August 6, l945 celebrates the day when the ENOLA GAY delivered
her cargo through Col. Paul Tibbets, pilot of B29 super fortress of
an atomic bomb on Hiroshima
"Another country that got away relatively easily from its war crimes is Japan. If one counts civilian casualties only, Japan's invasions were far more brutal than Germany's invasions. They killed, enslaved and raped millions of civilians. Japan was the only country to use chemical weapons, and it pioneered biological warfare by dropping plague, cholera and anthrax germs on Chinese villages. The number of people submitted to medical experiments in Japan's secret labs is much higher than the number of German prisoners who suffered the same fate. Nobody will ever know the number of "sex slaves" who were used (probably more than one million) and who died (sources say up to 90%). Prisoners of war in German camps were not mistreated (only 1% died) but prisoners of war in Japanese camps were used as slave labourers (and 31% died). If one includes China and all the occupied countries (Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc), Japan caused the death of about 12 million civilians, far more than those caused by Germany
Bushido
Laurens van der Post, writing of his experiences as a prisoner of the
Japanese, immortalised them in these words ~
For four years we were in the hands of a lot of lunatics: for us it
was a mediaeval war. It couldn't have been more horrible. We were
faced with death and brutality of the most extraordinary kind; we
were utterly powerless minute by minute. That was a war within a war.
This quotation was chosen by Tom McGowran to preface his collection
of extracts from the newsletters of the Scottish Far East Prisoner of
War Association which, together with a few items from other sources,
has been published by the Cualann Press
BEYOND THE
BAMBOO SCREEN.
The extracts are reminiscences written by survivors of the war's
worst atrocities. Statistics tell only a part of the full story ~ for
example, that of the 85,000 captured at the fall of Singapore, one
third died in captivity ~ and only those who read books such as this
will be able to understand the horrific way in which the prisoners
died, and the inhumane way in which the survivors were forced to
live. (When the Japanese troops burst their way into the Tanglin
Military Hospital they bayoneted not only the patients in the beds,
they bayoneted also the patients on the operating tables as well as
the doctors and nurses treating them.)
Red Cross parcels were never distributed to the prisoners ~ they fed
their captors instead. Occasionally a starving man would endeavour to
recover something from where the parcels were stored, but the
retribution if caught would be to be beaten unconscious and then to
be tortured, sometimes to death, sometimes not. Japanese torture is
bestial, as these accounts, written by survivors who are not
professional authors, bear irrefutable witness.
The book rightly discusses the contentious question of the
justification for the use of the atomic bombs at Nagasaki and
Horoshima. There are two factors of prime importance to this issue.
The first, too often forgotten, is that instructions had been issued
to all Camp Commandants that in the event of Allied invasion of
Japanese-occupied territory, all PoWs were to be exterminated in
whatever way was most convenient to local circumstances. At the War
Crimes Trials one of the documents attesting this was Document No
2701, and a translation of its text is included in t
Remembering Hiroshima
lines on the fiftieth anniversary
O, fortunate man:
Wrists bound, knees bent, head bowed,
Staring into the shadowed trench;
The blade is swift, the slice is sure.
Sightless, he sees what might have been.
Crushed into a basket, the wicker constrains
The drowning man's despairing, hopeful struggle,
While the clear salt water scalds his lungs.
. . . Or,
Trailed behind the boat as sharkbait,
Leaking blood to attract the sport
And excite the laughter.
Perhaps, at dusk,
Strung by his thumbs to a branch,
(His toes, even with the rocks attached,
Yet still failing to reach the ground)
He awaits the morning's bayonet drill.
His friends had had it worse. Old Joe,
Trussed with barbèd wire, mouth stopped,
Pumped through his nose with water,
Died beneath the boots that jumped and split
His distended stomach open
To their wearers' laughter.
But the destruction of the body is nothing.
The ritual is spiritual. They do it for the pain;
And, yet, better, for the agony
And for the ecstasy the agony gives them.
O, how they love their cruelty,
These little yellow men.
Thank God: he hadn't been a woman,
A pleasured nurse, gang-raped through the long night hours,
Tortured near to death,
Taken to the beach to wash
Irremediable stains
From broken body,
And machine-gunned standing in the surf.
Or, disembowelled to win a bet:
The soldier won (it was a boy);
The woman lost (the child, her life)
As God's blood dripped into the gutter.
And now, in the last few seconds of a lifetime,
Deep inside that shadowed trench
He sees his children playing in the sand,
Their mother, mourning, watching.
The blessèd blade sings its dirge:
The blood spurts, mushrooms,
Driven by the final heartbeat.
The trench is black. His head
Falls into the abyss.
Sharing the Responsibility: Japan's holocausts
13/12/1937 - 3/1938: Rape of Nanking or "Nanjing Datusha" (369,366 Chinese killed, and 80,000 women raped)
18/4/1942: 250,000 Chinese civilians murdered in retaliation for Chinese help to USA airmen
23/12/1943 - 14/2/1944: Rape of Manila (all male Filipinos 14 and older condemmed to die, 100,000 killed)
1937-45: Forced prostitution or "jugun ianfu" (400,000 Chinese women, 250,000 Korean women, 90% death rate, largest and most deadly mass rape recorded in history)
1933: Shiro Ishii'ss medical experiments in Manchuria (victims vivisected while still alive)
Only nation that used biological weapons in WW II
1939: Shiro Ishii's biological experiments in Harbin, China (10,000 prisoners died)
1940: Air bombing of Chinese villages with germs of bubonic plague (october 1940, Quzhou), cholera (1940, Yunnan), anthrax, etc (200,000 die)
Only nation that used chemical weapons in WW II
POW camps
10 million Asians were used as slaves and only 5,000 or so survivors may still be alive.
Death rate in Japanese prisoner camps: 38.2 %
25/4/1943-6/44: 16,000 PoWs and 80,000 Asian slave labourers died constructing the Thai-Burma railway
Japan is responsible for the casualties of more than 20 millions in Asia
