‘These fascists, having perpetrated the Bataan Death March, Rape of Manila and Lipa Massacre, among others, had to be stopped and the arsenal that defeated these war criminals included Fat Man…’
THEN you haven’t met Frank Castle: “…to pursue a natural justice. I’m not talking about vengeance. Revenge is not a valid motive. It’s a tawdry, emotional response no better than the act that provokes it. I’m talking about… punishment.” [Marvel Comics. The Punisher: Year One (mini-series)]
The sentiment behind the quote reverberates backward to World War II when an observer said “that he (Rom Landau, We Have Seen Evil,) felt he was watching a man (Hitler) who had ceased to be himself and was possessed by some alien spirit. And he goes on to declare that Hitler, in his view is a kind of medium, the vehicle of terrible, dangerous dark forces.” Conclusion: “How can you sign a pact with lunacy? Therefore we can only fight on.” [J.B. Priestley, “You Cannot Sign a Pact with Hitler: WE CAN ONLY FIGHT ON,” Delivered over the British Broadcasting System, August of 1941]
In Germany itself, the case was made by Clemens August von Galen (Bishop of Mí¼nster) whose sermon of August 3, 1941 was a public protest against T4 Action (the Nazis’ euthanasia program).
This mass murder was replicated by the Nazis’ fellow fascists in Europe in 1941. “22 July: On the orders of Ljubomir Kvaternik, brother of Slavko Kvaternik, head of the armed forces of the Independent State of Croatia, the Serbs of Bihać and its environs are arrested and imprisoned. On 23 July, they are led to the plateau of ÄŒeravci, two kilometers from Bihać, having been led to believe that they were setting off to work in Germany. Stripped, they are shot and, in some cases, have their throats cut. The bodies are then thrown into graves that had already been dug, as well as into the small River Klokot. This scenario is repeated several times in late July and during August. A subsequent document of the War Crimes Commission of the Yugoslav state refers to 10-12,000 victims in this sector (ZloÄini na jugoslovenskim prostorima u prvom i drugom svetskom ratu: zbornik dokumenta, 1993: 983)” [https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/massacres-dismembered-yugoslavia-1941-1945.html]
Brutalities. Madness. Halfway across the globe, the Oriental Hitlerites had their own program and by August 1941, the Nipponese had already raped Nanjing and set up a military sexual slavery system. “‘Brought in a group of comfort women – 1 woman for 100 soldiers.’ This record from an April 1939 report of the head of the medical squad of the 21st Army in Shanghai, appears in a memo in the Operations Journal of Setsuzo Kinbara, Chief of the Medical Affairs Section in the Medical Affairs Department of the War Ministry.” [Asian Women’s Fund, “Number of Comfort Stations and Comfort Women,” https://www.awf.or.jp/e1/facts-07.html]
The AWF documentation committee had reported that “there were 30 comfort stations in Philippines, over 50 in Burma, and over 40 in Indonesia, for a total of over 120 in these three countries. In the South Sea area at Rabaul of Solomon Islands there were 6 naval comfort stations and more army comfort stations, in sum 20.” And 1941 was only the beginning for Southeast Asia. “In Butuan on the island of Mindanao a comfort station was opened with three Filipino women in 1942. And it is known that in Cagayan of the same island the third comfort station was established in February 1943. That means that there were three comfort stations in Cagayan. In Dansaran in the central part of the island there was a Comfort station. In Davao of the island there was a comfort station where Koreans, Taiwanese and Filipinos were brought and forced into service.” [Asian Women’s Fund, “Women made to be Comfort Women — Philippines,” https://www.awf.or.jp/e1/philippine-00.html]
These fascists, having perpetrated the Bataan Death March, Rape of Manila and Lipa Massacre, among others, had to be stopped and the arsenal that defeated these war criminals included Fat Man (the Mark III implosion-type nuclear weapon with a solid plutonium core named after an antagonist in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon) and Little Boy (gun-type fission weapon of uranium-235 assembled as L11).
The militarist Japanese employed suicide formations at land (banzai charges), sea (kaiten) and air (kamikaze): “secret discussions were held among senior Japanese commanders about using organized suicide attacks as a means to restore a Japanese advantage.
Following the battle of the Philippine Sea, Rear Adm Obayashi, commander of the 3rd Carrier Division, volunteered to form suicide units. Due to the Emperor’s ambivalent attitude towards this extreme tactic, the euphemism of ‘Tokko’ (Tokubetsu kogeki: special attack) was used by the military for these tactics. In September 1944, the commanders of the IJA 4th Air Army and the IJN’s 1st Air Fleet conducted a set of tests to examine bomber accuracy against ships in Manila harbor.” [Steven J. Zaloga. Kamikaze: Japanese Special Attack Weapons, 1944—45. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2011]
Hirohito’s henchmen, moreover, conducted bio-warfare and bio-medical experiments: “Victims normally were brought to Pingfan in the dead of night in crammed freight cars with lumber logs on top or were delivered in grayish green paneled Dodge trucks owned by the Kempeitai. The victims were then brought into the building via a secret tunnel…Anyone charged with any type of crime such as anti-Japanese sentiment, opium smoking, espionage, communism, mental handicap or homelessness was sent to Unit 731 for experiments. Victims included mainly Chinese, stateless White Russians, Harbin Jews, Soviet prisoners captured at the borders, Mongolians, Koreans, and Europeans accused of espionage. During the Khabarovsk Trial, Major Iijima Yoshio admitted that he was personally responsible for subjecting at least 40 Soviet citizens to certain human experiments.” [Jenny Chan. Marutas of Unit 731: Human Experimentation of the Forgotten Asian Auschwitz. San Francisco: Pacific Atrocities Education, 2020]
Showa’s soldiers maltreated the people during their occupation of Asia-Pacific: “Starving Japanese soldiers ate the flesh of prisoners of war and slave laborers during World War II, sometimes stripping the meat from live men, according to documents unearthed in Australia…Kyodo described the documents as ‘the first official proof that elements of the former Imperial Japanese Army engaged in cannibalism’.”
[https://www.upi.com/Archives/1992/08/10/Documents-claim-cannibalism-by-Japanese-World-War-II-soldiers/2568713419200/]
Keep these all in mind as candles are lit at Hiroshima and Nagasaki this August. “After years in which Japan’s armies had roamed Asia at will, killing on a Homeric scale, retribution was at hand.” [Max Hastings. Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008]
“But when it was victorious, when the crooked cross and the rising sun were done with, the Great Beast’s keepers found that it would not go back to sleep.” [The Punisher: Born No. 4]
