Newt Gingrich: America's last WW2 veterans – here are their honest, inspiring and heartbreaking stories

FoxNews ^ | June 13, 2013 | Newt Gingrich

[NEMDF]

After Andrew Biggio bought a 1945 M1 Garand rifle, he brought it over to show his neighbor, World War II veteran Corp. Joseph Drago. When Drago held the rifle in his hands, his eyes lit up. The frail, elderly man was suddenly overcome with a burst of energy and began talking about the Battle of Okinawa. The rifle had unlocked memories that Drago had kept unspoken for 50 years.

When Drago was done speaking, Biggio, a veteran himself who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, asked his neighbor to sign the rifle. The young Marine always wanted to remember those precious hours.

[NEMDF]

Andrew Biggio is an amazing young man. Please consider purchasing his book, "The Rifle".

[Seruzawa]

We have never faced an enemy as vicious and tenacious as the Japanese. Jihadis are punks compared to the average Japanese soldier or sailor or pilot. They were brutal beyond even the Apaches. Utterly merciless and without pity. Their atrocities in China even outdid the Nazi SS. Thank the Lord that they weren’t all that competent when all is said and done.

[ArtDodger]

My cousin’s D-Day (Omaha Beach) and beyond, remembrances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ5w7r8m62Y

[NEMDF]

Thank you for sharing.

I think Andrew is working on a second book, trying to capture the stories of WWII vets from the Pacific theater.

[ArtDodger]

These 1st hand witnesses are disappearing fast!

[Bigg Red]

mark

[cyclotic]

I heard him on a podcast the other day. Excellent

[myerson]

“These 1st hand witnesses are disappearing fast!”

Yep, that means its time for the commies to start rewriting the history.

[GOP Poet]

bookmark

[rlmorel]

I lived in Japan for several years as a kid, and I found them to be wonderful, pleasant, polite, considerate charming people.

When I moved to the Philippines, they had a very different view of the Japanese there, and my Boy Scout troop hiked the route of the Bataan Death March each year which was marked with white obelisks.

I wanted to learn more, and I checked a book from the library, a thick tome that was a comprehensive narration of the POW experience of anyone captured by the Japanese in WWII. I don’t remember the name, but it was thick, with a lot of official documentation, footnotes, testimony, and first hand accounts.

I had read “The Colditz Story” at the age of 10, so I had some exposure to the Nazi treatment of allied POWs, but that book about the Japanese treatment of allied POWs completely caught me off guard.

I knew they had been more brutal than the Nazis, but didn’t know it had been like that. It wasn’t that the Nazis had not been brutal, but the Japanese were on a different planet in that respect.

It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the word that described the overall difference between the Nazi treatment of the allies (not including their treatment of the Soviets, which was akin to the Japanese approach) and the Japanese treatment of the allies:

It was “Sadism”.

As a 12 year old kid, I really had trouble wrapping my brain around the disparity of the wonderfully polite, charming people I had seen when I lived there, and the animals who seemingly had the moral underpinnings of insects in the WWII Japanese military.

It was very much like the American judge in the Nuremberg Trials (who was played in the movie “Judgement at Nuremberg” by Spencer Tracy) who, after sitting in the court and seeing for the first time the films and images from the concentration camps, went out to a beer hall with a German woman whose husband (a Wehrmacht General) had been executed by the allies.

In the beer hall, the Germans were having a jolly time, pounding their beer steins on the long tables, singing fun German songs, and drinking beer, and he could not place these people as the same ones who had brutally and industrially murdered millions of Jews.

He just could not wrap his head around it.

[Magnatron]

We’re in the same place Americans were in the 40s and 50s when the last Civil War veterans were dying.

Strange to think that our WWII vets on nearly gone...

[Seruzawa]

Humans are easily influenced to abuse their fellows. Look at the DemonRATs today and their attempt to designate all Trump voters as terrorists.

Sometimes violence is needed. Too bad no one had the guts to smash Hitler when he was a pipsqueak. Too bad no one sees tat the same thing is happening here. Witness the Capitol Hill protestors being held without due process in solitary confinement while looters walk freely in Chicago.

The DemocRATs are the same as the Nazis. They will do the same at first opportunity. If anyone doesn’t think so just go to THeHill or any other lefty website and see what they post. Just listen to the RATs in DC.

[rlmorel]

Very good post.

You said “Humans are easily influenced to abuse their fellows” and I think that the outright recognition of that as being part of our inherent nature that must be guarded against is vital. The Founders understood that very well.

And your statement about not crushing Hitler when he was a pipsqueak-that extends through his rise to power right up until he invaded France. The French/British/Polish forces at the time (in September 1939) had the largest combined ground forces in the world, even bigger than than Germany’s at that time, though airpower and mechanized equipment were better in Germany, as was the training and coordination. But the governments opposing Germany did not have the resolve to stand against them, and when Germany made its move into France, even though they knew it was coming, they did not prepare.

As you said, if someone had crushed him even before that, who knows where history might have gone.

I am currently listening to a book “The Coming of The Third Reich” by Richard J. Evans, and it is disturbing to listen to. It is hard not to be very concerned. I have for some time seen the profligate spending by our government by both parties (Spurred on by Democrats, and not opposed by Republicans) as leading us to the 1924 Weimar Republic, especially since the Left has taken power. (Granted, the author is indicating through the use of various terms and contexts in his book that he has leftist leanings, and he thinks conservatives are the up and coming Nazis, but to my analysis, it is the Left that is going down that path)

But on top of it, it is the utter lawlessness of the political parties (again, spurred on by actions of Democrats, and fully acquiesced to by weak or complicit Republicans) that worries me greatly.

Two conditions are a requirement for us as citizens of this republic to consent to rule of us by those we elect: that the elections are fair, and that those we elect are subject to the same laws we as citizens are. They have violated and repudiated both of those, which to me, means it is an illegitimate government.

The combination of the spending, the tendency towards tyranny, and the lawlessness of those we elect fills me with foreboding.

And it is too much like what I hear in this book.

[Inyo-Mono]

As a 12 year old kid, I really had trouble wrapping my brain around the disparity of the wonderfully polite, charming people I had seen when I lived there, and the animals who seemingly had the moral underpinnings of insects in the WWII Japanese military.

My son spent two years in Japan when he in the Navy and that was his reaction when I showed him articles about Japanese cruelty toward POWs in WWII. My Father was in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater during the war and told me, not long before he died, that the main reason air crews were issued Colt .45 pistols was not to fight the enemy if they were shot down, but to off themselves if they were about to be captured by the Japanese.

[rlmorel]

The Filipinos had quite a chip on their shoulder even in the late Sixties towards the Japanese who had treated them harshly, and that was evident even to a 12 year old kid.

For myself, there was something horrible in reading of that treatment. I remember reading right around that time a book about the Holocaust "I Cannot Forgive", and while it was awful to read, there was something mechanical and impersonal in the murder that didn't bother me in the same way that mechanicality and impersonality is at the root of my horror towards the Holocaust today. The fact that they turned humans into widgets to be destroyed is more disturbing to me as an adult.

But the Japanese didn't seem to have orders to do the things they did. It seemed to me that the Japanese performed those horrible atrocities because they wanted to or enjoyed inflicting them.

There is something horribly personal and sadistic in the atrocious actions of individual Japanese that, as a kid, really hit hard at me.

[lapsus calami]

 

 

The Japs had a different set of values they went by, the culture having re-developed a belief of Hakko Ichiu, a sort of manifest destiny that they were to rule the world, were a superior people to do so while everyone else was just a bunch of monkeys to be subjugated. They were a modern industrial and military power that had an inability to strike a competent balance between power and responsibility, due to an adherence to primitive religious and societal ideals that were not on the same planet with the ethics of the West, if not the rest of the world. A combination like that is ripe for breeding atrocities. That sort of belligerent attitude produced trouble for them all across the Pacific too. I know that when they went to various islands and started bullying people around instead of having a restrained hand, it backfired every time. A lot of tribes and peoples turned out hating them with the intensity of a thousand suns, didn't just want them gone, but preferably dead and wiped out. I remember a story about a Marine unit that landed on some island later in the war to snoop for Japs and were met on the beach by a pack of young people wearing nothing but grass skirts who wanted to join the Marine Corps right then and there. Boys and girls both. The commander politely turned down their offer, saying what they had to do was very dangerous and to let them handle it. But the kids would not relent, wouldn't back down, so finally he told them to come along, and wanting something to contribute towards the war effort carried the equipment for the Marines, as well as guiding them across the island. Eventually battle was joined with a Jap unit that was lurking, the island boys assumed duties as messengers, ammo runners and stretcher bearers while the girls tended to the wounded. They may not have gotten their wish to shoot it out with the unwelcome trespassers, but they performed splendidly as support staff for the Marines. All because the Japs were being a bunch of jerks to them.

 

 

[rlmorel]

All true. And the animosity towards Japan lingered for many years...and still does.

I had a personal encounter in which I saw this first-hand.

I met two old men who were lifelong friends with extraordinary stories-one of them had been a bush pilot in Alaska in the 1930s, and the other one had been instrumental in getting the transfer of a lot of F-86 Sabres to our forces in Korea where we were short, and the factories weren’t going to catch up with production in a short enough time frame.

During the war, the guy who had been a bush pilot got a commission in the Army, and at the end of the war, had been assigned to be the Provost Marshal of the Hiroshima district when Japan was occupied.

After the bomb, his orders were changed, and he was sent to Korea instead, and it was his job to get the surrendered Japanese out of Korea via ships and send them back to Japan before the Koreans slaughtered them.

When my wife and I were visiting them one night, I was talking about having lived in Japan, and the guy who had been in Korea got up without a word and never came back.

When I asked if he was okay, his friend said that he was okay, but that he couldn’t discuss anything about Japan. He had apparently been privy to many barbaric things (with visual and documentary proof) that the Japanese had done to Koreans while they had been occupying Korea, and had been traumatized by it.\

I guessed that, in his role, he had to know which Japanese officers and men needed to be separated from the others so they wouldn’t get “misplaced” when the ships arrived in Japan.

[The Truth Will Make You Free]

Finally watched your cousin’s video. Fascinating report of D-Day and WW2. Hadn’t heard the amazing way vehicles were waterproofed before. Nor how the Germans put people in camps in a different country. His story of knocking off the SS General was remarkable. Glad he recorded it. Interestingly, we just visited the Division 1 museum at Cantigny Park (Chicago area) a few weeks ago.

[ArtDodger]

Thank you for your comments. Remarkable to me how ordinary people rose to the occasion of greatness, for a short while, then returned to their every day lives...