Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [238]
Sugano and his colleagues much preferred the services of Allied POW labour to those of locally conscripted people. “From our viewpoint, the POWs were good workers,” he said. “Having been soldiers, they were used to obeying orders. Local people did not understand discipline. Even when you told them they must boil water before drinking it, they drank from the river anyway, and got cholera. They were very troublesome people.” Asked his views on the host of deaths among POW railway workers, Captain Sugano said 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.” Quite so. In the eyes of the Japanese, prisoners possessed no rights, were protected by no laws. Not only had they lost their honour by the warrior code of bushido, they had forfeited fundamental human respect. A Japanese war reporter, Ashihei Hino, observed without enthusiasm American prisoners on Bataan: “men of the arrogant nation658 which 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.”
As prisoners’ residual fitness ebbed away, some abandoned hope. They acquiesced in a fate which soon overtook them. “There is no doubt that many men just659 ‘dropped their bundle’ and died,” wrote Hall Romney, a forty-one-year-old former journalist who had been captured serving as a sergeant-major in the Singapore Volunteers, “whereas in similar circumstances men who retained a will to live survived…A feeling of loneliness has been a contributory factor in the deaths of many men, particularly some of the younger ones.” Stephen Abbott, captured in Malaya as a subaltern of the 2nd East Surreys, wrote of their early imprisonment as a time of almost complete self-absorption, overwhelmed by a feeling of inferiority to those who had vanquished them: “The most junior soldier felt660 some sense of personal responsibility. However much we blamed our leaders we were…members of a team which had let Britain down…This sense of failure seemed to permeate Changi camp. Most conversations seemed centred around grievances, blame, and attempts at self-justification.”
Among the most corrosive consequences of imprisonment was the collapse of loyalties, obligations to rank and peer groups. “I saw discipline go down661 the toilet very fast,” said U.S. Captain Mel Rosen, taken on Bataan. Behind the wire, only a minority of officers, such as the Australian Brig. Arthur Varley, retained the respect of their men. This no longer depended upon position in a military hierarchy, but solely upon the conduct of an individual leader. Bombardier Alex Young, an anti-tank gunner from Argyll, wrote contemptuously of his camp senior officer on Batavia: “Major D—was about as useful662 as a dead cat! His interests and motives were selfish. He looked on all sick (or so it seemed) as just so much encumbrances—they were better dead and out of the way. I saw him go off the train and never raise a finger to help those…who were too sick to move.” Australian Don Moore spoke of one officer known as “the white Jap663,” who ran a canteen for his own profit in the camp which he commanded. In Aomi prison camp on Japan, where fifty-three of three hundred men died in the first months, Stephen Abbott was recovering from malaria and dysentery when an Anglo-Indian sergeant came to him and said: “I know you’ve been terribly ill664, sir, but there are many dying men around. You’re the commanding officer and I think it’s now time you forgot