Armageddon

It was a war of hatred, fanned by propaganda. The Allies filmed themselves machine-gunning Japanese survivors in lifeboats and showed it in cinemas. The Japanese scoured their appalling prison camps to find prisoners fit enough to act in a propaganda film, playing golf and eating steaks. The reality was brutal. Women on both sides toiled and suffered. Two hundred thousand Asian women were forced into Japanese military brothels: rape on an industrial scale. Rather than face the shame of defeat and - according to their propaganda - inevitable rape by the Americans, Japanese women on Saipan jumped off cliffs with their babies.