[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 88 (Thursday, May 25, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H5593-H5597]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
``PRISONERS OF THE JAPANESE''
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May
12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I am certainly glad there is a friend in the
Speaker's chair as Speaker pro tempore today so I do not have to worry
about whether or not I am taking an hour away from someone's getaway
Thursday afternoon, a friend in the gentleman from Indiana [Mr.
Burton], who understands and loves history. I was just showing the
gentleman some of the pictures in the book that I am about to discuss
at length in this historical special order, the book titled ``Prisoners
of the Japanese.'' And the gentleman and I were just discussing up
there on that lofty perch I believe the most important in any
legislative body in all of history or anywhere in the world today, and
he said to remind people that everything I will be talking about for
the next hour also pertains to Cuba. Cuba at this moment is committing
under an evil dictator, Fidel Castro, ghastly human rights atrocities
in their prisons, up to and including in some cases, and you and I have
heard the testimony firsthand from Armando Valladares, in some cases
equally as savage as what I am going to read about the Japanese
warlords and what they did all over the South Pacific through Burma,
into Indonesia, what they did to Chinese prisoners, Russian prisoners,
American, Australian, and British prisoners.
Mr. Speaker, we are told over and over by all of the cable outlets in
this country that about 1 to 1\1/2\ million people watch the
proceedings of this Chamber, and sometimes if it has been a slow or
mundane legislative day the ratings actually go up if there is a
special order of quality on the House floor.
Because of that million-plus audience and because our Galleries are
filled with students today I want to give a warning that if any parent
is home and they have a child 11 years of age or under, and I will
explain in a moment why I am going to put the cutoff at 11 and under, I
could recommend that they ask them to go outside and play or busy
themselves in some other part of the house. If there is any parent in
the Gallery with a child of 11 years of age or younger, I would suggest
that they leave the Chamber, because I had nightmares the last two
nights reading this book, and I am in my sixties. The reason I would
say 12 years of age and up can handle it is for the simple reason that
I was in the 11th grade when the Second World War ended and I went to
movie theaters where the newsreels were there whether you wanted them
or not, and I saw the newsreels of the Nazi atrocities, all through
occupied Europe, and I remember specifically having painful thoughts,
if not nightmares, at film of the British taking a double camp, Bergen-
Belsen, and finding so many bodies of tortured human beings, most of
them Jewish, that they used bulldozers to build mass graves and then
pushed the bodies like cordwood into these mass graves. It was black-
and-white film. They showed the women camp commandants and guards,
brutal-looking, every one of them excessively overweight, stocky,
tough, cruel faces. And the British soldiers, typical young ``tommies''
in their late [[Page H5594]] teens or early twenties, made these Nazi,
SS women guards in the women's camp carry these emaciated bodies over
their shoulders. They would not let them drag them. That gave them that
little bit of dignity, these last remains of these terribly abused and
tortured human beings, they would put the bodies over their shoulders
but still contemptuously throw them into the pits. I saw that at 12
years of age. Therefore, I think 12-year-olds should be able to handle
pictures of what happens to babies taken out of their mothers' wombs
and killed, or killed in the womb. I have always used as an
example if I could handle that at 12, then why do we hide in the
abortion debate in this country the photographic evidence of the evil
fruits of abortion, and I believe that in this memorial weekend that 12
years of age and up is sufficient to handle the horror that I am about
to read.
So my daughter, Robin, is watching, all three of her children, Kevin,
Colin, and Erin should go outside, but my older grandchildren back here
I would expect to watch this speech. I hope they have been informed.
I read in my 1 minute, Mr. Speaker, a beautiful letter from a
publicist at William Morrow & Co., great publishing house, and he put
his heart into this letter. He did not have a clue that I would read
this to the whole Nation, but it so touched me what he said that I want
to read it for a second time today to set the scene for the horror that
I am about to discuss.
Justin Loeber writes to me as of yesterday:
``Dear Congressman Dornan:
``Thank you for your request for Gavan Daws'''--he is an Australian--
``book entitled, `Prisoners of the Japanese.'' This is the only book
that documents the Japanese atrocities of World War II. Mr. Daws'
primary purpose for writing this book is to pressure the Japanese
Government to acknowledge and apologize to the POW's for their horror''
inflicted upon them ``and being that the 50th anniversary of `VJ' day
is coming up, will the POW's'' of the Pacific campaign ``finally get
their due? Since most Americans think that WWII ended on `VE` Day''--on
the 8th of this month, May 8, the 9th for Russians, the 7th was the day
that General Jodl signed the unconditional-surrender document, and by
the way I looked up in my encyclopedia and reminded myself that Jodl
was hung 1 year and 5 months later on October 16, 1946, 1 of 11 hung as
a result of the Nuremberg trials of the top leadership of the ``Hitler
gang.'' Eisenhower would not go to the signing ceremony, he was so
offended by what he saw at Buchenwald and Dachau when we had overrun
those camps a few weeks before.
But that was 50 years ago this month, and as Mr. Loeber says, most
Americans think that was the end of the war.
But the war ending on V-E Day, ending the Holocaust that Japan had
brought to the Pacific, is probably the biggest secret in history,
particularly for our young students, I might add. Gavan took over 10
years to research his book. He lives in Hawaii, but coincidentally is
on the east coast right now. I spoke to him from the Cloakroom
yesterday. He will be here until June 2. He will be on the Charlie Rose
Show tonight. I did a show with him, the Blanquita Collins Show out of
Virginia that goes to about 12 States. He was a fabulous, fascinating
guest. And the Washington Times is doing a feature story for this month
and People magazine will have a story in July. ``However; its people
like you,'' Mr. Congressman, ``who can actually pressure our Government
to ask for the POW apology--by August 15, 1995 (`VJ' Day).''
Actually, Justin, V-J Day was September 2 on the deck of the Missouri
when General MacArthur in that stunning voice of his asked General
``Skinny'' Wainwright to step forward. He had himself survived 3\1/2\
years of brutal Japanese captivity, and he accepted the instrument of
surrender from the Japanese. There is a big plaque on the deck of the
``Big Mo'' that is now mothballed up in Puget Sound in the State of
Washington.
Here is the paragraph I read earlier, Mr. Speaker.
``On a wider scale, this is a story of compassion for the elderly.
After reading Gavan's book, I now have more patience for that old
person who is standing in line at the Post Office--the person that has
a limp'' or whose eyesight is dim ``and moves a little slower than the
rest of us. This person could have been tortured by the Japanese. Also,
this book has taught me to commemorate Memorial Day as it should be--
not at the mall celebrating the greatest sale of the year, but honoring
those people who fought for our country.''
{time} 1230
``I will be going with Gavan Daws to the 50th reunion of the
survivors of Bataan and Corregidor in Braintree, MA, over Memorial
Day.''
Now, I am hoping, Mr. Speaker, I can rearrange my schedule, it does
not look easy, to go up there.
I told you about the 3\1/2\ hours that I spent with a Bataan death
march survivor and Army officer, named Eugene Holmes, the colonel that
Clinton had so viciously and manipulatively used to dodge the draft,
and for 3\1/2\ hours, with our colleague, Jay Dickey's son, who is in
law school at the University of Arkansas, we listened to some of these
horrible stories.
I remember when this bright, young law student walked outside with
me. He said, ``Congressman, I am indebted to you for letting me drive
you and bring you to Colonel Holmes's house. I never heard stories like
this in all of my education.''
The one I remember, a simple one, far less horrific, I am about to
read, was a young West Pointer who was caught with one cigarette in a
camp on the island of Mindanao after they moved them down from Luzon.
They were working in fields there. He was caught with a cigarette. The
brutal Japanese guard, unusually tall for a Japanese at that time, 6
foot 1, called all the assembled prisoners out, all of them wearing
nothing more than what would be called a thong bathing suit, all of
them skinny, sunburned, ulcers and sores all over them.
He told this young West Pointer to hold his hands in the air. He
said, ``When you drop your arms, you will die.'' He lasted for about 3
hours, and as his arms slowly came down, this Japanese lieutenant shot
him in the face.
I looked across. I could see the tears in the eyes of Congressman Jay
Dickey's son. I think his name is Tim. There were tears in my eyes. As
many times as Irene Holmes had heard this story, there were tears in
her eyes. She said that Colonel Holmes does not plan to write a book on
the Bataan death march that he survived or his 3\1/2\ years in
captivity, and even does not talk about it much.
Most of the veterans, I guess, are going to take their stories of
brutality to their graves with them, and that is why taking the oral
histories by so many in Australia, his native country, in Britain, and
from our Americans, and from Chinese, the service that Gavan Daws has
done is powerful.
Now, what started me to read this book, I took it out of the library
4 months ago, had not gotten around to it with the rush of events with
the 100-day contract and so forth, was this cover story building up to
Memorial Day of last Sunday in this fantastic Washington Times
newspaper. I will do a commercial for them, Mr. Speaker. Everybody in
the country can get a national edition of this Washington Times. You
want to get the unadulterated, top-notch reporting of our time on
Whitewater, on four people in the administration under indictment who
are under special prosecutor investigation, including the Clintons
themselves, you will get the unexpurgated, unliberal-manipulated truth
in the Washington Times.
Here is the front-page story, last Sunday. There are Japanese heroes
on this, a handful only, unfortunately. ``Japanese doctor lectures as
penance for the horrors that he inflicted on war prisoners. Tokyo. As a
young army physician during Japan's occupation of northeast China in
World War II, Dr. Kim Yuasa says he honed his surgical skills on
healthy Chinese prisoners. `I would remove the appendix.
Then we would amputate both arms and then both legs.'''
If the prisoner would come to, Mr. Speaker, imagine what he would
think about God in heaven and his fate in life, looking down at his
torso, his arms and legs gone, his body stitched up, wondering how long
he had to live, wondering what his family was doing [[Page H5595]] at
that moment and why God had consigned him to this lonely death far from
his home with nobody knowing or to pray for him at the moment that his
soul goes to God.
Dr. Yuasa said at his press conference in Tokyo, he had the guts to
do this. Their duma, Mr. Speaker, their congress, does not want this
discussed. It is censored. It is bottled up. Talk about extremist
groups. I guess liberals would want to call them right-wing groups,
extremist groups in China, excuse me, they have them, too, in Japan,
will threaten to kill people that come forward to tell the stories of
the atrocities of the Japanese warlords.
You know, Mr. Speaker, for 2 decades in this House I have tried to
give dignity to the German people and the German nation by always using
the words ``Nazi'' or ``Gestapo'' or ``Hitler gang'' or ``the forces of
evil that had taken over Germany,'' so as not to blame a whole nation,
particularly the generations born since then, and I also adopt the same
policy with the nation of Japan because not having a Nazi party as
such, Bushito warriors were not known as much as the SS or the Gestapo,
the only way I could do it was to always say the warlords of Japan and
Tojo and his warlords, Tojo's gang. And now I am going back to
something I have not done in 50 years in saying the Japanese or Japan,
because this Nation refuses to apologize for this. They will not even
discuss it, the formal people in the government, and, therefore, that
relieves me of my obligation of sensitivity to say the warlords, so in
reading this article in the book and its title ``Prisoners of the
Japanese,'' I will not say the warlords of Japan, because it is time
for the nation of Japan to try and seek the dignity it has denied
itself for over 50 years.
There are heroes in Japan. This man who committed these ghastly
atrocities is such a hero for publicly doing penance. That is in Shinto
philosophy, Confucianism, Buddhism, it is certainly the core of Judaism
and Christianity and Islam to make amends for your sins.
Sometimes the prisoners were shot, Dr. Ken Yuasa says. ``We would
shoot them, and then we would practice removing the bullets from them,
keeping them alive to train on their internal organs. Typically,
surgeons would cut and cut until their patients stopped breathing;
sometimes without anesthesia. I dutifully carried out these operations
as duty to the emperor,'' Dr. Yuasa, now 78 said. ``There was no
conscience in us to tell us these were inhuman things. Today he travels
Japan, lecturing to anyone who will listen. Beyond his personal act of
public penance, he wants the nation of Japan to admit some of history's
most grotesque atrocities. Fifty years after the end of World War II,
Japan's ``parliament,'' our brother legislators there, in the Diet,
they refuse to issue an apology for the brutal conquest of much of East
Asia.
Most Japanese politicians do not even believe Japan did anything
wrong. To varying degrees, they believe Japan waged a type of holy war
to liberate China from the white man. Japanese politicians rarely say
so publicly, because international outrage inevitably forces them from
office, but they answer to fringe nationalist groups violently opposed
to any official show of contrition.
Dr. Yuasa spent the war attached to Japan's
infamous Unit 731. The unit, among other things, used live prisoners
as guinea pigs, thousands of them, in an attempt to develop the
ultimate biological weapon. If they had known about Ebola in Africa,
they would have had Ebola, using it. They used plague, anthrax, bubonic
plague, infected thousands of people with it. At the unit's
headquarters near Harbin, a captured area of China, Manchuria, Lt. Gen.
Shiro Ishii considered human experimentation crucial in gaining a
decisive edge over weak-willed adversaries in the West, according to
accounts from survivors and witnesses, pieced together by honorable
Japanese and western historians. These accounts show that Ishii
instructed thousands of doctors, thousands of scientists and
technicians, to inject American, Australian, British, Chinese, and
Russian prisoners of war with tetanus, anthrax, bubonic plague, and
every other germ that they could cultivate.
Between 3,000 and 12,000 prisoners, euphemistically referred to as
logs, like a log of wood that you could burn on the fire, the Japanese
word is maruta; when they entered the compound, none ever emerged alive
save for a handful liberated at the war's end, and I have never heard
of that handful, Mr. Speaker, and I am going to research this to find
out where those people, if any, are alive today to give firsthand
testimony.
Here is a captured picture in the Washington Times that is from Gavan
Daws's book of emaciation studies, where they would starve prisoners to
death and photograph them until their eventual demise.
The author told me there is another book out that I have the Library
of Congress researching now, called ``Unit 731,'' by Peter Williams and
Peter Wallace, two British authors that researched it. I will be back
to do another hour on that.
This has to be a one-man crusade. I am going to get the Japanese
Diet, their congress, to face up to these atrocities.
By the way, when I first came to Congress in 1977, I knew all about
Unit 731. I went up to Fort Meade. I went to the Army Chemical Corps. I
am sorry to say I was lied to, either lied to or stupid people told me
the records were destroyed or no longer existed that we got from
General Ishii and brought back to this country, letting all of these
war criminals go from Unit 731 at the very same moment we are hanging,
properly, for crimes for genocide and crimes against humanity, the
perpetrators of Hitler's war in Europe.
It says that one technician who traveled with the doctor, Yoshio
Shinozuka, joined Unit 731 as a 16-year-old, so he is only 66 years old
today. We ought to have him over here to address Members of this
distinguished body.
Using a special incubator developed by Ishii, he cultivated germs to
cause amoebic dysentery and typhus. ``During a skirmish with Soviet
troops on the Mongolian border in 1939, we dumped three drums of these
germs into the river,'' although he would be 72 today, because this is
1939, he is 16. ``We dumped three drums of these germs into the river
to contaminate the entire water supply, Mr. Shanizuka, now 72 years of
age, said last week. Although some Japanese soldiers also got sick, the
experiment apparently convinced Japanese officials, all the way up to
Hirohito.'' That is why I did not want George Bush or anybody going to
his funeral. Goodbye, das vidanya, good riddance, Hirohito.
The effect of this germ warfare and the project began to expand
dramatically. Apart from germ warfare, Unit 731 devised a series of
exotic experiments to improve the chance of survival for
Japanese soldiers in combat.
So the researchers pumped prisoners full of horse blood in an attempt
to develop a blood substitute. They all died. They deliberately
inflicted women prisoners with syphilis to discover ways to halt the
epidemic of venereal disease among frontline troops.
A little footnote here; thousands of Korean women, teenagers,
kidnaped and used as prostitutes for the Japanese Army, all the way
down to Java and Sumatra, all over into Burma, into Thailand, young
Korean teenagers used as prostitutes, called ``comfort women,'' no
official apology, Mr. Speaker, from the Japanese Diet, their congress,
to Korea. These women have bought airfare tickets over to Japan and
Tokyo and demonstrated in the street in front of the Diet, without an
apology. Those, being teenagers, would be in their sixties today.
They baked prisoners to death in dehydration chambers, starved
prisoners on limited diets on research on nutrition; to test artillery
shells riddled with anthrax and gangrene, scientists would tie
prisoners to stakes, shielding their heads and backs while leaving
their legs and buttocks exposed to exploding bombs. I guess, with the
language barrier, these poor God-forsaken prisoners could not say,
``Why are you doing this to me? What kind of a hell hole have I
discovered myself in here?''
Some of the Chinese prisoners could probably speak Japanese. What
would they say?
Then they treated the infected shrapnel wounds and then cooly
recorded every detail that ended up here in Maryland.
In the days ahead, as the victims slowly succumbed to infection,
often [[Page H5596]] writhing in pain, some prisoners survived the germ
injections only to be subjected to the frostbite experiment.
{time} 1245
The prisoner's limbs were dipped in water over and over and exposed
to sub-zero temperatures. I am told limbs made a hollow thud when hit
with sticks. Prisoners languished, some of them conscious, as doctors
amputated blackened, decaying limbs to keep them alive for only more
experimentation, all in an attempt to discover the optimal treatment
for frostbite. Unlike Nazi counterpart Josef Mengele, who experimented
on twins as though he were some demon from hell, Ishii escaped being
labeled a war criminal. He retired in Japan on a comfortable pension.
Many of his subordinates became key officials in Japan's military
community. Dr. Haisato Yoshimura, director of Unit 731's frostbite
atrocity experiments, became president of Kyoto Medical College and an
advisor to Japan's expedition to Antarctica.
Years ago I watched a documentary on Japan's Antarctic expedition. I
looked at photographs of it a year ago, January, when I was down in
Antarctica, and I was thinking what a tremendous scientific effort they
have made. Little did I know they had a Dr. Mengele, war criminal,
leading their Antarctic expedition.
Most members of Unit 731 are either dead or senile. If they are
senile, I hope they walk into the ocean, as did Mengele in a beach
community in Brazil to take his own life and throw himself back in
God's face. But the unit is still alive. These ex-killers and
scientists were doing penance. It is still alive, the mentality of it,
in Japan, though Dr. Yuasa and Mr. Shinozuka find themselves unwelcomed
in Japan's parliament and constantly harassed by Japan's ubiquitous
nationalists. The reception in Japanese schools is much warmer, and
that is the hope for Japan, the decent young citizens in Japan will
listen to these men.
Now, I took Daws' book, ``Prisoners of the Japanese,'' and I went to
the index, and I looked up Unit 731, and I want to read a couple of
references from this book so that people will understand the political
atrocity that was going to be perpetrated on American citizens in our
own National Air And Space Museum, the most visited museum in the
world. Martin Harwood, you deserve to resign. That you were going to
portray the exhibit of the fuselage of the Enola Gay that dropped the
atomic weapon on Hiroshima, that
you were going to portray this as a racist war against a noble people
defending their homeland. I brought up Unit 731 to his face with Sam
Johnson sitting at one elbow, and Joe McDade and Tom Lewis of Florida,
combat veteran from the air war over there.
I wish Ben Gilman had been there, who was saved by landing at Iwo
Jima as a young gunner on B-29's. But it was Sam Johnson who put
Harwood away when he asked him directly, ``Would you, Dr. Harwood, have
dropped the bomb?''
He says, ``I would have followed orders.''
``Would you have dropped it?''
``No, I wouldn't have.''
Sam Johnson put his hand in his face, and he says, ``Well, I would
have, and that's the difference between you and me.''
Thanks to the election of November 8, Sam Johnson is now on the board
of directors of the Smithsonian Museum.
But listen to these few references to 731: The first time it comes up
in the book, he writes:
``In Manchuria, at Pingfan,'' and that is a name that should ring
down through the pages of history, with all the horror of Auschwitz,
Dachau, Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Kelmo, Treblinka and Mydamit, it
should have the same ring, and nobody has ever heard of it in this
country: Pingfan, outside the city of Harbin, the epidemic prevention
and water supply unit of the coumintang army--how is that for a
euphemism? The epidemic prevention of water supply unit, Unit 731, had
a compound of 150 buildings, thousands of scientists. In our old block,
row block, they did experiments on human beings. The Kem Pai Kai
brought them prisoners for guinea pigs, men, women and children, Asians
and Caucasians. They were called maruta, meaning logs of wood. They
were infected with cholera, typhoid, plague, syphilis, anthrax. Others
were cut up alive to see what happened in the successive stages of
hemorrhagic fever. Others had their blood siphoned off, replaced with
horses' blood. Others were shot, burned with flame throwers, blown up
with shrapnel, left to develop gas gangrene, bombarded with lethal
doses of X-rays, whirled to death in giant centrifuges, subject to high
pressure in field chambers until their eyes popped out from their
sockets, electrocuted, dehydrated, frozen, and boiled alive.
Two prisoners were put on a diet of water and
biscuits, worked nonstop, circling in the compound, loaded with 20
kilograms of sandbags on their backs until they dropped dead. One
lasted 2 months longer than the other, and all this research into
malnutrition was done so that the Japanese army would be stronger in
its conquest.
Our old block at Kingfan, where the Japanese kept killing human
experimental subjects under scientifically controlled conditions, but
the book of starvation could have been written on the bodies of
prisoners in Japanese camps anywhere.
And then Daws goes on to document throughout the whole Pacific
theater how this set the standard for all Japanese camps.
One or two more references, and then I will come back to this floor
next month with Marshall Williams' book on just unit--this unit alone.
According to Japanese figures, of the 50,000 prisoners that they
shipped, 10,800 died at sea, more than any other American battle.
Americans that had survived 3 years of imprisonment, survived the
Bataan death march, from Camp O'Donnell, Cabana Twan, they were sent
off to ships without any markings on them and sunk by friendly fire.
What a sad tragedy those were. The POW transports were not part of Unit
731. They were not control laboratories for experiments on suffocation,
starvation and dehydration. With the nationality of the prisoners a
deliberate variable, still in the way men of different nationalities
behaved in the holes, there were observable differences for their sick
experiments.
299: Short of verifiable and verified facts and conceding that
neither Unit 731 nor anyone else set up those prisoner transports as
controlled experiments, it does appear that POWs of all nationalities
were subjected to essentially the same dreadful stresses in the holes
that they were doing scientifically at 731.
Now we are coming up on the 50th anniversary of these following
events. In the history of Japan, the invincible Japan, as far back as
their Sun God, this was the first time that commoners had ever heard
the voice of their emperor. This is August 15, 50 years ago. He is
saying the war is lost and they are surrendering, and the first words
of this first emperor to speak directly to his people were about
catastrophic humiliation. The unconquerable Japanese empire had been
terminally crushed in war, forced into abject surrender. The voice of
the Son of Heaven went
out into the poisoned air of Japan, out by shortwave to his empire in
ruins, and World War II was over.
Not quite, Mr. Speaker, my colleagues. For months the Japanese army
at Osaka had been killing drowned American airmen, airmen like our Ben
Gilman, poisoning them, shooting them, chopping their heads off. After
the emperor spoke, the last five were taken out to a military cemetery.
The was is over now. How would you like to be their parents?
Mercifully, their parents probably never knew this. Three were shot,
two were beheaded the same day. Hours after the peace had begun,
Japanese officers at Fukuoka on Kyusu took their samurai swords and
chopped to death 16 American airmen. The war is over, and this is being
done, the squad commander brought his girlfriend along to watch.
On the Celebes Islands in Indonesia; for our high school students,
that is the island that looks like a big octopus--well after the war
was over, 2 weeks later, two Australian airmen were strangled to death,
and it was 12 days after the emperor's broadcast on August 22 that the
Japanese at Ranau on Borneo killed the last 30 of their surviving
prisoners. Meanwhile, in Manchuria, at Unit 731's laboratories at
Pingfan, near Harbin, the Japanese machinegunned to death 600 Chinese
[[Page H5597]] and Manchurian laborers that kept up these 150 buildings
from hell and killed all human experimental subjects, the logs. They
were gassed to death with toxic chemicals, poisoned with potassium
cyanide in their food. Their bodies were stuffed, one after another, in
incinerators--does that not conjure up the Nazis' sick death camps in
Poland--or dumped in a pit in the courtyard and burned. Then the bones
were sunk in the river nearby, all the laboratory specimens, too. A
huge charnel heap of tortured and infected and vivisected human flesh
that they kept was so big that it would not burn.
The Japanese general in charge of Unit 731, soon to run a medical
school, the man directly responsible from start to finish for 6 years
of hell, wanted all his staff and families to commit suicide. They were
issued poison. Of course, he was not about to take poison himself, and
neither did hardly any of his people. Instead they bailed out of
Pingfan at top speed, about 2,000 of them. I wonder how many hundreds
are left alive in Japan today. The parting gesture of Unit 731 was to
turn thousands of infected rats loose on this world.
Final reference: Imagine their congress not apologizing for this and
us letting them get away from it after the way we groveled properly the
Germans' face into the dirt with Nuremberg war trials, creating a gulf
of communication block between the fathers and the sons of Germany.
Every time I rode in Germany in the late 1950's, early 1960's, I would
look at the back of my cabdriver or somebody, and I would think,
``Would you have guarded a camp?'' It was a serious judgment that we
put on a whole people in Germany, and Japan escapes all of this. Why?
Now here is the thing that broke my heart because I have always held
MacArthur in high regard and considered him a hero. Daws makes the case
it was MacArthur at the top. It was his reasoning that said Ishii
should be spared a war criminal trial. There was another class of
Japanese that MacArthur did not want to see tried. All the people who
ran Unit 731 at Pingfan. In fact, he made sure they were never brought
to court. I am going to have to check this out, Mr. speaker. You hate
to have your boyhood hero demeaned in your eyes. If ever there were
Japanese war criminals, these were the ones. Their lethal medical
experiments on living prisoners were atrocities as morally disgusting
as anything in the 20th century, but the American military had a use
for advanced research in biological and chemical warfare.
So they cut a deal with General Ishii Shiro, immunity in return for
all of his evil records. For General MacArthur, the lives and deaths of
the logs, the maruta, those thousands of suffering, poisoned prisoners'
bodies, appeared to be worth nothing legally, morally, or humanely. The
only nation to bring any Japanese from Unit 731 to trial was the Soviet
Union. The Russians convicted 12, from a lieutenant general down to a
private, but no death penalty. Well, how could they, with what was
going on in their gulag camps and torture? Two years for the private,
25 to the general, plus a loud public accusation that Ishii and the
rest of the morally guilty were safe in hiding, which was true.
Immediately after Tojo was hanged, December of 1948--what took us 2
years longer to hang him than the 11 with Martin Bormann maybe still on
the loose than the 12 that we gave the death penalty to in Europe?
Mr. Speaker, I will terminate this horror story still hidden by the
Japanese congress, their Diet. I will never look at them the same way
again. I will never travel to Japan with the same frame of mind that I
have in the last few trips until I see some decent apology to these
prisoners.
Look at this picture of this New Zealand handsome young fighter
pilot, a P-40 ``Kitty Hawk'' pilot, having his head cut off. Look at
this handsome, tall man standing here. He probably died in the camps.
The prisoners of Germany, American POW's, this is so totally separate
from the horror of killing 6 million Jews and 5 million other people in
Hitler's death camps, but of our prisoners, less than 1 percent died in
the German camps, but in the Japanese camps over a third of our
American prisoners died.
{time} 1300
``Daws' book, Prisoners of the Japanese, POW's of World War II in the
Pacific, is a searing,'' this is from the Washington Post, ``462-page
indictment of the particular and gratuitous savagery that Japan,''
notice they do not say warloads, ``inflicted on more than 140,000
allied prisoners of war who were starved to skeletons, worked to death
as slaves, if they weren't first hacked apart, burned alive, or
dissected alive as guinea pigs for experimentation in germ warfare and
medical sadism.'' That is by Ken Ringle.
Mr. Speaker, there is a debate that goes on in the medical community
now over what should be done with the evil fruits of all the German
experimentation, the Angel of Auschwitz, Dr. Mengele, I do not know why
we do not call him the Demon of Auschwitz, all of those medical
experiments. There are some things in there that medical science could
profit from. But theologians and ethicists in Israel say you cannot get
any good out of this medical experimentation, even if it would save
lives in the future, because so many people died horribly to extract
it. So it stays bottled up in the archives of the United States of
America.
But the other horrible experimentation, under Tojo and Hirohito in
Japan, it is also locked up somewhere. But it has disappeared, unlike
the German Nazi evil experimentation. It is somewhere. And I think that
if Simon Wiesenthal is correct, that no war criminal from Nazi Germany
anywhere in the world should know 1 minute of sound sleep at night, the
same should pertain to these Japanese war criminals.
Everybody who hears the sound of my voice who is going to give a
second of decent thought on Memorial Day to the 50th anniversary of the
Memorial Day between victory in Europe and victory over Japan, should
ask their local bookstore and library to get Mr. Daws' book,
``Prisoners of the Japanese,'' and read about the worse atrocities,
that cannot be forgiven because nobody has said we are sorry or asked
for forgiveness or an apology.
That is my gruesome contribution to the heroes of World War II.
One of these sleazy semi-pornographic street papers, in reference to
my Presidential quest, said, Mr. Speaker, that I was a perennial son.
That was supposed to be an insult.
If that means I am a perennial son of my father, who won three wound
chevrons in World War I, two of them for mustard gas, a poison gas,
that was the beginning of this century's introduction to this type of
nightmarish demonic horror, then, yes, I am a perennial son to him and
to every World War II veteran that I looked up to as young Greek Gods
when I was 12 years of age and all the Army nurses with them, including
the ones that suffered this type of captivity in the Philippine
conquest that were taken prisoner at Corregidor.
Mr. Speaker, have a nice Memorial Day. Mrs. Schroeder, about to
speak, have a nice Memorial Day. I know this touches your heart.
Remember these people when we were young kids that we looked up to, our
World War II veterans. It brings tears to everybody's eyes to see the
handful of remaining World War I veterans walking down the street.
Well, 50 years plus 4\1/2\ years in imprisonment, 6 for the British,
3\1/2\ for our Wake Island survivors, there are a few alive, they will
be up in Braintree, MA, the Bataan Death March survivors. And 10 years
from now, at the 60th anniversary, they will be marching at the head of
parades, in wheelchairs, on crutches, helped along by the younger
veterans from Vietnam or from Mogadishu or God knows where else we will
have to send young men and now women to die for liberty.
I hope people on this Memorial Day and next Armistice Day and on V-J
Day, which you can celebrate twice, August 15, the cessation of
hostilities, September 2, the deck, remember what I read, that people
were being murdered and beheaded and slaughtered before the day they
surrendered on that deck of the Missouri. I am going to find out why
our U.S. Army and our chemical warfare departments used this evil,
satanic, ill-gotten, bloody scientific knowledge and did not bring
these men to the justice that we did Hitler's gang.
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