JAP. BRUTALITY

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 57, 8 March 1944, Page 4

JAP. BRUTALITY

HONGKONG HORRORS

TORTURE AND BAYONETING

(0.C.) SAN FRANCISCO, Feb- 18

Horrible recollections of life in a Jap prison camp near Hongkong haunt the memory of Miss Gwen Dew, Detroit newspaper woman. Released from censorship or suppression, she has just described in California another "march of death" that took place after the white flag of surrender was run up at Hongkong and then hauled down to clear the way for the Rising Sun banner of Japan.

"Two hundred of us were marched 10 miles over the mountains," she said. "The oldest was an American, 83, and the youngest a baby of two months. Periodically we were forced to stop and watch the torture of Chinese and Indians on barbed-wire fences. We saw them bayoneted. We saw British soldiers paraded before Chinese civilians so the Jap conquerors could boast of the fall of white men.

"We saw the surrendered soldiers clubbed down and bayoneted in a broiling sun." The Japs had no regard for humanities or decencies, Miss Dew said. When their 50,000 troops overwhelmed the garrison of 10,000 British at Hongkong, a typical incident was a surge upon the St. Stephen's emergency hospital. The Japs ignored huge red crosses designating the hospital, beat down a guard and killed a hospital chief who tried to intervene. "They weren't' content to kill," she added. "They ripped the bandages off 60 British and Canadian wounded men and let them suffer before bayoneting them. Then they raped many nurses time and time again."

As a prisoner, Miss Dew lived for a time in a house with 18 men, a home filled with centipedes, scorpions and spiders, a nest of malaria. Most Camp Stanley prisoners slept on the floor with gunny sack blankets. In six months she had no fresh fruit or green vegetables, no milk, three eggs"Forty per cent had beriberi, scurvy or pellagra," she said. "They/generally lost 25 to 1001b. I ate out of a tin can from a garbage heap. In my six months the menu never varied: At 10 a.m. a bowl of rice, worms and weevils and a cup of water gravy; at 5 p.m. another bowl of rice and a cup of stew made from buffalo and fish heads." Miss Dew was repatriated on the exchange ship Gripsholm.