Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Russian Roulette
America’s Pacific War was a racist war of annihilation both before and after Japan’s surrender, Declan Hayes writes.
America’s 9th/10th March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo was the single most destructive air raid in military history, with over 100,000 murdered and more than a million made homeless. Along with the Americans’ carpet bombing campaigns in North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, it remains one of the most egregious war crimes in human history, not least because Imperial Japan was already a beaten docket.
Even as the last of their kamikaze fighters prepared to repel the Americans from the Japanese mainland in those first days of August 1945, Japan’s government was frantically searching for a way out of the morass. Knowing that the Soviet Red Army would soon descend on Manchuria, they knew that time was of the essence if the Americans were to be stopped raping and slaughtering yet more defenceless Japanese women and children, like they had previously done in Guam, Saipan and Okinawa.
Though the Japanese were at a loss to understand why the Americans would not accept their surrender, that answer came shortly afterwards in the form of two mushroom clouds, one in Hiroshima and the other in Nagasaki, the centre of Catholicism in The Land of the Rising Sun. Those two war crimes were accompanied by the Red Army cutting a swathe through the remnants of Japan’s once-mighty but now much-depleted Kmantung Army.
With McArthur gloating on the USS Missouri that Japan was defeated, the Yanks colonised not only Japan and the Pacific Basin, but also South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan before setting their sights on ridding South East Asia of the Dutch and especially the French. The Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bomb war crimes were done to tell the Soviets that all of Asia was now under the Yankee jackboot and that, in contravention to the Yalta and other treaties, only the Yanks would rule there.
America’s Pacific War was a racist war of annihilation both before and after Japan’s surrender. The American and British media — the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, Time, and Life being among the more prominent — painted their Japanese foes out as subhumans, as monkey men fit only for extermination. Buoyed by such propaganda, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) went on monkey hunts; in the main, they took no prisoners. Even Percival’s craven capitulation in Singapore was depicted as being the work of armed monkeys, not of a hopelessly outnumbered foe that deserved respect for the most pragmatic of self-survival reasons.
The Marines, America’s greatest generation mutilated, as a matter of course, Japanese war dead for souvenirs, they attacked and sank hospital ships, they shot, tortured and executed their prisoners. They harvested gold teeth from both the living and the dead, they urinated both on their prisoners and on the corpses of those they had killed. In their idle moments, they carved the bones of their Japanese prisoners into little forget-me-nots and sent them home to their loved ones. President Roosevelt got a letter opener made from the bones of a captured Japanese officer but returned it to the sender — if not the rightful owner — for his own reasons.
Rationality in the Pacific was so rare during WWII that, ironically, it required as a mouthpiece none other than prominent racist Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. to blow the whistle on the barbarities America’s greatest generation were routinely committing. Repelled by what he saw and heard of U.S. treatment of the Japanese in the Pacific theatre, the aviator spoke out. His sentiments are summed up in the following journal entry: “It was freely admitted that some of our soldiers tortured Jap prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as the Japs themselves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized.” When Lindbergh left the Pacific and arrived at customs in Hawaii, he was asked if he had any Japanese bones in his baggage. It was, by then, a routine question.
Eugene B. Sledge, author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, wrote of his comrades harvesting gold teeth from the enemy dead. In Okinawa, Sledge witnessed a Marine officer, one of America’s greatest generation of Goodfellas, stand over a Japanese corpse and urinate into its mouth.
Perhaps Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, put it best when he asked in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”
Churchill and MacArthur ordered their troops to summarily execute any Japanese combatants who tried to surrender. They spread rumours of the Kyoto ear mound, where the Japanese, cannibal fashion, supposedly stored 40,000 pickled ears and noses that they collected following the 1598 Japanese invasion of Korea. Kyoto, for some perverse humanitarian desire on behalf of America’s leaders to preserve Japan’s imperial culture, her mounds of Korean noses included, was spared the blanket bombing Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka suffered. Kyoto was, unlike the good, human people of Nagasaki and Tokyo, of cultural importance and both its architecture and its ear mound had therefore to be preservedi. Meanwhile, the marines made their own inhumane mound. They spliced off the ears and noses of their captives and engaged in wide scale scalping as well. In Okinawa, America’s Greatest Generation also proved themselves to be the world’s most accomplished serial rapists.
Although John Pilger’s excellent documentaries tell us how the 4th Psychological Operations Group and the 101st Airborne (Tiger Force) made their own ear necklaces in Vietnam where they routinely beheaded Vietnamese babies to teach the locals who ruled the roost, Pilger, for a good half century now, has been a bad man, as he doesn’t sing from the NATO hymn sheet.
Pilger looks for shades of grey. He incorporates into his analysis the psychological insights of sociopaths like Edward Bernays, who taught the Yanks how to sell their self-serving wars more effectively than Goebbels or his pale Japanese imitators ever could. As he also always makes sure to mention the collateral damage of Yankee war crimes in places like Falluja, Vietnam, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not least because civilians now form far in excess of 90% of all American kills, and as he seldom goes easy on the media’s hypocrites he is, to repeat, a bad man.
To see how bad, just read this FBI inspired EU notice lambasting Russia Today and Sputnik because they “gravely distorted and manipulated facts and have repeatedly and consistently targeted European political parties, especially during election periods, as well as civil society, asylum seekers, Russian ethnic minorities, gender minorities, and the functioning of democratic institutions in the [European] Union and its Member States”. Because such outlets would be as harmful to us as would have been regarding the “Simian” Japanese or Vietnamese as humans when the USMC was exterminating them, our fragile minds must be protected by the Google search engines of today’s Edward Bernays, who are here to tell us that only unelected war-mongers like Ursula von der Leyen or her morally challenged minions can spout the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Because John Pilger is now in his 80s, he is given a pass, as long as he does not stray into the rump Zelensky Reich or into rebel-held Syria, where he would be quickly dispatched. But woe betide anyone younger like Gonzalo Lira, Julian Assange, Gary Webb or Alina Lipp who might try to divine the truth about the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, MI6 agent Zelensky, the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons or any of America’s other organised crime families for, in their regurgitating of Russian propaganda, they are playing Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Russian Roulette and that, as countless corpses attest, never ends well for NATO’ beleaguered truth tellers.
