Upon the return of British prisoners of war to their homes in late summer 1945 from Japanese captivity, they would receive a letter signed by a government minister.

”Welcome home! You have suffered a long and bitter ordeal at the hands of a barbarous enemy.”

Many books and papers have been written about the sheer brutality and racial hatred of the war conducted against the Japanese by the Western Allies in comparison to the war with Germany. Yet, not until the end of the war were most of the revelations at hand, many of which still poison the relations between Japan and Great Britain, and to a lesser extent, the United States.

These revelations would mostly deal with the fates of Allied prisoners of war who fell into the hands of the Japanese Army and Navy between the years of 1941-45.

Throughout the years of war, a small number of prisoners managed to escape from captivity and return to America or Great Britain. Most of these would come from the Philippines and Burma, or survivors picked up by submarines and aircraft from Japanese ships transporting prisoners to Japan that had been sunk.

These men would share their stories, dire as they were.

The US Government would go to great lengths to suppress initial eyewitness reports of the 1942 Bataan Death March, where around 11,000 American and Filipino troops of General MacArthur’s defence force were marched, starved, beaten and shot to death as they were moved to prisoner camps. The news of the beheadings of a captured bomber crew of the Doolittle Raid had also been suppressed.

In the Spring of 1945, large numbers of British and Australian POWs would be freed from captivity in Burma by Field Marshal Slim’s forces, as well as Americans in the Philippines by General MacArthur.

The stories passed on to the liberators would stun them. Tales of starvation, rampant disease, beatings, shootings and beheadings over the slightest infractions of discipline and men worked until they fell over dead from exhaustion in their thousands. From the top, it was ordered that the stories be censored to limit the inevitable public outrage that would come should these stories be known before the war’s end, and the danger it could bring to the men still being held captive.

Tens of thousands of prisoners lived every moment of their lives in fear, wondering if they would be slaughtered by the Japanese in a final act of brutality as they lost the war.

When the war had been brought to it’s end with Allied victory over Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it became possible to compare conditions prisoners suffered at the hands of their enemies. It was found that only 4% of Western Allied prisoners died in German captivity, yet 27%, 37,756 out of 132,134, died in Japanese hands. Of the 130,000 Westerners interned in the Dutch East Indies, 30,000, nearly all the civilians, would die.

To give a British story, when the HMS Encounter was sunk in the 1942 battle of the Java Sea, 123 of its crew survived in the water to be picked up by Japanese crews. Of these, 41 were lost in an unmarked transport heading to Japan when it was struck by an American submarine. 30 died in POW camps, and only the remaining 52 returned home to England in 1945.

This type of institutionalized brutality overlayed upon the already deadly hazards of war would be well known to a Soviet or Jewish prisoner of the Nazis, but was beyond the pale for American, British and Australian publics. It was incomprehensible that a nation such as Japan, which claimed to have pretensions to civilization, would stray so far from basic humanity and the rules of war.

It is hard to overstate the trauma of the over 100,000 American, British, Australian and Indian servicemen taken prisoner in the early defeats. Western military culture dictated that being taken prisoner was an unfortunate circumstance that could befall even the fiercest of fighting men. They contemplated their lives behind barbed wire with dismay, but not the terror they would soon learn.

A young USAAF member would say

”In the beginning, we thought a couple of months and our army will be back.”

22 Year Old USAAF Enlisted Man, Doug Idlet

The sentiment shared by the enlisted man was common, but as the weeks went on and food and medical supplies dried up, Japanese policy would reveal itself. Officers and enlisted men alike would be sent to be used as slave labour on all manner of industrial and war projects, one of the most deadly being the Burma Railway.

”The Burma railway was a very difficult engineering challenge. At the beginning, when we did the surveying, we were working in virgin jungle, one could not even see through the trees with a theodolite”

IJA Captain Renichi Sugano, 9th Railway Regt

When asked about the deaths of Allied personnel on the railway project, the Captain would answer cautiously,

”Another unit was responsible for the care and custody of POWs, we simply borrowed them for labour and returned them to their camp each night.”

While the testimony of Renichi Sugano shows at best indifference to the condition and treatment of prisoners, in the eyes of most Japanese, prisoners had no rights and were protected by no law. Not only had they lost their honour as warriors, but they had also forfeited basic human respect.

”Men of the arrogant nation who sought to treat our motherland with unwarranted contempt. As I gaze upon these crowds of surrendered soldiers, I feel as if I am watching dirty water running from the sewers of a nation whose origins were mongrel and whose pride has been lost. Japanese soldiers look extraordinarily handsome, and I feel very proud to belong to their race.”

Japanese War Correspondent, Ashihei Hino

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Japanese behaviour floated between grotesquerie and pure sadism. If guards took a dislike to a prisoner, they killed him. The Japanese took a particular dislike to tall men, whom they obliged to bend down to receive punishment.

In a camp containing British POWs, six British officers were paraded in line for no discernible infraction and, one by one, were punched until they fell by a Japanese Warrant Officer. A trooper of the Third Hussars raised his hand to block the blows from a Japanese soldier striking at him with his rifle and was accused of having struck the man. After days of continued beatings, the man was taken outside the camp, tied to a tree and bayonetted to death.

”The execution was a necessary exercise of discipline. The prisoner was not shot lest the sound of gunfire unsettle the local natives.”

Japanese Camp Commandant

In another camp situated on the Burma Railway, a soldier who struck a Japanese was placed at attention in the sun outside the guard room. Whenever he moved, he was kicked in the stomach until his screams could be heard in every corner of the camp. He was eventually dragged into the back of a truck and placed alongside Japanese with rifles and shovels. The Japanese later returned, and the man was never seen again, his files being removed from the camp records the following day.

An officer of the Gordon Highlanders who protested against sick men being used for physical labour was taken into the jungle and tied to a tree. The guards lit a fire under him and burned him alive like a 16th-century Christian martyr.

At a camp in mainland Japan, days before the end of the war, five British officers were taken and shot after a radio receiver was discovered in their barracks.

As some prisoners' fitness ebbed away, some began to abandon hope; they simply gave in to a fate that quickly overtook them. There is no doubt that many men simply set down or dropped their pack, fell over and died. The feeling of loneliness was a major contributing factor in many of the spontaneous deaths amongst the younger troops. In contrast, those who were determined to simply survive seemed to do exactly that without any external influences.

Among the most debilitating consequences of imprisonment was the collapse of loyalties to peer groups and rank. Behind the wire, it was very seldom that an officer maintained the respect of his men, the Australian Brigadier General Arthur Varley being a notable exception.

”Major D was about as useful as a dead cat. His interests and motives are selfish. He looked on the sick like they were encumbrances and better dead and out of the way. I saw him go off the train and never lift a finger to help those too sick to move.”

Bombardier Alex Young

An Australian soldier, Don Moore, would write of an officer they knew as “The White Jap” due to the fact he ran a canteen within their camp and would charge high prices to the men for basic necessities despite their tiny camp salary, if they received one at all.

Flying Officer Arel Shern, a 49-year-old RAF administrative officer, was disgusted when the padre in his camp on Java, a non-smoker, would persuade desperate men to trade their bread for his cigarette rations.

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While Western civilians who fell into the hands of the Japanese were in an official capacity, interned rather than imprisoned. In a few places, like the Shanghai International Zone, such communities came through the war in a wretched state, yet almost all came out alive. In the Chapei Camp, the Japanese allowed families to stay mostly intact. Such things were truly exceptional cases, and throughout most of the Japanese Empire, internees suffered almost as terribly, if not as much as, imprisoned military personnel. The Dutch East Indies, in particular, saw massive numbers of deaths by starvation.

Like POWs, internees were victims of the ever-changing whims of the Japanese. In Tjideng Camp one morning, an order was issued that all dogs in the compound were to be killed. Lacking any other means, families were forced to do horrific things to comply with the order.

Infractions of discipline were punished with kneeling on the roadways for hours in the sun, causing severe burns on many of those who had to partake.

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Though being sent to work on the Burma Railway represented the worst possible fate of being taken alive by the Japanese for an Allied serviceman, shipment to Japan as a slave labourer also represented an incredibly lethal, albeit temporary, existence.

On the 17th of June, 1944, prisoners would be made to parade in Paul Romney’s camp. The commandant announced to them,

”Looking back on the past year and ten months, since camps were first established in Siam, you have worked both earnestly and diligently and produced a great achievement in the construction of the Siam-Burma Railway. For this, we wish to express sincere appreciation. Your work in Siam having finished, you are being transported to the land of the Rising Sun, an island country joyously situated and full of beautiful scenery. From time immemorial, our Imperial Nippon has had the honour of respecting justice and morality. They are men and women of determination, generous by nature, despising injustice in accordance with the old Nippon proverb, ‘The huntsman does not shoot the wounded bear’.”

After many more minutes of lyrical rhetoric spewed at half-dead men, the Japanese concluded

”I wish you bon voyage.”

The prisoners were sent on their way.

Conditions inside the holds of transport ships were always appalling, often fatal. Overlayed on hunger, thirst, and the Japanese guards, there was always the threat of American submarines. The Japanese made no effort to identify ships transporting prisoners, of whom it is estimated 10,000 perished at the hands of Allied attacks.

On the 11th of September, 1944, RAOC wireless mechanic, Alf Evans, was one of 1500 men aboard the Kachidoki Maru. Being ill with malaria, he was on the forward deck and not locked in the holds when the ship was suddenly struck by four American torpedoes. Having to jump into the water, we would cling to a raft as a Japanese destroyer would sweep the area, collecting survivors, Japanese only.

Struggling to swim to a life raft with two Gordon Highlanders on board, Evans would get aboard the small raft and they would eventually pick up 27 other men, all of them eventually being picked up by a Japanese submarine chaser after 3 days lost at sea. The Captain of the sub chaser wanted the men thrown overboard, but was convinced to keep them as prisoners, and all men were beaten to the Captain’s satisfaction before being locked in the hold.

Of the 1500 men that would embark for Japan with Alf Evans, only 600 would survive to become slave labourers.

On 14th December, 1944, Captain Mel Rosen was aboard the Oryoku Maru along with 1619 other American POWs. Water and tea would be periodically lowered to the prisoners in kegs, never enough for everyone.

The ship was dive-bombed multiple times by US carrier aircraft, and the attacks only stopped after dusk.

The situation for many of the men who never received any water or tea became so desperate that they resorted to drinking their own urine, despite the protest of doctors who tried warning the desperate men not to.

On the 15th, the Oryoku Maru would come under air attack again, but this time, she would be hit. The Japanese guards abandoned ship, and the prisoners managed to force their way on deck, diving into the sea.

Of the 1619 on the ship, around 1300 made it to the shore of Luzon to be recaptured by the Japanese. A month later, and after another sinking, only 193 men, including Mel Rosen, would be alive to land on Kyushu and be sent to start their labour.

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While the Japanese institutionalized brutality and death against those they conquered, like in any story of human affairs, it deserves shading. Individual Japanese, as well as small groups, acted with great professionalism and compassion towards POWs.

Lt. Masaichi Kikuchi, the commander of an airfield defence unit in Singapore. In early 1945, he was given 300 Indian prisoners from the Changi Camp. The officer who handed over the prisoners would say

”When you’re done with them, you can do what you’d like with them. If I were you. I’d shove them into a tunnel with some demolition charges.”

Kikuchi was told the explicit orders for handling prisoners who disobeyed or attempted escape were to execute them out of hand. Despite this, Kikiuchi did not kill his charges. Even after having two Indian escapees turned in by Chinese collaborators, he simply turned them over to the captured commanders from the Indian Army for punishment, rather than turning them over to other Japanese or killing them himself, as his orders stated.

Kikuchi would state after the war that the reason he believed he was spared was because he had never unjustly killed anyone.

American and Dutch doctors at the Kobe POW hospital signed a joint testimonial statement to its Japanese medical supervisor, Hiajiro Ohashi, praising the extraordinary efforts of him and his staff in saving the lives of allied POWs.

At a coal yard in Japan where Doug Idlet was being forced to work, he noticed a daikon floating down the river. Idlet would grab it and stuff it down his pants to take it back to his barracks. A shunting engine driver named Yoshioka saw this and approached Idlet.

”He asked me what I was going to do with it, and I said I was going to eat it. He told me that it’s dirty and to give it to him. He returned later with the daikon washed, sliced and cooked. From that day on, he always showed up with his leggings full of corn or something for us to eat.”

The examples here offer a glimpse of the Japanese who had even a flake of courage to go against standards that their culture expected, even demanded.

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Naturally, because the Allies won the war, much has been heard and written about the maltreatment of Allied prisoners by the Germans and Japanese, but almost nothing about the reverse. While there is ample evidence of Allied atrocities on the front, as well as prison guards acting inhumane towards their captives.

Those in London and Washington never troubled themselves to investigate the fates of abused German and Japanese prisoners, far less so to seek actual indictment. Such is the nature of military affairs that those typically selected to guard prisoners are chosen from the lowest quality of troops in every nation's armed forces.

None of this is to suggest any level of moral equivalence between the treatment of Allied POWs and the other way around, simply that seldom any belligerent in any war can claim to have a slate clean of any blemishes. Events around the globe over the last decade can attest to this.

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Since the end of the war in 1945, efforts have been made to mitigate responsibility for the deaths of so many Allied personnel at the hands of the Japanese. One of the few arguments made that has some level of validity was that Japan was simply not prepared to take on so many prisoners in such a short period, creating intense administrative and logistical issues.

Many armies in modern history have encountered similar problems upon the chaos of victory, and their prisoners have suffered as a consequence. Food and medical supplies were also chronically short all over the Japanese Empire. The argument used frames the situation as Western POWs having to share in the same privations as the Japanese.

Such claims may be possible, except for the fact that even where able, Allied prisoners were left to starve and die. There are no records that exist claiming that at any time or place Allied POWs were adequately fed and treated.

It is thus hard to dispute that the mistreatment of prisoners was the policy of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, not action borne of necessity. They fought with a cultural contempt for enemies who preferred captivity over destruction.

A people who adopt a code which denies the concept of mercy towards the weak and sick place themselves beyond the pale of civilization. The casual sadism of the Japanese soldier was so universal that it can hardly be considered anything other than institutionalized.

Japanese sometimes argue that the Allies matched and even surpassed the Japanese in barbarity with the bombing and fire raids of civilian areas. In 1944-45, aircrews who had been shot down and captured were tried as war criminals, many being beheaded in the days before the end of the war and even in the days shortly after.

Any society that can openly indulge in such acts, even under the guise of justified retribution, has lost its moral compass. 80 years later, there still seems to be no acceptable excuse. The Japanese waged war in such a way that it is easy to understand the rage that filled Allied hearts in 1945 when all was finally revealed.