My Dad In The War: The Japanese (Part One)

Here's where I lose my Japanese fans.
Before you read this, let me just tell you that these just aren't just my father's recollections or opinions. I also referred to the following non-fiction books to back up my Dad's version of what happened in World War Two. If I didn't have at least one verification of an event or an opinion that my father offered, then I didn't include it.

 

A tip of the hat to Stephen E. Ambrose who wrote "To America / Personal Reflections of an Historian."
 

A tip of the hat to Laura Hillenbrand who wrote "Unbroken."
 
and
 
A tip of the hat to Richard B. Frank who wrote "MacArthur."
 

Part One 
 

     During World War Two, the hatred Japan had for the United States went long and hard and deep, and was probably stronger than its hatred for any other country, including China. As for the Americans, they hated the Japanese just as much.
     This began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 and went beyond the Atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This hatred was fed to civilians and the military and nurtured by our very own governments. It's easier to kill an enemy you hate, and the differences in physical appearance, language, and culture combined with the propaganda and misinformation sanctioned from above, made the Japanese (and Americans) an enemy to be hated.
     And also to be feared.
     The only enemy easier to kill than the one you hate, is the one you fear.
     In the Pacific theater of the war, almost no infantryman became a POW on either side. If the Japanese ever captured a live soldier, which almost never happened, they would torture him to death.
     Other armies of other countries, when they ran out of ammunition, would surrender, but not the Japanese. They'd continue to fight with their bayonets, their shovels, sticks and rocks, and even their teeth. They'd fight to the very end, with the aim to kill ten Americans before they could be killed themselves.
     The atrocities the Japanese would commit included cutting off an enemies private parts and stuffing them into the dead enemy's mouth, extracting gold teeth from dead soldiers, and urinating into the open mouth of a dead soldier. This kind of behavior wasn't forbidden or frowned upon, but rather encouraged, and the Japanese--not all of them, to be fair--reveled in it.
     That's not to say the Americans didn't commit their own atrocities (see Halloween chapter), neither army's hands were clean, but the American's atrocities were spontaneous, brought on by the heat of the moment. With the Japanese it was policy. Only hate and racism could have caused that.
     The Japanese were called Lice, Vermin, Monkeys, Cockroaches, or Little Yellow Bastards by the Americans, and the Japanese called us names that were just as vile. All this may have degraded both sides as men, but it made them fierce soldiers.
     On a technical side, American soldiers far exceeded the Japanese, who were trained to do what they were trained to do and discouraged from doing anything more. The Japanese had a fierce class system, with every Japanese civilian or soldier expected to stay within that class. Where you were born was where you stayed, so, if a jeep were to break down, in the American military whoever could fix it would fix it, but in the Japanese military they had to wait for a mechanic because 1) they weren't supposed to fix it, and 2) they wouldn't know how to fix it.
     In the same way, if the Commanding Officer of a platoon was killed in battle, in the American military even the lowliest Private could step up to the plate and lead his brothers-in-arms into battle, but in the Japanese military they would be without a leader to tell them what to do.
     This was most apparent during the first part of World War Two, when it was thought by the Japanese that one's willingness to die for one's Emperor made them the superior soldier, but, in truth, it only made them better targets. For every American soldier who died fighting the Japanese during World War Two, nine Japanese soldiers died.
     So, after too many Japanese soldiers were lost in suicidal kamikaze attacks, the Japanese changed gears and learned how to hide behind bushes or in caves or in underground tunnels, and from there they could inflict the most damage.
     The Japanese did many things well, even superbly, but one thing they could never learn was tactics. For example, the Japanese can take a radio or an automobile and make it smaller, but they could never invent said radio or automobile, in the first place.
     In any army, at any other point in time, it was always policy to examine what you did, study what the enemy did, and then try to come up with a way to correct your mistakes and do better next time. From the beginning of the war until the end, the Japanese always believed in and never abandoned their code of "never surrender" as a way to win the war.
 

 

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