The price of victory has been high. Beginning with the dark days of December 1941 and continuing until September 1945, when the ships of the Pacific Fleet steamed triumphant into Tokyo Bay, the Navy's losses were severe. The casualties of the United States Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard reached the totals of 56,206 dead, 80,259 wounded, and 8,967 missing. Many of these gallant men fell in battle; many were lost in strenuous and hazardous operations convoying our shipping or patrolling the seas and skies; others were killed in training for the duties that Fate would not permit them to carry out. All honor to these heroic men. To their families and to those who have suffered the physical and mental anguish of wounds, the Navy includes its sympathy in that of the country they served so well. It is my sincere hope- and expectation- that the United States will hereafter remain ever ready to support and maintain the peace of the world by being ever ready to back up its words with deeds.

I investigated reported Japanese atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts of reliable eyewitnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility is beyond question afford convincing proof that the Japanese Army behaved and is continuing to behave in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns. Not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians were slaughtered, many in cold blood.

On serious estimates of the total death toll, Hindu efforts have been remarkably defective. Twitterati bandy about the number arrived at by historian KS Lal back in 1979: “80 to 100 million between 1000 and 1525” missing from the demographic figures, which already are necessarily vague in themselves. Moreover, these are not all victims of massacres: some fell as collateral damage of agricultural or economic policies that disrupted food production (as under the British or in Maoist China), or were never born because of the potential parents’ displacement or enslavement. On the other hand, in the Northwest the killing started centuries earlier, and after 1525, it resumed.

The source is the late Delhi Univ history professor K.S. Lal. But his claim is not that 80 millions were physically killed by the invaders/occupiers, merely that 80 million have gone missing from the extrapolated demographic development (itself already a very risky guess) during that period. This includes people killed, but also the effect of lawlessness and famines which he claims were triggered by the extremely high taxation and other deliberate poverty-promoting policies of the Delhi Sultanate.

I am compelled to observe, with whatever regret, that notwithstanding the frequent and sanguinary executions which have been dealt among the people of Hindustan, the number of the turbulent and disaffected never seems to diminish; for what with the examples made during the reign of my father, and subsequently of my own, there is scarcely a province in the empire in which, either in battle or by the sword of the executioner, five or six hundred thousand human beings have not, at various periods, fallen victims to this fatal disposition to discontent and turbulence. Ever and anon, in one quarter or another, will some accursed miscreant spring up to unfurl the standard of rebellion; so that in Hindustan never has there existed a period of complete repose.

But what has happened during the last year and a half has forced all reasonably farsighted men to understand that we are living in a new world. We have let our navy deteriorate to a degree both shameful and alarming. We have shown by our own conduct when the Hague Conventions were violated that all such treaties are utterly worthless, as offering even the smallest safeguard against aggression. Above all, the immense efficiency, the utter ruthlessness, and the gigantic scale of the present military operations show that we need military preparedness on a scale never hitherto

There were 600,000 dead, 14,000,000 driven from their homes 100,000 young girls kidnapped by both sides, forcibly converted or sold on the auction block ... One convoy of Sikhs and Hindus from West Punjab was 74 miles long, and raiders (Muslim mobs) who attack it constantly en route did not need to watch for it: they could smell its coming, for it was riddled with cholera and other foul diseases ... there took place murder, looting, burning and raping such as the world had not seen since the days of Chengiz Khan.

Our reprisal raids on North Vietnam hardly conformed to these standards. By our own account, in self-defense, we had already sunk three or four attacking torpedo boats in two incidents. In neither were our ships damaged nor any of our men hurt; indeed, one bullet imbedded in one destroyer hull is the only proof we have been able to muster that the second of the attacks even took place. To fly sixty-four bombing sorties in reprisal over four North Vietnamese bases and an oil depot, destroying or damaging twenty-five North Vietnamese PT boats, a major part of that tiny navy, was hardly punishment to fit the crime....

An important body of evidence that suggests the irrelevance of enemy atrocities to U.S. intervention in Vietnam may be found in official Washington responses to a broader spectrum of foreign atrocities. Official estimates of deliberate NLF killings in South Vietnam for the nine-year period 1958-1966 are on the order of 12,000, and the Defense Department estimates 19,578 enemy killings of civilians in South Vietnam from 1964 through September 1969. Yet in 1966 between 500,000 and 1,000,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered in Indonesia without even provoking any official U.S. protest, let alone an invasion to prevent mass murder.

Military men are the scourges of the world.

Mukherjee's account makes absolutely clear that, in order to protect the (British) Raj from a Japanese threat that never materialized, the British state sacrificed the lives of some 5 million people. The war cabinet maintained an attitude of callous indifference. In Churchill's case, the indifference was strongly tinged with racism.

Even today, as regards East Timor, where our brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) have very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our leaders. It is a “benign bloodbath” in our terminology.

Even today, as regards East Timor, where our brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) have very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our readers. It is a “benign bloodbath” in our terminology.

Imagine if you will a ship from a nation not at war with anyone sailing in international waters on a quiet June day being suddenly attacked by unidentified warplanes and torpedo boats, their markings covered up to conceal their country of origin. The vessel under attack had little with which to defend itself, but its crew heroically made sure that a large national flag was hoisted to demonstrate that it was not a belligerent in anyone’s conflict. The attackers noted the nationality of the vessel, but persisted in their aggression in a clear attempt to sink the ship and kill all its crew. The officers on the ship radioed that they were under attack and asked for help, but even though friendly fighter aircraft were within striking distance and were automatically dispatched, they were then mysteriously recalled... Life rafts lowered into the water as the vessel seemed to be sinking were machine gunned by the attacking aircraft and torpedo boats to make escape or evacuation of the wounded impossible but the captain and survivors worked heroically, and successfully, to keep the ship afloat. When the vessel finally made it back to port, the officers and crew were sworn to silence by their own government and a cover-up was initiated that has persisted to this day. Many of the ship’s survivors have died since that day 53 years ago, and the attempts of the remainder to see justice before they are also gone have been ignored.