Unspeakable Horror by Joseph B. Healy

Author:Joseph B. Healy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

THE PIG BASKET ATROCITY

By Stephen H. Foreman

The brutality of war is not driven by human instinct, it is conjured by the ugly will of man to send terrifying messages and examples of horror that will force the enemy du jour to submit. In a way, the intent is altruistic: Making the enemy quit will curtail the overall deaths; the sooner the battles come to an end, the sooner human existence can continue—with the victors now free to decide what that existence will be. War engenders unspeakable horror, a fall from grace so irretrievable as to make God and His angels hide their faces in despair and mourn their creation. In World War II, at times, sharks became the method by which the horrific was so heartlessly achieved. History has written these events in blood. For writers, mere mortals, words are insufficient, although the need is to try with what few means of expression we have. The Japanese conjured such depraved methods—including the unholy incident of the Pig Basket Atrocity.

To kill in war means engaging the underbelly of the most feral aspect of the self, to slaughter without feeling, to rip apart the enemy with no mercy, to become inhuman—to attack, in other words, like a shark.

The terror wreaked by Japanese soldiers on both military and Chinese civilians when they invaded Nanjing (also called Nanking) in the Republic of China was so horrifying as to be nearly unfathomable. History knows it as “The Rape of Nanjing.” From December, 1937, to January, 1938, this one city in China had a death toll estimated to be more than the dead of the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—men, women, children, the elderly; a reliable estimate totals somewhere in the range of between 200,000 to 300,000 murdered. The operative strike was in the form of instant, unprovoked death, multiple rapes perpetrated on women of every age (as young as twelve, as old as seventy), and ghastly mutilation. People were herded into houses that were then set on fire. If they tried to escape the flames, they were gunned down as they ran out the door. Civilians were bayoneted, and the dead were used for bayonet practice. Babies were ripped from the bellies of pregnant women. Officers tested the sharpness of their swords by random decapitation. There was no thought given to this. The victims had only to be standing nearby when an officer decided to behead them.

There was little difference between shark attacks and the bloodbaths executed by the Japanese soldiers, the difference being that the Japanese soldiers were more imaginative. They even went so far as to make sharks their instruments of death. Of course, sharks are not imaginative or, in the human definition of the word, cruel. They don’t know or care if you are Jewish, Black, Chinese, Caucasian, or a pig that had the misfortune of falling into the water. All these creatures know is that food is up there on the water’s surface. They have no thought process, no concept of intention.

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