Upon their entry into war, the Japanese equipped themselves with every modern weapon available and used the most sophisticated tactics in a way similar to any Western power. On paper, the Japanese also declared their adherence to the Geneva Convention, although they never ratified or observed it. How little Japan had advanced towards European values was evident from its treatment of civilian and military prisoners. One of the factors partially explaining the brutality of the Japanese was their refusal to allow their own troops to become prisoners of war. Bushido, the martial code of Japan, could not conceive of a preference for capture rather than death: 'better to die with honour than live in shame'. Therefore, those Japanese soldiers who surrendered were deemed to have waived their right to existence at all. As far as the Japanese were concerned, this code extended to all races. In what was to become known as the 'Death March', about 70,000 American and Filipino soldiers were captured at Bataan in April 1942 and marched 65 miles (104 km) to their camps, suffering the most terrible losses. At the height of Japanese expansion in 1942, its 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere' stretched across Asia from Burma to China and as far as Java in the south. Many of the occupied countries in this vast area were European colonies like the Dutch East Indies and the British islands of Hong Kong and Singapore. As the Japanese swept across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, many civilians as well as military forces were caught unawares by their rapid advance. There was a foreboding of what was in store for these hundreds of thousands of Japanese prisoners in the days following the British surrender of Singapore on 15 February, 1942. The Changi Square Incident, as it became known, involved 17,000 captured Allied troops. They were forced to sign a pledge that they would not try to escape and would obey all orders. After two to three days without water and food, commanding officers ordered their men to comply. Many of the men assembled in Changi Square could not have realised that the clothes they carried with them into captivity were likely to have to last them three or more years of imprisonment. The standard uniform for many, as the rest of their kit was either stolen or simply wore out, was to become a single loin cloth, known as the 'Jap-happy', The first few days at the mercy of the Japanese were a cruel introduction to what was to follow. It was not uncommon for men to be given no food at all for the first two or three days. The fittest of those assembled in Changi Square were later taken to work on the construction of the 'Death Railway', which was to link Bangkok with Rangoon. The weaker men and many of the civilians rounded up at Changi, stayed in a camp they built themselves on Singapore Island. It remained one of the better camps throughout the war. The Death Railway stretched 260 murderous miles (420 km) through tropical jungle, … land in which no human being had probably set foot for thousands of years', as one survivor put it. It was constructed by 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and over 100,000 native labourer’s conscripted to finish the impossible task in nine months, as was the Emperor’s wish. Every foot of its length was achieved at great human loss. A third of the POWs involved in its construction died. Of the native labourers, who were treated even worse than their European fellow workers, very few survived. All were forced to labour in appalling conditions without adequate tools or food supplies. So atrocious were the conditions, prisoners worked in that their greatest fear was not the Japanese but the many tropical diseases which decimated their numbers. A prisoner's identification tag. Inmates applied their skills to mess tins and produced their own (below), to improve on the ones issued by their captors (bottom). Malnutrition caused by the slow starvation diets made death and susceptibility to illness even more likely. But conditions on the railway were undoubtedly worsened by savage acts committed by Japanese guards. From dawn until dusk, men would be beaten into working to the point of fatal exhaustion. Rising from a sleeping space of just two or three feet, senior officers were made to work alongside their men. Prisoners were pushed until their last gasp. For John Coleman, an American POW, the most debilitating factor was the perpetual state of tension he and his comrades suffered at the hands of the cruel guards, whose standard form of rebuke was to slap prisoners briskly around the face. He noticed that such tension caused extreme cravings for tobacco in many smokers with terrible results. Their addiction, as much mental as physical, led to scenes where men bartered food in exchange for measly butts casually dropped by guards. Though many doctors performed miracles in such conditions, they were rarely given any help; in fact they were more often hindered in their tasks, especially by the Japanese habit of confiscating vital drugs supplied by the Red Cross parcel service. Once a man was sick, his chances of survival were further reduced because of smaller rations given to those who did not work. In Europe POWs received one Red Cross parcel per week on average; at the hands of the Japanese, prisoners were lucky to see any at all. Those parcels which did get through normally had the most useful items stolen from them. Thomas Pounder, a POW on the Death Railway, remembered a day when Japanese guards had stolen Red Cross parcels believing the packets of cheese they contained to be soap. He felt a rare pleasure spying on some guards trying to wash themselves with the cheese! The life of any prisoner of the Japanese, civilian or military, inevitably centred around food, or the lack of it. On mainland Japan internees were sometimes better fed than the mass of the Japanese people, their staple diet being rice and vegetables. Everywhere else, though, it was slow starvation which killed most POWs. The emaciated bodies of survivors bore ample evidence. Trying to escape while working on the notorious 'Death Railway', John Sharpe (below) endured torture and solitary confinement at the hands of the Japanese. Transferred to hospital in Singapore, his emaciated body tells the story of his ordeal. Malnutrition made it all the harder for prisoners to fight off the many diseases they suffered in Far East conditions. Malaria, dysentery and beri beri were some of the major afflictions. Many survived only through desperate attempts to improve their pathetic diets. As a rule, it paid to eat pilfered food on the spot: a good POW was also a good scrounger. On the whole, civilian internees received better treatment at the hands of the Japanese. If anything, they were given less food, but they did experience less brutality. Men at Sime Road civilian camp in Singapore ate green swamp weed or garlic, not for nourishment but to check skin diseases. Fortunately for them, more than a hundred doctors were on hand, without whose expertise Sime Road's death rate would have been far higher. Yet even at Sime Road towards the end of the Japanese occupation, severe malnutrition became widespread, as guards and captives competed for rapidly dwindling food supplies. It was during these worst days of captivity that many parents made huge sacrifices for their children, who were nonetheless badly affected. One of these self-sacrificing parents was Isla Corfield who, after the fall of the Philippines, had been sent to the camp of Santo Tomas with her daughter Gill. They were two of many British women who spent over three years in the camp. His armband identifies this man as a member of the Kempeitei, Japan's secret police, dreaded because of its brutal methods of interrogation. At first, these proud and increasingly ingenious colonial women, more used to watching polo matches than cleaning up toilets and attending tenko, the roll-call, would pass the time imagining lavish recipes to prepare for each other. But as the impossibility of feeding a huge zone of occupation dawned on the Japanese, women like Isla Corfield became increasingly desperate in their attempts to feed themselves. By mid 1945 Isla had sold her eternity and wedding rings for mungo beans. In the last days of the war, the importance of scarce rice supplies was again demonstrated during a deadly incident. A priest, also captive in the Philippines, found that 2,000 internees at Los Banos camp were being fed starvation rations although the American paratroops who liberated them found nearby stores stuffed with rice. The guards at this camp shot it out with the liberating troops while the internees lay flat on the ground in their own quarters; none of them was hurt, but 165 Japanese guards were killed for one casualty among the attackers. This was one of the few instances of direct vengeance against Japanese imprisoners.
If the Bushido code held that men in defeat were stripped of their dignity, the women who found themselves at the mercy of the Japanese were off the scale altogether. One survivor of Palembang camp in Singapore experienced the more barbaric and inconsistent nature of the Japanese: 'The same guard that would strike a woman in the mouth for wearing lipstick gave one of the girls a cheap little ring, telling her that she reminded him of his daughter. Exam papers from the 'University of Changi' founded by inmates in order to preserve their knowledge and sanity during years of captivity. In the camps, the death rate could be as high as 80 per cent. Often the only support for morale was a sense of solidarity, seeing inmates through to the bitter end. Tragically, prisoners still living in camps along the tracks of Death Railway were killed when Allied bombers began their attacks in late 1944. As both civilian and military internees found, by far the worst period of captivity was about to begin, as Japan's war economy ground to a halt and her forces were bled dry.When the chips were down, the worst treatment was meted out to the sick. Late in 1944 they prevented the prisoners' canteens along Death Railway from buying any further meat, sugar or salt from the Thais, because the Geneva Convention said that these commodities should be supplied by the detaining power. This attitude was totally in keeping with the kamikaze-style policy the Japanese adopted throughout towards the vital asset of camp labour. They were like 'scorpions stinging their own tails', reported Pounder. 'If the Japanese had treated their prisoners better, they might have achieved more in the areas they occupied.' More Japanese propaganda reassuring the world that great care was taken with POWs' health. In reality, though, medical supplies were erratic and disease was rife. As a result, in some areas, the health of economies reflected that of local prisoners. In Hong Kong, in contrast to Burma and Thailand, the Japanese camps for military prisoners were relatively humane and well run. In Shum Shuipo camp there was even a good library and prisoners were allowed to hold classes and produce plays and concerts. The same was true of civilians, who, apart from the inevitable matter of food, were not badly treated. The Japanese even gave up attempts to teach them to bow. 'Generally speaking, our passive refusal to take them seriously proved to be an excellent technique', one reported. These internees also successfully combated the usual manufacture of propaganda: flashlight photographs were taken of an open-air concert but the audience spoilt them by making V signs just before each flash. Queuing up for food in the officers' mess, most POWs considered themselves lucky to get any food at all. The experience of POWs in Hong Kong could not have been further away from that of prisoners on the islands of Japan. There it was not tropical ulcers which killed prisoners, but again malnutrition, and on the northern island of Hokkaido, the bitter winter cold. The only protection prisoners were allowed from winter sub-zero temperatures was rough hessian uniforms, woefully inadequate in the climate. Though the Red Cross often visited such prisoners from their base in Japan, they could not have known the story behind these POWs' transportation to mainland Japan, often in cramped ships. On trips from Java to Japan in 1942, which one in three did not survive, thousands were crammed into ships' holds often only four feet (1.2 m) high. The living used the dead for pillows. Incredibly, but for the swift pre-emptive action of the Allies, these POWs in Japan and elsewhere might never have lived to see their own release. It was revealed after Japan's capitulation that the Japanese had planned to massacre their prisoners. A pin loop holding the prisoner's identification plus money to obtain food in case of sickness. At the end of August 1945 the Allies had dropped special paratroop regiments to help the Thais prevent this planned genocide. Similar drops were made in the Philippines and in Borneo. When the Japanese finally did capitulate in August 1945, brought to their knees after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their surrender took most of their prisoners by surprise. So stubborn and unwilling were some Japanese to surrender that for many prisoners it took some weeks before they were released. In the Philippines, the Japanese fought on for two weeks after the formal surrender. In an effort to appear humane, the Japanese authorities made POWs send home notes which did not always reflect reality. Whatever the date of release, the transition from misery to freedom was often too abrupt for men, women and children long conditioned by constant deprivation. On release, almost all internees were immediately hospitalised, in many cases for months before they made full physical recoveries. For almost all, the mental suffering was to continue beyond the Allied destruction of the rickety camps which the prisoners had been asked to build themselves and in whose squalor many of their compatriots and friends had met their deaths. When they were finally freed from their ordeal, many POWs had to be hospitalised before they could embark on the long journey home.
