Armageddon: The Reality Behind the Distortions, Myths, Lies, and Illusions of World War II (1995)

The book says that the Pacific war was a racial war. US soldiers were surveyed and 18% felt more like killing the Germans after actually seeing them, but about half felt that way about the Japanese.

An opinion poll of Americans at the end of 1944 revealed that one in every eight people wanted any Japanese left alive at the end of the war to be exterminated.

Admiral William Halsey described the Japanese as “low monkeys” and urged his men to kill as many as they could and make “monkey meat.”

The book is another of those that notes that skulls of Japanese were sent home by US soldiers, and gold teeth were taken from the skulls (and sometimes from the wounded).

In the battle for Okinawa, 12,500 US soldiers died. Over 100,000 Japanese soldiers died.

Segregation in the US military is discussed briefly. In Salina, Kansas, for example, a black soldier was refused service at a lunch counter even though German prisoners-of-war were being served. Before the war no blacks were allowed in the Marines. In the navy, blacks were limited to working in the mess and in the services branch. In the army there were small all-black units. (If Japan would have actually been invaded in the proposed operations, no blacks would have been involved at all.)

Black units were not used in combat until March of 1944. Blacks were not allowed to join the Army Air Corps (there was no actual Air Force yet) until 1940. By 1945 almost 140,000 blacks were in the armed forces, and almost all of them were involved in menial support roles.

No black could be superior in rank to a white in the same unit.

All recreational. Eating and health facilities were strictly segregated according to the book. This type of thing went so far that blood from blacks was kept separate from blood donated by whites.

It wasn't just the US, either. Britain asked the Americans not to send black troops to Britain, and Australia objected to black servicemen from the US being used as laborers in Australia.

So, in this war for democracy, blacks were still being treated like dirt, and persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast were treated like dirt and placed in internment camps, sometimes behind barbed wire with armed guards. Not exactly the best examples of democracy, to say the least.

The destruction of Japanese cities by area bombing was preceded by the destruction of German cities, this despite the fact that they did not have the “cottage industries” many of the Japanese cities had. This policy of terror bombing started in late July of 1943 with Operation Gomorrah on the south banks of the Elbe. About 40,000 were killed in the raids. In February of 1945 there was a similar attack on Dresden, and around 70,000 to 80,000 were killed. So, the concept of killing lots of civilians was already in use before the B-29's attacked Japanese cities.

In relation to the fire raids on Tokyo, one quote from the US Strategic Bombing Survey stated that “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire in Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man.”

In relation to the bombing of Hiroshima, the target committee wanted the aiming point to be at the center of the city and not on the outskirts where the industrial section was actually located. Thus, Truman's statement in his diary that the target would be a purely military one was nowhere near the truth.

About half the population was killed in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bombs.

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