Recalling life in a Japanese POW camp

[Ma Chi / For China Daily]

The statistics assembled after the war tell a grim story. Less than 3 percent of Allied prisoners held in German-run camps in Europe died. Yet in the Japanese camps, it was a different story. Research after the Allied victory showed that 37.3 percent of Allied prisoners held by the Japanese died in WWII, and that didn't take into account the tens of thousands of local citizens in China, Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines and other occupied nations who were killed as the Japanese tried to implement their vision of a Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

US OSS teams who parachuted into Mukden after the Japanese surrender, found 1,600 prisoners who were gaunt, malnourished and emaciated. The Japanese guards had withheld vital International Red Cross supplies from the men for three and a half years.

One of the VIP prisoners, US General James Wainwright, who was flown directly to the Philippines to meet Allied commander General Douglas MacArthur, was, according to MacArthur, "haggard and aged. He walked with difficulty and with the help of a cane. His eyes were sunken and there were pits in his cheeks. His hair was snow white, and his skin looked like old shoe leather.

"He made a brave effort to smile as I took him in my arms, but his voice wouldn't come. For three years he had imagined himself in disgrace for having surrendered Corregidor," MacArthur wrote in his memoires.

"He believed he would never again be given an active command. This shocked me. 'Why Jim,' I said, 'Your old corps is yours whenever you want it."

The Japanese destroyed many records of the camps before their surrender, so it is difficult to pin down the exact numbers of dead.