• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1173 0

food. “They preferred to die rather than to eat what they were given,” said Idlett. “I knew some that would not eat rice675. Most died of inanition—loss of the will to live. At one time in the Philippines, we were burying fifty to sixty a day. I volunteered for the burial detail to get away from working on a farm in that Philippine sun—and to get an extra slice of bread. I don’t like rice—but I ate it.” American prisoners in the Philippines suffered grievously from the fact that, after enduring the siege of Bataan, most were half-starved when they entered captivity. “The ones who wouldn’t eat died pretty early on,” said Paul Reuter of the USAAF, a twenty-four-year-old miner’s son from Shamokin, Pennsylvania. “I buried people who looked much better than me. They just crawled under a building. I never did have any thoughts of not living. We were a bunch who’d been through the Depression. I never turned down anything that was edible—and I guess I just had the right genes.”

In Reuter’s camp, “anything that was edible” meant whale blubber or soya meal, occasionally dried fish, “which we ate bones and all.” Australian Snow Peat saw676 a maggot an inch long, and said, “Meat, you beauty!” “One bloke sitting alongside me said, ‘Jeez, I can’t eat that.’ I said, ‘Well tip her in here, mate, it’s going to be my meal ticket home. You’ve got to eat it, you’ve got to give it a go. Think they’re currants in the Christmas pudding. Think they’re anything.’” Vic Ashwell, captured on the Sittang River in Burma as a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant with the 3rd Gurkhas, agreed with Peat: “I was prepared to eat anything677. I volunteered for anything to get out, to keep body and mind ticking. When I saw younger officers just lying there, I’d urge them: ‘Come on, get on your feet!’” Ashwell noted that the first to die were private soldiers from humble backgrounds, malnourished in childhood during Britain’s Depression. Such men possessed few bodily reserves.

Squadron-Leader David Grant, at Mitsushima in Japan, wrote bitterly of “twelve hours of coolie labour on three cups of coarse rice and barley.” The chronic shortage, cause of many deaths, was that of green vegetables. In Rangoon Jail, prisoners were permitted gardens, manured with human excrement, where they raised spinach, cucumbers, aubergines, sweet potatoes and carrots. They were forbidden to grow maize, on the grounds that guards would not be able to see their charges through the crop. In the coal mines of Fukuoka, by contrast, Don Lewis and his companions received only two hundred grams of rice thrice daily, with a bowl of soup twice. On Shikoku Island, Japan, British airman Louis Morris became obsessed with food, spending countless hours recording in minute handwriting English, American and Asian recipes, which he planned to use to start a catering business after the war. Like more than a few captives, he also wrote painfully sentimental verses:

I’ve missed the sunshine after rain678

And England’s garden from a train;

Of crowds I’ve missed the friendly touch—

I did not dream it meant so much;

I miss the downlands rolling free,

The wrack where shingle meets the sea.

In the shipyards near Osaka, where American Milton Young worked, two starving British prisoners ate lard from a great tub used for greasing the slipway. It had been treated with arsenic to repel insects. They died.

Every Allied POW was entitled to receive International Red Cross food parcels, which were delivered in large quantities, but were withheld or issued to prisoners according to local Japanese whim. Most were systematically pillaged by prison staff. Hundreds of tons of Red Cross supplies were belatedly released to camp inmates only after Japan’s August 1945 surrender. While the war lasted, Paul Reuter received just three and a half parcels in forty months. Milton Young once offered to swap his tea ration for the coffee in a British prisoner’s pack. “I’ve never tasted coffee,” said the Englishman. Young made him some. After trying it, the other man would have nothing to do with a swap.