Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (A Book Review)

Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (A Book Review)

Gavan Daws combined ten years of documentary research and hundreds of interviews with surrviving POWs to write this explosive, first-and-only account of the experiences of the Allied POWs of World War II. The Japanese Army took over 140,000 Allied prisoners, and one in four died the hands of their captors. Here Daws reveals the survivors' haunting experiences, from the atrocities perpetrated during the Bataan Death March and the building of the Burma-Siam railroad to descriptions of disease, torture, and execution.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Daws (Shoal of Time) eloquently tells the story of 140,000 Allied military prisoners whom history has almost forgotten. He convincingly describes Japanese POW camps not as homogenizing institutions but as tribal societies of Americans, British, Australians, Dutch-and Japanese. The Japanese showed no mercy to those who fell into their hands, the author stresses: Thousands were worked to death; as many more died of disease and starvation; others were beaten to death or beheaded, often so clumsily that two or three strokes were required to finish the job. Daws combines archival research and personal interviews to describe inmates who did what they had to do to survive and afterward tried to live with their guilt. Their experiences highlight the scale of human pain inflicted by Japan. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

The Japanese held more than 140,000 POWs from the Western Allies and India during World War II. One-third of them did not survive captivity that was always onerous and often abominably brutal. The literature on these prisoners' experiences has been growing rapidly during the past few years, which is just as well, for the number of living survivors is diminishing rapidly. Daws offers a well-written, thoroughly researched account of these POWs that, along with more familar material, covers such rarely discussed topics as the Dutch POWs in Asia and the conflicts among different nationalities over personal hygiene. He does not bash the Japanese beyond their deserts, but in this respect as in many others, it is impossible to whitewash Japanese conduct, which was nothing less than barbarous in far too many cases. An exceptionally worthwhile addition to the literature on the war in the Pacific. Roland Green --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

A wide-angle saga that adds a chapter long missing from official and traditional histories of WW II's Pacific theater: the story of the torments endured by Allied military personnel captured when Japanese forces overran Greater East Asia. Drawing on interviews with survivors of the Japanese prison camps as well as archival sources, Daws (A Dream of Islands, 1980, etc.) effectively combines the experiences of individual American, Australian, British, and Dutch POWs with a panoramic perspective. He probes why the death rate among the more than 140,000 men interned by the Japanese reached 27% (as against but 4% for military prisoners of the Germans). By the author's painstakingly documented account, the causes were legion: inhuman living conditions, starvation diets, an almost complete lack of medical care, constant beatings by brutish guards whose (heartily reciprocated) racial hatred of whites often led to summary executions, forced labor on construction projects like the Burma- Siam railroad, and workaday atrocities. Thousands more POWs perished when the ships transporting them from the fetid jungles of conquered lands to Japan were blown out of the water by Allied aircraft or submarines. Daws provides a start-to-finish narrative, tracking the battered veterans of Bataan, Java, Midway, Singapore, and other campaigns before, during, and after their captivity. While he devotes considerable attention to group bonding, scavenging, and the other stratagems it took to stay alive behind the wire, Daws doesn't neglect the surprisingly cool receptions accorded repatriated POWs. Indeed, he reports, there are precious few memorials to Allied soldiers who died in Asian camps, let alone tributes to the brutalized, sometimes bestialized, survivors condemned to make peace with their freedom after VJ day. Overdue witness, eloquent and harrowing. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A powerful, disturbing, and necessary book." -- -- Parameters, U.S. Army War College quarterly

"All of us recognize how well you have captured the truth. Thanks for telling the world." -- -- Guy Kelnhofer, POW

"Daws has done for the POW saga what Schindler's List and The Diary of Anne Frank did for the Holocaust." -- -- The Asian Wall Street Journal

"My story is told in this book. Every word is true." -- -- Houston Tom Wright, POW

"Superb. A work of consummate historical scholarship. Devastating, heartbreaking." -- -- BBC Radio World Service

About the Author

 

For fifteen years, Daws headed historical research on the Pacific region at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. He also served as Pacific member to the UNESCO Commission on the Scientific and Cultural History of Humankind. The author of eight previous books, including the best-selling Shoal of Time, Daws has also won international awards for documentary films. He lives with his wife in Honolulu.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Sitting Ducks

Harry Jeffries was cruising, counting the days till his divorce papers came through and he could make his getaway from San Fancisco. He was an ironworker, his trade was bucking hot rivets, and his place of employment was the Golden Gate Bridge, the south tower, hundreds of feet above the waters of the bay. In his last week on the job--his last days as a married man--the world below appeared to him like a map laid out to show his life and times, past and future. Turn one way and there was the city, the cold-water hotel where he had been living out of a suitcase, separated from his wife and little daughter, the bars where he drank when he was not working, the blind alleys in the Tenderloin where he gambled when he was not drinking. Turn the other way and there was the blue Pacific, stretching off to the west--and the instant he was single again, that was where he was headed, over the horizon and out. On the stroke of noon, August 21, 1941, his big moment came up, and all the married men who worked on his level of the tower cheered and beat on the steel girders with their sledges and wrenches, wedding bells in reverse, as he climbed down off the bridge, free at last.

He and his friend Oklahoma Atkinson had their ship's passage booked for that same afternoon, and before the day shift on the tower downed tools they were sailing in style out through the Golden Gate.

They were going to be gone for nine months--which would make it June of 1942 when they came cruising back, flush with money, set for life. They had it all worked out.

 

They had met at the building trades labor temple. Harry was hanging around waiting for a poker game to materialize when Oklahoma came walking in with his little tin suitcase, looking all wide-eyed and countrified. They got to talking, and they clicked right off. They were a pair, a couple of healthy young physical specimens, the same age, twenty-six, the same height and weight, six feet one, one hundred ninety-five pounds, full of beans, purpose-built for bridge building. They organized things so that they could work the same shift in the same gang.

And they started running around together after hours, nightclubbing along North Beach, picking up women. Harry was the date maker. On the bridge he was known as Hollywood--a snappy dresser with slick hair and a movie-star moustache--and in the clubs no one was speedier with a silver Ronson when some goodlooking blonde sitting at the bar crossed her legs and tapped her cigarette. Oklahoma with his average man's Zippo was forever a step behind, meaning he was the one who always drew the goodlooking girl's less good-looking friend.

Not that he was complaining. Before San Francisco he had not seen a great deal of the world, not much beyond the flatlands for a day's drive or so around his tiny little hometown, and a military base or two from his hitch in the peacetime army of the United States, one lowly private soldier among thousands, grateful just to be fed and clothed and in out of the cold in the worst years of the Great Depression. Now here he was in the big city, with Hollywood Harry ordering up the high life.

Harry had started out a poor boy too, and that pointed him toward the service the same way as Oklahoma. Not the Army, though, the Marines. An elite corps--Harry liked the sound of those words. So he signed up with the reserves. But he never did make it to the real Corps. In the dark days of the 1930s recruiting lines in the big cities were as long as soup kitchen lines, and because the Marines were elite, for every one keeper they came across they could afford to throw back dozens. Harry was well set up, big and strong, but he was bowlegged; when the recruiters stood him at attention, daylight showed between his knees, and that was enough to wipe him out. It was a blow to his pride. He had to settle for the Navy.

His big cruise, aboard the battleship U.S.S. Colorado, took him from Bremerton in Washington State down the West Coast, through the Panama Canal, and up the East Coast to New York. It was the time of the World's Fair, and Harry was detailed to march with his shipmates in a big parade along Fifth Avenue. Passing the Empire State Building, the tallest skyscraper on earth, some of the young sailor boys got carried away and tilted their heads back to gawk; they lost their step and bumped into each other and fell down in a heap and took Harry with them.

Harry did not need the embarrassment. He was doing the parade the hard way already. In Havana, on liberty, his first ever night of catting around in a foreign port, he had picked up his first ever dose of the clap. All the way north to New York he had to suffer the Navy's fearsome gonorrhea treatment, standing at a trough, a nozzle stuck up his urethra to drench his inflamed plumbing with purple potassium permanganate, let that drain out, then take a syringe of Argyrol straight up. He made the Fifth Avenue march feeling sorry for himself, his greatest item of value and distinction tied with a butterfly bandage, and for extra protection a leather Bull Durham sack, so that the gonorrhea drip would not weep all over the crotch of his Navy whites.

By the time his ship got back to the West Coast the drip had dried up. But in Seattle he found a more serious sort of woman trouble to get himself into, a shotgun marriage, and that turned into a curse worse than the clap.

 

Poster’s comments:

1)    The hardback version of this now older book is out of print, I believe.  I think one can still get the paperback version.

2)   There are good lessons to be learned for the reader if times should get hard(er).

3)   The Japanese were as hard on many of their soldiers as their prisoners, or so is my opinion.

4)   The modern code of bushido (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido) doesn’t help much when one is very hungry and sick.

5)   Don’t let any food go to waste, period. Like every grain of rice must be consumed.

6)   Some groups did better surviving than other groups. You can read about it and make up your own mind.

7)      Preventive medicine is as important as corrective medicine, in my opinion. This idea even applies during hard times. For example sponge bathing with rain water (even without soap) collected in a rain barrel is better than not bathing at all, within common sense limits, of course. Some collected rain water is truly “dirty”, and can make us sick.