t_co
Senior Member
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2012
- Messages
- 2,538
- Likes
- 709
George Bush's comrades eaten by their Japanese PoW guards - Telegraph
A friend of mine, whose great-aunt was a translator for the Chinese Foreign Ministry in the mid-1970s, has told me that the elder Bush, then Chief US Liaison to China, used to regale his Chinese hosts with this story in particular. She also recalled that he, more than any other US senior official, hated the Japanese. She also suspected that when Bush vomited into the Japanese Prime Minister's lap in 1992, it was actually a calculated insult on behalf of his comrades who were literally eaten by Japanese soldiers.Lt George Bush, then a 20-year-old pilot, was among nine airmen who escaped from their planes after being shot down during bombing raids on Chichi Jima, a tiny island 700 miles south of Tokyo, in September 1944 - and was the only one to evade capture by the Japanese.
The horrific fate of the other eight "flyboys" was established in subsequent war crimes trials on the island of Guam, but details were sealed in top secret files in Washington to spare their families distress.
Mr Bradley has established that they were tortured, beaten and then executed, either by beheading with swords or by multiple stab-wounds from bayonets and sharpened bamboo stakes. Four were then butchered by the island garrison's surgeons and their livers and meat from their thighs eaten by senior Japanese officers.
The future president escaped a similar fate because he ditched his plane further from the island than the other crews, and managed to scramble on to a liferaft. American planes launched a hail of fire at Japanese boats which set out to capture him, driving them back, and he was eventually rescued by a US submarine.