"Cluster bombs called 'war crime'"

"Rats" wrote in message
...
"cypher745" wrote in message
m...
Hmmm. When you consider that I was not born till nearly 20 years after
the
fact. And that at the time my family had still not immigrated to the US,
I
would have to say that "I" did not kill anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

I just wanted to know if you opposed to the taking of human life, the
use
of
nuclear weapons or both. It would seem that the sanctity of human life
means
nothing to you. That it is just the use of nuclear weapons that you
object
to.

Rubbish. Soldiers have a duty to "die for their country".


Innocent civilians
don't.

I can't agree. A soldier has a duty to fight. Not to die.

The point is as horrible as it was killing hundreds of thousands of
civilians in those two attacks, the alternative would have been worse.

I think that what you need to understand is that the US knew this. They knew
that they were going to kill 100,000 to a 150,000 Japanese men, women and
children with those bombs. But they also knew that a direct assault on the
island would result in the deaths of millions of Japanese men, women and
children from suicides alone. Hell, even with the dropping of both bombs,
there was an attempted coup d'etat by a faction of the Japanese army when
they found out the Emporer was going to surrender.

You very quickly forget or choose to ignore
the attrocities that the US has committed in the many wars that it has
waged. By no means am I saying that the enemy that the US was fighting was
without fault

No we don't.

We know perfectly well that at times some of soldiers have done things that
we as country would not be proud of. But we also know, that our soldiers
have never done this.

December 14, 1944

Puerto Princesa Prison Camp, Palawan, Philippines All about them, their work
lay in ruins. Their raison d'etre, the task their commandant had said would
take them three months but had taken nearly three years. A thousand naked
days of clearing, lifting, leveling, wheelbarrowing, hacking. Thirty-odd
months in close heavy heat smashing rocks into smaller rocks, and smaller
rocks into pebbles, hammering sad hunks of brain coral into bone-white flour
with which to make concrete. Ripping out the black humus floor of the
jungle, felling the gnarled beasts of mahogany or narra or kamagong that
happened to be in the way.

Above the bay, in a malarial forest skittering with monkeys and monitor
lizards, they had built an airstrip where none should be, and now they were
happy to see it in ruins, cratered by bombs. One hundred and fifty slaves
stood on a tarmac 2,200 meters long and 210 meters wide, straining with
shovels and pickaxes and rakes. Ever since the air raids started two months
earlier, Lieutenant Sato, the one they called "the Buzzard," had ordered
them out each morning to fill the bomb pits, to make the runway usable
again. This morning had been no different. The men had risen at dawn and
eaten a breakfast of weevily rice, then climbed aboard the trucks for the
short ride to the airstrip. As usual, hey worked all morning and took a
break for lunch around noon. But now the Buzzard said no lunch would be
served on the strip, that instead the food would be prepared back at the
barracks.

The men were puzzled, because they'd never eaten lunch at their barracks
before, not on a workday. It didn't make sense to drive back now, for they
still had considerable repair work to do. Sato offered no explanation. The
prisoners crawled into their trucks again and took the bumpy serpentine road
back to the prison. In the meager shade of spindly coconut palms, they ate
their lunches squatting beside their quarters in an open-air stockade that
was secured with two barbed-wire fences. The entire compound was built at
the edge of a cliff that dropped fifty ragged feet to a coral beach splashed
by the warm blue waters of Puerto Princesa Bay. Around 1 p.m. the air-raid
alarm sounded. It was nothing more than a soldier pounding on an old
Catholic church bell splotched with verdigris. The men looked up and saw two
American fighters, P-38s, streaking across the sky, but the planes were
moving away from the island and were too high to pose a danger. Having
become discriminating appraisers of aerial threat, the prisoners ignored the
signal and resumed their lunches.

A few minutes later a second air-raid alarm sounded. The men consulted the
skies and this time saw an American bomber flying far in the distance. They
didn't take the alarm seriously and kept on eating. Presently a third
air-raid alarm sounded, and this time Sato and a few of his men marched into
the compound with sabers drawn and rifles fixed with bayonets. Sato insisted
that everyone heed the signal and descend into the air-raid hovels. "They're
coming!" he shrieked. "Planes-hundreds of planes!" Again the men were
puzzled, and this time suspicious. When planes had come before, Sato had
never registered any particular concern for their safety. Many times they'd
been working on the landing strip when American planes had menaced the site.
The Japanese would leap into their slit trenches, but often made the
prisoners work until the last possible minute. The Americans had to fend for
themselves, out in the open, as aircraft piloted by their own countrymen
dropped out of the sky to bomb and strafe the airstrip. Several weeks
earlier an American from Kentucky named James Stidham had taken a piece of
shrapnel from one of the American bombers, a B-24 Liberator, and was now
paralyzed.

During the lunch hour he lay on a stretcher in the compound, silent and
listless, with a fellow prisoner spoon-feeding him his ration. "Hundreds of
planes!" Sato shouted again, with even more urgency. "Hurry." The slaves
moved toward the air-raid shelters. They were primitive, nothing more than
narrow slits dug four feet deep and roofed with logs covered over with a few
feet of dirt. There were three main trenches, each about a hundred feet
long. On both ends, the structures had tiny crawl-space entrances that
admitted one man at a time. Approximately fifty men could fit inside each
one, but they had to pack themselves in with their knees tucked under their
chins. The prisoners had constructed these crude shelters for their own
safety after the American air raids started in October, to avoid more
casualties like Stidham. With Sato's reluctant approval, they'd also painted
"POW" on the galvanized-metal roof of their barracks. Sato was behaving
strangely today, the prisoners thought, but perhaps he knew something,
perhaps a massive air attack was indeed close at hand. All the signs pointed
to the imminent arrival of the American forces. The tide of the war was
turning fast*#8212;everyone knew it.

That very morning a Japanese seaplane had spotted a convoy of American
destroyers and battleships churning through the Sulu Sea en route to
Mindoro, the next large island north of Palawan. If not today, then someday
soon Sato and his company of airfield engineers would have to reckon with
the arrival of U.S. ground troops, and their work on Palawan would be
finished. Reluctantly, the American prisoners did as they were told, all 150
of them, crawling single file into the dark, poorly ventilated pits.
Everyone but Stidham, whose stretcher was conveniently placed beside one of
the trench entrances. If the planes came, his buddies would gather his limp
form and tuck him into the shelter with everyone else. They waited and
waited but heard not a single American plane, let alone a hundred. They
huddled in the stifling dankness of their collective body heat, sweat
coursing down their bare chests. The air-raid bell continued to peal. A Navy
signalman named C. C. Smith refused to go into his pit. Suddenly the Buzzard
set upon him.

He raised his saber high so that it gleamed in the midday sun, and with all
his strength he brought it blade side down. Smith's head was cleaved in two,
the sword finally stopping midway down the neck. Then, peeking out the ends
of the trenches, the men saw several soldiers bursting into the compound.
They were carrying five-gallon buckets filled with a liquid. The buckets
sloshed messily as the soldiers walked. With a quick jerk of the hands, they
flung the contents into the openings of the trenches. By the smell of it on
their skin, the Americans instantly recognized what it was-high-octane
aviation fuel from the airstrip. Before they could apprehend the full
significance of it, other soldiers tossed in lighted bamboo torches. Within
seconds, the trenches exploded in flames. The men squirmed over each other
and clawed at the dirt as they tried desperately to shrink from the intense
heat. They choked back the smoke and the fumes, their nostrils assailed by
the smell of singed hair and roasting flesh. They were trapped like termites
in their own sealed nest. Only a few managed to free themselves. Dr. Carl
Mango, from Pennsylvania, sprang from his hole, his clothes smoldering. His
arms were outstretched as he pleaded-"Show some reason, please God show
reason"-but a machine gunner mowed him down. Another prisoner crawled from
his trench, wrested a rifle from the hands of a soldier, and shot him before
receiving a mortal stab in the back. A number of men dashed toward the fence
and tried to press through it but were quickly riddled with lead, leaving a
row of corpses hung from the barbed strands like drying cuttlefish. A few
men managed to slip through the razor ribbon and leap from the high cliff,
but more soldiers were waiting on the beach to finish them off. Recognizing
the futility of escape but wanting to wreak a parting vengeance, one burning
prisoner emerged from his trench, wrapped his arms tightly around the first
soldier he saw, and didn't let go-a death embrace that succeeded in setting
the surprised executioner on fire.

All the while, Lieutenant Sato scurried from trench to trench with saber
drawn, loudly exhorting his men and occasionally punctuating his commands
with a high, nervous laugh. At his order, another wave of troops approached
the air-raid shelters, throwing grenades into the flaming entrances and
raking them with gunfire. Some of the troops poked their rifle barrels
through the entrances of the trenches and fired point-blank at the huddled
forms within. James Stidham, the paralytic who had been watching all of this
from his stretcher, quietly moaned in terror. A soldier stepped over to him
and with a perfunctory glance fired two slugs into his face. When Lieutenant
Sato was satisfied that all 150 prisoners were dead, he ordered his men to
heave the stray bodies back into the smoky pits. The soldiers splattered
additional gasoline inside and reignited the trenches. They tossed in more
grenades as well as sticks of dynamite to make it appear as though the
victims had perished in an air raid after all, with the shelters receiving
several "direct hits" from American bombs. The immense pall of smoke curling
from the three subterranean pyres was noted by observers five miles distant,
across Puerto Princesa Bay. Entries from Japanese diaries later found at the
camp spoke hauntingly of December 14. "Although they were prisoners of war,"
one entry stated, "they truly died a pitiful death. From today on I will not
hear the familiar greeting 'Good morning, Sergeant Major.'" Another
mentioned that on the beach below the camp, the "executed prisoners [are]
floating and rolling among the breakwaters." Said another: "Today the shop
is a lonely place.

There are numerous corpses...and the smell is unbearable." On January 7,
1945, an officer from the Army's intelligence branch, known as G-2, sat down
with a man named Eugene Nielsen, who had a remarkable story to tell. Their
conversation was not casual; it was an official interrogation, and the
intelligence officer, a Captain Ickes, was taking notes. At the time of the
debriefing, Nielsen and Ickes happened to be on the tropical island of
Morotai, a tiny speck in the Spice Islands of the Dutch East Indies that had
become a crucial stepping-stone in General MacArthur's drive toward Japan.
Eugene Nielsen was an Army Private First Class who had been with the 59th
Coast Artillery on the besieged island of Corregidor-directly across from
Bataan-when he was captured by the Japanese in May 1942. Born and raised in
a small town in the mountains of Utah, Nielsen was twenty-eight years old,
and three of those years he had spent languishing in a prison camp near the
Palawan capital of Puerto Princesa. There he had done backbreaking work on
an airfield detail, crushing rock and coral and mixing concrete by hand.
Nielsen had been evacuated to Morotai along with five other ex-POWs. He was
convalescing while awaiting shipment home to the United States. Although he
was racked with the residual effects of the various diseases he'd contracted
while starving in the tropics, he had recovered much of his strength since
his escape from prison. He had two bullet wounds which were still on the
mend. The officer from G-2 sat horrified in his chair as Nielsen told his
story, which concerned an incident on Palawan several weeks earlier, the
full details of which no official from U.S. Army intelligence had apparently
heard before.

The trench smelled very strongly of gas. There was an explosion and flames
shot through the place. Some of the guys were moaning. I realized this was
iteither I had to break for it or die. Luckily I was in the trench that was
closest to the fence. So I jumped up and dove through the barbed wire. I
fell over the cliff and somehow grabbed on to a small tree, which broke my
fall and kept me from getting injured. There were Japanese soldiers posted
down on the beach. I buried myself in a pile of garbage and coconut husks. I
kept working my way under until I got fairly well covered up. Lying there, I
could feel the little worms and bugs eating holes in the rubbish, and then I
felt them eating holes into the skin of my back. When he looked around,
Nielsen realized that a surprising number of Americans had made it down to
the beach-perhaps twenty or thirty. Some, like Nielsen, had torn bare-handed
through the barbed wire, but the largest group had made it down by virtue of
a subterranean accident: a natural escape hatch that led from one of the
trenches out to a shallow ledge in the eroded cliff wall.

Several weeks earlier, while digging the air-raid pits, some of the
Americans had serendipitously discovered this small fissure, and they'd had
the forethought to conceal it by plugging the opening with sandbags and a
veneer of dirt so the Japanese would never see it. They had thought, in a
not very specific way, that this tunnel might come in handy someday, and
they were right. One by one, they escaped the incinerating heat of their
shelter by crawling through the hole and burrowing out to the rock landing.
From there they jumped down to the beach, where they hid among the various
crevices and rock outcroppings. By doing so they gained only a temporary
reprieve, however, trading one form of butchery for another. Eugene Nielsen,
still lying in the refuse heap, heard gunfire sputtering up and down the
beach. Systematically, the soldiers were searching the rocks and hunting
down fugitives. It was obvious that they intended to exterminate every last
one. The prisoners camouflaged themselves with slathered mud and cringed in
the rocky clefts and folds, lacerating their legs and feet on the coarse
coral as they tried to squeeze into ever tighter recesses. Other prisoners
took refuge in a sewage pipe that was half filled with stagnant water, while
still others concealed themselves in thick mattresses of jungle weeds higher
along the banks. The seaside massacre went on for three or four hours. The
Japanese would pluck the prisoners from their hiding places and slay them on
the spot, either by gunshot or by bayonet. Squads of soldiers combed the
weeds in tight formation, plunging their bayonets every foot or so until
they harpooned their quarry. One American who'd been caught was tortured at
some length by six soldiers, one of whom carried a container of gasoline.
Seeing the jerry can, the American understood his fate and begged to be
shot. The soldiers doused one of his feet with gasoline and set it alight,
then did the same with the other.

When he collapsed, they poured the rest of the gasoline over his body and
ignited it, leaving him writhing in flames on the beach. Not far away, a
prisoner from South Dakota named Erving Evans, realizing he'd been seen and
hoping to avoid the same fate, leaped up from a trash pile where he'd been
hiding and blurted, "All right, you *******s*#8212;here I am, and don't
miss." They didn't. They were bayoneting guys down low and making them
suffer. They shot or stabbed twelve Americans and then dug a shallow grave
in the sand and threw them in. Some of these men were still groaning while
they were covered with sand. Then the Japs started to cover the grave with
rubbish from the pile where I was hiding. They scraped some of the coconut
husks off, and found me lying there. Then they uncovered me from the
shoulders on down. They thought I was dead, and seemed to think I had been
buried by my friends. I lay there for about fifteen minutes while they stood
around talking Japanese. It was getting to be late in the afternoon. One of
the guys hollered it was time to eat dinner, and every one of the Japs there
went off somewhere to eat. I got up and ran down along the beach and hid in
a little pocket in a coral reef there.

Down among the coral, Nielsen encountered seven other survivors. One of them
was very badly burned. His hair was singed and "his hide was rubbing off
when he brushed against anything." They were all crouched among the rocks,
hiding from a barge that was methodically trolling the coves and foreshores.
Having exhausted their hunt by land, the Japanese were now searching by
water. Aboard the barge were three or four soldiers armed with rifles as
well as a tripod machine gun. Nielsen peeked around the corner and saw the
barge coming. He decided he was insufficiently hidden, so he broke off from
the group and crouched behind a bush close by. From where he was secreted,
he could watch the barge approaching. The Japanese were whispering among
themselves and excitedly pointing out crannies that looked promising. One of
the seven Americans, a marine from Mississippi named J. O. Warren, wasn't
leaning back quite far enough. The Japanese saw his foot protruding from a
rock and immediately shot it. Warren dropped in agony from his wound.

In what seemed to be a sacrificial act intended to help his comrades, Warren
hurled himself out in the open so as not to tip off the whereabouts of the
other six. He was immediately shot and killed. The barge passed on. I left
that area and started down the beach. About fifty yards ahead I ran into
more Japanese. Suddenly I realized I was surrounded. They were up above me
and also coming in from both sides. I was trapped. So I jumped in the sea. I
swam underwater as far as I could. When I came up there were twenty Japanese
firing at me, both from the cliff and from the beach. Shots were hitting all
around me. One shot hit me in the armpit and grazed my ribs. Another hit me
in the left thigh, then another one hit me right along the right side of my
head, grazing my temple. I think it knocked me out temporarily. For a short
period I was numb in the water, and I nearly drowned. Then I found a large
coconut husk bobbing around in the bay and used it to shield my head as I
swam. They kept shooting at Nielsen from the beach. He decided to swim back
toward the shore so they'd think he'd given up and was coming in. He hoped
they'd momentarily let up on their fire, and they did. Nielsen then angled
slightly and swam parallel to the coastline for about a hundred yards.

The Japanese followed him down the beach, patiently tracking alongside him,
step for stroke. Occasionally they pinged a shot or two in his direction,
but mostly they just kept a close eye on him. I came down to a place along
the shore where there were a lot of trees and bushes in the water. I knew
they were following me, so I went toward shore and splashed to make a little
noise. I wanted them to think I was finally coming in. Then I abruptly
turned around and went out just as quiet as possible and started swimming
across the bay. They never shot at me again. Probably it was too dark for
them to see me. I swam most of the night. I couldn't see the other side of
the bay but I knew it was about five miles. About halfway out I ran into a
strong current. It seemed like I was there for a couple hours making no
headway. Finally I reached the opposite shore and crawled on my hands and
knees up on the rocks. I was in a mangrove swamp. I was too weak to stand
up. It was about 4 a.m. I'd been swimming for nearly nine hours. Washed up
on the far shores of Puerto Princesa Bay, Nielsen was a pitiful sight-naked,
nursing two bullet wounds, his skin crosshatched with lacerations. He rested
for a few hours and then stumbled half delirious through the swamp until he
encountered a Filipino who was walking along a path, wielding a bolo knife.
In his current state, Nielsen was suspicious of anyone carrying a knife. The
Filipino seemed wary of Nielsen's hideous castaway appearance but was not
especially frightened. "I couldn't imagine how he could be so cool," Nielsen
said. At first Nielsen worried that the man was a Japanese sympathizer, but
then the Filipino offered him water. Nielsen asked the man to take down a
letter. "I think I am the only one alive from the Palawan prison camp," he
said. "I want you to write to the War Department to tell them about the
Japanese massacre of the Americans at Puerto Princesa." Without uttering a
word in reaction, the Filipino began to walk away from Nielsen. Then he
abruptly turned around and said cryptically, "You have friends here."
Perplexed, Nielsen followed his new acquaintance down a path through dense
jungle to a hideout where Filipino guerrillas were stationed. There, to his
amazement, Nielsen encountered two more American survivors from the camp,
Albert Pacheco and Edwin Petry. "I didn't believe it at first," said
Nielsen. "I thought I was seeing things."



but to believe that the US fights fair and just wars is a
joke.

What was the last unjust war that the US was in? And when and how do we not
fight fair?

"David Bromage" wrote in message
.. .
ArtKramr wrote:
If the never attacked Pearl Harbor, there would have been no
casualities.

If the "advisors" had never been sent to Vietnam there would have been
no casualties. But they did and there were, in both cases. You can't
change history, you can only learn from it. At least smart people learn
from it.

Cheers
David


There would have been less. Not "none".

"Rats" wrote
"cypher745" wrote

What was the last unjust war that the US was in?

Korea, Vietnam and now the current war in IRAQ!

See! There is someone who thinks communism and a
murderous dictatorship is a good thing.

Thank God they die like flies when we come after them.

In article ,
"Rats" wrote:

"Steve Hix" wrote in message
...
Does one of the last major IJ Naval bases, and an army division with
headquarters count?

http://history1900s.about.com/librar.../aa072700a.htm
Read this you American ignoramus.

So you deny that the Imperial Japanese Navy had one of its last major
bases at Hiroshima, and that the headquarters of the Japanese Army's
defense of the island was also based in Hiroshima?

Kewl.

Note Ed Rasimus' post elsewhere in this thread. (If you don't care to,
the digest answer is, you have no argument.)

Read the above link and then come back and argue. I suspect you will have no
arguments.

It will have to wait a bit, since the site doesn't seem to be
responding. history1900s.about.com isn't talking.

Again, you dodged the question: Do you *really* think that the planned
direct invasion of the Japanese home islands, with attendant *far*
greater loss of Japanese, American, British and other Commonwealth
lives, is preferable to what actually happened?

Soldiers have a duty to die. That is what they are there for. Civilians do
not ask to be bombed.

Evasion noted. Apparently, you would prefer that far more Japanese and
Chinese civilians had died.

One hopes you don't respond with either evasion nor knee-jerk "anything
is better than nuclear", because it is an unsupportable position.

I didn't say anything is better than nuclear. I said that bombing a civilian
target with a nuke and killing thousands of civilians is a war crime. Do you
understand now?

I understand that you're totally wrapped around the axle of your
misconception about the definition of "war crime".

As long a no atom bomb is dropped, you're cool with hundreds of
thousands of more dead japanese and chinese civilians.

You've also made it quite clear that you don't care one whit for the
deaths of many more thousands of Japanese, American, British and
Commonwealth troops. After all, "it's the duty of soldiers to die for
their country". Wrong again...and what's sad is that you will likely
never understand why, or just how wrong, either.

In article ,
"Rats" wrote:

"Mortimer Schnerd, RN" wrote in message
. com...
What utter bull****. Soldiers have a duty to protect their country. They
do
that best by killing the other guy, not dying themselves.

You have a loser attitude. It must suck to be you.

OOOH! What a big man you are! OOOH! ****ING ****! **** OFF AND SUCK BUSH'S
COCK!

Come back when you get to junior high, or develop some modicum of civil
behavior, child.

In article ,
"Rats" wrote:

What was the last unjust war that the US was in? And when and how do we
not fight fair?

Korea, Vietnam and now the current war in IRAQ!

Ahh...so you're a supporter of ol' Kim Il Sung.

That explains a lot.

"Rats" wrote in message
...


Rubbish. Soldiers have a duty to "die for their country". Innocent
civilians
don't. As a soldier myself I was ready to kill the enemy soldier and to
die
at his hands if I failed. Dropping nukes on a civilian population is a war
crime.


To paraphrase George Patton

You dont win wars by dying for your country
You win by making the other poor dumb SOB die for his

Throwing away 1/2 million Allied and several million Japanese lives
away by invading Japan instead of using the bomb would
have been the true war crime.

Keith

"Rats" wrote in message
...
"cypher745" wrote in message
m...
I can't agree. A soldier has a duty to fight. Not to die.

True but his duty is to kill other soldiers and not civilians.

No we don't.

We know perfectly well that at times some of soldiers have done things
that
we as country would not be proud of. But we also know, that our soldiers
have never done this.

Well, you might but others don't.

December 14, 1944
snipped an account of Japanese brutality

Read this: http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/usa_...e_in_korea.htm

Rats, your example is truly horrific.

If an order was issued for this attack, then those that issueed the order
should be held accountable.

If as the Army contends, that these soldiers were in full rtreat and
frightend, and acted without thinking during the fog of war, then we need to
redouble are efforts in order to ensure that this never happens again.

But, I think that you are missing why this is a scandal, because it happens
so rarely. charges of abuse are rarely brought against US soldiers (In
proportion to their numbers).

What was the last unjust war that the US was in? And when and how do we
not
fight fair?

Korea, Vietnam and now the current war in IRAQ!

Are you saying that we did not fight fair, or that these wars were unjust?

Rat
"cypher745" wrote in message
m...

"Rats" wrote in message
...
"cypher745" wrote in message
m...
I can't agree. A soldier has a duty to fight. Not to die.

True but his duty is to kill other soldiers and not civilians.

No we don't.

We know perfectly well that at times some of soldiers have done things
that
we as country would not be proud of. But we also know, that our
soldiers
have never done this.

Well, you might but others don't.

December 14, 1944
snipped an account of Japanese brutality

Read this: http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/usa_...e_in_korea.htm

Rats, your example is truly horrific.

If an order was issued for this attack, then those that issueed the order
should be held accountable.

If as the Army contends, that these soldiers were in full rtreat and
frightend, and acted without thinking during the fog of war, then we need
to
redouble are efforts in order to ensure that this never happens again.

But, I think that you are missing why this is a scandal, because it
happens
so rarely. charges of abuse are rarely brought against US soldiers (In
proportion to their numbers).

What was the last unjust war that the US was in? And when and how do
we
not
fight fair?

Korea, Vietnam and now the current war in IRAQ!

Are you saying that we did not fight fair, or that these wars were unjust?

Rats,


It has been eluded to on this board that you are a socialist or a communist.
Is it true?

I only ask, because I am trying to understand your point of view.

Thank you.