(Jayfox)
Of course they were aware! By it's blatant nonintervention and silence towards atrocities that were committed against the Jews at that time the US and Britain could almost be seen to be condoning these actions.
I'm sorry, but if the U.S. was already involved in the war by 1943, and we were preparing for invasion in 1944, then how did we stand by? Non-intervention ceased the moment Germany declared war on the U.S., via their pact with Japan.
I'm not a WWII history buff, so I don't know all the particulars of our involvement in the European theater prior to D-Day, but I wasn't under the impression that we were ignoring the European theater altogether. And we were rather preoccupied with the Pacific theater.
War is war. It's not like we were ignoring the plight of the Jews because we didn't try "harder" to win a war we were already engaged in.
Actually, the main focus of US military might was on the European theater. This was an agreed policy between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, but Stalin had committed to attacking Japan, and didn't mention he had a secret treaty with them, which is why he didn't declare war on them until the last few days of the war.
Contrary to pacifists claims, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cities with military assets, and if you study the history of strategic bombing, you'd notice that US assertions that invading Japan would have cost millions of lives was generally accurate. If you scaled US casualties taking Okinawa and Iwo Jima, both considered Japanese home islands, up to taking the main islands, the casualty estimates were accurate.
Furthermore, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not significantly different in casualty counts than any firebombing campaigns on any other city by conventional weapons. The only difference was it took several wings of planes to accomplish with incindiaries what one plane with a nuke could do.
So then, lets look at the practice of firebombing. For instance, Bomber Harris, the British Bomber Forces commander, is generally attacked for his rather ruthless policies of firebombing anything, and not caring what, which is why the Brits didn't mind bombing at night.
The US had its Norden bomb sights, and bombed during the day, and so long as they had fighter cover, they were rather safe in the air. But not having fighter cover meant ten times the casualties to your bomber squadrons. Pretty soon, you are out of bombers. The long range flying required to bomb the Japanese home islands across the Pacific excluded the possibility of fighter escort over the main islands. Worse, ground air defenses: AA particularly, was rather intense, while the B-29 was nowhere near as accurate as its builders claimed it would be. In order to bomb accurately, they had to fly low, but this caused bomber losses to increase exponentially. Bombing from high altitude was not accurate and produced little to no damage to targets. So, firebombing was the only option that produced the damage desired with minimal losses to crews.
In the Pacific, the Japanese were at least as heinous as the Nazis. Many people like to pretend the Nazis were evil for their treatment of the Jews, but that treatment was not unique. The Germans, at least, had regulations mandating x many calories a day of food, etc. just enough to keep the prisoners alive and able to work, a system which only broke down toward the end when food became short and they needed to dispose of all the bodies that piled up. Many deaths of concentration camp prisoners didn't happen until after the Germans abandoned the camps ahead of allied advance. Many camps were ignored by the allies for at least several days up to weeks because they were not military targets. This neglect led to far more disease and starvation related deaths than would have otherwise happened. The German treatment of POWs was somewhat better. Little to no slave labor, better food and living conditions, though certainly not any sort of spa conditions.
The Japanese, on the other hand, treated anybody who wasn't Japanese the same way: like shit. There was the rape of Nanking, but that was only the most well known incident. There was the Bataan Death March, and the Japanese treated American prisoners with contempt: rare feedings, frequent beatings, always slave labor. Those who were sick or injured were bayoneted or shot or beheaded. Allied prisoners were used as test subjects for chemical and biological weapons. The Bridge on the River Qwai was also a real story of the slave labor construction of the Japanese rail line through southeast asia. When the Japs were retreating from the Phillipines, they raped and killed the women and children of Intramuros before abandoning it to a firestorm they set. They sometimes took their prisoners with them, and sometimes didn't. Those they abandoned, they abandoned, and didn't tell the allies of the presence of the POW camps, leaving the prisoners to starve and die for months. Those they took with them, they often shipped in the holds of cargo ships that were not marked as prisoner ships, leaving them open to being torpedoed and dive bombed by American subs and aircraft. Those prisoners that made it to the main islands were put to slave labor in mines and other menial jobs. Those that misbehaved were beheaded, or worse, impaled on bamboo shafts and left to die, and often abused by Japanese civilians who happened by.
Then there was the genocide of millions of Chinese, the abuse of the Koreans and kidnapping of Korean women to serve the Japanese military as 'comfort girls', etc.
Don't tell me that Japan shouldn't have been nuked. They had it coming.
