I just finished a very strong book that I urge people to read. It's called Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath, by Michael norman and Elizabeth Norman.

I want to refer to the subject in the of-topic section of ATU about how online friendships are made and what they mean:

I read this book because someone I admire and with whom I had exchanged PMs with at Expecting Rain recommended it. So t was a direct outgrowth of an online friendship.

Do you know where Bataan is? Maybe you do. I was so ignorant, I thought--guessing from the title--that it was a Holocaust book and referred to somewhere in Eastern Europe.

Bataan is in the Phillipines. The Japanese bombed the Phillipines very soon after they bombed Pearl Harbor. A lot of American and Filipino troops were there.

The first part of the book explains how the Japanese troops were able to overrun the American and Filipino troops, how the non-combat trained American troops were routed by the enemy, and how those who surrendered were marshaled into a march far from the Bataan peninsula.

A death march ensued. Men were given no food or water. When the Japanese felt like practicing bayonet, they pulled out men, killed them, and had other soldiers did mass graves. Many men were only injured and were buried alive.

Men contracted every concievable tropical disease and died on the road in great suffering.

The conditions at the prison camp were of course atrocious, and those men who were still alive were shipped to Japan to work in coal mines.

The book raises the troubling issue of man's inhumanity to man. How could Germany and Japan inflict suffering on so many people? And in what we call the modern world? How could so many contribute to the crimes?

I read somewhere that the Germans who dealt with the dead during the Holocaust referred to each dead person as a "piece," e.g., "700 pieces were destroyed today."

Dehumanizing those who were condemned allowed the mind to deal with the slaughter.

Here's an idea about the Japanese:

At Chinese school, while my children are in class, I sit with a woman, Agnes, who is 91 years old (overseas Chinese who grew up in Burma. She was an orphan who was taken in by Italian nuns and educated and eventually became a teacher) and a man in his 80s who was on the ground forces during the training of the Chinese Flying Tigers. I laugh to think that the 3 of us are the Senior Citizen table. Mr Wong was obviously very involved in WW2 and is something of a genius. I told him about the book and asked him how the Japanese could have been so cruel in the war.

He had a very interesting explanation. He said that for a Japanese soldier, capture and becoming a prisoner of war were far, far worse than death. To become a prisoner of war was to be less than an ant that you crush with your shoe. To the Japanese there was no question but to take your own life if defeat seemed inevitable. The American and other troops across Asia who were captured were like the ants to the stepped on. They had utterly no humanity in the eyes of the Japanese.

So I ask you, what do you think of this explanation? What are your thoughts on immense cruelty to the innocent. You know, it was common in China for the Japanese to use infants and young children for bayonet practice.

Let me open a thorny topic. Was it right for the US to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In my present frame of mind, I think, Yes. (Please don't flame me!) Mr. Wong talked about how the only other alternative was a land invasion of Japan (like D Day in France) would have been the only solution, and would have prolonged the war and cost many more lives on both sides.

Why drop two bombs? After Hiroshima, the Japanese wavered in surrendering. After the second bomb was dropped, Japan got the message, and an unconditional surrender was the result.

As many of you know, the Japanese were made to surrender to Gen. Wainwright who had been a prisoner of war, who had almost died, and was just a skelaton (sp?) when he was liberated from prison camp.

Military historian John Keegan's "A History of Warfare" might begin to supply answers to the questions you raise, dharma.

Essentially, Keegan challenges Clausewitz's dictum that "War is a continuation of politics by other means" and asserts that, on the contrary, war is a cultural activity- in the sense that the motives for and the means by which it is conducted arise from the prevailing culture.

His description of the Aztecs' treatment of their prisoners of war is every bit as horrific as those WWII Japanese atrocities you describe. In order to explain those Japanese atrocities, you need to look at pre-WWII Japanese culture: if your Head of State is regarded as a God, as was the Emperor of Japan, all the horrors of hell become imaginable, feasible, "acceptable".

Should the US have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Given the prevailing cultural circumstances in Japan, there was a sound military case for it. Hitler's bombing of the civilian populations of London, Coventry and Plymouth had already led to the systematic retaliatory carpet-bombing of German cities by the RAF and USAF. Two wrongs don't make a right, of course, but look at the circumstances the Allies faced.

There's a "War and Human Nature" thread somewhere on Off Topic which gives a rough summary of Keegan's "A History of Warfare".

I will get the book. I remember the thread and will look for it. I think that when the thread was current, I wasn't in such a mood of outrage and didn't read the thread too closely.

The point you raise about the bombing on the Western front is right. More tonnage was dropped on Germany and more civilian lives were lost than in Japan, I think. Also, I believe I heard somewhere that far more bomb tonnage and human lives were lost in North Vietnam than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then there was the miserable and pointless loss of an entire generation of young English men in World War 1 and the bravery and slaughter of the men who landed in Normandy...

Yes, I'll be interested in reading that book. I'll order it through interlibrary loan.

There's maybe something racist about that explanation of Japanese cruelty to Allied Pow's - they were inferior because they got captured rarher than commit suicide? Whew. The sadists at Abu Grain prison in Iraq didn't have that excuse for their "hazin" of Iraqi prisoners, anyway. A brute is a brute, and a sadist is a sadist.

The actress puts on a brave face as allegations surface of drug use,
infidelity and stealing one of her mother’s lovers, writes Jenny Paul



Shortly after Angelina Jolie awoke last Tuesday morning at the four-bedroom house Brad Pitt
owns in a gated community in Beverly Hills, the couple’s British-based
lawyers rang with news that prompted the actress to spend the rest of
the day in tears.


Lurid claims the 34-year-old allegedly slept with her mother’s
boyfriend when she was just 16 had been plastered across the world’s
entertainment headlines.


And worse, this is just one of many claims writer Andrew
Morton – most famous for his biography of Princess Diana – will make in
his unauthorised biography, which will hit US stores in the new year.


If that wasn’t bad enough, Canadian biographer Ian Halperin
has penned a shocking book of outrageous allegations about the star,
titled Brangelina, which is due in shops in just a matter of weeks.



“Brad is furious but Angelina
is absolutely heartbroken,” says a friend close to the couple. “She
spent most of the day in tears and Angie called a couple of friends
saying she thinks these books may well be the final straw that finishes
her and Brad’s relationship.


“Angie’s worried what revelations will be in the books and
she’s had to discuss difficult things with Brad over recent days,
knowing that even if the books aren’t published, he is going to read
everything in the manuscripts their lawyers are going over.


“Brad believes Angie has been misunderstood, and now he’s
worried these books are going to make him look like a middle-aged,
sex-crazed fool who was somehow tricked into leaving his loving wife Jennifer by a calculating, publicity-hungry Angelina.



“Being publicly humiliated is the one thing Brad can’t take.”


Morton decamped to LA for most of the recent northern hemisphere summer
and has talked to Angelina’s former friends from high school, as well
as some of her ex-lovers and former employees.


He is set to detail Angelina’s alleged affair with a female
rock star, and he will make detailed claims about how Angelina
allegedly lured Brad away from Jennifer, using sex as a weapon.


But Morton’s biggest coup is apparently his lengthy interviews
with documentary filmmaker Bill Day, who was in a relationship with
Angelina’s mum Marcheline Bertrand for 12 years, and posted a bitter
tribute online after her death, taking aim at Angelina.


Morton has also spoken to Angelina’s former lesbian lover,
Jenny Shimizu, who makes various claims about the actress and her
relationship with Brad.



“The book, like his other biographies, is going to be nothing short of explosive,” says an insider…



what's with the beard, Brad?

OK.

From the Bataan Death March to Brad & Angelina in one easy page - ATU strikes again.