War Crimes gone unpunished

Alive and safe, the brutal Japanese soldiers who butchered 20,000 Allied seamen in cold blood.

Crewmen on the submarine I-8, where Allied prisoners were slaughtered.

By NIGEL BLUNDELL - More by this author » Last updated at 17:53pm on 3rd November 2007.

The perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War remain alive and unpunished in Japan, according to a damning new book.

Painstaking research by British historian Mark Felton reveals that the wartime behaviour of the Japanese Navy was far worse than their counterparts in Hitler's Kriegsmarine.

According to Felton, officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordered the deliberately sadistic murders of more than 20,000 Allied seamen and countless civilians in cold-blooded defiance of the Geneva Convention.

Half a century on and this is important