Summit Gist

Thirty-two frightening snapshots of a hanging. And no one knew who the victims were – until now. The 32 black-and-white snapshots were like frames from a disturbing home movie —  four men marched to the gallows and hanged one by one. There’s a large crowd of onlookers present. Many are in military uniforms. Two priests accompany the condemned and raise crucifixes for them to kiss moments before execution. The scene is the stone courtyard of a big brick building where people are looking out glass-less windows and thronging the rooftop. Many bystanders have cameras. In one picture, a doctor with a stethoscope checks a victim for a heartbeat after he’s been hanged. When my colleague, copy editor Panfilo Garcia, brought the pictures to me and the Retropolis desk, he wondered whether anyone would like them as a donation. He had gotten them from his sister, but knew little about them. They were curled and a little yellowed from age. There were no captions. Thirty-two frightening snapshot...

American mutilation of Japanese war dead Brutality is common place in a war of attrition. The miX of Japanese war crimes and the extreme hatred of the Japanese in America led to things like this as a coping measure for soldiers. The pacific war is so incredibly fucked and not nearly enough people know about it and the wide range of atrocities that happened in it. People always talk about the horrible cost of human life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but know nothing about the Tokyo firebombings or the millions of murdered Chinese civilians. During World War II, some members of the United States military mutilated dead Japanese service personnel in the Pacific theater. The mutilation of Japanese service personnel included the taking of body parts as "war souvenirs" and "war trophies". Teeth and skulls were the most commonly taken "trophies", although other body parts were also collected. The phenomenon of "trophy-taking" was widespread enough that disc...

The original caption says "Japanese Prisoners captured on Bataan being led blindfolded back to Headquarters for questioning" Found in the US Army Official WWII Green books. Very interesting photo, you can see how exhausted the American soldier leading them is. The Battle of Bataan was a very rough slugfest for everyone involved The Battle of Bataan (Tagalog: Labanan sa Bataan; January 7 – April 9, 1942) was fought by the United States and the Philippine Commonwealth against Japan during World War II. The battle represented the most intense phase of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines during World War II. In January 1942, forces of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy invaded Luzon along with several islands in the Philippine Archipelago after the bombing of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The commander in chief of the U.S. and Filipino forces in the islands, General Douglas MacArthur, consolidated all of his Luzon-based units on the Bataan Peninsula to fight agai...

The body of a Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima island. The battle of Iwo Jima is the only time that American casualties exceeded Japanese in World War II, February 1945 by Eugen W. Smith.  The Battle of Iwo Jima (19 February – 26 March 1945) was a major battle in which the United States Marine Corps (USMC) and United States Navy (USN) landed on and eventually captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) during World War II. The American invasion, designated Operation Detachment, had the purpose of capturing the island with its two airfields: South Field and Central Field. The Japanese Army positions on the island were heavily fortified, with a dense network of bunkers, hidden artillery positions, and 18 km (11 mi) of tunnels.The American ground forces were supported by extensive naval artillery and had complete air supremacy provided by U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aviators throughout the battle. The five-week battle saw some of the fiercest and bloodiest fightin...

Two Chinese soldiers guarding a captured.Japanese soldier in Changde, Hunan Province, China // Nov-Dec 1943 Most ironic thing was that the KMT was encouraged to take prisoners to use as bargaining chip with Japan. When Red Cross went to Japan, Japan straight up said no Japanese soldiers were taken and those captured aren't Japanese (Basically implying that a real Japanese wouldnt surrender) The troops viewed every POW as a coward, because they themselves were taught that surrendering is cowardice and a disgrace, they were taught to not surrender at all. This characterized the Imperials as brutal to POWs. Women's rights in Imperial Japan was abysmal, where poor families can basically sell their daughters to brothels as legalized slaves. This way of life extended into their conquered territories as the comfort women. However, the overarching cause for these is the military, who sought to popularize their rule by claiming tenets to nationalism and racism, and combined with a corru...

German soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad, 1943 About 1 in 8 of them survived being pows and made it back to Germany. Of course, it depends on precisely what time frame you're talking about and who you're asking(the Russians had a much lower number, of course), but the German government, after the war, estimated about 1 in 3, with the last prisoner returning home in 1956. No question, though. It was a lot. The first thought I had when I saw this picture was "things will not go well for you." Seriously? I thought the number was more like 1 in 2. That may be close for the overall German prisoners during the war, but for just the German prisoners taken at Stalingrad, only 5,000 of 91,000 POWs taken ever returned to Germany. dude what... those are EXTERMINATION CAMPS, im talking about surviving concentration camps. HUGE difference! Also, The jewish population in europe Pre-ww2 was 9.5 million. After ww2 it was 3.8 million, so 6 million were killed by the nazis. That me...

Female Soviet soldier in German captivity 1941 Were enemy female soldiers exectuted by the Nazis? Unfortunately female red army soldiers were often raped and killed by the fascists or just killed. My grandmother who fought as a sniper with partisans throughout the war in Belarus and Ukraine would often tell me about her experiences She would talk about how many of her female colleagues would carry improvised suicide devices, or cyanide capsule but those were extremely rare. When they would hit the rail lines transporting POWS.to garner more manpower would often recruit the few surviving women,commissars, and Cossacks into special "retribution or revenge" pacts where if they while on expedition outside of the swamps where they operate from, if they encounter any German settlers they would brutally torture and kill the family, often drenching the occupied homes, blood, and other bodily materials. She would say how they were all fuelled by hate and rage, fighting with little to ...

An unfortunate Soviet female soldier lies dead, shortly after being executed by her German captors. 1941. Red Army female soldiers did not have a life to envy. The Germans called them "rifle broads". I believe there was actually a German Directive to kill female soldiers outright, similar to the "commando order". Their fellow Russian male soldiers called them "field mattresses".  The propaganda machine is quick to replace that with the timeless woman-knight archtype ('polianitsy"). Behind the lie of smiling hyper-snipers was a war against life itself. Nobody knows how many times it ended like this. You see a photograph like this and wonder about the human mind on the other side of the lens. Was he documenting reality, possibly the nihilism of war? Or is she a hunting trophy. Imagine how many hands and minds a photo from early 1940's, taken by a nobody halfway around the world and long dead, of 1 subject out of tens of millions, has to go throu...