CRI听力:Memories at POW Camps Hard to Forget: US WWII Veteran

92-year-old Ralph Griffith served in the U.S. army in the Philippines during World War II.

He and a number of other U.S. soldiers were captured after Japanese forces over-ran Corregidor Island in 1942.

Griffith spent 5-months in a prisoner-of-war camp in Cabanatuan before being transferred to a Japanese POW camp in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang in Liaoning.

He says many of his fellow prisoners didn't survive the transfer.

"I know one fellow, that we buried at sea. He had, he had dysentery, and he was skin and bones. Me and another fellow was talking to him one day, and the next minute by, he died. There was around 400 died that winter from starvation. We got very little rice and we started working at a factory called MKK."

Griffith says they were also subject to medical experiments.

"They put medicine, drop of medicine four places on my arm, and then took a scalpel, and made a cross and with each of those medicine. I never got sick or anything. I don't know what it was about. They never did tell us what it was."

It's been suggested as many as 580-thousand died as a result of medical experiments or germ warfare unleashed by the Japanese military during World War II.

Griffith says he hopes the history of what took place will finally be accepted as fact.

"The Japanese were pretty, they were pretty brutal against the Chinese people. They keep denying the things that went on, I guess. They even, I've heard they've even [deemed] that it was our fault to start the war, that we started the war, instead of the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They don't say too much about that. The schools, the denial of what things that went on, and they don't let the people know. The people, I guess, one day hear the things will get surprised, you know."

Japan surrendered on August 15th, 1945.

It's capitulation ended over 30-years of attempts to carve out territory thoughout the Asia-Pacific, including the failed attempt to over-run China.

For CRI, I'm Niu Honglin.