News-Info-Alerts

Re: Former POW Wants Apology

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: June 01, 2002

"Bataan survivor wants `apology'
Ex-GI says his lawsuit against Japan is symbolic
BY STEVE VOGEL
Washington Post Service

Mel Rosen's introduction to being a prisoner of war came in the first hours after he and his troops surrendered to the Japanese in the Philippines in spring 1942.

As they sat in a big field ringed by Japanese machine guns on the Bataan peninsula, a GI tried to use the latrine. A Japanese soldier thrust his bayonet through the American's chest, and when the blade did not come out cleanly, the Japanese soldier used his foot to push the dying GI into the latrine.

''Another Japanese soldier nearby was leaning on his rifle laughing, like it was a joke,'' said Rosen, 83, a vibrant retired Army colonel living in Falls Church, Va., who 60 years later cannot tell the story without choking up. ``You don't know what frustration is until you have to watch something like that and can't do anything about it.''

Legislation that would allow survivors to sue Japanese corporations that allegedly enslaved American POWs during World War II was introduced last year in the House and Senate. A House resolution with more than 225 co-sponsors will be pushed in coming weeks.

While the Bataan death march has entered the lexicon -- often in references that trivialize its inhumanity -- the full extent of the horrors that ensued for survivors is little understood.

HISTORY `LOST'

''I think it's time people learned what happened over there,'' said Paul Rutter, 81, an Oxon Hill, Md., man who survived the march and more than three years of captivity. ``That part of history has been lost.''

Marching for days in terrible heat, beaten and deprived of food and water, an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 of the 78,000 Americans and Filipinos who surrendered to the Japanese died during the march.

Over the next three years, those who survived were kept in debilitating conditions and exposed to tropical diseases, transported in ''hell ships'' to camps in Japan and elsewhere and forced into slave labor.

Of the 12,000 Americans taken prisoner at Bataan, only 4,000 were alive by the end of the war, according to authorities on the subject.

Rosen is the lead plaintiff in a $1 trillion class-action lawsuit against Japan filed in September in federal court in Chicago. ''Everything the Japanese did to us was deliberate, inhuman, brutal, calculated and racist,'' he said.

Hours after the raid on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, U.S. forces in the Philippines also were attacked by Japanese bombers and fighters, and later by a large invasion force of the Imperial Japanese Army.

The U.S. troops and their Filipino allies fighting on the Bataan peninsula across the bay from Manila held out against heavy odds for 150 days, until their ammunition and supplies gave out. After their surrender on April 9, the prisoners were rounded up and marched north for days, up to 55 miles in the heat without water.

''If anybody dropped or couldn't make it, we were not allowed to help. The Japanese clubbed them to death, bayoneted them, shot them or beheaded them,'' said Rosen, a 1940 West Point graduate who was a lieutenant with the Philippine Scouts. At a railhead, they were loaded into hot, crowded box cars. ''If you died in there, you couldn't fall to the floor even,'' said Rutter, a B-17

radio operator who had been based at Clark Field.

At their eventual destination, Camp O'Donnell, 54,000 prisoners were crammed into facilities built for a fraction as many people. Malaria and dysentery killed thousands more.

In November 1942, Rosen was sent to a penal colony on the island of Mindinao.

Two years later, he and 1,600 other Americans were loaded onto a ship bound for Japan. Rosen was put in a 30-by-50-foot hold with about 680 prisoners.

People had diarrhea and dysentery, and the hold soon filled with human waste. The next morning, the ship was attacked by U.S. dive bombers, whose pilots did not know that Americans were aboard.

Another attack by U.S. planes came the next day, and as the ship began to sink, prisoners emerged from the hold. ''Those of us still alive decided getting our heads blown off by machine-gun fire was preferable to going down in a sinking, burning ship,'' Rosen said.

The 1,300 American survivors who swam ashore were loaded onto a second ship. They reached a harbor in Formosa in January 1945 when U.S. bombers struck again.

Aboard a third ship, prisoners froze as they sailed in the North China Sea with little protection from the January cold. ''We were throwing American bodies overboard at the rate of 30, then 40, then 50 a day all the way to Japan,'' Rosen said.

By various estimates, 200 to 300 of the 1,600 prisoners loaded on the first ship made it to Japan. ''The death march was a Sunday stroll compared to the three hell ships,'' Rosen said.

STEEL MILL WORK

Rutter, who had been shipped to Japan earlier, spent two years working in a steel mill south of Osaka. ''We were money machines for them,'' Rutter said.

The lawsuit Rosen has filed is being pursued for symbolic, not monetary, reasons, he said. ``The Japanese are waiting for us to die off.''

When a U.S. Navy submarine accidentally sank a Japanese trawler last year, the U.S. promptly apologized, a proper gesture, Rosen said.

``I have been waiting 60 years for an apology.''"