Treatment of Australian POWs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are very few or no other articles that link to this one.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. After links have been created, remove this message.
This article has been tagged since November 2006.

At the fall of Singapore on the 15th February 1942, about 30 000 Australian soldiers were captured and taken to Japanese Prisoner Of War (POW) camps in Japan. Whilst the Australians were shocked that they had been forced to surrender, they gathered all they could before they were taken away by the Japanese trucks to the many different Japanese POW Camps. 1 At these camps the Australian soldiers were treated harshly. The prisoners were moved all over Japan and Singapore to help construct railways, bridges, runways and aerodromes working long hours in appalling conditions. Some of the many famous constructions were the Burma-Thailand railway and the bridge over the River Kwai. 2 Ultimately, the Australian POWs were beaten starved of food and medical supplies and treated badly. This essay will specifically examine how the Australian POW’s were treated and why the Japanese treated them poorly.

Whilst in the Japanese POW camps the Australian soldiers were physically abused. The Australian soldiers were frequently bashed when the Japanese soldiers thought they were not working hard enough. In these bashings many Australian troops might have their eyes torn out or their teeth and jaws broken. Some men were tortured to get information out of them. This might include having a skewer stuck in your ear and slowly hammered in further and further. The Japanese had many forms of punishment. One of these punishments was to place men who had done the wrong thing in small wooden cages without food and water. They would be left there for days and sometimes weeks. The Japanese would also make a prisoner stand in the sun with a bag of salt on their heads so that the perspiration would drip salt into their wounds. “Men were shot and bayoneted to death if they could not keep up with their party.” 3

The Australian POW’s were also starved of rations and medical supplies. They received one cup of water-rice a day and sometimes a small piece of fish. The soldiers had no cooking or eating utensils and the cooks did not know how to cook the food properly. When the soldiers received the little food that they did, it was often weeks or months too old and was often crawling in weevils and maggots. Although it looked disgusting the men ate it because “it’s going to be my meal ticket home”. 4 Lack of food and water left the soldiers looking emaciated. They suffered from malnutrition, pellagra, beri–beri, diarrhoea and dysentery. As the men were malnourished and starving any physical labour put immense pressure on their bodies and quite often many of them had to be carted away to the hospital because they had passed out. The Japanese also left the Australians without medication, as they believed that the sick were only wasting the supplies. Thus thousands of prisoners died from diseases that could have been prevented or cured. Some of these diseases were tropical ulcers which were just scratches that had become infected and had spread through the tissue to the bone and had to be painfully scraped out to reduce contamination. Others had pus leaking out of their bodies and had to have the pus scraped out. 5

“Of the 30,000 Australian Prisoners of War captured by the Japanese some 8,031 died while in captivity. After the end of the war, War Crimes Trials were held to investigate reports of atrocities, massacres and other causes of death.” 6 Of all the POW camps in World War II, Japans prison camps were by far the worst. In the German prison camps only 4 percent of Australians captured died whereas in Japanese camps 27 percent died. This later rose to 36 percent. 7 The Japanese also sent the Australian troops on “Death Marches”. These were marches through the jungle for sometimes days, carrying bags of rice or salt. The men who were too slow and dropped behind on these marches were shot. In the Sandakan to Ranau death march only six men of whom were all Australian were left out of the originally 500 British and 2000 Australian soldiers. 8

The Australian POWs were treated badly by the Japanese soldiers for many reasons. Firstly, the Japanese believed in the ancient art of Bushido or “way of the warrior”. Bushido taught people that it was dishonorable and disgraceful to surrender and that if you surrendered you would disgrace your family’s name. However, it was believed to be honorable to die for the Emperor. The Japanese would often go as far as killing themselves rather than surrendering. As the Australians had surrendered the Japanese believed that the Australians were dishonorable and thus treated them badly. The Japanese made the Australians work for them as they saw it as a chance for forgiveness. 9 Secondly, the poor treatment was partly because of corporal punishment. In Japan the higher-ranking officers punished the lower officers and so on. Thus the Japanese believed that it would not be wrong to use corporal punishment on the Australian prisoners. 10 Unfortunately for the Australian prisoners, the Japanese had not ratified the Geneva Convention and thus it was not completely illegal for them to treat the Australians so badly.

The Australian POWs were treated atrociously by the Japanese. They were beaten and tortured, receiving broken jaws and teeth and often having their eyes torn out the Australian soldiers suffered severely. They were starved of food and the food that they did receive often had layers of maggots and weevils covering it. Diarrhoea, beriberi, malnutrition and many other diseases were common around the camps due to the Japanese’s failure to provide sufficient rations and medical supplies. Approximately 8031 soldiers died in Japanese POW Camps during WWII. As well as this many of the returned soldiers suffered as they had been mentally scarred from what had happened and what they had seen. They had suffered because of the Japanese’s strong beliefs in Bushido and corporal punishment, which lead the Japanese to believe that the Australians were worthless and deserving of any treatment that they might receive.