theage.com.au
You surely can't beat war for bringing out the best of people!!
US soldiers committed wartime atrocities: BBC
Sunday 3 December 2000
A year-long television investigation that set out to explain the cannibalising brutality of Japanese soldiers during the Pacific war has uncovered stark evidence of atrocities by American marines.
A two-part documentary to be aired this week in Britain by the BBC, and the basis of a book to be released in the new year, dispels the myth that the Japanese military culture was somehow inveterately sadistic.
The product of extensive interviews with surviving soldiers in Japan, Australia, Britain and the US, Horror In The East points to a web of factors to explain the notorious cruelty inflicted on PoWs in particular, a program of unrelenting brutalisation of trainee Japanese soldiers by their superiors that left them completely emotionally desensitised.
The documentary confirms that Japanese troops carried out organised, group cannibalism of Australian and British troops in New Guinea. It argues that the Japanese resorted to cannibalism after bungling army commanders in Tokyo had sent far too many of them in, only to abandon them to starve in the jungle when supply lines failed.
But the film also exposes brutal reprisals exacted by American marines as the tide of battle turned towards the end of the war. Former US marines admit to extracting bags of gold fillings and teeth from the mouths of Japanese soldiers murdered under an unspoken US military rule of taking no prisoners. The marines also appear to have decapitated enemy soldiers and boiled their heads, to keep the skulls as souvenirs.
Far from being an inherently brutal race, the documentary explains that the Japanese treated German PoWs with great humanity and civility in the First World War when they fought on the Allied side. According to producer Martina Balazova, circumstances conspired in the 1920s and 1930s to revolutionise Japanese attitudes to war.
Increasingly, they were indoctrinated that the Emperor of Japan was a god, that surrender in any form was a mortal crime and that death in battle guaranteed them a place in heaven.
Raw army recruits were beaten senseless every day for months in a systematic new approach to strengthen discipline. Soldiers were brainwashed with the idea that the Chinese were sub-human.
The cumulative result was years of inordinate brutality towards the Chinese and then the Allies. Also brainwashed about the sin of surrender, Japanese civilians in their thousands suicided, in some case throwing their children off cliffs and beating the elderly to death in the face of the American advance.
And when they got the upper hand, the US soldiers were merciless. Former marine Paul Montgomery recalls one officer carrying a bag containing about seven kilograms of gold teeth. "That was our off-duty activity," he said. "And it was fair game, I guess."
The film features the findings of a Melbourne academic, Yuki Tanaka, who uncovered evidence of systematic cannibalisation of Australian servicemen in newly declassified Australian military documents.
"The practice of cannibalism was much more widely practised than previously thought," Professor Tanaka said. "I found through my research that cannibalism was organised, group practice rather than individually practised activity."
But it was the revelations about the American brutality that most surprised Martina Balazova, who did many of the interviews.
"I didn't expect that because you think the Americans ... don't do those things," she told The Sunday Age. "But they did. We talk about cannibalism of one side, which was a survival thing. But then I talked to Americans and, you know, we had American (this is nothing new...)
There was no evidence of such activity among Australian servicemen, just the Americans.
"There was raping, boiling of heads, picking out gold teeth from Japanese bodies," Ms Balazova says. "They were brutal." Ms Balazova says the Pacific war was altogether different from European theatres of combat - a process that quickly dehumanised all participants.
"Under no circumstances do I want to justify what went on there but I spent three days in those jungles filming," she says. "It is very difficult today to judge what people would do in such terrible conditions. It is very, very hot. Very humid, you can hardly move. There is no food at all, nothing... When you see the pictures, it was just hell on earth ... Once you are in that hell, something clicks in your head."
I can understand that. I have read many books, and accessed many web sites, which spoke of allied atrocities. I also knew people who fought in WW11. There is never a place to stand and gloat... |
