POOR AT BEST

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 December 1942, Page 4

POOR AT BEST

AND IN MANY CASES VILELY CRUEL JAPANESE TREATMENT OF PRISONERS. AMERICAN CORRESPONDENT’S SURVEY. The following article on the treatment of American prisoners by the Japanese was published recently by the “Christian Science Monitor” as a balanced study by its former Shanghai correspondent, Mr Frederick B. Opper, who himself was confined by the Japanese for 109 days. Mr Opper wrote:—

Treatment of American civilians and prisoners of war by the Japanese forces in Asia has varied from very good to unbelievably bad, and has been consistent only in its inconsistency. Diplomats and civilian .exchanges from Japan and occupied China paint a grim picture of Japanese occupation methods.

Care of the foreign internees in different cities of Japan and occupied China has been variously in the hands of the Japanese Army, Navy, Gendarmerie, Foreign Office, and the police, with each local group acting on its own initiative and confusion reigning supreme with orders and counterorders being issued with equal speed and carelessness.

In Shanghai the great majority of the 1,300 Americans still there are free. While in most cities Americans, Britons, and Dutch have been confined to their homes or housed in one large compound, the international character of Shanghai plus the large number of enemy aliens, persuaded the Japanese to give them the run of the city proper. Consequently, to most of the American citizens there the war has remained a relatively distant matter. They still walk the streets unmolested. They are s.till able to go to theatres and baseball games. Many of them have lost their jobs through the liquidation of their businesses by the Japanese or through pay-roll cuts, but others are working and drawing salaries as in the days before the war. GAOLED IN SHANGHAI. There are other Shanghai Americans, however, including the writer who have a different story to tell of. Japan’s occupation of the city’s International Settlement. Some 25 or 30 Americans as well as Britons, Dutch, Russians and others have spent up to six months in the Japanese gendarmerie gaol there under conditions that beggar- description. They sat and slept on wooden cell floors throughout the winter, supplied only with a single thin blanket. They were fed three small bowls of rice a day. In a cell 9 by 18 feet they rubbed shoulders with up to 40 fellow prisoners, all but a few being Chinese of the criminal class.

They bathed irregularly, sometimes no more often than once a month. They were not allowed to talk and they were beaten and slapped for whispering to a fellow 'prisoner. They received no exercise during their incarceration save for occasional set-ting-up drills and short shuffling walks about the cell.

They were questioned from time to time as to their pre-war activities. The questions were ridiculous and the questioners, non-commissioned officers, were ill-informed and obtuse. If the answers didn’t suit them the prisoners were apt to be slapped or punched. Ail around them Chinese and Japanese prisoners—there were a few Japanese held in the same gaol—were beaten and tortured. CELLS BUILT IN CELLAR The gaol itself was a former apartment house known as the Bridge House. Cells had been built in the cellar and the gendarmerie used the upper floors as offices and rooms for questioning. I have seen prisoners beaten with belts, iron bars, bamboo poles, dog whips, and bayonets. The Japanese guards frequently practiced jiujitsu on the Chinese prisoners, throwing them to the floor, picking them up and trying it again. Many of the guards wore sneakers and crept up on cells quietly in attempts to catch prisoners talking. When they did, the unlucky victims were either beaten or forced to stand for long periods with their hands above their heads or to kneel for equaly long hours on a cement runway. One elderly Chinese Y.M.C.A. leader was slapped and beaten unmercifully because the guards found a safety pin in a set of clean clothes which his wife had sent him. INCIDENTS OF BRUTALITY. Another was beaten for an hour and a half with a dog whip as hard as a burly sergeant-major could swing it because a fellow prisoner had thrown him a note as he passed the cell. He was then made to stand and kneel alternately, hands above his head, for nine hours without food. One A mep i can prisoner was punched in the face because he was unable to read Japanese. Police dogs, trained to pursue Chinese guerillas through the countryside, were frequently brought to the cell blocks and prisoners were made to shout and jump before them as the animals, worked up to a frenzy, snarling and .leaping at the wooden bars. The list of indignities could be extended. TREATMENT OF MARINES. Meanwhile, a dozen miles from •Shanghai there are close to 1.500 Americans in an internment camp. The majority of them are the Marine prisoners taken from Wake Island and the civilian workers stationed there at the time the Japanese attack was launched. Up to the time I left Shanghai no Swiss consular representative or Red Cross worker or neutral observer had been allowed to visit the camp and report on conditions, but authenticated reports indicate that the treatment of the Wake garrison and other prisoners there is fair by Japanese standards and poor by American. The men are fed rice and a watery stew that is sufficient to sustain life, but which is hardly enough for husky men forced to do manual labour. The men, who include the American Marine garrisons from Peking and Tientsin, the ' American sailors from the captured gunboat Wake, the British sailors from H. M. S. Peterel and some American seamen from torpedoed merchant ships are given daily exercise and are made to work at various farming tasks. The treatment is rough but not cruel. PLEDGE UNDER DURESS. Under duress the men were forced to sign a pledge that they would not attempt to escape. Promptly Commander Winfield S. Cunningham, Naval Commandant at Wake Island, the commander of the Wake, the commander of the Peterel and the chief civilian architect at Wake Island made a break for freedom. They, were caught the next day and were then lodged in the Bridge House for a month. They are now in the Shanghai Municipal Gaol, under a 10-year sentence, despite the fact that international law provides only 30 days’ solitary confinement for a war prisoner who is caught in attempting to escape. The Japanese said the fact that more than •one prisoner was implicated made it a conspiracy and not a simple escape and that therefore the case came under Japanese—not international —law. They attempted unsuccessfully to learn who had been the ringleader. If they

had succeeded he would have faced a capital sentence. Four Marine privates and corporals later made a break for freedom and were picked up after almost a month in the Chinese countryside. When I left Shanghai they had been held in the Bridge House for more than two months with no indication that they would be returned to the ’internment camp. No food was allowed to be sent in to them from the outside as was the case with civilian prisoners. SOME SPECIAL PRIVILEGES. Paradoxically, the - Japanese have made a determined attempt to persuade the world that they are a civilised people and not the barbarians their five-year war in China makes them appear. Foreigners, for example, have been accorded privileges not given to Chinese or Japanese prisoners. They can wash in running water each morning, they bathe occasionally, and their families are allowed to send them food, blankets, clothing and other necessities. Foreigners attribute this to two causes, the first that the Japanese are ashamed of what has happened previously in China and wish to be considered by outsiders the paragons their own people believe them to be. The. second is that they are not by any means sure of a final victory in the war and wish to be able at a later peace conference to point to evidences of good treatment as a bid. for mercy. While this may be true so far as higher officials are concerned, the privates and corporals with whom the foreigner comes in contact are uniformly confident of ■ ultimate victory and what good treatment has been accorded foreigners in occupied areas is due, not to fear of the future, but to direct orders.