There is no rational for what happened in Manila. This book was very well researched and the testimony of the survivors to the atrocities of the Japanese was gut wrenching to read.
To those that are students of history I recommend this book to read as hard as it is to read it.
Yes I was thinking of China as I read the paragraph and then at the end the cities are mentioned...
Japan invaded China and stayed there for 10 years and the horrible things they did to the Chinese are usually not considered part of the war crimes...
This terrible battle never should have happened. The Allies should have simply bypassed the Philippines. It was no more needed than, say, the island of Formosa was.
But wait. Douglas MacArthur said “I shall return”. So return he must, regardless of the cost.
Thanks sounds like a good subject for John Batchelor to review on his talkie.
I haven’t read this particular book but in Max Hasting’s book Retribution about the last year of the War in the Pacific he states that the entire Philippines Campaign was a pointless waste of life that did nothing to shorten the war. Of course he is contemptuous of Macarthur’s generalship overall.
“This book was very well researched and the testimony of the survivors to the atrocities of the Japanese was gut wrenching to read.”
It doesn’t seem like a topic discussed often, but the Americans did bring a large number of Japanese war criminals to justice after the war.
I’m not sure how many Japanese were hanged after trials - several thousand if I remember correctly.
And many thousands of others refused to surrender and were killed in combat.
The Japanese are considered allies now, and I guess they are - but during WWII they were a bad lot.
Subordinate commanders ignored Yamashita's orders and instigated a bloodbath that in the process destroyed most of the old city.
The entire Battlefield series by the BBC is on Youtube. I downloaded the Midway and the entire tarawa, Okinawa, Philippine Sea battle episodes. Good stuff.
And there are at least 5 damn good docuvideos on the Battle of Manila. I head to the RP twice a year for both business (we have offices there) and my brother is married to a Filipina who happens to belong to a strong political family there..so when I get picked up at the airport, I have ARMED guards haha
Plus I’ve been to UST or Univ of Santo Tomas where they interned a LOT of American prisoners. It still looks the same as you see in those videos as the university predates Harvard. Scary at night too.
Nips, by a long shot. Close tie between Germany and Russia for second, with Russia probably winning by a nose.
It was pretty well established at the end of WW2 that the German military fought a mostly clean war (with some glaring exceptions in the east but considering the brutality of their opponents there, no surprise). Notice that only now, decades after the fact, when nearly everyone involved is dead, “new scholarship” has been “deconstructing the myth of the ‘good Wehrmacht’”. By comparision, it was established and known, during and after the war and up to the present day, that the Japanese military was horrifically brutal in its treatment of enemy troops, prisoners, civilians, women, children, everyone.
I am at odds as to who was worse, the Germans or the Japanese in the war crimes committed, ........................ They didn’t stop in 1945, others were just as guilty when the iron curtain began to come down. Atrocities were committed in Asia and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I’d like to say we were clean, but Korea and Nam had their instances also. In Korea it was payback for the murdered POW’s, in Nam it was blood lust due to frustration of pacification by removal. I believe it was in Song Ve were our guys had their own way of removing people out of the area.(Permanently) In wars the worst is brought out in humans, and no nation is exempt. The beat will go on, and it will get worse. I am already at the point of seeing dark clouds and the 4 horseman on the horizon.
“who was worse, the Germans or the Japanese”
One big difference was that there was not a majority among the Germans who would commit war crimes (execute unarmed civilians who were not guilty of any crime or act of war). Among the Japanese, almost every single soldier was willing to do it. They were very reliably willing to kill themselves as well.
The Shinto cult of the Japanese race bound together with the divine emperor, along with with the totalitarian indoctrination of the whole society for many years before the war, made them arguably more fanatical than ISIS, and their killing was on a much broader scale.
Manila (where 14,000 Japanese military were ordered to execute the entire civilian population of that major city) was just one example - not an anomaly.
But the lefties would counter with. “But we interred Japanese right here in the states.” Yes, they are that stoopid. Sort of like them comparing illegal immigrants to Christ.
And yet we put both of them on the road to prosperity within a few years after their defeat. That did lead to a pretty good movie, though. Remember "The Mouse That Roared"? Lose a war to the US and get stuff!
These were not humans. They were Japs.
I had an older in-law, who was a Japanese POW - Bataan death-march, hell ships, prison in China.
Japanese high command had given a kill-all-prisoners order. He said he was saved immediately after surrender of Japanese by leaflets dropped on his camp declaring Americans were to be protected, followed immediately by a small team of OSS operatives who parachuted in to take surrender of the camp from the Japanese. He said Japanese officers were pushed outside the camp, into the hands of waiting Chinese mobs.
I found this book at the small time thrift store where I live. I am revolted by what I am reading, but cannot put it down.
It sheds light on McArthur the egotist and narcissistic. It also enlightens on what the GIs thought of “I shall return”. They mocked him. He had a tendency not to believe his intelligence officers but to believe what he wanted to believe. Dedicated and professional, but flawed in some ways. Japanese had banished their best general to Manchuria due to rivalry, and assigned him to defend Philippines after it was a lost cause.
Japanese soldiers were mostly beasts; stealing and raping whenever it suited them. Played sadistic games for their own entertainment.
The fight to take and saved the wrecked electrical plant was a total exercise in futility. Did not make strategic sense for taking a worthless objective.
I know we had internees who were in dire straits due to cruel starvation by the Japanese, but couldn’t this somehow have been avoided? Probably not. This is what our GIs would have faced had they invaded Japan!
Amazing GI soldiers!