ried in deep pits dug on the beach. In a gross miscarriage of justice, the Japanese officer responsible was sentenced to only two years in prison by a British Military Court.
MASSACRE ON PALAWAN (December 14, 1944)
One hundred and fifty American prisoners of war, were incarcerated in a P.O.W. enclosure situated on top of the cliffs overlooking the Bay of Puerto Princesa on the island of Palawan in the Philippines. While working on the construction of an airfield they were made to dig three trenches 150ft long and 4ft 6ins deep within the camp. They were told that the trenches were air-raid shelters and practice drills were carried out. The shelters were small and cramped, the prisoners sitting bunched up with their knees under their chins. When an American convoy was sighted heading for Mindoro an air-raid alarm was sounded. The Japanese guards, thinking the island was about to be invaded, herded the prisoners into the covered trenches and then proceeded to pour buckets of petrol into the entrances followed by a lighted torch to ignite the gasoline. As the prisoners stormed the exists, their cloths on fire, they were mown down by light machine-gun fire or bayoneted, shot or clubbed.
Dozens managed to get through the barbed wire fence and tumble down the fifty foot high cliff to the water's edge only to be shot at by a Japanese manned landing barge which was patrolling the shore. Only five survived by swimming across the bay and reaching the safety of a Filipino guerrilla camp. One prisoner, who tried to swim the bay, was re-captured and brought back to the beach. There, he suffered the agony of having petrol poured on his foot and set alight. His screams delighted the guards who then deliberately set fire to his other foot while at the same time prodding and stabbing his body with bayonets until he collapsed. His body was then doused with petrol and cremated. His remains, and the bodies of the other dead on the beach, were then buried in the sand. US Forces captured Puerto Princesa on February 28, 1945, and weeks later discovered 79 skeletons within the enclosure. They were given a proper burial by the men of 601 Quartermaster Company of the US Army. In all, 145 Americans had died.
THE PIG BASKET ATROCITY
When the Allies capitulated to the Japanese in East Java in 1942, around two hundred Allied soldiers took to the hills around Malang and formed themselves into groups of resistance fighters. Eventually they were rounded up by the Kempetai. The captured soldiers were squeezed into three foot long bamboo pig baskets and transported in five open lorries, under a broiling 38 degree sun, to a rail siding and then transferred in open railway goods wagons to the coast. (Eye witness to this transfer was a 15 year old girl, Elizabeth Van Kempen, who witnessed this while standing together with her father, on a nearby ridge of the mountain Semeru. They could plainly hear the prisoners screaming for help and water. Miss Kempen's father was later killed by the Kempetai at Malang on March 25, 1945, for hiding weapons and ammunition. (Elizabeth Kempen now lives, as of 2004, in Tilburg, Holland)
Half dead from thirst and cramp, the captives were carried on board waiting boats which then sailed out to the shark infested waters off the coast of Surabaya. There, the unfortunate prisoners, still enclosed in their bamboo cages, were thrown overboard to the waiting man-eaters. The commander in chief of Japanese forces in Java, General Imamura, was later acquitted of this atrocity in a Netherlands court for lack of evidence. A subsequent Australian Military Court found General Imamura responsible and handed down a sentence of ten years imprisonment.
THE KALAGON MASSACRE
British paratroopers, operating with the Burmese guerrillas, were the object of a search and destroy mission by the 3rd. Battalion, 215 Regiment of the Japanese 33rd. Division, in June 1945. Believing that the paratroopers were operating with the help of the local inhabitants, the 3rd. Battalion, accompanied by a detachment of the Kempei Tai, surrounded the village of Kalagon 