Brooklyn Eagle (July 1, 1943)
U.S. prisoners tortured by Japs, author tells Rotary
Relates how he aided in burial of nurses raped by soldiers
The Japanese are using British and American war prisoners as guinea pigs in experiments on the refinements of cruelty, author and educator Wenzell Brown told members of the Brooklyn Rotary Club yesterday at a luncheon meeting at the Hotel Bossert.
Recalling some of the horrors he had witnessed during six months as a prisoner himself in the Stanley Prison Camp at Hong Kong, Mr. Brown voiced an urgent appeal that everything possible be done for the rescue of the hundreds of men and women left “in the grip of hell.”
It was a hell, as described by the speaker, consisting of confinement under unsanitary conditions, dearth of food and ill-treatment ranging from insults and casual blows to torture and murder. This cruelty, he warned, was inflicted by the Japanese deliberately with the purpose of demonstrating their racial “supremacy” and their fitness, as they saw it, to dominate the world.
Seek race supremacy
Mr. Brown said:
The Japanese are maddened by the idea of race supremacy. To impress it upon their white victims, they walk them needlessly through the streets under guard, slapping them from time to time and repeating, “Don’t look down on the Nipponese.”
They take particular care to inflict these humiliations on the whites in the presence of the Chinese by way of warning the latter that their Allies are weak and powerless to help them. Wherever they go, they emphasize that they are destined to dominate the white peoples.
Mr. Brown was assistant professor of English at Lingnan University until the fall of Hong Kong. During the siege of the city, he served as a special guard on British transport trucks bringing supplies to the frontlines. Captured when the city fell, he was herded with other prisoners, including American and British civilians, into a small Chinese hotel. From there, after two and a half weeks, they were taken to the Stanley prison camp.
Details atrocities
Details of many of the atrocities he witnessed there were of an unprintable nature. But he told of seeing the bayoneting of men at the slightest pretext, and how he helped to bury the bodies of three British nurses raped and killed by the Japanese soldiers.
Eventually, he was released and returned to this country on the Gripsholm. But in leaving, he declared, he pledged that he would tell the world of the sufferings of those still in the hands of the Japanese and to appeal for their rescue. He is the author of the book Hong Kong Aftermath, which is soon to be published.