4

Japan: “Prisoners of War,” a Contradiction in Terms

During the Second World War there were many different types of camps. In the years from 1939–41 the camp system in the USSR became central to the invasions and deportations that followed. Communication between prisoners and the outside world was nonexistent; no foreign country was likely to come to the aid of captives. But events that were completely unexpected at the time showed how the most perfect security in the world can be breached—badly breached—and forced to change.

In the course of their early, rapid conquests, Japan was confronted with a huge number of civilians and captured soldiers who came under their control. The country did not have a developed system to administer the great influx of people. Ironically, however, when a camp system was finally organized it became an international cause celebre, influencing decisions at the highest level of the war that changed the outcome. In the most dramatic way the Japanese camps highlighted the importance of communication between prisoners and the world outside.

In the first months of 1942, Japanese Imperial armies advanced rapidly south toward Singapore encountering one success after another. Soon some 320,000 prisoners had fallen into their hands. Japan turned native prisoners loose, leaving 140,000 Allied military prisoners. The Japanese did not consider Allied soldiers in uniform to be “prisoners-of-war” at all. They did not have this legal concept. Japanese soldiers were forbidden to surrender; military regulations stated that the only alternative to victory was death in battle.31

According to the Japanese code, the Allied captives were not supposed to be there at all. Their presence was an embarrassment, they were not human beings with dignity. General Homma explained after the war that Japanese soldiers “despised beyond description” soldiers who allowed themselves to surrender. They were “genuinely surprised” the Allied soldiers had so little sense of shame. This attitude remained to the end.32

James Clavell put the matter succinctly in his novel King Rat. Peter Marlowe, the protagonist, humorously described the surrender of the Allied soldiers from their point of view: “They said we were without honor—the officers—because we had allowed ourselves to be captured. So they wouldn’t consider us P.O.W.s. They cut off our hair and forbade us to wear officers’ insignia. Eventually they allowed us to ‘become’ officers again, though they never allowed us back our hair.”33 The captives enjoyed relative freedom. Pierre Boule, a rubber planter in Malaya and author of The Bridge on the River Kwai, described the first months of inactivity as “a period of felicity.”34

As Japanese victories became less easy, the treatment of the captives became worse. It took the form of revenge and, soon, arbitrary slaughter. After Major General King’s surrender at Bataan in the Philippines, the Allied captives were driven on foot to the camp at Catanabuan, and along the road a systematic massacre took place with multiple beheadings. One American started counting bodies with their heads chopped off. At twenty-seven he stopped counting.

They would see a man desperate for water, catch him throwing himself down at some filthy pond and chop his head off. They would kill a man even if they did not catch him drinking, bayonet him for having water stains on his trousers. They would bayonet a man squatting with dysentery, leave him bleeding to death, fouled, with his pants down around his ankles. They killed men for going too slow . . . The Japanese in the truck convoys made a game of throwing rocks at the prisoners, or else would whack at them with rifle butts . . . they appeared to be keeping score.35

What became known as the “Bataan Death March” made a lasting impression on all the prisoners. For another three years, however, the experiences were not communicated to the world outside.

The number of captured Allied soldiers grew rapidly. In June 1942, Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo made a new decision: the captives would be used as laborers for war-related projects and dispersed throughout the zone of conquest, from Java to the Philippines and Manchuria. They never gained the status of “prisoners of war,” and their situation had many unresolved conflicts. Some captives clung to the concept of “prisoners of war” but it never corresponded to the reality of treatment. Another decision in Tokyo changed their situation further; many were sent north in the holds of ships to labor on the Japanese mainland until the end of the war.

Their status was unique. Their lives were considered without value. Of the Allied prisoners of war held in Germany and Italy, for example, only 4 percent died, but more than 27 percent of the Allied captives in Japanese custody would die. On the Burmese railway project the mortality rate exceeded 60 percent. David James, a historian and British captive himself, bitterly explained the statistics: “More British soldiers were killed . . . as prisoners of war than perished in fighting against the Japanese in battle during the entire campaign.”36

Japanese camps were in the open, close to work sites. Usually they were referred to by kilometer designation on a road or path, called “camps” or “jungle labor camps” in a loose sense. They were only clearings, railheads, stages, or temporary squatters’ camps. Jungle clearing was done by the captives, and as work advanced they moved to a new site, the jungle taking over the site just abandoned. The terms of labor were harsh. Prisoners were told “Work, or you will be shot.” A Major Maida informed the captives at an agricultural camp at Davao, “Now you will learn about hard labor. Every prisoner will continue to work until he is actually hospitalized.”37. When men fell sick their rations were removed. There were no “examinations” like those in Soviet camps, consisting of an NKVD doctor who gripped a fold of fat—Stefan Knapp called it the “stomach-gripping routine”—that determined the camp where each prisoner was sent.

In June 1942, the camps for Allied captives were transformed once again. Tokyo ordered the Southern Army to build a railway from Siam to Burma as a substitute for the sea route to Rangoon. The result was the crash program to build a Burmese railroad. About 61,000 Allied prisoners and a quarter million Asian laborers were impressed into construction. Some of the finest writings—by Australian, British, American, South African and French authors—are about work on this project. Even in its early stage, the mortality in these camps was high. From May 1943 onward a new policy called “Speedo” was enforced on the railway. A crescendo of violence was intended to spur the laborers to greater effort but in fact weakened them further and increased casualties. A British writer noted, “the cruder Japanese engineers boasted that each sleeper [tie] of the track would represent a dead prisoner.”38

As the war spread, Asian laborers were recruited into the Japanese camps. Torn from their social settings by economic necessity and false promises, called “engineers” and paid trifling sums, Tamils, Burmese, Javanese, Chinese, and Malays came with their families and belongings, arriving in an alien environment where they had to fend for themselves. Without medicine and suffering from every conceivable disease, they lacked leadership or discipline other than Japanese beatings. It was one of the great massacres of the war. No roll of Asian workers was kept, no names were recorded. The total casualties under Japanese occupation can only be guessed. Estimates of the number of Asians who died under Japanese occupation in Asia are in excess of eighteen million.39

In 1943, cholera struck the railway camps. Men became violently sick. The bacillus entered the Khwae Noi or Menam Kwa Noi—“Mother of the Waters”—and flowed downstream from one camp to the next. Previously the dead were buried each day in pits, now they were burned. After the arrival of cholera, surrounded by the dead and dying, each man devoted his remaining energies to trying to stay alive.40

As work and disease took their toll, more of the prisoners thought about the possibility of escape. Even if chances of success were poor, the chances of survival in staying behind were also poor. Escape became the dominant thought and obsession in many narratives.

Prisoners who had been deported into Soviet camps had no redress—their home countries were small, under occupation and powerless. But England and the United States were large countries, actively pursuing the war against Japan. Australia, an ally, was not too far away. If a prisoner wanted to risk his life in an escape attempt, he could try.

The spaces confronting him were forbidding. As in Siberia or Kazakhstan, once outside the camp enormous distances had to be crossed. The country was under military occupation, densely populated, the roads patrolled. The Japanese were quick to torture and kill men trying to escape. Examples were made of them in front of the other prisoners, they were tied to a stake and bayoneted, or hung from a wire and beaten to death. The Japanese said they were willing to kill ten for every one who escaped.

Ernest Gordon wrote that the great spaces around the camps were stronger than any fence or barrier:

It was fairly easy to break through the flimsy twelve-foot bamboo fence. Guards were stationed at several points around the perimeter of the camp; others patrolled at regular intervals. They could be eluded. But if a man broke through, where was he to go? A thousand miles of jungle was the strongest fence that could surround any camps. To be caught outside meant death—immediate death at the hands of violent guards, or slow death by starvation. We were not deterred by the wild animals or by the multitude of poisonous snakes in which the jungle abounded (I’d had a cobra crawl over my arm and thought nothing of it). It was the jungle itself, impersonal, menacing, that restrained us.41

Ronald Hastain explained in White Coolie, “The odds were all against such attempts. From the map of the world it is difficult perhaps to realize the vast extent of this region. We were already thousands of miles from Allied lands and neutral countries. There could be no slipping over borders . . . And always one was a white man among colored people who would sell you for a bowl of rice.”42

Dreams of escape and the desire to reach the Allied leadership, or to communicate some kind of record, went hand in hand. After the Burmese railway was completed in November 1943, survivors were transported north to Japan in the holds of “death ships” (Ray Parkin: “cargoes of old bones and dirty livers”); any communication from mainland Japan would be highly unlikely. The move made many of the captives rethink their plans. Those who had manuscripts, narratives, diaries, or drawings gave them to others for safekeeping, or buried them.

In most Japanese camps it was possible to keep a pencil and some paper. Laurens van der Post and his friends produced their own newspaper, “Mark Time.” Van der Post wrote: “As the supplies left behind by the Dutch were consumed, all our writings were increasingly produced on Japanese lavatory paper.”43 They managed to produce a collective “Memorial Book.”

As events turned against the Japanese armies, camp guards treated the captives with increasing cruelty. Many thought it was a form of revenge. In Java, Van der Post learned of the secret order of Field-Marshal Terauchi to his commanders to kill all prisoners in their camps when the Allies began a final assault in South-East Asia. It seemed all attempts to communicate with the outside world had failed. The few escapes, messages sent by native allies and contacts by hidden radio transmitter, seemed to have no effect.

Van der Post decided to bury all his manuscripts. Drawings “were gathered together with my diary, material for our memorial book, and such camp records as we valued, and on November 26, 1943, they were tied in bundles, wrapped in ground sheets and buried late at night in different places in our camp. As far as I know only my diary, a small number of illustrations and some copies of Mark Time survived their interment in the dark soil of our camp. The bulk and by far the most precious part of what we had buried mysteriously vanished.”

A number of excellent works in English were written about captivity in the many camps, and the works by Laurens Van der Post are especially noteworthy,44 also outstanding are works by the Australian Ray Parkin.45 The large majority of writings that we know were written in Japanese captivity were not recovered afterward, most were lost or destroyed. After the Japanese capitulation, Van der Post supervised a company of Japanese prisoners of war digging the soil of his old camp, looking for manuscripts he had buried. They were unable to find them. One hidden diary, with a London address inside the cover, had greater luck: “By some miracle the mildewed little book was recovered by an officer of the Indonesian Nationalist Forces who knew me and returned it to me, with some of the illustrations used in this story” (The Night of the New Moon).

A few fine poems by Ian Horobin survived, such as “Epitaph for Harokoe” and “In Memoriam,” but others that made a powerful impression on his fellow captives—“Java Sunday” about the beheading of a prisoner by a Japanese officer—were never recovered.46 John Coast paid an Indonesian to bury a long manuscript he had written, but when he returned after the war it was gone, probably taken by the man who buried it. Thomas Hayes, a doctor imprisoned in Bilibid Prison in the Philippines, buried his secret notebooks in the floor of the prison before he was shipped north in a ship’s hold. He did not survive the war, but his son found the notebooks and published them as Bilibid Diary, in 1945.47 This manuscript was exceptional. Most that were consigned to the humid earth quickly disintegrated.

In the last year of the war many prisoners were starving and sick, unable to walk, slipping in and out of consciousness. One wrote, “By the beginning of 1945 we were physically dying men.” Prisoners traveling to a new camp rarely survived the journey. When the camps in Japan were finally opened in 1945, few prisoners were able to rise to their feet and walk out.

*   *   *

In 1943, ten prisoners escaped from the labor camp at Davao, in Mindanao. They successfully made their way to General MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane, Australia. They were the first Americans to escape from the Japanese and reach the safety of Allied territory. They were also survivors of the “death march” in Bataan. Lengthy interviews with them made an overpowering impression on General MacArthur. Seldom in war has the escape of prisoners had a greater effect on subsequent military conduct and goals. Collectively, all of the prisoners were soon to become a major issue of the war. Their liberation became a priority of later military strategy.

Not only did primary witnesses escape, they brought with them their own written records. They arrived at the place—Brisbane—most likely to receive them with seriousness, concern, and willingness to act. It is difficult to say which method of communication, written or oral, was most instrumental in persuading MacArthur, and eventually the American public, of the danger to the captives as a group. The answer is probably a combination of both. MacArthur had a series of interviews with Captain William Dyess, who brought with him the diary he had kept throughout his captivity. Dyess also happened to be a fine writer. The presence of the diary, which he consulted during the interviews, gave extra authority and concrete accuracy to his words. Another book written by escaped captives, Ten Escape from Tojo, was vivid but hastily written.

Shortly after the interviews with MacArthur, Dyess sat down to write his own detailed narrative about his experiences for the War Department, titled Bataan Death March. Based on the diary he carried, it was a real act of literature. Its language was alert, fresh, and free of exaggeration, his insights into the minds of both captives and captors exceptional.

Permission to publish the book was denied at first. President Franklin Roosevelt personally suppressed the book, fearing it would have an incendiary effect on American public opinion.48. But he relented. When the book was released in January 1944, hundreds of newspapers and magazines serialized it and quoted it throughout the United States. It created a public furor.

During the war’s last months, General MacArthur broadcast almost daily to the Japanese people warning them not to harm the prisoners of war. On August 30, 1945, after the surrender, MacArthur arrived in Japan on a C-54 with the name “Bataan” prominently displayed on the airplane’s nose cone.49 It was a declaration. Bataan was the place of the infamous death march; it was also the place where the Allied soldiers were abandoned—some said by MacArthur—to captivity.

A few days after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, President Truman justified the use of the weapons in a letter to the Federal Council of Churches. He underlined the importance for him of the prisoners of war: “I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor . . . and their murder of our prisoners of war.”50

Events outside Japan were completely unknown to the captives themselves. A few had seen the flashes of the bombs from their distant camps. Ray Parkin wrote that by 1945 the captives imprisoned on mainland Japan “felt like Rip Van Winkels.” Most of them were convinced all their attempts to communicate with the world outside had failed. They had no hope, and believed they were completely forgotten.

After the surrender Ronald Hastain, author of White Coolie, was transferred from his camp at Toyama in Japan to an American destroyer. His first encounter was with an American ensign. He asked for news.

He stopped to look me fully in the eyes before replying firmly, but with a touch of conscious drama, “You are the news. You are the headlines. The liberation of you fellows is the only news that matters today. The whole world is waiting to hear from you.”

Allowing for the American proneness for exaggeration, this was still pleasant hearing . . . I made a disparaging comment, but he was bent on convincing me.