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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
“It started at her school when her 8th grade teacher asked the class if they thought it was right that we dropped the atomic bombs on Japan and my daughter said, “Yes. They started the war.” At which point the teacher (of Japanese descent) told her how terrible the bomb was.”
Dejavu! My kid answered close to the same thing to nearly the same question from his Japanese language teacher in the 4th grade. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/857912/posts?page=11#11
“The Japs used anthrax and other types of germ warfare in China and other countries. Some of the cultures they released are still active.”
IIRC, one of those is a particularly nasty strain of cholera that is now indigenous to an area of N.E. China.
My dads papers say he served New Guinea and the Philippine Island of Luzon. He was in Co. C of the 760th Field Artillery Battalion. If if wasn’t for ‘the bomb’, we probably wouldn’t be here today, Inyo.
My dad passed away in 2000. I wonder what he would say if he knew that my son - his grandson - is in the navy stationed in Japan today!
Sorry, I worded poorly. It “Had been intended for Germany, and was in the European theater. Truman ordered it to the Pacific, as it was no longer needed in Germany, and Japan still needed more prodding.”
“If I knew God I’d be Him.” But as I believe I’m responsible for my own soul, I believe there’ll be a reckoning for theirs as well, and at this late date, given the allied sense of our two peoples, I’d just as soon leave it in His hands.
On the monument of war dead in my hometown in New Zealand is the name of a soldier who was beheaded on what was called Devil’s Island...
It was a well known fact that the Japanese were much worse than the German Nazis, and the chances of coming home alive from Europe were better than an assignment to the Pacific...
Everything of a scholarly nature that I've read about WW2 supports what you say.
(I don't consider Leftist hysteria about 'the evil Americans' and their 'horrible crime of dropping the atomic bomb' to be "scholarly" in any way....merely the uniformed spineless caterwauling of children in the bodies of adults)
Everyone hopes they are done with counting coup and taking vengence.
Let’s never ever forget what ruthless, cruel animals the JAPS were.
That’s a leftwing party (counterpart to the Democrats and Commies) that controls one part of the Diet ~ not the Japanese as a whole.
I believe that your Father's perspectives are shared by all who either served in WW2 or who have studied it honestly. Such sentiments are typically not shared by those who hate America and use that vitriolic bile as a foundation for their ideological agenda.
Thank God for your Father and for all like him.
And people still can’t understand why the two Japanese cities were nuked.
Wow! Small world. My son, my father's grandson, is also in the Navy stationed in Japan aboard the USS Kittyhawk! My father passed away in 1988.
“Maybe the democrats in Congress could pass a resolution or something.”
To do what? Denounce Mark Felton’s book?
After the war sweetness and light prevailed and the US and the USSR faced off with 50 megaton nukes.
I don't think I phrased that right. Instead, let's try this, A board of aeons, all enlightened philosopher kings, took over and everything was made right ~ peace prevailed ~ the blind saw, the lame walked ~
Maybe I should try that again ~ how about it got worse and children were taught to cower in terror over fear of being blinded by atom bombs going off in their cities ~ all over the world.
Ain't much better today.
Mrs. Chang was working on another book, this time detailing the horrors of the Battan Death March, when she suffered a nervous breakdown, likely attributed to the horrific materials she was dealing with on a daily basis, and committed suicide in November, 2004.
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.
It serves no one but the Devil to nurture hate and anger, as hard as it is to not feel both when learning of such cruelty.
I haven’t found any info on routine German Navy atrocities. Do you have any info?
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