There are two reasons why a new book on the Japanese acts against World War II prisoners in Thailand involved on the construction of the Burma Railway might not be welcome. The first is that this conflict ended 60 years ago, and to open old wounds is undesirable. And the second is that the crimes of the defeated have from time immemor-ial received more publicity than those of the victors. For both these reasons it's not in the best of taste to add fuel to a fire that exists increasingly only in the historical record.
Against this view, Brian MacArthur, a veteran journalist from London's Times newspaper, argues that the gradual demise of the prisoners involved requires that their testimony be gleaned and recorded one last time.
This task Surviving the Sword efficiently attempts. Even so, any such account is likely to revive anti-Japanese sentiment -- in its war-time form probably a contributory factor in the shameless fire-bombing of Japan's cities in the later months of the war, and finally the two atomic bombs, all targeting civilians virtually exclusively.
MacArthur nevertheless points out that the statistics for the prisoners of war held by the Japanese are particularly ugly. Official records show that 132,142 Allied (British, American, Dutch and Australian) prisoners were taken in Asia by Japanese forces. Of these, some 64,000 were sent to work on the Burma-Thailand railway, a fifth of whom died there. And 27 percent of all Japan's prisoners died in captivity, compared to 4 percent of prisoners held by the Germans.
Bad as these statistics are, there were other cases, albeit unproven, of mass ill-treatment of prisoners that have received rather less publicity. Most controversial is the question of the number of German prisoners who died in Allied hands in Western Europe after May 1945. This is still the subject of a highly acrimonious dispute. At worst is an image of men held in fields surrounded by barbed-wire, with minimal rations, for up to a year and a half, with very many deaths resulting, as alleged by James Bacque in his controversial book Other Losses (Stoddart, 1989). Bacque estimates 1 million died in these conditions, though this figure has been very strenuously contested.
Any Briton will be familiar with tales of cruelties committed against Western POWs between 1942 and 1945 on the banks of the River Kwai. My own instinct is to try and see things from the other side as well. One book in particular has proved useful in this regard. Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II, edited by Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (Berg, 1996) is an even-handed collection of academic essays by different authors that treats Italians held in the UK, Britons held in Germany, Africans held by assorted captors, and so on. It contains both a chapter on Japan's work-camps in Thailand that looks at the individual Japanese (plus the Korean and, yes, Taiwanese guards they employed) and one written by a Japanese academic on his compatriots' attitudes to war-prisoners in history. Both shed a very different light on the matter than MacArthur's otherwise conscientious collection.
All the facts, however, proclaim that in war everyone suffers and almost everyone is guilty of something or other. Many Americans being carried in Japanese ships, for example, were killed when their own aircraft attacked these vessels, as happened when the Avisan Maru was sunk. How are we to compare these actions and categories of suffering, to establish a pecking-order of inhumanity?
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