The Pittsburgh Press (January 28, 1944)
JAPS TORTURE, KILL YANKS
Escaped officers tell of Philippine horrors
Ex-OWI official says most of 50,000 captured on Bataan murdered
Washington (UP) –
An outraged and furious capital demanded today that vengeance be exacted from the Japs – if not now, at the war’s end – in the name of 7,700 American fighting men and many Filipino soldiers destroyed by the brutal victors of Bataan and Corregidor through deliberate starvation, torture and murder.
Palmer Hoyt, former OWI Domestic Branch manager, declared today in a signed magazine article that the Japs have murdered “most of the 50,000 prisoners taken at Bataan.”
The documented story of Japan’s bestial treatment of war prisoners in the Philippines, jointly published by the Army and Navy, aroused in Congressmen and government officials alike a deep anger which, many of them declared, will be quenched only when retributive justice has been visited upon responsible Jap officials from the Emperor down.
For the present, however, there appeared to be little that this country would do – except to go on killing as many Japs as possible on the fighting fronts. Inquiry in official quarters developed no reason to believe that this government would stoop to Japan’s level by retaliating against Jap war prisoners in American hands. In any event, as of Jan. 7, American fighting men had taken only 377 Jap prisoners – a figure in nowise proportionate to the number of Japs killed in battle.
White House Secretary Stephen T. Early said the reason for releasing the story of Jap atrocities was that the United States can no longer expect to get medicine, clothing, and other supplies to American prisoners of war in the hands of Japs.
Secretary of State Cordell Hull said today it would be necessary to assemble:
…all the demons available from anywhere and combine their fiendishness to describe the conduct of those who inflicted these unthinkable tortures.
Mr. Hull indicated that this government had already protested to the Japs against the atrocities.
But at the same time, he admitted frankly that protests heretofore filed with the Japs in instances of cruelty imposed against war prisoners or interned civilians had proved of little avail.
The Army-Navy story, packed with verified instances of Jap brutality and barbarity, was based on sworn statements by two Army officers and a Navy officer who managed to escape from a prison camp on Davao after 361 days of hell.
What these men had to tell aroused Congress to an unprecedented pitch of rage. Chairman Sol Bloom (D-NY) of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said:
Let these Japanese know in plain and no uncertain terms that we’re going to hold them responsible for this nasty, damnable, despicable business.
We’ll hold the rats – from the Emperor down to the lowest ditch digger – responsible for one million years if necessary.
Jap brutality toward war prisoners – so horrible that the three officers who reported it said the heroes of Bataan and Corregidor would never have surrendered “had they known the fate in store for them” – was not confined to Americans and Filipinos.
In London, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden reported similar atrocities against British and Indian war captives. He said the British government was making the story public only because all efforts to obtain satisfaction from Japan had failed.
The American report proved conclusively that the Japs have scrapped all civilized rules of treatment of war prisoners.
The report added a new and ugly chapter to the story of Jap atrocities made so clear when the Tokyo government, again in complete violation of accepted rules of war, executed some of the captured American fliers who took part in the historic April 1942 raids on Japan’s principal cities.
In connection with those executions, President Roosevelt sent a stern warning to Japan. He said that if “such acts of barbarity and manifestations of depravity” were continued:
…the American government will hold personally and officially responsible for these diabolical crimes all of those officers of the Japanese government who have participated therein and will in due course bring those officers to justice.
The report disclosed these facts:
At Camp O’Donnell, about 2,200 American prisoners from Bataan died during April and May 1942. The death rate among Filipino prisoners was higher. By October, another 3,000 Americans had died at Camp Cabanatuan and 2,500 others were in such condition that American doctors were certain all would die.
Thus, of the approximately 20,000 American fighting men in the Philippines when the end came, at least 7,700 were dead or dying by October 1942. How many more have died since then is a problem almost too grisly to consider, for the death toll on some occasions reached 50 a day.
For a full week after the American defenders of Corregidor had surrendered, they were denied food. Then they received meager portions of rice and sardines.
Many technical men – at least 400 and possibly 1,400 – were shipped off to Japan for slave labor in war factories in complete defiance of the Geneva Convention on prisoner treatment to which Japan claims she is abiding.
At least three Americans and three Filipinos were buried alive. Others were beheaded.
Many were given the sun treatment, a form of torture in which they were forced to remain under the blistering sun with no covering.
A nightmarish memory to the men who escaped was what the prisoners called the “March of Death.” With no food, water or shelter from the sun, they were forced to make a 12-day march for 85 miles to work in labor battalions.
Those who fell screaming in agony of approaching death were beaten with sticks, whipped or shot if they dared ask for food or water. Some were run over by Jap trucks – deliberately.
Men who once weighed 200 pounds shrank to 90, became human skeletons, and died by the hundreds. Diarrhea and dysentery were almost universal, as was beriberi.
Because they asked for water, six Filipinos were shot, one was disemboweled and others were bayonetted.
Those who survived the bestiality were herded like cattle into small enclosures which reeked with the stench from the decaying bodies of men whom they once knew.
In contrast to the staggering death toll described by the three officers, the Japs have reported only 1,555 Americans as having died from disease in the camps in the Philippines.
The Army and Navy made it clear that nothing in the reports was hearsay – that it contained “only facts which the officers related from their own personal experience and observations.”
The three officers were Cdr. Melvyn H. McCoy (USN) of Indianapolis, now on duty in this country; Lt. Col. S. M. Mellnik (Coast Artillery) of Dunmore, Pennsylvania, now on duty in the Southwest Pacific, and the late Lt. Col. (then Capt.) William E. Dyess (USAAF) of Albany, Texas, who was killed recently in the crash of a fighter plane at Burbank, California.
The Army and Navy disclosed that other Americans are known to have escaped from Jap camps in the Philippines, including Maj. Michael Dobervich of Ironton, Minnesota; Maj. Austin C. Shofner of Shelbyville, Tennessee; Maj. Jack Hawkins of Roxton, Texas, and Cpl. Reid Carlos Chamberlain of El Cajon, California, all U.S. Marines.
Asked specifically whether this government was compiling a list of Jap officers in the Philippines with a view to holding them accountable after the war for the atrocities, Mr. Hull said this government is investigating all phases of the situation in the Philippines, seeking as much information as it possibly can get for use in handling the war guilt problem after the war.
Mr. Hull said that this government had been unable to get information on the disposition of American food, medicine, clothing and supplies bound for American war prisoners and civilian internees in Japan, after they had been transferred from the exchange ship Gripsholm to a Jap vessel some two months ago.
Asked whether the government’s announcement of the Jap atrocity story indicated that hope had been abandoned of repatriating additional American civilians from Japan, Mr. Hull said that no person could foretell with any semblance of accuracy what the chances, nominal or more substantial, would be.
He emphasized, however, that whether these chances be nominal or substantial, this government will continue to pursue what he described as this righteous undertaking of attempting to arrange a third exchange.
It was pointed out that in the past, supplies of medicine, clothing, and food for war prisoners were twice sent to Japan aboard the exchange ship Gripsholm. This avenue of relief, in view of Early’s statement, has apparently been closed.
Mr. Early’s statement made it appear that 1,500 tons of relief supplies sent from West Coast ports on Russian ships to Vladivostok, in the hope that they might be transshipped to prisoners of the Japs, may never reach their destination. The necessary arrangements with the Japs for transshipment of these supplies have not thus far been satisfactorily completed.
Meanwhile, the American Red Cross disclosed that it has never received any official information from prison camps in the Philippines. Thus far, it was said, the Japanese have refused to permit the International Red Cross to send a delegate to the Philippines.
Chairman Andrew J. May (D-KY) of the House Military Affairs Committee, commenting on the atrocity disclosures, said:
We ought to quit fooling around with islands and outposts and steam right into Tokyo and blow it into hades. This shows the kind of barbarian enemy we are fighting.
Andalusia, Pennsylvania (UP) –
Russian-born Lt. Col. Stephen Mellnik, 36, suffered severely from malaria during his imprisonment in Jap internment camps, but appeared in “fairly good health” by the time he returned home, his wife said today.
Col. Mellnik came to this country as a young child. He lived in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. His appointment to West Point followed a three-year term with the Army as a private in the 12th Coast Artillery. He is now on Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff in the Southwest Pacific.
U.S. officer intends to square accounts
Seattle, Washington (UP) –
Cdr. Melvyn H. McCoy, one of the three officers who made the report on atrocities in Jap prison camps in the Philippines, said today he has “work to do yet back in the Philippines” and wants to return “to square accounts” with the Japs.
Cdr. McCoy, who celebrated Christmas Day 1941 by escaping from the Japs to Corregidor and eating a ham sandwich for “Christmas dinner,” is now in command of radio activities at the naval station on Bainbridge Island, across Elliott Bay from Seattle.
The 37-year-old commander came here last November, a few months after his arrival in the United States following his escape from the Jap prison camp.
Cdr. McCoy graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1927, went to the Philippines in July 1940, and served as communications officer during the siege of Corregidor and was forced to send the final message marking the fall of that island May 6, 1942. The message said:
Going off the air now, goodbye and good luck, McCoy.
He said:
Then, the Japs got hold of me.
Japs complaining about internees
By the United Press
A few hours before the Army and Navy released the report on Jap atrocities in the Philippines last night, the Tokyo radio broadcast two reports concerning the treatment interned Japs are receiving.
One quoted Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu as telling the Diet that the interned Japs were “faced with all kinds of persecution in enemy countries” and that the Jap government has demanded that their condition be improved.
He said the condition of the internees was “beyond mere words of sympathy” and added that Japan was investigating through the Red Cross and neutral nations.
In the other broadcast, Tadakatsu Suzuki, head of the Jap wartime internee affairs management, was quoted as telling the Diet that the treatment of interned Japs had “improved little by little.”
Col. Dyess was silent on fate of Yanks
Los Angeles, California (UP) –
Mrs. Marajen Stevick Dyess, widow of Lt. Col. William E. Dyess, whose story of Jap brutality to American war prisoners shocked the nation, today said she knew her husband had suffered the first time she saw him after his escape from an enemy internment camp.
Col. Dyess was killed Dec. 22, 1943, when his P-38 plane crashed at Burbank, California.
His widow said Col. Dyess had been besieged by relatives and friends of men on the ill-fated Bataan Peninsula, but “he couldn’t tell them a single thing – it hurt him so.”
Allied HQ, Southwest Pacific (UP) –
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces on Bataan until he was ordered to Australia, declined to comment today on the Army-Navy report of Jap atrocities.
Fort Worth, Texas (UP) –
The sole comment of Maj. Jack Hawkins, listed as one of the four Marines who escaped from Jap prisoners, to the Army-Navy revelation of Jap atrocities against American and Filipino prisoners of war was:
There is some more of the story which will be out later.
Jap prisoners get good U.S. rations
Washington (UP) –
Japs captured by U.S. forces receive virtually the same liberal rations as do our own troops, in comparison with the starvation diet of Americans held prisoners by the Japs.
Army officers said Japs captured by U.S. troops undoubtedly fare better, as far as food is concerned, in captivity than they did when they were fighting under the Rising Sun.
And civilian Jap internees held in War Relocation Authority camps in the West, officials said today, are fed on a “scale only slightly lower than that of the average American civilian” although “considerably lower than the War Department’s feeding of prisoners.”
Japs claim attacks on hospital ships
San Francisco, California (UP) –
Tokyo radio reported a “new” hospital ship incident today and again threatened Jap retaliation, presumably against American prisoners.
It quoted a Dōmei dispatch from the South Pacific which said that it was “learned” that “enemy aircraft attacked the Yoshino Maru, while it was en route to a Japanese base.”
In a statement broadcast by Tokyo radio, Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu said the Jap government was prepared to take “appropriate steps” in the event it does not receive a “satisfactory reply” regarding the asserted U.S. attack on the Jap hospital ship Buenos Aires Maru.