Slaughter At Sea: The Story Of Japan's Naval War Crimes

Kyt · Nov 5, 2007

Alive and safe, the brutal Japanese soldiers who butchered 20,000 Allied seamen in cold blood

The perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War remain alive and unpunished in Japan, according to a damning new book.

Painstaking research by British historian Mark Felton reveals that the wartime behaviour of the Japanese Navy was far worse than their counterparts in Hitler's Kriegsmarine.

According to Felton, officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordered the deliberately sadistic murders of more than 20,000 Allied seamen and countless civilians in cold-blooded defiance of the Geneva Convention.

"Many of the Japanese sailors who committed such terrible deeds are still alive today," he said.

"No one and nothing has bothered these men in six decades. There is only one documented case of a German U-boat skipper being responsible for cold-blooded murder of survivors. In the Japanese Imperial Navy, it was official orders."

Felton has compiled a chilling list of atrocities. He said: "The Japanese Navy sank Allied merchant and Red Cross vessels, then murdered survivors floating in the sea or in lifeboats.

"Allied air crew were rescued from the ocean and then tortured to death on the decks of ships.

"Naval landing parties rounded up civilians then raped and massacred them. Some were taken out to sea and fed to sharks. Others were killed by sledge-hammer, bayonet, beheading, hanging, drowning, burying alive, burning or crucifixion.

"I also unearthed details of medical experiments by naval doctors, with prisoners being dissected while still alive."

Felton's research reveals for the first time the full extent of the war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Navy, a force that traditionally modelled itself on the Royal Navy. Previously unknown documents suggest that at least 12,500 British sailors and a further 7,500 Australians were butchered.

Felton cites the case of the British merchantman Behar, sunk by the heavy cruiser Tone on March 9, 1944. The Tone's captain Haruo Mayuzumi picked up survivors and, after ten days of captivity below decks, had 85 of them assembled, hands bound, on his ship's stern.

Kicked in their stomachs and testicles by the Japanese, they were then, one by one, beheaded with swords and their bodies dumped overboard.

A solitary senior officer, Commander Junsuke Mii, risked his career by dissenting. But he gave evidence at a subsequent war crimes tribunal only under duress. Meanwhile, most of the officers who conducted the execution remained at liberty after the war.

Felton also tells the horrifying story of James Blears, a 21-year-old radio operator and one of several Britons on the Dutch-registered merchant ship Tjisalak, which was torpedoed by the submarine I-8 on March 26, 1944, while sailing from Melbourne to Ceylon with 103 passengers and crew.

Fished from the sea or ordered out of lifeboats, Blears and his fellow survivors were assembled on the sub's foredeck.

From the conning tower, Commander Shinji Uchino issued the ominous order: "Do not look back because that will be too bad for you," Blears recalled.

One by one, the prisoners were shot, decapitated with swords or simply bludgeoned with a sledge-hammer and thrown on to the churning propellers.

According to Blears: "One guy, they cut off his head halfway and let him flop around on the deck. The others I saw, they just lopped them off with one slice and threw them overboard. The Japanese were laughing and one even filmed the whole thing with a cine camera."

Blears waited for his turn, then pulled his hands out of his bindings and dived overboard amid machine-gun fire.

He swam for hours until he found a lifeboat, in which he was joined by two other officers and later an Indian crewman who had escaped alone after 22 of his fellow countrymen had been tied to a rope behind the I-8 and dragged to their deaths as it dived underwater.

Uchino, who was hailed a Japanese hero, ended the war in a senior land-based role and was never brought to trial.

Felton said: "This kind of behaviour was encouraged under a navy order dated March 20, 1943, which read, 'Do not stop at the sinking of enemy ships and cargoes. At the same time carry out the complete destruction of the crews'."

In the months after that order, the submarine I-37 sank four British merchant ships and one armed vessel and, in every case, the survivors were machine-gunned in the sea.

The submarine's commander was sentenced to eight years in prison at a war crimes trial, but was freed three years later when the Japanese government ruled his actions to have been "legal acts of war".

Felton said: "Most disturbing is the Japanese amnesia about their war record and senior politicians' outrageous statements about the war and their rewriting of history.

"The Japanese murdered 30million civilians while "liberating" what it called the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule. About 23million of these were ethnic Chinese.

"It's a crime that in sheer numbers is far greater than the Nazi Holocaust. In Germany, Holocaust denial is a crime. In Japan, it is government policy. But the evidence against the navy – precious little of which you will find in Japan itself – is damning."

The geographical breadth of the navy's crimes, the heinous nature of the acts themselves and the sadistic behaviour of the officers and men concerned are almost unimaginable.

For example, the execution of 312 Australian and Dutch defenders of the Laha Airfield, Java, was ordered by Rear Admiral Koichiro Hatakeyama on February 24 and 25, 1942.

The facts were squeezed out of two Japanese witnesses by Australian army interrogators as there were no Allied survivors.

One of the Japanese sailors described how the first prisoner to be killed, an Australian, was led forward to the edge of a pit, forced to his knees and beheaded with a samurai sword by a Warrant Officer Sasaki, prompting a great cry of admiration from the watching Japanese.

Sasaki dispatched four more prisoners, and then the ordinary sailors came forward one by one to commit murder.

They laughed and joked with each other even when the executions were terribly botched, the victims pushed into the pit with their heads half attached, jerking feebly and moaning.

Hatakeyama was arraigned by the Australians, but died before his trial could begin. Four senior officers were hanged, but a lack of Allied witnesses made prosecuting others very difficult.

Felton said that the Americans were the most assiduous of the Allied powers in collecting evidence of crimes against their servicemen, including those of Surgeon Commander Chisato Ueno and eight staff who were tried and hanged for dissecting an American prisoner while he was alive in the Philippines in 1945.

However, the British authorities lacked the staff, money and resources of the Americans, and the British Labour government was not fully committed to pursuing Japanese war criminals into the Fifties.

• Slaughter At Sea: The Story Of Japan's Naval War Crimes by Mark Felton is published by Pen & Sword on November 20 at £19.99.
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spidge · Nov 5, 2007

This is what I call justice:

THE PARIT SULONG MASSACRE.

In January,1942, a company of Australian and Indian soldiers were captured by the Japanese and interned in a large wooden building at Parit Sulong in Malayasia. Late in the afternoon of January 22, 1942, they were ordered to assemble at the rear of a row of damaged shops nearby.The wounded were carried by those able to walk, the pretext being the promise of medical treatment and food. While waiting at the assembly point, either sitting or lying prone, three machine guns, concealed in the back rooms of the wrecked shops, started their deadly chatter, their concentrated fire chopping flesh and limbs to pieces. A number of prisoners whose bodies showed signs of life, had to be bayoneted. In order to dispose of the bodies, which totaled 161, the row of shops was blown up and the debris bulldozed into a heap on top of which the corpses were placed. Sixty gallons of gasoline was splashed on the bodies and then a flaming torch was thrown on the pile. Just before midnight, the debris of the nine shops had burned into a pile of grey ash two feet high, the 161 bodies totally incinerated. The perpetrator of this foul crime was Lt-Gen.Takuma Nishimura who later faced trial before an Australian Military Court. Nishimura was previously convicted of massacres in Singapore and sentenced to life imprisonment by a British Military Tribunal on April 2, 1947. After serving four years of his sentence, he was being transferred to Tokyo to serve out the rest of his sentence and while the ship stopped temporarily at Hong Kong he was siezed by the Australian military police and taken to Manus Island where his second trial was held. He was found guilty and hanged on June 11, 1951.
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Kyt · Nov 5, 2007

Sweet. Bet he thought he was home and safe. Still got off better than his victims - due process, proper trial, and professional execution, rather than just being butchered.

Hugh · Nov 5, 2007

Behar

Kyt said: ↑

Felton cites the case of the British merchantman Behar, sunk by the heavy cruiser Tone on March 9, 1944. The Tone's captain Haruo Mayuzumi picked up survivors and, after ten days of captivity below decks, had 85 of them assembled, hands bound, on his ship's stern.

Kicked in their stomachs and testicles by the Japanese, they were then, one by one, beheaded with swords and their bodies dumped overboard.

A solitary senior officer, Commander Junsuke Mii, risked his career by dissenting. But he gave evidence at a subsequent war crimes tribunal only under duress. Meanwhile, most of the officers who conducted the execution remained at liberty after the war.
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Rear Admiral SAKONJI NAOMASSA who ordered the BEHAR massacre was found guilty of war crimes in 1947 and hung. Captain of the TONE, Capt. MAYAZUMI HARUO was sentenced to 7 years in prison as in his defense he explained he had protested against his orders. ISHIHARA TAKANORI, the ships Master at Arms who through chain of command passed down the bulk of the executions to his Assistant Master at Arms, was set to go to trial but this was halted and no charges pressed as US political intervention by General MacArthur's HQ wanted to stop these war crimes trials, as it was trying to turn Japan into a western style democracy. By 1949 this was also backed by the British government and no further cases of the BEHAR massacre were brought before any war crimes court.

Regards
Hugh

Antipodean Andy · Nov 5, 2007

So, despite the US and the UK stopping the war crimes styles by 1949, the Australian government still hunted down Nishimura in 1951. Good on 'em!

morse1001 · Nov 5, 2007

It is very sad to read of the horrific barbarity of the japanese armed forces.

One has to ask, how do those who ordered the massacres and survived, justify their behavior?

I am on the Pen & Sword mailing list and have a booklet with special offers, I will have to see if I can get a copy from them or some other book shop.

spidge · Nov 6, 2007

Andy in West Oz said: ↑

So, despite the US and the UK stopping the war crimes styles by 1949, the Australian government still hunted down Nishimura in 1951. Good on 'em!
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The saying "never look a gift horse in the mouth" may have been appropriate.

Imagine the look on his face when he was snatched.

CTNana · Nov 6, 2007

I am a pacifist. I sometimes read what I read with varying measures of morbid fascination, humility, sorrow and pride. I'm not aware that I carry any prejudices and I'm trying really hard to see the bigger picture here, but how did not prosecuting these evil ? (can't think of a polite word) help to bring a modern style democracy to Japan?

I was mildly persuaded by Kyt's arguments about there being evidence of a desire for peace in Japan and that it was therefore not necessary to have dropped the atomic bombs. If we are supposed to accept that these acts, whilst inhumanly barbaric to us, were part of a culture that thought it more honourable to die than surrender, hence captured allied personnel (including civilians?) had already lost their honour as humans, and were therefore not worthy of humane treatment, how can we believe that a surrender could have been negotiated peaceably?

One often hears that there are pockets of underground nazis still in Germany. Are there still comparable groups in Japan?

Kyt · Nov 6, 2007

CTNana said: ↑

I am a pacifist. I sometimes read what I read with varying measures of morbid fascination, humility, sorrow and pride. I'm not aware that I carry any prejudices and I'm trying really hard to see the bigger picture here, but how did not prosecuting these evil ? (can't think of a polite word) help to bring a modern style democracy to Japan?
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Just like in post-war Germany, politics played a great part. One of the most infamous cases in post-war Japan was the decision not to prosecute, or infact take virually any action against the Japanese bilogical testing Unit 731:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
(please be aware that some of the details are horrific)

Have a read of the section on after the surrender and the pasrt MacArthur played.

I was mildly persuaded by Kyt's arguments about there being evidence of a desire for peace in Japan and that it was therefore not necessary to have dropped the atomic bombs. If we are supposed to accept that these acts, whilst inhumanly barbaric to us, were part of a culture that thought it more honourable to die than surrender, hence captured allied personnel (including civilians?) had already lost their honour as humans, and were therefore not worthy of humane treatment, how can we believe that a surrender could have been negotiated peaceably?
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The oft quoted Bushido code, which is used as both a defence and a stick to beat the Japanese with, has often been mistakenly been taken to have a linear history in Japanese culture. In fact, by WW1 it had basically died out in Japan.It was actually reintroduced by the Japanese nationalists (neo-fascists actually) as part of their militarisation of Japan.:

The history of Bushido:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido

Bushido & WW2:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/japan_no_surrender_04.shtml

One often hears that there are pockets of underground nazis still in Germany. Are there still comparable groups in Japan?
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There are overt and covert levels of "nostelgia" for want of a better word. The most obvious overt lack of recognition of Japanese wrong doing is the way that Japanese schools still fail to teach the true nature of Japanese activities during WW2. This is also apparent in the way that Japanese pliticians still refuse to make explicit apologies to their many victims. Another is their annual prescence at the Yasukuni Shrine, which has a much greater significance in relation to WW2 than, say the Cenotaph. This is because, linked with the countries refusal to fully acknowledge their past, they also have many war criminals commerated on the shrine.

Covertly, there are a number of right-wing organisations that still hark back to the past, some neo-nazi in style, others who want the role of the Emperor to be resurrected to his former position of god-leader.

However, one of the most right wing Japanese individuals was Yukio Mishima

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishima_Yukio

BTW, I am just about to add a link to the Did Japan deserve the bomb thread.

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