UNESCO and Japan’s Rewriting of History

At UNESCO, Japan lays bare the difficulties of achieving shared values within the Quad.

By Mindy L. Kotler

Originally published in The Diplomat, July 23, 2021
This version is slightly revised for clarity

On July 22nd, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, comprising the United States, India, Japan, and Australia, faced its first test. Unexpectedly, it came at the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. The focus was on Japan, not China, and the result reveals how fragile the idea of shared, universal values is for this multilateral coalition. As things stand, Japan is a willful outlier.

At the World Heritage Committee’s 44th virtual session, there was a review of several previously designated Japanese World Industrial Heritage sites that were the scene of war crimes in World War II. Americans, Australians, and Indians were among the thousands of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) brought to Japan during the war. They became slave laborers in various private mines, chemical factories, and steel mills, and on docks critical to support Imperial Japan’s war effort.

These very mines, foundries, and wharves were selected by Japan to represent its “Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining.” The Japanese, however, left out any mention of this forced labor and abuse, which was the substance of the hundreds of war crimes trials throughout the postwar Pacific.

UNESCO approved the designations in 2015 but conditioned the designations on a promise to provide a “full history” of these sites. Yet, six years later, Japan has not fulfilled this promise. Japan’s forced colonial workers from Korea are given slight mention, although Japan refuses to admit they were unwilling or unhappy. The POWs, which included soldiers, civilians, and mariners from Ireland, Egypt, Norway, Argentina, Jamaica, Portugal, Italy, and Arabia are unmentioned in any official publications, whether at the particular sites or at the Tokyo Industrial Heritage Information Center, which was opened in March 2020.

On July 12, 2021, a UNESCO draft decision noted that Japan still had to improve its interpretive strategy. The reprimand of Japan’s unwillingness to tell the “full history” of these properties was approved July 22. The Committee believes measures are still necessary to “allow an understanding of a large number of Koreans and others” who were forced or slave laborers. 

Unfortunately, UNESCO identifies POWs only as “others. This euphemism affirms Japan’s effort to censor its war crimes and rewrite the history of World War II. UNESCO members Australia, the United Kingdom, India, Norway, and the Netherlands need to insist that “others” means their veterans.

To satisfy UNESCO’s directive to include “others,” it is implied that Japan must acknowledge that five of the UNESCO industrial heritage sites — Hagi, Kamaishi, Miike, Nagasaki, and Yawata — held 26 POW camps during the war and provided more than 13,000 POW slave laborers from over 16 countries to Japan’s industrial giants, including Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Nippon Steel.

The Miike Coal Mine (Fukuoka #17) warrants particular attention. The mine, owned by the Mitsui conglomerate, was Japan’s largest. Nearly 2,000 Allied POWs suffered capricious brutality and starvation in deadly and primitive conditions. Hundreds died. American POWs were so desperate for a respite from the coal pits that they traded their meager rice bowls for someone to break their arms or legs.

Kamaishi’s industrial area (Sendai #4B and Sendai #5B) is also illustrative of missing war history. The site was the first to be bombed by U.S. Navy warships off Japan’s unguarded coastline. The iron works at this site, still owned by Nippon Steel, were among Japan’s largest. On July 14, 1945, more than 40 American, Dutch, New Zealand, and British POWs as well as hundreds of Japanese were killed in the bombardment.

Nippon Steel’s Yawata’s steel works (Fukuoka #3) was Japan’s most important armament manufacturer. The workforce was primarily composed of POWs who endured intense manual labor shoveling iron ore and tending the furnaces. Yawata was the primary target for the second atomic bomb. Cloud cover from aerial bombing on August 8, 1945, shifted the mission to Nagasaki, close to the Miike Coal Mine.

Japan’s unstated history of Allied slave labor at its UNESCO sites is part of a larger trend of the government’s rewriting history. The narratives presented at Japan’s industrial heritage sites also diminish the use of Korean forced labor and Chinese slave labor. This all dovetails with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s quest to retell Japan’s story in an uncritical, more glorious manner. So important was the UNESCO heritage designation to the former Abe administration that one cabinet adviser had the sole job of shepherding the application through UNESCO.

Highlighting the effort to annul history was last August’s 75th anniversary memorial address for the end of World War II. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, unlike his predecessors, did not mention, “learning from history” or having “remorse.” Instead, he said “we will never forget that the peace and prosperity we enjoy today was built atop the precious sacrifices of the war dead.”

This ahistorical take on Japan’s disastrous war is not a reassurance to UNESCO that Japan will correct the histories of its industrial heritage sites. Nor does it comfort the Quad allies that their shared history will not be recognized and reflected upon. Upholding historical facts is a value of democracy now being undermined by Japan as rapidly as in authoritarian China or Hungary. Japan’s defiance of UNESCO’s recommendations to explain the “full history” of its cultural properties shows how fragile the Quad’s so-called unifying principles are.

Mindy L. Kotler is director and founder of Asia Policy Point, a Washington think tank focused on Northeast Asia. She is also an adviser to the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society that represents the American POWs of Japan and their families.

Australian, British, Dutch and U.S. POWs: Living under the shadow of the Nagasaki Bomb

First appeared in the The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue. 32, No. 5, August 10, 2015

Australian POWs and the Nagasaki A-Bombing

by Michael Broderick, Associate Professor of Media Analysis, Murdoch University

David Palmer’s timely opinion piece in The Melbourne Age on 6 August 2015 draws attention to the little remembered history of scores of Australian and other allied POWs who were held as slave labourers in Japanese war industries in Nagasaki before and at the time of the atom bombing. Aspects of this neglected history also form a major component of my recent multi-screen, hyper-visualisation exhibition “Fading Lights: Australian POW and BCOF Troops in Japan 1945-52” (fadinglights.com.au), co-curated with Stuart Bender (Curtin University).

In 1983 Former Australian POW and author Hugh V. Clarke returned to the Fukuoka Camp No.2, a site now occupied by the Koyagi Junior High School adjacent to the former Kawanami Brothers Shipbuilding Company. 

Palmer’s efforts to have Australian soldier and Nagasaki POW, Private Alan Chick, officially recognized by the Japanese government as hibakusha, is especially commendable given that the award and medical entitlement occurred shortly before the former serviceman died last year. However, there was another Australian POW granted this status more than thirty years before.

At the time of the Nagasaki bombing Sergeant Peter McGrath-Kerr (2/40 Battalion) was also in Fukuoka Camp No 14 opposite the Mitsubishi steel foundry where he labored, alongside scores of other POWs. 1 Earlier that morning he and six comrades had toiled outdoors to repair a bridge over the Mifune Canal that had been destroyed in an air raid only eight days earlier (1 August). They had been sent back to the compound at around 10am for a rest break. McGrath-Kerr recalls that he was on his bunk reading a book when everyone began to bolt towards the air raid shelters.2 He awoke five days later, lying on a stretcher and saw that everything in sight was flattened. He had amnesia, five broken ribs and various cuts and bruises on his hands and legs.

Sergeant Peter McGrath-Kerr of 2/40th Battalion, who was taken prisoner by the Japanese and held in Java until May 1944. Sgt McGrath-Kerr was one of several hundred Australian, British and American POWs aboard the Tamahoko Maru en route to Japan when the ship was torpedoed and sunk by the US submarine Tang on 24 June 1944. One of only 212 survivors, he was transferred to the Fukuoka No. 12 POW camp in central Nagasaki. [This camp is NOT in central Nagasaki. We believe this is a typo and that it should read Fukuoka #14-B.]

McGrath-Kerr, like Private Chick, was one of 24 Australian POWs at Camp No. 14 only 1.7 kms from the nuclear detonation. All miraculously survived. Had they been exposed outside directly in the line-of-sight of the explosion each would have likely perished. Others were not so lucky. At least four POWs were killed and around 30 seriously injured, mostly Dutch.3 A few others died as a result of their exposure in the following weeks. War-time correspondent Denis Warner in a 1995 op ed for the International Herald Tribune (reprinted in the New York Times) recalls speaking with McGrath-Kerr in a Manila hospital shortly after his transfer from Nagasaki. Warner found McGrath-Kerr “emaciated and weak”, still suffering from his broken ribs and “radiation burns on one hand”.

Another injured Australian soldier in the hospital, Sergeant Jack Johnson, also spoke with Warner. Johnson had been between two of the camp buildings when the bomb struck. Looking for fellow survivors amidst the smoke and debris he saw a pair of boots jutting out from under the rubble. It was the unconscious McGrath-Kerr. With fires igniting all round, Johnson worked hard to extract his compatriot and left him in the care of Dutch orderlies. In 1980 McGrath-Kerr returned to Japan as a guest of the City of Nagasaki where he was entitled to free medical treatment and officially recognized as an atom bomb victim (hibakusha).4

Video testimony of five Australian POWs, including Chick, is on display at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. McGrath-Kerr’s testimony can be heard on the Australian War Memorial website.5

Remarkably, Private Chick, who survived both the harsh labor at Camp No. 14 and the Nagasaki atom bombing, returned to Japan only a few months after his liberation to be part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF). In 1948 he visited his former, now destroyed POW Camp and the Mitsubishi Foundry, and posed in uniform amongst former workers. He then served in the Korean War in the early 1950s.


Private Chick (crouching) with some of his former workers at the Mitsubishi foundry in Nagasaki, photographed while on BCOF duties. [AWM P00208.003 photo: Alan Chick]

Like many of his generation, including amongst his POW peers, Chick maintained in his 1995 video testimony displayed at the Nagasaki museum that the atom bombs were necessary and entirely justifiable:

Well I’m all in favour of it, myself. As far as I’m concerned, it saved several million lives. I think that’s a very good argument in favour of it. I think, since the advent of the Bomb, we’ve had no more world wars. Like, before the Bomb, they had two world wars in twenty-five years. And now its fifty years [1995] and there’s been no world war. I consider it to have been a good thing, actually.

While not considered hibakusha, two other Australian POWs witnessed the Nagasaki explosion. On Koyagi Island, south of Nagasaki harbor, the POW camp (Fukuoka No.2) was adjacent to the Kawanami Brothers shipworks. In late-June 1945, most of the Australians were sent north of Nagasaki to work in the coal mine at Nakama, but two Australian soldiers, Bob Watkins and Joe Flynn remained due to illness.6 Both saw the “great flash […] a feeling of heat, huge noise of explosion, followed soon by a great rush of air, dust rose knee height caused by […] shock of concussion transmitted through the ground”.7

Watkins recalls looking up from ten kilometers away towards the mouth of Nagasaki harbor: “I was amazed to see this huge column of smoke and flame rising skywards forming into a distinct mushroom shape as it went”.8

These accounts and the Nagasaki POW history remain little appreciated or recognized today. Similarly, the seven-year Australian BCOF presence (chiefly in the Hiroshima Prefecture) where more than 16,000 Australian troops rotated through Japan after the war, some bringing wives and families, is under-represented in military annals, especially in this centenary year of ANZAC commemorations.

Recent developments during the course of our research into and production of the Fading Lights exhibition were fortuitous. We learned during pre-production that a Nagasaki City Councilor, Mr Toyoichi Ihara (himself a hibakusha) was spearheading efforts by the local community to recognize the former POW camp on Koyagi. Mr Ihara, along with teachers, parents and students of the Junior High School that now occupies the site of the former POW Camp grounds, plan to erect a monument to the 73 soldiers, including 6 Australians, who died at the Camp during the war.9

In April this year we sought permission to film inside the Nagasaki Mitsubishi plant, rebuilt after the atom bombing, on the location where Chick and 23 other Australian POWs survived the nuclear blast. Mr Ihara had informed us that there was a small commemorative plaque inside the plant attesting to the history of the POW workers. Unfortunately, we were denied entry to record at the factory for our exhibition.

However, a few months later in late July, news reports emerged that Mitsubishi was formally beginning the process of apologizing to POWs who were forced to work in their Nagasaki factories. 10 

A surviving American prisoner of war, 94 year-old James Murphy, flew to Japan to accept the Mitsubishi apology*, describing what he endured as “slavery in every way”. A few days later, Mitsubishi’s spokesman Okamoto Yukio announced to the media “If there is such an opportunity, we will do the same apology” to other allied POWs including British, Dutch and Australian. Okamoto publicly admitted that his company was “one of those [that] tortured POWs most, so we have to apologize”.11

*NB: Mr. Murphy did not go to Japan. He accepted the apology in Los Angeles at the Museum of Tolerance. Mr. Murphy worked in a Mitsubishi Mining copper mine that is now owned by Mitsubishi Materials. The apology was from Mitsubishi Materials and only for POWs who worked at their mines. The Kawanami Brothers Shipbuilding Company was not part of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries until the 1960s. Mitsubishi Heavy has not yet apologized.

Nagasaki POWs: living under the shadow of the bomb
by Dr. David Palmer, visiting associate in history at the the University of Melbourne.

On August 6, 1945, 70 years ago, the world's first nuclear war began with the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. It unleashed the ongoing threat of annihilation under which the world still cowers.

Twenty-four Australian prisoners of war survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Private Alan Chick, of St Helens, Tasmania, was one of them. But on that day when an American bomber dropped the last atomic bomb in the first nuclear war, it didn't matter if you were Japanese or Australian, if you were a child, a Japanese general, or an Allied POW. Everyone within range of the bomb became a victim. More than 74,000 people died out of a population of 263,000, but some miraculously survived.

Chick and his battalion had been captured by the Japanese in Timor. He was eventually put on a ship bound for Japan, but a US submarine attacked this ship, sinking it along with hundreds of POWs. Chick survived with a few others and was picked up by a Japanese fishing boat off the Kyushu coast. He was taken to Nagasaki's Fukuoka POW Camp 14 and put to work at a Mitsubishi steel foundry [NO, he worked for Kawanami Brothers Shipbuilding Company that was not yet part of Mitsubishi]. His camp was less than two kilometres from the atomic bomb hypocentre on August 9. Knocked unconscious, he awoke to a world of complete black. When the smoke cleared he saw destruction, fires, and death everywhere. He had somehow survived again. 

To make the atomic bombings into solely a national tragedy without reference to non-Japanese who also suffered is a grave error. The bombings were an international tragedy.

By 1944, hundreds of British, Dutch, Australian and American POWs worked as slave labourers in Mitsubishi's massive shipbuilding complex in Nagasaki. Mitsubishi's workforce also included thousands of Korean labourers taken by force from their homeland, who worked under armed guard at the shipyard, its many factories around the city, and in the company's two coal mines on islands just off the coast.

This month, three of these Nagasaki sites – the shipyard (still operating) and the coal mines (closed decades ago) – were approved by UNESCO for World Heritage listing. The listing of the shipyard and mines required extensive negotiations between Japan and South Korea on the Korean forced-labour issue, and agreement on a compromise historical wording was finally reached. Mitsubishi also publicly apologised for its use of POW labour at its many mine sites, but has yet to apologise to those POWs at other sites, including the Nagasaki shipbuilding complex.

Atomic bomb victims, known in Japan as hibakusha, have been eligible for full healthcare and living expenses paid by the Japanese government, but Koreans who returned to their homeland after World War II were refused these benefits. Japanese and Korean peace activists and atomic bomb survivors started a movement decades ago to change this injustice, which has led to many successful court cases in Japan.

In the last few years, Japanese researchers at the Nagasaki Overseas Hibakusha Network, led by Nobuto Hirano, have extended their hibakusha recognition movement to Allied POWs. Like the Korean hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who also were forced labourers in Mitsubishi industries, Allied POWs were double victims: first as foreign forced labourers, and then as atomic bomb survivors. POWs were a substantial part of the labour force in Japan's war production and coal mining from late 1944 until the surrender. Within Japan there were 130 POW camps holding more than 32,000 POWs. Of these about 3500 died in those camps and a further 11,000 died en route to Japan when ships carrying them were sunk by Allied submarines and planes.


The Nagasaki blast.

There were 884 Allied POWs in the Nagasaki city region in two main POW camps: Koyagi Branch Camp (Fukuoka 2-B), on Koyagi Island in Nagasaki Harbour; and Nagasaki Mitsubishi Dockyard Branch Camp (Fukuoka 14-B) based in Saiwamachi (Urakami District). The Mitsubishi camp held 315 POWs. Of these, 113 died in the camp before the atomic bombing and seven died from the atomic bomb. Of the 195 POWs who survived at the end of the war, 152 were Dutch, 24 were Australian, and 19 were British. Alan Chick was held in Fukuoka Camp 14-B, next to Mitsubishi's steel foundry.

The researcher, Hirano, contacted me through Hideto Kimura, a Nagasaki colleague I've known for many years, to locate former Australian POWs who survived the bombing. A few years earlier, Kimura and I had seen a video interview with Alan Chick at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, taped in the 1980s. I found online documents in the Australian War Memorial Archives and National Archives of Australia detailing 24 repatriated Australian POWs who were in Nagasaki. Craig Collie, author of Nagasaki: The Massacre of the Innocent and Unknowing, had interviewed Chick in Heyfield, Victoria, which indicated where he might still be living.

I contacted the Returned and Services League in Heyfield and spoke with local RSL representative Sue Artso. She had been visiting Chick and his Japanese wife Anita (originally Hiroko) regularly in Heyfield's aged-care home. When we made the trip to Heyfield, we interviewed Chick over three days.

I completed the necessary Japanese government forms in English for him so he could get atomic bomb survivor recognition and benefits. I then submitted these to the Japanese consulate in Melbourne, which forwarded them to Tokyo for review. Within weeks, two officials from Nagasaki City delivered his benefits book directly to him – in Heyfield. Without the initiative of Nagasaki peace activists and researchers, Chick would never have received this recognition. Chick was the only Australian POW of the surviving 24 incarcerated at Fukuoka Camp 14-B to ever receive the certificate from the Japanese government. Chick died in 2014, only a year after receiving the certificate, but receiving the survivor book and benefits was a final recognition of his status as an atomic bomb survivor and a former Australian POW who was in Nagasaki.

Chick supported the atomic bombing of Nagasaki because he believed it ended the war. But many historians now argue that the bombs were not the major factor behind the surrender because Japan's industrial capacity had collapsed by mid-1945. The country had no access to raw materials, owing to Allied blockades. Finally, the invasion of Manchuria by the Soviet Red Army, the same day as the Nagasaki bombing, destroyed the fighting capacity of Japan's Kwangtung Army, ending the power of the Japanese military.

Whatever position one takes, the legacy of the atomic bombings continues – through the many diseases of survivors from radiation exposure, the genetic impact on the second generation, and the far greater danger of nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the ones used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The world also needs to understand that the victims of the atomic bombings were not only Japanese. In his Nagasaki address last year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated: "We who experienced the agony of atomic bombings not once but twice have ... raised ourselves to our feet once more, rebuilding our homeland and restoring Nagasaki as a beautiful city."

To make the atomic bombings into solely a national tragedy without reference to non-Japanese who also suffered is a grave error. The bombings were an international tragedy, and the victims included Koreans and Allied POWs. Chick survived, and his survival is testament to the international character of the victims.


1. Peter McGrath-Kerr, quoted in Hugh V. Clarke, 1984, Last Stop Nagaskai! Sydney, Allen & Unwin, p. 96. Denis Warner. 1995. ‘These Men Lived On to Tell a Ghastly Tale’. New York Times. 9 August.

.2 Peter McGrath-Kerr, quoted in Hugh V. Clarke, 1984, Last Stop Nagaski! Sydney, Allen & Unwin, p. 96. Denis Warner. 1995. ‘These Men Lived On to Tell a Ghastly Tale’. New York Times. 9 August.

3. Edlington, David. 1995. “An incandescent flash of death”, The Canberra Times, 27 July, p. 11 .

4. Clarke, Last Stop Nagaskai! p. 130. See also “Free medicine for POWs”, The Canberra Times, 14 August 1980, p. 7.

5.“Peter McGrath-Kerr as a sergeant 2/40th Australian Infantry Battalion and a prisoner of the Japanese, 1940-1945, interviewed by Tim Bowden”

6. Clarke, Last Stop Nagaskai!, pp. 105-109.

7. Clarke, Last Stop Nagaskai!, pp. 106.

8. Ibid.

9. Okada Gen, 2014, “Nagasaki residents seek to remember POWs who died in local camp”, Asahi Shimbun, 29 January

10. BBC News online, 2015 “Japan's Mitsubishi makes prisoners of war apology”

11. Associated Press, 2015, “Mitsubishi to apologise to POWs”, 22 July

Singapore Botanic Gardens

click for more photos of steps built by Australian POWs

On July 4, 2015, Singapore's Botanic Gardens became an UNESCO World Heritage Site. Established since 1859, the 74-hectare Singapore Botanic Gardens is thrice the age of the Singapore nation-state. It joins the ranks of picturesque, historically valuable sites around the world such as Italy’s Cinque Terre, the UK's Kew Gardens, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and the Great Wall of China.

For this blog, its wartime history is what is fascinating. This history was included, unlike in Japan's UNESCO application, in Singapore's description of the site and its application.

Biography

On February 15, 1942 Singapore fell to Imperial Japanese forces. Within a few days of the Japanese occupation, Professor Hidezo Tanakadate of Tohoku University assumed control of the Gardens and Museums, and asked some of the senior staff who were not in uniform to resume their work in the Gardens. Other staff members were not as fortunate, and were sent to work on the Siam-Burma Railway, where many lost their lives.

The Japanese kept the Gardens as a center of research activity. This was made possible because the Gardens and Japanese staff shared a common goal and belief in preserving the cultural and scientific heritage of Singapore. Their motives were different, but both placed science above animosity. The result was preservation of the Gardens and its invaluable research properties.

Kwan Koriba, Botany Professor from the Imperial University of Kyoto, became Director in December 1942. With a background in the relations between plant behavior and climate, Koriba immersed himself in research on the growth habits of selected Malayan trees using both the Garden’s Rain Forest and the Nature Reserves and produced a scientific paper entitled “Periodicity of Tree-growth in the Tropics”.

During the war, a set of brick steps down to the Plant House were built by Australian POWs. In August 1995, upon the 50th anniversary of the cessation of hostilities, a group of veteran POWs from Australia came to the Gardens to examine the steps they had built with bricks marked with arrows. The POWs had made bricks at a brickworks in Changi Prison.

Marks of defiance 

As an act of rebellion against their Japanese captors, the POWs carved arrows into the bricks to show that the staircases belonged to the state instead of the soldiers. The bricks were state property, they were not.

The Japanese were likely not aware of the meaning of the arrows, and if discovered, the prisoners would probably have been punished severely. Today, the arrows serve as a reminder of their bravery at a time of great hardship.

Tom Uren an Australian hero: In Memoriam

Tom Uren, a man of letters: POW, MP, AC

January 27, 2015

''I'VE been hit with open hands, closed fists, pieces of wood, iron bars and bamboo about two inches in diameter,'' Tom Uren says.

He was hardly more than a boy then- a prisoner-of-war and slave of the Japanese in his early 20s on the Burma-Thai railway.

But Tom Uren would take many more hits as his long, often controversial life wore on, and he rolled with them all and refused to lie down.

Today, aged 91, with most of his opponents fallen away - and a lot of them forgiven by him, including the Japanese - he will receive the highest honour his nation can bestow on a civilian: Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia.

Others to be so honoured today include former Howard government foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer, astrophysicist and joint Nobel prize winner Professor Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory, and the director of the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture in Canberra, the Reverend Professor James Mitchell Haire.

Australia mourns the passing of the Honourable Tom Uren AC. He was a prisoner of war, a parliamentarian, a minister, a deputy leader of his party and served our country throughout his adult life.He was an aspiring boxer and outstanding athlete who joined the army at the age of 20 and deployed to Timor.He spent his 21st birthday – and the following three – as a prisoner of war. He suffered the brutality of the Burma-Thai Railway and he witnessed from afar the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.Despite these experiences, he rejected hatred. -- Prime Minister Tony Abbott

Mr Uren's award states it is for ''eminent service to the community, particularly through contributions to the welfare of veterans, improved medical education in Vietnam and the preservation of sites of heritage and environmental significance".

All true, but it's an inadequate summation of the life of the Balmain-born man who, impoverished, left school at 13 years and seven months.

He fought for the heavyweight boxing championship of Australia at 19 (and lost), marched into the hell of the Burma-Thai railway at 21, served the Labor Party as member for the Sydney electorate of Reid for 32 years, became his party's deputy leader and a cabinet minister in the Whitlam government and later found himself consigned to the junior ministry for four years in the Hawke government.

As a whip-thin prisoner shipped from Thailand to Japan to labour in a copper smelter, he watched the sky discolour when the Fat Man atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. [He was at Omuta, Fukuoka 17 as a slave laborer for Mitsui Mining.]

It stopped the war and freed him, but he became one of Australia's leading anti-nuclear campaigners. The Japanese, he insists, were as much victims of militarism and fascism as anyone else.

Long a man of the Left, Mr Uren's early excursions into the peace movement were so passionate that ASIO believed he was taking his instructions from the Soviets. When newspapers published the libel, he sued and eventually won enough for two holiday homes, which he took delight in calling the ''Fairfax Retreat '' in the bush and the ''Packer Lodge'' on the New South Wales south coast.

His insistence in marching against the Vietnam War earned him several stretches in jails, including Sydney's Long Bay and Brisbane's Boggo Road. Mr Uren was appalled by the dehumanising effect of the old jails, and used his influence to get at least one of his fellow prisoners a job in Canberra.

''So many people are crook on their fellows, but I just look for the love in people,'' he says.

Often Mr Uren found himself talking, he says ''to two-and-a-half dogs". He was one of the early proponents of self-determination for the East Timorese, but no one seemed interested. He simply kept at it until it became mainstream.

The defining period of his life was the Burma-Thai railway. Taken prisoner on Timor aged 20, he marched into his first prison camp on the railway aged 21.

Always a big, strong man, he became known for his willingness to put his body between furious Japanese guards and his comrades, figuring he could take the beating that might kill a mate weakened by hunger, disease and slaving.

It was the influence of the camp commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward ''Weary'' Dunlop, that stayed with him. Colonel Dunlop, a surgeon, taxed fellow officers to build a small bank to buy medical supplies and food, saving the lives of many hundreds of men, and he ensured that the strong looked after the weak, the young looked after the old and the relatively healthy cared for the sick.

It was, Mr Uren says, collectivism - a principle he adopted for life and which during the Cold War found him branded a communist, though he never was.

He never forgot his fellow POW survivors, and fought a battle over 23 years to grant them extra benefits, arguing that they died younger and suffered greater illness than other returned servicemen. In 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that all remaining POWs would receive an extra $500 a fortnight.

Of the 22,000 Australian prisoners of the Japanese, only some 400 are alive now, but Mr Uren said Ms Gillard's action displayed compassion and justice, which he valued above all else.

And his elevation to Companion of the Order of Australia?


''I just want to thank my fellow Australians for their support, their warmth and their love in my evergreen years,'' he says.

Reprinted from The Sydney Morning Herald by Tony Wright

In my father’s footsteps on the death railway

click to order

Although many memoirs and histories have been written of the POW of Japan experience, few have been consider "literature." The books have not transcended from being a simple record of events to the art of telling a universal cultural tale. This has been in part because few of the stories told have been written with the skill or grace of an Anne Frank or an Elie Wiesel. Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken seems to have begun to fill this void. Hopefully, the related movie to be released this Christmas will provide more art to embed it into the national imagination.

Last month, Richard Flanagan the son of an Australian POW who slaved on the Thai-Burma Death railway was awarded prestigious Man Booker Prize for English Fiction for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It is a fictionalized account of the building of the Thai-Burma Death railway and living as its survivor.

Unlike Unbroken, it is not about virtue. The book’s hero, a doctor, and one assumes Flanagan too, is not romantic about war. He doesn’t believe that suffering is a kind of grace that lends virtue to the sufferers. Indeed, Evans “hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves.” Virtue, he believed, was just “vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.” This book is the next step in embedding the POW story into our national culture.

After slaving on the Burma-Thai Death Railroad, Flanagan's father was shipped to Japan to slave in a coal near Hiroshima on the In-land Sea, Hiroshima #9-B, the Ohama Mine in Onoda. The third book of Australian Ray Parkin's Wartime Trilogy novel of his experience as POW of Japan, The Sword and the Blossom, is an account of moving from the Death Railroad to this mine.

For an excellent analysis of the Flanagan novel, see Ian Buruma in the November 20th New York Review of Books.
To order: http://amzn.to/10cTKsM

Turning his father’s experiences as a Japanese POW into a Booker prize-winning novel became a pilgrimage for Richard Flanagan. Below he writes for the London Times how it took him from the jungles of Thailand and their ghosts to Tokyo, where he met the Lizard, a notorious camp guard. [Richard Flanagan, The Sunday Times (London) Published: 19 October 2014]

Allied prisoners toiling on the railway. (Topham Picturepoint/Press Association)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature. Written in 1689 by Matsuo Basho, the greatest of all haiku poets, it takes the form of a haibun, a nature journal that records a journey in prose and haiku.

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, one of those put to work on what in Australia is known as the Death Railway. A pharaonic project, the railway was pushed more than 250 miles through wild jungle in what was then Siam — and is today Thailand — and Burma in less than a year in 1943.

It was built by more than a quarter of a million slave labourers working mostly naked, with almost no machinery and only the most basic of hand tools. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. More corpses than Hiroshima. More corpses than there are words in my novel.

My father was a survivor of that, of cholera, of the hell ships that took POWs to Japan, of being a slave labourer in a coalmine under the Inland Sea, south of Hiroshima, at the war’s end. If Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the high points of Japanese culture, my father and his mates’ experience is one of its lowest.

For 12 years I tried to write a novel about that experience and all it suggested to me. And for 12 years other novels came and went as I continued to be unable to write this one. I wrote five wildly different novels attempting somehow to tell this story, all of them failures, all files which I deleted and all manuscripts which I burnt. I understood, although it made no sense, that this was the book I had to write if I was to keep on writing. And yet I could not write it.

Then I realised that my father, by now in his nineties, was growing frail and weak and although there was no logical reason to think such a thing, I felt I had to somehow finish this novel before he died.

Flanagan’s father, Archie, was also a slave labourer in a Japanese coal mine

For a year I visited and called with endless questions about daily life in the camp. What came first, roll call or breakfast? How does a rotting shin bone revealed by a blossoming tropical ulcer smell? What was it like having cholera?

My memories of my father when I was a child are of a sick man, debilitated by his war experience. We grew up with a man of often strange anxieties and deep compassion, whose stories of his POW experiences, while often funny, were compounded of love and pity. But I did not want the book to be about him. As much as his experience and perspective would influence it, I did not want some fictionalised version of his life. As much as it was about my father and me, it had to escape us both.

I went to Thailand and walked up and found the site of my father’s camp, walked that bitter track through the jungle from that camp to what little remained of the railway and the dead, overgrown embankments and cuttings. And I realised that the novel had to be a love story. Why?

Because great love stories seek to demonstrate the great truth about love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after. War stories are the great story of death. War illuminates love; while love — if it does not redeem war — is the highest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life.

Friedrich Nietzsche regarded hope as the cruellest of human torments because it prolongs suffering. But it is also the nub of who we are. Not for nothing were the most forsaken in the Nazi death camps the muselmänner, those without hope. Similarly art — when it seeks to speak of darkness but does not allow for hope — will finally fail. Without hope such art is untrue to what we know as a fundamental truth of ourselves.

And I had long been taken by a story my parents were fond of.

A Latvian man they knew, a postwar refugee, caught up in the vast movements of lives that the Second World War had involved, had returned to his home village after the war, to find it razed and his wife, he was told, dead. He searched the wastelands of postwar Europe for her for two years and finally had to accept the truth: that she had perished. He emigrated to Australia, met another woman, married and had children.

(Getty)

In 1957 he visited Sydney. Walking down a crowded street he saw walking towards him his Latvian wife, alive, with a child on either hand. At that moment he had to decide whether he would acknowledge her or walk on.

This beautiful story had always moved me. I started my novel yet again, with this image at its heart. Now it was a love story and its leading character a figure utterly unlike my father — a doctor who is the POW commander in one camp and who, after the war, is celebrated as a war hero but feels himself to be anything but that.

My father worried that people would forget what had happened and he trusted me that I might write something that encouraged people to remember. If my father was helpful with my endless questioning of minute detail, he never asked me what the story was. He allowed me the freedom to write as I have to write.

Yet I felt, rather shamefully, that perhaps I would not be able to finish the novel until he died, as though there was something in all this that held me back.

Towards the end of 2012, with the novel taking its final form, I resolved to visit Japan.

There I searched and found several guards who had worked on the Death Railway. I met a man who had been a Japanese army medical orderly and had been at my father’s camp. It looked, he said, like a Buddhist hell. He recalled skeletons crawling around in the mud. He told me the Australians were very bad with their hygiene. The Japanese took hot baths. The Australians did not. I paid for his tea and taxi home.

Five minutes before meeting another guard who had been on the Death Railway, I realised that he was the one who had been the Ivan the Terrible of my father’s camp, the man the Australians called “the Lizard”. The meeting was to be in the offices of a taxi company owned by his son in outer suburban Tokyo.

The Lizard had been sentenced to death for war crimes after the war. Later he had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment and then was released in a general amnesty in 1956. He is the only man I have ever heard my father — a gentle, peaceful man — speak of with violent intent.

Lee Hak-rae,  as he is now, was a dignified, gracious and generous old man [Korean Japanese]. Near the end of our meeting I asked him to slap me. Violent face-slapping — known as binta — was the immediate form of punishment in the camps, doled out frequently and viciously.

It was a curious request and the old man took some persuasion. Finally we stood up, facing each other. I asked him to slap me as hard as he could. Of his slaps, I recall only how clean and dry the skin of his aged hand was as it struck me.

On the third blow the taxi office began to shake and toss violently, like a dinghy in a wild sea. For a moment I thought I was going mad. But in one of those coincidences in which reality delights, but fiction — for fear of being unrealistic — is never permitted, a 7.3 Richter scale earthquake had hit Tokyo. For half a minute, as the room swayed and a wall of tossing taxi keys made a shimmering tingle, I saw the Lizard frightened. I saw too that wherever evil is, it was not in that room with that old man and me.

I went south to where my father was a slave labourer and the mayor of Sanyo Onoda city met me in front of television cameras to apologise.  I met villagers who remembered Australians arriving in that terrible winter of late 1944, skeletons in shorts. I met more guards. I was photographed by local media with one guard at the site of the camp where my father thought he would die in the spring of 1945. Below us, where once stood the minehead the POWs would run a gauntlet of sadistic guards to enter, there now stood a love hotel.

It was a bitterly cold day. We put our arms around one another for a photograph. A tiny, frail man, Mr Sato then curled into me in the manner children do when seeking forgiveness. Or perhaps he was just cold. When the photograph was taken, I took my arm away. Mr Sato stayed where he was, curling inwards.

That night I ended up drinking in a Japanese hostess bar with Kenji Yasushige,  the Sanyo Onada city council’s international relations and equal opportunities officer. As Kenji crooned a karaoke ballad to the largely empty bar, one of the hostesses looked at me and, smiling, asked why I was visiting the city.

“My father was a slave labourer here during the war,” I said.

“Really?” she replied, continuing to look at me with her dreamy, anime eyes. “What is slave labourer?”

There is strangeness in the world beyond any words.

My father, who was not a man for such things, rang within a few hours of my returning home. He wanted to know what had happened. He was 98, frail, but his mind was still good, his recall phenomenal. I told him how the Japanese people had been unfailingly kind and generous and how, amazingly, I had met some guards who had been at his camps, including the Lizard. He asked me what they said.

I thought of the earthquake. Of Mr Sato curling inwards. Of the near-empty hostess bar.

I said they talked in detail about all of their lives, except the camps where details seemed to elude them, but that I felt nevertheless that they carried shame, and how each one had expressed their sorrow and apologies for what had happened, and asked me to pass them on to my father.

My father stopped talking. After some time he said he had to go, and hung up.

Later that day my father lost all memory of his time in the POW camps. And yet his pre-war memory remained strong. He knew in an abstract way — as you know you have been in the womb — that he had been in the camps, but no memory remained. It was as though he were finally free.

For the next four months I lived mostly by myself on an island off the coast of Tasmania and I rewrote the novel. I felt I had written all my books in order to write this one book, to somehow communicate the incommunicable.

I emailed the final draft of my novel to my publisher on the Monday before Anzac Day. My father was ill, and I was with him early that morning. He asked how the book was going. I told him it was finally done.

He died that night.

In truth the novel was not quite done. There was some intensive rewriting, as is my way when publication approaches. And I see now what I could not see then, that hanging over it all, shaping everything, were his looming death and the question of love. But you only understand such things — and then only imperfectly — long after you have written the last word.

One thing did not change — the dedication: “To prisoner san byaku san ju go.” It was my father’s Japanese prison number, 335.

He had taught it to me as I was growing up as his son — a child of the narrow road to the deep north.

Bangka Massacre

Seventy-two years ago today, the SS Viner Brooke and a convoy of ships were sunk by Mitsubishi Zeros in the Bangka Strait. The survivors, evacuated from Singapore, washed up on Bangka Island, east of Sumatra. Australian women, children, wounded soldiers, and army nurses found themselves without shelter, food, or protection.

With few choices, the civilian women and children set off to find the invading Japanese so that they could surrender. Left behind were the wounded, 100 British troops from another bombed ship, 22 Australian nurses, and an elderly lady.

On February 16, Japanese troops discovered these survivors on Radji Beach. The soldiers immediately rounded up the men and took them over a bluff. After hearing several bursts of machine gun fire, the women on the beach knew the men were gone. The Japanese detachment returned, cleaned their bloody bayonets, and reloaded their guns.

They then ordered the 22 Army nurses, two of them wounded, together with the elderly civilian, to march into the sea, line abreast, and face the sea. It was about noon; the sea was tranquil, a light breeze played, palms lined the tropical shore. The nurses wore their grey dresses and Red Cross armbands. The Japanese soldiers then machine-gunned the women and left their bodies to float as so much debris onto the shore.

One survived.

Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, struck by a bullet that pierced her thigh, floated on the sea in shock. She gathered her wits and pretended to be dead until the Japanese left. She hid with a wounded British private for 12 days before deciding once again to surrender. They were taken into captivity, but the private died soon after. Bullwinkel was reunited with survivors of the Vyner Brooke. She told them of the massacre, but none spoke of it again until after the war lest it put Bullwinkel, as witness to the massacre, in danger. Bullwinkel spent three and half years in captivity; she was one of just 24 of the 65 nurses who had been on the Vyner Brooke to survive the war.

In captivity, the nurses and civilian women recall that their Japanese captors tried to "coerce" them into becoming Comfort Women in brothels set up by their military. Refusing meant that they faced starvation and other deprivations. Few felt that there was a choice. One nurse, Elizabeth Simmons records in her book, While History Passed that “I think all the girls would agree that this club [brothel] experience was the most repulsive and unpleasant in our whole imprisonment. I know it stands out grimly in our memory.” 

Another nurse, Betty Jeffrey in White Coolies notes that “Somebody suggested that we should all swear never to mention it, or tell any tales about anyone if and when we were released.” And nobody ever broke that promise. Simmons' book was the basis of the movie Paradise Road.

Nurses Memorial on Bangka

On March 2, 1993, in the presence of seven of the surviving nurses, including Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, the Nurses Memorial was dedicated on Bangka Island.

It is situated near, Radji Beach, the spot where survivors of the sinking of SS Vyner Brooke came ashore and where 21 Australian Army nurses were massacred.

The memorial incorporates stone from the: 'Women's Camp' which the Australian Army nurses occupied for a time as Prisoners of War. A bronze plaque records the names of all 65 nurses who were aboard the SS Vyner Brooke. 

Sister Bulwinkel died July 17, 2000 at 84.

Bangka Island is reputedly the setting for Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim.

Tom Uren, a man of letters: POW, MP, OA

The Fight 

The Age, January 26, 2013 reports on the award on Australia Day of Australia's highest honor given to former POW of Japan and politician Tom Uren. Mr. Uren was instrumental in persuading the Australian government in 2011 to give surviving former POWs of Japan and Korea additional compensation.

As The Age writes:

''I'VE been hit with open hands, closed fists, pieces of wood, iron bars and bamboo about two inches in diameter,'' Tom Uren says.

He was hardly more than a boy then - a prisoner-of-war and slave of the Japanese in his early 20s on the Burma-Thai railway.

But Tom Uren would take many more hits as his long, often controversial life wore on, and he rolled with them all and refused to lie down.

Today, aged 91, with most of his opponents fallen away - and a lot of them forgiven by him, including the Japanese - he will receive the highest honour his nation can bestow on a civilian: Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia.

Others to be so honoured today include former Howard government foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer, astrophysicist and joint Nobel prize winner Professor Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory, and the director of the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture in Canberra, the Reverend Professor James Mitchell Haire.

Mr Uren's award states it is for ''eminent service to the community, particularly through contributions to the welfare of veterans, improved medical education in Vietnam and the preservation of sites of heritage and environmental significance".

All true, but it's an inadequate summation of the life of the Balmain-born man who, impoverished, left school at 13 years and seven months.

He fought for the heavyweight boxing championship of Australia at 19 (and lost), marched into the hell of the Burma-Thai railway at 21, served the Labor Party as member for the Sydney electorate of Reid for 32 years, became his party's deputy leader and a cabinet minister in the Whitlam government and later found himself consigned to the junior ministry for four years in the Hawke government.

As a whip-thin prisoner shipped from Thailand to Japan to labour in a copper smelter, he watched the sky discolour when the Fat Man atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

It stopped the war and freed him, but he became one of Australia's leading anti-nuclear campaigners. The Japanese, he insists, were as much victims of militarism and fascism as anyone else.

Long a man of the Left, Mr Uren's early excursions into the peace movement were so passionate that ASIO believed he was taking his instructions from the Soviets. When newspapers published the libel, he sued and eventually won enough for two holiday homes, which he took delight in calling the ''Fairfax Retreat '' in the bush and the ''Packer Lodge'' on the New South Wales south coast.

His insistence in marching against the Vietnam War earned him several stretches in jails, including Sydney's Long Bay and Brisbane's Boggo Road. Mr Uren was appalled by the dehumanising effect of the old jails, and used his influence to get at least one of his fellow prisoners a job in Canberra.

''So many people are crook on their fellows, but I just look for the love in people,'' he says.

Often Mr Uren found himself talking, he says ''to two-and-a-half dogs". He was one of the early proponents of self-determination for the East Timorese, but no one seemed interested. He simply kept at it until it became mainstream.

The defining period of his life was the Burma-Thai railway. Taken prisoner on Timor aged 20, he marched into his first prison camp on the railway aged 21.

Always a big, strong man, he became known for his willingness to put his body between furious Japanese guards and his comrades, figuring he could take the beating that might kill a mate weakened by hunger, disease and slaving.

It was the influence of the camp commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward ''Weary'' Dunlop, that stayed with him. Colonel Dunlop, a surgeon, taxed fellow officers to build a small bank to buy medical supplies and food, saving the lives of many hundreds of men, and he ensured that the strong looked after the weak, the young looked after the old and the relatively healthy cared for the sick.

It was, Mr Uren says, collectivism - a principle he adopted for life and which during the Cold War found him branded a communist, though he never was.

He never forgot his fellow POW survivors, and fought a battle over 23 years to grant them extra benefits, arguing that they died younger and suffered greater illness than other returned servicemen. In 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that all remaining POWs would receive an extra $500 a fortnight.

Of the 22,000 Australian prisoners of the Japanese, only some 400 are alive now, but Mr Uren said Ms Gillard's action displayed compassion and justice, which he valued above all else.

And his elevation to Companion of the Order of Australia?

''I just want to thank my fellow Australians for their support, their warmth and their love in my evergreen years,'' he says.

See the full honours list here

The collective ordeal of the Allied POWs captured in Singapore is described in the book, The Prisoner List. The website for the book is HERE.

Lost Battalion's Compensation

Below is an excellent article from a Texas newspaper on the US government's compensation to the American POWs of Japan for their "undue hardships" and suffering. As Linda Goetz Holmes writes in Chapter 14 of her seminal account of how Japan's great companies benefited from slave labor, Unjust Enrichment: American POWs Under the Rising Sun, the US government was unsure as to how to compensate the POWs.

Thus, according to Ms. Holmes, they referred to a 1936 War Department field manual that gave soldiers on bivouac $1/day for lost meals. This compensation was approved under the War Claims Act of 1948. Following bitter complaints and the fact that the US in the San Francisco Peace Treaty had waived the right of its citizens to sue Japan, Congress in 1952 approved a second trance of $1.50/day for being "subjected to inhumane treatment." Many of the former POWs, however, never received the second payment as they had died, moved, or never heard of the offer.

In 2000, a number of countries--UK, Isle of Man, Norway, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand--granted their former POWs ex gratia benefits for their brutal treatment. In 2011, the Government of Australia approved for all surviving POWs of WWII and the Korean War a fortnightly grant of AU$500 (US$530) for the next four years. In 2001, Australia’s POWs of Japan had also been awarded a one-off ex-gratia payment of AU$25,000. In contrast, the US Congress has never allowed a vote for additional compensation to the American POWs.

Looking Back: Lost Battalion POW receives maltreatment compensation

DOUG McDONOUGH | Plainview Daily Herald Editor | Saturday, January 12, 2013

What is adequate compensation for 42 months of pain and suffering as a Japanese prisoner of war who was forced to work on the “Burma-Siam Death Railway” which connected with the infamous bridge over the River Kwai?

For several local veterans who were members of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, compensation for their compulsory labor and inhumane treatment during the darkest days of World War II amounted to just over $1,900, which was paid in 1953. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index calculation, that amount would have the same buying power today as approximately $16,500.

A photo and article in the Jan. 11, 1953, issue of the Plainview Sunday Herald shows Floyd R. Lamb receiving a $1,906.50 check from local Veterans Service Officer Harry McCain.

Lamb, a Plainview police officer at that time, was the first of less than a dozen local veterans from the same “Lost Battalion” to receive governmental checks as additional payment for compulsory labor and inhumane treatment suffered while being held in Japanese prison camps during World War II.

Lamb happened to be the first in the county to receive both the 1953 payment as well as another governmental check two years earlier, sent as compensation for the undernourishment he and his fellow POWs suffered during their captivity.

According to the article accompanying the 1953 photograph, Lamb and his comrades were captured March 8, 1942, while resisting the Japanese invasion of Java.

They were held 42 months in various camps from Java to French Indo-China. During that time he was starved, beaten and contracted beriberi, malaria and other tropical diseases.

“He was forced to work on a railroad in the Burma jungles covering over a thousand miles,” the Herald reported in 1953, “and for which he said more men died than the number of cross-ties laid in the roadway constructed entirely by hand labor.”

Lamb, who died Aug. 19, 1988, told the Herald that he weighed just 89 pounds when he was freed from a camp in French Indo-China — now Vietnam — by the U.S. Air Force and flown to Calcutta, India. From there he was sent to Washington, D.C., where he was admitted to Water Reed Military Hospital to recover.

According to the Herald, just nine survivors of the “Lost Battalion” still lived in the Plainview area in 1953. The A Battery of the 2nd Battalion was largely composed of National Guardsmen from the Panhandle-South Plains region, including Plainview and Lockney, who were activated a few weeks before the United States was drawn into the growing global conflict.

According to the Texas Military Forces Museum at Camp Mabry in Austin, the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery was mobilized on Nov. 25, 1940, along with the 36th Infantry Division, Texas National Guard, and sent to Camp Bowie at Brownwood. Originally intended to be part of a force to be sent to reinforce American troops in the Philippine Islands, the battalion was detached from the 36th Infantry Battalion and sailed on the USS Republic on Nov. 21, 1941. The ship was diverted from the Philippines when Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941, and landed on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies on Jan. 11, 1942, to reinforce Dutch, British and Australian troops already there.

The Japanese landed on the island and the Dutch surrendered on March 8, 1942, after token resistance. The entire battalion was taken prisoner.

The battalion (less Battery E) and the survivors of the cruiser USS Houston, which had been sunk off the Java coast, were sent to Burma, Thailand, or Japan to work for the Japanese as slave laborers. They worked on the “Burma-Siam Death Railway” building a railroad through the jungle and in the coal mines, docks and ship yards in Japan and other southeast Asian countries. They spent 42 months in captivity suffering humiliation; torture, both mental and physical; starvation and disease (without medication).

A total of 532 soldiers from the battalion, along with 371 survivors of the USS Houston, were taken prisoner. Of that number, 668 were sent to Burma and Thailand and 235 to other locations. Altogether, 163 soldiers died in captivity, and of those 133 died working on the railroad. Many more died as a result of diseases contracted while in captivity after the war.

For almost three years, no one heard from any of the members of the battalion, hence the name, “Lost Battalion.”

Lamb, who was 69 when he died Aug. 19, 1988, was a member of the Plainview Police Department for 13 years. Later, he was a sporting goods salesman for Gibson’s Discount Center.

He was a member of Seth Ward Baptist Church, Disabled American Veterans, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion and the Lost Battalion Association.

N.B.: An excellent book on the Lost Battalion is Hell under the Rising Sun: Texan POWs and the Building of the Burma-Thailand Death Railway (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series)

Canadian Prisoners of War Receive Apology from Japanese Government

Dr. Lester Tenney's courage in November 2008 to bring to the attention of the Japanese Ambassador to the US Ichiro Fujisaki the pain and humiliation felt by American as well as all prisonors of war of Japan was historic.  His efforts have brought about apologies and visitation programs for POWs not only for Americans, but also for Australians and now Canadians.

Japanese Foreign Ministers have twice this year delivered apologies to delegations of Australian POWs. The first visited Japan in March and the second in late November. The latter delegation included the first woman POW on an official delegation, 96-year old Nurse Lorna Johnston.

Below is the Press Release issued by Canada's Ministry of Veterans Affairs announcing Japan's first apology to the POWs of Canada. Unlike for the American and Australian POWs, the apology was not delivered by Japan's Foreign Minister in front of the press. Instead, it was presented in private by Japan's Parliamentary Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshiyuki Kato. Further, the trip was paid for by the Canada's Ministry of Veteran's Affairs and not the Government of Japan.

The apology wording was the same as the one given to the American and Australian POWs, which is a slight rewording of the 1995 general war apology by Prime Minister Murayama--the only official government apology for the war. The critical phrase "damage and suffering" is a direct quote from the San Francisco Peace Treaty.

Hong Kong Memorial Wall, Ottawa, Canada

The Canadians were involved the defense of Hong Kong in 1941. Approximately 290 Canadian soldiers were killed in battle and, while in captivity, approximately 264 more died as POWs, for a total death toll of 554. In addition, almost 500 Canadians were wounded. Of the 1,975 Canadians who went to Hong Kong, more than 1,050 were either killed or wounded. This was a casualty rate of more than 50%, arguably one of the highest casualty rates of any Canadian theater of action in the Second World War.

Still missing are the apologies from the Japanese companies that purchased these American, Canadian, and Australian POWs to labor in the factories, mines, and on their docks. As one Canadian POW noted, the apology is "most important to the Japanese" as he hopes "this apology will open up the Japanese secrecy over their treatment of (POWs) during World War 2 in 14 of their captured nations." He added: "I don't think they can go on and be a healthy culture by hiding this terrible past of theirs."


December 8, 2011
Canadian Prisoners of War Receive Apology from Japanese Government

Ottawa — The Honourable Steven Blaney, Minister of Veterans Affairs, and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird today recognized the heartfelt apology from the Government of Japan to former Canadian prisoners of war (POWs) for their suffering during the Second World War. The apology was delivered earlier today in Tokyo by Mr. Toshiyuki KATO, Japan’s Parliamentary Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs.

“It is my honour to join Canadian prisoners of war in acknowledging the apology by the Japanese Government for the treatment and suffering of prisoners of war under Japanese control during the Second World War,” said Minister Blaney. “This important gesture is a crucial step in ongoing reconciliation and a significant milestone in the lives of all prisoners of war. It acknowledges their suffering while honouring their sacrifices and courage.”

“The terrible pain and heavy burden of the Second World War have given way to a mutually beneficial, respectful relationship between Canada and Japan as mature democracies—a legacy of all who served in the Pacific campaigns,” said Minister Baird. “Today’s apology will help in healing as our two great countries move forward.”

On Christmas Day 1941, unable to fight any longer, the Allies had no choice but to surrender. During 17 and a half days of fighting, 290 Canadians were killed and 493 were wounded while trying to defend Hong Kong.

Those who survived the heavy fighting were imprisoned in prisoner of war camps in Hong Kong and Japan until Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945. For nearly four years, the Canadians were subjected to deliberate and systematic mistreatment at the hands of their captors.

The prisoners of war were forced into backbreaking labour in construction sites, mines, shipyards and foundries, and were frequently beaten and starved. Another 267 men died in the camps before the survivors were liberated. Many of those who returned to Canada suffered serious disabilities as a result of their experiences in Hong Kong, and many died prematurely.

Minister Blaney led a delegation of Canadian Veterans of the Battle of Hong Kong to Japan for the apology and a commemorative ceremony, and visited the graves of Canadian soldiers at the British Commonwealth Cemetery – Yokohama.

For more information on Canada’s contribution in Hong Kong, visit the Veterans Affairs Canada Web site at veterans.gc.ca.

Oh Australia

On September 1, the Australian government again honored its former POWs of Japan. Due to the efforts of former Japanese POW and parliamentarian Tom Uren, 90, all surviving POWs of WWII and the Korean War will receive a fortnightly grant of AU$500 ($US$530) for the next four years. In 2001, Australia’s POWs of Japan had also been awarded a one-off ex-gratia payment of AU$25,000.

American POWs of Japan in 1948 simply received a $1 per day compensation for the days they were prisoners. A few who received letters of notification (many did not as they had moved) received an extra $1.50 per day in 1952. American POWs unlike their Canadian, Australian, British, New Zealand, Isle of Man, Dutch, and Norwegian fellow POWs of Japan, never received extra services, compensation, or recognition for their brutal experience.

Australia’s new bonus payment was approved in May as part of Prime Minister Julia Gillard 2011-12 Federal Budget. It will cost AU$27.1 million. The payment will be tax-free, indexed annually to inflation and exempt from the income test, meaning it will not affect pensions or any other benefits the veterans receive.

The Prime Minister justified this extra expenditure by saying that it

acknowledges the severe hardship suffered by our former POWs. POWs were particularly subjected to horrific conditions and many returned home with physical and psychological scars that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Uren convinced Prime Minister Julia Gillard in January that Australian POWs of Japan suffered more than most soldiers and died at a much greater rate than other veterans. Those few still surviving—623—had watched the erosion of their conditions and benefits as they aged and the country became complacent. Uren had been captured by the Japanese in Timor in 1942 and mined coal as a POW slave laborer at Mitsui’s infamous Fukuoka #17 Omuta POW camp mine with Lester Tenney (Tenneberg)

Those Australian POWs who came back from the war in the Pacific, died at four times the rate of other veterans between 1945 and 1954, due mainly to the brutality they suffered under the Japanese. Uren said that securing the payments for the surviving few was not so much about the money. ''It's about giving credit to the service of our people,'' he said. ''It's justice and compassion, that's what this recognises. It recognises the suffering of our people.''

Former POW Norm Anderton who slaved on the Thai-Burma Death Railway said the $500 bonus payment to him and his comrades is "bloody great news" - and he reckons there wouldn't be too many Australians who would begrudge the Government's gesture.

In early March, Anderton was one of five former POW “Diggers” (Australian soldiers) who visited as Japan guests of the Japanese governent. They met with the then-Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara on March 3rd, privately offering them an apology for the horrors they endured under Japanese control. The Australians accepted it as the first ever official apology. Maehara, unlike his predecessor Okada who received American POWs in September 2010, refused to have TV cameras or reporters present during this important moment.  As you can see in this video, cameras were present as he greeted the POWs at the Foreign Ministry.

During the trip, the Japanese government also agreed to release over 21,000 index cards of POW records. The hope is to identify the hundreds of Australian POWs never accounted for, especially those on the Montevideo Maru. No such offer was made to the American POWs of Japan.

In November 2010, then-Foreign Minister Maehara visited Australia and made an unusual side trip that was not reported in the Japanese press. He visited the Australia War Museum and Memorial to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Solider and to stand silently and bow before the statue of Sir Edward "Weary" Dunlop. Dr Dunlop (1907-93) was the best known of the doctors who ministered to Australian prisoners held by Japan. A doctor on the infamous Thai-Burma Death Railroad where nearly 3,000 Australians died, he is immortalized in a large bronze statue in the War Memorial grounds. Although it is now de rigueur to visit the War Memorial, Maehara is likely the first Japanese Foreign Minister to honor Weary Dunlop.

Despite these important gestures of reconciliation and healing, it must be noted that neither the Australian POW delegation nor the American POW delegation— and by implication their governments—were able to get Japan’s official apology for its maltreatment of POWs in writing and available to the press. No copy of the wording of that apology has subsequently been made public.

And in terms of gestures, House passage of H.Res. 333, which simply honors the American POWs of Japan for their efforts toward justice, is the least Congress can do for its POWs of Japan in light of Australia's recent tribute to its surviving POWs.