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.
awww...No worries! That's okay..I'm just very happy that more people will be able to learn about these important things who perhaps missed seeing this thread.
I see that a link to this thread was posted early on, so hopefully some of those people will make it over here and see at least some of these posts as well.
I've learned a lot from posters to this thread, and I wish that everyone could educate themselves on these issues. Many of the facts discussed here are almost completely excised from the modern 'history' books taught in academia.
There have been a number of posts from people who either had direct, personal experience in these matters or who had close relatives who did, and their posts are oftentimes so heart-wrenching that I have trouble responding to them and I just have to leave the computer for awhile. I hope that they don't think that I'm being rude if I don't respond.....there was so much suffering it's overwhelming to read about it sometimes.
Our nation and the rest of the world owes our Veterans such a monumental debt......
Eastern Europeans for sure. The Nazis used Russian POWs to help build Auschwitz, and as test subjects for the first gassings. They treated them abominably.
As for the Poles, I doubt they had pleasant experiences with the Germans. But they were systematically [at least officers and NCOs] murdered by the Russsians.
My father was a Merchant Marine Officer, he did the Murmansk run several times, and he served in the Pacific also. He prefered the Atlantic by far. But then he always preferred colder climes. What is different about being shot out of the water by a Brit battleship you can not see and a brit sub that you can not see? The ? is how many merchant mariners were beheaded by the German Navy? You claim to hold the skinny about that.
“They were not ordered to. If they had been, Doenitz would have stretched hemp.”
There are posts on this thread saying otherwise. I have been credibly informed otherwise.
I heard that Ward Churchill had made this claim; do you have any other sources for this?
Cheers!
"Jap" is short for "Japanese".
Cheers!
BUMP in remembrance to my Dad’s generation.
The poster did not say that Nazis were less sadistic but in many ways the Japanese were more widely cruel and barbaric. ON a par with what Muslims have done over the last 1300 years.
Just ask the Chinese and other asians about how Japs treated them.
Like I said, the big difference between Japan and Germany when it came to naval forces was simply that Japan had aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, giant submarines, ordinary submarines, and miniature submarines.
The Germans had a "pocket battleship or two", some cruisers, and a whole big bunch of ordinary submarines.
Both navies were destroyed, but the German fleet was destroyed utterly! It was also smaller than the Japanese fleet.
They're the greatest :-)
There are times when I've worried about the "Oprah Generation" having what it takes to keep our nation and the world safe from threats like Imperial Japan or the Nazis, but then I look at the great job that our troops are doing in Iraq and all over the world and I remind myself that the true "Oprah Generation" isn't doing the real work that needs to be done....they're the ones sniping at our military and anyone who 'truly' supports our troops from the safety of their newspaper pressroom cubicles, TV 'anchor' chairs or from the Daily Kos or DU. They are the ones marching in the streets, calling our President a Nazi and demanding that we surrender the planet to a bunch of ragtag death-worshippers straight out of the seventh century.
Considering the fact that our troops are doing such fantastic work despite not only the islamofascists but their allies in the press and academia all over the world, . I think that our fathers and grandfathers would be very, very proud :-)
The Germans had two battleships [BISMARCK and TIRPITZ], two battlecruisers [SCHARNHORST and GNIESENAU], three “pocket battleships” [ADMIRAL GRAF SPEE, ADMIRAL SCHEER and DEUTSCHLAND, later LUETZOW], a flotilla of armed merchant raiders [ATLANTIS, THOR, PINGUIN, MICHEL, etc], heavy cruisers [PRINZ EUGEN, etc], light cruisers, some destroyers, two types of torpedo boat, and at least three classes of U-boat.
I think theat he/she just misunderstood what I was trying to say. My point was that their religion may have caused them as well to be that way. Germans at least had a more or less Christian background and were less sadistic to OUR pow’s, not to the Jews or others mind you, but to their US captive. That’s all I was trying to say. I know only to well what they did to the Jews, whom they hated with a demonic obsession of hatred. Mxxx
Historical evidence does not support the premise that Germans were less cruel to Christians. Germans were in the grip of a sadistic unChristian cabal during those years.
Germans were just as cruel to Christians as they were to Jews ...ask the Serbs and Greeks and other Christians in Europe who had to deal with the savages and their proxies.
However, the Allies might have still wanted to avoid any embarassing revelations about Uncle Joe's minions....
So-oldier ~of~ the Queen!
Ahh, Kipling, not taught much anymore.
My dad (who served in the Pacific Theater) did not tell me details but would occasionally mention the brutality of the Japs in WWII. It is difficult to even read this horror.
I’m only talking about our POW’s here, not others. I didn’t say anything about their being less cruel to Christians, just to our POW’s as compared to the Japs and our POW’s. Please read my posts.
Jap is short for Japanese. It’s akin to using “Brit” or Mex or Aussie or Viet or Dane or Swede or Rus.....N****er is a bastardization of negro which just meant "black" originally. i.e. it's just an easier way to say "black". Does that make it any less racist? The connotations of a word are just as important as its meaning.
The indians in America introduced tobacco to the “white eyes”.
There have been hundreds of millions of deaths, including black americans, due to tobacco. PS, the indians gave us tobacco.
The people who blame the whites for all these things and do not look at their own weaknesses are what they are. A bunch of racists.
It is why we have the 2nd amendment.
I’ve heard that one too.
I personally wasn’t there, so historical evidence is all we have to go by.
The article I came across claims that the American Indians gave syphillus to European explorers.
Whatever the case, lot of hanky panky going on
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