This book documents Japanese atrocities in World War II, including cannibalism, the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war, rape and enforced prostitution, the murder of noncombatants, and biological warfare experiments.
The Nanjing Massacre, also called Rape of Nanjing (December 1937–January 1938), was the mass killing and the ravaging of Chinese citizens and capitulated soldiers by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army after its seizure of Nanjing, China, on December 13, 1937, during the Sino-Japanese War that preceded World War II.
The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
According to British historian Mark Felton: The Japanese murdered 30 million civilians while "liberating" what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule. About 23 million of these were ethnic Chinese. It is a crime that in sheer numbers is far greater than the Nazi Holocaust.
Japanese Destroy Nanjing
Even before their arrival, word had begun spreading of the numerous atrocities they had committed on their way through China, including killing contests, arson and pillaging. Chinese soldiers were hunted down and killed by the thousands, and left in mass graves.
Secret wartime files made public only in 2006 reveal that American GIs committed more than 400 sexual offenses in Europe, including 126 rapes in England, between 1942 and 1945.
Both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan committed horrifying atrocities during World War II, for example. Both also suffered greatly during World War II – Germany in fact lost a greater percentage of its population in the fighting, but Japan suffered the ill-effects of two nuclear bombs.
The Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9 March 1945 was the single deadliest air raid of World War II, greater than Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki as single events.
More than 4,000 people were convicted of war crimes in other international tribunals, and about 920 of them were executed. Tojo and the six others who were hanged were among 28 Japanese wartime leaders tried for war crimes at the 1946-1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
In addition to the central Tokyo trial, various tribunals sitting outside Japan judged some 5,000 Japanese guilty of war crimes, of whom more than 900 were executed.
#1: The Holocaust
The Holocaust was just one of many despicable war crimes committed during World War II, but with the imprisonment, torture and execution of over six million Jews, the Holocaust truly stands above all others in the history of atrocities.
Because the attack happened without a declaration of war and without explicit warning, the attack on Pearl Harbor was later judged in the Tokyo Trials to be a war crime.
Over time, the majority of those POWs were transported to other parts of Japan's wartime empire to serve as slave laborers. In August 1942, the Japanese sent 346 American POWs from the Manila area to a compound known as Camp 10-A on Palawan to build an airfield at Puerto Princesa.
Coupled with the Chinese defeat to Great Britain in the Opium Wars, Japan realized the need for modernization. The aggressive expansionist policy before and during WW2 was fueled by such competition. The Japanese military, and eventually most civilians, saw the West as enemies and Japan as a savior.
The Soviet Union suffered the highest number of fatalities of any single nation, with estimates mostly falling between 22 and 27 million deaths.
The German was far more skilled than the Japanese. Most of the Japanese that we fought were not skilled men. Not skilled leaders. The German had a professional army. . . .
The US Army executed 98 servicemen following General Courts Martial (GCM) for murder and/or rape in the European Theater of Operations during the Second World War.
The Soviet Union also committed war crimes in Romania or against Romanians from the beginning of the occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in 1940 all the way to the German invasion in 1941, and later from the expulsion of the Germans in the region until 1958.
As the United States Army drove deep into Germany in early-1945, American soldiers stole and appropriated objects on a large scale.
Over the years Japanese political leaders have issued a number of general apologies for the Imperial Army's conduct during World War II. Despite these apologies, the Chinese people and Sino-Japanese relations have yet to be fully normalized, and tensions remain.
WW2 Japanese soldiers were terrified of U.S. Marines because their officers told them they would be eaten if they surrendered.
Chinese men who showed up late for meetings were beaten with sticks. Chinese women were kidnaped and turned into “comfort women”---prostitutes who serviced Japanese soldiers. Japanese soldiers reportedly bound the legs of women in labor so they and their children died in horrible pain.