On 09/06/2013 12:29 AM, WJHopwood wrote:
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Post by WJHopwoodAnd die they did. More than one in four at the hands of the Japanese.
By comparison, less than 2% of the POWs of Nazi Germany died in the
German POW camps. And, as Daws mentions, most Asian POWs of
the Japanese who had fought with the allies against Japan were released
after only a few months of captivity.
But with the whites, as Daws puts it, the Japanese "beat them until they
fell, then beat them for falling, beat them until they bled, then beat them
for bleeding. They denied them medical treatment. They starved them.
....When the International Red Cross sent food and medicine, the Japanese
looted the shipments...."If the war had lasted another year," wrote Daws,
"there would not have been a POW left alive."
WJH
There is a fine book I can recommend by Laura Hillenbrand titled
_Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption_.
It's about the American athlete Louis Zamperini, a B-24 bombardier in
the Pacific who endured a hellish 47 days in a rubber raft after his
plane was shot down, followed be another hellish two years of torment by
Japanese sadists in a POW camp.
The treatment of prisoners by the different powers was complex and
varied over place and time.
I think the situation in Europe changed significantly as a result of two
related events, the beginning of the Holocaust and the onset of
Barbarossa. Unlike the German invasions of Denmark, Norway, Holland,
Belgium and France, the wars against Jews and Russians were both
explicitly launched as "wars of annihilation". Sadism among guards is
always a problem. Who after all wants to be a concentration camp guard?
But murder of prisoners became official policy and millions of German
soldiers either participated, or at least witnessed, what happened -
becoming transformed and brutalized by the process.
This brutality gradually infected other spheres of German domination.
The initial German policy towards Russian prisoners was to intentionally
starve them to death - and millions died. Only later in the war did the
Nazis realize that slaves were useful to them and Russian prisoners were
put to work. I have read that 85% of all Russian prisoners died in
German custody.
Most American prisoners in Germany were airmen, captured in 1944 or 45,
and kept in more humane Luftwaffe controlled camps, or prisoners
captured during the Ardennes offensive in December 1944.
They were not in German hands for a very long time, and it was already
understood by many Germans that the war was lost and that it made sense
not to antagonize the western Allies any more than necessary. Even so,
there is reason to believe that, due to harsh conditions and lack of
food and medical care, a much higher percentage of these prisoners would
have died if the war had continued another six months or a year.
Of course the war in the east remained a war of annihilation to the end
- starting as the annihilation of Russians by Germans and ending up the
other way around. Most sources say that 95% of German prisoners
captured at Stalingrad never returned.
Alan