Prisoners Of War

National Archives #80-G-79984-28-2

Prisoners of war, or POWs, were military personnel who had surrendered and were entitled to certain protections under the Geneva and Hague Conventions. Only lawful combatants were entitled to these protections. Persons who engaged in combat while not wearing distinctive insignia  visible from a distance, or who were not part of a chain of command back to a legal sovereign, were unlawful combatants and had no protection under international law. They were generally executed as bandits by both Axis and Allies if taken prisoner.

POWs were theoretically entitled to the same rations, medical care, and pay as their captors. Enlisted men could be required to perform nonmilitary work, but officers could not be required to work. Punishment for attempted escape was limited to 30 days solitary confinement. POWs charged with more serious offenses were entitled to trial by military tribunal in the presence of a neutral observer. On conclusion of hostilities, POWs were required to be repatriated within a reasonable time frame. In practice, these protections were mostly observed between the western Allies and the European Axis. 

Allied Prisoners of War

Japan had signed both the Geneva and Hague Conventions but had ratified only the Hague Conventions, which had less to say about POWs. The Japanese had insisted on unconditional surrender of Allied forces in the Philippines and southeast Asia in the first months of the war, and they took the position that unconditional surrender meant that even the Conventions did not apply.

Under traditional bushido, captives were to be treated with mercy, but this injunction failed to make it into the code of the modern Japanese Army. As early as the Boshin Civil War of 1868, which deposed the Tokugawa shogunate (military dictatorship) and ushered in the Meiji Restoration, Western observers noted that both sides frequently beheaded prisoners. During the Pacific War, Allied prisoners of war were regarded by the Japanese as completely dishonorable and were subject to appalling treatment. It did not help that discipline within the Japanese Army itself was brutal, and many of the prison camp guards were Korean conscripts who were at the bottom of the military pecking order. The Korean guards were mistreated by their Japanese NCOs, and mistreated Allied prisoners in turn.

Ito had been constantly brutal. The POWs had no inkling that he spoke English until suddenly he addressed a terse question to Abbott: "Homesick?" ... He asked curiously what Abbott thought of the Japanese, and received a cautious reply: "I don't know them very well, so I cannot answer your question." The guard persisted: "How do you think of what you know? How do you think of me?" Abbott said: "In our army, we do not strike and beat people as punishment. Ito is always doing so, and this blackens my thoughts about him." The eyes of the little Japanese widened in amazement. He asked how the British Army punished wrongdoers. Abbott explained that physical chastisement was unknown. Ito never hit a prisoner again.

(Hastings 2007)

Assignment to prison camps was considered demeaning, so it is likely that camp commanders represented the worst of the Japanese officer corps. Many stole the Red Cross food parcels that were sent in large numbers for the prisoners, while others withheld hundreds more tons of Red Cross parcels until after the final Japanese surrender. Parcels from family members were also withheld. One camp commander on the infamous Burma-Siam Railway ordered the prisoners' band to play the dwarves' work tune from the animated film, Snow White ("Hi, ho, hi, ho, it's off to work we go") as the starving inmates were mustered into work details each morning.

The Japanese almost invariably executed prisoners of war who attempted to escape. In some camps, the prisoners were coerced into signing agreements that they would not attempt escape, allowing the Japanese to apply the legal fiction that prisoners who attempted escape were being executed for mutiny or desertion.

Military discipline tended to disintegrate among Allied prisoners of war, though some captive commanders, such as Maltby, were able to restore a measure of discipline. Maltby forbade individual escapes on the grounds that the Japanese would retaliate by withholding food, endangering the lives of the remaining prisoners. On the other hand, Maltby seriously considered organizing a mass escape in spite of predictions that a third of those escaping would perish. These plans never came to fruition. The Japanese eventually separated senior commanders from their officers and officers from men, which aggravated discipline problems.

The International Red Cross proved ineffective at applying pressure on the Japanese to improve camp conditions. Red Cross officials who visited the Hong Kong POW camps cabled back reassuring reports that gave no hint of how terrible conditions were. One of the officials later claimed that the Japanese were censoring his reports, and anything close to a candid evaluation of conditions would never have passed scrutiny. This official also claimed that the Kempeitai were searching his office and residence weekly for anything incriminating.

Incredibly, some POWs held in countries with a sympathetic local population were able to establish contact with Allied authorities. A group of escaped prisoners from Hong Kong organized the British Army Aid Group, which passed messages to the prisoners via Chinese truck drivers bringing supplies to the camps. In one camp, an electronics technician was able to construct a radio transmitter. The prisoners sent back reports on conditions in the camps and on Japanese activities in Hong Kong harbor. The Kempeitai were able to uncover some of these operations and executed three British officers for espionage.

Allied authorities were reluctant to believe that the Japanese treated their prisoners as badly as they did. Japanese POWs claimed under interrogation that Allied POWs were well treated, perhaps out of fear of retaliation, or perhaps because they believed their own propaganda. As late as January 1945, the British Political Warfare Committee suggested that mistreatment of Allied POWs was the exception rather than the rule, taking place mainly in isolated areas far from Japan where local military authorities were less well controlled. Such illusions were shattered within months as large number of POWs were released in the Philippines and Burma. Their stories were so shocking that the Allied governments sometimes censored them for fear of their own citizens' reactions. In particular, American authorities feared that stories about Japanese atrocities would undermine the "Germany First" policy.

The Japanese attempted to move large numbers of POWs from southeast Asia to Japan. The prisoners were packed into the holds of merchant ships under appalling conditions, and the ships were not marked in any way to indicate that POWs were aboard. As a result, many of these "hell ships" were sunk by Allied submarines and aircraft. The Japanese made little effort to rescue the survivors, although a number were picked up by American submarines.

In one notorious incident, Lisbon Maru was sunk by U.S. submarine Grouper on 1 October 1942 off the China coast. The ship was abandoned by the Japanese, who left 1,816 British POWs locked below decks with inadequate ventilation. When the prisoners broke out of the hold, five Japanese guards who had been left behind fired on them. At about this time the ship finally foundered in shallow water, and the prisoners found themselves in the water with four Japanese gunboats shooting at them. Some 843 were shot or drowned before the survivors were finally rescued. The captain of Lisbon Maru, Kyoda Shigeru, was later sentenced to seven years' imprisonment by a British military tribunal.

Mortality rates tell the story as well as anything. Whereas 4% of western POWs held by the Germans died in captivity, 27% of western POWs held by the Japanese perished in the prison camps. The contrast is particularly great for the Americans: Of 24,992 American soldiers captured by the Japanese, 8,634 or 35 percent died in captivity, whereas just 833 or 0.9 percent of the 93,653 American soldiers captured by the Germans died in captivity (Frank 1999).

On 16 August 1945, the Japanese Navy Ministry sent out an order that included the following:

All papers relating to prisoners and interrogation (particulary those such as the ones published in December 1944 which refer to interrogation of American pilot prisoners), and confiscated ——, together with this despatch are to be immediately and positively disposed of in a manner that will offer the enemy no pretext.

This order strongly hints that the Navy Ministry had previously issued orders to execute prisoners of war, which orders were subsequently destroyed.

Japanese Prisoners of War

The Japanese military ethos regarded surrender as completely dishonorable. The 159 Japanese soldiers captured at Nomonhan in 1939 and repatriated by the Soviets were severly punished by their own army. Enlisted men were assigned to penal units and officers were ordered to commit suicide. The message was clear, and prisoners of war constituted not more than 3% of Japanese casualties even in the final campaign at Okinawa. Those who did offer surrender sometimes engaged in perfidy, turning on their would-be captors with a grenade or knife.

Some Allied units became reluctant to offer quarter, with the result that many Japanese did not survive their attempt to surrender. However, those Japanese POWs who made it to the rear were usually treated humanely, in part because Allied intelligence officers considered prisoners to be valuable intelligence assets. The Japanese did nothing to prepare their men for the possibility of capture, since that possibility was unthinkable, and Japanese prisoners tended to talk freely with their captors if treated well. Many Japanese prisoners begged their captors to allow them to remain in Allied countries and to not inform their government of their capture rather than face the dishonor of returning alive to their families. These requests were refused, since such notification was required under the Conventions. Some prisoners even helped the Americans draft propaganda leaflets.

Sometimes Japanese prisoners of war did not remain psychologically broken. There were two instances of riots at Australian prisoner of war camps, where the actions of the Japanese prisoners suggest that they had decided it was better to regain their honor by being shot while attempting escape than to continue to endure the shame of captivity. The riot at Featherston on 25 February 1943 took place when 250 prisoners refused to report for work, the situation escalated, and 48 prisoners and one guard wound up dead. The mass breakout at Cowra on 4 August 1944 resulted in the escape of 359 prisoners, all of whom were subsequently either recaptured, killed while resisting recapture, or committed suicide. The Cowra breakout ultimately cost the lives of 231 prisoners and four guards. 

Russia had not signed the Conventions, and both Russian prisoners and prisoners of the Russians were treated with great brutality in the European war. The brief Russian campaign in Manchuria in August 1945 resulted in the capture of numerous Japanese prisoners, who were generally also treated quite poorly. Some were not repatriated until 1956. American researchers estimate that the Soviets captured 2,726,000 Japanese nationals during the campaign, of which only a third were military. Of these, 2,379,000 eventually returned to Japan. Some 254,000 were confirmed dead, and the remaining 93,000 were presumed dead. However, this 13% death rate was far less than that of either German prisoners in Russia or Western prisoners of the Japanese.

References

Drea (2009)
Frank (1999)
Hastings (2007)

Lindsay (2005)
Newman (1995)
Russell (1958)

The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2007-2009 by Kent G. Budge. Index

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