PRISONER OF JAPAN

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 3, 29 September 1943, Page 6

PRISONER OF JAPAN

Experiences Of Missionary

In China

To have lived in China as. a Japanese prisoner has been the experience, of the Rev. Hayden Mellsop, of the China Inland Mission, who'addressed the Wellington [Rotary Club yesterday. For the greater part of that time he was located in the city of Nanchang. in the province of Kiangsi (a district about as large as the whole of New Zealand), He was there when Japanese forces first bombed the place from the air, and watched ground troops shelling the city before they stormed across the river and captured the town. Mr. Mellsop said that people here might have heard of the horrors of Japanese bestiality in war, Ibut he could assure them that they had not heard one fraction of them. He had seen Japanese soldiers driving people from their homes and cutting- -them down ruthlessly in the streets in cold blood, innocent noncombatants without arms of any kind. They allowed the mission to carry on the hospital, but would not allow Chinese to go in or out. They surrounded the place with a tangle of barbed wire and made all within it prisoners. That did not matter so much till the food gave out. When the Japanese guards were asked if they would allow Chinese to go out and get some rice, their reply was. “No, the Chinese would not come out when, they could, now they will not be allowed to come out.” Mr. Mellsop said he did not know what might have happened but for the intervention of one Chinese who said he knew where there was a barn filled’ with rice. So in the silence of the night they managed to get over the wall of wire, and in one night moved from 14 to J'S tons of rice into the hospital. When they did venture forth they found that the whole of the business and residential premises of (Nanchang had been looted and destroyed, and that 15,000 Chinese had been put to death in ten days. The (battle in China was not all onesided. Describing the patience, persistence and courage of the Chinese, he told how they had taken up 170 miles of railway track and actually carried it to western China. He also explained how the Chinese induced the Japanese troops to come on and on, till they were surrounded and liquidated, while the people responsible for them disappearance evaporated into the hills when other enemy forces sought them out. One of the worst forms of Japanese domination was .the manner in which they forced the Chinese, to eat opium or smoke opium cigarettes till they became addicts, -and docile to Japanese rule.