American and Allied Soldiers at War
Learn About:
- What battlefield conditions were like for American and Allied soldiers in the Pacific
- The nature and extent of American and Allied war atrocities in the Pacific
- How American and Allied soldiers “rationalized” their brutal behavior
- What ideologies were and were not operative on the battlefield
Read:
E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed (read pp. 187-315, Ch. 9-15)
Watch: Hell in the Pacific (Inferno, Purgatory, Armageddon, Apocalypse)
Assignment:
Final paper, 5-7 pages
Please compare and contrast the different motivations of American/Allied and Japanese soldiers to treat enemy soldiers and civilians with utmost brutality. On the basis of the memoirs and visual accounts from Sessions 3 and 4 ("Japanese Soldiers at War" and "American and Allied Soldiers at War"), please discern reasons for the brutality of Japanese and American/Allied soldiers and military personnel toward enemy soldiers and civilians.
- How did average American/Allied and Japanese men become capable of carrying out such brutal atrocities and war crimes? In your analysis of the oral testimonies and interviews, please pay particular attention to the multiple and surprisingly similar factors such as military and political cultures, racism, the experience of war, and ideology.
- Bear in mind that this is a comparative paper that asks you to describe both sides.
Author Biography
Aaron S. Moore is a historian of modern Japan and East Asia in Arizona State University's School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. In addition to courses on modern Japan and East Asia, he teaches thematic courses on the history of science and technology, war and empire, and the global Cold War for the undergraduate, online MA, and immersion graduate programs in History and Asian Studies. He also advises honors, master's, and doctoral students in History and Asian Studies. He is an affiliate of ASU's Korean Studies Program and the Center for Asian Research.His first book, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan's Wartime Era 1931-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2011), was published in paperback in 2013; Japanese and simplified Chinese editions are being prepared by Jinbun Shōin (2019) and Beijing Yanziyue Culture and Art Studio (2019), respectively. He is the author of several articles and book chapters on modern Japanese intellectual history and the history of technology in imperial Japan and post-1945 Asia, one of which was awarded a Distinguished Contribution to Electrotechnical History Commendation by the Society for the History of Technology.
His second book is Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development, and the Cold War Order (Bloomsbury Press, 2018), co-edited with Hiromi Mizuno and John DiMoia. This volume traces the transformation of Japan's colonial network of people, technology, capital, and ideas into the post-war system of development in Asia under the US Cold War order. Chapters on Japan and South Korea analyze how these colonial networks and connections enabled both Japan's postwar economic recovery and economic development in other Asian nations, thereby questioning conventional nationalist narratives of independent "economic miracles" in Japan and South Korea. It also details how under the banner of "economic cooperation," Japan and Korea's overseas technical and economic aid projects in Asia facilitated the erasure of past colonial violence and enabled the continued marginalization of communities within Asia's newly independent nations.
His current monograph project, Damming Asia: The Cold War and Japanese Post-Colonial Development in Asia, examines the history of Japan's overseas development system in Asia from its origins in Japan's colonial rule in Asia before 1945 to its rise as the world's leading aid donor by the Cold War's end in 1989. Through an analysis of large-scale dam construction in Burma, Vietnam, South Korea, and Laos conducted by Japanese engineers and consultants after 1945, he traces how earlier colonial power relations were reconfigured into new relations of power linking Japan and post-colonial Asia under the banner of "economic cooperation."
He started working at ASU in 2008 and earned his doctorate from Cornell University. Before that he worked as a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as an assistant professor of East Asian history at Ohio University. He conducts research in Korean and Japanese, and his research has been funded by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA, among other organizations.
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