The Pacific Episode 1: Guadalcanal/Leckie FULL LENGTH

To be fair there actually were cameramen and photographers in the ranks of the militaries of every major participant in the war and yes, they would actually have to lug those bulky 1940's cameras around lol so even though you were wrong, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility. The photos and videos captured by those men provided a useful source of propaganda for news reels and helped civilians on the home front understand what was going on. They are also of immense historical value all these years later. There's even a good bit of color video footage of the war, which was a relatively new thing at the time. Regarding the Japanese, and how they could have sided with an evil regime like Nazi Germany: Not many know this because it's not taught very well but the Japanese were just as brutal if not worse than the Nazis. They considered themselves to be racially superior to other Asians and they had ideological, political and military reasons to join the Axis. Between 1937-1945 the Japanese military slaughtered some 14 million Chinese civilians and soldiers (that's more than twice the estimated 6 million who died in the Holocaust) and killed millions more during their occupation of the Pacific in places like the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. They committed unspeakable atrocities in China including mass rape in the Chinese capital of Nanking, impaling babies on bayonets and holding contests to see who could lop off the most heads with a sword. These contests by the way were casually reported in Japanese newspapers as if they were the scores of a baseball game. Japanese POW camps were especially brutal. For example it's estimated that 27% of Allied POW's died in Japanese camps while only 4% of Allied POW's died in German and Italian camps. They carried out sick experiments on Chinese and Russian prisoners including removal of organs and drilling holes in the head while the patient was alive and awake. They even attempted to weaponize the bubonic plague. Near the end of the war before the atomic bombs were dropped, a mission known as Operation PX was drawn up. This included aircraft launched from submarine aircraft carriers being loaded with plague bombs and attacking LA, San Diego and San Francisco. The submariners would also infect themselves with the plague and run ashore in a suicide mission. So yeah, the Japanese were right up there with the Germans in terms of brutality. In fact Mussolini and Fascist Italy were pretty benign in comparison to both of them.

JMCN1990