Well, I can see that you are provoked by my daring to question the heroic role of the US Army, but I cannot claim credit for turning you into a national chauvinist.
> He rewrites World War II to leave out a
>most significant part of the Axis powers, Japan, and thus the entire Pacific
>Theater,
Well I didn't want to embarrass you by making an issue out of America's race war against the Yellow Peril. After all what was at issue in the Pacific Theatre, the struggle against Fascism? Hardly. This was a war to restore white prestige in the face of the humiliation of Field Marshall Slim's defeat at Singapore.
There is no sense in which the contest between Japan and the Allies was one between democracy and repression in the Far East. The British, Americans, Dutch and French had subjugated Asians in a policy that was Hitler's model for his own eastern Empire.
In 1919, America blocked the Japanese proposal to have the League of Nations Charter include a line opposing race discrimination.
In fact, though it was bogus, Japan's appeal to Asians to support the struggle against European power had considerable effect. The former colonial powers were gutted to find that nationalist leaders in Indonesia and Burma saw no difference between the Japanese and the British.
Aung San Burma's independence leader started a Burmese Independence Army to fight against the British alongside Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army, both sponsored by the British, before turning against the Japanese, too. Later Britain' secret services had him assassinated.
Indonesia's independence leaders like Sukarno were distrusted by the Americans because they had taken a sanguine attitude to the Japanese occupation.
In Korea, US troops occupied the country to stymie the national liberation council, and reinstituted the old order, putting the former Japanese police back in power!
Domestically, there is no doubt today that America's war against Japan was promoted as a race war against the Yellow Peril. Read John Dower's excellent book on the subject. Japanese-Americans were detained without trial in concentration camps on the sole basis of their racial origins. Many died in brutal conditions.
The race propaganda against Japanese prepared the American public for the gratuitous use of nuclear bombs, some three days after the Japanese forces had agreed to surrender.
And this act of genocidal slaughter is what Leo feels America has most to be proud of in the anti-fascist war.
>And that is supposed to be historical analysis which one takes seriously, as
>if it was not chapter one, verse one of every history of the war that
>American efforts were initially focused almost exclusively on the Pacific
>Theater.
'America failed to get onto mainland Asia because she did not have enough manpower to carry on a large-scale land war in both Europe and Asia.' Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, p73
'The US therefore deliberately chose to concentrate on winning the war against Germany before that against Japan, and to concentrate its resources accordingly.' Hobsbawm, Age of catastrophe, p41
(and as we have seen, these efforts were pretty derisory)
>It was a great imperialist crime, no doubt, to have as a priority
>the protection of your own national territory against invasion.
Your own national territory, in .... Hawaii!
>
>In his first post Heartfield announced how Europe was about to fall before
>Tito's partisans; now, he wants to add every partisan in Europe, and pretend
>that his original formulation wasn't as ludicrous as he made it
well, actually I initially said that Tito's partisans *and the Soviet army* had rolled back the German forces in the East, which is correct, but I am happy to add the role of the Italians and Greeks. Leo finds it ludicrous that Tito's partisans broke Germany's will, but every serious historian understands that it was in the Balkans that Germany faced the first serious challenge to its expansion.
>But lost in this
>attempt to rescue Trotskyist dogma is any sense of the close cooperation
>between the Allied forces and the various partisans,
I think this is pretty grotesque, given the allies military operations against partisan forces in Greece, Italy and Korea, where Britain and the US collaborated with fascists to put down popular movements.
>or the fairly obvious
>way in which engagements with the Allied forces kept the German Nazis and
>Italian Fascists from focusing on and disposing of partisan forces which were
>no match for their superior firepower.
This is just surreal. The partisans were well aware that they did not have the conventional armour to take on the German Army, which is why they were using guerilla methods. The allies' principal military endeavours up to 1944 were undertaken against German cities, or in a war over the colonies. How this was supposed to help the partisans was anyone's guess.
>It also neglects to deal with all of
>the Nazi and Fascist collaborators which sprung up at the same time as the
>resistance, or to recognize the great unevenness among national resistance,
>such that the German or Belgium resistance was completely insignificant
>beside the French or Italian resistance.
What's your point exactly? Do you take me to be defending European honour against American? You should not judge people by your own chauvinistic standards.
I certainly don't want to understate the collaboration in Europe. I only wanted to point out that the people's war against Germany was undertaken by anti-fascists, long before a US-British invasion force ever set foot on European soil. And that further, the allies only ever steeled themselves to occupy Europe when it became unavoidable that these anti- fascist movements of the left were winning the War against Hitler's Germany. Allied policy was to occupy Europe and disarm the partisans, to restore the old pre-war order.
>
>What exactly is demonstrated by comparing the number of American armed forces
>killed with the total number killed in the Soviet Union,
You misread me. The figure of 13 million Soviet (as against 295 thousand US) was the number of military casualties in both cases. (TG Sharman, Modern European History Notes. Adding in Soviet civilian casualties pushes the figure up to 21 million.)
-- James Heartfield