Three-quarters of a century ago they fought each other in a Pacific War of almost unbridled brutality. Now, U.S. Marines and Japan’s new island-hopping troops are storming beaches together in military exercises.
Joined by Australian soldiers, U.S. Marines and Japanese troops staged an amphibious assault on the beaches of Bowen, a town on Australia’s east coast, during Exercise Talisman Sabre. The exercise offered a window into how the three countries, now partners, might fight against their common adversary, China.
During World War II, the situation was reversed, with U.S. Marines fighting Japanese soldiers in an island-hopping campaign which saw some of the most brutal fighting in World War II. Battles on islands such as Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima became synonymous with death and destruction.
The famous island assault at Iwo Jima cost the lives of nearly 7,000 Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese. Casualty numbers in Okinawa reached into the hundreds of thousands, with 12,520 Americans, 94,136 Japanese soldiers, and 94,000 civilians killed.
E.B. Sledge, a Marine veteran who served in the Pacific theater, recounted the savagery of the Pacific in his book, With the Old Breed. In one example, he recalled discovering the corpses of fellow Marines mutilated by the Japanese during the Battle of Peleliu. One of the rotting corpses had been decapitated, with the head laid to rest on the body. Two others had their penises cut off and stuffed into their mouths.
“My emotions solidified into rage and hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced,” Sledge wrote. “From that moment on, I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances.”
These examples were not limited to the Japanese side. In another example, Sledge described a fellow Marine showing him the severed hand of a dead Japanese soldier he kept as a war prize. Sledge also recounted a Marine officer urinated in the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers.
Instances such as these bred a special kind of hatred between the Japanese and Americans. Japanese soldiers were often portrayed as sub-human monkeys by American media, while Americans were seen as bestial devils. The propaganda was so effective that many Okinawans reportedly committed suicide after Americans seized the island in 1945, afraid that they would be raped and murdered.
“The fact that U.S. Marines, the Australian Army, and Japan Ground Self-Defense Force conducted an amphibious combined joint forcible entry into the same objective area here during Talisman Sabre cannot be [overstated],” Marine Corps Maj. Mike Mroszczak said.
The Japanese troops are part of the new Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade, which the country created last year when China and Japan’s dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which Japan has had sovereignty over essentially since 1895, heated up.
Three hundred of the brigade’s estimated 2,000 troops took part in the three-week exercise, which involved sea, land, and air activities, including some involving special forces. In total, 34,000 personnel, 22 ships, and more than 200 aircraft participated.
The brigade and the exercise mark a new frontier for the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Japan’s Constitution, which was written by the Allies after Japan’s defeat in World War II, effectively prevents the country from having offensive military capabilities. The brigade is Japan’s first active marine unit since the war. Should China make a move against the Senkaku Islands, it is the brigade that would lead the charge against the invasion.
Threats posed by China and North Korea have reignited a debate in Japan over the forces’ role, with pacifists seeking to avoid militarization and more conservative elements pushing for greater military latitude. Prime Minister Shinzō Abe lifted a ban against engaging troops abroad in 2014, sparking protests from pacifists.
Abe wants to change the Japanese Constitution to mention the Self-Defense Forces by name, formalizing them as a military. But his attempt was shot down last week, when his party failed to win the two-thirds supermajority required to set a national referendum in motion.
Despite its constitutional limitations, the Japanese military is considered the fourth-most-powerful conventional force in the world and has the ninth-largest budget.
