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Baxter 19
the rank they had held when captured by the Japanese. This was their "just due" for three and one-half years of slave labor, brutality, starvation, and disease, their recompense for three and one-half years of mental anguish and the psychological torture of hopelessness, as the body, mind, and spirit slowly wasted away.
The average pay for over 10,000 American ex-P.O.W.'s from all branches of the military services was $1,890. This amount was payment in full for the battle of Bataan and the siege of Corregidor; payment in full for the Death March, a grueling eighty-mile, seven-day trek at the cost of 10,000 American and Filipino lives; payment in full for the first prison camp?Camp O'Donnell, where from May to July, 1942, thirty to fifty P.O.W.'s were buried in mass graves, piled together as in a rubbish heap; and, finally, payment in full for 1,277 days and nights as slave laborers of the Japanese. As the final tally is told, "payment in full" by the Government of the United States of America amounted to $1.40 a day.
In 1948 the United States Government forced Japan to acknowledge non-payment of wages to all Allied ex-prisoners of war. The fair settlement agreed upon by both countries was $1.00 a day.
THE FOUR CITIES SELECTED FOR DESTRUCTION BY THE ATOMIC BOMB
President Truman did not have a soft spot in his heart for Tokyo or any other Japanese city. It was Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson who did. Stimson pointed out that the city of Kyoto was the historic center of Japanese culture and religion, and he forbade its destruction. Tokyo was not selected as a prime candidate for atomic bombing by the Target Committee of the Interim Committee, a civilian-military council of advisers to Truman on atomic policy, because by the summer of 1945 Tokyo already had been fire-bombed to rubble. On March 9, 1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay had ordered approximately 200 B-29's to destroy Tokyo