ABSTRACT
For Australian prisoners, doctors were also a secure reminder of home and of a relationship that had nothing to do with war. They ‘had expectations derived from civil life about doctors in uniform and those expectations contributed to the formation of different roles for different medical officers. Understandably, the doctors were focused on the very sick patients, while other officers seemed more concerned with preventing the less ill men from becoming sicker—both logical points of view. Australian officers also usually had separate sleeping quarters, a fact not always appreciated by the others. Attitudes to officers understandably soured when starvation became widespread and men saw their officers eating better than they were and doing little or no manual work. Although Allied officers and non-commissioned officers were technically not required to work for a captor nation under the 1929 Geneva Convention, the decision as to whether or not to honour the Convention was often made at the whim of individual Japanese officers.
