Torture is not just a Japanese soldier thing, not just a German soldier thing, not just an Allied soldier thing neither. Its a war thing. Both sides did it. Just at different intensities. The Japanese soldiers had a superiority complex + honour code + xenophobia nailed into them, which made them very brutal.
The Army had Patton. The Navy had Bull Halsey. Later, the Air Force would have Curtis Lemay, and the Marines was blessed to have a damned fine warrior like "Chesty" Puller. The men of the greatest generation were the greatest generation because they had badasses like these leading them.
i walked point to the 26 Marines still standing. then we went into a sweep formation, crossed the strip and drove north. Gunships and arty paved the way for us. i was last man on the right in control of the last fireteam. i did not know my team. we were all volunteers. Most of us had been recruited from the medical center in Dong Ha where we were being treated for our wounds suffered earlier that day. Accompanied by several tanks and amtracks we swept north into the fire. The tanks reconned by fire and we had very little contact going north. Those 50 cals get a lot of respect. The temperature that day was near 135. I lost one of my team to heat. He got a ride on a trac on the way out. it must have taken two hours to bag the 34 bodies we found. Two had just died. the rest were in that state a body becomes when lying in the sun for two days. When we were loaded and started back the NVA reacted. it was touch and go to get back to the strip. Lost a tank enroute but it was pulled to safety. i returned to Con Thien to recover from a bullet in the ankle.
My great uncle was a .30 cal. machine gunner with the 77th In. Div. in the pacific during WWII. One time he was sitting on the back pouch at my grandparents' house and was telling my grandfather (who was his older brother and a WWI vet) about a Banzi charge his unit faced. My dad was listening through the kitchen window, and he told me Uncle George said "Tony, they just kept coming and we kept cutting them down and they wouldn't stop, we killed every one of them" and dad said Uncle George started to cry.
Unit 731 was not an anomaly or rogue exception, dominated by demented ‘doctors’ like Shiro Ishii, confined to Manchukuo & occupied China. The mindset & the actions were universal, standard procedure, for the Japanese ‘armed forces’ throughout Asia & the Pacific. My own great uncle ( Sparrow Force, AIF, Portuguese Timor ) witnessed this. Ad nauseum.
It's funny how the japanese soldiers need to jump out of the trees before they shoot, and how the american soldiers just stand in broad daylight without any cover
Vets have it really bad in this country, but Vietnam vets had it the worst. PTSD still wasn’t a diagnosis by the time they got back. It was shameful to wear anything in ohbluc cus you’d get attacked and cussed out. And you couldn’t talk to your family because they would only accept you as a hero not a victim.
This is one of the cases where I think the scene would have worked a lot better if there was no music, or at least not during the battle, but it's aftermath. By being dramatic (even if well done or great) underscoring, it takes away from the drama and in turn becomes a bit cheesy actually. James Horner wrote a great score though!
Through out wars you can see on How much more slowoly gun fire goes of like in ww2 EVERY 5 seconds there was like 50 gun shots from 50 guns but now a days there will be like 70. Shots by 3 guns
