Tag: wwii

Japan Continues Drifting From Post-WW2 Pacifist Constitution, Inking Landmark Navy Deal With Australia

Japan continues getting further away from its pacifist constitution adopted after World War 2, as US regional allies continue strengthen defense alliances in face of the ‘China threat’.

Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles announced Tuesday a major deal with his country’s Indo-Pacific trade partner Japan, hailed as “the largest defense industry deal ever made between Japan and Australia.”

Australia plans acquire a total of eleven frigates from Japan in a major boost to its navy, valued at 10 billion Australian dollars (approximately $6.5 billion or €5.6 billion).

The major contract was awarded to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which will provide Mogami-class warships, which are highly advanced and with an array of weapons, with the bid succeeding over that of Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems.

“This decision was made based on what was the best capability for Australia,” Marles said. “We do have a very close strategic alignment with Japan.”

“The Mogami-class frigate is the best frigate for Australia,” Marles described. “It is a next-generation vessel. It is stealthy. It has 32 vertical launch cells capable of launching long-range missiles.”

This agreement marks Japan’s first export of warships since before the Second World War, and only its second significant defense sale abroad, which is why some Australian analysts consider the landmark deal to be high risk.

Many details of the deal still remain shrouded in mystery, but one maritime sources says: “Under the agreement, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will supply the Royal Australian Navy with three upgraded Mogami-class multi-role frigates built in Japan from 2029. Eight more frigates will be built in Western Australia.”

Additionally, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has never built warships outside of Japan. Rabobank in a note has commented further of this factor as follows:

Japan continues to increase its defense exports after decades of controls to stay out of global conflicts after World War II. Mitsubishi is going to build a fleet of frigates for the Royal Australian Navy in the coming years. The first three will be built in Japan, the remainder in Australia, bolstering the defense ties between the two countries. Both are US allies and face a threat from China. Australia aims to increase its surface fleet to its largest size since WWII.

It was only just over a decade ago, in 2014, that then-prime minister Shinzo Abe partially lifted the post-WW decades-long self-imposed ban on foreign arms sales.

The high tech multi-mission stealth frigate for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, now to be supplied to Australia’s military…

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ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 80: Truman’s ‘Human Sacrifice’ to Subdue Moscow

Sumiteru Taniguchi was one of the “lucky” ones. He lived a long and productive life. He married and fathered two healthy children who gave him four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He had a long career in Japan’s postal and telegraph services. As a leader in Japan’s anti-nuclear movement, he addressed thousands of audiences and hundreds of thousands of people. He traveled to at least 23 countries. The organizations in which he played a prominent role were nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Many of the more than 250,000 who lived in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, were not so lucky. Tens of thousands were killed instantly by the plutonium core atomic bomb the U.S. dropped that day from the B29 Bockscar, captained by Major Charles Sweeney.

The bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” exploded with a force equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT and wiped out an area that covered three square miles, shattering windows eleven miles away. Some 74,000 were dead by the end of the year. The death toll reached 140,000 by 1950. Included among the victims were thousands of Korean slave laborers, who toiled in Japanese mines, fields, and factories. Since then, atomic bomb-related injuries and illnesses have claimed thousands more victims and caused immense suffering to many of the survivors.

The scene of death and destruction defied description. Corpses, many of which had been charred by the blast, lay everywhere. Susan Southard, in her groundbreaking book Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, describes the scene that U.S. occupation troops encountered when they landed on September 23, 1945: “The Urakami Valley had vanished from existence, corpses were burning on cremation pyres, skulls and bones were piled on the ground, and people were walking through the ruins with beleaguered and empty expressions.”

Among the troops was Keith Lynch, a sailor from Nebraska. Lynch wrote to his parents that he had just seen

“a sight I hope my children, if I am so fortunate, will never have to see, hear of, or ever think of. It was horrible and when you get to thinking, unbelieveable….Such a thing as I saw yesterday cannot be described in words. You have to see it and I hope no one ever has to see such a thing again.”

The death toll was even higher and the destruction greater in Hiroshima, which the U.S. had obliterated three days earlier with a uranium core atomic bomb. There, some 200,000 were dead by 1950. The Nagasaki bomb was more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima, but damage was limited by the fact that the bomb missed its target and that the mountains surrounding Nagasaki, which is located in a valley, contained the blast. However, in Urakami Valley, where the bomb landed, nearly 70 percent of the population perished.

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New Search for Amber Room Launched in Poland

A promising new search for the legendary lost Amber Room has launched in Poland. The effort is reportedly being spearheaded by researcher Jan Delingowski, who has spent the last ten years investigating the curious case of the ornate gold and amber paneling that was stolen from a Russian palace by Nazi forces during World War II and then subsequently went missing as the chaotic end of the conflict unfolded. While it has long been thought that the treasure was lost somewhere in Poland, countless searches for the pilfered riches have come up maddeningly short over the years. However, there is hope that this latest hunt for the Amber Room may finally solve the case at last.

Based on a tip from a former prison inmate who claimed to have gleaned insight into the treasure’s fate by a Nazi war criminal he served alongside, Delingowski’s investigation led him to a location that once served as an SS training area in the village of Dziemiany. The researcher’s work was apparently compelling enough that Polish officials signed off on an excavation of the area, which reportedly commenced on Monday. In a testament to the seriousness of the search, Delingowski has assembled a team of experts to assist in the effort, with ground-penetrating radar being used to examine the area in the hopes of pinpointing specific spots to dig.

“The probability of discovery exists,” one of the scientists working on the project told a local media outlet, “and if something valuable is found, it could become one of the greatest archaeological sensations.” One reason for such optimism is that an early examination of the area uncovered what is described as a “brick-lined underground warehouse,” seemingly designed for valuable objects and with its entrances purposely filled with dirt long ago. An additional intriguing element to the peculiar spot is that the subterranean structure was not included on any contemporaneous Nazi maps of the training ground.

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Spain proposes declassifying secret Franco era files

The Spanish government on Tuesday introduced a bill to automatically declassify all secret government files older than 45 years, including documents from Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and the transition to democracy.

If approved by parliament, the proposed law could shed light on some of Spain’s darkest chapters, including Franco’s ties to Adolf Hitler, the locations of mass graves where victims of his 1939-75 rule were buried, and details of the 1966 Palomares nuclear accident caused by the mid-air collision of two U.S. Air Force planes over a fishing village in southern Spain.

“With this law we will overcome an obstacle in our legislation to put us in line with European standards,” Justice Minister Felix Bolanos told reporters. 

“Citizens have the right to know. Administrations have the obligation to provide documentation that is important for history,” he added.

The bill seeks to replace the existing law governing official secrets, enacted during Franco’s rule, which lacks provisions for automatic declassification based on the amount of time that has passed. 

The law would automatically declassify all documents older than 45 years unless they constituted a justified threat to national security, Bolanos said.

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Hiroshima at 80: Setting the Abhorrent Precedent

August 6th marks the 80th anniversary of mankind’s most cataclysmic and ignominious achievement: The first weaponized use of an atomic bomb. At approximately 8:15 in the morning, the bomb “Little Boy” detonated over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. While estimates have varied between 70,000 and 140,000 dead, the sheer magnitude of devastation caused to a largely civilian population cannot be understated. To this day, much debate rages on regarding the necessity of such weapons in the closing chapter of the Second World War.

The current orthodoxy of American military history, however, stands firmly entrenched that the usage of this bomb (and a subsequent one in Nagasaki three days later) was critical to ending the war quickly and saving the lives of countless Americans and even Japanese civilians who would have assuredly died in the ensuing operation to seize the entirety of mainland Japan. But how vital was the atomic bombing truly to ending the war? A deeper dive into contemporary sources reveals that the bombing was needless, cruel, and firmly established an abhorrent precedent for a newly established global hegemon.

Operation Downfall

Modern military historians desperately cling to the notion set forth by former War Secretary Henry Stimson, as articulated in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s Magazine, that, if forced to carry a ground invasion of Japan to conclusion, it would “cost over a million casualties, to American forces alone.” This invasion, dubbed “Operation Downfall,” was estimated by Stimson’s calculations to last well into 1946 and would have entailed that “additional losses might be expected among our allies” and that “enemy casualties would be much larger than our own.”

And while a large preponderance of scholarship on the matter seeks to reaffirm these claims, it was a dubious metric even at the time. As Barton J. Bernstein wrote in a 1999 issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies, no pre-Hiroshima literature can be found that would back up these claims. It appears to be a postwar invention by Stimson, Truman, et al., to justify the decision. This is an important distinction, as the bulk of pro-atomic weapon usage advocates rely heavily on this claim. However, perhaps surprisingly to some, the decision was questioned by many senior military leaders within the United States military even at the time.

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Ukrainian Proposal to Trade WWII Corpses for Living Prisoners is Beyond the Pale – Ex-DoD Analyst

The callousness of the Ukrainian offer to exchange the exhumed remains of Russian WWII soldiers for Ukrainian military prisoners is “hard to imagine,” former US Department of Defense analyst Karen Kwiatkowsky told Sputnik.

“It also suggests that there are not enough current Russian soldiers dead or captured to match those Ukrainians dead or held as POWs by Russia,” Kwiatkowski notes.

This offer, and other similar acts perpetrated by the Ukrainian side, “ensure Ukraine’s future will even more impoverished, less free, and even more widely held in contempt by the world community.”

Kwiatkoswki also lamented the West’s inability to “get its data and intelligence right regarding Ukraine,” and argued that “such willful ignorance on the US and NATO side kills more Ukrainians, and degrades Ukraine as desperate acts and offers such as this one become normalized.”

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Zelensky claimed he ‘never heard of’ Ukrainian Nazi collaborators’ crimes – Polish president

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky claimed he had no idea about the atrocities committed by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators during World War II until confronted about the issue by Polish President Andrzej Duda, the latter has told the media outlet RMF24.

According to the president, Zelensky’s claim underscores that Ukrainians are kept in the dark about their nation’s troubled past. “He said to me: ‘Andrzej, I’ve never heard of the murders, the killing of Poles in western Ukraine, in Volhynia. They didn’t teach us about it in school’,” Duda said, recounting one of his meetings with the Ukrainian leader.

The president was referring to the infamous Volyn massacre, which has long been a flashpoint in bilateral relations between the two countries. Militants from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) slaughtered up to 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945 in the regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, which were later incorporated into Ukraine. Both the UPA and the OUN collaborated with Nazi Germany during WWII.

Many historic ultranationalist leaders, including OUN leader Stepan Bandera, a notorious Nazi collaborator, are widely revered by Ukrainians today. According to Duda, they are ignorant about the crimes of the past. The widespread belief that they are aware of their own “difficult history” is wrong, according to the Polish president.

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Israel vs Germany: Who Killed More?

People who defend Israel like to play a numbers game. They like to talk about how insulting and absurd it is for people to make comparisons with the Nazi genocide of us Jews. They bring up the six million number and talk about how nothing compares with it. They talk about how what’s happening in Gaza is a drop in the bucket when taken in context. You can hear this argument made all the time by all sorts of defenders of the Israeli-American siege of Gaza. Here’s a quote from something someone wrote on Substack that got some traction:

“…people have no concept of the scale of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a killing machine. Over 10,000 Jews were murdered in a single day, on many days. In one 100 day period 1.5 million Jews were murdered. Jews were lined up and shot into pits or crammed into rooms and gassed. The lucky ones got a shelf to sleep on, a piece of bread and a few months of labor until their bodies gave out. Don’t compare anything to the Holocaust.”

My initial reaction to reading something like this is to think, well…Israel is killing hundreds of people a day, every day, and also horribly disfiguring and crippling as many or more. Lots of people are also dying from disease, infections, malnutrition, and ultimately succumbing to horrible injuries from the constant carpet bombing that Israel is carrying out. Is that nothing? Is this a morality contest for racking up bodies? Does this person think that unless Israel surpasses 10,000 a day or whatever arbitrary figure they come up with, Israel (and they themselves) are in the clear? That unless it is 10,000 a day, they’re not like the Nazis — that they’re moral and right?

But today a secondary thought appeared in my mind. If you are doing comparative accounting of mass slaughter and using the Holocaust as the gold standard for evil, six million doesn’t mean much when talking about the number of people Israel has killed in Gaza. That’s because the sizes of the two political entities being compared — Israel vs Germany — are vastly different. During its genocide, Germany had at least ten times the population that Israel has today. For this numbers morality game to have any meaning, you need to readjust your figures — instead of absolute sums, you need to work with something that gets closer to a per-capita genocide rate.

In our hyper-information age, people are obsessed with numbers. Numbers are everything. Without numbers, things don’t have meaning for many of us. It’s a bit of an unhealthy obsession I think. But since it’s so vital to people, I want work with the numbers a bit to see if we can put things into perspective.

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Something is going terribly wrong in the Baltic Sea

Beneath the waves of the Baltic Sea lies a silent but growing threat – the decaying remains of chemical munitions dumped after World War II. For years, these weapons have sat largely untouched, posing a known danger to marine life and coastal communities.The issue gained serious attention in the 21st century as scientists began to sound the alarm about growing environmental risks. Decades-old shells are corroding, raising the specter of toxic leaks that could trigger a full-blown environmental disaster.

Now, Germany is moving to recover and destroy these submerged stockpiles. But framed as an environmental cleanup, Berlin’s project may in fact worsen the environmental balance in the Baltic.

Russia has repeatedly emphasized the importance of its involvement in this process, citing its status as a directly affected nation with relevant expertise. Yet with international relations strained, meaningful cooperation remains elusive. So what happens if this mission is carried out without Russian input? RT takes a closer look.

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