re: 70 Years Ago Today, the U.S. Army Air Corps Made Tokyo Howl

You bring up some good points there. The Japanese did tend to fight to the death rather than surrender. But on the other hand, if you look at the Japanese land forces (both IJN and regular army) and compare them to their German counterparts, you'll see that Japan for all intents and purposes, had an army trained and equipped to fight a war along the lines of a WWI style static defense instead of a modern mechanized, combined arms war. In this regard the German Heer was far and away a better trained and better equipped fighting force. And while static defense tended to serve the Japanese in the Pacific, it not even once stopped a concerted Anerican effort to take an objective from the Japanese.

On the other hand, there are numerous instances of German forces being able to stop and even throw back American forces. The bottom line is the Japanses possessed good individual soldiers who fought very bravely and did all they could. But at the end of the day, Japan's land forces were woefully outmatched in virtually every facet by the American forces they faced.

As for treatment of POWs, the Germans did for the most part treat western prisoners well, especially comparative to how the Japanese treated American, and British/Commonwealth soldiers. However, from a standpoint of brutality, the treatment Soviet POWs received from their German captors was as bad as the worst from the Japanese.

I'd have to look at the numbers, but I believe an American POW had a far better chance at surviving a Japanese POW camp than a Soviet POW in the hands of the Germans.