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.
At the start of WW-I, U-Boots always approached their prey on the surface and ordered them to stop and abandon ship. The British responded by mounting 6” deck guns on merchant ships and outfitting “Queen ships”, or Q-ships, converted merchantmen with hidden batteries.
It didn’t take long for the U-Boots to strike without warning.
The Lusitania, for instance, had two 6” deck guns and was sunk in the Irish Sea, clearly a war zone, and was carrying Canadian soldiers out of New York, a purportedly neutral port. The German embassy had taken out full page advertisements on the shipping pages of New York newspapers warning passengers that they could not guarantee the safety of passengers embarking on the Lusitania.
At the start of WW-II both sides remembered WW-I. In addition, advances in radio communication and antisubmarine aviation made it even more imperative that submarines not give any unnecessary warning. Neither sided expected submarines to give any warning of an attack.
Japanese merchantmen were unarmed and U.S. submarines always attacked without warning and never (to my knowledge) stuck around to aid survivors. (Hollywood notwithstanding, U.S. submarines generally attacked merchantmen while surfaced, purely for tactical reasons.)
From what I read in Flyboys, it was a perversion of the samurai culture perpetrated by a bunch of samurai wannabees.
The treatment of the Ukraine is an example of what you are writing about in regards to slaughtering the very folks who were welcoming them.
Subs, of any service, typically did not hang about after sinking a ship. It would be a very stupid move, tactically. An interesting book to read is called “Iron Coffins”. It was written by a german national who started in the German navy in the submarine force as a middie, and through the war years advanced to skipper of his own boat. He was one of the 10% that survived. I recall a story in that book that involved a german sub on the surface moving towards a sinking merchie to render aid, and being strafed by an allied aircraft. The book is a good read.
Be careful out there, and God bless you.
I disagree. The U.S. was engaged in total war, and would have had no problem sinking unarmed enemy merchies regardless of what the other side was doing.
And they didn't get any; in their cities or on the various islands/countries the Allies took back from them.
The problem is not who paid what price in Japan. The problem is the almost absolute refusal of Japanese society, and government, to see themselves as anything but victims in WW II, and to acknowledge what they did.
While that is a problem, rubbing WWII in the faces of those who had nothing to do with it and who are now a good friend and an ally is not helpful. Never forget the horrors of history, and insist it be taught accurately, but don't blame the sins of the grandparents on those populating Japan today.
IMHO.
Unfortunately, they don't. And that is a common problem among many Asian nations - not to accurately each their own history, warts and all, to their students.
Neither do our schools. Several years ago, my 4th grade kids were taught the history of WWII. It consisted of; We nuked the japanese, little children died horrible deaths from radioactivty, and while dying made peace cranes. That was it.
God’s got your back
"Japanese soldiers who butchered 20,000 Allied seamen in cold blood"
I believe the Japanese handled POW's (and civilians) worse than any of the other axis forces.
Teach your children well...
It is a sad fact that we must undertake teaching history to our children (or in my case grandchildren) because today's schools refuse.
Seems like they were up to the Japanese standards.
It is indeed fitting that Bush the President later barfs on the Jap PM.
BUMP
The Japanese attacked first; the Germans declared war first; the US defended itself.
Both places are, today, quite lucky they are not simple agrarian societies farming pitiful fertile plots in between slabs of melted glass.
End of story.
Sure it was. It was American and British policy to target civilian populations, in both Germany and Japan.
Interesting points, and I agree to a certain extent.
In regards to lining up the women and children then executing them to make the japanese surrender, we would have had to invade the home islands first. The estimates of our casualties had we invaded the home islands were quite high. These estimates were based on the record of the ferocious, fanatical fighting that the IJA had done in our island hopping campaign.
The idea of targeting civilian population centers was to destroy the work force, the infrastructure, and break the will of the enemy people to fight. This would end the war, and in the long run, save lives rather than drag it out. I do not believe in a theory of “Just War” that requires you to allow the slaughter of your own troops to avoid the slaughter of the enemy.
A naval blockade may have worked, but how many women and children would have died due to disease and starvation before the fanatics surrendered? Perhaps many more than died from bombing.
For the past 15 years the Japanese have been in a deflationary malaise which saw their property values decline by 50%. Their middle class is in ruins. During this time Americans have made billions borrowing Japanese yen at 1/2% interest rates.
Unfortunately we are headed down the same rathole. By the time the Fed is done decimating the dollar, Asians will be borrowing money from us at 1/2%.
BUMP
The accuracy of that era's bombing notwithstanding, we at least attempted to avoid civilian casualties in the early days.
Later, when we realized that our enemies were engaged in "Total War" we employed more or less the same tactics our enemies were employing.
One must remember that in the early days of the war in the Pacific, the battles took place far from the Japanese homeland and thus, there was no opportunity to target Japanese civilians. By the time we had fought our way up to within range, we had experienced enough of Japan's concept of "Total War" that we adapted our approach to recognize that we were not just fighting a military or a government, but the whole of the Japanese nation. (The same is true of Germany.)
I suspect that is why we employed the strategy (and tactics) of our own version of "Total War" I have no doubt that had Japan been able to reach the mainland US, Americans on their homeland would have experienced the Japanese variant of "Total War". IMHO
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