captain_spalding said:

Spiny Norman said:

I never saw that cemetery when I was based in Moresby but I got a small sense of it when I was doing evacuation flights out of Tokua, about 15 km from the erupting volcano at Rabaul. I knew there were extensive caves the Japanese had dug or extended on the other side of that mountain. The eruption had pumped out enough ash & rock that the entrance was completely covered up, and all the bodies & gear still in there would be there forever. They’d never been known or remembered from then on.

It’s the same in many places across the Pacific. Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Guam, Okinawa, Biak and other places have cave defences created by the Japanese.

No Allied soldier was going to risk his life going into them, (I know of two who did. One was killed immediately, and, the other, against all odds, succeeded in persuading some of those inside to surrender), so the least-costly (in Allied lives) strategy was to collapse the cave entrances with explosives, entombing those inside.

Every year, there’s ‘expeditions’ from Japan to try to locate the remains of fallen Japanese soldiers, including cave victims, and to return some of their bones to Japan.

Add to that who knows how many Japanese who were killed in the many, many palm log and earth bunkers that were built everywhere the Japanese occupied, and which are now collapsed, overgrown, and lost. And many, many more who went unburied in solitary deaths, or in the seas around islands.

Yeah. :(