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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues > Prisoners of war
English translation and first privately published edition of a valuable book on Japanese immigration and internment during WWII. Initially published in Japanese to a limited readership. This informative study, candidly and insightfully written, details the formative period of Japanese migration to Peru and, just as importantly, the trying experience of the author, his family, and 1,800 other Japanese-Peruvians who were interned in the US during WWII. Excellent memoir portrays Asian immigrant experience of cultural adaption in Latin America. Insightful forward by the late C. Harvey Gardiner, who wrote extensively on the Japanese in Latin America and Peru, in particular"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
During the Second World War, Germany captured nearly 94,000 American soldiers, while the Allies shipped almost 380,000 Germans to the United States. We Were Each Other's Prisoners compares, for the first time ever, stories of POWs from both sides of the conflict: From the anti-Nazi German soldier who tried desperately to turn himself in rather than fight for Hitler, to the U.S. prisoner who thrice escaped his German captors,the last time to join Russian troops in the Battle of Berlin, to the Jewish-American prisoner who was sent to a slave labour camp.Culled from more than 150 interviews with 35 American and German surviving POWs, the book addresses larger political and psychological issues: What does it mean to be a prisoner, especially for men whose cultures prize individual heroism? Why did conditions differ so dramatically in American and German camps? How were these men received upon their return to their homeland? How have they coped with the long-term effects of incarceration?
During the Second World War, just under two thousand British
citizens were detained without charge, trial, or term set, under
Regulation 18B of the wartime Defence Regulations. Most of these
detentions took place in the summer of 1940, soon after Winston
Churchill became Prime Minister, when belief in the existence of a
dangerous Fifth Column was widespread. Churchill, at first an
enthusiast for vigorous use of the powers of executive detention,
later came to lament the use of a power which was, in his words, in
the highest degree odious'.
This book is the moving story of nine American soldiers and pilots who were captured and held prisoner for five years. It could only be told in their own words so author Zalin Grant interviewed each of the men and wove their accounts together to form a single, compelling narrative of war and survival. They describe the details of their daily existence in a Vietcong jungle prison as the war ebbed and flowed around them: the rats, the terror of American bombing raids, the sickness, starvation, and torture. Through the juxtaposition of their individual stories we see the subtle, destructive tensions that operate on a group of men in such desperate circumstances. Marched up the Ho Chi Minh trail to Hanoi, the prisoners' physical ordeal gave way to an agonizing moral dilemma. Should they join the "Peace Committee," a group of POWs protesting the war? Or should they resist their captors by all possible means as ordered by the secret American commander of the Hanoi prison? After years in the jungle on the edge of survival, each man had to answer the questions: Who am I? What do I believe? These men form a cross section of the army we sent to Vietnam. Their words illuminate not only their individual background and experience, but also the meaning of this war for all of us.
A former prisoner of the Gestapo, Kulka leads us through the horror of the Nazi death camps, describing such unbearable conditions as the over-crowded ghettos where Jewish minorities were left to starve, separation of families in cases where parents were brought to one concentration camp and children to another, and fear of an unknown fate such as the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Few people escaped from Auschwitz, and fewer survived such escape attempts. From personal experience as well as accounts from other survivors, Kulka details the only successful escape, led by Siegfried Lederer, where all those involved survived.
Ranging over a quarter of a millennium and four continents, Captives uncovers the experiences and writings of those tens of thousands of men and women who took part in Britain's rise to imperial pre-eminence, but who got caught and caught out. Here are the stories of Sarah Shade, a camp follower imprisoned alongside defeated British legions in Southern India; of Joseph Pitts, white slave and pilgrim to Mecca; of Florentia Sale, captive and diarist in Afghanistan; of those individuals who crossed the cultural divide and switched identities, like the Irishman George Thomas; and of others who made it back, like the onetime Chippewa warrior and Scot, John Rutherford. Linda Colley uses these tales of ordinary individuals trapped in extraordinary encounters to re-evaluate the character and diversity of the British Empire. She explores what they reveal about British responses to, relations with, and frequent dependence upon different non-European peoples. She shows how British attitudes to Islam, slavery, race, and American Revolutionaries look different once the captive's perspective is admitted. And she demonstrates how these individual captivities illuminate the limits of Britain's global power over time - as well as its extent. Richly illustrated and evocatively written, Captives is both a magnificent and compelling work of history, and a powerful and original reappraisal of the significance and survivals of empire now.
*Highly Commended by the British Records Association for the 2019 Janette Harley Prize* In September 1943, at the height of World War II, the Aegean island of Leros became the site of the most pivotal battle of the Dodecanese campaign as the British tried, in vain, to retain control of the island. Over the course of two short months - from 15 September 1943 to 17 November 1943 - almost 1500 men lost their lives and hundreds more ended up in Prisoner-of-War camps. In this book, Julie Peakman, a modern-day resident of Leros, brings to life the story of the men caught up in the battle based on first-hand interviews and written accounts including diaries, letters and journals. She tells of the preparations of the soldiers leading up to the battle, the desperate hand-to-hand fighting, and the suffering endured from continual bombings. She also shows the extent of the men's despair at the allied surrender, the many subsequent daring escapes as well as the terrible years of incarceration for those who were captured and imprisoned. Many of the heart-rending accounts of the battle are told here for the first time, providing a unique eyewitness take on this forgotten corner of World War II.
In October 1943 Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin signed a solemn pact that once their enemies were defeated the Allied powers would 'pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusers in order that justice may be done'. Nowhere did they say that justice would be selective. But it would prove to be. TRAITORS outlines the treachery of the British, American and Australian governments, who turned a blind eye to those who experimented on Australian prisoners of war. Journalist and bestselling author Frank Walker details how Nazis hired by ASIO were encouraged to settle in Australia and how the Catholic Church, CIA and MI6 helped the worst Nazi war criminals escape justice. While our soldiers were asked to risk their lives for King and country, Allied corporations traded with the enemy; Nazi and Japanese scientists were enticed to work for Australia, the US and UK; and Australia's own Hollywood hero Errol Flynn was associating with Nazi spies. The extraordinary revelations in TRAITORS detail the ugly side of war and power and the many betrayals of our ANZACs. After reading this book you can't help but wonder, what else did they hide?
In 1938 Johnny Sherwood was a young professional footballer on the brink of an England career, touring the world with the all-star British team the Islington Corinthians. By 1942 he was a soldier surrendering to the Japanese at the siege of Singapore. Taken prisoner he was sent to a POW camp deep in the heart of the Thai jungle, where he was starved, beaten, and forced to build the notorious 'railway of death' on the River Kwai. Johnny kept his and his men's spirits up with tales of his footballing past, even organising matches until he and the other prisoners became too weak to play. One day, he even encountered a brutal Japanese guard, and was shocked to recognise him as a Japanese footballer Johnny had played against. Many years after Johnny's death, his grandson Michael discovered an old manuscript hidden in the attic of his mother's house. It was Johnny's own account of his wartime experiences - the story too horrific to reveal in full to his loved ones. In the tradition of bestselling memoirs like The Railway Man, Lucky Johnny is an inspirational tale of survival against the odds.
Women throughout the world have always played their part in struggles against colonialism, imperialism and other forms of oppression. However, there are few books on Arab political prisoners, fewer still on the Palestinians who have been detained in their thousands for their political activism and resistance. Nahla Abdo's Captive Revolution seeks to break the silence on Palestinian women political detainees, providing a vital contribution to research on women, revolutions, national liberation and anti-colonial resistance. Based on stories of the women themselves, as well as her own experiences as a former political prisoner, Abdo draws on a wealth of oral history and primary research in order to analyse their anti-colonial struggle, their agency and their appalling treatment as political detainees. Making crucial comparisons with the experiences of female political detainees in other conflicts, and emphasising the vital role Palestinian political culture and memorialisation of the 'Nakba' have had on their resilience and resistance, Captive Revolution is a rich and revealing addition to our knowledge of this little-studied phenomenon.
During World War II the Japanese imprisoned more American civilians at Manila's Santo Tomas prison camp than anywhere else, along with British and other nationalities. Placing the camp's story in the wider history of the Pacific war, this book tells how the camp went through a drastic change, from good conditions in the early days to impending mass starvation, before its dramatic rescue by U.S. Army ""flying columns."" Interned as a small boy with his mother and older sister, the author shows the many ways in which the camp's internees handled imprisonment--and their liberation afterwards. Using a wealth of Santo Tomas memoirs and diaries, plus interviews with other ex-internees and veteran army liberators, he reveals how children reinvented their own society, while adults coped with crowded dormitories, evaded sex restrictions, smuggled in food, and through a strong internee government, dealt with their Japanese overlords. The text explores the attitudes and behaviour of Japanese officials, ranging from sadistic cruelty to humane cooperation, and asks philosophical questions about atrocity and moral responsibility.
During the First World War hundreds of thousands of Germans faced incarceration in hundreds of camps on the British mainland. This is the first book on these German prisoners, almost a century after the conflict. The book covers the three different types of internees in Britain in the form of: civilians already present in the country in August 1914; civilians brought to Britain from all over the world; and combatants. Using a vast range of contemporary British and German sources the volume traces life experiences through initial arrest and capture to life behind barbed wire to return to Germany or to the remnants of the ethnically cleansed German community in Britain. The book will prove essential reading for anyone interested in the history of prisoners of war or the First World War and will also appeal to scholars and students of twentieth-century Europe and the human consequences of war.
During the final days of the Second World War, for 900 Allied officers, held by the Germans in Oflag IX A/H and Oflag IX A/Z, freedom was still a world away. Marched east by their captors, away from the liberating American forces, March and April 1945 was a time of great trials, at the mercy of vengeful Nazis and Allied air raids. Amongst their number were many men whose names would become well known - Desmond Llewellyn, 'Q' in the Bond films, Frederick Corfield, a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher and Major Bruce Shand, father of Camilla Parker Bowles. The March East 1945 draws on official and eyewitness accounts from British, Commonwealth, American and German records, as well as over 30 diaries and memoirs. It reveals the human story that unfolded over two weeks in Hesse, Thuringia and Saxony, and explains how the prisoners lived until their final liberation. Complemented by 100 photographs and illustrations taken and drawn by PoWs, as well as the German instructions for camp evacuation published for the first time in English, this book provides a fascinating insight into the last days of the Second World War.
Prisoners of war have featured in virtually every conflict that the US has engaged in since its revolutionary beginnings. Today visitors to Washington will frequently see a black POW flag flying high on government buildings or war memorials in silent memory. This act of fealty towards prisoners reflects a history where they have frequently been a rallying point, source of outrage and problem for both military and political leaders. This is as true for the 2003 Iraq War as it was the American Revolution. Yet, the story of prisoners in American wars (both enemies taken and soldiers captured) reveals much about the nation itself; how it fights conflicts and its attitudes towards laws of war. A nation born out of an exceptional ideology, the United States has frequently found itself faced with the contradictory imperatives to be both exemplary and secure: while American diplomats might be negotiating a treaty at The Hague, American soldiers could be fighting a bloody insurrection where it seemed that few if any rules applied. By taking a historical approach, this book demonstrates that the challenges America faced regarding international law and the war on terror were not entirely unique or unprecedented. Rather, to be properly understood, such dilemmas must be contextualized within the long history of those prisoners captured in American wars.
Yasutaro Soga's ""Life behind Barbed Wire"" (Tessaku seikatsu) is an exceptional firsthand account of the incarceration of a Hawai'i Japanese during World War II. On the evening of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Soga, the editor of a Japanese-language newspaper, was arrested along with several hundred other prominent Issei (Japanese immigrants) in Hawai'i. After being held for six months on Sand Island, Soga was transferred to an Army camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and later to a Justice Department camp in Santa Fe. He would spend just under four years in custody before returning to Hawai'i in the months following the end of the war. Most of what has been written about the detention of Japanese Americans focuses on the Nisei experience of mass internment on the West Coast - largely because of the language barrier immigrant writers faced. This translation, therefore, presents us with a rare Issei voice on internment, and Soga's opinions challenge many commonly held assumptions about Japanese Americans during the war regarding race relations, patriotism, and loyalty. Although centered on one man's experience, ""Life behind Barbed Wire"" benefits greatly from Soga's trained eye and instincts as a professional journalist, which allowed him to paint a larger picture of those extraordinary times and his place in them. The Introduction by Tetsuden Kashima of the University of Washington and Foreword by Dennis Ogawa of the University of Hawai'i provide context for Soga's recollections based on the most current scholarship on the Japanese American internment.
This book reopens a chapter in Canadian history. The book is a series of diary entries beginning in 1941, when author Tom Sando was imprisoned in concentration camps, first in Petawawa and then Angler, Ontario -- a young Japanese Canadian imprisoned only because he was willing to stand and fight for his rights as a Canadian. The Japanese Canadians relocated to Petawawa and Angler were imprisoned in maximum security penitentiaries: compounds encircled by three layers of barbed wire fences, and under constant surveillance by rifle-armed guards stationed in watchtowers. These people were not prisoners-of-war or even criminals, but Canadian civilians deemed dangerous by the Canadian government because of their race. This is a unique first-hand look at a part of the Japanese internment that many Canadians are still unfamiliar with. Tom Sando relates his story of loneliness, fear, and eventually friendship and hope, candidly and with careful thought.
Through the Valley is the captivating memoir of the last U.S. Army soldier taken prisoner during the Vietnam War. A narrative of courage, hope, and survival, Through the Valley is more than just a war story. It also portrays the thrill and horror of combat, the fear and anxiety of captivity, and the stories of friendships forged and friends lost In 1971 William Reeder was a senior captain on his second tour in Vietnam. He had flown armed, fixed-wing OV-1 Mohawks on secret missions deep into enemy territory in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam on his first tour. He returned as a helicopter pilot eager to experience a whole new perspective as a Cobra gunship pilot. Believing that Nixon's Vietnamization would soon end the war, Reeder was anxious to see combat action. To him, it appeared that the Americans had prevailed, beaten the Viet Cong, and were passing everything over to the South Vietnamese Army so that Americans could leave.
For eighteen months during the Second World War, the Canadian military interned 1,145 prisoners of war in Red Rock, Ontario (about 100 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay). Camp R interned friend and foe alike: Nazis, anti-Nazis, Jews, soldiers, merchant seamen, and refugees whom Britain feared might comprise Hitler's rumoured "fifth column" of alien enemies residing within the Commonwealth. For the first time and in riveting detail, the author illuminates the conditions in one of Canada's forgotten POW camps. Backed by interviews and meticulous archival research, Zimmermann fleshes out this rich history in an accessible, lively manner. The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior will captivate military and political historians as well as non-specialists interested in the history of POWs and internment in Canada. |
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