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THE HOSPITAL MASSACRES
Directly in the path of the invading Japanese hordes lay the Princess Alexandria Hospital in Singapore. Guarded by a detachment of Ghurka troops they were ordered by a Japanese officer to lay down their arms. The Ghurka NCO replied that this was not a military target but a civilian hospital. Angered by their refusal to disarm, the Japanese officer ordered his men to seize and kill two dozen of the Ghurka guards. This order was promptly carried out and the Nippon soldiers then entered the hospital. The wholesale slaughter which followed defies description, sick and dying patients being butchered in their beds. Some were just shot, others clubbed and bayoneted and not a few were beheaded by the sword. A number of the victims were survivors from the Prince of Wales and Repulse. The scene of carnage resembled an abattoir, disemboweled patients sprawled everywhere. Doctors and medical orderlies were then killed as were the nurses who were first raped in a most brutal fashion. A similar atrocity occurred in Manila when the Headquarters of the Filipino Red Cross in General Luna street was captured. Some seventy civilians, sick patients and a number of children were put to death in the same brutal and sadistic way. In Burma, on the afternoon of February 7, 1944 an Advance Field Hospital was overrun by the Japanese who first wiped out the protective guard of West Yorkshires then killed every doctor and medical orderly they could find. The sick and wounded were massacred where they lay after their personal possessions were stolen. In all, thirty-one patients, nine orderlies and four doctors were brutally put to death.
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GENOCIDE IN SINGAPORE
Collectively known as the 'Chinese Massacres', this peaceful city was subjected to acts of savagery, in many cases beyond anything the Nazis had dished out. The soldiers of Nippon had but one thing on their minds in Singapore, to exterminate the entire Chinese population of this great city. Reliable estimates put the final number killed at between nine and twelve thousand. After interrogation by the Kempetai they were obliged to hand over all their personal possessions, rings, watches, jewellery, money etc. before being forced on to captured British lorries and driven to the Tanjong Pagar Wharf where most were were beheaded or bayoneted. Others were roped together and taken on barges out to sea where they were thrown overboard. The slaughter continued for twelve successive days as boats from Singapore Harbour brought even more Chinese civilians to the execution site. In the Geylang district, thousands of Chinese were herded into the grounds of the Teluk Kurau English School. Altogether, 3,600 persons were then interrogated by the Kempetai . In groups of two hundred, they were taken by truck to the crest of a hill off Siglap Road and there they were killed by shooting, beheading or bayoneting. All but one of the Teluk Kurau School victims, perished. In another massacre, seven hundred Chinese were taken to an area just east of Changi and murdered in the most disgusting manner. Their headless bodies were then thrown into already dug mass graves. The victims heads were piled up on the back of a waiting lorry and carted away. Next morning, the sight that greeted the Singaporean was something that they will never forget. Everywhere, mounted on the tips of long bamboo stakes, were the severed heads of murdered Chinese. After the war, a British Military Court sentenced the commanding general of Japanese troops in Singapore, Lt.Gen.Takuma Nishimura, to life imprisonment, but at a later trial for other crimes, an Australian Military Court handed down a death sentence. He was hanged on June 11, 1951.
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THE HANKOW REPRISAL
Every criminal act known to man was inflicted on Chinese civilians by the soldiers of Nippon during their occupation of Manchuria. Indiscriminate killings, beheadings, bayoneting of live victims and the vicious raping of tens of thousands of women and young girls, were the order of the day. Living with this constant terror and barbarity the civilian population could offer but little opposition. However, on August 19, 1945, four days after the surrender, a civilian group managed to capture twenty six Japanese soldiers and executed them near the town of Hankow in north-east China. Four of them were beheaded, four were tied to posts and shot through the back of the head, another four had their arms and legs broken and then crudely amputated, four more were found minus hands and feet and had their genitals stuffed into their mouths. The remaining ten had their eyes gouged out and then bayoneted to death. In this act of reprisal, the past methods of killing by the "Sons of Heaven" had been copied to the letter.
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SAN FERNANDO CEMETERY
( 1944 )
On the 23rd of December, fifteen American prisoners of war, who were too sick to work, were taken from their prison cells and driven to the outskirts of San Fernando, Pampanga, in the Philippines. There, in a small cemetery, a hole fifteen square feet was dug. Guards from the truck then took up positions around the hole. One by one , the POWs were brought to the edge of the hole and ordered to kneel. They were then bayoneted and decapitated. After the war, the guard commander, Lt. Junsabura Toshino, was sentenced to death and hanged.
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