Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [237]
Of 130,000 Europeans interned in the Dutch East Indies, almost all civilians, 30,000 died, including 4,500 women and 2,300 children. Of 300,000 Javanese, Tamils, Burmans and Chinese sent to work on the Burma–Siam railway, 60,000 perished, likewise a quarter of the 60,000 Western Allied prisoners. There seemed no limit to Japanese inhumanity. When a cholera epidemic struck Tamil railway workers at Nieke in June 1943, a barracks containing 250 infected men, women and children was simply torched. One of the Japanese who did the burning wrote later of the victims: “I dared not look into their eyes655. I only heard some whispering ‘Tolong, tolong’—‘Help, help.’ It was the most pitiful sight. God forgive me. I was not happy to see them being burnt alive.”
To give a British illustration: when the Royal Navy destroyer Encounter was sunk in the 1942 Battle of the Java Sea, 123 of its crew lived to enter captivity. Of these, 41 were lost when a transport carrying them to Japan was sunk by an American submarine; 30 died in POW camps; just 52 returned to England in 1945. This represented a saga of systematic deprivation and brutality, overlaid upon the hazards of war, of a kind familiar to Russian and Jewish prisoners of the Nazis, yet shocking to the American, British and Australian publics. It seemed incomprehensible that a nation with pretensions to civilisation could have defied every principle of humanity and the supposed rules of war. The saga of Japan’s captives has exercised a terrible fascination for Westerners ever since.
THE OVERWHELMING majority of Allied service personnel and civilians in Japanese hands were captured during the first months of the Far East war: Americans in the Philippines; Dutch in their East Indies colony; British, Australians and Indians in Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma. Thereafter, only small numbers were added: a few soldiers from battlefields, survivors of sunken ships, airmen shot down over Japanese territory. Even if detail was lacking, a powerful message filtered down through the ranks of all the Allied forces: it was worth taking pains to avoid capture. More significant, the Americans and British were no longer retreating and surrendering, but at worst holding their ground, more often advancing.
It is hard to overstate the trauma suffered by more than 100,000 American, British, Australian and Indian servicemen taken prisoner during the early Allied defeats. They had been conditioned by their culture to suppose that surrender was a misfortune which might befall any fighting man, especially those as poorly led as had been the Allies in the early Far Eastern campaigns, and as lamentably supported by their home governments. As crowds of disarmed personnel milled about awaiting their fate in Manila or Singapore, Hong Kong or Rangoon, they contemplated a life behind barbed wire with dismay, but without the terror which their real prospects merited. “In the beginning656,” said Doug Idlett, a twenty-two-year-old USAAF enlisted man from Oklahoma captured in the Philippines, “we thought: ‘A couple of months and our army will be back.’” In the weeks which followed, however, as their rations shrank, medicines vanished, and Japanese policy was revealed, they learned differently. Officers and men alike, dispatched to labour in sweating jungles, torrid plains or mines and quarries, grew to understand that, in the eyes of their captors, they had become slaves.
“The Burma railway was a very difficult657 engineering challenge,” said Captain Renichi Sugano, who commanded a section of No. 9 Railway Company, which supervised much of the construction work on this most terrible of all projects to which Allied prisoners were committed. “At the beginning, when we did the surveying, we were working in virgin jungle, where you could not even see through the trees to make measurements with a theodolite.” Almost all Japanese army