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Originally Posted by Safe-Keeper
Those three are only a few examples. The Allies during World War II did not have too much respect for human lives. Granted, they didn't have death camps (even though the US built concentration camps for Japanese), but they were not particularly nice people either.
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During a total war a lot of people don't have a whole lot of respect for human life, it's just the way humans are. What I meant was that the (Western) Allies didn't systematically undertake to commit genocide or organize atrocities on a large and/or coordinated scale and that seemed to be the contention of the previous post. Yes attrocities did happen on all sides and even American troops perpetrated some, I know of at least one incident from an eyewitness account, but they weren't organized or condoned by the chain of command and were usually the result of mentally exhausted small units who'd simply seen too much and weren't in a merciful mood when confronted with the perpetrators of the organized attrocities that they'd come across. It doesn't excuse it, but it wasn't systematic on our end. There may not be a world of legal difference between the incidents of GIs shooting SS men attempting to surrender after those same GIs had just liberated Buchenwald and commonly understood war crimes, but to me there's a huge moral difference.
As for the Nisei camps the times were different then, and a lot of people just weren't very well educated on the different types of Japanese immigrants here. They were the result of widespread fear among the American population. I don't condone them, but I also wouldn't paint them as concentration camps either because of the connotation that term has because of what the Germans did. Death Camps aside, even a "regular" German concentration camp was magnitudes worse than anything that happened in the US. A total of 5 Japanese were confirmed killed by guards in the US camps during the entire course of the program. That's not excusible either, but it's pale in comparison to the German camps of any kind so using the term Concentration Camp evokes a certain image in one's mind that isn't really comparable in my opinion.
I'd also make the distinction between the Western Allies and the Soviets, which did have a systematic program of attrocities against not only their enemies but also their own people before, during and after the war.
Sorry to belabor the point, but it gets my dander up a little when I see moral equivilency arguments about the sides in WWII.
But like I said, that wouldn't prevent me from trying out a Japanese sub addon, although like it's been said it would be sort of limited unless you changed history somewhat and went after Allied shipping instead of going after Allied warships. It makes me wonder at what point do can you still have an accurate sim when the only way to make it "fun" (or survivable really) would be to change the tactics used by the players to the point that they completely went against the actual doctrine of the IJN at the time you know? If you went after shipping it would be more survivable, but also historically innacurate, while if you went solely after combat ships your campaign would be pretty short indeed. So it's a tough call.