WW2 soldiers radicalised by their diaries, finds study

09 May 2013 A historian studying World War Two soldiers responsible for violent atrocities in the Far East, says they were partly radicalised by their own dairies. Dr Aaron William Moore, from The University of Manchester, has been studying the private diaries of 200 American, Chinese and Japanese soldiers over the past ten years for a new book out next month. The diaries he tracked down were written during the eight years of "total war”, in which up to 20 million Chinese died and resulted in 2 million Japanese military casualties. One low point was the 'Rape of Nanjing' following the Japanese capture of the former capital of the Republic of China on December 13, 1937. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. "The state did not 'brainwash' these people into committing atrocities,” said Dr Moore. "Rather, it was a number of factors, including their diaries, which they used to build up a rationale which normalised acts of extreme violence.