In some ways Prisoners of the Japanese is similar to another American classic, Studs Terkel’s The Good War. In both books ordinary men tell stories about their World War II experiences, but where The Good War often makes you smile, Daws’s book will make you cry:
They took four more officers … They beat them for hours–beat them to death. They threw the bodies in a swill pit behind the Japanese latrines. Next morning … one of the guards was walking around in a pair of British suede shoes.
Gavan Daws is an Australian historian who lives in Hawaii, and this book is written primarily for American readers. While it includes material about British, Australian and Dutch POWs (as well as the thousands of Asians who were enslaved by the Japanese during World War II), most of its voices are American. But as the Japanese treated all their captives with indiscriminate brutality, this is of small consequence.
Prisoners of the Japanese raises a lot of questions. Why did Allied submarines sink Japanese ships which they knew, or should have known, were carrying POWs? (This leads to the almost unbearable fact that ‘of all POWs who died in the Pacific war, one in three were killed on the water by friendly fire’.) But the most fascinating issue is the way men of different nationalities behaved.
The British tried hardest to preserve discipline and the distinctions of rank. The Dutch (who usually had much more tropical experience) tended to be more compliant. They survived in far greater numbers. The Americans included the most ruthless traders and were more competitive with one another. Alone of the nationalities, they killed each other, especially on the hell-ships that were taking them to Japan towards the end of the war.
The Australians, on the other hand, seem to have maintained a real solidarity, and this, along with Gallipoli, has become one of the most powerful and moving manifestations of the way we see ourselves.
But this is to oversimplify the complex social orders that arose in captivity. Men quickly learned that their chances of survival were stronger if they formed small groups—families almost. The ideal number seems to have been four. Beyond this family, affinity might extend, in diminishing degrees, to larger units based on a home town, a military unit and eventually a nationality. Other alliances developed. The Australians and Americans both disliked the British. And of course everyone