introduction
"Sadly, Qin and Han have made soil in the middle of the road, and the palace has made soil. Rise, the people suffer; death, the people suffer. These few words are from Zhang Yanghao's "Hillside Sheep Care For Ancient Times" in the Yuan Dynasty. As the poem says, wars are always manipulated by those in power, and the rise and fall are the suffering of the people. In the Second World War, we can also see that the two atomic bombs that shocked the world were caused by the endless harm caused by the explosion.
"Little boy" and "fat man"— two mundane terms— should be a nightmare for the Japanese. These are the names of the two atomic bombs, the code names of the two atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II. After the two atomic bombs exploded, Japan surrendered in full force, hastening the end of World War II.
But at that time, it was already the end of the war, and Japan had already shown its full decline, so why did the US authorities use powerful nuclear weapons in this situation?
▲Photo of the atomic bomb
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World War II swept the globe, and the whole world wanted to end this brutal war as soon as possible and return to its original peaceful life. However, the dropping of the atomic bomb is indeed a powerful accelerator, which will undoubtedly speed up the pace of ending the war. But if this reason alone is not enough to make the United States determined to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese mainland.
There are many reasons for this, and the retaliation of the United States for Japan's cruel mistreatment of prisoners is also one of the reasons.
The Pacific War is a very heavy memory for Americans.
At the beginning of World War II, the United States did not directly participate in the war, and they officially participated in the battlefield, in fact, after Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese army.
This incident greatly angered the U.S. government and the people, but due to poor preparations, the U.S. Navy was defeated in the battle against the Japanese army, and suffered heavy casualties. Within a year, about a hundred thousand American soldiers were captured by the Japanese. Instead of being repatriated, these captured soldiers were brutally mistreated.
▲Stills of the U.S. military in World War II
Preston Hubbard is an American history professor who worked at Pay University in Austin, Tennessee. Here are Professor Hubbard's recollections of what he experienced during his captivity: The "Hell Ship", transformed from a large luxury cruise ship, transported prisoners of war to various shelters: Osaka, Tokyo, Hakodate, Fukuoka, Nagoya, Sendai, Hiroshima, North Korea, Java, Thailand, philippines, Malay, Shanghai, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Fengtian.
And the 278-passenger cruise ship was almost crammed into more than 1,600 prisoners of war.
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The Japanese army also captured a large number of American troops and Filipino soldiers in the Philippines, and this figure is still inconclusive, about 50,000 American soldiers and 40,000 Filipino soldiers.
The Japanese military at the time ordered that the prisoners of war be transferred to Oldernell, more than 100 kilometers away, in a short period of time.
During this transfer, the Japanese did not provide sufficient food to the captives, and on the way, tens of thousands of captives died of fatigue and starvation. After arriving at the camp, another 20,000 people were tortured and killed, and the captives who survived their previous suffering faced even more brutal torture.
▲ Old photos of AMERICAN PRISONERS of war
The main purpose of the concentration camps built by the Japanese army was to hold prisoners, and the soldiers who were unfortunate enough to be captured in various countries became free labor for the Japanese when they arrived at the concentration camps. Their hard work never stops, and if they want to take a break, all they can get is flogging and killing.
No matter which country's soldiers are captured and imprisoned in Japanese concentration camps, they can be described as nine deaths.
The captives in the concentration camps were like being in purgatory, with very little food to eat. Starvation, disease abuse, and the death of a large number of captives in a short period of time. And those who can survive in this situation are really unbearable and want to escape from the concentration camp even more.
▲Fengtian prisoner of war camp during World War II
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But for the unarmed and frail captives, it was not easy to escape. Once such an attempt is made and then captured back to the concentration camp, their fate is worse than death.
One way in which concentration camps execute such fleeing captives is to force them to be exposed to the sun until they die.
In order to prevent the escape of prisoners of war, the Japanese also took a more brutal approach: they would kill all the people in the cells of the prisoners who tried to escape.
In the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy, it is said: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, and a foot for a foot." "The U.S. military retaliated in the same way against this atrocity of the Japanese, who also mistreated the Japanese prisoners of war and died, both of which came and went, but suffered from prisoners of both armies. In this case, American hatred of Japan has reached its peak.
▲Japan after the atomic bombing
Finally, for various reasons, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese mainland, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within a week of the atomic bombing, Japan announced its surrender. American journalist Linda Getez Helms once made detailed statistics, from December 7, 1941 to the end of 1942, in nearly a year, about 30,000 American soldiers and workers, about 20,000 American civilians were captured by japan.
Helms bluntly stated that the situation of Pacific prisoners of war was closely related to the dropping of atomic bombs by the United States and later post-war policy toward Japan.
epilogue
Wars between countries are for the sake of profit and survival, and no one may dare to say that they are innocent, and all kinds of wars will always exist in human society, some will be remembered forever, and some will quietly disappear into the long river of history. The horrors of war are also a wake-up call to how hard peace is today.
Resources:
"Hillside Sheep Tong Cares for the Ancients"
The Old Testament: Deuteronomy