More atrocities revealed –
Covit: Playful Jap amputates arm of Yank prisoner
Manila internee says another U.S. soldier was clubbed in back with rifle butt when he stumbled in hot sun
By Bernard Covit, United Press staff writer
Revelation on the Army and Navy of Jap atrocities against U.S. and Filipino prisoners of war has enabled Bernard Covit, former member of the United Press Manila staff who was interned by the Japs, to write about atrocities which came to his attention while he was awaiting repatriation.
New York –
Disclosure of the Jap atrocities to our American and Filipino last-ditch fighters on Bataan and Corregidor, horrible as it is to every civilized person, came almost as a relief to those of us who had borne the knowledge as an awful, secret burden when we returned to the United States aboard the exchange liner Gripsholm.
Reports of the treatment of our soldiers seeped past the barbed-wire fences of our civilian internment camp at Santo Tomas. Our own conditions were far from good, but the knowledge of what was going on at Cabanatuan, 60 miles from Manila, made us almost ashamed of our comparative good fortune.
Many of those in our civilian camp on the University of Santo Tomas campus were relatives and friends of the unhappy men penned like beasts at Cabanatuan and Camp O’Donnell.
Hear of death march
We learned, of course, of the “march of death” – how the miserable, weakened men wee marched into Manila, the stragglers shot and bayonetted. It wrung our hearts to learn that some of the men – some 5,000 or 6,000 – had been marched all the way up to Cabanatuan and housed without bedding on dirt or plank floors, and without what is all-important in the Philippines, mosquito nets to keep off the malaria-spreading insects.
This is the story of a friend of mine – a lieutenant at Cabanatuan:
We are being worked 10 to 12 hours a day. It isn’t so much the work a it is being out under the hot, tropical sun of the Philippines all the time.
Lack hats
Many of the boys have worn out their shoes, pants and shirts. A real hardship is the lack of hats to shade us.
My job is hoeing a long line of vegetables. My back is in pretty bad shape from bending over, but many of the men are suffering worse than I am.
There is practically no medicine at all, and a majority of us are suffering from dysentery and many have malaria badly.
Half die
In my group there were originally about 1,000 men. Today there are a little less than 500 left, most of them having died from malaria and dysentery.
I hate to think of the dozens who have been beaten, mutilated and tortured to death.
I was out in the field yesterday when one of my friends, a sergeant tumbled over as he worked. The poor chap had been wounded on Bataan. He had a badly-infected shoulder and the sun was too much for him.
A Jap guard approached and whacked the butt end of his rifle into the sergeant’s back. I heard a terrible crunching sound and when I ran forward to intervene, I received a backhand blow across the face that sent me sprawling.
Jap lops off arm
Last week one of the men lost his arm from the elbow down when he was so unfortunate as to trip and fall out of line as we were marching back the five miles to camp. A Jap guard playfully made a pass at him with his razor-sharp bayonet and severed his arm. It was lucky one of our men there knew how to take care of him, applying a tourniquet and binding the arm.
There have been dozens of such cases here in camp. The food we receive is usually some rice and mango beans. Once in a great while we are given a banana. Our sole drink is tea or water, which we boil.
Another lieutenant, a medical officer, supplies a list of names of Americans in the camp who had been civilians in the Philippines before the attack on Dec. 8, 1941, and who had volunteered in the Armed Forces. This list was of great interest to those in Santo Tomas because they were in many cases close friends or relatives.
Of 20 names, 10 had died in Cabanatuan. Six had succumbed to malaria, two to dysentery and two of wound infections. Of the 10 remaining alive, three were mutilated.
Beriberi, a malnutrition disease which swells the victims; joints, arms and legs grotesquely, was rife in the camp. When these swellings are lanced, the stench is terrible. In the cramped quarters of the prison camp the well grew almost to hate the ill because of this unpleasantness.
Like punch drunk
My informant told how imprisonment had begun to affect the men’s minds:
The boys walked around as if they were punch drunk. They are absentminded and vacant-eyed. You have to call them several times before they know they are addressed.
Many of them live in a world of their own. At night they babble about home and loved ones in the States [this was a year and a half after the fall of Manila].
It is heartbreaking to hear the boys muttering in their sleep. There have been a few violent cases and the Japs have taken them away. What has been done with them, we have no idea. None has ever returned to the camp.
We learned of a number of attempts at escape from the military camps. Im March 1942, two Australians and a Britisher attempted to escape from our own civilian internment at Santo Tomas. They were beaten and lugged to a narrow out in the cemetery. They were compelled to stand in the pit, knee deep and then the Japs discharged their pistols into them. Some of the officials of our camp who had gone to the cemetery with the men to ease their last moments saw them shot.
The guards did not have shovels but merely kicked dirt over the bodies with their boots. As the group turned away, one of the figures in the grave stirred. A Jap guard turned and poured several more shots into him.
‘Please tell my wife’
The Britisher, a mate on a merchant ship which had been caught in Manila Bay, turned to the internment camp officials just before he died and said: “Please tell my wife.” He had married an English girl two weeks before he sailed for the Far East.
One of the witnesses told me:
It was terrible. The men had no ides until they saw the grave that they were to be killed.
The court martial which had pronounced this barbaric sentence had held its proceedings without the presence of the accused. The death sentence for civilians attempting to escape internment is of course in complete contravention of international law.
Even the commandant of Jap gendarmes, Lt. Tomayusu, was shocked. Removing his uniform to humble himself he went in old slacks and bedroom slippers to army headquarters to plead with the military that the death sentence be remanded. He was paid no heed.
It is my observation that whenever the attention of the world has been called to Jap atrocities, there has been some effort on the part of Jap authorities to mitigate their brutality.
MacArthur ready to avenge heroes
Denver, Colorado (UP) – (Jan. 29)
Senator A. B. Chandler (D-KY) said today that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, fully aware of the Jap atrocities, is determined to avenge each and every one of them.
Senator Chandler, who made a tour of war fronts last fall, said:
Gen. MacArthur told me of the atrocities. He is intensely determined to avenge each hero’s death.
Senator Chandler is in Denver to attend a mining conference. Asked about the atrocities, he recalled previous stories of Gen. MacArthur’s Doomsday Book.
In this book, he said, Gen. MacArthur is keeping a list of each atrocity as it is reported to him, with the names of hundreds of men who have been subjected to him.
Some of his information was obtained from diaries taken from dead Japs, and these diaries confirmed the reports of the atrocities, Senator Chandler said.
The diaries told of operations which Jap physicians performed on American soldiers without the use of anesthetics, “to see how white men would react to torture.”
They also told of one American officer being smothered to death under the heel of a Jap soldier, when he did not revolt at the task of cleaning a cattle field.
Senator Chandler said:
These stories should make us want to go ahead, full speed, in our war with Japan. I have been demanding that we speed up the fight against Japan for two years.
Kirkpatrick: British join in cry against Jap ‘apes’
By Helen Kirkpatrick
London, England –
Britain has reacted with the same horror and loathing which characterized the American reception of reports on the Japanese treatment of prisoners – reports which will do more than any other one thing to impress the British with the greatness of the menace which Japan represents to the civilized world.
As the London *Daily Express” says:
If there lingered in any man’s mind a thread of doubt that Britain would throw the whole terrible weight of her military power against the Japanese the day Hitler is dead and done for, it must snap now, today, on reading what Anthony Eden said to the House of Commons. The bestiality of our other enemy commands the full hatred of all Englishmen. The sword must retrieve our honor as a nation… his honor is the honor of apes, his code is the code of the drooling lunatic.
The Daily Mail says:
The Japanese have proved themselves a subhuman race. It is in that regard that they must in the future be treated. There can be no place for them after this war in the concourse of civilized nations, in the common relations of human beings. Let us resolve to outlaw them.
