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The Pig-basket atrocity was a war crime witnessed by Elizabeth Van Kempen during WWII in which English and Dutch prisoners of war were carried in bamboo baskets Japanese soldiers in Indonesia.

Detail

At the time of the witnessed event, the Allied forces had surrendered East Java to the Japanese. Approximately 200 Allied soldiers remained around Malang to form resistance groups.

Elizabeth Van Kempen was raised on a rubber and coffee plantation in the Dutch East Indies (of which her father was the manager). Although the use of the local language was enforced to dissuade collaboration with resistance groups, their lives were mostly uninterrupted by Japanese occupation until her father was interned in February of 1942, after which they were separated until his death. The rest of the family was later interned in 1943 until after the war (in part) to protect them from pemuda who were unhappy with Dutch rule over Indonesia.

The event was witnessed by Elizabeth and her father in October 1942 as they "walked back home for lunch" when they observed 5 trucks filled with a few hundred soldiers driven to a rail siding and loaded onto rail wagons. Elizabeth observed that the soldiers were carried in bamboo baskets.

Trials

The commander in chief of the Japanese forces in Java at the time was lieutenant-general Hitoshi Imamura. Although he was acquitted by a Dutch military court due to a lack of evidence, a subsequent trial in 1946 by an Australian military court convicted Imamura to have "failed to discharge his duty as a Commander to control the members of his command, whereby they committed brutal atrocities." Imamura was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment which was served at Sugamo prison, where he stayed until his release in 1954.

He considered that his imprisonment was too light with respect to his responsibility for the crimes of his subordinates, so he had a replica of the prison built in his garden where he stayed until his death in 1968.

References

1. ^ Van Kempen, Elizabeth (January 1, 2009). "Memories of the Dutch East Indies: From Plantation Society to Prisoner of Japan" (PDF). The Asia-Pacific Journal. 7 (1) – via APJJF.
2. ^ "Massacres and Atrocities of WWII in the Pacific Region". members.iinet.net.au. Retrieved 2021-12-28.
3. ^ "Biography of General Hitoshi Imamura - (今村 均) - (いまむら ひとし) (1886 – 1968), Japan". generals.dk. Retrieved 2021-12-28.
4. ^ "AWM54 1010/4/156 - [War Crimes and Trials - Affidavits and Sworn Statements:] Statements by General Imamura Hitoshi proving his Command Area of responsibility of such, together with certifying statements and five maps showing the area of his (Imamura's) Command 1946". www.awm.gov.au. Retrieved 2021-12-28.
5. CASE NO. 21 TRIAL OF GENERAL TOMOYUKI YAMASHITA
6. Van Reybrouck, David (2020). Revolusi. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. p. 212. ISBN 978-94-03-18440 1.

• Massacres in 1942
• World War II prisoner of war massacres by Imperial Japan
• Allies of World War II
• Massacres in Indonesia
• Japanese war crimes in Indonesia
• 20th-century mass murder in Indonesia