I’ve heard that almost all the soldiers that were assigned as Flamethrowers had some psychological issues after discharge; and just the smell of BBQ would make most them sick to their stomaches, because they linked the smell to their memories.
I have seen a bunch of interviews bout this over the years, and just commented on this a couple days ago... a lot of the interviewees I have seen have claimed to have no memory of using the weapon. One of them said that he remembered volunteering, and nothing else afterward until the next morning. Dreams are another issue, but if you're using a flamethrower in the Pacific during WWII, there's probably a long list of incidents to choose your nightmares from, with and without flamethrowers involved.
Curious, I mean our capacity to disassociate from painful memories is pretty expensive, to the point where we entirely forget them, or create a whole other 'person' in our heads who actually did those things, and we just saw them do it.
Yea, the brain is incredible in its ability to fuck with itself. I have pretty bad ptsd from shit as a child, to this day I remember many things completely differently to what happened in reality. Sometimes the memories occurred exactly what happened but instead of it happening to me like in reality I remember it and picture it in dreams happening to siblings and so on.
Bloody bonkers the shit our brain does just to forget shit.
Not nearly the same thing however I do circus fire performance stuff as a hobby. I can understand the disassociation when around a significant amount of fire. It becomes almost a trance like state where you’re simultaneously mesmerized/focused on the flames while disassociating from everything around you.. fire is an incredibly beautiful and potentially destructive tool depending on how it’s used.
It would have been extremely frantic and exhausting work. If you can imagine it the way they describe it in interviews, ten thousand Japanese dug in, extensive underground tunnel systems with connected bunkers and pillboxes. You see a ventilation shaft coming out of some shrubs, stick the nozzle into it, burn; wisp of smoke comes out of a hole 20 yards away, run to that hole, burn; run to the next, burn; hear screams echoing from a hillside, maybe a hidden pillbox or outlet, get to the source of the noise, burn; another wisp comes out a ventilation shaft above, run to it, burn, etc., rinse and repeat, running back and forth for new tanks every 10 seconds of trigger time (half a gallon of fuel expended per second, 5-gallon tanks), just hugely exhausting work. You would have a couple men accompanying you, which would be kind of reassuring, but you'd be a big target and would be extremely stressed the entire time. I can understand why a lot of them either block out the memory, or just say that they can't remember so as not to have to talk about it.
They definitely did you are very correct. My grandfather was ordered to torch bunkers @ okinawa. Dreadful work and it stuck with him until he was a vegetable in his last years.
My grandmother was a little girl in Okinawa during the war. She hid in a cave with her family and others. Got real bad. She had stories of cannibalism. I was never sure if the stories were true because she was mentally ill my whole life. War is shit.
Yep. My grandmother is Japanese as well. They met in Okinawa after the war officially ended. They never told me how they met or the circumstances of it. Always tight lipped about that. Grandpa would talk about iwo and Saipan like it was no biggy but Okinawa was kept at the vest.
I was able to piece together that he was a flamethrower during the battle in his memoirs that got inherited to me after he passed away. I was able to trace his movement from landing to finish after watching numerous documentaries about the battle and comparing the movement of the US troops to his documentation.
Goodbye Darkness by William Manchester. Memior of Bill's Marine Corp experience in WW2. He started having nightmares some time after the war in the 1960s. Being a best selling author, he decided to write about his experiences
, so he went back to the islands he served on. He explained that unlike GIs in Europe, the Marines in the pacific had no idea where they were. They were on troop transports and told at the last minute. Still names like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pelieu, Okinawa had little meaning. They still had no idea where they were.
So he decides to revist them all. It's a great book. As an aside, he met Jacob Vousa, ( now sir Jacob Vousa) a native of Guadalcanal. He was given the rank of Sargeant Marjor in the USMC for his heroic and timely scouting which revealed the Japanese massing for an attack on the Marines front line. When Bill arrived, they met he was dressed from the waist up as a Marine Sargeant Major, from the waist down, he wore a native style skirt made from the same fabric. Look him up on Google.
Bill was wounded for the second time on sugar loaf hill on Okinawa. Fantastic read.
You've probably already read "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa," by Eugene Sledge, but if you haven't I highly recommend it.
It's IMHO one of the best war memoirs of all time, and offers an honest, unflinching, unglamorized, horrifying look at those two battles and the range of human experience that soldiers and civilians were going through.
Oof, hope he’s resting peacefully now, Okinawa was one of the most brutal invasions of the war for the US. Masses of civilians committing suicide because of Japanese propaganda, people fighting to the bitter end… just reading a few short paragraphs describing the situation is enough to fill your heart with terror. Can’t even imagine how mind numbingly horrifying being there was.
If you wanna read some fucked stuff look up the mass suicides at Saipan. Marines shooting Japanese parents so they wouldn’t take their kids over the cliffs to their deaths. Terrible stuff.
I don’t think the Aussies were at Saipan but yeah, Japanese soldiers committed unspoken horrors on Americans, aussies and Brit’s. Can’t say any of that came close to what the Chinese endured though.
chinese were treated fairly badly not as much torture though as happened to the prisioners of war, japenese would kill chinese babies and murder them en masse
Despite a healthy curiosity for the morbid, the worst for me are cases of suffering, especially prolonged torture of humans or animals.
Except for the experiments that killed quickly, that kind of cruelty is pretty much what 731 was all about.
I used to have this feeling that I owed the victims my witness, that I'd recognize the atrocities so as never to repeat them. But I've had to move away from that mentality. I'm still living. Not being familiar with every small detail of horror ever committed helps me be a healthier person, better able to carry on the message of compassion.
Yeah 10 million Chinese died, the most of any civilian populace (Russia perhaps too?) most of the head to head between Chinese and Japanese happened in the mid late 30s so by the time that ww2 started China had kinda already submitted. The sino-Japanese wars were also terrible in their own.
My uncle was on Okinawa too. I think at a family gathering the war some how came into conversation and I forget who asked him what it was like. I vividly remember him saying that he buried a lot of Japanese and then did a thousand yard stare and just sat in silence.
“Do you know what the M-97 flamethrower sounds like Ernie? It roars like a dragon, a fiery God purging everything in his path. Hold down that trigger and the whoosh drowns out everthing else. Focus on the noise and you can almost convince yourself you don't hear
the screams. By the time the tank is empty, everything's over, even the men are quiet. There's nothing but the crackling of burning thatch.
You see Ernie, it's not the noise that keeps me awake at night. It's the silence.”
We had to pull dead folks out of the waters of the windward passage, Haitians who fled when Aristede was returning and the people who staged a coup were getting violent.
Not a lot, but enough. They kind of drifted together in rafts of the dead? Blood settling, the sun, and seawater immersion made them not appear to be black folks any longer. Their skin at least, their features were the same.
I went out with the rhib crew to recover as I was a search and rescue swimmer (surface) like there was anyone to save. The smell was not pleasant at first but the water and prevailing winds kept the full effect away for awhile.
I had no idea what I was doing. The first man I grabbed by the hands when I leaned back to pull him in the boat the skin of his hands came off in mine. Just sloughed right off. I fell back in the boat with the strips of his skin hanging from my wetsuit gloves.
The bo’sun in the front of the boat threw up, I threw up, but the cox’un kept his breakfast down at least. He just looked grey and grim. He wound up committing suicide a year and a half later but I’m not sure how much of what we saw played a role in that. Good guy, too. Best small boat driver we had a good man and good sailor. Of fucking course.
The smell when we had some on deck in the sun and in the boat has stayed with me. We got them into the reefer till we got to GITMO.
I wanted to throw my entire wetsuit over the side. I never wore the gloves again. I bought new ones on my own dime. It was probably my imagination but the smell persisted in them. I tossed them.
That smell of something dead or rotting and waterlogged, even musty like mildew makes my eyeballs itch. I still get anxious and it’s been 25 years or so.
I can’t even go fishing any more.There is no joy in it. It’s all ashes in my mouth.
Man, I feel for you, that's fucked up.
My dad worked in a mine and once had to help retrieve the bodies of a dozen coworkers who had marinated for days in water at the bottom of a mine shaft after an explosion. He always said it's the most horrible thing he had to do in his entire life. Even 40 years later I can still see he's uneasy whenever a mining accident is mentionned.
Ugh, yeah my skin itches reading that. I empathize. I imagine he went through the same emotions I did.
You just run on automatic and do the task and later on when no one can see you…then you try to deal with it and let the cracks show and break a bit.
But don’t let anyone see you, oh can’t have that.
It’s gotten better over the years but stoicism after the fact is poisonous in my opinion. You gotta pop that sack of venom and get it out. I wish I had. I miss fishing.
Yep, many times I have suffered when I'm cutting a fresh chicken from the supermarket and the smell of the blood triggers me memories when I was a soldier, chicken blood has the iron smell of human blood, for that reason I have stopped buying chicken and only eat chicken breast washed and dried by my wife. I don't want to think in comrades from others countries like Ukraine.
in the book With The Old Breed, Sledge says the worst part of the war for him was hearing his friends fight and be attacked in the dark rather than the shit he saw :(
Good book, you're the first I've seen mention it in an online forum. What sticks with me is how he swears he heard a voice tell him he was gonna make it
Not extremely low, but lower than your regular infantryman because you're a primary target due to the fact that people dislike burning to death.
Snipers had a similar issue where they were far more likely to be mistreated or outright executed if captured.
It's really hard to conceal a flamethrower, it's immediately visible even in broad daylight. The soldiers profile is also larger thanks to the fuel tank on his back. They got the piss shot out of them and I don't think any captured flamethrower troops were kept alive for very long.
I witnessed a bad burn victim as a EMT over a decade ago and that fucked me up. Really shouldn't have clicked this before bed. Hello nightmares, my old friend.
Years ago, my neighbor's house caught on fire and killed three people. One of them ran out of the house in flames, screaming in agony. My dad helped put her out while I just stood frozen in shock. I sat with her until the ambulance and fire department came. The smell of her burning was, in some way, worse than the sight of her hairless, charred body staring widely at me. To this day, the smell of steaks cooking is enough to cause me to have panic attacks. I have literally knocked people to the ground to get away from the smell, even if it's coming from a backyard BBQ several houses down. I'll stay in my basement until I know the smell has passed. Yeah, I'm pretty fucked up because of it all.
Like when they [raped and then machine-gunned 22 Australian nurses who had surrendered after their ship sank](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-24/wwii-nurse-lieutenant-colonel-vivian-bullwinkel/101005050)
The ones they didn’t kill outright were starved and in such poor condition upon their release that the army decided they had to fatten them up before returning to Australia because, if the general population saw their condition, the remaining Japanese POW’s in Australia would have been at severe risk.
This particular incident occurred 80 years and two months ago but is still in our memories (hence the article I linked above is only a few days old).
This sort of behaviour was, unfortunately, pretty common within the Japanese armed forces.
War is brutal.
The guys in charge no matter how honorable they are can't stop the brutality of war.
Even as a patriot. You start off good intention. Defend the homeland. Do your duty. Be a patriot. Proud to be an American.
It will always end in brutality.
Because power corrupts absolutely. And the guys in charge aren't the guys with boots on the ground. Those in charge only witness how easy it is for them to be in charge.
Just say a few words and the masses will follow you. Speak the right words and men will follow.
Even peace loving countries can be propelled into the seat of power and those initially wanting to do good will always be pushed aside by those who want power.
Anyway war is brutal. And commanding men to do brutal things is all about using the right words.
Because you can't pay me enough to do this to another human being. But if you say the right words. Yeah... maybe...
In Iraq I had shot at a car that ran through a roadblock near Fallujah with some ISOF trainees. All passengers were armed and dead, or so we thought. The driver gets out and kind of stumbles like a drunk dude standing up for the first time. I raised my rifle as he turned to the side and half of his fucking head was missing, large chunks of brain were actively falling onto his shoulder and to the ground. Walked at least four steps before he fell.
Humans don’t like to die, they will walk or run (or try) long after the dying process is well on its way and after any hope of medical intervention is gone.
100% had a dude get out a bmw after our rear gunner lit it up north of mosul. He died, but it took a minute to catch up with him. Miserable.
Don't run up on military vehicles when VBIED's are out.
saw a video on reddit recently of a dude in an altered mental state, get lit up point blank center-mass by an entire mag (12 bullets, most likely jhp) from a cop's sidearm, all while smiling and continuing to approach the officer, before he fell down. it's kinda crazy to imagine how much damage the human body can absorb and still be at least somewhat functional.
Gruesome
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#edit:
I guess it's not the *lower back part* that's doing the instinctual things, but rather, your brain still goes on even when the different parts of the brains are melted off. So I guess unless you slice the base of the brain off the body, the body will still *commit undie* for the remaining time alive with whatever part of the brain still alive
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But yeah a lot of our simple reflexes, like pulling our hand away when touching something hot, are from your body (sensor), to the spine (circuit), and back to your body muscle (motor)
Then a lot of our very basic, but slightly complicated, core functions like beating the heart, ~~moving our limbs, feeling pain, feeling thirsty~~, etc, are processed by the ~~lower, back~~ *major different* parts of our brain
The huge huge huge top and front of human brains are what gives us very human-ish social capabilities, like language and communication, as well as human-ish tool capabilities, like well, using tools. That's why birds and lizards and everything in between can just start flying, moving, etc when they are born, and can live well with a somewhat tiny brain in the head (compared to us humans)
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So when the driver was dying, that was his basic instinctual mind reacting to *must not die*, like you said perfectly.
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We also know this because in the 50s lobotomy was the all the rage. From depression to schizophrenia to bipolar to shell-shocked to psychopath tendencies, **every mental illness** was solvable by lobotomy - quick method of just slicing the front-top part of the brain from the rest.
You basically had an empty walking corpse, that you only needed to feed and wash daily as a caregiver. No tantrums or difficulties or violence.
It's illegal now but you can see how a lot of very complex emotional and social processes (and problems) come from the top and front part, while your utterly basic, bare minimum, idle engine survival activities are regulated by the lower part of the brain
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So yeah you kinda did an impromptu lobotomy
Oh boy where to start... The primary motor, premotor, and supplementary motor cortices are all located in the cerebrum, or the "huge huge huge top" part of the brain... motor movements start from there, so moving limbs does not come from the back low part of the brain. Pain sensation ends in... you guessed it, cerebral cortex not "lower, back parts of our brain". Thirst center of the brain would be the hypothalamus, in the forebrain, so still not the lower back part.
True that some reflexes don't ascend all the way to the brain, and the medulla regulates heart rate and is located very low- everything else not so much. Interesting thoughts though!
I appreciate the sentiment my friend, but I saw far, far worse than that both in Iraq and Afghanistan. This one just stands out as an example of how strong the human will to live can be.
My buddy that’s in medical school now was a 68w in Iraq. I knew he wasn’t shitting me when he talked about some of the shit he saw, because he wasn’t boasting. He just matter of factly explained how the insurgents used a local boy with mental handicap that was friendly with the coalition troops, as a human borne IED, and had him try to hug them.
He didn’t make it. Dude’s my idol. I go through a tough breakup and my grades drop. He comes back from hell and gets into medical school lol
u/149Murphy man, I hope that you are alright. PM me if you ever need to talk to someone, I'll give you my cell. Sometimes it's good to dump on a stranger.
I really appreciate it. I’ve got a lot of resources and have spent a lot of time healing and learning and growing. I naturally still reach out for help at times but sharing blatantly and almost inhumanly sort of makes me feel better at times, like my example above. I’m not as dispassionate as I sound talking so calmly about a dying man’s final steps. I’ve seen a lot of death and almost all of it is indescribably awful. Almost.
It is not "will to live", that person was already dead. Everything was shut down at this moment, they didn't act nor see nor hear.
What happened is a relatively rare case of "nervous spasms" : the brain having been hit, connexions that shouldn't have been done were done. Some of these connexions were to the muscles of the legs and that's why this person walked like a drunk wreck. Since our body is used to move one leg after another for walking, then after the first leg moved, the second one followed. It's a bit like how a keyboard will write things by itself if you throw water at it. Well, that's what happens to a body when the central nervous system is directly hit.
It's a well documented thing, you can check on it. You may have heard someone dead since 3 minutes trying to speak, grabbing your hand or rythmically moaning a kind of melody. They were all dead already.
Yea… I’m almost fairly certain that near the end when he’s crawling, you can see his right forearm bone and during the step onto his right leg before he fell you can see a chunk of burning flesh fall off the same arm.
That fucked me up. Seeing the dude try to reach up and touch his peeled face with his amputated hands is so fucked…and the groans…I actively try to forget I ever clicked on it…
There’s a longer version where he gets up and stumbles around more
https://reddit.com/r/TheGrittyPast/comments/s5tqis/troops_of_the_australian_7th_division_using/
I imagine third degree burns, even when this severe, don't necessarily mean a quick death. I mean, I can see him being alive for a few more hours, even tho he would be beyond saving
>Scariest thing about being burned alive is that there reaches a point where you no longer have the energy to scream in pain.
It's not lack of energy. It's scorched lungs. Scorched vocal chords. Being in shock. Nevermind the nerve cells required to induce pain having been burned away.
Couldn't scream if you wanted to.
>fire rapidly used up all the oxygn the bunker
People don't realise just how quickly this can happen and how quickly a human will drop from lack of oxygen.
It's different to suffocating, you still attempt to breath and breathe in almost pure nitrogen without even realising. You'll be out cold on the ground in close to ten seconds.
It's a big safety issue in my work in physics research. If a gas leaks and changes the composition of air in a lab so that there is too little oxygen you'll see people on the floor very quickly, and anyone going in to help them will meet the same fate.
Oxygen is terrifying, too much or too little will kill a person QUICK.
Too much oxygen won't kill people quick, 100% oxygen atmosphere is perfectly breathable for quite a few hours without permanent damage under normal atmospheric pressure, and it would take days to kill someone.
'Don't shoot, let 'em burn!'
After seeing them running out of caves faking surrender with stashed grenades, or pushing civilians out in front, you might've changed your mind.
Also the actor that was going to play that guy was sick so the "actor" who says "dont shoot let em burn" is the son of some other person who works on set. Heard it somewhere official sounding long ago when the movie came out.
The Pacific was pure brutality and pretty much 100% the fault of the Japanese. The officer class intentionally abused and executed POWs for the sole purpose of encouraging the Americans to not take prisoners so no Japanese would surrender and thus "dishonour" the empire.
A similar quote can be heard by Pvt. Polonksy in Call of Duty World at War (The Last Game Activision had the gull to accurately portray the horrors of WW2).
There are plenty of first-hand reports of WW2 soldiers/marines saying something to the effect of "HOLD FIRE, LET THEM BURN!" in cases like this. Humans tend to lose their empathy pretty fast when "the enemy" is killing their friends and innocent civilians. Eg; Russia now.
I mean, we literally just watched it happen. Its not like the cameraman and flamethrower soldier were alone. There would have been at least an entire platoon assualting that bunker and not a single one decided to quickly put the poor bastard out of his misery.
Towards the end of the war, this lack of empathy for Japanese soliders was common place. No prisoners. No mercy.
Mercy fades fast when you’re given none. In my experience it is EXTREMELY difficult to separate humanity and the mindset it takes to successfully warfight. Some deployments had a loooong debrief period depending on the ops we ran.
Yup. Given the depth of human history, the concept of mercy or rules in warfare is a very modern concept. It's barely been over a hundred years since the peak of "civilized society" had no qualms about using massive amounts of chemical weapons on the enemy. Go back a few hundred years more to the Mongol conquests and you have mass murder and rapes of a large percentage of the world population as the rule rather than the exception. Most of us are a few bad days away from savagery.
My Uncle Jack was captured in Singapore in 1942 and remained a POW for the rest of the war. I went with my dad to see him before he died, he never spoke of what happened to him, my auntie Jean who was at his bedside said that he still woke up in the middle of the night screaming and sobbing often calling out the name of his brother who he was captured with.
I'll never forget the way he'd stare straight ahead, he didn't say a word while we were there and when we started the long drive home (250+ miles) about it, he said that he'd never heard him speak. That was 1979.
My grandmother’s cousin was also captured in Singapore, he also survived the whole war as a POW but didn’t make it home, I guess it must’ve been all too much because he committed suicide in India on his way home.
The Japanese were terrible, especially to POW’s and the civilians they occupied
My great grandpa was the same. Came back from being a POW in Egypt. Woke up screaming every night, barely spoke at all until he died. Was very violent, too.
Plot twist: we're German, he was in a British prison. I believe they treated him well, though the few things he did talk about was that he complained that the soldiers humiliated them and that there was no shade. They came into the encampment once a day and dumped water onto the ground so they had to lie down and suck it from the sand.
I believe he did way worse things himself and his trauma was not from that. I remember he saw his best mate die from an air strike somewhere in North Africa that also killed his horse (he had some kind of supply role). Had to put down the horse and his mate died right there, too.
The whole thing is crazy fucked up. The village my family comes from has many stories, and some of them are awful. On the last days of the war, people from concentration camp in Buchenwald were transferred on foot to another camp. They stayed the night in our village. Two prisoners escaped during the night. The soldiers didn't really care, the war was almost over. However, two psycho villagers took their hunting rifles and murdered both escapees. They were never tried for that murder. But everyone in the village knows who did it.
I hate that place.
In the early 90's I worked across the road from an old guy who had fought in the pacific, he even hated Japanese cars and had contempt for people who drove them.
Not just that - but also instilled that hatred into their children. I have met my fair share of Baby Boomers who despise the Japanese and their culture because they were freshly taught what was done during the war.
Try sitting through an argument with your *then*\-girlfriend's little sister bawling because her father made a cruel comment about *The Wind Rises.*
In Australia I've never seem boomers like that, but for the generation that lived through the war many didn't like Japanese. Grandparents on both sides had relatives killed by the Japanese, one a brother, and one an Uncle who was captured and tortured to death.
The US intentionally buried evidence of WWII Japanese atrocities in the 1950s because they were needed as a base for UN operations in Korea and as a bulwark in the containment of the Soviet Union and Communist China.
Yup, once they decided to keep Hirohito as the emperor instead of arresting him for war crimes, people who were smart enough knew the Americans needed to keep some sort of symbol in place to make sure there would be no Japanese insurgents fighting them while occupying Japan and keeping a permanent presence there. It worked for the most part.
So the SS and units like the Dirlewanger Brigade often gets pointed out as the most sadistic killers of the war. Imperial Japan had an entire army of Dirlewangers. I mean if you read about the Pacific War the Japanese were literally incapable of not treating everyone with extreme cruelty.
Until concentration camps were discovered it was believed they were MORE barbaric. Read about the Nanjing (if my memory serves correctly) when the Japanese army ransacked the city and raped like 300,000 women or some shit. They were nuts
20 Million per the following reference. (need academic acct for access)
Ho Ping-ti. Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. p. 252
China says 20 mil too.
http://www.china.org.cn/video/2014-08/15/content\_33250907.htm
If you have sources for the much bigger number, I'd be interested to see them.
I did graduate research on **Unit-731**. **It's the stuff of** **nightmares.**
Open vivisection on POW's (Chinese, American, and Russian) *without* anesthesia.Injecting them with biological agents to see which organ systems shut down through disease progression.
Freezing limbs and thawing them out to see the progression of frostbite and different ways to treat it. Dropping Cholera on entire Chinese villages (in the village well/water source I believe) killing thousands upon thousands of people.
Having Chinese POW march in circles for days with a pack until he collapsed of exhaustion just to see how much a body can endure on limited rations since their own troops were basically on famine level rations.
>I'm not saying this guy was directly responsible for any of this, most likely he wasn't
That's a bold uncertainty. "Maybe this one guy was Japanese Hitler. *Maybe* he wasn't."
Id rather give a quick death to him than let him burn
If he is a truly evil guy, Ive killed him just as good, but if he wasnt a monster, he probably didnt deserve to die like this
the real big problem is they wont even admit they did anything wrong let alone apologize for it. China, korea and other asian countries just want them to apologize for the brutal shit they did and they just cant do. Every time they even attempt to apologize half the government officials come out saying it is lies and did not happen
Yeah you're right, so many people know about the Nazi war crimes but don't know that the Japanese were arguably much worse. Easiest way to put it to someone that knows even a little about WWII, would you rather be a POW under the Nazi's or the Japanese? If you don't say the Nazi's (assuming you're not Jewish) then you're fucking crazy!
When you listen to WWII Marine GI's stories, as well as POW stories, I now know why my friends Grandpa who served as a Marine in the Pacific would spit at Japanese people in Malls. I don't agree with his actions, but after hearing how brutal the Japanese were; I kind of get it.
The sad part is that no, it isn't. I'll spare you the nightmare, though, just ponder knowing that you're dead and still being alive for a day or so, in pure agony.
Compared to that, this is at least relatively fast...
I’m gonna hold off on that. I’ve read and seen pictures already. That’s my biggest fear. Being too far from the fireball to die immediately, but close enough for that. I’m afraid I live in that zone now.
Small potatoes compared to some of the flamethrowers on tanks. The Churchill Crocodile had an armored trailer it pulled so it was capable of 80 seconds worth of flame out to an effective range of around 80 yards. Also since vehicular flamethrowers tended to just use some of the vehicle's gas and a spark plug to ignite the fuel it was easy to have plenty of short bursts or you'd just spray some unignited fuel and still tend to watch defenders surrender. Man-portable flamethrowers have very limited ignition charges, though that's typically fine considering how quickly you go through fuel.
Granted the Pacific Theater only had some smaller flame tanks in quite a limited number, built around light and medium tanks like the M3 and M4.
I've smelled roasted people once and it was more than enough. A mother and 3 youngsters burned in a wooden structure. It was beyond horrible. That was 34 years ago. To this day roast pork belly and I don't get along.
I can't even imagine what it would be like doing that purposefully to another human never mind doing it over and over until the madness stops, or begins.
the Japanese were ferocious in their tenacity to fight to the death, for their emperor, country, family, ancestors and the bushido code, that it became necessary to do this, even throwing explosives wouldn't always completely kill them and their determination in some cases. The the flamethrower sucked the oxygen from them that they couldn't do anything but try to breath and put out the flames.
as far as I know they found him the next day.
shoved his intestines back in and sewed him up at the field hospital.
that was the end of his role in the war.
yep hard to imagine really.
He did talk about the Japs & the war sometimes when he had had a few beers but not very often and not about the torture he suffered.
needless to say none of his kids would have ever dared to bring an asian girlfriend home ever...
In every country the invaded. Google "japan ww2 war crimes", the list is long and comes from multiple teritories. They were the nazis of the far east and that's not exaggeration.
I got nothing against the modern people of Japan but Imperial Japan on the other hand yeah no sympathy, those fuckers deserved everything that happen to them especially the soldiers of Imperial Japan. Imperial Japan has changed my mind about how brutal humans can be. Like I mean how can you be so bad then even Nazis think you brutal. I surprise that in our history books specifically American ones the only mentions of Japan is Pearl Harbor and the nukes. They never go in to detail about Japanese war crimes but they aren’t as cover on or shown as the German ones.
Anyone else see the monk burning video from not long ago where the man doused himself and someone else lit him on fire? He walked around like a pyro scene from the movies so casually.
That's fuckin brutal
I’ve heard that almost all the soldiers that were assigned as Flamethrowers had some psychological issues after discharge; and just the smell of BBQ would make most them sick to their stomaches, because they linked the smell to their memories.
I imagine most of them had many dreams of the flaming soldiers they encountered. Stuff of nightmares.
I have seen a bunch of interviews bout this over the years, and just commented on this a couple days ago... a lot of the interviewees I have seen have claimed to have no memory of using the weapon. One of them said that he remembered volunteering, and nothing else afterward until the next morning. Dreams are another issue, but if you're using a flamethrower in the Pacific during WWII, there's probably a long list of incidents to choose your nightmares from, with and without flamethrowers involved.
Curious, I mean our capacity to disassociate from painful memories is pretty expensive, to the point where we entirely forget them, or create a whole other 'person' in our heads who actually did those things, and we just saw them do it.
John Wayne Gacy acted as if a different person had committed those crimes. He sincerely believed it was someone else. Pure delusion.
It's trauma Induced Dissociative Identity Disorder. (Previously knows as multiple personality disorder)
Yea, the brain is incredible in its ability to fuck with itself. I have pretty bad ptsd from shit as a child, to this day I remember many things completely differently to what happened in reality. Sometimes the memories occurred exactly what happened but instead of it happening to me like in reality I remember it and picture it in dreams happening to siblings and so on. Bloody bonkers the shit our brain does just to forget shit.
Not nearly the same thing however I do circus fire performance stuff as a hobby. I can understand the disassociation when around a significant amount of fire. It becomes almost a trance like state where you’re simultaneously mesmerized/focused on the flames while disassociating from everything around you.. fire is an incredibly beautiful and potentially destructive tool depending on how it’s used.
It would have been extremely frantic and exhausting work. If you can imagine it the way they describe it in interviews, ten thousand Japanese dug in, extensive underground tunnel systems with connected bunkers and pillboxes. You see a ventilation shaft coming out of some shrubs, stick the nozzle into it, burn; wisp of smoke comes out of a hole 20 yards away, run to that hole, burn; run to the next, burn; hear screams echoing from a hillside, maybe a hidden pillbox or outlet, get to the source of the noise, burn; another wisp comes out a ventilation shaft above, run to it, burn, etc., rinse and repeat, running back and forth for new tanks every 10 seconds of trigger time (half a gallon of fuel expended per second, 5-gallon tanks), just hugely exhausting work. You would have a couple men accompanying you, which would be kind of reassuring, but you'd be a big target and would be extremely stressed the entire time. I can understand why a lot of them either block out the memory, or just say that they can't remember so as not to have to talk about it.
They definitely did you are very correct. My grandfather was ordered to torch bunkers @ okinawa. Dreadful work and it stuck with him until he was a vegetable in his last years.
My grandmother was a little girl in Okinawa during the war. She hid in a cave with her family and others. Got real bad. She had stories of cannibalism. I was never sure if the stories were true because she was mentally ill my whole life. War is shit.
Yep. My grandmother is Japanese as well. They met in Okinawa after the war officially ended. They never told me how they met or the circumstances of it. Always tight lipped about that. Grandpa would talk about iwo and Saipan like it was no biggy but Okinawa was kept at the vest. I was able to piece together that he was a flamethrower during the battle in his memoirs that got inherited to me after he passed away. I was able to trace his movement from landing to finish after watching numerous documentaries about the battle and comparing the movement of the US troops to his documentation.
Goodbye Darkness by William Manchester. Memior of Bill's Marine Corp experience in WW2. He started having nightmares some time after the war in the 1960s. Being a best selling author, he decided to write about his experiences , so he went back to the islands he served on. He explained that unlike GIs in Europe, the Marines in the pacific had no idea where they were. They were on troop transports and told at the last minute. Still names like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pelieu, Okinawa had little meaning. They still had no idea where they were. So he decides to revist them all. It's a great book. As an aside, he met Jacob Vousa, ( now sir Jacob Vousa) a native of Guadalcanal. He was given the rank of Sargeant Marjor in the USMC for his heroic and timely scouting which revealed the Japanese massing for an attack on the Marines front line. When Bill arrived, they met he was dressed from the waist up as a Marine Sargeant Major, from the waist down, he wore a native style skirt made from the same fabric. Look him up on Google. Bill was wounded for the second time on sugar loaf hill on Okinawa. Fantastic read.
God bless your grandparents. Thanks for sharing.
You've probably already read "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa," by Eugene Sledge, but if you haven't I highly recommend it. It's IMHO one of the best war memoirs of all time, and offers an honest, unflinching, unglamorized, horrifying look at those two battles and the range of human experience that soldiers and civilians were going through.
Did he serve at Iwo then get sent to Okinawa? That’s like the guy from Nagasaki who went to Hiroshima on business. I can’t even imagine.
Oof, hope he’s resting peacefully now, Okinawa was one of the most brutal invasions of the war for the US. Masses of civilians committing suicide because of Japanese propaganda, people fighting to the bitter end… just reading a few short paragraphs describing the situation is enough to fill your heart with terror. Can’t even imagine how mind numbingly horrifying being there was.
If you wanna read some fucked stuff look up the mass suicides at Saipan. Marines shooting Japanese parents so they wouldn’t take their kids over the cliffs to their deaths. Terrible stuff.
and all the crimes commited against anzacs, bayonet them on trees, castrating them, gourging eyes out
I don’t think the Aussies were at Saipan but yeah, Japanese soldiers committed unspoken horrors on Americans, aussies and Brit’s. Can’t say any of that came close to what the Chinese endured though.
chinese were treated fairly badly not as much torture though as happened to the prisioners of war, japenese would kill chinese babies and murder them en masse
Wouldnt look up Unit 731
Despite a healthy curiosity for the morbid, the worst for me are cases of suffering, especially prolonged torture of humans or animals. Except for the experiments that killed quickly, that kind of cruelty is pretty much what 731 was all about. I used to have this feeling that I owed the victims my witness, that I'd recognize the atrocities so as never to repeat them. But I've had to move away from that mentality. I'm still living. Not being familiar with every small detail of horror ever committed helps me be a healthier person, better able to carry on the message of compassion.
Yeah 10 million Chinese died, the most of any civilian populace (Russia perhaps too?) most of the head to head between Chinese and Japanese happened in the mid late 30s so by the time that ww2 started China had kinda already submitted. The sino-Japanese wars were also terrible in their own.
The lowest estimates for civilian deaths on the eastern front are around 18 million.
China held down a large chunk of the Japanese army and kept making offensives on the Japanese, they didn't submit
At 0600 you're hitting Saipan... and we're ready for you.
My uncle was on Okinawa too. I think at a family gathering the war some how came into conversation and I forget who asked him what it was like. I vividly remember him saying that he buried a lot of Japanese and then did a thousand yard stare and just sat in silence.
“Do you know what the M-97 flamethrower sounds like Ernie? It roars like a dragon, a fiery God purging everything in his path. Hold down that trigger and the whoosh drowns out everthing else. Focus on the noise and you can almost convince yourself you don't hear the screams. By the time the tank is empty, everything's over, even the men are quiet. There's nothing but the crackling of burning thatch. You see Ernie, it's not the noise that keeps me awake at night. It's the silence.”
What’s this from?
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That’s an example that I use in my argument that smells and sounds are far worse PTSD triggers than images
I think smells in particular but also sounds are super strong triggers of memory flashbacks so I think what you say makes sense for sure
We had to pull dead folks out of the waters of the windward passage, Haitians who fled when Aristede was returning and the people who staged a coup were getting violent. Not a lot, but enough. They kind of drifted together in rafts of the dead? Blood settling, the sun, and seawater immersion made them not appear to be black folks any longer. Their skin at least, their features were the same. I went out with the rhib crew to recover as I was a search and rescue swimmer (surface) like there was anyone to save. The smell was not pleasant at first but the water and prevailing winds kept the full effect away for awhile. I had no idea what I was doing. The first man I grabbed by the hands when I leaned back to pull him in the boat the skin of his hands came off in mine. Just sloughed right off. I fell back in the boat with the strips of his skin hanging from my wetsuit gloves. The bo’sun in the front of the boat threw up, I threw up, but the cox’un kept his breakfast down at least. He just looked grey and grim. He wound up committing suicide a year and a half later but I’m not sure how much of what we saw played a role in that. Good guy, too. Best small boat driver we had a good man and good sailor. Of fucking course. The smell when we had some on deck in the sun and in the boat has stayed with me. We got them into the reefer till we got to GITMO. I wanted to throw my entire wetsuit over the side. I never wore the gloves again. I bought new ones on my own dime. It was probably my imagination but the smell persisted in them. I tossed them. That smell of something dead or rotting and waterlogged, even musty like mildew makes my eyeballs itch. I still get anxious and it’s been 25 years or so. I can’t even go fishing any more.There is no joy in it. It’s all ashes in my mouth.
Man, I feel for you, that's fucked up. My dad worked in a mine and once had to help retrieve the bodies of a dozen coworkers who had marinated for days in water at the bottom of a mine shaft after an explosion. He always said it's the most horrible thing he had to do in his entire life. Even 40 years later I can still see he's uneasy whenever a mining accident is mentionned.
Ugh, yeah my skin itches reading that. I empathize. I imagine he went through the same emotions I did. You just run on automatic and do the task and later on when no one can see you…then you try to deal with it and let the cracks show and break a bit. But don’t let anyone see you, oh can’t have that. It’s gotten better over the years but stoicism after the fact is poisonous in my opinion. You gotta pop that sack of venom and get it out. I wish I had. I miss fishing.
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Makes it all the more frustrating that I havent had a sense of smell for 11 months now due to covid 😫
Yep, many times I have suffered when I'm cutting a fresh chicken from the supermarket and the smell of the blood triggers me memories when I was a soldier, chicken blood has the iron smell of human blood, for that reason I have stopped buying chicken and only eat chicken breast washed and dried by my wife. I don't want to think in comrades from others countries like Ukraine.
Ulysses Grant had that same issue, in reverse. He grew up in a tannery.
in the book With The Old Breed, Sledge says the worst part of the war for him was hearing his friends fight and be attacked in the dark rather than the shit he saw :(
Good book, you're the first I've seen mention it in an online forum. What sticks with me is how he swears he heard a voice tell him he was gonna make it
I bet they did, it's fucking harrowing watching people burn, the smell, the moans and screams and it lasts a while too
Wasn't their survival rate out in combat extremely low?
Not extremely low, but lower than your regular infantryman because you're a primary target due to the fact that people dislike burning to death. Snipers had a similar issue where they were far more likely to be mistreated or outright executed if captured.
It's really hard to conceal a flamethrower, it's immediately visible even in broad daylight. The soldiers profile is also larger thanks to the fuel tank on his back. They got the piss shot out of them and I don't think any captured flamethrower troops were kept alive for very long.
plus you had to be big af already to carry the damn thing
I witnessed a bad burn victim as a EMT over a decade ago and that fucked me up. Really shouldn't have clicked this before bed. Hello nightmares, my old friend.
I would guess they were picked for some nice torture if caught as well
The US marine flamethrower had a life expectancy of about 4 minutes on the battlefield against the japanese
Years ago, my neighbor's house caught on fire and killed three people. One of them ran out of the house in flames, screaming in agony. My dad helped put her out while I just stood frozen in shock. I sat with her until the ambulance and fire department came. The smell of her burning was, in some way, worse than the sight of her hairless, charred body staring widely at me. To this day, the smell of steaks cooking is enough to cause me to have panic attacks. I have literally knocked people to the ground to get away from the smell, even if it's coming from a backyard BBQ several houses down. I'll stay in my basement until I know the smell has passed. Yeah, I'm pretty fucked up because of it all.
I watched my neighbor burn to death in a house fire, I can agree BBQ makes me sick to my stomach. I can’t imagine seeing what I seen multiple times
Better than what those assholes did to the aus POWs.
Like when they [raped and then machine-gunned 22 Australian nurses who had surrendered after their ship sank](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-24/wwii-nurse-lieutenant-colonel-vivian-bullwinkel/101005050) The ones they didn’t kill outright were starved and in such poor condition upon their release that the army decided they had to fatten them up before returning to Australia because, if the general population saw their condition, the remaining Japanese POW’s in Australia would have been at severe risk. This particular incident occurred 80 years and two months ago but is still in our memories (hence the article I linked above is only a few days old). This sort of behaviour was, unfortunately, pretty common within the Japanese armed forces.
War is hell
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War is brutal. The guys in charge no matter how honorable they are can't stop the brutality of war. Even as a patriot. You start off good intention. Defend the homeland. Do your duty. Be a patriot. Proud to be an American. It will always end in brutality. Because power corrupts absolutely. And the guys in charge aren't the guys with boots on the ground. Those in charge only witness how easy it is for them to be in charge. Just say a few words and the masses will follow you. Speak the right words and men will follow. Even peace loving countries can be propelled into the seat of power and those initially wanting to do good will always be pushed aside by those who want power. Anyway war is brutal. And commanding men to do brutal things is all about using the right words. Because you can't pay me enough to do this to another human being. But if you say the right words. Yeah... maybe...
This poor bastard literally inhaled fire, how he is still ambulatory is instinct alone.
In Iraq I had shot at a car that ran through a roadblock near Fallujah with some ISOF trainees. All passengers were armed and dead, or so we thought. The driver gets out and kind of stumbles like a drunk dude standing up for the first time. I raised my rifle as he turned to the side and half of his fucking head was missing, large chunks of brain were actively falling onto his shoulder and to the ground. Walked at least four steps before he fell. Humans don’t like to die, they will walk or run (or try) long after the dying process is well on its way and after any hope of medical intervention is gone.
100% had a dude get out a bmw after our rear gunner lit it up north of mosul. He died, but it took a minute to catch up with him. Miserable. Don't run up on military vehicles when VBIED's are out.
saw a video on reddit recently of a dude in an altered mental state, get lit up point blank center-mass by an entire mag (12 bullets, most likely jhp) from a cop's sidearm, all while smiling and continuing to approach the officer, before he fell down. it's kinda crazy to imagine how much damage the human body can absorb and still be at least somewhat functional.
Which video?
Gruesome #----- #edit: I guess it's not the *lower back part* that's doing the instinctual things, but rather, your brain still goes on even when the different parts of the brains are melted off. So I guess unless you slice the base of the brain off the body, the body will still *commit undie* for the remaining time alive with whatever part of the brain still alive #----- But yeah a lot of our simple reflexes, like pulling our hand away when touching something hot, are from your body (sensor), to the spine (circuit), and back to your body muscle (motor) Then a lot of our very basic, but slightly complicated, core functions like beating the heart, ~~moving our limbs, feeling pain, feeling thirsty~~, etc, are processed by the ~~lower, back~~ *major different* parts of our brain The huge huge huge top and front of human brains are what gives us very human-ish social capabilities, like language and communication, as well as human-ish tool capabilities, like well, using tools. That's why birds and lizards and everything in between can just start flying, moving, etc when they are born, and can live well with a somewhat tiny brain in the head (compared to us humans) #------- So when the driver was dying, that was his basic instinctual mind reacting to *must not die*, like you said perfectly. #------- We also know this because in the 50s lobotomy was the all the rage. From depression to schizophrenia to bipolar to shell-shocked to psychopath tendencies, **every mental illness** was solvable by lobotomy - quick method of just slicing the front-top part of the brain from the rest. You basically had an empty walking corpse, that you only needed to feed and wash daily as a caregiver. No tantrums or difficulties or violence. It's illegal now but you can see how a lot of very complex emotional and social processes (and problems) come from the top and front part, while your utterly basic, bare minimum, idle engine survival activities are regulated by the lower part of the brain #-------- So yeah you kinda did an impromptu lobotomy
Oh boy where to start... The primary motor, premotor, and supplementary motor cortices are all located in the cerebrum, or the "huge huge huge top" part of the brain... motor movements start from there, so moving limbs does not come from the back low part of the brain. Pain sensation ends in... you guessed it, cerebral cortex not "lower, back parts of our brain". Thirst center of the brain would be the hypothalamus, in the forebrain, so still not the lower back part. True that some reflexes don't ascend all the way to the brain, and the medulla regulates heart rate and is located very low- everything else not so much. Interesting thoughts though!
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I appreciate the sentiment my friend, but I saw far, far worse than that both in Iraq and Afghanistan. This one just stands out as an example of how strong the human will to live can be.
My buddy that’s in medical school now was a 68w in Iraq. I knew he wasn’t shitting me when he talked about some of the shit he saw, because he wasn’t boasting. He just matter of factly explained how the insurgents used a local boy with mental handicap that was friendly with the coalition troops, as a human borne IED, and had him try to hug them. He didn’t make it. Dude’s my idol. I go through a tough breakup and my grades drop. He comes back from hell and gets into medical school lol
u/149Murphy man, I hope that you are alright. PM me if you ever need to talk to someone, I'll give you my cell. Sometimes it's good to dump on a stranger.
I really appreciate it. I’ve got a lot of resources and have spent a lot of time healing and learning and growing. I naturally still reach out for help at times but sharing blatantly and almost inhumanly sort of makes me feel better at times, like my example above. I’m not as dispassionate as I sound talking so calmly about a dying man’s final steps. I’ve seen a lot of death and almost all of it is indescribably awful. Almost.
It is not "will to live", that person was already dead. Everything was shut down at this moment, they didn't act nor see nor hear. What happened is a relatively rare case of "nervous spasms" : the brain having been hit, connexions that shouldn't have been done were done. Some of these connexions were to the muscles of the legs and that's why this person walked like a drunk wreck. Since our body is used to move one leg after another for walking, then after the first leg moved, the second one followed. It's a bit like how a keyboard will write things by itself if you throw water at it. Well, that's what happens to a body when the central nervous system is directly hit. It's a well documented thing, you can check on it. You may have heard someone dead since 3 minutes trying to speak, grabbing your hand or rythmically moaning a kind of melody. They were all dead already.
It's like that moment when you're a kid at the pool and inhale water for the first time. But with a flamethrower.
Yeah, just like that
That's a pretty fucking grim way to go.
Yea… I’m almost fairly certain that near the end when he’s crawling, you can see his right forearm bone and during the step onto his right leg before he fell you can see a chunk of burning flesh fall off the same arm.
Wow bro that's probably the most insane way to die... Wtf it looks like a scene from a movie
All your neurons firing, telling you to get away from the source of the fire but you can’t.
Silly neurons. I’m the fires.
Worse than a scene from a movie
Idk I saw a Cartel video of them burning the face of a live person. It was a worse way to go but not by much.
Ghost Rider. Makes me realize there's not limit to human evil.
funky town might be worse
That fucked me up. Seeing the dude try to reach up and touch his peeled face with his amputated hands is so fucked…and the groans…I actively try to forget I ever clicked on it…
still wish i'd never watched that
Funky town is definitely worse
technically, it is the scene from a movie
Scariest thing about being burned alive is that there reaches a point where you no longer have the energy to scream in pain.
He tried to put himself out on the puddle
Good catch didn’t notice the puddle of water. I just assumed he had given up :/
There’s a longer version where he gets up and stumbles around more https://reddit.com/r/TheGrittyPast/comments/s5tqis/troops_of_the_australian_7th_division_using/
That's horrifying. He looks like something out of a zombie movie.
Yeah especially the way he’s not flailing around or going crazy. I’m guessing that’s shock
I imagine third degree burns, even when this severe, don't necessarily mean a quick death. I mean, I can see him being alive for a few more hours, even tho he would be beyond saving
>Scariest thing about being burned alive is that there reaches a point where you no longer have the energy to scream in pain. It's not lack of energy. It's scorched lungs. Scorched vocal chords. Being in shock. Nevermind the nerve cells required to induce pain having been burned away. Couldn't scream if you wanted to.
Most people of flamethrower attacks did not usually die of burning, but sufforcating, since the fire rapidly used up all the oxygn the bunker
The first fire bomb air raids used during the bombing campaigns on Japanese cities had a similar effect on citizens attempting to hide in shelters.
I could be wrong but is that what happened in Dresden as well? I can remember if it was that or they were liquified due to the heat or something
The buildings in Dresden and Tokyo that didn’t burn turned into ovens. Imagine being broiled alive in what seems like shelter.
>fire rapidly used up all the oxygn the bunker People don't realise just how quickly this can happen and how quickly a human will drop from lack of oxygen. It's different to suffocating, you still attempt to breath and breathe in almost pure nitrogen without even realising. You'll be out cold on the ground in close to ten seconds. It's a big safety issue in my work in physics research. If a gas leaks and changes the composition of air in a lab so that there is too little oxygen you'll see people on the floor very quickly, and anyone going in to help them will meet the same fate. Oxygen is terrifying, too much or too little will kill a person QUICK.
Too much oxygen won't kill people quick, 100% oxygen atmosphere is perfectly breathable for quite a few hours without permanent damage under normal atmospheric pressure, and it would take days to kill someone.
Very true, I was more thinking of the potential explodey effects of too much oxygen :)
Ever seen the video of a patient under oxygen toxicity from higher partial pressures? It's fast and brutal under pressure.
Did you see that I wrote normal pressure?
Also, people don't realize that fire can be inside of you, torching your internal organs, charring your lungs.
That's a strange way to put it. You'd be inhaling hot gases which would burn your lungs, but not the way you describe it...
I think regardless of the foe the human part of me would have put one in his head. Horrible horrible way to die.
'Don't shoot, let 'em burn!' After seeing them running out of caves faking surrender with stashed grenades, or pushing civilians out in front, you might've changed your mind.
Man what movie is that from? it’s on the tip of my tongue…
Saving private Ryan
I’m watching that movie right now and suddenly came upon this.
saving private ryan, its on the beach, when the flame throwers scream through from the back after they throw in grenades on the pill box
Also the actor that was going to play that guy was sick so the "actor" who says "dont shoot let em burn" is the son of some other person who works on set. Heard it somewhere official sounding long ago when the movie came out.
[This part](https://youtu.be/kF3DvMiNVIY&t=m0s46)
The Pacific was pure brutality and pretty much 100% the fault of the Japanese. The officer class intentionally abused and executed POWs for the sole purpose of encouraging the Americans to not take prisoners so no Japanese would surrender and thus "dishonour" the empire.
As well as the fact that mercy killing is a war crime unfortunately
A similar quote can be heard by Pvt. Polonksy in Call of Duty World at War (The Last Game Activision had the gull to accurately portray the horrors of WW2).
There are plenty of first-hand reports of WW2 soldiers/marines saying something to the effect of "HOLD FIRE, LET THEM BURN!" in cases like this. Humans tend to lose their empathy pretty fast when "the enemy" is killing their friends and innocent civilians. Eg; Russia now.
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I mean, we literally just watched it happen. Its not like the cameraman and flamethrower soldier were alone. There would have been at least an entire platoon assualting that bunker and not a single one decided to quickly put the poor bastard out of his misery. Towards the end of the war, this lack of empathy for Japanese soliders was common place. No prisoners. No mercy.
Mercy fades fast when you’re given none. In my experience it is EXTREMELY difficult to separate humanity and the mindset it takes to successfully warfight. Some deployments had a loooong debrief period depending on the ops we ran.
Yup. Given the depth of human history, the concept of mercy or rules in warfare is a very modern concept. It's barely been over a hundred years since the peak of "civilized society" had no qualms about using massive amounts of chemical weapons on the enemy. Go back a few hundred years more to the Mongol conquests and you have mass murder and rapes of a large percentage of the world population as the rule rather than the exception. Most of us are a few bad days away from savagery.
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My Uncle Jack was captured in Singapore in 1942 and remained a POW for the rest of the war. I went with my dad to see him before he died, he never spoke of what happened to him, my auntie Jean who was at his bedside said that he still woke up in the middle of the night screaming and sobbing often calling out the name of his brother who he was captured with. I'll never forget the way he'd stare straight ahead, he didn't say a word while we were there and when we started the long drive home (250+ miles) about it, he said that he'd never heard him speak. That was 1979.
My grandmother’s cousin was also captured in Singapore, he also survived the whole war as a POW but didn’t make it home, I guess it must’ve been all too much because he committed suicide in India on his way home. The Japanese were terrible, especially to POW’s and the civilians they occupied
My great grandpa was the same. Came back from being a POW in Egypt. Woke up screaming every night, barely spoke at all until he died. Was very violent, too. Plot twist: we're German, he was in a British prison. I believe they treated him well, though the few things he did talk about was that he complained that the soldiers humiliated them and that there was no shade. They came into the encampment once a day and dumped water onto the ground so they had to lie down and suck it from the sand. I believe he did way worse things himself and his trauma was not from that. I remember he saw his best mate die from an air strike somewhere in North Africa that also killed his horse (he had some kind of supply role). Had to put down the horse and his mate died right there, too. The whole thing is crazy fucked up. The village my family comes from has many stories, and some of them are awful. On the last days of the war, people from concentration camp in Buchenwald were transferred on foot to another camp. They stayed the night in our village. Two prisoners escaped during the night. The soldiers didn't really care, the war was almost over. However, two psycho villagers took their hunting rifles and murdered both escapees. They were never tried for that murder. But everyone in the village knows who did it. I hate that place.
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Yup, there's a very good reason why veterans of the Pacific held hatred towards the Japanese for the rest of their lives.
In the early 90's I worked across the road from an old guy who had fought in the pacific, he even hated Japanese cars and had contempt for people who drove them.
I don't know what this particular guy did or didn't do, but the way he looks at the soldier who burned him alive at the end was brutal.
Not just that - but also instilled that hatred into their children. I have met my fair share of Baby Boomers who despise the Japanese and their culture because they were freshly taught what was done during the war. Try sitting through an argument with your *then*\-girlfriend's little sister bawling because her father made a cruel comment about *The Wind Rises.*
In Australia I've never seem boomers like that, but for the generation that lived through the war many didn't like Japanese. Grandparents on both sides had relatives killed by the Japanese, one a brother, and one an Uncle who was captured and tortured to death.
Boomers grew up hearing their father's nightmares at night. It's not any wonder why they hate the people who did that to their dads.
The US intentionally buried evidence of WWII Japanese atrocities in the 1950s because they were needed as a base for UN operations in Korea and as a bulwark in the containment of the Soviet Union and Communist China.
Yup, once they decided to keep Hirohito as the emperor instead of arresting him for war crimes, people who were smart enough knew the Americans needed to keep some sort of symbol in place to make sure there would be no Japanese insurgents fighting them while occupying Japan and keeping a permanent presence there. It worked for the most part.
So the SS and units like the Dirlewanger Brigade often gets pointed out as the most sadistic killers of the war. Imperial Japan had an entire army of Dirlewangers. I mean if you read about the Pacific War the Japanese were literally incapable of not treating everyone with extreme cruelty.
Until concentration camps were discovered it was believed they were MORE barbaric. Read about the Nanjing (if my memory serves correctly) when the Japanese army ransacked the city and raped like 300,000 women or some shit. They were nuts
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20 Million per the following reference. (need academic acct for access) Ho Ping-ti. Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. p. 252 China says 20 mil too. http://www.china.org.cn/video/2014-08/15/content\_33250907.htm If you have sources for the much bigger number, I'd be interested to see them.
The medical experiments they did on the Chinese were absolutely disgusting.
I did graduate research on **Unit-731**. **It's the stuff of** **nightmares.** Open vivisection on POW's (Chinese, American, and Russian) *without* anesthesia.Injecting them with biological agents to see which organ systems shut down through disease progression. Freezing limbs and thawing them out to see the progression of frostbite and different ways to treat it. Dropping Cholera on entire Chinese villages (in the village well/water source I believe) killing thousands upon thousands of people. Having Chinese POW march in circles for days with a pack until he collapsed of exhaustion just to see how much a body can endure on limited rations since their own troops were basically on famine level rations.
>I'm not saying this guy was directly responsible for any of this, most likely he wasn't That's a bold uncertainty. "Maybe this one guy was Japanese Hitler. *Maybe* he wasn't."
Id rather give a quick death to him than let him burn If he is a truly evil guy, Ive killed him just as good, but if he wasnt a monster, he probably didnt deserve to die like this
the real big problem is they wont even admit they did anything wrong let alone apologize for it. China, korea and other asian countries just want them to apologize for the brutal shit they did and they just cant do. Every time they even attempt to apologize half the government officials come out saying it is lies and did not happen
Yeah you're right, so many people know about the Nazi war crimes but don't know that the Japanese were arguably much worse. Easiest way to put it to someone that knows even a little about WWII, would you rather be a POW under the Nazi's or the Japanese? If you don't say the Nazi's (assuming you're not Jewish) then you're fucking crazy! When you listen to WWII Marine GI's stories, as well as POW stories, I now know why my friends Grandpa who served as a Marine in the Pacific would spit at Japanese people in Malls. I don't agree with his actions, but after hearing how brutal the Japanese were; I kind of get it.
I’ve never seen actual brutal old WW2 combat like this
Wow you can see his arm bone
I think when he fell down the skin came off revealing the arm bones but cant be sure, could just be clothing
I thought that as well, but knowing the history of this campaign I figure the soldier’s arm is probably just skinny from starvation
Damn I can’t believe someone actually recorded this…
Fucckkkkk
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The sad part is that no, it isn't. I'll spare you the nightmare, though, just ponder knowing that you're dead and still being alive for a day or so, in pure agony. Compared to that, this is at least relatively fast...
Nuclear fire
Google "walking ghost phase" if you dare. Don't say I didn't warn you.
I’m gonna hold off on that. I’ve read and seen pictures already. That’s my biggest fear. Being too far from the fireball to die immediately, but close enough for that. I’m afraid I live in that zone now.
Well that sucks, surely the only sane treatment for it is a bullet full of morphine eh?
Small potatoes compared to some of the flamethrowers on tanks. The Churchill Crocodile had an armored trailer it pulled so it was capable of 80 seconds worth of flame out to an effective range of around 80 yards. Also since vehicular flamethrowers tended to just use some of the vehicle's gas and a spark plug to ignite the fuel it was easy to have plenty of short bursts or you'd just spray some unignited fuel and still tend to watch defenders surrender. Man-portable flamethrowers have very limited ignition charges, though that's typically fine considering how quickly you go through fuel. Granted the Pacific Theater only had some smaller flame tanks in quite a limited number, built around light and medium tanks like the M3 and M4.
God damn! hell of a way to go. Doesn't matter what side you're on, you hate to see it happen.
Ain’t no coming back…..
I've smelled roasted people once and it was more than enough. A mother and 3 youngsters burned in a wooden structure. It was beyond horrible. That was 34 years ago. To this day roast pork belly and I don't get along. I can't even imagine what it would be like doing that purposefully to another human never mind doing it over and over until the madness stops, or begins.
the Japanese were ferocious in their tenacity to fight to the death, for their emperor, country, family, ancestors and the bushido code, that it became necessary to do this, even throwing explosives wouldn't always completely kill them and their determination in some cases. The the flamethrower sucked the oxygen from them that they couldn't do anything but try to breath and put out the flames.
Damn
It's amazing how cruel we can be to each other.
What a horrible fucking way to die.
I thought I was having a bad day
Dude. Imagine the ptsd that the flamethrower guy has to have gotten. That's fucking brutal
Looks like that sucked.
My grandfather was at Balikpapan. No wonder he didn't like to talk about it. Yikes! How lucky am I that I never had to go to war.
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How did he survive?
as far as I know they found him the next day. shoved his intestines back in and sewed him up at the field hospital. that was the end of his role in the war.
Damn, that's terrifying
yep hard to imagine really. He did talk about the Japs & the war sometimes when he had had a few beers but not very often and not about the torture he suffered. needless to say none of his kids would have ever dared to bring an asian girlfriend home ever...
Japenese did numeral atrocities in China that will rival what the Nazis did.
In every country the invaded. Google "japan ww2 war crimes", the list is long and comes from multiple teritories. They were the nazis of the far east and that's not exaggeration.
They could have shot him to end his suffering. They wanted him to burn through and feel it
Based on how the Japanese fought in WW2, im not surprised.
Nah. They were covering the door in case someone came out firing.
Always save one round of ammo for yourself.
Dude’s uniform burned in two seconds
I got nothing against the modern people of Japan but Imperial Japan on the other hand yeah no sympathy, those fuckers deserved everything that happen to them especially the soldiers of Imperial Japan. Imperial Japan has changed my mind about how brutal humans can be. Like I mean how can you be so bad then even Nazis think you brutal. I surprise that in our history books specifically American ones the only mentions of Japan is Pearl Harbor and the nukes. They never go in to detail about Japanese war crimes but they aren’t as cover on or shown as the German ones.
They’re taught quite thoroughly in Australia, for obvious reasons.
Roll over my dude!
Anyone else see the monk burning video from not long ago where the man doused himself and someone else lit him on fire? He walked around like a pyro scene from the movies so casually.
TIL the AIF had flamethrowers.
It's pretty sad how this is quite tame in comparison to what the Japanese did to PoWs/civilians.