Combat Lessons No 1 Rank And File In Combat Wwii: Fill & Download for Free

I am going to assume that by ‘tougher’ you mean better at fighting, more resilient in the face of combat conditions and capable of accomplishing missions. Since you specify ‘elite’ German troops, I will assume you mean something on the order of Fallschirmjaeger, SS-Jagdverbande or the very best Waffen SS divisions like the 2nd Das Reich or 5th Wiking. Given that, no, not at all. On the contrary, such a German unit could be expected to outperform US Marine infantry by a significant margin.Fallschirmjaeger resting during a lull in Italy. These elite troops were part of the Luftwaffe rather than the Army during WWII. The one in the foreground carries an FG.42, the first assault rifle used in combat.Otto Skorzeny (centre) and other members of unit that rescued Mussolini from Gran Sasso, photographed with the Italian leader in the aftermath of the raid. Though credited as an SS commando operation, only Skorzeny and 26 other members of the unit were SS Jaeger from SS-Sonderverband z.b.V. Freidenthal. The other 82, including the men who commanded the operation on the ground, Major Otto-Harald Mors (foreground, left) and Oberleutnant Georg Freiherr von Berlepsch (left of Mors), were members of I.Fallschirmjaeger-Lehr-Bataillon, 7.Fallschirmjaeger-Regiment, demonstrating the longstanding commando traditions of the Fallschirmjaeger.Hauptsturmfuehrer (Captain) Karl Ullrich of the highly decorated 5th SS Panzer-Division Wiking. Awarded the knight’s Cross with Oak leaves, he would later be the division’s last commander.Aside from a few Marines crewing shipboard weapons during landings, the Marines did not face German forces during WWII, so we cannot make a direct comparison. However, we can compare the performance of Marines to US Army units in the Pacific and then US Army units against German ones. In the Pacific, US Marines tended to demonstrate a 70% greater casualty exchange rate per man than US Army units fighting against the Japanese in comparable circumstances. The key phrase here is ‘in comparable circumstances.’ The Marines participated in a number of unnecessary and badly supported head-on beach assaults that resulted in high losses. The Army tended to avoid such showy operations.Meanwhile, in late 1943 through 1944, the Germans tended to enjoy a roughly 100% superiority in casualties inflicted per man against the US Army. So, looked at like that, average German units were actually slightly better than US Marine infantry by about 17%, while elite units like the Hermann-Goering Panzer-Fallschirmjaeger Division enjoyed casualty exchange rates twice as good as the average German unit.Looking back famous battle of Belleau Woods in WWI, where US Marines did face the Germans, at the end of the first day, Marine losses were 2.5 times as high as German losses. Using T.N. Dupuy’s numbers for the advantages of a defensive position, and considering the Germans were somewhat outnumbered, this would tend to corroborate the numbers above, suggesting a slight German advantage amongst their average troops.Why? Well, let’s look at how they were trained and selected:The US Marines had a more comprehensive marksmanship program than the US Army, one which placed much greater emphasis on fire discipline and accuracy. This is born out in combat footage. In a US military study of combat footage from WWII through Vietnam it was observed that Marines, 90% of the time are seen to aim carefully, to fire predominately on semi-automatic when armed with automatic weapons, and to fire off shots on semi-auto more slowly and with greater deliberation. By contrast, Army soldiers are seen to rapidly fire off shots, often emptying their magazine, with less time taken to acquire their a target or assess range. Where the US Army relied on volume of fire, and many officers had little faith in marksmanship under combat conditions, the Marines valued precision shooting.However, the Germans were known for having a similarly superior marksmanship program which, as far back as WWI and before, placed great emphasis on teaching soldiers to evaluate ranges under combat conditions, to prize accuracy over speed, encouraged concentration of fire to suppress or destroy targets, and taught that one should withhold fire until within effective range to cause significant damage, and preferably until the minimum possible range, to achieve the most decisive effect.As early as the turn-of-the-century, the Germans had devised pop-up targets and moving targets for marksmanship practice to improve realism. Soldiers who identified a target and evaluated the range were taught to immediately call out this information, so that other soldiers nearby could quickly adjust their sights and engage the target. Every platoon and squad had a designated observer, generally a more senior soldier picked for proven ability to accurately identify range and target, who would report this information to their commander to allow them to assess how best to allocate fire and make sure everyone’s sights were correctly set. In the infantry squad, this individual was typically placed with the machingunner, who was seen as the major source of firepower.Unlike the US system, where recruits learned on rifles, followed by only cursory familiarisation with their other weapons, unless they were designated a BAR gunner, Germans were trained from the start on rifles, submachineguns, pistols and machineguns, learning how to fire the latter from the bipod, from the very stable four-legged mount made for it, which could be fitted with a scope for accurate fire to 2000m, and even from the hip in “assault fire.” (And yes, this can be done effectively in real life, provided the weapon is braced properly and the range is short. There are a number of accounts of German machinegunners using this technique to good effect against enemy squads caught in the open at 50–75m during assaults.) Those demonstrating the best marksmanship with the weapon were made the machinegunners, but everyone was effectively trained in it’s use to 1000m and could quickly take over the weapon. Every Marine was a rifleman, but every German soldier was both rifleman and machinegunner.The US Marine Corps had developed a strong tradition and unique sense of espirit d’corps that the Army, outside of a few individual units, lacked. Despite civilian jokes about the narrow-minded, quaint, stubborn ways of the Marines, they had and have the reputation of an elite service, which attracted higher quality volunteers than the Army got. However, Marine training was built on the same psychologically backwards, counterproductive “break them down and build them up” approach the Army used, only with greater intensity and brutality. Random beatings, sadistic hazing and petty harassment were a regular feature of training. This tended to stifle some of the very initiative that would later be encouraged, alienate more intelligent recruits, and leave Marines with mixed, conflicted feelings about the service, something of a love-hate relationship. The Marines also tried to buttress this tradition by wasting a lot of training time on an obsession with such militarily useless matters as Napoleonic marching drill, something they are still famous for their skill at. On top of that, the Marines, like the US Amy, had a centralised depot training system, which meant that initial training was conducted by instructors who would not form part of the recruits’ unit, giving the whole thing a more distant, impersonal, factory assembly line feel.Drill and ceremony training took up a significant portion of a US Marine recruit’s time.The Germans, in contrast, had largely discarded hazing as a training methodology, recognising it to be out-dated and counterproductive. Instead of mindless sadism, the Germans tried to make training tough in realistic, combat-orientated ways that soldiers could appreciate as actually teaching important battlefield lessons. Breaking the individual personality of the recruit was frowned on in favour of trying to find and build on strong points in their character. Off duty time in training was far more relaxed, and relations between all ranks considerably more congenial than what was found in the very stratified, class-conscious US services. Officers led the training most of the time, rather than farming it out to NCOs as was the US practice. The Germans created a degree of camaraderie across all ranks that was the envy of every other fighting force.Contrary to the popular stereotype of the precise German formation doing the Prussian Slow March (“Goose Step”) down the Unter der Linden, as far back as WWI the German Army had begun to discard such drill and ceremony training as useless. Only a few specially selected units such as the Leibstandarte and the Grossdeutschland’s demonstration battalion trained for such displays. Most German soldiers learned only a few rudimentary movements like Present Arms, and instead of marching about in formation, they were drilled in practical combat movement, such as taking cover rapidly under sudden fire, and rushing from cover to cover.The Germans placed great emphasis on combat movement and fieldcraft, and this proved to be one of the greatest differences between German and Allied units on the battlefield. Much of the fire and movement tactics and fieldcraft practiced by armies today was adapted from the Germans, and where the soldiers of our time might find their Allied counterparts’ battlefield behavior old-fashioned, most of what German soldiers did back then would seem quite familiar and modern.The Germans retained greater combat mobility by never going into combat with the kind of ridiculous loads many Marines were forced to lug ashore, as they knew that was suicidal. Germans were trained to leave non-essential equipment behind (in their platoon carts in land operations) and were taught to never go into battle with more than 22kg on them. All the other stuff would have be brought ashore by follow-on troops once the beach was taken, in amphibious landings.Training was conducted by each regiment, so that some of the NCOs and officers conducting training would be going to the front with the new troops, ensuring that they had leaders who were familiar to them, and who were likewise acquinted with them, knowing their strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, German troops were rarely put straight into combat when they reached the front. Instead, frontline units organised their own training courses, so that newly arriving troops could be taught all the latest tactics by the very officers and NCOs who would lead them in battle.A short anecdote from the training of the SS-Verfungstruppe that would later become 2nd SS “Das Reich” will serve to illustrate a number of German training principles:‘One of our platoon leaders loved that piece of ground, so we were often “in Paradise.” One Autumn day we marched out through a steady drizzle of rain to “Paradise.” We arrived just as the farmer had finished spreading the area with manure. There was a terrible stink of cows and pigs in the air. The prayer, “Lord let this cup pass from me”, was not granted and on our officer’s lips was a satisfied smile as he explained the tactical situation. He waved his hand across the dung-covered “Paradise” and pointed to a small wood. There, he explained, were the enemy trenches and went on to say that it was our task to carry out an attack and to drive him from those positions.‘The machineguns opened up and we fired our blanks at the imaginary enemy. Then we had to rush forward and fling ourselves flat. Some recruits tried to find a nice place on which to lie down. This caused our officer to order a new movement. “The enemy barrage is too heavy. As we cannot pas through it we will roll over and over on the ground in order to reach a new assault position. Follow me”, and he flung himself on to that dung covered field and rolled over and over. With rifles pressed between our knees and tight to out chests we, too, rolled over and over, cursing and swearing.‘We returned to barracks stinking from the filth which encrusted our uniforms. But our officer marched at out head as proud as a Spaniard, as if we had just won a battle. Before he dismissed us he spoke a few words. “Lads, think of this. If we were under fire you would not have time to find a nice place to fling yourself down You would hit the deck quickly, irrespective of whether it was a field of flowers or a pile of shit.” He was right, of course.’I would draw your attention to the following points from this story:1.) The officer leads the training personally, and specifically participates in the most unpleasant aspect of it, demonstrating leadership by example.2.) He explains the tactical situation the exercise takes place in beforehand, and he further explains the specific necessity of the exercise afterwards; the German armed forces made great effort to get recruits to understand the purpose of everything they did, and encourage active, thinking obedience, rather than mindless automaton behavior.3.) The officer speaks to his troops in a friendly, comradely manner; he is their teacher, and they are his worthy students. He does not treat them with disdain or belittle them.4.)The officer does not care that the recruits voice dissatisfaction in the form of cursing, so long as they do what is ordered. No special punishment follows for them having the insolence to do this. German soldiers were expected to be willful individuals who had opinions of their own and were free to voice them to a much greater degree than most Allied troops were.5.) The story shows the great degree to which the German ground forces trained to reflexively and instantly throw themselves flat under fire. Many Allied soldiers hesitated to do so, or preferred to only kneel in place, exposing themselves to fire in the process.6.) The Germans made great use of lateral movement while prone to confuse the enemy about their location, and frequently altered the exact axis of their attack to find the best place to infiltrate close to enemy positions safely.Contrary to stereotype, the Germans had long ago abandoned their own mania for precision marching drill in favour of practical combat skills. Note that no NCO is wasting the time to correct these 5th SS-Division soldiers on their casual attitude to Shoulder Arms.The US Marine Corps’ background as a shipborne, expeditionary service meant the Marines were often deployed in small landing parties, and at one time, in boarding actions that tended to be much more fluid and individualistic than massed field battles on land, leaving them with a much greater tradition of initiative at the small unit level than the Army. To this day the Marines show more comfort with “Mission-type Orders” than the US Army, though the latter has narrowed that gap a fair amount since the 1940s. NCOs typically enjoyed greater autonomy and responsibility than their Army counterparts.Germans, on the other hand, invented “Mission-type Orders” or Auftragstaktik. Encouraging initiative down to the lowest soldier, stressing wide latitude in executing orders, rapid and flexible reaction to changing events, and thriving in chaos were the hallmarks of the German military. Of all the combatants in WWII, only the Finnish made comparable demands on the tactical thinking and active participation of their lowest-ranking soldiers, and their system had been created by a German officer.The Germans possessed one final advantage that added to both their initiative and morale: the selection and training of leaders. In the US, a college degree guaranteed (as today) an officer rank, despite the lack of correlation between either the affluence to pay for college or academic success with combat leadership. The Marines did happen to have a much tougher training course for their infantry officers than the Army (modern Marine Infantry Officer’s Course is of similar difficulty to Army Ranger School), however, the difficulty was mostly in the physical intensity, rather than in tactics and leadership. Marine officers could (and still can) often outrun their whole platoon with ease, but typically lacked the degree of practical job knowledge their platoon NCO possessed. Training for a US Marine officer was also much shorter than what his German counterpart received. Marine officer training was around 6.5 months, which is actually less than what a German NCO had to go through.Additionally, the US has tended towards a ‘management’ style of command that focuses on choreographing what everyone else is doing, but leaving most of the physical leadership to NCOs. Many US officers have chosen to ignore this and lead from the front, but they were the exceptions, rather then the rule, and the system has tended to discourage this behaviour. This command-post leadership creates to a sterile, brittle, and uninspiring command style, which can’t react to events on the spot.In Germany, merely having an Abitur and an awesome physique wouldn’t guarantee you the coveted silver shoulder straps. First, you had to submit to a detailed psychological examination conducted by a team of officers and psychologists which sought to test your willpower and determination in adversity, your decisiveness and quick-thinking under stress, and your ability to communicate clearly and teach soldiers, with the latter being tested by literally having the candidate try to teach something they knew to some random soldiers loaned to the psychological board. Assuming you got passable marks, you then had to apply to individual regiments. It was up to the colonel of each regiment to interview you, look over your test results and accept you or not. The German Army couldn’t force any colonel to take a given candidate, and there was no quota system. Having gotten this far, the officer-candidate now attended training as a common soldier in the regiment that accepted them, where they were expected to demonstrate exceptional initiative, decisiveness, determination and integrity. They were tested in their squad command abilities repeatedly. If they didn’t really shine in basic training, they simply became a private soldier.If they passed, then before 1942, they received a promotion to Fahnenjunker-Unteroffizier (Officer Cadet holding the rank of Corporal/Squad Leader) and went on to a 9 month leadership course, the Kriegschule. From 1942, they had to undertake a six week combat tour first. If they did well in battle as a squad leader, they went on to the leadership course. At any point, they could fail and be stuck as a squad leader. Throughout the course, their leadership qualities, particularly their tactical ability was continually scrutinised and tested, and also heavily mentored by the officers running the course. It was a far more intellectually demanding course and mentally focused course. Where a US Marine officer candidate engaged in intense athletics every day, and the most common cause of failure in training was injury or physical inability, a German officer cadet spent 1 hour a week on athletics, but 6 hours a week on tactics, 6 on military history, 3 on weapons technology, 3 on combat engineering, 2 on topography, map reading and navigation, and at least an hour each week on each of air defence, communications and automotive engineering. By far the most common cause of failure at Kriegschule was lack of mental ability. German NCOs had to pass a similar course.If they passed, then before 1942 they got another promotion to Fähnrich (Ensign, equal to Unterfeldwebel/Sergeant) and went on to a much more difficult 9 month Waffenschule, where they learned how to command troops in thweir arm of service. From 1942, they again had to undertake a six week combat tour before proceeding to the advanced course. At the advanced course, the same screening, selection and mentoring was repeated more intensely. Many simply stayed NCOs. But even this course only made them Oberfähnrich (Senior Ensign, equal to Overfeldwebel/Sergeant Major). They the returned to their regiment for an 8 week ‘field probation’ where their officers would scrutinise them to see of they really had what it took to be an officer. Those that finally made it to leutnant rank (which required a final vote by the officers of the regiment) tended to truly be the most gifted soldiers and ablest leaders in their units, in contrast to the ‘Butterbars’ and ‘Shiny Privates’ US enlisted people still joke about.German officers were expected to know their soldiers to a much greater degree than their US counterparts as well. A company commander would be expected to remember to congratulate a soldier not only on his own birthday, but on those of his parents’ as well. German officers at company level were expected to keep up on any problems a soldier was having at home, and to sit down and have a one-on-one talk with every soldier under their command at least once a month, talking about whatever concerned them and trying to address any problems they had. Unless interrupted by sustained combat, a German company would sit down every day while their commander read out current events, which they were given the opportunity to ask questions about. While the National Socialist system encouraged this as a time to disseminate propaganda, in actual practice it was a time when the company would discuss as a unit whatever was on their mind.Perhaps most importantly, German officers were taught to lead from the front always. Even Field Marshals led attacks in person on many occasions, belt full of grenades and submachinegun in hand. This attitude of always doing more themselves than they asked of their subordinates won a degree of respect and devotion from German soldiers that US officers simply couldn’t compete with. Even the most cynical and fatigued German soldier found it hard to shirk battle when they ran across their 72 year old corps commander digging a fighting hole and preparing to form the rearguard with just himself and his staff. (Which is how Paul Hausser re-established the defensive line that held the Falaise-Argentan gap open long enough for most of Army Group West to escape encirclement.) Individual US officers sometimes displayed this attitude, but in the German Army, it was expected as a matter of course. This is perhaps best illustrated by the story of a request for the award of the Iron Cross 1st Class which reached the desk of Field Marshal Schoerner in late 1944. The citation described how, during an attack, a certain regimental commander had taken up an MG.42 and led the foremost assault platoon in the attack, staying at the very point of the advance throughout the day of fighting, despite being wounded. As a consequence, their division commander recommended they be given the medal. Schoerner, however, angrily scrawled across the citation document: “Every German regimental commander is expected to be at the forefront of their men in attack and defence. This action in no way merits a special award!”Leadership from the front:Hauptmann (Captain) Peter Kiesgen, recipient of the Knight’s Cross, with 5 Tank Destruction Badges for the personal destruction of a tank by means of infantry weapons in close combat, instructs Hitlerjugend in the art of tank hunting.Oberleutnant (Senior Lieutenant) Günther Viezenz, wearing 7 Tank Destruction Badges and his Knight’s Cross. He would eventually win 5 Tank Destruction Badges in Gold and 1 in Silver for destruction of 21 enemy tanks.Hauptmann Ferdinand Frech, holder of the Knight’s Cross, 4 Tank Destruction Badges in Silver, and the Close Combat Clasp in Bronze for 15–24 days in hand-to-hand combat.Major Goerg Wenzelburger, holder of the Knight’s Cross, and the Close Combat Clasp in Gold for 78 days of hand-to-hand combat.This Sturmbannfuehrer (Major) of SS-Standarte Germania wears the Knight’s Cross and Close Combat Clasp in Silver for 25–49 days in hand-to-hand combat.SS-Brigadefuehrer and Generalmajor der Waffen-SS Sylvester Stadler, holder of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Close Combat Claps in Gold for 50+ days of hand-to-hand combat.Oberst (Colonel) Erich Lorenz, commander of 85.Infanterie-Division, holder of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, 2 Tank Destruction Badges in Silver, and the Close Combat Claps in Gold for 50+ days of hand-to-hand combat.Generalmajor Otto-Ernst Remer, holder of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Close Combat Clasp in Silver for 25–49 days of hand-to-hand combat.Consequently, though the German Army and USMC possessed many similarities, the Germans held the edge in initiative, leadership and morale. And that is just regular units.Felix Steiner, the man who set up the main Waffen-SS training program, had joined the SS merely in order to put his training ideas into effect, having been ignored as an Army major. (He was actually so disinterested in the Nazi Party that, despite repeated admonishments from Himmler, he could never be bothered, even as an SS general to give more than a disinterested wave and lukewarm “Heil” rather than the resounding, crisp “Heil Hitler!” salute expected of him, finding the idea of actually saying “Heil Hitler” simply too ridiculous.) He created a program that aspired to be even more modern than the already avant-garde German Army program, with more combat-oriented physical training, more time using weapons, night movement and night combat training, and even greater emphasis on fieldcraft. All the most renowned Waffen SS divisions like the Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Wiking, Hohenstaufen, and Hitlerjugend divisions went through a version of his school, and the two divisions he personally trained and commanded, 2.SS Das Reich and 5.SS Wiking, were respectively the second and fourth most highly decorated divisions, in terms of awards won by members, in the entire German order of battle. (The first was the famous 7.Flieger/1.Fallschirmjaeger and the third the Army’s 4.Panzer).(It’s worth noting that, contrary to what modern people might think, membership in the NSDAP was not a requirement of joining the Waffen-SS, even for officers. Joachim Pieper, a highly decorated officer of the Leibstandarte, despite being Heinrich’s Himmler’s adjutant for a time, avoided ever joining the party, and only ended up on the membership rolls because Himmler, in exasperation, finally signed a card on his behalf, without his knowledge or permission, and filed it in 1943. Likewise, political education, even in units like the Leibstandarte, Hitler’s bodyguard regiment, was met with derision and hostility by the troops and mockery and biting sarcasm from most of the officers. To most such soldiers, being a good soldier was the pinnacle of being German, and all the rest was just the theoretical babbling of a bunch of behind-the-lines political academics. Many of Himmler’s letters of complaint have survived, concerning lack of cooperation with political officers from the SS Main Office, as well ignoring various SS structures on things like minimum height or geneological purity. Thus, the diminutive Sepp Deitrich, the Leibstandarte’s commanding officer, not only allowed people to join who were, like himself, under the official height requirement of 178cm, he also accepted 3 Armenians as soldiers, before the outbreak of the war and the personnel shortage, and freely let his troops marry Ukrainian and Russian women on the Eastern Front, both in complete contravention of the SS’s racial purity standards.)The Fallschirmjaeger held even more stringent standards than Steiner’s Waffen-SS school, in terms of required minimums of physical ability. They originated out of the Polizei Abteilung z.b.V (zu besonderen Verwendung, or ‘for special use’) Wecke, later Landespolizeigruppe z.B.V. Wecke and Landespolizeigruppe General Goering, a special unit of the Prussian State Police picked members of which had been trained by Hermann Goering (who had been a parachute enthusiast and parachute salesman in the 20s) to parachute onto the roofs of buildings in the middle of cities and conduct rapid surprise assaults similar to what modern special forces like GSG9, the SAS and Delta Force do when storming buildings. (The modern units don’t typically engage in anything as dangerous as urban paradrops, preferring helicopters. However, some of the LPG’s techniques have survived amongst their modern equivalent, the German anti-terrorist commando unit Grenzschuetzegruppen 9, who do still train in the use of parachutes in urban settings, such as to rapidly descend from rooftops to ground level). This background led to the original Fallschirmjaeger receiving a degree of commando-type training not present in German army infantry, as they demonstrated at places like Eben Emael. The original battalion, expanded into the Fallschirmjaeger-Regiment Hermann Goering, itself persisted as the most elite of the elite Fallschirmjaeger, eventuality forming the nucleus of the bizarrely successfully Panzer-Fallschirmjaeger Division Hermann Goering, the best division of the Italian front. The original Fallschirmjaeger division, the 7.Flieger/1.Fallschirmjaeger, also built around elements of the original Regiment-Hermann Goering/Luftlande-Sturmregiment.1, collected more decorations amongst it’s members than any other division in the German armed forces.The Waffen-SS created it’s own special operations troops, SS-Sonderverband z.b.V. Freidenthal, members of which, under former Liebstandarte officer Otto Skorzeny, joined with Fallschirmjaeger to rescue the imprisoned Benito Mussolini from the Gran Sasso Resort. An originally company-sized force, it would expand into SS-Fallschirmjaeger-Bataillon 500, SS-Jaeger-Bataillon 501, SS-Jaeger-Bataillon 502, and SS-Fallschirmjaeger-Bataillon 600, all of which also operated under titles such as SS-Jagdverbande-Mitte, SS-Jagdverbande-Dora II, etc. These were made up of specially selected troops from the best Waffen SS units, trained to conduct direct action raids and operate behind enemy lines, and eventually became their own Amt (department), Amt VI, of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, under Skorzeny’s command.These units could be expected to be two to three times as good, in casualty efficiency, as US Marine infantry, and somewhat better than the Marine Raider battalions, which HQMC never showed much love for.

No!Were US POWs Starved to Death in German Camps?Reports of the Allied advance in Europe in spring 1945 raised concerns about the treatment of prisoners of war.July 23, 2018Background: During World War II, an estimated 90,0000 Americans were held as prisoners of war (POWs) in Germany. Once captured, the POWs were first processed through a Dulag (transit camp) where, according to the Geneva Convention signed in 1929, they were required to give their name, rank, and serial number. They were then sent to the actual POW camps, which were sometimes divided among different types of camps such as Marlag (Marinelager), a prison camp for naval servicemen; Oflag (Offizierslager), a camp for officers; Stalag (Stammlager), a camp for officers and enlisted men.Map of the major POWs camps in Germany. Image: Cindy Farrar Bryan and TheArrowheadClub.com.Under the Geneva Convention, officers were not required to work but enlisted men were often made to work, often in difficult conditions. While Allied POWs were subjected to harassment, beating, starving and sometimes death in German camps, their situation was altogether more tolerable than in the Pacific. Over 40% of the American POWs in the Pacific perished, compared to between 1 and 2% in Germany.The main concerns were shortages of food; the meager rations POWs received from the Germans were supplemented by the more than 27 million parcels sent by the Red Cross during the war.Standard content of a Red Cross parcel.In the USA, the parcels were assembled by more than 13,000 volunteers in distribution centers such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis, and sent to the International Red Cross Committee in Geneva, Switzerland, for distribution in roughly 60 POW camps in Germany.The packages contained nonperishable foods like prunes, raisins, liver pâté, coffee, corned beef, sugar, dried milk, oleomargarine, biscuits, orange concentrate, cheese, canned salmon or tuna fish and chocolate bars, along with amenities like cigarettes and soap.In an enormous logistical feat, POWs at first received one Red Cross parcel per week, greatly alleviating the plights of the POWs.Results:Source: Gallup Poll, May 1945, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.What Happened: As the war progressed, the logistics of delivering the parcels became insurmountable. The German planes that flew daily from Lisbon, Portugal (a neutral country), to Germany carrying air mail to POWS were cut off after the liberation of France in the summer of 1944. In addition, surface mail and next-of-kin parcels, which were formerly shipped to Marseille, France, were stalled from June to October 1944. Fighting along the Marseille-Switzerland line made it almost impossible to move mail into or out of Switzerland (a neutral country). As a result, POWs experienced long periods in later 1944-early 1945 where they received no Red Cross parcels and no news from home. The few rations they received were woefully inadequate as the fierce fighting on the continent led to a tripling of the numbers of American POWs.When the Allied liberated their first POW camps in April 1945, they found prisoners in different states of poor conditions: recently imprisoned men who survived on a few slices of bread a week, those who had been in prison for a long time and suffered from the harsh conditions and the poor diet, while others, who had been on forced marches, sometimes 600 miles long, from the east as the Germans moved them inland, were in even worse shape.The Allies themselves, and future historians, however, found no documented effort by the Germans to purposefully starve or kill American POWS. The situation was different for eastern, especially Russian prisoners of war. It is estimated that about 3.5 million, or 57% of all Soviet POWs died in German custody.The results of this May 1945 poll can be explained by the fact that in April and early May 1945, there were numerous reports of Allied forces liberating concentration camps. The deliberate killing and starving of camp inmates was widely reported and may have been conflated with news of Prisoners of War camps by the American public. Articles such as the ones below use words such as “semi-starvation,” “slave labor,” mistreatment and appalling sanitary condition, when reporting on both POWs camps and concentration camps.Gene Currivan, "Out of Hitler Slavery Into the Light," in the New York Times, April 1, 1945.Were US POWs Starved to Death in German Camps? | The National WWII Museum | New OrleansJapan revisits its darkest moments where American POWs became human experimentsOne Japanese doctor has dedicated himself to ensuring the vivisection of eight US airmen by his fellow countrymen is not forgottenJustin McCurry in FukuokaThu 13 Aug 2015 12.40 EDTLast modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 08.00 ESTShares3803Comments909B-29 crew that were used for live vivisection experiments. Photograph: World War II Database: Your WW2 History Reference DestinationFor a while after the end of the second world war, Toshio Tono could not bear to be in the company of doctors. And the thought of putting on a white coat filled him with dread.As a young man with an interest in gynaecology, it was an aversion that could have quickly ended his dream of a career in medicine.But there were powerful reasons behind his phobia.In 1945, as a first-year student at Kyushu Imperial University’s medical school in southern Japan, Tono became an unwilling witness to atrocities.Those atrocities – namely the dreadful medical experimentation on live American prisoners of war – decades later, continue to provoke revulsion and disbelief in his country and abroad.The man who survived Hiroshima: 'I had entered a living hell on earth'Read moreAs Japan prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of its wartime defeat on Saturday, speculation is building over how, or if, Shinzo Abe, the conservative prime minister, will apologise for his country’s wartime atrocities.Amid widespread criticism, including in the US, that under Abe Japan is attempting to expunge the worst excesses of its past brutality from the collective memory, Tono believes his “final job” is to shed light on one of the darkest chapters in his country’s modern history.In early May 1945, just weeks after he began his studies, a US B-29 Superfortress crashed in northern Kyushu island after being rammed by a Japanese fighter plane. The US plane, part of the 29th Bomb Group, 6th Bomb Squadron, had been returning to its base in Guam from a bombing mission against a Japanese airfield.One of the estimated 12 crew died when the cords of his parachute were sliced by another Japanese plane. On landing, another opened fire on villagers before turning his pistol on himself. Local people, incensed by the destruction the B-29s were visiting on Japanese cities, reportedly killed another two airmen on the ground.“The B-29s crews were hated in those days,” Tono, now the 89-year-old director of a maternity clinic in Fukuoka, told the Guardian in a recent interview.FacebookTwitterPinterestToshio Tono, who now heads a maternity clinic. Photograph: Justin McCurry/GuardianThe remaining airmen were rounded up by police and placed in military custody in the nearby city of Fukuoka. The squadron’s commander, Marvin Watkins, was sent to Tokyo for questioning. There, Watkins endured beatings at the hands of his interrogators, and is thought to have died in his native Virgnia in the late 1980s.The prisoners were led to believe they were going to receive treatment for their injuries. But over the following three weeks, they were to be subjected to a depraved form of pathology at the medical school – procedures to which Tono is the only surviving witness.“One day two blindfolded prisoners were brought to the school in a truck and taken to the pathology lab,” Tono said. “Two soldiers stood guard outside the room. I did wonder if something unpleasant was going to happen to them, but I had no idea it was going to be that awful.”Inside, university doctors, at the urging of local military authorities, began the first of a series of experiments that none of the eight victims would survive.According to testimony that was later used against the doctors and military personnel at the Allied War Crimes Tribunals, they injected one anaesthetised prisoner with seawater to see if it worked as a substitute for sterile saline solution.Other airmen had parts of their organs removed, with one deprived of an entire lung to gauge the effects of surgery on the respiratory system. In another experiment, doctors drilled through the skull of a live prisoner, apparently to determine if epilepsy could be treated by the removal of part of the brain.The tribunals also heard claims from US lawyers that the liver of one victim had been removed, cooked and served to officers, although all charges of cannibalism were later dropped owing to a lack of evidence.As an inexperienced medical student, Tono’s job was to wash the blood from the operating theatre floor and prepare seawater drips.“The experiments had absolutely no medical merit,” he said. “They were being used to inflict as cruel a death as possible on the prisoners.“I was in a state of panic, but I couldn’t say anything to the other doctors. We kept being reminded of the misery US bombing raids had caused in Japan. But looking back it was a terrible thing to have happened.”Medical staff preserved the POWs’ corpses in formaldehyde for future use by students, but at the end of the war the remains were quickly cremated, as doctors attempted to hide evidence of their crimes.When later questioned by US authorities, they claimed the airmen had been transferred to camps in Hiroshima and had died in the atomic bombing on 6 August.On the afternoon of 15 August, hours after the emperor had announced Japan’s surrender, more than a dozen other American POWs held in Fukuoka camps were taken to a mountainside execution site and beheaded.The macabre experiments at Kyushu University were not without precedent. In occupied China, members of the imperial army’s Unit 731 experimented on thousands of live Chinese and Russian POWs and civilians as part of Japan’s chemical and biological weapons programme.Of the 30 Kyushu University doctors and military staff who stood trial in 1948, 23 were convicted of vivisection and the wrongful removal of body parts. Five were sentenced to death and another four to life imprisonment. But they were never punished.They were the beneficiaries of the slow pace of justice as US-led occupation authorities attempted to deal with large numbers of military leaders and civilian collaborators suspected of war crimes. One of the most senior doctors, Fukujiro Ishiyama, killed himself before his trial.By the early 1950s the Korean peninsula was in the midst of a bloody civil war, while Japan had been officially recognised as a US ally under the terms of the San Francisco peace treaty.With a politically stable Japan regarded as key to preventing the spread of communism in the region, President Truman issued an executive order that led to freedom for imprisoned war criminals, including those awaiting execution.By the end of 1958, all Japanese war criminals had been released and began reinventing themselves, some as mainstream politicians, under their new, US-authored constitution.“The way Japan was during the war, it was impossible to refuse orders from the military,” Tono said. “Dr Ishiyama and the other doctors committed crimes, but in a way they were also victims of the war. But I hated doctors for a while. I couldn’t get to sleep without pills.”After the war, Tono spent years examining documents and revisiting relevant locations in an attempt to establish what had happened.Ignoring pleas from his former superiors not to disclose the truth about the POWs’ treatment, Tono revealed all in Disgrace, his meticulously researched account of the crimes.Like the leaders of Unit 731, the doctors who conducted live vivisection re-entered postwar society as respectable members of the medical community. Most never spoke of their wartime experiences.Earlier this year, the university, which has long since dropped its imperial title, made the surprising decision to acknowledge the darkest chapter in its history with the inclusion of vivisection exhibits at its new museum.Tono, too, is currently displaying photographs and documents at his clinic.Seven decades on, a simple stone monument erected by a local farmer marks the spot where the B-29 came down, and where the airmen’s terrifying ordeal began.“The job of a doctor is to help people, but here were doctors doing exactly the opposite,” Tono said. “It’s difficult to accept, but this really happened. I decided to tell the truth because I don’t want anything like this to ever happen again.”What War Captives FacedIn Japanese Prison Camps,And How U.S. RespondedBy JESS BRAVINStaff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNALApril 7, 2005After his B-24 Liberator crashed into the Pacific Ocean in May 1943, U.S. Army Capt. Louis Zamperini spent 47 days on a life raft before being rescued by a Japanese patrol boat. Then his ordeal really began.Shipped through a succession of prison camps, he finally arrived at Japan's secret Ofuna interrogation center. There, prisoners thought to hold critical intelligence were placed under a strict regimen designed to make them break. Solitary confinement, blindfolding and compulsory calisthenics were routine. Prisoners were shaved and stripped, forbidden from speaking to each other and made to stand at attention or assume uncomfortable positions for interrogations. Cooperate, and treatment might improve. Violate the rules and you might be slapped or beaten -- or worse."There was no such thing as international law, just Japanese law," says Mr. Zamperini, now 88 years old. Japan had never ratified the Geneva Conventions, and Ofuna inmates were told they had no treaty protections -- such as the right to reveal nothing but name, rank and serial number.Upon Tokyo's surrender, however, the U.S. declared that international law did apply -- and held accountable much of the Japanese hierarchy, from prison guards to cabinet ministers. U.S. military prosecutors brought hundreds of cases for mistreatment of captured Americans, failure to classify them as prisoners of war and hiding them from delegations of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Offenses as minor as failing to post camp rules or holding up a prisoner's meal were considered war crimes. A single count could bring a year at hard labor."The defendants in these cases, as you would expect in most contexts of war, believed that the circumstances justified what they were doing," says Prof. David Cohen of the University of California, Berkeley, who has been collecting trial records from around the world for a War Crimes Studies Center he founded in 2000.Summary ExecutionsAlthough Nuremberg and other postwar tribunals largely are remembered for prosecuting the Nazi leadership for crimes against humanity, the trials originated in the mistreatment of prisoners of war. It was the German practice of summarily executing downed Allied flyers that in 1944 led Washington to begin planning for war-crimes prosecutions.Ofuna prison camp, where American prisoners were interrogated during World War II. Image courtesy "Devil at My Heels," the memoir of POW Louis Zamperini.Other than the flyers, Prof. Cohen says, American and British soldiers captured by the Germans usually received adequate treatment. (Russian POWs fared far worse, under Nazi racial policies that considered Slavs subhuman.)Prisoners of the Japanese, however, faced grueling treatment across the board. Forced labor, meager rations and poor medical care were the rule, along with occasional beheadings by samurai sword and even incidents of cannibalism.But as the U.S. saw it, mistreatment didn't have to rise to the level of torture to merit punishment. For conditions that fell short of torture, prosecutors brought charges under the sweeping Geneva provision that barred "any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." Along with routine beatings, Japanese interrogators had used solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, blindfolding, head shaving, restricting meals, uncomfortable positions and other techniques to make prisoners talk. Japan failed to register some prisoners or facilities with the Red Cross, delayed delivering their mail or Red Cross packages and denied some Americans POW privileges without full-blown judicial proceedings.Japanese regulations required that prisoners of war "be humanely treated and in no case shall any insult or maltreatment be inflicted." In a February 1942 diplomatic note, Tokyo told Washington that while Japan held "no obligations" under the Geneva Conventions, it nevertheless intended to apply "corresponding similar stipulations of the treaty" to captured Americans. When complaints arrived from the foreign governments or the Red Cross, which then as now was the only independent group allowed to visit prisoners, officials forwarded them to military authorities.Soda Pop and a BiscuitMr. Zamperini, who still lives in his hometown of Los Angeles, says his first encounters with Japanese interrogators were hardly pleasant, but to his surprise, "they didn't beat you to get information out of you" -- at least not always.Louis Zamperini, held by the Japanese during World War II, in a 2003 photo.After subsisting on a diet of plain rice, Mr. Zamperini was led before "naval officers in white suits with gold braid" who sat feasting at "a table full of goodies." Refuse to answer and they sent "you back to your cell more miserable than when you started." To get some of the food, Mr. Zamperini says he used a ruse, pretending to crack under pressure and then offering misleading information about the location of U.S. airstrips. "I got a soda pop and I got a biscuit, so I won," he says.U.S. military commissions classified practices like these as war crimes. "Any corporal punishment, any imprisonment in quarters without daylight and, in general, any form of cruelty is forbidden," an Army judge advocate explained.Government-appointed defense attorneys protested the vagueness of some charges. Threatening prisoners with "unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment … does not constitute any war crime," one argued. "It does not allege any specific act." The attorney recalled his own World War I experience as a U.S. interrogator. "We tried by all manner of words and all manner of inducements -- I will not go beyond that -- to attempt to glean information which would be helpful in our operations against the enemy," he said, and no one considered it a war crime."We looked this up very carefully," the prosecutor replied. "When you start to threaten a man, of course you violate the provisions of the Rules of Land Warfare." The commission ruled for the prosecution.The World War II defendants insisted that they hadn't received proper training, or that prisoners exaggerated their mistreatment, or that any problems resulted from cultural misunderstandings or were appropriate punishment for breaking camp rules. Low-ranking guards claimed they were following superior orders, while top officers and cabinet ministers blamed rogue subordinates. Defense lawyers argued that Japan wasn't legally bound by the Geneva Conventions and, even if it were, many prisoners, such as Allied flyers, had no right to treaty protections because they committed such war crimes as sabotage or "indiscriminate bombing" of cities.Hundreds of TrialsWhile the international tribunals at Tokyo and Nuremberg focused on a handful of high-ranking Axis defendants, hundreds of lower-profile national military commissions tried the small fry. For instance, in November 1945, a British military court at Wuppertal, Germany, sentenced three German officers to terms of up to five years for crimes at a Luftwaffe interrogation center. The central offense: "excessive heating of the prisoners' cells … for the deliberate purpose of obtaining from the prisoners of war information of a kind which under the Geneva Convention they were not bound to give," according to the summary published in 1948 by the United Nations War Crimes Commission."POW asleep, Ofuna" (1945) by John Goodchild, Australian war artist.At Yokohama, Japan, meanwhile, the U.S. Army conducted more than 300 war-crimes trials through 1948. More than 90% involved prisoner mistreatment, says Berkeley's Prof. Cohen. American prosecutors focused on Ofuna, a secret interrogation camp run by the Imperial Navy for pilots and other high value prisoners, including Col. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, the Marine Corps flying ace. Using affidavits and testimony from former prisoners, prosecutors depicted a grim world where men were broken through physical and psychological cruelty.When Japan failed to cooperate with the Red Cross, the U.S. considered it a war crime. Lt. Gen. Hiroshi Tamura, head of prisoner management, was sentenced to eight years hard labor for, in part, "refusing and failing to grant permission" to the Red Cross to visit prison camps, denying Red Cross delegates "access to all premises" where prisoners were held and refusing to let prisoners speak to the Red Cross without Japanese observers present.Japanese authorities told Ofuna prisoners that they weren't POWs but unarmed "belligerents" who weren't entitled to Geneva's protections. Navy aviator James Balch testified that an interrogator "explained to me that I wasn't a registered prisoner of war, that I was a special prisoner of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and was, as far as the Japanese were concerned, still a combatant."Lawyers for the Japanese defendants argued that since some captured Americans "lost the status of POWs in that they were saboteurs," it was no war crime to withhold POW privileges from them, Army records say. A military commission rejected that argument as "untenable" because "there is no evidence of any judicial proceedings against the … victims for the alleged acts of sabotage by which they would be deprived of their status" as POWs.The 'Ofuna Crouch'Japanese interrogators put captured Americans in painful contortions for periods of 30 minutes to several hours. One hated position, the so-called Ofuna crouch, involved "standing on the ball of your foot, knees half bent and arms extended over the head," Navy Lt. Cmdr. John Fitzgerald said in a http://deposition.In an affidavit, Navy Capt. Arthur Maher recounted his treatment after his ship, the USS Houston, was sunk in February 1942 off Indonesia. Captured after swimming to Java, Capt. Maher said Japanese officers "promised that we would be treated in accordance with international law."Upon reaching Ofuna, things were different. "As we entered the camp gates, the utter stillness was noticeable." The Americans were told not to speak, locked in nine-by-six-foot cells and put to a stultifying routine of closely timed meals, exhausting calisthenics and limited chances to wash up. Prisoners were given just one cigarette a day and had to smoke it immediately, Capt. Maher said. Many of the guards, he said, "were sadists, some obviously cowards who did not wish to see battle," he said. "A few were definitely decent and tried to alleviate our condition."During interrogations, "prisoners were required to sit at rigid attention and were never allowed to relax," Capt. Maher said. "At times, a cigarette would be offered in an attempt to throw you off guard. Interrogators used different tactics to obtain results. Some tried flattery, cajolery and sympathy; others used threats of violence. But the prisoner was never allowed to forget that he was in a subservient position and there was nothing that he could do about it," he said.Mail between prisoners and their families was restricted to a trickle of censored letters, Capt. Maher said. "This flagrant violation of international law caused great anxiety on the parts of the relatives of all prisoners in Ofuna. The Japanese frequently referred to the fact that we could write as soon as we left Ofuna, using that as an added incentive to talk and be rewarded by being sent to a regular prisoner-of-war camp."At trial, Japanese officials insisted they had done nothing wrong. The chief of naval intelligence, Rear Adm. Kaoru Takeuchi testified that he had ordered that prisoners be treated well."I had a pamphlet named 'How to Interrogate Prisoners of War' compiled," he said. "The main points in the book" were "to respect international law. Not to mistreat prisoners of war. And to conduct the interrogation in a free, conversational manner." To make sure staff got the message, he had these passages "printed in gothic letters and underlined it with a black line," he said. Moreover, abusing the prisoners was ineffective. "Since Anglo-Saxons would not betray their countries, it would be no use to force them to talk," the admiral testified.Officers were held liable for their subordinates' mistreatment of prisoners -- even if they tried to stop the abuse. Camp commander Suichi Takata "took immediate action and investigated all complaints made by the POW officers as to abuses committed upon POWs, reprimanding the guilty," and also "tried to correct the food situation and living conditions in the camp," concluded Army reviewer George Taylor. Two former prisoners -- the senior American and British officers held there -- wrote letters recommending clemency. In view of such "mitigating circumstances," Mr. Taylor recommended that Mr. Takata's punishment be reduced -- to 15 years at hard labor, from the original sentence of 40 years.Half the time, Army reviewers found the commissions too lenient and recommended that harsher sentences be imposed. On occasion, though, they accepted defense arguments. Prison guard Masatomo Kikuchi was convicted of compelling prisoners "to practice saluting and other forms of arduous military exercises on their rest days and at other times when they were tired." The reviewer concluded that "drilling a detail of men for 15 or 30 minutes … is so universally utilized in the armies of the world to teach discipline and for exercise that it would be unjust and unreasonable to consider it a war crime."'No Serious Injury'Moreover, the reviewer found that the commission had overreached in convicting Mr. Kikuchi of two "beatings." In fact, testimony showed "that the mistreatment consisted of a series of slappings." Since "no serious injury was sustained by any of the POWs as a result of his mistreatment," Mr. Kikuchi's sentence was cut to eight years hard labor, from 12.Cmdr. Sashizo Yokura, an Ofuna interrogator, testified that he opposed beating American prisoners, even though beatings commonly were used to discipline Japanese soldiers. He said he had learned from an interpreter who studied in the U.S. that, while "the Japanese think that beating is the simplest punishment when someone violates a regulation, … the Americans consider beatings as the greatest humiliation." Moreover, he said, beatings were counterproductive, as prisoners wasted interrogators' time bemoaning their treatment.CASE FILE• See documents describing cases involving the beatings of American soldiers.Prosecutors, however, contended that Cmdr. Yokura had subtly signaled guards to soften up prisoners for interrogation. Specifically, they introduced evidence that in December 1944, Cmdr. Yokura delayed the meal of a captured B-29 flyer, Maj. H.A. Walker, and forced him to perform kampan soji, an awkward floor-cleaning exercise using a no-handle mop that typically was used to discipline Japanese sailors. These acts, prosecutors argued, contributed to Maj. Walker's "death by inches" nine months later, after he had been severely beaten by guards and denied medical attention.Cmdr. Yokura's defense attorney, Michael Braun, challenged this theory in his closing argument. "We all regret the death of Maj. Walker, just as we regret the deaths of 250,000 to 300,000 other Americans who died in the past war," he said. "But the fact that a man died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp does not automatically mean that any Japanese brought to trial theoretically for his death is guilty of it." Cmdr. Yokura denied holding up Maj. Walker's meal, but even if he had, Mr. Braun argued, he would have been justified because Maj. Walker refused to give his name, rank and serial number, as required by the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. Army's own Rules of Land Warfare authorized "food restrictions as punishment," he http://observed.Mr. Braun urged the military commission not to apply a double standard. "The eyes of the world are focused on what America does here," and "whatever we do is going to be carefully read, carefully scanned, carefully measured against the principles we enunciate."The commission sentenced Cmdr. Yokura to 25 years at hard labor.Post-War LessonsIn 1949, the lessons of World War II trials were incorporated into international law. But following Sept. 11, 2001, Bush administration lawyers reexamined the degree of force and cruelty that could be used to interrogate prisoners captured in the war against terrorism. An April 2003 interrogation policy approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld listed permissible methods including 20-hour interrogations, "dietary manipulation," "isolation," "sleep deprivation," "face slap/stomach slap," and "prolonged standing."Mr. Zamperini, the former Japanese prisoner, says that in today's war on terrorism, severe treatment of the enemy might be called for."You've got a bunch of religious cutthroats that don't follow rules and regulations," he says, and "if it's a question of saving a lot of lives, then torture would be in keeping" with the country's best interest. "This is a whole new ballgame," he says.Write to Jess Bravin at [email protected]

Q. We know that many WWII German POWs were placed stateside and worked on farms until the war ended, but what happened to Japanese POWs?Japanese prisoners of war in america PACIFIC HISTORICAL REVIEWThe US maintained 425,000 enemy during the Second World War in prisoner-of-war camps from New York to California. The majority were Germans, followed by Italians and Japanese. 5,424 Japanese soldiers and sailors most captured involuntarily during the bloody battles of the South Pacific, tested the formidable ingenuity of the War Department. The very first prisoner Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, commander of a Japanese midget submarine which had participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor, abandoned his damaged craft and swam for shore. As he crawled up onto Waimanalo Beach on Oahu, he was captured by one of the nervous military patrols positioned to repel a feared full-scale invasion. When it finally became evident that the disheveled POW knew less about Tokyo's war plans than did his captors, he was moved under heavy guard to a hastily constructed detention camp at Sand Island, Hawaii, where he remained until his transfer to the mainland on February 29, 1942. For the next six months, as German and Italian POWs poured into England and the United States from the battlefields of North Africa, Ensign Sakamaki remained the only Japanese military captive in American hands. In July 1942, he was finally joined by nine others.War Department's Provost Marshal General's Office created a network of permanent POW camps as well as hundreds of small branch camps designed as satellites around the larger camps located at or near existing military bases. Each camp averaged 2,500 prisoners, and adhered generally to the requirements of the Geneva Convention that the layout and food, sanitary, and health services be identical with that provided to American armed forces.There were several reasons for the substantial disparity in the number of prisoners from Europe, and those few from the Pacific. Foremost was the fact that unlike the German and Italian prisoners of war, who had been schooled in the provisions of the Geneva Convention, the average Japanese soldier was molded to prefer death to surrender. Moreover, the official Japanese Military Field Code commanded each Japanese soldier to remember that "rather than live and bear the shame of imprisonment by the enemy, he should die and avoid leaving a dishonorable name!" Capture by the enemy, even if wounded or unconscious and unable to move, was equated with irrevocable shame. Japanese soldiers were directed to save the last round of ammunition for themselves or to charge the enemy in a suicidal assault. Even on very rare occasions when a Japanese soldier might have been unable or unwilling to take his own life, the Pentagon's official histories of the war candidly admit that he might not have survived the heat of combat: "American troops, who were fearful of the widely publicized treacherousness of the enemy, were reluctant to take prisoners."Major battles in the Pacific theater often accounted for no more than a dozen Japanese captives, as against thousands of enemy killed. During the Burma campaign, for example, Commonwealth and American forces captured only 142 enemy prisoners (most of whom were badly wounded or unconscious) while killing 17,166!7 On Guadalcanal, between January 1 and February 15, 1943, the American XIV Corps took only eighty-four Japanese prisoners, thirty-three of whom were too sick or wounded to walk. In fact, from the opening salvo of the Pacific campaign, through the Battles of the Java Sea, Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, Savo Island, Bismarck Sea, New Guinea, Kula Gulf, Bougainville, Tarawa, and Makin, a grand total of only 604 Japanese were taken prisoner by the Allied forces. Not until the beginning of the Philippine campaigns in October 1944 did the number of Japanese prisoners of war approach the five thousand mark, including a twenty-nine-year-old sniper captured on Eniwetok-the only Japanese woman soldier taken prisoner in the entire war. The war was nearly over before significantly large numbers of Japanese soldiers, usually malnourished and disillusioned, surrendered to Commonwealth and American forces.The second reason for the low number of Japanese prisoners in the United States was the War Department's decision to turn the majority of its captives from the Pacific theater over to its allies. Since American forces lacked both the personnel and the rear-area facilities to detain large numbers of prisoners, an agreement was reached with Australia in September 1942 by which all captured Japanese-except for those whose potential military intelligence value necessitated their shipment to the United States proper-were turned over to the Commonwealth of Australia. In return, the United States assumed a proportionate share of the cost of their maintenance (through lend-lease aid), and was responsible for their final disposition at the end of the war.10 Thus, the Japanese prisoners who arrived in the U. S. were either brought in for special interrogation or because they were closer to the United States when captured than to the holding pens in Australia or New Zealand.The Japanese prisoners arrived in America at Angel Island, California, a small mountainous island in San Francisco Bay. A quarantine station of the Immigration Service before the war, Camp Angel Island was converted by the army into a temporary transit center for the incoming groups of Japanese captives before they were routed to the main interrogation center at Tracy, California. While at Angel Island the prisoners were deloused and their belongings disinfected;_____________________________________________________________________________Japanese Prisoners of War in Americaforms were processed and serial numbers assigned, and the prisoners given a much-needed medical examination. The majority of cases of malaria, syphilis, skin disease, intestinal worms, and minor combat wounds were treated in camp, and those few who required more serious treatment were cared for at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco. When it came time to fill out the mandatory postal card to inform their families of their safety, and to file their names with the International Red Cross Prisoner Information Bureau, nearly all the Japanese captives resolutely requested that their families in Japan not be advised of their imprisonment."l Better they be considered dead than dishonored by captivity.Then, finally, came their first meals in America, and the prisoners were astonished at the quality and quantity of their food. Indeed, they found themselves better fed in captivity than in their own army. A typical menu was that offered at Camp Angel Island on September 16, 1944:Breakfast: Sausages, rice, browned crusts, apples, coffee, milk, sugar.Lunch: Sukiyaki, cabbage salad, rice, caramel pudding, water.Dinner: Spaghetti and hash, baked tomatoes, lettuce and tomato salad, rice, cakes, cocoa.While it would not be long before both the Japanese and German prisoners demanded menus more to their national tastes-which the War Department, anxious to protect the interests of American prisoners in enemy hands, quickly produced-the newly arrived Japanese captives had every reason to be calmed by their treatment thus far. For the few days until their shipment to the Tracy interrogation center, the Japanese spent their time listening to the camp gramophone, playing cards and Mah-Jong, and whispering among themselves as they strove to understand the ulterior motives of their captors.The American authorities did, indeed, have ulterior motives. Aside from Washington's general adherence to the Geneva Convention, which, admittedly, was losing its appeal as atrocity stories began to pour in from enemy camps, the War Department was following a specific and calculated plan of treatment. Since the main reason for the prisoners' shipment to the United States was for interrogation purposes, the confidence of the incoming POWs had to be won over. The task appeared formidable: the prisoners feared and despised their captors, both militarily and culturally-no less, in fact, than they were themselves hated in return. Moreover, the captives loathed themselves for their failure to die in combat. Yet army intelligence quickly detected an encouraging pattern among these seemingly overwhelming obstacles.The POWs' psychological makeup evolved into three distinct phases. Immediately upon capture, and up to forty-eight hours afterwards, the Japanese prisoners were of little value to the American interrogators. They were certain that they would be tortured and killed, and were either unresponsive or the information they offered was confused and unreliable. After several days, the army found that a second phase set in, as the prisoners realized that they were not to be tortured or in any way mistreated. This was the moment that the intelligence officers awaited; the prisoners' fear was changing to gratitude and they were anxious to reciprocate by talking freely. For the next ten days to two weeks, the prisoners were most receptive and informative. Then came the third and final phase, when the Japanese captives grew accustomed to the plentiful food and kind treatment, and became annoyed at being questioned. Continued interrogation only drove them into a shell of indifference and they were no longer reliable sources of military information.The interrogation of the Japanese prisoners taught army inteligence officers several additional curious lessons. For example, no threat of physical violence or solitary confinement succeeded in extracting information from a prisoner as effectively as the simple threat of forwarding his name to his relatives in Japan. Another lesson was the captives' realization that they knew no rules of life which applied in this situation. They were dishonored and their life as Japanese had ended. When their earnest requests to be allowed to kill themselves were denied, many discarded their traditional views and became model prisoners. An American official later recalled that "Old [Japanese] Army hands and long-time extreme nationals located ammunition dumps, carefully explained the disposition of Japanese forces, wrote our propaganda and flew with our bombing pilots to guide them to military targets. It was as if they had turned over a new page; as if, having put everything they had into one line of conduct and failed at it, they naturally took up a different line." One group of Japanese prisoners of war changed its outlook so dramatically that the men announced that "they had been badly misled by the Emperor and the Japanese military clique ... and wished to fight back to Japan side by side with Allied soldiers!"Still another important lesson discovered in the interrogation of the Japanese prisoners was that, unlike German or Italian captives who had to be questioned in isolation before older prisoners had the opportunity to intimidate them or alter their stories, the new prisoners were far more willing to talk freely after being consoled by those captured before them. Time and again it was found that the old prisoners advised the new ones to disclose everything to the authorities lest they all be blamed for lying or falsifying military information. One American army report noted that on numerous occasions, "a Japanese prisoner who had been doubtful regarding certain points would come of his own volition the following day and state that he had discussed the point with other members of the same group and his version was right-or wrong-as the case might be." Having learned these lessons about Japanese captives at the interrogation outposts on Guadalcanal and New Guinea, American intelligence officers now brought them to bear on select prisoners being shipped from Angel Island to Tracy.There were two interrogation installations in the United States during the war: Fort Hunt, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp about seventeen miles from Washington, D.C., and Byron Hot Springs, an isolated spot west of San Francisco near Tracy. Both were kept so secret that architectural plans used by construction workers were labeled "Officers' School," although these men must have wondered why officers needed eight-foot fences, hidden microphones in the long rows of cells, barred windows, and heavy gates at the entrances from the main highway. The locations were known only as "P.O. Box 1142" and "P.O. Box 541," respectively. While, strictly speaking, these interrogation centers contravened or, at the very least, "bent" a dozen or so articles of the Geneva Convention of 1929 relating to the rights of prisoners of war, the War Department was convinced that not only was the potential military information well worth the international ramifications but also that the treatment of American prisoners in Japanese hands could not have been made much worse by violations of the Geneva Accords. In any case, the interrogations were so shrouded in secrecy that there was little chance of disclosure.The interrogations were generally conducted in an informal atmosphere by American intelligence officers, many of whom were Japanese-American specialists from the army's Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) in Minnesota. It was a closed society; each of the forty-five interrogators was assigned to one prisoner whom he continued to interview until the authorities were satisfied that no further military information could be learned from the captive. The few surviving time sheets indicate that the interviews usually lasted from forty-five minutes to an hour and were conducted at a rate of two or three each day for a week or more.Yet, however informal these interviews, the interrogators were well aware of the seriousness of their task, and approached each Japanese prisoner in deadly earnest. Every question was planned, and the interrogators followed a lengthy and detailed checklist of questions concerning military equipment, fuel, rations, morale at the front as well as at home, rumors, personalities of commanders, postwar expectations, and so forth. The resulting reports, by contrast, were brief usually two or three single-spaced pages-concise, and frequent. Rather than chance the accumulation of critical military information, the interrogators nearly every four days forwarded their findings: a potpourri of items ranging from the deteriorating quality of Japanese clothing to the number of boiler rooms in the enemy aircraft carrier Hiryu. As the war progressed and the number of incoming Japanese captives increased substantially, so did the number of interrogations and reports. During 1944 the number of Japanese prisoners of war interrogated at Tracy were as follows:January 13 August 174February 5 September 74March 36 October 101April 132 November 75May 105 December 129June 87 July 146TOTAL 1,07723When it was clear that the prisoners had no further information of value, they were assembled into groups and shipped to several POW camps across the country.The War Department's network of prisoners-of-war camps by mid-1943 had reached five hundred main and branch enclosures and covered the nation from coast to coast. Their prime task, of course, was to house the thousands of Germans and Italians arriving each month from the battlefields of North Africa, which reached 360,000 by 1944. Since the number of Japanese prisoners was so small, they were simply shunted to existing camps as space and transportation became available. Although they would appear in dozens of camps, often just in transit, the bulk of the Japanese spent the remaining war years in one of three camps: McCoy, Wisconsin; Clarinda, Iowa; and Angel Island, California. While the largest and most representative was McCoy, the distribution of the Japanese in the United States was as follows:CAMP SER VICE OFFICERS NCO ENLISTED TOTAL COMMANDAngel Island 9 24 71 312 407Clarinda, Iowa 7 - 73 982 1,055McCoy, Wisconsin 6 3 10 2,749 2,762Meade, Maryland 3 1 - 1 2Kenedy, Texas 8 91 499 - 590Madigan General 9 3 - 2 524 Hospital, Washington, D.C.Camp McCoy, which began, typically, as a CCC camp in 1935, was located some five miles from the small town of Sparta, Wisconsin. It was ideal as both a training center and a prison camp since it was isolated yet located on the main line of the Milwaukee Railway between Milwaukee and Minneapolis, as well as on the branch line of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway. Commissioned as an internment site by the Provost Marshal General's Office in March 1942,25 McCoy within weeks became the new home for 293 enemy aliens brought in by the FBI (106 Germans, 5 Italians, and 181 Japanese), and one Japanese prisoner of war (none other than Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki from Hawaii). Eventually, he would be joined by nearly three thousand other Japanese military prisoners, as well as some one thousand Germans, and five hundred Koreans who had been captured serving with the Japanese. Despite the apparently substantial numbers of enemy prisoners at Camp McCoy, they constituted only a small segment of the tumultuous events taking place there. Thousands of soldiers-indeed several hundred thousand soldiers-were trained at McCoy and prepared for shipment overseas. The few thousand foreign prisoners of war, relegated to a remote area of the military post and heavily guarded, went almost unnoticed.The world for the Japanese prisoners consisted of Compounds 1 and 2 (with the Germans in Compounds 3 and 4, and the Koreans in Compound 5). Within each compound were two rows of old CCC barracks with approximately fifty army double-decked bunks in each. Several additional barracks were used as mess halls, and one barrack in each compound was fitted as a day-room and equipped with furniture, playing cards, a gramophone, and an assortment of Japaneselanguage books donated by the YMCA. Each camp was required by the Geneva Convention to maintain a canteen where, during certain hours, the prisoners could purchase toothpaste, shoe polish,. handkerchiefs, candy, crackers, cigarettes, soft drinks, and locally grown produce at the prevailing market price. In some camps even beer and light wines were permitted at the prisoner's own expense.Each enlisted POW received eighty cents a day to spend at the camp canteen. A trifling sum by today's standards, perhaps, but during the war years it would buy eight packs of cigarettes or eight bottles of beer. Officers were paid a graduated salary based on rank-lieutenants, $15 per month; captains, $25; and majors through generals, $35-despite the fact that American POWs in Japanese hands were rarely paid anything. A later agreement with the Japanese government that was publicized as the Army's Prisoner of War Circular No. 28, 6 May 1944, listed the following higher salaries for captive Japanese officers, though they were now to be charged for the cost of their food, clothing, laundry, and orderly service:Equivalent grades in United States Army Navy Monthly Pay Army Navy Taisho Taisho $128.91 General Admiral Chujo Chujo 113.29 Lieutenant General Vice Admiral Shosho Shosho 97.66 Major General Rear Admiral Taisa Taisa 81.08 Colonel Captain Chusa Chusa 62.90 Lieutenant Colonel Commander Shosa Shosa 45.51 Major Lieutenant Commander Taii Itto (Tokumu Taii 40.53 TaiiNito ii Itto 37.11 Taii Santo Taii Nito 32.23 Captain Lieutenant Taii Santo 28.71 Chu Itto Chui First Lieutenant Lieutenant junior grade Chui Nito Tokumu Chuif 28.00 Shoi cShoibkumu Shoi o Shoi 28.00 5.00 Second Lieutenant Ensign (Tokumu ShoiSince War Department regulations (and common sense) prohibited the prisoners from obtaining real money which might enable them to bribe guards or make good their escape, their pay was maintained in a U.S. Treasury Trust Fund (#218915), and all sums were paid to the captives in canteen coupons.While the military was responsible for the overall maintenance of the prisoners' existence, nearly everything else, the daily amenities of life, were supplied by a religious or humanitarian organization-usually the YMCA. The War Prisoners Aid of the YMCA, as the captives soon learned, constituted an influence over their lives second only to the U.S. Army. The Japanese prisoners, no less than the Germans, Italians, and Koreans, received from the YMCA such items as their stationery, musical instruments, library books, sports equipment, phonograph records, hobby materials, handicraft tools, and religious items of all sorts. No requests were too insignificant. During one of his monthly inspection visits to Camp McCoy, for example, the representative of the YMCA, Dr. Howard Hong, noted that the prisoners appreciated his organization's earlier donations of Japanese volumes for the library, the colored crepe paper and thin wire needed by those making artificial flowers, and the Mah-Jong sets and Go games. But he cited the need for incense sticks for Buddhist services; a clarinet, flute, snare drum, and large harmonica; and some tennis equipment. He closed his report with the conclusion that the "Health and morale among the prisoners are excellent."Yet beneath this idyllic surface, there were serious problems in the Japanese prisoner community. A major difficulty was the strain which existed between the three nationalities imprisoned at McCoy. The Germans in the adjoining compound, separated as much by their respective racist ideologies as by reminders that Germany and Japan had been enemies in the First World War. The German prisoners, on the other hand, openly ridiculed their Japanese allies, often gesturing or mimicking across the fence that separated them. Every evening was potentially explosive since they all shared the same canteen, barber shop, and PX facility. "After dinner, they gulp their daily ration of two bottles of 3.2 beer and soft drinks," camp commander Lt. Colonel Horace I. Rogers told a reporter from Collier's, "but for each race, the other is nonexistent. They never look at each other, even in furtive curiosity. They hate each other."30 Relations between the truculent Japanese and the more cooperative Koreans were even more acrimonious and deeply rooted in the centuries of discrimination and subjugation by the Japanese over their peninsular neighbor. The capture of the Koreans gave them an opportunity to assert their national independence. Visiting State Department, Red Cross, and YMCA officials were always pleasantly surprised to learn that the Koreans generally requested nothing more than Christian Bibles and cloth to make Korean flagsrequests that the authorities were understandably happy to grant.Visiting officials to the camp were soon gritting their teeth when it came to meeting with the spokesman for the Japanese prisoners who, at Camp McCoy, was Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki. The complaints by the Japanese were petty and unending. They did not want to work with American women in the camp laundry; they resented being housed with three Marshall Island natives; they demanded coal for the barracks stoves instead of the wood made available by the camp authorities; they wanted more books and dictionaries; they did not want American personnel present in their barracks during Saturday morning cleaning; and on and on. On several occasions, the Japanese went over the head of the American camp commander, Lt. Colonel Horace Rogers, and lodged complaints with the Spanish embassy in Washington, D.C., which undertook to look after their interests. Each such complaint was immediately followed by a visit from the Spanish consul in nearby Chicago who would investigate the charges and help smooth out the difficulties.Finally, there were major divisions and animosities within the Japanese prisoner community itself. The most persistent and difficult problem was the rivalry between army and navy personnel. While such rivalries are common to all armed services, they were especially prevalent among captured survivors of a society based on the veneration of the warrior, and exacerbated by the need to blame someone for their nation's military defeats. Naval prisoners far outnumbered those from the army, and each incoming group of Japanese sailors from the battles of Midway or the Coral Sea increased the preponderance of naval prisoners over their increasingly hostile army colleagues.Another problem among the prisoners derived from the timing of their capture. The later in the war they were captured, the greater the implied resistance to the enemy, and the less shame and dishonor for having been captured. Consequently, each arriving group of prisoners viewed those who greeted them with arrogance and disdain, forcing yet another layer of hostility on an already highly anxious and introspective prisoner community. Each party was aware that the next layer of hostility was only as far away as the next arriving group of captives.Lastly, there was the ever-present question of honor and suicide. While suicide in a prison camp was not as glorious as death on the battlefield, to some, death by any means was preferable to living with the shame of failure. "Our desire for suicide, however, was thwarted on every hand," recalls Kazuo Sakamaki rather melodramatically, considering the tiny number of self-inflicted injuries among the Japanese POWs. "We had no knives to cut our throats. We had no ropes to hang ourselves with. Some of us banged our heads against every object in sight; some men refused to eat. And yet we did not die.... Our life was a dilemma. We wanted to die and yet we could not die. We wanted to kill ourselves and we could not." This issue was nearly always at the boiling point and was kept there by a small number of unruly hard-liners who rejected any compromise with their required fate. On occasion they went so far as to challenge the authority of their ranking POW officer, the venerable naval Lt. Commander Kametaro Matsumoto, for attempting to promote peaceful hobbies among them. While their challenge failed to dislodge the old officer, or ferment suicidal militarism among the prisoners, or swing control from the naval to the army officers, the event helped highlight the problems with which the American authorities had to contend.The War Department had a solution to these difficulties: put the prisoners to work. The captives would be kept occupied and, it was hoped, too tired to contemplate mischief. They could also help alleviate the domestic labor shortage caused by the shipment of millions of Americans overseas. The Geneva Convention permitted belligerents to utilize the labor of able prisoners of war, officers excepted, so long as their labor did not aid directly in the war effort. Such work fell into two broad categories: maintenance of military installations and contract work for private employers. With the initiation of the government's labor program on January 10, 1943, the German, Italian, and Japanese prisoners of war immediately began performing a variety of menial and clerical jobs within their own compounds and on military bases across the nation. They crated and packaged supplies, took inventories of equipment, operated laundries and sawmills, loaded creosote poles, marked surplus property, worked on company trash details, toiled at general construction work, did kitchen work, and served as orderlies to their senior officers. Contract labor was a different matter, though no less important. Farmers and small businessmen located near POW camps petitioned the local office of the War Manpower Commission for groups of twenty or more prisoners, although the regulations, certifications of need, objections from labor unions, and bureaucratic delays often exasperated all but the most laborstarved employers.The more than five thousand Japanese prisoners posed a particular problem. Unlike the German prisoners who went to work with the knowledge that it was not only unavoidable but perhaps even preferable to idleness, the Japanese proved to be poor workers. They were wracked by inner conflicts, indecisively led by their noncommissioned officers, and, most importantly, distrusted by their captors. Anti-Japanese sentiment was implacable in some American communities. When, for instance, the War Relocation Board released three Japanese Americans from an internment camp on the West Coast and shipped them to the labor-starved town of Marengo, Illinois, the residents arose in a storm of protest. The three startled farm boys from California were marched back to the train station by an angry mob led by the mayor, the president of the Park Board, and the commander of the local post of the American Legion. Officials recognized that this community, or others like it, would likely respond no better to the appearance of Japanese military captives. The result was that the overwhelming majority of Japanese prisoners worked on military posts, under guard, rather than on contract work in the civilian sector. To overcome the reluctance of some commanders to make maximum use of their Japanese prisoner-of-war labor, General Wilhelm D. Styer, commander of the U.S. Army in the Western Pacific, thundered: "We must overcome the psychology that you cannot do this or that. I want to see these prisoners work like piss ants! If they do not work, put them on bread and water!"Yet a portion of the Japanese prisoners, in some cases as many as fifteen to twenty percent, simply refused to work. On a few occasions, the cause was strife within the prisoner community, especially the refusal of army prisoners to take orders from naval prisoners. But most of those who refused to work did so on the grounds that their labor would assist the American war effort. Some feigned illness while others refused to work. Nearly every routine camp report to the Provost Marshal General's Office (PMGO) mentions such recalcitrant prisoners.The problem was how to get the prisoners to work without violating their rights or jeopardizing the safety of American prisoners. For the first two years of the war, the War Department prevented POW camp commanders from exercising any more pressure than a reprimand, an admonition, the withholding of privileges, and, in extreme cases, a court martial. Generally speaking, these were useless gestures that held no fear for combat-hardened enemy soldiers. Finally, in October 1943, the PMGO reinterpreted Article 27 of the Geneva Convention to permit the use of reasonable pressure in getting prisoners to comply with a work order. Called "administrative pressure," the policy authorized the camp commander to impose a restricted diet and reduced privileges for any recalcitrant prisoner. This was not a punishment, the War Department reasoned, since the prisoner could terminate the pressure at any time simply by complying with the order; such "administrative pressure" was just an inducement to obey a proper command.Given this new latitude, prison camp commanders now met each potentially explosive situation with vigor. At Camp McCoy, for example, even the normally "generous and kind" Lt. Colonel Rogers startled his Japanese POWs by his swift action. According to an amused delegation from the Spanish consulate:On May 30, 1944, about 22 Japanese officers ordered their men not to work. Colonel Rogers spent several hours in attempting to persuade the officer prisoners to change their minds. That night he approached the 90 non-coms and asked them whether they would cooperate with him. After 9 had absolutely refused to cooperate he put them in the guard house for the night and made no attempt to interview the rest.The next morning the prisoners staged a sit-down strike, refusing to turn out for roll-call, breakfast or work. After issuing a clear warning to the noncoms, Colonel Rogers ordered out his troops with bayonets and forced all prisoners to march at the double five miles to a place of work, to work all morning without the usual 10 minutes rest every hour, and to return to the camp at the double at noon. The prisoners of course became exhausted and about 12 stragglers received minor bayonet wounds. A few were so overcome that they had to be picked up by a truck which was ordered along for the purpose. This treatment effected a cure, for a spokesman for the non-coms informed Colonel Rogers that there would be no further trouble.Each incident had to be handled individually. Normally, prisoners who refused to obey a work order were sentenced to the stockade for fourteen days; in extreme cases the prisoners spent fourteen days at hard labor. In rare instances when the number of striking POWs ran into the hundreds and posed the threat of a camp uprising, the troops were called out. On only one occasion-when three Japanese naval prisoners being treated for tuberculosis at Denver's Fitzsimons General Hospital rushed their guards-were prisoners shot dead on the spot.Curiously, the War Department's greatest fear never materialized. From the moment that the first shiploads of prisoners arrived in the United States, the government worried that thousands of escaped Nazi and Japanese prisoners would sabotage and rape their way across the country while American military forces were locked in combat overseas. Elaborate precautions were taken in the location and construction of the camps, and camp commanders were encouraged to find the most efficient balance of security measures from among such options as additional floodlights, patrolling war dogs, the censoring of prisoner mail, sporadic bed checks, a network of prisoner informants, shakedown inspections, and a general aura of firm military discipline. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the symbol of domestic security, heightened public anxiety by warning that "even one escaped prisoner at large, trained as he is in the techniques of destruction, is a danger to our internal security, our war production, and the lives of our citizens!" Communities which hosted Japanese prisoners, such as Sparta, Wisconsin, near McCoy, were constantly warned to be especially vigilant and to report immediately any suspicious activities. "The Japanese, with their reputation for trickiness and sneakiness," the authorities cautioned, "are apt to make a greater attempt to disturb our homefront security than the Germans ever did."Despite the many obstacles to prisoner escape-substantial security measures; a fatiguing labor program; an array of artistic, musical, athletic, educational, and spiritual outlets; and the most compelling obstacle of all: there was simply nowhere to go-some captives still sought to flee. Since most prisoners in the U.S. were German, they not surprisingly accounted for most of the escapes, 1,036.41 Some escapees merely walked away while a guard's attention was directed elsewhere,while others cut fences, passed through the camp gates in makeshift American uniforms, smuggled themselves out aboard commercial delivery trucks, jumped over the compound fences from barracks rooftops, climbed out of hospital windows, or tunneled underground. The Japanese, to the government's astonishment and relief, seldom attempted to escape. Unlike the Germans who were breaking out at the monthly rate of three escapes per ten thousand captives, the Japanese attempted only fourteen escapes throughout the war, all from McCoy. The first to flee was Terumasa Kibata, who slipped away from his work detail, ten miles north of the camp, on July 3, 1944. While the records indicated that Kibata suffered from shell shock and was probably not in full control of his faculties, a near-hysterical search was initiated by the police, military authorities, and FBI. Two army planes were brought in for air surveillance. Even before this collective weight could be brought fully to bear, a bewildered Kibata wandered back into camp the day after his escape. He explained to the startled guards that he had hoped to "catch a train," though he was unsure about his destination or purpose for escape.The next escapes did not occur until nearly a year later. During the early morning hours of May 22, 1945, three Japanese POWs, Takeo Nakamura, Kokei Tanaka, and Hajime Hashimoto, all twenty-four years of age, dug under a fence enclosure in what was probably the most well-planned escape of them all. They had plotted since September of the previous year, stealing a Texaco road map from the glove compartment of the camp ambulance, a pair of bolt cutters from a storage area, and extra food from the mess hall. When finally apprehended, Nakamura had a duffel bag filled with enough items to cover a two-page list by the FBI, and included a styptic pencil, sixteen assorted fish hooks, a hundred "U.S. Army" matchbooks, and seven changes of socks. A Wisconsin farmer spotted him a week after his escape as he poled down the Mississippi River on a makeshift raft near the town of Prairie du Chien. His comrades did not make it that far. They were captured several days later, less than twenty miles west of the camp and near the community of West Salem, as they marched along Highway 16 in their Japanese uniforms with the letters "PW" stenciled in bright yellow on both front and back.No sooner had local farmers begun to relax than two more Japanese broke out in early July. The populace was warned that the POWs would try to steal food from local farms or take milk from cows in pastures, and that "these men, with their strange philosophy of 'dying for the Emperor,' could cause a great deal of damage. Residents in the county are urged to report anything they may see or hear that might aid authorities to track down the Japs." After being gone about a week, one escapee was captured at a local farm where he had knocked at the back door, rubbed his stomach to indicate to the startled farmwife that he was hungry, and was given some bread by the terrified woman who then dashed to the telephone. The highway patrol took him into custody as he waited politely at the back door for the next course. His comrade was apprehended on July 17 on the outskirts of West Salem, Wisconsin, where he was discovered by a Chicago & Northwestern railroad policeman huddled in a boxcar. He offered no resistance and, in the vernacular of the front-page news announcement, "the Nip was returned to confinement." Immediately, however, another Japanese prisoner slipped away. The local population, doubtless beginning to wonder about the highly touted security measures at McCoy, girded themselves for yet another "desperate Jap on the loose." The police and FBI were alerted as usual, dog patrols scoured the countryside, and two days later the escapee was sighted while creeping along the outer perimeter of the camp on his hands and knees. Apprehended without resistance, he told his captors that he escaped for fear that he would be beaten by the other prisoners who suspected him of being an informant. He was nonetheless returned to his compound with unknown results.Four more escapes occurred before the end of the war, but all the captives were returned in a matter of days. The last Japanese prisoner to escape during the war was Yuzo Ohashi, a recent captive from Iwo Jima. Early on the morning of August 29, 1945, he slipped away from his work detail and, under the mistaken belief that "Mexico was located about 300 miles south of Camp McCoy," spent the next four days moving south and foraging for food. He was apprehended on September 2-the day of Japan's official surrender-at Cashton, Wisconsin, about twenty-two miles south of McCoy. He told his guards that Japan had clearly lost the war and that he did not wish to return home in shame. It was escape, Ohashi explained, or suicide.As the end of the war with Japan approached, American authorities worried about the possibility of mass suicides among the POWs. Imaginations ran wild, fueled by stories about the mass suicides on Iwo Jima and Okinawa; the riots by the Japanese prisoners at Camps Featherston and Cowra in New Zealand; and by the appearance of a lengthy alarmist article in the Rocky Shimpo, a Japanese-language newspaper published in Denver, which predicted a dreaded mass suicide of the prisoners at Camp McCoy. Despite such fears, the end of the war passed uneventfully with no suicides among the POWs.With Japan's surrender came the question of democracy in postwar Japan. The public mood was perhaps best summarized by a Texas cowboy in a "man-on-the-street" opinion poll, who stated that "You can't civilize or educate Germans or Japs in a short length of time. We've got to give them a new form of government so we might as well start making Democrats out of them right now."52 The War Department agreed. As early as April 1945, the Special Projects Division of the PMGO had considered a program to reeducate the Japanese prisoners despite a ban on such activity by the Geneva Convention. Following a secret study conducted among the Japanese POWs at McCoy, Clarinda, and Angel Island, the PMGO determined that such an indoctrination effort would not only provide the American occupation forces in Japan with reliable government officials, but would serve as a laboratory to test the educational and rehabilitation programs under consideration for the postwar period. The project was secretly authorized by the Secretary of War on July 18, 1945, after which the prisoners were screened, evaluated, and the most cooperative among them selected for reeducation. The potential converts to democracy, a total of 205 men, were then sent to one of three specially designated "re-orientation centers": Camps Huntsville, Kenedy, or Hearne, Texas.The program was directed by Lt. Colonel Boude C. Moore, born in Japan to missionary parents, educated in the United States, and resident of Japan from 1924 until 1941. He was assisted by Dr. Charles W. Hepner, a luminary from the Far Eastern Branch of the Office of War Information, who had spent some thirty years in Japan. Together they organized a dazzling program of lectures by the faculty of nearby Sam Houston State Teachers College, with simultaneous translation into Japanese; study of the English language and literature; comparisons of American and Japanese newspapers, books, and magazines; and the translation of material for distribution to the Japanese prisoners not participating in the program. The most important activity was the assignment every two weeks of a new "study topic" which required group and individual research and discussion. The topics ranged from an assessment of Japan's civilian and military morale to the comparison of various segments of Japanese and American ways of life. Moore and Hepner hoped that these exercises would cause the prisoners to consider the nuances of the subjects and require some measure of democratic input by all members. They also believed that the reports would serve as a barometer of the POWs' morale and allegiance to the Emperor.Augmenting these pursuits was a heavy dose of American music, newspapers, movies and cartoons, and such recreational activities as softball, table tennis, and baseball. The prisoners were also encour-aged to attend Sunday religious services in an effort "to replace their traditional Emperor-worship with a more positive philosophy, and to show them the close relationship between democracy and Christian principles." When the program ended in December 1945 and the POWs prepared for repatriation home, the authorities believed that a significant, if unknown, number of the prisoners had embraced the principles of the American dream. Unfortunately, no follow-up investigation traced the careers of the Japanese "graduates" and their impact, if any, on postwar politics.No sooner was the war over than Washington began repatriating Japanese POWs as promptly as shipping permitted.55 While Japanese prisoners in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Okinawa were not released for another year-due as much to Allied fears for the security of postwar Japan as to the need for cheap labor-the prisoners in the U.S. started home less than a month after the war ended. Beginning in October 1945, the Japanese POWs at McCoy, Clarinda, Hearne, Kenedy, and Huntsville were sent to a cluster of holding camps at Lamont, California. There they kept busy with the usual military post-related tasks as carpenters, cooks, and janitors and also as contract workers on local farms. By the end of December 1945, vessel space became available for 1,120 men (including 675 sick and badly wounded) and the captives were trucked to the Los Angeles Port of Embarkation for immediate shipment overseas. Each departing man was fingerprinted once again, his records updated, and his belongings searched for "contraband" or money in excess of the 500 yen ($125) or 200 yen ($50) which the officers or enlisted men respectively were allowed to bring back to Japan. A week later, on January 5, 1946, another 1,462 Japanese departed; on January 20, three days after a third group of 441 prisoners left Lamont for Los Angeles, that camp was deactivated. Also during January the remaining 2,376 Japanese prisoners departed from a similar system of camps in Corcoran, California, to the piers of San Francisco and Japan. A single Japanese prisoner remained to recover from his wounds, and on June 1, 1948, he waved an indifferent farewell to Angel Island from the railing of his departing ship. It was over. For the 5,400 repatriated Japanese captives, however, numerous difficulties still lay ahead.The events which greeted the returning Japanese were bitter-sweet. The emotion of seeing the port of Uraga and Mt. Fuji was mixed with shame of returning alive from enemy captivity. Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki became something of a public figure, not only as a former POW, but as the first Japanese prisoner of the war. "Everyday, letters poured in," Sakamaki recalls, quoting from a representative sample:Your past is not wrong at all. You need not feel ashamed. On the contrary, we owe you thanks. With a new heart, please work for a reconstruction of our beloved country. No wonder we lost the war, Mr. P.O.W. No. 1. Although I am a mere merchant, I know how to commit hara-kiri. A man who does not know what shame is, is a beast. If you want to die now, I will gladly come and show you how it's done. Which is the more manly life-live long and cheap, or live short but glorious? Shame on you.And finally, I cannot understand how you could return alive. The souls of the brave comrades who fought with you and died must be crying now over what you have done. If you are not ashamed of yourself now, please explain how come. If you are ashamed of yourself now, you should commit suicide at once and apologize to the spirits of the heroes who died honorably.Many years passed before Sakamaki and his more than 1,500,000 fellow former prisoners of war held by Russia, China, Britain, and the United States 61 became comfortably integrated into Japanese society, a process made far easier for those who had been held in the United States. They returned better fed and clothed than their comrades in other Allied camps. They were also more emotionally stable and often had at least a smattering of the language of their new occupiers. Summing up his four years of war, Sakamaki described a metamorphosis which startled even himself:My steps were these: all-out attack, failure, capture, a sense of dilemma, mental struggle, attempts at suicide, failure again, self-contempt, deep disillusionment, despair and melancholy, reflections, desire to learn and yearning for truth, meditation, rediscovering myself, self-encouragement, discovery of a new duty, freedom through love, and finally, a desire for reconstruction.I claim no credit for this transformation. I wish to preach to no one. I only hope that this will show to all ... that man is capable of being made anew....The key to it all, Sakamaki concluded, was the concept of democracy. "I learned it as a prisoner. It was the best education of my life."Japanese prisoners of war in World War II - WikipediaAllied prisoner of war campsJapanese POWs held in Allied prisoner of war camps were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. In an attempt to win better treatment for their POWs, the Allies made extensive efforts to notify the Japanese government of the good conditions in Allied POW camps. This was not successful, however, as the Japanese government refused to recognise the existence of captured Japanese military personnel.Most Japanese captured by US forces after September 1942 were turned over to Australia or New Zealand for internment. 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.Japanese POWs practice baseball near their quarters, several weeks before the Cowra breakout. This photograph was taken with the intention of using it in propaganda leaflets, to be dropped on Japanese-held areas in the Asia-Pacific region.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. Japanese POWs generally adjusted to life in prison camps and few attempted to escape.There were several incidents at POW camps, however. On 25 February 1943, POWs at the Featherston prisoner of war camp in New Zealand staged a strike after being ordered to work. The protest turned violent when the camp's deputy commander shot one of the protest's leaders. The POWs then attacked the other guards, who opened fire and killed 48 prisoners and wounded another 74. 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.More seriously, on 5 August 1944, Japanese POWs in a camp near Cowra, Australia attempted to escape. During the fighting between the POWs and their guards 257 Japanese and four Australians were killed.Other confrontations between Japanese POWs and their guards occurred at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin during May 1944 as well as a camp in Bikaner, India during 1945; these did not result in any fatalities.In addition, 24 Japanese POWs killed themselves at Camp Paita, New Caledonia in January 1944 after a planned uprising was foiled.Post-warA Japanese prisoner of war watching a British Royal Air ForceDakota transport landing at Bandoeng, Java, during May 1946.Soviet and Chinese forces accepted the surrender of 1.6 million Japanese and the western allies took the surrender of millions more in Japan, South-East Asia and the South-West Pacific.In order to prevent resistance to the order to surrender, Japan's Imperial Headquarters included a statement that "servicemen who come under the control of enemy forces after the proclamation of the Imperial Rescript will not be regarded as POWs" in its orders announcing the end of the war. 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.Japanese prisoners released from Soviet captivity in Siberia prepare to disembark from a ship docked at Maizuru, Japan, January 1946.Repatriation of some Japanese POWs was delayed by Allied authorities. Until late 1946, the United States retained almost 70,000 POWs to dismantle military facilities in the Philippines, Okinawa, central Pacific, and Hawaii. British authorities retained 113,500 of the approximately 750,000 POWs in south and south-east Asia until 1947; the last POWs captured in Burma and Malaya returned to Japan in October 1947.The British also used armed Japanese Surrendered Personnel to support Dutch and French attempts to reestablish their colonial empires in the Netherlands East Indies and Indochina respectively.At least 81,090 Japanese personnel died in areas occupied by the western Allies and China before they could be repatriated to Japan. Historian John W. 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 1.2 million Japanese military personnel following the war. 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.Over the next few months, most Japanese prisoners in China, along with Japanese civilian settlers, were returned to Japan. The nationalists retained over 50,000 POWs, most of whom had technical skills, until the second half of 1946, however. Tens of thousands of Japanese prisoners captured by the Chinese communists were serving in their military forces in August 1946 and more than 60,000 were believed to still be held in Communist-controlled areas as late as April 1949.Hundreds of Japanese POWs were killed fighting for the People's Liberation Army during the Chinese Civil War. 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 1964.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 594,000 Japanese POWs, of whom 70,880 were immediately released, but Japanese researchers have estimated that 850,000 were captured.Unlike the prisoners held by China or the western Allies, these men were treated harshly by their captors, and over 60,000 died. Japanese POWs were forced to undertake hard labour and were held in primitive conditions with inadequate food and medical treatments. This treatment was similar to that experienced by German POWs in the Soviet Union.The treatment of Japanese POWs in Siberia was also similar to that suffered by Soviet prisoners who were being held in the area.Between 1946 and 1950, many of the Japanese POWs in Soviet captivity were released; those remaining after 1950 were mainly those convicted of various crimes. They were gradually released under a series of amnesties between 1953 and 1956. After the last major repatriation in 1956, 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 1990s. Some, having spent decades away and having started families of their own, elected not to permanently settle in Japan and remain where they were.Due to the shame associated with surrendering, few Japanese POWs wrote memoirs after the war.