By Craig Madsen (USN, Ret.)

It was January 25. “I was 10 years old when [they] suddenly came to our village. They killed my mother, my two sisters and my only brother. My sisters were just 2 and 3 years old and my brother was only 4. I saw many terrible things that day. Anyone who stayed at home was killed. They didn’t care if you were a man or woman, young or old — they just wanted to kill people and they did it in the most horrific way. They killed and then they left. After they were gone, I returned to see the destruction. People were unrecognizable as they were all just black bodies with no hair or clothes.”

Sound familiar? 1,298 people died that day at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army because they lived close to land the Japanese controlled in the Hebei Province of China in 1941.

How about this — a militaristic governing organization took over an 880-square-mile locality, arrested the leadership, and instituted harsh assimilation policies. They incorporated indoctrination into the education system over multiple years, encouraging hatred of their enemies and lauding the virtues of suicide.

It’s not Gaza — it’s Okinawa.

When the United States invaded Okinawa as a part of WWII, the estimated population was between 450,000 and 500,000, of whom 100,000 were Japanese military or militias. The battle resulted in 49,151 U.S. casualties, including 12,520 killed or missing and 36,361 wounded. Japanese military casualty estimates range from 84,166-117,000 deaths. Additionally, 149,634 non-combatant Okinawan people died.

War is brutal.

There were no ceasefires. There was no flow of relief supplies to civilians behind enemy lines. “During the battle, the Imperial Japanese Army showed indifference to Okinawans’ safety, and its soldiers used civilians as human shields or outright killed them. The Japanese military also confiscated food from the Okinawans and executed those who hid it, leading to mass starvation, and forced civilians out of their shelters.”

The U.S. forces pressed on for a full 82 days of sustained combat operations. The end result was the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military. The Japanese fought from underground in caves and tunnels they had constructed and were blasted or burned out using artillery, tanks, and infantry armed with machine guns, grenades, and flamethrowers. Civilians, having had years of indoctrination that the U.S. forces were raping, atrocity-committing barbarians, often committed suicide.

War is not neat or tidy.

Civilians on a battlefield get hurt or die — often. That’s what’s happening in Gaza right now. There should be no ceasefires or respite for a brutal enemy. There is only unconditional surrender or elimination of the evil Hamas regime that committed atrocities against civilians, has failed Gaza Palestinians, and now treats them with contempt, using them as human shields and hoarding supplies for Hamas members.

Japan recovered from WWII. The evildoers that committed atrocities were held to account — seven Japanese leaders were turned over to the victorious forces, found guilty, and hanged by 1948, with many others sentenced to terms in prison of up to life in duration. We were not at war with the Japanese people, much as we are not at war with the Palestinians. Once the cancer that is Hamas is eradicated, along with the genocidal “from the river to the sea…” call for the elimination of the nation of Israel, the victors should establish a compassionate government similar to what was done by General MacArthur in post-war Japan coupled with a modern-day Marshall Plan to actually help the Palestinian people prosper.

In the meantime, be prepared for many more deaths. Evil must be eradicated and “never again” be allowed to rise up and kill innocent civilians. We did it before in WWII; Israel can do it now. We in the international community need to allow them the freedom to do so. And China — with its history of the Panjiayu Massacre described above and its response to the 1937 Rape of Nanjing — should fully agree.