Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

Thereafter, within the span of a single generation, for reasons that are still puzzled over and debated by scholars, Japan’s military culture took an abrupt turn toward the barbarous. By the early 1930s, the behavior of Japanese troops was attracting international notoriety, and the trend only grew worse through the end of the Second World War. Meiji’s warning thus became prophecy. In throwing away their lives like so many feathers, Iwabuchi’s forces in Manila unshouldered the burden of a mountain. Forsaking the “true valor” prescribed in the rescript, possessing no sound discrimination between right and wrong, the soldiers and sailors abandoned themselves to feral violence against defenseless innocents. And in the end, as Hirohito’s grandfather had foretold, the world came to detest them and to look upon them as wild beasts.