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.
Amen, Bro.
I don’t think the japanese beleive in god.
The term “Japs” is no different from calling African Americans “N*ger”. I hope you don’t use such a racist term again.
I hope youre kidding.
My dad served on a B17 crew in England, but would never even consider buying anything Japanese. He took a hard look at a VW once, but wasn’t very happy when I bought a Mitsubishi Colt in 1981. It was the only non-American car I have ever owned and it was a d**m good one, went 250,000 miles with no mechanical problems. Other than that, like my dad, I have alway been a GM man.
I'm sorry for the continuing pain that you (and other surviving victims and victims' relatives) are forced to endure.
I'm sure that you know they all are heroes and our nation will be indebted to their sacrifice until the end of time.
I'm curious, I know of course that nothing can bring them back or eliminate the pain that their unspeakably brutal loss has inflicted upon you and your family for generations to come, but would things have been made just a bit easier for you and your family if there had been more of a forthright acknowledgement of this by the postwar Japanese Governments? Or would it had made no particular difference at all in terms of your family's ability to gain some degree of closure on this?
From the article:
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
I completely understand your Dad's sentiments....they were and are shared by millions the world over for entirely valid and justifiable reasons. Your choices are also easy to understand, particularly in the context of the modern world economy where so many "Japanese" cars are actually built in America by American workers. If there is a car that would provide the same level of safety as the bigger American cars but it has a "Japanese" nameplate, I might consider it, but it's true, I tend to have a natural bias toward the 'traditionally American' names and I don't expect to change :-)
I'm delighted that you're finding it interesting and worthwhile. :-)
There are a number of excellent books mentioned on this thread....I'm hoping that you might consider some of the others as well, as there's a tremendous amount of superb scholarship on these subjects available now.
They were not ordered to. If they had been, Doenitz would have stretched hemp.
I'd hate to imagine what he would have done had he seen the Japanese tourists I sighted at the Arizona Memorial. Though they tossed flowers into the waters and voiced prayers for the war dead, I know he'd have killed every one of them, had he been able to get to them.
What they weren’t [at least for Western prisoners of war] were POW camps.
I'd hate to imagine what he would have done had he seen the Japanese tourists I sighted at the Arizona Memorial. Though they tossed flowers into the waters and voiced prayers for the war dead, I know he'd have killed every one of them, had he been able to get to them.
If you don't mind my asking, would you by any chance be familiar with what he endured at the hands of Imperial Japan and would you be willing to tell us a little about it?
(considering, of course, that this is a family website)
From your description, it sounds as if he was unspeakably brutalized.
He never spoke of what he went through, what he saw, what he knew or what he may have heard of. He was my grandmothers brother, my Great-Uncle I knew he was in the South Pacific from ‘43 to ‘46, in the US Navy, was in “communications” of some sort and made it ashore much more so than the average seaman. He was so tight-lipped that even his wife knew nothing of his war experiences. I suppose it was common, and is common, that those who were there and who made it back are not the sort to complain or to blow their own horns.
I know one who does.
I met him in 1987 in Tyler, TX.
His name is Noboru Yoshida.
He became a christian and was promptly rejected by his family - a very painful thing for him. Still, he continued in his faith, and pleaded with us to pray for his family, that they may come to salvation. We did pray. I have no idea what became of Noboru.
I have heard of similar responses by Veterans from a variety of theaters and eras. I think that in many cases it's because what they endured was so horrible, bottling it up inside became a self-protection mechanism of sorts, in that it helped to remove the awful memories to the back burner, at least a little bit.
It's also because they're from the pre-Oprah generation, and they know that it's not manly or decent to babble and whimper endlessly about your own problems or bad experiences.
Japanese PM denies "comfort stations" existed.
Whitewashing the Rape of Nanking.
Japanese MPs claim deaths at Rape of Nanking are exaggerated by Chinese
For goodness' sake, it's one thing to try and downplay and rewrite the history. But when some of their victims from WWII are still ALIVE?
Yeah, Waxman to assure there is accountability.
“The comforting thing I tell myself is, these people will soon be confronting the reality of everlasting hell”
That’s your comfort? You’re out of your effing mind.
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