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.
Scroll down for more...
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.
Scroll down for more...
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.
Scroll down for more...
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.
Unit 731 - Manchuria. A Japanese bio warfare unit that released plague infested rats, fleas, cholera and all sorts of other stuff in China. they also practiced vivisection and other “medical experiments” [freezing z prisoner’s arm by pouring water on it, then snapping it off; tying prisoners to stakes and dropping artillery in to see schrapnel patterns, and gangrene, etc]
I've never heard anyone suggest that any party is 'completely' innocent of any wrongdoing in WW2, but I also have never heard any (credible) suggestions that any wrongdoing of the USA or our British or Aussie Friends was anywhere remotely hinting of the scale of the magnitude or of the brutality so enthusiastically engaged in by the Japanese.
It's a matter of degree, and in the grand scale of things the Japanese stand way, way out in these matters.
From the article:
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.
We ran out after the two.
And people want to destroy the Second Amendment to the Constitution. What even one tenth of those poor Chinese civilians could have done with an old fashioned high powered rifle and fifty rounds. Brings to mind an old slogan in Britain 1940.
You can always take one with you.
Why is it with folks like your media droid, that “orders are orders” is never part of German culture, but Japanese atrocities are explainable by their culture.
Bridge On the River Kwai, a movie from the 1950's, depicts a tiny portion of the suffering of their slave labors.
My ex-husband’s great uncle was a Death March survivor and was also without wife or children. I, unfortunately, never met him, nor did my ex. He was apparently quite the character (and everyone was very fond of him).
ping
Every Filipino I know even NOW is well aware of shall we say Japanese "behavior" during their occupation of the Philippines.
“Me, too. In fact, the Japanese leader of the Pearl Harbor attack later converted to Christianity due to a former American POW and Doolittle Raider, Jacob Daniel DeShazer. I found out about him through a tribute to him on television. Forgiveness was his inspiration and no one who reads about his own change of heart during his captivity can say he didn’t practice what he preached.”
My father fought them from the beginning until the end, including serving on the U.S.S. Marblehead during it’s long and horrible ordeal.
As I was reading the thread, I was especially struck in a positive way by your post.
You need a dose of history, with a chaser of common sense.
They’re in their eighties. But not too late to hang them, I suppose. Get real.
He quickly discovered a way to keep the Japanese from beating him; just act crazy. They didn't want to get too close to him out of fear that the craziness would rub off. But at the same time, they didn't want to kill him and anger the gods, who might just transfer his insanity to the person who killed him. It was quite a gamble on his part, but it paid off in that he survived the brutality of the mine and is still alive today.
I've helped him load up his purchases before and he has a couple of bumper stickers on the back of his truck, one has a mushroom cloud with "twice wasn't enough" circling the top, the second says "Made in America, tested in Japan".
He is quite a character, and I hope he has it easy for the rest of his life, for he has certainly done his time in hell.
“We only had one more, and it was intended for Germany.”
I don’t know where you learned that, but Germany surrendered in May, 1945, before we had comepleted the construction of ANY nukes. So, it makes no sense that we would have built and designated a nuke to be used against Germany when Germany was already out of the war, don’t you think?
Your teen-age daughter is nearly killed in a viscious attack by a drugged-out gang-banger. She is horribly disfigured for life, and the horror of her ordeal has left her an emotional wreck, unable to maintain any family life.
Her attacker is sentenced to 20-40 years, gets out after 12 years with good-time.
He moves into a house three doors down the street.
Still letting bygones be bygones?
It was meant to be terrible.
You have a brave daughter, and good for you too.
It was meant to be terrible.
You have a brave daughter, and good for you too.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.