Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (14 page)

Most interrogations would begin by beating the suspect with fists or a stick, ‘but beating exhausts us, so we move on to torture,’ says Tshuchiya.
Then the victim might be attacked with a red-hot iron bar: ‘The iron bar was brought in and it was all red with heat and it was hard to stay in the room because human flesh is burned and it smells bad.’
Alternatively the Kempeitai might use the ‘hanging’ torture, in which a large stone was tied to the suspect’s body and he was suspended in a position of excruciating agony for hours at a time.
But according to Tshuchiya, who personally tortured at least fifty different people during his career, ‘beating or hanging people upside down is not so effective as water torture’.This was his speciality (and it would have been used on Captain Matthews and the other Allied POWs in Sandakan).
‘You tie them face up, lying on a long bench,’ says Tshuchiya, ‘and then you put a cloth on their face and then you pour water onto the cloth so the person can’t help drinking it.
You push their stomach out with water — blow it right up.’
When the stomach was distended the Kempeitai would beat their victim hard on the belly with a stick so that the water was vomited back up.
Then they would repeat the procedure again and again.
‘During the torture some people are killed,’ says Tshuchiya.
‘Those people who aren’t expert at it kill them, because if water goes into the bronchial tubes and the lungs then they die.
You tell by the colour of the face and the colour of the nails.
If it’s a bloodless face, like a dying face, that’s the moment we have to stop.
We try not to kill them — but to take them to the verge of being killed.’
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The Kempeitai faced the traditional problem encountered by torturers through the ages — false confessions.
Since most people will say anything the torturer wants to hear in order to stop the pain, they will often implicate innocent people who in turn are tortured and name still more innocent people.
‘Mostly they lied,’ says Yoshio Tshuchiya in a frank assessment of the information gained from suspects under torture.
But that knowledge didn’t stop the Kempeitai trying to obtain what they must have known would be false confessions.
‘If we arrested these people and found nothing out, then we would have to carry the responsibility,’ he says.
‘The Kempeitai would be blamed.’The Kempeitai operating in Borneo during the war similarly did not wish to ‘lose face’ — and as a result of their torture of the Allied POWs and local people implicated in the plot, thousands of other innocent people were tortured and killed.

The discovery of the resistance group and their radio within the Sandakan camp had one other far-reaching effect.
The Japanese, having shot Captain Matthews and the rest of the leaders of the group, decided to separate out the vast majority of the officers in order to deprive the enlisted men of leadership and so make further resistance more difficult.
‘At eight o’clock on the morning of this particular day in August 1943,’ says Peter Lee, ‘we were suddenly informed that we had to be ready — all officers, with the exception often who were allowed to stay, had to be ready to move in four hours.’
He felt ‘great sadness’ at being ordered to leave his men: ‘It’s rather like being separated from your family.
I would have given my right arm to have stayed.’
Altogether 230 officers were transferred to another POW camp at Kuching.

After the officers left, the 2500 POWs who remained were treated much worse by the Japanese — rations were reduced and even sick prisoners were forced to work.
In the autumn of 1944, with the Sandakan airfield nearly completed, more Japanese soldiers were transferred to North Borneo to defend the island in the event of attack.
Because of this additional strain on local food supplies, the POWs’ rations were reduced still further.
The local Japanese commanders also realized that starving the POWs would make them less of a security threat if the Allies landed in the area.
A weak and sick POW could not be turned swiftly into an effective soldier to fight the Japanese once again.
As a result of this deliberate policy of starving and beating the prisoners, the death rate increased massively and soon a hundred POWs were dying each month — at the start of 194S only around 1900 remained alive.

By January 1945 bombing by the Allies had made the Sandakan aerodrome unusable.
Since the POWs were no longer useful as forced labourers at the airfield, the Japanese decided to use 5OO of the fittest as porters for two battalions who were marching from Sandakan to Api on the west coast of Borneo.
The first 90 miles (I5O km) of this marathon trek of more than 120 miles (200 km) lay through thick jungle.
A second march was begun in May which involved all of the POWs who were thought fit enough to attempt it — around SSO men.
The remaining seriously sick 250 POWs remained at Sandakan, on starvation rations.

Conditions on both marches were appalling.
The POWs, mostly barefoot, had to traverse jungles and swamps rich in snake-infested undergrowth.
‘Maybe one in ten of them was sort of healthy,’ says Toyoshige Karashima, a Taiwanese camp guard who accompanied them.
(Most of the guards the Japanese employed in Sandakan came from Taiwan — then one of Japan’s colonies.) ‘But the food situation was terribly bad and a lot of them were sick.
They had malaria and things like that, so they were weak.’
Karashima and his comrades were under strict instructions to shoot any POW who could not keep up the required pace: ‘We were told that if they fell over, we shouldn’t leave them.
We had to get rid of them.
It was maybe three or five days into the march and there’d been very heavy rain the night before, so the prisoners were cold and shivering and about thirty of them couldn’t keep up, so we gathered them up and dealt with them....The only thing we could do was to get rid of them, because they couldn’t keep up.
The prisoners were put in a kind of valley and so we shot them from above.
If they’d had weapons it would have been different — but it made me think, because I have a conscience.
But we were told that we had to follow orders, and if we didn’t then we would be killed.’

A few days later he murdered again.
One of the Australian prisoners fell exhausted in the jungle.
‘For an hour I tried to find ways of taking him with me, but I couldn’t,’ says Karashima.
‘He said he wanted to drink coffee and eat bread, but that was impossible.
I did have some bread and I’d eaten about half of it, so I gave him the other half.
I thought after he ate it he might be able to walk, but he couldn’t.
He said, “Please kill me”, and when I looked at his legs it was very clear that he wouldn’t be able to stand up — he wouldn’t be able to walk.
And his thighs were very swollen.
He knew that he couldn’t do anything.
And he said he was happy to die, and he gave me a photograph and an address.
And he asked me to send the photograph to the address.
I think it was a photograph of his family.
His mother, his father or girlfriend — something like that.
But after the war we had a very hard time so I just threw it away.’

After the Australian POW had finished eating the bread Karashima shot him dead: ‘I felt very sorry for him, but I had no choice but to kill him.
When people were about to die they just gave up once they knew there was no chance of survival.
For us, even if I wanted to help him, there was no way I could, except to help him by killing him.’

After the war Toyoshige Karashima was convicted of murdering Australian prisoners of war and imprisoned for more than ten years.
But even today, when pressed, he still doesn’t accept his personal responsibility for the crime: ‘I don’t feel guilty now about what I’ve done because in a war people cannot be normal.
We had already learnt what the Japanese were like when we were trained by the Japanese army at a training camp in Taiwan.
When we joined the Japanese army, we were told that we were the soldiers of the emperor and all we needed to do was to obey orders — which were the orders of the emperor.
That’s what I was told.’

Of the remaining sick POWs left at Sandakan, seventy-five were forced to set out on a similar trek across Borneo on 9 June, less than two weeks after the second march had departed.
None of this group survived more than 30 miles (5O km).
As for those left at Sandakan, by July a hundred of them had died, leaving only fifty still alive.
Then the remaining Japanese were ordered to evacuate Sandakan completely.
Shortly before his own death from malaria, Lieutenant Moritake ordered the execution of twenty-three of the sickest POWs.
According to the later evidence of Sergeant Murozimi, the remaining twenty-seven had all died of malnutrition and sickness by 15 August.
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Meanwhile none of the forced marches across Borneo had reached the intended destination by the coast — the original Japanese plan had been ludicrously ambitious (so much so that several Japanese soldiers had died on the trek, despite receiving much better rations than the POWs).
The marchers actually stopped at the town of Ranau, less than 100 miles (160 km) from Sandakan.
At Ranau the POWs who had survived the appalling ordeal of the march through the jungle — about 190 of them — were immediately ordered to build thatched huts for the Japanese and then for themselves.
Then they were forced to carry heavy loads on their backs from the centre of Ranau to their embryo POW camp on the outskirts of the town.
Other POWs were set to work lugging barrels of water up a hill from a nearby stream.
The prisoners were given even less to eat than before — less than 4 ounces (100 g) of rice each day — and, as a consequence, every day more and more of them died.
By 20 July the remainder were too weak to work.
On 1 August, Captain Takakuwa decided that the thirty-three POWs who — by what must have been miraculous powers of courage and willpower — had somehow survived thus far should be killed.
All of them were shot.

When Peter Lee heard what had befallen his comrades his reaction was simple: ‘Absolute horror!
Because nobody at that time had any idea that such a thing could possibly occur in what is called a civilized world.’
Of the 1800 Australian prisoners of war who had been alive at Sandakan camp in 1944 only six, who had managed to escape into the jungle, survived.
The rest died either in the camp itself, on the marches, or once their trek was over.
Every single one of the 700 British prisoners of war lost his life.

The story of what happened at Sandakan is more than a mere catalogue of horror — it is instructive.
Because, unlike the Nazi extermination policy which from the moment of its full implementation in early 1942 was a systematic blueprint for murder, the full extent of the criminal Japanese policy towards Allied POWs only emerged piecemeal.
There were, from the first moments of the war, instances of murderous brutality like the bayoneting of the prisoners at the Silesian mission in Hong Kong, but this was not the norm.
By far the majority of surrendering Allied soldiers survived to become captives of the Japanese, though from the moment they did become prisoners they were subject to mistreatment.
Japan had signed the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war in July 1929 but had never ratified it.
Early in the war the Allies protested at the Japanese treatment of POWs and in response to this pressure the Japanese government did agree in principle to abide by the terms of the Geneva Convention (with the exception of the provision forbidding the use of POW labour to ‘further the war effort’).
But as these examples from the Dutch East Indies and Borneo demonstrate, this promise to implement the provisions of the Convention was never enforced.
The view of the Japanese military was similar to that of the Soviet High Command, and Stalin in particular.
Since their own soldiers were forbidden under any circumstances to become prisoners, what was the point in committing to the humane treatment of the surrendered forces of the enemy?
In any case, thought many senior Japanese military officers, to treat enemy POWs according to the Geneva Convention was not just onerous, but was to pander to the standards of the Western democracies at a time when Japan should be forging ahead guided only by her own sense of what was right and proper.
It was this logic that led to the infamous abuse of Allied POWs as forced labour on military engineering projects like the Burma railway and the building of the Sandakan airfield.

In addition, the Geneva Convention was also utterly at odds with the whole atmosphere of brutality in which the Imperial Army itself functioned.
As the survivors of Sandakan testify, the guards would often brutalize each other.
As for the Taiwanese guards, at the bottom of the racial and hierarchical chain in the camp, they were so abused that on at least one occasion a Taiwanese guard at Sandakan committed suicide sooner than endure mistreatment any longer.

Once the Japanese had embarked on a policy of treating their prisoners as dishonourable, of working them like beasts of burden and denying them adequate food, clothing and accommodation, a crime like Sandakan was always possible.
At Sandakan, only six out of 2500 POWs survived, but this was an unusually high death rate.
Overall, roughly 27 per cent of the 350,000 Allied POWs taken by the Japanese died in captivity.
In contrast, only 4 per cent of the Allied POWs held by the Germans or Italians perished.
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There are those who use such statistics to fuel the argument that the Japanese possess some kind of unique ‘oriental’ cruelty.
But that is not the case.

What is less well known is the death rate of Soviet prisoners held in German camps on the Eastern Front during the Second World War.
Of the 5.7 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans between June 1941 and February 1945 a staggering 3.3 million died — a death rate more than twice as high as that for Allied POWs in Japanese hands.
Moreover, this horrific level of mortality was expected and planned for by the Germans before the war against the Soviet Union began.
A planning document from the Wehrmacht’s central economic agency, dated 2 May 1941 (six weeks before the war against Stalin began), states baldly: ‘Tens of millions of men will undoubtedly starve if we take away all we need from the country.’
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