|
My father was a Seabee in the Pacific during WWII, but I don't know anything about it really, because that generation didn't talk about it.
Just a few things about the Japanese Army that I learned, for those on DU who are so horrifically ignorant. A little was picked up by reading or listening over the years, and much was from the China episode yesterday on TCM, form the "Why We Fight" series. That was a great, very informative series, recognizing the propaganda angle, because they were still then at war, and trying to keep and weary andsacrificing people's spirits up. About the sacrifices, by the way, I know from our family that there was an uncle on a farm, who could not get parts for a needed tractor, applying over and over again, for all the four years of the war. They really could not get things; they also participated in rubber drives, paper drives, metal drives, recycling cans for the war, etc., and had Victory Gardens so commercial produce could be sent to the troops. At one point, one-third of all the produce grown in the U.S. during WWII, was from Victory Gardens.
Japan was like Germany and Italy, all fascistic military dicatorships and all, bixarrely, launching these attempt to take over the world from their own regions. Germany took Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc., expanding; Italy took Ethiopia, expanding; and Japan, following its own Tanaka Plan (Japan's Foriegn Minister, I think), was going to obliterate and subjugate the peaceful and not moderized country of China, then expand to the South Pacific islands. Japan had already shown itself to be a brutal, vicious, extremely feared army--torturing, murdering civialians who had already surrendered, capturing women and raping them (as "comfort women"), then torturing them to death--the few who survived have been trying for all these years to get restitution from the Japanese Government for this atrocity, and the courts there have dismissed it every time. Japan, unprovoked, attacked the independant section of China known as Manchuria, launched a total genocide, wiped the country off the map, then got bogged down.
Meanwhile, the then thriving, international city of Shanghai launched two separate boycotts of Japan, after Japan illegally blockaded Shanghai so it could not get shipments at its own ports. Both 1932 and 1937, these attempted commercial boycotts by Shanghai were met with heavy Japanes bombbardment, and genocide upon landing on shore. Then, the worst of all, the attack on fleeing civilians called "The Rape of Nanking," 1937. The Japanese took the city and area, and as the people fled, the Japanese army launched a totally hysterically cruel bloodbath, an attack of rape, burning, stabbing, mutilating, shooting, battering, so unGodly horrifying, that it outraged the world at that time. It came out that this terroristic attack, new for that war, was planned. The Japanese commited many genocides, murdered prisoners and civilians, destroyed whole areas of countries, raped, put the skulls of victims on posts for villagers to find, had concentration camps, death camps (for civilians), and internment camps, just as the Nazis had.
When the horrific slaughter against the Chinese was not going as planned, and stalled, they moved ahead with the next part of the Tanaka conquest plan, to the islands of the South Pacific, where agian, they committed genocides, destroyed areas, terrorized whole populations, and continued. Then, on December 7th, 1941, they decided to get rid of the U.S. bases of the area, so they could continue. When the attack happened, it was known immediately--as I remember my Mom telling me--everyone knew then that we were now at war, and it was going to be bad. Thank God we had Franklin Roosevelt, an educated public-spirited people who knew already what had been building up for years (the British had already been heavily attacked and bombed by Germany many times by then), and this was when we still had the moral authority to fight a war against torture and oppression.
|