How Psychology Solved A WWII Shipwreck Mystery

The Bataan Death March (Filipino: Martsa ng Kamatayan sa Bataan; Japanese: バターン死の行進, Hepburn: Batān Shi no Kōshin) was the forcible transfer by the Imperial Japanese Army of 60,000–80,000 Filipino and American prisoners of war from Saisaih Point, Bagac, Bataan and Mariveles to Camp O’Donnell, Capas, Tarlac, via San Fernando, Pampanga, where the prisoners were loaded onto trains. The transfer began on April 9, 1942, after the three-month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II. The total distance marched from Mariveles to San Fernando and from the Capas Train Station to Camp O’Donnell is variously reported by differing sources as between 60 mi (97 km) and 69.6 mi (112.0 km). Differing sources also report widely differing prisoner of war casualties prior to reaching Camp O’Donnell: from 5,000 to 18,000 Filipino deaths and 500 to 650 American deaths during the march. The march was characterized by severe physical abuse and wanton killings, and was later judged by an Allied military commission to be a Japanese war crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March

Considered a war crime, the Bataan Death March was a dark day in the US Army’s history as well as a black page of World War II.
Do you guys believe that this WAS truly a war crime or not?
Do you guys think that it compares to Germany’s war crimes in the European Theater?
I know that this is a touchy subject, but im looking for opinions and objectivity.

@CWO:

@RJL518:

Considering what is going on in America today, and i am NOT looking for a discussion on today’s political situation mind you, do you guys agree with what America did 75 years ago with Japanese, German and Italian-Americans at that time?

Without getting into the highly charged question of “Considering what is going on in America today,” which is a subject that pertains to present-day politics rather than history, this should actually say “with what America did 75 years ago with Japanese-Americans at that time” because German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not interned – or to put it more bluntly thrown into concentration camps – during the war.  There’s a scene in the movie Midway in which the Charlton Heston character meets with the young Japanese girlfriend of his son, who like his dad is a naval aviator.  She and her parents have been interned, and at one point she turns to Heston and says angrily, “Damn it, I’m an American!  What makes us different from German-Americans or Italian-Americans”?  The Heston character, who has the decency to look embarrased, answers, “Pearl Harbor, I guess.”  Yes, that was part of the answer…put another part of the answer is that Japanese-Americans were much more visible as minorities in the U.S. than German-Americans and Italian-Americans, both of those latter groups being European rather than Asian.

It is false to assert that German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not interred. Those who’d immigrated to the U.S. from Italy or Germany were in many cases placed in concentration camps. (I saw a television documentary about this.) But it was apparently felt that assimilation was more possible for Germans and Italians than it was for Japanese. Someone of German or Italian blood who’d been born here would not be interred; whereas someone of Japanese blood who’d been born here might.

Conditions in the concentration camps were bad. The inmates were thin. Not so thin as to be in danger of death. But still clearly malnourished. Given that the U.S. as a whole was not experiencing any sort of food shortage during the war, this failure to adequately feed the concentration camp inmates is a black mark upon our record; quite apart from the justice or injustice of interning these people in the first place.

Leaving the Philippines wasn’t a “strategy” by MacArthur; he was ordered to leave by Roosevelt.  It should also be noted that MacArthur’s handling of the opening phases of the Philippines campaign was sloppy; as I recall, he was caught unprepared by the Japanese invasion, even though by the time it started he had already heard about the raid on Pearl Harbor.

Wise words, Worsham.

Like Model , he would have done very well in the halcyon days. I believe he would have done less well, defensively, unlike  Model, though. He would have worried his Army commander, like Guderian, never wanting to pause to regroup. But that would not have mattered to him or to the result.

Wait is that the same person as the user here

Ol’ Blood n’ Guts???
:-D

@ABWorsham:

I wonder how a Germany ruled by the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm would have faired had WWI been just a large Balkan Conflict?

I think quite well.  The breakup of the Austrian-Hungary empire would probably have happened in which case I think Austria becomes very politically tied to Germany (perhaps it even becomes part of Germany).  Either way (or even without Austria) Germany would be the economic leader of Europe by the mid 1950’s.

@strategic:

I may would have been a proponent of continuing the war to Moscow to obliterate Stalin after 1945, so communism would be nothing but a fad and dead.

If I remember correctly, the USSR had something like 300 divisions in Eastern Europe at the time of the Potsdam Conference – a rather large figure compared to what the Anglo-Americans had in Western Europe.  I doubt the Americans and the British could have beaten those kinds of numbers.  I also don’t imagine that a radical move like expending one of America’s rare and priceless A-bombs on Moscow would have done anything other than get those 300 veteran Soviet divisions (who had just helped whip the Wehrmacht) really, really angry at them.  The US and the UK being democracies, they would have also found it a trifle hard to convince their war-weary voters and servicemen to start a whole new war against the country which had just helped them defeat Nazi Germany, and which was getting ready to help them finish off militarist Japan.

At any rate, if you exclude Cuba and China and North Korea, Communism today is in fact pretty much a dying fad…espcially when you consider the amount of free-market capitalism with which China has been flirting for the past decade or so.

I proclaim this thread Worthy.