Letters Across the Sea by Genevieve Graham (best short novels of all time txt) 📗

Max was one of more than 1,100 Canadians who were stuffed into the boats like sardines and given barely any food or water. When they arrived at the camps, they were covered in waste and vomit. Max was imprisoned at Niigata, where prisoners worked in a mine ten to twelve hours a day, swinging a sledgehammer by a white-hot furnace, pushing hoppers filled with coal up steep railway inclines, or other similar tasks.

Besides the physical beatings and punishments, and the lack of nourishment, medicine, and sanitation, the Japanese were also extremely lax in reporting to the Red Cross exactly who they had in their camps. For months, even years, Canadian families like the Ryans and the Dreyfuses had no idea if their fathers, brothers, and sons were dead or taken prisoner.

Emperor Hirohito’s original plan had been to execute all POWs if the Japanese were forced to surrender. Some reports claim the mines the men were digging were actually large burial caves for the prisoners. But because the atomic bombs were so quickly and unexpectedly dropped, the war ended too abruptly to carry out that plan. That’s not to say they didn’t manage to kill the prisoners in a more drawn-out manner.

Canadian and British prisoners of war being liberated from Sham Shui Po in Hong Kong in August 1945. Despite the smiling faces, you can see how thin some of the men are—and this was after a month of receiving food drops. The men who would be liberated from the Japanese camps were in even worse shape. PO Jack Hawes / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-145983.

Two hundred and sixty-four POWs died in those camps. Here’s a statistic that Molly didn’t know, but we do now. During WWII, 4 per cent of Allied POWs held in German and Italian camps died in captivity. In the Japanese camps, that number was at least 27 per cent. Some reports I read suggest it was up to 38 per cent. Between May 1946 and November 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) took place in Tokyo. Eleven justices from Canada, the United States, Australia, China, France, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the Soviet Union tried twenty-eight Japanese military and civilian leaders for war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity in what is known as the Tokyo Trial. All twenty-eight were found guilty. Two died of natural causes during the trial. One had a mental breakdown during the trial, was sent to a psychiatric ward, then was released in 1948. Seven were found guilty of inciting or participating in mass-scale atrocities and sentenced to death by hanging, including the former prime minister of Japan Hideki Tojo. Sixteen were given life imprisonment, and two, lesser terms. Three of those sixteen died between 1949 and 1950, and the rest were paroled between 1954 and 1956. They committed crimes against millions of people, and they served fewer than eight years in prison.

The list of those not indicted is disturbing. For example, Emperor Hirohito was never tried; General MacArthur decided to leave him on the throne in an attempt to help the Japanese people accept their defeat and occupation. There were other notable exceptions, such as the heads of the Japanese military police, or Kempeitai—the Japanese equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo. Those responsible for rounding up tens of thousands of young, non-Japanese women to serve as “comfort women” were never pursued, nor were those who forced non-Japanese men into military service. Secret immunity was granted to a group of officers and scientific researchers in Manchuria who conducted lethal experiments on thousands of prisoners and civilians, on the grounds that they share their research results with the Americans. A number of the guards at Niigata, where Max spent most of his imprisonment, were tried and found guilty of mistreating or causing the deaths of prisoners; however, no one was ever charged for what happened on board the infamous hell ships.

On the other hand, not everyone turned a politically blind eye. The victimized Asian countries sought justice beyond the Tokyo Trial. They tried an estimated five thousand Japanese, executed as many as nine hundred for war crimes—including acts of cannibalism on Allied POWs and civilians—and sentenced more than half to life imprisonment. Reports vary, some saying the cannibalism was done purely out of hunger, but others claim the flesh of Allied prisoners was given to Japanese troops by their commanders to give them a sense of victory.

Of the 1,985 Canadians sent to Hong Kong, 1,425 eventually came home. Initially, Canadians were outraged at the treatment of their men, but their attention was quickly drawn elsewhere. After all, far more men had been killed, wounded, and taken as prisoner in Europe. The world was also in shock over the revelation of the atrocities carried out in Nazi concentration camps as well as the human toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Japanese civilians.

After I completed writing this book, I made the most astounding discovery: the great-uncle of a close friend of mine, Lance Corporal Philip Doddridge of the Royal Rifles, is one of the five Canadian Hong Kong veterans still alive today. It broke my heart to hear him say in an interview, “I think we’re largely forgotten, if not ignored.” The terribly sad fact is that Molly’s POW series was fictional; there were no substantial articles written about Doddridge or the other Hong Kong POWs until decades later.

Every returning Canadian prisoner suffered chronic health problems. Eighty-seven of the men came home blind. Two hundred died before the age of fifty. After nearly four years of being denied calories and essential vitamins, the survivors suffered from avitaminosis, which caused wet beriberi (shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat, swollen limbs, possible heart failure) and the unremitting stabbing and burning agony of electric feet. Two years after they returned home, more than 70 per cent of Canadian POWs still had intestinal parasites, whipworms, hookworms, and threadworms. Very few