Posted on 05/25/2002 8:54:30 PM PDT by Pokey78
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:34 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Mel Rosen's introduction to being a prisoner of war came in the first hours after he and his troops surrendered to the Japanese in the Philippines in spring 1942.
As they sat in a big field ringed by Japanese machine guns on the Bataan peninsula, a GI tried to use the latrine. A Japanese soldier thrust his bayonet through the American's chest, and when the blade did not come out cleanly, the Japanese soldier used his foot to push the dying GI into the latrine.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
My Fathers cousin was there. He was an MP Sgt. and survived the horror, only to be sent to japan and worked for years as a slave laborer in the mines.
At the wars end, he was just a living skeleton with a rag for a loincloth.
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Sleep my sons, your duty done, for freedoms light has come, Sleep in the silent depths of the sea, or in your bed of hallowed sod Until at dawn you hear at last the loud, clear reveille of God. -from the Eternal Flame Memorial, Corregidor
Most combat vets don't talk about it. I don't blame them. My Gramp was in the trenches in France in WW I. He wouldn't talk about it until he was in his late 80's, but never would talk about the actual horrors. I was never in combat but I don't even bother talking about my experiences with my family. It's a different world and most civilians don't get it. It's not a Bing and Bob musical, singing songs around the tent....
First, I CAN'T BELIEVE the Washington Post printed this article!!!
Second, the Japanese have done a terrible job of coming to terms with their atrocities during the Second World War. The Rape of Nanking? Hell Ships? Never happened in their history books. Here in Germany, the people have come to terms with their past. It is taught in schools, there are documentaries on the Concentration Camps on network televsion at least 10 times a year. Japan will never, ever, ever come to terms with their atrocities. Ever. It is much simpler and nobler for them to demand an apology for the Atomic Bomb.
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SOURCE: Stars and Stripes
DATE PUBLISHED: 31 August 1945
"Horrific details of atrocities carried out by Japanese doctors are emerging as Allied PoWs are released. Prisoners have been subjected to vivisection. Others have been used as human guinea-pigs and injected with acid, innoculated with fatal diseases or frozen at minus six degrees Fahrenheit.
Eight US Airman shot down after B-29 raids in May died in vivisection experiments carried out by Professor Fukujiro at Kyushu University. One PoWs stomach was removed, and artery was cut to see how long it was before he died....................others have been boiled or dehydrated to death. Experiments included prolonged exposure to X-rays and prisoners subjected to a pressure chamber where the blood was forced out of their skin as they died in agony."
"Everything the Japanese did to us was deliberate, inhuman, brutal, calculated and racist"
"If anybody dropped or couldn't make it, we were not allowed to help. The Japanese clubbed them to death, bayoneted them, shot them or beheaded them"
"There were hundreds of American bodies and thousands of Filipino bodies left along the route of the death march."If the Japanese Empire can be replaced by a peaceful, constitutional republic, the Islamic theocracies can also--and they should be.
One of the highlights of my life came last year when I had the opportunity to visit the Philippines and the Bataan Memorial. A very moving site.
My home video of the memorial sets next to my father's 5th Marine Division Spearhead book.
They're lucky we nuked. That ended it. We could have continued to rain napalm down on their cities, which would have been much more horrific than two nukes. The stupids can't see that. In fact I don't see Japan invasion as ever being necessary, given we had air superiority at the time. We had an air war machine that could have burnt every one of their cities to the ground. It would have taken a few more years, but the nukes ended it. They're lucky we went nuclear.
Apples and oranges. The Japanese, for all their atrocities during the 30's and early to mid 40's, were industrious and hardworking. Muslim filth, on the other hand, are lazy scum who depend on foreigners to do their dirty work. They are savages with no work ethic whatsoever. There is no potential in the arab states...just poverty and misery for the masses and stolen wealth for the elite. They are firmly entrenched in the 8th century and don't seem to have any desire to move forward. We need to stop them from coming into our country. Let them rot in their islamic paradise.
1986 there was a made for TV movie titled "Women of Valor" starring Susan Sarandon and Kristy McNichol. It involved Army nurses captured by the Japanese and forced into the Bataan Death March, then into prison. You felt sorry for them until the end of the movie and the disclaimer that there were no women in the Bataan Death March. I was angry about that one.
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