sabro
後輩
- 23 Apr 2004
- 1,006
- 35
Rabe is not the only source. Others are not hard to come by...just google it.
The sheer scale of the attrocities in China and the fact that many records were lost (some to firebombings) or intentionally destroyed makes estimates of the actual numbers impossible to come by. Japanese revisionists sieze upon this to reduce the numbers to hundreds of thousands rather than millions-- yet the testimonies, diaries and interview of Japanese soldiers support a much larger number. War time Japanese newspapers boasted of large numbers of civillians killed, recounted decapitation contests, and gave full personal accounts of soldiers bayonette training with live targets. If war is hell, than world war II was a hell like no other.
The barbarity, inhumanity and ferocity of the Japanese attack was no secret in Japan at the time. The kidnapping and daily rape of young girls is very well documented. The torture killings of American pilots was never kept secret. The starvation, forced labor, and inhumane conditions afforded POW's and civillian internees by the Japanese has never been in question. Nanking is one incident--Japan inflicted hundreds of "Nanking" type incidents on China. Japanese conduct in Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan and the Phillipines is also well documented. And yet some who are too young to know better would like to change the historical record and make it cleaner and less horrible.
World War II also saw the US shift from condemning arial bombardment of civilian areas in Spain and China by the axis, to the "strategic bombing" of Germany to the all out firebombing of Japan. By the end of WWII, Americans had come to accept the wholesale slaughter of civillians as part of total war. Americans also began to accept the slaughter of some POW's in the Pacific and showed marine pilots strafing shipwrecked Japanese sailors in newsreels (to which the cheerful voice-over announcer remarks,"these japs will be meeting their ancestors." Life Magazine even carried a photo of an officer with a Japanese skull on his desk. By the time we dropped the atomic bombs, 400,000 civillians had been burned to death by firebombs dropped from B29's-- a tactic purposefully designed to kill the maximum number of civillians- a practice condemned by the American press, public and military only seven years earlier.
When the Japanese war machine collapsed in early 1945, millions of Japanese "Pioneers" who were sent to colonize Manchuria and soldiers without supplies were abandoned in China and left to face an enraged Chinese population. Attrocities were returned in kind if not in number. The Soviets sent many of these survivors to Siberian gulags from which few ever returned.
The Japanese military also abandoned hundreds of thousands of its own troops to the advancing Americans-- most of whom died of disease and starvation. Of the 140,000 soldiers left in New Guinea only about 4000 survived. Left without food, water or ammunition and with no hope of rescue, many of these soldiers had resorted to canibalism to survive.
I guess my point is that we should never try to rewrite history because we don't like a part of it. This was an aweful chapter that bears remembering and not repeating.
The sheer scale of the attrocities in China and the fact that many records were lost (some to firebombings) or intentionally destroyed makes estimates of the actual numbers impossible to come by. Japanese revisionists sieze upon this to reduce the numbers to hundreds of thousands rather than millions-- yet the testimonies, diaries and interview of Japanese soldiers support a much larger number. War time Japanese newspapers boasted of large numbers of civillians killed, recounted decapitation contests, and gave full personal accounts of soldiers bayonette training with live targets. If war is hell, than world war II was a hell like no other.
The barbarity, inhumanity and ferocity of the Japanese attack was no secret in Japan at the time. The kidnapping and daily rape of young girls is very well documented. The torture killings of American pilots was never kept secret. The starvation, forced labor, and inhumane conditions afforded POW's and civillian internees by the Japanese has never been in question. Nanking is one incident--Japan inflicted hundreds of "Nanking" type incidents on China. Japanese conduct in Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan and the Phillipines is also well documented. And yet some who are too young to know better would like to change the historical record and make it cleaner and less horrible.
World War II also saw the US shift from condemning arial bombardment of civilian areas in Spain and China by the axis, to the "strategic bombing" of Germany to the all out firebombing of Japan. By the end of WWII, Americans had come to accept the wholesale slaughter of civillians as part of total war. Americans also began to accept the slaughter of some POW's in the Pacific and showed marine pilots strafing shipwrecked Japanese sailors in newsreels (to which the cheerful voice-over announcer remarks,"these japs will be meeting their ancestors." Life Magazine even carried a photo of an officer with a Japanese skull on his desk. By the time we dropped the atomic bombs, 400,000 civillians had been burned to death by firebombs dropped from B29's-- a tactic purposefully designed to kill the maximum number of civillians- a practice condemned by the American press, public and military only seven years earlier.
When the Japanese war machine collapsed in early 1945, millions of Japanese "Pioneers" who were sent to colonize Manchuria and soldiers without supplies were abandoned in China and left to face an enraged Chinese population. Attrocities were returned in kind if not in number. The Soviets sent many of these survivors to Siberian gulags from which few ever returned.
The Japanese military also abandoned hundreds of thousands of its own troops to the advancing Americans-- most of whom died of disease and starvation. Of the 140,000 soldiers left in New Guinea only about 4000 survived. Left without food, water or ammunition and with no hope of rescue, many of these soldiers had resorted to canibalism to survive.
I guess my point is that we should never try to rewrite history because we don't like a part of it. This was an aweful chapter that bears remembering and not repeating.