During World War II, more than 5 million soldiers served with the Imperial Japanese Army. More than 12,000, including 800 Koreans, were engineers and guards on the Burma-Thailand Railway. Around 1,000 of them died.
The appalling experiences of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) created an image of Japanese soldiers as cruel. Many guards inflicted brutal physical punishment. The Japanese did not provide adequate food or medicine. They also pushed the workers to construct the railway as quickly as possible. This caused thousands of deaths among Allied prisoners and Asian forced labourers.
Enemy of the Allies
… we had no training whatever in the handling of prisoners. Instead, everyday we had beaten into us the military spirit, the glories of the Japanese Army, the necessity for absolute obedience, and the code of military conduct. Everyday we were beaten a few times, and after two months' training we were sent to Southeast Asia.
[Yi Hak Nae, 'The man between: a Korean guard looks back' in Hank Nelson and Gavin McCormack (eds.), The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History, St Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1993, p 121]
Around 12,000 Japanese and 800 Korean soldiers worked on the Burma-Thailand Railway as engineers or guards. They were some of over 5 million soldiers who served with the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
The appalling experiences of Allied POWs on the railway and throughout the Asia-Pacific region created an image of Japanese soldiers as uniformly and deliberately cruel. Indeed, many guards resorted to brutal physical punishment. The Japanese were unable or unwilling to provide adequate food and medicine, or to relax the pace of construction along the railway. This caused thousands of deaths among Allied prisoners and Asian forced labourers.
The massive loss of life among the railway workforce was the result of many factors. The Japanese perception of POWs, their own conception of duty, the structure of the Imperial Japanese Army and the pressures of war all played a part.
Every Japanese commander was under pressure from above, and the Japanese culture of unquestioning obedience transferred this stress down the command chain. In the years before World War II, the Japanese state had become highly militarised and hierarchical. All authority stemmed from Emperor Hirohito and obedience was expected without question.
POW Albert Coates OBE recalled a conversation with a Japanese guard, Kumanda:
If he was ordered to do so by his commanding officer, he would fill me up with rice, then a gallon of water, and jump on my stomach … Kumanda was quite serious, that though he knew and liked me, he was bound to carry out the orders of his officer.
[Albert Coates and Norman Rosenthal, The Albert Coates Story, Melbourne, Hyland House, 1977, p 108]
The Japanese relationship with POWs was also conditioned by their attitude towards surrender. The conduct of all Japanese soldiers was governed by the Senjinkun military code, which stated that a soldier was expected 'not to survive to suffer the dishonour of capture'. The opportunity to die for the emperor was considered an honour.
Allied prisoners, therefore, seemed not worthy of respect. They had failed in their duty to continue fighting to the death. Assuming that they themselves would forfeit their rights to humane treatment if they surrendered, the Japanese believed that enemy prisoners should be treated with disdain.
The Japanese Government had signed the 1929 Third Geneva Convention, which guaranteed POWs minimum rights and humane treatment. But they had not ratified the Convention. When war came, most Japanese soldiers refused to observe its requirements. This is why many Japanese combatants were tried for war crimes after 1945.
Japanese soldiers also accepted that physical punishment was a fact of military life. In the Imperial Japanese Army, any soldier could beat his subordinate. When confronted with prisoners, who were on the lowest rung of the military hierarchy, the Japanese did not hesitate to inflict what would be considered in Allied armies to be cruel and demeaning punishment.
For the Koreans who served as guards on the railway, POWs represented the only men lower than them in this hierarchy of punishment. Cho Mun San, a Korean guard later charged with war crimes, wrote after the war that:
One of the instructors at the training camp at Fuzan instructed us that we were to treat POWs like animals; otherwise they would look down on us.
[Cho Mun San, cited in Gavan McCormack, 'Apportioning the blame: Australian trials for railway crimes' in Hank Nelson and Gavin McCormack (eds.), The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History, St Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1993, p 99]
Some Japanese soldiers felt professionally diminished by being posted to guard duty. Thousands of kilometres from their homes, which they knew were under attack by the US Army Air Force, they took out their frustrations on those who were lower than them in the military order.
Another factor influencing the Japanese treatment of prisoners was the deep cultural and language gulf between prisoners and guards. Japanese and Koreans were given little training in dealing with prisoners. Misunderstandings were common.
Treatment of prisoners
Japanese military discipline was sadistic, because they administered instant or Japanese punishment. This was carried out on their own troops, but when it was administered to prisoners it was particularly vicious and brutal.
[Tom Uren, Straight Left, Milsons Point, NSW, Vintage Australia, 1995, p 40]
Japanese soldiers are widely remembered as being cruel and indifferent to the fate of Allied POWs and the Asian rōmusha (forced labourers). Many men in the railway workforce bore the brunt of pitiless or uncaring guards. Cruelty could take different forms, from extreme violence and torture to minor acts of physical punishment, humiliation and neglect.
But it should be recognised that behaviour of the Japanese varied from place to place and from person to person. Some prisoners recounted instances of compassion by the Japanese and even a sense of sharing a burden.
The Imperial Japanese Army also relied on physical punishment to discipline its own troops.
Physical punishment was used for seemingly minor infractions, such as failing to salute a Japanese guard. Not being saluted caused the Japanese to lose face. The most common form of punishment was face-slapping, often done with a hard instrument, such as a bamboo stick or a shovel.
More-severe beatings were also common. The Australian surgeon Lieutenant Colonel Ernest 'Weary' Dunlop AC, CMG, OBE described a Japanese soldier beating prisoners who had missed work (some of whom had been in hospital) over a period of hours:
blows with a fist, hammering over the face and head with wooden clogs, repeatedly thrown to the ground … kicking in the stomach and scrotum and ribs etc ... When the men fell to the ground, they were somehow got to their feet by such painful stimuli as the above and the dose was repeated.
[E.E. Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop, Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin, 1989, p 249]
The Japanese used many types of physical punishment. Some prisoners were made to hold a heavy stone above their heads for many hours. Others might be forced into small cells with little food or water. Ex-POW Tom Uren AC, who lived in a camp with Dunlop, described how a young Indigenous soldier was made to kneel on a piece of bamboo for a number of days. The bamboo cut into him, causing gangrene and the eventual loss of his legs.
On the worksite, guards would throw jagged stones at prisoners working in cuttings below and beat anyone they thought was working too slowly. Sometimes they simply laughed at the misfortune of their captives.
The unpredictability of the guards made their prisoners particularly vulnerable. An action that could attract a savage beating one day could elicit a laugh and a cigarette the next day. Ray Parkin noted in his diary, shared in the book Into the Smother, the 'fatal impulsiveness as the Japs can so readily show'.
The Japanese military police, or Kempeitai, were particularly feared by prisoners. They used torture in order to gain information from prisoners, particularly those who had been caught trying to escape or who were in possession of an illegal radio.
The Japanese attitude to sick prisoners was perhaps the most hated of all. Dunlop's diaries are full of accounts of the Japanese insisting on meeting their quota of workers, regardless of whether the prisoners were well enough to work or not. Stan Arneil remembered:
If they wanted 200 men they had to have 200 men. The guards would deliver 200 men even if perhaps thirty of them might be on the backs of their mates. We would carry them back at night. Usually one would die during the day.
[Stan Arneil in Hank Nelson, Prisoners of War: Australians under Nippon, Sydney, ABC, 1985, p 48]
The POWs found it hard to resolve the contradiction between the Japanese demanding that the railway be completed quickly but making no effort to protect the health of their workforce.
The Japanese respect for the dead also seemed to the prisoners to be contradictory. Treating the prisoners with such neglect that they died, the Japanese then allowed funerals to be conducted and cemeteries created. In early 1944, the Japanese even created a memorial near the bridge at Kanchanaburi to the people of all nationalities who died in the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway.
Not every Japanese soldier on the Burma-Thailand Railway was callous and brutal. Ex-POW Hugh Clarke remembered the English-speaking Lieutenant Sumi preventing his men from beating their prisoners while they worked on an embankment. When the work was completed, Sumi organised a meal of fish and a concert for the Australians.
After the war, the Japanese were held accountable for their maltreatment of the POWs. Australian courts tried almost 1,000 Japanese and Koreans for war crimes, of whom 62 were accused of war crimes committed on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
Learn more about the trials of war criminals.
Japanese on the railway
Little is known of the experience of Japanese engineers and guards who worked on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
The Japanese were organised into 2 types of units.
Two regiments — the 5th and the 9th Railway Regiments — were tasked with the construction of the railway itself.
The POW Organisations oversaw the administration of the workforce and guarding of prisoners. These units were overseen by the 2nd Railway Administering Department under Major General Ishita, who in turn answered to South General Army and ultimately Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo.
Japanese forces in Malaya also provided troops for the administration of POWs.
Work on the Burma-Thailand Railway was difficult and dangerous for everyone.
Although better supplied with food and medicine than their prisoners, the Japanese soldiers also experienced the sapping tropical weather and exposure to disease. Cholera was particularly feared. When the waterborne disease began to kill his friends at Konyu in July 1943, ex-POW Ian Denys Peek observed 'Cholera is a word all the Nips know, and it frightens the stuffing out of them'.
The Japanese lost around 8% of their force of 12,000 on the Burma-Thailand Railway. This death rate paled into insignificance compared to that of their workforce, but it was still high. Australian forces serving in the Kokoda and Buna-Gona campaigns of 1942 and 1943 in situations of comparable hardship had a death rate of around 4%.
Although the Burma-Thailand Railway was a vital part of Japanese strategy, many Japanese soldiers would have seen it as a backwater. Japanese engineers may have taken professional pride in their work, but the average soldier would have known that he had not been assigned to more prestigious combat units.
Prisoners considered the treatment of soldiers within the Imperial Japanese Army far harsher than in Western armies. The average Japanese soldier often lived a difficult and brutalised life. Likewise, the Korean guards, who were colonial subjects of the Japanese and at the lowest rung of the military hierarchy, would have found working on the railway a harsh and isolating experience.
For all this, the Japanese took pride in the railway's construction. When the 2 ends of the railway met at Konkoita on 16 October 1943, they held a ceremony in celebration. Dignitaries, a film crew and a band were present to see the last dog spike, made of gold, hammered into place.
In early 1944, the Japanese also built a memorial in Kanchanaburi to commemorate the Allied POWs who died on the railway. It remains a site of remembrance today.
Many Japanese soldiers learned of the surrender of their country in August 1945 with shock and incomprehension. For men conditioned to believe in the invincibility of their nation and emperor, the reversal of roles with those who had been their prisoners was profoundly disturbing. Nagase Takashi, a Japanese interpreter who, after the war, travelled with the Australian War Graves Commission survey party, described having to salute former prisoners for the first time:
I had to salute the Caucasians in the local people's presence, who had been our prisoners until recently. I never felt such a heavy saluting arm. Just then a real feeling of surrender struck me.
[Nagase Takashi, Crosses and Tigers, Bangkok, Allied Printers, 1990, p 30]
The process of accepting the surrender of Japanese units and shipping them home took a number of months. Priority was given to returning Allied troops. Some Japanese were also interned and tried for war crimes.
Sources
- Hugh Clarke, 'Of elephants and men' in Hank Nelson and Gavin McCormack (eds.), The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History, St Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1993, p 38.
- Ray Parkin, Into the Smother, London, Hogarth Press, 1963, p 96.
- Ian Denys Peek, One Fourteenth of an Elephant, Sydney, Pan Macmillan, 2005, p 203.