BROKEN LIVES Japan Should Pay: Move In Australia

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 February 1947, Page 6

BROKEN LIVES Japan Should Pay: Move In Australia

(From

C. B. Mentlplay,

Special Press

Association Correspondent.)

(Rec. 11.0 a.m.) SYDNEY, This Day. "Japan should be made to pay,” is the cry that is being raised throughout Australia as ex-ser-vice organisations, backed by a sympathetic press, seek support for their claims that cash payments should be made by enemy nations to the survivors and dependants of men whose bodies and minds were broken by years of torture in prison-camps and in labour gangs. it is public apathy which is the chief opponent of the servicemen’s demands. Officials of ex-service organisations state that now, 18 months after the end of the war, the public does not know and does not want to know of the sufferings of Australia’s thousands of ex-prisoners. A Grim Record. The record is a grim one.' Along with many other smaller units, the entire Australian Eighth Division was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore. In the following years, Australians died in thousands under shocking conditions from Malaya to Burma and Siam. The story of the construction of the Burma-Siam railway is unparalleled in the history of modern warfare for its acts of bestiality perpetrated by the Japanese. . In August last year, it was reported that the Siam Government had offered to buy this infamous railway built often literally over the bodies of enslaved prisoners of war. In October, the Australian ex-pri-soners of War and Relatives’ Association, with the support of other organisations, put before the Premier, Mr. Chifley, a claim for heavy individual reparations from Japan for men who suffered hardship after surrendering

themselves into Japanese hands. Mr. Chifley promised that the claims would be discussed later, but so far no official pronouncement has been made.

The basic claim, which was origin--1 ally made by the Eighth Division sub- ' branch of the Australian League of Ex-servicemen, is for £5OOO to be paid to ex-prisoners or the next-off . kin of men who died in captivity, for the abuses and cruelty inflicted above the ordinary usage of war. This provoked a remarkable and immediate reaction. Within a few weeks, over 1100 letters were received by the league from men whose sufferings in the peace-time world could be attributed directly to treatment they had received at the hands of the Japanese. These letters and the personal investigation of the cases they represented have revealed that a staggering number of former ' members of the eighth Division though discharged as fit men, are now close to complete physical and mental collapse., “Broken Derelicts.” "With two more years of. public neglect and lack of interest, this glorious division will be a band of broken derelicts,” declared Mr. B. J. Macdonald, federal president of the Returned Soldiers’ League. Mr. E. Millhouse K.C., is prepared to fight the matter at the British Empire Service League conference in June, where the league will submit that the countries in which allied prisoners of war built permanent assets should pay for them. An examination of the Hague convention reveals that the men’s claims are sound. It is merely .a question of whether in war reparations, the wreckage of men’s lives should be placed on a similar priority to damage to. factories and pqjrt installation’s. It i.s an old question with a new and bitter twist: “What price glory?”