Why did the WW2 Allies insist in unconditional surrender?
- Thread starter Sir Chaos
- Start date
I Blame Communism
Banned
The fact that this was the second round, given the strong impression that the Germans would keep trying until they were stopped for good; a desire on the part of the USA to completely reform the world through revitalised international institutions and financial oversight that was incompatible with surviving fascist rogue states; and, for the Soviets and Chinese, the whole business of having fought bitter total wars to stave off utter national destructional and sustained multiple megadeaths.
Pretty understandable, when you think about it - especially since neither Germany nor Japan was ever likely to offer acceptable terms of any sort.
Pretty understandable, when you think about it - especially since neither Germany nor Japan was ever likely to offer acceptable terms of any sort.
Macragge1
Banned
On the most absolutely basic level (and there were a fair few secondary factors) - the Allies had been 'lenient' on Germany after the First World War - this is to say, their territory had been unoccupied and a small standing army was still allowed etcetera. Seeing how this turned out, the Allies had no desire to fight another one in the next twenty years, and so the absolute destruction and subjugation of the enemy was seen as necessary in order to eradicate any possibility of a 'stab-in-the-back' myth that had given Hitler so much support in the twenties and thirties. The fact that both Germany and Japan were really nasty, genocidal regimes (worse, for example, than Wilhelm's Germany, which itself wasn't angelic) further reinforced the need for the absolute dismantling of their power structures.
I agree with Macragge's assessment, but additionally, clearly the policy worked as a real detterant to future aggression from these countries. Look at how peaceful and benign Germany and Japan are today. Nazism, and the warped code of Bushido are truly dead as any real force in the world. I have always lamented that just a few short years later, we accepted an armistice in Korea. If we had accepted nothing less than unconditional surrender then, how much pain and human suffering in North Korea for the past 50+ years could have been avoided?
The Chinese simply had too many waves of people. It was, even in retrospect, better to accept a tie than to push on and cause millions more deaths on both sides.
Anyway, remember that WWI was a war of moral ambiguity-no good guys, no bad guys. Both sides were motivated by nationalism, imperialism, and revanchism.
WWII was different. The Germans and the Japanese were the blatant aggressors, and the atrocities committed by the Western Allies (the Soviets...not so much) paled in comparison to what the Nazis and Japanese militarists did.
Anyway, remember that WWI was a war of moral ambiguity-no good guys, no bad guys. Both sides were motivated by nationalism, imperialism, and revanchism.
WWII was different. The Germans and the Japanese were the blatant aggressors, and the atrocities committed by the Western Allies (the Soviets...not so much) paled in comparison to what the Nazis and Japanese militarists did.
Because the West and the SU could never have agreed on the terms of a conditional one, and had either tried for a condiitional one, the other would have immediately assumed that a deal was being made at its expense. "Press on until we meet in the middle" was the only viable option.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Look up! On the horizon It's a bird! It's the red cavalry! No, it's Soviet Apologist Man!
Anyway, the memetic notion that the Soviets did things remotely in the league of Germany or Japan is just plain false. To their record, Germans have...
- Extermination camps using gas and other methods. The Soviets never ran extermination camps using gas or any other method. (The majority of GULAG inmates survived.)
- The deliberate extermination of Soviet PoWs (Holocaust-level death rates through deliberate neglect). The conditions of German PoWs were poor, but if anything, better than the normal GULAG - certainly not worse. The majority survived.
- Deliberate creation of artificial famine through plundering food on a massive scale. The Soviets opened soup kitchens in Berlin shortly after the surrender.
- Combatting partisans through mass collective punishment - including locking helpless people in burning buildings and marching them across minefields - as part of official policy. The Soviets were fighting partisans in western Ukraine and the Baltic into the early 50s, and never did anything of the sort.
- Summary executions of hundreds of Jewish soldiers and commissars on the Eastern Front. The Soviets shot their prisoners sometimes (everyone did), but never as official policy.
The Japanese have the use of biological weapons (obviously nobody else did this), massacre in captured cities on a massive scale (not remotely comparable to often drunken, exhausted half-mad Soviets running wild for a few days - and there are just as many cases of Soviets sharing their rations with the citizens of captured cities), and routine massacre and abuse of prisoners.
One again, when it comes to Soviet history, people much prefer slogans to fact.
I agree with you about Korea, though.
The Nazis and Japanese were certainly worse than the Soviets, but you seem to be forgetting the mass rape of German civilians in the Race to Berlin.
I Blame Communism
Banned
How could I, when it's just about the only WW2 attrocity most people seem to be familiar with in any detail?
I was making one-to-one comparisons of the worst German and Japanese crimes to their nearest Soviet equivelants. I'm sure you're away was truly massive rape of Soviet women by Germans soldiers during the several years of occupation, and that it was completely tolerated by the army command, who actually issued the men going into Russia in 1941 with condoms. With the embarrasing creation of Mischlings being thus avoided, it doesn't appear that the army command had any intention of ending this practice.
I'm certainly aware that there was widespread rape of civilians in eastern Germany and other countries during the last phases of the war and that Soviet soldiers were basically not punished for it. I also know that it was not part of any co-ordinated or official policy, that it was promptly halted once the fighting was over, and that many Soviet soldiers helped their former enemies with food and shelter.
I'm sure you're also aware that a few WAllies soldiers raped women in the seedy bits of Paris. It's a big, wild world that contains no plaster saints.
Clibanarius
Banned
And by the time the allies had landed on normandy beach they had spent to much money and to many resources and lives to accept a peace treaty
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
How could I, when it's just about the only WW2 attrocity most people seem to be familiar with in any detail?
Let's put aside, for a moment, the question of whether the Soviets or the Axis committed worse war crimes -- I'm pretty sure everyone here agrees it was the Axis anyway -- and look at the last statement.
IBC -- so you think that the Soviet March to Berlin Rapes* are better known than any and all of the Axis War Crimes -- including (but not limited to) the Rape of Nanking, Japanese POW camp atrocities, Nazi collective punishment (including following the invasion of Poland) -- not to mention something called the Holocaust?
Speaking for myself, of all the things listed, I knew about before I went to college -- didn't hear about the Soviet rapes until it came up in a PSCI discussion.
*I actually don't know if it has a name -- bit of a clue right there
That's quite interesting. I knew about the mass rapes committed by members of the Red Army as early as the 1970s because that's when I'd read Ryan's The Last Battle. However, I didn't know about Nanking until the 1980s.
I suppose it all depends on what you've read, where you were raised, and who raised you. Trying to figure out which atrocity story is more widely known is ultimately fruitless because what people know and how they learn about it is predicated on many different factors unrelated to the actual facts in question.
Well, I belive it maybe be apocryphal but I do believe the impetus behind "unconditional surrender" was a conversation between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at the Casablanca Conference, and one of them mentioned Ulysses.S.Grant and got talking on how it also meant "Unconditional Surrender" or some such, and it was a nice shiny bow-wrapped present to Herr Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry. if there was an applicable trope, I think Nice Job Breaking It Hero would apply.
Sir Chaos
Banned
Geez... I hope not. That whole "two wrongs make one right" thing is so 20th century.
Anyways... so to summarize, it was
1) to stop the Axis nations (Germany in particular) from starting WW3 in another 20 years or so (though it would have been interesting to see whose side Italy would be on next time...)
2) due to Axis war crimes, in particular Japanese treatment of prisoners and Chinese, and German treatment of "Untermenschen", especially the Holocaust (as far as was known about it at the time)
3) because Churchill/Roosevelt and Stalin could not agree on terms for anything else
Anything else I missed?
Look up! On the horizon It's a bird! It's the red cavalry! No, it's Soviet Apologist Man!
Anyway, the memetic notion that the Soviets did things remotely in the league of Germany or Japan is just plain false. To their record, Germans have...
- Extermination camps using gas and other methods. The Soviets never ran extermination camps using gas or any other method. (The majority of GULAG inmates survived.)
Very many people died in the Soviet Gulags. We don't have detailed records of Soviet victims even now.
- The deliberate extermination of Soviet PoWs (Holocaust-level death rates through deliberate neglect). The conditions of German PoWs were poor, but if anything, better than the normal GULAG - certainly not worse. The majority survived.
One example - at Stalingrad, about 100,000 German prisoners were taken. 5,000 eventually returned to Germany in the mid 1950s.
- Deliberate creation of artificial famine through plundering food on a massive scale. The Soviets opened soup kitchens in Berlin shortly after the surrender.
The Soviet Union murdered millions in the Ukraine in the early 1930s by means of deliberate famine. That's their own citizens, not wartime enemies.
- Combatting partisans through mass collective punishment - including locking helpless people in burning buildings and marching them across minefields - as part of official policy. The Soviets were fighting partisans in western Ukraine and the Baltic into the early 50s, and never did anything of the sort.
I take it that you didn't know that the way Zhukov favoured clearing minefields was to march troops across them, on the basis that losses incurred in this way were less than those suffered by artillery fire?
- Summary executions of hundreds of Jewish soldiers and commissars on the Eastern Front. The Soviets shot their prisoners sometimes (everyone did), but never as official policy.
The Japanese have the use of biological weapons (obviously nobody else did this), massacre in captured cities on a massive scale (not remotely comparable to often drunken, exhausted half-mad Soviets running wild for a few days - and there are just as many cases of Soviets sharing their rations with the citizens of captured cities), and routine massacre and abuse of prisoners.
One again, when it comes to Soviet history, people much prefer slogans to fact.
I agree with you about Korea, though.
This is not to excuse the Germans or Japanese or anyone else; it's just a case of recognising facts.
Typo
Banned
Because Munich and Pearl Harbor meant that neither Germany or the Japanese can be trusted to keep the peace when they broke pretty much every agreement they ever made