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. The first heads to appear on spikes were eight Chinese looters caught red-handed by the military just after the occupation began. 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. The hybird word 'Genocide' was first coined by Professor Raphael Lemkin during the Nuremberg Trials and used notably by Sir Hartley Shawcross the British Prosecutor. The word combines the Greek 'genos' (race, tribe, community) with the Latin suffix 'cide' (killing).
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.
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 P.O.W.s 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 brought to trial, sentenced to death and hanged.
SANDAKAN DEATH MARCH (1945)
Sandakan, the prison compound in British North Borneo (now Sabah) held 2,434 Australian and British P.O.W.s, captured when Singapore fell. They were transported in a decrepit tramp steamer, the Yubi Maru, to Sandakan to help build a military airstrip for the Japanese. When their labour was no longer required, they were confined to the prison compound where they slowly died from starvation, disease and brutalities. As the Allies approached the islands, over 1,000 prisoners, still alive, were force marched in groups of 50 to another camp in the jungle near the village of Ranau, about 120 miles away. The 291 prisoners, including 288 stretcher cases, who were too sick to march and left behind at Sandakan, were massacred soon after, many dying after undergoing diabolical torture. In June, 1945, of the 455 prisoners that left Sandakan for Ranau on the first march, only 140 reached Ranau alive, the remainder had died or were shot during the march. Prisoners were shot out of hand, their bodies littering the route. On the second inhumane death march, 536 P.O.W.s left Sandakan but only 189 were still alive when they reached their destination, 142 of these were Australians