In the terrible conditions of beatings and starvation in Japanese camps, prisoners of war died from fear and uncertainty. The question was, what would happen to them when they were called? The Palawan massacre is just one of many examples of heinous crimes committed by Japanese soldiers.
To prevent the rescue of POWs from the Allies, on December 14, 1944, a group of 150 American soldiers were forced into the trenches of the Puerto Princesa camp in the Philippine province of Palawan and set on fire. Many tried to get out, but were stopped by snipers. Those who tried to hide behind the rocks were brutally slaughtered. Others tried to escape by climbing over the cliff that ran along one side of the trenches, but were later hunted down and killed.
Only 11 Americans escaped.
The Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing, was a case of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese soldiers against the population of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Cases of slaughtering children with bayonets, beheading people, as well as burying people alive are known. Historians today estimate that between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed.
It is estimated that 80,000 women were raped. One of the most heinous crimes in Nanjing is certainly forcing family members to have sexual relations with each other. Hence the term for this horrific event “The Rape of Nanjing”.
During the occupation of Southeast Asia, Japan connected Thailand and Burma to arm its troops. The railway was built manually and without machines. She was passing through a dense jungle. The prisoners were forced to do hard work in incredibly high temperatures. As food, they received only rice and minimal amounts of water.
During the construction of the railway, around 110,000 people lost their lives. Some of their lack of vitamin B led to complete paralysis. They were dying of cholera and dengue fever.
The Philippine army surrounded the Japanese. The Japanese did not know what to do with 76,000 prisoners of war. They killed as many as they could in a short period. They forced 76,000 people to walk 120 kilometers through impassable jungle to reach the next camp. During that time, they were beaten and starved.
2,500 Filipinos and 500 Americans failed to reach their destination. Their corpses were left in the jungle. Those who reached the camp met a similar fate. Starved and beaten, they died one after another. In the end, 26,000 Filipinos and 7,000 Americans did not see freedom.
During February 1942, not long after they conquered Singapore, a group of Japanese soldiers broke into the British hospital “Alexandra”. Terror began against the patients, but also against doctors, nurses and other staff. They threw patients out of bed and beat them to death.
For them, they locked around 100 patients overnight in dirty sheds with medical waste. During that short-lived tyranny of the Japanese army, about 100 people lost their lives.
Witnesses have confirmed that Japanese soldiers ate their enemies during World War II in Southeast Asia. Some witnesses say that the victims were often not dead and that many of them were eaten alive.
There is a documented case of Japanese soldiers who, after killing eight American airmen on Chichi Jima, on the Bonin Islands, ate four of them.
Towards the end of World War II, the Japanese army occupied Nauru, a small island in Micronesia that was plagued by leprosy.
The Japanese loaded the infected population on a ship, which they then blew up. 70 percent of the remaining population was transferred to a neighboring island. On that occasion, almost half of the population died of hunger and disease.
During the war with China and Korea, the Japanese army forced about 200,000 women and girls into prostitution. They were called “comfort women”. Their reality was much more terrifying than that name. They were sent to brothels all over East Asia whose users were mostly Japanese soldiers. They were abused and raped sometimes for several days.
In 2015, Tokyo agreed to pay $8.3 million in compensation to victims and issued a formal apology. Many Koreans and Chinese consider this insufficient. Many a Japanese claim that the existence of “comfort women” is a historical fiction.
In February 1943, the Japanese army captured over 300 Dutch and Australians after one of their minesweepers was destroyed. On the first evening, they took 85 prisoners to the forest on the island of Ambon and beheaded them there. The next day, a similar fate awaited the remaining prisoners. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave.
After the fall of East Java, many allied soldiers were captured. Some of them were forced into cages one meter wide that were used to transport pigs. In such a confined space, they would be transported by trucks to a nearby port.
In the harbor, they would be transferred to boats that were going to the open sea. There they would throw them into the sea, leaving them to drown or be eaten by sharks.
