Upon the return of British prisoners of war to their homes in late summer 1945 from Japanese captivity, they would receive a letter signed by a government minister.

Welcome home! You have suffered a long and bitter ordeal at the hands of a barbarous enemy.

Many books and papers have been written about the sheer brutality and racial hatred of the war conducted against the Japanese by the Western Allies in comparison to the war with Germany. Yet, not until the end of the war were most of the revelations at hand, many of which still poison the relations between Japan and Great Britain, and to a lesser extent, the United States.

These revelations would mostly deal with the fates of Allied prisoners of war who fell into the hands of the Japanese Army and Navy between the years of 1941-45.

Throughout the years of war, a small amount of prisoners managed to escape from captivity and return to America or Great Britain. Most of these would come from the Philippines and Burma, or survivors picked up by submarines and aircraft from Japanese ships transporting prisoners to Japan that had been sunk.

These men would share their stories, dire as they were.

The US Government would go to great lengths to suppress initial eyewitness reports of the 1942 Bataan Death March where around 11,000 American and Filipino troops of General MacArthur’s defence force were marched, starved, beaten and shot to death as they were moved to prisoner camps. The news of the beheadings of a captured bomber crew of the Doolittle Raid had also been suppressed.

In the Spring of 1945, large numbers of British and Australian POWs would be freed from captivity in Burma by Field Marshal Slim’s forces, as well as Americans in the Philippines by General MacArthur.

The stories passed on to the liberators would stun them. Tales of starvation, rampant disease, beatings, shootings and beheadings over the slightest infractions of discipline and men worked until they fell over dead from exhaustion in their thousands. From the top, it was ordered that the stories be censored to limit the inevitable public outrage that would come should these stories be known before the war’s end, and the danger it could bring to the men still being held captive.

Tens of thousands of prisoners lived every moment of their lives in fear, wondering if they would be slaughtered by the Japanese in a final act of brutality as they lost the war.

When the war had been brought to it’s end with Allied victory of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it became possible to compare conditions prisoners suffered at the hands of their enemies. It was found that only 4% of Western Allied prisoners died in German captivity, yet 27%, 37,756 out of 132,134, died in Japanese hands. Of the 130,000 Westerners interned in the Dutch East Indies, 30,000, nearly all the civilians, would die.

To give a British story, when the HMS Encounter was sunk in the 1942 battle of the Java Sea, 123 of its crew survived in the water to be picked up by Japanese crews. Of these, 41 were lost in an unmarked transport heading to Japan when it was struck by an American submarine. 30 died in POW camps and only the remaining 52 returned home to England in 1945.

This type of institutionalized brutality overlayed upon the already deadly hazards of war would be well known to a Soviet or Jewish prisoner of the Nazis, but was beyond the pale for American, British and Australian publics. It was incomprehensible that a nation such as Japan, which claimed to have pretensions to civilization, would stray so far from basic humanity and the rules of war.

It is hard to overstate the trauma of the over 100,000 American, British, Australian and Indian servicemen taken prisoner in the early defeats. Western military culture dictated that being taken prisoner was an unfortunate circumstance that could befall even the fiercest of fighting men. They contemplated their lives behind barbed wire with dismay, but not the terror they would soon learn.

A young USAAF member would say

In the beginning, we thought a couple of months and our army will be back.

22 Year Old USAAF Enlisted Man, Doug Idlet

The sentiment shared by the enlisted man was common, but as the weeks went on and food and medical supplies dried up, Japanese policy would reveal itself. Officers and enlisted men alike would be sent to be used as slave labour on all manner of industrial and war projects, one of the most deadly being the Burma Railway.

The Burma railway was a very difficult engineering challenge. At the beginning, when we did the surveying, we were working in virgin jungle, one could not even see through the trees with a theodolite

IJA Captain Renichi Sugano, 9th Railway Regt

When asked about the deaths of Allied personnel on the railway project, the Captain would answer cautiously,

Another unit was responsible for the care and custody of POWs, we simply borrowed them for labour and returned them to their camp each night.

While the testimony of Renichi Sugano shows at best indifference to the condition and treatment of prisoners, in the eyes of most Japanese, prisoners had no rights and were protected by no law. Not only had they lost their honour as warriors, but they had also forfeited basic human respect.

Men of the arrogant nation who sought to treat our motherland with unwarranted contempt. As I gaze upon these crowds of surrendered soldiers, 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.

Japanese War Correspondent, Ashihei Hino

As some prisoners' fitness ebbed away, some began to abandon hope, they simply gave in to a fate that quickly overtook them. There is no doubt that many men simply set down or dropped their pack, fell over and died. The feeling of loneliness was a major contributing factor in many of the spontaneous deaths amongst the younger troops. In contrast, those who were determined to simply survive seemed to do exactly that without any external influences.

Among the most debilitating consequences of imprisonment was the collapse of loyalties to peer groups and rank. Behind the wire, it was very seldom that an officer maintained the respect of his men, the Australian Brigadier General Arthur Varley being a notable exception.

Major D was about as useful as a dead cat. His interests and motives are selfish. He looked on the sick like they were encumbrances and better dead and out of the way. I saw him go off the train and never lift a finger to help those too sick to move.

Bombardier Alex Young

An Australian soldier, Don Moore, would write of an officer they knew as “The White Jap” due to the fact he ran a canteen within their camp and would charge high prices to the men for basic necessities despite their tiny camp salary, if they received one at all.

Flying Officer Arel Shern, a 49-year-old RAF administrative officer, was disgusted when the padre in his camp on Java, a non-smoker, would persuade desperate men to trade their bread for his cigarette rations.