Prisoners of the Japanese

Title: Prisoners of the Japanese – POWs of the Second World War in the Pacific

Author: Gavan Daws

Publisher: Pocket Books, 2007 (First published: 1994)

ISBN: 978-1-4165-1153-3

Pages: 396

The Second World War was the bloodiest act of aggression among men. Millions perished in the flames raged by this Great War, many millions got injured, the lives of a lot many were changed forever and once again the folly of war dawned right and clear in the minds of sensible people anywhere in the world. Asia also carried more than its fair share of the bitter fruit of war than spawned in Europe. Japan aggressively moved into the game, harbouring hopes of establishing an Asian empire of its own – like that of UK, France and Holland – from where they could obtain raw materials for their industries and they could sell the finished products in the colonial markets. The Allied forces opposed them and for a time it seemed that Japan would have the last word. Thousands of American, British, Australian and Dutch soldiers surrendered and were taken as prisoners of war. This book describes the circumstances which led to their capture, grimy details of their lives in the camps, the inhuman treatment meted out to them in work details and special killing projects such as the Burma – Siam Rail road. Apart from expounding the progress of war as a backdrop to the human trauma unweaving before the reader, Daws also looks into the life of the prisoners after they went back home at the end of the war. The narrative is so stunning in its impact and so forceful in its choice of expressions that the reader becomes at one with the prisoner in his suffering. Gavan Daws headed historical research in the Pacific region at the Institute of Advanced Studies and is the author of twelve books with a slew of awards for his documentary films.

The Pacific war was really hard on the Americans. Though they had seen it coming for a long time complacency got the upper hand and it was impossible for them even to contemplate that Japan might be able to give them a good thrashing on the field. Concepts of racial superiority and aversion to Asiatic races prompted many to reside in fool’s paradises, never taking the deteriorating conditions seriously and vainly hoping that the war, if at all it comes about, would last for only a maximum of two weeks, by which time – they thought – Japan would be brought to its knees. But Pearl Harbour altered all calculations and rudely jolted the giant out of slumber. The ruthless efficiency and surgical precision with which Japanese bombers sowed death on that remote Pacific naval base astonished American strategists. The little Asian country appeared on the verge of playing another David, which it did against Russia in 1904-05 when the giant European nation was humbled on the battle field. In Pearl Harbour they could exploit the advantage of surprise to the hilt. Other US bases in the Pacific soon surrendered to Japanese efforts. For a time, it seemed that Japan had established an invincible shield around itself, after subduing American forces in the Pacific. East Asia had already fallen to them in earlier stages of the war – Korea, Indo-China, Indonesia, Thailand and Burma had fallen much earlier. The book presents the conditions and the war situation in general, before going on to describe the actual process in which American troops were overwhelmed and taken prisoner in the Wake islands and Philippines.

Daws’ description of how the conquering Japanese treated their American and European prisoners is shocking and provokes repulsion at the wanton cruelty and sadism of the victors. He ascribes racial prejudices also to the extraordinary strictness of the Japanese, by hinting that the smallness of the Japanese in physique against their Western prisoners must had fed their inferiority complex to inflict maximum pain on the physically superior body. We have to note here that many of the author’s remarks are outright racist for which he warns us beforehand that the racist remarks are reproduced as such as it came from the prisoners themselves. This argument is so flimsy and lacks any substance or decency. If the author is deputed to report on a street brawl, will he be casual enough to reproduce the exchanges verbatim?

                  

Whatever may be the lapses in discretion on the part of the author, there is no denying that he had captured the grisly details of prison life under the Japanese. Shocking descriptions of the Bataan death march in Philippines, the forced transportations over the sea in undersized vessels and the utter inhumanity of the Japanese administration of POW camps abound in confounding the reader with a realization about the psychological change that comes about in victor against the vanquished. A prisoner’s death due to malnutrition, overwork, disease or all of them combined was nothing of significance to the conquerors. POWs started to die in droves when the Burma – Siam railroad project began.

Japan wanted to conquer India, which was the jewel in the crown of British Empire. However, Burma was a strategically inconvenient place in terms of movement of troops and material. A railroad from Thailand to Burma would ease the Japanese the trouble of moving ships through the Malacca Straits and Bay of Bengal. They could offload them in Thailand at the South China Sea coast and transport through the forests bordering Burma. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were drafted for building the rail road, mostly out of bare hands. Ravaging diseases and lack of food killed 20% of the prisoners of the war. In this stretch Japan forced East Asians also to toil as slave labour. These Romushas, as they were called, were cheated to sign up. This act was in direct contrast to Japan’s moral stand that the war they are waging in Asia was to liberate the Asian people from the Western yoke and to share the resulting prosperity. But the Asian workers’ plight was more pathetic than the westerners. If the latter were treated as enemy prisoners, the former didn’t have a higher claim than animals with the Japanese. About half of them, running to nearly 150,000 perished on the wayside.

When the war was grinding down to a close, the POWs were faced with another threat. The Japanese tried to move them to the home islands, in ships which increasingly came under attack from Allied planes and submarines. Then came the firebombing and cluster bombing of Japan for which the prisoners bore collateral damage. And at last came the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – these towns were selected for annihilation on the assumption that very few prisoners were held there, but still a few of them died in the nuclear holocaust. The new and devastating weapon finally broke the back of Japan. It surrendered on Aug 15, 1945 and the prisoners went home at last.

The book is distressingly replete with racially charged references and disparaging remarks about the Japanese and Asians in general. It would have been pardonable had this book came out immediately after the war when emotions were flaring hot and high. But, coming after a remove of 60 years, such foul mouthing of the enemy on openly professed racial lines is in bad taste. The author goes on to provide a moral basis for indiscriminate killing of the Japanese, by narrating an incident in which young children spat at the prisoners caught parachuting from downed Allied planes. The narrow-mindedness goes to its extreme when he says that those guards who behaved humanely with the prisoners were Christians practicing their faith in secret. Quite unexpectedly, the author is cross with General Douglas MacArthur who was the commander of the Pacific fleet and played a larger than life role in the war history. But Daws does not spare an opportunity to malign him. If I am asked to hazard a guess on the real motive of the author to produce a book of this sort, I would definitely conclude that it is to provide a moral justification for the terrible nuking of two cities, along with a mostly innocent population. And, to do justice to the author, we have to appreciate that he had succeeded to a large extent in achieving this objective. The descriptions of the war years are so original and absorbing.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star