Campaigns as Axis?

[guiltyspark]

Originally Posted by David603

So Stalin killing 20 million or so of his own civilian citizens doesn't count as a war crime? It was a massacre of at least 3 times the scale of what happened to the Jews in Europe under the Nazi's. Not to mention killing hundreds of thousands of German and Polish POWs.

The Russians treatment of captured personnel and civilians was far worse than anything the Germans did.

I agree that the US did commit war crimes by deliberate bombing German civilians, as did my own nation, the British. However the scale of what the these nations did is dwarfed by what Stalin did, so the point stands.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima were selected as possible targets for atomic bombs because they did not contain any targets of military significance and could thus safely be left intact to test the full power of the atomic bomb. At least a third of the deaths were Korean and Chinese forced labourers, and military personnel made up substantially less than 1 per of the victims.

you are confused

they were selected ahead of the bombings to be untouched by other air raids so that the effects could be observed.

And they were indeed military targets , especially nagasaki which was a huge industrial port city that created many munitions and ordanance for the japanese war machine. mitsubishi steel works being one of them

as for the POW casualties , that is irrellevent , the japanese had POWs working all over japan as slave labor. It really makes no difference.