The saying goes that history is written by the victors, and that holds very true when it comes to World War II. It is often referred to as the good war, with the Allies depicted as the shining white knights who came to save the entire world from the evils of Hitler and the Japanese. However, while the history books tend to depict the Allies as almost saintly, the reality of the situation was often a lot more disturbing and a lot less flattering.

The Allies committed many atrocities during World War II and its aftermath that they would rather you forgot. While there is no questioning that the Axis were certainly worse, it is clear from the many atrocities committed by the Allies that war brings out the brutality in all of us.

10 The Massive Bombing Campaign Against Civilian Targets In Japan

Most people know of the moment in history when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The famous argument for their use was that the Japanese were impossible to bring to surrender and that such a shocking display was the only thing that would prevent a land war that would last decades and cost millions of lives. However, well before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US had already been bombing Japanese civilian cities on a regular basis to demoralize the enemy and had caused quite a death toll.

In fact, General Curtis LeMay, who ordered the attacks, was of the mind that the Japanese might not actually surrender until they were pretty much all wiped out. It was for this reason that he decided the bombing campaigns of regular Japanese cities were not enough and that the US needed to go for one of their most major cities and do something drastic.

On March 9, 1945, he carried out his plan and ordered an air raid on Tokyo itself, but this was no normal bombing run. The bombers were dropping napalm cylinders and petroleum jelly to firebomb the entire city.^[1] More than 40 square kilometers (15 mi²) of city was burned to ruin, with many melted people stacked on top of each other. It was a horrific sight, with at least 100,000 civilians killed. General LeMay even remarked once that the United States may have killed more people firebombing Tokyo than they did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and admitted that he would have likely been charged with war crimes if his side had lost.

9 Russian Soldiers Raped Women After Liberating Poland From The Nazis

Russia certainly doesn’t have the best reputation among the Allies today and was always the more dangerous part of the faction, but the country was basically essential to stopping Hitler. They not only slowed his advance but came roaring back, pushing across the territory Germany had taken and eventually straight on to Berlin itself. The Russian soldiers were exhausted and demoralized after so much fighting, and with society breaking down around them in many ways, they found it fairly easy to revert to primitive behaviors. While some of this only took the form of looting, the amount of rape that went on is incredibly disturbing. To make matters worse, Stalin actually approved of his soldiers raping enemies—he believed that it was a great way to psychologically destroy them.

There weren’t just revenge rapes against Germans in the major cities. The Red Army at the time was known for liberating camps in countries such as Poland and then raping all of the female victims.^[2] After so much horrific fighting, many of these men were only thinking about their basic instincts and also felt that they should be able to take what they want, considering how much of a favor they were doing Europe by liberating it from the Nazis.

8 Operation Paperclip Was Probably Even Worse Than You Already Thought

Not everyone knows it by name, but everyone knows the basics of what Operation Paperclip was. During World War II, the United States and many others had been eying the Germans’ technology and all the various things they were working on and desired to gain the Nazis’ scientific secrets. When the war ended, they found that the Nazis were working on many things they hadn’t even imagined, such as nerve agents and a weaponized form of bubonic plague. Instead of trying to destroy all the research on such horrible things, the US decided they needed these scientists for themselves.^[3]

The goal was to bring almost 90 German scientists into the United States, whitewash their past a bit, and get them to put their scientific knowledge to work for the US. Now, some may think this wasn’t really that bad, as they were just scientists and possibly following orders. However, these were not nice men. Some of them knew full well how the concentration camps worked and would personally handpick people to slave themselves to death on their projects—just to enjoy the cruelty of it. Others were, as we mentioned, working on chemical warfare and similarly terrible things, making it hard to simply accept the excuse of “following orders.”

Unfortunately, most of these men grew old and grey working for the US government and never saw any real consequences for their actions.

7 US Soldiers Started Collecting Japanese Skulls

The atrocities of the Japanese during World War II are very well-documented, and in the United States especially, their misdeeds are very well-known. Most people have heard of Japan’s Unit 731 as well as of actions like the Bataan Death March. The Japanese were known for incredibly brutal treatment of prisoners of war and in some cases were witnessed burying captured enemies alive.

However, war brings out the brutality in all of us, and as the campaign in the Pacific dragged on, US soldiers began to perform actions that many people today would find to be shocking and horrific. They started mutilating Japanese corpses and taking trophies, even going so far as to send them back home to civilians, who were actually thankful instead of disgusted. One of the most common things to take were ears because they were easy to cut off and haul away as a trophy, but skulls were the real coup de grace.

Unfortunately, neither process for obtaining the skull was anything short of barbaric. They would either have to boil the head to get the skin off or leave it out long enough for ants to eat all the flesh, leaving the skull underneath intact.^[4] To be clear, the United States military leadership officially was against the practice and tried to discourage it, but the soldiers kept taking skulls anyway.

6 The Americans Sent Soviet Dissidents Back To Russia To Die

The world was so excited when World War II ended and just so glad to move on that many people completely forgot about some of the worst atrocities that happened directly after the war. At the famous Yalta Conference, one of the less famous things promised was repatriation of citizens trapped in another Allied country’s territory or kept as their prisoners. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and everyone was riding high on their emotions, but before long, it became clear just how brutal and awful such a generalized policy could be.

The United States had a couple million people they had to send back, and many really didn’t want to go back to Soviet Russia.^[5] The Americans initially resorted to force, but this led to some suicides, so they started going for a sneakier approach, and the British followed suit. They actually started tricking people, telling them they were taking them somewhere else and then sending them back to the Soviet Union. Many of the people sent back were executed for desertion or other crimes, and others were sent to be worked to death at labor camps.

5 The US And The UK Used German POWs As Slaves Back Home

As World War II went on, the British started to end up with a bit of a problem: Storing all of the German prisoners of war and feeding them was becoming an incredible strain on the system. The United States, to help out their ally, agreed to take many German POWs themselves to ease the burden. However, this presented its own issue. The Americans had to find a safe place to put them, and they also were going to be dealing with an increasing burden to care for all these prisoners. And while the Allies did some atrocious things, actual concentration camps of the sort Germany and Japan used were completely out of the question. The Allies were also concerned with actually following the Geneva Conventions, which did not allow for captured soldiers to be used as slaves.

However, both countries quickly decided to go ahead and start using their captured Germans for mass labor, as they had a labor shortage from all their own men fighting the war and had to now take care of hundreds of thousands of prisoners.^[6] To get around the fact that they couldn’t technically treat them as slaves, they paid the POWs an incredibly tiny wage. (In England, this amounted to a single shilling a day.) The laborers were often not fed all that well, either, although the governments would claim their own people were also doing without due to war rationing. While Allied POW camps weren’t the horror shows that Axis camps were, abuse still happened, and the Allies still used enemy soldiers as slaves in all but name.

4 Millions Of Ethnic Germans Were Deported To Germany After The War

When the war ended, most people think that things quickly became sunshine and roses. However, the aftermath of World War II was incredibly ugly, and the victors didn’t always make decisions that kept the sanctity of human life in mind. In fact, there was a strong desire to get revenge on anyone involved. We all know that the Nuremberg trials brought justice to many Nazi war criminals, but the Allies didn’t save their anger for only the leadership and soldiers. After the war, they approved a plan to forcibly deport 12 to 14 million ethnic Germans back to the ruins of Germany from the various surrounding countries that they had been born in, including Poland.^[7]

Most Western history books don’t talk about this because of how shameful it turned out to be. Rough estimates say that about 500,000 civilians died as part of the largest forced migration in known history. To make matters worse, many of these citizens were actually placed into the remains of concentration camps around Germany and were forced to do hard labor as “reparations in kind” for what Germany had done to other countries around them. If this wasn’t bad enough, the vast majority of the people being forced to migrate were women, elderly people, and males under 16 years of age who had been too young to fight in the war.

The sad truth is that the concentration camps didn’t cease operation when the war ended but went on for years afterward, imprisoning ethnic Germans who likely had no say or part in Germany’s initial decision to militarize. In their quest for justice, in this particular case, all the Allies did is get revenge on the wrong people—the innocent.

3 Stalin’s Scorched-Earth Policy

Because the Allies won, when World War II atrocities are talked about, Western history books mostly mention the horrible things done by the Axis. Commonly mentioned is the scorched-earth policy put in place by Hitler. Essentially, if the enemy were going to take a territory, the Germans would burn down all crops, destroy all buildings, and ruin any railroad or other infrastructure to make it harder for the enemy to advance. Many of Hitler’s own commanders thought this was insane and got away many times with actively resisting it. Their argument was that they could always take the place back later, and they felt it would be easier to rebuild if everything wasn’t torn to pieces.

However, while most people only think of this as a Nazi thing, Stalin also put a scorched-earth policy in place.^[8] And his was likely much more brutal than the Nazis’. Stalin had an iron grip on his military, so there would be no ignoring his orders, and he wanted it done proper. He had little care for how it would impact his own civilians or how hard it would be to feed them or move them to a safe place. Stalin had special demolition battalions whose sole job was to destroy infrastructure, crops, and entire towns that they had to leave behind to the Germans.

Stalin’s scorched-earth policy hit Ukraine especially hard, as it was fought over by Germans and Soviets, both using a similar strategy to prevent the other side from advancing. By the end of the war, a huge portion of Ukrainian infrastructure had been destroyed.

2 The Americans And The British Turned Away Many Jewish Refugees

Whenever you mention any of the bad things the Allies did in the war, or anything that we put up with from Stalin, people will always argue that while it was bad, it was outweighed by the fact that we stopped the Holocaust from going any further. In fact, many people seem to be under the impression that the Holocaust was the main reason the United States and many other countries entered the war. The truth is that the United States officially entered the war after Japan attacked and had only been unofficially helping countries like France and England because they were allies.

While there was news filtering out of Germany about what was happening, most countries were more concerned about protecting their own borders than anything, and we didn’t know the full extent of the Holocaust until after Germany had been defeated. The world didn’t fully realize the problem, and Jewish people already had a history of being unwelcome in many parts of Europe and around the world, which made it easier for Hitler to massacre so many of them.

The United States in particular, while acting the hero today, turned away possibly as many as hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees over the course of the war, refusing to increase their quotas for those regions despite the horrific circumstances.^[9] Unfortunately, the British weren’t much better. While they did take in some refugees, they actually made it harder for the Jewish people to use an agreement that allowed them to take refuge in what was then Palestine. Many Jews who couldn’t make it to Palestine or into the US ended up being taken in by other European countries. Many of these countries then fell to Germany, putting the Jewish refugees right back in the arms of Hitler. Most died in the Holocaust.

1 Canadian Troops Burned Down An Entire Town In Revenge

Today, Canadians are known for being some of the nicest people on the entire planet. They take in loads of refugees with much less red tape than most countries, and their main national fault is apologizing too much—something they keep apologizing for and thus perpetuating the cycle. However, as previously mentioned, war brings out the brutality in all of us, and Canada was no exception. Near the end of World War II, part of the Canada Corps were fighting off some of the last German resistance and ended up in a pitched battle near a town called Friesoythe—home to about 4,000 German civilians.

While they were advancing on Friesoythe to mop things up, the Canadians’ leader was killed in the midst of battle. An erroneous report went around that he was killed not by a German soldier but by a civilian sniper who had cowardly shot him in the back. The acting commander was so incensed that instead of taking the time to find out if it was true, he decided to take revenge on the entire town. Once the town was taken over and the population had fled, the Canada Corps set about burning it all to the ground.^[10]

The French Revolution changed everything. France’s kings were replaced almost overnight by the most radical government the world had ever seen. France was suddenly a beacon of freedom: “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” was the motto of the revolution: it is still used to defend liberalism today.

But the revolution wasn’t all positive. Thousands of innocent people lost their lives and the country was torn between different groups who used force to crush rebellion. It led France into dictatorship and, eventually, back to the days of kings. Here, we’ve rounded up ten of the most dreadful atrocities of the French revolution.

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10 Beheading Louis XVI

The beheading of Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette was one of the biggest events of the French Revolution, but it didn’t have to happen. Before he was king, Louis XVI was quiet, dedicated to his studies and painfully shy. It took him seven years to consummate his marriage to the beautiful and intimidating Hapsburg heiress. When he became king he was cautious and indecisive, eager to be loved. In another age he would have been a great king, but he was entirely unsuited to the political crisis of the time.

People around him took advantage of his weakness to seize more power. Louis was little more than a figurehead. It was no surprise when the new government voted to abolish the monarchy shortly after.

Some revolutionaries argued against executing Louis, but the revolution was in full swing and the public hated him. Louis XVI was killed by guillotine in January 1793.

The move shocked many across the world since Louis had always been seen as a moderate king. His death enraged nearby European countries and led to a war that might have been avoided. He faced his death fearlessly: with his final breath, he forgave those who condemned him and hoped that no more blood would be spilled.^[1]

9 Toppling Of Statues

Executing Louis wasn’t enough: later that year, the rebels decided to remove all trace of the old kings from the country. They started with the tombs of St Denis, the traditional resting place of France’s royals.

To begin with, the masons were happy just to destroy the old Carolingian statues and other symbols of royalty. But within a month they were hammering into the old vault that held the kings from the House of Bourbon. When they were in, they started destroying the old coffins. Some of the kingly remains were put on public display, while others were dumped into a large burial pit, to cries of joy from the crowd. Many people came to watch—so many that the labourers struggled to do their work. According to eyewitnesses, members of the crowd grabbed at the bodies when they could, taking stray hairs, teeth and other things as personal mementos. These acts were later condemned both within France and across the world, but by that time it was too late.

After the Bourbon Restoration, the kings were retrieved from the pit and moved to the crypt in the basilica, but the damage was already done: many of the kings were unrecognisable.^[2]

8 The Law of Suspects

The revolution started because the rebels wanted everyone to be free and equal. After they won, though, their anger didn’t come to an end: instead, they started hunting down anyone who might be a threat. This period is now known as the Reign of Terror, and it resulted in thousands of innocent deaths.

The Reign of Terror started with the Law of Suspects, which granted the government the power to accuse pretty much anyone of being a rebel. They attacked the priests, who were driven underground—for a while, being Catholic was actually illegal. In the end, anyone who might have been connected to the old nobles could be imprisoned and executed.

Over two years around 500,000 people were accused—a huge number for the time. So many were accused, in fact, that the prisons were too full and people had to be put under house arrest. Though most were eventually allowed to walk free, around 16,000 people were killed—and many thousands more died in prison. Under the law, anyone whose “conduct, relations or language [showed them to be] partisans of tyranny … and enemies of liberty” was arrested and put on trial.^[3]

7 Lyon Erased

Not everyone in France supported the revolution. The city of Lyon backed the moderate Girondins, a group who were part of the revolution but were not as bloodthirsty as the others. The rebel leaders considered Lyon a centre of royalist support, so they laid siege to it in 1793. Over the course of the fighting over 2,000 people were killed in Lyon and the city was conquered. The revolutionaries had won, but they had further plans for the city.

In October, the National Convention issued a decree calling for Lyon to be destroyed. Everyone who lived in Lyon was to have their weapons taken away. They would be given to revolutionaries. Any building “inhabited by the wealthy” was to be torn down, leaving only the homes of the poor, factories, and some monuments.

They even planned to purge the city’s name from history. The city’s name would be erased: Lyon would be called Liberated City (Ville Affranchie) instead. They planned to build a column with an inscription on it saying: “Lyon made war on Liberty; Lyon is no more.” Fortunately, this project was never finished.^[4]

6 Girondins Executed

France’s new government had two main groups: the Girondins and the Montagnards. The Girondins were moderates: they wanted to build a free, capitalist, democratic country where everyone had a say in how they were ruled—regardless of who they were. They were supported across France but the people of Paris liked the Montagnards more.

They were extremists who “wanted everything levelled”. Anyone seen as elite had to give up their status or be executed. The groups got along well to begin with, but fell out over Louis’s death. The Montagnards wanted to kill him, but the Girondins wanted the country to vote on it. The Montagnards said they were plotting to save the king and called them traitors.

Things boiled over on the streets of Paris. A group of soldiers and citizens surrounded the government buildings and demanded the Girondins be kicked out of the government. The Montagnards duly did so. Some Girondins were able to escape, but a few months later, those who were left were rounded up and guillotined.^[5]

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5 Drownings at Nantes

The city of Nantes was a center of revolution, but much of the countryside surrounding it was royalist. The region rose up in rebellion, leading to the Battle of Nantes. After this, the new French government decided to purge the city of anyone who still supported the monarchy. To do this, they sent Jean-Baptiste Carrier, one of their most committed supporters.

Jean-Baptiste took his job very seriously. In around five months, between 12,000 and 15,000 people were killed by his order. Nantes lies on the Loire, which Jean-Baptiste called “the national bathtub”. He and his men built special boats called lighters which were specifically designed for drowning prisoners. The captives would be shackled to each other, often naked, and herded onto the boats—which had trap doors on the bottom. The boats were then sunk with the prisoners on board. The elderley, pregnant women and children were all drowned without distinction.

In the end Jean-Baptiste’s methods were too extreme even for the revolution: he was recalled to Paris by the Committee of Public Safety, put on trial and executed by guillotine.^[6]

4 Law of 22 Prairial

Over the course of the Reign of Terror, thousands of people were imprisoned, some for absurd reasons. By June 1794, the prisons of France—particularly Paris—were overcrowded, so action had to be taken. Robespierre and his allies drafted a new law which would allow trials to be concluded much quicker: they pushed this law through the Convention and it was passed on 10 June 1794.

It meant that people could be put on trial for simple things like ‘spreading fake news’ or ‘seeking to inspire discouragement’. Citizens were expected to confront or report their neighbours if they expressed any kind of opposition to the government.

When these people were put on trial, they weren’t treated fairly: the judges and jury only had three days to come to a conclusion, and they had to choose whether to allow the accused to go free or be put to death.

This new law marked the beginning of the Grand Terror. Executions per day increased dramatically across France, and most of those killed were undoubtedly innocent. The Grand Terror came to an end after two months, but not because people were horrified by the killings. No, the new law had also made it so members of the Convention could now be put on trial. Looking to preserve their own skins, the members of the Convention removed Robespierre and guillotined him, bringing an end to the killings.^[7]

3 The Massacre in the Vendee

The revolution was supposed to be a movement that freed the French lower classes and gave them liberty and security. But anyone who opposed the new government was harshly punished, even those who were lower class. In the early days, the church was singled out for its wealth and excess. The revolutionary government veered between atheism and a new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, but they were united in their desire to destroy the old Catholic system.

In the Vendee, however, the people rose up to protect their priests and churches from the new revolutionary government. When the government ordered them to form a conscript military unit, they rebelled, joining together in local militias which were collectively known as the Catholic and Royal Army. This alarmed the new government, who sent the army to tackle the problem. After a series of pitched battles, the Catholic and Royal Army was defeated.

But the government didn’t stop there. Determined to prevent another such uprising, the government sent General Louis Marie Turreau with twelve columns of troops to destroy to Vendee. Farms, villages, supplies and forests were destroyed, and the soldiers killed without restriction. When it was over, General Francois Joseph Westermann wrote a letter back to the government saying: “There is no more Vendée… According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands. I do not have a prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated all.”^[8]

2 Law of the Maximum

Unlike many other atrocities on this list, the Law of the Maximum was implemented with good intentions—though the government was forced to do it. One of the biggest reasons people joined the rebellion in the first place was because food was too expensive, but by 1793 even the basics were going back up in price. The enrages, a collection of anti-elite protestors who might today be called Marxists, argued that the nobility had been replaced by greedy merchants. Action was needed to take away their wealth and help the poor.

The government passed the Law of the Maximum in response. It set a maximum price for goods, from bread and wine to iron and shoes. Merchants had to display a list of prices outside their stores and, if any of their prices were above the maximum, they would be fined. Instead of going to the government, the fine went to whoever informed the authorities about the illegal pricing, encouraging people to rat out merchants who ignored the law.

It had a disastrous impact on France. While merchants did reduce their prices, it left them with almost no money. The less honest shopkeepers began watering down their goods, disguising ash as ground pepper, starch as sugar and pear juice as wine. Farmers in rural areas began hoarding their produce because they couldn’t get a good enough price in the cities, meaning that people in the cities starved.

The result was a black market where the rich could still buy the goods they needed, while the poor had no access to food at all. These famines were fixed temporarily when the government sent soldiers to take food from the farmers and bring it to the city by force, but this only caused more unrest.^[9]

1 September Massacres

After Louis was killed, the government fell into chaos. No-one knew who was in charge. In the meantime the Paris Commune, who were supported by the armed mob, had all the power. Chaos reigned as the new government fought over who should be in power, alongside issues like the economy, the army, and the justice system.

What dominated, however, was a fear of counter-revolutionary backlash. The new movement had been denounced in Britain, Austria and Prussia, and war loomed on the horizon. Meanwhile, French royalists were gathering support in other parts of the country. The revolutionaries feared that, if a royalist army was to attack Paris, the new revolutionary government would fall. In particular, they came to believe that the inmates of the city’s prisons would join with the counter-revolutionaries if given a chance. These fears were exacerbated when it came time for the new army to leave the city, with the people believing it would leave the city vulnerable to a prison break.

Between the 2nd and 6th of September 1792, the inmates were attacked by revolutionary mobs, with over 1000 being killed in the space of a single day. Half the city’s entire prison population was massacred, with corpses left mutilated in the streets. The revolutionary government sent letters to regional governments saying that conspirators in the city’s prisons had been executed. The act was repeated elsewhere: murders of prisoners took place in 75 of France’s 83 departments.^[10]

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