Japanese Treatment Towards POW’s
Heroes Remember
Japanese Treatment Towards POW’s
The Japanese culture has little regard for prisoners of war.
Their values are never to surrender and never to be taken
prisoner so their treatment of prisoners of war was nothing like
the German or the British and western ideas of how to treat prisoners.
It takes about 3,000 calories to keep a soldier...
a person, a hard working person alive.
We were fed about 1,200.
This had a very severe effect on the health of the prisoners,
of course, and gradually the prisoners began to die of malnutrition.
The Japanese had no real plans for how to treat prisoners of war.
They refused to obey the principles of the Geneva Convention
that governs the treatment of prisoners of war.
You can only wonder that they were so interested in using
us as slave labor but they would starve us at the same time.
You could only conclude that they hoped that eventually
we would all die in captivity.
They had no, I don't think they had any idea that we would be,
that they would look after us well enough
to see us return even if they were victorious.
I think that you can only conclude,
and the report of the Far East War Crimes tribunal concluded,
that this was, it must have been,
a deliberate strategy to eventually have
all the prisoners of war disappear through malnutrition.
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