Paul Fussell relates the killing and maltreatment of German prisoners in the ETO in his memoirs, which by comparison wasn’t as common as it Eugene Sledge’s memoirs of the PTO. But after the Malmedy massacre, it was much more common; leading me to believe that it wasn’t simple racism but the massacres of Wake and Bataan that set the standard.
As for “souvenir” hunting, perhaps that’s just because Germany had better dentistry than Japan, and less gold teeth.
The WWII army vets in the Wisconsin town where I grew up had all been sent to New Guinea with the 32nd Division, the descendant of the Iron Brigade of the Civil War. My dad, a Korean War vet, drank with them at the VFW. They all came back home with bags of gold teeth. Thirty years after the war, they still needled the one guy whose mom had discovered his bag and took it away from him of it out of horror.
In every war that descends into brutality, dehumanization of the enemy leads to horrible excesses. There is no doubt that the racism endemic to the 1940s was partly a cause of the casual disrespect done to Japanese remains - but it was by no means the sole cause. Rather, mutual hatred built up in battle (much of it inspired in turn by Japanese excesses) exacebated the existing racism to the point where the average marine cared little about outraging the humanity of his Japanese opponents.
It doesn’t have to be that way - it is interesting to note that in the 1905 war between Japan and Russia, the Japanese were noted by observers to be particularly humane towards their POWs.
A good starting point to get a feel of how brutal the Pacific Campaign was I would suggest starting with * The Brave Japanese* by Kenneth Harrison, however any book covering the Pacific War that has first hand accounts from combat Marines will provide you with not only the confirmation of my statement, but the mindset that caused this.
While I’ll agree that in general, the killing of injured enemy soldiers is unacceptable, I’ll have to make an exception for the war in the Pacific. You are basing your moral judgment by thinking that the wounded enemy soldier is “following” the rules. You would expect that an enemy soldier who is surrendering or who is wounded and in need of medical attention to no longer fight and intend no harm. Unfortunately in many instances this was not the case when it came to the Japanese soldiers. As I stated before, there were many, many acts carried out by the Japanese that convinced the Marines that it was not worth the risk to take a prisoner or to provide aid to the wounded. They watched as aid men (medics) would attempt to provide did to a wounded enemy, only to be blown up.
I remember one quote from a Marine that stated that if a Japanese soldier was attempting to surrender that every attempt was made to convince that soldier to strip naked at a distance so the Marines could visually determine that he was not booby trapped. He stated that too many Marines had died attempting to take a prisoner only to be killed as the prisoner detonated a grenade when they attempted to take him into custody.
To try to judge the Marines 70 years later is really not fair. I would think that any of us placed in that situation would place self preservation above all else. If we had witnessed fellow soldiers die time after time by an enemy hell bent on suicide I would bet that we would think twice before attempting to take a prisoner or help a wounded soldier.
I apologize for not giving you specific quotes. I am very well read on the subject, but have not bookmarked specific quotes. Searching for them would require more time than I have at the moment. However, verifying my claims isn’t very difficult if you are interested in doing so.
I’ve seen film of Japanese surrendering in their under clothing, sort of a loincloth, diaper thing.
The were exiting a tunnel or cave, and were I a Marine on Iwo, I’d sure as hell poke a flame thrower in there and toss some grenades rather than go in looking for them.
There’s a book I actually got for my mother, awhile back—I only skimmed through it, myself—The Anguish of Surrender, about Japanese POWs in the US, including the author’s interviews of surviving former prisoners.
I have no idea how they were treated. Since I grew up close to one, I know my grandparents and parents said they were generally treated well, except for the real “Nazis.” They were guarded closely and confined to the prison camp.
Again, based on hearsay from my relatives, the difference between real “Nazis” and the OK Germans was rank. Non-commissioned and enlisted were allowed to work on farms and sometimes go to town under supervision. Officers were not. I have heard, but have no direct evidence, that families who used German soldiers for farm help befriended them and the friendships lasted after the war.
I also heard of escape attempts, which were pretty useless, since the only success would be traveling about 200 miles down a river to Galveston Bay and hope a U-boat was close.
I know nothing about Japanese camps. As far as I know, there were none in Texas.
That reminded me of Ooka Shohei’s autobiography of his time as a POW in Taken Captive: A Japanese POW’s Story. Ooka was an author and professor of literature who had relied upon his personal experiences in the army and as a prisoner in his novel Fires on the Plain. Starving and half delirious with malaria he was only taken prisoner in the Philippines because the hand grenade he had tried to kill himself with failed to explode.
Life in PoW camps in the US was comparatively comfortable; one of the questions German prisoners asked in Europe was whether they would be sent to Britain or the US; the US being seen as a land of plenty compared to austere Britain. There are even accounts of prisoners putting on weight in US custody, unthinkable in Soviet custody.
I used to live next door to a woman who got married to an Italian who she met when he was PoW over here, so fraternisation wasn’t unknown even here. However it wasn’t all fun and games, during the the Battle of Britain Polish pilots in particular used to fly over bailed-out Luftwaffe pilots so their parachutes would ‘Roman candle’ and plummet to their doom to prevent them being taken prisoner.
Whale.to? You can’t be serious Kobal2:(. James Bacque and his “work” in Other Losses was already brought up, it’s been thoroughly discredited. That it winds up on whale.to next to vaccination conspiracies, 9/11 Truth, chemtrails, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alien mind control and other nuttiness kind of speaks for itself.
It just occurred to me that the day this thread was started, discussing the inscrutable Asiatic inability to comprehend surrender was also the 151st anniversary of the day 65 Frenchmen preferred to fight to the death against 3,000 Mexicans.
Where, exactly, do you see this discussion on the inscrutable Asiatic inability to comprehend surrender (nice alliteration) as opposed to the vicious treatment of prisoners, both Asian and European, taken by the Imperial Japanese Army and its insistence, largely carried out, that its soldiers fight to the death and commit suicide before surrendering from ~1933-1945?
As I said earlier, while fighting to the last man makes for great heroic stories, it almost never actually happens. Those 65 Frenchmen didn’t fight to the death, 19 were taken prisoner. That’s nearly 30%, which is about 30 times the percentage of soldiers of the IJA taken prisoner in every single battle they fought. Oh, and small point of order, but being as they were 65 men serving in the French Foreign Legion, they weren’t Frenchmen.
My father grew up in Tennessee during the war. He said that the German POWs would get Red Cross packages with real chocolate bars in them (something that the kids couldn’t get, or afford, at the local store due to war-time rationing), so he and his friends would hang out along the railroad track and chuck rocks at passing locomotives. The engineers, in turn, would chuck lumps of coal back at them (good naturedly I’m sure), which the kids would then collect and turn in at the local store for cigarettes (its was the 1940s, give 'em a break). Then the kids would go down to the camp and trade smokes through the wire for chocolate with the Germans.
I spent a few summers working at the ultra-lux Hotel Hershey in Hershey, Pa., and was surprised to learn of its role serving as “accommodations” for the Vichy ambassador, his family and staff after Vichy France was occupied by the Germany military.
One thing that I’d like to mention is the US also worked on de-Nazifying the German POWs. Remember the US knew we were going to win this war and we didnt want the Nazis to start back up again later. So when the POWs came in they were careful to separate the hardcore Nazis (like SS) from the rest. These regular troops were shown propaganda movies proving Nazi rhetoric was wrong.
I guess it worked pretty well since some German POWs volunteered to parachute back into Germany to establish a resistance or volunteered to serve in the allied forces.
And there were times it didnt and those hard core Nazis held tight sway in the camps over their fellow soldiers and were hard on those that started to show they wanted to change. I read once where some US guards shot some for doing Hitler salutes.
