Crewmen on the submarine I-8, where Allied prisoners were slaughtered
Posted on 11/03/2007 6:56:30 PM PDT by Stoat
The perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War remain alive and unpunished in Japan, according to a damning new book.
Painstaking research by British historian Mark Felton reveals that the wartime behaviour of the Japanese Navy was far worse than their counterparts in Hitler's Kriegsmarine.
According to Felton, officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordered the deliberately sadistic murders of more than 20,000 Allied seamen and countless civilians in cold-blooded defiance of the Geneva Convention.
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Crewmen on the submarine I-8, where Allied prisoners were slaughtered
"Many of the Japanese sailors who committed such terrible deeds are still alive today," he said.
"No one and nothing has bothered these men in six decades. There is only one documented case of a German U-boat skipper being responsible for cold-blooded murder of survivors. In the Japanese Imperial Navy, it was official orders."
Felton has compiled a chilling list of atrocities. He said: "The Japanese Navy sank Allied merchant and Red Cross vessels, then murdered survivors floating in the sea or in lifeboats.
"Allied air crew were rescued from the ocean and then tortured to death on the decks of ships.
"Naval landing parties rounded up civilians then raped and massacred them. Some were taken out to sea and fed to sharks. Others were killed by sledge-hammer, bayonet, beheading, hanging, drowning, burying alive, burning or crucifixion.
"I also unearthed details of medical experiments by naval doctors, with prisoners being dissected while still alive."
Felton's research reveals for the first time the full extent of the war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Navy, a force that traditionally modelled itself on the Royal Navy. Previously unknown documents suggest that at least 12,500 British sailors and a further 7,500 Australians were butchered.
Felton cites the case of the British merchantman Behar, sunk by the heavy cruiser Tone on March 9, 1944. The Tone's captain Haruo Mayuzumi picked up survivors and, after ten days of captivity below decks, had 85 of them assembled, hands bound, on his ship's stern.
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Target: the merchant ship Behar. Its surviving crew were beheaded with swords
Kicked in their stomachs and testicles by the Japanese, they were then, one by one, beheaded with swords and their bodies dumped overboard.
A solitary senior officer, Commander Junsuke Mii, risked his career by dissenting. But he gave evidence at a subsequent war crimes tribunal only under duress. Meanwhile, most of the officers who conducted the execution remained at liberty after the war.
Felton also tells the horrifying story of James Blears, a 21-year-old radio operator and one of several Britons on the Dutch-registered merchant ship Tjisalak, which was torpedoed by the submarine I-8 on March 26, 1944, while sailing from Melbourne to Ceylon with 103 passengers and crew.
Fished from the sea or ordered out of lifeboats, Blears and his fellow survivors were assembled on the sub's foredeck.
From the conning tower, Commander Shinji Uchino issued the ominous order: "Do not look back because that will be too bad for you," Blears recalled.
One by one, the prisoners were shot, decapitated with swords or simply bludgeoned with a sledge-hammer and thrown on to the churning propellers.
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Atrocity: The Japanese executing prisoners
According to Blears: "One guy, they cut off his head halfway and let him flop around on the deck. The others I saw, they just lopped them off with one slice and threw them overboard. The Japanese were laughing and one even filmed the whole thing with a cine camera."
Blears waited for his turn, then pulled his hands out of his bindings and dived overboard amid machine-gun fire.
He swam for hours until he found a lifeboat, in which he was joined by two other officers and later an Indian crewman who had escaped alone after 22 of his fellow countrymen had been tied to a rope behind the I-8 and dragged to their deaths as it dived underwater.
Uchino, who was hailed a Japanese hero, ended the war in a senior land-based role and was never brought to trial.
Felton said: "This kind of behaviour was encouraged under a navy order dated March 20, 1943, which read, 'Do not stop at the sinking of enemy ships and cargoes. At the same time carry out the complete destruction of the crews'."
In the months after that order, the submarine I-37 sank four British merchant ships and one armed vessel and, in every case, the survivors were machine-gunned in the sea.
The submarine's commander was sentenced to eight years in prison at a war crimes trial, but was freed three years later when the Japanese government ruled his actions to have been "legal acts of war".
Felton said: "Most disturbing is the Japanese amnesia about their war record and senior politicians' outrageous statements about the war and their rewriting of history.
"The Japanese murdered 30million civilians while "liberating" what it called the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule. About 23million of these were ethnic Chinese.
"It's a crime that in sheer numbers is far greater than the Nazi Holocaust. In Germany, Holocaust denial is a crime. In Japan, it is government policy. But the evidence against the navy – precious little of which you will find in Japan itself – is damning."
The geographical breadth of the navy's crimes, the heinous nature of the acts themselves and the sadistic behaviour of the officers and men concerned are almost unimaginable.
For example, the execution of 312 Australian and Dutch defenders of the Laha Airfield, Java, was ordered by Rear Admiral Koichiro Hatakeyama on February 24 and 25, 1942.
The facts were squeezed out of two Japanese witnesses by Australian army interrogators as there were no Allied survivors.
One of the Japanese sailors described how the first prisoner to be killed, an Australian, was led forward to the edge of a pit, forced to his knees and beheaded with a samurai sword by a Warrant Officer Sasaki, prompting a great cry of admiration from the watching Japanese.
Sasaki dispatched four more prisoners, and then the ordinary sailors came forward one by one to commit murder.
They laughed and joked with each other even when the executions were terribly botched, the victims pushed into the pit with their heads half attached, jerking feebly and moaning.
Hatakeyama was arraigned by the Australians, but died before his trial could begin. Four senior officers were hanged, but a lack of Allied witnesses made prosecuting others very difficult.
Felton said that the Americans were the most assiduous of the Allied powers in collecting evidence of crimes against their servicemen, including those of Surgeon Commander Chisato Ueno and eight staff who were tried and hanged for dissecting an American prisoner while he was alive in the Philippines in 1945.
However, the British authorities lacked the staff, money and resources of the Americans, and the British Labour government was not fully committed to pursuing Japanese war criminals into the Fifties.
• Slaughter At Sea: The Story Of Japan's Naval War Crimes by Mark Felton is published by Pen & Sword on November 20 at £19.99.
It was meant to be terrible.
You have a brave daughter, and good for you too.
LOL, Japan just moved to an economic war and has been able to fight it without response.
Note the 30 years of huge trade surpluses Japan racks up while tightly controlling access to its own markets. We are a source of raw materials to Japan, little more.
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier ~of~ the Queen!
Very few survivors after we retook the Philippines. We hung about 990 class "A" war criminals during the 40's, but all of those who received life imprisonment were home scot-free by 1956. We did hang on to a couple till 1958, hence this old tag line of mine.
At this late stage in the matter it's true that the number of meaningful options is diminished from what they were in, say, the 1950's and 1960's when so many top Nazi officers and blatant war crime perpetrators from WW2 were tracked down in South America and successfully prosecuted in American and European courts..
I think that for a great many people, a significant amount of pain exists today because Japan has not ever come to terms with it's innumerable war crimes in any meaningful way, certainly nothing like what Germany has done to admit to and make efforts to atone for it's wartime sins. This in fact is a significant focus of the featured book and article here:
Felton said: "Most disturbing is the Japanese amnesia about their war record and senior politicians' outrageous statements about the war and their rewriting of history.
One thing that really stands out to me, as I read so many passionate posts in this thread as well as the similar thread from September
Beheaded at whim and worked to death Japan's repugnant treatment of Allied PoWs
is that there is a very special, raw anger reserved for the Japanese which is not in evidence for the Nazis or the Russians, and it's being passed down through generations of people with little of it being diminished. A common thread among the posters here at FR is anger at the breathtaking brutality and the scale of it all to be sure, but also a white-hot anger at the modern Japanese for failing to come to terms with what they have done in even the most basic, minimal sense. I have a feeling that a bit of honesty from Japan in these matters would go a long way toward allowing the victims as well as the sons and daughters of victims to have just a bit of peace in their lives. The boiling anger at the Japanese is palpable in both threads and makes it painful to read through them all, as well as heart-rending at times to respond to those posting to me. It doesn't strike me as an irrational anger in most cases, but an anger that is evidence of a deep wound that has been kept open and has become terribly infected, never having been allowed to heal at all.
"Why did we drop only two?" "Because we are a decent Country, and we were out of A-Bombs at the time."
Uh, no.
Most people believe that the Japanese Empire was spared another atomic bomb strike because the United States had used up its only two bombs.
Wrong. There was another available bomb in August 1945, with more on the way.
The United States actually had three Atomic weapons ready for use near the end of WWII, two of which were dropped on Japan, the third was being readied for a mission by Col. Tibbets' unit, the 509th Composite Group when Japan surrendered. The USA had two "Fat Man" plutonium Atomic weapons in the inventory at the end of calendar year 1945. The Japs would have lost that bet that the US was "bluffing"...
In an August 2002 interview with Studs Terkel published in the British Guardian newspaper, Paul Tibbetts recalled something similar: "Unknown to anybody else--I knew it, but nobody else knew--there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay. He said, 'You got another one of those damn things?' I said, 'Yessir.' He said, 'Where is it?' I said, 'Over in Utah.' He said, 'Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it.' I said, 'Yessir.' I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over."
Source: Warbird Forum: The third bomb
There was a production line set up to generate plutonium cores for the "Fat Man" model of the US nuclear stockpile. Did you think that the US had invested 2 billion (1943) dollars just to make five atomic bombs in 1945? The only reason that the US did not go into war-time production mode on the 'Fat Man' plutonium cores is that the war ENDED when Japan surrendered. The "Little Boy" uranium gun-type atomic weapon first dropped on Hiroshima was a one-off model, never produced again. All of the other US atomic weapons were of the plutonium-implosion "Fat Man" model. So the first bomb was tested in the US during July 1945. Two more atomic weapons were dropped on Japan in August 1945. As stated, one more atomic bomb was being readied for Tokyo for late August 1945; it was never delivered. At the end of calendar year 1945 the US had two "Fat Man" type nuclear weapons in its inventory out of the five produced in 1945, however if Japan had not surrendered the nuclear 'production line' was designed to produce 7 plutonium cored nuclear weapons per month. More than enough to have taken care of the Nazis and/or the Japs if they did not surrender.
"A third bomb was being shipped from New Mexico, target Tokyo, when the war ended. Production was geared to seven per month with an expectation that 50 bombs would be required to assure that an invasion would not be required. Release of radiation from the untested Hiroshima bomb, designed as the original gun-type and made of uranium, was a surprise. The radiation range was expected to be within the blast radius, that is, a lethal dose of radiation would only kill those already dead from concussion. The Alamogordo bomb test and later production were of the more complicated plutonium, yet cleaner, implosion device."
Source: WW2 Pacific: Little Known Facts: Atomic Bomb -- Allies
Hope this helps,
dvwjr
If you set up a scale of bad behavior in war time...the Germans have an awful lot on their side...the slaughter of the Jews, various villages in the Ukraine that were decimated, and countless acts. But when you examine the use of germ warfare, the events on the high seas, the treatment of Koreans and Chinese...I think the Japanese easily are the group that got off easily. Most of their “bad” history has been forgotten...while many still sit around and talk the “bad” Germans.
Well, never mind. No point in getting upset about it now. The comforting thing I tell myself is, these people will soon be confronting the reality of everlasting hell, and the punishment they endure will be worse even than the horrors they visited upon our suffering countrymen. God is just, and He doesn’t accept excuses about how it was just their culture.
Many Japanese war criminals may have escaped justice, but many paid the price for them.
War is indeed HELL.
日本＊ピング＊ (kono risuto ni hairitai ka detai wo shirasete kudasai : let me know if you want on or off this list)
I pray that you're right :-)
War is cruelty and it cannot be refined.
ping
They were all we had, at the time. Truman made a masterful bluff, and it wasn't called, Japan folded...
the infowarrior
Hmmm, never heard an older in-law say "That company made the bombers that blew up my house!" before boarding a Boeing to travel overseas...
Truest statement here. War cannot be refined.
However, I do wish that some of my fellow Freepers wouldn’t condemn a whole people for the actions of those who conducted WWII. I’m talking about those who would say we “should’ve dropped another one” or that the Japanese are “fill in the blank”..you’ve read them.
There are plenty of Japanese who know, and are quite embarrassed by the truth of thier nation’s conduct during those years. I know many of them, young and old, that know thier government is full of crap on the issue. They just don’t want to re-live it.
As I understand the memorials to them, the people honor the fact that young men went off to fight for thier country. They lost, but the Japanese people do not see them as criminals. They see them as soldiers who had a job to do.
Yes, the Japanese official line is twisted, and these views piss off thier nieghbors to this day, but most are as passive as the Germans when it comes to the idea of ever entering into another war.
By all means, I think the atrocities should be prosecuted, even now. But, I don’t think it serves us well to rub thier faces in it. Someone mentioned that China will pay them back someday (reckoning). I would ask, after reading this thread, who’s side will we be on?
Realpolitik interferes with this, to good or ill. Japan is an invaluable strategic ally now. It’s a major reason that North Korea doesn’t dare do more than it has. The most insufferable thing in Japanese culture is to be embarrassed. Maybe that is why US politicians do not wish to embarrass Japan with official motion on the issue. Same reason that there is no official fuss about the incident of Israel attacking the USS Liberty.
As for whether there are war criminals that escaped punishment, I think they have to live every day of their lives knowing that hundreds of thousands of japanese men, women and children payed for their sins at Hiroshima and Nagasaki..
They will have to live with that secret guilt until the day they die, and their survivors, family members, descendants, those who know what their husband, father, uncle, grandfather did during the war, will also have to live with it.
Additionally, we are living in the beginning of what is being called the "information age"..
There will come a time when any japanese citizen can enter his/her grandfather's name on Google or some other search engine, and they will find that name listed as being an officer or crewman on some vessel in WW2, and find accounts of the murders performed by that vessel's crew members.
They will then know not only what their grandfather did in the war, but that everyone in the world with a computer terminal can easily find out what they did in the war.
How disgraceful will that be, when your grandpa's war crimes are a matter of public record on the world-wide web?
For all the world to see?
I cannot begin to imagine the humiliation those descendants will feel.
Those that escape prosecution will suffer the greatest punishment of all for their culture.
The public disgrace and humiliation of his entire family line.
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