Jap's Enemy No. 1

In Lourenc,o Marques, Mozambique, where they filed their first stories of internment under the Japs, 26 U.S. correspondents grimly compared notes with the sassy Jap correspondents returning with tennis racquets and golf clubs from White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. Last week the U.S. newsmen ended their long voyage home aboard the Gripsholm. By comparison with their sadistic treatment in Jap prisons and concentration camps, even those U.S. correspondents interned in Germany and Italy had been pampered.

But even the worst treated among them admitted he had got off easy by comparison with John Benjamin ("J.B.") Powell, editor since 1917 of the China Weekly Review. In a Manhattan hospital, 56-year-old Editor Powell lay horribly emaciated, crippled for life. He had lost all ten toes as a result of freezing and gangrene in Shanghai's notorious Bridgehouse Prison.

The Japs had special reason to hate Editor Powell. Most famed and un-scarable of English-language editors in China, he had been singled out as Jap "Public Enemy No. 1" as far back as the invasion of Manchuria. When they banned the Review in Jap territory, he organized his own underground postal service. When their gangsters attacked his Shanghai printing plant, he steel-plated its doors, went armed. A hand grenade last year hit him in the back but failed to explode. The day before Pearl Harbor his head editorial denounced the Japs for stealing motor cars (including his own) off Shanghai streets.

In Bridgehouse Prison, Powell's grilling filled a half-dozen notebooks. Japanese, who take for granted their own correspondents are spies, refused to believe he was not one. In Cell No. 5, a 12-by-18-ft. cage with six-inch bars, he was dumped among 40 prisoners--consumptives, lepers, syphilitics, even a few Japanese. Eaten alive by lice, they tried to keep warm by crowding five or six together under one filthy blanket. Rations were rice, occasionally embellished by fish heads and seaweed. Forbidden to talk to each other, the prisoners were compelled to sit on the floor, in rows, for easier counting during change of guards. A favorite discipline forced them to sit, with heads bowed, as long as eight hours at a stretch, facing Tokyo. They called this the "New Order Kneeling Posture."

When Editor Powell's finger infected, a Jap doctor sheared the whole skin away without anesthetic. When his feet swelled painfully, the Jap doctor laughed and a Jap nurse futilely painted them with iodine. Removed to Kiangwan prison, he was put in solitary confinement in a 5-by-10-ft. cell. His weight had dropped from 160 to 80 Ib. When he could no longer walk on his twice-swollen feet, he was sent to Shanghai General Hospital under military guard, there had his toes amputated.

Still, Editor Powell does not pity himself. "We got off with our lives at any rate," he philosophizes. "I wish I could say the same for some of the Chinese." (Once he counted 85 blows on a Chinese prisoner who was clubbed to death.) Some day he hopes to go back and "put out the next edition." Meantime, he urged in a weak voice that nevertheless strikes fire, "the thing to do is to win the war. There are 1,500 American prisoners of war in Shanghai. They're waiting for us to set them free."

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