The Pacific

[stuartj]

Originally Posted by sc_rufctr

"Neither the Light Horse of 1918 or most of the characters being portrayed in the The Pacific circa 1943 were professional soldiers."

That's the point I was trying to make. There is a big difference between "conscripts" and "professional" soldiers. I was trying to be subtle.

"More than Wikipedia you say? We'll just have to wait for the Peter Fitzsimmons book. It happened in 1918, when can we talk about it?"

I don't mind talking about the incident. It was never a secret. We were taught about our military history in the Army.

Lots more info here... Australian Light Horse Studies Centre

"I didnt tell you about ANZAC Day, I simply mentioned it happened to be yesterday."

I was being a smart ass.

Thats a relief. I thought for a minute you were saying that youve been in the army, so you have special knowledge and your opinion is sacrosanct. There are a couple of people here that pull that **** quite regularly.

Im sure you know there were no conscripts in the Australian Light Horse in 1918 or AUS forces in the Pacific in WW2. The USA operated conscription in WW2.

[sammyg2]

wiki:

It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers—and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30%.

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by stuartj

Thats a relief. I thought for a minute you were saying that youve been in the army, so you have special knowledge and your opinion is sacrosanct. There are a couple of people here that pull that **** quite regularly.

Im sure you know there were no conscripts in the Australian Light Horse in 1918 or AUS forces in the Pacific in WW2. The USA operated conscription in WW2.

Let us not forget that if it were not for the people you are so willing to blame for whatever you can dream up, you would be typing in Japanese right now.

Seems the right thing to do would be to say thank you or just STFU!
Or is it that Australia has become the new france?

[stuartj]

Sammy, if you had two clues they would collide and kill you.

[stealthn]

Originally Posted by m21sniper

I'm not even talking about just soldiers. Even when measuring their civilian atrocities against those of the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese Empire was IMO leaps and bounds worse.

The Japanese, for instance, conducted numerous chemical weapon attacks against population centers during the war.

Off topic, but the US army did the same with various chemicals in the US in the fifties against your own people.....

[BeyGon]

the RAPE OF NANKING. by Iris Chang, great book on Japanese in China.

[ODDJOB UNO]

riveted to this the past 7 weeks. if you want your gold teeth yanked out by me...........BOTHER ME or CALL ME during the hour show. yes i am hooked .


my dad served 5 years straight in an army eng. battalion(sergeant). basically come off LST under fire and start blowing up jungle to make runway or repair existing runway.


new guinea/biak/luzon for giggles.


5 years with (2) count'em R&R's to OZ and New Zealand. other than that getting his ass shot at/or bombed/or strafed constantly while enjoying the hell out of the mud and rain.


one time they got their 1st shower in 3 months. not 10 minutes after going back to his mash style tent, air raid siren went off, and he hauled ass into a bomb crater full of mud. 500# bomb wasted his tent killed some friends and wasted the showers they just had built. and he was covered in mud and PISSED OFF AS A MOFO!


my mom used to empty fruit cans and fill them with vodka and rum and whiskey and reseal them and ship them over to him.


he HATED the japs until the day he died. when i bought my 1977 datsoon 280-z he about killed me.


he was slated for the invasion of the jap mainland(OP. CORONET) and was never so happy, "actually the happiest day of my LIFE" and i quote when they nuked the hell out of hiroshima and nagasaki.


flat out HATED ANYTHING JAP> hated SAKI hated RICE i mean HATED THEM TO HIS SOUL til the day he died in my arms.


so yes once again spielberg and hanks have me RIVETED to the tube watching this.


and yes there are atrocities in EVERY WAR, dont fool yerself. after getting all yer friends blown away for a few years ALL OF US NO MATTER WHO WE ARE would turn into ANIMALS! including me.

[Rick Lee]

IMHO, the worst crime of WWII and the postwar era is that we failed to make Japan admit and atone for their wartime atrocities. The emperor should have been publicly executed and Japan's school textbooks should have been made to cover their wartime history. MacArthur was basically the absolute ruler of postwar Japan and did not want to shame them, which they sorely needed.

As it is, Japan to this day views itself as the victim, not the aggressor, in WWII. There is zero mention in their textbooks of their atrocities in their occupied territories. They did stuff in China the Nazis could never have thought up. Read up on their experiments on Chinese civilians in Harbin -

Unit 731 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And when Iris Chang wrote The Rape of Nanking, it wasn't translated into Japanese for 10 years because they couldn't find any Japanese historians who would agree to review the translations. They have never apologized for their crimes or even acknowledged them. They've pretty much had the exact opposite treatment as the Germans did and with the exact opposite results.

[ODDJOB UNO]

the atrocities commited by the japanese started wayyyyyyyy before the u.s. got involved.


the same with the nazi's. except in europe it didnt come to light until right after d-day when a number of brits were murdered after they surrendered, by the SS.

then as we continued on thru france, we started to discover more. then when we started into germany the light bulb went on. and when it really hit the fan was when the malmedy massacre was discovered. then the gloves were off. and as far as the u.s. was concerned there were very few prisoners taken if you had any SS insignia on you. when we found the death camps, it flat out became ugly.


bottomline its human nature to react to outside stimulus with a equal or greater REACTION to that stimulus.

[jpachard]

What isn't mentioned in the miniseries but is in the book(I'm about 1/2 way through). Is that the Japanese in one instance cut off some dead Marines genitals and shoved them in their mouths for the next guys to see when they came back to the line.

This was one savage campaign and we should all be thankful for what those marines did.

As an aside I was horrified this past year when none of the major news companies made ANY mention of Pearl Harbor on December 7th. on their respective national home pages.

[m21sniper]

Originally Posted by stealthn

Off topic, but the US army did the same with various chemicals in the US in the fifties against your own people.....

Was the 1950s WWII?

Are our "own people," civilians of a foreign land? Or EPW's protected under the geneva conventions?

Did we tie up live civilians and use them as bayonet practice? (regular practice for the japs)
Did we practice epxerimental surgeries and torture techniques with no anesthesia on POWs and civilians?
Did we force entire populations of girls to become whores and ship them back home?

PS: To which experiments are you referring?

[Soterik]

My father was also in the South Pacific in WWII. He was a front line medic with the 41st division. Initially a National Guard unit formed mostly from men from the Pacific NW states, they were nationalized shortly following Pearl Harbor as I recall.

He wasn't a conscript, and joined with a whole bunch of other buddies when they were 17, and they lied about their age.

Dad spent almost 4 years in the South Pacific, battles such as Salamaua (72 days of continious battle), Lae, Buna-Gona, Nassau Bay, Biak, Hollandia.

The 41st division killed and captured more Japanese than any other division, and were nicknamed the "bloody butchers" by Tokyo Rose after the battle at Sanananda. My dad says they wore the title proudly. I know that at Milne Bay the Japanese slaughtered all 36 Australian soldiers they had captured, the Australians ultimately had a very good victory there.

Dad's kinda tired of all the Marine stories... but understands the reason there is so much documentation of these battles is that the Marines had photographers, and camera men with them. That's another reason there are so many Australian pictures as well, they had photographers also. My father said they had nobody to record the battles they were in that traveled with them, so that's why there are so few pictures from the regular "army".

All very interesting to watch, but dad isn't watching it....he remembers it all too well, though he'll be 87 this summer. He still thinks of his life as before WW2, and after. I've been too several of the reunions, and it's nice to hear the stories of the fun times they had. They don't talk about the bad stuff.

regards,
Eric

[ODDJOB UNO]

what i have noticed in this series being a history buff and having read alot of books re: europe and the pacific is:


they are cramming days and months of action into an hour. they are relying on a small number of people for personal experiences because the pool of participants is dwindling with age.


what we are seeing is from the eyes and ears of a few at a certain place beach hill fox hole pill box. at another beach it could have been entirely different better or worse.


trying to collate all these experiences is impossible. example being which island which landing craft was one on?


remember the scope of the pacific. IT WAS HUGE! more than can be fathomed by any single person. what was the most dangerous duty? front line grunt, pilot,tanker,flight deck,on a submarine, building runways? ALL OF IT if the bullet or bomb had YOUR NAME ON IT!


i think they are doing a remarkable job considering how wide spread the action was and how many people ships aircraft were involved.


now in comparison iraq and afghanistan cant hold a candle in comparison to either theatre in world war II for manpower and equipment.

[m21sniper]

Originally Posted by Soterik

Dad's kinda tired of all the Marine stories... but understands the reason there is so much documentation of these battles is that the Marines had photographers, and camera men with them. That's another reason there are so many Australian pictures as well, they had photographers also. My father said they had nobody to record the battles they were in that traveled with them, so that's why there are so few pictures from the regular "army".

There was not a single Marine unit present (that i am aware of) at the largest, most difficult/dangerous, and most important amphibious assault in human history.

[Fritter]

My grandpa was in the US Navy during WWII. He died in 1991. I am loving these shows because I can really see and feel some of the things he went through. These men were truly selfless heroes and I find myself in awe watching. The episode when they showed them boarding the transports and then leaving the ship to invade Peleleiu (sp) are amazing.

[sc_rufctr]

Originally Posted by Fritter

My grandpa was in the US Navy during WWII. He died in 1991. I am loving these shows because I can really see and feel some of the things he went through. These men were truly selfless heroes and I find myself in awe watching. The episode when they showed them boarding the transports and then leaving the ship to invade Peleleiu (sp) are amazing.

x2... May your grandfather rest in peace.

[m21sniper]

On the block where i used to live my neighbor on my right was a WWII Avenger turret gunner who fought in several major battles in the Pacific and my other neighbor on the left was in the first wave at D Day and later in the Battle of the Bulge

Talk about being awestruck in the company of two little old men.

My Great Grandfather rode in the incursion to find Pancho Villa and fought in WWI in the cavalry
My Grandfather pat. side was in the 3rd Army in WWII, tank mechanic
My Grandfather mat. side was in the USAAF 8th AF, B-17 mechanic
My father was a sailor in the 60s and spent some time in a DD off Yankee Station (and in the Atlantic as i recall)
Both my uncles were in the Army reserve during the Vietnam war, neither was unlucky enough to go.
My sister was a Medevac pilot and did tours in both Astan and Iraq.
I was but a lowly leg grunt during the Cold War.
My 11yo Godson wants to be a USAF Air patrolman.

[sc_rufctr]

Originally Posted by m21sniper

I was but a lowly leg grunt during the Cold War...

Nothing lowly about being a leg grunt.

Do you remember the day they bombed Gaddafi?
I was a lowly Medic in an infantry battalion at the time.

[m21sniper]

I do recall that, as a matter of fact.

[sc_rufctr]

Originally Posted by m21sniper

I do recall that, as a matter of fact.

April 15, 1986. I was 21 then. I'm guessing you're a few years younger than me.