Banzai!

Today I saw the World At War episode 6 - the Pacific theater of the war. The episode beautifully elucidated the build up to the Japanese intrusions in Manchuria - including its quitting the League, its brushes with USSR for the huge coal deposits in Manchuria, and how the imperial army switched directions and moved along the Great Wall into mainland China. What was unique about this war, the Sino Japanese one, was the absolute ruthless and barbaric nature of it. Apparently, even the Nazis were taken aback by the nature of the war. Nanking is quite famous, or rather infamous for this. Apparently, there was this competition between two rival generals of the imperial army to behead as many people as possible and in one day each beheaded hundreds of Nankingians. Peking fell, Shanghai followed. Due to the presence of Europeans who were also there for material benefits, Japan got into the Axis alliance. The episode then took us to the Indo-china region and how they finally got into war with Britain for Malaya and Burma. Britain at that time was fighting on multiple fronts - in Egypt against Mussollini's forces and Rommel's Afrika Korps and also facing the Luftwaffe Blitz. The Japanese advances weaned the Africa units of some of their reinforcements. Rommel could therefore push Wavell's forces east to near Tobruk. The tug of war continued for a while (Episode 8 is about the African wars) in the Middle Eastern/Mediterranean theater. I often use words like "Ging Ming!" with Shveta - meaning "save us!" (or "save me"?)...seems like when little girls were being carted away for persecution in Nanking, some lady in the European occupation areas heard their cries and those cries haunted her for the rest of her life, after she knew what happened to the people there.
To think that all this happened 60-70 years back seems strange. USSR lost more than 25 million people, Germany about 7-8 million. Who does bodycount in poorer countries?...Globally some 40-50 million or more must have perished in those 5 years. And yet we are 7-8 billion people today!!...