‘Drums of death beating’ –
No-quarter war on Japs to result from atrocities
Enemy accused of using hospital insignia on ships to ward off air attacks
Washington (UP) – (Jan. 29)
The Army and Navy Journal suggested today that the Japs may be using hospital insignia to ward off U.S. aerial blows against their steadily shrinking merchant fleet.
The Journal’s suggestion, following exposure by the Army and Navy of Jap atrocities against American and Filipino war prisoners, was in reply to enemy threats of retaliation for alleged sinking of hospital ships by U.S. airmen. The Journal’s attitude was the Japs may be making a belated effort “to conciliate world opinion.”
Meanwhile, military observers here agreed that from now on it will be a no-surrender, no-quarter war against the Japs. The Army-Navy story of Japan’s mass murder of more than 7,700 American and 14,000 Filipino heroes of Bataan and Corregidor makes any other kind of war impossible, they felt.
Senator Styles Bridges (R-NH), whose son, Lt. (jg.) Henry Styles Bridges, is on a warship in the South Pacific, said:
They’ve demanded a no-quarter war, and icy American wrath will give it to them. The drums of death are beating in American hearts tonight.
Senator Dennis Chavez (D-NM), from whose state went thousands of young men who were killed or captured in the Philippines, called for “complete, total, absolute destruction of Jap military power.” Senator Chavez said, “From now on, it is no quarter.”
There were indications, too, that home front endeavors against the Japs would be intensified as a result of the atrocity disclosures. Dispatches from all over the country showed War Bond sales soaring.
The futility of expecting civilized conduct by Japan toward war prisoners was summed up in Los Angeles by Capt. Samuel R. Grashio of Spokane, Washington, who escaped from an enemy prison camp with a few other survivors of Bataan and Corregidor: “We all prayed for death and cursed the day we surrendered.”
Want to kill more Japs
A War Department observer here had this to say about the attitude of American fighting men toward their enemy in the Pacific:
We see a lot of soldiers who have come back from Europe and the Pacific. The boys from Europe speak impersonally of the enemy. Those from the Pacific do not. They all want to go back and kill more Japs.
Their motive is revenge. What they have seen makes them hate the Japs personally. They know all about the Japs. They enjoy killing them.
‘No-quarter war’
At the Navy Department, an observer put it this way:
It is a knockdown, drag-out, no-quarter war. You can’t fight Japs any other way. There are no cases on record of any American actually giving up to the Japs since Bataan and Corregidor – and those boys couldn’t help themselves; they were smothered.
If you have been reading the communiqués, you will notice that for some time now neither side has exhibited any great eagerness to take prisoners. Our men feel that not even a dead Jap is a good Jap, but that he is better that way than alive.
This was the attitude of the men who fight. The attitude of civilians was expressed by Congressional demands for “vengeance,” “retribution,” “justice.” Editorials from all over the country spoke of the Japs as “animals who sometimes stand erect,” given to the “congenital bestiality of a subhuman breed,” fit only in the words of the Army and Navy Register, to “be treated as common outlaws.”
The Army and Navy Journal’s view on the Jap hospital ship charges was that:
Insofar as the Japs are concerned, we may infer it was perhaps with some dim notion that it is desirable to conciliate world opinion that they advanced the claim that the action to be taken by them is in retaliation for such acts by our forces.
Probably the truth is their merchantmen losses have become so stupendous, as a result of the hunting of our planes and submarines, and so serious in the effect upon their war effort and standard of living, that they are hopeful of saving tonnage, perhaps by misuse of the International Red Cross code.
The Journal, warning the Japs that their conduct “will bring to them a harvest of heartache and bodily pain,” proposed an International Red Cross investigation into the hospital ship charges, and added:
There could be only one result from such a probe, the fact that American fliers do not attack hospital ships and that such a practice is one of the Japanese methods of conducting war.