How U.S. Marines Became Monsters in WWII

[00:00:00]So, the men who fought America's first land battle of the whole war were the first Marine Division. And this was a unit that had only been put together on the 1st of February 1941, which is less than a year before the United States even got into the war. On the 7th of August 1942, they landed on Guadal Canal, a hot, wet, malari ridden island.

[00:00:20]And this was the first time in the war that American troops actually went on the attack on the ground instead of defending or retreating. Now, these guys were young and most of them had never been in combat. They were mostly volunteers in their late teens and early 20s. Only a thin layer of the division had ever even fought before. A small number of older men left over from the First World War and from those minor American interventions they called the Banana Wars. So, these few regulars were the experienced core and everybody else was brand new. You basically had a mostly green division built around a small group of professionals. They were also short of gear. A lot of the division's heavy equipment got left behind. The trucks, the tents, the spare clothing, and the mosquito netting. And what they actually knew about the enemy was thin. And it was colored by that casual pre-war belief that the Japanese were shortsighted, clumsy, second rate soldiers. The one solid thing they carried ashore was fear. And it was built on atrocity stories. mostly the reports that captured Americans had been killed and mistreated after the fall of Wake Island. So, the hatred had a head start. The Marines came ashore already believing the Japanese had beheaded captured Americans at Wake Island, a story that got passed around in graphic detail. And then on Guadal Canal, they actually found photographs of mutilated Marine bodies in the belongings of Japanese troops. So the Marines showed up already scared and already angry and knowing very little that was actually true about the men waiting for them. Now the Japanese soldier waiting on those islands had years of combat behind him from the war with China. And he'd been shaped by a deliberate program. The soldiers were all issued a short printed code called the Senzhin Gun, the field service code, and its most quoted line told them to never live to feel the shame of being a prisoner. Choose death over capture because being taken alive disgraced you, your family, and your country. Across the entire Pacific War, only a very small number of Japanese troops ever surrendered to the Western Allies. Fewer than 50,000 out of millions, while the rest either fought to the end or entered themselves.

[00:02:26]Running right alongside this was a propaganda slogan, Kitiku Bea, which translates roughly as demon beasts, America and Britain. The word kitiku originally meant a brute or a devil.

[00:02:38]Japanese media and schooling pushed this picture of Americans and British as subhuman monsters. Cartoons drew Roosevelt and Churchill with horns and claws, and one leaflet showed two leaders feasting on the bones of their victims under a caption calling them devils and beasts. And the point here for everything you're about to hear is that the fanatic enemy the Marines met was the product of a worldview the state built on purpose and not some natural trait of the people. Japanese propaganda told its own soldiers that to join the Marine Corps a man had to kill his own parents or another family member. It was propaganda that painted Americans as gangsters, criminals, madmen, and cannibals. And while most of these things were aimed at Americans in general rather than the Marines alone, the Marines were the ones who took the bulk of the fighting in the Pacific, which is arguably the worst theater of the entire war. As you're now going to hear, Japanese troops and civilians were told what would happen to anyone the Americans captured. They were told Americans would rape the women and torture the men. And the version fed to the civilians added that the Americans would run people over with tanks and murder their whole families. and people believed it. Prisoners questioned later said so plainly. So these things that were about to happen when the Marines came to the Japanese islands are now going to make sense. And here's the strange part. The same propaganda that called the Americans demons also called them soft, spoiled, cowardly, and unwilling to fight in the rain or at night. So the enemy was somehow both a monster and a weakling. When the two sides actually met, both of those pictures broke at once. The Marines had expected an ordinary enemy, one who would pull back or give up once he was clearly beaten. Instead, they ran into men who would not surrender and who fought until they were dead. Both of those madeup images, the soft American and the surrendering Japanese fell apart in the same few days. And what replaced them was the belief on each side that the enemy was exactly as dangerous as the worst stories had warned. One incident did more than any other to set that no prisoners habit in the Marine's mind. A patrol from the first marine division, about 25 men, was sent out to investigate based on what a captured Japanese sailor had said after he was given alcohol and questioned. He said that there were Japanese to the west who was sick, worn down, and maybe willing to surrender. And the Marines had also reported seeing what looked like a white flag near the lines. The patrol came ashore close to where it had been warned not to go, and it got pinned down and wiped out through the night. Only three men survived, swimming back to the marine lines, and some of them reported seeing bodies hacked with blades at first light. Word spread that the patrol had been lured to its death by a fake surrender. And after this, no prisoners became an unspoken agreement. But the clearest reason the killing of helpless men became routine had to do with staying alive, not with hatred. After the fight at Tenneroo, a wounded Japanese officer who looked like he was dead used a hidden pistol to shoot and badly wound a marine who came over to check on him before he himself was killed. After that, Marines started to shoot or bayonet any Japanese lying on the ground. They treated it as survival because a surrender or a wounded man often turned out to be one last attack.

[00:05:55]And the Pacific did things to men that the war in Europe just did not. These were small islands with no rear area and nowhere to retreat. The fighting was close, constant, and around the clock with the enemies sometimes a few yards away in the dark and no clear line between the front and safety. The climate and the disease did a lot of killing, too. The heat, the rot, the insects, and the swamp all wore men down. A lot of historians described the Pacific as something closer to a war of extermination fought between two sides that each saw the other as less than human. The Americans pictured the Japanese as apes, vermin, and insects.

[00:06:35]While the Japanese cast the Americans and British as demons, devils, and monsters, and that made atrocity feel normal in a way that it rarely did against the Germans. The Japanese way of fighting turned the no surrender code into a method for killing as many of the enemy as possible on the way down. Japan had signed but never ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention, which is the international agreement on how you treat prisoners. And they treated surrender as shameful. In 1942, the army actually changed its own criminal law so that an officer who surrendered the troops under his command faced prison no matter the circumstances. That put surrender pretty close to desertion in the eyes of the law. And in practice, this produced tactics built around death. Soldiers would fake surrender to draw the Americans out into the open and then start shooting. Wounded men would hold grenades and set them off when American troops came over to help them. So even just trying to give aid could get a man killed. Japanese soldiers would deliberately shoot at the medical corman and the stretcherbeerbearers, which was widely reported. The massed bonsai charge named for the battlecry worked the same way. And so did Gyokuzai, the wider idea the Japanese called the shattering jewel, meaning honorable total destruction. Not as some clever maneuver, but as a way to take as many Americans into death with them as possible. And because the fake surrenders and the grenade attacks were real, refusing to take prisoners could be defended as just staying alive. But the line kept moving without anyone really deciding to move it. From refusing risky surreners to shooting men who were genuinely giving up. And then there was finding the bodies of Marines who'd been mutilated by the Japanese.

[00:08:18]The Marine answer was to stop taking surreners. For the first 2 years after America got into the war, Allied troops were often unwilling to accept a Japanese surrender at all. Surrendering men were sometimes killed at the front or on the way to the rear. And it ran the other way too with mutilation of the Japanese dead by the Americans. Men reportedly wore Japanese ears on their belts within the first days. And gold teeth got pride from the dead. Sometimes from men who weren't yet dead. The most common trophies were gold teeth than ears, sometimes noses or hands, and sometimes held skulls that were boiled clean and then kept or traded. This trophy taking was real, and it was common enough to alarm the high command.

[00:09:02]When Japanese remains were returned from the Mariana Islands decades later, a large share came back with the skulls missing, taken as trophies. And the reason it felt normal goes back to the home front. These men had grown up through years of propaganda that drew the Japanese as monkeys, rats, and insects. And to a generation taught to see the enemy as an animal, collecting a skull could feel like keeping a hunting trophy. The historians who have studied this most closely make the unsettling point that the collectors were largely ordinary men, not men driven mad by combat, and that the trophies only became socially unacceptable after the war once the Japanese were seen as fully human again. At the time, men got photographed with boiled heads because they were proud of them. A member of Congress, Francis E. Water of Pennsylvania, gave President Roosevelt a letter opener carved from the armbbone of a dead Japanese soldier. Several weeks later, Roosevelt had the bone returned with word that he didn't want such a thing and that it should be buried. The flow of bones was heavy enough that it actually became a customs matter, and the command had in fact tried to stop it with a Pacific Fleet Order in September 1942 that banned using any part of the enemy's body as a souvenir. Japan noticed all of it and took it as a symbol of American barbarism, which caused a real shock and anger and sharpened that picture of the American as a demon. And the civilians who had been taught all of this were living on the next islands right in the American path. Saipan was the first invasion of an island full of Japanese civilians raised on these monster stories with a garrison that was ordered to die. Saipan was different because it was full of families. When the Americans landed on the 15th of June 1944, there were about 25,000 civilians there.

[00:10:46]People who had listened to all of those horrific and partly true stories for years. The commander of the island ordered every man who could still fight and the able-bodied civilians as well into one final hopeless attack before dying by his own hand. That attack came in the early morning of the 7th of July 1944. And it's usually called the largest bonsai charge of the war. It was a mass human wave assault by roughly 3,000 men, a lot of them walking, wounded or civilians, and some of them unarmed. They hit mainly American army troops who lost about 400 killed and many more wounded while killing the attackers almost to a man. So the soldiers were almost all gone. But the island's tens of thousands of civilians were still there. At the northern tip of Saipan near a place called Miy Point, the civilians began taking their own lives rather than be captured. They jumped from two high cliffs. Whole families waded into the surf to drown and some even used grenades. The actual estimates run from a few hundred to several thousand. And the crulest part was what the Marines did. Once they understood what was happening, they brought up interpreters with loudspeakers, promising the civilians they wouldn't be harmed. They even put already surrendered Japanese on these same speakers to beg the others not to jump. A lot of them jumped anyway, and there was film footage of it. Now, on those infamous islands, the Japanese fought from the caves, the pill boxes, and the bunkers. So, flamethrowers, explosive charges, and sealing caves up with the men still inside became the standard answer to those tactics whenever the enemy wouldn't come out.

[00:12:23]There were many Japanese civilians in those caves, too. And the US Marines had no way of knowing who was still inside when a cave got sealed or burned with the flamethrower. So, this brutality wasn't something that only monsters did.

[00:12:36]It was something the Pacific did to nearly everyone in it. And Okinawa was all of it at once and far larger. It's a populated home islands prefixure of Japan. And when the Americans landed there on the 1st of April, 1945, there were hundreds of thousands of civilians.

[00:12:54]The Marines and soldiers who fought there all the way through to the end of organized resistance on the 22nd of June were by now veterans of every horror the islands had produced so far. The civilian death toll was enormous.

[00:13:07]Estimates run from around 40,000 to 150,000 Okinawan civilians dead, which works out to something like a quarter to a third of the island's pre-war population. But once people were actually captured, the monster myth fell apart. Japanese soldiers taken alive by the Marines weren't eaten or tortured as policy. They were fed, given medical care, questioned, and held as prisoners.

[00:13:32]Civilians on Saipan and Okinawa who came in were put into camps, fed and cared for, and the documented cannibalism in the Pacific actually ran the other way.

[00:13:42]On Chichiima, a small island, Japanese officers executed eight captured American airmen, and four of the dead were partly eaten. The veterans went back to ordinary civilian life carrying their souvenirs, which then sat in trunks and atticss and got forgotten.

[00:13:56]And those souvenirs keep surfacing every now and then. Souvenir skulls are still being turned over to the authorities and sent back to Japan.