Surviving A Japanese P O W Camp

This is a touching and sometimes humorous story of an American family’s survival in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Eleven-year-old Peter Wygle's story and his father's diary create a poignant adventure that reads like a novel. This is a compelling story of the struggle to survive when the enemies were not only the Japanese, but also some fellow prisoners.

During World War II the Japanese imprisoned more American civilians at Manila's Santo Tomas prison camp than anywhere else, along with British and other nationalities. Placing the camp's story in the wider history of the Pacific war, this book tells how the camp went through a drastic change, from good conditions in the early days to impending mass starvation, before its dramatic rescue by U.S. Army "flying columns." Interned as a small boy with his mother and older sister, the author shows the many ways in which the camp's internees handled imprisonment--and their liberation afterwards. Using a wealth of Santo Tomas memoirs and diaries, plus interviews with other ex-internees and veteran army liberators, he reveals how children reinvented their own society, while adults coped with crowded dormitories, evaded sex restrictions, smuggled in food, and through a strong internee government, dealt with their Japanese overlords. The text explores the attitudes and behavior of Japanese officials, ranging from sadistic cruelty to humane cooperation, and asks philosophical questions about atrocity and moral responsibility.

A unique and heartbreaking memoir of a child's imprisonment in a Japanese POW camp during World War II.1942: It was towards the middle of the year when my friends started disappearing...'On the island of Java, the stirrings of the Second World War in Europe and the angry-looking man called Hitler seem a million miles away from Norwegian-born Lise and her siblings. Then one day, her friends and neighbours start to disappear, and she begins to realise that they are not safe after all.Through ten-year-old eyes, Lise tells of her family's two-year imprisonment in POW camps and the brutal treatment received at the hands of their Japanese captors. For respite from the rat-infested floor of their shelter they adopt a blue door, which sits on concrete posts in the ground. They live on it during the day as young Lise plots ways to protect her family from disease, starvation and the desperate behaviour of fellow prisoners. This is a little girl's heartbreaking tale of survival.'A devastating portrayal of a child's loss of innocence to humiliating cruelty' Observer* The Blue Door is published in paperback as The Little Captive.

Many Allied POWs in the Pacific theater of World War II suffered terribly. But abuse wasn't a matter of Japanese policy, as is commonly assumed. Sarah Kovner shows poorly trained guards and rogue commanders inflicted the most horrific damage. Camps close to centers of imperial power tended to be less violent, and many POWs died from friendly fire.

How do you survive with your beaten starved and humiliated as a prisoner of war in a camp on the Thai Burma Railway? 'You stick together. That's what you do, ' says David Digger Barrett. 'You scam, lie, steal, cheat and hate the bastards with as much energy is you love and protect your mates.' David 'Digger' Barrett was given his nickname at an early age by his father. It was prophetic: as an eighteen-year-old looking for fun and adventure, he enlisted as a private and served in World War II. After surviving the Malayan campaign, he would spend over three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. It would take Digger more than fifty years to rid his mind of the hate he had for the guards of the Imperial Japanese Army. His story of courage, mateship and survival takes him from the prison camps of Thailand and Burma to the fight for reparations for all Australian POWs of the Japanese.

The author recounts her childhood experiences as a Japanese prisoner during World War II.

First published in the US in 1995. This is an account of the author's three years imprisonment in a Japanese camp on Sumatra during WWII, her childhood before the war on the island of Tarakan and her escape from Tarakan with her fathers and sisters. It tells of the uplifting influence of a singing group in the camp comprised of Dutch Australian and English women prisoners. A television documentary entitled 'Song of Survival' was based on events recorded in this book. Includes an index.

Frank Grady's remarkable account of his years as a prisoner-of-war - his capture, his interrogations, his labor, his survival strategies - offers a riveting portrayal of the heroic efforts required to outlast a hellish war. As head of the U.S. Army's cryptography department in the Philippines handling all incoming and outgoing messages for generals Douglas MacArthur and Jonathan Wainwright, Grady was of special interest to the Japanese when captured in the spring of 1942. His memoir describes his first months as a POW in the infamous Cabanatuan camp and his subsequent transfer to Japan, where he attempted to outwit his interrogators about American cryptographic techniques. This book is more than the story of one man's survival. It is a moving account of wartime conditions that brought out the best and the worst in the prisoners, guards, and Japanese civilians. Grady perceptively depicts the uglier dimensions of human nature - betrayal, cowardice, greed, and wanton viciousness - but also celebrates the tenacity, intelligence, compassion, and determined good spirits that kept him and hundreds of other American prisoners alive in spite of severe malnourishment. From a murderous camp commander who was tried and hanged after the war to a kind civilian woman, Grady came into direct contact with far more Japanese than did most POWs, and he relates these encounters in detail. One of few Americans who saw Tokyo after the firebombing of March 1945, he also offers a personal glimpse of the destruction of the city. An unusual climax to the memoir comes when his own camp, near the port town of Kamaishi, is unknowingly destroyed by the U.S. Navy.