So much for leaving no soldier behind.
That would bring closure for over 1,000 families. It would be hard knowing how they died and that they were POW’s of the Japanese, knowing how inhumane they were to Americans.
But they would be accounted for at least.
Years ago I had a friend who was an older fellow. Sometimes I’d go over to his house and help him with his computer problems. Once I was in his study and I needed a screwdriver. He told me that there was one in a box on the shelf.
There were lots of boxes, I grabbed one on a high shelf towards the back. It was a cigar box. What I saw shocked me, there were brutal pictures of emaciated American soldiers from WWII and other people who kind of looked Japanese but apparently were Pilipino. There were pics of some pretty brutal stuff. They were pics from the Bataan Death March.
When he saw me looking at the black and white pictures, he gently took the box from me and said, “this is something I’d prefer to forget about”. He would never talk about it and none of the members of his family including his wife knew what I was asking about when I brought it up. They all said that “daddy never talks about the war”.
Mankind can be brutal and IMO opinion that brutality is more likely to come from the emotional leftists than from any other group of people and from the mentally ill on the left who think babies are not babies, they can change the weather and that there are more than two sexes.
Can there be reparations for the families?
I appreciate your point, but in this case there would be very little that could provide anyone solace. DNA would have been degraded to the point of useless. And if there were 1,000 POWs in the hold, it would simply be a big pile of “muck” by now.
And getting bodies out of it would create a mess.
It sounds cold, but knowing where they are is about as good as you get some times.