Japanese aircrew bailouts, prisoners?

[NUPPOL]

IJN loss april 1942
http://www.pacificwrecks.com/forum/v...php?f=2&t=4965

[Johnny .45]

Sorry, if I'da known this was going to get so many replies, I would have hurried back faster. Yes, Japanese aircrews were often killed outright due to lack of armor, and perhaps many didn't wear parachutes on offensive operations, but I was mostly curious about things like routine patrols, ferry operations, etc, where to loose an engine or run out of fuel and to go down might mean capture. I take it that it depended mostly on who the man was; in theory, most of them would have ditched, and then killed themselves if found by Americans, I guess.
Not all Japanese were as fanatic as they make out, but since they were fed terrifying stories about the awful things Americans did to Japanese prisoners, it would help encourage them to kill themselves. Most of them knew nothing about Americans, and expected to be tortured in unspeakable ways (in addition to being dishonored). If you expected to be subjected to the most gruesome and painful torture imaginable if captured, you'd probably kill yourself as well. Americans POWs were subjected to ill-treatment by Japanese, but nothing like what they expected the Americans to do to them (according to what their officers told them).
As for the video, I watched it, and the answer is he both killed himself and was shot. You can see him pull the pin from a grenade. If they didn't have guns on him already, they pulled them when they saw that. As the thing goes off, you see one or several smaller splashes, that would be the men shooting at him. The delay is either because they didn't have their guns ready, and it took a moment to pull them out and aim them when they saw him pull the pin, or they were already aimed at him and were startled by the explosion and fired at him. In any case, bullets hitting the water don't look like that. That's a single, larger blast from underneath the water, i.e. a grenade held against his stomach. The bullets were just overkill, and I'm not even sure they hit him.
That said, I can't help but wonder if the lack of Japanese prisoners taken early on is solely because they committed suicide, or if it was also because the US troops were shooting them rather than taking them prisoner. There wouldn't be any proof really, but I do know they encouraged them to hate the Japanese ("The only good jap is a dead jap" and all that), so it would not surprise me to find that many were shot in the water. Homicidal racism was the officially promoted doctrine in 1942, as far as I can see. They wouldn't outright tell them to shoot prisoners, but that doesn't mean mean wouldn't take things into their own hand on the rare occasion that an opportunity to take one POW presented itself. I know I've seen footage (maybe from the same reel that the grenade-suicide is from) that strongly appears to show submariners shooting a Japanese man in the water. It might have taken time for them to convince the men that they really NEEDED to keep some of them alive, and by then the Japanese were unwilling to allow themselves to be taken prisoner.
Amazing to think all this happened so recently, in the 20th century. I strongly suspect that humans don't, haven't and won't really change fundamentally.

[Larry deZeng]

For the up close and personal side of the story, this is probably the preeminent account of it all:

WAR WITHOUT MERCY: RACE AND POWER IN THE PACIFIC WAR by John W. Dower. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986, xii, 399 pp., illustrated, $22.50, ISBN 0-394-50030-X.

It's still the benchmark after 27 years. You can find many reviews of the book online. Prof. Dower covers the American attitude towards the Japanese enemy and the "take no prisoners" behavior of most of our guys who fought in the Pacific. Many documented examples.

L.