
“Send Parsons Immediately” - merrier
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/without-chick-parsons-General-MacArthur-Never-Made-Return-Philippines-180964406/
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dforrestwilson
Makes me wonder if the author of Cryptonomicon had heard of Parsons while
researching for his book.

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merrier
Title came from [https://thebrowser.com/share-
link/87jB](https://thebrowser.com/share-link/87jB).

~~~
jakevn
The title is actually a quote of a wire from MacArthur to D.C.

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valuearb
Great but sad, read. This part reminded me of the Japanese apologists who pop
up on any thread that touches on Hiroshima denying that the Japanese military
committed mass atrocities.

"The death toll from the Battle of Manila was horrific: more than 100,000
Filipinos, the majority of them civilians; ...

Parsons ventured into the city soon after MacArthur finally dislodged the
Japanese, on March 4. “Manila is finished, completely demolished,” he wrote in
a letter to Travis Ingham. But he had one last mission: finding his mother-in-
law.

... When he had gone in search of a good friend in Manila, Carlos Perez Rubio,
he found a gruesome scene: “twenty-two bodies—the entire family including
women and children...liquidated in a most brutal fashion. Bayonets mostly.”

... Before she was tossed into a mass grave with the others, Blanche Jurika
had been tortured and beheaded. “If she could have just lasted another three
months,” her son-in-law recalled, “she’d have been all right."

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stephengillie
Germany invaded Poland on the 45th anniversary of the Japanese occupation of
Korea. (Maybe not exactly, but close.) Japan had been a menace in the East
Pacific since the 1890s, formed an anti-Russia alliance with the UK, used WWI
as an excuse to invade German islands in the Pacific, and was trying to invade
further into China during the time between World Wars in Europe.

~~~
user982
_> Germany invaded Poland on the 45th anniversary of the Japanese occupation
of Korea. (Maybe not exactly, but close.)_

1) The Japanese-American Battle of Manila came on the 46th anniversary of the
Philippine-American Battle of Manila (exactly), the first battle of the
Philippine-American war of colonization that saw widespread, sanctioned US
atrocities against the native population to the tune of hundreds of thousands
of civilians dead.

2) The Japanese occupation of Korea was only made possible by the wholehearted
support and abetting of the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt was
awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for facilitating this annexation and personally
ordered the striking-out of Korea as a nation from White House records.[1]

 _> Japan had been a menace in the East Pacific since the 1890s, formed an
anti-Russia alliance with the UK, used WWI as an excuse to invade German
islands in the Pacific, and was trying to invade further into China during the
time between World Wars in Europe._

Japan was considered a menace in the East Pacific only when it threatened
territories already conquered through Western imperialist expansion by the
likes of Britain, Russia, and the United States. It is not any more abhorrent
that Japan invaded German islands in the Pacific, than that Germany had made
claims to Pacific islands in the first place. Japan's campaign of brutal
spread and subjugation was not some uniquely objectionable aberration, it was
a direct application of lessons learned from experienced masters; Japan was a
late adopter of a well-worn and broadly used template of colonialist conquest.

[1]:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06bradley.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06bradley.html)

~~~
valuearb
1) The US didn't kill more than 20,000 Filipinos, the rest died from Cholera.
2) Helping negotiate a peace treaty is now an act of violence?

I would never say the millions the Japanese murdered, tortured, raped and
enslaved during their WW2 expansion made them unique in history. I would say
that the insanity of the military leadership that ordered that holocaust was
also the reason for two nuclear bombs.

