Khou, who was blacklisted by the KMT regime in the 1980s due to his background as Japanese soldier and his advocacy for democracy, visited China on several occasions to collect information about his fellow Taiwanese soldiers who were unable to return home, and came up with his own estimates.Īccording to him, about 15,000 Taiwanese soldiers had participated in the Chinese Civil War of them, 12,000 were killed or went missing. One of the pioneers in gathering information and promoting veteran rights is Khou Chiau-eng (許昭榮), a veteran who fought in the Pacific in the Japanese Navy and joined the Chinese Civil War as a sailor in the Nationalist navy. Some of them died, and those who surrendered as prisoners of war were quickly forced to fight on the side of the Chinese Communist Party.Īfter the Korean War broke out, many of them were sent to North Korea to fight South Koreans and Americans. The volunteers and a large number of Taiwanese youth who were abducted by Chiang’s army were sent to China to fight the communists. The Nationalist Army launched a crackdown the next day, killing tens of thousands of people and almost wiping out an entire generation of Taiwanese elite. 27, 1947, after an argument between a cigarette vendor and Tobacco Monopoly Bureau agents escalated into an anti-government uprising. Some WWII veterans joined Chiang’s Nationalist troops after failing to find work after the war, while others had to find ways to survive amid the crackdown that followed the 228 Massacre. While the majority of those who survived the war returned home, some were unable to do so due to post-war chaos. Many Taiwanese women were also recruited as nurses.Īfter the war, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) tried 173 Taiwanese soldiers in 1946. Meanwhile, more than 8,000 Taiwanese children between the age of 12 and 20, known as shonenko, manufactured fighter planes at a naval factory in Japan between 19. According to post-war estimates, 90 percent of the Aboriginal soldiers who saw combat duty there were killed. Most of them (there were between 4,000 and 8,000 in total) were sent to Papua New Guinea and suffered some of the highest casualty rates.

Approximately 20,000 of them were Aborigines.Įlite Aboriginal soldiers, known as the Takasago Volunteers, were reputed for their supreme jungle survival skills and were fearless and fearsome. Many Taiwanese men volunteered because they were taught that fighting for the Japanese emperor was an honor and that they would receive better payment as soldiers. A total of 30,304 were killed in action, and more than 15,000 were listed as missing.Ĭasualty rates among Taiwanese were around 15 percent, much higher than those for Japanese troops. The wrong idea of the war and the lack of understanding of history is the result of strict education system and propaganda promoted by Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Nationalist government, which retreated to Taiwan in 1949 following the Chinese Civil War.īecause of that education, the role of Taiwanese in past wars remains, by and large, unknown.Īccording to statistics from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare,Ģ07,183 Taiwanese - 126,750 military personnel (1937-1945) and 80,433 soldiers (1942-1945) - fought in the Sino-Japanese and the Pacific wars in the Japanese Imperial army. Worse yet, not only is the majority of young Taiwanese unaware of that history, some of them have an incorrect perception of the war altogether, thinking that Japan was the enemy and that it was Japan, not the U.S., that bombed major cities across Taiwan toward the end of the war in 1945.

While more than 200,000 Taiwanese men and women participated in some of the largest military campaigns in history - as Japanese imperial military personnel because Taiwan part of the Japanese empire - no such ceremonies are held to remember them. In similar ceremonies the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, civilians and politicians also pay tribute to those who perished in the Allied Forces’ atomic bombings on Aug. On June 6 every year since the end of the World War II, ceremonies have been held on the beaches of Normandy, where heads of state and war veterans gather and mourn the thousands of soldiers who fell on that fateful day in 1944 and during the entire war.

Forgotten souls our last night meaning