World War Ii

"We shall not be diverted from our purpose of destroying German militarism and Nazism."

"The Allies have agreed that the German people must be given the opportunity to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis."

"If the Japanese Government does not accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."

"The British Government is determined that Germany shall never again be able to disturb the peace of the world."

"In spring 1940 another wave of persecution of Polish intellectuals, called "Aktion A-B" by the Germans, began in all the large cities of the General Government. Governor Hans Frank openly saw this as "a convenient moment" in which the SiPo and SS had to act at a "faster pace" as the West was more concerned at the time with the invasion of Belgium and France than the fate of the Poles."

"These 15 individuals were sentenced to death by the SD summary court. Permission for the execution was granted pursuant to an order by the Commander of the Security Police and SD in the Radom District; it will be carried out by the Commando unit on 28 June 1940."

"On 14 June 1940, 20 people left "in a transport" guarded—it was said—by twice as many Germans, armed to the teeth. The chroniclers of Pawiak do not record this separately, but rather as part of the next, larger deportation. My mother and I despairingly speculated as to where these two terrible "kennels" had gone. Pawiak had not yet heard the name "Palmiry". The regular shots coming from the clearing there eventually attracted the attention of the foresters, and from them — through secret newspapers — Pawiak learned of Palmiry. Two days of hell began on 20 June. Bolts slammed, long lists of names were called into our cells, and maybe three of us were left from the original dozen. The next day, Mieczysław Niedziałkowski was dragged out (...) Everyone on the long lists was taken to the "transport", about 400 people at that time. They were led under the arms of Maciej Rataj, sick, unfit, battered people dragged from their cells, too weak to walk to the truck. The "kennels", filled with SS men and escorted by heavily armed German vehicles, turned right after they left the gate. Pawiak had its ideas about where they were going. The prison was a lot emptier but — as always — not for long."

"I got to Auschwitz via a mass operation, known by its perpetrators as "Aktion A-B". It affected tens of thousands in central Poland, in Kraków, Warsaw and Częstochowa. Thousands of young men were taken from their homes or off the streets in June 1940 and taken, as a precaution, to the new concentration camp at Oświęcim"

"During the hot summer days of 1940, rumors began circulating in Kraków that were working on some major construction on the Silesian border, like large barracks or blocks — all surrounded by barbed wire and kept under the tightest secrecy. But even if it had been public, none of us could have grasped what was going on, because the Germans were building Auschwitz."

"Most terrifying was the atmosphere, paralyzing thought and will, filled with fear and terror—the shouting of outraged Germans, the cries of beaten prisoners and uncertainty about what tomorrow would bring. New prisoners were brought in every night after interrogation. Often after their names were called in the cells, people were herded into the courtyard, from whence they were taken either to camps or to be shot. Executions began in the shooting range near the ravine at Czechowy Górny, then at the cemetery on Unicky Street, at Rury Świętoduskie, and the Jewish cemetery. Others were taken to the forests near Niemce and Kopopnica. Jews were shot in the Krępiec forest. Most of the time we learned of this from the prisoners in Work Cell 19, who dug the execution pits and buried the bodies. The lists of prisoners to be shot or deported to camps were prepared by the Gestapo under Cramer's supervision and approved by Gestapo commander Müller. Those lists were taken to the Castle, where the transports were organized. A group of Gestapo officers would arrive to collect the prisoners (if they were to be executed, mostly at night), with Gestapo officers from the prison staff also taking part."

"On 4 April 1940, I saw about 10 covered German trucks going down the road from Firlej to the barrens. At the time I was leaving my house in a horse-drawn wagon; I returned about three hours later. When I got back I learned from my family and neighbors that gunfire had been heard coming from the barrens, that they had been surrounded by a chain of guard posts, and that a guard had been posted at the yard of each house to prevent people from going out. By the time I returned there was neither gunfire nor guards. Not much later, I saw the same German trucks leave for Radom. I then went to the barrens. The day before I had noticed several freshly dug large holes there. I went to them. They had been filled in and trampled by boots. You could see the marks of their hobnails. Nearby were bone fragments. Later I heard that the Nazis had shot a large group of people from the Chlewiska area."

"In the first half of 1940 the so-called Aktion AB was started, targeting mainly Polish intellectuals. Thousands were shot at Palmiry, the chosen execution site near Warsaw. Among those killed there were Marshal of the Sejm Maciej Rataj; one of the leaders of the Polish socialists, Mieczysław Niedziałkowski; a prominent athlete and gold medalist at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, Janusz Kusociński; writer and editor of the first underground magazine in the country, Poland Lives, Witold Hulewicz; Polish Senator :Helena Jaroszewiczowa, and the renowned chess player Dawid Przepiórka."

"Let no one mourn for me, because I die — not in the field, not in battle, yet still like a soldier — as a Pole for Poland, with her name on my lips, no small honor. Blood spilled on Polish soil will fertilize it, breeding avengers and a free, greater Poland."

"The fate of the majority of those imprisoned in Warsaw by Aktion A-B in spring 1940 was settled. June became the month of mass executions, starting on the 14th."

"The Third Reich's authorities began planning the liquidation of the Polish "leadership class" even before they began the war. They had prepared proscription lists, with 80,000 Poles targeted for elimination. Among them were political activists, insurgents from Silesia and Greater Poland, activists from social organizations, teachers, Catholic priests and judges. From the beginning of the occupation these plans were implemented in two ways: mass executions and imprisonment in concentration camps. The former were undertaken by the Security Police's Einsatzgruppen, who entered Poland just behind the Wehrmacht. Once in the country, they were joined by Selbschutz, Polish German units under the direction of the SS. In the course of this "political cleansing", the Germans murdered 50,000. Another 20,000 were taken to concentration camps in April and May 1940."

"In addition, the Katyn massacre almost coincided with the so-called "Aktion A-B" ... in the area under Nazi occupation, where similar people from similar social circles were shot or sent to concentration camps. A high-ranking Soviet official was permanently attached to the SS command in the General Government, and it is difficult to believe that the timing of these two actions was entirely coincidental."

"Gentlemen! I have discussed with my colleague Streckenbach, in the presence of Obergrüppenführer Krüger, this extraordinary-pacification program, the goal of which is the accelerated liquidation of the majority of rebellious politicians and politically suspect individuals in our hands while simultaneously putting an end to traditional Polish criminality. I freely admit that this will result in several thousand Poles losing their lives, mainly from the circle of Polish ideological leaders. All of us, as National Socialists, must commit to making every effort to ensure that no further resistance crystallizes within the Polish nation."

"Around 9 p.m., we heard loud commands and orders in the corridor. A moment later the door to cell 43, mine, opened, and I heard a loud voice say "Achtung!" All 37 of us stood at attention in two rows. Names were called out; those called were made to stand in the corridor with their faces to the wall. The rest of us were pale, nervous and unsure of what would happen next. A moment later, a short sentence was read in German and then translated into Polish: For hostile activities against the Germans, you have been sentenced to death by shooting. Afterwards the men were taken to cell 48 and the women to the second floor. The death cell rang out with the national anthem, hymns and military songs all night."

"We arrived at Auschwitz around three in the afternoon ... The kapos and SS men herded us into the yard with sticks ... We had to walk up to tables where they took down our personal details, asked about our occupations and issued us numbers on what looked like cards ... Then they began teaching us how to line up for roll call ... The kapos began hitting us with their mallets, seemingly oblivious to where their blows fell. We ran around the yard, completely stunned, terrified, with no idea what was happening and what was expected of us."

"General readers in the West may be far less acquainted with the history of Unit 731-or, for that matter, the Sino-Japanese War that informs the backstory of Unit 731-for reasons that the remembrance of World War II and war crimes operates on a different plane form the one in postwar Japan. The story of Unit 731 nonetheless needs to be retold and passed on to the next generation of people across the world, as they shoulder the responsibility of protecting those who fall victim to comparable episodes of mass atrocity and grave human-rights abuses in the twenty-first century."

"This book outlines medical experimentation that was conducted by Unit 731, heinous acts including injecting human subjects with pathogens; monitoring the progress of diseases by drawing blood samples from and conducting vivisection on live individuals; exposing human subjects to infected insects in an open-air testing field; infecting a health individual with venereal disease by way of forced sexual intercourse with a carrier of venereal disease; causing frostbite on limbs by exposing them to water and cold air in a sub-zero temperature environment; and collecting human specimens-organs, body parts and even entire bodies of human subjects-which were subsequently kept at Unit 731’s lab and the army medical facilities in Tokyo. None of the subjects in Unit 731’s custody survived the war, as they either died during experiments or were killed en masse as part of the Japanese cover-up effort at the war’s end. Some of the biological weapons thus developed, meanwhile, were put to use during the Japanese military campaigns against China. The Imperial Japanese Army also set up other medical units in Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Singapore, so that biological weapons research and development could be carried forth in the broader region of Asia and the Pacific under Japanese military control."

"Several factors have conspired to keep Unit 731’s activities from receiving the attention they so richly deserve. The decades of concealment of the outfit’s history were partly the fruit of the Japanese central government’s reputed skill at inactivity, along with its priority on avoiding all manners of controversy, whether domestic or international. Evidence also failed to surface simply because there were no survivors among the victims of Unit 731; all were eliminated before the end of the war. Then, there was the combination order-threat by commanding general Ishii Shiro himself that former unit members were to “take the secret to the grave.” Obedience to the command was probably not at all difficult for those surviving Japanese members of the unit who could have borne witness but would have felt scalpels turned in their own hearts were their children to ask, “Daddy! How could you do something like that?”- and feel it even more acutely in their later years when the question would be prefaced with “Grandpa.”"

"Some four decades following the end of World War II, details concerning the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731, which researched and conducted biological warfare, began surfacing with startling impact. Information about this outfit, at whose hands an estimated three thousand Manchurians, Chinese, Russians, Koreans, Europeans, and Americans were killed, had remained largely hidden over the years, either by governmental control or a code of silence adhered to by its former members themselves. Then, newly revealed information stirred interest in an era which Japanese officialdom had been trying to wash away with the detergent of neglect. Japan has been told to leave the past behind and move ahead told to new ties of friendship and commerce with other countries. Yet while business ties develop, and amity is proclaimed to be spreading old facts emerging as recent revelations increase their magnetic attraction and pull us into a reexamination of what happened then-and again incite us into debates of how and why. It can be argued that probably no school system anywhere teaches true history; only the degree of rearrangement varies. For the years during which the research units were active, the chasm between history and Japan’s official stance yawns wide. For years, Unit 731 “did not exist.” Requests and demands not just or monetary compensation but for mere recognition of history and apology have been brushed away, turned down because “compensation has been made at government levels.” Instead, Japan offers its dedication to “world peace” with statements that are as vague as they are eloquent."

"This last fact highlights an even more astonishing result of the exhibition. Surviving members of Unit 731 who had sworn to remain silent about their memories came out before the public to testify-to confess-and finally unburden their minds. After a half century of silence, they told. Some could tell all but their names, and retained that one secret before the public: an omission meaningful to them, but a minor exclusion for those of us more interested in their stories than in their identities. Others identified themselves openly. Some reached the point of weeping with equal openness, as they looked back through decades of silence to stir up ugly recollections. But those who are coming forward now, after some half-century of silence, are among the most forceful in pressing for the story to be told. Additionally, a limited number of members of the post-war generation- scientists, doctors, writers-are searching out the survivors, doing their own research, and informing the public through writings and lectures. Outrage and shame span the generations. Exhibition sites generally have a desk where visitors may write their impressions and comments. Attendees from elementary school on up have recorded the shock of the history lesson."

"Information on Japan’s consumption of live human beings as biological test material has been surfacing for many years now. As with the comfort women issue, however, there has never been a jolt of sufficient voltage to rock the national government into acts of contrition or compensation. Rather, it has been local governments who have opened their eyes to history. The efforts of local governments in conjunction with high degrees of volunteer activity in their areas, can be credited with bringing the Unit 731 Exhibition before the eyes of Japanese in sixty-one locations over the course of a year and a half. The exhibition, in whose final days this book was begun, was arranged by a central organizing committee in Tokyo, and each locality which wanted to plan a local exhibition had to raise its own funds and find its own venue. There was, of course, an admission fee to enter the exhibit, and so for the visitors it could be considered a self-financed course in the history omitted by orthodox education. The shock to the Japanese people was predictable. In spite of the occasional documentary coverage or newspaper article, Unit 731 was largely unknown and unthought of. It sat safely outside the scope of the consciousness of most Japanese. True, some attention was drawn to Unit 731 when the Japanese government was taken to court for not permitting factual accounts of it in school textbooks, but even those with some knowledge of the Ishii organization had their eyes opened at the exhibits."

"There are several reasons why the code of silence has evaporated at this late hour. Whatever these motivations might be, however we can be grateful that the grave did not get all the truth. One focus of this book will be the actual words of those who helped conduct Japan’s biological warfare human experimentation program. The exhibition itself, the reactions it provoked, and the testimonies of former unit members who came forth and spoke out were all driving factors behind the creation of this book. It is as important for these events to be available to English-readers as it is that Japanese know them. Some of the testimonies and statements presented ere were originally given at lecture programs which the author attended, recorded, and translated. At other programs in different parts of the country, testimonies were obtained with the cooperation of the local organizing committees. An independent team sought out former Unit 731 members and produced a video series which was another source. A few of the testimonies were told to other people who then reported on them at lectures or in print. The recent declassification under the Freedom of Information Act of some documents that had been sealed for years also played an important role in the creation of this book. Events in the former Soviet Union likewise brought about a freeing of material formerly kept hidden away. Some Japanese documents have also been declassified making them available to researchers. In the end, however, the most thought-provoking source of public information on Japan’s human experiments comes from those who were there, then emerged from silence and provided the personal accounts which lead us back to the crimes with distressing credibility. These firsthand recollections make mockery of statements which attempt to smooth down the edges of the cruelty and racism that made Unit 731 possible."

"The Epidemic prevention and Water Purification Department of the wanting Army-popularly known by its codename “Manchurian Unit No 731” or simply “Unit 731”-was a secret biological weapons research and development unit maintained by the Imperial Japanese Army in the outskirts of Harbin in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, northeastern China, for the duration of World War II in Asia and the Pacific. It has gained international notoriety in recent decades as research revealed the shocking details of Unit 731’s core wartime activity: the use of thousands of human guinea pigs for medical experimentation. The vast majority of these human subjects are believed to have been Chinese nationals taken prisoner over the course of the course of the Second Sino-Japanese war that originated in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, and that grew to fullblown warfare in July 1937. Men, women, and children of other nationalities were also used for experiments, and babies born to women in Unit 731’s custody apparently were not spared either."

"While launching counter-offensives against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the last war years, the Allied powers repeatedly issued joint declarations regarding their intention to bring to justice the Axis war criminals. One might expect, under those circumstances, that the members of Unit 731 would have been among the first for the Allied authorities to name as war criminals and to put on trial. But that, in fact, was not the case. Unit 731 rather became a pawn of cold-war politics as the U.S. government prioritized racing against the Soviet Union in securing the biological weapons’ knowledge that Unit 731 had amassed and, to that end, shielding from war crimes prosecution the medical unit’s former members, including its chief, Surgeon General Ishii Shiro. The Soviet authorities, for their part, had their own share of interests in gaining access to Unit 731’s secretive information, but they appeared also focused on using it as a propaganda tool to be deployed against the United States. Having failed in getting the inter-Allied prosecuting agency at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, 1946-48) to incorporate the evidence of Unit 731 in the case against major Japanese war criminals, the Soviet government set up a special military tribunal at Khabarovsk in December 1949 to hold a joint trial of 12 former Japanese army officers on criminal charges relating to Unit 731’s wartime activities. It went on to publish the official record of the trial in multiple languages (including in Japanese), and put pressure on the United States and other Allied countries to proceed with a trial of the Japanese emperor, Hirohito (1901-89; r. 1926-89), based on the Khabarovsk Trial’s findings. No formal inter-Allied deliberation concerning the possible trial of Hirohito ensued, however, since the U.S. government snubbed the Soviet initiative as a publicity stunt, and the Soviet government eventually let the matter drop. In this manner, the Allied Powers allowed certain known war criminals to escape prosecution despite their stated policy at the outset to mete out stern punishment to war criminals, thereby sending contradictory messages to the Japanese public about the Allied commitment to justice and accountability."

"The Japanese people began acquiring knowledge about Unit 731 as early as the 1950s, thanks in part to confessional accounts that some of the former Japanese soldiers returning from China published, and also to book-length studies of Unit 731 became a household word with the publication in 1981 of Akuma no hoshoku (“The Devil’s Gluttony”), written by popular author Moriumura Seiichi. This book offered in a gripping narrative the details of diabolical activities of Unit 731, and set in motion a nation-wide dialogue about Unit 731 and its legacy in postwar Japan. Meanwhile, Unit 731 as a subject of scholarly inquiry gained traction, and researchers in Japan as well as elsewhere came to produce a number of original studies that made extensive use of archival materials in China, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States."

"As of today, Unit 731 is arguably one of the most thoroughly researched and best documented among many known episodes of Japanese war crimes. It may be also said that the highly organized and institutionalized nature of Unit 731’s criminality likely made it comparatively easy for researchers to develop a comprehensive picture of Unit 731’s wartime activities once relevant oral and documentary histories became available. To achieve the same level of comprehensiveness would be challenging with other episodes of large-scale Japanese war crimes, such as the Nanjing Massacre, whose occurrence could not be attributed to the establishment and operation of a single Unit 731-like criminal organization. In a word, the crimes committed by the members of Unit 731 were a case of “criminality of closed systems” in the sense that the unit members made systematic use of humans for medical experimentation in fulfillment of their specific organizational mission, just like the members of concentration camps in German-controlled Europe gassed to death the Jewish people in fulfillment of the camps’ organizational mission."

"The Japanese right in the past decades has contested the veracity of individual confessional accounts by former soldiers and other types of documentation by researchers in their effort to deny that alleged heinous acts were ever committed in the name of Japan or of the Japanese emperor. However, it is an indisputable fact that the Japanese army leadership at the highest level sanctioned the establishment off Unit 731 for the purpose of researching and developing biological weapons. Furthermore, given the duration of Unit 731’s operations, given the well-established lines of communication between unit 731 and the army authorities at Tokyo, and given the transmission of human specimens taken from individuals used for medical experimentation from the former to the latter, one could reasonably infer that the Japanese army leadership at the highest levels knew and condoned the use of human guinea pigs, if not that they expressly authorized it. The share of responsibility for Unit 731’s activities on the part of Emperor Hirohito, in this regard, is worthy of further investigation. After all, Emperor Hirohito occupied the highest position in the Japanese army establishment for the entire duration of World War II in Asia and the Pacific, in his capacity as “the head of the Empire, combining in Himself the rights of sovereignty, and exercises them,” and concurrently assuming the “supreme command of the Army and Navy” (The Constitution of the empire of Japan, 1889-1947)."

"I believe in the magic and authority of words."

"'When Jean Moulin offered his services to Gen. Charles de Gaulle in October 1941, the leader of the Free French based in London accepted with alacrity. Moulin, a former prefect (regional administrator), was the highest-ranking member of the pre-Vichy Third Republic to join de Gaulle’s organization. In addition, Moulin, who had been living in the Vichy zone, possessed knowledge about nacent French Resistance groups and their leaders. In return for money and arms, Moulin proposed to unite the different groups under the Free French banner... He also warned that unless the Free French took action the Resistance would fall under communist influence."

"Had all of us in France meekly, lawfully carried out the orders of the German master, no Frenchman could have ever looked another man in the face. Such submission would have saved the lives of many, some very dear to me. But, France would have lost its soul."

"It would be insane and criminal, in the event of Allied action on the continent, not to make use of troops prepared for the greatest sacrifices, scattered and unorganized today, but tomorrow capable of making up a united army of parachute troops already in place, familiar with the terrain and having already selected their enemy and determined their objective."

"Char's message as a member of the French resistance, to his superiors in London, insisting that certain codewords "The library is on fire" be changed after a disastrous parachute drop which set a forest on fire and alerted the Gestapo to the location of his group of Maquis fighters"

"What Gandhi had not achieved in decades of campaigning, Bose’s INA achieved postumously in less than two years: making the British decide to quit India. And this, in fact, without firing too many bullets: if you radiate power, you often don’t have to use it. The court historians have always downplayed the role of the INA and attributed the merit for the achievement of independence to the Mahatma."

"The Japanese encountered resistance from some indigenous peoples, to be sure, and not only from those ethnic groups and elites that had done relatively well under Western colonial rule. The overwhelming majority of Indians showed no interest in the kind of liberation the Japanese had in mind for them. In the Philippines the peasant Hukbalahap movement waged a guerrilla war against them; in Burma the Karen and Kachin hill tribes also resisted Japanese rule. Nevertheless, the Japanese had no difficulty in finding collaborators among both anti-European nationalists and opportunists. Indian nationalists had not forgotten the 1919 Amritsar Massacre; it was in March 1940 that Udham Singh assassinated Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who had been Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab at that time. Though the majority of Congress leaders eschewed collaboration with the Japanese - in practice, 'Quit India' meant neutrality, albeit with a great deal of circumlocution - Subhas Chandra Bose enthusiastically hailed 'the end of the British Empire' and called on Indians to join the Axis side. Around 3,500 answered the initial call from Berlin of the self-proclaimed Netaji ('leader') to form an Indian Army of Liberation, most of them Indians who had been taken prisoner by the Germans in North Africa. When he reached Asia - having travelled by U-boat from Kiel to Sumatra - Bose was able to recruit a further 45,000 men (again mostly prisoners from Singapore and elsewhere) to his Indian National Army and the Axis cause."

"By August 1945, war weariness, overwhelming odds, and sheer self-preservation exerted countervailing pressures to the indoctrination. While they did fight hard at the outset of August Storm, Japanese soldiers eventually capitulated in droves to the Soviets."

"Operation August Storm was a colossal undertaking, pitching 1.6 million Soviet troops against 1 million Japanese. Historians continue to debate whether it, rather than the atomic bombings, holds primary claim in compelling Japan to finally surrender on August 15."

"The Japanese had expected a Soviet offensive into Manchuria but believed that it could not begin before autumn. The August 9 assault not only surprised them, but also caught them in the process of reorganizing their defenses and units. The result was massive victory by the Soviets, despite fierce and dedicated resistance by many Japanese units."

"Based on proven capabilities of the Japanese High Command and the individual Japanese soldier, Soviet plans were as innovative as any in the war. Superb execution of those plans produced victory in only two weeks of combat. Although Soviet. planners had overestimated the capabilities of the Japanese High Command, the tenacious Japanese soldier met Soviet expectations. He lived up to his reputation as a brave, self-sacrificing samurai who, though poorly employed, inflicted 32,000 casualties on the Soviets and won their grudging respect. Had Japanese planners been bolder-and Soviet planners less audacious-the price of Soviet victory could well have been significantly higher."

"Long live the Communist Party, and partisans! Fight, people, for your freedom! Do not surrender to the evildoers! I will be killed, but there are those who will avenge me!"

"I am not a traitor of my people. Those whom you are asking about will reveal themselves when they have succeeded in wiping out all you evildoers, to the last man."

"Japan Forms Alliance With White Supremacists in Well-Thought-Out Scheme: From the East Asian Correspondent, Sept 1, 1939. — In a course of action praised by many as "far-sighted" and "tactically brilliant," the Japanese government has sworn its allegiance to the Axis powers led by white-supremacist Nazi Germany. In a formal statement, Japanese leaders declared, "We wish to be counted among the loyal allies of this back-stabbing, racist hate nation." Following the announcement, Japanese General and military leader Hideki Tojo told reporters, "We are pleased to enter into an alliance with the paranoid, xenophobic government of Nazi Germany. We anticipate a deeply enriching exchange of our military aid with their deep-seated hatred of our non-white heritage.""

"These and many other attempts to replace history by myth and invention are not merely bad intellectual jokes. After all, they can determine what goes into schoolbooks, as the Japanese authorities knew, when they insisted on a sanitized version of the Japanese war in China for use in Japanese classrooms. Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity by which groups of people today, defining themselves by ethnicity, religion or the past or present borders of states, try to find some certainty in an uncertain and shaking world by saying, 'We are different from and better than the Others.'"

"The Second World War started in Asia with another convenient episode but it too had deeper roots. The Japanese militarists and nationalists were looking to build an empire in Asia to provide raw materials, markets, cheap labour and land for settlement. Japan had already taken the rich Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931 after a series of bombs had conveniently exploded on a Japanese-owned railway line. In 1937 Japanese soldiers were out on regular patrol in Beijing, a right established after a multinational force had defeated the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion at the end of the nineteenth century. As the patrol neared an ancient bridge in Beijing, said to be the one the Venetian explorer Marco Polo had crossed on his way into the city centuries before, shots apparently rang out. The next day the Japanese produced a body in Japanese uniform. Although rumour in Beijing claimed that the Japanese had simply dressed up a dead Chinese beggar, the Marco Polo Bridge incident became Japan’s justification for invading China south of the Great Wall and occupying a great swathe of the coast down to the border of Hong Kong. That invasion helped to turn American opinion away from isolationism to confrontation."

"Japan's population needed to rise 'as rapidly as possible' from around 70 million in 1938 to 100 million by 1960, with each Japanese couple being encouraged to have around five children. This would provide the surplus of Japanese necessary to colonize and run what had been known since 1940 as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. There were no necessary limits to the extent of that sphere. In 1942 Komaki Tsunekichi, a professor of geography at Tokyo Imperial University, had proposed that both Europe and Africa should henceforth be regarded as part of the Asian continent, while America should be known as 'Eastern Asia' and Australia as 'Southern Asia'. All the world's oceans, since they were interconnected, should simply be renamed the 'Great Sea of Japan'. The authors of the 'Investigation of Global Policy' were no more modest in their ambitions. Stages One and Two of their planned 'Enlargement of the Sphere of the East Asia Co-Operative Body' envisaged the incorporation of the whole of China, as well as nearly all French, British and Dutch possessions in Asia. Stage Three would have added the Philippines, India and all Soviet territory east of Lake Baikal. Finally, in Stage Four, the Co-Prosperity Sphere would have been extended to 'Assyria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries, West Asia [and] Southwest Asia'."

"Less familiar, but no less chilling - and in many respects strikingly similar - are the blueprints for a new order drawn up by some Japanese writers in the early 1940s. Japan, it is true, had no Hitler, no single ideologue adumbrating a Utopia which all others could 'work towards'. But it had many little Hitlers. In 'An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus', a report completed in July 1943, officials in the Population and Race Section of the Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry's Research Bureau took as their premise that the Japanese were the 'leading race' of Asia, whose mission was to 'liberate the billion people of Asia' by planting as much Japanese 'blood' as possible in Asian soil. This would be possible, however, only if the right demographic resources existed at home. 'We should actively improve our physical capacity eugenically by promoting such methods as mental and physical training as well as selective marriages,' the report urged."

"Japan humbly accepts that for a period in the not too distant past, it caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations, through its colonial rule and aggression, and expresses its deep remorse and heartfelt apology for this."