ABSTRACT
On the 7 December 1941, Japan commenced hostilities against British and American Pacific regional strongholds, with twin strikes at Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong. Within a period of less than six months Japan held the entire region. In total, more than three million square miles of South-East Asia and almost all of the Western Pacific. With this military success came around 320,000 Allied prisoners of war (Daws 2008: 96; Waterford 1994: 31, 182). This number included around 22,000 prisoners from Australia and another 22,000 from the USA (Beaumont 2001: 344). For most of the Allied prisoners of the Japanese, captivity lasted from early 1942 until the end of the war in 1945. The Americans were mostly captured in the Philippines, while the British and Australians were mostly captured in the regions around Singapore, including various territories in modern day Malaysia and Indonesia, which were then British and Dutch colonies. Allied POWs were transported around the Asia-Pacific to be used as labour in support of Japan’s war effort. By the end of the war, POWs were located in camps all the way from Papua New Guinea in the south to Manchuria in the north, with around 36,000 having been held in Japan itself. Around 3,500 of those prisoners died in Japan, and a further 11,000 died on the way to Japan, mostly due to torpedo attacks on transport ships.
