Rescue from the horrors of Auschwitz 74 years ago was commemorated at the end of January. Civilian prisoners of the Japanese obtained their freedom in the Philippines soon after. The battle for Manila lasted from February 3 to March 3, 1945 - an entire month. The Holocaust remains the most monstrous crime of the 20th century, but atrocities occurred on the other side of the world, which are only briefly mentioned, if at all. Among younger generations, they are virtually unknown. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March are becoming brief footnotes.
Several thousand civilians were prisoners in the Santo Tomas (University) internment camp. Some were brutally killed while interned. As the war grew worse for the Japanese, they accelerated a campaign of deliberate starvation. Pleas by parents for food to sustain the children and babies were ignored for months.
In October, 1944, American forces landed on Leyte Island. Already scant rations were summarily reduced to 1 1/2 cups of wormy rice per day for adults and 5 ounces for children under 10. Milk for babies was stopped. By January, 1945, the ration was 1/2 cup for adults. The prisoners scraped a native root and picked hibiscus leaves to make a thick soup. Doctors were punished for listing starvation as a cause of death. My 5' 2" mother weighed 72 pounds when liberated, and my step-father at 6' 3 1/2" weighed 135 pounds.
100,000 citizens, mostly Filipinos, were killed during the month long resistance. Some were victims of crossfire in the vicious fighting, but mostly they were deliberately murdered by the Japanese. The American First Cavalry had raced through Manila to free the internees, knowing they would be killed first. During the battle for the city, 16,000 Japanese troops refused to surrender. They herded people into churches, hospitals, and houses and set the buildings afire. Those who fled were shot, bayoneted or beheaded - men, women, children, babies. The daughter of of one of the Philippines' future presidents saw her grand-mother killed and her baby sister thrown into the air and caught on a bayonet.
I have photographs of Manila after its final liberation. The devastation is almost equal to what we have seen of Hiroshima after the atom bomb. Barely a building is recognizable. The city was almost totally razed.
Meanwhile, military and civilian prisoners were being freed from other camps. Cabanatuan, Bilibid and Los Banos added their recitation of atrocities. Besides slave labor, other human rights violations included inhumane medical and bacteriological experiments, starvation, withholding Red Cross care packages, Hell ships, mayhem and rape. Many military prisoners, shipped to Manchuria as slave labor, never made it there. Prison ships were supposed to be marked. They were not. Our own submarines sank some of them, thinking they were enemy supply ships.
Japan was finally forced to admit its crimes against the Korean "comfort women" and for the rape of Nanking, China, but that country has sanitized its history books covering the period. Young Japanese today know nothing of Pearl Harbor or of the barbarous treatment afforded prisoners of war. Germany has tried to atone, accepts its culpability and teaches students that World War II was an evil period in its history.
Japanese behavior was spawned by culture. Schoolboys were taught to honor the knights of bushido and the samurai code. To surrender meant dishonor, not only for a soldier but for his family. Death was the heroic alternative. Even common soldiers had no respect for an inferior race, as they judged the caucasians to be, who surrendered at Correigidor. They were deemed unfit to live. The suicides and fights to the death on far Pacific islands presented an unexpected study of the Japanese psyche. Kamikaze suicide missions provided emphasis. Young teens learned in simulators, on the ground, how to take off, keep a plane in the air and aim it at a ship. They didn't practice landings. They would die gloriously for their god-emperor.
Such fanaticism influenced the decision to drop the atomic bomb. Hundreds of devastating raids had been made over Japan. In March, 1945, Tokyo was firebombed. Sixteen square miles were leveled, 83,000 were killed and a million made homeless. This was eight months before 80,000 were killed in Hiroshima (over time and the dimming of witnessed history, the figure keeps inflating). A slogan appeared in Japan: "One hundred million people die in honor. Better to die than seek ignominious safety." The militarists prepared to sacrifice as much of Japan's population as necessary. We hear that the bomb was not necessary; that the Japanese were so weakened. That is not true. A million men at arms remained in the home islands. There were still 500 kamikazes. Neither did the second atomic bomb over Nagasaki bring immediate submission, contrary to what is taught today. Unrelenting further raids by B-29s in the days following clinched it. I was glad to hear Oliver North, in his TV "War Stories," in 2012 mention that very fact. I've been telling it for years. The military was threatening to depose Emperor Hirohito when he made his unprecedented radio address to his people, announcing unconditional surrender. It was the first time the people of Japan had heard the voice of their Emperor.
Of almost 14,000 civilian internees from several nations, less than 3,000 were alive in 1999, the last time I checked the figures. About 9,000 remained of 33,600 military personnel. 20 years later, that number is drastically reduced. Survivors had, for years, sought $22,000 in reparations and a formal apology from Japan. While the U.S. gave former Japanese detainees and their children $20,000 in reparations for their detention in relocation camps here, Japan still denies its history. Read sometime how we helped to rebuild the Japanese nation after the war. If you are too young to know about it, and, I'm sure, textbooks of history in the last couple of decades have omitted some important details, educate yourself.
Under U.S. occupation war crimes trials were held. Executions or imprisonment followed. After helping Japan to begin rebuilding, occupation was ended and sovereignty restored in 1950. Soon the Korean Conflict heated up. The Treaty of San Francisco in 1951 freed war criminals not yet tried and absolved Japan. We needed bases there for the new conflict. The country had no money for reparations at the time. It was being subsidized by the United States. In the year 2000, a federal judge ruled that the peace agreement bars former prisoners of the Japanese from seeking redress. Our country will be made to feel eternal guilt for Hiroshima and U.S. relocation camps without the accusing whispers from those soon to be forgotten voices echoing in its collective ear.
2/2/12
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