Alive and safe, the brutal Japanese soldiers who butchered
20,000 Allied seamen in cold blood
By Nigel Blundell
The perpetrators of some of the worst
atrocities of the Second World War remain alive
and unpunished in Japan, according to a damning
new book.
Painstaking research by British historian Mark
Felton reveals that the wartime behaviour of the
Japanese Navy was far worse than their
counterparts in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine.
According to Felton, officers of the Imperial
Japanese Navy ordered the deliberately sadistic
murders of more than 20,000 Allied seamen and
countless civilians in cold-blooded defiance of the
Geneva Convention.
“Many of the Japanese sailors who committed
such terrible deeds are still alive today,” he said.
“No one and nothing has bothered these men
in six decades. There is only one documented case
of a German U-boat skipper being responsible for
cold-blooded murder of survivors. In the Japanese
Imperial Navy, it was official orders.”
Felton has compiled a chilling list of atrocities.
He said: “The Japanese Navy sank Allied merchant
and Red Cross vessels, then murdered survivors
floating in the sea or in lifeboats.
“Allied air crew were rescued from the ocean
and then tortured to death on the decks of ships.
“Naval landing parties rounded up civilians then
raped and massacred them. Some were taken out
to sea and fed to sharks. Others were killed by
sledge-hammer, bayonet, beheading, hanging,
drowning, burying alive, burning or crucifixion.
“I also unearthed details of medical
experiments by naval doctors, with prisoners being
dissected while still alive.”
Felton’s research reveals for the first time the
full extent of the war crimes committed by the
Crewmen on the submarine I-8, where Allied prisoners
were slaughtered.
Imperial Japanese Navy, a force that traditionally
modelled itself on the Royal Navy. Previously
unknown documents suggest that at least 12,500
British sailors and a further 7,500 Australians were
butchered.
Felton cites the case of the British
merchantman Behar, sunk by the heavy cruiser Tone
on March 9, 1944. The Tone’s captain Haruo
Mayuzumi picked up survivors and, after ten days
of captivity below decks, had 85 of them assembled,
hands bound, on his ship’s stern.
Kicked in their stomachs and testicles by the
Japanese, they were then, one by one, beheaded
with swords and their bodies dumped overboard.
A solitary senior officer, Commander Junsuke
Mii, risked his career by dissenting. But he gave
evidence at a subsequent war crimes tribunal only
under duress. Meanwhile, most of the officers who
conducted the execution remained at liberty after
the war.
Felton also tells the horrifying story of James
Blears, a 21-year-old radio operator and one of
several Britons on the Dutch-registered merchant
ship Tjisalak, which was torpedoed by the
submarine I-8 on March 26, 1944, while sailing from
Melbourne to Ceylon with 103 passengers and
crew.
Fished from the sea or ordered out of lifeboats,
Blears and his fellow survivors were assembled on
the sub’s foredeck.
From the conning tower, Commander Shinji
Uchino issued the ominous order: “Do not look
back because that will be too bad for you,” Blears
recalled.
One by one, the prisoners were shot,
decapitated with swords or simply bludgeoned with
a sledge-hammer and thrown on to the churning
propellers.
According to Blears: “One guy, they cut off his
head halfway and let him flop around on the deck.
The others I saw, they just lopped them off with
one slice and threw them overboard. The Japanese
were laughing and one even filmed the whole thing
with a cine camera.”
Blears waited for his turn, then pulled his hands
out of his bindings and dived overboard amid
machine-gun fire.
He swam for hours until he found a lifeboat, in
which he was joined by two other officers and later
an Indian crewman who had escaped alone after
22 of his fellow countrymen had been tied to a
rope behind the I-8 and dragged to their deaths as
it dived underwater.
Uchino, who was hailed a Japanese hero, ended
the war in a senior land-based role and was never
brought to trial.
Felton said: “This kind of behaviour was
encouraged under a navy order dated March 20,
1943, which read, ‘Do not stop at the sinking of
enemy ships and cargoes. At the same time carry
out the complete destruction of the crews’.”
In the months after that order, the submarine
I-37 sank four British merchant ships and one
armed vessel and, in every case, the survivors were
machine-gunned in the sea.
The submarine’s commander was sentenced
to eight years in prison at a war crimes trial, but
was freed three years later when the Japanese
government ruled his actions to have been “legal
acts of war”. Atrocity: The Japanese executing prisoners.
Felton said: “Most disturbing is the Japanese
amnesia about their war record and senior One of the Japanese sailors described how the
politicians’ outrageous statements about the war first prisoner to be killed, an Australian, was led
and their rewriting of history. forward to the edge of a pit, forced to his knees
“The Japanese murdered 30million civilians and beheaded with a samurai sword by a Warrant
while “liberating” what it called the Greater East- Officer Sasaki, prompting a great cry of admiration
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule.About from the watching Japanese.
23million of these were ethnic Chinese. Sasaki dispatched four more prisoners, and
“It’s a crime that in sheer numbers is far greater then the ordinary sailors came forward one by one
than the Nazi Holocaust. In Germany, Holocaust to commit murder.
denial is a crime. In Japan, it is government policy. They laughed and joked with each other even
But the evidence against the navy – precious little when the executions were terribly botched, the
of which you will find in Japan itself – is damning.” victims pushed into the pit with their heads half
The geographical breadth of the navy’s crimes, attached, jerking feebly and moaning.
the heinous nature of the acts themselves and the Hatakeyama was arraigned by the Australians,
sadistic behaviour of the officers and men but died before his trial could begin. Four senior
concerned are almost unimaginable. officers were hanged, but a lack of Allied witnesses
For example, the execution of 312 Australian made prosecuting others very difficult.
and Dutch defenders of the Laha Airfield, Java, was Felton said that the Americans were the most
ordered by Rear Admiral Koichiro Hatakeyama on assiduous of the Allied powers in collecting evidence
February 24 and 25, 1942. of crimes against their servicemen, including those
The facts were squeezed out of two Japanese of Surgeon Commander Chisato Ueno and eight
witnesses by Australian army interrogators as there staff who were tried and hanged for dissecting an
were no Allied survivors. American prisoner while he was alive in the
Philippines in 1945.
However, the British authorities lacked the staff,
money and resources of the Americans, and the
British Labour government was not fully committed
to pursuing Japanese war criminals into the Fifties.

• Slaughter At Sea:The Story Of Japan’s Naval War Crimes

by Mark Felton is published by Pen & Sword on November 20
at £19.99.
Target: the merchant ship Behar. Its surviving crew were
beheaded with swords Daily Mail, 3 Nov 2007