Beheaded at whim and worked to death: Japan's repugnant treatment of Allied PoWs

The Daily Mail (U.K.) ^ | September 17, 2007 | Max Hastings

[Stoat]

Beheaded at whim and worked to death: Japan's repugnant treatment of Allied PoWs

22:59pm 18th September 2007

 

The sheer brutality of the battle for the Far East defies imagination. And in a new book, historian Max Hastings argues that Japanese intransigence made it far worse.

 

Yesterday, he explained why America had to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Here, in the final part of our exclusive serialisation, he reveals how the West was stunned when it emerged how cruelly their prisoners of war had suffered...

As the men of the victorious British 14th Army advanced through Burma on the road to Mandalay in January 1945 they encountered Japanese savagery towards prisoners.

After a battle, the Berkshires found dead British soldiers beaten, stripped of their boots and suspended by electric flex upside down from trees. This sharpened the battalion's sentiment against their enemy.

Back in Britain it was beginning to emerge that such inhumanity was not confined to the battlefield.

Men who had escaped from Japanese captivity brought tales of brutality so extreme that politicians and officials censored them for fear of the Japanese imposing even more terrible sufferings upon tens of thousands of PoWs who remained in their hands.

 

The US government suppressed for months the first eyewitness accounts of the 1942 Bataan death march in the Philippines on which so many captured American GIs perished, and news of the beheadings of shot-down aircrew.

 

Grotesque: A prisoner of war, about to be beheaded by a Japanese executioner

 

In official circles a reluctance persisted to believe the worst. As late as January 1945, a Foreign Office committee concluded that it was only in some outlying areas that there might be ill-treatment by rogue military officers.

A few weeks later, such thinking was discredited as substantial numbers of British and Australian PoWs were freed in Burma and the Philippines.

Their liberators were stunned by stories of starvation and rampant disease; of men worked to death in their thousands, tortured or beheaded for small infractions of discipline.

More than a quarter of Western PoWs lost their lives in Japanese captivity. This represented deprivation and brutality of a kind familiar to Russian and Jewish prisoners of the Nazis in Europe, yet shocking to the American, British and Australian public.

It seemed incomprehensible that a nation with pretensions to civilisation could have defied every principle of humanity and the supposed rules of war.

The overwhelming majority of Allied prisoners were taken during the first months of the Far East war when the Philippines, Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma were overrun.

As disarmed soldiers 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 that their real prospects merited.

They had been conditioned to suppose that surrender was a misfortune that might befall any fighting man.

In the weeks that followed, as their rations shrank, medicines vanished, and Japanese policy was revealed, they learned differently. Dispatched to labour in jungles, torrid plains or mines and quarries, they grew to understand that, in the eyes of their captors, they had become slaves.

They had forfeited all fundamental human respect. A Japanese war reporter described seeing American prisoners - "men of the arrogant nation which sought to treat our motherland with unwarranted contempt.

"As I gaze upon them, 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 and acquiesced to a fate that soon overtook them. A feeling of loneliness was a contributory factor in the deaths of many, particularly the younger ones.

The key to survival was adaptability. It was essential to recognise that this new life, however unspeakable, represented reality.

Those who pined for home, who gazed tearfully at photos of loved ones, were doomed. Some men could not bring themselves to stomach unfamiliar, repulsive food. "They preferred to die rather than to eat what they were given," said US airman Doug Idlett.

"The ones who wouldn't eat died pretty early on," said Corporal Paul Reuter. "I buried people who looked much better than me. I never turned down anything that was edible."

Australian Snow Peat saw a maggot an inch long, and said: "Meat, you beauty! You've got to give it a go. Think they're currants in the Christmas pudding. Think they're anything."

But in the shipyards near Osaka, 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.

Prisoners were bereft of possessions. Mel Rosen owned a loincloth, a bottle and a pot of pepper. Many PoWs boasted only the loincloth. Even where there were razor blades, shaving was unfashionable, shaggy beards the norm.

In the midst of all this, they were occasionally permitted to dispatch cards home, couched in terms that mocked their condition, and phrases usually dictated by their jailers. "Dear Mum & all," wrote Fred Thompson from Java to his family in Essex, "I am very well and hope you are too.

"The Japanese treat us well. My daily work is easy and we are paid. We have plenty of food and much recreation. Goodbye, God bless you, my love to you all."

Thompson expressed reality in the privacy of his diary: "Somehow we keep going. We are all skeletons, just living from day to day. This life just teaches one not to hope or expect anything. My emotions are non-existent."

Prisoner Paul Reuter slept on the top deck of a three-tier bunk in his camp. When disease and vitamin deficiency caused him to go blind for three weeks, no man would change places to enable him to sleep at ground level.

"Some people would steal," he said. "There was a lot of barter, then bitterness about people who reneged on the deals.

"There were only a few fights, but a lot of arguing - about places in line, about who got a spoonful more."

This was a world in which gentleness was neither a virtue that commanded esteem, nor a quality that promoted survival.

Philip Stibbe, in Rangoon Jail, wrote: "We became hardened and even callous. Bets were laid about who would be next to die. Everything possible was done to save the lives of the sick, but it was worse than useless to grieve over the inevitable."

Self-respect was deeply discounted. Every day, prisoners were exposed to their own impotence. Rosen watched Japanese soldiers kick ailing Americans into latrine pits: "You don't know the meaning of frustration until you've had to stand by and take that."

Almost every prisoner afterwards felt ashamed that he had stood passively by while the Japanese beat or killed his comrades. And prisoners hated the necessity to bow to every Japanese, whatever his rank and whatever theirs. No display of deference shielded them from the erratic whims of their masters.

Japanese behaviour vacillated between grotesquery and sadism. Ted Whincup laboured on the notorious Burma railway, a 250-mile track carved through mountain and dense jungle.

The commandant insisted that the prisoners' four-piece band should muster outside the guardroom and play "Hi, ho, hi, ho, it's off to work we go" - the tune from Snow White - each morning as skeletal inmates shambled forth to their labours.

If guards here took a dislike to a prisoner, they killed him with a casual shove into a ravine.

The Japanese seemed especially ill-disposed towards tall men, whom they obliged to bend to receive punishment, usually administered with a cane.

One day Airman Fred Jackson was working on an airfield on the coral island of Ambon when, for no reason, six British officers were paraded in line, and one by one punched to the ground by a Japanese warrant officer.

A trooper of the 3rd Hussars, being beaten by a guard with a rifle, raised an arm to ward off blows and was accused of having struck the man. After several days of beatings, he was tied to a tree and bayoneted to death.

An officer of the Gordons who protested against sick men being forced to work was also tied to a tree, beneath which guards lit a fire and burnt him like some Christian martyr.

Although Labour on the notorious Burma railway represented the worst fate that could befall an Allied PoW, shipment to Japan as a slave labourer also proved fatal to many.

In June 1944, the commandant in Hall Romney's camp announced to the prisoners that their job on the railway was done. They were now going to Japan.

Conditions in the holds of transport ships were always appalling, sometimes fatal. Overlaid on hunger and thirst was the threat of US submarines. The Japanese made no attempt to identify ships carrying PoWs. At least 10,000 perished following Allied attacks.

RAOC wireless mechanic Alf Evans was among 1,500 men on the Kachidoki Maru when she was sunk. Evans jumped into the water and dog-paddled to a small raft to which three other men were already clinging to.

One had two broken legs, another a dislocated thigh. They were all naked, and coated in oil. A Japanese destroyer arrived, and began to pick up survivors - but only Japanese.

Evans paddled to a lifeboat left empty after its occupants were rescued, and climbed aboard, joining two Gordon Highlanders. They hauled in other men, until they were 30 strong.

After three days and nights afloat, they were taken aboard a Japanese submarine-hunter. The captain reviewed the bedraggled figures paraded on his deck, and at first ordered them thrown over the side. Then he changed his mind and administered savage beatings all round.

Eventually the prisoners were transferred-to the hold of a whaling factory ship, in which they completed their journey to Japan. Filthy and almost naked, they were landed on the dockside and marched through the streets, between lines of watching Japanese women, to a cavalry barracks. There they were clothed in sacking and dispatched to work 12-hour shifts in the furnaces of a chemical work.

Many prisoners' feet were so swollen by beriberi that in the desperate cold of a Japanese winter, they could not wear shoes. Even under such blankets as they had, men shivered at night, for there was no heating in their barracks.

At Stephen Abbott's camp when prisoners begged for relief, the commandant said contemptuously: "If you wish to live you must become hardened to cold, as Japanese are. You must teach your men to have strong willpower - like Japanese."

Yet by 1944 the death rate in most Japanese camps had declined steeply from the earlier years. The most vulnerable were gone. Those who remained were frail, often verging on madness, but possessed a brute capacity to endure that kept many alive to the end.

Out of fairness, it should be noted that there were instances in which PoWs were shown kindness, even granted means to survive through Japanese compassion.

In his camp, Doug Idlett told a Japanese interpreter he had beriberi "and the next day he handed me a bottle of Vitamin B. I never saw him again, but I felt that he had contributed to me being alive."

Lt Masaichi Kikuchi, commanding an airfield defence unit in Singapore early in 1945, was allotted a labour force of 300 Indian PoWs. The officer who handed over the men said carelessly: "When you're finished, you can do what you like with them. If I was you, I'd shove them into a tunnel with a few demolition charges."

Kikuchi could do no such thing. When two Indians escaped and were returned after being re-captured, he did not execute them, as he should have done. He thought it unjustified.

The point of such stories is not that they contradict an overarching view of the Japanese as ruthless and sadistic in their treatment of despised captives. It is that, as always in human affairs, the story deserves shading.

There was undoubtedly some maltreatment of German and Japanese PoWs in Allied hands. This is not to suggest moral equivalence, merely that few belligerents in any war can boast unblemished records in the treatment of prisoners, as events in Iraq have recently reminded us.

Since 1945, pleas have been entered in mitigation of what the Japanese did to prisoners in the Second World War. First there was the administrative difficulty of handling unexpectedly large numbers of captives in 1942.

This has some validity. Many armies in modern history have encountered such problems in the chaos of victory, and their prisoners have suffered.

Moreover, food and medical supplies were desperately short in many parts of the Japanese empire. Western prisoners, goes this argument, merely shared privations endured by local civilians and Japanese soldiers.

Such claims might be plausible, but for the fact that prisoners were left starving and neglected even where means were available to alleviate pain. There is no record of PoWs at any time or place being adequately fed.

The Japanese maltreated captives as a matter of policy, not necessity. The casual sadism was so widespread, that it must be considered institutional.

There were so many arbitrary beheadings, clubbings and bayonetings that it is impossible to dismiss these as unauthorised initiatives by individual officers and men.

A people who adopt a code which rejects the concept of mercy towards the weak and afflicted seem to place themselves outside the pale of civilisation. Japanese sometimes justify their inhumanity by suggesting that it was matched by equally callous Allied bombing of civilians.

Japanese moral indignation caused many US aircrew captured in 1944-45 to be treated as "war criminals". Eight B-29 crewmen were killed by un-anaesthetised vivisection carried out in front of medical students at a hospital. Their stomachs, hearts, lungs and brain segments were removed.

Half a century later, one doctor present said: "There was no debate among the doctors about whether to do the operations - that was what made it so strange."

Any society that can indulge such actions has lost its moral compass. War is inherently inhumane, but the Japanese practised extraordinary refinements of inhumanity in the treatment of those thrown upon their mercy. Some of them knew it.

In Stephen Abbott's camp, little old Mr Yogi, the civilian interpreter, told the British officer: "The war has changed the real Japan. We were much as you are before the war - when the army had not control. You must not think our true standards are what you see now."

Yet, unlike Mr Yogi, the new Japan that emerged from the war has proved distressingly reluctant to confront the historic guilt of the old. Its spirit of denial contrasted starkly with the penitence of postwar Germany.

Though successive Japanese prime ministers expressed formal regret for Japan's wartime actions, the country refused to pay reparations to victims, or to acknowledge its record in school history texts.

I embarked upon this history of the war with a determination to view Japanese conduct objectively, thrusting aside nationalistic sentiments. It proved hard to sustain lofty aspirations to detachment in the face of the evidence of systemic Japanese barbarism, displayed against Americans and Europeans but on a vastly wider scale against their fellow Asians.

In modern times, only Hitler's SS has matched militarist Japan in rationalising and institutionalising atrocity. Stalin's Soviet Union never sought to dignify its great killings as the acts of gentlemen, as did Hirohito's nation.

It is easy to perceive why so many Japanese behaved as they did, conditioned as they were. Yet it remains difficult to empathise with those who did such things, especially when Japan still rejects its historic legacy.

Many Japanese today adopt the view that it is time to bury all old grievances - those of Japan's former enemies about the treatment of prisoners and subject peoples, along with those of their own nation about firebombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"In war, both sides do terrible things," former Lt Hayashi Inoue argued in 2005. "Surely after 60 years, the time has come to stop criticising Japan for things done so long ago."

Wartime Japan was responsible for almost as many deaths in Asia as was Nazi Germany in Europe. Germany has paid almost £3billion to 1.5 million victims of the Hitler era. But Japan goes to extraordinary lengths to escape any admission of responsibility, far less of liability for compensation, towards its wartime victims.

Most modern Japanese do not accept the ill-treatment of subject peoples and prisoners by their forebears, even where supported by overwhelming evidence, and those who do acknowledge it incur the disdain or outright hostility of their fellow-countrymen for doing so.

It is repugnant the way they still seek to excuse, and even to ennoble, the actions of their parents and grandparents, so many of whom forsook humanity in favour of a perversion of honour and an aggressive nationalism which should properly be recalled with shame.

The Japanese nation is guilty of a collective rejection of historical fact. As long as such denial persists, it will remain impossible for the world to believe that Japan has come to terms with the horrors it inflicted.

• Abridged extract from NEMESIS: THE BATTLE FOR JAPAN 1944-45 by Max Hastings, published by HarperPress on October 1 at £25. Max Hastings 2007. To order a copy at £22.50 (p&p free), call 0845 606 4213.

[donna]

Hitler’s war on Christ: Joel Miller explores Nazi plan to eradicate the Church

“The fragile, typewritten documents from the 1940s lay out the Nazi plan in grim detail,” writes Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Edward Colimore: “Take over the churches from within, using party sympathizers. Discredit, jail or kill Christian leaders. And re-indoctrinate the congregants. Give them a new faith – in Germany’s Third Reich.”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/606793/posts

[Pontiac]

If you haven’t read it already The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is the best book on the subject that I have read. It is very readable.

However I can not recommend Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes. I just could not get through it. It just plodded along.

[epow]

The Japanese military were worse than animals before and during WWII.

A civil engineer who I will call Bill (not his real name) I once worked with and who became a close friend in spite of the age difference was captured on Bataan in early 1942 after hiding in the jungle for weeks when the Filipino US Army unit he commanded became separated from the main US force and was practically destroyed. He was shipped to Japan in the hold of one of the Japanese POW "hellships" and somehow managed to stay alive until his camp was liberated after hostilities ended in 1945. But of the approximately 2000 original POWs in his camp at the beginning only about 80 were still alive at the end. Of course thousands more prisoners were brought in to replace the dead, so the camp remained crowded and filthy throughout the war.

He was in a camp near the coal mines on the northern island of Hokkaido where the winters are cold and snowy. They had no shelter from the winter weather except a wooden plank floor surrounded by a board fence with large gaps between boards and a rusty tin roof that leaked like a sieve. They were worked 12-14 hour days 7 days a week in the coal mines with guards standing watch to make sure they worked hard and steady. They were given a 5 centimeter rice ball dipped in a thin fish broth at morning and another rice ball with a few ounces of broth at night. Bill was 6' tall and weighed 190 lbs when captured and only 85 lbs when liberated. His back was covered with scars where guards crushed out their cigarette butts just for the fun of it. Jis face and arms were also scarred by various abuses, and his teeth were false because his natural teeth had been either knocked out by guards or had decayed so badly they had to be pulled after he was liberated. All prisoners were treated that way, and if a prisoner looked up or made a sound when he was burned by a cigarette butt he was beaten to the ground with a rifle butt and then stomped and kicked by the guards.

Bill saw thousands of prisoners die for lack of food, exposure to freezing weather, overwork, and not even the most basic medical care, and many more died because of severe abuse and torture by the sadistic guards. Each morning started with the prisoners lined up facing each other. They were ordered to punch the man opposite them in the face with their fists, and if the guards thought either man didn't punch hard enough both men were beaten to the ground with rifle butts or wooden truncheons. Minor rules infractions were severely punished, often by beheading or bayoneting witnessed by the other prisoners. Breaking a shovel or other mining tool was punishable by beheading if the officer in charge felt like it would set an example, or by a severe beating if he didn't.

My friend Bill passionately hated the Japanese one and all until the day he died, and who could blame him? Several years after the war he was arrested and briefly jailed in California when a Japanese-American man standing on a downtown sidewalk made a disparaging remark to his wife in Japanese when Bill walked by. Bill understood Japanese, and he attacked the man with his fists until passers by pulled him off. Until he passed away he would not ride in a Japanese car or have any Japanese made appliance, TV, radio, or any other item in his home.

Some people who knew Bill thought he was wrong to be so deeply prejudiced against the Japanese people long after the war was over and Japan had become one of our closest allies. But I respected his feelings, and I admit that I can understand his hatred to some degree myself even after all the years since Bill passed away. The Japanese military personnel got off way too easy after the war to suit me after the inhuman cruelty that was done by them to Allied POWs during that war. IMHO every Japanese army and navy officer should have been hung or shot for allowing and often encouraging their men to abuse and kill POWs.

But I don't hate the Japanese people today. I believe they belong to a far different kind of culture than that of their militaristic grandfathers and great-grandfathers in Imperial Japan 60-odd years ago. As a committed Christian I am commanded by Christ to forgive everyone who asks for forgiveness, and I do when asked and also when not asked in many instances. But AFAIK no Japanese official has ever asked for forgiveness from their former American prisoners or their families.

[Stoat]

What a moving and touching story, thank you so much for posting.

So very much pain remains after all this time....it’s evident in so many posts here. There is so much pain in this thread that I haven’t been able to bring myself to respond to every post, as I always ‘try’ to do in other threads. The pain here is too great, and I hope that posters whom I haven’t replied to don’t feel offended.

I am thinking that perhaps one reason why there hasn’t been any sort of ‘national apology’ for these barbaric acts from Japan is that even after all of this time, most Japanese people honestly do not know the extent of these horrors. They have likely been shielded from knowledge of them by generation after generation who didn’t want their exalted grandfathers to ‘lose face’ in history.

Having never been to Japan, this is only my guess based upon reading, but it seems to me that it would be one possible logical explanation. The specter of having to contend with ‘loss of face’ over their defeat in WW2 would be magnified exponentially by coming to terms, on a national / cultural level, with a true, unvarnished and complete understanding that their own fathers and grandfathers joyfully engaged in such depraved inhumanity.

By suggesting this, I don’t by any means intend to say that it excuses them; quite the contrary.

Particularly considering the ease by which so much of this information is available nowadays, for an entire culture to wilfully turn it’s back upon it’s own horrific transgressions against all of humanity makes them far less than an honorable and virtuous culture and nation.

But I don’t think that Japan is alone.....has Russia issued a “national apology” for the gulags and the millions who died under Stalin? Have they tried to make amends, paltry as any effort would be?

Although I think that it’s wonderful and commendable that many are able to forgive these evils from within the context of Christianity or Judaism, this, I think, addresses the place that the Christian or the Jew occupies in the view of God. It does not, however, address the place that the Japanese or the Russians occupy with God, and my hope is that all guilty parties will one day be called to answer for what they have done, as well as their failure to come to terms with what they have failed to acknowledge to their fellow man while on Earth.

[epow]

and my hope is that all guilty parties will one day be called to answer for what they have done, as well as their failure to come to terms with what they have failed to acknowledge to their fellow man while on Earth.

I believe you can be sure of that.

I have to believe that if God is omniscient, just, and fair, and he is, he will mete out much more severe punishment in the spiritual phase of life that I believe follows this physical phase of life to those unrepentant sinners who cruelly tortured and killed helpless victims here on planet earth than to unrepentant souls who sinned as all men have sinned, but did not commit such horrendous crimes against humanity.

It appears to us now that the WWII Japanese torturers, Nazi death camp fiends, Stalinist Russians, wicked religious inquisitors, and all other human monsters who down through history have tortured and killed helpless men, women, and children got away with their horrible atrocities scot free, but the last chapter in their book of life has not yet been opened and read. God's mill grinds slowly, but it grinds exceedingly fine.

[JG52blackman]

Overall death rate for allied POW’s of the Japanese during WW2 was 27%. Overall death rate for WESTERN allied (not Soviet) POW’s of Germany was 4%.
Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides also documents atrocities as well as some kindnesses done to American and British POW’s by Japanese captors.

[JG52blackman]

Overall death rate for allied POW’s of the Japanese during WW2 was 27%. Overall death rate for WESTERN allied (not Soviet) POW’s of Germany was 4%.
Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides also documents atrocities as well as some kindnesses done to American and British POW’s by Japanese captors.

[JG52blackman]

Overall death rate for allied POW’s of the Japanese during WW2 was 27%. Overall death rate for WESTERN allied (not Soviet) POW’s of Germany was 4%.
Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides also documents atrocities as well as some kindnesses done to American and British POW’s by Japanese captors.

[naturalized]

Do you agree with this?

I don't agree at all - I didn't come away from that book thinking Bradley was trying to equate any conduct of the allies with the atrocities of the Japanese.

[dsc]

“The Japanese were not punished nearly enough for their unspeakable crimes. Right about now they should be rediscovering fire enabling them to move out of their caves.”

Admiral Nimitz? Is that you?

[Navy Patriot]

Admiral Nimitz? Is that you?

No, but I worked for him for a while.

[aruanan]

And they killed some 200,000 Chinese and others doing chemical and biological warfare experiments on them. Someone said they made the Nazi death camp folks look like Boy Scouts.

[Sir Gawain]

It's not like the Japanese are paying any price for their barbaric treatment of American POWs and allied civilians.

We dropped two bombs on their sorry ass. I'm willing to call it even.

[aruanan]

How did he get out?

[Stoat]

And they killed some 200,000 Chinese and others doing chemical and biological warfare experiments on them. Someone said they made the Nazi death camp folks look like Boy Scouts.

It appears that books such as this might serve as documentation for what you (and others) say on this topic:

Amazon.com Factories of Death Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-Up Books Sheldon Harris

 

Editorial Reviews
 

From Publishers Weekly
Harris, professor emeritus of history at California State University, here presents evidence from Chinese, American and KGB archives that Japanese scientists used human beings, including Allied prisoners of war, in biologial warfare (BW) research during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. The project was carried out in large part by the notorious Army Unit 731 under the direction of Major (later Lieutenant General) Ishii Shiro. Harris, who also maintains that American authorities made a postwar deal whereby Ishii and his staff disclosed their BW data in exchange for immunity from war-crimes prosecution, notes that U.S. intelligence agencies have only selectively released material pertaining to the Japanese BW program. The author inconclusively considers charges made during the 1950-53 Korean War that U.S. forces employed BW agents on the battlefield, possibly with the assistance of Japanese specialists. Scholars will appreciate Harris's assiduous research and analysis, but his dry presentation makes his book of doubtful interest to general readers.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

International Herald Tribune
"...Will surely be the classic work for many years to come."

 

[dsc]

“No, but I worked for him for a while.”

Really? Tell us about it.

[TASMANIANRED]

There should have been a Japanese Nuremberg..

[VR-21]

"The two things the bother me the most of these facts are one; the uniformity of the Japanese in mistreating POW's (you never hear of any good or fair officers) and two; the persistence of the Japanese to this day in their refusal to assume any national guilt for these actions."

My father was a prisoner of the Japanese. Every account I know of about the conduct of the Japanese military with regard to their treatment of PW's and civilians in conquered territories is disgraceful. That said, My father (who was very close-mouthed about the experience) did tell me that guards in Hoten Prison (Mukden, Manchuria) where he spent most of his captivity would on a few occaisions sneak food to them.

What they would do is walk up to them and slap, punch and knock them down, at which time they would surreptitiously drop a boiled egg or a piece of fruit next to them and walk away. They did this as some risk, as any humanity shown to the PW's was severely punished. As perverse as this sounds, the prisoners desperately needed the food, and getting roughed up was the price to pay.

[Last Dakotan]

I am humbled by your father’s service to his country.

[VR-21]

So am I. He now lies in the National Cemetery at Ft. Bliss, Texas. I miss him terribly.