"I shot him in the head with a .45 and automatically the mouth opens up. Man! All them gold teeth staring at me. And I didn’t knock them out with a rifle, but I used pliers. I had a whole canteen of gold teeth. That’s kind of cannibalistic, but during the war everything is horrible.
I guess I just had so much hate while I was doing that, you know. There are a lot of atrocities in war on both sides. Not only on one side, on both sides. Call it revenge. Call it what you will.
In training they showed us the Japanese fighting the Chinese - showed us how they threw the children up and bayoneted them. And they put that hate in us. In other words, you can’t kill sweetly, you have to have that hate. Well, after that training, you have a lot of hate. I hated the Japs. But it was something that I just loved to do - kill, day in and day out.
I thought they were very cruel, they were sadistic. They wanted to die for the Emperor and we had to go out there and help them die for the Emperor. I would have described myself as a professional killer, United States Marine, that was sent out, thousands of miles from home, to die for an ideal so that we’d have a better world to live in." – Sgt. Michael Witowich, 2nd Marine Div., Tarawa, Nov. 1943 #ww2 #marines #hardcore #stayzero #zerofoxtrot