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Japanese WW ll Cannibalistic Atrocities

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  • Japanese WW ll Cannibalistic Atrocities

    I was introduced to Vince Robinson (LCI 336), the author of this article by another LCI sailor. Since then, we have exchanged sea tales and emails. Vince was the editor of his ships newsletter for years.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Former president George Bush escaped being cannibalized.
    Soon after the Japanese surrender, a U.S. Amphibious Landing Craft, LCI 336 was dispatched to the Northern Bonin Islands, from Saipan. On board were troops of the First Battalion, 3rd Marines that were to take command of the island while a 20-man Marine Police Force investigated the whereabouts of American pilots that bailed out over the Islands after their aircraft were disabled during bombing missions.
    On the morning of October 19, 1945, LCI 336 passed through the outer mine field and entered Futomi Harbor of the main island, Chichi Jima, North of Iwo Jima.
    Everything on the island was in shamble, the results of Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force bombing missions that were conducted during June 1944 to August 1944. Former President George Bush participated in these bombing raids. During one of these raids his aircraft was hit and disabled. Luckily he managed to glide far enough out to sea to be rescued by a U.S. Submarine before a Japanese patrol boat reached the area.
    Heading the investigation was Col. Presley M. Rixey and working under his supervision were three Marine investigators.
    When Japanese Gen. Yoshio Tachibana, the commanding Japanese Army officer of the Bonin Islands was asked by Col. Rixey, “What became of the American fliers that were captured on these islands?” Without hesitation the General replied, “Yes, we captured six and they all received very kind treatment.”
    Now with the American flag flying over the island, Korean laborers, that were prisoners, came forth to tell their story, without fear of retaliation. What Col. Rixey and his staff would learn would be the most unbelievable, fiendish and vacuous atrocities ever imposed on mankind.
    With direct orders from Japanese Gen. Yoshio Tachibana, Lt. Col. Kikujima and Capt. Noboru Nakajima clubbed, bayoneted, beheaded and mutilated all the American airmen. Not only those who bailed out over the island, but those who landed offshore and were picked up by their patrol boats.
    One Korean prisoner who was interviewed told Col. Rixey that one very brave Marine pilot who was about to be beheaded refused the blindfold and in a gesture of defiance, rolled down his own collar.
    Gen. Yoshio Tachibana and Major Suco Matoba feasted on the American’s livers and used large chunks of the thighs in soup.
    When Gen.Tachibana learned that one airman had been buried with his liver intact, he had the body exhumed and ordered his army physician extract the liver.
    In his report, Col. Rixey states: “We were flabbergasted at first. We were expecting beheadings, but never cannibalism! What manner of men were these? Polite—cooperative—obedient soldiers, brave and fearless—but beneath this veneer—barbarians and worse.”
    On December 17, 1945 Col. Rixey ordered Major Robert D. Shaffer, USMC to start rounding up these criminals. After their arrest they were taken to Guam to await trial.
    In September 1946, Gen. Tachibana, Capt. Yoshio, Col. Ito, Maj. Matoba and Capt. Nakajima were all found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.
    Adm. Mori and Capt. Sato were given life in prison.

    From the logs of Vincent Robinson, Commander of VFW Post 11294, Froesthill, CA, who participated in the operation.
    Hamp
    USS LCI (L) & (G) 450
    WW ll Gator Navy

  • #2
    Same Story, Different Version

    George Bush's comrades eaten by their Japanese POW guards
    By Charles Laurence in New York
    (Filed: 26/10/2003)

    The former President George Bush narrowly escaped being beheaded and eaten by Japanese soldiers when he was shot down over the Pacific in the Second World War, a shocking new history published in America has revealed.
    The book, Flyboys, is the result of historical detective work by James Bradley, whose father was among the marines later photographed raising the flag over the island of Iwo Jima.
    Lt George Bush, then a 20-year-old pilot, was among nine airmen who escaped from their planes after being shot down during bombing raids on Chichi Jima, a tiny island 700 miles south of Tokyo, in September 1944 - and was the only one to evade capture by the Japanese.
    The horrific fate of the other eight "flyboys" was established in subsequent war crimes trials on the island of Guam, but details were sealed in top secret files in Washington to spare their families distress.
    Mr Bradley has established that they were tortured, beaten and then executed, either by beheading with swords or by multiple stab-wounds from bayonets and sharpened bamboo stakes. Four were then butchered by the island garrison's surgeons and their livers and meat from their thighs eaten by senior Japanese officers.
    The future president escaped a similar fate because he ditched his plane further from the island than the other crews, and managed to scramble on to a liferaft. American planes launched a hail of fire at Japanese boats which set out to capture him, driving them back, and he was eventually rescued by a US submarine.
    When the black hull of the USS Finback surfaced in front of him, he thought he was hallucinating, he told Mr Bradley in a television film made to coincide with the publication of Flyboys. He had been vomiting, bleeding from a head wound, and weeping with fear. He said only four words to his rescuers: "Happy to be aboard."
    Mr Bush's part in the raid - for which he won the Distinguished Flying Cross - has long been known to Americans. Not known until now was the grim fate of his downed comrades - none from his own plane - who swam ashore.
    Mr Bradley pieced together the horrific truth from secret transcripts of the war crimes trials, given to him by a former officer and lawyer who was an official witness at the time, and the testimony of surviving Japanese veterans.
    A radio operator, Marve Mershon, was marched to a freshly dug grave, blindfolded, and made to kneel for beheading by sword, testified a Japanese soldier, named as Iwakawa, at the war crimes trial. "When the flyer was struck, he did not cry out, but made a slight groan."
    The next day a Japanese officer, Major Sueo Matoba, decided to include American flesh in a sake-fuelled feast he laid on for officers including the commander-in-chief on the island, Gen Yoshio Tachibana. Both men were later tried and executed for war crimes.
    A Japanese medical orderly who helped the surgeon prepare the ingredients said: "Dr Teraki cut open the chest and took out the liver. I removed a piece of flesh from the flyer's thigh, weighing about six pounds and measuring four inches wide, about a foot long."
    Another crewman, Floyd Hall, met a similar fate. Adml Kinizo Mori, the senior naval officer on Chichi Jima, told the court that Major Matoba brought "a delicacy" to a party at his quarters - a specially prepared dish of Floyd Hall's liver.
    According to Adml Mori, Matoba told him: "I had it pierced with bamboo sticks and cooked with soy sauce and vegetables." They ate it in "very small pieces", believing it "good medicine for the stomach", the admiral recalled.
    A third victim of cannibalism, Jimmy Dye, had been put to work as a translator when, several weeks later, Capt Shizuo Yoshii - who was later tried and executed - called for his liver to be served at a party for fellow officers. Parts of a fourth airman, Warren Earl Vaughn, were also eaten and the remaining four were executed, one by being clubbed to death.
    The parents of all the airmen are now dead, but Mr Bradley contacted all their families. "The first reaction was a stunned silence, a hush. But I think that at last knowing how these men died, however horrible their deaths, has allowed closure and in a word I heard from them, healing," he said. Mr Bush's first reaction was also to say nothing. "There was a lot of head-shaking, a lot of silence," the author told The Telegraph. "There was no disgust, shock or horror. He's a veteran of a different generation."
    The former president returned to Chichi Jima with Mr Bradley for the first time since his rescue for the CNN documentary broadcast last week. Mr Bush looked sombre but never visibly upset, and ventured into the water in a modern liferaft to re-create his experience.
    He recalled that while on the submarine he asked himself why he had survived. "Why had I been spared and what did God have in store for me? In my own view there's got to be some kind of destiny and I was being spared for something on Earth." Earlier he had told Mr Bradley: "I think about those guys all the time."
    Hamp
    USS LCI (L) & (G) 450
    WW ll Gator Navy

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    • #3
      Fukkin' animals...

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      • #4
        OK, I'm going to go throw up now...
        “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

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        • #5
          Does anyone know why the Japanese did this? Cannibalism?

          I am researching the Japanese decent into barbaric behaviour in wartime i.e. The Rape of Nanking and also further atrocities they committed during WWII as they did not behave like this during WWI.

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          • #6
            1) They were losing.
            2) They were cut off.
            3) They were going to die.
            4) They were not allow to give up.

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            • #7
              Thank you Chimo.

              Were they given special orders and was it protocol? Why the cannibalism? Was is some form of PsyOps on their part?

              Olivia

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              • #8
                I found no such orders issued. Starving men who views their prisoners as nothing more than animals would treating their prisoners as livestock. They even developed a methodology to keep the man alive longer and therefore supply further meat. Take the arm and legs first and the man can still live for weeks before being butchered for the rest.

                Is it any wonder that we took very few Japanese prisoners. They didn't want to surrender and frankly, neither did we want their surrender.

                The Pacific War, like the Great Patriotic War, were one where mercy was neither asked nor given by both sides.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Olivia2012 View Post
                  I am researching the Japanese decent into barbaric behaviour in wartime i.e. The Rape of Nanking and also further atrocities they committed during WWII as they did not behave like this during WWI.
                  I would treat Nanking as a whole separate topic. There's a lot of things that don't make sense and trying to paint the Japanese as simple butchers do not reveal the scope and depth of that massacre.

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                  • #10
                    Chimo, thank you very much :)

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                    • #11
                      Chimo is a greeting, not my name. It's the unofficial motto of the Canadian Forces Military Engineers. It means, Greetings Friend.

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                      • #12
                        Well thank you for letting me know that very interesting military fact my friend chimo to you too :)

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                        • #13
                          cannibalism is more common that we think, in Russia prisoners that escape take 1 inmate with them as a food source, they called him cow, since jails are usually far from civilization, the road home can be long. nothing beats meat supply the stays fresh and doesn't need to be carried. of course the "cow" doesn't know it, until too late.
                          "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" B. Franklin

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                          • #14
                            I remember a John Wayne western (Big Jake) where the Duke described hanging as a gastly way to die - in the case of those cannibals - quite appropriate. A gastly death for gastly deeds.

                            When I read the story above, I am feel very proud of our president George H.W. Bush - he is a hero. I wish I could feel like that about the presidents that followed him.
                            Last edited by USSWisconsin; 07 Apr 12,, 07:16.
                            sigpic"If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees.
                            If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children."

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                            • #15
                              There are accounts of Japanese soldiers cannibalizing the bodies of Australian soldiers in Papua New Guinea. Again, Japanese troops were either poorly supplied or not supplied at all & were determined not to surrender. I'm afraid I don't have any further details, but if you comb through Australian histories of WW2 in the Pacific you may find more.
                              sigpic

                              Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

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