Tag: World War II (1939-45)

Book Review: ‘On Wars,’ by Michael Mann

Media Library

ON WARS, by Michael Mann If wars are “the least rational of human projects,” why have there been so many of them all over the world, in every era? This is the question that the sociologist Michael Mann poses in the boldly titled “On Wars.” It is an ambitious book, plumbing the roots of war from the early Roman Republic to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with intermediary chapters on ancient and imperial China, Mongol conquests, feudal Japan, the carnage of European Christendom, clashes in pre-Columbian and Latin America, the two world…

Seiichi Morimura, 90, Who Exposed Japanese Wartime Atrocities, Dies

Media Library

Seiichi Morimura, who wrote a searing exposé of the Japanese Army’s secret biological warfare program in occupied China, describing how it forcibly infected thousands of prisoners with deadly pathogens, died on July 24 in Tokyo. He was 90. The announcement of his death by his publisher, Kadokawa, was cited in Japanese media. Mr. Morimura detailed the atrocities committed by the Japanese program — called Unit 731 — in a widely sold book, “Akuma no Hoshoku,” or “The Devil’s Gluttony” (1981). Among the horrors he described were vivisections performed without anesthesia…

Wreck of Japanese Ship That Sank Carrying Australian POWs is Found

Chin@Strategy

The wreck of a Japanese ship that sank in 1942 after it was torpedoed by an American submarine has been found, the Australian government said on Saturday. The ship was carrying hundreds of prisoners of war, most of them Australian, who all died, and the discovery resolves a painful episode in that country’s wartime history. A U.S. Navy submarine attacked the ship, the Montevideo Maru, in July 1942 as it traveled unescorted from Rabaul, a port in the Australian territory of New Guinea that had been captured by Japan earlier…

Guadalcanal Anniversary Marked by a Kennedy

Chin@Strategy

Caroline Kennedy, the United States ambassador to Australia, and Wendy Sherman, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, stood together at dawn on Sunday on the island of Guadalcanal to honor the 80th anniversary of the World War II battle there that nearly led to the deaths of their fathers, and that redefined America’s role across Asia. Then and now, there was violence, great-power competition and jittery concern about the future. Their visit occurred as China’s military was expected to wrap up 72 hours of drills around Taiwan simulating an invasion.…