Posted on 02/20/2024 4:35:03 PM PST by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1942, 200-plus Australian and Dutch prisoners captured after the Battle of Ambon earlier that same year were summarily executed near Laha Airfield on present-day Maluku, Indonesia. It was the last and the largest of a series of POW executions in the days following the February 3 conclusion of the battle; collectively, they’re known as the Laha Massacre.*
The individual incidents, timelines, and body counts of the several incidents are reported with a good deal of variance and conflation in the sites describing these horrible days, but the evening of February 20 as the consummating atrocity appears to me solidly attested — as does the destruction of a Japanese minesweeper during the battle (by this time, an event that was a couple of weeks past) as one of the motivations. The Japanese officer tasked with conducting the butchery, a Captain Nakagawa, recorded the event in a grim diary entry. (According to Ambon: The Truth About One of the Most Brutal POW Camps in World War II and the Triumph of the Aussie Spirit, Nakagawa did not approve of the executions, but he obeyed his orders.)...
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
“Nakagawa did not approve of the executions, but he obeyed his orders.)...”
Kind of a universal thing. American operatives no exception.
The Chinese should have avoided trying to colonize Indonesia and they are making the same mistake with America.
bkmk
Geez, the “Japs” were lucky that we didn’t summarily execute every military member on the whole damned island after pulling this kind of stuff.
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