http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0%2C6903%2C500631%2C00.html
Film exposes Allies' Pacific war atrocities
Horrific footage shot during battle with Japanese shows execution of wounded
and bayoneting of corpses.
Jason Burke
Sunday June 3, 2001
The Observer
For more than half a century they have been portrayed as wholesome heroes who
fought in terrible conditions to save the Western way of life from Japanese
aggression. But now the savage acts that Allied soldiers were driven to
commit in the Pacific theatre are about to be exposed.
Researchers for a TV series to be broadcast on Channel 4 this month have
unearthed disturbing and previously unseen footage from the Second World War
which had languished forgotten in archives for 57 years.The images are so
horrific senior television executives had to be consulted before they were
considered fit for broadcast.
The film, shot in colour, was taken by an unknown combat cameraman in 1944
during fighting on the Pacific Island of Peleliu. It includes scenes of
American soldiers shooting Japanese wounded as they lie prone on the ground.
In another scene on the Japanese island of Okinawa a year later, a US soldier
is filmed dragging a wounded enemy from a hiding place. Although the man has
his ankles tied together, two bullets are fired into his knees and then,
while he is still moving, shots are fired into his chest and head.
Other footage from Hell in the Pacific shows American soldiers using bayonets
to hack at Japanese corpses while looting them. Former servicemen interviewed
by researchers spoke of the widespread practice of looting gold teeth from
the dead - and sometimes from the living.
Others spoke of units throwing away their bayonets to avoid being ordered by
'over-enthusiastic' officers to charge, and of machine-gunning villages full
of civilians and clubbing wounded Japanese soldiers to death as they tried to
surrender.
In an incident related by a former marine, soldiers killed a shell-shocked
comrade with a shovel for fear his screaming would give away their position.
The revelations will shock many accustomed to the heroic image of American
soldiers, particularly given the romantic myth boosted by blockbuster films
such as Pearl Harbor, which goes on general release this weekend.
Many cherished British military myths are overturned. Researchers found -
contrary to the image of solidarity projected by films such as Bridge over
the River Kwai - that in several POW camps prisoners dispensed brutal justice
through 'kangaroo courts' to those who collaborated with Japanese guards.
Fred Seiker told interview ers he had presided over a makeshift tribunal in a
prison camp on the infamous Burma railway that found a fellow prisoner guilty
of betraying a food-smuggling operation to the guards. The man was put to
death by being drowned in a communal latrine.
There are also stories of Japanese ears and heads being collected by
British-led troops - particularly by Gurkhas and Nigerians.
Neither are the Australians spared. Many witnesses interviewed for the series
spoke of large-scale desertions by Australian troops before the fall of
Singapore in 1942. One, a soldier with a British Highland regiment, speaks of
Australian troops shooting officers who attempted to stop them boarding ships
leaving the doomed city.
Historians last week said the new material would surprise many. 'People are
often blissfully unaware of what their country and their allies do in a war,'
said Dr Antony Best, a lecturer at the London School of Economics. 'Interest
in war crimes has been revived by the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and
so actions from 50 or more years ago are increasingly being re-examined.'
Best said many of the antecedents for the brutality of the war in Vietnam - a
conflict that has become a byword for atrocities - could be traced to the
conflict in the Pacific. 'The truth is that war is an occasion when god-awful
things happen,' he said.
Jonathan Lewis, the writer and director of the new series, said at least one
marine who had fought in Vietnam reported that the battles on the Pacific
islands were the worst. 'These were ordinary men faced with conditions of
extraordinary adversity,' he said.
'We have always been told that these kinds of atrocities are aberrations in
battle, but the lesson of the Pacific War is that then at least they were the
norm. It is not a case of levelling blame. Taboos were forgotten by everyone.
That is the way war is conducted, and that's why we have made an anti-war
film.'
One US marine, Steve Judd, based on the island of Saipan during some of the
fiercest combat of the war, blamed repeated exposure to horrors for some of
the Allied excesses.
Judd described how he was ordered to clear some caves. Aware of the Japanese
tactic of pretending to surrender before blowing themselves and their captors
up with a hidden grenade, he and his team decided to be indiscriminate. 'We
just blew it all up. We don't know if there
