JAPAN

GAVAN McCORMACK—In such an ecological hotspot, teeming with life at the juncture of forest and sea, Japan’s government, in consultation with the US government, insists that a huge new military facility must be constructed for the US Marine Corps. So strategically attractive is this site, overlooking the East China Sea, that the Pentagon planned, and would have carried out, such a scheme in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War except that it would have had to pay for it itself.

In December 1949, 12 members of Japan’s Kwantung Army faced trial in Khabarovsk for the atrocities they’d committed while developing biological weapons and testing them on prisoners of war. But Shiro Ishii, the head of the unit, never faced the tribunal. Instead, he was offered immunity and taken to the US, where he masterminded biological warfare during the Korean War. Until today, the US continues developing biological weapons in its dual-purpose labs, like the Lugar Laboratory in Georgia, and multiple facilities in Ukraine, whose activities have been causing alarm. Shiro Ishii’s successors allegedly continue their experiments on human subjects.

A B ABRAMS—An example of such an incident was in April 1946, when approximately U.S. personnel in three trucks attacked the Nakamura Hospital in Omori district. The soldiers raped over 40 patients and 37 female staff. One woman who had given birth just two days prior had her child thrown on the floor and killed, and she was then raped as well. Male patients trying to protect the women were also killed. The following week several dozen U.S. military personnel cut the phone lines to a housing block in Nagoya and raped all the women they could capture there – including girls as young as ten years old and women as old as fifty-five.

MICHAEL K. SMITH—The swath of destruction roars through the northern part of the city at 9000 miles an hour, making it rain debris. Houses and buildings are smashed, crushed, and burned. Stone is pulverized and tiles shoot through the air like bullets. The sturdy beams of the Mitsubishi Steelworks twist and turn like silly putty while roofs of reinforced concrete buildings crumple and collapse. Trees are ripped from the ground, utility poles snap like broken matchsticks, and a hurricane of shattered glass embeds countless shards in human flesh. Stunned survivors cup detached eyeballs back inside their skulls.

Generally good answer but to nit pick what you left out was the flawed Japanese pre war training program that was very elitist and purposely focused on a rather small highly trained cohort of pilots rather than quantity as well as quality. Look at the U.S. or British training system the contrasts are striking. Just the entrance criteria were so elitist that few could even qualify for pilot training and training was so tough and realistic that losses were high just as in say Japanese destroyer crews for example.