The above photo is of Japanese officers joyfully (with a riveted crowd) executing prisoners. British historian Mark Felton’s latest book Slaughter At Sea: The Story Of Japan’s Naval War Crimes documents the Imperial Japanese Navy and its deliberate and sadistic murders of more than 20,000 Allied seamen and countless civilians in cold-blooded defiance of the Geneva Convention during WWII. Crimes that have by and large gone unpunished, and ignored. All too often slanted textbooks love to hammer home the point that we indeed dropped terrible bombs on Japan and, of course, not once but twice atomic bombs. However, it indeed saved lives, the ideology the United States was confronting had it invaded the island, is best described as follows:
Felton tells the horrifying story of James Blears, a 21-year-old radio operator and one of several Britons on the Dutch-registered merchant ship Tjisalak, which was torpedoed by the submarine I-8 on March 26, 1944, while sailing from Melbourne to Ceylon with 103 passengers and crew.
Fished from the sea or ordered out of lifeboats, Blears and his fellow survivors were assembled on the sub’s foredeck.
From the conning tower, Commander Shinji Uchino issued the ominous order: “Do not look back because that will be too bad for you,” Blears recalled.
One by one, the prisoners were shot, decapitated with swords or simply bludgeoned with a sledge-hammer and thrown on to the churning propellers.
According to Blears: “One guy, they cut off his head halfway and let him flop around on the deck. The others I saw, they just lopped them off with one slice and threw them overboard. The Japanese were laughing and one even filmed the whole thing with a cine camera.”
Blears waited for his turn, then pulled his hands out of his bindings and dived overboard amid machine-gun fire.
He swam for hours until he found a lifeboat, in which he was joined by two other officers and later an Indian crewman who had escaped alone after 22 of his fellow countrymen had been tied to a rope behind the I-8 and dragged to their deaths as it dived underwater.
There is indeed an air of unreality surrounding much of the contemporary discussion about US strategy against Japan in WWII. The horrors of the Nazis tend to make almost anyone else (from the Japanese to our occasional ally “Uncle Joe” Stalin) look good in comparison. But it’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that downplaying Japanese ferocity is politically convenient in some circles. Thanks for a valuable reminder.