Posted on 08/19/2002 11:23:47 PM PDT by BlessingInDisguise
JAPANESE soldiers butchered Australian soldiers for food on the Kokoda Track, veterans have claimed.
Sixty years after they fought on the infamous track, Australian veterans say cannibalism was common among enemy troops after their supply lines were cut. In a Sky TV documentary to be aired today, one digger describes finding the body of an Australian sergeant with his heart and liver missing, and strips of flesh cut from the arms, legs and buttocks.
Disobeying orders not to engage the enemy, he says that the patrol pursued the Japanese and found four of them cooking the human flesh.
The veterans admit that they were incensed by the knowledge that the Japanese had resorted to be eating Australian dead, and in the heat of battle they showed no mercy to their enemies.
In another incident, Australian troops entered a Japanese hospital from where shots had been fired, and although most of the occupants were bandaged and either sick or wounded, all were shot dead.
Former RSL state president Bruce Ruxton confirmed the allegations of cannibalism, but said many people would not want to believe the Japanese had eaten the flesh of Australian soldiers.
"There was cannibalism. That's a fact of life," Mr Ruxton said.
"There were men out of my battalion who were found with their buttocks cut off. My battalion was there, I wasn't."
Mr Ruxton, who was a rifleman in Borneo with the 2/25 Infantry Battalion during World War II and then served with the occupation forces in Japan, said the Japanese committed some terrible sins during World War II.
"People just don't understand. They (the Japanese) weren't animals. That is too good a name for them. They were monsters. Nothing shocks me about them."
The revelations come only days after Prime Minister John Howard and Papua New Guinea leader Sir Michael Somare unveiled a memorial dedicated to the Kokoda Track Diggers and their PNG allies.
The memorial, unveiled on Wednesday, is high in PNG's mountainous jungle at Isurava, where 1000 Diggers made a stand against 4000 Japanese.
But Australian War Memorial historian Dr Peter Stanley said yesterday that he believed cannibalism of soldiers had to be seen in perspective.
"It's been known since 1942. It was documented in an inquiry which was reported late in the war, I think in 1944," Dr Stanley said. "It's been documented in every book on Kokoda since 1942.
"Two thousand Australians died in the Papuan campaign. In 1942, if people had come back saying Japanese are eating the dead, 2000 Australian families would have been devastated.
"No Australian was killed in order to be eaten. The Japanese ate Australians who were already dead. That's what William Webb (the jurist who investigated Japanese atrocities) found."
Dr Stanley said it was important to keep reports of cannibalism on Kokoda in proportion, given that such a large number of families lost loved ones.
"It's important not to allow them to imagine their relatives were eaten," he said.
The ANZAC Legacy -- the Kokoda Track, presented by John Gatfield and produced by Lisa Whitby, screens at 12.30pm and 11.30pm today on Sky News Australia.
Somebody better tell them to clean up their website, (at: http://www.gaijininvestor.com/commentary/010301digitaltv.html) then!!
/sarc
Here's even a foreigner in Japan with his own website referring to himself as -- gasp-- a "gaijin"!
At: http://www.nanyo.net/e/mag/gaijin_eye/people.html
If its such a nasty word, why do people use it in such an unapologetic and positive way?
You must have had somebody look at you bad and point a finger and say 'gajin', and you took it from that that the whole word denotes racism somehow. My, there is even an amateur actor's group of foreigners in Tokyo for years called "Gaijin-za", and nobody ever got hot under the collar.
You're sure of this?
You're sure about the Germans, too?
You're sure that the last war *really fundamentally changed* these two authority-worshiping societies, to the point where they will never again become a focal point for global totalitarian brutality?
I've always wondered if the Romans knew something we don't, when they made a point of utterly destroying those civilizations which attacked them, rather than trying to assimilate, accomodate, or change them.
History will certainly judge... but I just hope I'm not still around if it passes the kind of judgement that I can see in my mind's eye, in my darker moments...
But the point is, the youth of Japan and Germany today are not brought up to unquestioningly follow orders as they were in the '30's and '40's, and this somewhat puts the kaibosh on filling the ranks with happy little drones willing to wage aggressive war on one's neighbors.
LMAO! Yeah, must something in the water!
And you have documentation correct ?? Please post. My father served in the pacific and I have diaries stating that the japs prisoners were used to gather intelligence. Dead men tale no tales. Prove your point.
Yes, but the SC 430 a really, really nice one! And damned fun to drive..... :)
So you had a bad, subjective experience in Asia. Fine, go cry in your own coffee. Your experience does not speak for everybody, any more than mine does.
You also don't speak for the thousands of foreigners that did well in Japan and left and have good memories, or otherwise still do business with Japan. Like I said, there is no stampede of 38,000 Americans to Narita airport to evacuate the place.
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