NPR refers to Japanese "abuse" of prisoners in the Bataan Death March

In a story about General Taguba on All Things Considered. In the same story, they also refer to "abuse" of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

http://harrisonheritage.com/adbc/murphy.htm

The inhumane treatment and the atrocities committed against me and my fellow Prisoners of War by the Japanese as we faced forced marches, beatings, torture, murder, starvation, diseases, slavery, and squalid living conditions defies belief.

The degradation, the brutal treatment, torture and barbarism started from my first day as a POW and ended when I returned to U.S. Control. My captors insisted that survival was futile because they showed me orders from Tokyo to massacre me and all other POWs immediately upon the landing of U.S. Forces on the Japanese homeland. These orders were not carried out because the atomic bombing of Japan forced an early nonconditional surrender. From the first they tried to starve us to death, work us to death and beat us to death. They refused to treat POWs diseases in the hope that death would result.

I was captured on Bataan and was forced to make the Bataan Death March. The Bataan defenders, already exhausted, starved and diseased were forced to march for days in the tropical heat without, headcovering, without water, without food and without medications. Those who were not able to continue the March were summarily beaten with rifle butts, bayoneted, shot or decapitated and left to die along the roadway. Of the estimated 10,000 Americans on the March, it is estimated that 1,000 died. Thousands of Filipinos died on this same March.


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Bataan death march

Their was a young man who used to sit out side his house next door who looked just awful. He was always wrapped in a blanket. And we were told he had been on the death march and had lived. I would have been 11 years old.We were not to pester him so we would just say hi and leave it at that.

i think it is the only way to break through to folks to get an understanding of just how bad a direction we are heading.

:hi:

peace