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Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 58, 6 September 1945, Page 7

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TREATMENT OF PRISONERS (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright.)

WASHINGTON, September 5. Shocking Japanese atrocities committed against American prisoners are revealed in a . State Department report which was not released during the war because of fear that the Japanese would increase their butchery and shut off shipments of relief supplies to the prisoners. Japanese guards in the Philippines on December 14, 1944, forced American prisoners into an air-raid shelter tunnel, emptied in buckets of petrol, and threw in blazing torches. Screaming victims who rushed from the tunnels were bayoneted and machine-gunned. The guards threw in dynamite charges to dispose of the prisoners remaining in the tunnel. About 40 prisoners got out of the tunnel and hurled themselves over a 50ft cliff on to a beach. Some were shot and others were buried alive. The Japanese recaptured one prisoner who tried to swim out to'sea. They prodded him with bayonets and poured petrol over both his feet and then set them alight. They mocked, derided, and bayoneted him till he collapsed. The Japanese then poured petrol over the body, and watched the flames devour it. The Japanese captured an American flyer who had been forced down in the sea off New Guinea, beat him with sticks virtually all day and all night till 3 o'clock the next afternoon, and then, while troops screamed wildly, a civilian named Inouye hacked off the flyer's head with six slashes of a sword. SINKING OF HELL-SHIP. Seven hundred and fifty Americans, crowded into a Japanese freighter, starved, thirsted, and suffocated for three weeks until the ship was torpedoed off the Philippines on September 7, 1944. The guards, acting on the orders of Lieutenant Hosimoto, machine-gunned survivors floundering in the sea, and other guards threw grenades among Americans trapped in the "holds. Japanese fished 29 prisoners out of the sea, transferred them to another ship, and then shot them and threw the bodies into the sea. The report states that the United States intercepted a Japanese military message \ordering the outright murder of Allied individuals who surrendered \ or were captured. Two starving Americans picked pawpaws from a tree in their prison camp." A Japanese mess sergeant named ! Nishitomi broke each man's left arm as tjunishment. Japanese at Lasang airfield, in the Philippines, compelled 650 American prisoners to work, although it was a military installation. Lieutenant Hosida forced prisoners to kneel for a long time with their shinbones on rails, and then compelled them to run several kilometres barefooted over sharp coral. They worked with bleeding feet in coral from April until August, 1944, because they were deprived of their shoes. Japanese at Santo Tomas internment camp, Manila, killed four American civilians whose bodies were found with ten unidentified corpses buried near the military police headquarters. The dead were wired together in a bundle. ANGER AND DISGUST, "If anybody ever starts feeling sorry for the Japanese, he ought to be taken out and shot," said a high ranking naval officer at Manila as evidence of camp cruelties continues to pile up. Commander Stassen said: "In the past few days. I have experienced extremes of emotion, ranging from indescribable joy at the sight of the faces of liberated allies to anger and disgust over the treatment of our men. The watchword of all engaged in liberating these prisoners should be, 'We are making free men. 1" Colonel S. L. James, a signals officer who was captured on Bataan, told General Eichelberger and two officers of the general headquarters war crimes branch that even generals were knocked and kicked round by the Japanese, who played no favourites. Rank was not considered. Prisoners had to stand rigidly art attention.while the Japanese beat them. Medical officers said that 80 per cent, of the 2000 prisoners examined so far were in a serious condition.