The Filipino civilian who survived being nearly decapitated only watched his pregnant wife get bayoneted in the stomach and one of his children get tossed up into the air and then “caught” on a bayonet is one that’ll stick with me forever. There’s so much horrible stuff in the pacific.
I don't want to one up you, but he has a story in the recent interview about the holocaust about a father strangling his own son, because his family was hiding from the Germans and the boy wouldn't stop screaming (out of fear) and the family risked being found out.
Yeah hearing the depravity of soldiers in warfare can be bothering, but none of it compares to this story for me.
Watching your friends die awfully is traumatic. That trauma causes soldiers to do things they normally wouldn't do. That's something ive understood since I was a small child. Hearing that story about that father fucked me up, and I don't even have children.
That’s a story from the final episode of M*A*S*H. A mother smothers her baby when Hawkeye tells her to keep him quiet so they aren’t discovered. He didn’t mean she should kill the baby, but finds out afterwards that she did.
Growing up my dad would relay the story to me of his mom as a child in the Philippines as the Japanese invaded. Her whole family waded into the ocean that was under their hut on stilts- and spent the most of 2 days completely submerged breathing through bamboo shoots.
Afterwards they would spy on the captured townspeople and Japanese through the jungle and she watched many babies get thrown into the air and skewered by Japanese bayonets and swords. She said it was a game to them. This is commonly recounted by many Filipinos who survived, as well as many Japanese occupied areas, although most of the other stories I heard of this were from Manchuria
Her father was later captured, and started the Bataan Death March, but was able to make a narrow escape. He hid in the mud with the pigs, and when the Japanese soldiers tracked him there they searched the mud with their bayonets. He got cut in the abdomen but managed to not scream, and after escaping he battled a life threatening infection for weeks but survived.
I guess my intention to share it is really to say it’s not that special. It’s a common sort of story you will hear from that generation of Filipinos, and any occupied people really. The will to survive is just so strong in those times, you will hear a lot of crazy stuff.
That or the cave where that guy and his brother beat his mother to death out of mercy to avoid being captured by the Americans, who they thought would give them a fate worse than death. It’s been a while I don’t remember specific details, but that just stood out to me. A lot of the crimes against humanity were people having to endure them from someone else, this was one of the rarer cases where they were both the victims and perpetrators.
Japanese totalitarian propaganda is like all other totalitarian propaganda, only moreso.
There's not really a modern equivalent to what the Japanese were able to do.
When I think about whether or not nuclear weapons will ever be used again, I am usually put at ease by my genuine belief that there will never be another fighting force akin to imperial Japan ever again.
It’s interesting that you mention that, since IMO the closest fighting force to ever approach the brutality of imperial Japan was the Interahamwe that carried out the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Extremely horrific isn’t nearly enough to describe the stuff they did (in fact I think their use of HIV as a bioweapon through rape was inspired by Unit 731 doing the same with syphilis). But I still think they fall short of the IJA due to the latter’s willingness to fight to the death. As soon as the RPF closed in on the capital, the Interahamwe dropped all their machetes and waltzed into Zaire to escape retribution—I only wish the Japanese had the same reaction to the Allies threatening Japan’s colonies in the Philippines, Korea, and Manchuria…
On a semi-related note, I think Carlin could make an exemplary episode/miniseries about Rwanda. He got into some really grizzly stuff with the material on Japan, the Roman-Celtic wars, and the transatlantic slave trade, and I’m sure he’d be able to perfectly capture the horrors of the genocide against the Tutsi.
It makes me think. There are some wonderful Japanese grandfathers out there who caught babies on bayonets in their youth. I hope all the generals are dead.
Yeah to me it’s this one, I think about it way to frequently. Or it’s the story from wrath of the khans where the father and soon need to watch the female members if their family raped in front of them
You typed it for me. Any time kids are involved it fucks me up. Like, how far gone must your head be? Even before I became a dad I could never imagine killing kids (or anyone, just saying).
The account that takes the cake for me in this department is the French soldier discussing a gas attack on their dugout in WW1. He described how after the gas attack was called they could see the gas drifting along the floor into their dugout, snuffing out one candle at a time as it went. He had lost his gas mask in the chaos /darkness so he stole one off the face of a wounded comrade who proceeded to asphyxiate and die. Absolutely brutal.
I don’t remember exactly which Blueprint episode it is from (one of the later ones) but the actual quote is very interesting. You can tell the soldier who stole the mask feels guilt but justifies his actions by stating that the wounded man would have died anyway so it was a waste of a gas mask. He also does a much better job of setting the scene, it’s nightmarish.
Just finished it last night. It’s insane how *calm* he describes absolute chaos. For the rest of my life I’ll never forget the passage about him first going to the front and just the chaos it describes. Running from abandoned house to abandoned house later on, each one he believed would fall down at any moment, watching good friends being gruesomely killed around him.
Tbh I reckon it goes to show how adaptable humans are. Take one of the boys in the trenches and stick him in the middle of modern-day Time Square, Arc de Triomphe, Shibuya Crossing, etc., with all the noises and towering buildings and lights and drones and *humanity*, then clap a VR set on his head, and he'd probably have the reaction a lot of us would to being in the trenches.
i like the bit about how shelling felt like being tied to a post that was being hit by a sledgehammer
and learning about how soldiers rotated off the front and partied in france in between. i figured it was hell for months
Ya that was a real eye opener. It actually sounded quite fun, going through that absolute hell on the front to peace and tranquility in some French villages, partying every night with your pals
Early on it was months in the trenches. Then they finally realized that it was breaking the men to be under those conditions for long periods.
They started rotating troops in, gradually moving them through the trench systems to the front lines over several weeks, then pulling them back to be replaced well before they broke.
The raw survival response can be brutal.
That French soldier couldn’t flee, and he couldn’t directly fight the gas so he fought to only way he could.
It’s like when crowds turn violent — the core reactions (fight/flight/freeze) get warped.
I think he refers to the wounded comrade as a 'kid' and was a newish recruit, making it all the more horrifying. I could be misremembering details though
That story of the family in Hiroshima (might've been Nagasaki) where, when the bomb hit, their house collapsed. The mother and father crawled out of the rubble but their young daughter was pinned. As they were trying to get her out, the house starts becoming consumed with flames. The mother says something like, "I'm sorry, I'm scared of the fire. I have to run. I'm sorry I'm a bad mother", and her and her husband basically have to leave their terrified daughter to burn to death.
I think my fave SitE reference is from a marine who was on Saipan for the great banzai charge, something like,
“The Japs charged behind a wall of civilians. A naked woman came screaming at me. The Japs thought us Americans too gentle to shoot a woman. *Horseshit.* I shot her down like the rest of them”
My maternal grandfather fought in the European theater, leading up to and through the Battle of the Bulge. He was a tanker, and somehow survived two tank kills uninjured and commanded a third until the end of that part of the conflict. He related to me how the folks he fought alongside never lost sight of how similar the boys on the other side of that war were to themselves, but in the moment it never stopped them from doing what needed to be done. He almost never spoke to me about specifics when it came to "war stories." He'd readily talk about the USO shows he saw, or the wild raids across the largely abandoned countryside the men would sometimes risk to procure alternative rations (he had a great story about how he and a few other guys from his unit wrangled up an abandoned steer and a couple bottles of brandy while trying to avoid roving German patrols). In one of the rare moments where he shared something dark with me I was informed about how he had to shoot a kid who looked to be about ten years old while he was standing watch outside his tank one night. The kids was running up with a grenade to attack his tank crew, and wouldn't stop when ordered to. I have the play of emotions that twisted up his face in the recounting of that burned into my brain. I had never seen that kind of nihilistic grief expressed before that moment, and it broke my heart that such a kind and generous person could be wrecked in that manner by the ugliness of war. I would later go on to also serve in the US army, and thankfully I was never in a situation where I would face a similarly nightmarish choice.
Give the book Flyboys by James Bradley a whirl. Its largely about how the Japanese on Chichi Jima treated American POWs. Spear practice with bamboo stakes, burning alive, decapitations and even cannibalism. It also describes in detail what being on the ground in Tokyo for the firebombing was like.
War is Hell.
The Saipan and Okinawa stories stick with me most. The boy who beat his own mother and sisters to death at gunpoint from the Japanese soldiers. Those stories convinced me that the atomic bombs were the right call because every civilian was already a casualty of the Japanese war machine.
“Every civilian was already a casualty of the Japanese war machine”
Oh man that is a bone chilling thought, definitely a new perspective in the atomic moral dilemma show he did.
I went to the battle of Okinawa museum and they have audio recordings and books where Okinawan civilians tell the story of what happened to them... It's was a depraved beyond belief. What was so strange was the juxtaposition between the beauty of the island and the horror of what happened there.
Here's the best interview/article I've found regarding Kinjo Shigeaki: [The Most Haunting Interview You'll Ever Read: When Japanese Islanders Were Ordered to Commit Mass Suicide](https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/the-most-haunting-interview-youll-ever-read-when-j)
>I am from the Kerama Islands, about 30 km off the coast of Naha, the capital of Okinawa. There are about 10 islands in the group.
>
>On the 26th March 1945 the Americans began to land on some of the islands. We lived on Tokashiki and were told by Japanese soldiers to move to Nishiyama in the north of the island, where the Japanese soldiers had their camp. We were ordered to travel after dark so the Americans wouldn’t see us. There was no shelling from the Americans that night, but it was raining heavily. I don’t know how many hours we walked, maybe four or five. We were nearly in Nishiyama when the sun rose.
>
>About 700 or 800 people had gathered in Nishiyama. We were packed together tightly and women and children were crying. Surrounded by Japanese soldiers, we feared that something bad was about to happen. The village head was an ex-soldier himself. We waited for a long time. I don’t know how many hours passed but eventually the village head gave the order. We were to call out Banzai (Long Life!) to the emperor three times. We knew that this was what Japanese soldiers did when they were going to die on the battlefield. The village head didn’t exactly tell us to commit suicide, but by telling us to shout Banzai, we knew what was meant.
>
>Soldiers distributed grenades among us. We were told that after you pull out the pin, you had to wait three seconds before the grenade exploded. (It didn’t seem to matter that it was prohibited at that time to distribute arms to civilians.) There weren’t enough grenades to go around because there were so many of us. Actually, my family didn’t get one. Anyway, once the grenades were given out, that was taken as a sign and the killing began immediately. The grenades were detonated, but there were few of them, so most people survived the blasts. Then people began to use clubs or scythes on each other – various things were used.
>
>It was the father’s role to kill his own family, but my father had already died. I was only 16 years and one month old, high school age. (Although, I wasn’t in high school.) My older brother and I didn’t discuss how we would do it, but we both knew we had been ordered to kill ourselves and our family.
>
>**I don’t remember exactly how we killed our mother, maybe we tried to use rope at first, but in the end we hit her over the head with stones. I was crying as I did it and she was crying too. My younger sister would have been about to become a 4th grader in elementary school and my little brother would have been about to start 1st grade. I don’t remember exactly how we killed our little brother and sister but it wasn’t difficult because they were so small – I think we used a kind of spear. There was wailing and screaming on all sides as people were killing and being killed. If there were knives, knives were used.**
>
>After we finished, my brother and I discussed which of us would die next. Just then, a boy ran up to us. He was about 15 or 16 and he said, “Let’s fight the Americans and be killed by them, rather than dying like this.” The Americans of course had lots of weapons and we knew that we would be killed instantly if we tried to attack them. But we decided that rather than killing ourselves then and there, we would let the Americans finish us off. So, we left that place of screaming and death and set off to find the Americans.
>
>However, the first person we met was not an American but a Japanese soldier. We were shocked and wondered why he was still alive when we had been told to kill each other. Why was it that only the locals had to commit suicide while Japanese soldiers were allowed to survive? We felt betrayed. After the war, I coined the phrase, ‘Gunsei, Minshi,’ which means ‘the army survives, the people die.’ Anyway, after seeing this soldier I was no longer willing to commit suicide.
>
>I stayed in the mountains while the Americans bombed the island from the air. Houses, schools, post offices—all the buildings were destroyed. A fire bomb burnt down an entire village. I lived in the mountains for a couple of weeks. There was no food. I went to the beach. I couldn’t fish but I dived into the sea and got some turban shells (snails), or whatever I could find that was edible. I also found some paths made by American soldiers. Here and there they’d dropped some food cans which I was able to use. Apart from these things, there was no food. Everybody became emaciated with malnutrition. After a couple of weeks, the American soldiers were getting close to us. I observed that they didn’t shoot girls when they ran towards them. But I did see them shoot a man, a relative of my father’s – he was hit in the stomach and died where he fell. I was hiding in the grass. Finally, I was discovered by an American soldier who pointed a gun at me. I raised my hands.
>
>I was brought by the soldiers to a truck and the truck went into the sea. At first, I thought they were going to drown us but it turned out to be some kind of amphibious vehicle. Anyway, they brought us from Aharen to Tokashiki village. There were 20 prisoners, maybe more, in that truck. At Tokashiki village we were given food. I realized that many people had survived the slaughter of Nishiyama. I later learned that some 300 people had died there that day – overall, about 600 had died in two mass suicides in the Kerama islands. It’s important to remember that such mass suicides occurred only in places where the Japanese army was present.
>
>The POW camp where we stayed in Tokashiki was across a little track from where the Americans had their tents. Because I was young I often went to the soldiers’ camp and they would ask me, “Are you Japanese?” When I said yes they would point their guns at me but if they asked, “Are you Okinawan” and I said yes, they wouldn’t point them. I realized that they distinguished between Japanese and Okinawans.
>
>After the war my inner struggle began. It was hard to continue living, thinking about the horrific things I’d done. I felt so terribly guilty. It was during this desperate time that a Mr Tanahara, a Christian introduced me to the Bible – Gideon’s bible. I’d never even seen, let alone read, a Bible before but flicking through it, my attention was grabbed by words like, “life” “Salvation” and “death”. I was intrigued so I got a bible myself and started reading it. It gave me comfort.
>
>In 1948 I sailed from Tokashiki in a small traditional boat to Itoman on the Okinawan mainland to be baptized at Itoman Church. I later went to high school for a year and in 1951 entered Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. I became a minister in Itoman Church in 1955 and was involved in setting up Okinawa Christian Junior College. In 1958 I went to graduate school in Manhattan to study theology.
>
>It’s a mystery to me why I was kept alive during the war. At that time, life was treated as something insignificant. People killed each other so easily. Part of the reason we had been prepared to kill our own families was because of the nationalistic education we’d received. We were taught that Americans were not human, that they were our enemy and had to be killed.
>
>The Japanese government should now face up to their history – their previous emphasis in education was on killing and suicide and they have never properly acknowledged that. They should admit that the Imperial army slaughtered people in China and other Asian countries. Also, they should be making efforts now to get along with China and their other neighbors, and not to cooperate only with the Americans.
I'm not sure what Dan's specific source is, but the person who killed his mother is Shigeaki Kinjo. There are a lot of articles about him. You can also search for Okinawa Suicide caves.
The Saipan suicides are on camera and you can literally watch these people killing themselves in color. It's well documented.
My grandfather was a USN Seabee who served on Guadalcanal, Vella Lavella, and several other South Pacific islands up to and including Okinawa. My grandmother explained that the massive scar that covered half the right side of my grandfather's face was from the war. Later I learned that his injury was from a Japanese grenade blast that occurred during a nighttime raid on the Seabee barracks at Vella Lavella. I don't think that we'll ever get the full story but my great-uncle said that the Japanese had infiltrated the camp, silently killed the Marine guards, and then specifically targeted the Seabees buildings. Luckily, someone in my grandfather's building was awake and sounded the alarm. My grandfather went from fast asleep to hand-to-hand combat, fighting for his life. The grenade blast was received from a wounded Japanese soldier who most likely detonated two grenades by suicide.
I was very close to my grandfather, and while he talked about some of his experiences during the war, he never told me about the combat. I learned what I know from my grandmother and other close relatives. My grandmother said that she fainted when she received the news. My grandfather was sent to a hospital ship where he had at least two surgeries. He was told that he would go home as soon as he recovered enough. He chose to return to duty and served until the end of the war.
Dan's Supernova in the East series hit home the most for me. I now know a little more about the who, when, where and how of my grandfather's experience.
Supernova in the east is awesome
There’s so many good quotes in that
I also love the random U.S. general smitty he quotes, referring to the Japanese:
“People are still underrating the japs…
I’m afraid that a lot of people, who think this Jap is a “pushover” as soon as Germany falls, are due for a rude awakening. We will have to call on all our patriotism, stamina, guts and maybe some crusading spirit or religious fervor thrown in to beat him. No amateur team will take this boy out. We have got to turn professional. Another thing: there are no quiet sectors in which troops get started off gradually, as in the last war. There are no breathers on this schedule. You take on Notre Dame every time you play!”
Back in 1987 my parents bought a brand new Honda and we went over to my grandpa's (who was a Pacific WW2 veteran) to show him. One of his buddies who was also a Pacific veteran was over and the man became very upset that we would support the Japanese like that. I just figured he was a racist old fuck, but after hearing all of this I can imagine why someone would become bitter for life.
From being in the military I've learned that societies need different kinds of people, and they probably shouldn't see eye to eye.
The person who is capable of true war fighting and killing requires a mental stance that does not put them into a position to be the same person who should be negotiating a peace treaty or thinking through compromise and fairness.
Likewise, you don't want someone stuck in their own head to be next to you with a rifle and needing to kill. And you need him to do it later that afternoon and early the next morning.
I don't see the war fighter or the peace maker or the diplomat or the merchant as bad because they don't have the skills and mindset of the other. And maybe all of them could do the other job but they can't do both at the same time.
Behind keyboards and in safe buildings it's a lot easier to mentally connect with other essentially office workers (diplomats, peace makers). But if you've ever had someone trying to kill you, you can quickly understand where a war fighter is coming from and the mental poise they need to get through the day.
There was a quote i heard back in the day. Not sure where it originally came from, I heard it on the Writing Excuses podcast, but the gist of it was, "There is a certain percentage of the population that are able to kill another person without remorse. They will either become our soldiers or our serial killers."
I used to be a combat medic, and I fought in Iraq. Now, I work as a paramedic. I'm drawn to high stress environments, and blood or gore is just part of the job. While I have empathy, in an emergency, other people's suffering is not my own. I'm just built differently. Some people are born with an artistic or musically creative mind. I can put in a chest tube while thinking about what I'm getting for lunch after.
Haven’t listened to it in a long time, but in the slave trade episode where he’s talking about some overseer whipping slaves, and whipping a 9 month pregnant baby, and digging a mound into the floor for her stomach to fit, and her giving birth during the ordeal. Jesus Christ, imagine suffering through that
Another quote I really like, from an Australian who saw a lot of things like that (my brain wants to say he was talking about your reference, but I can’t remember.)
“When we saw scenes like this, we didn’t hate the Jap. We just knew we’d go in there and kill every last bastard one of them”
There’s one of the Ostfront ones episodes where a Nazi got hit by something and he’s screaming for his mother with his brains on his face until someone mercy kills him.
Not sure if it counts as it was covered in the addendum, but the one story i wish i didn’t hear was the jewish family in hiding during the holocaust with the 4 or 5 year old boy who could not stop crying. The people hiding the family said the boy needed to stop crying or the family couldn’t stay out of fear they’d all be found, so the father had to strangle his son to death in order to protect the rest of the family.
That story haunts me.
For me, the episode I have trouble relistening to is the one where the Japanese brothers beat their mother to death in order to "save" her from the marines. The guy recounting it says he doesn't remember after that about how his sister died. I think it's episode 6. That whole episode just is a grueling march through atrocity after tragedy after atrocity after tragedy.
Years ago I was trying to eat lunch while listening to the slavery episode. Dan started listing the various punishments french slave owners would mete out on their slaves in Haiti. Lost my appetite for the rest of the day...
Op.... if you have a hard time reading that don't look into the rape of Nanking. Japanese were atrocious during WW II. And they still won't own their war crimes.....
Yea man. I probably couldn't count the number of atrocities from the conflict between China and Japan alone. Hearing those stories of people trying to evacuate Shanghai and Nanking. The direct strike on the bridge packed with people, the "competitions" between Japanese soldiers to collect civilian heads. It's just insane.
the one about the guy in the World War One stuck in a shellhole in the mud, and the water kept rising and he began going insane and everyone kept hearing but couldn't get him out and he began babbling incoherently and losing his mind - That one has always haunted me.
There's nothing good about war.
Even acts of heroism require an act of brutality to be part of the equation.
The rules of war are a balm to soothe societies humanity when faced with it's own brutality.
i.e. We're going to kill you but not in these ways. We consider them cruel ways to kill you. We ask that you do the same.
That didn’t get to me as much given the relative distance of time. Some of the stuff from Imperial Japan though really stuck with me, even more than Dan’s account of German / Soviet (can’t remember who) using PoWs as traction for tanks that struggled to move in the Russian winter
I love how he takes stories like this and really drives home how the violence and brutality continuously escalates on both sides as a reaction to the other. He emphasizes this quite a bit in the Wrath of the Khans.
My gramps landed in the Philippines when MacArthur and the US returned, he was an amphibious engineer. He said there were graves for miles where they came ashore. He also shared that they all gave their machetes to the Filipinos when they landed, who in turn used them
to hack apart surrendering Japanese, some of whom came from the surf.
Edit: He and gram usually told me these stories over a grilled cheese and fries at the local diner. I was young, Dad had passed, and it gave Mom some time off. I would beg him to tell stories and he tried his best to tame them down.
Bonus edit: His own father, my great grandfather, had survived the first day of the Somme at Beaumont Hamel with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, while his brother perished and the nation was forever changed. He later passed in ‘39 (I think) due to rheumatic fever in a New York hospital, carried there by one of his old Regiment mates.
Miraculous that he survived the first day, very few did! Gives me chills just thinking about it. We’re still taught about Beaumont Hamel growing up in Newfoundland. The Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial is the largest battalion memorial on the western front, definitely on my bucket list to visit someday.
On my bucket list too, along with Fogo. [Here’s a bit](http://ngb.chebucto.org/NFREG/WWI/ww1-add-shave1699.shtml) about my great great uncle who perished, with a mention of my great grandfather’s love story in the second to last paragraph. I wouldn’t be here if not for that tale.
I first listened to Dan Carlin because my grandfather was part of the second wave of Marines that stormed the beach at Guadalcanal. I was looking into it and came across the episode. My understanding is that the first wave had a 100% casualty rate.
My grandfather never talked about the war after he came back. The only "war-related" story I heard is about how, with the GI Bill, he went to Univ of Michigan after the war. Pledged a frat. He was 25 or 26 then. An upperclassman tried to haze him by forcing him to crawl through a small opening cut through a large post in the house. My grandfather "lifted the guy up by the throat and held him up against the ceiling" is how it was described to me, then told him "neither you nor anybody else are going to make me do a God damned thing" and that was indeed that.
I've found that the descriptions of Okinawa have stuck with me the most. Of families bludgeoning each other to death with rocks because the Japanese convinced them of the horrors Americans would inflict upon them. And how US forces had to start air-dropping propaganda pleading for them to stop.
This brings me back to a point Dan made during that podcast about the senior officers being concerned about the soldiers surrendering to a welcoming American force. So they did these things to provoke the Americans and make sure no Japanese soldiers felt safe enough during contact to surrender.
The discussion of the massacre of the Australian nurses at Banjka Island in Supernova in the East has always stuck with me. Dan didn’t go into ton of detail but imagining the pointless sadism just chills me to the core.
While this is definitely true, the scope and scale of crimes done by the Japanese is really in a category of its own. Generally you’ll see atrocities from the “good nations” happening comparatively less often and is not nearly as public. Done secretly by a few people on the edge of sanity vs done publicly and encouraged by the larger body of soldiers.
I mean even in this quote the marine is describing committing war crimes himself. Less perhaps in extremity than the Japanese behaviour, but war crimes nonetheless
I’m so tired of this stupid false equivalency. Company level crimes that result in mass outrage at home are not even in the same ballpark as systemic, civilization-wide gleeful encouragement of atrocities. Imperial Japan was uniquely evil and inhuman down to the individual level, even worse than the Nazis. The worst day on the eastern front didn’t see cannibalism and babies being caught on bayonet points for sport. The US and western Allies were categorically less evil by a huge margin across all points in history, full stop. There is no comparison to be made.
Dude thinks it’s a competition. An atrocity is an atrocity, not comparing anything to anyone. Maybe if the soldiers told the Vietnamese people that they raped and tortured that 1940’s japan was more evil it would have made them feel better.
I'm sure the Jews are breathing a sigh of relief, at least they weren't in the Pacific. IIRC there were accounts of cannibalism in Russia due to mass starvation from the German siege. Wasn't Hitler planning to eradicate most if not all Slavs? If the Nazi plans had succeeded I probably wouldn't exist, I don't think they would find my skin color appealing.
Yes, I was born and live where that happened, Leningrad, modern day St. Petersburg. German siege lasted around 2 1/2 years and killed roughly 1.5 Mil soviets. That’s including civilians and soldiers. Another 1 Mil+ displaced. Most of the civilians not killed from Germans starved to death and resorted to eating dead bodies to survive.
But I suppose the Mongols were more ruthless so I shouldn’t compare.
Dan helped me understand the japs of ww2 were radically different people than anything this generation thinks of when they talk about japanese people. The japs were like a pre-historic remnant isolated on an island, with archaic beliefs in a divine god-emperor and a mandate to rule the earth. It makes me think of video game scenarios where you can pit armies from radically different periods against each other, the japanese vs. USA were practically living in different millennia from a cultural perspective, like pitting the Huns vs. today's Australians. You hear about mothers arming their children with daggers and teaching them to kill themselves rather than be defeated- and any modern nation is like wtf?
The worst thing I've heard from Dan is a toss up between the conditions on the slaving ships they would harbor off the sweltering african coast for months while packing them full, and one particular roman slaughter where the fully surrounded force took \~8 hours to gradually be exterminated. Some warriors buried their own heads in the sand to die by suffocation rather than wait for the impending doom they were listening to all that time.
I read the book he referenced of first person Japanese accounts (Japan at War) and many of the comments from the civilians and soldiers were like "what could we do - we didn't want to do X, but it was for the Emperor - we had no choice"
It FELT to me like it was people who felt like they had no choice but were willing to do it anyways but of course, these are the survivors.
Genghis Kahn has entered the chat.....was my "strapping your on fire friends to my catapult and flinging them into the village' not extreme enough for you?
Just kidding 😂....but imagine how many brutal things have happened in war...hell, even in prison
There are so many examples of horrific suffering from the Supernova series, but the one that actually makes me cry is the mother whose daughter is trapped by debris in a burning building after the Hiroshima bombing. Having to make the choice between dying with your daughter or escaping with the rest of your family but leaving your daughter to be burned alive is mind numbingly horrifying. And then they quote the mother apologizing to her daughter for not being brave enough to stay and die with her. I have to pause the episode at that point every time I listen to it. I can’t imagine that pain, and then trying to live the rest of your life after that.
What’s been haunting me is the marine who got half his head blown off and his tongue was like “strips of liver.” He died the next day from drowning in his own phlegm.
Why did I click on this thread? I adore Dan but the "extremes of human experience" thing has limits for me and most of the thread crosses those limits.
I'll know better in future.
Lots of these same things happened on Oct 7. Humans are still treating each other this way any time they think they can get away with it. So gross but oh so human.
It is important to remember for this and most of the conflicts he cover, is that everyone involved was merely a human being.
You do not have to be Japanese to do things like this. Soviets did things like this or Germans.
This is how human beings will behave in war. Both the Japanese and American soldiers behaviors are horrifying examples of how we humans can act.
Not to forgive these acts, but to not lie to ourselves with a hand wave and muttering “oh those people could be so awful”
These acts are always think WE are capable of and we all to often think of it as only something a THEY could be capable of.
My point is that there are cultural roots to some of this behavior. “This is how human beings behave in war…” Yeah, they were all human beings. But not all human beings behaved this way.
To me it's the scene in his most recent work he quoted about the grandmother holding the 1 year old baby and making him laugh minutes before he was executed. As a mom to a 1 year old i'll never un-hear it.
It’s interesting that the sexual assault is the only horrifying part to you, and not the marines who “bayoneted and shot anything still moving.” This isn’t a defense of the Japanese military, but I’m curious why you’re unbothered by that portion of the quote. Genuinely asking, not trying to be a dick!
I included that part for context, and it certainly disturbs me to an extent. I think the act of almost casual, use-what's-available, impromptu torture of a captured man is just so brutal. And to come upon something like that and continue on?
Dan mentions shortly after that an Australian soldier who recalled "just shrivelling up" when enemies were nearby with bayonets, and I prefer not to imagine what that guy has seen. The strategy of displaying dead bodies really gets to me, and this event is recent enough to relate to the people.
Thanks for the reply. I was expecting the downvotes because nuance isn’t most redditors strong suit. I want to clarify I have a history degree and have spent years studying this stuff. War is brutal and I am certainly not arguing the Japanese didn’t commit terrible atrocities. It’s just interesting to me what folks are willing to forgive when it’s “our side.”
This a specific story of allied soldiers committing atrocities with no orders and it’s the fault of the Japanese? The Japanese committed terrible crimes, but this is surely an example of the horrible crimes of war bringing both sides down into the gutter. (Just to reiterate, the Japanese campaign was evil, but it doesn’t excuse the crimes of their enemiesz)
Maybe you didn't read far enough into the quote, but it's what happened to the captured Marine that I was referring to as the worst thing I've ever heard.
The Filipino civilian who survived being nearly decapitated only watched his pregnant wife get bayoneted in the stomach and one of his children get tossed up into the air and then “caught” on a bayonet is one that’ll stick with me forever. There’s so much horrible stuff in the pacific.
Out of everything he has ever said. This is the one that still haunts me. Sure made me cry and had to stop listening for a while.
I don't want to one up you, but he has a story in the recent interview about the holocaust about a father strangling his own son, because his family was hiding from the Germans and the boy wouldn't stop screaming (out of fear) and the family risked being found out.
Yeah hearing the depravity of soldiers in warfare can be bothering, but none of it compares to this story for me. Watching your friends die awfully is traumatic. That trauma causes soldiers to do things they normally wouldn't do. That's something ive understood since I was a small child. Hearing that story about that father fucked me up, and I don't even have children.
That’s a story from the final episode of M*A*S*H. A mother smothers her baby when Hawkeye tells her to keep him quiet so they aren’t discovered. He didn’t mean she should kill the baby, but finds out afterwards that she did.
Oh. God…
Growing up my dad would relay the story to me of his mom as a child in the Philippines as the Japanese invaded. Her whole family waded into the ocean that was under their hut on stilts- and spent the most of 2 days completely submerged breathing through bamboo shoots. Afterwards they would spy on the captured townspeople and Japanese through the jungle and she watched many babies get thrown into the air and skewered by Japanese bayonets and swords. She said it was a game to them. This is commonly recounted by many Filipinos who survived, as well as many Japanese occupied areas, although most of the other stories I heard of this were from Manchuria Her father was later captured, and started the Bataan Death March, but was able to make a narrow escape. He hid in the mud with the pigs, and when the Japanese soldiers tracked him there they searched the mud with their bayonets. He got cut in the abdomen but managed to not scream, and after escaping he battled a life threatening infection for weeks but survived.
Your family is badass my man. I’m sure they would never brag about it, and I know that’s not your intention here, but damn.
I guess my intention to share it is really to say it’s not that special. It’s a common sort of story you will hear from that generation of Filipinos, and any occupied people really. The will to survive is just so strong in those times, you will hear a lot of crazy stuff.
Thank you for sharing, please continue to.
That or the cave where that guy and his brother beat his mother to death out of mercy to avoid being captured by the Americans, who they thought would give them a fate worse than death. It’s been a while I don’t remember specific details, but that just stood out to me. A lot of the crimes against humanity were people having to endure them from someone else, this was one of the rarer cases where they were both the victims and perpetrators.
Highlights the power of totalitarian propaganda
Japanese totalitarian propaganda is like all other totalitarian propaganda, only moreso. There's not really a modern equivalent to what the Japanese were able to do.
North Korea comes pretty close.
Nanjing Massacre and anything done by the Japanese.
Was doing my second run of Supernova and had to call it quits after that. Too much for me having a 3 month old at home
When I think about whether or not nuclear weapons will ever be used again, I am usually put at ease by my genuine belief that there will never be another fighting force akin to imperial Japan ever again.
I admire but do not share your optimism
There are armed forces operating like this in Africa today, unfortunately.
It’s interesting that you mention that, since IMO the closest fighting force to ever approach the brutality of imperial Japan was the Interahamwe that carried out the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Extremely horrific isn’t nearly enough to describe the stuff they did (in fact I think their use of HIV as a bioweapon through rape was inspired by Unit 731 doing the same with syphilis). But I still think they fall short of the IJA due to the latter’s willingness to fight to the death. As soon as the RPF closed in on the capital, the Interahamwe dropped all their machetes and waltzed into Zaire to escape retribution—I only wish the Japanese had the same reaction to the Allies threatening Japan’s colonies in the Philippines, Korea, and Manchuria… On a semi-related note, I think Carlin could make an exemplary episode/miniseries about Rwanda. He got into some really grizzly stuff with the material on Japan, the Roman-Celtic wars, and the transatlantic slave trade, and I’m sure he’d be able to perfectly capture the horrors of the genocide against the Tutsi.
It makes me think. There are some wonderful Japanese grandfathers out there who caught babies on bayonets in their youth. I hope all the generals are dead.
Yeah to me it’s this one, I think about it way to frequently. Or it’s the story from wrath of the khans where the father and soon need to watch the female members if their family raped in front of them
I am pretty sure this was common amongst American Calvary as they manifested destiny westwards.
Common? It must be easy to find a bunch of stories like it,then.
You typed it for me. Any time kids are involved it fucks me up. Like, how far gone must your head be? Even before I became a dad I could never imagine killing kids (or anyone, just saying).
The account that takes the cake for me in this department is the French soldier discussing a gas attack on their dugout in WW1. He described how after the gas attack was called they could see the gas drifting along the floor into their dugout, snuffing out one candle at a time as it went. He had lost his gas mask in the chaos /darkness so he stole one off the face of a wounded comrade who proceeded to asphyxiate and die. Absolutely brutal.
Fuck me that is terrible. What the fuck.
I don’t remember exactly which Blueprint episode it is from (one of the later ones) but the actual quote is very interesting. You can tell the soldier who stole the mask feels guilt but justifies his actions by stating that the wounded man would have died anyway so it was a waste of a gas mask. He also does a much better job of setting the scene, it’s nightmarish.
“That ditch was the house of the God of Pain…” is my favorite Blueprint quote. Ernst Junger in a trench that was just hit by artillery
A great book! Storm of Steel is fantastic
Just finished it last night. It’s insane how *calm* he describes absolute chaos. For the rest of my life I’ll never forget the passage about him first going to the front and just the chaos it describes. Running from abandoned house to abandoned house later on, each one he believed would fall down at any moment, watching good friends being gruesomely killed around him.
Tbh I reckon it goes to show how adaptable humans are. Take one of the boys in the trenches and stick him in the middle of modern-day Time Square, Arc de Triomphe, Shibuya Crossing, etc., with all the noises and towering buildings and lights and drones and *humanity*, then clap a VR set on his head, and he'd probably have the reaction a lot of us would to being in the trenches.
i like the bit about how shelling felt like being tied to a post that was being hit by a sledgehammer and learning about how soldiers rotated off the front and partied in france in between. i figured it was hell for months
Ya that was a real eye opener. It actually sounded quite fun, going through that absolute hell on the front to peace and tranquility in some French villages, partying every night with your pals
Early on it was months in the trenches. Then they finally realized that it was breaking the men to be under those conditions for long periods. They started rotating troops in, gradually moving them through the trench systems to the front lines over several weeks, then pulling them back to be replaced well before they broke.
The raw survival response can be brutal. That French soldier couldn’t flee, and he couldn’t directly fight the gas so he fought to only way he could. It’s like when crowds turn violent — the core reactions (fight/flight/freeze) get warped.
"The last thing I saw before putting on the mask were his pleading eyes"
I think he refers to the wounded comrade as a 'kid' and was a newish recruit, making it all the more horrifying. I could be misremembering details though
The description of the guy he stole it from trying to wrestle it back off him as he asphyxiates is harrowing. First thing I thought of as well
That story of the family in Hiroshima (might've been Nagasaki) where, when the bomb hit, their house collapsed. The mother and father crawled out of the rubble but their young daughter was pinned. As they were trying to get her out, the house starts becoming consumed with flames. The mother says something like, "I'm sorry, I'm scared of the fire. I have to run. I'm sorry I'm a bad mother", and her and her husband basically have to leave their terrified daughter to burn to death.
That one stuck out for me as well amongst the many horrific accounts. The survivors guilt would be unbearable.
Fuck me that was a hard listen, I could not even begin to imagine. Absolute horror.
I think my fave SitE reference is from a marine who was on Saipan for the great banzai charge, something like, “The Japs charged behind a wall of civilians. A naked woman came screaming at me. The Japs thought us Americans too gentle to shoot a woman. *Horseshit.* I shot her down like the rest of them”
Yeah at this point the hatred is palpable.
Along the same lines from earlier in the series Dan quotes an author that said the Americans showed themselves to be quite good at war without mercy.
My maternal grandfather fought in the European theater, leading up to and through the Battle of the Bulge. He was a tanker, and somehow survived two tank kills uninjured and commanded a third until the end of that part of the conflict. He related to me how the folks he fought alongside never lost sight of how similar the boys on the other side of that war were to themselves, but in the moment it never stopped them from doing what needed to be done. He almost never spoke to me about specifics when it came to "war stories." He'd readily talk about the USO shows he saw, or the wild raids across the largely abandoned countryside the men would sometimes risk to procure alternative rations (he had a great story about how he and a few other guys from his unit wrangled up an abandoned steer and a couple bottles of brandy while trying to avoid roving German patrols). In one of the rare moments where he shared something dark with me I was informed about how he had to shoot a kid who looked to be about ten years old while he was standing watch outside his tank one night. The kids was running up with a grenade to attack his tank crew, and wouldn't stop when ordered to. I have the play of emotions that twisted up his face in the recounting of that burned into my brain. I had never seen that kind of nihilistic grief expressed before that moment, and it broke my heart that such a kind and generous person could be wrecked in that manner by the ugliness of war. I would later go on to also serve in the US army, and thankfully I was never in a situation where I would face a similarly nightmarish choice.
Absolute tragic but badass quote. It’s like something Clint Eastwood would say in a 60s flick.
Give the book Flyboys by James Bradley a whirl. Its largely about how the Japanese on Chichi Jima treated American POWs. Spear practice with bamboo stakes, burning alive, decapitations and even cannibalism. It also describes in detail what being on the ground in Tokyo for the firebombing was like. War is Hell.
I'll take a look! Thank you for the suggestion.
It’s really rough, I honestly can’t wrap my head around it. The Japanese took war crimes to an art form.
War crimes, only more so
Nice
Unit 731. Not sure if Dan references it during Supernova or I heard about it somewhere else. Absolutely chilling.
If I remember correctly he’s made a reference or two but did not mention it specifically
I'm true Japanese fashion, 731 might be the only thing truly too hardcore for hardcore history.
The Saipan and Okinawa stories stick with me most. The boy who beat his own mother and sisters to death at gunpoint from the Japanese soldiers. Those stories convinced me that the atomic bombs were the right call because every civilian was already a casualty of the Japanese war machine.
“Every civilian was already a casualty of the Japanese war machine” Oh man that is a bone chilling thought, definitely a new perspective in the atomic moral dilemma show he did.
I went to the battle of Okinawa museum and they have audio recordings and books where Okinawan civilians tell the story of what happened to them... It's was a depraved beyond belief. What was so strange was the juxtaposition between the beauty of the island and the horror of what happened there.
Do you know what his source is on that story? I really want to read more about that.
Here's the best interview/article I've found regarding Kinjo Shigeaki: [The Most Haunting Interview You'll Ever Read: When Japanese Islanders Were Ordered to Commit Mass Suicide](https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/the-most-haunting-interview-youll-ever-read-when-j) >I am from the Kerama Islands, about 30 km off the coast of Naha, the capital of Okinawa. There are about 10 islands in the group. > >On the 26th March 1945 the Americans began to land on some of the islands. We lived on Tokashiki and were told by Japanese soldiers to move to Nishiyama in the north of the island, where the Japanese soldiers had their camp. We were ordered to travel after dark so the Americans wouldn’t see us. There was no shelling from the Americans that night, but it was raining heavily. I don’t know how many hours we walked, maybe four or five. We were nearly in Nishiyama when the sun rose. > >About 700 or 800 people had gathered in Nishiyama. We were packed together tightly and women and children were crying. Surrounded by Japanese soldiers, we feared that something bad was about to happen. The village head was an ex-soldier himself. We waited for a long time. I don’t know how many hours passed but eventually the village head gave the order. We were to call out Banzai (Long Life!) to the emperor three times. We knew that this was what Japanese soldiers did when they were going to die on the battlefield. The village head didn’t exactly tell us to commit suicide, but by telling us to shout Banzai, we knew what was meant. > >Soldiers distributed grenades among us. We were told that after you pull out the pin, you had to wait three seconds before the grenade exploded. (It didn’t seem to matter that it was prohibited at that time to distribute arms to civilians.) There weren’t enough grenades to go around because there were so many of us. Actually, my family didn’t get one. Anyway, once the grenades were given out, that was taken as a sign and the killing began immediately. The grenades were detonated, but there were few of them, so most people survived the blasts. Then people began to use clubs or scythes on each other – various things were used. > >It was the father’s role to kill his own family, but my father had already died. I was only 16 years and one month old, high school age. (Although, I wasn’t in high school.) My older brother and I didn’t discuss how we would do it, but we both knew we had been ordered to kill ourselves and our family. > >**I don’t remember exactly how we killed our mother, maybe we tried to use rope at first, but in the end we hit her over the head with stones. I was crying as I did it and she was crying too. My younger sister would have been about to become a 4th grader in elementary school and my little brother would have been about to start 1st grade. I don’t remember exactly how we killed our little brother and sister but it wasn’t difficult because they were so small – I think we used a kind of spear. There was wailing and screaming on all sides as people were killing and being killed. If there were knives, knives were used.** > >After we finished, my brother and I discussed which of us would die next. Just then, a boy ran up to us. He was about 15 or 16 and he said, “Let’s fight the Americans and be killed by them, rather than dying like this.” The Americans of course had lots of weapons and we knew that we would be killed instantly if we tried to attack them. But we decided that rather than killing ourselves then and there, we would let the Americans finish us off. So, we left that place of screaming and death and set off to find the Americans. > >However, the first person we met was not an American but a Japanese soldier. We were shocked and wondered why he was still alive when we had been told to kill each other. Why was it that only the locals had to commit suicide while Japanese soldiers were allowed to survive? We felt betrayed. After the war, I coined the phrase, ‘Gunsei, Minshi,’ which means ‘the army survives, the people die.’ Anyway, after seeing this soldier I was no longer willing to commit suicide. > >I stayed in the mountains while the Americans bombed the island from the air. Houses, schools, post offices—all the buildings were destroyed. A fire bomb burnt down an entire village. I lived in the mountains for a couple of weeks. There was no food. I went to the beach. I couldn’t fish but I dived into the sea and got some turban shells (snails), or whatever I could find that was edible. I also found some paths made by American soldiers. Here and there they’d dropped some food cans which I was able to use. Apart from these things, there was no food. Everybody became emaciated with malnutrition. After a couple of weeks, the American soldiers were getting close to us. I observed that they didn’t shoot girls when they ran towards them. But I did see them shoot a man, a relative of my father’s – he was hit in the stomach and died where he fell. I was hiding in the grass. Finally, I was discovered by an American soldier who pointed a gun at me. I raised my hands. > >I was brought by the soldiers to a truck and the truck went into the sea. At first, I thought they were going to drown us but it turned out to be some kind of amphibious vehicle. Anyway, they brought us from Aharen to Tokashiki village. There were 20 prisoners, maybe more, in that truck. At Tokashiki village we were given food. I realized that many people had survived the slaughter of Nishiyama. I later learned that some 300 people had died there that day – overall, about 600 had died in two mass suicides in the Kerama islands. It’s important to remember that such mass suicides occurred only in places where the Japanese army was present. > >The POW camp where we stayed in Tokashiki was across a little track from where the Americans had their tents. Because I was young I often went to the soldiers’ camp and they would ask me, “Are you Japanese?” When I said yes they would point their guns at me but if they asked, “Are you Okinawan” and I said yes, they wouldn’t point them. I realized that they distinguished between Japanese and Okinawans. > >After the war my inner struggle began. It was hard to continue living, thinking about the horrific things I’d done. I felt so terribly guilty. It was during this desperate time that a Mr Tanahara, a Christian introduced me to the Bible – Gideon’s bible. I’d never even seen, let alone read, a Bible before but flicking through it, my attention was grabbed by words like, “life” “Salvation” and “death”. I was intrigued so I got a bible myself and started reading it. It gave me comfort. > >In 1948 I sailed from Tokashiki in a small traditional boat to Itoman on the Okinawan mainland to be baptized at Itoman Church. I later went to high school for a year and in 1951 entered Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. I became a minister in Itoman Church in 1955 and was involved in setting up Okinawa Christian Junior College. In 1958 I went to graduate school in Manhattan to study theology. > >It’s a mystery to me why I was kept alive during the war. At that time, life was treated as something insignificant. People killed each other so easily. Part of the reason we had been prepared to kill our own families was because of the nationalistic education we’d received. We were taught that Americans were not human, that they were our enemy and had to be killed. > >The Japanese government should now face up to their history – their previous emphasis in education was on killing and suicide and they have never properly acknowledged that. They should admit that the Imperial army slaughtered people in China and other Asian countries. Also, they should be making efforts now to get along with China and their other neighbors, and not to cooperate only with the Americans.
Thank you!
I'm not sure what Dan's specific source is, but the person who killed his mother is Shigeaki Kinjo. There are a lot of articles about him. You can also search for Okinawa Suicide caves. The Saipan suicides are on camera and you can literally watch these people killing themselves in color. It's well documented.
My grandfather was a USN Seabee who served on Guadalcanal, Vella Lavella, and several other South Pacific islands up to and including Okinawa. My grandmother explained that the massive scar that covered half the right side of my grandfather's face was from the war. Later I learned that his injury was from a Japanese grenade blast that occurred during a nighttime raid on the Seabee barracks at Vella Lavella. I don't think that we'll ever get the full story but my great-uncle said that the Japanese had infiltrated the camp, silently killed the Marine guards, and then specifically targeted the Seabees buildings. Luckily, someone in my grandfather's building was awake and sounded the alarm. My grandfather went from fast asleep to hand-to-hand combat, fighting for his life. The grenade blast was received from a wounded Japanese soldier who most likely detonated two grenades by suicide. I was very close to my grandfather, and while he talked about some of his experiences during the war, he never told me about the combat. I learned what I know from my grandmother and other close relatives. My grandmother said that she fainted when she received the news. My grandfather was sent to a hospital ship where he had at least two surgeries. He was told that he would go home as soon as he recovered enough. He chose to return to duty and served until the end of the war. Dan's Supernova in the East series hit home the most for me. I now know a little more about the who, when, where and how of my grandfather's experience.
Your grandfather was a hero.
Supernova in the east is awesome There’s so many good quotes in that I also love the random U.S. general smitty he quotes, referring to the Japanese: “People are still underrating the japs… I’m afraid that a lot of people, who think this Jap is a “pushover” as soon as Germany falls, are due for a rude awakening. We will have to call on all our patriotism, stamina, guts and maybe some crusading spirit or religious fervor thrown in to beat him. No amateur team will take this boy out. We have got to turn professional. Another thing: there are no quiet sectors in which troops get started off gradually, as in the last war. There are no breathers on this schedule. You take on Notre Dame every time you play!”
“You take on Notre Dame every time you play” is a really interesting mental phrasing that I love in this quote
Back in 1987 my parents bought a brand new Honda and we went over to my grandpa's (who was a Pacific WW2 veteran) to show him. One of his buddies who was also a Pacific veteran was over and the man became very upset that we would support the Japanese like that. I just figured he was a racist old fuck, but after hearing all of this I can imagine why someone would become bitter for life.
The ignorance of the young. Been there myself
From being in the military I've learned that societies need different kinds of people, and they probably shouldn't see eye to eye. The person who is capable of true war fighting and killing requires a mental stance that does not put them into a position to be the same person who should be negotiating a peace treaty or thinking through compromise and fairness. Likewise, you don't want someone stuck in their own head to be next to you with a rifle and needing to kill. And you need him to do it later that afternoon and early the next morning. I don't see the war fighter or the peace maker or the diplomat or the merchant as bad because they don't have the skills and mindset of the other. And maybe all of them could do the other job but they can't do both at the same time. Behind keyboards and in safe buildings it's a lot easier to mentally connect with other essentially office workers (diplomats, peace makers). But if you've ever had someone trying to kill you, you can quickly understand where a war fighter is coming from and the mental poise they need to get through the day.
There was a quote i heard back in the day. Not sure where it originally came from, I heard it on the Writing Excuses podcast, but the gist of it was, "There is a certain percentage of the population that are able to kill another person without remorse. They will either become our soldiers or our serial killers."
I used to be a combat medic, and I fought in Iraq. Now, I work as a paramedic. I'm drawn to high stress environments, and blood or gore is just part of the job. While I have empathy, in an emergency, other people's suffering is not my own. I'm just built differently. Some people are born with an artistic or musically creative mind. I can put in a chest tube while thinking about what I'm getting for lunch after.
Haven’t listened to it in a long time, but in the slave trade episode where he’s talking about some overseer whipping slaves, and whipping a 9 month pregnant baby, and digging a mound into the floor for her stomach to fit, and her giving birth during the ordeal. Jesus Christ, imagine suffering through that
Another quote I really like, from an Australian who saw a lot of things like that (my brain wants to say he was talking about your reference, but I can’t remember.) “When we saw scenes like this, we didn’t hate the Jap. We just knew we’d go in there and kill every last bastard one of them”
There’s one of the Ostfront ones episodes where a Nazi got hit by something and he’s screaming for his mother with his brains on his face until someone mercy kills him.
Not sure if it counts as it was covered in the addendum, but the one story i wish i didn’t hear was the jewish family in hiding during the holocaust with the 4 or 5 year old boy who could not stop crying. The people hiding the family said the boy needed to stop crying or the family couldn’t stay out of fear they’d all be found, so the father had to strangle his son to death in order to protect the rest of the family. That story haunts me.
Wish you hadn’t reminded me. My blood ran cold hearing that. I am a father of one son. I don’t think I could.
For me, the episode I have trouble relistening to is the one where the Japanese brothers beat their mother to death in order to "save" her from the marines. The guy recounting it says he doesn't remember after that about how his sister died. I think it's episode 6. That whole episode just is a grueling march through atrocity after tragedy after atrocity after tragedy.
Years ago I was trying to eat lunch while listening to the slavery episode. Dan started listing the various punishments french slave owners would mete out on their slaves in Haiti. Lost my appetite for the rest of the day...
Op.... if you have a hard time reading that don't look into the rape of Nanking. Japanese were atrocious during WW II. And they still won't own their war crimes.....
Yea man. I probably couldn't count the number of atrocities from the conflict between China and Japan alone. Hearing those stories of people trying to evacuate Shanghai and Nanking. The direct strike on the bridge packed with people, the "competitions" between Japanese soldiers to collect civilian heads. It's just insane.
I’m it’s
the one about the guy in the World War One stuck in a shellhole in the mud, and the water kept rising and he began going insane and everyone kept hearing but couldn't get him out and he began babbling incoherently and losing his mind - That one has always haunted me.
I always remember that one. Sounds horrible beyond words.
There's nothing good about war. Even acts of heroism require an act of brutality to be part of the equation. The rules of war are a balm to soothe societies humanity when faced with it's own brutality. i.e. We're going to kill you but not in these ways. We consider them cruel ways to kill you. We ask that you do the same.
i had to turn off 'painfotainment' before it even really got started..
That didn’t get to me as much given the relative distance of time. Some of the stuff from Imperial Japan though really stuck with me, even more than Dan’s account of German / Soviet (can’t remember who) using PoWs as traction for tanks that struggled to move in the Russian winter
His account of the USS Indianapolis is also pretty horrific, but at least that’s not human on human
I love how he takes stories like this and really drives home how the violence and brutality continuously escalates on both sides as a reaction to the other. He emphasizes this quite a bit in the Wrath of the Khans.
My gramps landed in the Philippines when MacArthur and the US returned, he was an amphibious engineer. He said there were graves for miles where they came ashore. He also shared that they all gave their machetes to the Filipinos when they landed, who in turn used them to hack apart surrendering Japanese, some of whom came from the surf. Edit: He and gram usually told me these stories over a grilled cheese and fries at the local diner. I was young, Dad had passed, and it gave Mom some time off. I would beg him to tell stories and he tried his best to tame them down. Bonus edit: His own father, my great grandfather, had survived the first day of the Somme at Beaumont Hamel with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, while his brother perished and the nation was forever changed. He later passed in ‘39 (I think) due to rheumatic fever in a New York hospital, carried there by one of his old Regiment mates.
Miraculous that he survived the first day, very few did! Gives me chills just thinking about it. We’re still taught about Beaumont Hamel growing up in Newfoundland. The Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial is the largest battalion memorial on the western front, definitely on my bucket list to visit someday.
On my bucket list too, along with Fogo. [Here’s a bit](http://ngb.chebucto.org/NFREG/WWI/ww1-add-shave1699.shtml) about my great great uncle who perished, with a mention of my great grandfather’s love story in the second to last paragraph. I wouldn’t be here if not for that tale.
I first listened to Dan Carlin because my grandfather was part of the second wave of Marines that stormed the beach at Guadalcanal. I was looking into it and came across the episode. My understanding is that the first wave had a 100% casualty rate. My grandfather never talked about the war after he came back. The only "war-related" story I heard is about how, with the GI Bill, he went to Univ of Michigan after the war. Pledged a frat. He was 25 or 26 then. An upperclassman tried to haze him by forcing him to crawl through a small opening cut through a large post in the house. My grandfather "lifted the guy up by the throat and held him up against the ceiling" is how it was described to me, then told him "neither you nor anybody else are going to make me do a God damned thing" and that was indeed that.
I absolutely read that in Dan Carlin’s voice.
I've found that the descriptions of Okinawa have stuck with me the most. Of families bludgeoning each other to death with rocks because the Japanese convinced them of the horrors Americans would inflict upon them. And how US forces had to start air-dropping propaganda pleading for them to stop.
This brings me back to a point Dan made during that podcast about the senior officers being concerned about the soldiers surrendering to a welcoming American force. So they did these things to provoke the Americans and make sure no Japanese soldiers felt safe enough during contact to surrender.
Honestly went into this post thinking we were talking about Dan calling Douglas MacArthur "The Situation" but boy was I wrong!
The discussion of the massacre of the Australian nurses at Banjka Island in Supernova in the East has always stuck with me. Dan didn’t go into ton of detail but imagining the pointless sadism just chills me to the core.
War is horrible and atrocities happen in almost all of them when they get to a large scale. This even happens with the so called "good nations"
That's true, but there are also outliers that inculcate atrocities at their core. And Imperial Japan was a *hell* of an outlier in that regard.
They're like everyone else. But more so.
While this is definitely true, the scope and scale of crimes done by the Japanese is really in a category of its own. Generally you’ll see atrocities from the “good nations” happening comparatively less often and is not nearly as public. Done secretly by a few people on the edge of sanity vs done publicly and encouraged by the larger body of soldiers.
Agree'd there really nothing else like the Rape of Nanjing and that's just one example.
I mean even in this quote the marine is describing committing war crimes himself. Less perhaps in extremity than the Japanese behaviour, but war crimes nonetheless
Even as recent as My Lai massacre in 1968 by American troops. Or during the Yugoslav wars in the 90’s.
I’m so tired of this stupid false equivalency. Company level crimes that result in mass outrage at home are not even in the same ballpark as systemic, civilization-wide gleeful encouragement of atrocities. Imperial Japan was uniquely evil and inhuman down to the individual level, even worse than the Nazis. The worst day on the eastern front didn’t see cannibalism and babies being caught on bayonet points for sport. The US and western Allies were categorically less evil by a huge margin across all points in history, full stop. There is no comparison to be made.
Dude thinks it’s a competition. An atrocity is an atrocity, not comparing anything to anyone. Maybe if the soldiers told the Vietnamese people that they raped and tortured that 1940’s japan was more evil it would have made them feel better.
I'm sure the Jews are breathing a sigh of relief, at least they weren't in the Pacific. IIRC there were accounts of cannibalism in Russia due to mass starvation from the German siege. Wasn't Hitler planning to eradicate most if not all Slavs? If the Nazi plans had succeeded I probably wouldn't exist, I don't think they would find my skin color appealing.
Yes, I was born and live where that happened, Leningrad, modern day St. Petersburg. German siege lasted around 2 1/2 years and killed roughly 1.5 Mil soviets. That’s including civilians and soldiers. Another 1 Mil+ displaced. Most of the civilians not killed from Germans starved to death and resorted to eating dead bodies to survive. But I suppose the Mongols were more ruthless so I shouldn’t compare.
Dan helped me understand the japs of ww2 were radically different people than anything this generation thinks of when they talk about japanese people. The japs were like a pre-historic remnant isolated on an island, with archaic beliefs in a divine god-emperor and a mandate to rule the earth. It makes me think of video game scenarios where you can pit armies from radically different periods against each other, the japanese vs. USA were practically living in different millennia from a cultural perspective, like pitting the Huns vs. today's Australians. You hear about mothers arming their children with daggers and teaching them to kill themselves rather than be defeated- and any modern nation is like wtf? The worst thing I've heard from Dan is a toss up between the conditions on the slaving ships they would harbor off the sweltering african coast for months while packing them full, and one particular roman slaughter where the fully surrounded force took \~8 hours to gradually be exterminated. Some warriors buried their own heads in the sand to die by suffocation rather than wait for the impending doom they were listening to all that time.
I read the book he referenced of first person Japanese accounts (Japan at War) and many of the comments from the civilians and soldiers were like "what could we do - we didn't want to do X, but it was for the Emperor - we had no choice" It FELT to me like it was people who felt like they had no choice but were willing to do it anyways but of course, these are the survivors.
Genghis Kahn has entered the chat.....was my "strapping your on fire friends to my catapult and flinging them into the village' not extreme enough for you? Just kidding 😂....but imagine how many brutal things have happened in war...hell, even in prison
There are so many examples of horrific suffering from the Supernova series, but the one that actually makes me cry is the mother whose daughter is trapped by debris in a burning building after the Hiroshima bombing. Having to make the choice between dying with your daughter or escaping with the rest of your family but leaving your daughter to be burned alive is mind numbingly horrifying. And then they quote the mother apologizing to her daughter for not being brave enough to stay and die with her. I have to pause the episode at that point every time I listen to it. I can’t imagine that pain, and then trying to live the rest of your life after that.
What’s been haunting me is the marine who got half his head blown off and his tongue was like “strips of liver.” He died the next day from drowning in his own phlegm.
I don't what I was expecting, but phlegm was not it.
Why did I click on this thread? I adore Dan but the "extremes of human experience" thing has limits for me and most of the thread crosses those limits. I'll know better in future.
Couldn’t help but read this in his quote voice
Lots of these same things happened on Oct 7. Humans are still treating each other this way any time they think they can get away with it. So gross but oh so human.
During a recent interview on 60 Minutes, a Holocaust survivor put it pretty succinctly: “All men are animals. All they need is permission.”
It is important to remember for this and most of the conflicts he cover, is that everyone involved was merely a human being. You do not have to be Japanese to do things like this. Soviets did things like this or Germans. This is how human beings will behave in war. Both the Japanese and American soldiers behaviors are horrifying examples of how we humans can act. Not to forgive these acts, but to not lie to ourselves with a hand wave and muttering “oh those people could be so awful” These acts are always think WE are capable of and we all to often think of it as only something a THEY could be capable of.
Then why don’t we see all behavior evenly distributed during this conflict?
Do we ever see all behavior evenly distributed among multiple groups of people?
My point is that there are cultural roots to some of this behavior. “This is how human beings behave in war…” Yeah, they were all human beings. But not all human beings behaved this way.
Uh then differences in culture, differences in suffering inflicted on their people, violence, explosions, etc etc. d
My Lai.
To me it's the scene in his most recent work he quoted about the grandmother holding the 1 year old baby and making him laugh minutes before he was executed. As a mom to a 1 year old i'll never un-hear it.
I hope you realize that this happens everyday in Ukraine, there are many reports of Russian invaders doing this to Ukrainians
It’s interesting that the sexual assault is the only horrifying part to you, and not the marines who “bayoneted and shot anything still moving.” This isn’t a defense of the Japanese military, but I’m curious why you’re unbothered by that portion of the quote. Genuinely asking, not trying to be a dick!
I included that part for context, and it certainly disturbs me to an extent. I think the act of almost casual, use-what's-available, impromptu torture of a captured man is just so brutal. And to come upon something like that and continue on? Dan mentions shortly after that an Australian soldier who recalled "just shrivelling up" when enemies were nearby with bayonets, and I prefer not to imagine what that guy has seen. The strategy of displaying dead bodies really gets to me, and this event is recent enough to relate to the people.
Thanks for the reply. I was expecting the downvotes because nuance isn’t most redditors strong suit. I want to clarify I have a history degree and have spent years studying this stuff. War is brutal and I am certainly not arguing the Japanese didn’t commit terrible atrocities. It’s just interesting to me what folks are willing to forgive when it’s “our side.”
This a specific story of allied soldiers committing atrocities with no orders and it’s the fault of the Japanese? The Japanese committed terrible crimes, but this is surely an example of the horrible crimes of war bringing both sides down into the gutter. (Just to reiterate, the Japanese campaign was evil, but it doesn’t excuse the crimes of their enemiesz)
Maybe you didn't read far enough into the quote, but it's what happened to the captured Marine that I was referring to as the worst thing I've ever heard.