The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [157]
When considering the horrific cruelties inflicted on European POWs by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War, it is important to see them in the overall context of atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking.53 Whereas 6.2 per cent of British Commonwealth prisoners of the Japanese died between 1941 and 1945, the figures were 23 per cent for the Dutch, 41.6 per cent for the Americans and a monstrous 77 per cent (230,000 out of 300,000) for Indonesian forced labourers.54 As Pedro Lopez, the Philippine counsel at the Japanese War Crimes Tribunal, stated of the 131,000 documented Filipinos – the full figure was probably many times higher – murdered by the Japanese after 1941, there were ‘hundreds who suffered slow and painful death in dark, foul and lice-infested cells’.55
The literature covering what one historian has called ‘The Horror in the East’ is voluminous, and the Kachanaburi death camp on the River Kwai, Unit 731’s anthrax experiments, Changi Jail in Singapore, Korean ‘comfort’ women, the Bataan Death March and so on have particularly foul places in the long story of man’s inhumanity to man.56 There are many other, lesser-known aspects of the barbarity shown by the Imperial Japanese forces towards their captives, including that of the psychopathically sadistic behaviour of the Japanese Navy, and especially their Marines. Cold-blooded torture and the routine execution of prisoners seems to have been standard procedure. What happened to the SS Tjisalak was fairly normal practice, according to the evidence given at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.57 After the 5,787-ton Dutch merchant ship was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean on the way from Melbourne in Australia to Colombo in Ceylon on the morning of Sunday, 26 March 1944, the captain gave its seventy-six crewmen the order to abandon ship. Unbeknown to them, an official Japanese naval order of almost exactly a year earlier had authorized submarine commanders: ‘Do not stop at the sinking of enemy ships and cargoes. At the same time carry out the complete destruction of the crews of the enemy ships.’ What happened next was thus the officially condoned policy of the Japanese Admiralty.
The Japanese submarine I-8 rose to the surface and its commander, Tatsunosuke Ariizumi, ordered it to move close to the three lifeboats full of survivors, which were fired upon with machine guns. Survivors of that ordeal were ordered to come up on to the submarine’s deck, where they were disarmed and their hands tied. Within a few minutes the crowded foredeck was full of the Tjisalak’s Chinese, Indian and European crew. They then started to behead the Europeans, one by one. ‘They’d just go up and hit a guy on the back and take him up front, and then one of the guys with a sword would cut off his head. Zhunk!’ recalled the ship’s radio operator. ‘One guy, they cut off his head halfway and let him flop around on the deck. The others I saw, they just lopped ’em off with one shot and threw ’em overboard. They were laughing.’58 Another survivor, a twenty-one-year-old British wireless operator called Blears, agreed. ‘They were having fun, and there was a cameraman taking movies of the whole thing!’ As he was led off to execution, Blears could see ‘Two Japanese officers were waiting for us, one with a sword and the other with a sledgehammer.’ Managing to free one of his bound arms, he dived into the water and swam to a raft from the wreckage of the Tjisalak, as two Japanese sitting on deckchairs fired at him. Fear of the sharks that were being attracted by the smell of blood from his comrades made him swim all the faster. Back on the submarine, the twenty-two seamen were all tied together by long ropes and the I-8 then submerged, ‘dragging the kicking and