Pardon me for being off-topic but I can't let this one go.
NP300 said:
Well that is debatable. How do you know it "saved" 4 million Japanese lives? Why are you so sure? We can't know what would have happened. But a crime against humanity is a crime against humanity and Anglo-American bombing tactics during WWII certainly qualify as crimes against humanity as they did not distinguish between the military and civilians, and often specifically targeted civilians.
Also, this line of reasoning can be used to justify any crime against humanity. The Nazis could say that their internment of Jews saved lives because the Jews tended to join partisan organizations and then kill lots of people. The USSR could say it was ok to massacre the intelligentsia because they would organize anti-communist uprisings, which would lead to many deaths. So where does this slippery slope lead to?
So what I am saying is that if we are going to accuse Germany and Japan of "crimes against humanity" there needs to be an objective standard and the US also has to be held up to the same standard. There can't be hypocrisy here and what I see on this subject is a mountain of disgusting, stenching hypocrisy. We are told that Germany and Japan did X, therefore they are evil. But when one shows them that the US also did X then they rationalize it away with excuses.
Japan was almost entirely dependent on its newly gotten territories for resources such as food and war materials. Due to the liberation of those territories, the Japanese had neither, and their homeland was being systematically bombed and their means of prolonging the war destroyed. Starvation was inevitable. Given the facts of the American invasion plan, Operation Olympic, the war would have likely gone on until 1946 or 1947, given the estimated amount of Japanese resistence and potential terrain issues - not to mention the fact that the area that was to be the staging ground for the invasion was hit by a typhoon about when the forces were to be assembled there, potentially giving the Japanese a gigantic moral boost as the third Kamikaze. That is not to mention that nearly every Japanese man, woman, and child was being told by the government to prepare to attack American soldiers with whatever they could find, even down to sharp sticks(likely resulting in a recreation of statistics seen on Iwo Jima and Okinawa only on a far greater scale, and with far greater civilian casualties).
The average human can survive maybe two to four weeks without food, assuming they were in good condition before exposed to such conditions. Now imagine an entire nation the size of California reduced to food conditions similar to Leningrad (eating boiled shoe leather) and think of how many people would die from starvation. That seems reasonable given an estimated American invasion lasting a year. Does the 4 million dead mark strike you as surprising now?
That doesn't factor in combat casualties. In the initial estimates for Operation Olympic the unit assigned to spearhead the invasion wasn't mentioned beyond the 5th day - it was assumed it would simply cease to be functional due to casualties by that point.
Story made short, the statistics and the facts of the situation reveal the number of American and Japanese - and probably Soviet - dead would be far, far greater than the combined 250,000 or so killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts.
If you want to play the "bad is bad" card, then I have but a few final words for you: comparing what was to be the extermination of a race, the paranoid execution of non-existant threats, and the barbaric savagery of a people who considered themselves superior to all others to the desperate wartime actions of nations fighting tyranny is a non sequitor. The Allies didn't set out to purge the world of the Germans and the Japanese, to eliminate them as future rivals, or to stamp them out of existence simply because they were "inferior". The action isn't all that matters, the motive and the circumstance are very important too, because it is motive and circumstance that can be used to justify an action. If you don't see that distinction, that's your loss.
Finally I would recommend some education about the holocaust, since this is what the SS and Germany are accused of:
http://www.codoh.com/found/found.html
Accused? It is not an accusation, but a
fact. That you link to a page
which attempts through verbal diarrhea to essentially trivialize the Holocaust, and, by extension support its original proponents indicates something to me. If you choose to reply to this, be advised that I have no intention of responding to you.
Ok so that's a little strange I guess, but his conduct during the fierce Arnhem battles was exemplary 
. I probably 
just to see the explosion 
.
, I feel the same way of Peiper. He was a good 
