Forgotten Captives In Japanese Occupied Asia

Using archival, oral and literary sources, Blackburn and Hack, along with an impressive team of international contributors, rectify the obscured picture of the Japanese captive by bringing together, for the first time, a collection of essays covering an extremely broad range of forgotten captives.

Using archival, oral and literary sources, Blackburn and Hack, along with an impressive team of international contributors, rectify the obscured picture of the Japanese captive by bringing together, for the first time, a collection of essays covering an extremely broad range of forgotten captives.

A pathbreaking account of World War II POW camps, challenging the longstanding belief that the Japanese Empire systematically mistreated Allied prisoners. In only five months, from the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to the fall of Corregidor in May 1942, the Japanese Empire took prisoner more than 140,000 Allied servicemen and 130,000 civilians from a dozen different countries. From Manchuria to Java, Burma to New Guinea, the Japanese army hastily set up over seven hundred camps to imprison these unfortunates. In the chaos, 40 percent of American POWs did not survive. More Australians died in captivity than were killed in combat. Sarah Kovner offers the first portrait of detention in the Pacific theater that explains why so many suffered. She follows Allied servicemen in Singapore and the Philippines transported to Japan on “hellships” and singled out for hard labor, but also describes the experience of guards and camp commanders, who were completely unprepared for the task. Much of the worst treatment resulted from a lack of planning, poor training, and bureaucratic incoherence rather than an established policy of debasing and tormenting prisoners. The struggle of POWs tended to be greatest where Tokyo exercised the least control, and many were killed by Allied bombs and torpedoes rather than deliberate mistreatment. By going beyond the horrific accounts of captivity to actually explain why inmates were neglected and abused, Prisoners of the Empire contributes to ongoing debates over POW treatment across myriad war zones, even to the present day.

Detention camps in Asia have held hundreds of thousands of people – political dissidents, prisoners of war, and civilian populations. This volume examines why states detain, the conditions of detention, and the effects of detention systems on society as a whole.

During World War II the Japanese were stereotyped in the European imagination as fanatical, cruel, almost inhuman - an image reflected in most books and films about prisoner of war in the Far East. While the Japanese certainly treated those they captured badly, behaving far worse to Chinese and native captives than to Europeans, the conventional view of the Japanese is unhistorical and simplistic. It fails to recognize that the Japanese were acting at a time of supreme national crisis trial, at a particular period of their history, and that their attitudes were influenced by a combination of their perception of their own racial identity mixed with a powerful historical tradition. This collection of essays, by both western and Japanese scholars, aims to see the question from a historical viewpoint, and from both a western and Japanese perspective, looking at it in the light of both longer-term influences, notably the Japanese attempt to establish themselves as an honorary white race. The essays also examine particular instances. Conditions in the almost self-run camp at Changi contrasted remarkably with those on the Burma Railway, where disease and a failure to provide supplies caused terrible suffering. The book also addresses the other side of the question, looking at the treatment of Japanese prisoners in Allied captivity.

Eighty years after his death in a Japanese prison camp, this compelling new biography charts the career of a distinguished but hitherto neglected hero of the British army. Major-General Merton Beckwith-Smith DSO, MC commanded the British 18th Division during the catastrophic Fall of Singapore in February 1942. A highly respected and much decorated veteran of the First World War, he was captured along with tens of thousands of other soldiers - British, Indian, Australian, and Malay - who were then held prisoner on Singapore Island. Amidst hunger, disease and widespread despair in Changi, over the next six months he rallied the spirits of his soldiers, created a make - shift university and theatre, and helped to inspire a remarkable renewal of collective church life. At the same time, he improved conditions for hospital patients and encouraged sports and other recreations. While the fate of many of the men he led was to toil, and often die, on the infamous Burma Railway, Beckwith-Smith was exiled to Karenko Camp, Formosa (present-day Taiwan), where, mistreated and malnourished, he died of diphtheria and heart failure on 11 November 1942. Beckwith-Smith, was the most senior British officer to end his life as a prisoner of war in the Far East. Yet until now he has been a strangely forgotten warrior. Based on exclusive access to family archives, and drawing on an array of other eye-witness accounts, Michael Snape's richly detailed biography brings to an end that neglect. The result is a story that offers vivid insights into one man's experience of two world wars, while also revealing why he was so admired by his fellow officers and by the ordinary soldiers who served under him.

Sheds new light on the mistreatment of downed airmen during World War II and the overall relationship between the air war and state-sponsored violence. Throughout the vast expanse of the Pacific, the remoteness of Southeast Asia, and the rural and urban communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, more than 120,000 American airmen were shot down over enemy territory during World War II, thousands of whom were mistreated and executed. The perpetrators were not just solely fanatical soldiers or Nazi zealots but also ordinary civilians triggered by the death and devastation inflicted by the war. In Forgotten Casualties, author Kevin T Hall examines Axis violence inflicted on downed Allied airmen during this global war. Compared with all other armed conflicts, World War II exhibited the most widespread and ruthless violence committed against airmen. Flyers were deemed guilty because of their association with the Allied air forces, and their fate remained in the hands of their often-hostile captors. Axis citizens angered by the devastation inflicted by the war, along with the regimes’ consent and often encouragement of citizens to take matters into their own hands, resulted in thousands of Allied flyers’ being mistreated and executed by enraged civilians. Written to help advance the relatively limited discourse on the mistreatment against flyers in World War II, Forgotten Casualties is the first book to analyze the Axis violence committed against Allied airmen in a comparative, international perspective. Effectively comparing and contrasting the treatment of POWs in Germany with that of their counterparts in Japan, Hall’s thorough analysis of rarely seen primary and secondary sources sheds new light on the largely overlooked complex relationship among the air war, propaganda, the role of civilians, and state-sponsored terror during the radicalized conflict. Sources include postwar trial testimonies, Missing Air Crew Reports (MACR), Escape and Evasion reports, perpetrators’ explanations and rationalizations for their actions, extensive judicial sources, transcripts of court proceedings, autopsy reports, appeals for clemency, and justifications for verdicts. Drawing heavily on airmen’s personal accounts and the testimonies of both witnesses and perpetrators from the postwar crimes trials, Forgotten Casualties offers a new narrative of this largely overlooked aspect of Axis violence.

The string of military defeats during 1942 marked the end of British hegemony in Southeast Asia, finally destroying the myth of British imperial invincibility. The Japanese attack on Burma led to a hurried and often poorly organized evacuation of Indian and European civilians from the country. The evacuation was a public humiliation for the British and marked the end of their role in Burma. The Evacuation of Civilians from Burma investigates the social and political background to the evacuation, and the consequences of its failure. Utilizing unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs and official reports, Michael Leigh provides the first comprehensive account of the evacuation, analyzing its source in the structures of colonial society, fractured race relations and in the turbulent politics of colonial Burma.