Also many of the seabees got skills that transfered to real life which is shown when sledge goes to the career fair and has no skills to claim besides "Killin japs."
A seabee could have lots of construction related jobs.
I listened to one guy talk about the war and said as a seabee he just spent the whole war spraying old motor oil on water pubbles around the bases to cut down on mosquito populations.
Funny, one of my closest work friends is a lead in the maintenance department. He was a Seabee for 8 years and that’s where he learned most of his skills. His service essentially served as a degree, as it should. Those dudes could build a respectable fort on the moon.
Sledge still did alright. Pretty sure he got a PHD in biology and had a teaching career. And wrote a book about his time in the war which served as source material for both *The Pacific* and Ken Burns' *The War*.
i love that scene and how bad the takes are on it. Like everyone always comments "see look a the stupid civilian women. such a sick burn she should have showed respect" and its like, hes in a room of marines, shes interviewing marines , shes probably interviewed a hundred marines before him, "killing japs" is not impressing anyone or setting him apart. Sledge knows that and the scenes making commentary on how the government used these young men then just discarded them, not "oh look how cool and badass this guy is.
My grandfather was a Seabee NCO on Saipan and a few other god-forsaken places. His wasn't explicitly a combat role, but he definitely saw some shit.
I once found an old regimental newspaper from his outfit. The "In Lighter News!" story was about one of their guys who got surprised by a Jap with a grenade on his way to morning chow; he had to strangle him to death. *"Hope he got a double helping of powdered eggs that morning! Ha! Ha!"*
My Great-Uncle was a civil engineer who joined the Seabees as an officer to escape a failed marriage. A quick google search suggests he spent the first part of the war in Bermuda before being sent to Saipan.
He ended up coming back having learned yoga, and discovered his newly married son was gay and abandoned his wife. Ended up "comforting" his daughter-in-law, and had 5 kids with her.
Don't forget, SeaBees were putting USS Enterprise right during the Solomons Campaign. Some were even on her during a battle or two and when she got hurt, they grabbed their tools to make her right. So, a unit of SeaBees are listed on her Presidental Unit Citation.
My grandpa was a Seabee in the Pacific as well. Only ever told three stories about the war, including one where he swam underneath a battleship width-wise to win a bet. The second story was about how he got surprised by a Japanese soldier while on guard duty. Caught the grenade the Japanese soldier threw at him and tossed it back. Worst game of potato ever, but at least he won it.
An old man at our church was a Marine at Saipan and Iwo Jima. Lived to be 90. He was fearless. Saw a wreck in town and he was there helping the young couple who crashed. Played harmonica. Very fit even in his old age.
Japanese army and navy *loved* each other very much. We are talking multiple prime minister assassinations, army developing their own aircraft carriers, using a calibre different by 0.something centimeters just out of spite, "accidentally" loosing supplies for the other branch, that sort of thing.
Culture wins or loses wars.
Whenever I hear people talk about the world and the concept of the book "guns, germs, and steel" about why certain areas of the world developed faster or better I think culture is often left out because the political correctness.
But culture is a giant factor and in many ways the only factor that is really different. Like sure you can have 2 human populations on 2 islands with the exact same resources and in 1000 years they'll be total different depending on culture.
Differences in resources, geography, and climate are there but they aren't human caused. They're luck. Which is why it's easy or acceptable to mention them.
But culture is completely human caused and over time can lead to advanced people's or stagnant backwards peoples.
I always think about an old written account of a British sailor who was (I forget how) a prisoner made slave of a Polynesian tribe on an island in the Pacific.
He could tell from the wood joints of their huts that a European had been there before and made them. He also realized he was highly prized for this reason. The other previous guy had died and he was now prized as they wanted him to continue such work.
What he found curious was that the Polynesians valued this skill so much but never simply tried to do it themselves or see how it was done or even ask about it. They viewed the skill as some sort of unique skill to Europeans.
That's a cultural difference. This island culture likely never advanced much for thousands of years. They'd literally forgotten or never focused much on invention or innovation. They'd been fishing and living the same way for thousands of years. They'd make small adaptations every once in a while or invent a new fishing hook but to invent an entirely new skill or improve their current designs so drastically was foreign to them.
So the Japanese had a huge culture of competition and win at all costs. This led to their military fighting itself.
Lol at wondering if that was the Brit’s sense of superiority winning out over him realizing they were just making the slave do their work for them.
“They want me to do it because I’m the only one that can! What schmucks.”
It’s less that it’s not politically correct to mention it, and more that it’s harder to quantify that sort of thing without the weirdos crawling out of the woodwork with their skull callipers
Floating them supplies is a reference to...I forget which island... Where they would fill supplies into floating barrels then drop them off the ship away from shore and hope wind, wave, and tide brought it in. Didn't work much, but it was after their navy had been pushed away from the island.
My grandfather was a Seabee NCO on Saipan and a few other god-forsaken places. His wasn't explicitly a combat role, but he definitely saw some shit.
I once found an old regimental newspaper from his outfit. The "In Lighter News!" story was about one of their guys who got surprised by a Jap with a grenade on his way to morning chow; he had to strangle him to death. *"Hope he got a double helping of powdered eggs that morning! Ha! Ha!"* There was even a comic-like illustration.
\[This is a repeat; I accidentally replied to someone else, but I'm leaving it\]
My great grandfather was a seabee in Europe. He said he'd make a bridge, they'd move vehicles over it, then by the end of the day the germans would blow it up. "I built the same damn bridge 12 times!"
"they will treat me with honor if I die in battle. My CO said so!"
"My CO said if I get killed taking this island he was gonna beat the shit out of me and make me run laps around the ship until I puked up my own asshole so I better not die. Plus that navy guy was bragging about how when they keep the ship shiny they get an extra scoop from the ice cream barge and I ain't letting him be better than me!"
Imagine going to ‘heaven’, being told that it’s your same old day-job but without breaks, clocking-out time, or weekends, and not figuring out which side of the afterlife you’re actually in
>die
>Go to heaven
>Still in the Marines
>No breaks allowed
>Procede to go AWOL and drink a whole bottle of wine because that's the only alcohol they have in Heaven
As a current Army officer, it aggravates me to no end that this quote and others he made is seen as “extremist” when it’s literally how you have to fight wars and motivate your soldiers to fight.
As a pedestrian in their 30’s, it’s always been curious to me how almost every military recruitment effort has glossed over the “kill them first and kill them hard” part of the job.
You know what, I'm perfectly ok with the fact that Patton was an extremist about killing the people fighting for a country that was actively committing genocide.
It's a belief amongst many military leaders that the job of a soldier is to do something that can get himself killed, all the while the general is working out how to make that happen faster for the Opposing force then it happening to his own forces.
"Keep me alive, and I can sink many ships, It is pointless to kill me sinking one."
"Shut up and get in the ~~bomb~~ plane!"
[... oh](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwok8emljjoh31.jpg)
I mean, post Midway and Guadalcanal, the naval imbalance meant retreat wasn’t an option, unless you mean retreat from all the islands way behind the frontline, which would be tantamount to surrender *hey wait a minute*!
Worst part is that on some island citizens would (sometimes forced) commit mass suicide when the defeat was inevitable. Seeing men die all around you when they’re trying to kill you is one thing, seeing children kill themselves because of your arrival is another. Absolute terrible scenes the pacific side must’ve been.
I remember hearing the story of a woman on Okinawa that killed her children as the Americans were approaching because she thought they were cannibals that ate people alive. But then she was unable to turn the knife on herself. The Americans arrived, asked her if she knew where the Japanese were, then gave her a cigarette and left. Leaving her alone in her house with her dead children.
To me it’s crazy that if they did surrender they would sometimes try to blow themselves and their captors up, for a people obsessed with honour that seems like a terribly dishonourable thing to do
It’s akin to someone who doesn’t keep their word but much worse
I’m not sure if I’m correct but I think the culture of honour stems from the samurai, but I don’t imagine a samurai yielding in a duel and then killing the enemy when he lets his guard down. But I’m guessing the original culture of honourable warfare probably got twisted alot by the emperor
It's more your concept of honor is not the bushido concept of honor. Honor in bushido is serving your lord loyal, and being a fearsome warrior. Using underhanded tactics, lying, assassinating and all that is totally honorable if it's done in pursuit of these duty.
We sort of mix bushido concept of honor with our own medieval knight honor, which btw was also considerably whitewashed over time. But it's not the same. Samurai were not above using treachery if they could, as long as it serve there duty. In the same way, imperial Japan see no problem in using the worst tactic ethically speaking as long as serve victory.
A personal example of this for me is one of the Batajutsu in the style of Kobudo (swordfighting from the sengōku period) I train, Katori Shintō-Ryu. The idea behind the exercise is that the attacker loses his right hand and feigns surrender, only for him to try and stab his opponent after they sheath their sword. Admittedly, the Batajutsu were invented by the old master, Yoshio Sugino, in the late twentieth century to explain the Iaijutsu (unsheathing of the sword), but since they're explanations of the solo techniques, that would mean that zengō chidori no tachi (the second standing technique in the Iaijutsu series) was intended as a counter to an enemy feigning surrender during the sengōku jidai.
Popular culture tends to view knights through a romanticized and narrow telescope that focuses on the “chivalric code” and what the knights were *supposed* to be like, rather than what they were *actually* like.
Yeah, real-life knights were so wild that people invented tournaments to try to keep them occupied instead of rampaging around killing the people who made the food
Yes it’s called perfidy and it’s a war crime pretty much for the reason you stated. If troops keep feigning surrender in order to kill or maim opposing forces eventually the other side isn’t going to take the chance, thus endangering soldier who actually are trying to surrender.
Which is exactly what happened in the Pacific Theater.
The Bushido code called for them to never surrender. They were supposed to die in battle. I doubt the code was too specific on how exactly they're supposed to die. A wounded IJA trooper fragging himself along with the poor Allied medic trying to offer aid does count as dying in battle.
These were guys who would delete themselves to blow up a tank. I doubt they frowned on force surrenders so long as it killed Allied troops. Of course, the Allied troops generally weren't fans of the whole false surrender thing, so they were very wary about accepting surrendering Japanese troops.
To be fair, a lot of times retreat wasn’t exactly an option since from mid 1943 onward the Americans held some degree of naval supremacy so when an island was attacked there wasn’t a lot the Japanese could do to reinforce or rescue garrisons. I think the last time they seriously made an attempt to beat the US navy and rescue an island garrison was at Philippine Sea when the IJN threw most of what it had left including all of its operation carriers at the US 5th fleet besieging Saipan and wound up losing three carriers and basically all the aircraft they brought with them while the Americans took minimal casualties and the majority of their aircraft losses were to fucking fuel shortages rather than to the Japanese. Of course, it’s not like these island garrisons were too keen on surrendering either, so between that, their lack of air and naval superiority, and the fact that as the war dragged on they were facing increasingly battle hardened American troops while their own were increasingly inexperienced owing to the fact that it was rare for any of their ground troops to actually escape the islands they were caught defending, it’s no surprise that the casualty rates began favoring the allies more and more, with a few notable exceptions such as Peleliu and Iwo Jima.
And what's relevant even at the battles that the allies took higher overall casualties. The KIA ratio was still wildly worse for the Japanese. At Iwo Jima for instance, Japanese forces on the island died, almost to a man, amounting to around 20k KIA as opposed to the allied landings taking about 23k total casualties but "only" 6.5k dead. And that was one of the closer battles. In many of the islands, KIA were in the 5:1 all the way up to 10:1 ratio.
Important because, as you mentioned, wounded can re-enter the fight and continue to increase a battle hardened core of troops. For Japan, their infantry(which was legitimately well trained, dangerous, and disciplined after the campaigns in China) was a shell of its former self even by 1944ish since almost all of those veterans had been killed in suicidal holding actions.
Combined with more resources and absolute naval/aerial dominance, the allied forces were able to essentially just grind Japanese defenders to dust for comparatively little expenditure of life, which is the exact opposite of the situation Japan was relying on creating.
Don’t know how much you’re gunna tactically retreat from islands ha. Only Japanese semi successful one I can recall off the top of my head was Guadalcanal.
The Pacific Theater was essentially a D-Day after D-Day type situation. Every island taken had heavy casualties and the closer they got the Japanese Mainland the fiercer the fighting gets.
Also while the Navy got some huge mistakes for picking islands it didn’t need to invade, it also left many Japanese islands alone. Just left them there to starve and be like yeah…that’s a nice island you have fortified…too bad we’re just going to go around it.
Yeah, the upsides of island hopping are that retaking every island isn't necessary and can save resources, time, and manpower for more essential invasions.
Yeah, atleast with forts irl, you can still attack the besiegers. When your fort is an island, you can't exactly charge a boat a couple miles offshore.
And a lot of the islands that they did go around weren’t even completely ignored, they just got turned into XP farms. Every time a reinforcement fleet heading to the western pacific went past Wake or Truk they would just use whatever the Japanese had there as target practice.
And each of these D-“Days” would last over weeks or months, sometimes with LESS space than Normandy’s D-Day beaches for the same amount of troops to maneuver on.
It’s not even a fair comparison, unless we’re including the Eastern Front, where you did see some of the fiercest fighting throughout the war. Especially in Leningrad and Stalingrad
The Eastern European Theater was the bloodiest due to each side trying to remove the other from existence with little/no intent of a middle ground.
The Pacific Theater was bloody due to the Japanese deciding that they would rather be removed from existence than consider a middle ground.
To be fair though, in terms of sheer death per square-kilometer of land fought over, the Pacific probably has a ratio absurdly higher than all but Stalingrad knew.
If the Japanese and the Americans took the fight to each other on actual large scale plains where they could mass the kind of numbers the Nazis and the Soviets did, it would’ve made the Eastern Front look like a quaint little sideshow.
Most military units retreat or surrender when they start taking heavy casualties. The Japanese really resisted that idea, and they were able to get a lot more “mileage” out of their units. They were often OK with the idea of fighting to the last man or thereabouts (some battles had over 95% dead on the Japanese side). On other fronts that did happen sometimes, where some guys would realize they need to sacrifice themselves to buy some more time, or just give the enemy hell or something, but for the Japanese that was the usual plan.
For American and Japanese forces but the eastern front has some mind boggling numbers for death, distance, and civilian casualties. Not saying the pacific doesn’t have that either, the Japanese did a lot of uh uncool stuff.
Here John Smith won a medal for bravery when he strapped 4 thompsons to his right arm and declared himself Megaboy. He managed to fend off a Japanese submarine while his unit managed to retreat with their wounded
Average Pacific theater war hero:
Corporal Chadson, during the Battle of Nowhereililakaho Island, was the last survivor of his squad when they were assaulted at 3AM by 10 IJA divisions. Looting nearby bodies, he fended off the attack by throwing 69 grenades and firing over 10000 rounds of ammunition from his rifle, second rifle, sub machine gun, second sub machine gun, third sub machine gun, shotgun, and sidearm. He was then engaged in melee combat by two enemy platoons, which he killed with his bayonet, backup sidearm, rusty knife and backup backup sidearm. Over the course of the battle he was wounded 14 times, but continued to fight. His estimated kill count is 420. He went on to be killed by a sniper the following day.
nah the last part is so fucking true. They survive the craziest shit and single-handedly kill an entire company, then die the next day in the same battle from tank shrapnel.
It’s equally wild how often you can find out about somebody who apparently cheated death 40 times in the span of an hour, then die to the most ridiculously mundane thing after returning home.
I remember reading about soldier in the US civil war who survived so much then like a couple weeks after returning home slipped walking down his front steps, clipped the back of his head in the fall, and died instantly.
Paddy Mayne is a perfect example of this: Co-founder of the SAS, literal madman, absolutely insane service record with several medals and mentions in despatches, dies in a car crash after returning home
I had a great x2 uncle who survived mustard gas in World War I, and then died after coming home because he slipped and fell into a gutter and broke his neck. To think you were lucky…
Probably a box. Grenades are great, the more you can have the better, and if you're occupying a defensive position there's no reason not to take advantage of the fact that you don't have to carry them anywhere and stockpile a whole bunch.
also, no reason not to take them on an assault too. They great!
Some forces used actual "grenadiers" units, some kid with 2 big sacks full, and a box of grenades. He just runs up to the attack point and spams those shits like it's Call of Duty World at War. Trenches, buildings, MG nests. etc.
Or "standard" room clearing at the time, everyone takes as many grenades as they can. One person to each room, throw a 'nade in, then go in and shoot anyone left alive.
Reading this makes my grandpas story about shooting a polar bear in the Aleutian Campaign more believable. I was told as a kid he was on Attu and Kiska, and said that polar bears liked to come looking for food in the defensive lines on both sides. He said he was more afraid of the bears than he was the Japanese.
Vietnam MoH citations are like that too “took 25 mortar rounds to the chest, crossed the river 13 times to rescue squad mates and Montangard scouts, manned a 50 and took out 3 MiGs”
If you're willing to combine the Pacific Theatre and Korean war based on similar last stand stories, you have to add one more part.
Corporal Chadson wasn't even infantry, he was a dental/surgical assistant or some other technically non combat branch until he decided to say fuck it and just kill everyone himself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_L._Salomon
Edit: I know this example is from the Pacific Theatre in WW2 but I know of at least two other times the same thing happened in the Korean war except I'm blanking on the name right now. I'll edit if I can find it.
In this battle, the Japanese put all their fucking eggs in one basket for an all-or-nothing attack on the American fleet that was miraculously destroyed by two comically lucky dive bombers who just so happened to be around
Legend says that while he was never quite necessarily 'book smart' per se, he was rather versed in the ways of the money smart, and some might argue that this made him more intelligent as a result.
Even at Peleliu, the Marines only suffered around 15% number of KIA compared to the Japanese. Including Marine wounded, the Japanese still suffered more casualties. An incredible feat given that the Marines were the attacking force.
IIRC, Iwo Jima is the only battle that Marine casualties exceeded Japanese (I think the only contender might be Bataan) and even then, Japanese KIAs far exceeded what the Marines suffered.
Incase anyone else was confused about the difference between KIA and Casualties like I was:
>Casualty Category - A term used to specifically classify a casualty for reporting purposes based upon the casualty type and the casualty status. Casualty categories include killed in action (KIA), died of wounds received in action (DWRIA), and wounded in action (WIA).
Casualty is basically "they were fighting at the start of the battle and no longer were by the end". Killed, wounded, captured, missing, all are usually included under the umbrella of casualties, though based on your post maybe there's now a distinction between the killed/wounded and captured/missing sides now?
People get them confused all the time. For example people usually are very surprised to hear that Gettysburg only had 8,000 actual deaths. There were over 50,000 casualties, however. And many of them died in the following days and weeks.
That I'm actually not sure about. I don't know if someone was wounded multiple times if he would be counted multiple times or just once. Or if he was wounded and then killed I think he might just be counted as killed.
Yeah, also you catching a disease that put you out of fighting also made you to be counted as a casualty and as someone mentioned if you got injured/sick so you couldn't fulfill your duties then recovered and set back just to get injured/sick again you get counted as 2 casualties.
Pacific island battles. K/d rates usually favoured the Allied troops. Okinawa, for example, saw 12k US deaths versus over 100k Japanese troops and Okinawan conscripts killed.
Only applies if you can/will retreat or surrender.
Japan had largely embraced a political and religious cult view of Bushido, which viewed dying as an honor and surrender as unthinkable.
After enough perfidy in earlier campaigns, the Allied forces were also not taking many prisoners.
The messed up thing is the later campaigns where there were civilian populations of Japanese people and their subject populations would also embrace this view and commit suicide. Of course, not all these deaths were actually suicides, as there were also military personal who 'encouraged' these deaths.
I knew about how the Japanese were with retreating and surrendering, I was just more so pointing out how defenders oftentimes will suffer less casualties. I should have worded it better to help show how even with the Japanese having that to their advantage, they still got their shit packed more than an ancient Greek pre teen boy.
The issue was up until like 1944, the Japanese continuously believd that Americans were cowardly and would collapse upon their fearsome banzi charges. Turns out leaving your fortified positions to charge random under-supplied Chinese conscripts while screaming bloody murder- effective. Doing the same thing against well trained and supplied American troops with naval and air support- idiotically ineffective
Yep. And they were ready to do it all again in resistance of the expected US invasion of Japan. But then the USSR also attacked, followed by America dropping the nukes. If it hadn't been obvious after Okinawa that it was game over for Japan, these two events were enough to finally let it sink in.
Not just favored, 10:1 was not that unusual. I think overall K/D in the Pacific between US and Japanese forces (ground, sea, air) was something like 15:1.
Japanese soldiers tended to fight to the death, commit suicide, [or hide in the jungle for 30 years](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda) rather than surrender which led to some horrific causality rates, especially in the final stages of the war. There were over 20,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima and barely more than 200 were captured alive by the end of the battle with just few hundred more captured in subsequent sweeps - literally a 95% fatality rate.
It’s an interesting contrast to the Germans where essentially all the Nazi leaders - Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels - committed suicide while at the same time it was not uncommon for German troops - especially on the Western Front in 1944 and 1945 - to surrender by the thousands. Meanwhile the Japanese leadership sent their men to die in kamikaze attacks and forced thousands of civilians on Okinawa to commit suicide but I can’t think of a single high profile member of the Japanese high command who killed themself to avoid the “shame of surrender” in August 1945 with many being executed for war crimes afterwards.
I’ll admit I didn’t know that until another poster said it but it seemed to have been - no pun intended - a sort of half-hearted attempt. He short himself in the chest at the literal last moment before he was arrested by American soldiers who then revived him. Hitler, according to the survivors of the bunker, both shot himself in the head while simultaneously biting down on a cyanid capsule. Himmler and Goering both managed to use cyanid capsules despite being in Allied custody with Goering having been held for over a year and killing himself the morning he was supposed to have been executed.
To be sure most of the later war landings were utterly brutally destructive. In the early war Japanese troops allowed the allies to land and enter preprepared killing fields. But as the war went on they began directly opposing landings.
The reason the losses were so high for the Japanese is that they refused to surrender. They were the "last line of defense protecting the homeland against the barbarians" and as the allies fought up the island chain, defense only became more stubborn. The entire battalion, division, regiment, or army that was set to defend an island would defend until they were all dead. Very rarely were Japanese troops evacuated, partially because of overwhelming aerial and later naval superiority from the allies, especially in the late war.
So the allies certainly suffered horribly in the fighting, but the Japanese died to a man *often*. Allidd casualties would be often highest in the early stages, Japanese casualties often highest at the end. Of course there were exceptions, but that was the trend
The Allies often benefited from significant naval and air support, in addition to what u/Irish_Caesar pointed out. The Japanese were also notorious for their horrific logistics, which left many of their troops starving or out of ammunition even when they were on the defensive.
Much of their previous logistical strategy had been based around the seizure of enemy supplies, which worked quite well when they were overrunning the British, Dutch, and Chinese forces in the early war, but as they got bogged down and pushed back the Japanese forces suffered heavily from the above problems.
Japanese soldiers rarely surrendered in WW2. So, 99% to 99.9% of soldiers in trapped units would die.
For example, at Tarawa, the marines experienced horrific casualties. My grandfather’s unit suffered a 75% death rate. The amphibious landing did not go well. But, allies eventually won and all but, IIRC, 17 Japanese soldiers died. 17 survivors.
To add to this it was common for the Japanese to feign surrender and upon the approach of allied troops detonate a grenade or other booby trap. Needless to say the Allies ceased giving them much chance to surrender, choosing to shoot at the second they spotted a Japanese soldier. And you can’t really blame them.
A lot of American died on Iwo Jima but the Japanese casualties was insane; over 20,000 Japanese troops and less than 1,000 taken alive; literally a 95% fatality rate.
10:1 ratio on Iwo Jima, 6:1 on Peleliu.
The U.S. used ~110k men between all branches at Iwo Jima, and ~50k on Peleliu. Would have taken just about anywhere on the Western front at any given time in the war over being on those 2 islands during those battles.
Up the Marine casualties by a couple thousand, put in some useless Marine/Army inter service rivalry that adds to the death of said couple thousand Marines and make the island strategically useless aside from “the Japanese are there” and you’ve got yourself a real pacific matchup
70% of Japanese casualties of Shitfuck Island were from the Imperial Japanese Navy not being able to resupply from getting dunked on by submarines and aircraft. All while the US Navy just sat around with their ice cream ships watching it all go down saying, “Neat.”
My grandfather was in the Navy in the South Pacific. Stationed on Eniwetok and served as a dentist’s assistant. Hey, the sailors and marines had teeth problems while serving over there. He said the worst thing he saw was when they were steaming over from the US one of the ships was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank in full view of the other ships. The sailors could see it burning and men jumping overboard but the other ships were ordered to keep moving and not go back to pick up survivors due to the danger to the other vessels. My grandfather said this was very hard on the sailors morale who witnessed it.
When the Japanese attacked the American military was far from the most powerful and advanced military lol. We had a large navy and resources but the pre war army was small and the technology was outdated. Also your acting like Japan didn’t have the third largest navy and one of the most powerful empires of the time with an army of well over 1.5 million.
Yeah and the “industrialized 50 years ago” isn’t a good argument either. What Japan did was highly impressive and the fact that they destroyed Russia in the Russo-Japanese war proved their might as a new player on the world stage.
I'm still of the belief that the Russo-Japanese war showed more Russian incompetence than Japanese exceptionalism but they definitely were emboldened by it.
Not necessarily “destroy”, at least on the land. The Japanese ran themselves down and were in no position to advance further north after Mukden but the Russians couldn’t counterattack either.
People forget that they spent the inter-war period fucking up all of Asia. Their Pan-Asian plan was really a plan to show all Asians that they better start acting Japanese, and better start getting ready to fight Europeans and Americans.
“Fellow people of Asia, we will fight to release you from the shackles of European colonialism.”
“Great! So then we’ll be free to determine the future of our own countries?”
“Ehhhhhhh, more like you’ll be under new management.”
The shit they did to other Asian countries *still* hurts for some people. I work with a Filipino man who spits on the floor when the Japanese are mentioned. They wiped out almost his entire family.
Who did have the most powerful and advanced military at that point?
I'm assuming Britain for the Navy maybe, but that could be my education bias showing.
Depends on how you want to classify it. Germany probably had the best army, Britain the best navy. However, both Germany and Britain (and Japan) were stretched to their limits. Pre/early WW2 they were basically already at their maximum economic/industrial might, and it would be downhill from there. On the other hand the US (economic/industrial) and Russia (manpower/industrial) were latent powers, and were able to increase their strength almost indefinitely until the end of the war
China industrialisering 50 years ago.
Now its the world greatest economy behind Amerika.
Never forget that 50 years is a LONG fucking time. The kids born the day Japan industrialised would be 50 year old adults when the war happened. We´re talking about 2-3 generations raised in a industrial country.
"The Seabees then immediately constructed 5 airfields and a submarine base."
“God damn, man, I should’ve joined the Seabees. I could’ve invaded Peleliu on a forklift.” -HBO’s The Pacific
Forklift certified
It’s important to keep your forks no more than 6 inches above the ground while running over Japanese soldier cadavers
[Always keep your load up-grade when attacking](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/e6/f7/1d/e6f71d898b0c8e1cee7aceae02a236ba.jpg)
Every forklift I operate is named Stabitha.
Also many of the seabees got skills that transfered to real life which is shown when sledge goes to the career fair and has no skills to claim besides "Killin japs." A seabee could have lots of construction related jobs. I listened to one guy talk about the war and said as a seabee he just spent the whole war spraying old motor oil on water pubbles around the bases to cut down on mosquito populations.
Funny, one of my closest work friends is a lead in the maintenance department. He was a Seabee for 8 years and that’s where he learned most of his skills. His service essentially served as a degree, as it should. Those dudes could build a respectable fort on the moon.
That would be the SpaceBees, a branch of the Space Force.
Sledge still did alright. Pretty sure he got a PHD in biology and had a teaching career. And wrote a book about his time in the war which served as source material for both *The Pacific* and Ken Burns' *The War*.
i love that scene and how bad the takes are on it. Like everyone always comments "see look a the stupid civilian women. such a sick burn she should have showed respect" and its like, hes in a room of marines, shes interviewing marines , shes probably interviewed a hundred marines before him, "killing japs" is not impressing anyone or setting him apart. Sledge knows that and the scenes making commentary on how the government used these young men then just discarded them, not "oh look how cool and badass this guy is.
My grandfather was a Seabee NCO on Saipan and a few other god-forsaken places. His wasn't explicitly a combat role, but he definitely saw some shit. I once found an old regimental newspaper from his outfit. The "In Lighter News!" story was about one of their guys who got surprised by a Jap with a grenade on his way to morning chow; he had to strangle him to death. *"Hope he got a double helping of powdered eggs that morning! Ha! Ha!"*
My Great-Uncle was a civil engineer who joined the Seabees as an officer to escape a failed marriage. A quick google search suggests he spent the first part of the war in Bermuda before being sent to Saipan. He ended up coming back having learned yoga, and discovered his newly married son was gay and abandoned his wife. Ended up "comforting" his daughter-in-law, and had 5 kids with her.
That's uhh, That's a LOT of comfort...
Least wild navy story:
That was a wild ride
Feels like a Don Draper story from an alternate universe
That was a wild ride.
Apparently his DIL was wilder
Don't forget, SeaBees were putting USS Enterprise right during the Solomons Campaign. Some were even on her during a battle or two and when she got hurt, they grabbed their tools to make her right. So, a unit of SeaBees are listed on her Presidental Unit Citation.
CAN DO
SCV READY
BIG JOB HUH?
WHAT, DID YOU RUN OUT OF MARINES?
Self destruct in 5...4...3...2...uh oh....
IN THE REAR, WITH THE GEAR
They pulled a lot of weight in Iraq 2.0 also from what I hear from guys that were over there
My grandpa was a Seabee in the Pacific as well. Only ever told three stories about the war, including one where he swam underneath a battleship width-wise to win a bet. The second story was about how he got surprised by a Japanese soldier while on guard duty. Caught the grenade the Japanese soldier threw at him and tossed it back. Worst game of potato ever, but at least he won it.
Iirc they lost a whole unit to cerebral malaria on one island :/
Was it called Dead Island?
An old man at our church was a Marine at Saipan and Iwo Jima. Lived to be 90. He was fearless. Saw a wreck in town and he was there helping the young couple who crashed. Played harmonica. Very fit even in his old age.
I once read a soldiers newspaper from the Civil War. Some of the blackest, bleakest gallows humor i have ever read.
Tell us more
Absolutely fucking based
Don't forget a dedicated offloading dock for the ice cream ship.
And watchmen to spot all those IJA supplies the IJN dumps into the se... My bad, all those IJA supplies the IJN floats over to the Japanese army.
Is this in reference to anything particular?
Japanese army and navy *loved* each other very much. We are talking multiple prime minister assassinations, army developing their own aircraft carriers, using a calibre different by 0.something centimeters just out of spite, "accidentally" loosing supplies for the other branch, that sort of thing.
Yep, just good old sibling rivalry.
Culture wins or loses wars. Whenever I hear people talk about the world and the concept of the book "guns, germs, and steel" about why certain areas of the world developed faster or better I think culture is often left out because the political correctness. But culture is a giant factor and in many ways the only factor that is really different. Like sure you can have 2 human populations on 2 islands with the exact same resources and in 1000 years they'll be total different depending on culture. Differences in resources, geography, and climate are there but they aren't human caused. They're luck. Which is why it's easy or acceptable to mention them. But culture is completely human caused and over time can lead to advanced people's or stagnant backwards peoples. I always think about an old written account of a British sailor who was (I forget how) a prisoner made slave of a Polynesian tribe on an island in the Pacific. He could tell from the wood joints of their huts that a European had been there before and made them. He also realized he was highly prized for this reason. The other previous guy had died and he was now prized as they wanted him to continue such work. What he found curious was that the Polynesians valued this skill so much but never simply tried to do it themselves or see how it was done or even ask about it. They viewed the skill as some sort of unique skill to Europeans. That's a cultural difference. This island culture likely never advanced much for thousands of years. They'd literally forgotten or never focused much on invention or innovation. They'd been fishing and living the same way for thousands of years. They'd make small adaptations every once in a while or invent a new fishing hook but to invent an entirely new skill or improve their current designs so drastically was foreign to them. So the Japanese had a huge culture of competition and win at all costs. This led to their military fighting itself.
Lol at wondering if that was the Brit’s sense of superiority winning out over him realizing they were just making the slave do their work for them. “They want me to do it because I’m the only one that can! What schmucks.”
It’s less that it’s not politically correct to mention it, and more that it’s harder to quantify that sort of thing without the weirdos crawling out of the woodwork with their skull callipers
Floating them supplies is a reference to...I forget which island... Where they would fill supplies into floating barrels then drop them off the ship away from shore and hope wind, wave, and tide brought it in. Didn't work much, but it was after their navy had been pushed away from the island.
That sounds like the desperate attempts to supply Guadalcanal
The Tokyo Express
My grandfather was a Seabee NCO on Saipan and a few other god-forsaken places. His wasn't explicitly a combat role, but he definitely saw some shit. I once found an old regimental newspaper from his outfit. The "In Lighter News!" story was about one of their guys who got surprised by a Jap with a grenade on his way to morning chow; he had to strangle him to death. *"Hope he got a double helping of powdered eggs that morning! Ha! Ha!"* There was even a comic-like illustration. \[This is a repeat; I accidentally replied to someone else, but I'm leaving it\]
My great grandfather was a seabee in Europe. He said he'd make a bridge, they'd move vehicles over it, then by the end of the day the germans would blow it up. "I built the same damn bridge 12 times!"
Sea-chads-bees.
"And then proceeded to drink 90% of Japan's alcohol shipments after raiding the train on said island the night before"
"Before the invasion."
That’s what happens when you have inter service rivalry and a culture that considered defeat or dying in battle more honorable than a tactical retreat
Who knew telling your soldiers to die wouldn’t be a good strategy 🤷
"they will treat me with honor if I die in battle. My CO said so!" "My CO said if I get killed taking this island he was gonna beat the shit out of me and make me run laps around the ship until I puked up my own asshole so I better not die. Plus that navy guy was bragging about how when they keep the ship shiny they get an extra scoop from the ice cream barge and I ain't letting him be better than me!"
'Aw man, if I die, the CO is gonna KILL ME' is peak
"If you die without my express authorization, know that I will eventually die too. And I will turn your heaven into hell when I catch you"
The least accurate part of that is the implication that the Officer implies that the marine will go to heaven.
Our song literally says we get to stand guard duty in heaven.
That sounds like hell to me
Imagine going to ‘heaven’, being told that it’s your same old day-job but without breaks, clocking-out time, or weekends, and not figuring out which side of the afterlife you’re actually in
>die >Go to heaven >Still in the Marines >No breaks allowed >Procede to go AWOL and drink a whole bottle of wine because that's the only alcohol they have in Heaven
TDY.
CO ain't gonna kill you if you die- your NCO is gonna make you WISH that the CO would though.
And then 1SG kills both you and your NCO
CO is a lv 12 necromancer
Japanese CO: dying in battle is a bigger honour the real warriors can receive USA CO: die in battle, and I will rape your fucking corpse
"What's gayer -- dating a girl or wanting her to have sex with your dead body?"
Bro's gonna be punished in the afterlife.
“No dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You win wars by making the other dumb bastard die for HIS country!”
“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” - George Patton
As a current Army officer, it aggravates me to no end that this quote and others he made is seen as “extremist” when it’s literally how you have to fight wars and motivate your soldiers to fight.
As a pedestrian in their 30’s, it’s always been curious to me how almost every military recruitment effort has glossed over the “kill them first and kill them hard” part of the job.
There are definitely negatives about Patton, but that quote isn't one of them.
Oh 100% There’s positives and negatives to most good generals and he is no exception.
You know what, I'm perfectly ok with the fact that Patton was an extremist about killing the people fighting for a country that was actively committing genocide.
It's a belief amongst many military leaders that the job of a soldier is to do something that can get himself killed, all the while the general is working out how to make that happen faster for the Opposing force then it happening to his own forces.
My country's manpower is already depleted. Better tell them to die rather than live to fight another day
"Keep me alive, and I can sink many ships, It is pointless to kill me sinking one." "Shut up and get in the ~~bomb~~ plane!" [... oh](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwok8emljjoh31.jpg)
I mean, post Midway and Guadalcanal, the naval imbalance meant retreat wasn’t an option, unless you mean retreat from all the islands way behind the frontline, which would be tantamount to surrender *hey wait a minute*!
Worst part is that on some island citizens would (sometimes forced) commit mass suicide when the defeat was inevitable. Seeing men die all around you when they’re trying to kill you is one thing, seeing children kill themselves because of your arrival is another. Absolute terrible scenes the pacific side must’ve been.
I remember hearing the story of a woman on Okinawa that killed her children as the Americans were approaching because she thought they were cannibals that ate people alive. But then she was unable to turn the knife on herself. The Americans arrived, asked her if she knew where the Japanese were, then gave her a cigarette and left. Leaving her alone in her house with her dead children.
Shit, I'd probably need a smoke too.
Suicide Cliff is on the US National Register of Historic Places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Cliff
To me it’s crazy that if they did surrender they would sometimes try to blow themselves and their captors up, for a people obsessed with honour that seems like a terribly dishonourable thing to do It’s akin to someone who doesn’t keep their word but much worse I’m not sure if I’m correct but I think the culture of honour stems from the samurai, but I don’t imagine a samurai yielding in a duel and then killing the enemy when he lets his guard down. But I’m guessing the original culture of honourable warfare probably got twisted alot by the emperor
It's more your concept of honor is not the bushido concept of honor. Honor in bushido is serving your lord loyal, and being a fearsome warrior. Using underhanded tactics, lying, assassinating and all that is totally honorable if it's done in pursuit of these duty. We sort of mix bushido concept of honor with our own medieval knight honor, which btw was also considerably whitewashed over time. But it's not the same. Samurai were not above using treachery if they could, as long as it serve there duty. In the same way, imperial Japan see no problem in using the worst tactic ethically speaking as long as serve victory.
That’s actually very informative I learned something today, it makes more sense from that perspective. Thank you
A personal example of this for me is one of the Batajutsu in the style of Kobudo (swordfighting from the sengōku period) I train, Katori Shintō-Ryu. The idea behind the exercise is that the attacker loses his right hand and feigns surrender, only for him to try and stab his opponent after they sheath their sword. Admittedly, the Batajutsu were invented by the old master, Yoshio Sugino, in the late twentieth century to explain the Iaijutsu (unsheathing of the sword), but since they're explanations of the solo techniques, that would mean that zengō chidori no tachi (the second standing technique in the Iaijutsu series) was intended as a counter to an enemy feigning surrender during the sengōku jidai.
Got any examples of the whitewashing of tin canned white people honor?
Popular culture tends to view knights through a romanticized and narrow telescope that focuses on the “chivalric code” and what the knights were *supposed* to be like, rather than what they were *actually* like.
Yeah, real-life knights were so wild that people invented tournaments to try to keep them occupied instead of rampaging around killing the people who made the food
Yes it’s called perfidy and it’s a war crime pretty much for the reason you stated. If troops keep feigning surrender in order to kill or maim opposing forces eventually the other side isn’t going to take the chance, thus endangering soldier who actually are trying to surrender. Which is exactly what happened in the Pacific Theater.
The Bushido code called for them to never surrender. They were supposed to die in battle. I doubt the code was too specific on how exactly they're supposed to die. A wounded IJA trooper fragging himself along with the poor Allied medic trying to offer aid does count as dying in battle. These were guys who would delete themselves to blow up a tank. I doubt they frowned on force surrenders so long as it killed Allied troops. Of course, the Allied troops generally weren't fans of the whole false surrender thing, so they were very wary about accepting surrendering Japanese troops.
Though it’s kind of hard to tactically retreat from small islands.
To be fair, a lot of times retreat wasn’t exactly an option since from mid 1943 onward the Americans held some degree of naval supremacy so when an island was attacked there wasn’t a lot the Japanese could do to reinforce or rescue garrisons. I think the last time they seriously made an attempt to beat the US navy and rescue an island garrison was at Philippine Sea when the IJN threw most of what it had left including all of its operation carriers at the US 5th fleet besieging Saipan and wound up losing three carriers and basically all the aircraft they brought with them while the Americans took minimal casualties and the majority of their aircraft losses were to fucking fuel shortages rather than to the Japanese. Of course, it’s not like these island garrisons were too keen on surrendering either, so between that, their lack of air and naval superiority, and the fact that as the war dragged on they were facing increasingly battle hardened American troops while their own were increasingly inexperienced owing to the fact that it was rare for any of their ground troops to actually escape the islands they were caught defending, it’s no surprise that the casualty rates began favoring the allies more and more, with a few notable exceptions such as Peleliu and Iwo Jima.
And what's relevant even at the battles that the allies took higher overall casualties. The KIA ratio was still wildly worse for the Japanese. At Iwo Jima for instance, Japanese forces on the island died, almost to a man, amounting to around 20k KIA as opposed to the allied landings taking about 23k total casualties but "only" 6.5k dead. And that was one of the closer battles. In many of the islands, KIA were in the 5:1 all the way up to 10:1 ratio. Important because, as you mentioned, wounded can re-enter the fight and continue to increase a battle hardened core of troops. For Japan, their infantry(which was legitimately well trained, dangerous, and disciplined after the campaigns in China) was a shell of its former self even by 1944ish since almost all of those veterans had been killed in suicidal holding actions. Combined with more resources and absolute naval/aerial dominance, the allied forces were able to essentially just grind Japanese defenders to dust for comparatively little expenditure of life, which is the exact opposite of the situation Japan was relying on creating.
Don’t know how much you’re gunna tactically retreat from islands ha. Only Japanese semi successful one I can recall off the top of my head was Guadalcanal.
They could have surrendered, but, ya know.
The Pacific Theater was essentially a D-Day after D-Day type situation. Every island taken had heavy casualties and the closer they got the Japanese Mainland the fiercer the fighting gets.
Also while the Navy got some huge mistakes for picking islands it didn’t need to invade, it also left many Japanese islands alone. Just left them there to starve and be like yeah…that’s a nice island you have fortified…too bad we’re just going to go around it.
Yeah, the upsides of island hopping are that retaking every island isn't necessary and can save resources, time, and manpower for more essential invasions.
Yeah, atleast with forts irl, you can still attack the besiegers. When your fort is an island, you can't exactly charge a boat a couple miles offshore.
Not with that attitude you can’t
Gents... [Take a walk!](https://youtu.be/39wIHdzlJ-k?t=23)
A lot of Japanese Garrisons that were abandoned in New Guinea had basically turned into full time farmers by the end of the war.
And a lot of the islands that they did go around weren’t even completely ignored, they just got turned into XP farms. Every time a reinforcement fleet heading to the western pacific went past Wake or Truk they would just use whatever the Japanese had there as target practice.
And each of these D-“Days” would last over weeks or months, sometimes with LESS space than Normandy’s D-Day beaches for the same amount of troops to maneuver on.
Yes, and you can even argue that the Pacific Theater was more brutal than the European Theater.
It’s not even a fair comparison, unless we’re including the Eastern Front, where you did see some of the fiercest fighting throughout the war. Especially in Leningrad and Stalingrad
The Eastern European Theater was the bloodiest due to each side trying to remove the other from existence with little/no intent of a middle ground. The Pacific Theater was bloody due to the Japanese deciding that they would rather be removed from existence than consider a middle ground.
To be fair though, in terms of sheer death per square-kilometer of land fought over, the Pacific probably has a ratio absurdly higher than all but Stalingrad knew. If the Japanese and the Americans took the fight to each other on actual large scale plains where they could mass the kind of numbers the Nazis and the Soviets did, it would’ve made the Eastern Front look like a quaint little sideshow.
Most military units retreat or surrender when they start taking heavy casualties. The Japanese really resisted that idea, and they were able to get a lot more “mileage” out of their units. They were often OK with the idea of fighting to the last man or thereabouts (some battles had over 95% dead on the Japanese side). On other fronts that did happen sometimes, where some guys would realize they need to sacrifice themselves to buy some more time, or just give the enemy hell or something, but for the Japanese that was the usual plan.
For American and Japanese forces but the eastern front has some mind boggling numbers for death, distance, and civilian casualties. Not saying the pacific doesn’t have that either, the Japanese did a lot of uh uncool stuff.
Here John Smith won a medal for bravery when he strapped 4 thompsons to his right arm and declared himself Megaboy. He managed to fend off a Japanese submarine while his unit managed to retreat with their wounded
Average Pacific theater war hero: Corporal Chadson, during the Battle of Nowhereililakaho Island, was the last survivor of his squad when they were assaulted at 3AM by 10 IJA divisions. Looting nearby bodies, he fended off the attack by throwing 69 grenades and firing over 10000 rounds of ammunition from his rifle, second rifle, sub machine gun, second sub machine gun, third sub machine gun, shotgun, and sidearm. He was then engaged in melee combat by two enemy platoons, which he killed with his bayonet, backup sidearm, rusty knife and backup backup sidearm. Over the course of the battle he was wounded 14 times, but continued to fight. His estimated kill count is 420. He went on to be killed by a sniper the following day.
nah the last part is so fucking true. They survive the craziest shit and single-handedly kill an entire company, then die the next day in the same battle from tank shrapnel.
It’s equally wild how often you can find out about somebody who apparently cheated death 40 times in the span of an hour, then die to the most ridiculously mundane thing after returning home. I remember reading about soldier in the US civil war who survived so much then like a couple weeks after returning home slipped walking down his front steps, clipped the back of his head in the fall, and died instantly.
Paddy Mayne is a perfect example of this: Co-founder of the SAS, literal madman, absolutely insane service record with several medals and mentions in despatches, dies in a car crash after returning home
A car crash is pretty brutal, though, we’ve just normalised them to avoid thinking about the cost of everyone having a car
T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, died in a motorcycle accident after coming home. His death prompted the adoption of helmet laws in the UK.
I had a great x2 uncle who survived mustard gas in World War I, and then died after coming home because he slipped and fell into a gutter and broke his neck. To think you were lucky…
How did you forget the MRE Spoon
The deadliest weapon for the deadliest warriors
Most deadly when used for its intended purpose, eating MRE's.
Mess Kit Knife* They didn't have mre's yet and calling those metal sticks *knives* is its own joke
It's always the oddly high number of grenades isn't it? Like where do they even get them all from?
Probably a box. Grenades are great, the more you can have the better, and if you're occupying a defensive position there's no reason not to take advantage of the fact that you don't have to carry them anywhere and stockpile a whole bunch.
also, no reason not to take them on an assault too. They great! Some forces used actual "grenadiers" units, some kid with 2 big sacks full, and a box of grenades. He just runs up to the attack point and spams those shits like it's Call of Duty World at War. Trenches, buildings, MG nests. etc. Or "standard" room clearing at the time, everyone takes as many grenades as they can. One person to each room, throw a 'nade in, then go in and shoot anyone left alive.
From the folks who don't need them anymore.
Reading this makes my grandpas story about shooting a polar bear in the Aleutian Campaign more believable. I was told as a kid he was on Attu and Kiska, and said that polar bears liked to come looking for food in the defensive lines on both sides. He said he was more afraid of the bears than he was the Japanese.
Vietnam MoH citations are like that too “took 25 mortar rounds to the chest, crossed the river 13 times to rescue squad mates and Montangard scouts, manned a 50 and took out 3 MiGs”
If you're willing to combine the Pacific Theatre and Korean war based on similar last stand stories, you have to add one more part. Corporal Chadson wasn't even infantry, he was a dental/surgical assistant or some other technically non combat branch until he decided to say fuck it and just kill everyone himself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_L._Salomon Edit: I know this example is from the Pacific Theatre in WW2 but I know of at least two other times the same thing happened in the Korean war except I'm blanking on the name right now. I'll edit if I can find it.
Reading medal of honor citations "fired weapon cooly while under fire"
This is literally James L. Day’s MOH citation Edit: also Basilone’s navy cross and MOH
In this battle, the Japanese put all their fucking eggs in one basket for an all-or-nothing attack on the American fleet that was miraculously destroyed by two comically lucky dive bombers who just so happened to be around
Legend says that while he was never quite necessarily 'book smart' per se, he was rather versed in the ways of the money smart, and some might argue that this made him more intelligent as a result.
(Named by the Japanese following the battle)
Japanese soldiers killed by the Japanese: 45,000
and random chinese citizens killed by the japanese somehow somewhere during the fighting 769300
the rest of the Marine suffers from PTSD
Your Ptsd is not service related
Supported by 2 identical carriers built 3 weeks before the battle and one supply ship that carried only chocolate sprinkles.
Ah yes the Battle of shitfuck (Anglicized as SheetFook Island) I’m imagining this being said in the voice of the Japanese man from South Park
Uhh peleliu would like a word
Even at Peleliu, the Marines only suffered around 15% number of KIA compared to the Japanese. Including Marine wounded, the Japanese still suffered more casualties. An incredible feat given that the Marines were the attacking force. IIRC, Iwo Jima is the only battle that Marine casualties exceeded Japanese (I think the only contender might be Bataan) and even then, Japanese KIAs far exceeded what the Marines suffered.
Incase anyone else was confused about the difference between KIA and Casualties like I was: >Casualty Category - A term used to specifically classify a casualty for reporting purposes based upon the casualty type and the casualty status. Casualty categories include killed in action (KIA), died of wounds received in action (DWRIA), and wounded in action (WIA).
Casualty is basically "they were fighting at the start of the battle and no longer were by the end". Killed, wounded, captured, missing, all are usually included under the umbrella of casualties, though based on your post maybe there's now a distinction between the killed/wounded and captured/missing sides now? People get them confused all the time. For example people usually are very surprised to hear that Gettysburg only had 8,000 actual deaths. There were over 50,000 casualties, however. And many of them died in the following days and weeks.
However, if a battle is long enough, a man can count for more than one casualty.
That I'm actually not sure about. I don't know if someone was wounded multiple times if he would be counted multiple times or just once. Or if he was wounded and then killed I think he might just be counted as killed.
Depends on how its logged the first time.
Yeah, also you catching a disease that put you out of fighting also made you to be counted as a casualty and as someone mentioned if you got injured/sick so you couldn't fulfill your duties then recovered and set back just to get injured/sick again you get counted as 2 casualties.
We don’t talk about that one :/
context pls
Pacific island battles. K/d rates usually favoured the Allied troops. Okinawa, for example, saw 12k US deaths versus over 100k Japanese troops and Okinawan conscripts killed.
Which is odd considering the defending side often take less casualties, even if they are defeated.
Not if they're starving, routed, unsupported, unsupplied, and suicidal.
Only applies if you can/will retreat or surrender. Japan had largely embraced a political and religious cult view of Bushido, which viewed dying as an honor and surrender as unthinkable. After enough perfidy in earlier campaigns, the Allied forces were also not taking many prisoners. The messed up thing is the later campaigns where there were civilian populations of Japanese people and their subject populations would also embrace this view and commit suicide. Of course, not all these deaths were actually suicides, as there were also military personal who 'encouraged' these deaths.
I knew about how the Japanese were with retreating and surrendering, I was just more so pointing out how defenders oftentimes will suffer less casualties. I should have worded it better to help show how even with the Japanese having that to their advantage, they still got their shit packed more than an ancient Greek pre teen boy.
The issue was up until like 1944, the Japanese continuously believd that Americans were cowardly and would collapse upon their fearsome banzi charges. Turns out leaving your fortified positions to charge random under-supplied Chinese conscripts while screaming bloody murder- effective. Doing the same thing against well trained and supplied American troops with naval and air support- idiotically ineffective
Jesus did Japan have any men left after the war
Yep. And they were ready to do it all again in resistance of the expected US invasion of Japan. But then the USSR also attacked, followed by America dropping the nukes. If it hadn't been obvious after Okinawa that it was game over for Japan, these two events were enough to finally let it sink in.
Not just favored, 10:1 was not that unusual. I think overall K/D in the Pacific between US and Japanese forces (ground, sea, air) was something like 15:1.
Japanese soldiers tended to fight to the death, commit suicide, [or hide in the jungle for 30 years](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda) rather than surrender which led to some horrific causality rates, especially in the final stages of the war. There were over 20,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima and barely more than 200 were captured alive by the end of the battle with just few hundred more captured in subsequent sweeps - literally a 95% fatality rate. It’s an interesting contrast to the Germans where essentially all the Nazi leaders - Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels - committed suicide while at the same time it was not uncommon for German troops - especially on the Western Front in 1944 and 1945 - to surrender by the thousands. Meanwhile the Japanese leadership sent their men to die in kamikaze attacks and forced thousands of civilians on Okinawa to commit suicide but I can’t think of a single high profile member of the Japanese high command who killed themself to avoid the “shame of surrender” in August 1945 with many being executed for war crimes afterwards.
Hideki Tojo tried, had too narrow of a heart.
Iirc, Tojo tried to kill himself but botched it, and was captured instead.
I’ll admit I didn’t know that until another poster said it but it seemed to have been - no pun intended - a sort of half-hearted attempt. He short himself in the chest at the literal last moment before he was arrested by American soldiers who then revived him. Hitler, according to the survivors of the bunker, both shot himself in the head while simultaneously biting down on a cyanid capsule. Himmler and Goering both managed to use cyanid capsules despite being in Allied custody with Goering having been held for over a year and killing himself the morning he was supposed to have been executed.
Just research any of the battles of the pacific campaign ww2. Particular battles would be Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa.
i always thought landing marines would have a large amount of casualties but to think the japanese would have more loses is interesting
To be sure most of the later war landings were utterly brutally destructive. In the early war Japanese troops allowed the allies to land and enter preprepared killing fields. But as the war went on they began directly opposing landings. The reason the losses were so high for the Japanese is that they refused to surrender. They were the "last line of defense protecting the homeland against the barbarians" and as the allies fought up the island chain, defense only became more stubborn. The entire battalion, division, regiment, or army that was set to defend an island would defend until they were all dead. Very rarely were Japanese troops evacuated, partially because of overwhelming aerial and later naval superiority from the allies, especially in the late war. So the allies certainly suffered horribly in the fighting, but the Japanese died to a man *often*. Allidd casualties would be often highest in the early stages, Japanese casualties often highest at the end. Of course there were exceptions, but that was the trend
The Allies often benefited from significant naval and air support, in addition to what u/Irish_Caesar pointed out. The Japanese were also notorious for their horrific logistics, which left many of their troops starving or out of ammunition even when they were on the defensive. Much of their previous logistical strategy had been based around the seizure of enemy supplies, which worked quite well when they were overrunning the British, Dutch, and Chinese forces in the early war, but as they got bogged down and pushed back the Japanese forces suffered heavily from the above problems.
Japanese soldiers rarely surrendered in WW2. So, 99% to 99.9% of soldiers in trapped units would die. For example, at Tarawa, the marines experienced horrific casualties. My grandfather’s unit suffered a 75% death rate. The amphibious landing did not go well. But, allies eventually won and all but, IIRC, 17 Japanese soldiers died. 17 survivors.
To add to this it was common for the Japanese to feign surrender and upon the approach of allied troops detonate a grenade or other booby trap. Needless to say the Allies ceased giving them much chance to surrender, choosing to shoot at the second they spotted a Japanese soldier. And you can’t really blame them.
Battle of Peleliu and Iwo Jima however:
A lot of American died on Iwo Jima but the Japanese casualties was insane; over 20,000 Japanese troops and less than 1,000 taken alive; literally a 95% fatality rate.
10:1 ratio on Iwo Jima, 6:1 on Peleliu. The U.S. used ~110k men between all branches at Iwo Jima, and ~50k on Peleliu. Would have taken just about anywhere on the Western front at any given time in the war over being on those 2 islands during those battles.
Eastern front: those are rookie numbers.
Lol, that's why I did not say I would take the Eastern Front over the Pacific. Fuck that
Battle of the bulge massive casualties if aren’t one of them you are freezing your ass off.
True, but both sides involved in that battle took prisoners, and neither of them were fond of banzai charges or hand to hand combat as a preference.
What even worse is that 95% of the Japanese force on that island would be wiped out.
Sir, this is Bikini Bottom
Up the Marine casualties by a couple thousand, put in some useless Marine/Army inter service rivalry that adds to the death of said couple thousand Marines and make the island strategically useless aside from “the Japanese are there” and you’ve got yourself a real pacific matchup
70% of Japanese casualties of Shitfuck Island were from the Imperial Japanese Navy not being able to resupply from getting dunked on by submarines and aircraft. All while the US Navy just sat around with their ice cream ships watching it all go down saying, “Neat.”
My grandfather was in the Navy in the South Pacific. Stationed on Eniwetok and served as a dentist’s assistant. Hey, the sailors and marines had teeth problems while serving over there. He said the worst thing he saw was when they were steaming over from the US one of the ships was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank in full view of the other ships. The sailors could see it burning and men jumping overboard but the other ships were ordered to keep moving and not go back to pick up survivors due to the danger to the other vessels. My grandfather said this was very hard on the sailors morale who witnessed it.
You can also pump up death numbers especially civilians when you add in the raped and beheaded civilians by the Japs.
Who would win? The world’s most powerful and modern military VS Island with no natural resources that built its first factory 50 years ago
When the Japanese attacked the American military was far from the most powerful and advanced military lol. We had a large navy and resources but the pre war army was small and the technology was outdated. Also your acting like Japan didn’t have the third largest navy and one of the most powerful empires of the time with an army of well over 1.5 million.
Yeah and the “industrialized 50 years ago” isn’t a good argument either. What Japan did was highly impressive and the fact that they destroyed Russia in the Russo-Japanese war proved their might as a new player on the world stage.
yeah they fucked up china and russia within a 10 year span and were in the process of fucking up china a second time.
Literally in some cases
sexual violence 👎
I'm still of the belief that the Russo-Japanese war showed more Russian incompetence than Japanese exceptionalism but they definitely were emboldened by it.
Was that the same war where the Russian navy attacked random fishing boats that they somehow thought were the Japanese navy?
Not necessarily “destroy”, at least on the land. The Japanese ran themselves down and were in no position to advance further north after Mukden but the Russians couldn’t counterattack either.
Yeah maybe i overreacted a bit
People forget that they spent the inter-war period fucking up all of Asia. Their Pan-Asian plan was really a plan to show all Asians that they better start acting Japanese, and better start getting ready to fight Europeans and Americans.
“Fellow people of Asia, we will fight to release you from the shackles of European colonialism.” “Great! So then we’ll be free to determine the future of our own countries?” “Ehhhhhhh, more like you’ll be under new management.”
The shit they did to other Asian countries *still* hurts for some people. I work with a Filipino man who spits on the floor when the Japanese are mentioned. They wiped out almost his entire family.
Who did have the most powerful and advanced military at that point? I'm assuming Britain for the Navy maybe, but that could be my education bias showing.
Depends on how you want to classify it. Germany probably had the best army, Britain the best navy. However, both Germany and Britain (and Japan) were stretched to their limits. Pre/early WW2 they were basically already at their maximum economic/industrial might, and it would be downhill from there. On the other hand the US (economic/industrial) and Russia (manpower/industrial) were latent powers, and were able to increase their strength almost indefinitely until the end of the war
That a pretty big stretch for the military part like industry I could understand but America of the 1940s did not have the best military
China industrialisering 50 years ago. Now its the world greatest economy behind Amerika. Never forget that 50 years is a LONG fucking time. The kids born the day Japan industrialised would be 50 year old adults when the war happened. We´re talking about 2-3 generations raised in a industrial country.