Max Hastings: The Japanese Mistreatment of POW's--And Still They Don't Apologize

Max Hastings, in the Sunday Telegraph (London) (2-13-05):

IT IS INTERESTING to compare codes of massacre among the nastier participants in the Second World War. Throughout the struggle, the Soviets continued to kill their own people, as well as their enemies, in hundreds of thousands for supposed failures of courage or loyalty. The Germans murdered captive Russians, Poles, Jews and other "sub-humans" in millions, yet treated uniformed Western allied prisoners with relative humanity - only four per cent died.

The Japanese conferred "sub-human" status on all allied prisoners. More than a quarter perished in consequence, 12,000 of them while working on the Burma railway. The survivors suffered experiences matching those of inmates of Hitler's concentration camps.

The Japanese rationalised their behaviour by claiming that they were exacting revenge on behalf of the peoples of Asia for centuries of humiliation at the hands of white imperialist oppressors. To this day, however, they have failed to explain why this policy also required the killing of something like 15 million Chinese and a host of other Asians whom they "liberated", including 100,000 workers on the Burma Railway.

Brian MacArthur has set himself the task of recording the experiences of British and Australian prisoners of the Japanese, while there are still some alive to tell their stories. His book is a labour of love, if such a phrase is not too discordant. MacArthur feels passionately committed to these men, and to preserving the memory of what they endured.

The outcome makes re-lentlessly bleak reading, re-deemed only by the nobility of some of those who survived. There was the legendary Australian surgeon "Weary" Dunlop, who offered himself again and again for Japanese beatings, by his unyielding demands on behalf of his patients, along with other good and brave men, whose humanity deserves our deep respect....

Today, it remains hard not to look warily upon modern Japan, a society in collective denial about its past crimes, even as Western historians publish relentless accounts of our own imperial falls of grace, most far less awful than those of Nippon. Brian MacArthur has made a significant contribution to the literature of the war in the Far East, which is still much less known to us than the matching struggle in Europe.