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Bezig met laden... Prisoners of the Japanese: Pows of World War II in the Pacificdoor Gavan Daws
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In the first disastrous months following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Army took over 140,000 Allied prisoners. More than one in four of these POWs died at the hands of their captors. They were denied medical treatment. They were starved. When the International Red Cross sent food and medicine, the Japanese looted the shipments. They sacrificed prisoners in medical experiments. They watched them die by the tens of thousands from diseases of malnutrition like beriberi, pellagra, and scurvy, and from the epidemic diseases of the tropics: malaria, dysentery, tropical ulcers, and cholera. Those who survived were slated to be worked to death. If the war had lasted another twelve months, there would not have been a POW left alive.
Prisoners of the Japanese raises disturbing questions as well about the value placed on the lives of Allied POWs by their own supreme command. Of all military prisoners who died in the Japanese zone of captivity, more than one in four were killed by "friendly fire" ordered by General Douglas MacArthur. It is impossible not to be seized by the horror of the POWs' ordeal. But while the inhuman cruelty of the Japanese prison camps is documented exhaustively - beyond the shadow of a doubt - the book, at its core, tells a heartening story of ordinary men, trapped in impossible circumstances, not only struggling to survive but stubbornly, triumphantly asserting their humanity. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)940.54History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- Military History Of World War IILC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (4.03)
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A wide-angle saga that adds a chapter long missing from official and traditional histories of WW II's Pacific theater: the story of the torments endured by Allied military personnel captured when Japanese forces overran Greater East Asia. Drawing on interviews with survivors of the Japanese prison camps as well as archival sources, Daws (A Dream of Islands, 1980, etc.) effectively combines the experiences of individual American, Australian, British, and Dutch POWs with a panoramic perspective. He probes why the death rate among the more than 140,000 men interned by the Japanese reached 27% (as against but 4% for military prisoners of the Germans). By the author's painstakingly documented account, the causes were legion: inhuman living conditions, starvation diets, an almost complete lack of medical care, constant beatings by brutish guards whose (heartily reciprocated) racial hatred of whites often led to summary executions, forced labor on construction projects like the Burma- Siam railroad, and workaday atrocities. Thousands more POWs perished when the ships transporting them from the fetid jungles of conquered lands to Japan were blown out of the water by Allied aircraft or submarines.