Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Learn more More Like This. The Naked Venus People on Sunday Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Isle of Forgotten Sins Passed Action Adventure Drama. Murder Is My Beat Cossacks in Exile The Last Command Girls in Chains The Singing Blacksmith The Naked Dawn Arthur Kennedy, Betta St. Edit Cast Cast overview: David Bowman Gertrude Michael Toni Chase Ernst Deutsch Matsuru as Ernest Dorian Corinna Mura Japanese Radio Operator Gil Frye Gilmore has also calculated that Allied forces in the South West Pacific Area alone captured at least 19, Japanese.

As the Japanese forces in China were mainly on the offensive and suffered relatively few casualties, few Japanese soldiers surrendered to Chinese forces prior to August The conditions these POWs were held in generally did not meet the standards required by international law. The Japanese government expressed no concern for these abuses, however, as it did not want IJA soldiers to even consider surrendering. The government was, however, concerned about reports that POWs had joined the Chinese Communists and had been trained to spread anti-Japanese propaganda.

The Japanese government sought to suppress information about captured personnel. While the Bureau cataloged information provided by the Allies via the Red Cross identifying POWs, it did not pass this information on to the families of the prisoners.


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When individuals wrote to the Bureau to inquire if their relative had been taken prisoner, it appears that the Bureau provided a reply which neither confirmed or denied whether the man was a prisoner. Although the Bureau's role included facilitating mail between POWs and their families, this was not carried out as the families were not notified and few POWs wrote home. The lack of communication with their families increased the POWs feelings of being cut off from Japanese society.

Because they had been indoctrinated to believe that by surrendering they had broken all ties with Japan, many captured personnel provided their interrogators with information on the Japanese military. Few Japanese were aware of the Geneva Convention and the rights it gave prisoners to not respond to questioning. Moreover, the POWs felt that by surrendering they had lost all their rights.

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The prisoners appreciated the opportunity to converse with Japanese-speaking Americans and felt that the food, clothing and medical treatment they were provided with meant that they owed favours to their captors. The Allied interrogators found that exaggerating the amount they knew about the Japanese forces and asking the POWs to 'confirm' details was also a successful approach.

As a result of these factors, Japanese POWs were often cooperative and truthful during interrogation sessions. Japanese POWs were interrogated multiple times during their captivity. Most Japanese soldiers were interrogated by intelligence officers of the battalion or regiment which had captured them for information which could be used by these units.

Japanese Prisoner of War tells of experiences in book

Following this they were rapidly moved to rear areas where they were interrogated by successive echelons of the Allied military. These interrogations were painful and stressful for the POWs. Some Japanese POWs also played an important role in helping the Allied militaries develop propaganda and politically indoctrinate their fellow prisoners. The wording of this material sought to overcome the indoctrination which Japanese soldiers had received by stating that they should "cease resistance" rather than "surrender". The United States provided these countries with aid through the Lend Lease program to cover the costs of maintaining the prisoners, and retained responsibility for repatriating the men to Japan at the end of the war.

Prisoners captured in the central Pacific or who were believed to have particular intelligence value were held in camps in the United States. Prisoners who were thought to possess significant technical or strategic information were brought to specialist intelligence-gathering facilities at Fort Hunt , Virginia or Camp Tracy , California. After arriving in these camps, the prisoners were interrogated again, and their conversations were wiretapped and analysed.

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Some of the conditions at Camp Tracy violated Geneva Convention requirements, such as insufficient exercise time being provided. However, prisoners at this camp were given special benefits, such as high quality food and access to a shop, and the interrogation sessions were relatively relaxed.


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The continuous wiretapping at both locations may have also violated the spirit of the Geneva Convention. Japanese POWs generally adjusted to life in prison camps and few attempted to escape. The protest turned violent when the camp's deputy commander shot one of the protest's leaders.

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The POWs then attacked the other guards, who opened fire and killed 48 prisoners and wounded another Conditions at the camp were subsequently improved, leading to good relations between the Japanese and their New Zealand guards for the remainder of the war. This was the only time that the Japanese Government officially recognized that some members of the country's military had surrendered. This tactic was initially rejected by General MacArthur when it was proposed to him in mid on the grounds that it violated the Hague and Geneva Conventions , and the fear of being identified after surrendering could harden Japanese resistance.

MacArthur reversed his position in December of that year, however, but only allowed the publication of photos that did not identify individual POWs. He also directed that the photos "should be truthful and factual and not designed to exaggerate".

VJ Day: Surviving the horrors of Japan's WW2 camps

Millions of Japanese military personnel surrendered following the end of the war. Soviet and Chinese forces accepted the surrender of 1.

Japanese prisoner of war camp Morotai

While this measure was successful in avoiding unrest, it led to hostility between those who surrendered before and after the end of the war and denied prisoners of the Soviets POW status. In most instances the troops who surrendered were not taken into captivity, and were repatriated to the Japanese home islands after giving up their weapons.

Dower has attributed these deaths to the "wretched" condition of Japanese military units at the end of the war. Nationalist Chinese forces took the surrender of 1. While the Japanese feared that they would be subjected to reprisals, they were generally treated well. This was because the Nationalists wished to seize as many weapons as possible, ensure that the departure of the Japanese military didn't create a security vacuum and discourage Japanese personnel from fighting alongside the Chinese communists.

The nationalists retained over 50, POWs, most of whom had technical skills, until the second half of , however. Tens of thousands of Japanese prisoners captured by the Chinese communists were serving in their military forces in August and more than 60, were believed to still be held in Communist-controlled areas as late as April Following the war, the victorious Chinese Communist government began repatriating Japanese prisoners home, though some were put on trial for war crimes and had to serve prison sentences of varying length before being allowed to return.

The last Japanese prisoner returned from China in Hundreds of thousands of Japanese also surrendered to Soviet forces in the last weeks of the war and after Japan's surrender. The Soviet Union claimed to have taken , Japanese POWs, of whom 70, were immediately released, but Japanese researchers have estimated that , were captured. Japanese POWs were forced to undertake hard labour and were held in primitive conditions with inadequate food and medical treatments. They were gradually released under a series of amnesties between and After the last major repatriation in , the Soviets continued to hold some POWs and release them in small increments.

Some ended up spending decades living in the Soviet Union, and could only return to Japan in the s. Some, having spent decades away and having started families of their own, elected not to permanently settle in Japan and remain where they were. Next month, Mr Baxter will publish a book describing his wartime experiences called Missing, Believed Killed, in which he describes in detail his time in captivity including his friendship with Mr Hirano.

He was a kind, compassionate guard. He risked his life to get extra rations for POWs. He treated POWs differently to other guards who abused them. During the first six months of his captivity, more than men died from malaria, dengue fever, dysentery and other tropical diseases, with Mr Baxter at one point given only a fifty-fifty chance of survival. His final two years in captivity were spent toiling in harsh labour mines in the southern island of Kyushu, from where he witnessed the Nagasaki atomic bombings from 40 miles away and describes feeling the scorched wind from the blast.