“When we made contact with a group of Japanese in the jungles, we would form a horseshoe semi-circle around them, this way we wouldn’t be shooting each other. Once we were all in the right positions around them, on signal we would all start firing.
After the firing stopped, we had to check the bodies and camp area; the Japanese that were just wounded we shot, none were left alive. On this particular raid, I carried a thompson machine gun. When I saw the 3 Japanese that I hit that day and how broken up they were, I got sick to my stomach cause one of the Japanese was hit in the left shoulder and arm, which was just barely attached to his body.
His bones were showing through his flesh, he was still alive and moaning, so he was shot in the head – this ended his suffering. When I checked his pockets for any papers or regiment ID, I found he had a picture of a woman and 2 children.
This made me realize I had just killed a husband and father. On all these hunts, we never left any Japanese alive. This has haunted me all my life because we could tell no one, never, of what we were doing on the Japanese renengade hunts.”
– Warren Lemoi. US Marines. Guam, 1945-46. World War Two.
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This is only part of a much longer story. The entire thing will be available in my upcoming book “What War Did To us” on Amazon soon
