Book Review - Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific

Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific

Written by: Gavan Daws,

Scribe, Melbourne, 2008.

ISBN: 978086519782, 462pp

Reviewed by: John McCarthy

This book was first published in the United States to highly favourable reviews in 1994. Ten years later it was published in Australia. In 2008 it was reprinted. The New York Times Book Review considered it ‘may be the rawest, harshest book about the war’. The international edition of The Japan Times Weekly found it ‘sears the reader’s memory with unforgettable images’. One cannot fail to agree with this judgment. The Australian found it ‘indispensable’. The book is largely about survival, and bare survival can well be ugly.

Australians are familiar with the plight and suffering of Australians taken prisoner by the Japanese. The literature is extensive, going back as far as Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island (1952), which has sold more than a million copies, to at least Cameron Forbes, Hellfire: Australia, Japan and the Prisoners of War (2005). Australians are not nearly as well informed, however, on the fate and behaviour of American prisoners taken by the Japanese.

Bare figures might make a point. Although, as Daws points out, accurate numbers are difficult to verify, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East found the death rate of Western prisoners of the Japanese was 27.1 per cent. American prisoners of war had a 37 per cent death rate. That was seven times the number of American prisoners of war who died while held by the Germans and the Italians.

Daws asks and suggests reasons why this happened. Prisoners of war held by the Japanese armed forces were subjected to murder, beatings, summary punishments, brutal treatment, forced labour, horrific medical experimentation, starvation rations, and the deliberate withholding of essential medical supplies.

The horror began for the Americans following the fall of the Philippines and with the Bataan death march. Just to take one incident: the Japanese tied the captives’ wrists with wire, and with measured pace killed between three and four hundred men inside two hours. Daws suggests the order for this brutality was given by General Nara Akira, a graduate of Amherst College and the United States Army’s Infantry School. In this instance, the value of such fourth level diplomacy might be questioned.

Daws’ account of the of the Bataan death march is indeed ‘searing’. As he points out, nothing and nobody stopped the Japanese of all ranks from doing whatever they liked to their surrendered prisoners. The result was ‘mass atrocity’. The atrocities continued throughout the war. Australian prisoners of war were massacred by the Japanese at Parit Sulong in southern Malaya on 22 January 1942 and at Banka Island on 16 February 1942 and again at the Tol Plantation following the fall of Rabual in January 1942. The Sandakan death march in 1945 rivalled that of Bataan.

The survivors of such initial horrors had to learn how to stay alive in the fearful prisoner of war environment created by the Japanese. A question remains: why was the American death rate some 10 per cent higher than the average? Daws provides sufficient evidence to support the view that the heightened Australian view of mateship, localised as it was among groups and sub groups—which Daws called ‘tribes’—was a contributing factor to their higher rate of survival. On the Burma- Siam railway, for example, the Australian death rate was 29 per cent; the British was 61 per cent. There could well be many explanations for this difference but it might be difficult to escape the suspicion that the Australian prisoners of war had a different collective mentality to some others.

The Americans appear, for example, to have held a much more individualistic and perhaps commercial view of survival. There were rackets, prisoners who preyed on gamblers, those who stole from the sick, and widespread exploitation of the weak. Daws writes of the prisoners of war becoming more and more like prison inmates, exhibiting a ‘ratlike cunning’. Nobody could be trusted. There was one particular racket where a prisoner would get rice on interest in return mainly for tobacco. When he no longer could meet the rice interest payments he simply died of starvation. Here the difference in Australian attitude was most apparent. As Daws remarks, although the Australians could cheat and steal with the best of them, the Australians were horrified at the practice. They could not imagine doing men to death by charging interest on something as basic as rice. Australians shared, Americans traded.

Daws has an informative chapter on the war trials and the retribution that followed. The lower grade war criminal, the C Class, after trial was generally swiftly executed. Still, as Daws points out, only one Japanese was sentenced to prison for every fifty prisoners of war who spent three and a half years in a prison camp, and only one Japanese executed for every 250 prisoners of war who had died horrible deaths. Moreover, the longest sentence any Japanese war criminal served was less than thirteen years. Many senior Japanese convicted war criminals after release quickly became active in public life. One became the Japanese Prime Minister in 1957.

All in all, something approaching one in three white prisoners died while in Japanese captivity. Yet the Japanese had not always been so barbaric. Previous Japanese regulations stipulated that prisoners of war were to be treated with good will and never subjected to ill treatment. The Russians taken prisoner during the 1905 war were treated this way. When the Japanese took some small Pacific islands occupied by the Germans, the German prisoners were treated in terms of the Geneva Convention. In 1919, the International Red Cross gave two nations outstanding ratings for their treatment of prisoners of war: the United States and Japan. The question is thus posed: were the actions of the Japanese military from the 1930s through to 1945 a horrific aberration? Hopefully, yes.

Gavan Daws has written a moving and in parts a terrifying book. What happened to the prisoners of war of the Japanese between 1941 and 1945 should never be forgotten.