it tells about german feelings:

A few weeks after the end of the war, an opinion poll in the American occupation zone revealed the aftereffects of the politics and propaganda of the Nazi regime. The Germans were weary of politics and did not believe in a positive new beginning. They despised the Russians but also rejected the Americans, whom they blamed for their “voluntary” entry into the war, and from whom they expected the forced introduction of a “foreign” form of government – i.e., democracy.

Stance toward the Allies. – The Russians are without a doubt the least popular. Even today, 92% of those surveyed said that they consider the Russians an “inferior” people. The Germans cannot and do not want to grasp that they were defeated “even” by the Russians. Strong feelings of revenge are noticeable here. Most Germans were evidently hoping that the Russians would be forced to rebuild the destroyed Germany. To our question: “Did you assume that the Western Allies together with the Germans would wage war against the Soviets?,” 72% responded in the affirmative. [ . . . ]
We (the Americans) are in second place. It is astonishing that people are generally more hostile toward us than toward the French and the English. A psychological assessment of the opinion survey shows that there are two reasons for this. First: it is generally said that the English and the French were “forced” to go to war, while the Americans entered voluntarily into war against the Reich. It is assumed that the French and the English will behave “in a manner that is customary after a war,” while the Americans are “suspected” of wanting to impose their own way of life (democracy) onto the German people. Second; the idea that we waged a “Jewish war” remains predominant. [ . . . ] The English are credited with a certain “correctness.” What also contributes to their popularity is that they are not as “rich” as we are: the element of envy is absent. Most popular are the French “archenemies,” probably because people assume that they can deal most readily with the French.

There are lots of interesting documents on that site. Somewhere there is a transcript of the discussions, among german physicists held in the UK, about the dropping of the two atomic bombs. Several worry that their failure to produce the weapon for germany will lead to them being treated as traitors once they return to post-war germany, possibly executed.

The generalized assumption among germans was that Germany post-ww2 would be much like the pre-ww2, and the outcome of the war something like the outcome of WW1: reparations, some time under foreign control, and then prepare to fight again because the world rules would remain essentially the same. ccupation had to last decades to (apparently) change this attitude.

 

[r16]

"be forced to rebuild"

must be because they were accustomed to slave labour . Despite the hard feelings of many a WW I veteran appalled to think what may have happened with the French or Polish or Russian labourers as there was nothing new on the Western Front .

 

[caketastydelish]

I've done some more research and it appears to me that the biggest mistake that cost the axis powers the war was Japan spreading herself too thin (even BEFORE Pearl Harbor). If Japan properly collaborated with Germany and they did a two-pronged attack on Russia (with Japan almost entirely focusing on Russia, ignoring China and all these other places) they'd have knocked Russia out before America even got involved. That would have made for a very different war.

 

[W|M]

The Japanese really did not want to go to war with the Soviets after Khalkhin Gol

 

[Traitorfish]

On a related noted, how central was Tojo to the Japanese regime? Western propaganda portrays him as the equivalent to Hitler and Mussolini, but it seems like the way Anglo-American propaganda had developed since the First World War assumed that the enemy was by definition some sort of despot, and that the propagandists were quire happy to appoint one if the enemy power had rudely neglected to do so.

 

[Imaus]

Japan had little in the way to fight any arctic or tundra war. Even fighting in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia was hell for them in the inter-war period. The Japanese wanted to fight on nice plains and nice seas, not jungles or wastes. The Japanese forces themselves were never anywhere near equipped to fight in Siberia, or transport anything across Siberia, or had any real desire to expand in that direction. The Metals, Rubbers, Foodstuffs, and other such resources they wanted were to the south and west, not North. The main transit link was still the Trans-Siberian railroad, Soviet Industry was in Central Asia and along the Urals and not Siberia or the Pacific, and basically nothing would had been gained going for it.

The Aleutian Campaign was basically the nightmare of every Japanese strategist for over fifty years made manifest. When the Soviets invaded Manchuria, it became a reality; especially as most of the fighting was in August and September; if they had continued until Winter, everyone would had been butchered or starved out north and west of Hokkadio.

If Japan was to attack the U.S.S.R, in co-ordination with the Nazis, it would had been better to get them to go through Shanxi, get the Mongols and Uigurs on their side and whatever Cliques are on that side of the border, and attack to Kazakhstan and the Plains; not Siberia. The Japanese Air Force might had bombed the railroad out of commission, but the Soviets would had sabotaged it for thousands of miles anyway if the Japanese even thought of using it. Vladivostok and some pacific towns might had been occupied, but other than that I imagine the Imperial forces would had continued to move like the Tang did.

 

[Ajidica]

@Imaus that was what I was thinking. Plus, Japanese needed resources now, not in a couple years once they got the mines and railways up and running. The already exploited resources were in the south in the European colonies, not in the Siberia.

 

[caketastydelish]

If Japan was to attack the U.S.S.R, in co-ordination with the Nazis, it would had been better to get them to go through Shanxi, get the Mongols and Uigurs on their side and whatever Cliques are on that side of the border, and attack to Kazakhstan and the Plains; not Siberia. The Japanese Air Force might had bombed the railroad out of commission, but the Soviets would had sabotaged it for thousands of miles anyway if the Japanese even thought of using it. Vladivostok and some pacific towns might had been occupied, but other than that I imagine the Imperial forces would had continued to move like the Tang did.

Then they should have just done this. I'm thinking in the long term, not in the short term. With Russia knocked out (which would have been feasible if the Nazis and Japanese directly collaborated to make it an absolute priority) the odds of them knocking the Soviet Union out of the war would have been far from impossible. And once that happens, everything would have been very different. Germany would no longer have to fight on two fronts. It's even possible that they could have done it (or at least gotten close to it) before America's involvement in the war. If the only two important allies left are Britain and the United States, it would have been very different. A full-out invasion of the United States would have been next to impossible, one of Britain more plausible but still unlikely, but it could produced a stalemate thus eventually leading to a ceasefire or peace treaty.

 

[Cutlass]

I've done some more research and it appears to me that the biggest mistake that cost the axis powers the war was Japan spreading herself too thin (even BEFORE Pearl Harbor). If Japan properly collaborated with Germany and they did a two-pronged attack on Russia (with Japan almost entirely focusing on Russia, ignoring China and all these other places) they'd have knocked Russia out before America even got involved. That would have made for a very different war.

Japan was already losing battles against the Soviets in Mongolia. Had they abandoned the idea of a Pacific War to fight in Siberia they would have a) lost. b) gained nothing in strategic objectives that were necessary to their other goals. c) At the very best, the Soviets could have played scorched earth land for time for over 4000 miles before the Japanese even reached any of the resources that they need to actually cross those 4000 miles.

Japan's Pacific War aims was to gain control of oil specifically, and other resources generally, that they needed to keep their economy and war machine functional. They couldn't gain those in Siberia, even if they drove the Soviets back 1000s of miles. Which they couldn't have done anyways, as Soviet heavy land formations were simply better than those of the Japanese, and the territory to be covered was too inhospitable to cross.

 

[caketastydelish]

Yes, but it would have forced the Soviets to fight on two fronts. Japan did not have what it took to single-handedly beat the Soviet Union, but they didn't have to. My point is they'd be fighting the Nazis the same time. If the Soviets were spread thin like that, rather being able to put 100% of their effort just to the Nazis, taking them out would have much more likely.

 

[Phrossack]

Seems to me like Japan was doomed to lose, unless mayyybe they didn't hit Pearl Harbor.

They couldn't realistically hope to beat the US once that happened. They were hopelessly outmatched in land wars with the USSR, worse so in winter or in the vast and empty stretches of the Russian Far East. And they were firmly stuck in China--too weak to win, too stubborn to leave.

Did Japan stand any chance of keeping America out of the war had they not hit Pearl Harbor and instead restricted the fight to the Philippines, or even had they not attacked America at all?

 

[W|M]

Yes, but it would have forced the Soviets to fight on two fronts. Japan did not have what it took to single-handedly beat the Soviet Union, but they didn't have to. My point is they'd be fighting the Nazis the same time. If the Soviets were spread thin like that, rather being able to put 100% of their effort just to the Nazis, taking them out would have much more likely.

The Soviets still had an army of nearly 1.5 million men in the Far East in June 1942 in case of an attempted Japanese invasion