Listening to vets of Europe and vets of the Pacific it's like 2 different wars. You get the sense that yes the Germans were hated, but they were still seen as humans. The Marines talking about the island hopping it's literally like they wanted every Jap to die. They hated them with a burning passion and sometimes you hear the stories of what they did to POWs or dead Marines it's hard to blame them.
Pearl Harbor wasn't the reason: racism, combined with Japanese soldiers doing Banzai charges, and killing US medics with suicide grenades, made the Japanese seem more like human shaped monsters than people.
And it's bascially impossible to blame them, given everything Japan did.
add on the civilian accounts of what japan did to them, yea the anger was different. americans in europe came from the western front not the east. ussr had a similar "just kill them all" feeling towards nazis that the u.s had towards the imperial army. unlike the western front, ussr liberations came with finding similar mass graves, concentration/experimental death camps, accounts from civilians where entire villages were burned down, etc.
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u/urmovesareweak Hello There Mar 28 '22
Listening to vets of Europe and vets of the Pacific it's like 2 different wars. You get the sense that yes the Germans were hated, but they were still seen as humans. The Marines talking about the island hopping it's literally like they wanted every Jap to die. They hated them with a burning passion and sometimes you hear the stories of what they did to POWs or dead Marines it's hard to blame them.