Tough question. There is just so much cruelty in WW2, it’s really hard to fathom.
Everyone- literally- knows who Hitler was and knows about the pure horrific brutality of the Nazi regime and the SS. Yet somehow, the Japanese are often given a pass in WW2 and considered less evil than Hitler.
So while the Holocaust and many atrocities of the Nazi Reich rank as the cruelest events in WW2 I think we should focus on what the Japanese did.
The rape of Nanjing. When the Japanese army took Nanjing it subjected the civilian population to brutality and horror that would make the SS gawk in horror.
- 50,000+ women were raped and then executed. Women who had been raped were found dead, impaled with swords through their vagina as to kill them slowly and painfully,
- Babies were used for target practice and sword practice. One man would toss the baby in the air so another could try to cut the child in half with his sword
- Cvilians were rounded up and executed before being left out on the street- thousands of civilians were found with bullet holes in their backs as they were mowed down while trying to flee.
- Around 300,000 innocent civilians were slaughtered over the course of days.
Here is a first hand account of what happened- I think it is worth reading so you can grasp the full horror of what happened.
On December 13, about 30 soldiers came to a Chinese house at No. 5 Hsing Lu Koo in the southeastern part of Nanking and demanded entrance. The door was open by the landlord, a Mohammedan named Ha. They killed him immediately with a revolver and also Mrs. Ha, who knelt before them after Ha’s death, begging them not to kill anyone else. Mrs. Ha asked them why they killed her husband and they shot her. Mrs. Hsia was dragged out from under a table in the guest hall where she had tried to hide with her 1-year-old baby. After being stripped and raped by one or more men, she was bayoneted in the chest and then had a bottle thrust into her vagina. The baby was killed with a bayonet. Some soldiers then went to the next room, where Mrs. Hsia’s parents, aged 76 and 74, and her two daughters aged 16 and 14 [were]. They were about to rape the girls when the grandmother tried to protect them. The soldiers killed her with a revolver. The grandfather grasped the body of his wife and was killed. The two girls were then stripped, the elder being raped by 2–3 men and the younger by 3. The older girl was stabbed afterwards and a cane was rammed in her vagina. The younger girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had been meted out to her sister and mother. The soldiers then bayoneted another sister of between 7–8, who was also in the room. The last murders in the house were of Ha’s two children, aged 4 and 2 respectively. The older was bayoneted and the younger split down through the head with a sword
None of this was rare. This was how the Japanese treated the Chinese people in WW2. They treated American POWs no better either. Japan kidnapped Korean women to serve as sex slaves and performed gruesome experiments on captured civilians.
It does not matter how great Japan is today- they do not deserve a pass for what they did.
They were every bit as evil, demented, and disgusting as the Nazis and they deserved every inch of the ass kicking the US handed them. Japan was not the good guy in WW2, they were 100000% the bad guy. They were an evil, racist, totalarian Empire that had no concern for human life whatsoever.
Japanese soldiers and generals are no more heroes than the SS monsters that slaughtered millions in Europe.