Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: A debt long overdue

Tuesday, July 25, 2000 | 10:03 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

During recent years there have been several agreements reached for Germany to pay reparations for its actions before and during World War II. So far that country has paid $60 billion and recently agreed to pay an additional $4.8 billion to 900,000 Nazi slaves forced into labor. About $1.6 billion was contributed by more than 3,000 German businesses. Even Germany's Evangelical Church has agreed to chip in $5 million for the laborers forced to dig graves for it.

This most recent fund was set up because of pressure American lawyers helped to bring on the companies and German government. It was in American courts where lawsuits were filed for the large number of central and eastern European laborers who did slave labor for the Nazis.

This would lead us to believe that there should be little problem for the Americans forced into slave labor for the Japanese companies to be repaid. Not so. The American POWs forced into the mines of Japan are getting the same amount of consideration that country is giving the Korean men and women it treated as slaves. None.

So what is the biggest obstacle being faced by the Americans who worked as slaves for the major Japanese companies? Our own government doesn't want to admit that a rather sloppy job was done when distributing the $90 million it seized in Japanese assets. Only $20 million was used to settle the claims of POWs and civilian internees. The U.S. Justice Department says that these payments and our treaty with Japan are final and shouldn't be disturbed.

The former POWs making the claim can't believe that the $1 for each day of imprisonment they received for rations when discharged was a fair settlement. Like Germany, some of Japan's wealthiest and most prominent companies used slave laborers. POW Maurice Mazer worked in Mitsubishi's copper mines. Mitsubishi sure is a corporation today that's familiar to millions of Americans. So were the airplanes it produced during World War II. Working back-breaking jobs for long hours with insufficient food and suffering from disease, he survived. According to Sy Brody, editor of the Jewish War Veteran magazine, at age 86 Mazer has heart disease, osteoporosis and insomnia.

Mazer was captured at Bataan and relates some of the same horror stories we have heard from other Americans captured there in early 1942. Nevada's Ralph Levenberg, in his recollections of being a Japanese prisoner captured at Bataan, titled his memoirs "Nothing Had Prepared Me For This Kind of Brutality." They died by the thousands, and the survivors were put in the hot and steamy holds of transport ships where they couldn't lie down and oftentimes had to drink their own urine.

Let Brody tell us about Mazer's experiences prior to becoming a slave in Mitsubishi's copper mines:

"As the march progressed, more men fell out of the line due to dehydration, injuries and heat exhaustion. Mazer carried a sick man on his back until a Japanese truck deliberately rammed them. The soldier fell to the ground dead and Mazer limped away.

"After they had walked 30 miles, they were herded into boxcars that were poorly ventilated. It took four hours for them to travel 25 miles to a Japanese prisoner of war camp called Camp O'Donnell. Here he received his first food in five days. Hundreds of men died in this camp from malaria, dysentery, beriberi and starvation. They lived in thatched huts which were exposed to the sun. The prisoners had no soap, disinfectant or medicine. They were repeatedly beaten with clubs, planks and anything from a broomstick to a bamboo pole."

It's time for the Japanese corporations to now pay for the slave labor they extracted from helpless American POWs. Also, it's time for our own Departments of Justice and State to get their heads out from between their legal and diplomatic cheeks and do what is fair and just.

The lawyers representing the POWs should put the names of the corporations, such as Mitsubishi, on the Internet and in the press and ask American consumers to do what is fair and just. Don't buy any of their products or the products of their subsidiaries until they pay their debt to American POWs.