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POW Camps Had Been Essentially An Extermination Camp

The Japanese sought death and glory, hence the kamikaze suicide attacks of pilots who flew into approximately 40 US warships in 1945. Surrender was a matter a great shame, so their ethics were challenged when thousands of enemy troops gave themselves up.

With its lightning war in Southeast Asia in the months following Pearl Harbor, Japan gained many new territories and thousands of prisoners - American, British, Australian, Dutch, Chinese, and Korean - who had surrendered when hope was lost. The Japanese were mentally and physically unprepared by this deluge of men. Japanese culture dictated that Allied soldiers were cowards and nowhere in the campaign of aggression was there a facility to accommodate prisoners. Accordingly their response to the captives was unrestrained and barbarous hostility. Americans and Filipinos rounded up when the Japanese overwhelmed the Philippines were forced to march for 60 miles from Bataan without adequate food, drink, or rest.

An estimated 10,000 men died on the march through dense jungle, from a total of 75,000. At their destination, Camp O'Donnell, conditions were poor, food was sparse, disease was rife, treatment by guards was vicious - and four out of ten died within the first three months.

POW camps had been essentially an extermination camp - extermination not in the Nazi sense of the word, not according to a cold master plan, but through a kind of malign neglect. For reasons that were never apparent, basic medicines that could have readily saved legions of lives, medicines like quinine, emetine, and sulfa tablets, were never made available. The toll began to level off. The graveyard details buried tens instead of fifties each day.

Once the immediate crisis of mortality began to dissipate, once dysentery and malaria and other causes of mass death were brought under control, a whole new crop of ailments emerged. Over time, the camps increasingly became a kind of freak show of medical exotica. "The whole place was a pathological museum," said Dr. Ralph Hibbs, who spent most of his time at Cabanatuan in charge of the tuberculosis ward. "Most doctors would never see such cases in their entire life." Never before had physicians encountered such graphic and strange illustrations of the effects of long-term vitamin and mineral deprivation.

People lost their voices. People lost their hair. They lost eyes, they lost hearing, they lost the signals of their peripheral nerves. Their teeth fell out. Their skin fell off. They developed strange ringings in their ears. Rank metallic tastes soured the backs of their tongues. Their fingernails grew brittle and developed strange, textured bands that, like growth rings in trees, reflected times of relative plenty or abject dearth.

Scurvy, pellagra - these were the ordinary ailments, and they were all experienced early on. The highly milled rice the Japanese fed the prisoners was devoid of its outer husk, or pericarp, which contained the vitamin B the men desperately needed. As a result of this deficiency, many men suffered from advanced cases of beriberi. And in a world already overburdened with grotesque distinctions, the prisoners came to realize that there were two kinds of beriberi, wet and dry, and it was possible to have both kinds at once.

Wet was the more dramatic and hideous, causing the extremities to swell to drastic proportions. Yet dry beriberi could be just as painful and debilitating. It made the nerve endings of the feet throb and ache with a hot electric tingling. Prisoners would stay up much of the night, lying on their backs, kneading and rubbing their feet with their legs in the air. Those afflicted with dry beriberi walked with a strange, birdlike gait in which they wildly flung out their hands with each mincing step in an instinctive reflex to balance themselves while also absorbing some of gravity's shock.

The Japanese camp authorities were firm believers in mass punishment. If one person stole an egg from the poultry farm, the entire poultry-farm detail went on half rations. If one person sabotaged a steamroller on the airstrip, everyone suffered. Very few people even considered escape, let alone attempted it. Most of the escapes were undertaken by people who were out of their heads with malaria, or out of their heads for some other reason, and they almost invariably ended up getting caught - and promptly shot.

The tedium at the camp was excruciating - the monotony, the starchy sameness. The mental torpor wasn't caused merely by vitamin dearth but by the long spool of undifferentiated days. The years dragged on without plot. The prime of their lives floated away, unaccounted for. There was day and night. Rainy season and dry. Each day had its little notches and markings. The trick was filling the long gaps in between.

The Japanese hierarchy soon realized the benefits of a large, cheap, expendable workforce. The men captured in the fall of Singapore were soon ferried north to work on the notorious Burma railway, furthering the Japanese ambition of invading India. Japan had signed the international convention, which expressly forbade the use of prisoners of war in projects that would assist their enemy, yet still Allied men became their slaves.

Many of the prisoners came via Changi, a massive camp in Singapore where conditions had appeared squalid. After traveling for days in steel rice railway trucks to camps hewn out of virgin jungle, Changi began to seem like paradise. Before leaving Changi, they were compelled to sign a declaration that they would not attempt to escape. Again, this flew in the face of international law.

The prospects for escape were grim. Few men gave themselves a hope of survival in the jungle, and if they were caught the penalty was death. The skill of the firing squad was woefully lacking - an Australian was left unscathed, after numerous rounds had been fired. "For God's sake, shoot me through the head and kill me," he roared.

Shocking stories of appalling brutality and sadism by the Japanese guards became known after the war. They threw boulders at men working below, forced prisoners to push enormous rocks up steep hillsides, beat men, threatened and caged them.

Out of 60,000 Allied prisoners, an estimated 12,000 died. Of about 270,000 slave laborers drawn from China, Burma (now Myanmar), and surrounding countries, there were 70,000 deaths. At the end of the Second World War, the British alone hanged 265 Japanese for their cruelty, but this has done little to soothe the fury of veterans.

In his book, The Night of the New Moon, writer and philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post describes his experiences as a captive of the Japanese: "I had been made to watch Japanese soldiers having bayonet practice on live prisoners-of-war, tied between bamboo posts, and had been taken to witness executions of persons of all faces and nationalities for obscure reasons like showing a spirit of willfulness or not bowing with sufficient alacrity in the direction of the Rising Sun."

Once World War II began to turn against Japan, much of its army found itself cut off on remote Pacific islands. Prepared to die for their emperor, Japanese soldiers had little sympathy for any of their prisoners of war. As food ran out they became increasingly desperate. And savage. Hatam Ali, a Pakistani soldier in the British Army, had been a POW since 1942, when Singapore fell to a surprise Japanese assault. For two years he and his comrades were forced to work 12-hour days, subsisting on grass and leaves.

In late 1944, the situation turned from cruel to insane. Each day the captors selected a prisoner and took him to a hut nearby. While his companions listened in horror, the Japanese cut huge chunks of flesh from the victim’s body and threw him, still screaming and writhing in agony, into a pit half-filled with rotting corpses. The dying took hours, the pitiful wails growing fainter and fainter until the body was retrieved and disemboweled. The awful stench of decaying human flesh permeated the camp.

Finally one morning the Japanese came for Ali, and he collapsed in the mud in terror. The soldiers grabbed him and dragged him off. As they neared the hut, Ali found a last reservoir of strength. He broke free of his captors and sprinted toward the jungle. He dived into the darkness of the undergrowth. Ali wandered the forest for 15 days before advancing Australian forces found and rescued him.

It was later discovered that the Japanese did more than just murder their prisoners — the dead were butchered, cooked, and eaten. One starving unit of Japanese men even decided to draw straws, whereupon the loser — who ran for his life — was shot and devoured by the lucky winners.

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