"In Japan during the 2nd World War the religion of State Shinto inextricably linked Japanese soldiers to their homeland." "At the time, State Shinto taught them that the world was full of gods dominated by the sungoddess, from whom the Emperor of Japan was said to be descended." "And the Emperor was not only a god himself, he was also the supreme commander of the Japanese armed forces." "Every order these soldiers received was given in the name of the Emperor." "We were told that the Emperor was a living god." "If you go to war and die in action, then you become a god and are enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine and the Emperor will kindly visit and pray for you." "And one of the clearest instructions these soldiers received in the name of their Emperor was that under no circumstances were they to be captured alive." "I never thought of surrender." "Every soldier remembered the words from the "Military Service Code"" " "Don't bring shame on yourself by becoming a prisoner of war."" "This is the story of how, when the war turned against the Japanese, their willingness to die rather than surrender was to have terrible consequences, not just for Japan, but for every nation touched by the war in the east." "When American marines tried to retake Japanese held islands like here at Tarawa in the Pacific in 1943, the ferocious way in which the Japanese were prepared to fight to the death did not make the Americans respect them more," "it had quite the reverse effect." "I thought they were very cruel, they were sadistic, and they wanted to die for the emperor and we had to go out there and help them die for the emperor." "I blew a lot of them out of the caves;" "as they came out of the pill boxes after we'd put the gasoline in the slits and lit it with a flame thrower." "We shot the hell out of them as they were going out." "To many Amercians, the Japanese refusal to surrender became, like their surprise attack on Pearl Harbour and their mistreatment of prisoners of war, just another sign that they were a dishonourable foe." "We're gonna have to slap" "The dirty little Jap," "And Uncle Sam's the guy who can do it" "We'll skin the streak of yellow" "From the sneaky little fellow" "And he'll think a cyclone hit him when he's through it." "Their alibi for fighting is to save their face" "For ancestors waiting in celestial space" "We'll kick that precious space down to that other place" "We've gotta slap that dirty little Jap" "We had been taught that the Japanese were subhuman when we got into the attack." "But of course we had no love for Hitler or the Nazis but we also had many people in America who were of German descent, of descent from Italians." "It was an entirely different view we had of the Italians, of the Germans, than we had of the Japanese." "This view that the Japanese were somehow different from the other enemies the Allies faced extended to the way in which Japanese war dead could be treated." "They would turn these bodies over and hit them in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle." "I saw marines that had much in a paper sack of gold teeth." "It weighed probably 10 or 15 pounds." "Now that was their off duty activity, and it was fair game I guess." "Shoot 'em in the head with a 45, automatically the mouth opens up." "Man then, all them gold teeth staring me in the face." "And I didn't knock them out with a rifle butt, I used the pliers, I guess I had so much hate and so thought why I was doing that." "I had a whole canteen, a canteen of water here and a canteen of gold teeth here." "And the mutilation of Japanese war dead by some Americans was not just confined to stealing the gold teeth from their mouths." "This photograph published during the war in Life Magazine, shows the girlfriend of an American sailor next to a souvenir which her boyfriend has sent home from the Pacific." "The skull of a Japanese soldier signed by her boyfriend's comrades." "There are a lot of atrocities in war, that are on both sides, on both sides." "Not only one side, both sides." "Call it revenge, call it what you want." "Japanese soldiers fighting the Australians in New Guinea were also to commit atrocities against enemy war dead." "In late 1943, forbidden to surrender and cut off from their supplies," "Japanese troops began to starve." "As a result, some resorted to cannibalism, eating both their own dead and the enemy dead as well." "The findings of the Australian Army on this most sensitive issue were kept secret until the 1990s," "when a Japanese academic managed to get them declassified." "The practice of cannibalism was much more widely practised than previously thought." "I found through my research that the cannibalism was organized group practice rather than individually practised activity." "That senior Japanese officers were aware of the problem of cannibalism amongst their men is clear from this order from Major General Aotsu, which says that any Japanese soldier who has eaten human flesh is to be sentenced to death," "but specifically excludes from that those who have eaten enemy flesh." "The purpose of this group cannibalism was of course survival because about 160,000 Japanese forces were sent to New Guinea in 1942 but 93 per cent of the Japanese forces died and I feel angry towards the Japanese officers who made this decision to send such large numbers of" "Japanese soldiers in New Guinea without sufficient preparation." "And when the situation changed they simply decided to abandon those soldiers." "And what these abandoned soldiers knew was that when they died their divine emperor would go and worship them himself." "The first signs that large numbers of civilians as well as soldiers might be prepared to die for their emperor rather than surrender came in 1944" " at a place 1400 miles south east of the home islands of Japan - the island of Saipan." "Here, civilians were told that the Americans would rape and murder them if they were captured and with the encouragement of the Japanese army thousands took their own lives." "They were throwing the women and children off the cliff onto the coral." "There's pictures of it." "And as they were throwing the children I used to shoot the children as they went down so they wouldn't suffer when they hit the coral." "They'd jump and you could hear the screaming of the children on the coral." "It's a great big cliff." "They'd jump down with the babies." "A lot of times I used to think about that in my dreams." "If it was right for me to do that thing so they wouldn't have to suffer when they went down, cause they were going to die anyway, you know, when they hit the coral down there." "But a lot of them won't die, they'd still be alive and have a horrible death, so I'd shoot them and it's like shooting a horse that breaks his leg." "And this is a human being." "How I ever went through Saipan I don't know." "I've been years in post traumatic stress, stress from the war." "Japanese propaganda about Saipan emphasised the nobility of dying in the struggle against the Allies" "and the message was spread even amongst Japanese schoolchildren." "With the capture of islands like Saipan and Tinian, heavy bombers were now in easier range of targets on the home islands of Japan." "The Allies now launched the biggest aerial bombardment the world had ever seen." "During the war the allies dropped more that 160,000 tons of bombs on Japan in an effort to make the Japanese accept unconditional surrender." "I was 21 years old." "And I really was wanting to get the war over and I wanted to get home." "And if they told me to go and bomb some cities then I went and bombed cities." "They were bombed to nothing left except steps and chimneys." "Complete 100 per cent obliteration." "It's not like going out a sticking a bayonet in somebody's belly okay." "You still kill 'em but you kill 'em from a distance and it doesn't have that demoralising effect upon you." "I felt everything except mercy for the people for some reason." "I did not, I was not obsessed with any feeling of sympathy." "I just wasn't." "Tokyo was firebombed on the 10th March 1945." "Over 300 American B29 bombers dropped incendiaries which caused a fire storm in the Japanese capital." "About 100,000 people died." "First a little flame would catch our clothes, so we told each other and tried to put it out." "I heard a sharp scream on my back." "It was my baby." "The baby was crying on my back." "I turned around." "He was crying with his mouth open and the sparks of fire got into it." "The red flame was burning right in his mouths." "My mother shouted at me to hold him in my arms rather than carrying him on my back." "My father and my mother were trying to protect the baby from the raging fire around us." "My parents must have been caught in the fire and died." "It's beyond any description." "It's so very painful even to think about it." "Despite the destruction in Tokyo, opinion was still divided in the Japanese government in the months that followed over what should be done." "Accepting unconditional surrender might, some feared, mean the elimination of the institution of the emperor itself." "Emperor Hirohito, together with his military leaders, believed that in order to negotiate a more advantageous peace" "Japan needed to win one big victory." "And these were the men who would help provide it: the Kamikazes." "Pilots who would fly their planes to crash deliberately into enemy targets." "Kamikaze strategy had been born in 1944 with sporadic suicide attacks on Allied planes and ships." "Now in the spring of 1945 Kamikazes were to sortie en masse for the first time." "There had always been a tradition amongst the Japanese warrior elite of suicide being an honourable way out of an insurmountable problem." "Now this tradition was extended beyond the elite." "In this close knit society, one strongly based on respect through hierarchy, suicide was now seen as a way of showing that what mattered was not one's own life but the life of the state, the life of the Emperor." "Through films like these showing the self-sacrifice of the Kamikaze the message was spread into the general population." "I thought they were doing very well." "I didn't think that they were wasting their lives." "I believed that they were sacrificing their lives for the country." "And us civilians, we should also be ready to sacrifice our lives for the coutnry when the time came." "The Japanese people belonged to the Emperor." "We were his children." "But not all Kamikazes volunteered as freely as the propaganda images suggest." "The story of how Kenichiro Oonuki came to be a kamikaze offers a less simplistic insight." "All the fighter pilots, about 150 of us at the training base, were called in." "A senior officer, the head of the troop told us they were recruiting people for a special mission." "And he said, "lf you go on this mission, you won't come back alive."" "Everybody thought this was ridiculous and nobody really was willing to go." "We wanted to give the answer "No, I don't want to go."" "But later on we thought, "Wait." "If we want to say no, can we really say it?" "Can we say no to this officer?"" "We told each other that we should calm down and think about the consequences." "If some people rejected the offer, they might be shunned and sent to the most severe battle front in the south and would meet certain death anyway." "Then when their family was informed of this, how would they feel?" "They would be ostracized from the community." "Nobody wanted to volunteers, but everybody did write" "" Yes I volunteer for the special mission with all my heart."" "Everybody had the same expression in their eyes." "Like a deep sea fish looking up at the blue sky above." "I've never seen sadder expressions in anyone's eyes since then." "The biggest Kamikaze attack of the war was on the British and American fleets during the battle for Okinawa in spring 1945." "I think they were the worst moments of my life." "I'd been frightened many times in the war but that was about the worst time, sitting there knowing that one kamikaze coming up there could have swept the whole of our complement of aircraft and aircrew." "They could kill the whole lot." "It's not nice." "We wouldn't be expected to survive if the kamikaze had hit the deck." "All of us would have gone up in smoke, a lot of roasting going on and all they'd do is to brush the remains over the side..." "that's all what one can do..." "The guns were going, all the ship's guns were, the place was black with smoke up there where the bursts had been going on." "And there were occasional splashes in the sea where some kamikaze had been hit, or missed, you know, because some of them were pretty careless." "One of them had hit the forward gun turret and that killed about six people and injured another six." "And the second one had bounced off the flight deck aft and that I think swept a few aeroplanes into the sea and killed about four people or maybe eight people." "Because of the war and what we heard about what they did on the land fighting we had no compassion for them at all." "There're no good Japanese, there're only dead ones." "The British warships with their armoured decks did not suffer as much under kamikaze attack as the Americans." "Altogether 24 American ships were sunk and around 200 damaged by kamikazes off Okinawa." "Kenichiro Oonuki was shot down by the Americans before he had a chance to crash his plane into one of their warships." "The Japanese authorities said he was dishonourable, imprisoned him, and denied him the chance to fly another kamikaze mission." "Many of my comrades died, thousands of them, whereas we simply survived." "We survived and we feel guilty about it." "In March 1945 as the kamikazes flew around them the Americans landed here on the small island of Tokashiki." "As on Saipan the civilians were told by the Japanese army that the Americans would rape and murder them." "The army encouraged the islanders to adopt kamikaze tactics." "To some, they gave 2 hand grenades and told them to throw one at the Americans and then to blow themselves up with the other." "On March 27th 1945, about 800 villagers gathered in this ravine at the southern end of the island." "The Americans were less than half a mile away." "The children were told that they would be killed if the enemy captured them." "And also that to be captured would bring great shame, so it was better to choose to die." "There was an explosion, a small American bomb had dropped nearby." "One of the village elders started to try and kill his family with the branch of a tree." "At the sign that this senior member of the group would sacrifice those he loved, other villagers started to follow his example." "The first person we killed was our own mother, who gave us life." "Everything around me, including my mind was all in absolute chaos and I don't remember the details." "But what I do remember is that we first tried to tie her neck with rope." "Finally we took a stone and bashed in her head." "That's the brutal thing we did to our mother." "I was only 16. I couldn't stop crying because of a sadness that I had never experienced before." "I will never cry like that in my life again." "That day in March around 320 men, women and children died on Tokashiki." "Shigeaki Kinjyou survived only because as he tried to attack the Americans in a suicide charge he was captured alive." "I think we were dreadfully manipulated." "As I got older my soul started to suffer." "55 years, since the end of the war, and I still suffer today." "By the time of the suicides on Tokashiki, in March 1945, the Japanese Empire had been pushed apart." "The British army was advancing through Burma." "And the Americans threatened to land on Okinawa, the largest piece of Japanese territory they'd yet reached, less than a thousand miles from Tokyo." "The Imperial Japanese Army ordered an heroic stand to be made here on Okinawa, one that might then allow the Japanese to negotiate peace from strength." "The Americans expected the Japanese to defend the beaches." "After all, that was the only way a landing could ever be prevented." "But on April the 1st 1945, when 50,000 American troops came ashore, they found their arrival virtually unopposed." "Everyone was very happy." "What happened to the Japanese?" "Now we just thought we were luckier than hell." "And we were very surprised that there wasn't cannon fire, mortar fire, small arms fire meeting us." "We were very pleased." "But there were Japanese troops on the island, more than eighty thousand of them dug into the fabric of the island interior." "Some in concrete pill boxes underneath the trees." "I saw Americans for the first time in my life." "Their tanks come first and then the infantry companies followed." "The soldiers were carrying guns and they were chewing gum." "I didn't know what they were chewing at the time." "They looked as though they came for a picnic." "The Japanese leadership hoped that on Okinawa their army, together with the civilian population, would be so determined, so prepared to sacrifice themselves that the Allies would realize that a compromise peace would be in everyone's best interests." "We realised that we were losing a lot of people." "A lot of people." "They were very excellent trained troops." "And killed any number of our company people." "You'd get up there and you'd get under machine gun fire and mortar fire and you lose people." "The Japanese soldier' last word was usually "Mother"." "I saw several people die in the war, but I heard nobody call out "Banzai" for the Emperor." "Americans also muttered "Mother" when they died." "When we shot them, we heard them calling "Mom" or "Mother"." "We talked about it amongst ourselves that when they were dying they said the same thing as us." "But not all American soldiers accepted this common link of humanity as they were." "They were inhuman race." "We were taught and did not ever take a Japanese prisoner." "In the 2 years that I was overseas with the Raiders, 4th Marine, 6th Marines divisions," "I saw no prisoner ever taken." "One came with 30, 40 of them with their hands up." "They were killed on the spot." "Because we didn't take prisoners." "On Guadalcanal, a number of Japanese would come up, purporting to surrender, and fall down with grenades under their arms, and blow up people." "Any number of tricks, the Japanese had." "We took no prisoners." "The Americans would often order the Japanese soldiers ever surrendered that did to take off their clothes to show they weren't armed." "Many thousands of Japanese soldiers did manage to survive to become POWs." "But occasions were even after their surrenders had been accepted." "The lives of surrender soldiers still at risk." "Two fellows, running a telephone line across country, came across a Japanese who'd surrendered to them." "They took him to the company headquarters, and the captain just blew his top," "'You've ruined our record,' he said," "'Sergeant, er take this prisoner to battalion headquarters and I'll see you at 11.15.'" "Well, it was eleven o'clock and the headquarters was 5 miles away." "So they took him out and killed him." "After weeks of fighting, much of it hand-to-hand, and distraught with lack of sleep and food," "Hajime Kondo decided his time had come." "Almost all my colleagues had died." "I thought it's time for us to join them." "That why we decided to attempt a Banzai attack." "It was suicidal behaviour but I believed that death would be a kind of relief for us at the time." "I saw my comrade get shot and fall down on the ground and when I was trying to save him, I stumbled over a stone and fell down." "I was surrounded by American soldiers." "They were pointing guns at me and that's how I was captured." "As the Americans pushed the Japanese army to the south of the island, there were many civilian suicides, several thousand here at Cape Kiyan." "Once more, the Japanese army played a crucial role in encouraging civilians to kill themselves." "On the remote islands nearby, where there were no Japanese soldiers, there were no mass suicides." "It was an awesome scale of sacrifice." "Around 8,000 American troops, 60,000 Japanese soldiers and 150,000 Japanese civilians died on Okinawa." "And still the war continued." "The reason why then Japan continued the war is that for the previous half century, through the first sino-japanese war, the russo-japanese war, up to World War I, the Japanese had never lost a war." "Japan had always won." "Thus, both the Government and the military people didn't know how to deal with losing a war." "They didn't have any experience of defeat and they didn't know how to end it, how to lose the war." "In that situation, it was easier to continue the war rather than make the courageous decision to lose it." "While the fighting raged on Okinawa, here in Borneo the Japanese refusal to surrender was to have a catastrophic effect on allied Prisoners of War." "British and Australian Prisoners of War had been first sent to this camp at Sandakan in North Borneo and forced to build an airfield by their Japanese captors." "Many had been captured at the fall of Singapore, others when the Japanese over-ran the island of Java." "The prisoners laboured here in temperatures often as high as 30 degrees celsius, malnourished, many sick with beri beri or malaria." "Always under the constant threat of receiving a beating from their Japanese guards." "There was one occasion on which somebody intervened" "When he was an officer, when one his men were being beaten up by some Japanese guards and he was horribly beaten up by quite a number of them." "The Japanese treatment of Prisoners of War was brutal, sadistic, and uncivilised, but in those conditions, there was no solution." "You have to take it." "In the old British phrase, you have to grin and bear it." "Peter Lee was fortunate to survive." "He was one of a group of officers transferred from the camp before the crisis developed." "I'd have given my right hand to have stayed." "I lost some very good friends, not only amongst the 700 men who were left, but also the officers." "They were very fine men." "Fearing an Allied invasion, the Japanese forced more then 1000 British and Australian Prisoners of War to march through the jungle over 160 miles towards Japanese bases on the other side of Borneo." "The biggest of these forced marches, with nearly 550 POWs, left Sandakan in May 1945." "Well, maybe one in ten was sort of healthy." "But the food situation was terribly bad and a lot of them were sick" "They had malaria and things like that so they were weak." "A couple of days later, we were told that if they fell over, if they fell over, we shouldn't leave them." "We had to get rid of them." "As the prisoners of war fell, exhausted, by the side of the jungle trail, they were shot." "One of the Australian prisoners of war who collapsed was murdered by Toyoshige Karashima." "I felt very sorry for him, but I had no choice but to kill him." "I shot him" "When people were about to die, they know that up to then they had made their utmost effort to survive." "But once they realise that there is no chance of survival, they just give up." "For us, even if I wanted to help him, there was no way I could, except to help him by killing him" "Each day, as they marched on through appalling conditions, more prisoners of war died." "And not just prisoners of war." "A hundred of the 1 ,000 Japanese soldiers who went on the marches from Sandakan died." "But, in contrast, all of the prisoners of war who were left in Japanese care would lose their lives, the final survivors murdered by the Japanese in an attempt to conceal their crime after they'd reached their destination." "Of the 1800 Australian Prisoners of War who'd been alive at Sandakan camp in 1944, only 6, who'd managed to escape into the jungle, survived." "The rest died either in the camp itself, on the marches, or once their trek was over." "Every single one of the 700 British Prisoners of War lost their lives." "Absolute horror." "Because nobody, I'd say, at that time, had any idea that any such thing could possibly occur in what is called a civilised world." "Toyoshige Karashima was subsequently convicted by an Australian War Crimes tribunal of murdering more than a dozen Prisoners of War." "I don't feel guilty now about what I have done because in a war people cannot be normal." "We had already learnt what the Japanese were like when we were trained by the Japanese army at a training camp in Taiwan and we saw many Japanese in colonised Taiwan." "When we joined the Japanese army, we were told that we were the soldiers of the Emperor and all we needed to do was to obey orders - to obey orders which were the orders of the Emperor." "That's what I was told." "And the fierce resistance of the Emperor's army was costing the Allies dear." "I passed right by a graveyard." "lndescribable number of crosses, er, of, er, of markers." "I couldn't describe to you how I was um affected by that." "I had never seen 7,000 markers before." "And when I came to realise that they were just kids like myself, that wouldn't be going home, sorry, I um," "I just couldn't make it any more." "It it just took something out of me, that I didn't know was there." "I thought I was pretty tough." "I wasn't tough." "I, er, anyway, yeh, it was a traumatic event." "With Okinwa taken, the next battle, these marines believed, would be on the home islands of Japan." "We went from Okinawa to Guam to be in training to attack Japan." "And we fully expected heavy casualties." "Whether, without the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945, the Japanese might have subsequently given up before any invasion was necessary, is one of the great unanswered questions of history." "For the last few weeks of the war," "Japan had been seeking Moscow's help to mediate a peace, but one that still fell short of unconditional surrender." "What is certain is that, after the atomic bombs were dropped, throughout Asia and the Pacific Japanese troops laid down their arms, finally allowed to stop fighting and survive." "Around 5,000 soldiers and politicians would subsequently be tried for war crimes." "British and Malay officials watched 10,000 faces getting lost as the Japs marched past and saluted the Union Jack." "Prestige is precious in the Far East and this is the way to make sure that, from now on, Japan's name is mud." "Spared humiliation was the Emperor himself." "After the nuclear bombs had been dropped and the Japanese had made peace overtures to the allies who had hinted that the institution of the Emperor could be kept in Japan - and so it proved." "After the war Hirohito remained in his palace in the central part of Tokyo, for the allies useful as a symbol of continuity between the old Japan and the new;" "now a constitutional monarch at the head of a democratic government, no longer a living god." "Historians is divided into how much Hirohito, with a hard-line government around him, was able to control the conduct of the war." "But what there is no argument about, is that at the end of the war, the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Armed Forces stayed on as Emperor, despite more than a million Japanese soldiers dying in his name." "Why did the person at the top, the person who had supreme responsibility, not take responsibility for the war?" "I would have expected if the Emperor had given any thought to those who died in misery on the frontline, he would have taken some responsibility." "Veterans don't really talk about war experiences openly." ""Don't talk about bad things"" " they say as it would shame Japan." ""Keep quiet."" "Emperor Hirohito remained on the throne until his death in January 1989."