An Outcast of the Islands

For ten months after the Jap came, Marist Father Albert Lebel still served on Bougainville Island. Once he talked his way ashore from a Jap destroyer by arguing that he was doing no harm and would be only another internee to feed.* Back at his coastal mission, Father Lebel used both brass and stealth to help more than 70 nuns, priests and others to escape from the island. Only on orders from his bishop and military authorities did he finally leave himself.

At a South Pacific base, he told an Associated Press reporter two tales of Jap inhumanity that he had heard. The Japs tried to force a planter to reveal the hiding place of other whites. "They . . . prodded him into leading them over some trails into the hills," said the Father. "He was a fat man, none too physically fit. He tried to drink from a river and in his exhaustion fell in. They let him drown."

The Japs grabbed a middle-aged storekeeper, according to Father Lebel, looped a rope around his neck and drew it down between his legs, forcing his head down to the level of his knees. "Then they made him trot along ahead of them, like some great clumsy dog on a leash. After they had gone about three miles, they got tired of the sport. One Japanese . . . took his sword and chopped off the man's head. Then all the Japanese casually sat down to lunch a few feet away."

*How well the Japs feed some prisoners is dubious. Of 13,724 U.S. soldiers in Jap camps, 600 are already known to be dead, chiefly from malnutrition, pneumonia, malaria, dysentery and diphtheria.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.