ABSTRACT
As the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) indicated, the matter of prisoners of war in the Far East was one of its three great failures in World War II and was on a par with Nazi Germany’s concentration camps and prisoners of war on the European eastern front (Siordet 1948; ICRC 1948; Kosuge 1994: 21). Indeed, the Japanese army’s treatment of Allied prisoners was brutal in the extreme. According to the records of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which sat in judgement on Japan’s war responsibility and war crimes, of the 132,134 prisoners of European and North American nationalities 35,756, that is, 27.1 per cent, were believed to have died.1 Compared with the death rate of 4 per cent among those British and North American soldiers captured by the Germans and the Italians over the period of the war, this figure is disproportionately high. Furthermore, when we consider British prisoners alone, opposed to a mortality rate of 5.1 per cent for those held by the German and Italian armies, the figure for those taken prisoner by the Japanese is 24.8 per cent.
