Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [236]
Throughout the war, a trickle of former prisoners reached Britain and the United States. Most were escapees from the Philippines, or survivors picked up by submarines from Japanese ships sunk while carrying POWs to Japan. They told their stories, and dreadful indeed these were. The U.S. government suppressed for months the first eyewitness accounts of the 1942 Bataan death march, on which so many surrendered survivors of MacArthur’s army perished, and news of the beheadings of captured Doolittle raid aircrew. The British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, gave a graphic account of some POW experiences to the House of Commons in January 1944, and the public was shocked by what it was told. Yet, in a curious reversal of the usual wartime propaganda inflation of the bestialities of the enemy, in official circles a reluctance persisted to believe the worst.
The few Japanese captured in Burma or the Pacific who had been in contact with Allied POWs were quizzed by Allied interrogators about their welfare, prompting the sort of response given by a twenty-five-year-old naval technician on 19 September 1944: “American PWs appeared to be652 in good health,” said the Japanese. “About 60 British PWs quartered in same area…seemed to have an easy life, rising at 0800, doing a little exercise, then working in the gardens till 1100hrs. After dinner they again worked in the gardens till 1700, when they had supper and played games or went fishing.” As late as January 1945, the British Foreign Office Political Warfare ( Japan) Committee reached quite sanguine conclusions about the treatment of Allied captives. “There was evidence653,” the committee minuted, “that prisoners of war in Japan itself and in the more accessible regions are treated reasonably well, according to Japanese standards, and that reports of serious ill-treatment come from outlying areas where the Japanese government has little control over local military officers in charge of the camps. The Japanese while they were being everywhere victorious might have thought they could safely disregard the opinion of the rest of the world, but now…they must realise that…their future will largely depend on their external relations with other Great Powers. From motives of self-interest, therefore, they are more and more likely to realise that they had better treat prisoners of war well.”
In the spring of 1945, such wishful thinking was discredited. Substantial numbers of British and Australian POWs were freed by Slim’s victorious army in Burma, likewise Americans by MacArthur’s men in the Philippines. Their liberators were stunned654 by the stories they heard: of starvation and rampant disease; of men worked to death in their thousands, tortured or beheaded for small infractions of discipline. An urgent signal was sent from Mountbatten’s headquarters to the Foreign Office, asking for guidance about the treatment of atrocity stories. SEAC was told that they should be censored. If the British public learned before hostilities ended what had been done to its soldiers, sailors and airmen, outrage was inevitable. The Japanese, in their desperation, were capable of imposing even more terrible sufferings upon tens of thousands of POWs who remained in their hands. Prisoners were themselves haunted by an expectation that the Japanese would slaughter them in the rage of defeat.
When the war ended, it became possible to compare the fates of Allied servicemen under the Nazis and the Japanese. Just 4 percent of British and American POWs had died in German hands. Yet 27 percent—35,756 out of 132,134—of Western Allied prisoners lost their lives in Japanese captivity. The Chinese suffered in similar measure. Of 41,862 sent to become slave labourers in Japan, 2,872 died in China, 600 in ships on passage, 200 on the land journey, and 6,872 in