“We Australians knew that they (The Japanese) were there in the jungle and we would dig in into position and then of course they would make an attack on our position. And when that was over and invariably we had been quite successful, we would then go out amongst the dead, the dead and the wounded. And on one occasion I went out on my own to a lot of them, and these were Japanese marines, and the officers had white scarves and white gloves in the middle of the bloody jungle.

I mean, they’re supposed to be their elite, their elite force, but they didn’t give us any more trouble than the army guys did.

They were cannibals. One of our officers – he was a very nice bloke, a very efficient guy – was shot and left on the track somewhere and they found his body later, went out and looked for his body and then his rump had been cut off.

Nobody told me what a lot of bas***ds the Japanese were. Nobody. You found that out for yourself. And we had no respect for them at all because we did not consider them as being good soldiers, we considered them, you see, as animals. And that’s the way we regarded them.”
– Keith Ross, Australian Army. New Guinea, October 1942
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As we always say here at Battles and Beers (TM) Every soldier has a story, and every story deserves to be told.