Helpful Score: 3
My father-in-law was in this POW camp. He says that this is a mostly true tale of what happened, only colored a bit by the author's viewpoint. The author was a marine at the embassy, and was told by the Japanese that he was being sent home. He packed all his things, and he was transported to the POW camp, where he was allowed to keep his possessions, including souvenirs he had bought in the Orient.
My father-in-law, Jack, was captured off a sunken Merchant Marine vessel by the Germans and sold to the Japanese as a slave. He arrived in Japan with minor injuries and no boots. He was forced to march for miles on a cut foot without boots, and to make it worse, that foot was on the leg that was shriveled by polio. He had no possessions. He is in one of the pictures. He lost 47 pounds off a thin frame during his time in the camp. Jack told us that the POWs who had possessions were treated better by the guards. They traded their possessions for extra food and clothes. Jack wouldn't talk much about the camp to his family, so we know most of what we know from an interview he did with an oral history project. He said that we couldn't conceive of what he had gone through, so it would be useless to explain.
He told us of being beaten, and he had deep scars on the back of his neck. He said that the guards would threaten to chop off prisoner's heads for amusement. Sometimes they would follow through, and actually do it, laughing. This book tells of the brutality that humans can inflict on one another in the name of glory and other high concepts.
When you read this book, take into account that this is written by one of the prisoners who was treated better than the rest.
An interesting note: this camp was close to the primary target for the second atomic bomb; the target was abandoned because it was obscured by smoke and clouds and they decided that they couldn't get good photographs. They went on to their secondary target, Nagasaki.
My father-in-law, Jack, was captured off a sunken Merchant Marine vessel by the Germans and sold to the Japanese as a slave. He arrived in Japan with minor injuries and no boots. He was forced to march for miles on a cut foot without boots, and to make it worse, that foot was on the leg that was shriveled by polio. He had no possessions. He is in one of the pictures. He lost 47 pounds off a thin frame during his time in the camp. Jack told us that the POWs who had possessions were treated better by the guards. They traded their possessions for extra food and clothes. Jack wouldn't talk much about the camp to his family, so we know most of what we know from an interview he did with an oral history project. He said that we couldn't conceive of what he had gone through, so it would be useless to explain.
He told us of being beaten, and he had deep scars on the back of his neck. He said that the guards would threaten to chop off prisoner's heads for amusement. Sometimes they would follow through, and actually do it, laughing. This book tells of the brutality that humans can inflict on one another in the name of glory and other high concepts.
When you read this book, take into account that this is written by one of the prisoners who was treated better than the rest.
An interesting note: this camp was close to the primary target for the second atomic bomb; the target was abandoned because it was obscured by smoke and clouds and they decided that they couldn't get good photographs. They went on to their secondary target, Nagasaki.
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