Isoroku Yamamoto's post war fate if he survived WW2?

[August]

Originally Posted by HunterICX

Fixed it for you.

Wether it's just or not the faith of the ones on the side that lost is decided by the victors.

You meant to say fate right?

[HunterICX]

I also meant to take a morning coffee first before posting

[CCIP]

True, but to be fair, it's pretty widely agreed that both Japan and Germany's war aims were generally pretty reprehensible and incompatible with human rights and international law. And I'm not talking about the war conduct, just aims. Whether they personally agreed with them or not, people like Yamamoto were complicit in them at a very high level. I don't think they should be painted as some sort of monsters, but they're no victims of victors' justice - if you make your bed, if you choose national interest and war aims over international law, well, you have to lie in it. Again, Yamamoto was an extremely intelligent man and I think he knew that very well himself.

[August]

When the Mongols captured Bagdhad in 1258 they wrapped the Sultan of Persia and his entire family in a large blanket then trampled them to death with their horses. I say the nazis got off easy...

[Oberon]

There have been many others just as evil and rephrensible as the Nazis and Imperial Japan, the difference is the technology they wielded.
Their goals of expansion and conquest at the expense of others, are not so dissimilar to many empires before them and some after.

Not condoning, just taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture of human history.

[HunterICX]

Originally Posted by CCIP

True, but to be fair, it's pretty widely agreed that both Japan and Germany's war aims were generally pretty reprehensible and incompatible with human rights and international law. And I'm not talking about the war conduct, just aims.

It's widely agreed on because of hindsight, obviously the axis powers wheren't striving for human rights and international law and it would've been a different world today if they had gotten their way.

Human rights and International law matters little when the side defending those doesn't win.

Originally Posted by CCIP

Whether they personally agreed with them or not, people like Yamamoto were complicit in them at a very high level.

Totally agreed with you there.

Originally Posted by CCIP

I don't think they should be painted as some sort of monsters, but they're no victims of victors' justice - if you make your bed, if you choose national interest and war aims over international law, well, you have to lie in it. Again, Yamamoto was an extremely intelligent man and I think he knew that very well himself.

It would've been a good bed for him to lie in if his nation did obtain total victory.

Originally Posted by Oberon

There have been many others just as evil and rephrensible as the Nazis and Imperial Japan, the difference is the technology they wielded.
Their goals of expansion and conquest at the expense of others, are not so dissimilar to many empires before them and some after.

Not condoning, just taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture of human history.

We've had some dark times and I'm sure more lie ahead.

Only reason we call ourselves civilized is that we no longer throw our feces on the street...but even that isn't true in a manner of speaking.

[Bilge_Rat]

re: Keitel and Jodl, when the Nuremberg tribunal was setup, they wanted to have a representative from each force, so you had Goering: Luftwaffe, Donitz: Navy and Keitel and Jodl representing OKW and OKH. Their sentence were based partly on the evidence, partly on internal court maneuvering (the Russian judges wanted to sentence every defendant to death) and partly, on the political climate. In hindsight, the death sentence was unjustified in their case.

[Bilge_Rat]

actually, there is an interesting controversy going on right now in Germany about war crimes trial.

Werner Christukat, 89, has been indicted for his role in the Oradour massacre.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-959577.html

It raises many interesting questions about whether it is possible to have a fair trial 70 years after the event when almost all the potential witnesses are dead.

[Jimbuna]

I tend to prescribe to the opinion below:

The Dutch criminal law expert Frits Rüter, head of an Amsterdam-based project researching justice and Nazi-era crimes, has accused Germany's Nazi hunters of activism. He says that the German judiciary initially failed in its obligation and refrained from pursuing perpetrators who were just cogs in the Nazi machinery. Now, only aged men are left and punishing them helps nobody, he says. It is too late, he adds.

[Dread Knot]

Originally Posted by Torvald Von Mansee

I don't know off the top of my head if he was responsible for any actual war crimes, but is it safe to say even if he wasn't guilty he would have been executed via "victor's justice" for just being too damn good a leader?

Discuss.

Yamamoto was sort of a bipolar strategist. Sometimes he was brilliant, other times he was reckless. His operational plans often broke such basic military principles as concentration of force and maintenance of the objective. In retrospect, the Midway operation seems to have been dreamed up by a desire to just grimly keep pushing the initiative Japan held and give his carriers something to do. He was so obsessed with luring the US carriers out to fight that he never devoted much thought to what to do if they're already there. He could probably could have cut off the Marines at Guadalcanal if he had been willing to commit the full might of Combined Fleet, but he failed to do so, and Guadalcanal eventually became the decisive campaign of the Pacific War.

His later survival in the war could have saved the IJN from some fairly embarrassing subsequent underestimates of USN strike capability, as in the case of the Truk raids, and he might have had enough political clout to prevent the Yamato's final suicide sortie. However, if the Yamato would have survived she likely would have ended up expended in an atomic bomb test like the Nagato and Prinz Eugen were. He may have even been able to stifle the whole kamikaze corps concept as stupid and pointless.

As the architect of the strike on Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto did manage to avoid the cardinal sin and capital crime of making Douglas MacArthur look bad in the field, so it's possible he might have survived any subsequent trials. But indications are that he expected to join his men who had already died in combat, and, like his chief of staff, Admiral Matome Ugaki, he seemed to have been waiting for the right time and place for his own death.

[Admiral Halsey]

Originally Posted by Dread Knot

But indications are that he expected to join his men who had already died in combat, and, like his chief of staff, Admiral Matome Ugaki, he seemed to have been waiting for the right time and place for his own death.

Strange as what i've heard he was one of those few that hated the idea of ritual suicide.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Admiral Halsey

Strange as what i've heard he was one of those few that hated the idea of ritual suicide.

Really?

Who told you?

[CCIP]

Expectation of death in combat isn't the same as ritual suicide

Yamamoto himself drew a lot of ire from Japanese nationalists for his own stance on things, even assassination threats prior to the war, and took them in his stride. I don't think he had any fantasies about "going out in a blaze of glory", unlike even many of his subordinates - he just had a sober and realistic attitude about his prospects. And was proven right, mind you.

[Dread Knot]

Previous to his shoot-down over Bougainville, Yamamoto had certainly received many dire warnings. Admiral Ozawa begged him not to go on the front line inspection, unless it was in "a cloud of carrier planes." General Imamura recounted to him how his own bomber had been bounced by US fighters in the same area a few weeks earlier and had barely escaped in a cloud bank. Rear Admiral Takatsugu noted that the itinerary of his visit had gone out over an unsecure aviation code and confided his fears to Yamamoto.

However, if he harbored a death wish or was simply motivated by bravura we'll never know,

[Oberon]

Yamamoto was a gambler, it was one of his favourite pastimes, and in this case, his gamble didn't pay off.

I wonder, if Yamamoto had survived the war, whether there would have been a scandal later in his life with Kawai Chiyoko, or whether it would have been hushed up and quietly kept under the rug, or kotatsu.