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.
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.