JAPS HANGED

Grey River Argus, 29 November 1946, Page 2

JAPS HANGED

IN NEW GUINEA • TOKIO, November 26. The Australian legal section of Allied Headquarters in Tokio announced that 21 Japanese war criminals were hanged at Rabaul. Giving evidence at the War Crimes Tribunal on Japanese brutality to sick, wounded and dying Allied war prisoners working in Siam and Burma, a Melbourne surgeon, Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Coates, a former war prisoner himself, said he amputated as many as 10 legs. daily in one camp. He said the lives of thousands of Allied prisoners who died in the streaming Burma jungles because of mistreatment and starvation, could have been saved had their Japanese captors provided quinine from the bountiful stocks they kept. Once a Japanese medical officer inspected men in hospital “by hastily walking past them”, and ordered 1000 out to work on a railway project immediately. A great number of them died daily from tropical diseases.