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The Allied Powers had seemingly learned the lessons of Versailles and didn't try to punish the losers (well, not as much), instead letting them grow. Thus why t

The Allied Powers had seemingly learned the lessons of Versailles and didn't try to punish the losers (well, not as much), instead letting them grow. Thus why them not being victorious didn't matter, I guess.

krapp 9y ago
Also, the US felt a strong, capitalist Japan would be less likely to fall prey to communism.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Concerns about communism also led to them doing a 180 on keeping war criminals around and in them outright funding Japanese organized crime to violently suppress the Japanese left, as detailed in Kaplan and Dubro's Yakuza book. Japan still has echoes of this policy in that organized crime is entangled with legitimate government and business to a surprising degree.
yequalsx 9y ago
America did try to punish the Germans. Millions starved as a result of deliberate Allied policy. It wasn't until the schism with the USSR that policies shifted. Eisenhower in particular wanted Germany to be an agrarian society.
- Qub3d 9y ago
  Wait, i'm confused. I've always been told America poured tons of money into Germany via the Marshall Plan [0], which resulted in the "Wirtschaftswunder"[+] of the 50s and 60s. Former president Hoover went over and surveyed Germany almost directly after the war, in 1947. [0]:https://web.archive.org/web/20090419195002/http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2008/webarticles/080103_marshallplan.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090419195002/http://www.un.org... [+]: Literally "economic miracle"
  - rtpg 9y ago
    Didn't Marshall Plan money end up coming back to the US? Essentially a loan to purchase US goods? It's definitely helpful as a loan, of course.
  - vkou 9y ago
    The initial plan (Carried out between 1945 and 1947) was starving Germany - economically, and literally. Once communism became the big boogieman, the US did a 180 on its occupation policy, and instead started dumping money and American goods into Germany via the Marshall plan.
  - sgift 9y ago
    Long story short: This wasn't the original plan. The original plan, which was in effect for a while, was a variant of the "Morgenthau plan" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan#JCS_1067 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan#JCS_1067 ). It took two years for them to realize that not only would they be starving Germans (intention), but also the rest of Europe (unintended), and more or less block any economic growth in Europe (+risk Europe falling under the sway of the Soviet Union). So, they reversed their plans and the rest is history (that history includes the Marshall plan).
  - klaasn 9y ago
    There was a lot of punishment as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...
- rangibaby 9y ago
  > Eisenhower in particular wanted Germany to be an agrarian society. The US wanted to apply the same policy to Japan as well.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  As a German. I have never heard about these starved millions. The agrarian society plan was the Morgenthau plan which didn't get implemented from what I know. My parents are WW2 generation. I have never heard any complaints from them or relatives about the American behavior after WW2.
  - yequalsx 9y ago
    Being German does not preclude you from being ignorant of post war German history. Google it. You can find lots of information on the Allied occupation of Germany. It wasn't until the Berlin airlift that feeding Germans became fashionable. My dad was in WW2 on the American side. He ended as a guard in a POW camp after the war. He'd have denied the starvation too but it did occur. Eisenhower did want, initially, for Germany to be an agrarian society. He wasn't the only one with this view. Morganthau was not the only person with this idea.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      The first years after the war were confusing for everybody. The country had been effectively destroyed,news about German crimes slowly came out, nobody knew how the Germans would respond to occupation. It's no wonder it took years to sort things out. No matter what people in DC were planning I have never heard from people who lived then about Americans getting in the way of people trying to rebuild.
      - yequalsx 9y ago
        Because the Americans that people in Germany interacted with weren't making the decisions. Use Google. Research it. It's not a controversial topic in terms of historicity. Germans as a matter of deliberate policy were prevented from getting the food they needed.
        maxxxxx 9y ago
        I guess I'll have to take your word. From what I have heard life in the American Zone was by far the best and it was worst in the Russian Zone.
awkwarddaturtle 9y ago
> The Allied Powers had seemingly learned the lessons of Versailles and didn't try to punish the losers (well, not as much), instead letting them grow. This was true for Germany but not for japan. Due to hard feelings over ww2 and of course racial animosity/hatred, our plan for japan was deindustrialization. We wanted japan to be at least a few decades behind the US and turn more of their nation into docile agrarian farmers. We also instituted starvation policy to thin out and subjugate the japanese. There was rampant starvation in japan in the first few years after ww2. We had troops specifically assigned to destroy japanese industrial/engineering/science capacity. One of the most famous was the destruction of japan's cyclotron. https://youtu.be/hJRxchhBbNQ https://youtu.be/hJRxchhBbNQ Keep in mind that we were an extremely racist nation 70 years ago and we had just nuked and firebombed japan into complete rubble. Whereas germans were "our white aryan brothers" ( it's absurd to think it now, but that's how the leaders of the US thought back then ) and we felt an obligation to rehabilitate them, the japanese were viewed as inferior asians with plenty of motive to attack the US again. The only reason japan was allowed to reindustrialize was the soviet threat and the korean war. We needed japan to help seal off the soviets, chinese and north koreans. It's fascinating stuff. If the communist threat didn't exist and the korean war never occurred, japan might be a more agrarian society today controlled by the US administrators.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  There was a Japan faction and a China faction who each wanted their respective countries to be the center of US Asia policy and the China faction lost.

krapp 9y ago

Also, the US felt a strong, capitalist Japan would be less likely to fall prey to communism.

emodendroket 9y ago
Concerns about communism also led to them doing a 180 on keeping war criminals around and in them outright funding Japanese organized crime to violently suppress the Japanese left, as detailed in Kaplan and Dubro's Yakuza book. Japan still has echoes of this policy in that organized crime is entangled with legitimate government and business to a surprising degree.

yequalsx 9y ago

America did try to punish the Germans. Millions starved as a result of deliberate Allied policy. It wasn't until the schism with the USSR that policies shifted. Eisenhower in particular wanted Germany to be an agrarian society.

Qub3d 9y ago
Wait, i'm confused. I've always been told America poured tons of money into Germany via the Marshall Plan [0], which resulted in the "Wirtschaftswunder"[+] of the 50s and 60s. Former president Hoover went over and surveyed Germany almost directly after the war, in 1947. [0]:https://web.archive.org/web/20090419195002/http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2008/webarticles/080103_marshallplan.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090419195002/http://www.un.org... [+]: Literally "economic miracle"
- rtpg 9y ago
  Didn't Marshall Plan money end up coming back to the US? Essentially a loan to purchase US goods? It's definitely helpful as a loan, of course.
- vkou 9y ago
  The initial plan (Carried out between 1945 and 1947) was starving Germany - economically, and literally. Once communism became the big boogieman, the US did a 180 on its occupation policy, and instead started dumping money and American goods into Germany via the Marshall plan.
- sgift 9y ago
  Long story short: This wasn't the original plan. The original plan, which was in effect for a while, was a variant of the "Morgenthau plan" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan#JCS_1067 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan#JCS_1067 ). It took two years for them to realize that not only would they be starving Germans (intention), but also the rest of Europe (unintended), and more or less block any economic growth in Europe (+risk Europe falling under the sway of the Soviet Union). So, they reversed their plans and the rest is history (that history includes the Marshall plan).
- klaasn 9y ago
  There was a lot of punishment as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...
rangibaby 9y ago
> Eisenhower in particular wanted Germany to be an agrarian society. The US wanted to apply the same policy to Japan as well.
maxxxxx 9y ago
As a German. I have never heard about these starved millions. The agrarian society plan was the Morgenthau plan which didn't get implemented from what I know. My parents are WW2 generation. I have never heard any complaints from them or relatives about the American behavior after WW2.
- yequalsx 9y ago
  Being German does not preclude you from being ignorant of post war German history. Google it. You can find lots of information on the Allied occupation of Germany. It wasn't until the Berlin airlift that feeding Germans became fashionable. My dad was in WW2 on the American side. He ended as a guard in a POW camp after the war. He'd have denied the starvation too but it did occur. Eisenhower did want, initially, for Germany to be an agrarian society. He wasn't the only one with this view. Morganthau was not the only person with this idea.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    The first years after the war were confusing for everybody. The country had been effectively destroyed,news about German crimes slowly came out, nobody knew how the Germans would respond to occupation. It's no wonder it took years to sort things out. No matter what people in DC were planning I have never heard from people who lived then about Americans getting in the way of people trying to rebuild.
    - yequalsx 9y ago
      Because the Americans that people in Germany interacted with weren't making the decisions. Use Google. Research it. It's not a controversial topic in terms of historicity. Germans as a matter of deliberate policy were prevented from getting the food they needed.
      - maxxxxx 9y ago
        I guess I'll have to take your word. From what I have heard life in the American Zone was by far the best and it was worst in the Russian Zone.

awkwarddaturtle 9y ago

> The Allied Powers had seemingly learned the lessons of Versailles and didn't try to punish the losers (well, not as much), instead letting them grow. This was true for Germany but not for japan. Due to hard feelings over ww2 and of course racial animosity/hatred, our plan for japan was deindustrialization. We wanted japan to be at least a few decades behind the US and turn more of their nation into docile agrarian farmers. We also instituted starvation policy to thin out and subjugate the japanese. There was rampant starvation in japan in the first few years after ww2. We had troops specifically assigned to destroy japanese industrial/engineering/science capacity. One of the most famous was the destruction of japan's cyclotron. https://youtu.be/hJRxchhBbNQ https://youtu.be/hJRxchhBbNQ Keep in mind that we were an extremely racist nation 70 years ago and we had just nuked and firebombed japan into complete rubble. Whereas germans were "our white aryan brothers" ( it's absurd to think it now, but that's how the leaders of the US thought back then ) and we felt an obligation to rehabilitate them, the japanese were viewed as inferior asians with plenty of motive to attack the US again. The only reason japan was allowed to reindustrialize was the soviet threat and the korean war. We needed japan to help seal off the soviets, chinese and north koreans. It's fascinating stuff. If the communist threat didn't exist and the korean war never occurred, japan might be a more agrarian society today controlled by the US administrators.

emodendroket 9y ago
There was a Japan faction and a China faction who each wanted their respective countries to be the center of US Asia policy and the China faction lost.