Jap guards put Filipino’s head on top of pole
Further horrors in prison camp told by U.S. Army captain
Los Angeles, California (UP) –
Capt. Samuel R. Grashio of Spokane, Washington, today added to the story of American soldiers who stumbled across Bataan under the lash of their Jap captors, then died of starvation and infection in a prison camp around which gleeful guards paraded with the head of a Filipino on the end of a pole.
Covered with lice and open sores, in agony from hunger and dysentery, the captured Americans watched their well-fed guards smoke American cigarettes from a “new-type package,” presumably sent by the Red Cross for the prisoners.
He told of the pluck of a 19-year-old member of the Air Force who died from the barbarism of his Jap captors.
Skeleton in skin
Capt. Grashio said:
He was a skeleton in skin lying by a garbage pit. Blowflies swarmed over countless sores on his body. They were eating him alive. I asked him if I could do anything for him.
He asked me to take him away somewhere so the other boys wouldn’t see him dying there like a rat.
The hero of Capot. Grashio’s story was Lt. Col. William Edwin Dyess of Albany, Texas, with whom he surrendered to the overwhelming Jap horde, and with whom he escaped. Col. Dyess was killed in the crash of a P-38 at Burbank, California, on Dec. 22.
Prodded, beaten
On April 9, 1942, Capt. Grashio said, he and Col. Dyess were captured by a tank-led Jap spearhead while trying to help enlisted men in their unit prepare a couple of boats to flee Bataan.
Dyess and I were ordered out of a car we had gotten into and herded over by the tanks.
They took all our personal things like rings and watches.
Jap enlisted men had a field day. They were under ordered not to treat officers as officers. We were prodded and beaten with gun butts and taunted. About three or four thousand of us were grouped together.
Describes death march
After we surrendered, the Japs grouped some of us around artillery objectives being shelled from Corregidor so that some of our men were killed by our own artillery.
The “death march” toward a prison camp started about 10:30 a.m. PHT, Capt. Grashio said.
He said:
We all prayed for death and cursed the day we surrendered. I am here today because I followed Dyess out. He is the greatest man of the war to me.
The Japs prodded us in relays so they wouldn’t get tired themselves. We got a little water out of a caribou wallow, but had no food.
Legless boy crawls
A Filipino boy with both legs off crawled along on his stomach and was finally abandoned. Many were on crutches.
We vomited as we walked along, always with the Japs shoving and beating us. We couldn’t stop to take care of ourselves, and we had to do that, too, as we walked and stumbled.
Once, Capt. Grashio said, a Jap soldier clubbed Col. Dyess into a ditch for no purpose at all, and he was forced to march on and leave him.
Hit in face
Capt. Grashio said:
At Hermosa a Jap hit me in the face for nothing and knocked my teeth out with a bamboo cane the size of a two-by-hour. In seven days, we got to San Fernando, but we still had no food. Pretty soon they gave us a little rice.
Occasionally American soldiers would go out of their mind and rush for a well. They were beaten back by clubs and guns.
Once a light Jap tank met us head-on. The driver purposely swerved the machine and ran over a soldier, crushing him into the road.
Stand for hours
At San Fernando, the Americans were forced to stand for hours in the hot rays of the sun. Then they were crowded into small freight cars and five hours later were pushed out at the village of Capris.
They marched the remaining nine miles to Camp O’Donnell.
He said:
We again got a few handfuls of rice. We couldn’t wash. I figured there were four or five thousand U.S. troops and seven or eight thousand Filipino soldiers there. I estimated that I saw 1,100 American and 14,000 Filipino soldiers buried.
Two Filipinos help Yanks to escape
Miami, Florida (UP) –
Two Filipino prisoners at the Davao Penal Colony assisted in the escape of three American officers on whose sworn statements the Army-Navy account of Jap prison camp atrocities was based, according to Philippine President Manuel Quezon.
Mr. Quezon said last night that when he heard what the two Filipinos had done, he granted them “absolute pardon” for the pre-war offenses which had occasioned their commitment to the Penal Colony by the Philippine government.
The American officers were the late Lt. Col. William E. Dyess, Cdr. Melvin H. McCoy, and Lt. Cdr. S. M. Mellnik. Whether the aides escaped, too, Quezon did not say. Nor did he disclose their names.
Allied HQ, New Guinea (UP) –
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commenting on revelations of Jap atrocities against Allied war prisoners, said today “the stories speak for themselves.”
Minneapolis, Minnesota (UP) –
Marine Maj. Michael Dobervich, 28, of Ironton, Minnesota, said today that he had received a vicious blow with a rifle butt when he was a Jap prisoner and that he knows “those atrocity stories are no baloney.” He is another of the few fighting men who escaped after being captured at Bataan with Lt. Col. W. E. Dyess.
Davis explains delay in story
Says U.S. feared news would hit exchanges
Washington (UP) –
Director Elmer Davis of the Office of War Information disclosed today that the OWI wanted to “break” the Jap prison camp atrocity report long before the Army and Navy made it public.
But the report was held up, he added, for fear that its release would jeopardize further exchange of civilian internees between the United States and Japan. Efforts to arrange a third exchange apparently have broken down.
Got news in November
Mr. Davis said the OWI learned last November of the existence of an atrocity report made by the late Lt. Col. William E. Dyess, Cdr. Melvyn H. McCoy and Lt. Col. S. M. Mellnik after they escaped from a prison camp in the Philippines.
He said:
The OWI was hoping for a change in policy quite a while back. If the decision had rested with us, the story would have been out long before this.
Part withheld
It was learned from other sources that, for security reasons, a considerable portion of the accounts given by the three officers was withheld from the public. The withheld parts, it was said, dealt chiefly with their methods of escape.
It was also learned that the atrocity account might have been kept secret even longer had not the British decided to publish a comparable report yesterday.
Mr. Davis scoffed at any suggestion that the report’s release was timed to coincide with the Fourth War Loan Drive.
Americans in dark on fate of kin
Washington (UP) –
American kin of men who were taken prisoner by the Japs on Bataan and Corregidor are at the mercy of the enemy on the score of learning whether their captured relatives are still alive or have died in captivity.
The Army-Navy revelation of Jap atrocities said at least 5,200 Americans had died in two prison camps in the Philippines by October 1942, with another 2,500 in such condition that doctors were convinced they could not live long. But Japan has reported the names of only 1,555 Americans as having died in prison camps.
The American Red Cross expects a surge of anguished inquiries as a result of the Army-Navy revelation of torture, starvation and murder of American soldiers but, it said today, it has no means of obtaining the answers.
Albuquerque, New Mexico (UP) –
Dr. V. H. Spensley, president of the Bataan Relief Organization and father of a soldier who died in a Jap prison camp, said today he doubted the “entire truth” of stories of enemy atrocities in the Philippines and asked if such “propaganda” is required to “sell war bonds.”