“Send Parsons Immediately”
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
"The death toll from the Battle of Manila was horrific: more than 100,000 Filipinos, the majority of them civilians; ...
Parsons ventured into the city soon after MacArthur finally dislodged the Japanese, on March 4. “Manila is finished, completely demolished,” he wrote in a letter to Travis Ingham. But he had one last mission: finding his mother-in-law.
... When he had gone in search of a good friend in Manila, Carlos Perez Rubio, he found a gruesome scene: “twenty-two bodies—the entire family including women and children...liquidated in a most brutal fashion. Bayonets mostly.”
... Before she was tossed into a mass grave with the others, Blanche Jurika had been tortured and beheaded. “If she could have just lasted another three months,” her son-in-law recalled, “she’d have been all right."
1) The Japanese-American Battle of Manila came on the 46th anniversary of the Philippine-American Battle of Manila (exactly), the first battle of the Philippine-American war of colonization that saw widespread, sanctioned US atrocities against the native population to the tune of hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.
2) The Japanese occupation of Korea was only made possible by the wholehearted support and abetting of the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for facilitating this annexation and personally ordered the striking-out of Korea as a nation from White House records.[1]
> Japan had been a menace in the East Pacific since the 1890s, formed an anti-Russia alliance with the UK, used WWI as an excuse to invade German islands in the Pacific, and was trying to invade further into China during the time between World Wars in Europe.
Japan was considered a menace in the East Pacific only when it threatened territories already conquered through Western imperialist expansion by the likes of Britain, Russia, and the United States. It is not any more abhorrent that Japan invaded German islands in the Pacific, than that Germany had made claims to Pacific islands in the first place. Japan's campaign of brutal spread and subjugation was not some uniquely objectionable aberration, it was a direct application of lessons learned from experienced masters; Japan was a late adopter of a well-worn and broadly used template of colonialist conquest.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06bradley.html
I would never say the millions the Japanese murdered, tortured, raped and enslaved during their WW2 expansion made them unique in history. I would say that the insanity of the military leadership that ordered that holocaust was also the reason for two nuclear bombs.