I had a great uncle who was captured during the battle of the Kasserine Pass and spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp. He was called up again to fight in Korea, was captured, and spent 3 months in a North Korean POW camp. Afterwards he said that he would rather spend a year in a German camp than a week in a North Korean one.
@@davidkinsey8657 That goes for everything. For example (my family in ww2) the town my grandfather lived in, wasnt really touched by americans that much. They even were quite friendly to local children and auch. On the other hand, the town of my grandmother was mass raped by americans. From what she told me, it felt surreal believing those americans, always portrayed as heroes in ww2, were no different than any other army. But on average, other armies stand out more, because 1. they lost, and 2. they actually were worse. I mean look at the soviets, they won, yet everyone knows how insanely gruesome the red army was.
My dad had a friend who was a survivor of the Bataan death march in WW2. He had been beaten so severely, that it broke something in his nervous system that allowed him to feel the cold. The two of them would go steelhead fishing, and only my dad would need to wear waders, while his friend would be hip deep in the frigid river with a smile on his face.
In the book "Kill Anything that Moves" by Nick Turse, American interrogators would often hand over prisoners to South Vietnamese interrogators knowing they would do far worse to get confessions and information, or to dispose of a prisoner without a paper trail.
"Fun" fact: South Vietnamese intelligence service once tortured a Vietnamese intelligence officer. After normal torture fails to yield anything, they decide to chop his legs off. Pieces by pieces. And they do it 6 times.
@@torlekjpec5708 yeah in the Vice documentary "This is What Winning Looks Like" the Afghan National Police just snatch up random men saying they are Taliban. Then they execute and dump them out in the wilderness and face zero consequences. It doesn't show many more details than that, but it would be easy to tell them "hey get rid of this guy".
If you were unfortunate enough to be captured by the Japanese Kempa-tai..The Japanese Secret Police service, chances are most would not have made it to a prisoner of war camp! As a matter of fact, it's my understanding that the way the Chinese learned to treat and tortured the Japanese prisoners came directly from the techniques used by the Kempai-tai on the Chinese. But I'm sure a bit of imagination also played a roll as well.
One fairly overlooked book on prisoners held in Japanese captivity was The Tub by Hugh V. Clarke, captured at Singapore and worked on the Thai-Burma Railway
It really was horrific, did you read the forgotten highlander he was forced to work on building railways through jungles by the Japanese, many didn’t even have shoes as they had fallen apart, it’s been a good while since I read it but one part that really stuck out to me was the tale of his slave ship, which was sunk while carrying POWs he managed to reach a lifeboat and encountered a Japanese officer who threw him a tin of chocolate, he had no water to drink, they both knew that if he gave into his awful hunger he would die of dehydration due to the sugar (you need to urinate more to get the excess sugar out your bloodstream) true horror
@@bingbongbingbongbingbongbing90 I didn't but whats the point in saying any part of it was less horrific than the rest as so many terrible things happened to so many men in those hell holes, but maybe try that docu 'a doctors war' about an Brit doctors time in a POW camp
@@johnryder1713 i dont think hes putting it out there to say it's "more horrific". I think he's just putting it out there to give perspective on another scenario
@@aquilamotionpictures408 Because after all happened to Jeremiah, maybe it wasn't so easy to forgive and forget, especially if you just act like a politician hoping to look good to your voters
It depends on what army you were with. For American or British, German POW camps were not vacation spots but not death camps. For Russians, German POW camps was a death sentence and the same for German POW's in Russian POW Camps. Germans did well in US or British POW camps. The worst camps for Allied soldiers were Japanese camps. Few Japanese surrendered but those that did lived better then Allied POWs.
"Germans did well in US or British POW camps." oh really? Try Rheinwiesenlager, no one even knows how many German POWs perished in Allied camps after the war. Canadian historian James Bacque claimed in his book Other Losses that the number is likely in the hundreds of thousands, and may be as high as 1,000,000 but then Americans and their quislings in Germany hysterically attacked him .
@@bdleo300 No, it was in the thousands, mostly do of supply problems. Ask yourself why did Wehrmacht fight their was west to surrender to British or American forces?
I think it would be cool to see a vid on what were seen as the best countries when it came to treatment of POW's in camps. For example many POW's in Canadian camps decided to stay after the war ended. My grandpa worked with many German WW2 vets and most of them had been POW's. Edit: By the way there are actually a lot of entertaining stories about Canadian POW camps.
Better to die than fall into your enemies hands is the lesson from bad treatment of prisoners. That only makes the enemy more likely to put up a stronger fight. You should always treat prisoners of war the way you would want the enemy to treat those we lose to it. That makes the enemy more likely to surrender when they see it is not going well for them.
@@lehoang3532 I was one of those hippies that protested against the war. Not my pet. The CIA tortures everyone they go after. Gitmo is not a nice place either.
One very sad story dramatized in the BBC the series Colditz (1972) was when Polish Lieutenant Ryszard Bednarskis family was disgracefully threatened by the Gestapo and forced to betray escape attempts, until the senior Polish officer intervened and asked could he be moved elsewhere, but subsequent to the war the poor guy felt so bad he took his own life on meeting another Polish Colditz inmate
John McCain also stayed because the POWs had a pact that release would happen to the POWs in the order they arrived. There were many others who were there longer than McCain.
or even worse , a Vietcong in a South Vietnammese camp , my grandpa was a SV veteran for 6 years and They got a methode called "Un-moved anything that moved" basiclly dont care who you shoot , just if you cant see their face but theyre from the north , dump a M16 mag on them , if they survived , Dump another one
Chinese collaborators were often executed but Japanese POWs were generally not mistreated. One Japanese account I read just mention being made to build roads and other construction for a couple of years before being repatriated. In fact Chiang Kai-shek, the ROC leader at that time wanted to use Japanese POWs in his civil war. To this day some Japanese nationalists deny the Japanese military committed warcrimes on the grounds that the Chinese didn’t take revenge on Japanese POWs.
Well, the Chinese warlords and the Chinese communists used to not be so nice, they gave you the option to join or die, and if you didn't join your death would not be quick, also the nationalist forces committed several atrocities against Japanese POWs but no on such a large scale and when millions of Japanese soldiers surrendered at the end of ww2 the Nationalist forces were especially kind to get them to join them if possible.
My wife is from Nagasaki Japan and yes the Japanese school system doesn't teach much about WWII except the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a reoccurring theme when I visited the atomic bomb museum in Nagasaki and the history was really one sided saying how terrible it was and should never use one again with no context of why it was used.
@@condedooku9750 honestly idk why you defend them. They got off relatively easily and their country has become prosperous. Can’t say the same about the entire families slaughtered in China whose lineage seized to exist because a single Japanese soldier wanted to stick his private parts into others.
@@condedooku9750 In WWII join or die was an extraordinarily generous offer. What fool would refuse when you’re not being asked to fight your own but someone else?
@@johnyricco1220 No, this offer was given to the Japanese POWs, the Chinese Collaborators were just killed, slowly at that, so... It wasn't a very generous offer when you were making it to a guy fanatically loyal to his country, to which you probably only captured because he was so hurt he couldn't fight anymore.
The thing is, the Chinese didn’t stop at soldiers or collaborators. When the Soviets invaded Manchuria and butchered Japanese civilians, the Chinese cheered them on and joined in
@@cpt-cheese3489 Understandable but not justifiable, killing POWs (unless they are 100% war criminals) or civilians is never okay and collaborators deserve a trial before any sentence is handed down.
6:02 - I'd much rather be a Vietnamese captured by the Americans. The fact you even brought up waterboarding shows how fuck-all the torture was. I'm not saying it's easy, but compared to the Vietnamese torture methods, waterboard me all fucking day...
Based on your name, I'm guessing you are female. Then I'd advise you to not choose and just fight to the end. Americans have some really "brilliant" methods of torture applied to female prisoners. And they teach that to their South Vietnamese.
My Father was captured at Corregidor Island in Manila Bay, May 1942 and finally released Sept. 1945. As I grew up, he never like any Japanese that would have been old enough to have fought during the war. A younger Japanese person, he had no hard feeling towards or against them. He held in a POW camp East of Manila, Taiwan, Hospital in Southern Japan, forced to help build ships in Yokohama and his last POW camp was at Sendai, Japan 3 years and 4 months
American treatment of Filipinos in the 1898-1904 Insurrection mirrored Indian wars treatments/methods. That is where waterboarding was said to be invented. Ethnic differences between combatants inspire cruelty. Both sides mirror each other in most cases.
Really? Check out the Union pow camps, especially Camp Douglas in Chicago, and Elmira, "fondly" dubbed Hellmira by the prisoners, in New York. Both were far worse than Andersonville for the simple reason that every thing that caused prisoner suffering was deliberate and planned. What happened at Andersonville was due to lack of supplies, not animosity.
@@aquilamotionpictures408 To say that the POW Camps in the North were as deadly as those in the South is a fact, to say that those in the North were like that for pleasure while those in the South were like that because of their inability to be better is revisionism.
As bad as north Vietnam camps were . More people were able to come back and tell stories comparatively to the Japanese camps we got stories from survivors of japans camps sure but the amount captured in Vietnam doesn’t come close to those captured in WW2
Not to mention that American prisoners can still walk on their 2 feet. Our compatriots who where held in US (and US puppet's) prison camps are not so lucky - assuming they are lucky enough to live.
Andersonville Prison, was extremely bad. In fact, it was one of the only few cases where the Warden of the Prison was tried for war crimes in the civil war, even the Confederates themselves did not like the appalling conditions in the prison. But, id say the Andersonville case was one of extreme neglect. And partly due to some ignorance as well. Like how the water use was in the prison. But, I don't think it was on the level of Japanese internment camps, because theirs were clear acts that were intentional. The Japanese, believed you lost your honor if you surrendered, and did not deserve any modicum of humanity.
Bridge on the River Kwai is very fictional, according to most survivors whom saw it when it premiered in 1957. King Rat was written by a Changi survivor.
@@allfd2414 let me gues you read the gulag archipelago, a book written by an open fash and Franco supporter whos ex-wife admited 90% of The book was made up campfire stories about the gulags?
@@konstantinkelekhsaev302 what the Soviets did in ww2 was considerably fucked up from Cannibalism too human experimentation don't try to deny something that's well documented
@@konstantinkelekhsaev302 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CaOwcYLGTMo.html one human experiment I can think of was Soviet scientists tried to make Ape Human hybrids by inseminating Humans women and ape females.
You got a lot of the images wrong. 7:15 that was from the Qing dynasty's execution of prisoners, decades prior. 7:12 was early warlord era not sino-japanese war, the uniforms and dress styles are completely different.
@ julian...yeah, making Muslim enemy combatants crawl into a naked pile is far worse than being hung by your arms backward until you suffer permanent physical damage. Way to go, Sparky. Just demonstrated to the entire planet for eternity what an absolute dim bulb you are. Nice. Bet your folks are so proud of you.
The Japanese were still the worse with the highest death rates but NVA camps rank up there. US forced in Viet Nam were in a savage guerrilla war with a lack of proper leadership leading to individual acts of torture. Some of those method are still used and approved by right wing politicians.
As terrible as the US POW-MIA of Vietnam that should never be forgotten are, one should never forget it wasn't the first time, as many people on passing ships and plane said there were similar men held and working in fields after the war, in Turkey subsequent to Gallipoli, as alluded to in the book and movie, the Water Diviner
You should have talked about the crimes against humanity committed by the Union in the American Civil War. Andersonville (CSA POW camp) was a picnic compared to the brutality of the Union camps.
It was the flag for the nationalist Chinese who fled to taiwan after they lost the civil war. Nationalist China is the China that fought Japan in World War 2
@@alexrempel3274 the Communists stopped their invasion during the occupation. they only took it back up in 1945 after the west freed them from the Japanese. The Taiwanese ancestors fought far more than the communists in China
I'd say the Russian POW camps in the current Russo-Ukraine war are pretty terrible. But as it's a current war, we can't really tell how Ukrainian and Foreign legion POW's are being treated beside stories from prisoners being swapped and videos that get leaked. But with all the war crimes Russia has been committing I wouldn't be surprised if it's as bad or getting close to how bad the Japanese WW2 POW camps were.
