Foreign News: The Unspeakable Jap

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Anthony Eden gravely rose in the House of Commons, added his evidence to the U.S. indictment of Japanese butchers (see p. 12). It was British evidence, notably restrained, much less detailed than the U.S. stories.

Said Eden, reporting on prison camps in Siam, Burma, Malaya, Java, Borneo, Indo-China and the Philippines: "There are many thousands of prisoners from the British Commonwealth, including India, who are being compelled by the Japanese military to live under tropical jungle conditions without adequate shelter, clothing, food or medical attention . . . building railways and making roads . . . their health is rapidly deteriorating . . . there have been some thousands of deaths. The number of deaths reported by the Japanese to us is just over 100. . . . The refusal of the Japanese Government to permit neutral inspection of camps in the southern area is difficult to understand in view of the fact that they have allowed visits by neutral inspectors ... in the northern area comprising Hong Kong, Formosa, Shanghai, Korea and Japan itself. The British Government are reasonably satisfied that conditions generally in this area are tolerable . . . [though] Hong Kong appears to be growing worse."

Englishmen hearing Eden's few specific accounts of bayonetings, floggings and clubbings knew that he was as impassioned as any American. Said Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express: "If there lingered in any man's mind a spirit of doubt that Britain would throw the whole terrible weight of her military power against the Japanese the day Hitler is done for, it must have snapped on reading what Eden said."