 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 near Tenasserim, Burma. By 4pm all the inhabitants were rounded up, the men confined in the local mosque, the women and children locked up in adjoining buildings. That evening, eight of the younger women were taken out by the Kempei Tai and brought to their headquarters for the pleasure of their own officers. They were never seen again. The next morning, a conference was held and orders given to destroy the village and all the inhabitants to be killed. The massacre began that same morning, the villagers being taken out in batches of five to ten, blindfolded and then bayoneted or shot. Their bodies were then thrown down a number of deep wells around the village and as the wells filled up the bodies were pounded down with bamboo poles to make more space for the next batch of victims. In this way the 3rd Battalion disposed of around 600 bodies. Two victims who miraculously escaped, were to give evidence at the trial of the battalion commander and thirteen others before a British Military Court held in Burma after the war. Their plea of 'superior orders' and 'military necessity' was not accepted by the court.
LOA KULU MASSACRE (July 30, 1945)
After surrendering to overwhelming numbers of Japanese troops, around one hundred members of the Netherlands East Indies Army were disarmed and for a while permitted restricted freedom in the town of Samarinda, in Borneo, where most of the soldiers lived with their families. Early on the morning of July 30, all prisoners, including their families, were rounded up and taken before a Japanese officer who summarily sentenced them all to death. No reason was given as they were bundled into lorries and taken to Loa Kulu just outside the town. There they had their hands tied behind their backs and as the men and children watched, the women were systematically cut to pieces with swords and bayonets until they all died. The screaming children were then seized and hurled alive down a 600 foot deep mine shaft. The men captives, forced to kneel and witness the butchery of their wives and c