“I have some respect for the Japanese Navy. But their Army was a bunch of thugs, who even exceeded the cruelty of the Nazis.”
Don’t. The Japanese Navy was just as bad. The perps of the Manila massacres were mostly Naval troops.
Well, they were sailors in name only. Labeled Special Landing Force, they were a creation of the Japanese Navy’s need to have troops when the Japanese Army wouldn’t provide them. They tended to be more fanatical than sometimes even the Army troops, these were the troops that held out to the last in Manilla, where the Japanese Army actually wanted to withdraw from the city.
Submarines based in Fremantle Harbour— family went to a Phillipine Island near/in the Slot to deliver a friend who was an Australian (who owned the island, a copra plantation), and volunteered to be a Coastwatcher (huge radios then) — with Filipino guerillas went over the side in rubber boats on a cloudy but full moon night to get the man to his station. Concealed up a tree with gear he called in major ship movements until approx 2 weeks later when the japs triangulated on his signal... dragged him to a prison and chopped his head off. A close friend to Americans in the Fremantle naval base then and forever remembered by those serving there. And now, fairly certain all of those veterans have passed away.
We must never forget them-— NEVER!