Speaking of the Battan Death March, there was a well-done documentary this week (anniversary of Hiroshima bombing week) where a famous TV talent and her mother traveled back to the Philippines where her grandfather died in the War.
The film tracked the destruction of the Japanese Army geographically. They digitized the US Army's handwritten daily reports of "Jap Deaths" by various army divisions.
The film showed the steady progress of the US Army by a time-lapse painting of red dots on a map of the main Philippines island where 320,000 Japanese were steadily killed. An estimated 15,000 Americans were killed during this campaign and that doesn't include the many thousand Americans killed on the Battan Death March
The documentary made visits to several places along this march to talk to Filipino people and see various sites where Japanese soldiers had occupied and died.
Here are some observations on the content:
Finally, I'll note that I never heard of the American conquest of the Philippines until a Filipino told me about it on an on-line computer forum. The US State Department stated that war "resulted in the death of over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants", and that "as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease".
As I watch the steady influence of American Fake News on Japanese news coverage, I believe the people of Japan are as prone as ever to propaganda. Like so many Americans, they live in a mental prison of what the cultural masters teach them they "must" believe.
That is certainly a part of the problem but the bigger issue is with their superiority complex. It prevents them from admitting wrongdoing. I think it stems from the whole "Emperor is a descendent from God" thing.
Most people aren't aware that Tojo, along with more than 1,000 other Japanese WWII war criminals, are honored in the Yasukuni Shrine, in Tokyo. This shrine memorializes Japanese who died in service to the Emperor. No true remorse for their murderous actions in WWII. They were just serving a descendent of God, after all.
Thanks for your input and review.
I’d like to revisit Japan before I pass but I’d likely be disappointed.
So much has changed since the 50s when I was an Army Brat over there...
The Japanese had learned a lot of “wrong lessons” from their campaigns in Manchuria and China, where local food supplies were fairly plentiful, and supply lines were short and easy to defend.
Extending their reach into the southwest Pacific and east central Asia meant an environment where local food wasn’t available (compared to China, they might as well have been in the desert), their supply lines were far too long to defend (especially with airpower), and they didn’t have nearly the amount of shipping capacity to do it anyway. And as was noted elsewhere, “non-martial” duties like logistics and supply were not highly regarded or prioritized in the Imperial Japanese Army.
Hence, the victorious armies that had run wild across East Asia in 1941-42 were starving to death in the jungles of Guadalcanal and Burma a year later.