Counter-Currents
1,906 words
Part 2 of 2
None suffered more in war, none suffered more in “peace,” than German women and girls. Of all the war crimes committed by the Allies during World War Two, the massive rapes of helpless women and children were perhaps the most monstrous. Of course, an untold number of German women and children did not survive the violent, nonstop assaults. One million? Two million? Ten million? Since no one in power cared, no one was counting.
And as this monstrous crime was enveloping the women of Europe, a similar spiritual slaughter was transpiring in Asia.
Because the great bulk of fighting in the war against Japan was fought on the water, in the air, or across islands either uninhabited or sparsely populated, rape is a word seldom mentioned in American war diaries or official reports during the years 1941-1944. When US forces invaded the Japanese island of Okinawa, however, this changed. Almost immediately, and in spite of the bloody fighting, US soldiers began the sexual assault on the females of the island. In one prefecture alone, during a ten-day period, over one thousand women reported being raped. Since most victims would never come forward and voluntarily suffer such shame in a society where modesty and chastity were prized above all else, the number of rapes was undoubtedly much greater than reported.
Incidents like the following became common:
Marching south, men of the 4th Marines passed a group of some 10 American soldiers bunched together in a tight circle next to the road. They were “quite animated,” noted a corporal who assumed they were playing a game of craps. “Then as we passed them,” said the shocked marine, “I could see they were taking turns raping an oriental woman. I was furious, but our outfit kept marching by as though nothing unusual was going on.”
So pervasive was the crime, and so frightened were the people, that hundreds of Okinawa women committed suicide by swallowing poison or by leaping from the steep cliffs of the island.
With their nation’s surrender in August, 1945, Japanese officials were so concerned about the mass rape of their wives and daughters by the victors that they rounded up tens of thousands of girls from poorer families throughout the nation and all but forced them into prostitution at various brothels, or “comfort stations.” Although such stop-gap measures did prevent wholesale rape on a German scale, this was small consolation to the women and children who had to endure the sanctioned sex attacks. Earning anywhere from eight cents to a dollar a day, a girl working in the “rape stations,” as they more commonly were called, might be brutally raped and sodomized from 15 to 60 times a days.
“They took my clothes off,” remembered one little girl. “I was so small, they were so big, they raped me easily. I was bleeding, I was only 14. I can smell the men. I hate men.”
Despite hundreds of thousands of American and Australian occupation soldiers using the rape stations, thousands more preferred taking their sex violently. In the days, weeks and months after the surrender, numerous atrocities were committed as the victors laid claim to the “spoils of war.”
In the Spring of 1946, American GI’s cut the phone lines in Nagoya and raped every women they could get their hands on, including children as young as ten. At another city, US soldiers broke into a hospital and spent their time raping over 70 women, including one who had just given birth. The mother’s infant was flung to the floor and killed.
Had Allied occupation commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, spent even half the time on stemming rape as he spent censoring news from Japan or running down real or imagined Japanese war criminals, the attacks would have been curtailed. But, like his opposite in Europe, Gen. Eisenhower, he did not.
As American historian, John W. Dower, acknowledged:
Once you recognize that soldiers rape — including “our” guys, our fathers, uncles, grandfathers, sons, husbands, boyfriends, grandsons — then you understand the tremendous resistance [by authorities] to recognizing mass rapes during wartime as the atrocity it has always been and still is.
***
When it comes to propaganda, we suspected our enemies of it, but we never figured we were using propaganda. We felt like our country was too honest to use propaganda on us, and we honestly were not conscious that they were.
So wrote Katharine Phillips, an American Red Cross worker during World War Two. Hardly concealed in Katherine’s words written long after the war, is the fear, the dread fear, that perhaps the inhuman evil that her generation was told to hate a thousand times over during four years of war may not have been so evil or so inhuman after all. Just as with every other war known to man, World War Two had also been a war of words, a war of poisonous words; a war of deceit, treachery, hate, and lies in which trusting, unsuspecting people were lashed once again into a frenzy of murderous madness by outrageously vicious and vile propaganda. True, some angry words are perhaps needed in times of war to awaken and impassion the laggards among us to work and slave like ants to win such a contest; but equally true, some of that same propaganda, in the hands of evil men behind desks far removed from danger, contribute to outright murder of the most heartless and cold-blooded kind, encourage rape on a massive, historical scale, add to the agonizing death by fire of uncounted millions of women and children, and engender enough hate, misery and pain to make a planet groan.
For many, like Katherine, it took years before they came to realize that the very people they had been programmed to despise, dehumanize and ultimately exterminate like vermin were but after all, very frail, very frightened, very human, and finally . . . were very much like themselves. For a fortunate few, however, even in the midst of the terrible inferno itself, reality sometimes shattered the hate-filled propaganda unexpectedly.
The sudden re-humanization of the Japanese came as a shock to some. While sifting through a blackened, blown-out cave on Iwo Jima, one marine was “horrified” when he discovered some childish and brightly-colored paintings strewn among the wreckage. After poring over the art work, the soldier was stunned.
“The Japanese soldiers had children . . . who loved them and sent their art work to them,” the incredulous marine suddenly realized, just as American children would send pretty pictures to their equally proud fathers.
Rummaging through pockets of the fallen enemy, other Americans were startled when they found newspaper clippings of baseball teams back home in Japan, just as any normal American soldier would carry; or they discovered inside enemy helmets photos of beautiful Japanese movie stars just as many US marines folded pin-ups of Betty Grable or Rita Hayworth in theirs; or they unwrapped delicate letters from home with pictures of girl friends inside, or they stumbled upon a torn photo amid the debris of battle of a now-dead soldier laughing and rolling on the ground with puppies in his back yard back home. For some Americans, the abrupt realization that there were more similarities between them and their enemy than not was life-altering.
Occasionally, in even more startling ways, the realization of shared humanity came when a dead soldier’s diary was discovered:
Sept. 30 1942 (still on Guadalcanal) We took a short rest in the grove, when we found a figure of a man in a bush. Had he escaped from a crashing plane or infiltrated from the sea? Two or three soldiers chased and caught him after five min or so. He was a young American soldier.
He got a bayonet cut on his forehead and was bleeding. He sat down on the ground leaning on coconut trunks and had his hands tied behind his back. He looked thin, unshaven and wore a waterproofing overcoat.
He pleaded with me to help him, ‘General, Help me! ‘General, Help me!’ He thought I was senior and an officer of higher rank. In the rain, I stood hesitant about what to do with this American soldier. It was impossible for me to set him free. We couldn’t take him with my party. . . . We had not roughed him up after capturing him, but the moment I had deported him, the men of the HQ treated him violently. I thought later I should have released him.
I regretted what I had done to him. He didn’t make me feel any hatred as an enemy. It was a strange feeling for me. He looked quite young and mild-mannered, and didn’t look strong or ferocious at all. He was gentle but fully composed and never disgraced himself. I can’t say what befell this young soldier. I am sure he was not a soldier who would easily leak out a military secret. And I am afraid he never returned to his camp.
With the dawn of peace, men and women of good will finally found the strength and courage to revisit the awful crucible they had recently escaped from. Some, in shame, cast off the old prejudice and hate that they once had so eagerly embraced, and seek a reckoning, an new and honest understanding of the past that they had played a part in.
Such was the case of Edgar Jones. A veteran himself, first in Europe, then in the Pacific, Jones struggled mightily to make sense of the many senseless things he had seen, heard and perhaps even done. When he was through, when he truly understood what had occurred, the veteran exploded in anger . . . and honesty.
We Americans have the dangerous tendency in our international thinking to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward other nations. We consider ourselves to be more noble and decent than other peoples, and consequently in a better position to decide what is right and wrong in the world. What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers. . . . [W]e mutilated the bodies of enemy dead, cutting off their ears and kicking out their gold teeth for souvenirs, and buried them with their testicles in their mouths. . . . We topped off our saturation bombing and burning of enemy civilians by dropping atomic bombs on two nearly defenseless cities, thereby setting an all-time record for instantaneous mass slaughter.
As victors we are privileged to try our defeated opponents for their crimes against humanity; but we should be realistic enough to appreciate that if we were on trial for breaking international laws, we should be found guilty on a dozen counts. We fought a dishonorable war, because morality had a low priority in battle. The tougher the fighting, the less room for decency, and in Pacific contests we saw mankind reach the blackest depths of bestiality.
Fortunately, the passionate, heartfelt words of Edgar Jones now speak for millions more around the globe. Alas, if only such words as his could be emblazoned across the sky in fiery letters before each and every rush to war and before each and every “holy crusade” to slaughter an “inhuman” enemy, then certainly the world would be a better place because of it.
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15 comments
I really appreciate this series on American war crimes against the Japanese. It is hardly ever discussed, even among WWII revisionists. This is why I keep coming back to Counter-Currents.
Well, I didn’t like this second part of the article either. I feel that this author’s purpose is to condemn the allies, presenting case stories and anecdotes to give the impression that Americans wreaked a wave of unrelenting atrocity upon the Japanese.
First of all, as Sherman so eloquently put is, “War is Hell”. Real war is hellish, barbarous, uncivilized, bestial and every other noxious term you care to throw at it. In order to engage in total war, you need to dehumanize the enemy. If your populace and soldiers are empathizing with them as cute and cuddly teddy bears, even if they are, your war effort is going to be a shambles, and more of your people will die because of that. To carry out the kind of war effort that makes the war short and minimizes pain, expense and death to your people, the foe needs to be transformed into caricatures of dark creatures that bear little if any semblance to humans. And the propaganda posters in this article do that pretty well. I am not ashamed of them at all, I think they are not only quite appropriate, but tasteful and creative as well. A nation’s prime consideration must be to protect its own people, not be fair, generous, nice and sweet to its enemies.
The author makes no attempt to put rapes in perspective, as for example estimating what percent of U.S. soldiers engaged in that, which must have been a very tiny minority. It was punishable by very stiff penalties, for one thing. But again, in real war, like the first waves of marines to hit the beaches, where the chances of survival were less than 50%, you expect barbarity. Your best friend, who you love like a brother, has his head blasted off, and you are splattered with his brains. Mangled corpses with intestines hanging out, the stench of bodies, doomed men with grievous wounds screaming for days, the adrenaline, hatred towards the enemy who had done all that: that is the war we are talking about. I am sure “mass rapes during wartime [is] the atrocity it has always been and still is.” Real war is madness and very bad things happen. That is the human condition. It was certainly not unique to Americans. Every single combatant did the same things at times, although the Americans probably did it the least. If the war had lasted longer and Americans had been thrown into the midst of more brutality, then they would naturally have done more of it.
The point of examining the war for WN, in works such as this author’s excellent “Hellstorm”, is to understand that Germany was no different from any other combatant, and bears no more guilt than any of the others. All humans did the same horrible things in the war when put in the same circumstances. Germany suffered incredibly during the war, and still fought valiantly. Our American ancestors likewise fought heroically, and all Europeans should, and must, feel the greatest pride in their forefathers, including the mighty Germans. Yes, it was a fratricidal war, and was terribly destructive to our people, and we wish it hadn’t happened. All of that effort, blood and treasure should have been spent in securing the future for our European folk, rather than destroying each other.
But in any case, here we are now. We can learn from the past that we can never repeat such a war. The Japanese are not European, and so frankly we should have little concern for them, except related to how they can help us. Certainly, from a distance, we can admire them and their achievements, and appreciate them, there is much to admire about them. But they are not us, they are not for us, and you can bet that they are mainly concerned with us in relation to how we can help them. That is as it should be. Our tears, sympathy and energies need to be reserved soley for our kind, our people, our folk.
I also don’t think that the author understands WW2 in its proper context as it pertains to WN. History exists not as a search for truth, but as spiritual sustenance for a particular people. Indeed, the goddess of history is a woman with her breast bared, symbolically offering that sustenance. A folk needs confidence in itself, and needs to regard itself as good, strong, virtuous and blessed. The history that we teach our children should provide for these needs. It should be only positive, only showing us in the best light, only showing us at our best moments, generating feelings of the greatest pride and self-love. “Truth” is something for academics who care about minutiae, and the common people only suffer from being exposed to it.
You really are a moral imbecile.
If you sober up and want to withdraw this comment, just ask.
Thanks for the effort of Andrew for writing such a long comment. However, I frankly think your premise was utterly wrong and warped, and the last paragraph of yours being especially flawed and fairly disgusting. It seems you suffer from an inverted moral righteousness coupled by illogical arguing.
Also please do not forget that for all the ingenuous and gullible innocence of the average GI and the American public in general being victim of a enormous deceit, still one cannot factually deny that it is the US side who, led by the totally dishonest, unscrupulous, duplicitous, and repugnant political leadership from FDR to Truman and to the lesser like Eisenhower, and backed and instructed by the ultimately vile and vicious international Jewry, provoked wars against both Germany and Japan (not the other way round), destroyed the just, right, and glorious National Socialist Germany, killed untold number of young men of all White nations in such a wasteful and unnecessary war for nasty Jewish interest, and did horrendous and irreparable harm to the White race and his culture and civilization.
Thus it is neither Germany nor Japan, but US who was then one of the chief and real culprits of the WWII. As for Japan, albeit being non-White, it chose to ally itself with the right and just force of Germany (a honor by association at least) and also was largely blameless in its war against US (FDR and his cohorts deliberately and purposefully cornered, goaded, insulted, and manipulated Japan into fighting the first shot, as already is well known and historically proved beyond doubt). Japan also has a distinct, dazzling, high-caliber civilization of its own, and was admirably given the title “quasi-Aryan” by no lesser than Hitler himself.
There is so much to admire about the Japanese. They just wanted to be the colonialists of Asia, as Europe and America so much of the rest of the world. I think they were deserving of the resources from the less advanced countries of the Far East.
A large part of WWII was the need for fuel resources, and the economic apparatus surrounding it. The combustion engine changed everything. Now it would be the nation’s with the capability of extracting precious resources who would remain viable. Both Germany and Japan were nations of high culture, but had awareness of their racial identity. We’re these two countries really supposed to let themselves be put under the economic boot of large colonial powers like Great Britain? That just would not be right. The rise of international communism was the final and most important player in this act. The rest, as they say, is tragic history.
@Andrew
You seem to belong to that kind of WN who think that ethnocentrism and morality are mutually exclusive. They are not. Just as an individual can pursue his interests in an honorable, non-criminal way, so can do nations, even in the case of conflict or war.
There is a difference between a war with violence limited to combatants, and “total” war in which unarmed civilians are needlessly slaughtered. Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki served no military need at all and could easily have been avoided.
Well, I appreciate that my comments are published even though they are disagreeable to most. I assert that my beliefs and my position are adaptive, they are designed for a people to survive in this harsh, unforgiving world. In my opinion, the morality that Mr. Johnson and many others hold to is decent, gentle, kind, warm-hearted, fair, wonderful when applied to Whites and grossly maladaptive when applied to non-Whites. I like and respect Mr. Johnson, I appreciate his intelligence and the intellectual quality of this site, and I don’t particularly want him or others to adopt my beliefs, because they are contrary to their character. They are meant for the architects of a new society, and not for the consumption of the majority. It is not my purpose to uglify counter-currents.
My beliefs would be absolutely non-controversial to the Indo-Europeans of a different era, and probably the great majority of human groups in the past who had the greatest success. I fear that the selective pressures of the “10,000 year explosion” of civilization upon the European genome have made us too kind, gentle and fair. A big part of renewing European society will require reinvigorating the genepool with superior genes.
Do you not realize that the morality (or amorality for that matter) that you are proposing is akin that of a sociopath, but merely on a more collective level? Nobody here is questioning that “a nation’s prime consideration must be to protect its own people.” Everybody here believes that, but do you not realize that we need to maintain good relations with non-White nations? That is simply the way it is, there are too many non-Whites in the world for us to simply ignore them or be belligerent with all of them. And in order to maintain good relations with them, we must not see them in a purely utilitarian sense. Maintaining good relations actually requires believing that it is a moral imperative to do so, because when people think in purely utilitarian ways they end up trying to cheat, steal, and lie to get as much as they can out of someone else or another people. When this is done, unnecessary and destructive conflict arises.
Also, do you not realize that the sort of purely utilitarian mindset you advocate is also what caused the destructive conflicts among Europeans that were purely detrimental for Europeans as a whole (like WW1 and WW2)? You want Europeans to have this sort of thinking just for themselves and not against themselves, but this is impossible. When people develop a certain morality or way of thinking, they apply it not just to foreigners but to their own family as well. Do you not realize that wars like WW1 and WW2 were caused specifically because of the type of thinking you are advocating, except that it was applied in an intra-European sense instead of against non-Whites? When Germany was a defeated mess during the Weimar Republic, abused and treated like trash by Britain and France, how is it that you think the British and French justified themselves. They used the same thinking you are advocating, they likely said to themselves, in regards to the Germans, that “we should have little concern for them, except related to how they can help us” (to quote you). So the problem with advocating this type of thinking against non-Whites is that eventually it will infest intra-European affairs as well. That makes sense if you think about it, because it is like the way people who begin by abusing just animals move on to abusing humans as well eventually.
In short, morality is what holds the world together, and if it is to succeed in preventing needless destruction it cannot be practiced in a purely exclusive sense. The problem with the average White person today is not that they are too moral, but rather that they have not figured out how to reconcile morality with ethnic interests in the way we New Rightists/Identitarians have.
A big part of renewing European society will require reinvigorating the genepool with superior genes.
Yes, indeed. But I don’t think it’s going to be brought about by yet more high-tech medicine and science, as some WNs like to fool themselves into thinking. Personally, I think there will be a giant collapse and as a result the means to keep inferior people of all age categories alive will just not be there. Slowly, as in the not-too-distant past, the toughest will survive and reproduce. “Germs” will feed on those who deserve it. Nothing new here; it’s the way of the world. Technology applied to human life extension is ultimately sh*t and doesn’t last long.
I guess its safe to say that chivalry is dead?
One million? Two million? Ten million? Since no one in power cared, no one was counting.
But…But… The prize was worth it……
Trick question.
Who said that ??
Madeline Albright.
With their nation’s surrender in August, 1945, Japanese officials were so concerned about the mass rape of their wives and daughters by the victors that they rounded up tens of thousands of girls from poorer families throughout the nation and all but forced them into prostitution at various brothels, or “comfort stations.”
WTF? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time “leaders” considered their working class less than human. Sounds like something the British aristocracy would have done in the event of an invasion. They considered the English working class almost as another species.
Thomas Goodrich has now produced first rate on both the holocausts the Allies committed against the German People (Hellstorm) and the American crimes against the Japanese. I think Goodrich should follow this up by looking at Allied crimes agaist the Italians, Allied/Resistance crimes against “Collaborators”, and Soviet/Yugoslav crimes against the Eastern European Axis partners.
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