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Re: WW II Slave Labor Reparations Battle

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: May 28, 2003

"Memories energize WWII slave laborers' battle for reparations
By Joe Segura, Staff writer

The Japanese attack planes showered Corregidor during the invasion of the Philippines, and the thunder of the explosions rattled the American command observation post to the core.

Soldiers scrambled for cover, but Army Maj. Harry Julian commander of a hastily formed retaliation fire unit didn't budge or blink.

"He stood his ground,' recalled former POW Joseph Della Malva of Seal Beach, an aide to the major.

Julian, a West Point officer, later was killed while being transported with other prisoners of war on a "Hell Ship' to a slave labor camp in Japan. The vessel had been torpedoed by American submarines.

Seal Beach resident Glenn Bowers, another POW and survivor of the Japanese slave camps, recalled a friend starving to death because he couldn't stomach the small portions of bland rice. "He just wasted away,' he said.

The mental images have survived six decades among those who were on the front lines during World War II one of several conflicts that required the ultimate sacrifice being remembered this Memorial Day.

For the former POWs of the Japanese camps, survival was important. But they often envied the dead.

The former World War II prisoners of war in the Pacific Theater many of them now in their 80s still have difficulty dealing with the morbid memories of their years of enslavement by private corporations.

Savage slaughters, barbaric beatings and crude and cruel conditions were daily routines for the POWs, and their experiences have been the focus of two pushes for reparations in the courts and Congress.

It's an uphill fight: Earlier efforts have failed, the Bush administration opposes their efforts, and many of the men are dying. But they are pressing on.

A total of 27,465 U.S. troops were taken prisoner in the Pacific; 11,107 died in detention, according to government statistics.

For the surviving POWs experts estimated that 5,745 were still alive as of Jan. 1, 2000, with an average age of 84 the clock keeps on ticking.

The POW ranks have thinned dramatically: 30 percent of the survivors of Bataan and Corregidor have died, with more than 1,000 dying in 2001.

"Each month that justice is denied us, another 50 survivors will die,' said Lester Tenney, a survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March in the Philippines, during testimony before the HouseJudiciary's Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims, which reviewed a POW reparations bill.

"We don't have much time left,' he testified Sept. 25, criticizing the Bush administration for its opposition.

The former POWs don't want their stories to be forgotten.

There are vivid memories of the Bataan Death March, after the fall of the Philippines, and of their journey aboard "Hell Ships' to various labor camps in Japan and of their days of enslavement and abuse at the hands of soldiers and civilians operating the private companies. Bataan

Lou Campbell, 83, father-in-law of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach/Long Beach, recalled scores of American captured troops dying during the march from malnutrition or cruelty from enemy soldiers, who often killed on a simple whim.

During the march, the prisoners were denied access to water. Any move toward a water source along the path could result in a sadistic bayonet stabbing.

At one artesian well, Bowers said, he broke ranks and dared fate for some water. As he rushed to join the other prisoners, a pursuing soldier cut his right shoulder with a bayonet. "I ducked low and got lost in the crowd,' he added.

Malaria, dysentery, edema and lice were common problems.

If disease or malnutrition didn't kill the troops, many were simply beheaded, recalled the former POWs.

Campbell, then 23, was with the Army Air Corps' 34th Pursuit Co. He suffered from severe dehydration and beriberi, and at one point doctors considered amputating his feet. Bowers, pounded by dysentery, malaria and beriberi, said his weight dropped to 87 pounds.

Tenney told a congressional hearing last September that he saw many friends slaughtered.

"Day after day on the march I watched in utter helplessness as hundreds of my friends, many who had become my brothers, were shot, bayoneted, decapitated, and in some cases, buried alive,' he testified of the march that began April 9, 1942.

The captives' diet consisted mainly of watery rice soup, which occasionally featured tiny bits of fish or meat.

Bread was a rarity. Small rolls were considered prized possessions, and they were traded for other goods or services, recalled Della Malva.

'Hell Ships'

A majority of the surviving POWs were put on "Hell Ships,' and restricted to hot hulls while sailing to Japan, where they would be enslaved by private corporations.

Campbell recalls the holding hulls having limited room for sit ting, and 5-gallon buckets tethered on ropes from the top deck passed about for body waste. The buckets often spilled on the prisoners as they were being pulled up out of the hull.

Bowers had the misfortune once of being under a spilled bucket.

The prisoners were allowed two meals, consisting of watery soup poured into a small canteen, Della Malva recalled. The meals were distributed aboard deck, which provided brief moments of relief from the hot and smelly hulls that were crammed with about 500 soldiers.

There were rare periods of relief on the decks. However, one session was cut short by alarm bells that the convoy was under attack by the U.S. Navy. The soldiers were ordered back into the hulls and the hatch was secured, so that they were in complete darkness.

In the silence, they heard a torpedo's loud hum, as it passed by the hull, stunning the soldiers, Della Malva recalled. He added: "There was fear silence.'

Slave camps

Campbell was transported to a Mitsubishi machine shop in a Manchuria camp, where a scientist experimented on him and others, testing them mainly with various injections.

Bowers said he never knew what the experiments were about, but believed they were testing germ reactions. He never became espe cially ill, believing he had been protected by the shots given by U.S. doctors when he enlisted.

"I guess I had more going for me than they (Japanese scientists) had to give,' Bowers said.

In one gruesome experiment, a young soldier's arm was pulled out, and the scientists gauged how quickly he bled to death, Campbell recalled.

Tenney said he'd been forced into mines "that were collapsing and steel mills and loading docks too dangerous to work in.'

Food and water were rare resources, and the POWs often risked beatings and death in their quest to survive.

While the soldiers were sadistic and stern about food supplies being dipped into, civilian supervisors sometimes looked the other way.

"They saw that we were putting on weight and muscle, and that meant we'd do more work for them,' Della Malva said.

Tenney said he worked in a Mitsui coal mine. He had a diet of 500 calories of rice a day. And medical care was practically nonexistent.

"It was in the coal mine where I was beaten many times almost to the point of death,' he testified.

"My back and shoulders were broken, my teeth knocked out, my nose and head split wide open, all of this done by civilians working for Mitsui, and these tragedies were done on a daily basis,' Tenney added.

"Any time we didn't work fast enough, didn't work hard enough, or if the Americans won a sea battle, we were beaten,' he recalled.

Campbell said the horrific ordeal resulted in mental problems, add ing that he will at times wake up from a nightmare, angry and belligerent. He has a deep fear of harming his wife, for whom he declares a devout devotion.

© 2003 Long Beach Press Telegram"