I know less about the Japanese case than the German. The standard published point of departure is John Dower’s War without mercy. There certainly did seem to be some important differences—I’ll call them cultural and/or social, though some would haggle over whether either is the appropriate term—between the Japanese and U.S. troops. To put it roughly, I think it fair to say that by and large the Japanese saw Americans’ willingness to surrender and Americans saw Japanese willingness to engage in banzai charges and kamikaze attacks (a favorite scholar of mine, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, has published one book and a collection of edited primary documents related to the latter; here’s an article stemming from her work on them) as things done by animals.
As for the SS and particularly the Einsatzgruppen, they were fighting international Bolshevism. There were other things in the mix beyond a hatred and fear of Marxism (Omer Bartov’s work is once place to look) but the perpetrators saw themselves as enmeshed in an existential conflict. That may completely implausible motivation seven decades on, but I suspect future generations are going to have a hard time buying contemporary motivations for the Global War on Terror (before anyone suggests otherwise, I am not equating the Holocaust and the Global War on Terror), as well.
American troops have never perpetrated anything of the scale that Japanese and German forces did during World War Two. But I don’t think any American should kid themselves about some sort of inherent American decency. The Philippine-American War is an example too often overlooked in our country’s military history. During World War Two American soldiers and Marines are well known to have collected Japanese skulls as trophies (I understand perfectly well how the conditions they were under could have lead them to find that to be acceptable behavior, I’m just pointing out that being American didn’t stop them from being capable of it). And we can be quite inhumane to our own. Look at our country’s history of lynchings and the fact that something like 1% of our adults are imprisoned on any given day and 600 or so of them are sexually assaulted on that day and the public at large doesn’t really seem too concerned about it.
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