this Ain't Hogan's Heroes............

books:


	• Prisoners of the Japanese: Pows of World War II in the Pacific Gavan Daws William Morrow & Co, 1994 - 462 pages average customer review:based on 33 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Brutal

This book leaves you with an excellent impression of how brutal the conditions and treatment of our soldiers by the Japanese.
Our soldiers went through hell and many did not come home. A must read for WWII buffs. I can now totally understand why WWII vets do not buy Japanese merchandise, cars, etc and have a dislike for the Japanese as a whole. I am not passing judgment but in my view--they have every right to feel the way they do.
I will definitely read this book a second time.

Terrific

Extremely well written and comprehensive overview of the POW experience in Indonesia. A very good balance of human stories, information, statistics, and background. Strongly recommended.

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imperial devil race

Japan has committed some of the world's worst atrocities in history (nanking massacre, unit 731, batton death march, comfort women, pearl harbor, ect..) and they still refuse to apologize, compensate, or make an accurate history in there textbooks. Why is Japan so cowardly and instead try to make their amends to their victims of the horrible crimes against humanity. No wonder people call Japan a "devil" race.

WWII POWs in the Pacific

During the course of WWII, the Japanese Army took more than 140,000 Allied prisoners, and one in four died in captivity. Their story has never been systematically recorded or documented--until now. Australian author Gavan Daws combined ten years of research and hundreds of interviews with surviving POWs to recreate this haunting account of day-to-day heroism and humor amid atrocities. Incredibly complete, profoundly disturbing, yet eminently readable, this book will hold your interest and expand your vision of the human story.

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this Ain't Hogan's Heroes............

"Prisoners of the Japanese: POWS of World War II in the Pacific"by Gavan Daws is an extremely graphic book. The experiences of Allied Prisoners of War (POWS) in the care of Japanese forces are nothing like the experiences portrayed in "Hogan's Heroes" or even "Stalag 17". At least Nazi Germany went through the motions of following the Geneva Convention. Imperial Japan treated captured soldiers and naval personnel in a fashion similar to the way Germany treated Jewish civilians in their death camps. All they needed were furnaces and Zyklon B......

When confronted with the thousands of prisoners captured at Singapore, Wake Island, the Phillipines, etc., the Japanese military had no infrastructure or guidelines for handling prisoners. Under the Code of Bushido, to be captured was a grievous dishonor. A POW was (in Japanese eyes) scum that had no right to life. That meant Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright commander of US forces in the Philippines had to bow before the lowest private Japanese soldier. There was no difference between officer and enlisted. No form of military structure was allowed to exist. The prisoners were robbed, beaten, starved assiduously denied medical care and killed on a whim. They all became slaves to the Japanese war machine.

Based on extensive interviews, Mr. Daws has distilled the experiences of the POWS into the individual stories of a few survivors of the experience. For example, there's Frank Fujita of the Texas National Guard. He was a rarity, a soldier of Japanese ancestry fighting on the side of the Americans in the Pacific. It was years before his captors ever noticed he was Japanese.

Houston "Slug" Wright is a descendant of a proud Texas Ranger family. At his moment of despair he found the best friend a man could have in Dr. Henri Hekking.

Dr. Hekking was a Dutch colonial Army officer and physician who had been thoroughly trained by `root doctor' grandmother in Indonesia before going to medical school in Holland. This is a perfect combination of skills when your Japanese captors refuse the most basic of medical supplies. Dr. Hekking heroic efforts were in the best traditions of medicine.

Then there are two partners, Harry Jeffries and Oklahoma Atkinson were a couple of card sharks who worked as construction workers during the day. Of course they would stay on the job at Wake Island just a little too long....... They would need every bit of their hustling skills in order to survive captivity.

Comparisons have been made between captivity by the Japanese in the Pacific and the US internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry. There is no comparison. While the US treatment of west coast Japanese was inexcusably a racist insult, a violation of civil liberties, not to forget humiliating, that's it. They were not starved, forbidden water, beaten to death, denied medical care or forced to debase themselves multiple times daily before their captors. Nor were they decapitated in broad daylight in front of witnesses.

This is a well written book. It is well-paced and extremely informative. But it is not light reading.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Gavan Daws combined ten years of documentary research and hundreds of interviews with surrviving POWs to write this explosive, first-and-only account of the experiences of the Allied POWs of World War II. The Japanese Army took over 140,000 Allied prisoners, and one in four died the hands of their captors. Here Daws reveals the survivors' haunting experiences, from the atrocities perpetrated during the Bataan Death March and the building of the Burma-Siam railroad to descriptions of disease, torture, and execution.

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