Prisoners of the Empire
Inside Japanese POW Camps
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- 33,99 €
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- 33,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
A pathbreaking account of World War II POW camps, challenging the longstanding belief that the Japanese Empire systematically mistreated Allied prisoners.
In only five months, from the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to the fall of Corregidor in May 1942, the Japanese Empire took prisoner more than 140,000 Allied servicemen and 130,000 civilians from a dozen different countries. From Manchuria to Java, Burma to New Guinea, the Japanese army hastily set up over seven hundred camps to imprison these unfortunates. In the chaos, 40 percent of American POWs did not survive. More Australians died in captivity than were killed in combat.
Sarah Kovner offers the first portrait of detention in the Pacific theater that explains why so many suffered. She follows Allied servicemen in Singapore and the Philippines transported to Japan on “hellships” and singled out for hard labor, but also describes the experience of guards and camp commanders, who were completely unprepared for the task. Much of the worst treatment resulted from a lack of planning, poor training, and bureaucratic incoherence rather than an established policy of debasing and tormenting prisoners. The struggle of POWs tended to be greatest where Tokyo exercised the least control, and many were killed by Allied bombs and torpedoes rather than deliberate mistreatment.
By going beyond the horrific accounts of captivity to actually explain why inmates were neglected and abused, Prisoners of the Empire contributes to ongoing debates over POW treatment across myriad war zones, even to the present day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kovner (Occupying Power), a research scholar at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, delivers a rigorous and wide-ranging study of Japan's treatment of POWs during WWII. Though Japan received praise for its "scrupulous conduct" toward Russian POWs during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, and officially pledged to uphold the Geneva Conventions in WWII, its military culture, which regarded surrender with utter contempt, was a factor in the abuse and neglect of prisoners, according to Kovner. She notes that in the five months following Pearl Harbor, Japan captured more than 140,000 Allied soldiers and 130,000 civilians, without an adequate system in place to manage them. Showing an impressive command of source materials in multiple languages, Kovner documents the experiences of Allied POWs and Asian laborers forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway and American and Filipino soldiers rounded up for the Bataan Death March, notes that many of the worst abuses occurred at the hands of undernourished Korean and Taiwanese guards, describes conditions aboard the "hell ships" that transported POWs to where their labor was most needed (and were regularly sank by Allied torpedoes), and details efforts to hold Japanese officers responsible for war crimes. She concludes that "there was no overarching policy or plan to make POWs suffer... POWs were simply not a priority." This revisionist history adds essential nuance and depth to an emotionally charged subject.
