[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 25 (Thursday, February 11, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H631-H632]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     TRIBUTE TO THE PEOPLE OF GUAM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Guam (Mr. Underwood) is recognized 
for 15 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. UNDERWOOD. Mr. Speaker, today I am introducing legislation, as I 
have for each of my four terms here, regarding an issue that is very 
special to the people of Guam, and that is an issue that goes back to 
the World War II experience of the people of Guam.
  I am often asked what I enjoy most about my service as the elected 
representative of the people of Guam to the U.S. Congress, and my reply 
is that I appreciate being able to educate and tell Guam's story to as 
many people as possible.
  Since I have been here, the most compelling story the people of Guam 
have to offer is their wartime experience. It is a story which begins 
during a time when the people of Guam were not yet U.S. citizens but 
were in a sense Americans-in-waiting. The story is filled with horror 
and heroism, suffering and relief, anticipation and disappointment, 
captivity and freedom, life and death. These are all the ingredients to 
a blockbuster movie, including Guam's happy ending of liberation from 
her captors by primarily U.S. Marines of the Third Division.
  Yet as time passes and the story of Guam's occupation is passed from 
generation to generation on Guam, this is often where the story ends. 
But like any great Hollywood movie, there is always more to the story 
that can be told but sometimes simply is not. In many cases the 
producers are constrained by budget, time, and attention spans of their 
audiences, and Guam's World War II experience is no different.
  It has now been 54 years since the liberation of Guam and, if 
anything, time has not meant that all is forgotten or forgiven, not 
until there is some measure of national recognition of what happened to 
our fellow Americans on Guam and how the Federal Government failed to 
make them whole and right the wrongs which resulted from the Japanese 
occupation.
  There was a woman by the name of Mrs. Beatrice Flores Emsley, who was 
the most compelling advocate of this cause, who came and testified 
several times in front of congressional committees until her death two 
years ago. At the age of 13 she survived an attempted beheading by 
Japanese officers.
  In the capital city of Agana, she, along with another group of 
Chamorro people, were rounded up for beheading and mutilation and 
execution by swords. After being struck in the neck, she fainted, only 
to awake two days later with maggots all over her neck but thankful to 
be alive.
  She would be haunted by her wartime experience for the rest of her 
life. And the long scar trailing her neckline, caused by the Japanese 
sword, was her constant reminder. Yet Mrs. Emsley never had words of 
bitterness, only that the people of Guam be made whole.
  These stories are not meant to simply draw emotional attention to a 
very difficult time, but the people of Guam suffered enormously as the 
only American territory which was occupied by an enemy power since the 
war of 1812, in which hundreds of people died, thousands of people were 
injured, and thousands of people were subjected to forced marches, 
forced labor, and internment by the invading Japanese Army.
  There have been many opportunities by America to recognize Guam's 
dramatic experience of World War II. In 1945 Congress passed the Guam 
Meritorious Claims Act, which is known as Public Law 79-224. This was 
the legislation which was meant to grant immediate relief to the 
residents of Guam by the prompt settlement of meritorious claims. That 
legislation had no forced labor, no forced march provision to it, even 
though later legislation which covered the same topic for other groups 
of Americans did allow for it.
  While the Guam Meritorious Claims Act became the primary means of 
settling war claims for the people of

[[Page H632]]

Guam, it was clearly inadequate. It was recognized by a number of 
Federal commissions, including the Hopkins Commission, Secretary of 
Interior Harold Ickes in 1947 and 1948, that the Guam Meritorious 
Claims Act, which was in existence for one year, was inadequate to deal 
with the thousands of claims that had to be submitted and in fact were 
not submitted.
  It was inadequate to deal with the claims of a people who had simply 
lost all their homes and, instead of concentrating on the claims, they 
were all trying to find ways to be resettled. As a consequence, 
thousands of people, the vast majority of people of Guam never 
submitted claims. And most of the claims that were submitted and 
adjudicated by the United States Navy, which was the administering 
authority by congressional action for these claims, basically most of 
them were property claims.
  To give my colleagues an example, one person who was beaten to death 
for saving a Navy pilot was given by the U.S. Navy, his family was 
given $665.10 for the sacrifice of their father. A Navy plane had been 
shot down. He tried to go and help the pilot. The Japanese discovered 
him. He was subsequently beaten to death. The pilot was also executed. 
And for this the family received compensation, $665.10.

                              {time}  1700

  If you wanted to personally, if you wanted to adjudicate a claim in 
1946 dollars of more than $5,000, which was allowed for a death claim, 
you had to come to Washington, D.C. to personally adjudicate the claim, 
which was quite an impossibility for a community that was war-torn at 
the time and did not really recover from World War II until the 1950s.
  In asking on Congress to revisit this issue I want to point out a 
couple of items:
  In 1945 there was the Guam Meritorious Claims Act. This was the act 
designed to deal with the American nationals of Guam for their 
suffering during World War II.
  In 1948 there was similar legislation for Americans and American 
nationals, that was the term used at the time, to adjudicate their 
claims as a result of their suffering at the hands of the Japanese and 
the Germans. This includes people like who were nurses, for example, or 
American civilians who happened to be caught in the Philippines when 
the Japanese came. These people, including some people from Guam who 
happened to be in the Philippines at the time of the Japanese 
occupation, were allowed to submit claims under the 1948 law, and as a 
result of the inefficiencies in that law, that later was amended in 
1962 to further perfect and finalize the arrangements dealing with the 
wartime experience.
  The people of Guam were not included in the 1948 law, and they were 
not included in the 1962 law, and I want to explain a brief personal 
example of how that worked.
  My grandfather, James Holland Underwood, was from North Carolina and 
he was a civilian on Guam when the Japanese landed. He was taken by the 
Japanese as a civilian internee, put in Japan for four years. While he 
was in Japan for four years, his wife, my grandmother, his sons, 
including my father, and their families were subjected to the Japanese 
occupation under very horrendous conditions. My parents lost three 
children during the Japanese occupation.
  My grandfather was allowed to file a claim with the 1948 law, later 
revised in 1962, but neither of my parents were ever compensated for 
any of the experiences that they had, despite the fact that they were 
the ones who suffered the most. Not to say that my grandfather did not 
suffer as well, but it was an anomaly of congressional law.
  The first question that I am always asked on something like this is 
why do we not submit these claims to the Japanese Government, since 
they were the source of this problem to begin with? And the issue is 
rather simple. The U.S.-Japan peace treaty in 1951 forever closed the 
door. That is typically part of peace treaties, whereby if you sign a 
peace treaty with a country, that claims of your own citizens against 
the other country are inherited by your own government. This was 
acknowledged by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles when the issue 
was raised in the 1950s.
  So what we have is a case of legislation that has fallen through the 
cracks, has taken the one single group of Americans in this century who 
directly experienced foreign occupation and has ignored their 
sacrifices and has not respected their loyalty.
  Yet despite this experience, July 21, which is the day that the 
Marines landed on Guam, is by far the biggest holiday on Guam. People 
are eternally and genuinely grateful for the sacrifices of the men of 
the Third Marine Division, First Marine Provisional Brigade, units of 
the 77th U.S. Army infantry, the Coast Guard, the Navy, very genuinely 
grateful for the sacrifices in removing the Japanese from Guam.
  Yet the people of Guam have not been treated the same as the people 
of the Philippines, who were granted $390 million by the U.S. Congress 
and who in turn, because they became an independent Nation, were 
allowed to submit separate claims against Japan. The people of Guam 
were not treated the same as other U.S. nationals and other American 
citizens and most noticeably sometimes different people, because they 
were in the same family, were treated differently.
  This is an issue which will take some resolution. I am glad to see 
that there have been several cosponsors for this legislation. I have 
introduced this legislation today. I hope and I pray that this will be 
the Congress that will finally put this issue to rest. World War II, 
the sacrifices of the World War II generation, are no less the men in 
uniform and the people back on the domestic home front, but certainly 
for a very small group of people who were considered American nationals 
at the time, who endured a horrendous occupation by an enemy power, 
subject to forced marches, forced labor, brutal killings, many injuries 
and widespread malnutrition which itself caused hundreds of deaths, 
must not go unnoticed, must not go unrecognized.
  And so I hope and I pray that this will be the Congress where we will 
finally bring an end to this wartime legacy.
  Mrs. Beatrice Flores died two years ago. Under this legislation, if 
she had remained alive, she would be awarded $7,000 for injuries 
suffered as a result of World War II. Today, even if this legislation 
passes, nothing would happen. Her family would get nothing because the 
only legitimate claims that can be made were for those people who 
actually died during the Japanese occupation.
  So, the longer we wait, the more justice is delayed, the more certain 
people who experience this directly will not get compensated, and so I 
feel very strongly about this. I feel that the people of Guam finally 
need for this to come to a conclusion, and I hope that Members of this 
body will support this piece of legislation.

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