WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) by Anderson Janice & Williams Anne & Head Vivian

Author:Anderson, Janice & Williams, Anne & Head, Vivian [Anderson, Janice]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Canary Press
Published: 2011-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

Japanese War Crimes And Atrocities

1937–45

Japanese military aggression in East Asia and the Pacific region between the years 1937 and 1945 was so bestial and savage that it is hard for most Westerners to comprehend. Among the list of atrocities carried out include slave labour, massacres, executions, medical experiments, germ and gas warfare, beheading, rape, torture, boiling victims alive, impaling on bayonets, burning alive, starvation, neglect – and so the list goes on. As many as 200,000 women were sold as sex slaves, and the years of nightmare did not end until late 1945, when the Allied forces entered the territories held by the Japanese.

Evidence of their brutality, racism and fanaticism can be seen in the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands Chinese civilians and prisoners of war after the collapse of the Chinese capital Nanking (now called Nanjing) in 1937. It was also witnessed in the brutal death marches in which thousands of allied prisoners were murdered.

Women and children were brutally treated as were other non-combatants during the Pacific War of 1941–45. For example, Australian army nurses who served overseas during World War II had to put up with not only uncomfortable conditions in makeshift field hospitals, but also the risks and horrors of war. Out of 65 nurses who were evacuated from Singapore on board the small ship Vyner Brooke in 1942, only 24 survived to return to Australia. The bombing and sinking of the ship by Japanese planes led to the death of 12 nurses. Of the survivors, 21 were slaughtered by Japanese soldiers when they reached Bangka Island in lifeboats, and eight died as prisoners in the Japanese camps of hell. Clearly marked hospital ships and field stations were indiscriminately bombed by the Japanese, killing both patients and medical staff alike. On the Alaskan island of Attu, Japanese troops attacked a US base camp and slaughtered everyone in the field hospital.

On 14 May 1943, an Australian hospital ship, Centaur, was struck by a Japanese torpedo off the east coast of Australia. The ship was clearly marked with large red crosses prominently displayed on each side of its white funnel. As a hospital ship, it should have been protected under the Geneva convention, and the attack was classed as Japanese barbarity. The ship exploded and sank within three minutes, leaving those on board no time to send a distress signal. A total of 268 crew, doctors, nurses and other medical personnel died, leaving just 64 survivors. Another deliberate attack on a hospital ship took place while it was anchored in Darwin harbour. Again, the Manunda was clearly marked and the majority of the nurses, medical staff and crew were killed in this barbarous attack.

Japanese submarine crews regularly murdered any survivors of merchant ships that had been sunk by them. Lifeboats were either rammed or machine-gunned and survivors in the water were shot. Survivors from the US merchant ship SS Jean Nicolet were taken on board a Japanese submarine and brutally stabbed to death before being thrown into the shark-infested sea.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.