The Palawan Massacre

Warfare History ^ | May 25, 2021 | Dick Camp

[artichokegrower]

Superior Private Tomisaburo Sawa of the Imperial Japanese Army fixed the bayonet on his Type 99 Arisaka rifle and carefully checked to make sure the weapon was loaded. From his position on the veranda of the prison guard barracks, he watched as members of his platoon advanced across the courtyard. The POWs that Sawa were in charge of didn’t know it, but many would soon become victims of the now-infamous Palawan massacre.

[artichokegrower]

Much has been made recently of anti Asian hate crimes. A review of history is revealing

[lightman]

Stories like these are the reason why I detest seeing a Mitsubishi bearing down on me tailgating.

Come closer and I will go slower. How slow can I go?

Find out.

[lightman]

Best tribute EVER to the Mitsubishi legacy:

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/york/obituary.aspx?n=john-c-yates&pid=116811966

[Tacrolimus1mg]

I’m kind of a WWII nut, and this was new info for me. Thanks for sharing.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

I have a book somewhere about the Code of Bushido including why the Japanese committed such terrible war crimes. They were not trained to be human beings, just as the Red Chinese Red Guards were trained not to be human beings, with the Russians/No. Koreans, Communist Cubans and No. Vietnamese/VC being in the same class of war criminals.

[Chainmail]

Fascinating and well-written obituary - BUT the Mitsubishi Type 96 was code-named the "Nell" (Bombers had women's names and fighters had men's names) not "hell" and he received a "Commendation" for shooting it down, not an "accommodation".

Needed a better editor.

[kearnyirish2]

Japan deserved everything it got as that war wound down, but we showed we could be just as brutal - that is HOW we won. Never mind the atomic bombs; the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed countless civilians, was an awesome display of force. To have strategists determine how much high explosive ordinance had to be dropped to destroy buildings, then how much incendiary to use to set it all alight, was brilliant...

[kearnyirish2]

The Japanese viewed troops who had surrendered as traitors to their leaders, beneath contempt.

[Joe 6-pack]

"To have strategists determine how much high explosive ordinance had to be dropped to destroy buildings, then how much incendiary to use to set it all alight, was brilliant..."

IIRC, Robert McNamara was part (or maybe head) of Lemay's statistical analytics team that performed the calculations. It's at least one thing he did right, but perhaps that led to him embracing a view that war could be won by number crunching alone, leading to his later failures as SecDef.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Ever wonder why the world still hunts down Nazi war criminals from the 1930s and 40s, but have given up on hunting Japanese war criminals.

[kearnyirish2]

I’m not going to “Monday morning quarterback” the decisions, and I’m the first to remind others that Japan held US territory during the war (not just isolated islands but part of Alaska as well), but there is a serious moral issue with doing that. While Japan was brutal with enemy civilians, reducing ourselves to that level cost some moral high ground.

By the time Vietnam came around (a just war in my mind), the implementation of the policies targeting civilian populations was unjustifiable; the same dynamics didn’t apply. When those US leaders came forward years later and admitted errors in carrying out the war in Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia), it seems clear to me that they were guilty of war crimes. The very fact that war wasn’t even declared while we carried out those bombing campaigns was bizarre, and captured Americans paid a price; the lack of a declared war made any protections under the Geneva Conventions moot. At that point, bomber crews were just guys dropping bombs on civilians.

I wasn’t in kindergarten yet when the Vietnam War ended, and I’m glad I missed it; in hindsight, if the ARVN couldn’t conduct the war (even heavily subsidized/armed by us), there was no way to win it without massive civilian casualties.

[Joe 6-pack]

I think I great alternative history/speculative fiction exercise would be to try and figure how much different the world might be had Johnson been impeached and removed for fighting a war without Congressional declaration, and what the fallout may have been.

Would Humphrey have pulled the US out, or would he have pushed congress to declare war? If the former, would the "domino" theory have been realized with more of east Asia succumbing to revolution and leading to even greater conflict? If the latter, how would the Chicoms and Soviets have reacted? Would a full declaration of war led to the employment of tactical nukes?

[kearnyirish2]

If we weren’t involved, the dominoes (at least those of the former French Indochina) may have fallen more slowly - our bombing in particular drove many peasants into the communists’ arms.

In terms of actually declaring war, I doubt it would have changed anything. Nuclear weapons would fail as badly as conventional bombs - few targets, and many of the “enemies” were within the borders of the country we were defending.

I remember the Soviet “invasion” of Afghanistan, and its parallels to our involvement in South Vietnam are amazing. They were “invited” to bolster a weak government, spent their blood and treasure futilely for years, and in the end they withdrew - and the government they supported lived on a couple of years before being overthrown.