Editorial: The enemy we face
Manila has fallen and the fall of Berlin seems imminent.
But these signal victories do not mean the end of the war. They do not even mean we are near the war’s end.
While we are feeling jubilant about the way the wars in the Pacific and Germany are going, let us pull up and go back a few days to another Page One story.
We mean the story about the rescue of 510 Allied prisoners who were cooped up by the Japanese in Luzon Island horror camps.
Not the story of the rescue, which was dramatic and heroic, but the subsequent truth which resulted from that rescue – the grim tales told by the rescued. The eyewitness stories of how the Japs executed American and Filipino prisoners for trivial or imaginary offenses. How hundreds, and perhaps thousands, died of neglect in these so-called prison camps. How the prisoners were beaten and subjected to dozens of sadistic, barbaric cruelties by their Jap custodians. Of the rotten food they were given. How they were starved. How the Japs laughed at their misery.
We are up against a fiendish enemy in the Pacific. No reasonable American mind possibly can understand the degraded and excessively savage mind of the Jap. But we must try to understand it. If we are to win that war, we must not wince in the slightest. It will be a desperate, barbaric war until the last Jap is killed or driven into cringing surrender.
And while we are wising up to the insanely savage Jap, let’s not forget the Nazi. While the Nazi may possess more finesse and may pretend more respect for the international rules of warfare, he also is a hopeless barbarian. We cannot relent with him, either in the vigor with which we prosecute the war or in the terms of his surrender, any more than we can soften up for the Jap.
Our enemies are vicious, last-ditch fighters. They will stop at nothing. Neither dare we.