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Originally Posted by 17thfabn
I agree with Mithrandir the gas would not have been as effective againt troops in dispersed defensive positions. It would be very effective agains closely packed landing troops on the beach. If we opened this door to the use of chemical weapons it might have been more damaging to U.S. troops than to the enemy.
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Your point is well taken, 17th and I don't really disagree with it. My thinking in this case had more to do with the tactical use of gas against heavily dug-in fortifications, such as those the Marines encountered on Iwo Jima and various other Pacific island strongholds. As the troops found out the hard way, Iwo was a maze of interconnected tunnels and hard points that were virtually impervious to direct shell fire. Use of shell or bomb-delivered poison gas against such positions would have, I think, been extremely effective in a tactical sense. The gas is heavier than air and would have made the tunnels and machine gun positions quickly untenable, forcing the enemy troops out into the open where conventional weapons were more effective. As you suggest though, we could probably gotten away with that only once. Had we used it, it is likely the Japanese would have done so in turn the next time an island was hit.
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Originally Posted by JohnK3
Let's not forget the atrocities committed building the Burma Railroad, the site of the infamous "Bridge Over the River Kwai." (Which was, by the way, NOT over the River Kwae, but over a different river.)
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John, as we later learned, atrocities like that occurred all over the Pacific. Look, for example, at what happened in Nanking after the Japanese invaded China in the 1930s. It is perhaps well that the American public did not know the true extent of Japanese barbarity toward prisoners-of-war before the conflict ended, else the retribution demanded against the Japanese people would have been too horrible to behold at war's end. While such actions may well have been just in the Biblical sense, they would have been geopolitically counterproductive given the standoff with the Soviets that developed after the war.