DATE: Wednesday, April 9, 1997              TAG: 9704090001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Glenn Allen Scott 

                                            LENGTH:  101 lines

JAPAN'S FORMER AMERICAN POWS ARE "HEROES STILL" THE JAPANESE TREATED PRISONERS OF WAR, AS WELL AS INTERNED CIVILIANS, WITH A DEPRAVITY BEYOND EASY BELIEF. THE HIGH COMMAND DECREED IT.

Ninety-six of every 100 U.S. military personnel taken prisoner by the Germans in World War II survived the experience. Seventy-three of every 100 American POWs of the Japanese lived to return to the United States, according to Gavan Daws' Prisoners of the Japanese (Morrow, 1993).

The Japanese treated prisoners of war, as well as interned civilians, with a depravity beyond easy belief. The high command decreed it. The policy was shaped in part by hatred of Westerners, who savagely oppressed Asians and other non-whites throughout the Age of Imperialism, then nearing its end.

But the Japanese Empire treated other Asians who fell into their hands as horribly or worse than whites. The death rate of Filipino POWs was higher by far than the American. Civilian Filipinos suffered terribly - an example, the Japanese slaughtered 18,000 men, women and children in one locale.

The Japanese also committed unspeakable crimes against Chinese, Koreans, Southeast Asians, Indonesians and anyone else their armies rolled over. A million of the slave laborers of the Japanese Empire were killed or died of disease, injuries, suicide and despair in captivity. Only six of 2,000 British Commonwealth POWs taken by the Japanese in Sandaken, New Borneo, reached the camp that was their destination.

Commanding officers of prison camps were directed slyly by Japan's high command to murder all POWs if Allied forces invaded the Japanese mainland.

Let us now, then, with appropriate deference, single out some of the malnourished, disease-ridden men who emerged from captivity following the Japanese surrender 51 years ago this summer.

Each of these men is grateful for the atomic bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing Japan to its knees; they have no doubt that the bombs saved them. All are in their 70s and 80s. None expected to live so long - few of Japan's former POWs still live.

On hand for their monthly breakfast get-together at Bunny's Family Restaurant on Wilroy Road in Suffolk the first week of April were:

William ``Gunner'' Wells, Virginia Beach, a chief gunner's mate on the fortified island of Corregidor when captured. He retired from the Navy as a commander in 1957 and then managed a hardware store for 28 years. He is honorary commander of the Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor.

Clyde A. Barnes, Norfolk, a U.S. Army PFC when Corregidor fell. He is a Bataan Death March survivor.

Charlie W. Dowdy, Virginia Beach, a South Norfolk-born sailor captured on Corregidor. He was a chief boatswain's mate when he retired from the Navy in 1959. He worked as an aircraft mechanic before retiring from the civil service in 1962.

Earl R. Harper, Virginia Beach. He became a POW after the Japanese sank his submarine in the Java Sea.

Edward L. Hill, Norfolk, a U.S. Army infantryman when he was captured in the Philippines.

William F. Jeffries, Virginia Beach, a sailor who served as an infantryman on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor before being taken prisoner.

Jenro Lambaiso, Virginia Beach, a chief boatswain's mate when he retired from the Navy. He was taken prisoner after the Japanese sank the oiler USS Trinity.

Norman R. Matthews, 80, Suffolk. Assigned to the Army Air Force, he survived the Bataan Death March, the hell-ship voyage to Japan and his time as a slave laborer. He retired from the U.S. Air Force and was for 13 years a building inspector in Suffolk. His brother, morally ill, died in a POW camp in the Philippines.

Stanley D. Woody, Norfolk, a sailor captured after the Japanese sank the USS Houston in the Java Sea. He was a slave laborer on the Thailand-Burma Death Railway.

Isaac. G. ``Ike'' Hylton, Virginia Beach, a boatswain's mate second class when U.S. and Philippine forces surrendered on Corregidor. Hylton grew up in Danville. A chief warrant officer when he retired from the Navy after 21 years' service, he was a federal marshal for 23 years.

As a reporter on the court beat, I met Ike Hylton about 35 years ago. Someone quietly told me he had survived imprisonment by the Japanese.

I had read about the Bataan Death March, the hell ships and the slave-labor camps. As a child during World War II, I had seen the shocking pictures of freed POWs and also of Nazi death-camp survivors and dead. Those pictures taught me that evil stalked the world - a lesson since confirmed again and again and. . . . Americans and others who perished as prisoners had been shot, bayoneted, burned, clubbed or beaten to death in other ways. Or they had succumbed to starvation, thirst or dysentery, diarrhea, cholera and numerous other diseases bred by unimaginable filth.

So I was awestruck by trim, soft-spoken and smiling-but-businesslike Marshal Hylton. I still am.

As I was by all the men at the breakfast. I'm automatically in awe of anyone who has endured the terrors and pain of battles, death camps, slave-labor camps, torture cells, massacres, bombings, rape, mutilation and batterings anywhere, anytime. Any troubles I have are puny compared with the unendurable suffering of those who survive such hells.

Bataan Death March survivors Dowdy and Matthews were two of four Hampton Roads residents who told their stories for the first time in ``Heroes Still: On the Journey From Bataan,'' a documentary video co-produced by Rick Salzberg, who is the Chrysler Museum's public-relations manager, and Chris Dickon of WHRO-TV, and aired hundreds of times by Public Broadcasting stations since its release nine years ago.

That anyone could not be profoundly moved and horrified by ``Heroes Still'' is - for me, at least - inconceivable. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The

Virginian-Pilot.

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