Truth Hurts
Japanese Defense Minister forced to resign for pointing out that Japan was asking for it.
Quick back story. Fumio Kyuma, native of Nagasaki, was in Chiba the other day addressing university students when he pointed out that the A-bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima “couldn’t be helped” and was “inevitable.” He noted it had the desireable efffect of preventing Japan from suffering the kind of decades-long Soviet nightmare suffered by Germany, Eastern Europe and Korea.
Some things Kyuma didn’t mention that seemed to get left out in most of the reporting of this story. He didn’t note that estimates of American war dead if the United States was forced to invade Japan run most conservatively right around the number of Japanese dead in the military infrastructure and manufacturing cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where about 200,000 people were killed. Some estimates of American invasion dead run as high as 800,000. Estimates of Japanese civilian and military dead in the invasion run from 1 million to 10 million. Those are based on what happened on Okinawa, where mothers were famously seen throwing their babies off cliffs prior to jumping themselves. Also, that Japanese fight to the death thing that led to virtually all of Iwo Jima’s 22,000 defenders dying in their caves, at a cost of 6,800 American lives.
Japan of course to this day considers itself a victim in the war that it started in China with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, followed by the invasion of China proper in 1937, and the Pearl Harbor surprise attack and invasion of Southeast Asia in 1941. An estimated 25 million people were killed or died as a result of the war in the Asian-Pacific theater. They were dying at a rate of 200,000 a month under Japanese occupation. There were plans to murder more than 100,000 Allied prisoners of war as the Allies closed in.* The Japanese high command had no interest whatsoever in capitulating.
All that ended a few days after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.
* Most of the old guys who survived Japanese captivity are dead now. Here are a couple of them:
Decades later, POWs recall evils of war
JULES CRITTENDEN
2 March 1997
Preston Clark doesn’t think very often about the three years he spent as a prisoner of the Japanese on the River Kwai, of the starvation, disease and labor that killed so many men there.
It was half a century ago and life goes on, Clark explains. But now and then, a haunting dream takes the old Navy commander back to the jungle camps.
“I’m in a building, and outside people are coming and going. Mostly going, and it’s looking bleak. I’m one of the last,” said Clark, 80, of Wenham.
In Hull, retired Navy chief Leo Callahan, 76, wakes up some nights in a cold sweat, panicked by the thought he is still a POW - half-starved, beaten and slaving in a Japanese coal mine.
“You think back and wonder, `How the hell did I ever do that?”‘ Callahan said recently.
Clark and Callahan’s hellish odysseys began 55 years ago yesterday. It was after midnight on March 1, 1942, when the USS Houston took three torpedo hits, rolled on its side and sank off Java.
The heavy cruiser was part of an Allied fleet defending Java that was annihilated in a month of clashes with the Japanese. The Houston and the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth were trying to escape on Feb. 28. Air reports said the coast was clear.
“When we came into the Sunda Strait, there was the entire Japanese fleet,” Callahan said. He was sleeping by his 5-inch gun when the Klaxons woke him that night.
“We were shooting at everything we could see,” said Clark. “A destroyer would come real close in and shine a searchlight on us. Their big ships would lob in shells while our guys tried to shoot out the searchlight.”
“The Jap destroyers came in so close, you could see the men on deck,” Callahan said. “It was a tremendous battle. We threw everything we had at them.”
But in the fierce, hourlong firefight, they were outgunned. The Perth sank first and then the Houston. Capt. Albert Rooks, who went down with the ship, had time to reverse course, bringing his men closer to Java for the long swim ashore.
“She took her time going down, like she was giving us a chance to get off,” Callahan said. “I just walked right down the side of the ship and dove in.”
“In the water it was nice and warm,” said Clark. “I saw the loom of a mountain ahead, and swam for that.”
He swam for nine hours. Callahan swam for 30. Of 1,064 men on board, 368 made it ashore.
From the beach, Clark’s captors made him haul a supply cart for two days without food or water. Drinking from ditches, he caught dysentery and kept it for three years. His bare feet became a mass of blisters.
Crammed into makeshift prisons, Clark and Callahan got their first taste of POW rations - moldy, maggot-filled rice.
“As the months went by, you could see your muscles waste away,” Clark said. “The Japanese had a Herculean problem. They never expected to get so many prisoners. They got 80,000 on Singapore alone. They were overwhelmed. And beside that, they didn’t give a damn.”
The POWs learned to expect frequent, irrational beatings.
“The Japanese Army was run on beatings. As near as I could tell, the only reason for advancement was to reduce the number of people over your head who were entitled to beat you,” Clark said. “POWs were at the bottom of the heap. It didn’t matter what your rank was, everyone got bashed.”
Most of the Houston crew was soon shipped north to Burma. Callahan, sick with malaria, was kept back in Java.
With 61,000 other British, Australian and Dutch POWs in Burma and Thailand, Clark led crews that moved dirt, broke rock and built bridges on the 150-mile Death Railroad.
They lived in muddy camps along the line the Japanese needed to supply their army in Burma. They died of beriberi, cholera and tropical ulcers - virulent infections that set into any scratch. With no medical supplies, POW medics used sharpened spoons to scoop out the rotten flesh while the patient was held down.
Before it was over, 15,000 POWs were dead, one in four.
“They sent men out to work who were obviously unfit,” Clark said. “Men died like flies.”
In Java, Callahan spent two years as a dockworker before he was packed on a ship to Japan.
“(American) subs were following us the whole way. We could hear the calls to action stations on the Jap destroyers around us,” he said. One night, a POW on deck asked to trade places with Callahan in the hold.
“So he went down and I went topside,” Callahan said. That night, “A Jap destroyer went up. A terrific explosion. In the water, we could see the phosphorescent trails of three torpedoes headed for us. The ship went down in minutes. No one escaped from down below.”
He swam for 20 hours before a Japanese ship picked him up.
“They marched us down the streets of Nagasaki to a Mitsubishi shipyard. These days, whenever I see that Mitsubishi symbol on a car, I want to run into it,” Callahan said.
In early 1945, after eight months in the shipyard, he was sent north to work in a mine. It saved him from the atom bomb.
“We didn’t know that. We thought, `Coal mines will kill you.”‘ Callahan said. He carried shrapnel in his face for two years after a mine explosion. But he knew the war was ending when he saw the sky fill with B-29 bombers.
“One day we woke up, and the Jap guards were gone. But nobody came for us,” he said. The POWs headed for Nagasaki.
“You never saw anything like the devastation. It was just blown away,” he said. Doctors later found radiation in his blood, and he has had several tumors removed. But he said, “If it wasn’t for the atom bomb, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have lasted another year.”
The war ended for Clark in a Bangkok warehouse. He remembers Thai women bringing roast pork to the skeletal POWs.
“We’d eat it, get sick, eat some more,” he said. “I’ll never forget the taste of that pork.”
Both men stayed in the Navy after the war and made repeated trips to Japan. Clark remembers coming ashore at Yokohama in 1950. An old man bowed to him.
“It was something that had never happened to me,” Clark said. “The Japanese were kind and respectful. It was very different than it had been for me.”
Topics: history
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:43 am on Tuesday, July 3, 2007
5 Responses to “Truth Hurts”
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July 3rd, 2007 at 1:54 pm
….but the ones denying Japanese attrocities, including the horrific “rape of Nanking” keep their seats. I think it has to do with the Chinese and their constant demands for repeated and redundant apologies.
Talk about conflicted. Not sure what we could do.
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:26 pm
“Japanese Defense Minister forced to resign for pointing out that Japan was asking for it.”
Professor R.J. Rummel of the Univerity of Hawaii estimates that the Japanese military MURDERED about 6,000,000 people during WWII.
They weren’t asking for it…they were begging for it.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB8.1.GIF
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:40 pm
The Japanese are a very proud people, and value their honor great;ly, to the point of hubris. They took their loss in WWII very bady, and go to extreme lengths to avoid the subject. This is not the first time that they exhibited such denial about their role in WWII.
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:57 pm
the proof that japan had it coming is the fact that it took TWO bombs to get a surrender.
a demonstration certainly wouldn’t have worked if even the one on hiroshima didn’t work!
ALSO: recent releases of the secret USA cables and of the japanese defenses proves that the bombs saved millions of lives - of our soldiers and millions of japanese.
it was the humane way to end the war, and it ended it in a healthily unambiguous way.
God Bless Truman.
i wish W had the resolve of Truman: we would nuked torabora and iraq woulda been pacified years ago.
July 5th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
“They were dying at a rate of 200,000 a month under Japanese occupation”
It’s worth remembering this.
In Australia, people focus on the POW’s and their trauma on the Burma railway, and fair enough - it was horrific and a big impact on Australia. Personally I knew two ex Japanese POW’s. What Australians generally don’t know is that as well as 61,000 POW’s of whom 15,000 died, the Japanese also used hundreds of thousands of native Burmese and Thais, of whom at least 100,000 died, perhaps as many as 200,000 - the dead natives weren’t even counted. Throughout the Japanese occupied territories life for the locals was often as bad as life for the POW’s.
It’s very sad that so many Japanese are unable to be proud in the present without lying about WWII.