Historical images - Images that made history

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RomanesEuntDomus said:
I really wonder how many japanese skulls are still in the US in the possession (knowingly or unknowingly) of the families of war vets.
It's so fucked up, this stuff didn't even happen on the eastern front. How did it come to this? Was there an escalation between the two sides that culminated in US troops putting heads on their tanks?
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The US homefront was fed a steady diet of 'Japs are subhuman filth' propaganda, which was helped along by things like the Bataan Death March and Pearl Harbor.

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Well, I figured that Pearl Harbor and the propaganda was playing a huge role in this, but somehow, it's hard to believe that that's enough to make people committ such atrocities as putting the skulls of defeated enemies on your tanks or some of the other shit that went down.

Fun Fact concerning the anti-jap propaganda:
It was so vicious in how it depicted asian people in general, there was an actual fear that if they don't dial back, they might end up encouraging some people in Asia to switch sides and fight for the Japanese instead.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
such atrocities as putting the skulls of defeated enemies on your tanks
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nothing out of the ordinary tbh
people have done similar things all throughout history and all across the world. vlad tepes, ottoman conquests, arab islamic expansion, mongol hordes, viking raids, aztec ritual wars and sacrifice, the list goes on forever. history is full of gruesome and macabre displays like this, and much worse.
 
BigRuler said:
nothing out of the ordinary tbh
people have done similar things all throughout history and all across the world. vlad tepes, ottoman conquests, arab islamic expansion, mongol hordes, viking raids, aztec ritual wars and sacrifice, the list goes on forever. history is full of gruesome and macabre displays like this, and much worse.
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All of the things you mention have been hundreds of years in the past and even though war is and forever will be about killing enemies, there's a certain anachronistic barbarism to beheading enemies and using their skulls as trophies that just seems utterly out of place for a modern nation in the 20th century.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
All of the things you mention have been hundreds of years in the past and even though war is and forever will be about killing enemies, there's a certain anachronistic barbarism to beheading enemies and using their skulls as trophies that just seems utterly out of place for a modern nation in the 20th century.
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you can find the same level of brutality in more recent conflicts, too. the bangladesh independence war, the bosnian war, the rwandan genocide, the iran-iraq war and anfal campaign - there's no shortage of cruelty in any historical period, and pretending that people are in some way better or above it all because of some nebulous concept of 'modernity' is nothing but decadence and arrogance.
 
BigRuler said:
you can find the same level of brutality in more recent conflicts, too. the bangladesh independence war, the bosnian war, the rwandan genocide, the iran-iraq war and anfal campaign - there's no shortage of cruelty in any historical period, and pretending that people are in some way better or above it all because of some nebulous concept of 'modernity' is nothing but decadence and arrogance.
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I'm aware of these conflicts and the stuff that went down there, it's not the brutality in war in general that surprises me (how could it?), it's the brutality in one specific instance committed by one specific party that surprises me in contrast to the way how they waged war on the other side of the globe at the same time.

These attacks happened only in Asia between the US army and the Imperial japanese army. At the same time, nothing of this sort happened in the fight of Germany or Italy against allied forced, not even between Russians and Germans to my knowledge.
The quality of brutality in the pacific war by one side that didn't do anything similar in any of the other regions that they fought in is what surprises me.

My point isn't that in 1900 or some other arbitrary point in time, "modernity" was invented and brutality was abolished by all of mankind, until it suddenly flamed up again in 1942 in Asia to everyone's surprise and has never been observed ever since.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
I really wonder how many japanese skulls are still in the US in the possession (knowingly or unknowingly) of the families of war vets.
It's so fucked up, this stuff didn't even happen on the eastern front. How did it come to this? Was there an escalation between the two sides that culminated in US troops putting heads on their tanks?
Click to expand...

It'd probably be easier to dehumanize something that blindly charges at you with no regard for its own safety and never surrenders under any circumstance.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
Well, I figured that Pearl Harbor and the propaganda was playing a huge role in this, but somehow, it's hard to believe that that's enough to make people committ such atrocities as putting the skulls of defeated enemies on your tanks or some of the other shit that went down.
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The island fighting was incredibly brutal and they'd already been told to view Japs as essentially subhuman monsters, which wasn't exactly helped by the fact they routinely tortured and outright murdered Allied prisoners and did their own desecrations of bodies. If you spent months hunkered down in some vile jungle and finally actually got to the enemy and finished them off, it was personal by that point.

RomanesEuntDomus said:
These attacks happened only in Asia between the US army and the Imperial japanese army. At the same time, nothing of this sort happened in the fight of Germany or Italy against allied forced, not even between Russians and Germans to my knowledge.
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The vast majority of the Germans who ended up surrendering at Stalingrad never made it home. It's presumed their lives were pretty short and miserable. Those who ended up east of where the Wall went up in Berlin generally had all their women gang raped and worse.

Some Germans would fight through 100 miles of Russians just to get to Americans to surrender to instead.

Head trophies are pretty fucked up but far from unusual.
 
AnOminous said:
The vast majority of the Germans who ended up surrendering at Stalingrad never made it home. It's presumed their lives were pretty short and miserable. Those who ended up east of where the Wall went up in Berlin generally had all their women gang raped and worse.

Some Germans would fight through 100 miles of Russians just to get to Americans to surrender to instead.
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Again, I am aware of this.
Still, using wire to attach a human head to your tank or sending it to your gf via mail is on a whole new level of fucked up. The dehumanization that this signifies is what surprises me. Though the first part of your comment sums up the reasons for that, I guess.
 
RomanesEuntDomus said:
I really wonder how many japanese skulls are still in the US in the possession (knowingly or unknowingly) of the families of war vets.
It's so fucked up, this stuff didn't even happen on the eastern front. How did it come to this? Was there an escalation between the two sides that culminated in US troops putting heads on their tanks?
Click to expand...
Keep in mind that during the island hopping campaign, both sides effectively had their backs to the wall and it seems like there was a mutual hatred between Allied and Japanese forces. Japanese tactics were brutal and Allied troops responded in kind. I imagine American troops were pissed off at the Japanese in a way they weren't pissed off at the Germans or Italians at the time- it wasn't Luftwaffe planes that sunk the Arizona.

Keep in mind from the Japanese side you had belief in the Emperor as a divinity in his own right and a pretty deeply embedded warrior culture. There's an argument out there (and I believe the one that Truman accepted) that the A-bombs were a warning attack to end the war without putting actual troops on Japan's main islands, as supposedly they were prepared to defend it until death which would have resulted in a lot of both Allied and Japanese deaths.
 
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The Shadow said:
Keep in mind that during the island hopping campaign, both sides effectively had their backs to the wall and it seems like there was a mutual hatred between Allied and Japanese forces. Japanese tactics were brutal and Allied troops responded in kind. I imagine American troops were pissed off at the Japanese in a way they weren't pissed off at the Germans or Italians at the time- it wasn't Luftwaffe planes that sunk the Arizona.
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There was also the fact that unlike most of the major fronts in Europe, both sides were often cut off from command and supply lines for weeks at a time and short on bullets and supplies, so a lot of the fighting was vicious and hand to hand, not shooting at each other from a distance.
 
AnOminous said:
There was also the fact that unlike most of the major fronts in Europe, both sides were often cut off from command and supply lines for weeks at a time and short on bullets and supplies, so a lot of the fighting was vicious and hand to hand, not shooting at each other from a distance.
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I mean if you really give it thought- the guys in Europe and North Africa at the very least had the civilized world in walking distance. You may have endured hell in Normandy or Sicily, but at the end of the fighting there were houses, women, and liquor. After a fight in the Pacific you pretty much just had to settle for putting on puppet shows with Tojo skulls.
 
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