ATROCITIES: Before Hiroshima

In the week when the first U.S. newsmen entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki and made plain to U.S. readers the appalling devastation of those cities, the State Department issued a formal report on atrocities committed by the Japanese. The timing was not missed by many readers.

The State Department report was a compilation of some 240 separate protests made to the enemy while the war raged. Behind the stiff, formal language was apparent the rage which must have gripped Secretaries Hull and Stettinius every time a new atrocity account came in. The Department had refrained from public outburst as long as the war was on.

But now some of the tale could be told. It covered the familiar stories of lack of hospitals, lack of food and clothing, vermin-infested camps, corporal punishment of prisoners, death by decapitation of a U.S. airman on New Guinea, name not disclosed. (From Korea came a story of U.S. prisoners on Jap ships, crazed with thirst, biting their arms and drinking their own blood, perishing when the ships were bombed by U.S. planes.)

But among all the cases cited in the long and sickening report, one stood out in barbaric horror.

The date was Dec. 14, 1944. The place was Puerto Princesa in the Philippines. On that date in that place Jap guards drove 150 U.S. prisoners into air-raid tunnels, emptied gasoline into the tunnel openings and set them afire. The victims, enveloped in flames and screaming in agony, swarmed from the shelters. As they did, they were bayoneted or machine-gunned. About 40 who threw themselves over a 50-ft. cliff onto a beach were attacked by sentries on the shore. Many, moaning in agony, were buried alive.

One, who swam into the sea, was recaptured. A Jap soldier poured gasoline on his foot and set it afire, finally set fire to his other foot and to both his hands. In the end the Japs bayoneted their victim, poured gasoline over him and watched the flames until his body was consumed.

Last week the pestilential camps of the Japanese Empire continued to disgorge their victims (2,900 from Niigata, 3,495 from Nagoya, 1,100 from Tientsin). The record of horror grew. From Australia came a story of the flogging and raping of nuns in New Britain, of Jap cannibalism practiced on the bodies of U.S. and Australian soldiers. The stories, which seemed to have no end, differed only in the details of calculated cruelty.