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1. 1. rachel peepers

   U.S. Marines killed in WW2, 24,486. Sixty-four years later, Tom Hanks stabs them in the back.

   Somebody may ask. How can a guy like Tom Hanks, who has Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers on his resume, suddenly and inexplicably decide the fight against the Japanese was based on propaganda and racism? Surprisingly to most people, Hanks has been going on TV lately making a moral equivalency case, saying that Americans and Japanese soldiers hated each other because each was different from the other (then he tries to link it to our distaste for Muslim extremists not only who launched a sneak attack on us, but who continue to want to attack innocent civilians; who want to kill us). Well, I think it’s time somebody put Hanks in his rightful place. The truth is, Hanks I’m convinced, is a fraud. I think that, when it comes to despising the U.S. military, he’s in bed with Barack Obama. Finally, Hanks, I believe, is admitting his Hollywood hatred for America and everything it stands for because he just can’t hold it in any longer. And I guess he feels that he’s rich enough that he no longer has to.

   The background.

   Seems to lil’ ol’ blond haired, blue eyed Rachel that, when it comes to American-hating guys like Hanks, love of money has always come way before hatred of country. But eventually the true colors show through.

   Fact is, I believe Tom, somewhat ironically, despises most everything our country and military stand for. If somebody was going to make a killing off of WW2, he’d want it to be him. I believe that Hanks believed in his pre-Saving Private Ryan days that he could make a pile of money making war movies, while embedding within them the almost subliminal notion that the GI’s were no better than the Japanese or Germans. How many of us have actually bought into that lie? Did U.S. Marines in WWII commit equivalent acts of barbarism that the Japanese soldiers specialized in? You decide.

   Here’s a sample of what the Japanese busied themselves with during the war years. Or, Tommy, is it just some Rachel concocted propaganda?

   How about The Rape of Nanking for starters? The Bataan Death March. The Japanese practice of lopping off heads of prisoners of war. The barbaric, inhumane medical experimentation on American soldiers in 1945 Japan. Perhaps a little more atrocity history is necessary to put this moral equivalency lie to rest. My thanks to George Dunkan for the language and information that I have a feeling Hanks won’t be making any movies about. For Hanks to say that our greatest generation was no better than the enemies they fought, enemies who wanted to enslave the world cerca 1940, is unforgivable. I believe that Eddie Slovic had a thousand times the courage and love of country as a Tom Hanks. Who’s good at pretending. He’s an actor. In real life, I believe he’s nothing but a liar. Now let’s take a look at the kind of soldiers Tom Hanks compares the United States citizen soldier to.

   This is a sample of what the Japanese were responsible for leading up to and during the second world war. “Known historically as the ‘Rape of Nanking, in 1937, (the real start of World War II) the Chinese capital had a population of just over one million, including over 100,000 refugees. On December 13, the city fell to the invading Japanese troops. For the next six weeks the soldiers indulged in an orgy of indiscriminate killing, rape and looting. They shot at everyone on sight, whether out on the streets or peeking out of windows. The streets were soon littered with corpses, on one street a survivor counted 500 bodies. Girls as young as twelve, and women of all ages were raped by gangs of 15 or 20 soldiers, crazed by alcohol, who roamed the town in search of women. At the Jingling Women’s University, students were carted away in trucks to work in Japanese army brothels. Over a thousand men were rounded up and marched to the banks of the Yangtze river where they were lined up and gunned to death to give practice in machine-gun traversing fire. Thousands of captured Chinese soldiers, many wounded, were also murdered. In the following six weeks, the Nanking Red Cross units alone, buried around 43,000 bodies. About 20,000 women and girls had been raped, most were then murdered. Department stores, shops, churches and houses were set on fire while drunken soldiers indulged in wholesale looting and bayoneting of Chinese civilians for sport. It is estimated that over 150,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were killed in this, the most infamous atrocity committed by the Japanese army.

   PHILIPPINES MASSACRE

   “A full account of all massacres of Filipinos by Japanese troops would fill several books. In Manila, 800 men, women and children were machine-gunned in the grounds of St. Paul’s College. In the town of Calamba, 2,500 were shot or bayoneted. Around 100 were bayoneted and shot inside a church at Ponson and 169 villagers of Matina Pangi were rounded up and shot in cold blood. At the War Crimes Trial in Tokyo, document No 2726 consisted of 14,618 pages of sworn affidavits, each describing separate atrocities committed by the invading Japanese troops. The Tribunal listed 72 large scale massacres and 131,028 murders as a bare minimum.

   THE CHEKIANG MASSACRES

   “The Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo brought a retaliation against the Chinese people that staggers the imagination. On April 18, 1942, sixteen twin-engined Mitchell B-25 bombers, each carrying one ton of bombs, and led by Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, were launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. Their mission was to bomb the Japanese capital, Tokyo, and then, unable to land back on their carrier, proceed to friendly airfields in China, 1,200 miles across the East China Sea. Some of the planes reached their destination safely but the others ran out of fuel and crashed after their crews had baled out. Sixty four airmen parachuted into the area around Chekiang. Most were given shelter by the Chinese civilians but eight of the Americans were picked up by Japanese patrols and three were shot after a mock trial for ‘crimes against humanity’. The Japanese army then conducted a massive search for the others and in the process whole towns and villages that were suspected of harboring the Americans were burned to the ground and every man, woman and child brutality murdered. When the Japanese troops moved out of the Chekiang and Kiangsu areas in mid-August, they left behind a scene of devastation and death that is beyond comprehension. Chinese estimates put the death toll at a staggering 250,000. Lt. Col. James Doolittle was later awarded the US Medal Of Honor. (The Chinese Department of Defense claims that 1,319,659 Chinese soldiers were killed between 1937 and 1945. It estimates the number of Chinese civilians killed during this period at over 30,000,000)

   ATROCITY ON LUZON

   “While many atrocities were committed on Luzon, this one stands out for its sheer bloody mindedness. Fourteen Filipino resistance fighters surrendered to the Nippon savages after their ammunition was expended. Tied together neck to neck and with hands tied behind their backs, they were marched three miles to their place of execution. Ordered to sit down, another group of prisoners were brought in and forced to dig fourteen holes two feet wide and four and a half feet deep. When the digging finished the fourteen Filipinos, with their neck ropes removed, were forced to jump into the holes while the other group shoveled the earth back into the hole and stamped it down hard until only the head and neck of the victims were visible above ground. Their repugnant duty finished, the grave diggers were then lined up and shot in cold blood. The attention of the Japanese was now focused on the fourteen heads awaiting decapitation. A few soldiers had gone behind some bushes to defecate and after scraping together their excreta on to banana leaves they returned to the buried victims and kneeling down offered each head a last meal. Unable to move, the helpless men could only shake their head from side to side whereupon the Japanese soldiers stuffed the revolting faeces into their mouths amidst peals of laughter from their comrades. After they had their fun, the serious business of execution commenced as an officer drew his sword and with deft strokes separated the fourteen heads from the bodies. No one was ever punished for this foul deed.

   MURDER ON WAKE ISLAND (January 12, 1943)

   The stubborn defense of the island by the tiny garrison of 388 US Marines and 1,200 civilians workers lasted for fourteen heroic days. On December 23, 1941, Major James P.S. Devereux of the 1st. Defense Battalion, US Marine Corps, and Commander Winfield Cunningham of the Naval Air Station, realizing that the odds were hopelessly stacked against them, called for a cease fire, raised the white flag and surrendered the island. In January, 1942, the US Marines, numbering 1,187, were herded into the cargo holds of the 17,163 ton Japanese luxury liner Nitta Maru, for transportation to Yokohama and then to Shanghai. Those left behind included the civilians and the wounded Marines. A year passed and on the night of January 12, 1943, the Japanese accused the civilians of being in secret radio communication with US naval forces. The 97 American civilians still on Wake (actually 98 but one was caught stealing food and was beheaded) were marched to the beach and there lined up with their backs to the ocean and brutally murdered by machine guns. After the war, the Japanese commander on Wake, Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara, and eleven of his officers, were sentenced to death by a US Naval Court at Kwajalein. Sakaibara was transported to Guam to await his fate. There, on 19 June 1947, he was executed by hanging. The murdered civilian POWs were later buried in Honolulu Memorial, Hawaii.

   THE ‘AKIKAZE’ EXECUTIONS (March 18, 1943)

   “The Mitsubishi built destroyer Akikaze (Lt. Cdr. Sabe Tsurukichi) was ordered to sail to Wewak in New Guinea to remove some German residents who were suspected of using radio transmitters to report ship movements to the Americans. Forty civilians were rounded up, most of them German clergymen, plus a few nuns with two children. About thirty more civilians were picked up when the ship stopped at Manus Island before proceeding to Rabaul. En-route, Captain Tsurukichi received a radio message from the 8th Fleet Headquarters to dispose of all neutrals on board. On the aft deck a wooden scaffold was erected and a sheet hung across the deck to shield the executions from the rest of the prisoners. One by one the victims were led from their cabins, interrogated and blindfolded and taken to the rear of the ship. There, they were hung on the scaffold by the wrists from a rope and pulley and as their feet cleared the deck they were shot by a four man rifle party. Their bodies were then thrown overboard. The two children were taken from the arms of the nuns and thrown into the water. The men were killed first then the women, the whole procedure lasting three hours.”
   (George Duncan, Massacres and Atrocities of WWII)

   BACK TO RACHEL

   I know it’s a chore to read through all this, but just imagine what it was like trying to live through it.

   Incidentally, Hank’s “Band of Brothers”, as I see it, was filled with ludicrous suggestions that there was also a moral equivalency between the German and American soldiers while anybody at Malmedy would disagree. As I remember, in virtually every Band of Brothers episode there was a gratuitous shot of an American soldier killing a white-flag-waving German soldier in cold blood. High ranking American officers were generally painted as cowardly, callous fools. Why didn’t at least the TV reviewers in the mainstream media pick up on this? Isn’t the answer so obvious? Because they agreed with it.

   Hanks, last week, went on foaming at the mouth spewing, in Rachel’s opinion, contempt for American soldiers by implying the Marines in the Pacific were out to “kill them all”. Give me a break. The Japanese believed surrender would bring dishonor to themselves and their families. The Japanese respected no one who surrendered. For the most part, the Japanese hated taking prisoners and wouldn’t be taken prisoner. The United States soldier was 7 times more likely to die as a prisoner of the Japanese than of the Germans. When the Japanese weren’t engaging in bayonet practice with POW’s, you might find them playing games with Chinese babies, throwing them up in the air, and trying to impale them with their bayonets. What a way to pass the time. What a pitiful excuse for an American, in my humble opinion, Tom Hanks really is. When it comes to your basic respect for country and the United States Marine Corps, Private Puke is missing in action.

   Yes, Dr. Hanson, he’s unhinged.

   March 12, 2010 - 10:59 am   Link to this Comment | Reply

   

   
2. 2. aaron chitty

   i agree. sure hes a good actor, but no historian. lets leave the text books to the scholars and historians and well leave the acting and movie making to the actors and movie making

   March 16, 2010 - 1:31 pm   Link to this Comment | Reply

   

   
3. 3. Aaron Carine

   Obama despises the U.S. military? Then why does he keep using it? Against Japanese war crimes we have to set the incineration of Japan’s cities,the wholesale killing of civilians on Okinawa,and the killing of Japanese prisoners,wounded,and shipwrecked. Americans did have strongly racist attitudes toward the Japanese,the internment of Japanese-Americans is not the only example.

   June 7, 2011 - 7:30 pm   Link to this Comment | Reply