Have You Forgotten, Uncle Sam?

THE United States—and probably a few other countries—was surprised at the howl of in dignation which arose from Aus tralia when it was suggested that selected Japanese should assist the teams of Americans who propose to re-survey the tropical waters north of Australia. The plan has been dropped. If the survey is made, Americans and/or Aus tralians will do the job.

Australia’s protest was not based on security reasons. Australia knows that, in the long years be fore 1941, every reef and rock in the Southwest Pacific was charted by the Japs, as part of their plan for seizing and settling all these South Pacific countries.

Australia’s angry refusal to have anything to do with Japs, in the connection suggested, was based oh sentiment—on her still vivid memories of what Australians suffered at the hands of this people. How can Australians forget the cruelty and beastliness with which their soldiers and civilians were treated by this sub-human species in Malaya, Burma, Borneo, East Indies, New Guinea? In ali the annals of warfare, there has been nothing more horrible than the torture and massacre of our people by the Japs in the Pacific Islands and Indonesia.

Eight years have passed since the Japan which plotted our destruction was battered into abject, shameful surrender in Tokio Bay; but we who were so close to the Pacific War, still are sickened by the memories of what happened to men and women we knew, caught by these Asiatic gentlemen at Tol and Tarawa, Buna and Amboina and Borneo.

We know that the Communist menace of the Cold War is as great as the Jap menace of the Pacific War, and that it is important to our security that Japan, if possible, be lined up with the Western Powers against Red Asia. American strategy is quite correct. Inter national politics makes strange bedfellows.

But please. Uncle Sam, don’t ask us to accept Japanese as friends and comrades, yet awhile. Why, among them there may be some of the human swine recently re leased from Manus. Have you al ready forgotten, Uncle Sam, that the evidence written down in the long months of Australia’s trials of Jap war criminals at Manus is probably the foulest story of human treachery and cruelty ever re corded?