I know a lot about what happened to these guys, and you can too, if you read this amazing site I came across called “The Notes of Japanese Soldier in USSR”:

I read it in the English version (you can get it in Russian and Japanese too), kind of badly translated but illustrated with these great drawings made by one of the “Pulverized” Kwantung Army POWs, who was shipped all over the Soviet empire, and ended up in Hungary riding horses with Mongolian POWs. The best thing about his story and his illustrations is that they’re about the happiest things you’ll ever see. The good old Japanese sense of humor is all over the place: jokes about baseballs smashing into the catcher’s nose in a POW-camp pickup game, jokes about “unfunny injections” from gorgeous Russian-lady doctors (the dude can draw women, let me tell you) and jokes about the fun of dying of dysentery in the Russian winter. It’s amazing. You expect some gloomy Solzhenitsyn shit and you get like Tom Sawyer in the GULAG. I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed reading anything as much as I did this site.

But as much as I love the Imperial Japanese forces, I have to do my job here as the War Nerd and say the final lesson I take away from all the research I’ve been doing. For awhile now, I’ve been saying that the two great Axis powers had the finest soldiers of that war. Well, I was wrong. I’d say the Japanese may have had the bravest soldiers, but that’s not the same thing as “best.” Like the Lt. who charged those Soviet tanks on foot, with a sword; brave, but stupid and a waste of fine troops. Better to scatter and hope some of your men reach base than walk into machine guns like that.

When all’s said and done, I have to say, and it’s kind of sad, the Russians and the Germans divide first place between them—the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, tied for first and, unfortunately, locked in a death grip. Nobody else comes close. Third, a distant third, to the US; fourth—who even cares? The rest don’t even count. All creds, props, whatever to you Russians, and though you might not like me saying it, to those Germans too, because you two were Ali and Frazier, man. You were the twin towers, the best of the best. So bask in that; your grandparents earned it. Glug some vodka for me and pour a Roman-style libation at the foot of Zhukov’s statue for me…comrades.

Gary Brecher’s book The War Nerd is due out in stores shortly.

This article was published in Issue #288 of The eXile in May of 2008.

Read more: eXile Classic, exile issue 288, stalin, the war nerd, Gary Brecher, eXile Classic

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