In this previous post …
I discussed some observations that a lot of history seems to be fake and I referenced Miles Mathis’ website at http://mileswmathis.com/updates.html. One of his writers later wrote a paper about the Burma campaign in World War II. He claimed that it was fake, but, since my Dad was in that campaign, I know he’s wrong. So I wrote the following back in January.
NO ONE CARES IF LESTRADE'S BURMA PAPER HAS MAJOR ERRORS?
https://milesmathis.freeforums.net/thread/62/cares-lestrades-burma-paper-errors
Jan 5, 2023 at 2:09pm by lol
1. Brief history of Merrill's Marauders (5307 Composite Unit)
https://marauder.org/history.htm.
2. Diary of a soldier in Dad's team
https://marauder.org/diary.htm.
3. List of dates of death of 5307 Unit soldiers (about 2444 men altogether; 1 is still alive aged 101; (Kinder) Dad's date of death is correct, March 2012)
https://marauder.org/passing.htm.
4. Wikipedia's take on the 5307 Unit (seems accurate)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrill%27s_Marauders.
5. Thorough report on Merrill's Marauders (with several pictures)
https://jstor.org/stable/pdf/26918040.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A6d7d49a0588c560095eb30392b9dae95&ab_segments=&origin=&acceptTC=1.
6. Home page for the report
https://jstor.org/stable/26918040#metadata_info_tab_contents.
7. Report on the Short-lived 475th Infantry Regiment (excerpt below giving reasons for the Burma Campaign)
arsof-history.org/articles/v5n4_over_the_hills_page_1.html
...
_From the outset, Burma presented a challenge for the United States Army. The British were in charge of operations in the country because it was their former colony. In north Burma, the U.S.-led Northern Combat Area Command (NCAC) had a small force of mostly Chinese troops. These were nominally under American control. Burma was one of the most difficult geographical environments in WWII and a lack of resources plagued operations. NCAC had to clear the area so that it could build a bypass—the Ledo Road—from Ledo, India to the portion of the Burma Road not controlled by the Japanese. Otherwise, all supplies into China had to arrive by air. Secondly, the Allies wanted to keep the bulk of the Japanese ground forces engaged in mainland Asia because the main advance against Tokyo was across the Pacific islands. To keep the bulk of the Japanese Army fixed, the Nationalist Chinese Army had to have desperately needed supplies to constitute a viable threat.
_Although the effort was insufficient, the air bridge from India to Kunming, China supplied vital resources until the Ledo Road was complete. Japanese fighter aircraft based at Myitkyina, Burma were a major threat for Allied cargo planes flying the “Hump” route. This forced the unarmed aircraft to fly a longer and more dangerous course. Clearing higher passes in the Himalayas and the additional distance meant that aircraft carried less cargo. To secure the trace of the Ledo Road and make the Hump flights more effective, Myitkyina had to be taken from the Japanese. It was for this reason that the U.S. Army formed the GALAHAD Force [nicknamed Merrill’s Marauders after their commander Brigadier General (BG) Franklin D. Merrill], the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional).
8. Two Quotes from Lestrade's last paper: mileswmathis.com/pacthe122.pdf
"Later in the Burma Campaign Orde (after recuperating from flower vase water) decides to invade Burma using gliders. No really. His second choice was unicycles [Miles].
"'Afterward, some Chinese units attacked the town itself, but the attack was soon called off when two Chinese battalions, in the confusion and excitement of the battle, mistakenly engaged each other in a fierce firefight, and when two other battalions were moved in, they too repeated the mistake.'”
"I love the slapstick of the Japanese running around in a panic pouring petrol on their own runway to try and stop the airfield being captured. Or the idea that the Chinese army managed to get confused and fight itself not just once but twice in the same village. Utterly ridiculous."
9. MY COMMENTS
_I'm not offended about anyone's speculations or findings, but Lestrade could have gotten a much better picture of the Burma campaign if he had found any of the links above. He seemed to conclude that the whole thing was fiction, but I have plenty of evidence that it was real. Dad was in the Burma campaign with Merrill's Marauders. He often told anyone who'd listen about some of the experiences he had there. He also wrote to a lot of his buddies from the war and met with them at reunions pretty often.
_What I had recalled from his stories was that he got training in Texas or somewhere in the Southwest in 1943. Then they were taken by ship through the Mediterranean and Red Seas and across the Indian Ocean. Before they reached India, a submarine torpedoed the ship, but it sank slowly so the men were rescued and taken to India nearby. The mules that they had trained with remained on the sinking ship. He said a train took them from the {south-}west side of India to the east near Burma. While riding the train, he took target practice on some India farmer's ox. He never admitted that he did it, but his buddy's son said he did. I imagine he regretted it afterward, if it was true. He saw a lot of things made from bamboo in India. Airplanes dropped supplies to them while they were in the jungles of or near Burma. Once a supply drop rolled down a hill and crushed one of the men who was napping. On another occasion Dad had planned to stay in a foxhole for the night, but his buddy told him to come stay by him. That night the foxhole got hit by a Japanese explosive. Another time Dad was smoking a cigarette at night when he heard a sniper bullet hit a tree or something near him. That was the last time he ever smoked. He said he tried to shoot Japanese soldiers on at least one occasion, but he doesn't know if he ever hit anyone. When the mission was accomplished, he and others were assigned to another unit that was to be involved with the Chinese in China just over the Burmese border.
_After reading Lestrade's take on the Burma campaign, I looked online for more info and found and read the links above. So I now know a lot more about it than I did before. The Marauders were volunteers. Dad had been drafted into the army, but once in, he apparently accepted the offer to volunteer to Burma. Some places say there were 3,000 soldiers in the unit, but the link on dates of death above show only 2,444 men were in the unit. It's probably because battalions can have up to 1,000 men each, but these only had about 800 each. If anyone wants to say that there was no Burma campaign, I don't know how the 2,444 men with their dates of death (#3 link), and the stories we in the family know, and the many reunions that Dad and some of my family attended, can be explained.
_The #7 link seems to have a good rationale for the Burma campaign. From the airfield at Myitkyina the Japanese were able to send up planes to intercept Allied planes taking supplies to the Chinese. So the Allies needed to take that airfield from them.
_Regarding the 2 quotes at #8, the gliders were actually used. My brother said Dad saw or knew about the Allied gliders that landed at Myitkyina. Dad was talking about that at one of his reunions and one of the guys who overheard him said he was one of the glider pilots. His name was Al Deckert, not on the list above. The purpose of gliders is often to prevent anyone hearing them in flight. As for some of the Chinese battalions fighting each other, Dad knew about that too. In the confusion of fighting it's to be expected that there will be mistakes like that. There were others, like Allied planes dropping bombs on their own men there.
_My brother had heard that at one point Japanese troops were trying to cross a river or creek to engage the Marauders despite a machine gun mowing them down. He heard that they had done that against Chinese, on the expectation that the machine gun would get too hot and the charge would eventually succeed. But the Marauders used two machine guns and took turns firing them, so when one got too hot, they switched to firing the other one. He heard that the Japanese lost 700 men at that creek, but in one of the links above, probably the diary, it said 300 were killed there. He says Dad told him that the Marauders could tell when the Japanese were preparing for an attack the next day or night, because they sounded like they were having a drunken party.
_I think the Japanese may have been drugged much of the time. If the U.S. or Britain was in control of Japan, as one of Miles' papers concluded, since before the war, then it may not have been hard to cause them to fail.
_Some of the men who volunteered with the Marauders are said to have had war experience in the Pacific earlier. Miles and his other writers should look for first-hand accounts for their papers. Miles’ writers’ Pacific Theatre papers have seemed pretty strongly suggestive that much of the war was fake, but if there were troops who fought in any of them and if they had reunions like the Maruaders did, those should be better sources than most anything else online.
Jan 5, 2023 at 3:12pm by lol
GLIDERS LANDING AT WW2 MYITKYINA SHOWN ON VIDEO
I just found this video which shows gliders landing at Myitkyina, Burma during the battle there.
ALLIES WIN MYITKYINA AIRSTRIP [ETC.]
Here are some more videos. The last two may be the same as the one above.
MERRILL'S MARAUDERS DOCUMENTARY (some of the Marauders are interviewed many years later)
MERRRILL'S MARAUDERS | Special Ops Forces of WWII
Merrill's Marauders (1944) (same as previous)
Transport airplanes land US and Chinese soldiers on Myitkyina airstrip in Myitkyina
ALLIES WIN MYITKYINA AIRSTRIP [ETC.], Part 1, transport planes and gliders land troops on Myitkyina
Jan 5, 2023 at 4:24pm by lol
This video tells more of the story of the war in Asia. Compare with Lestrade's paper.
Burma Campaign | The Stilwell Road
The Stilwell Road & the China-Burma-India Campaign (probably same as previous)
This video gives detailed info on Japan's early defeat of Burma.
Japanese Advance on Burma Road
Now going back to compare with earlier papers on the Pacific Theatre
Battle of the Coral Sea
Jan 6, 2023 at 10:36am by lol
FEAR, XENOPHOBIA, THE PACIFIC THEATRE REALLY HAPPENED
https://milesmathis.freeforums.net/post/358/thread
Glad to see there's more than one reader of Miles' site who doesn't blindly accept the claims made there. And I share your confusion about why so many historical photos seem to be or are obviously doctored.
Some of the Marauders literature says the Marauders were somewhat fearful of the Japanese, but I found a video that says the Japanese feared the Americans, partly because the Americans often lived up to the Japanese propaganda, by engaging in atrocities, such as murdering POWs and sometimes torturing them. Here's the title and link: Why History Overlooks How Much the Japanese Actually Feared the Americans in WW2 youtube.com/watch?v=shZBMjzX9iY
The video also says the Japanese believed they were the most civilized race and all of Asia was depending on them to expel foreigners and improve Asian society.
Ironically, it says the Japanese were taught to have contempt for anyone who surrendered and they had no problem murdering POWs either.
Here are recent comments under that video. {I think people like these commenters are a better source of info about the war than Lestrade’s sources or his interpretations.}
Steven Tuck
4 months ago
My father was sent to the Philippines in November 1941...stationed at Clark field, the Japanese attacked the day after pearl harbor, he was in constant combat from that day until his capture on bataan in May 1942...he was in the bataan death march and spent 3 and a half years being beaten...tortured...starved...slave labor...while waiting to go work in the lead mine on August 6, 1945, he witnessed the atomic blast of the bomb that was dropped on hiroshima which was only 80 miles away...a couple of weeks later the Japanese guards at the camp fled and the next day American C47 transport planes flew low over the camp and dropped containers full of fresh baked bread with butter and lots of other good food, the first real food my father had in 3 and a half years...when American troops liberated the camp he weighed about 90 pounds...his testimony at the war crimes trials in Tokyo in1946 was instrumental in sending several Japanese guards to prison for 20 years hard labor...
Greg USMC
4 months ago
My great [uncle?] Charlie was a platoon sgt on Guadalcanal.... ... I asked him explicitly “Is it true the Japanese soldiers wouldn’t surrender!?” He glanced over at me with a kind of half-smile and half-look of resignation and said: The Japanese soldiers didn’t surrender easily. One day we were moving across a little clearing between tree lines and we started taking fire from a tree at the other edge of that clearing. We managed to get closer and figure out which tree it was and I stood up and sprayed it with my Thompson. The man fell from pretty high up but before he hit the deck, he pretty much stopped in mid-air. He had a rope around his neck and hung hisself.” The look on his face when he said it made me feel bad about my non-stop pestering.
Aaron Laughter
4 months ago
My great granddad told me that his squad stopped taking prisoners after a couple of fake surrenders by the Japanese killed some of his friends, and really can you blame them.
TheRetirednavy92
2 months ago
One of my uncles who survived was on the Canal, he said after he saw what they did to our guys they never took a Japanese prisoner for the rest of the war.
Mike Kennedy
4 months ago
My uncle was an infantryman with the 96th Division during the battle of Okinawa. His company took heavy casualties during the fighting and he was one of the few who managed to make it through without getting wounded. He would not talk about the fighting, even being the streetwise tough guy back home that he was, but he did tell my dad about an near-fatal incident he experienced on Okinawa. ... His unit was cautiously making its way through tall grass, spread out and alert for sudden attacks from hidden Japanese. As my uncle slowly stepped forward, for an instant he felt the ground was spongy, then an explosion knocked him off his feet and threw him backwards. He was splattered with blood. Other GIs came to help him, thinking he was wounded. But it turned out it wasnt his blood. It was Japanese. The spongy ground he felt was the top of a covered foxhole, and in it was a Japanese soldier who exploded a grenade held under his chin as my uncle stepped on the top of the foxhole. As to why my uncle was not wounded or dead, it was surmised that the Japanese soldier's helmet deflected the shrapnel enough that it didn't hit my uncle. The GIs knew the Japanese held the grenade under his head because his head was obliterated by the blast. That is the only experience my uncle would describe to my dad, also a veteran, about the battle of Okinawa.
bracoop2
3 months ago
The 96th was decimated at Hacksaw Ridge.
J Mac24
1 month ago
My Grandfather was sent to the Philippines with his brother while in the Army in 40 or 41. They were both captured when it fell to the Japanese. They both escaped capture and found there way to Corregidor Island, where they were captured again when it fell. Both survived their captivity. I have some of his items from the POW camp. Some pictures of the POW’s at the camp and some other things with their names carved in them. Amazing what they went through. Definitely the Greatest Generation. RIP Sammy and Rex Hulsey.
TODIA Think
4 months ago
The 1st Marine Division tried to assist the wounded Japanese after the battle of the Tana rue. They paid for that. All of the wounded were booby trapped! They never tried again. Also, you never mentioned the Bataan death march. That too was motivation to bring suffering upon the Japanese. They brought it on themselves.....
Jon Wolff
4 months ago
My father-in-law was a young boy in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese. He's told me of seeing heads decapitated by the Japanese strung up on light poles. The Japanese were especially brutal to the European, Eurasian, and Chinese citizens. Being Chinese, his own father was put into a prison camp. He escaped and found refuge for the rest of the war among the Malays, who the Japanese left alone.
Seawind
4 months ago
I had a relative in Carl's Raider battalion and after the Makin Island raid when those who were left behind were beheaded, he said it only became more brutal as they returned the favor. Both sides would not take surrender and would regularly behead each other.
Rob Carp
2 months ago
My dad was with the USMC 1st DIVISION on Guadalcanal. He never talked about his combat experience, but he came away with a hatred of the Japanese that stayed with him until the mid ‘60’s when he learned of the treatment of Japanese Americans from a Japanese American clergyman. It was then he made his peace.
D C
2 months ago
Both my grandfather's were in the pacific theater.
Grandpa on Father's side was in 1st batch of troops in occupied Japan.
Found a film reel at hidden base near Mt fuji, donated it to Stanford University.
His older brother , a lieutenant died on the last day of fighting in Okinawa, by pop up machine gunner.
Mathew Mcdonald
4 months ago
My grandfather just turned 101 and was in the First Marines division at Guadalcanal. Got stranded when the Navy ships had to retreat, caught malaria and still fought. The only thing he would ever say is that the Japanese would not take prisoners therefore they didn’t either. That’s hardcore. ...
Michael DeLoach
2 months ago
My grandfather was a WW2 and Korean War vet. He was part of the ground crew who prepped the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, before it took off that day. He was also a golden gloves boxer on Joe Louis' boxing team who boxed in the '36 Olympics. He was indeed a great man who was part of the greatest generation.
wandering pine
3 months ago
My Grandpa was stationed in Japan after the War, and despite the horror of the conflict, he actually befriended a Japanese family who gave him a signed Japanese flag, which now hangs on my wall as a reminder of both my Grandpa and of the people whom we once fought, but who ultimately healed and made amends. Peace won after all that was lost. Forgiveness won after all that was taken.
War always represents a failure to listen. Nobody is worth killing, no matter how different they seem, and nobody is immune to becoming a monster amid the chaos of war. No matter who "wins," the loser in war is always Humanity.
I and others wrote some more in that thread at https://milesmathis.freeforums.net/thread/62/cares-lestrades-burma-paper-errors.