Max Hastings on Japan's Treatment of POWs

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The Japanese maltreated captives as a matter of policy, not necessity. The casual sadism was so widespread, that it must be considered institutional.

There were so many arbitrary beheadings, clubbings and bayonetings that it is impossible to dismiss these as unauthorised initiatives by individual officers and men.

A people who adopt a code which rejects the concept of mercy towards the weak and afflicted seem to place themselves outside the pale of civilisation. Japanese sometimes justify their inhumanity by suggesting that it was matched by equally callous Allied bombing of civilians.

Japanese moral indignation caused many US aircrew captured in 1944-45 to be treated as "war criminals". Eight B-29 crewmen were killed by un-anaesthetised vivisection carried out in front of medical students at a hospital. Their stomachs, hearts, lungs and brain segments were removed.

Half a century later, one doctor present said: "There was no debate among the doctors about whether to do the operations - that was what made it so strange."

Any society that can indulge such actions has lost its moral compass. War is inherently inhumane, but the Japanese practised extraordinary refinements of inhumanity in the treatment of those thrown upon their mercy. Some of them knew it.

In Stephen Abbott's camp, little old Mr Yogi, the civilian interpreter, told the British officer: "The war has changed the real Japan. We were much as you are before the war - when the army had not control. You must not think our true standards are what you see now."

Yet, unlike Mr Yogi, the new Japan that emerged from the war has proved distressingly reluctant to confront the historic guilt of the old. Its spirit of denial contrasted starkly with the penitence of postwar Germany.

Though successive Japanese prime ministers expressed formal regret for Japan's wartime actions, the country refused to pay reparations to victims, or to acknowledge its record in school history texts.

I embarked upon this history of the war with a determination to view Japanese conduct objectively, thrusting aside nationalistic sentiments. It proved hard to sustain lofty aspirations to detachment in the face of the evidence of systemic Japanese barbarism, displayed against Americans and Europeans but on a vastly wider scale against their fellow Asians.

In modern times, only Hitler's SS has matched militarist Japan in rationalising and institutionalising atrocity. Stalin's Soviet Union never sought to dignify its great killings as the acts of gentlemen, as did Hirohito's nation.

It is easy to perceive why so many Japanese behaved as they did, conditioned as they were. Yet it remains difficult to empathise with those who did such things, especially when Japan still rejects its historic legacy.

Many Japanese today adopt the view that it is time to bury all old grievances - those of Japan's former enemies about the treatment of prisoners and subject peoples, along with those of their own nation about firebombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"In war, both sides do terrible things," former Lt Hayashi Inoue argued in 2005. "Surely after 60 years, the time has come to stop criticising Japan for things done so long ago."

Wartime Japan was responsible for almost as many deaths in Asia as was Nazi Germany in Europe. Germany has paid almost £3billion to 1.5 million victims of the Hitler era. But Japan goes to extraordinary lengths to escape any admission of responsibility, far less of liability for compensation, towards its wartime victims.

Most modern Japanese do not accept the ill-treatment of subject peoples and prisoners by their forebears, even where supported by overwhelming evidence, and those who do acknowledge it incur the disdain or outright hostility of their fellow-countrymen for doing so.

It is repugnant the way they still seek to excuse, and even to ennoble, the actions of their parents and grandparents, so many of whom forsook humanity in favour of a perversion of honour and an aggressive nationalism which should properly be recalled with shame.

The Japanese nation is guilty of a collective rejection of historical fact. As long as such denial persists, it will remain impossible for the world to believe that Japan has come to terms with the horrors it inflicted.

• Abridged extract from Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings (2008)

Why McCain and all POWs deserve our profound respect and gratitude

Painting by Australian POW Murray Griffin

by Joan Cook, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University, The Conversation, August 28, 2018

On Saturday, John McCain, the U.S. Republican senator from Arizona, a war hero and two-time presidential contender, died. As remembrances of him pour out, let us not focus on partisan politics and which political party currently favored him more.

As a trauma psychologist who has spent the past 20 years working with combat veterans and former prisoners of war, I implore my fellow Americans to say our goodbyes to this American hero in a very different way. As Senator McCain, a man who was held prisoner of war for five-and-a-half years in Vietnam, lost his battle to brain cancer, let us take this opportunity to open our hearts and minds to the men and women who serve in uniform, particularly the diminishing number of former POWs.
Horrors we cannot knowU.S. Army Master Sgt. Finley J. Davis was captured Dec. 1, 1950 in the Korean Conflict. His remains were identified only recently, on Aug. 8, 2017 and were buried in North Charleston, S.C., April 19, 2018. U.S. Department of Defense, via AP

I have had the privilege of clinically working with dozens of former POWs, typically combatants who were taken hostage and held by an enemy power during World War II, the Korean Conflict or the Vietnam War. What many Americans may not know or remember is that fewer combatants are taken hostage nowadays. The reasons for this are many, including the changing nature of combat, such as the lower ability on our enemies’ part to use large amounts of mortar, artillery fire and airstrikes. Compared to World War II, where the number of POWs was over 100,000, the Vietnam War had relatively few, with fewer than 800 Americans known to have been held captive. But when you work with a POW and hear what he went through while in captivity, and the long-standing effects post-captivity, you realize that one is too many.

These men were cut off from the life they used to know, the comforts of home and the arms of their loved ones. They also suffered severe and extended exposure to captivity trauma. The tactics commonly used by captors are isolation, deprivation, abuse and interrogation. Most U.S. POWs were treated very harshly, but imperial Japan, the North Koreans, Chinese and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were particularly brutal. Our men, and sometimes women, were actively beaten and tortured. They were forced to stand or kneel for hours and sometimes days on end. They were denied and deprived of food, water and medical care. They were threatened with death and had to see and hear their fellow soldiers being tortured. These men had their arms and leg bound by ropes, ratchet handcuffs, leg irons or stocks, and were stretched for long periods of time. Can you imagine the physical pain and the emotional terror?

And, on top of that, they felt profound loneliness and humiliation.

Understandably, these men were in a hurry to return home. Hardly any received reintegration or rehabilitation upon release. And, the results of their captivity trauma followed them. The lifelong effects of captivity cannot be overstated. The consequences of being a former POW are extensive and well-documented.

These men often have neuropsychological, psychiatric, medical and social difficulties. Their problems include memory deficits, decreased ability to concentrate, gruesome nightmares, interrupted sleep cycles and an exaggerated startle response. Not surprisingly, they have much higher rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder than the general population.

They also have higher rates of chronic physical health disorders, particularly those of the peripheral nervous system, joints and back, and an increased rate of peptic ulcers. Because of the physical punishment or treatment with torture devices or procedures, they can also have long-lasting moderate to severe pain. How they live with these long-lasting effects is nothing short of remarkable.
Ongoing effectsA veteran marches in a United War Veterans Council parade on Veterans Day, 2016, in New York City. Glynnis Jones/Shutterstock.com

The enduring and painful psychological toll can also have an impact on their interpersonal relations and the lives of their spouses and children. Former Vietnam War POWs are more likely to divorce, have shorter marriages and have wives with lower marital satisfaction than Vietnam-era service members who did not experience captivity. It makes sense that POWs have greater impairments in connecting with others and a harder time with emotional and sexual intimacy.

Former POWs also have higher rates of verbal and physical aggressiontoward their partners. Many men I have treated over the years have talked about walking point around the perimeter of their homes because of concern that they or their loved ones might be attacked. Some go so far as to sleep with weapons under their pillows. Imagine having a partner with such afflictions.

Now it’s true that some of these men did not experience resulting emotional distress. Most did, however: some with continuous troubles and others with a waxing and waning of difficulties over their lifespan.

I’ve never had the fortune to meet John McCain or had an opportunity to directly assess his mental health. But he talked about his struggles rather candidly at times. And others have commented that he seemed most engaged when he was outraged, perhaps an effect of his captivity.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to tell you while McCain was incredibly resilient, there was also enormous pain. How can people know this about Senator McCain and our nation’s service members and not feel for them, not put ourselves in their shoes for just a second, imagine their agony, show them the respect they deserve and profoundly appreciate their sacrifice? At his passing, I ask other Americans to join me in saying, “Thank you, Senator McCain for serving our country with distinction and honor. America was better for your presence. Rest well, Old Soldier.”

Hawaii marker to honor hundreds of WWII prisoners of war

LuDan Crowley

POW recounts the inhumanity of Imperial Japan

By WYATT OLSON
STARS AND STRIPES, August 16, 2018

Daniel Crowley often repeats two words as he recounts his experience as a prisoner of war being shipped from the Philippines to Japan in 1944: nightmare and lucky.

“The hellships were nightmarish,” said the 96-year-old. As the Allies prepared to retake the Philippines after more than three years of Japanese occupation, POWs were marched to ports to be shipped to the Japanese mainland. Hundreds of men would be crammed together in the deepest bowels of the ships in sweltering heat and little or no ventilation.

“They would prod you in the ass with their bayonets and force you down into the deepest ‘dragoons’ until they packed human beings so tightly that you couldn’t turn around, sit down, lie down,” Crowley said. “You just sat in the [feces]. It’s beyond your worst nightmare.”

The guards’ “idea of a humane gesture,” he said, was to let a few men each day carry buckets of feces and urine to the top deck and dump it over the side of the Taikoku Maru. “And throw dead bodies over the side,” he said. “They definitely allowed that every day.”

“But actually, I was lucky,” Crowley said, noting that the ship made it to Japan intact in a relatively fast 17 days. Other hellships took many more weeks and were frequently targets of Allied submarines and carrier aircraft because they were not marked as carrying POWs.
Death march

For Crowley and all the other American POWs in the Philippines, the hellships were just one scene from a three-year tribulation steeped in death, deprivation and depravity.

The youngest of six brothers, Crowley was stationed in the Philippines in the spring of 1941 as a private in the U.S. Army Air Corps and worked on servicing aircraft.

With the outbreak of war with Japan that December, he and everyone else in uniform “all turned into infantry grunts,” defending the island with mostly World War I-era weapons.

Four months later, about 78,000 American and Filipino troops made a final stand with their backs against the sea at the tip of Bataan Peninsula. Crowley was among them.

On April 9, 1942, Maj. Gen. Edward King Jr., surrendered those troops, and they were led away on the infamous and deadly Bataan Death March.

Crowley, however, jumped into the sea at night and swam to Corregidor Island, about three miles off the tip of Bataan, which was still held by the U.S. Marines. He fought there until May 6, when Gen. Jonathan Wainwright surrendered. The POWs were marched through the streets of Manila escorted by young Japanese officers on horseback with drawn swords, Crowley said.

At the end of the march, they were loaded into railroad boxcars, where they were crammed together standing for what was about an eight-hour trip.

“Most everyone was suffering from diarrhea,” he said. “Between the urine and the [feces], we were wallowing in it. The floor of the car became a pestilence.

“That was probably the most horrible thing and all those years of incarceration — wallowing in the human waste,” he said.

‘Known mess’

Crowley ended up in a POW camp near the city of Cabanatuan, about 70 miles north of Manila.

“The death rate got to be astronomical,” he said. “Those who were dying were thrown under the barracks to lie in the dirt. That was called the ‘zero ward,’ meaning you weren’t going to come out of there alive.”

With the “known mess” he was in, Crowley said he jumped at the chance to join a work detail that was sent to the southern Philippine island of Palawan, where he spent a year and a half building a runway from jungle using nothing but axes, picks and shovels.

They survived on what was roughly 600 calories a day in the form of rice soup.

“The body stabilizes after a while, and all those who are going to die quickly, die quickly,” he said. “So the death rate was at horrendous levels in the first two months. After about six months, weak from the lack of nutrition and water under the brutal slave labor, you were a living skeleton.

“If you didn’t jump and work your ass off when you were ordered to, they’d just beat you to death if they wanted to. At the very least they’d beat you to pulp.”

“My beard was down to my waist,” he said. “My hair was hanging over my shoulders. My skin was burned black from the sun.”

He feigned insanity, and with the appearance to match it, the work camp’s doctor eventually deemed him “unfit for labor,” Crowley said with a laugh.

Others found a more painful way out of hard labor. He recalled that a guy from Long Island would use a metal bar to break the arms of the willing.

“These fellows would put their arm down on the stump, and he’d shatter it with his metal bar,” he said. “That was 10 cigarettes he charged.”

‘American slaves’

In March 1944, Crowley was shipped to the Japanese mainland where he worked in two separate copper mines, the last one 2,000 feet below the surface.

“We were slaves at the Furukawa copper mine,” he said, recalling the sadistic pleasure the controller of the cable and winch seemed to get in letting the bucket filled with men freefall for 1,900 feet before it careened to a stop.

He recalled walking through waist-deep snow to the wooden hut they were housed in outside the mine.

“They would give us two or three fist-sized clumps of charcoal to heat the whole wooden structure where hundreds of slaves were packed in — American slaves,” he said.

How did Crowley cope with such conditions for long without losing hope?

“I simply believe I was blessed by a strong father with the strong mind who imparted some of his genes to me so that I could make it,” he said. “I just pretended it was normal to get in that bucket with about 20, 25 other people and drop at an alarming rate for brutal slave labor. Every day was a new milestone. It actually got to the point where it was the normal way to live.”

But he also fixated on fantasies of vengeance, with thoughts of making the “sons of bitches pay if I could someday,” he said.

Crowley has had a good life since he was liberated, married 65 years to his first wife with whom he had two children. Living in Connecticut, he remarried recently, and his wife, Kelley, 42 years younger than him, admits that she has a hard time keeping up with him. He laughs often and jokes frequently.

But he will not make peace with his old enemy.

“I couldn’t forgive,” he said. “How could I forgive?"

POW Oral history

PROFILES AMERICAN SPECIAL PRISONERS OF JAPAN

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7TH POW JAPAN TRIP, DECEMBER 5-14, 2015

The following five American veterans, members of the U.S. Army Air Corps and U.S. Navy, travel to Japan on a Japanese government-funded program of remembrance and reconciliation. They will visit the sites of their capture, torture, and rescue as well as several Japanese cultural properties.

These men were “special prisoners” who were afforded no rights or even minimal care. One of the trip’s participants, Fiske Hanley, wrote a book, Accused American War Criminal on the horrors he and other flyers endured. Two of the men, Navy aviators Charles Brown and William Connell, were mentioned at length in James Bradley’s Fly Boys. Connell is believed to be the last American to leave Chichijima alive (others were beheaded and cannibalized).

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They will visit the location of the Kempeitai Tokyo Regional Headquarters where the US Army Air Corps aviators were tortured and held in the infamous horse stalls. The site is now the municipal building for the Chiyoda ward of Tokyo. The Kempeitai HQ for the Empire was located at today’s Palace Hotel. They will also visit the man-made island (by American POWs) that was the Omori POW Camp, where they were all held the final days of the war. It was the first POW camp liberated on the mainland. This site is now a motor boat racing venue and called Heiwajima or Peace Island. They also plan to visit the site of Ofuna, the Imperial Navy’s interrogation center in Kamakura where the two Navy aviators were held as well as Pappy Boyington and Louis Zamperini.

The men will include a visit to the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage and the memorial to the Raids in Yokomamicho Park. The Foreign Ministry will host a reception for them.

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CHARLES H. BROWN, 91, resides in Kingwood, West Virginia where he was born and raised. Upon graduating high school in the spring of 1942, he enlisted in the V-5 program (Naval Aviation Cadet) of the U.S. Navy. In the period 1942 to 1945, the Navy produced 61,658 pilots - more than 2.5 times the number of pilots as the Imperial Japanese Navy. After a semester at Potomac State College in Keyser, West Virginia, he traveled to Washington, DC to impress upon the Office of Naval Personnel that he was ready to enlist. He entered active duty February 10, 1943 and took Navy pre-flight training at the University of Georgia at Athens. After advanced training in Kansas and Texas, he was commissioned an Ensign on April 1, 1944. After training to fly a Douglas SBD Dauntless (divebomber) at the Naval Air Station in Deland, Florida, he was sent to the Naval Air Station Glenview, Illinois for carrier training and then to the Naval Air Station Astoria, Oregon to learn to fly a SB2C Curtiss Helldiver. He left San Francisco on January 20, 1945, aboard the USS Randolph CV15 assigned to the VB-12 of Carrier Air Group 12 known as “Crommelin’s Thunderbirds” after their legendary Commander Charles Crommelin. They were engaged in the first carrier strikes against Japan. Barely 26 days at sea and on his first mission, Brown was shot down on February 16, 1945 by anti-aircraft fire while bombing a factory. He made a water landing on Lake Kasumigaura, Japan’s second-largest lake, which is about 35 miles northeast of Tokyo. Villagers from Kamiotsu (today’s Tsuchiura in Ibaraki Prefecture) captured him and his gunner. They paraded the men to authorities with their hands tied behind their backs, blindfolded, and subject to local women hitting them with their geta (wooden shores). At the train station, Brown was briefly positioned for what he thought was to be a beheading. Instead, he was jerked to his feet and put on a train to Tokyo and the Kempeitai’s Regional Headquarters. There he was subject to continual, ruthless interrogation and kept in a filthy horse stall with a Japanese civilian, who was possibly an informer, and a Korean civilian, who taught him how to use chopsticks. Brown was not considered a POW; he was a criminal, a “special prisoner” outside any protections of military custom. After two weeks he was then taken from Tokyo to the notorious Ofuna Naval Interrogation Center in the historic seaside town of Kamakura. After a month of solitary confinement in a 6’ x 8’ cell, he was permitted to mix with other prisoners, but not to speak. At Ofuna, there was continual mental and physical torture on top of starvation and minimal sanitation. The Ofuna interpreter told the prisoners that there was a standing order that if the Japanese homeland was invaded, all prisoners were to be executed. While at Ofuna, he witnessed a “delivery” of young comfort women to the guards, which temporarily displaced the prisoners from their cells for the guards’ “recreation.” Sometime near July 1, 1945, the survivors were transferred to the Omori POW Camp Tokyo #1, an island in Tokyo Bay built by POWs. Finally, the prisoners were permitted to talk to each other and have their wounds treated. However, the special prisoners were kept in a separate barracks surrounded by barbwire and not allowed to associate with the other POWs. By late July, physically and mentally fading, he was confronted by another prisoner, flying ace Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington who cajoled him to “hang in there.” And he did. On August 15th, the Emperor’s address to the nation telling his people to stop fighting was broadcast throughout the camp. Much to Brown’s surprise the ‘kill all order” was not given and, instead, each special prisoner was given an envelope of Japanese currency for their “time” at Ofuna. Suffering from severe malnutrition, Brown barely remembers the next two weeks. On August 28, 1945, weighing 97 pounds, he was taken aboard the U.S. hospital ship Benevolence and soon flown back to the United States to recuperate from the after effects of beriberi, dysentery, avitaminosis, and beatings. After leaving the Navy in January 1946, he returned home and enrolled in West Virginia University where he received his AB and LLB in 1950. Brown became an attorney and practiced real estate and banking law for 50 years. He did not receive help for his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from the Veterans Administration (VA) until 1997, but he credits the VA counseling service with helping rid him of his persistent nightmares. He has been married to Betty for 67 years. They had three children. Some of Mr. Brown’s experiences as a POW are included in James Bradley’s 2004 best-selling history, Fly Boys: A True Story of Courage and Roy W. Bruce’s 1994 Crommelin's Thunderbirds: Air Group 12 Strikes the Heart of Japan. Mr. Brown’s POW memoir and oral history can be found at the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project.

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WILLIAM L. CONNELL, 91, lives in Edina, Minnesota. Born in Bakersfield, California, he grew up in Seattle, Washington. At 17, after graduating high school, he enlisted August 29, 1942 in the U.S. Navy and was sent to Yakima, Washington to join the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) to learn to fly. The Yakima Composite Squadron is one the few remaining original CAP Charter Squadrons. In January 1943, he began his Naval Aviation Cadet training at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. In April, he was sent to flight school at Naval Air Station Olathe, Gardner Kansas where they trained on the N3N Yellow Peril bi-plane for two months. Next was the Pensacola Naval Air Station to learn to fly a variety modern aircraft. He graduated in December 1943 becoming an Ensign and Naval Aviator. He spent the next three months in Douglas SBD Dauntless (divebomber) training at the Deland Naval Air Station in Florida and then six weeks at the Naval Air Station Glenview, Illinois for carrier training on Lake Michigan. Next was training on the new SB2C Curtiss Helldiver at Naval Air Station Barbers Point, Connell was assigned as a replacement pilot to Air Group 2 aboard the USS Hornet (CV-12), which he joined on June 29, 1944 at the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Enewetak, captured in February 1944, was a major forward base for the U.S. Navy during the rest of the war. After the war, the atoll was used for nuclear testing as part of the Pacific Proving Grounds. Forty-three nuclear tests were fired at Enewetak from 1948 to 1958. Connell’s first and last mission was July 4, 1944. After a predawn takeoff, Connell and his gunner, Ben Wolf, approached the small volcanic island of Chichijima in the Bonins, known today as the Ogasawara Islands. Their squadron was to bomb one of the heavily-garrisoned island's two radio bunkers, but as they approached their objective, they spotted two Japanese freighters entering the harbor. They decided to attack them as targets of opportunity. But before Connell had a chance to drop his bombs, an anti-aircraft shell exploded beside his airplane, tearing off the tail section. Although Connell was able to parachute out safely, his gunner did not. He landed in the waters near Chichijima and was captured. His first day was spent strapped to a tree in an excruciatingly painful position that prevented him from sitting. In the week that followed, he was either tied to the tree or being interrogated. While he was on the island, eight American aviators were captured, beheaded, and partially cannibalized for dinners by the General Staff. Five Japanese officers were eventually hanged for these crimes that were chronicled by Chester G. Hearn in his 2003 Sorties into Hell: The Hidden War on Chichi Jima. Connell has the distinction of being the last American to leave the island alive. He was taken to Japan to the Ofuna Naval Interrogation Center in Kamakura, about 30 miles southwest of Tokyo. He spent nearly ten months there enduring isolation, brutal interrogation, and starvation. In April 1945, he was transferred to the Omori POW Camp Tokyo #1, an island in Tokyo Bay built by POWs. Today, the island is Heiwajima, a motorboat racing venue. Considered a “special prisoner” he and other aviators were kept in a separate barracks away from the other POWs on the island. They were considered criminals, not captives. Those who could work were sent out into the firebombed Tokyo to clear the rubble and salvage building materials. Daily, they were threatened with execution if Japan lost the war. Fellow prisoner, the Marine Corps flying ace Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington organized Connell and other to fight back if the Japanese tried to enact this plan. In the end, this was not necessary and their Japanese captors disappeared soon after the Emperor’s speech ending hostilities on August 15, 1945. After liberation at the end of August, he was flown back to the United States to recuperate at the Naval Air Station, Sandpoint, Seattle Washington hospital. Despite his ordeals, he remained in the Navy and retired in 1964 as a Lieutenant Commander. He spent the next 23 years as a State Farm Insurance agent. After his second retirement, he worked for the next 11 years in various positions at the Minnesota Valley Country Club in Bloomington, Minnesota. Connell has since turned his attention toward educating children about the history of World War II and mentoring them through golf and tennis. In 2012, he took his second parachute jump, but this time under much more controlled circumstances in Minnesota. He has also returned to Chichijima several times--once with President George H.W. Bush, who was also shot down near the island. Twice married, Connell is the father of four children. He is mentioned prominently in James Bradley’s 2004 best-selling history, Fly Boys: A True Story of Courage. His oral history has been recorded by the POW Oral History Project, based at Concordia University, St Paul as well as by the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project.

SCOTT M. DOWNING, JR, 96, resides in Amarillo, Texas. He was working for Boeing Aircraft making B-17s in Seattle, Washington when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in September 1942. He was not called to active duty until February 15, 1943 and he began his basic training at Buckley Field, Denver, Colorado (today’s Buckley AFB). He was then sent to Fort Hays State College in Kansas for Cadet Training and then to Bombardier School at Big Spring, Texas. In June 1944, he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant and sent to Harvard Army Airfield, Nebraska (today’s Harvard State Airport) and the 505th Bombardment Group for B-29 training. In mid-December 1944, he reported to Grand Island Army Airfield, Nebraska (today’s Central Nebraska Regional Airport) to pick up a new B-29 plane and was sent to Tinian to join the 482 BS, 313 Wing, 505 Bombardment Group, 20th Air Force in the Mariana Islands, arriving December 27th. Raids against Japan from Tinian had started November 24, 1944. His crew’s bombing and mining missions began on January 29, 1945. On their 20th mission over Tokyo on May 25/26, 1945, his B-29 was shot down near Musai, about 15 miles northeast of Tokyo in Chiba Prefecture. He bailed out of the burning plane and was captured almost immediately by civilians who turned him over to military personnel. The next day he and three other members of his crew were trucked through bombed-out downtown Tokyo to the Kempeitai Tokyo Regional Headquarters. After initial interrogations and beatings, he was thrown in a cell that was about 8’ x 12’. These were converted horse stalls that often held 19 men per cell including some that were critically burned and injured. For roughly three months, Downing subsisted on a baseball-sized ball of rice each day, and his weight fell from 165 to 120 pounds. These months were marked by a horrible monotony of fear and homesickness, occasionally interrupted by guard-administered beatings and sadistic interrogations. The men were not allowed to talk, wash, shave, or receive medical care. Conditions were so tight that when everyone would lie down to sleep, the only way to turn over was to stand in place, turn, and then lie back down. Throughout the day and night, they listened to fellow POWs–some of whom had been severely burned–scream in pain or insanity and struggle to take one more breath before their breathing stopped altogether. It is estimated that 250 American flyers were brought the Kempeitai Tokyo Regional Headquarters, but only 160 survived. On August 15, 1945, Downing and his fellow prisoners were moved to a barbed wire-surrounded barracks on a five-acre man-made island between Tokyo and Yokohama called Omori POW Camp Tokyo #1. This move was part of an agreement between the United States and Japan in anticipation of the end of the war. It was a tough camp but a relief from the Kempeitai horse stalls. On Omori, the prisoners had more freedom and could talk, bathe and exercise. On August 29, 1945, the over 500 POWs including 155 B-29 flyers on Omori became the first liberated by American forces. After the war he was in and out of Madigan General Hospital (today’s Madigan Army Medical Center) at Fort Lewis, Washington. He remained in the service and was assigned duty in the spring of 1946 at Clinton County Air Base in Ohio. In April 1947, he was ordered to Japan and was sent to the 611th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at Shiroi Air Base (today’s Shimofusa Japan Maritime Self Defense Forces Air Base) located northeast of Tokyo. Downing was soon asked to help investigate the atrocities committed by the Tokyo Kempeitai for war crimes prosecution in Yokohama. Working in the Investigation Division of the Legal Section of General Headquarters, Japan, he helped interrogate Japanese defendants and assisted the prosecutor by preparing the witnesses. He also testified concerning conditions and the treatment of the prisoners at the Tokyo regional Kempeitai Headquarters. Discharged from the Air Force while in Japan, he concluded his part of the investigation in early fall of 1948 and returned to the United States and Canyon, Texas. He then entered the construction business with his two brothers. Downing has been married to Bitsy for 64 years and they have one son. He enjoys fishing and watching college sports. His oral history is held by the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress.

FISKE HANLEY II, 95, lives in Fort Worth, Texas where he grew up. Always fascinated with aviation, he earned an AS in Aero Engineering from North Texas Agricultural College (today’s University of Texas at Arlington) and in 1943 a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Texas Technology College (today’s Texas Tech University). In his junior year, he was accepted into the Army Air Corps Aviation Cadet Program. Immediately after graduation, he was sent to the Boca Raton Army Airfield, Florida for cadet training for engineering, meteorological, and communications. The base was created from appropriated land of Japanese-Americans. In September 1943, he was sent to Yale University for specialized technical training and graduated in February 1944 with a second lieutenant’s commission. With only 20 members of his Yale class, Hanley was sent to B-29 flight engineering school at the Seattle Boeing factory. Graduating in August, he was assigned to the 504th Bombardment Group training as a flight engineer at Fairmont Army Air Field, Nebraska. In January, his air crew commanded by 2nd. Lt. John A Brown made their way to Tinian. They flew 16 missions, seven considered combat, which included the March 10, 1945 bombing of Tokyo. Hanley’s plane was shot down on March 27, 1945 while mining the Strait of Shimonoseki. One of only two crew members who survived the plane’s destruction, he parachuted into a rice paddy near Ueki, southwest of Yawata, near the steel mills of Kokura on Kyushu Island [today the mills have become UNESCO World Industrial Heritage sites]. His first eight days were spent in or near Kokura at a police station and a military facility. He had his wounds treated twice and he believes he was questioned by a high level Combined Fleet Command about his mission to mine Shimonoseki Straits. In early April, Hanley and 12 other B-29 captured crew members were taken north over 600 miles by train to Tokyo. On April 6th, the group arrived in Tokyo. Before reaching the Kempeitai Tokyo Regional Headquarters, the prisoners’ guards took the time to reward themselves by visiting a Comfort Station, or military brothel. The American flyers were taken to filthy, basement 4’11’ x 9’10” dungeons or “pig boxes” [buta bako] and told that they would either die of their wounds in or be executed. They were “special prisoners,” considered criminals who murdered women and children and lower than the vermin that would infest their cells and bodies. Eight men, a mixture of B-29 crewmen and Japanese political prisoners, were crammed into these cells. Except for one light bulb that burned 24 hours a day in the corridor, these cells were continually shrouded in gloom. Eventually he was sent to a cell holding 19 other men in an 8’ x 12’ horse stall in the back of Kempeitai Tokyo Regional headquarters. Many mortally wounded men were thrown into these cells. Hanley still has nightmares of their groans and screams of agony as they slowly succumbed to their injuries. Subject to constant beatings and brutal interrogations, Hanley and the other POWs were quickly fading from starvation, torture, untreated wounds, unsanitary conditions, and misery. One tormentor, the English-speaking Yasuo Kobayashi particularly stands out for his cruelty. He seemed to thrive on the prisoners’ agony and enjoy their suffering. He was directly responsible for the deaths of many prisoners and the continual torment of the rest. Although sentenced postwar to 40 years hard labor, he was released in 1952 and settled into a peaceful and successful life in Hawaii. On August 15th, the surviving POWs were taken to Omori POW Camp Tokyo #1 a prison camp island constructed by American POWs. Still “special prisoners” they were separated from the other POWs, but allowed more freedom, given medical attention, and could talk, bathe and exercise. On August 29, 1945, the over 500 POWs including 155 B-29 flyers on Omori became the first liberated by American forces. Camp Omori also housed Olympian Louis Zamperini, a WWII hero at the center of Unbroken, a film by Angelina Jolie based on the best-selling book by Laura Hillenbrand. Hanley was a “source for Unbroken” and he was invited to the movie’s Hollywood premiere in 2014. After liberation and medical care on the U.S. hospital ship Benevolence, he was flown back to the United States. He was treated at Letterman Army Hospital and then went home to Texas on leave. He was discharged from the Army Air Corps and married to Betty, an American Airlines stewardess, in June 1946. He went to work as an engineer for Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft in Fort Worth, which became Convair, then General Dynamics, and now today’s Lockheed Martin. He worked on developing new bombers and fighters as well as NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket. He retired in 1989 and wrote The History of the 504th Bomb Group in World War II and then his autobiography, Accused American War Criminal: One of Few Survivors of Japanese Kempei Tai Military Police Brutality. Married to Betty for 23 years they had three children.


DONALD E. RYAN, 93, lives in Sebring, Florida. He grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on November 16, 1942. He did his basic training at the Big Spring Army Air Force Bombardier School in Texas. In January 1943, he was sent to the Gulfport Army Air Field in Mississippi for aircraft training on P-39/P-40s and other older planes. He then trained at Boeing’s B-29 flight engineering school in Renton, Washington. In August 1943, he was assigned to the 794-468th Bombardment Group; 58th Wing, 20th Air Force at the Smoky Hill Army Airfield Salina, Kansas with the first group to train on the B-29 Superfortress. In January 1944, the 468th Bombardment Group shipped out to the Kalaikunda Air Force Station in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. It was one of four B-29 bases established by the U.S. in India. Ryan flew as a tail gunner in the 16 missions they had in India which included flying gasoline and bombs over the “hump” (the Himalayan Mountains) to China; bombing railyards and docks in Bangkok, Singapore, and Sumatra. The crew also participated in the bombing the steel mills at Yawata on Kyushu (today an UNESCO World Industrial Heritage site). In April 1945, they were reassigned to Tinian in the Mariana Islands. On their second mission, May 25-26, 1945 to bomb Tokyo, his plane was attacked and hit by fighter planes and those that could, bailed out. Ryan landed on a farmer’s fence near today’s Misato in Saitama prefecture close to Tokyo. The local Kempeitai official, who identified himself as having attended the University of Michigan, questioned him while “playing” Russian roulette on him. This intimidation was reinforced by taking Ryan to a saw mill and alternatively trying to stuff him into a casket or pushing him toward the buzz saw. He was soon turned over to military authorities in Tokyo and told he was a “special prisoner,” undeserving of care or POW status. He was taken to the Kempeitai Tokyo Regional Headquarters near the Imperial Palace. He was put in an 8’ x 10’ cell that was once a horse stall with 16 other men. Flies and lice soon turned his and his cellmates’ skin into unending open boils and infections. Continual beatings, starvation, darkness, filth, random cruelty by the guards, and dehydration wore on his humanity and morale. He endured the slow deaths of two badly burned fliers who were added to his cell. On August 15th, the horse stalls were emptied and the prisoners were taken to Tokyo Bay to wash in the surf and then to Omori POW Camp Tokyo #1. Still “special prisoners,” the men were held in barracks separate from the other POWs on this man-made island outside Tokyo. It was a tough camp but the prisoners had more freedom and could talk, bathe and exercise. On August 29, 1945, the over 500 POWs including 155 B-29 flyers on Omori became the first liberated by American forces. Ryan was evacuated to the USS Benevolence and soon flown to Hawaii to take a ship back to the United States. He spent at least six months in the Edward Hines, Jr., Veterans Administration Hospital outside Chicago and was discharged from the Army Air Corps in mid-1946. Ryan returned home to Kalamazoo where he worked with his brother in a truck leasing business and for a number of years owned the Otsego Inn. He has five children from his first marriage. He enjoys dancing and married his fourth wife in 2013.

Civilian POW of Japan in the Philippines

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Americans were not the only ones in the Philippines who became prisoners of Imperial Japan. Among the civilians in the Philippines there were British, Czechs, Swedes, Poles, Dutch, and many other nationalities. Civilians of Allied countries were interned and brutally treated. The following newspaper article tells the story of one Scottish family and the multi-generational effect of Japanese internment and cruelty. 

The full story is told in a new book made from a Scottish mother's diary, Amazing Grace: The unbroken spirit of a Japanese prisoner of war is available on Amazon. All proceeds go to The Samaritans.

Hidden in her son's teddy, a mother's diary of courage: A heart-tugging story of love and defiance in a brutal Japanese PoW camp - rediscovered 70 years on Iain Brown discovered his mother Grace was a Japanese prisoner of war 

From The Daily Mail,  28 November 2015 

The candlelight flickered as Grace Brown settled her infant son down for the night. Beside her on a filthy mattress a woman groaned, her face swollen grotesquely with the tropical disease, beriberi. 

There were 34 of them in that long, dark, sweltering hut, all in various stages of starvation. Some had been tortured. A few were close to death. Outside, a Japanese guard barked an order. 

Somewhere in the room, a child whimpered with fear. Gently, Grace extracted her son’s teddy bear from his arms, and felt within the lining. She pulled a sheaf of papers and a pencil from inside, and, looking around to make sure no one could see her, started to write. 

‘I keep saying to myself that certainly never had I expected to make this my home — nor my prison ...’ 

One cold day in 1992, a few weeks after the death of his mother, Iain Brown started the long, arduous task of clearing out her lifelong possessions. 

In her final years, Grace Brown had lived a simple life. A stern school secretary, who lived alone, she rarely smiled, and spent many hours volunteering for the Samaritans. Tucked in a drawer, Iain stumbled across a set of manila folders. 

Leafing through the sheaves of yellowing papers inside, he realised he was looking at his mother’s secret diary. He gently packed them away without reading them. ‘

It wasn’t for me to pry,’ he says. ‘I put the papers back in the folders and forgot about them for the next 25 years.’ 

Earlier this year, his daughter Jackie finally read them. What she found was extraordinary: an astonishing account of the two and a half years Grace spent as a Japanese prisoner of war in the Philippines during World War II — the pages she had risked her life to write by candlelight all those years ago. 

photographs of Santo Tomas by Carl Mydans

From surviving on one ‘maggoty cup of rice a day’ to sucking on stones because she was so hungry, Grace’s diary is a sometimes horrifying, occasionally funny and startlingly human account of life under one of the most brutal prison camp regimes of the 20th century. She makes wry observations about day to day life in camp — ‘if you have ever been starving you will know that sex is the last thing you worry about’, and bemoans being ‘one of the heavier ones’ when she weighed in at just over 7st. Perhaps most remarkable is that the diary, which has now been published ,along with some of Grace’s letters home, exists at all. For her notes survived only because Grace hid them from the guards inside the teddy bear belonging to her infant son — Iain. Today, Iain, 73, has no memory of his time in the Philippines. 

Reading his mother’s diary after all these years he has learnt that as a baby he had his milk stolen by prison guards, and spent a week in the sweltering hold of a cargo ship with 150 other prisoners, sharing a single cup of water a day with his mother. That he survived is a miracle. 

‘Mother never, ever talked about the war,’ he says. The discovery, 70 years on, of her account of what really happened to his family during those lost years, has set off a whirlwind of emotions. ‘It was like reading a letter from her,’ he says, his voice thick with emotion. ‘You recognise the phrases, the way she would speak, it was as though she were sitting there next to me, reading to me. ‘I was very upset. 

I still get that way now.’ 

Life really began for 30-year-old Grace Brown when she arrived on the Filipino island of Cebu in 1938. She had left the Scottish town of Helensburgh several months earlier on the arm of her Glaswegian husband Caldwell, an employee of the Far Eastern Trading Company, and couldn’t wait to start married life. 

Beautiful and outgoing, Grace laughed so much her nickname was ‘Giggles’. Colonial life was in full swing in Cebu and she settled in immediately, spending her days training ‘house girls’ and evenings drinking gin fizzes at the Club Filipino. 

In a letter to her brother, written shortly after her arrival, she describes Caldwell as an ‘absolute gem of a husband to have. I think we are ideally suited to each other’. In 1941 Grace became pregnant and designed the perfect nursery for her unborn baby. There were nursery rhymes stencilled on the walls, and handmade furnishings shipped from America. 

But on Christmas day, just weeks after the Japanese invaded the Philippines, the couple were ordered to evacuate from Cebu city to safety 60 miles away. Grace, heavily pregnant, was soon in trouble. A local doctor declared she needed a caesarean, and would have to return to the city for the birth. He added that the journey would likely kill her. 

‘Little did he know what stout Scots blood could do,’ she scoffs in her diary. ‘I had no intention of dying.’ Instead, she swigged brandy for the pain. Iain was born after days of complications, as rumours swirled of an imminent invasion of the city. Grace remarked: ‘I knew it would be a boy. No girl would cause that much trouble in war time.’ 

After the Japanese landed on Cebu the family found themselves transferred to a prison, where they slept on wooden benches and constantly scrubbed at the floors, trying to get rid of the thousands of bugs. Every time Grace’s bags were examined by the Japanese guards, she would find her small stock of milk and baby food depleted. 

But the horrors of the jail were nothing compared to the cargo ship the family were placed in for the long journey to their camp in Manila in December 1942. Packed in with 150 prisoners, there was hardly room even to stand upright. It was, she wrote, the first time she asked: ‘Can I bear this?’ 

At first, life in the camp — actually the campus of a university outside Manila [Santo Tomas]— seemed relatively tolerable. Before combat troops took over, the prisoners were allowed to build their shacks. Grace bemoans drily that they had to be open at the front so the guards could inspect at any time — ‘therefore no sex’. 

But with the arrival of fighting forces, the camp became more brutal. The prisoners were starving, but would be savagely beaten if caught eating a weed. Grace and other inmates sucked on stones to keep the hunger pangs away. 

And one day, Caldwell disappeared. 

Grace writes simply that he was ‘taken away’ and that ‘I never knew whether he was alive or dead’. 

Reading the diary 70 years later, Iain found this profoundly moving. ‘She just referred to it briefly and then got on with it. 

‘It takes an enormous amount of strength to do that.’ Instead she writes about the mundane, repetitive horrors of life in camp. 

Given just 700 calories a day of watery, maggoty rice, food became a constant obsession. ‘Everyone could think and talk and dream of nothing but FOOD. They spent their day copying out recipes and poring over cookbooks.’ 

Grace and Iain slept in a room with 34 others. She wrote about watching fellow campmates deteriorate rapidly through sickness and hunger. ‘They would be confined to bed, could not sit up, nothing but skin and bones and their faces and legs puffed up with beriberi.’ 

There was a morning roll call each day, and prisoners were forced to bow from the waist to the guards. Those who did not were beaten. It makes her determination to record her experience by writing on scraps of paper, and concealing them in her son’s teddy, bear even more remarkable. 

The diary contains no dates or names, and there are gaps, probably because worsening conditions meant there were periods when she was unable to write. Also hidden in the bear was Grace’s wedding ring. It was her one treasure, a little luxury that reminded her of happier times. 

Today, Iain wears the ring. Everyone could think and talk and dream of nothing but FOOD And then one day in February 1945 it was all over. An allied plane swooped low over the camp and a pilot dropped his goggles with a message attached reading: ‘Christmas is coming, roll out the barrel, we will be in tomorrow or the next day’. 

The joy the following night when American tanks broke through walls at the front, was indescribable. ‘THAT IS A NIGHT I WILL NEVER FORGET,’ she writes. The camp mates went ‘wild with joy and excitement’. But while the camp had been liberated (‘the food has been wonderful — we just can’t believe it — milk and sugar again and coffee and BREAD’), Grace still had no idea where her husband was. She had not seen him in nearly two years. 

After liberation, a rumour did the rounds that the Japanese had been taking white men out of hospitals and shooting them. When one morning, Grace’s name was read out on the camp loudspeaker calling her to the office, she was convinced it was because her husband was dead. Yet when she walked in, there he was — like a miracle — alive and waiting for her. 

Caldwell had been held in a hospital, and although he rarely spoke about what happened, the family believe he was tortured. Grace writes that on two occasions the Japanese had taken him out of the hospital ‘for investigation’. 

In 1944 he survived a horrific massacre in which every other patient except one was killed, by hiding in a cupboard. A newspaper report from the time reveals the Japanese had smashed their way into the hospital without warning, armed with rifles, pistols, machine-guns, sabres and spears, killing everyone in their path. 

Caldwell was profoundly traumatised by what he had seen. ‘However,’ writes Grace with her trademark sturdiness, ‘he is alive and that is the main thing these days. 

In Grace's diary she writes they were given just 700 calories a day of watery, maggoty rice, food became a constant obsession. 

‘I feel now there is nothing more in life to be afraid of. We will come out alive.’ And they did. 

The family were taken to America, where Grace took a job as a secretary. She typed up her diary and sent it to a New York publisher, who rejected it on the grounds she was not American. She never attempted to publish it again, instead hiding it away and refusing to talk about her experiences with even her closest family. 

When the family finally returned to Scotland in 1946, penniless and traumatised, everything had changed. The carefree young couple who had embarked on their Far Eastern adventure eight years before, no longer existed. 

Grace moved back in with her parents in Helensburgh, took a job as a hotel receptionist and sent Iain to a local school. Tragically, Caldwell was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and remained there until he died in 1979. 

‘Mum and Dad lost everything we had. Absolutely everything,’ says Iain. ‘When they landed back in Britain they had no house, no money, nothing. 

‘And mother also lost her husband. He lived until he was 71 but never fully emerged from hospital.’ 

Over the years, Iain, who had a successful career in finance, developed a fascination with the Philippines. In 2005 he visited Cebu and Manila, searching out places he and his parents had been. 

Reading his mother’s diary now, he has been able to fill in the gaps, the missing pieces of his own story — and hers. ‘I feel closer to her now,’ he says. ‘I know her better, and I know more about her.’ 

Grace did not harbour anger at the Japanese, but ignored them and never bought Japanese products. In her later years she volunteered for the Samaritans. She loved being able to help others. 

Weak and emaciated in the camp, under the constant threat of torture and death, it was something she had been unable to do. Her resilience had made her an excellent listener, and she was particularly skilled at talking people out of taking their own lives. 

Grace’s granddaughter says that on the rare occasions when she did smile, it was radiant, and transformed her face. 

‘She suffered a great deal but she realised life has to go on,’ says Iain. ‘We knew we were lucky, because we were still here.

And what of the fate of the torturers

Award-winning newsman Bob Simon died this past National Foundation Day, Japan's holiday to remember its Empire and the establishment of the Imperial family. One of his most inspiring stories for 60 Minutes was on Louis Zamperini. It won an Emmy.

For the segment, Simon went to Japan to track down Mitsuhiro WATANABE the torturer of Zamperini and hundreds of others who passed through the Omori and Naoetsu POW camps where Watanabe was a psychotic guard.

Simon found him. The interview is above. Zamperini had wanted to meet Watanabe and Simon want to film the encounter. Watanabe, an unrepentant former Imperial Army captain and now insurance salesman, refused.

Watanabe had escaped arrest by going into hiding during the American Occupation of Japan. He escaped prosecution when Washington suspended the arrest warrants of suspected war criminals after the San Francisco Peace Treaty went into effect on April 1, 1952.  With this, Watanabe was free to emerge from hiding and become a typical Japanese salaryman--an insurance salesman to be exact.

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Watanabe severely beat and psychologically tortured Zamperini and was reviled among the other POWs, American and Allied. Yet, frankly and sadly, Watanabe was not the exception. Imperial Japan's fascist state had forged beasts from simple peasants and school boys.

Legendary war historian Max Hastings wrote in Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 about the shocking Japanese treatment of POWs that has horrified and “fascinated” Westerners ever since. He noted that the POW’s “liberators were stunned by the stories they heard: of starvation and rampant disease; of men worked to death in their thousands, tortured or beheaded for small infractions of discipline.” He said that “It seemed incomprehensible that a nation with pretensions to civilisation could have defied every principle of humanity and the supposed rules of war.”

Sign Petition to Japan - SHOW UNBROKEN

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Stop the ban on Angelina Jolie's movie, Unbroken, 

in Japan

Here is our open letter to filmmaker Angelina Jolie in which we, The Indo Project initiate a counter petition as an answer to the Petition started in Japan to ban Angelina Jolie's movie UNBROKEN. We encourage people to sign to stop the continued effort of Japan to deny and censor its war record and crimes. 

Open Letter to Angelina Jolie,

Prior to the release of your movie Unbroken which depicts, among other things, the circumstances of a Japanese POW camp, the news broke that your movie might be banned from being distributed and screened in Japan. Japanese nationalists have already collected 8,000 signatures in a petition to ban the movie, and Hiromichi Moteki of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact has questioned the movie’s credibility and called the film immoral, racist and demonic.

We at The Indo Project question Mr. Moteki’s sources and hope he’s aware of the list of the many war crimes the Japanese committed in the period 1937-1945. Has he ever read up on the Nanking Massacre and the other massacres, the building of the Burma railway line or the Bataan Death March? Official Japanese war crimes include torture (including water boarding), use of chemical weapons, forced prostitution (comfort women) and forced labor (romusha). WWII statistics of casualties are tricky and controversial but if we have to mention one number, Mr Moteki can check the US Navy Department Library for himself. While the total number of American service men (93,941) in German POW camps experienced a 1% death rate, US service men (27,465) interned in Japan and Southeast Asia, had a 38-40% mortality rate.

We at The Indo Project all had relatives in Japanese internment camps and life was exceedingly harsh: starvation, excruciatingly long train rides in box cars without food or water, withholding of food and medication, forced labor, torture, death marches— we have heard it all in our families. A denial of the war crimes represented in the movie is a denial of the atrocities perpetrated against our family members who rest in war cemeteries and mass graves all over Indonesia, killed, directly or indirectly, by the Japanese army.

The war in Asia has been underrepresented in movies and books, and sadly, generations of Japanese schoolchildren still may not know what their grandfathers did in the war as Japan’s role in WWII has been denied and pushed under the rug for generations. This denial has now been compounded by name calling, which, in our view, is compelling testimony of how nervous some Japanese factions are about being found out in a movie that shows the excessive cruelty of some Japanese officers. By banning the movie in Japan, the Japanese miss yet another opportunity of educating their children about the Japanese war record.

We applaud you, Mrs. Jolie, for pointing your cameras at the war experience in Asia. By doing so, you honor our grandparents and fathers and mothers who perished in Japanese internment camps and prisons. Your hero in the movie, Louis Zamperini, survived to tell his tale to Laura Hillenbrand and you, and in the telling of his story, it has become our story too.

We want to endorse your movie by starting a counter petition, signed by the survivors (POW’s, civilian internees of the Japanese camps) descendants and other family members or friends of those who could not sign for themselves because they died under the Japanese regime. We petition Japan to stop all forms of censorship and show the movie, and we commit to supporting the movie by taking family and friends to see it together.

Inez Hollander Lake, Ph.D.
On behalf of The Indo Project

SIGN PETITION HERE

Waiting for Unbroken

On Tuesday, December 9th, NBC Dateline featured a preview of the movie Unbroken about an American Olympian who became a POW of Japan. The TV program focuses on Angelina Jolie the director. The American premiere will be December 15 in Hollywood. There is still time to buy the book by Laura Hillenbrand. The movie will be released throughout the US on Christmas Day.

Denier of the Bataan Death March

Photo by Jim

In the October 2012 issue of the popular Japanese monthly magazine, Seiron, is an unattributed commentary on the Bataan Death March. The author dismisses the brutality of the March by asserting that the Americans were racist cowards and prevaricators who willfully murdered civilians. Passages from Dr. Lester Tenney's book, My Hitch in Hell, on the battle of Bataan and the Death March are used as proof.

The Seiron writer emphasizes his point by identifying Dr. Tenney as Jewish, thus drawing on common prejudices against the Jewish people as villainous, lazy liars. Dr. Tenney, a former tank commander from Company "B" of the Maywood 192nd Tank Battalion and the last Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, persuaded the government of Japan in 2009 to issue a formal apology for Imperial Japan's abuse and misuse of American POWs.

Nearly 60, still existing Japanese companies, used American and Allied POWs as slave labor in horrific conditions to maintain war production. Companies such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Kawasaki, Toshiba, and Nippon Sharyo participated in the program to "employ white slaves." No company has yet to apologize. In the current Japanese Cabinet, the family companies of two Cabinet ministers, Taro Aso (Aso Group) and Yoshimasa Hayashi (Ube Industries) used slave labor during the war

The article's anti-Semitism is used to separate veterans like Dr. Tenney from other “Americans” and to imply that his quest for justice is corrupted and not mainstream. The point is to isolate those who want sincere apologies for the war by suggesting that they as not true Americans. If they were loyal Americans their interest would be on security in Asia and not "lying" about Japan. This article is part of the current greater effort, under the new Japanese government, to deny Japan’s war history and to undo Japan’s few war apologies of which one was to the American POWs of Japan. If the Murayama apology of 1995 is redone, upon which the apology to the POWs is based, then the latter apology would be undone.

Anti-Semitism aside, the Seiron article selectively quotes Dr. Tenney and employs false facts. It is similar to another denier article attacking Dr. Tenney that appeared in the December 23, 2010 edition of the Shukan Shincho by Masayuki Takayama entitled "Bamboo Strings?".

Below is a translation of the Seiron article followed by a correction of the facts and exact quotes from Dr. Tenney's book.

Commentary of the Season [Orifushi no Ki]

Unnamed author, Seiron, October 2012, pp. 35-37
Provisional Translation by Asia Policy Point

The bombardment on the Philippine’s Clark Field came almost at the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Two weeks later, on December 22, 1941, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma and his 40,000 troops hit the shores of the Lingayen Gulf. Subsequently, they defeated the American and Filipino forces, which were three times stronger than those of the Japanese.

MacArthur was terrified and reported to Washington the abandonment of Manila and started withdrawing to the Bataan Peninsula. Cowards always run fast when they escape. Lester Tenney, a Tank Corps member who had just arrived at Luzon, was a coward equal to MacArthur.

His Tank Corps rushed to the Bataan Peninsula, avoiding any encounter with the Japanese. According to his book, the Bataan Death March, he wrote that he killed all residents and “indiscriminately shot at shops and huts because we could not distinguish Filipinos from the Japanese” when they passed by a small village.

He also wrote “we killed those who did not have identification” and “we fired the tank cannons to blow up four houses with their families because they tried to leak the American presence to the Japanese.” Though he is, in fact, a Jew, it seems he thinks that the whites have a special privilege to kill any colored people.

Six months later, he surrendered to the Japanese. The Japanese forced him to walk to a camp, which was only 120 kilometers away. Half of the march was actually “by freight train” (Ibid.). He exaggerated as if “it was a march from hell.” The foolish Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada invited him to Japan and apologized.

It would have been better to send him [Tenney] to The Philippines and try him for killing many innocent people.

[Here the article continues with examples of British and Korean inhumanity and "cowardice".]

Corrections to the Seiron’s history of the Battle of Bataan

These corrections were prepared in cooperation with Dr. Stanley Falk, former chief historian of the U.S. Air Force and a military historian specializing in World War II in the Pacific. He is the author of the authoritative history, Bataan: The March of Death.

On December 22, 1941, the Japanese 14th Army commanded by Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma landed at five spots along the Eastern part of Luzon’s Lingayen Gulf. Prior to the landing, American air and naval power had been virtually destroyed. The Japanese were established on Luzon airfields and Army short-range fighters were in position to support Japanese ground troops when required. All this had been accomplished in less than two weeks starting on December 8th.

The Japanese Lingayen force totaled 43,000 men (not 40,000 as noted by Seiron). Previously about 4,000 others had landed further north in Luzon, with another 2,500 landing at the southern tip of the island. Then, two days after Lingayen, another 7,000 landed in southern Luzon. Altogether, about 56,500 Japanese troops were on the Philippines by the end of December 1941.

American and Filipino forces on Luzon probably totaled about 80,000, but most of them were poorly trained and equipped Filipino troops. General Douglas MacArthur's air force had been all put completely destroyed in the first few days of the war, and he had no naval forces to oppose the Japanese fleet blockading the Philippines.

Mathematically, the American forces were not as the Seiron author states “three times as large as those of the Japanese.” They were less than 1.5 times as large. The defending forces outnumbered the Japanese invaders by approximately 3 to 2, but were a mixed force of non-combat experienced regular, national guard, constabulary, and newly created Commonwealth units; the Japanese used their best first-line troops at the outset of the campaign.

General MacArthur was not "terrified" by the Japanese invasion, as the author suggested. The evacuation of Manila and withdrawal to Bataan was part of a long-held plan to pull-back to Bataan in the face of vastly superior Japanese forces and to hold the entrance to Manila Bay, thus denying Manila harbor to the Japanese. The withdrawal was carried out in a very effective manner, while the Japanese concentrated on capturing Manila (practically unopposed since Fil-American forces were headed for Bataan).

The American tanks also did not "rush" to Bataan to avoid meeting the Japanese. Instead, they were tasked to engage the enemy and fought well as part of the covering force that shielded the forces as they withdrew into Bataan. They, in fact, helped hold off the Japanese assault for four months from an expected one.

The American troops on Bataan, exhausted, hungry, sick, and running out of ammunition for their antiquated weapons were surrendered by their commanding officers on April 9, 1942. This was four months after the start of hostilities, not the “six months” noted by the Seiron author. Corregidor was surrendered on May 6th.

The Bataan Death March was composed of three to four segments. Troops were rounded up at Bagac on the west side of the Bataan peninsula and Marvieles at Bataan’s tip. These groups converged at Balanga on National Road 54 on the east side of Bataan.

The trek from Bagac to Balanga was 27k (16.7 miles) and from Mariveles to Balanga 54k (33.5 miles). The 100 kilometers (65 miles; not 120k) mentioned by the Seiron author from Mariveles only took the prisoners to San Fernando. The POWs were then transported by freight rail about 25 miles to Capas (the train trip was not more than half of the Death March as the Seiron author notes). One hundred or more prisoners were stuffed into each of the trains' boxcars, which were unventilated and sweltering in the tropical heat—dozens died standing.

After they reached Capas, they were forced to walk the final seven miles to Camp O'Donnell. Sanitation, food, and medical care at Camp O'Donnell were abysmal. The survivors of the march continued to die, first at a rate of 30–50 per day to 300-500 per day by late summer.

Although many of the prisoners did leave Bataan on trucks, especially from Bagac or Balanga (maybe one-fourth), the great majority was forced to march under inhuman conditions in the hot sun, with little food and water, and subject to constant harassment, beatings, shootings, beheadings, bayoneting, and other forms of brutal and often sadistic treatment.

HERE you can find Dr. Lester Tenney’s description of the Death March from Chapter 4 in his book, My Hitch in Hell: The Bataan Death March (ISBN 0-02-881125-9, Potomac Books Inc., June 2007).

BELOW are quotes from Chapter 2 in Dr. Tenney book about his thoughts and feelings when his tank crew found them have to fire on civilian targets.

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...given that we had arrived in the Philippines only a few weeks before hostilities began and that most of us American soldiers came from traditional Midwestern Caucasian homes, we found distinguishing the Filipinos and the Chinese from the Japanese people very difficult. As a result, the constant infiltration of Japanese soldiers and civilians and the threat that Japanese sympathizers would give our position away caused us great anxiety. Our safety was in jeopardy.

Page 28
There were many times when we in fact did locate and eliminate some of these enemy sympathizers … On our march into this village, we had been bombed by enemy aircraft and precision shelling by Japanese artillery. Now we knew why they had their guns aimed so perfectly and how their aircraft was able to locate us in the middle of the juggle so easily. We were set up by spies or Japanese infiltrators. Some of the villagers were our enemies, and we wanted to know who they were.

Page 28
Our tank crew decided that with only four of us, we could not safely enter and search each of the four homes. Instead, when no one would admit who the guilty people were or where the three men were hiding, we proceeded to spray round after round of bullets into each of the homes in this small community. We knew we had to find these enemy spies, or we would face the same bulldog attack each day of our withdrawal into Bataan. When we finish shooting, we felt emotionally drained and guilty. We sat down and almost cried. Did we kill anyone in these buildings? Was anyone wounded by our gunfire? We never knew the results of our attacks. We felt that had there been people inside they would have answered our previous commands to come out. Did we act without concern for the people inside, if any? I do not think so. Our fear of being killed made necessary what might seem a brutal act.