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Old 05-12-2013, 01:28 PM
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ElAurens ElAurens is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: The Great Black Swamp of Ohio
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Gents, please don't paint all of my countrymen with the same broad brush.

We are not all racists.

The Japanese defeat in WW2 had nothing to do with their size, or their race. It had everything to do with their mindset, their poor understanding of how the US, The British Empire, China, and the Netherlands East Indies, would react, and their inability to consolodate their newly gained holdings after the first six months of the war. ( "Victory Disease" as it was called later by the Japanese). And most significantly the inability of Japanese industry to produce the engines of war in the numbers and quality necessary.

The Japanese bet everything on a lightening campaign that would shock the Allies to the bargaining table. They commited all their reserves out of the gate. To be sure at the time their and our perceptions of each other were very racist, and all mostly wrong.

They saw the west as a bunch of fat, lazy shopkeepers who could never be warriors, and we saw the Japanese as short, near sighted, dull witted people that were no threat.

Obviously neither assesment was correct.
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Personally speaking, the P-40 could contend on an equal footing with all the types of Messerschmitts, almost to the end of 1943.
~Nikolay Gerasimovitch Golodnikov
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