Prisoners of Japan

By the late spring of 1942, advancing Japanese forces had overrun most of the western Pacific and Southeast Asia and in the process cap tured about a third of a million Allied prisoners. Approximately half of these were American, British, Dutch, Australian, and Canadian military personnel; the rest were Asian troops serving in colonial armies: Filipinos, Indians, Indonesians, and Malayans. Thousands of the latter died or were killed shortly after their capture, many were impressed as forced labor, and most of the rest were released. The Western prisoners, however, were doomed to suffer more than three years of brutal captivity in what Gavan Daws aptly describes as "a charnel house of atrocities" (p. 363). Japan's savage treatment of its World War II prisoners contrasted starkly with its behavior in earlier conflicts. At the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese army issued detailed regulations stipulating the humane treatment of captured enemy personnel. These precise instructions closely followed the relevant provisions of the 1899 Hague Convention on the laws and customs of land warfare, and Rus sian prisoners were treated accordingly. Japan then signed and rati fied the 1907 Hague Convention, and its humane treatment of German POWs in World War I mirrored the earlier example. A decade later, the Japanese government signed but failed to ratify the much more detailed 1929 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. During World War II, nevertheless, Japan was still legally bound by the Hague Con