* Ueda Masami, captured in August 1944, ‘had had malaria so badly that he was among those ordered to commit suicide, since they were neither able to work or fight’, noted his interrogators. ‘He did not obey this order, he said, because he felt that the Emperor would prefer that he remained able to fight’ (ATIS Research Report 76 [VI], AWM 12/53). Ueda’s case was typical, according to one Allied informant, an Indian medical captain who became a Japanese POW in February 1942 and served in a Japanese medical unit until 1944: ‘The Japanese believe that a sick man is of no service to the Emperor,’ the Indian doctor said. ‘If a doctor thinks a patient may, after treatment return to active service, he will [receive] attention, but if really ill medicine and treatment will not be wasted on him; he may even be shot.’ Later in the war, the Japanese sick and wounded were always the first to suffer the deprivations of an army on its knees. In Bougainville, for example, the medical orderlies were repeatedly ordered to shoot the seriously sick. In the Philippines in 1945, the hospitalised received two rice balls a day, compared with six for fit troops. They were considered simply not worth feeding, and slowly starved to death.