Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II

by Laurence Rees

  Security was so lax in those early days that around a dozen POWs managed to escape by crawling under the perimeter fence. All of them were eventually recaptured — the area was surrounded by dense jungle and the locals knew that if they were caught helping escaped POWs they would be killed themselves. As a result of these escape attempts the camp commandant, Susumu Hoshijima, acting on orders he had himself received, ordered the prisoners of war to sign a contract pledging that they would not try to escape. Thereafter it was normal practice to shoot any prisoner who escaped, even after he had been recaptured unharmed.

  As another security measure the Japanese introduced a special punishment for those prisoners who had committed relatively minor offences — wooden cages. ‘They were raised off the ground about two and a half feet,’ says Dr Mills. ‘The bars were made of wood and they were completely open to the atmosphere. People could only sit in them, not stand. And people went almost out of their mind, at times, in there. It upset the camp terribly. Everyone was on edge, especially when those in the cage were yelling and screaming.’ Altogether three wooden cages were eventually in use in the camp. Each day the prisoner would be released for ‘exercise’ — which consisted of the guards beating him up before locking him back in the cage. Some POWs had to endure 40 days of this torture.

  Around the same time, because of the harshness of the work on the aerodrome and the inadequate diet, more POWs started to become sick. ‘Beriberi and pellagra were very prevalent,’ says Dr Mills. ‘Everyone was suffering from them to some degree. The earliest manifestation of this was aching of the feet. People couldn’t sleep at night because of their feet aching. They’d walk all night, trudge up and down. It’s called “happy feet”. People did go to the wall. We did have deaths from vitamin deficiency, and we continued to have them all the time. In general it was a very poor diet, and a lethal diet over a long period.’ Jim Millner, another Australian POW, was one of those who complained to Hoshijima about the food, ‘and the Japanese commander told us that people die of starvation every day in Japan. You’re only POWs — why should we feed you? The Japanese only feed POWs if they work.’

  During March and April 1943 another 1200 prisoners of war, the majority British, arrived at Sandakan. Amongst them was RAF officer Peter Lee. He and his men had previously been held in a camp along the coast of Borneo at Jesselton (today’s Kota Kinabalu), where they had been imprisoned in an overcrowded local jail and had only been given congealed rice to eat. Initially he thought the open aspects of Sandakan camp an improvement on Jesselton, but it soon became clear that many of the British prisoners, already weakened by two years of imprisonment, would not survive. ‘Every day I used to go and see our men in the sick bays,’ he says,’ and you’d find a young man that I’d known as a typical example of young British manhood, fit as a fiddle when we were in Singapore. Now you’d either find them horribly emaciated, ghosts of their former self, or incredibly bloated with beriberi, with enormous distended stomachs, their private parts distended, and just lying back naked on the bench. And inevitably, of course, people who’d reached that degree of malnutrition didn’t recover.’

  Meanwhile, the Japanese were concerned about the lack of progress on the construction of the aerodrome and as a result the brutality with which the POWs were treated began to increase. ‘If you didn’t obey an order immediately,’ says Peter Lee, who worked at Sandakan, ‘depending on the personality of the particular Japanese soldier you’d get a crack over the head or a crack over the backside with a stick. There was one occasion when an officer intervened when one of his men was being beaten up, and he was horribly beaten up by quite a number of them. The natural emotion of anyone, any reasonable person, if they’re attacked is to defend themselves. But as a prisoner of war of the Japanese you very quickly realized that this was not on. If you attempted to defend yourself you were bashed senseless by the man and his comrades. In this situation you have to take it. In the old British phrase you have to grin and bear it.’

  ’There was a great deal of bashing at the airport,’ says Dr Mills, ‘to force the POWs to work harder, and they had a ruthless gang of Japanese who would beat people up. I saw the result of it.’ Jim Millner led a work party of Australian POWs at the aerodrome and was ‘bashed’ by the Japanese ‘on many occasions’. ‘We had to bow to all the Japanese officers,’ he says, ‘which was very degrading. And any Japanese, no matter what his rank, could bash you if he felt like it, and they used to take great delight in it. The main thing was to stand on your feet. If they knocked you down, they put the boot in. But eventually, if you stood on your feet, they’d end up with a grudging respect for you and you got away without being too badly bashed.’

  However, much to the surprise of the POWs at Sandakan (ignorant as they understandably were of the methods of training used by the Imperial Army), the Japanese guards would, on occasion, ‘beat themselves up’. ‘To give them justice,’ says Dr Mills, ‘they did it to themselves. It was their policy. If some soldier was getting down in the dumps or out of sorts he would be beaten up in front of his own group — knocked down, then kicked. Then he would have to present arms to the man who did it. And the incident was finished. It was very good psychologically because they never allowed people to feel sorry for themselves. I have seen funny occasions when the NCO beat up the young soldier, the lieutenant beat up the NCO, the captain beat up the lieutenant — it went right to the top, beating each other up quite publicly. We used to applaud it. They took no notice. It was some of the only fun we got, when the Japs started to beat themselves up.’

  Then, in the summer of 1943, the POWs suffered a severe setback. A resistance group within the camp, led by Captain Lionel Matthews, had managed, with the help of Malayan collaborators, to build a small radio in order to listen secretly to BBC news bulletins, whose content was then passed around the camp. In May 1943 they attempted to obtain more radio parts in order to build a transmitter — but their luck ran out and they were betrayed by a Chinese civilian. Immediately Matthews himself and all the POWs who had been working with him were arrested by the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret military police. Originally formed to ensure discipline within the Japanese armed forces, by the 1930s the Kempeitai were also engaged in political surveillance and their role had become similar to that of the German Gestapo. The Kempeitai habitually used sadistic methods of interrogation, and Captain Matthews and the rest of the POWs suspected of being members of his resistance group were all brutally tortured.

  Not surprisingly, few former members of the Kempeitai are prepared to talk about their work — which is why the interview we managed to obtain with Yoshio Tshuchiya is so valuable. He joined the secret police in 1933 when he was twenty-two and remained with them until 194S, by which time he was head of the ‘information unit’ based in Qiqihar in Inner Mongolia. He used similar methods of interrogation on his prisoners to those that his colleagues in Borneo would have used on the Allied prisoners of war.

  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 bea
t 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.’3

  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.4

  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 wer
e 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.