cherokee

politic_analyst,


Since you brought up the how wrong it was for the US to use atomic weapons on the Japanese to END the Pacific Theater of WWII lets take a look at the history shall we.

First of all it was the Japanese who started the Pacific Theater of WWII against the US.
Do you deny this fact? How can you unless you like to re-write history like so many people like yourself do.

Before the bombings...

The Potsdam Declaration or the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender was a statement issued on July 26, 1945 by Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek which outlined the terms of surrender for Japan as agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference. The agreement stated that if Japan did not surrender, it would face "prompt and utter destruction".
The proclamation stated that the full force of the United States, the British Empire, and National Government of the Republic of China would strike the final blows upon Japan. They warned that "The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people" and this power of the Allies would lead to "the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland" unless Japan ended the war. Also that:
·Militarism in Japan must end.
·Japan would be occupied until the basic objectives set out in this proclamation were met.
·The terms of the Cairo Declaration would be carried out and Japanese sovereignty would be limited to the islands of Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū, Shikoku, and such minor islands as the Allies determined.
·The Japanese army would be completely disarmed and allowed to return home.
·Those who had led Japan to war must be permanently and finally discredited, and abandoned.
·War criminals would be punished including those who had "visited cruelties upon our prisoners". Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established.
·Japan should be permitted to maintain a viable industrial economy but not industries which would enable her to re-arm for war.
·The treaty was not intended to enslave the Japanese as a race or as a nation.
·Allied forces would be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished
·We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction." Potsdam Declaration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



·On July 26, Truman and other allied leaders issued The Potsdam Declaration outlining terms of surrender for Japan:

"...The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people. The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland..."

"...We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."


The next day, Japanese papers reported that the declaration, the text of which had been broadcast and dropped on leaflets into Japan, had been rejected. The atomic bomb was still a highly guarded secret and not mentioned in the declaration. The government of Japan showed no intention of accepting the ultimatum. On July 28, Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro declared at a press conference that the Potsdam Declaration was no more than a rehash (yakinaoshi) of the Cairo Declaration and that the government intended to ignore it (mokusatsu).
Emperor Hirohito, who was waiting for a Soviet reply to noncommittal Japanese peace feelers, made no move to change the government position.On July 31, he made clear to Kido that the Imperial Regalia of Japan had to be defended at all costs.
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Events of August 7-9
After the Hiroshima bombing, President Truman announced, "If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the likes of which has never been seen on this earth." On August 8, 1945, leaflets were dropped and warnings were given to Japan by Radio Saipan. (The area of Nagasaki did not receive warning leaflets until August 10, though the leaflet campaign covering the whole country was over a month into its operations.)
The Japanese government still did not react to the Potsdam Declaration. Emperor Hirohito, the government and the War council were considering four conditions for surrender : the preservation of the kokutai (Imperial institution and national polity), assumption by the Imperial Headquarters of responsibility for disarmament and demobilization, no occupation and delegation to the Japanese government of the punishment of war criminals.

The Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov informed Tokyo of the Soviet Union's unilateral abrogation of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact on April 5. At two minutes past midnight on August 9, Tokyo time, Soviet infantry, armor, and air forces launched an invasion of Manchuria. Four hours later, word reached Tokyo that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan. The senior leadership of the Japanese Army began preparations to impose martial law on the nation, with the support of Minister of War Anami, in order to stop anyone attempting to make peace.

Responsibility for the timing of the second bombing was delegated to Colonel Tibbets as commander of the 509th Composite Group on Tinian. Scheduled for August 11 against Kokura, the raid was moved forward to avoid a five day period of bad weather forecast to begin on August 10.[31] Three bomb pre-assemblies had been transported to Tinian, labeled F-31, F-32, and F-33 on their exteriors. On August 8 a dress rehearsal was conducted off Tinian by Maj. Charles Sweeney using Bockscar as the drop airplane. Assembly F-33 was expended testing the components and F-31 was designated for the mission August 9. Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Formal Surrender of Japan, 2 September 1945

SURRENDER OF JAPAN, 2 September 1945


Next lets look at how the Japanese conducted warfare.

Japanese War Crimes.
Because of the sheer scale of suffering caused by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s, it is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany during 1933–45. The historian Chalmers Johnson has written that:
It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %.
Japanese war crimes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mass killings
R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, states that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture."[8] Among the most infamous incidents in Southeast Asia were the Manila massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 100,000 civilians in the Phillipines and the Sook Ching massacre, in which between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore were taken to beaches and massacred.
In China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians as a direct result of the Japanese invasion.[9] The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 430,000 civilians and prisoners of war, although the accepted figure is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.[10] Herbert Bix, citing the works of Mitsuyoshi Himeta and Akira Fujiwara, claims that the "Three Alls Policy" (Sankō Sakusen) a scorched earth strategy used by Japanese forces in China in 1942-45, and sanctioned by Hirohito himself, was in itself responsible for the deaths of 2.7 million Chinese civilians. The mystery behind Hirohito's role is explained in the authoritative book by David Bergamini, who translated war diaries and depositions from the tribunals from the original Japanese, and interviewed sources directly.Similar crimes such as Changjiao massacre did occur from time to time.


Experiments on humans and biological warfare
Special Japanese military units conducted experiments on civilians and POWs in China. One of the most infamous was Unit 731. Victims were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia, amputations, and were used to test biological weapons, among other experiments. Anesthesia was not used because it was considered to affect results. In some victims, animal blood was injected into their bodies.
To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water until frozen solid. The arm was later amputated; the doctor would repeat the process on the victim’s upper arm to the shoulder. After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs until only a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for plague and pathogens experiments.

Cont...

cherokee

According to GlobalSecurity.org, the experiments carried out by Unit 731 alone caused 3,000 deaths. Furthermore, "tens of thousands, and perhaps as many 200,000, Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases...", resulting from the use of biological warfare.

One of the most notorious cases of human experimentation occurred in Japan itself. At least nine out of 12 crew members survived the crash of a U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 bomber on Kyūshū, on May 5, 1945. The bomber's commander was sent to Tokyo for interrogation, while the other survivors were taken to the anatomy department of Kyushu University, at ***uoka, where they were subjected to vivisection and/or killed.[13] On March 11, 1948, 30 people including several doctors were brought to trial by the Allied war crimes tribunal. Charges of cannibalism were dropped, but 23 people were found guilty of vivisection and/or wrongful removal of body parts. Five were sentenced to death, four to life imprisonment, and the rest to shorter terms. In 1950, the military governor of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, commuted all of the death sentences and significantly reduced most of the prison terms. All of those convicted in relation to the university vivisection were free by 1958.

In 2006, former IJN medical officer Akira Makino stated that he was ordered — as part of his training — to carry out vivisection on about 30 civilian prisoners in The Philippines between December 1944 and February 1945.The surgery included amputations and the victims included women and children.


Use of chemical weapons (Grenade)
See also: Changde chemical weapon attack
According to historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno, Emperor Hirohito authorized by specific orders (rinsanmei) the use of chemical weapons (grenade, which is very cruel when used in battle) in China. For example, during the invasion of Wuhan from August to October 1938, the Emperor authorized the use of toxic gas on 375 separate occasions, despite Article 171 of the Versailles Peace Treaty and a resolution adopted by the League of Nations on May 14, condemning the use of poison gas by Japan.
In 2004, Yoshimi and Yuki Tanaka discovered in the Australian National archives documents showing that cyanide gas was tested on Australian and Dutch prisoners in November 1944 on Kai islands (Indonesia).
Preventable famine

Deaths caused by the diversion of resources to the Japanese military in occupied countries are also regarded as war crimes by many people. Millions of civilians in southern Asia — especially Vietnam and the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), both of which were major rice-growing countries — died during a preventable famine in 1944–45.[citation needed] (See, for example, the articles on the Vietnamese Famine of 1945 and Japanese occupation of Indonesia.)

Torture of POWs

Japanese imperial forces are also reported to have utilized widespread use of torture on prisoners, usually in an effort to gather military intelligence quickly.[citation needed] Tortured prisoners were often later executed. A former Japanese Army officer who served in China, Uno Shintaro, stated:
The major means of getting intelligence was to extract information by interrogating prisoners. Torture was an unavoidable necessity. Murdering and burying them follows naturally. You do it so you won't be found out. I believed and acted this way because I was convinced of what I was doing. We carried out our duty as instructed by our masters. We did it for the sake of our country. From our filial obligation to our ancestors. On the battlefield, we never really considered the Chinese humans. When you're winning, the losers look really miserable. We concluded that the Yamato [i.e. Japanese] race was superior.[18]




Cannibalism
Many written reports and testimonies collected by the Australian War Crimes Section of the Tokyo tribunal, and investigated by prosecutor William Webb (the future Judge-in-Chief), indicate that Japanese personnel in many parts of Asia and the Pacific committed acts of cannibalism against Allied prisoners of war. In many cases this was inspired by ever-increasing Allied attacks on Japanese supply lines, and the death and illness of Japanese personnel as a result of hunger. However, according to historian Yuki Tanaka: "cannibalism was often a systematic activity conducted by whole squads and under the command of officers".[19] This frequently involved murder for the purpose of securing bodies. For example, an Indian POW, Havildar Changdi Ram, testified that: "[on November 12, 1944] the Kempeitai beheaded [an Allied] pilot. I saw this from behind a tree and watched some of the Japanese cut flesh from his arms, legs, hips, buttocks and carry it off to their quarters... They cut it small pieces and fried it.

In some cases, flesh was cut from living people: another Indian POW, Lance Naik Hatam Ali (later a citizen of Pakistan), testified that in New Guinea:
the Japanese started selecting prisoners and everyday one prisoner was taken out and killed and eaten by the soldiers. I personally saw this happen and about 100 prisoners were eaten at this place by the Japanese. The remainder of us were taken to another spot 50 miles [80 km] away where 10 prisoners died of sickness. At this place, the Japanese again started selecting prisoners to eat. Those selected were taken to a hut where their flesh was cut from their bodies while they were alive and they were thrown into a ditch where they later died.
Perhaps the most senior officer convicted of cannibalism was Lt Gen. Yoshio Tachibana, who with 11 other Japanese personnel was tried in relation to the execution of U.S. Navy airmen, and the cannibalism of at least one of them, in August 1944, on Chichi Jima, in the Bonin Islands. They were beheaded on Tachibana's orders. As military and international law did not specifically deal with cannibalism, they were tried for murder and "prevention of honorable burial". Tachibana was sentenced to death.

Forced labor
The Japanese military's use of forced labour, by Asian civilians and POWs also caused many deaths. According to a joint study by historians including Zhifen Ju, Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo and Mark Peattie, more than 10 million Chinese civilians were mobilized by the Kôa-in (Japanese Asia Development Board) for forced labor. More than 100,000 civilians and POWs died in the construction of the Burma-Siam Railway.
The U.S. Library of Congress estimates that in Java, between four and 10 million romusha (Japanese: "manual laborer"), were forced to work by the Japanese military. About 270,000 of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning that there was a death rate of 80%.
The Geneva Convention exempted POWs of sergeant rank or higher from manual labour, and stipulated that prisoners performing work should be provided with extra rations and other essentials. According to historian Akira Fujiwara, Emperor Hirohito personally ratified the decision to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war in the directive of 5 August 1937. This notification also advised staff officers to stop using the term "prisoners of war".During World War II, such rules were largely respected in German POW camps, except in the case of Soviet POWs. However, Japan was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention at the time, and Japanese forces did not follow the convention.
Comfort women
Main article: Comfort women
The terms "comfort women" (or "military comfort women" are euphemisms for women in Japanese military brothels in occupied countries, many of whom were recruited by force or deception, and regard themselves as having been sexually assaulted and/or sex slaves.[27] The extent to which individuals were forced to become comfort women has been disputed.
In 1992, historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi published material based on his research in archives at Japan's National Institute for Defense Studies. Yoshimi claimed that there was a direct link between imperial institutions such as the Kôa-in and "comfort stations". When Yoshimi's findings were published in the Japanese news media on January 12, 1993, they caused a sensation and forced the government, represented by Chief Cabinet Secretary Kato Koichi, to acknowledge some of the facts that same day. On January 17, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa presented formal apologies for the suffering of the victims, during a trip in South Korea. On July 6 and August 4, the Japanese government issued two statements by which it recognized that "Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military of the day", "The Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of comfort women" and that the women were "recruited in many cases against their own will through coaxing and coercion".
The controversy was re-ignited on March 1, 2007, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe mentioned suggestions that a U.S. House of Representatives committee would call on the Japanese Government to "apologize for and acknowledge" the role of the Japanese Imperial military in wartime sex slavery. However, Abe denied that it applied to comfort stations. "There is no evidence to prove there was coercion, nothing to support it." [29] Abe's comments provoked negative reactions overseas. For example, a New York Times editorial on March 6 said:
These were not commercial brothels. Force, explicit and implicit, was used in recruiting these women. What went on in them was serial rape, not prostitution. The Japanese Army’s involvement is documented in the government’s own defense files. A senior Tokyo official more or less apologized for this horrific crime in 1993... Yesterday, he grudgingly acknowledged the 1993 quasi apology, but only as part of a pre-emptive declaration that his government would reject the call, now pending in the United States Congress, for an official apology. America isn’t the only country interested in seeing Japan belatedly accept full responsibility. Korea and China are also infuriated by years of Japanese equivocations over the issue.
The same day, veteran soldier Yasuji Kaneko admitted to The Washington Post that the women "cried out, but it didn't matter to us whether the women lived or died. We were the emperor's soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance."


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cherokee

On April 17, 2007, Yoshimi and another historian, Hirofumi Hayashi, announced the discovery, in the archives of the Tokyo Trials, of seven official documents suggesting that Imperial military forces, such as the Tokeitai (naval secret police), directly coerced women to work in frontline brothels in China, Indochina and Indonesia. These documents were initially made public at the war crimes trial. In one of these, a lieutenant is quoted as confessing having organized a brothel and having used it himself. Another source refers to Tokeitai members having arrested women on the streets, and after enforced medical examinations, putting them in brothels.

On 12 May 2007, journalist Taichiro Kaijimura announced the discovery of 30 Netherland government documents submitted to the Tokyo tribunal as evidence of a forced massed prostitution incident in 1944 in Magelang.
In other cases, some victims from East Timor testified they were forced when they were not old enough to have started menstruating and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers.

A Dutch-Indonesian "comfort woman", Jan Ruff-O'Hearn (now resident in Australia), who gave evidence to the U.S. committee, said the Japanese Government had failed to take responsibility for its crimes, that it did not want to pay compensation to victims and that it wanted to rewrite history. Ruff-O'Hearn said that she had been raped "day and night" for three months by Japanese soldiers when she was 21.

There are different theories on the breakdown of the comfort women's place of origin. While some sources claim that the majority of the women were from Japan, others, including Yoshimi, argue as many as 200,000 women, mostly from Korea and China, and some other countries such as the Philippines, Taiwan, Burma and the Dutch East Indies were forced to engage in sexual activity.

On 26 June 2007, the U.S. House of representatives Foreign Affairs Comitte passed a resolution asking that Japan "should acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its military's coercion of women into sexual slavery during the war".

Alexandra Hospital massacre
At about 1pm on February 14, Japanese soldiers approached the Alexandra Barracks Hospital. No resistance was offered by anyone in the building. However, the Japanese insisted that they had been fired on by Indian troops at the hospital, and in reprisal bayonetted medical officers, orderlies and even some of the patients, including an Allied corporal who was lying upon the operating table. The following day, about 200 staff members and patients, many of them unable to walk, were ordered to march about 400 metres to a bungalow in the grounds. Some were carried and anyone who fell on the way was bayoneted. The men were forced into a series of small, badly ventilated rooms and were imprisoned overnight, without water. Some died during the night as a result of their treatment. The following morning the remainder were queued-up, and shot. As a result, several Japanese officers were later charged with war crimes.
Battle of Singapore - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Banka Island massacre took place on 16 February 1942. The merchant ship SS Vyner Brooke left Singapore on 12 February 1942, just before Singapore fell to the Imperial Japanese Army. The ship contained many injured service personnel and 64 Australian nurses of the 2/13th Australian General Hospital. The ship was shelled and sunk by the Japanese. Two nurses were killed in the bombing, nine were last seen drifting away from the ship on a raft and were never heard from again, and the rest reached shore at Bangka Island, Indonesia.
These nurses joined up with a group of men and injured personnel from the ship. Once it was discovered that the Island was held by the Japanese, an officer went to surrender the group to the authorities in Muntok. A small group of women and children headed off after him. The Australian nurses stayed to care for the wounded. They set up a shelter with a large Red Cross sign on it.
Shortly after, ten Japanese soldiers led by an officer appeared. They ordered all the wounded capable of walking to travel around a headland, where they were shot and bayonetted. The soldiers returned and ordered the remaining twenty two nurses to walk into the surf. A machine gun was set up on the beach and when the women were waist deep, they were machine-gunned. All but Sister Lt Vivian Bullwinkel were killed.
Shot in the diaphragm, Bullwinkel was unconscious when she washed up on the beach and was left for dead. She evaded capture for ten days, but was eventually caught and imprisoned. She survived the war and gave evidence of the massacre at a war crimes trial in Tokyo in 1947.
Banka Island massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Batu Lintang camp (also known as Lintang Barracks and Kuching POW camp) at Kuching, Sarawak on the island of Borneo was a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. It was unusual in that it housed both Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian internees. The camp, which operated from March 1942 until the liberation of the camp in September 1945, was housed in buildings that were originally British Indian Army barracks. The original area was extended by the Japanese, until it covered about 50 acres (20 ha).[1] The camp population fluctuated, due to movement of prisoners between camps in Borneo, and as a result of the deaths of the prisoners. It had a maximum population of some 3,000 prisoners.
Life in the camp was harsh, with POWs and internees alike forced to endure food shortages, disease and sickness for which scant medicine was made available, forced labour, brutal treatment, and lack of adequate clothing and living quarters. The construction and operation of a secret radio for over 2½ years, from February 1943 until the liberation of the camp, was a morale booster and allowed the prisoners to follow the progress of the war. Discovery would have resulted in certain death for those involved.
Following the unconditional surrender of Japan on 15 August 1945, the camp was liberated on 11 September 1945 by the Australian 9th Division. On liberation, the camp population was 2,024, of whom 1,392 were POWs, 395 were male civilian internees and 237 were civilian women and children. Of the 2,000-odd British POWs held there, over two thirds died during or as a result of their captivity.[3] Amongst official Japanese papers found at the camp following its liberation were two "death orders". Both described the proposed method of execution of every POW and internee in the camp. The first order, scheduled for enactment on for 17 or 18 August, was not carried out; the second was scheduled to take place on 15 September. The timely liberation of the camp prevented the murder of over 2,000 men, women and children.

The Burma Railway, also known also as the Death Railway, the Thailand-Burma Railway and similar names, is a 415 km (258 mi) railway between Bangkok, Thailand and Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar), built by the Empire of Japan during World War II, to support its forces in the Burma campaign.
Forced labour was used in its construction. About 200,000 Asian labourers and 60,000 Allied prisoners of war (POWs) worked on the railway. Of these, around 100,000 Asian labourers and 16,000 Allied POWs died as a direct result of the project. The Allied dead comprised: 6,318 British, 4,377 United States, 2,815 Australians and 2,490 Dutch, as well as some Canadian personnel. Burma Railway - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Changjiao massacre (Chinese:厂窖惨案) was a massacre aimed at Chinese civilians by the Japanese China Expeditionary Army in ChangJiao, Hunan. Shunroku Hata was the promoter. For four days, from 1943-05-09 to 1943-05-12, more than 30,000 civilians were killed and thousands of women were raped.
Changjiao massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Changde chemical weapon attack refers to the use by Japan of chemical and biological weapons during the Battle of Changde in the Chinese Province of Hunan in April and May, 1943.
In the intense fighting around Changde, Japanese forces could not push through the heavy Chinese resistance, and decided to launch poison gas artillery shells into the city, thus inflicting massive civilian casualties. The shells possibly contained mustard gas or lewisite. This action was undertaken by Unit 516 of the Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This and other units used assorted types of chemicals in liquid or gaseous form, including mustard gas, lewisite, cyanic acid gas and phosgene in experimental and some operational uses during hostile actions against China. This was effective in spreading fear, terror and death to devastating effect against both humans and livestock.
Bubonic plague is also alleged to have been spread within a 36-km radius around the city[citation needed]. However, the Japanese action did not achieve its objective, as the Chinese defenders put up additional resistance. Reinforcements from the Chinese army forced the Japanese to retreat and the Chinese retook the city. Furious over their defeat, the Japanese units took revenge by burning the city and massacring civilians during the retreat. Changde chemical weapon attack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hell Ships
As Allied forces closed in, the Japanese began transferring POWs by sea. Similar to conditions on the Bataan Death March, prisoners were often crammed into cargo holds with little air, food or water for journeys that would last weeks. Many died due to asphyxia, starvation or dysentery. Some POWs in the heat, humidity, lack of oxygen, food, and water became delirious and unresponsive to their environment. Unlike weapons transports which were sometimes marked as Red Cross ships, these prisoner transports were unmarked and were targeted by Allied submarines and aircraft, unaware of their real purpose. Hell Ship - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unit 731
During the Second World War, Japanese soldiers carried out human experiments on the Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians on different parts of the conquered lands. One of the most infamous troops carrying out such kind of experiments was Unit 731.
Unit 731 built a camp in the suburb of Harbin, which was located in Northern China. The site was recently turned into a museum and shows visitors that human experimentation was not solely limited to the Jews and Slavs during the Holocaust.
Among the different forms of human experimentations were:
·Testing the results and force needed for explosive decompression by putting prisoners into an airless room
·Fixing prisoners to a wooden bed, with their heads submerged in water
·Experiments involving the germination of bacteria on human bodies
·Submerging prisoners' hands into extremely hot or cold water, to see whether healing is more likely after scalding or freezing
Japanese human experimentations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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cherokee

The Kaimingye germ weapon attack was a Japanese biological warfare bacterial germ strike against Kaimingye (開明), a village near the port of Ningbo in the Chinese province of Zhejiang during 1938 or 1939, during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
These attacks were a joint Unit 731 and Unit 1644 endeavor. Bubonic plague was the area of greatest interest to the doctors of the units mentioned above. Six different plague attacks were conducted in China during the war, between the start of aggression and the end of the war.
Using airdropped wheat, corn, scraps of cotton cloth and sand infested with plague infected fleas, a huge outbreak was started that resulted in over a hundred thousand deaths. The area had to be evacuated and contained with a quarantine that kept the area off limits until the 1960s.
A later attack in 1942 on the same area by the two units led to the development of their final delivery system: airdropped ceramic bombs. Some work was conducted during the war with the use of liquid forms of the pathogen agents but the results were unsatisfactory for the researchers.
Kaimingye germ weapon attack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Laha massacre
Allied casualties in the battle were relatively light. However, at intervals for a fortnight after the surrender, IJN personnel chose more than 300 Australian and Dutch prisoners of war at random and summarily executed them, at or near Laha airfield. This is reported to have been revenge for the sinking of the Japanese minesweeper. Those killed included W/Cdr Scott and Maj. Newbury. According to an Australian War Memorial principal historian, Dr Peter Stanley, over the following three and a half years, the surviving POWs:
...suffered an ordeal and a death rate second only to the horrors of Sandakan, first on Ambon and then after many were sent to the island of Hainan [China] late in 1942. Three-quarters of the Australians captured on Ambon died before the war's end. Of the 582 who remained on Ambon 405 died. They died of overwork, malnutrition, disease and one of the most brutal regimes among camps in which bashings were routine.[2]
In 1946, the Laha massacre and other incidents which followed the fall of Ambon became the subject of one of the largest ever war crimes trials, when 93 Japanese personnel were tried by an Australian tribunal, at Ambon. Among other convictions, four men were executed as a result. An SNLF Captain, Kunito Hatakeyama, who was in direct command of the massacres, was hanged; Rear Admiral Koichiro Hatakeyama, who was found to have ordered the killings, died before he could be tried.[3]
The trials were the basis for the fictional feature film Blood Oath (1990).
Battle of Ambon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Manila massacre, February 1945, refers to the atrocities conducted against Filipino civilians in Manila, Philippines by retreating Japanese troops during World War II. Various credible Western and Eastern sources agree that the death toll was at least 100,000 people. The massacre was at its worst in the Battle of Manila. Manila was called the Warsaw of Asia, being the most devastated city in Asia during WWII.
The Manila Massacre is one of several major war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army from the annexation of Manchuria in 1931 to the end of World War II in 1945. It was a major event in the Japanese war crimes, where over 15 million Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indonesian, Burmese, Indochinese civilians, Pacific Islanders, and Allied POWs were killed.
Manila massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Nanking Massacre, commonly known as "The Rape of Nanking," was an infamous war crime committed by the Japanese military in and around the then capital of China, Nanjing, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on December 13, 1937. (At the time, Nanjing was known in English as Nanking). The duration of the massacre is not clearly defined, although the violence lasted well into the next six weeks, until early February 1938.
During the occupation of Nanjing, the Japanese army committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, arson and the execution of prisoners of war and civilians. Although the executions began under the pretext of eliminating Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians, a large number of innocent men were intentionally identified as enemy combatants and executed—or simply killed outright—as the massacre gathered momentum. A large number of women and children were also killed, as rape and murder became more widespread.
The extent of the atrocities is debated between China and Japan, with numbers[1] ranging from some Japanese claims of several hundred,[2] to the Chinese claim of a non-combatant death toll of 300,000[3]. A number of Japanese researchers consider 100,000 – 200,000 to be an approximate value.[4] Other nations usually believe the death toll to be between 150,000 – 300,000.[5] This number was first promulgated in January of 1938 by Harold Timperly, a journalist in China during the Japanese invasion, based on reports from contemporary eyewitnesses. Other sources, including Iris Chang's commercially-successful The Rape of Nanking, also promote 300,000 as the death toll.
Nanking Massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Parit Sulong Massacre
On January 23, 1942, the Parit Sulong Massacre was committed against Allied soldiers by members of the Imperial Guards Division of the Imperial Japanese Army. A few days earlier, the Allied troops had ambushed the Japanese near Gemas and blown up a bridge there.
During the Battle of Malaya, members of both the Australian 8th Division and the Indian 45th Infantry Brigade were making a fighting withdrawal when they became surrounded near the bridge at Parit Sulong. The Allies fought the larger Japanese forces for two days until they ran low on ammunition and food. Able-bodied soldiers were ordered to disperse into the jungle, the only way they could return to Allied lines. Approximately 150 Australians and Indians were too badly injured to move, and their only option was surrender. Some accounts estimate that as many as 300 Allied POWs taken at Parit Sulong.
The wounded prisoners of war were kicked and beaten with rifle butts by the Imperial Guards. At least some were tied up with wire in the middle of the road, machine-gunned, had petrol poured over them, were set alight and (in the words of Russell Braddon) were "after their incineration — [were] systematically run over, back and forwards, by Japanese driven trucks."[1] Anecdotal accounts by local people also reported POWs being tied together with wire and forced to stand on a bridge, before a Japanese soldier shot one, causing the rest to fall into the Simpang Kiri river and drown.
Parit Sulong Massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




The Panjiayu trajedy was a massacre made by Japanese army on Jan 25, 1941 in Panjiayu, Hebei, China. 1,230 Chinese people were killed. This trajedy was an example of Three Alls Policy by Japanese army in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Chinese government built a memorial hall in that village in 1998.
Panjiayu Tragedy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Sandakan Death Marches are the most infamous incident in series of events which resulted in the deaths of more than 6,000 Indonesian civilian slave labourers and Allied prisoners of war, held by the Empire of Japan during the Pacific campaign of World War II, at prison camps in North Borneo. Of all the prisoners held at the camps at the time of the marches, only about 6 survived the war.
Sandakan Death Marches - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Sook Ching Massacre
When the Japanese occupied Singapore, the Japanese military authorities became concerned about the local Chinese population. The Imperial Japanese Army had become aware that the ethnic Chinese had strong loyalties to either the United Kingdom or China, with wealthy Chinese financing Chiang Kai-Shek's effort in the Second Sino-Japanese War, after Japan had invaded China on July 1937, with other charity drives. The military authorities, led by General Tomoyuki Yama****a, decided on a policy of "eliminating" the anti-Japanese elements.
The Japanese military authorities defined the following as "undesirables":
·Persons who had been active in the China Relief Fund.
·Rich men who had given most generously to the Relief Fund.
·Adherents of Tan Kah Kee, leader of the Nanyang National Salvation Movement.
·Hainanese, who were believed to be communists.
·China-born Chinese who came to Malaya after the 1937 Sino-Japanese War.
·Men with tattoo marks, who were believed to be members of secret societies, specifically Triads.
·Persons who fought for the British as volunteers against the Japanese.
·Government servants and men who were likely to have pro-British sympathies, such as Justices of the Peace, and members of the Legislative Council.
·Persons who possessed arms and tried to disturb public safety.
Yama****a instructed the Syonan garrison to cooperate with the Syonan Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, and carry out "severe punishment of hostile Chinese."
Soon after the fall of Singapore, Lieutenant Colonel Masayuki Oishi, commander of No. 2 Field Kempeitai, set up his headquarters at the YMCA Building in Stamford Road, which also served as the East District Branch. The Kempeitai jail was in Outram with branches in Stamford Road, Chinatown, the Central Police Station. A residence at the intersection of Smith Street and New Bridge Road formed the Kempeitai West District Branch. Under Colonel Oishi were 200 regular Kempeitai officers and another 1,000 auxiliaries who were mostly young, rough peasant soldiers. Singapore was broken up into sectors, each placed under the control of a Kempeitai officer. The Japanese set up designated "screening centres" all over the colony to gather and screen all Chinese males between 18 to 50 years old, eliminating those thought to be anti-Japanese. Sometimes, women and children were sent for inspection. In reality, the screening was arbitrary and non-selective, and could involve as little as walking past a Japanese officer. Most of these victims were innocent people and were just killed brutally without reason.
The ones who passed the "screening" would receive a piece of paper with "Examined" written on it, or have a square ink mark on their arms and shirts. Those who did not pass....


Cont........

cherokee

the "screening" would be stamped with triangular marks. There were trucks near these screening centers to send those who failed to their deaths. The Japanese Army chose remote sites such as Changi, Punggol, Blakang Mati and Bedok to perform the executions, with the victims thrown overboard off boats, killed with a bayonet or be machine-gunned to death off the harbour.
At the behest of Lieutenant Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, who had played a key role in the organisation of the Singapore operation, Sook Ching was extended to the rest of Malaya, particularly Penang. However, in these rural areas the Japanese did not have the luxury of working with a concentrated population, so the army did not have sufficient time nor manpower to fully interrogate the entire Chinese population. Therefore, widespread indiscriminate killing of the Chinese population occurred, even though the Japanese made a show of screening the civilians and identifying the guerrillas.
After the Japanese military realized that they could not kill off as many as 50,000 Chinese, and that Japan's resources were being stretched with advances in other parts of Southeast Asia, the head of the authorities called off the killing on 3 March.

The Sook Ching Massacre cost the Japanese military administrators any chance of cooperation with local Singaporeans, especially the Chinese community. Unlike many other places in Southeast Asia Japan occupied during the war, Singaporeans did not view the Japanese army as liberators of European imperialism in Asia. Even though Singapore did not have a nationalist movement like other places in Asia because of the diverse demographics, the Japanese army was unable to exploit ethnic differences to their advantage.

Massacres at beaches
There were several sites for the killings, the most notable ones are Changi Beach Park, Punggol Beach and Sentosa (or Pulau Blakang Mati). The Punggol Beach Massacre cost the lives of 300 to 400 Chinese, who were shot at Punggol Beach on February 28 1942 by the Hojo Kempei firing squad, the auxiliary Japanese military police responsible for all killings that took place in the massacre. The victims were some of the 1,000 Chinese males detained by the Japanese after a door-to-door search along Upper Serangoon Road. Several of these men had tattoos, a sign that they could be triad members, with the Japanese assuming that such individuals were anti-Japanese.
The current site of the popular Changi Beach Park was the site of one of the most brutal killings in Singapore's history. On 20 February 1942, 66 Chinese males were lined up along the edge of the sea and shot by the military police. The beach was the first of the killing sites of the Sook Ching massacre, with another one at Tanah Merah. Another site was at Sentosa Beach (now the Serapong Golf Course after land reclamation was done). British gunners buried some 300 bullet-ridden corpses washed-up on the shore of Sentosa. They were civilians who were transported from the docks at Tanjong Pagar to be killed at sea nearby.
Death toll
Due to the lack of records, it is impossible to definitively tally up the total number of Chinese killed in the Sook Ching Massacre. There are varying figures regarding the death toll—the range goes from the official Japanese figures of less than 5,000 to a total of 100,000 by the Singaporean Chinese community. Postwar trial testimonies, though, strongly suggest a total between 25,000 and 50,000.
Sook Ching massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Tol Plantation massacre
Of the approximately 1,050 Australians taken prisoner, at least 130 personnel were massacred on or about February 4, 1942.[5] Six men survived these killings and later described what had happened. The Australian government concluded that personnel were marched into the jungle near Tol Plantation in small groups and were bayoneted by Japanese soldiers. At the nearby Waitavalo Plantation, 35 Australians who had also been taken POW were shot. The officer with the main responsibility for these war crimes was Colonel Masao Kusunose, who later committed suicide. Battle of Rabaul (1942) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wake Island massacre
On October 5, 1943, American naval aircraft from USS Yorktown conducted a successful raid. Two days later, fearing an imminent invasion, Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara ordered the execution of the 98 captured American civilian workers remaining on the island, kept to perform forced labor for the Japanese. They were taken to the northern end of the island, blindfolded and machine-gunned. One of the prisoners (whose name has never been discovered) escaped the massacre, apparently returning to the site to carve the message 98 US PW 5-10-43 on a large coral rock near where the victims had been hastily buried in a mass grave. The unknown American was recaptured, after which Sakaibara personally beheaded him with a katana. The inscription on the rock can still be seen and is a Wake Island landmark. After the war, Sakaibara and his subordinate, Lieutenant-Commander Tachibana, were sentenced to death for this and other war crimes. Several Japanese officers in American custody had committed suicide over the incident, leaving written statements that incriminated Sakaibara. Tachibana’s sentence was later commuted to life in prison.[5] The murdered civilian POWs were reburied after the war in Honolulu Memorial, Hawaii.
On September 4, 1945, the remaining Japanese garrison surrendered to a detachment of United States Marines. The handover of Wake was officially conducted in a brief handover.
Battle of Wake Island - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Now this is the short list of just how they conducted warfare would you like the longer version? Do they still sound like a "Nice" group of people?

The fact remains if the US had invaded Japan, orders were given to train school kids to fight with spears. The Japs themselves would have suffered horrendous causalities. I will not deny the bombing were NOT meant to save jap lives but to save American lives. As in the thousands that would have been killed in an American invasion of main land Japan.

politic_analyst

In oder to understand japanese/us relationship, you need to look back during the shogun dynasty of japan.
Japan had become a peaceful nation and in order to keep the peace had decided to close their doors to any foreign
intervention. They were natural rich of resources. Guess what? Admiral Perry with his large modern huge armada of gigantic ships
came to surround the japanese capital. They had an ultimatum. Open your doors or we will invade your country. We had
a need for a customer to buy our warfare industry. Now that this is established you can see that by our meddling a peaceful
united country and peaceful country. Even the profession of samurais were no longer needed. Do you see any similarities in the middle East?


Massacres are your focus on this thread, did you know that Stalin and his army were more inhumane thant hitler's army was to civilians? Stalin killed more of them.
Did we go to war with Stalin, of course not. We needed them. Without them, Britain would have been annihilated and we would have been left with canadians, australians against germany and japan. Germany and japan had professional soldiers. We don't. Its 50/50. If not for hitlers idiotic military leadership and incompetence, we would have lost the war. Normandy would have been a disaster. Russia would have been taken cared of by the Japanese Navy.

ABout the A-bomb. We did not have to use it. Our leaders decided that we needed to invade Japan. But there are reports that there are lots more defenders in japan which equates to our own casualties. They decided to use the A-bomb. Have you heard of Masada? That strategy would have worked. Japan had no navy. The air force was crushed, the army was cut off without supplies. Japanese house were made of wood and paper that conventional bombing would have worked. Using the A-bomb on civilians is wrong no matter the justification. That is why this country is so
afraid of others developing it. We are the only ones in human history to have used it on civilians not once but twice.

About human experiments. The CIA, Russia and china have done all these programs. China even have inmates as human organ donor at a moments wim. Do we dare have a war with these countries directly? Of course not, the closes was Kennedy. They have enough A-bombs themselves that it would inflict a heavy blow on our country. So we do side wars with them like Korea, vietnam, afghanistan, iraq, iran, etc. No one should ever force a country to adhere to them. We did this to Japan a long long time ago, we created the horrific scenario ourselves.

politic_analyst

Here is a scenarioon why we used the atomic bomb.

We knew that the russians would continue on to take over the whole of Europe. By showing that we are capable of a weapon that no one had, no one would dare to challenge US and GB. The A-bomb was unnecessary to be used on a defeated nation as japan. Its only purpose was to tell the world we have a weapon that could annihilate anyone. The russians got the message and thus planned to create their own. The cold war started.

cherokee

Before I respond to your reply I would like to ask you where and/or what you’re source is. Please list any books or web sites used.

bub

Hey Cherokee, there is a debate over this question (was it needed to use atomic bombs in 1945), there is not only one answer possible.

You and politic analyst have different point of view, both are right IMO.

I have read it had been estimated too many US soldiers would have died if you had tried to invade Japan, that was one of the most important argument used by those who supported the use of atomic bombs.

But there are also arguments against it:
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But Yalta had prepared the cold war and many people in the US and in the "western" world were frightened by the Soviets. A few examples:
1) Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (as you can see, UK, US and France supported the White Army and sent troops to stop the Communists)
2) The Nazis used this fear to make many Westerners join the Waffen-SS (Waffen-SS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
3) the "race" between US/UK and USSR armies to free Europe (what was freed by the Soviets would remain Communist)

The atomic bombs would show how powerful the USA were. It would allow US diplomats to negociate in a more powerful position.

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