Posted on 08/15/2011 8:00:34 PM PDT by decimon
ST. LOUIS (AP) — A doctor once told Albert Brown he shouldn't expect to make it to 50, given the toll taken by his years in a Japanese labor camp during World War II and the infamous, often-deadly march that got him there. But the former dentist made it to 105, embodying the power of a positive spirit in the face of inordinate odds.
"Doc" Brown was nearly 40 in 1942 when he endured the Bataan Death March, a harrowing 65-mile trek in which 78,000 prisoners of war were forced to walk from Bataan province near Manila to a Japanese POW camp. As many as 11,000 died along the way. Many were denied food, water and medical care, and those who stumbled or fell during the scorching journey through Philippine jungles were stabbed, shot or beheaded.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Not chortle, but it should serve as a warning as to what will happen if you try to exterminate an entire race of people and bomb civilians for no reason.
Those who lament the atomic bombing of Japan, which arguably saved lives on both sides, should be reminded that the Japs (and that's what they were then) reaped what they sowed.
Triple hearsay comes to mind. I don’t have a real problem with hanging Homma, but Yamashita got railroaded. He had ordered Manila be left as an open city, but a Jap Admiral disobeyed orders, and Japanese Marines [mostly] were the troops that committed the atrocitiesand fought the U.S troops. Yamashita was up a gully in northern Luzon without a radio when it happened.
While his execution may have been warranted because of the conduct of some of his troops in Malaya [the Imperial Guards division beheaded a bunch of Aussie prisoners], his only real crime in the Phillipines was delaying the triumphal march of that historical imperative, Douglas MacArthur.
After the March, he was sent up to Korea to work in a copper mine, where he quickly figured out a way to avoid punishment. He acted like he was insane. The Japanese belief at the time was that an insane person was being tortured by one of the gods and that to harm or kill that person would displease the gods and could bring their punishment down upon your own head. He explained this to his fellow prisoners and soon the mine's entire slave labor force was "insane". The Japanese administrators didn't care, so long as they kept up their quotas.
Probably was Wake or Guam. I suspect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Guam_(1941)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wake_Island
That was probably Wake Island.They also endured pure hell.
“When I hear the typical BS about Heroshima or Nagasaki, I almost get ill thinking of the Bataan Death March, etc.”
All you have to do is know a little bit about Imperial Japan’s Unit 731 and the arguments against destroying this evil regime with nuclear weapons as fast as possible completely falls.
Japan had a bio-chemical weapons research unit in which they did live vivisection on prisoners, pregnant women and even babies. Note: live subjects.
They injected diseases such as plague into research subjects. When the disease advanced they would dissect the person alive without anesthesia to see the reaction. They didn’t want anesthesia to interfere with their observations.
The Emperor himself know about and over saw some of these experiments.
Warning: don’t look at the photos. Just read about it. No sane or moral person could possibly say that nuking the people who did this was unjustified.
The whole license is 1,959 pages long - just think of what else is in it.
A True American Hero
I had a great uncle who was on the death march to camp donalson(I think).He hated the bastards till the day he died.People handle adversity in different ways and I’m sure it ate at him the rest of his life.
Yes they did,We grew up watching the old 16 MM news reels of the War after school,My Wife is a Filipina and the stories I got from her family, shocking,There was a war crimes archive in Manila somewhere, will try to look it up on my next trip over there.
his only real crime in the Phillipines was delaying the triumphal march of that historical imperative, Douglas MacArthur.
You hit the nail on the head. MacArther was a SOB. But he was our SOB.
A good strategy for such debates is to avoid mentioning what it saved us and to concentrate instead on the lives being lost on the Asian mainland.
Sad story. did your other uncle make it back?
Also mention the fact that without dropping the bombs, the Soviets would have taken to the Northern part of Japan, and left Japan divided, just like Korea, with the most likely result a brutal civil war, just as in Korea.
First of all, the Soviets lost over a million men when taking Berlin, not 170,000. And, quite frankly, what needs to be explained to them is why their stupid pig communist (three redundant terms) leader Stalin caused those 170,000 (1 million) men to die needlessly all because he wanted to be sure and take Berlin before the Americans did. They died for Stalin’s vainglory. And I don’t care how many armed communist thugs or armed Nazi thugs killed each other. They all served socialist scum so what happened to them is largely imaterial to me.
Can't blame him. I wouldn't agree with anyone acting on such emotion but I would never say they shouldn't have such emotion. I'm sure that I would.
Thanks. My Dad was a full colonel and was in command of a unit that saw many of those atrocities after the war.
I have found as a general rule that the vets who fought the Germans tend to let bygones be bygones, but the ones who fought the Japs hate all them to their graves.
I have to admit, the Japs who participated still refuse to apologize for much of what they did. Bastards, all of them.
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