Prisoners Of The Japanese | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘They were totally unprepared. So really, what my book is about is everyone knows how much allied POWs suffered at the hands of the Japanese, but they don't know why. And my book is about why they were neglected and abused. And I find that the Japanese completely had no plan for this number of POWs. They, the guards who watched these POWs had poor training, the agencies that were responsible for them, were completely bureaucratically incoherent. Um, and there is no established policy though of debasing and tormenting prisoners...
We think I think sometimes of war crimes as being intentional, as being committed by evil people. But I think some of the worst experiences come about through poor planning. And in this case, the leadership didn't care. There's nothing inherent to Japanese character or culture that led to the inhumane treatment of POWs. The Japanese government and military never made it a policy to abuse captives. And you know, as you suggested, the horrors of captivity are due to accident, to bureaucratic incompetence... If you look at archival records, there are a few cases where we find the records of Japanese speaking captives. There aren't many, but there are some. And these accounts show that these people could speak Japanese, they really dealt much better way. They found that the guards really just wanted the prisoners to follow the rules. And therefore, we know that much of it was due to misunderstanding... They were humiliated that they felt that they had to bow right, to the Japanese. And this is sort of, from the Japanese point of view, this, they had to do this to each other. This is part of the culture, right’...
‘How does the experience of the Allied prisoners of war in Japanese captivity compare to how other combatants to World War Two treated their prisoners?;
‘That's a big question. I think that it depends what you compare, right? In terms of deaths among POWs, the Pacific war’s one of the worst places to be a prisoner aside, but there are worse places to be in the Eastern Front. Russians in the Eastern Front, or to be Germans in Russia, that was a place that nobody wanted to be held, which had many, many more people die.’
‘So one of the most notorious aspects of the camp system was some of the work projects that people had to do such as the Thai Burma Railway, perhaps the most famous, how do these fit into the story you're telling?’...
‘Life in some camps in Japan and in what's now South Korea were better. And we know this by looking at the archival records and people's diaries. Certainly the camps in South Korea, and in some places in Japan were spartan, but they compare favorably with other places. For example, in Keijō, in Seoul, officers farmed potatoes and vegetables and they had hogs and rabbits. And, quite different from the railway or Bataan Death March, the commander was actually struggling to find work for them. And they were paid. As one British officer said, his name is Colonel Ellerington [sp?]. And there he said, you know, the fault lies with the system rather than with the individual.’
‘So would your argument be that the focus that we have on things like the Thai Burma Railway, perhaps obscures the complexities of prisoner experiences?’
‘Sure, yeah. I'm a historian. And I always argue for complexity’...
‘Did the situation in the camps relate to the situation in the war as a whole? So for example, when the war began going badly for Japan, did things get worse for the prisoners?’...
‘In Fukuoka, in Japan, nobody had enough to eat. And in fact, people outside the gates were jealous of the prisoners of war for how much they ate. No, it wasn't a lot of food, but they were still fed’...
‘The first thing that surprised me is that the Japanese court martialed guards for mistreating POW. So that we hear a lot about how the Japanese guards mistreated POW... there are these incidents of when guards mistreated prisoners. of them being prosecuted. The reason that we don't find more examples of this is because the agency that's responsible for these guards really has very little power… Tokyo and Washington are communicating with each other during the war, and, or Tokyo and London, or Tokyo and Canberra, right. But these talks fail. And the reason that they failed, and this links into another question you asked, I think, is that Japan was really concerned about the treatment of its internees. This is a big deal in the US, the internment camps. But they don't care what happened to their POWs, but the US was the opposite. And since these negotiations work on reciprocity, the talks failed... the Allies bombed boats, despite knowing Americans were abroad, and more than half of all POW fatalities, one historian found, resulted from Allied bombs and torpedoes.’
‘So was that because the Allies just felt that a bit of military importance of these attacks was, was such that they would risk POW deaths? Or was it, they just didn't really know how many POWs would have been at risk?’
‘It's hard to say from the evidence we have. But I think, you know, my educated guess would be the former, right. That they're trying to win the war’"
