Three weeks after Imperial Japanâ (TM)s surrender, five men dressed in baggy khaki uniforms stared at the camera. They and two colleagues were the only survivors out of the 210 Allied airmen which Imperial Japan had imprisoned in â oeparadise.â Joining them were 18 British soldiers, the only survivors of 600 of their countrymen similarly but separately imprisoned. Another 10,000 Allied soldiers and civilians were also imprisoned on the South Pacific island of New Britain. More than half died before liberation. What motivated such inhumane treatment? This bookâ (TM)s quest for an answer traces the genesis of Bushido, Imperial Japanâ (TM)s martial code, and surveys the prisonersâ (TM) recollections of their ordeal as the Battle for Rabaul raged around them from 1942 to March 1944.

Three weeks after Imperial Japan’s surrender, five men dressed in baggy khaki uniforms stared at the camera. They and two colleagues were the only survivors out of the 210 Allied airmen which Imperial Japan had imprisoned in “paradise.” Joining them were 18 British soldiers, the only survivors of 600 of their countrymen similarly but separately imprisoned. Another 10,000 Allied soldiers and civilians were also imprisoned on the South Pacific island of New Britain. More than half died before liberation. What motivated such inhumane treatment? This book’s quest for an answer traces the genesis of Bushido, Imperial Japan’s martial code, and surveys the prisoners’ recollections of their ordeal as the Battle for Rabaul raged around them from 1942 to March 1944.

Many Allied POWs in the Pacific theater of World War II suffered terribly. But abuse wasn't a matter of Japanese policy, as is commonly assumed. Sarah Kovner shows poorly trained guards and rogue commanders inflicted the most horrific damage. Camps close to centers of imperial power tended to be less violent, and many POWs died from friendly fire.

A devastating portrait of the suffering of Japanese-held POWs in the Second World War.

A British officer recounts his harrowing years as a POW in Thailand, including his time as the camp commandant, in this WWII memoir. Colonel Cary Owtram served with the 137th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, and the 11th Indian Infantry Division in Malaysia. After being captured by the Japanese in Singapore, he was transported to the infamous Burma railway. He went on to spend the next three and a half years in grueling captivity in Thailand, first in Ban Pong Camp and then Chungkai Camp—one of the largest POW camps in the region. Owtram was appointed the British Camp Commandant at Chungkai, making him responsible for his fellow prisoners—a heavy responsibility added to the general deprivation and hardship suffered by all. During that time, Owtram kept a secret diary in which he recorded the brutal experience of surviving day to day and attempting to deal with their harsh and unpredictable Japanese captors. It is not only the prisoners who suffered, but also their families at home. The postscript by Owtram’s daughters vividly demonstrates the agonies of doubt and worry that loved ones went through and the effect of the experience on all.

Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period. Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical perspective on the war legacy of Japan.

"Multi-Domain Battle in the Southwest Pacific Theater of World War II" provides a historical account of how US forces used synchronized operations in the air, maritime, information, and land domains to defeat the Japanese Empire. This work offers a historical case that illuminates current thinking about future campaigns in which coordination among all domains will be critical for success.