ALTHOUGH LABOUR on the Burma railway represented the worst fate that could befall an Allied POW, shipment to Japan as a slave labourer was an ordeal which also proved fatal to many. On 17 June 1944, prisoners were paraded in Hall Romney’s camp on the railway. The commandant announced that they were being transferred to Japan. “Looking back on the past year and ten months since camps were first established in Siam,” said the Japanese officer benignly,
you have worked both earnestly and diligently and produced a great achievement in the construction of the Siam–Burma railway…For this we wish to express sincere appreciation. Your work in Siam having finished, you are being transported to the Land of the Rising Sun, an island country joyously situated and rich in beautiful scenery. From time immemorial our Imperial Nippon has had the honour of respecting justice and morality…They are men and women of determination, generous by nature, despising injustice in accordance with the old Nippon proverb “The huntsman does not shoot the wounded bear.” In spring the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. In summer fresh breezes rustle over the shadow of green trees. In autumn the glorious moon throws its entrancing light on sea and river…
After many more minutes of such lyrical rhetoric before his audience of half-dead men, the Japanese commandant concluded: “I wish you ‘bon voyage.’” The prisoners were sent on their way.
Conditions in the holds of transport ships were always appalling, sometimes fatal. Overlaid on hunger and thirst was the threat of U.S. submarines. The Japanese made no attempt to identify ships carrying POWs, of whom at least 10,000 perished following Allied attacks. RAOC wireless mechanic Alf Evans was among 1,500 men in the holds of the Kachidoki Maru on the night of 11 September 1944, when the ship was hit by four torpedoes. Evans was lucky. Suffering malaria, he was sleeping with other sick men on a hatch cover on the forward deck, instead of being battened below. As the ship began to settle, he asked a gunner officer: “What do I do? I can’t swim.” The gunner said: “Now’s the time to learn.” Evans jumped, and dog-paddled to a small raft to which three other men were already clinging. One had two broken legs, another a dislocated thigh. They were all naked, and coated in oil. A Japanese soldier hung on for a while, reciting repeatedly in English: “I am large sick, I am large sick.” Evans, desperately cold, saw a Japanese tunic floating by. He seized this and put it on. Aboard the sinking hulk, the Japanese had been shooting their own wounded and pushing women into boats. One British POW, Ralph Clifton, saved a baby from the sea, for which a Japanese officer later rewarded him with ten cigarettes.
A destroyer arrived, and began to pick up survivors—but only Japanese survivors. The prisoners were left to the sea. Alf Evans paddled to a lifeboat left empty after its occupants were rescued, and climbed aboard, joining two Gordon Highlanders. They later hauled in other men, until they were thirty strong. After three days and nights afloat, they were taken aboard a Japanese submarine chaser. The captain reviewed the bedraggled figures paraded on his deck, and ordered them thrown over the side. The POWs were astonished to find that their own guard, Tanaka, a notoriously brutal character, dissuaded him. The vessel’s captain satisfied his feelings by administering savage beatings all round. Eventually the prisoners were transferred to the hold of a whaling factory ship, in which they completed their journey to Japan.
Almost naked and coated in filth, they were landed on the dockside at Moji and marched through the streets, between lines of watching Japanese women, to a cavalry barracks. There they were clothed in sacking and dispatched to work twelve-hour shifts in the furnaces of a chemical works in the town of Omuta: “Life consisted only of work and sleep.” Of the fifteen hundred men who had embarked with Alf Evans, just six hundred survived to become slave labourers.
On 13 December 1944, Captain Mel Rosen was among a detail of 1,619 American POWs marched through the streets of Manila to the docks. In earlier times, Filipinos sometimes gave V signs to prisoners, or kids called out “We’re with you, Joe!” By that last winter of the war, local people had learned the price of such gestures. Most were silent and impassive. Next day the Americans left for Japan on the freighter Oryoku Maru, a voyage that was to become one of the most notorious of the war. Water and tea were periodically lowered to the prisoners in kegs. Those closest to the ladders drank. Others did not. Some men congratulated themselves on grabbing a few mouthfuls of boiled seaweed, but later regretted these, for they became violently sick. The ship was dive-bombed several times by U.S. carrier planes. The attacks ended at dusk. The prisoners were desperate with thirst. Doctors urged them not to drink their own urine, but some did so anyway. “That night was terrible, the worst thing I can imagine,” said Rosen. “Discipline went to hell, especially among the newer arrivals. I did not myself see anyone biting a man’s throat and drinking his blood, but I’ve heard of it happening from lots of others.” Some prisoners wilfully killed others, in the demented struggle for water and food. Next day, they were again subjected to air attack. This time, they were hit.
The Japanese crew and guards abandoned ship. The prisoners forced their way on deck to find the superstructure on fire. They took to the sea, and for a few brief minutes revelled in its warm wetness: “It was such a wonderful feeling as one jumped off that ship into the water.” Those who could not swim pushed hatch covers over the side and clung to them. The prisoners found themselves only a short way offshore from Luzon, and with little choice save to make for it. On the beach, they were welcomed by armed Japanese. As survivors struggled ashore, they were herded onto a tennis court on the old American naval base. Out of 1,619 men who had boarded the ship, some thirteen hundred remained. In the blazing sun, for some days they were not fed at all, merely given a little water. On the fourth and fifth days, each man received a spoonful and a half of raw rice. When they demanded aid for the sick and injured, a truck was brought to take them away. These men were never seen again, and were assumed to have been shot.
On Christmas Eve the survivors were put aboard another ship, the Enoura Maru, which took them to Formosa. It was deep winter. The Americans possessed only their shorts or G-strings. “People literally froze to death,” said Rosen. Yet still there was wretchedly little to drink: “You could have got an IOU from any man for a cup of water—and he would have paid up after the war.” When American Helldivers attacked again, Rosen was struck by steel fragments in the ankle, thigh and upper body. “There were dead and dying men everywhere. Steel deck supports fell, killing everyone underneath. After a few days, the Japanese lowered nets into the holds, to take away the dead. Then they took survivors off the hulk, and loaded us onto yet another ship, the Brazil Maru. We buried dozens of men every day.” On 29 January 1945 they arrived at Moji on Kyushu. Just 193 men landed, out of more than a thousand who left the Philippines. Rosen weighed eighty-eight pounds. The survivors were issued clothing from a stack of old British uniforms. An American doctor excavated bomb fragments from Rosen’s armpit with a penknife, before they were taken to Fukuoka to start their labours.
Working conditions in Japan were in no way preferable to those in South-East Asia. Many prisoners’ feet were so swollen by beriberi that in the desperate cold of winter, they could not wear shoes. Even under such blankets as they had, men shivered at night, for there was no heating in their barracks. At Stephen Abbott’s camp at Aomi, when prisoners begged for relief, the commandant said contemptuously: “If you wish to live you must705 become hardened to cold, as Japanese are. You must teach your men to have strong willpower—like Japanese.” Abbott demanded bitterly: “Men tortured by hunger, disease, bitter cold, and the daily fear of death?” Yet by 1944 the death rate in most Japanese camps had declined steeply from that of 1942 and 1943. The most vulnerable were gone. Those who remained were frail, often verging on madness, but possessed a brute capacity to endure which kept many alive to the end. In Hall Romney’s camp, just six men died in July 1944, compared with 482 in the same month of 1943.
THE CULTURAL chasm between captives and their jailers often seemed unbridgeable. Stephen Abbott recorded an exchange with a guard named Private Ito on a ship taking them to Japan. Ito had been consistently brutal. The POWs had no inkling that he spoke English until suddenly he addressed a terse question to Abbott: “Homesick?” The Englishman shrugged. Ito said: “I’ve been homesick for six years—first in China, then the Philippines and Timor, most lately in Singapore. I shall now at last see my family and I am happy.” Abbott said coldly: “That will be nice for you.” Ito revealed that he had an economics degree from Tokyo University. He asked curiously what Abbott thought of the Japanese, and received a cautious reply: “I don’t know them very well, so I cannot answer your question.” The guard persisted: “How do you think of what you know? How do you think of me?” Abbott said: “In our army, we do not strike and beat people as punishment. Ito is always doing so, and this blackens my thoughts about him.” The eyes of the little Japanese widened in amazement. He asked how the British Army punished wrongdoers. Abbott explained that physical chastisement was unknown. Ito never hit a prisoner again.
An enormous amount has been written about Japanese cruelty to prisoners. It should be noticed, nonetheless, that conditions varied widely in different camps. For instance, 2,000 British POWs in Saigon lived not intolerably until late 1944, sometimes even able to slip under the wire to visit local shops and brothels. It seems important also to record instances in which POWs were shown kindness, even granted means to survive through Japanese compassion. A British bugler, Corporal Leader, found himself in a Singapore hospital in 1942. Back home in Norfolk he had been a Salvation Army bandsman. Now, he was amazed to be visited by a Japanese who announced that he too had been a “Sally Army” member in Tokyo. He wanted to help the sick Briton. The Japanese contacted a local Malay Salvationist, who sent Leader letters, eggs and biscuits. Interned on Sumatra, Dr. Marjorie Lyon was able to keep many of her sick companions alive thanks to an officer named Mizusawa, who gave her drugs from the military hospital in Padang—and sometimes left her alone in the dispensary, to enable her to steal more: “He was a really kind-hearted Japanese706.”
When Erroll Shearn was digging air-raid shelters outside the Kempeitai headquarters in Batavia, two young Japanese officers emerged. Speaking in Malay, they applauded his gang’s work. Shearn asked them cautiously: “How do you like winning707 the war?” They answered: “We don’t like war. We are engineers, not soldiers, and we would much rather be back at Tokyo University.” Shearn said: “I don’t like war either. I am a lawyer, not a soldier.” One of the Japanese pulled out a cigarette case, said, “You and I are friends. Have a cigarette,” and gave the Englishman the packet. At lunchtime Shearn’s benefactor returned, and asked if the prisoners had enough to eat. Told that they had not, he brought them food and tea.
Little old Mr. Yogi, civilian interpreter in Stephen Abbott’s Aomi camp, had learned his indifferent English in an earlier career as a ship’s purser. “Are you contented708, Abbotto?” he asked one day. The British officer shrugged. Yogi himself always looked miserable. Now, he said: “Some of my people are not worried by trouble. They are young people accustomed to bullying from superiors. I am made unhappy by it because, perhaps, I am too proud. I am older and have seen things different in Japan. You understand? I am proud of being Japanese, but I also know something of how Western peoples live. I am not ashamed of real Japanese customs—but the war has changed the real Japan. We were much as you are before the war—when the army had not control. You must not think our true standards are what you see now.”
Abbott wrote: “I realised that Yogi longed for peace as much as any of us. As a civilian he was treated with contempt by the soldiers…Above all things he wanted to regain his self-respect.” Yogi told the Englishman that his wife was sick with beriberi and needed meat: “I have made decision that our cat must be killed to give meat for my wife.” This unwilling samurai could not face killing the family pet himself: “Will you please ask your cook-sergeant to do this and make stew? I will bring cat tonight. Please do not tell other Japanese. They would laugh at me.”
The terror of Aomi camp was its commandant, Captain Yoshimura. Every prisoner lived in fear of the screamed summons from a guard: “Number one to office—speedo! Yoshimura-San waits!” This officer was “small, stout, effeminate and twenty-six years old. He walked with a Napoleonic strut and his cruel, spiteful eyes blinked at you through thick glasses. He had a high-pitched voice and, when he raved, this rose to a scream which in other circumstances might have been amusing. His power was enormous—extending way beyond our prison camp. In Aomi town everyone, from the mayor to the most humble peasant, obeyed his commands. He was the only army officer for miles around and, as such, took precedence over all civilians.” Yoshimura liked to draw his sword and swish it above the heads of prisoners, shouting contemptuously: “What are the lives of a hundred captives when thousands of brave Japanese are dying each day for the Emperor?”
Then came a day when there was an accident at the quarry where the prisoners worked, and which had already witnessed the deaths of forty of their number. This time, by a happy quirk of fate, it was the turn of Yoshimura to perish. The camp’s senior NCO, Sergeant Sumiki, demanded of Stephen Abbott how he felt about the news. Abbott murmured something about “a terrible tragedy709.” Sergeant Sumiki burst out laughing, thumped the Englishman on the shoulder and cried out: “You lie! You very pleased. Me, too, very pleased!” The Japanese guards hated the tyrant as much as the British did.
One day at Doug Idlett’s camp in the Philippines, there was a call for volunteers to work at Japanese headquarters for a month:
I had beriberi710. I was sitting holding my foot and typing with one hand. A Japanese interpreter named Sekiyawa asked what was wrong with me, and I told him. Next day he handed me a bottle of Vitamin B. I never saw him again, but I felt that he had contributed to me being alive. Later, at the coalyards in Japan where we worked, there was a shunting engine driver named Yoshioka. One day he was resting by his can when we saw a daikon, a big Japanese radish, floating in the water by the tracks. We bent down and pulled it out. I stuffed it in my pants. Yoshioka asked: “What are you going to do with that?” I said: “Eat it.” He said: “You cannot. It’s dirty. Give it to me.” Later, he gave it back to us cleaned, sliced and cooked. From that day on, he always arrived with his leggings full of corn or something else for us to eat.
Lt. Masaichi Kikuchi, commanding an airfield defence unit in Singapore early in 1945, was allotted a labour force of three hundred Indian POWs from the Changi compound. The officer who handed over the men said carelessly: “When you’re finished, you can do what you like with them. If I was you, I’d shove them into a tunnel with a few demolition charges.” Kikuchi was told of the standing order that any prisoner who disobeyed orders or attempted to escape was to be executed out of hand, “and I knew that this was being done.” However, when two of his Indian POW detail broke out and were returned after being betrayed by local Chinese among whom they had sought refuge, Kikuchi handed them over to their own officer, a captain of the Indian Army, for punishment. He often asked himself afterwards why he had not killed them, as so many others were killed. A cynic would suggest that it was because Japan’s defeat was plainly so close. Kikuchi himself simply claimed to regard executions in such circumstances as unjustified: “I told myself after the war711 that the only reason I had been allowed to survive was that I had done nothing bad to others.” Likewise, in 1945 American and Dutch doctors at Kobe POW hospital signed a joint testimonial to its Japanese medical supervisor, Dr. Hiyajiro Ohashi, praising the extraordinary efforts of himself and his staff to assist Allied prisoners.
The point of such stories is not that they contradict an overarching view of the Japanese as ruthless and often wilfully sadistic in their treatment of despised captives. It is that, as always in human affairs, the story deserves shading. All the Japanese described above showed nuggets of courage, in defying a pattern of behaviour towards prisoners which their culture encouraged, even demanded. There is another issue. Because the Allies won the war, much was heard about the maltreatment of prisoners in German or Japanese hands, almost nothing about the reverse of the coin. There is ample anecdotal evidence that some American, British and Australian guards in POW camps behaved inhumanely towards their charges.
Some German prisoners—sensationalists claim tens of thousands—died in Allied hands in north-west Europe in the summer of 1945, chiefly because the administrative machinery was overwhelmed by their numbers. This was an argument advanced to justify some POW deaths in Japanese hands in 1942. Nobody in London or Washington, however, troubled to investigate the fate of abused German or Japanese prisoners, far less to frame indictments against Allied personnel. In the nature of military affairs, those selected to guard POWs are among the least impressive material in every nation’s armed forces. None of this represents an attempt to suggest moral equivalence between Japanese treatment of Allied POWs and the other way around; merely that few belligerents in any war can boast unblemished records in the treatment of prisoners, as events in Iraq have recently reminded us.
WHAT ENABLED some men to survive the unspeakable experiences of captivity, while others perished? Mel Rosen attributed 5 percent to self-discipline, 5 percent to optimism—“If you didn’t think you were going to make it, you didn’t”—and 90 percent to “pure luck.” Milton Young, a carpenter’s son from Rhode Island who spent an orphan childhood working on a chicken farm, believed that an uncommonly harsh upbringing helped him to survive Japanese captivity. He was even grateful not to have a home to think about: “I didn’t have much of a family, and that helped.”
At the end of the war712, British private soldier Don Lewis of the 1/5th Sherwood Foresters recorded the fate of his battalion, almost a thousand strong when it went into action in Malaya at the end of 1941. Thirty-five men were killed in battle, and a further 11 died of wounds. In captivity, 50 died of “complaints unknown” a further 1 of diphtheria; 17 of malaria; 9 of beriberi; 11 of cardiac illnesses; 31 of dysentery; 21 of malnutrition; 1 was killed by a falling tree; and 1 by an Allied bomb; 45 were lost on Japanese convoys; 24 were merely recorded as “missing.” Lewis was among 287 men known to have returned to Britain.
Since 1945, pleas have been entered in mitigation of what the Japanese did to their prisoners in the Second World War. First, as mentioned above, there was the administrative difficulty of handling unexpectedly large numbers of captives in 1942, for whom no provisions of care or supply had been made. This has some validity. Many armies in modern history have encountered such problems in the chaos of victory, and their prisoners have suffered in consequence. Moreover, food and medical supplies were desperately short in many parts of the Japanese empire. Western prisoners, goes this argument, merely shared privations endured by local civilians and Japanese soldiers. Such claims might be plausible, but for the fact that prisoners were left starving and neglected even where means were available to alleviate their condition. There is no record of POWs at any time or place being adequately fed.
It is thus hard to dispute that the Japanese maltreated captives as a matter of policy, not necessity. They flaunted the cultural contempt with which their soldiers were taught to regard inferiors of their own society, never mind enemies who preferred captivity to death. A people who adopt a code which rejects the concept of mercy towards the weak and afflicted seem to place themselves outside the pale of civilisation. The casual sadism of the Japanese towards their prisoners was so widespread, indeed almost universal, that it must be considered institutional. There were so many cases of arbitrary beheadings, clubbings and bayonetings in different parts of the empire that it is impossible to dismiss these as unauthorised initiatives by individual officers and men. The indifference which the Japanese navy showed towards prisoners in its charge who found themselves struggling in the sea after their ships sank was shameful by any standard.
Japanese sometimes justify such inhumanity by suggesting that it was matched by equally callous Allied bombing of civilians. Japanese moral indignation caused many U.S. aircrew captured in 1944–45 to be treated as “war criminals.” For instance, eight B-29 crewmen of the 29th Bomb Group were killed in 1945 by suffering unanaesthetised vivisection carried out in front of medical students at a hospital in Fukuoka on Kyushu. Their stomachs, hearts, lungs and brain segments were removed. Half a century later, one doctor present, Dr. Toshio Tono, said: “There was no debate among the doctors713 about whether to do the operations—that was what made it so strange.” Many captured American airmen were beheaded, not only in the last days of the war, but even in the period immediately following the Japanese surrender.
Any society which can indulge such actions, whether or not as alleged acts of retribution, has lost its moral compass. Much Japanese behaviour reflected the bitterness of former victors about finding their own military fortunes in eclipse, becoming the bombed instead of the bombers. More than sixty years later, there still seems no acceptable excuse. The Japanese, having started the war, waged it with such savagery towards the innocent and impotent that it is easy to understand the rage which filled Allied hearts in 1945, when all was revealed. The ambivalence of post-war Japan about its treatment of captives is exemplified in the 1952 memoirs of wartime foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, one of the more rational of the country’s leaders. He wrote: “After the war many instances were recorded of kindly treatment by Japanese in individual cases, and a number of letters of thanks were received from ex–prisoners of war and persons who had been in concentration camps.” Shigemitsu tarnished his own reputation by penning such pitiful stuff. War is inherently inhumane, but the Japanese practiced extraordinary refinements of inhumanity in the treatment of those thrown upon their mercy.