SECOND EDITION

New Zealand Herald, Volume 82, Issue 25300, 6 September 1945, Page 6

SECOND EDITION

WAR CRIMES TRYING JAPANESE COURTS - MARTIAL TEKIUBLE ATROCITIES AN OFFICIAL REPORT B.v Telegraph—Press Association— Copyright (Eccd. 2.10 a.m.) NEW YORK, Sept. 5 Lieutenant-General Eichelberger, commander of the United States Eighth Army in Japan, said Japanese war criminals would be tried on a court-martial basis. Liberated war prisoners were now supplying information. He added that it was not. a simple problem. Probably no action could be taken for such things as slapping a man. Shocking Japanese atrocities committed against American prisoners are revealed in a State Department report which was not released during the war because of the fear that the Japanese would increase their butchery and shut off shipments of relief supplies to prisoners Philippines Outrage Japanese guards in the Philippines on December 14, 1944, forced American prisoners into an air raid shelter tunnel, emptied buckets of petrol into the tunnel and threw blazing torches among the men. Screaming victims who rushed from the tunnel were bayoneted and machine-gunned. Tlhj guards threw m dynamite charges to dispose of prisoners remaining in the tunnel. About 40 prisoners got out and hurled themselves over a 50ft clilf on to the beach. Some were shot and others buried alive. The Japanese recaptured one prisoner who tried to swim out to sea. They prodded him with bayonets, poured petrol crer both his feet and then set it alight. They mocked, derided and bayoneted the mail until lie collapsed. The Japanese then poured petrol over the body and watched the flames devour it. Japanese captured an American flier forced down in the sea olf New Guinea. They beat him with sticks virtually all day, all night, and until 3 p.m. the next day. Then a civilian named Inouyo hacked off the flier's head with six slashes of a sword. Machine-Gunned In Sea A group of 750 Americans crowded in 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. Other guards threw grenades among Americans trapped in the holds. The Japanese fished 29 prisoners out of the sea and transferred them to another ship and 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 surrendering or ' captured.. Prisoners' Arms Broken Two starving Americans picked papaya from a tree in their prison camp. A Japanese mess sergeant, Nishitomi, broke each man's left arm as punishment. Japanese at Lasang airfield, 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 to August, 1944; because they were deprived of their shoes. The Japanese at the 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. _____