Surviving the Japanese Onslaught

Surviving the Japanese Onslaught PDF Author: William Albert Tate
Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
ISBN: 9781473880740
Category : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description

Surviving the Japanese Onslaught

Surviving the Japanese Onslaught PDF Author: William Albert Tate
Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
ISBN: 9781473880740
Category : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description


Surviving the Japanese Onslaught

Surviving the Japanese Onslaught PDF Author: William Tate
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1473880750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
These are the firsthand memoirs of the late William Albert Tate (W.O, RAF Bomber Command) framed within the factual history of his service career in the Royal Air Force between the years 1938 and 1946, penned by his son. This gripping narrative relays William's firsthand recollections of his time spent as a Japanese Prisoner of War, when he was incarcerated for two years in Rangoon Gaol, after bailing out of his Wellington over Burma. Tales of the harsh brutalities inflicted by his captors and the unsanitary conditions in which he and his fellow captives were held offer a real sense of the everyday realities experienced by Japanese Prisoners of War at this time. Jungle diseases, enforced starvation, sadistic torture tactics and the ever present threat of aerial bombardment all beset these prisoners. William and his son meditate on the legacies of enduring such trials as these in an engaging account of survival against the odds.

Surviving the Japanese Onslaught

Surviving the Japanese Onslaught PDF Author: William Albert Tate
Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
ISBN: 9781473880733
Category : Prisoners of war
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
* An honest and frank first-hand account of life as a Japanese Prisoner of War. * Set solidly in historical context by the author's son. * A gripping tale of survival against the odds, enhanced by the inclusion of photographs and documents taken directly from the author's family archive.

Surviving the Japanese Onslaught

Surviving the Japanese Onslaught PDF Author: William Albert Tate
Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
ISBN: 9781473880764
Category : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description


The Anguish of Surrender

The Anguish of Surrender PDF Author: Ulrich A. Straus
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295802553
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
On December 6, 1941, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki was one of a handful of men selected to skipper midget subs on a suicide mission to breach Pearl Harbor’s defenses. When his equipment malfunctioned, he couldn’t find the entrance to the harbor. He hit several reefs, eventually splitting the sub, and swam to shore some miles from Pearl Harbor. In the early dawn of December 8, he was picked up on the beach by two Japanese American MPs on patrol. Sakamaki became Prisoner No. 1 of the Pacific War. Japan’s no-surrender policy did not permit becoming a POW. Sakamaki and his fellow soldiers and sailors had been indoctrinated to choose between victory and a heroic death. While his comrades had perished, he had survived. By becoming a prisoner of war, Sakamaki believed he had brought shame and dishonor on himself, his family, his community, and his nation, in effect relinquishing his citizenship. Sakamaki fell into despair and, like so many Japanese POWs, begged his captors to kill him. Based on the author’s interviews with dozens of former Japanese POWs along with memoirs only recently coming to light, The Anguish of Surrender tells one of the great unknown stories of World War II. Beginning with an examination of Japan’s prewar ultranationalist climate and the harsh code that precluded the possibility of capture, the author investigates the circumstances of surrender and capture of men like Sakamaki and their experiences in POW camps. Many POWs, ill and starving after days wandering in the jungles or hiding out in caves, were astonished at the superior quality of food and medical treatment they received. Contrary to expectations, most Japanese POWs, psychologically unprepared to deal with interrogations, provided information to their captors. Trained Allied linguists, especially Japanese Americans, learned how to extract intelligence by treating the POWs humanely. Allied intelligence personnel took advantage of lax Japanese security precautions to gain extensive information from captured documents. A few POWs, recognizing Japan’s certain defeat, even assisted the Allied war effort to shorten the war. Far larger numbers staged uprisings in an effort to commit suicide. Most sought to survive, suffered mental anguish, and feared what awaited them in their homeland. These deeply human stories follow Japanese prisoners through their camp experiences to their return to their welcoming families and reintegration into postwar society. These stories are told here for the first time in English.

Embracing Defeat

Embracing Defeat PDF Author: John W Dower
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393320275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description
This study of modern Japan traces the impact of defeat and reconstruction on every aspect of Japan's national life. It examines the economic resurgence as well as how the nation as a whole reacted to defeat and the end of a suicidal nationalism.

Apocalypse Undone

Apocalypse Undone PDF Author: Preston John Hubbard
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826514011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Apocalypse Undone recounts Preston Hubbard's four-and-a-half year odyssey from a young, idealistic CCC worker to a much older, troubled man full of contempt for war and those who make it. He survived the Bataan Death March; imprisonment at Camp O'Donnell, where the death rate exceded 400 a day; a jungle work detail on Tayabas Isthmus; the starvation diet of Manila's Bilibid Prison; a 17 day voyage to Japan on a Hell Ship; and a Japanese POW camp bombed by American planes.

Belly of the Beast

Belly of the Beast PDF Author: Judith L. Pearson
Publisher: Diversion Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 1626812918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
“A searing tribute . . . [to] America in its bleakest hour” (Sen. John McCain, New York Times–bestselling author of Faith of My Fathers). On December 13, 1944, POW Estel Myers was herded aboard the Japanese prison ship, the Oryoku Maru, with more than sixteen hundred other American captives. More than eleven hundred of them would be dead by journey’s end . . . The son of a Kentucky sharecropper and an enlistee in the navy’s medical corps, Myers arrived in Manila shortly before the bombings of Pearl Harbor and the other six targets of the Imperial Japanese military. While he and his fellow corpsmen tended to the bloody tide of soldiers pouring into their once peaceful naval hospital, the Japanese overwhelmed the Pacific islands, capturing seventy-eight thousand POWs by April 1942. Myers was one of the first captured. After a brutal three-year encampment, Myers and his fellow POWs were forced onto an enemy hell ship bound for Japan. Suffocation, malnutrition, disease, dehydration, infestation, madness, and complete despair claimed the lives of nearly three quarters of those who boarded “the beast.” Myers survived. A compelling account of a rarely recorded event in military history, this is more than Myers’s true story—this is an homage to the unfailing courage of men at war, an inspiring chronicle of self-sacrifice and endurance, and a tribute to the power of faith, the strength of the soul, and the triumph of the human spirit. “An inspiring look at one of World War II’s darkest hours.” —James Bradley, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Flags of our Fathers and Flyboys “A searing chronicle.” —Kirkus Reviews

Surviving a Japanese Internment Camp

Surviving a Japanese Internment Camp PDF Author: Rupert Wilkinson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786465700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
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 behavior of Japanese officials, ranging from sadistic cruelty to humane cooperation, and asks philosophical questions about atrocity and moral responsibility.

Surviving the Sword

Surviving the Sword PDF Author: Brian MacArthur
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
During World War II, there were few fates that could befall a soldier so hellish as internment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. To this day, many survivors–most of whom are in their eighties–still cannot talk about their experiences without unearthing terrible memories. Surviving the Sword gives voice to these tens of thousands of Allied POWs and offers us a powerful reminder of the terror and depravations of war and the resilience of the human spirit. In this important book, Brian MacArthur draws on the diaries of American, British, Dutch, and Australian Fepows (Far Eastern prisoners of war), some of whose recollections are published here for the first time. These soldiers wrote and kept their diaries, in secret, because they were determined that to record for posterity how they were starved and beaten, marched almost to death, or transported on “hellships”; how their fellows were summarily executed by guards or felled by the thousands by tropical diseases; and how they were used as slave labor–most notoriously on the Burma-Thailand railway, as depicted in The Bridge on the River Kwai. The diaries excerpted in this book make plain why the Fepows believed that their brutal treatment by Japanese and Korean guards was, literally, incomprehensible to those who did not live it. The prisoners whose stories appear here risked torture and execution to keep diaries and make sketches and drawings that they hid from the guards wherever they could, sometimes burying them in the graves of lost comrades. The survivors’ narratives reveal not just a litany of horrors, but are a moving testament to the nobler instincts of humanity as well, detailing how the POWs prevailed over horrible conditions, even finding or creating a precious few creature comforts and sustaining the rudiments of culture, learning, and play. Forced into solidarity by inhuman conditions, the soldiers showed incredible compassion for one another, improvising ingenious ways to care for the sick, boost morale by subtly mocking their jailers’ authority, or even turn meager rations into the occasional feast. Countless thousands died in Japanese prison camps during World War II. Those fortunate enough to emerge from their ordeal were never the same again.Surviving the Swordat last fills a notable historical gap in our understanding, while also commemorating and memorializing the Fepows’ struggle and sacrifice.