World War
Preface:
Everyone knows that World War II was a global war. However, knowledge of its development and impact on Western Europe is rather limited. At least in the last two centuries knowledge of war crimes has increased. The purpose of today’s lecture is to draw a rough outline of the neglected aspects of this war and to raise some interest in the exploits and suffering of the people who were affected by fascism, “Herrenmenschentum” and aggression, and fought against it.
Photo: Iwo Jima
This photo is well known: it shows the conquering of Iwo Jimo, a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, on 19th February, 1945. It was one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific.
Photo: Ira Hayes
Hardly anyone knows this one: a non-white Native American, Ira Hayes, paratrooper from Arizona, member of the group of Marines that raised the flag on the small Pacific island of Iwo Jima. Hardly anyone knows that Indian Nations such as the Irokese, Chippewa and Sioux declared war on Germany. Ira Hayes died in 1955 with no belongings and probably drunk in a water ditch in the reservation from which he came from.
Photo: Film poster
The bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is a famous film on the role of British prisoners of war in the construction of a bridge built to transport supplies to the Japanese Emperor’s troops in Burma. The protagonist is a white European: Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey. The film portrays the role of allied prisoners of war as the most important for the construction of the bridge.
Photo: Forced labourer on the Burma railway
In fact during the building of the railway – alongside that of the bridge over the river Kwai – ten thousands Asian forced labourers died. They are not remembered in any movie. Incidentally, later, troops of the 81st West African Division, which means black soldiers, fought on this very railway. They were recruited by the British because of the extreme climate of the jungle. No movie tells their story either.
Photo: Hiroshima, August 1945 Photo: Manila, August 1945 Photo: Troops parade Paris, 25th August, 1945 Photo: Camp de Thiaroye Cemetery Photo: Domenica newspaper Photo: Massacre of Nanking Photo: Bombardment of Nauru Photo: Kwajalein and runway atoll Photo: Forced labour for the Japanese Photo: Forced labour, construction of an airport Photo: Forced prostitute Photo: Former forced prostitute Photo: Human experiment Mukden Photo: Barnaba Photo: „Tojo“ Photo: Papuan Infantry Photo: Aborigines on MG Photo: Espionage sailor Photo: Spear fighter Photo: Indian pilots [ED: it is perhaps little known, or documented, in the epistemic communities from which the speaker hails, that said British Government and Army were directly responsible for the famine in Bengal during 1942-43 that saw the deaths of up to 4 million Bengalese.] Photo: Caribbean, costal guard Photo: Troop transport Photo: Recruiting Photo: Truck breakdown Photo: El Alamein Photo: Arabic Legion Photo: Maori Battalion Photo: Painting FEB Photo: Black soldiers in the snow Photo: Black aircraft mechanics Photo: Black in Stalag Three participants of World War II In place of all the participants of World War II, I briefly want to introduce three personal fates from three continents: a black South African soldier, a scout from Oceania and a Philippine resistance fighter. 1. Photo: Kyzer He reports that: “In the night of 21st of November, 1943 the British were involved in a horrible tank battle. The Allied troops withdrew. But our commanders didn’t know that. A little later we found out that our brigade was surrounded by two German tank divisions. And then German battle planes came, flew over the battle ground and attacked our supply lines. We heard explosions, the trucks were blown up, and everywhere there was dust and smoke. We couldn’t see or recognise anything. At the same time German tanks proceeded and we South Africans delivered a horrible fight, very brave but useless. The post was run over by German troops. I only was a first class private and all the higher officers suddenly had disappeared! But I managed to bring four and later another five trucks with wounded through.” Frank Kyzer only escaped because he medically treated a German soldier on the battle field and because of this he wasn’t shot. 2. Photo Together with his friend Aaron Kmana, Biuku Gasa was at beginning of August 1943 on his way back from a patrol for the Allies when he discovered a wrecked boat at the reef on the entrance to the lagoon. Then he asked us to bring this message to the US military base in Rendova. We rowed sixty kilometres to Rendova where many Americans were, and led them back to the island of Olasana. So we saved Kennedy’s live.” Only in May 2002 the research society National Geographic from Washington sent divers to the Salomon Islands. They would find the wreck of Kennedy’s patrol boat. With them was a nephew of the former US President. He visited the two men who had saved his uncle’s life and finally thanked them – something that John F. Kennedy never did. 3. Photo: Remedios Gomez-Paraisa “He didn’t want to serve the Japanese and hid himself. But he was betrayed. Since he refused to collaborate, the Japanese tortured him to death. That’s why I went underground together with my brother.” Only in October 1944, two and a half year after their escape, US troops returned to the Philippines under General MacArthur. “When they landed we had fought their way free.” Remedios Gomez-Paraisa says. Side by side with the US troops Philippine guerrilla units moved into the capital of Manila where the Japanese had dug themselves in. “Our units freed US American prisoners out of the University of Santo Tomas and fought at many places in the city together with US soldiers against the Japanese.“ But the US militaries didn’t trust these partisan troops because they stood for an end of the US American colonial regime and the independence of the Philippines. The war against the Japanese was not yet over when US General Douglas MacArthur requested the fighters to surrender their weapons to the US army. Otherwise they would be persecuted as “revolutionists” and “straying bandits”. Remedios Gomez-Paraisa remembers that the US troops at beginning of 1945 butchered about 200 fighters. Many of these men and women had shortly before freed Manila together with the US army. Only in 1990 the Philippine government recognised the resistance movement of the Second World War and granted its members a pension. At the beginning of 2000 Remedios Gomez-Paraisa helped her former companions in the anti-Japanese resistance to fill in the forms for pension. She herself got a pension of about 60 Euro a month. This was for four years of life endangering fighting for the liberation of her country. Photo: Grave stone Photo: Acknowledgments and book recommendation Klaus Viehmann,
This and similar photos are very well k
This picture of the destruction of Manila in the Philippines is rather unknown. The fight over Manila between Japanese troops on one side, and US troops and Philippine independence fighters on the other, lasted from the 3rd February to the 3rd March, 1945. Afterwards, 11,000 buildings were destroyed and the city centre was turned to ashes. Overall, 100,000 Philippine civilians died. Later, Dwight D. Eisenhower was to comment that: “Of all capitals destroyed during the war only Warsaw suffered greater damage than Manila”.
A famous scene: The Free French Forces and the Allied Troops march through the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées at the end of August 1945 after the liberation of Paris.
Little known is that Weeks before De Gaulle ordered to barrack the units of black soldiers from the colonies of France, who had fought until then for an independent France, in camps for transportation back to their home countries. They were excluded from the honour in Paris. In November 1944 about 1,300 Senegalese soldiers landed at the harbour of Dakar and were detained in the Camp de Thiaroye. There they waited for the payment of the rest of their wages and entitlements on dismissal that were promised to them in Europe. A general had given them his “word as an officer” that he would ensure that they would get what they were entitled to. But on the night of the 31st November, 1944, French tanks surrounded the camp and opened fire at five o’clock in the morning. Nobody knows the exact number of dead. Conclusions drawn from the graves in the soldiers cemetery of Thiaroye – shown on the photo – suggest the number could have been as many as 300. The relevant documents of the French colonial authorities were marked with “Blocked for journalists and historians”.
World War II did not start on 1st September, 1939 in Europe, but on 3rd October, 1935 in Ethiopia. After a speech by Benito Mussolini in Rome, in which he claimed an Italian Empire in Africa, fascist Italian troops declared war with their boots as they marched over the Ethiopian border. This was the biggest colonial war ever fought in Africa. The Italian troops used poison gas and heavy artillery. They tested weapons there as the German Air force was to do in the Spanish civil war only one and a half years later.
Word War II in Asia started at the latest in 1937 as imperial Japanese troops attacked China. The first eight days after the invasion of Nanking from 13th - 20th December, 1937 produced a massacre. US-American and Chinese historians conclude in unison that there were at least 20,000 thousand rapes and 370,000 dead in Nanking. After the war the Nanking massacre was not mentioned for decades. In 1994 the Japanese Minister of Justice, Nagano Shigeto, still denied that the massacre took place.
The beginning of World War II in the Pacific is usually dated 7th December, 1941 and recorded as having taken place in Pearl Harbour. This is not quite right. Already on 27th of December, 1940 a war ship bombarded the central Pacific island of Nauru. The ship was a “Hilfskreuzer”, a support cruiser to the German Navy that was already operating in the Pacific Ocean by the end of 1940. They torpedoed British and Australian ships and mined harbours in New Zealand. Nauru was devastated by fires.
Many other formerly idyllic Pacific islands were made partly inhabitable by the war and associated building works. The damage is visible even today.
While at least some of the surviving European forced labourers did at least get some compensation finally, the forced labourers in Asia and the Pacific, as well as the Africans, didn’t get anything.
Only two examples: the Japanese abducted more than 5,000 Indians and deported them as forced labourers to the South Pacific on their advance into Singapore. And hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Indonesians and Koreans were forced into labour in the occupied countries – like the Burma railway mentioned previously.
About 55,000 locals served at the height of the battles in New Guinea as forced labourers and porters. Eye witnesses report that on the Japanese side there was a similar amount. This means that altogether about 100,000 islanders had to work for the war on and behind the frontlines. Probably thousands, if not tens of thousands, lost their lives during WWII on New Guinea and the Pacific islands alone.
A war crime that has become more widely acknowledged in recent years was the prostitution of 200,000 girls and women in the military brothels of the Imperial Japanese Army between 1932 and 1945; next to 120,000 Koreans there were women from China, the Philippines, Malaya and Burma. The Japanese called the victims of their mass rapes “willing servants of the emperor”.
Japan’s war crimes on Asian women became public because of the protests of those affected. In 1991, the “Korean Council for sexual abuse of forced women by Japanese militaries” was set up. Since then the self-help organisation of Korean women meets once a week in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul and wants to continue its protests until the Japanese government assumes full responsibility for the war crimes on women.
Unfortunately the human experiments of German physicians during World War II were carried out elsewhere. Little known in Europe is that in Mukden in China, Japanese physicians tested biological and chemical weapons. Indeed in 1942, Japanese battle planes are reported to have flown low-level over the village of Chong Shan. Shortly afterwards pestilence broke out and one third of the village population died. After 1941 there were also human experiments on prisoners of war conducted in Mukden. About 70 percent of the test subjects were Chinese soldiers, workers and intellectuals. The length of the victim’s agony after injection of bacteria, of experiments with freezing or by systematic malnourishment was noted in lists with the utmost care.
Even after the end of the war the killing in the Pacific continued. On the small island of Barnaba, west of the Gilbert Islands, conquered in 1943 by the Japanese, lived 700 locals and 713 working migrants from other islands. The last Japanese supply ship reached Banaba in October 1943. But the occupation of the island lasted two more years. By 20th August, 1945, two weeks after the official end of the war, the Japanese drove together about 150 locals that hadn’t yet starved on the cliffs over the sea and shot them down. When the Allied landed on Banaba on 1st October, 1945 they only found Japanese soldiers who claimed to have evacuated all islanders.
Not only Japanese kamikaze pilots and US marines fought in the Pacific, as shown in documentations and newsreels. In Papua, New Guinea and on the neighbouring islands locals also served as soldiers.
When the Japanese invaded in 1942, the Australians combined their altogether 3,800 colonial soldiers from New Guinea into a Pacific Island Regiment. The desperate static warfare in the tropic mountains of New Guinea lasted several months and cost the lives of 7,200 Japanese, 1,400 Australians and 800 Americans. Nobody counted the dead colonial soldiers.
For protection of the Australian coast, Aborigines were mobilised and partly trained on automatic weapons. However, their racist discrimination continued after the war.
A special unit of inhabitants of the Street of Torres took over the scout jobs for the Allies. Their sailors also transported special Allied troops over the Japanese front lines. If they were discovered by Japanese Troops they were killed immediately.
In the US press of that time these soldiers were not shown as such, but rather as local, lightly dressed spear fighters as on this photo. Somewhat absurdly this picture actually was of a US marine with South Pacific ancestors who had to pose for the cameras.
At the beginning of World War II the British Government increased the number of soldiers in the army, navy and air force of the Royal Indian Army to about 2.5 Million. Thus the Indians provided the largest colonial troop in the history of European colonialism. They were used in Africa, Asia and Europe. Later 120,000 Gurkhas from the neighbouring kingdom of Nepal joined in. At least the Indian soldiers were provided with disability benefits and pensions. Even if these were lower than the ones for British soldiers, the situation of the professional soldiers of the Royal Indian Army was better than that of most Africans next to whom they fought on many frontlines.
Latin America and the Caribbean were also involved in the Second World War. From there came raw materials and soldiers. Most islands in the Caribbean during this time were still British colonies. From here the German submarines were supposed to be fended and in 1942 alone 336 ships were destroyed in the Caribbean. Even Brazil was attacked. Altogether the submarines of the Axis powers attacked, between 1942 and 1944, at least 37 Brazilian military, trade and passenger ships as well as fishing boats. Altogether the German-Italian submarine war cost about 1,000 Brazilians their lives. Most of the victims were civilians.
An estimated amount of 250,000 to 500,000 soldiers from Latin America of mainly Latin American ancestry served in World War II in the US army. Next to Brazilians, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans there were first and foremost Puerto Ricans. A regiment from Puerto Rico crossed the Rhine in March 1945 and stayed as occupation army in South Germany. Other Puerto Rican soldiers were used in Hawaii and Burma. On the 11th July, 1944 the British Times reported that: “2,000 new conscripts from the Caribbean are now being trained at the military base in Yorkshire. They are part of the massive muster from the West Indian islands and are being educated as aircraft and motor mechanics, radio operators, cooks and administrators.” In Europe 236 Caribbean volunteers died and 265 were wounded. During collections alone on the tiny island of Grenada, at that time with less than 60,000 habitants, more than £20,000 was donated.
In many parts of the British Empire Africans were recruited forcibly and systematically. Black soldiers were mainly used in Africa and South East Asia. They were issued worse food and weapons and simpler uniforms than white soldiers. The veterans meet regularly since the war and still claim today a decent pension from the British government or compensation which never happened.
For the Allies, Africa was of great military strategic value. In what today is Ghana more than 5,000 British and US American planes were assembled until October 1943. The planes then flew from there to North Africa and the Middle East. On the “Great North Road”, thousands of trucks brought supplies from South Africa via Tanganjika to Kenya and Egypt. For a long time this was the only route of supplies for the Allied troops in North Africa.
Without the African Soldiers who built the streets and secured the transport of the German Wehrmacht, General Rommel would not have won the battle of El Alamein and would have proceeded on to Palestine, with horrible results for the Jewish habitants.
As is well known many Arabic organisations sympathised with Nazi Germany, either out of opposition to the British colonial empire or out of sheer anti-Semitism. Less known is that at the beginning of the Second World War about 1,350 Arabs, Cherkessians and Jews served under British command in the “Arabic Legion”. By 1945 it had grown to number 8,000 men. The British used them in North Africa in the battle at El Alamein against the German Army. In Palestine the British recruited about 9,000 Arabic soldiers, who were also used in North Africa and Europe and took part in the liberation of Italy, Greece and France. During the war the Arabic Palestinian Hazin Khalidi and the Jewish Palestinian Uzi Narkiss became friends. They fought together in North Africa against Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In the Israeli-Arabic Wars of 1948 and 1967 they found themselves on opposite sides of the front. To avoid being accused of “collaboration” they were only able to continue their friendship in secret. It lasted until the death of Khalidi in 1979.
A Maori Battalion, formed out of native soldiers from New Zealand, was part of the Allied forces that managed to destroy the German and Italian Army in North Africa and took 30,000 prisoners. For this battalion the war continued into Italy in September 1943. At the beginning of 1944 Maori soldiers dispelled the last German troops from the famous fortress of Monte Cassino, a battle that, given the extremely strong defensive German line and inevitable high losses involved, notoriously involved high numbers of colonial regiments.
Less known is that Brazilian expedition troops (FEB) fought in Europe. For almost the whole winter of 1944-1945 they fought in the mountains close to Bologna. On the 12th December, 1944, 145 Brazilian soldiers lost their lives. In March and April 1945 they proceeded, together with US units into Northern Italy. In Montese, German troops that had been defeated by Maoris and Brazilians surrendered to Brazilian officers: a circumstance that must have hurt German “Herrenmenschen” particularly and that was captured by a Brazilian soldier in this oil painting.
During World War II, 1.2 million Afro Americans served in the US Army. Afro Americans were used to defend as second class soldiers their second class civil rights in the name of democracy against fascism. The Afro American civil rights organisation Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) wrote 1940: “We feel sorry for the brutality, the blood and the death of the people of Europe as well as we felt sorry for China and Ethiopia. But we also want democracy in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Michigan, in Washington and in the Senate of the United States!”
Only very late on in the war blacks were allowed to become pilots in the US air force. Rather they were trained as mechanics. About a hundred of those who became air force officers demonstrated on 5th April, 1945 on the air force base Freeman Field in Indiana against racial segregation and they occupied the white officers’ club. Three of them were brought in front of a court martial. Only in 1995, half a century later, this verdict was annulled.
When black soldiers came into German captivity they suffered a harder fate than their white comrades, if they were not shot right away as it is documented in the war in France in 1940. The German Army provided the bacteriologist Paul Uhlenhuth in 1944 with 150 black captives. New serums against tropical diseases were supposed to be tested on them. Even in death the discrimination didn’t stop. At the PoW cemetery in Luckenwalde there are twenty graves of black soldiers. Following the racist state doctrine, they were buried at a clear distance from the graves of white PoWs.
Frank Kyzer’s life as a soldier started at the beginning of 1940. He and others had been brought to Garawi in Egypt, where the South Africans had a transition camp for non-European troops. From the middle of 1941 onwards he was one of 14,000 black soldiers of the Native Military Corps, which had to supply the fighting troops in the desert with water and medical support.
Altogether 379 South Africans were wounded on this day in Sidi Rezegh; 3,000 came into German captivity and 224 died. The survivors buried the dead after the horror of this battle was over. White infantry men and black orderlies lay side by side in a mass grave. But the high command of South Africa let the bodies be exhumed and buried anew, separated by skin colour. When the soldiers returned to South Africa they didn’t get equal rights as promised, instead the Apartheid was institutionalised.
Everybody knows John F. Kennedy and some know that he was captain of a US patrol torpedo boat during the Pacific war. Only few know that he wouldn’t have survived and become President without the help of Biuku Gasa.
“When Captain Kennedy entered the bay of Kolombangara with his boat he didn’t notice that he was being followed by a Japanese destroyer”, explains Biuku Gasa. “And so it crashed. The Japanese had shot their torpedoes and sunk Kennedy’s boat. We climbed on palm trees to get coconuts. One of them we gave Kennedy. He spoke a little Pidgin English and wanted us to bring a message to his people. But there was no paper. So I said to him: “Why don’t you write your message on the skin of a coconut or – as you white say – on the shell?” Kennedy was excited about this idea and carved the message in the coconut. “The natives know our position. They can lead you. Eleven men survived. We need a small boat.”
When the Japanese forces rolled over the Philippines in 1942, Remedios Gomez-Paraisa lived in the Philippine province. Her father was a mayor there.
Remedios Gomez-Paraisa went with her brother into the mountains and enlisted farmers for the Philippine resistance. “We managed to set up a squadron. But in the beginning we only had one weapon – my father’s pistol. So our fight in the Anti Japanese People’s Liberation Army began. That was the name of the biggest resistance in the Philippines during the Second World War. It had about 30,000 armed people. Remedios Gomez-Paraisa was one of the few female leaders in the guerrilla army. “We learned to set up ambushes and to acquire weapons or food from the enemy. More than once we managed to derail supply trains of the Japanese.”
“We wanted lasting peace, true democracy and justice. But already after a few months we had to realise that our hopes were not fulfilled. So we returned to the mountains to continue the fight for the liberation of our country.”
This gravestone stands in the Philippines. I want to conclude my lecture with this picture. This grave stone stands symbolically for the remembrance of the victims who are not known and the people who are never appreciated in Europe and the West but without whom the liberation from fascism and “Herrenmenschentum” wouldn’t have been possible.
To conclude I would like to thank my colleagues at Rheinisches Journalistenbüros. Without their research and publications this lecture wouldn’t have been possible. Their book is highly recommended and can be found at the book stall.
Thank you for your patience.
Berlin, Juli 2006