For Whom The Dinner Bell Tolls

And tale so strange and unsettling that it just has to be true....

The year was 1944 and American fighter pilots were peppering the South Pacific with bombs in a ruthless retaliation to the attack on Pearl Harbor. After nearly three months of continuous raids of Futomi Harbor on the Island of Chichi Jima, just 700 miles south of Tokyo, the Japanese had surrendered and the Red Cross went in to clean up and patch up the survivors.

There were nine American flyboys shot down during the raids, but only one of them survived to tell the tale. 20 year old George Herbert Walker Bush was fortunate to glide his ruined plane further from the island than the others who had been shot down. He was plucked out of the ocean by the crew of the USS Finback. They found him clinging to the wreckage of his craft, vomiting and bleeding from the head. The only words he could muster were, "Happy to be aboard," when they brought him up on deck.

When some of the Japanese officers were captured and questioned as to the whereabouts of the other eight pilots who had swam to shore, General Yoshio Tachibana happily told them, "Yes, we captured six of them and they all received very kind treatment."

HA!

The General's idea of "kind treatment" was akin to the kind treatment that Hannibal Lector showed his patients whenever he felt a bit peckish. For it was revealed through further trials and investigations that those captured pilots were clubbed, bayoneted, and mutilated before they were served up as a four course meal!

That's right, boys and girls. It seems that the military Asian aristocrats had a taste for "long pig" and a sick sense of humor. The General and his pals feasted on the pilots' livers and large chunks of meat that were stripped from their legs and boiled into a stew.

The fiendish General Tachibana liked the man meat so much that he became incensed when he found that one of the airmen had been buried before his liver had been removed.

"What the fuck?!" he reportedly shouted in a fit of child sized boot stomping anger. "That's my favorite part of gai-jin (foreign barbarian)!!!"

The General ordered the buried airman to be dug out of his grave and had the liver removed so he could enjoy it with his cream of sum yung guy soup.

In contrast to these atrocious and horrific deeds, the captured Japanese officers were most polite and cooperative to their captors. They were thought of as "gentle and soft-spoken." One of the men, Adml Kinizo Mori, a senior naval officer said that his friend, "Major Matoba brought a delicacy to a party in his quarters- it was a specially prepared dish of Airman Floyd Hall's liver. I ate it pierced with bamboo sticks and cooked with soy sauce and vegetables."  Yum.

Matoba went on to convey that they believed the human "delicacies" to be good medicine for their stomachs.

Fortunately for Mr. Bush, he survived to become the 41st President of the United States. And fortunately for you, dear reader, he survived to have this picture taken and posted on the internet....

It's a damned good thing he wasn't wearing these when he was shot down. The Japanese would have fought to the death to get their mouths on those tasty gams!!!