World Battlefronts: The Wages of Rape …

Jap bodies were strung like rags on the barbed wire around the American beachhead on Bougainville. In the torn jungle beyond, they lay like rotten fruit on the musty ground. While the attack was on—six futile assaults—the Japs had even sent their walking wounded back into action, to charge again. The Americans had mowed them down. At week’s end the Japs were withdrawing, possibly to reorganize. In the month since the assault began they had lost 3,508 counted dead—20 for every American killed—and many more wiped , out in the jungle by artillery.

The windrows of Japanese dead had a peculiar distinction. They wore red shoulder patches, the insignia given to the troops who had captured Nanking in 1937. Some of the rapists of Nanking had collected their wages.