&gt; It&#x27;s like nobody on the US side had studied any history whatsoever.<p>It certainly seemed like that, though its more likely the actual problem was that the people at the highest levels of authority on the US side consistently ignored and overrode the people that had studied history and learned from it, listening instead to the people that had not, because the latter were saying more pleasing to the decision-makers ideological preconceptions.<p>Its not like the uniformed military leadership of the time somehow, in a historical aberration, managed to include only people who were completely ignorant of every past experience of occupation of formerly-hostile territory everywhere, including the occupations of Japan and Germany after WWII.