Supernova in the East III

Hardcore History 64 – Supernova in the East III

"The whole dysfunctional Japanese government and all the reasons it was. Let's not forget, for example, about assassinations, and how much of a tool to prevent thinking that wasn't patriotic enough from being, you know, publicly expounded upon. I mean, there was a period in Japanese history that we talked about, where historians sometimes call it government by assassination. And it was the most extreme in Japanese society sort of driving the bus...

I was interested in the similarities between the university and high school professors in Germany in the First World War, and in Japan before the Second. If you go read any number of accounts, but All Quiet on the Western Front is the most famous. They all talk about how their professors. It's funny, it's like the opposite of today's stereotype of the Marxist leftist professor that corrupts the young minds that come into the classroom and makes them anti government...

The Japanese do not see themselves as the equals of all these yellow peoples in Asia that they are ‘freeing’, using my fingers as air quotes, from their European colonial masters... They see themselves as superior to them in a racial and ethnic sense, the same way that the Germans see themselves as superior to the Slavic people...

‘Remember, the adjective attached to this fortress city of Singapore, the Gibraltar of the East, right? It's a fortress city. And Churchill says, in my defense, I basically didn't think to ask whether something called a fortress had defenses. He said I would no sooner ask if a battleship that you had just launched had a bottom. So why were there no defenses? It's complicated. Some of it was part of a particular branch of the military theories right, at the pre war.

You saw in the First World War too,  this idea that defenses are bad for morale. Troops get accustomed to the safety of living behind trench walls or fortifications or whatever, then you need them to go on the aggressive, they're soft. Another reason some of the generals in Malaya said that they didn't want defenses. They thought it was bad for the morale of the civilians that the troops were protecting. There's a lot of reasons. Problem is, is that if you turn out to be wrong about that, if the acid test of combat proves that it would be very nice to have some defenses and they're not there, once again, who gets screwed in that situation? And the Allied troops will be forever trying to build ad hoc defenses in pouring rain as quickly as they can five minutes after escaping combat with the Japanese still on the way. You know, often at night'...

‘MacArthur’s great stature in the United States was in part due to his own highly efficient public relations organization. Most of the war news from the Philippines which the American public read came from MacArthur's communiques and press releases. Of 142 communiques released by his headquarters between December and March, 109 mentioned only one individual: MacArthur’... MacArthur had a way of getting his name into the press releases in multiple places even when it's not about him. Particularly like instead of saying, you know, the US Army's right flank on Bataan, the press release would say MacArthur’s right flank on Bataan'...

'If I told you on the Western Front, maybe in 1944, when the Germans and the Americans are facing each other in France, that there was a German unit that was there to terrorize the other side and hurt them around and freak em out. And they would come out of their foxholes at night, sneak over no man's land jump into an American foxhole, butcher the GIs in there, put them in obscene positions right on the side of the foxhole in blood and then go back to their own trenches at night. And if I told you they called themselves the werewolves and the vampires because that would freak everybody out, that's not too hard to believe is it? You'd probably go to the movie or read the book about it because the second world war has all kinds of wild things like that, right? But it's crazy, right? It's different. I mean, it's freaky. You imagine that people on the ground would probably be talking about it in the sector where it happened: did you hear what happened? The werewolves struck again, you know.

But I had to think about it like that to realize how freaky it is because in the Pacific that happens all the time. The Japanese do this routinely. They jump into the foxholes at night and they butcher people. They disembowel them, they stuff the genitals into the mouth and the stories are all over the place...

When you met veterans when I was growing up, the more combat they saw, traditionally, the less they would talk about it, but the vibe was different between people who fought in the Pacific and people who fought elsewhere. And the one thing that overwhelmingly was different was you could meet people who fought elsewhere that sometimes didn't like their opponents very much or sometimes hated them, but almost to a person, I didn't meet anybody who fought the Japanese, who didn't harbor really still bitter feelings decades and decades later...

Lord Russell of Liverpool was looking at the stats compiled at the Tokyo war crimes trials and came up with a doozy... a British or American soldier who fell into captivity by the Germans are the Italians had a 4% chance of dying while in captivity. A British or American soldier who fell into Japanese hands had a 27% chance of dying before being returned home and it's not even close. The most gentle thing you could probably say is that the Japanese had a much lower level of priority in terms of attention and resources towards POW than the other major powers did.

The truth is, is that guys like General Yamashita, who led the Singapore campaign, and General Hama, who led this Philippines campaign will both be executed by the Allies after the war for war crimes. And probably neither one of them deserve that. If you examine it closely, both of those generals, I mean Hama had it set up so that they were hospital stops and rest stops and food, but only for about 24, 25,000 people. They had the same problems with the exposure moment and the acid tests of combat. They win, but they plan for 25,000 prisoners and they end up with 78,000"


Today liberals claim university professors and students are liberal because they're smarter. So...

So much for burning the boats being the key to success