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salute British and Australian inmates, offering them water and cigarettes. A British medical team landed by parachute—big, strapping men whose rude health inspired in the POWs a perverse sense of shame at their own debility. When they saw the pistol on a paratrooper’s belt, so institutionalised were the hapless prisoners that they said in alarm: “The Japs won’t like that930.” The British officer responded: “Cheer up. You can tell them what you like, hit them over the head with a hammer, anything. Don’t mess around—just give them orders. Treat them like scum, that’s all they are.” Not all the liberating forces behaved sensitively to prisoners. A repatriation officer931 who arrived at Lt. Cmdr. George Cooper’s camp on Batavia admonished the inmates to realise that they were infinitely better off than concentration camp prisoners he had seen at Belsen and Buchenwald. Several of his hearers walked away in disgust.

Six American paratroopers landed a plane at a prison camp outside Mukden, where senior British and American officers had been held since 1942. “It seemed like talking to men from Mars932,” wrote Brig. Sam Pearson to his wife. “They had flown from central China with orders to locate us…the 1st plane has arrived this morning and been seized by the Nips because the Russians coming in from the north have ordered all movement to stop…Those six chaps were very brave men as they nearly met their end at the hands of the local Nips. They were stripped naked and stood up against the wall. How they got out of that fix I don’t know, but I agree with the anthem ‘God Bless America.’”

When the first parachute food drop landed at the camp on Japan’s Shikoku Island where RAF Squadron Leader David Grant was held, “I felt a lump933 the size of a cricket ball crawling up to my throat. I turned to hide myself. I said to the man next to me: ‘Will you let me pass, please. I think I am going to cry.’ ‘That’s OK, old boy,’ he said in a broken voice, ‘half the bloody camp is crying already.’” At Alf Evans’s camp, the Japanese commandant “Charlie Chan” got up on a box and said “‘the wicked Americanos had dropped934 two terrible deathray bombs and the Japanese people of two towns had been killed and burnt and the Japanese had surrendered.’ This was it, this bloody war was over at last. Some of us had made it…We all went mad, singing and jumping about, praying to God and thinking of those of our comrades who had died in the three and a half years of suffering.” When the Americans arrived, hysterical prisoners fell on them, kissing and hugging their deliverers.

Three American doctor POWs took the extraordinary risk of leaving their camp at Kobe, then travelling across Japan to check in at the Imperial Hotel in downtown Tokyo. Bewildered hotel staff eventually acceded to their importuning. In the restaurant they were served breaded veal cutlets, rice, a vegetable salad and tea off real china on clean linen. When a Kempeitai officer arrived and began fiercely questioning them about their presence, Lt. Murray Glusman jabbed a finger at him and said: “Listen, you goddamned son of a bitch935. We won the war. And if you don’t treat us with the respect that is our due as officers of the United States Navy, I’ll see to it that your ass is strung up from the highest lamp post in Tokyo!”

British POW Andrew Cunningham’s brother Stuart, an officer of the Fleet Air Arm, flew into Singapore a few days after the surrender, immaculate in tropical whites. Andrew, a skeleton, looked at him and said: “My God, Stuart, you look fat936.” Like most prisoners, he was overwhelmed by the experience of freedom: “We came out into a world that seemed wonderful, where people asked ‘What would you like for supper?’” Cunningham even found compassion to spare for his former jailers: “I loathed the Japanese, yet at the end I felt desperately sorry for them. We had sacrificed everything, but we’d won. They had sacrificed everything—and lost.”

IN THE STREETS of Chongqing, Chinese and Americans embraced each other in the streets. “Mei kuo ting hao, mei kuo ting hao!” they cried,