POWs, the Japanese and the Geneva Convention

“We’re the battling bastards of Bataan,
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,
… and nobody gives a damn.”

The surrendered soldiers marched for about three weeks under the wary surveillance of cruel Japanese guards. What is now known as the Bataan Death March, originally began as an evacuation of the American and Filipino soldiers. The Japanese officers grossly underestimated the number of surrendered prisoners; they prepared for only 25,000 men when there were actually 100,000. On their 75-mile route, survivors witnessed horrifying acts of cruelty by the Japanese. In the book Ghost Soldiers, survivors of the Bataan Death March tell of the unforgettable events.

If they couldn’t keep up with the rest of the troops, they were often killed without warning.

“Captain Bert Bank witnessed some of the worst of the horrors… He watched in terror as an American lieutenant colonel, whom Bank had been holding up for hours, suddenly slipped from his grasp and dropped from exhaustion, only to be run through with a bayonet.” (Sides 96)

Starving and dying of thirst, the Japanese would sometimes taunt the weak soldiers with food and water. In this particular instance, the guards forced the men to stand at attention right next to a spring of fresh water but would not let them drink.

“Finally one of the men in Abraham’s group could take it no longer. He bolted from the ranks and threw himself on the spring…Abraham watched in full disbelief as the guard unsheathed his sword. With a ‘quick ugly swish’, he brought the blade down and cleanly decapitated the American.” (Sides 85)


At the end of their trek on foot, they were loaded into kiln-like boxcars. The men, by this point, had jungle rot, dengue fever, amebic dysentery, bacillary dysentery, tertian malaria, cerebral malaria, typhus, typhoid, nerve fatigue, vitamin deficiency, dehydration, beriberi or other tropic diseases. You can imagine the stench of hundreds of “unbathed” POWs crammed against each other in the dark heat.

“Their bodies were sour with encrusted sweat, gangrenous wounds, and the suppuration of tropical ulcers. Many of them had dysentery and when they lost control, which was often, they had no option but to defecate where they stood.” (Sides 103)

The few that survived the journey were sent to slowly wither away at Camp O’Donnell, or were later transported to a camp in Cabanatuan. Upon learning that another Japanese-run POW camp in the Philippines had massacred its prisoners, General Walter Krueger assembled a handpicked rescue team to free the 513 survivors in the Cabanatuan camp. Considered World War II’s greatest rescue mission, specially trained Rangers freed the POWs from the hellish camp. Survivors celebrated their freedom and mourned the loss of their comrades and friends.


The stories told by these remarkably brave ex-POWs raised a few issues. The first thing I couldn’t understand was why the Japanese camps were drastically worse than other camps during the war. The death of Allied POWs kept in Italian and German camps were about 4 percent, while Japanese-run camps had an average death rate of 27 percent. Basically, one out of four captives of the Japanese perished. The probable reasons for the atrocious behavior of the Japanese were their cultural beliefs. At this time, most of Japan felt they were racially superior.
More intense was their belief that falling into the hands of the enemy, or surrendering, would bring shame on a soldier and their family. Japanese often committed suicide and pursued kamikaze missions rather than surrender. The ratio of one soldier captured for every 120 deaths. With such a disgust toward their own POWs, how could they be expected to view American POWs with a sense of mercy?


My next question was whether or not American-run camps treated their POWs as horribly. It is recorded that about 95 percent of Japanese POWs survived and returned to Japan. I was unable to find any information about American guards treating the prisoners inhumanely. We had signed the third Geneva Convention in 1929 but Japan never did. The Geneva Convention, in short, lists guidelines that nations should follow during wartime to ensure that “combatants must be clearly distinguished from civilians” and that POWs are treated humanely. Japan had no regard for these rules even while we followed the guidelines when handling Japanese prisoners of war.

Upon learning this, I realized how today we have a similar situation. The Bush administration described the Geneva Convention as “quaint” and insisted that the people held at Guantanamo Bay were “enemy combatants” and didn’t have the right of “habeas corpus”. When the Obama administration closed the detention facility, it was a promise to return America to a “moral high ground”. It’s a tricky issue that Americans still debate. We want to find terrorists and gather as much information as we can. But how many of the detainees are actual terrorists and how many are innocents. Personally, I don’t believe we should mistreat other groups because they aren’t part of the Geneva Convention. It would be shameful to resort to inhumane methods and would only perpetuate cruelty towards prisoners of war.

Of course I don’t believe we have done anything close to what the Japanese did to their POWs, but recognizing what is right or wrong will be imperative if we are to ever restore our good relations with other nations.

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