If you added another clause to make it “a friend of a friend” it’d be the very definition of an urban legend. Which I think I’ll consider it to be any way, since from your description it’s from the narrative of a movie / newsreel.

Second, there was an ongoing guerilla war going on in the South throughout the Korean War. (There was a home-grown Communist movement in the South that predated the Soviet occupation of the North.) These executions should be seen in the context of ongoing attacks accompanied by atrocities by the guerillas.

Neither side was interested in taking prisoners.

Al

The war against the Japanese could only be considered a “forgotten front” by Europers and scumbags in the Uncle Joe Fan Club. For many, if not most, Americans, it was the primary front of the war. It was the Japanese who attacked us at Pearl. It was the Japanese who were slaughtering our POWs. The Germans were a European problem. Japan was the primary in the hearts and minds of most Americans.

Seems like I saw a general discussion of Bismarck Sea in Richard Frank’s book on the Guadalcanal campaign, and in a volume of Morison’s US Naval Ops of WWII series.

George,

Surrender may indeed be, as you put “a western, bourgeois concept.” Inasmuch as I’m a western bourgeois, and somewhat Norte-Amero-Euro centric, perhaps that explains my positions. BTW, I don’t like Stalinists or commies any more than you do.

Hendryk – do you have a citation for that story? Especially the part about the suiciding pilot?
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The incident is mentioned in the book Angels Twenty: A Young American Flier a Long Way from Home by Edwards Park who flew in New Guinea and concerns the newsreels of time describing the battle and its casualty free outcome on the american side which he wryly remarks upon and includes as far as I can recall the pilot (a friend of his) finding – in the authors words “a use for that big ol´rusty Iron they carried around”.

Grimmy:
There wasn’t much sniveling over the bleeding out of Japanese soldiers by US and allied warfighters by the time of the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Guadalcanal had been in progress for some time as had the New Guinea fight, including the epic ANZAC defensive action along the Kokoda Track.
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Yes its true there wasnt much compassion especially with the japanese canibalising the corpses of their australian opponents during the Kokoda Campaign but when you consider having to fight a grimm war in a forgotten part of the world with little resources/support compared to the european theater its small wonder that some of the most remote and primitive airstrips also had high suicide rates.

The absolute barbaric brutality of the Japanese was well known by this time and there was very nearly zero hesitation to do unto them what they’d been doing for so long to so many for so long.

The Japanese killed in the Battle of the Bismark Sea were being sent to reinforce their offensive to take New Guinea. The allied forces were barely able to hold on as it was. If the Japanese had succeeded, there’s every likelihood that the ANZAC nations would have been cut off, isolated and eventually invested by Japanese forces.

I seriously doubt there was any pilot that shed even a single tear of remorse for those Japanese that got fed to the sharks.

And once the slaughter should have been over, it continued. The waters were quite warm, many of the Japanese survivors were afloat in lifeboats, rafts, and debris, and the remaining distance to the islands they planned to reinforce was not great. The appropriate orders went out to Allied pilots. The Bismarck Sea turned red.
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The one telling effect of the above mission was of the pilot who upon returning from this slaughter got out of his aircraft, put his .45 pistol in his mouth and terminated his own life.

You make some interesting comments for someone with your pen name.

As far a Pinochet is concerned, I am not aware that he did anything wrong, other than the accusations made by communists and communist sympathizers. And since I don’t believe anything such people say, I have no reason to agree that Pinochet did anything wrong. Even if some of the people on his side acted excessively, (and I don’t concede that they did), on balance, Pinochet was a great liberator and hero.

It is precisely because Pinochet thwarted the goals of Stalinists, and for no other reason, that he is hated so much by the left. The people who wanted to hang Pinochet don’t give a damn about a few dead civilians here or there. The Pinochet haters are the type of people who would regard any number of deaths in Chili as necessary expenditures if the result was a Marxist dictatorship. The left will use concepts of human rights only so long as it serves their purposes…..just as they use human rights advocates when, and for so long, as it suits them.

If you ever feel compelled to give mercy to those who moments before were very willing to steal your property, enslave you or kill you, after they “cease resistance”, you would be wise to remember that “surrender” is a western, bourgeois concept.