- American and Australian soldiers massacred Japanese prisoners
of war, according to one of the most detailed studies of memoirs of the
Second World War in the Pacific, published this week.
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- It also discloses that the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese
Army were far from the cruel, mindless troops of popular legend, and that
Gen Douglas MacArthur wanted to launch nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union
from an underground airstrip in Britain.
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- In The Faraway War, published to coincide with the 60th
anniversary of the Hiroshima atom bomb and of VJ Day, Prof Richard Aldrich
of Nottingham University has gathered the diaries of men and women from
across the Pacific war front, from the common soldier to the highest general.
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- He said: "We have this stereotypical idea that the
Japanese were all cruel and robotic while the Allied forces were tough
but fair in their treatment of the enemy.
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- "But I was very surprised by much of what I found
and had to rethink all those stereotypes."
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- Prof Aldrich found several examples confirming what became
an American policy in some parts of the Pacific theatre not to take prisoners
of war.
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- He quotes the diaries of Charles Lindbergh, the American
aviation pioneer, who toured the Far East visiting United States units.
On one occasion he commented to a group of senior officers that very few
Japanese seemed to be taken prisoner.
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- "Oh, we could take more if we wanted to," one
of the officers replied. "But our boys don't like to take prisoners.
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- "It doesn't encourage the rest to surrender when
they hear of their buddies being marched out on the flying field and machine-guns
turned loose on them."
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- Although Lindbergh was sympathetic to the Nazis and was
suspected of deliberately portraying his fellow countrymen in a very negative
light, his allegations are supported by other American diarists, who report
that the US marines, in particular, did not take many prisoners. Prof Aldrich
also discovered new diaries showing that American generals worried about
the abuse of human remains by their troops.
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- They were particularly concerned that the skulls of dead
Japanese soldiers were often displayed as gruesome mascots by some units,
while US marines made a speciality of collecting ears.
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- Australian troops are also shown not to like taking prisoners.
Prof Aldrich quotes the 1943 diary of Eddie Stanton, an Australian posted
to Goodenough Island off Papua New Guinea. "Japanese are still being
shot all over the place," he wrote. "The necessity for capturing
them has ceased to worry anyone. Nippo soldiers are just so much machine-gun
practice. Too many of our soldiers are tied up guarding them."
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- The book also features the memoir of a New Zealand soldier
working with a Fijian regiment who came across the bodies of two native
women, pegged out on an earthen mound.
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- They had been "raped to death" by Japanese
soldiers. Then they found a dead American soldier who had stakes driven
through each shoulder and his hands cut off. "As we moved away again,
one of my corporals said to me: "No more prisoners, turaga[sir]."
I agreed with him.''
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- Prof Aldrich has found Japanese diaries that belie the
common perceptions that soldiers or even low-ranking officers were automata
devoted fanatically to their emperor and the codes of bushido, hara-kiri
and kamikaze.
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- "One young officer praises America and its ideas
of democracy and modernity, while on another occasion a Japanese soldier
voices out loud his envy of some Germans who had set up a sort of peacenik
camp on New Guinea to get away from the war," Prof Aldrich said. One
of the most bizarre episodes recorded was when Field Marshal Lord Alanbrook,
the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, visited Gen MacArthur, the American
who commanded allied occupation troops in Japan, in November 1945.
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- He recorded, with some approbation and agreement, MacArthur's
view that "we should assemble at least 1,000 atomic bombs in England
and in the States. We must then prepare a safe aerodrome by tunnelling
into the side of a mountain so that we shall be able to go on operating
from England even when attacked".
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- He also recorded Macarthur's view of the Soviet Union.
"He felt certain they would also attempt to convert Japan into a subject
county, so as to be able to use the Japanese manpower at a later date for
operations in the Pacific.
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- "He considered them a greater menace than the Nazis
had ever been, complete barbarians, as exemplified by one commander [in
Manchuria] who had issued orders that every woman between the age of 16
and 60 was to be raped twice by Russian soldiery as an example of the superiority
of the Russian race!
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- "Macarthur considers that they should be met by
force if necessary and not by conciliatory methods which were only interpreted
as weakness by the Russians."
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- - The Faraway War, Personal Diaries of the Second World
War in Asia and the Pacific, Doubleday, £20.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08
/06/wjap06.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/08/06/ixworld.html
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