Americans still missing. Since moved into a new role as Research Historian where he spent the majority of his time helping family members discover their loved ones world war ii stories throughout our services. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome james dausey. [applause] thank you, pete. It is a great honor to be a part of this incredible conference. It is my third of these and a great delight to moderate a panel with such esteemed unfamiliar speakers. Twoink you know our speakers very well. I will keep the introductions brief for both of them. First, going in the order of presentation first, james , holland. Historian, writer, and broadcaster. We have seen him on countless tv shows and documentaries. Hes led many of our tours here at the museum. There are too many books i would take 10 minutes going through all of his books. Just to mention a few of them italys sorrow, a year of war, 194445, fortress malta, the battle of britain. Hes working through a threevolume new history of the Second World War in the west. Have been completed on that. Involved in several documentaries for bbc. And james finds time for other interests besides history. And for many people, you think the history just takes over everything in your life, but he is living proof that it doesnt need to, as he is a big fan of the sport of cricket. For our second presenter, very wellknown, a longterm friend of the Museum Richard frank. , internationally renowned expert in the pacific war one of , our longest serving advisors. President ial counselor. He was an historical consultant for our road to tokyo exhibition. Also has led many tours for the travel program. After graduating from the university of missouri he was , commissioned in the United States army which he served 34 , years. A tour of duty in the republic of vietnam. Rifle platoon leader in the 101st division. He completed law school in Georgetown University law center in washington, d. C. Soon afterwards began work on , his first book, published in 1990. He won the united state marine corps general greenes award. We at the museum are delighted and honored to be hosting the official book launch of the volume of his trilogy on the first history of the asian war. Asia pacific war. That first volume, tower of skulls, comes out in march. March 3 will be the book launch. It is my great privilege to turn the panel over to james and then richard. Thank you. [applause] thank you, jason. Thank you very much. While it was completely really brilliant in previous conferences to be standing at a huge, great hall while there is , nothing wrong with the halls of the previous years, it is so much better to be in this amazing environment. Amazing planes above us. This feels like the right place to be talking about about the Second World War. And talking of cricket, its my duty as an englishman and a cricket fanatic to bring up in very gentlyt every time i come to new , orleans. My last book was about the enormity campaign, and said, how would i bring cricket into this . I was going through diaries and then may 17, it said, had a game of cricket, score 16. I thought, brilliant. Thats my answer. I managed to get it in. Anyways, this is much darker stuff today. Much more serious. When i was asked to do this, i think what rob and the good folk here had in mind was that i was specifically talking about the atrocities. But actually, i think the descent into barbarity goes beyond the atrocities. I will do them in stages. Look at these young chaps. He realize that the hitlers ss jugen division really were jugen. They were young guys, recruited at 17. Most of them 18 by the time they get in. Boy, do they look freshfaced. I have an 18 year old son and the thought of him being on the front line is horrendous. And of course, plenty of 18yearolds. Plenty younger than that beside. The interesting thing about the jugen, people always talk about elite divisions in terms of the germans. I think, you know, i think it is overused. I think what is interesting about them was they are not amazingly well trained. There are certainly very wellequipped. And these are fanatical guys. They have been brought up in a totalitarian militaristic state, where discipline is all. If you say go across the field and get shot at, theyll do it. Similarly, you know, there is a sort of mood that comes from the top. You have to look at who the Senior Commanders are in the 12th hitler jugen division. A lot of those waffen ss divisions. A lot of them go back to the early days of the nazis. You can see where this filters down. You are not talking about the prussians commanding these divisions. This is them on on d 1, the early hours of june 7. Going through here. What is fascinating about this is that d 1, the focus is so heavily on dday. It was a couple years ago, he was talking about how the canadian fought on d 1. These engagements. I dont want to go over the same old ground too much. However, it is a really really , important engagement and is broadly written out of the narrative a little bit. Or if it goes in, it goes in for the wrong reasons. In the wrong ways. I think this little engagement that happens between the ninth canadian Infantry Brigade and , a regiment, one of the main fighting units of the 12th ss, i think it tells you so much about what is going on. The nature of the fighting and enormity, and about the nature of the fighting to come. All of those things are endlessly fascinating. So when the next sort of 15 minutes, what im going to do is try to explain why that is so important. When a division is moved to the front line, it doesnt all arrive en masse. It arrives slightly in drifts and drafts. However the leading unit is the , 25th panzergranadier unit. Regiment, which is commanded by a waffen ss. There he is in his glad rags. There he is in his normandy kit. They have some rather fantastically designed kits for normandy. Had the best kit, the best camouflage smocks and new uniforms and all the rest of it. They always look the part. They were gung ho and ready for business. The plan was that when they got there, they wanted to pull up alongside the 21st panzer, the only Panzer Division in normandy at the time, and then you would have 12 ss in the middle the hitlerjugend , division. Zer, hot footing it up. They were not hot footing it that far because they were being hammered by the bombers. Alliedhter bombers fighterbombers strafing them to , hell, really. The idea is that they all pull in a line and go straight for the sea, to the west and push them down and push the allies back to the sea. That is the plan. Time,ut 8 00 a. M. British 9 00 a. M. American time meyer , has about half the divisions infantry and a third of the artillery. Which is not bad. I reckon hes got 29 artillery bevys plus a whole host, a horse to backtrack 75 millimeter , antitank guns, a few 88mm antitank guns, mortars, and of course lots of young men bristling with firepower and this for getting into scrap and kicking some canadian butt as quickly as they can. That is the situation. On top of that, you have gruper rauch. Joseph. Named after he is in the Panzer Division. The 192ndcommanding grenadier regiment and has been added another whole load of guns. Most of these are on tracks. I reckon hes got about 28 guns. So in other words by the time , meyer is on the scene, youve got rauch as well, plus remnants of the Infantry Division. Not very good, but theyve still got bodies. Youve got a formidable force. You also have a force in the 12th ss who are up for the fight. If panzermeyer tells them to go into battle, they will go. Meyer turns up and does a bit of wrecking. He gets shot at and hastily retreats and goes back to the ardennes. It got bashed about in the war. It had bomb damage and all the rest of it, but none of that is there anymore. It has been tarted up. It is absolutely one and the same place. You can look at the photos of the 12th ss and say, that is the spot. You can see that is the main abbey on the righthand side of that picture. That is where he goes up and looks out. There you are. You can marry yourself up at that wharf, for example. This is one of the towers on the abbey. That photo you just saw two back if i go back. , can you see the lefthand tower in that corner . That bit in the corner there if , i go back again, thats it. There they are, looking out. And from there, this huge, undulating area to the west. This is the area through which the ninth canadian Infantry Brigade are advancing. From up there, you have just the mother of all views. If youre the head of the artillery, and you are coordinating all the artillery in that area that is where you , would want to be. Trust me, you know, because you can see everything. You can get on the blower and get all your guns where you want them to be. Any canadians coming up, they will have a hell of a time. That is the long and short of it. I keep saying it is the ninth canadian Infantry Brigade, but actually, its not, really. Its the north nova scotia highlanders. Theres not a lot of them. Theres four companies each , about 119 men. Each. Just about under 800 men. Something like that. They are supposed to be supported by two regimens of two whole regiments of artillery but they are not there. They have been held back supporting and operation of the eighth brigade attacking an old radar station. It is five miles away. Theyre pushing very much on their own. They have a squadron of troops, four tanks of m10 tank destroyers. And the sherman tanks of the sherman fusiliers. That is basically it. They are supposed to go into action with huge artillery support, and as is the allied way of war, you go in with plenty of firepower. They are supposed to have naval gun support as well. But the Naval Forward observation officer cant get through on the radio because the radio has been so scrambled. He just cannot get through so they do not have that Naval Support either. So in other words, what you are talking about is a handful of infantry, you know, 800 men, tops. And of course, when you are doing a battalion attack its them aree all 800 of swarming up in a single direction. You go up in companies and you have one company in reserve and two companies up forward, and then you have, of those companies, two platoons up there and on reserve. One your actual spearhead is comparatively light. They are going up against camp gruber rauck which has to be said, slightly dealing with the and they are also coming up against the 12th ss. Oops. Sorry. Im being too keen. So this is basically they get up to this little hamlet, and they push on through there, then and get into the next city, by midday the city is captured. Then they push on to this village here. It is this village here. This is the southern bit of it. They push right into there and by this point of the day it is , quite hot. The canadians of the leading elements come into this area and this typical norman village, this kind of big square area. With water in it. That is where you would use it for getting your water for home and you would use it for laundry and all sorts of stuff. They are using it to slake their thirst. They are filling up their water bottles. At that moment, all hell breaks loose. This is the moment the 12th ss start raining in their shells. There has been fighting all day. I mean you know, they have been dingdonging with the camp gruber, there has been plenty of fighting and shelf fire coming in. But suddenly, it is absolutely wild. The person who has got overall control of the artillery in this area is mayors guys. So i reckon if you toss it up, he has got 59 guns supporting him which is a heck of a lot. , he also has his own battalions panzer grenadier regiment. A panzer grenadier regiment is basically a murder motorized regiment. The other thing really interesting about this and compares to the divisions is that they are, they are kind of understrength. They are 10,000 or 11,000 men strong. But the ss Panzer Divisions are really overstrength. The strength of the 12th ss is about 18,000 men strong. 17,000,but what meyer had, they are about 210,000 to 215,000 men strong. Pretty much a double the company size of those of the canadians. Anyway to cut a long story short, the canadians get pushed back, then beyond. At this later in the afternoon, point the artillery starts to kick in. The ss men get no further at all and have to be pulled back. There are stages in this fight, and this is the area i am talking about. This is an original british map, it belonged to a lieutenant who was the commander of the sherwood range a British Armored , unit. This is a section of his original map. You can see can you see just to the west, you can see a bolo you can see the town below that red line. And then above that, slightly to is authie. That is authie. They are pushing back a mile back to this village. That is as far as the germans get. What is really interesting is that during this time, the third battalion which does the main attack through authie and into is commandedlage by one of those ghastly nazi thugs. He really gives the ss a really bad name. The has earned his nazi strikes from commanding guards at dachau. He has been in the ss division. First he has done all sorts of unspeakable things in the Eastern Front. And there he is on the lefthand of our picture. With his new fancy kit on. And he is an absolute lunatic. The problem is when you are young, an 18yearold ss type, you take your lead from your commanders. The commanders, if they are brutal, incompetent, and stupid like he was, then what happens that tends to kind of filter down. They captured lots of canadians and then started executing them. So in authie itself they execute , eight. Two of these canadians are dragged from where they lay and put into the middle of the road. Some french civilians try to pull them off. They are warned off. Dont you pull them off or we will shoot you. Then a force come up and run over the bodies back and forth, back and forth until they are absolutely in april. A pulp. Some french civilians have to clear them up by using a shovel. It is just beyond disgusting. Various other canadians are captured during the day. And these ones are on their way to the abbey. In total, 37 men are executed by a combination of being shot in the head, being smashed in the head with rifle butts, and various other kind of unspeakable acts. A lot of them are actually killed in the abbey and their bodies are sort of left there. It is incredibly brutal. This is the brutal bit we are all talking about in relation specifically to this talk. I do think there was another type of barbarity that needs to be addressed. And what happens is that later on that afternoon, the artillery kicks in. The canadians counterattack. They moved back onto the village. They cannot hold it and they pull back again. Any kind of knocking the canadians back into the sea is being knocked in the head. The full weight of the ss division, half of that derivative, a huge amount of artillery. I reckon you are talking six to one in terms of manpower. Considerably greater than that in terms of firepower for the germans. Very where the germans have the advantage in firepower, but they do in this situation. They get absolutely nowhere. What does this tell us . First of all, this episode tells us one thing. When you come up against the ss, you will have despicable atrocities like the ones that happened in the abbey. It also tells us that the canadians are probably better than we give them credit for. Which i think is definitely true. Repeatedly during the Second World War, the canadians time and time again, whether it be in the navy, whether it be in the air force, whether it be on the ground, they punch above their weight. All volunteers, canadians. There is no draft. So that is one thing. Second thing it tells you is perhaps the 12th ss is not as good as we have given them credit for. I think maybe possibly, but they are still pretty good. I mean how good do you need to be . You have a good machine gun, you antitank gun, you have some pretty useful mortars, and you will do what youre told. That is usually enough for most people. I think they are pretty good, they are ok. They are certainly well equipped. What it also tells you is going on the offensive in normandy , anywhere whoever the site is, is incredibly difficult. And i think that is one of the big, big lessons. It sets the tone around the abbaye darden. It sets the tone for the campaign that is going to follow. What is absolutely the case is in the fighting that follows, we have over the year successive narrative historians have rather had it in for the allies and complaining about how slow they are and stodgy and british stopping for too much cups of tea and american stopping for too many hershey bars. All the rest of it. I think that is absolute nonsense. I say have you walked that , ground . You know there are two different , types of normandy. There is the bit where the canadians are and the british are, which is to the east and west of caen which is largely , open fields. I look at that. Operation access. But as the british going into attack basically over the same ground that this has been fought the plus one, with canadians and the 12 ss. You look at that and that to me just says, first world war. There is the tommys with their distinctive helmets disappearing off into the mist. The point is you have to take that leap of faith. The allied way of war is to use firepower as much as they possibly can to limit the number of people in the firing. Very sensibly, americans, canadians and british limit the number of kind of infantry. You know the narrative, it is , about the infantry and the army. In the case of british second army, 13 in the infantry, 7 in armor. You know 45 service troops. ,so in other words the actual , spearhead is actually small. The idea is you probe forward behind a barrage, behind firepower, you go to the germans. The one thing the germans will always always do with pavlovian , deliberation is counterattack. The moment they counterattacked, wham , down comes your firepower. Wham down comes your airpower. Down comes your offshore naval guns in the case of the Normandy Campaign. But it still means it is incredibly dangerous to take that leap of faith and go out into the front. And this next picture, that is the ammunition lorry going up again. You can see the wide open space of this terrain. It is really difficult to attack. It is a brutal, brutal battle that has been begun here in normandy. And you know as if that was not , bad enough, then you have the bacage. It has to be just so incredibly hard. Until you work out how you can get through that, the rhinos dont kick in until the third week of the hedge cutters of july in 1994. It is going to be a long old slog. You are up against an enemy that you are not allowed to retreat. That is disciplined, that if they do not do what they are told, they are going to be shot. Has got some pretty half decent weaponry. Those 75 millimeter high 88, velocity antitank machine guns. The barrels overheat, but you dont want to be up against them. This is really, really difficult and of course it is incredibly difficult for the germans as well. You know, because they have got the added disadvantage of not having the supply lines we have in the allies. They dont have air cover. They dont have, you know the , germans having to deal with them fighting all the time. What you get in this era of high population is the most unbelievable levels of destruction. So that by the time it is actually all over, and i love this picture. This comes from a museum down in dorset, but look at that. If you want any illustration of of just how difficult this is this picture tells you all. , you can see the men scattered out, the shermans in operation trying to go through these , hedgerows. Really, really difficult. I trust you, any of you have not im sure all of you have been to the beaches of normandy, but if you get a chance, go off the beaches, go inland a bit, have a look where this took place. Go to the peninsula or the high ground and eons. It is amazing and it really, really does. You suddenly go ok, i get it, i can see why this would be a complete nightmare. In thing think anyone who criticizes the speed of the allied defense in the first six or so, seven weeks of though of the Normandy Campaign really needs to have a big rethink. Because it was really tough, really brutal. Those american Infantry Divisions, they are losing 115 casualties of their fighting force in two weeks. You know, it is just absolutely brutal. And i think what that opening of salvo opening kind between the 12th ss and the canadians on d plus one is so instructive. Because yes, absolutely, appalling crimes are committed and that is one part of it. But it also, it shows you that anyone going on the offensive in normandy is going to have a very very tough time. , and no ground is going to be taken without huge amounts of sacrifice. And it is really interesting. Migrate friend and colleague pete crean, he made the point to , me many years ago that he said, the average daily casualty rate, when you add up british, canadian, all the allies, american, german, civilians, comes to some gargantuan number. But divide that by the 77 days of the Normandy Campaign, and you get a figure of 5875 casualties per day. And that is a worse casualty rate per day than the worst battles of the first world war, usually considered a byword for slaughter. And i am including verdun and the sonne. Thank you. [applause] richard and good afternoon, everyone. I trust james has awakened you your post prandial stupor. [laughter] richard you have already heard about saipan, tinian and guam from our opening excellent sterling presentation by will hitchcock. You heard yesterday from craig and ian about some of the details about what happened in the battles on the land and at sea around the Mariana Islands. I just note as sort of a footnote, the initial loadout for saipan, there were troops aboard ship as of the 28th of may. Everybody else came aboard the next couple days. And they are long since on route to the Mariana Islands by the time of normandy. Im going to talk about the bitter end of the campaign on saipan. This became notorious for scenes depicted both in print and memorably in images both still and Motion Picture of japanese civilians committing suicide, particularly off of a couple of sites we are going to talk about. This became a standard issue that was reported again and again in the post World Literature where it habitually is depicted as though most of the japanese civilians on saipan shows selfdestruction rather than surrender. You get various numbers presented, numbers in print up to about 25,000. When i checked just the other day on wikipedia, the entry there claims 22,000 japanese civilians died on saipan. And the thing i want to note is first that actually there were suicides both on saipan and tinia, and that is what i will be talking about based upon where we are now with respect to the new scholarship. I had begun work on this when i discovered this wonderful work which was published a few months ago by alexander astoroff, titled mass suicides on saipan 1944. Ia in this is a tremendous piece of scholarship which has tracked down and answered separated fact from myth to a degree that no other publication about this episode covers. It builds out upon an important work in 1995 by the first one to challenge the notion that it had been truly massive levels of suicides at saipan. Let me get us going here. No. Oh i see what i got to do here. There we go. Basically, i will get us geographically oriented. Im going to go through some details about the background for all of this, the reason for the suicides, and then talk about particularly about how the influence of this episode resonated through the rest of the pacific war, as it very much did. Is great john partial map, that is where we are. There out in the middle of pacific. Saipan, tinian and guam on most maps, tinian is so close to saipan, they are virtually one blob together. Guam is 100 miles away. We are focusing on saipan and tinian in this presentation. Saipan. This is a map to orient you briefly. You see where the american landings took place on the 15th of june down in the southwest portion of saipan. The area where it became the most notorious for suicides is up at the very north end of the island, two locations. The point which became shorthand for everything. And also a location they called suicide cliffs. This is an image that i took marpihis year from the point looking west. I have been to a lot of sites in the pacific and i have seen a lot of ocean. But i would have to say i have never seen a swath of the pacific as gorgeous as the waters off marpi point. The deep purple blues of the ocean, the whitecaps, no photograph to my mind actually totally captures the absolute beauty of that. But to stand there and to realize what the history is, what the horror is that took place there and then to look at , this Natural Beauty is one of the most jarring experiences ive ever had in terms of being on a site, on a Historic Site in the pacific. If i turned around and took a shot directly behind myself looking now south, the highrise area you see there was what was called suicide cliffs. Marpi point is only 80 to 100 feet from top to bottom. Suicide cliffs are as much as 800 feet from top to bottom. There probably were more suicides on the high ground than on marpi point. Point for various reasons got a lot more attention. This is tinian, the marines landed there on the 24th of july way up in the northwest, one of the most brilliant operations of the war, and drove the japanese down. And the suicides on tinian take place almost entirely at the southern end of the island. The view, by the way, off the southern end of tinian is almost exactly the same as marpi point. It is another scene of beauty masking the horror that took place there. Im not going to dally around on this. There has been a tremendous amount of ink shed over how many deaths there were on saipan and tinian in the war. But the authors incredible indepth work through enormous numbers of archival documents and a very sensible and shrewd approach to the ever elusive issue of counting, led him to slipped one year. I want to point out, when we talk about japanese civilians, we are talking about those japanese from the main islands of japan. We are also talking about okinawians. Okinawa was a prefecture of japan. They were counted as japanese. Although okinawans have good reason to believe they were discriminated against. Secondclass civilians. We are not talking about other civilians who were present on these islands including a group of koreans, korean civilians who had been who chased the japanese empire to the Mariana Islands. There were also of course the local inhabitants, mainly people from what were then called the caroline islands. You see some of the caroline islanders who were in marine custody. This is really the key slide of the whole presentation. This is where the author captures something that has been elusive for multiple decades. As you can see, it breaks down rather closely and to a fairly round number. In other words he finds there , were about 43,000 japanese civilians on saipan and tinian. Obviously much the most on saipan. Of that total number, just about exactly 13,000 perished. And that left about 30,000 survivors, just very little under 30,000. I added the math and the percent. So be warned, that is my effort at math. If i could do math, i would not have been a lawyer. You will see that the survival rate on saipan is just under two thirds and 80 on tinian. And overall, the survival rate is 70 . So let me talk about now how do we get to this particular moment . How do we get to the fact that these civilians, many of them parents hurtling their children off cliff tops and following them in leaps to deaths or exploiting grenades with the family around, all of these run this scenes that take place horrendous scenes that take place there . The background starts really with, for all japanese, not just the civilians, but the military personnel and the culture. Although i am specifically very hesitant to make broader comments about what National Cultures are like, i think it is very safe to say that in the case of japan, a very high emphasis was placed upon the individual deferring to the group. It was a common aphorism, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down. This is inculcated in japanese family, certainly at that era. It was reinforced by the educational system. In the educational system, the japanese teachers are government employees. They follow curriculum set forth in tokyo, and that curricula basically emphasized that the japanese were unique. They were the land of the gods. Their emperor was a direct descendent of a god. Their educational system also inflicted what one writer called a tyrannical suppression of individual exceptionalism. It reinforced that basic cultural norm they learned at home, to subordinate themselves to the group norm. Accordingly, these basic attitudes and ideas were shared by both the civilians and military personnel, all the way through their youth. The military however had its own little culture its own set , of beliefs. This has been the subject of a lot of writing. What im going to give you is the cliff notes version of the cliff notes version of how the Japanese Imperial armed forces got to this state that they were at. The traditional view and the one that americans held during the world war ii period is the japanese were enthralled with a code of bushido, samurai warriors. This was expressed in various writings. This one is i think one of the shortest and simplest ways, its saying the way of the warrior i , found out lies in dying. When confronted with two alternatives, life and death, one is to choose death without hesitation. There is nothing particularly difficult. One has only to be resolved and push ahead. In fact, although there certainly is a historical thread going back where samurai warriors would typically commit suicide either to atone for defeat or for disgrace, in fact, as edward dray, one of our friends, one of our great historians who wrote the best book about the Imperial Japanese army, as he pointed out, the actual lineage of these beliefs is actually quite ambiguous. And during the period of the shoguns, basically from the 17th century to the meiji restoration in 1868, and the elite warrior class, there was a tradition of suicide to atone for defeat or disgrace. It was somewhat incentivized by the frequent habits of beheading such people. There was also running parallel to that, concurrent with that, was the fact that it was also deemed to be a norm to promote reconciliation within the frequent regional wars to actually accept the surrender. You might also think this is a pragmatic aspect about this, if you are a local warlord, and your reputation in waging war is that you exterminate any army defeat, this might incentivize the next army you face to be rather more enthusiastic and resistant. So these two attitudes existed coexisted. On the one hand there was clearly this warrior tradition of suicide, but it was by no means permeating the entire culture of all japanese warriors through all these years. During the meiji era which was marked at the beginning by not a small amount of revolts against the government, the government found it expedient to expect the surrender of rankandfile members of the revolting or rebel forces and their junior officers. The what we get to his in russojapanese war, and by this time, it becomes an unwritten norm in the Imperial Army that death is to be preferred over surrender. And at this time, if you were in fact captured by the russians and returned, you would face a gauntlet of derision, cheers and derision, jeers and insults for which no apology or explanation was adequate. As ed dray put it, along with the ideas of racial superiority, national uniqueness, seizure and fighting spirit, the myth of death before dishonor slowly permeated postwar society, incubating until the army would use it again. So we then get to that period of, skipping forward, i will take us straight to the area of the shanghai battles in 1932. This was a relatively small period of hostility around shanghai. And that particular incident generated two episodes which became enormously famous and influential in japan. One involved an army major by the name of naburo kugo. He was very severely wounded and captured when he was incapacitated by the chinese. He was returned to Japanese Forces after the cessation of the hostilities. But kugo faced this incredible level of peer pressure, and in his own depression to atone for his sin of having been captured, and he committed suicide. To, you know, this was, i think as tammy phrased it this morning, you might have said that kugo faced a career setback. His suicide became the subject of no fewer than five major movies that were shown throughout japan and one play and became celebrated as the way that a true japanese warrior behaves. The only way a true japanese warrior behaves. There were also three enlisted men who had an improvised explosive device, and they charged the chinese position and the device blew up. In the retelling, they had deliberately blown themselves up. They became war gods. The facts are obscure as to whether this was an accidental explosion or whether this was a chinese round. In any event, these two episodes enormously resonated throughout japan, and eventually what all of this ambiguous train of events stretching back hundreds of years, eventually culminated in was the 1941 field regulations. The key passage in that said meet expectations of our family and Home Community by making effort upon effort, always mindful of the honor of your name. If alive, do not suffer the disgrace of becoming a prisoner. In death, do not leave behind a name soiled by misdeeds. Now it is important to remember , that in the Imperial Army, most of the units drew their personnel from specific discrete geographic regions. So you did not leave your community to join the army, you took your community with you into the army. So there was no sort of anonymity for the average japanese soldier with respect to if your misconduct takes place, that it wont get back literally get back to your home. There is another phase of this whole thing. When japan began its war in china in 1937, up to that point, japan had signed off on a number of International Agreements on treatment of prisoners of war and various other things. In august 1937, imperial headquarters issued a directive to the armed forces in china that said you are not bound to abide by any of these International Agreements we have previously signed. So no holds barred with respect to the war on china, and that is certainly presaged what would come within the next eight years. What drove the average japanese family to choose suicide over surrender on saipan really came down to two basic things, a fear and coercion. The fear was the propaganda that had instilled in them the notion that the americans were all demons, devils, monsters, wild beasts, and since they were not human, their behavior would be inhuman. If you fell into american hands, you would suffer all manner of horrible tortures. The women would be raped. There would be protracted horrifying methods of death. And the americans might not be above cannibalism. And this was imbibed by the japanese civilian population. It also seeped out to the koreans and the local population on both saipan and tinian. All of whom, as the battle began starting in saipan on the 15th of june, all of whom leaved that truly, if they fell into american hands, their fate would be unimaginably cruel and end in some sort of horrifying death. Now when you get to what actually takes place, there is also the factor that the japanese civilians also had reason to fear the Imperial Armed forces. That basically, if they showed any sign of a being willing to voluntarily surrender, they might in fact be murdered by their own armed forces, who were inculcated with their own beliefs about it was entirely unacceptable to surrender. So i have divided up what happened into a series of the main themes. The book shows just an incredible mosaic of patterns of what happens with individual japanese, what americans saw and experienced and did and you can , find an example of almost anything. But by far and away, the largest number of japanese who chose selfdestruction did so voluntarily. Once again, instilled by the fear of fate even worse than committing suicide or murdersuicide. It was quite common for the parents who hurtled children over cliffs or kill them, there were instances where they had the eldest son was given the task of killing his parents, then his brothers and sisters before he killed himself. There is just any number of permutations of how this happened. There were also japanese soldiers, some of whom believed they were in effect committing mercy killing, to kill the civilians to keep them from suffering even worse fate in american hands. Plus as i indicated, especially as the battle went on, the japanese soldiers, in their own defeat and despair, would decide that the civilians should share the same fate that they did. In fact, there was one quote from one japanese soldier who said, we are no longer soldiers. We are no longer civilians. We are all japanese. We will all share the same fate. We also have the fact that, in all of this tremendous anecdotal material on japanese survivors and their statements describing experience was, there definitely was episodes where members of the japanese army, members and the imperial navy, both encouraged japanese civilians to surrender or told them that they should save their lives and surrender, they should not simply commit suicide. So all of those patterns took place in this episode here on saipan and then again on tinian. Now oops, what happened here . Then you have death by american hands. And basically as the author says, and anyone who understands who studies this would agree, by far and away, the most japanese civilians who died simply died incidentally to the fact of the americans employing their weaponry aimed at japanese combatants. And that accounted for by the largest number of japanese deaths at american hands. The author thinks the actual total number of suicides both saipan and tinian put together, was probably no more than about 2000 of the 13,000 deaths. The great majority of individuals were probably killed in the course of ordinary fighting, not deliberate killing by american forces, but incidental to their campaign to defeat the forces of Imperial Japan on saipan and tinian. A second thing that happened, and is particularly came into effect and was seen most vividly in the very last stages on both saipan and tinian as they pressed the Japanese Forces back to one end of the island, the end on saipan, where you frequently had lots of caves and you would have japanese soldiers and japanese civilians mingle together on those caves. And the americans of course could not always tell which was which. And in terms of blocking off those caves and attempting to kill the japanese combatants, they would inadvertently kill the civilians. The americans deployed a lot of loudspeakers, and i will get back to individual efforts attempting to persuade , civilians to surrender. They had some significant success with respect to okinawans, koreans, and some success with respect to the japanese. But there still was obviously a large number of deaths. The other thing that the author brings out that i was not fully aware of was that although we knew there were a large number of japanese civilians on saipan and tinian, particularly saipan and made some preparations to , set up internment camps to isolate and protect and feed and care for the civilians, as it turned out, the preparations were far short of what was needed for the total number of japanese civilians that were on the island, which had been grossly underestimated. Likewise on medical facilities. There was an army part of an Army Field Hospital that was delegated designated early on to provide the main source of treatment for the japanese civilians. Ive read their records. And they completely were overwhelmed also. The author believes as many as perhaps in 1900 japanese civilians died in these internment camps. Now the complicating factor is a lot of the japanese civilians who ended up in these internment camps only did so after they had been out in the wild for a long time. They arrived extremely dehydrated, malnourished, many of them had wounds that had been untreated for literally weeks. So they were in a very bad shape before they got to the internment camps. Nonetheless, despite everything else, the basic fact is this. You have about 70 of the japanese civilians on these two islands are going to survive. There was absolutely no pattern whatsoever of an intent to exterminate the japanese civilian population on saipan or tinian. And there are simply countless stories of american soldiers and marines taking all manner of measures in order to help save these japanese civilians. Let me just touch on a couple of the more notable ones. One of the most celebrated is that of a marine named guy gabaldon who was with the regimental Intelligence Section of the second marines of the Second Marine Division. He was actually a kid of mexican descent who had lived in los angeles. He had taken up with a japanese family. He had attended Japanese Language School and was very conversant in japanese. What was remarkable was he would go out on his own and attempt to make contact with japanese soldiers or civilians and talk them into surrendering. And he achieved tremendous feats of actually talking japanese civilians and military personnel into surrendering. I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly how much courage it would take to do that to go out on your own , facing the japanese who most american servicemen believed were absolutely notorious that , if you wandered into them, you would be lucky if you were killed immediately. Your most likely fate would be tortured before you are killed. The courage of this individual is just astonishing. There was another great story, a japaneseamerican who was an interpreter, who was with the 27th Infantry Division. And he kept working to talk to japanese civilians and military personnel into surrender. And on july 26, they located a cave that have a number of Japanese Military personnel. And over 100 civilians. He went in unarmed and sat down and talked to them for two hours to eventually convince all of them to surrender. We have other accounts. We have an account from one marine, i read about one of his buddies who opened fire on a position and later discovered he had just killed a japanese woman and several children. And afterwards, this marine killed himself. A fellow named bill rogan, who i knew, was in the Second Marine Division and they had an , incident in which they had been moving forward, and they encountered a japanese bunker type underground position. The first one they ran into was full of Japanese Military personnel. And they attacked that and basically blew it up and killed japanese combatants. They then encountered a similar type position a short distance further on. And they began closing in on it and threw some grenades, and to their horror, after the grenades exploded, they could hear the screams of children. And as bill described in his memoir it was the only time he , saw marines with tears in their eyes in the middle of combat. Let me move this along to basically the japanese use of the episode. Ironically it became well known japan due to American Press reports. Back here. There were two basic purposes they were pursuing. The of which was simply by first reciting this heroic actions of not only the military personnel who all died but also the civilians, choosing to also commit suicide. This was to stimulate the war effort. The agenda here was to intimidate the u. S. That this was a preview of what invading the japanese held islands was going to be like. It would be like saipan. In support of the japanese government effort, there was a japanese artist named fujita, and he completed this painting which was widely publicized and shown around japan, death of our brave comrades on saipan. And if you look carefully at this work , which fujita studied in france at the louvre and other european influences in his painting, and you will see where i put number one out there, it shows you the cliffs and people going over the clifs. And foujita was also famous for the fact that he was very accurate in his details. Where i put the number two, because this is so dark, what he is showing us is a japanese soldier who has put the muzzle of his rifle into his mouth and is trying to pull the trigger with his toe, which was a method of committing suicide used by japanese combatants in the pacific. The american response to this was very significant. Basically right after the news of what had happened on saipan became known, you begin to find in american planning documents at the highest level, im talking about the joint chief of staff, they began using phrases saying that if we go into japan, we are going to be facing a fanatically hostile population. And that is being factored into what an invasion of japan will be like. And then in the spring of 1945, the japanese government announces that they are basically what effectively they are doing is trying to pretty much obliterate clear distinctions between any civilians and any military personnel in japan. They declare that beyond everyone who is already in uniform, any male 15 to 16, any female is part of the national militia. We tested this out in effect on okinawa with horrendous also losses among the okinawans. This is going to make it a very difficult, if not impossible for the average american soldier, marine, airman, to distinguish who is and who is not a japanese combatant at normal combat ranges. A japanese officer says i hope may be we can put some patches on the civilian clothes because they have no uniforms for these people to distinguish themselves as combatants. And that is an important part of american thinking about what the to beon of japan is going like. Saipan is the great preview of what is to come. Thank you. [applause] paul well, thank you both, gentlemen, and jason. Now we will get to the questions. If we see your hands raised. We will start in the front to your left, gentlemen. Gentlemen. [laughter] gentlemen, to what extent or could you comment on that eisenhower and macarthur and churchill had knowledge of the details of everything that was going on that you have explained . James yes. In the case of the abbey they , didnt know. They didnt know until they finally overran it later on. As far as they are concerned, a lot of those guys, they are prisoners, prisoners of war. They would expect them to be treated as such. I dont think they knew about them immediately. But word gets out. And it certainly spread like wildfire. There is no question about it, the canadians, after the fall, were a little bit more twitchy with the trigger than they had been beforehand. How much eisenhower knows about it, will you know, of course, that goes back to the top. They absolutely do know that. And it, you know it is one of , those things that stiffens resolve and makes you think, we are on a crusade here. This is exactly the kind of barbarity we need to overrun. And there of course is countless other massacres, most notoriously of course marvin gaye, but i think it is wrong to assume that it is only the germans and atrocities on the Eastern Front taking place. The allies are just as guilty of it. Only last week or the week before last, i was in the National Archives in college park just outside of washington, dc, and i was reading through all of the incidents where sergeant west was convicted for murdering 70 odd italians at the airfield which he absolutely , did. He just mowed them down in the same way that the ss guys were doing to the canadians and the abbey. These things do happen in war. They clearly happen more when the command of your unit are ss, ares case the 12th particularly they are not particularly welltrained themselves. Richard with respect to saipan, this was there was enormous publicity about this. It was covered in newsreels, it was covered in life magazine, time. There were numerous articles about this. This was not you can be absolutely sure that the information got to the top of policymakers. It also just as importantly spread throughout the u. S. Population. That this is what fighting the japanese, even the civilians, would be like. Paul there is a question online. Were there any repercussions, any prosecutions of the 12th ss . James yeah there was. , one person was captured at the september, i think it was and spent the rest of the , war in england. It is interesting because it is one of those places where it is a house just in the northeast of london, and what they would do is they would interrogate german officers quite heavily. And then treat them ok and give them sort of chocolate biscuits and cocoa, and that sort of thing, and make them feel at ease and put them in a room together. You have these transcripts that one can still read of all these conversations of these senior german officers. And it makes absolutely clear that he is a total rabid nazi. He is absolutely all National Socialism bigtime. And the kind the ends justify , the means and all the rest of it. After he is put on trial, and he is tried and he is sentenced to death by the canadians, but he is reprieved and gets out in the 1950s, rices memoir writes his memoir, grenadiers, it is really fantastic. A lot of it is complete nonsense and justification and all the rest of it. One has to read it with that in mind. But he got away with it. He was absolutely at the center ss the veterans , associations and all the rest of it. He went to his grave a nazi. Richard just, let me say this. The japanese command on saipan was a dead by the end of the campaign. There was nobody around to be tried. One aspect about it though was there were innumerable moments , where marines and soldiers are witnessing japanese soldiers gunning down civilians. And there was retribution exacted wherever possible to do that, to stop that, while it was in process. But there was no highlevel trial with respect to the saipan suicides. Let me just add one other point. I was thinking about, actually i was talking to a colleague, and within japan these days, this episode is not has been enormously overshadowed by a much bigger controversy of what happened on okinawa. This would be really a subset of the controversy over that, doesnt get nearly the attention that okinawa does. Paul next question is in the back with connie, please. To your right. Thank you all for what you bring to the room today. My question is for james holland. And i apologize if you already answered it. I was a couple minutes late getting in from lunch. I heard you start with dday plus one. My question is about the canadians on dday itself. The sixth. How would you rate their performance in this in accomplishing their objectives . And what percentage of that success do you think might be allocated to the fact that they were trained and organized by province, the armored brigades knew the Infantry Brigades when they arrived . James i think the canadians were they did extremely well on dday. They made the furthest inroads. They also suffered proportionately the highest deaths of any of the beaches. Obviously the greatest number of deaths were on omaha, but there were more men that landed there. The highest ratio. They deserve our eternal respect. There is plenty of units and training with tanks as well. This idea that they were being infantryman and training to jump in and out is not really the case. They were pretty good. They were pretty determined. To be perfectly honest, i think across the board, the infantry and armor and artillery, i think all of the, you know, the allied armies that land on normandy are pretty good. There is barely a man there who has not been training for two years. There is plenty of germans who barely had any training whatsoever. So we tend to put the germans on a kind of pedestal i dont think they deserve it. I think a lot of that is because postwar, a lot of our accounts of the fighting were written by people in the allies who had been there, and they had never had to fight against themselves. So we are entirely enamored about kind of machine guns and all the rest of it. But you try kind of fighting when you have got fighterbombers attacking and all the rest of it. British troops, canadian troops, american troops, by and large, there is not much in it. I think they are all pretty good, pretty competent. If you have a mean line of kind of not bad Infantry Division, it kind of goes like that. Whereas with the germans, it is kind of like that. I think there are greater extremes within the german performance. But the canadians, they get my vote, certainly. Richard let me add to that. There is a wonderful book published recently by mark milner called stopping the panzers, exactly about the third canadian division. It is a tremendous revelation because the canadians tend to get lost in the shuffle of dday accounts. There is a military historian, when you start noticing that they figured they were on the ground, the germans would attack with their panzers. So when they come in, they come in with double the amount of Field Artillery that lands on dday. They trade in their 25 pounder tote guns for american and the selfpropelled 105 guns that they want to get inland quickly. They bring in an entire canadian tank brigade with them to support one Infantry Division. As i told mark, i said after i read this, i realize these were the most heavily armed canadians in history. James the other thing i should tell you is their performance is absolutely stupendously good. Just a nightmare place to fight and nightmare time of the year. It is incredibly unfortunate for those combatants involved in europe that you had the succession of truly awful winters in europe. Snow and rain and mud. Pretty much all the time. And the casualties they suffered were just absolutely enormous. In the narrative of what we do, we tend to focus on things that have been turned into movies. Tv boxes and that does come , at the detriment of that. Because the canadians are quite modest people. They have not sort of been banging and shouting about their achievements, and i think they do get lost in the narrative of world war ii. Paul we will try to get two more questions in here. Front row, please. Richard, i have got two questions that deal with postwar japan. I was interested to learn that japanese units were composed geographically. So although there were not many survivors, prisoners, what were the ramifications to those that did go home . And then secondly, has there ny debate amongst the society in japan about this strategy of the suicide code since the end of the war . Richard i think it is safe to say that Imperial Japan as it existed up to 1945, is no more. There is still these nationalistic elements within japan. For the military personnel who had become prisoners of war, by the time they got home, the end of the war had pretty much totally discredited the Japanese Armed forces. You read a lot of accounts about how difficult of a time a lot of the former soldiers and sailors had in readjusting to a society that treated them shunned them during the postwar period. They were not facing the sort of retribution they could have expected had japan continued as Imperial Japan post1945. The second question was about no. From what i understand from my colleagues i relied on for this, he emphasized that basically the whole episode of what happened in saipan is grossly overshadowed by what happened on okinawa. Mainly because of course okinawa is still part of japan. And there is still this bitter undercurrent between the okinawans and the japanese over their treatment back then as sort of symbolic of their whole issue of being secondclass citizens and discriminated against. Paul gentlemen on the left the , last question will be in the back to your right, please. I would like to ask james incident atld the the abbey play into what would later become slightly known that american commanders and some allied commanders started issuing orders from reprisals against ss units . Or would that be more after malady and whatnot . James yeah, ok, a lot of this stuff is real is really hearsay. I remember when i was doing my normandy book, i read an autobiography of a guy called slaughter who was in the 29th Infantry Division and landed on dday until he was badly wounded. He says in his book that he was told, dont take any prisoners. Just shoot them. He actually that says he made a big point about how he didnt do that, but that is what they were told. Sergeant west said, i was told by the Senior Commander this is , what we should do. They point the finger up to patton. It is really shadowy, all this who says what. I think a lot of things are said on Chatham House rules. Kind of in Quiet Company and off the record. And i think it just entirely depends on who the commander is is what the circumstances and what happened in the , preceding two days, a week, 10 days. If you had a really, really bad time, and everyone is fed up, everyone is, you know, you have suffered a lot of casualties and something happens, already your blood is up. You can see how these things happen in a time of war that they shouldnt happen, but they do happen. It is still happening today. Andknow, the british army the British Royal marines, there has been notorious cases of people kind of shooting wounded afghans and appalling crimes, supposedly against iraqis as well. You know as long as there are fighting innting incredibly tough situations, there will always be miscarriages of justice and atrocities carrying out. It is as certain as night follows day. Richard i agree with that. One episode that is interesting is about the last two weeks , three weeks of the war in europe, both the americans a evidence thatal gis and brits were infuriated by any german that kept fighting, especially someone who kept shooting or shot one of your buddies. Your chances of accepting your surrender if you killed one of these guys in the last couple weeks of the war was very slim. James yeah i think that is , absolutely true. What you know you are up against youthnatical hitlers guys. And you will take the chance. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel. You can see the war is almost over. And you just think, wow. They are nazis, so im going to shoot them. There is lots of that going on. It doesnt mean it is right. But i do think one can sort of understand how people get into the situation where that takes place. Note, gentlemen, thank you very much. Sorry im adjacent. I was going to sorry, jason. I was going to cut you off. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer 1 this is American History tv on cspan3 where each weekend we feature 48 hours exploring our nations past. Thefilm green book Won Academy Award for best picture and brought attention to issues faced by africanamericans when traveling during the jim crow era. Monday 8 00 eastern, historians and local officials discuss issues to raise awareness about africanamerican to resolve and to preserve once popular sites. Heres a preview. This brings me to what you want to hear about, the green book. It was the sort of racism that needed the green book. 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