To: mark silvers who wrote (327 ) 8/14/1998 12:40:00 AM From: Dwight E. Karlsen Respond to of 10167
No one is trying to make the horrors of the holocaust a Jew vs. Christian struggle for the title of "who has suffered more" since we're speaking of suffering though, I'd like to contribute a few cold facts: Russia lost 20 million young men defending the country against the Nazi invasion during WW II. Twenty million. And a whole lot of those Russian soldiers died wearing uniforms sewed in the USA, donated to the Russians during the war. Was this decision an act of generosity by the USA, or a form of "the Nazi's have to be stopped. If you supply the men prepared to die, we'll supply the uniforms." That's just another alternative, decidedly cynical viewpoint, for the sake of offering different theories on motivations of nations. The USA lost "about 291,000 battle deaths during all of World War II" * During the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945, the Japanese army captured Nanking, China, a city of about 1 million, in December 1937. More than half the city's residents managed to flee the city or jam into the International Safety Zone (a 2 1/2 square mile sectory near the city center, marked off by white flags and Red Cross banners). But of those left, some 300,000 Chinese men, women and children died at the hands of the Japanese after the Chinese army had thrown down its arms. One order to the 66th (Japanese) Battalion read: "All prisoners of war are to be executed". In one instance the Japanese army spent most of one day tying the arms of 14,777 Chinese soldiers behind their backs. The prisoners were then marched to the river and surrounded by troops with machine guns. At evening, firing commensed and went on for about an hour. It took all night for the soldiers to bayonet the bodies to make sure they were dead. Eyewitnesses reported that some ponds were so stuffed with corpses that they disappeared, the water completely displaced. Thousands of bodies were dumped into the Yangtze river, running it red with blood. By the end of March 1938, most of the rape and killing ended. About 3 1/2 months, and one city had lost more people to the Japanese army than all of the US battle casualties in all theaters of battle during all of World War II."* Food for thought (doesn't make me very hungry though). * "The Woman Who Wouldn't Forget", Reader's Digest, Sept. 1998. The three paragraphs about Nanking are almost word-for-word from this article by Ralph Kinney Bennett, in which he documents American Iris Chang's research from public and formerly-private sources on the subject of Nanking's tragedy. Iris Chang published a book in 1997 called "The Rape of Nanking".