re: Peleliu WW2 Chat

i've been there twice. it's a brutal fricking place and custom built for a defender to extract as much pain as possible.

quote:

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atrocities to your fellow buddies

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What amazes me (and I apologize if this comment isn't really fitting for the thread) is when you read descriptions of what the Japs did to American bodies on Iwo, Peleliu, etc. and what the Native Americans did to the bodies of Custer's troops, is the similarities. Not just mutilated, but specifically things like castration with the severed penis placed in the mouth, etc.

I know that it's a symbolic way to remove a soldier's manhood, but for two cultures thousands of miles apart to do the same thing, when I don't recall ever reading about that happening in European wars, it just boggles my mind. They say that Native Americans came from Asia via the Bering land bridge. I'm wondering if some Asian culture pieces survived thousands of years on both sides of the Pacific.

I don’t have much to add to this thread other than my grandfather was with the first marine division on the island of Peleliu and in the Guadalcanal conflict.

He was a farm boy from Garden City, Kansas, who enlisted in the Marines
My grandfather was adopted as his biological family gave him and his sister up during the great depression.

Met a lifelong friend on the beaches in the south Pacific moved his family out of Garden City when they returned to South Louisiana

He didn’t talk about the war very much, but on very rare occasions when he had one too many beers. Once such occasion, we were playing golf at Briarwood on airline and he was in his 80s. He was just watching and riding in the cart and drinking and he told me stories about machine gun nests wiping out many of his friends. Discovering caves in the rocky cliffs when the tide was out. Flamethrower filling caves up with fire and enemy soldiers bailing out on fire.

That Generation saw some tough shite.