Dukasaur wrote:Phase 7: With Germany and Italy out of the war, Japan continued to fight, and nuclear bombs were preparared for use against Japan.
There are those who say that Germany's exit from the war simplified the decision to use the bomb -- that use of such a terrible weapon was made easier by the fact that it was to be used against Asians rather than Europeans. It is unclear how true this allegation might be.
On the one hand, Allied air forces certainly weren't gentle with Germany. Over 3,000,000 tons of conventional bombs had been dropped on Europe, resulting in a million German casualties (1/4 of a million dead and 3/4 of a million injured) and probably another 300,000 casualties in German-occupied areas of other countries.
On the other hand, it is true that there were racist overtones to the war against Japan that weren't present in the against Germany. In both the U.S. and Canada, Japanese citizens were interned, while German and Italian citizens were assumed to be loyal unless proven otherwise.
According to
the wikipedia articleDuring the war "annihilationist and exterminationalist rhetoric" was tolerated at all levels of U.S. society; according to the UK embassy in Washington the Americans regarded the Japanese as "a nameless mass of vermin".[90] Caricatures depicting Japanese as less than human, e.g. monkeys, were common.[90] A 1944 opinion poll that asked what should be done with Japan found that 13% of the U.S. public were in favor of the extermination of all Japanese: men, women, and children.[91][92]
In Australia, the entire British stockpile of poison gas leftover from WW I was brought in, to be used if Japanese forces successfully landed on Australian soil. This was "justified" because Japan had never signed the Geneva Conventions and was not protected by the ban on poison gas.
Phase 714 players in 2 groups will play 7-player games on the WWII Australia map. The
first player eliminated in each game is out of the tournament. The remainder will go on to the next round.
