SURVIVING THE SWORD: Prisoners of the Japanese 1942-45
By Brian MacArthur
Little, Brown, £20; 495pp
ISBN 0 316 86142 1
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For most people in Britain in 1939-45 the war meant the war against Germany and Italy. That is understandable: German bombs fell on our cities. It was the war in the air, in the Atlantic, in the Western Desert, then in Italy and France that mattered. The war in the Far East scarcely impinged on the consciousness of the nation. Everyone knew of Monty’s Eighth Army: the 14th Army which, under the command of General Slim drove the Japanese out of Burma, knew itself to be the “forgotten army”.
There were exceptions to this indifference and ignorance: those whose fathers, sons, husbands or brothers were held prisoner by the Japanese. But, while the war mattered intensely to them, they knew nothing of the conditions in which their loved ones were held. Brian MacArthur quotes a letter from a mother (sent in May 1943 and delivered in November 1944) who wrote: “Everyone asks after you and comforts me by saying that the Japanese are behaving well to their prisoners, having come to realise that we are doing the same.” Just as well for her peace of mind that she didn’t know the truth. At least 27 per cent of Japan’s PoWs died in captivity, compared with 4 per cent of Germany’s.
Even after the war the near-silence was maintained. At a time when it seemed that every second or third film celebrated British wartime heroism, often in a German PoW camp, there were no films about the captives of the Japanese; the reality was too terrible. MacArthur writes that there is “only one memorable film about the war in the Far East — The Bridge on the River Kwai — and its central theme . . . is fiction, not fact”.
One reason for the silence is that the circumstances in which so many had been prisoner were shameful. The Fall of Singapore was the blackest day in the history of the British Empire, a defeat comparable to that which the French suffered in 1940. The other reason is that few of Japan’s PoWs spoke of their experiences. They couldn’t, at least not for many years. It was impossible for them to believe that others could understand what they had endured. It was only in old age that my father, taken prisoner at Singapore, told us anything about what he had undergone. Like most of his comrades he could not forgive the Japanese for their cruelty and indifference to suffering.
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MacArthur does justice to these men. He lays bare the horrors, so awful that, reading of them, one is amazed that there were any survivors. But he also pays tribute to the courage the vast majority showed in their determination not to die, and especially to the work of their doctors and medical staff, improvising ways of carrying out operations in appalling conditions. Excerpts from the diaries that some of them managed to keep make you realise that the Japanese camps, like the Nazi death camps, were all that we have imagined of Hell translated to the surface of the Earth and made reality. There are pages of this book that will bring tears to your eyes, tears evoked by horror, pity and often admiration.
I have only one criticism. MacArthur accepts, apparently unquestioningly, the idea promoted by Laurens van der Post, himself taken prisoner in Java, that, since the Japanese code of Bushido taught that it was shameful to surrender rather than die in battle, this, to their mind, justified their brutality towards their prisoners. “The Japanese,” MacArthur writes, “would take their own lives in hundreds of thousands rather than endure the disgrace of falling into enemy hands.” This is bunkum. In August 1945 they surrendered in their hundreds of thousands just as completely as the British had done at Singapore. Many behaved obsequiously; they even started bowing to the walking skeletons they had held captive and so abominably maltreated.