Word: jap
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...years-belated shock came in a joint Army-Navy release, based on factual, eyewitness, non-hearsay accounts from Lieut. Colonel William E. Dyess and two others who escaped from Jap imprisonment and torture last April. From their reports, the Army & Navy concluded that of the 22,300 Americans taken captive on Bataan and Corregidor, at least 7,700 had been tortured, starved or shot to death in the first year of imprisonment. The number of dead among the 28,000 Filipino captives was incalculable...
...Jap cruelty began on the very day of surrender. It flowered in a carnival of sadism on the 85-mile march from Bataan to San Fernando, a trek since known to all the prisoners as the "March of Death." Colonel Dyess, subsequently killed in a U.S. plane crash, described...
Death by Starvation. At Camp O'Donnell the Jap commanding officer bluntly told the Americans that they would not be treated as prisoners of war, but as captives without any rights or privileges. He carried out his words to the letter. The usual diet was a "watery juice with a little paste and rice." After the first week the death rate was 20 Americans and 150 Filipinos a day; after two weeks it had risen to 50 Americans and 500 Filipinos daily. Said Colonel Dyess...
Revenge. Reading of the calculated cruelties, remembering the scrupulously fair treatment given to Jap prisoners, the U.S. people veritably groaned for revenge. Kentucky's Representative Andrew J. May, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, called on the entire Fleet to steam into Tokyo harbor and blow the city to bits. Cried Sol Bloom, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "We'll hold the rats responsible - from the Emperor down to the lowest ditchdigger - for a million years...
Were the atrocity stories supposed to help the sale of war bonds? All over the U.S., plain citizens thought so (bond sales zoomed, even doubled for several days after publication). Said Albuquerque's Dr. V. H. Spensley, a dentist whose son died in a Jap prison camp: "I can't understand why such information should be brought out now . . . except to sell bonds. For that purpose it's absolutely rotten. If the morality of America has sunk so low it required this kind of propaganda to sell bonds, we wonder what the boys are fighting...