Fiolar - Yeah, they hated them with a vengeance...not surprising under the circumstances.

I knew a man who had been a marine sergeant in the Pacific, and he was on most of the islands where heavy fighting occurred...not Guadalcanal, I don't think, but pretty well all the others after that.

He told me that very few Japanese surrendered, but sometimes some of them did. He said that the problem he then had was he could not keep these prisoners alive (which he wanted to, in order to garner information, and because he considered it the right thing to do in a normal military sense). There were too many men in his unit who would march these Japanese to the rear while he was busy commanding at the front line, and simply shoot them as soon as they were out of his sight. He was aware it was happening, but he never really found a solution to it, mainly because he was too busy with more pressing matters that were right in his face...like a major firefight with dug-in Japanese troops.

In another unit, some guys took a captured Japanese kid of maybe 20 who was obviously terrified, and eager to cooperate in any way he could, despite not knowing any English....and they patiently taught him that "thank you" in English is the phrase "son-of-a-bitch-US-Marines!". They then sent him off to the tender care of the next unit.

The Japanese were generally equally vicious to prisoners and sometimes even more so.

That's what happens when you simply cannot grasp that the other guy also has a mother, and a sister, and a country he loves, and a life he holds dear. Military training does everything it can to denigrate and dehumanize the "enemy". We see the horrific results on the battlefield.

Bid Red - Yes, you are right about the tides of history, and everyone has done misdeeds, Native Americans included. It's always important to hear both sides of the story. As for evil, well, I guess you can call it that if you want...the results certainly are evil, whatever the original intentions.

paddymac - Yep. That war was cooly, deliberately, provoked by the Roosevelt administration, which knew exactly what it was doing. However, I still doubt that they realized the Japanese were going to hit Pearl Harbor...at least not with anything like the amount of force that they did.

And the Maine? Well, yeah, one ship is a small price to pay for gaining an overseas empire in 2 oceans. But it may have been an accident, due to spontaneous combustion in the coal bins causing a magazine explosion. Such things happened now and then. If so, it was very fortuitous for Washington, seeing they wanted a war. One thing for sure, the Spanish didn't do it! Nothing could possibly have been less in their interest at the time. They were most eager to avoid war with the USA...a war which they really had no hope of winning.

- LH