Quotes About POWs

Japan had held 132,134 western POWs and 35,756 of them died in detention, a death rate of 27 percent. In contrast, only 4 percent of the POWs held by the Germans and Italians died.

It was necessary to bluff the Japanese camp commanders, with whatever authority I could muster, that I had come officially to ensure that the surrender terms were being complied with and that living conditions for the POWs were being immediately improved.

As the prisoners' commanding officer and senior medical officer, Dorrigo Evans reported to Major Nakamura that four men had died the day before, two overnight, and that this left eight hundred and thirty-eight POWs. Of this eight hundred and thirty-eight, sixty-seven had cholera and were in the cholera compound, and another one hundred and seventy-nine were in hospital with severe illness. A further one hundred and sixty-seven were too ill for any work other than light duties.

American POWs from the last Iraq war, who were held prisoner and tortured by Iraq, are now being prevented by our government from suing the Iraqis who tortured them.

It takes time to understand the difference between civilian POWs and military POWs. There's an educational process.

I went overseas hoping to prove that all our POWs were home. I came back convinced that they were still alive.

Without territory, it does not even have the resources to provide detention facilities for prisoners, even if it were interested in holding captured POWs.

In the winter of 1973, the American POWs held captive in Vietnam were released according to the terms of the Paris Peace Accords.

The U.S. overall has an excellent record when it comes to treatment of POWs and persons listed as foreign combatants, but the longer the war against terrorism goes on, the more tempting it is for our guys to stoop to the other side's level. After all, they're only human, and they might come to view the person sitting across from them as someone not worthy of any rights at all.

The final effort came when our reconnaissance team reported contact with the POWs and their guards by radio near midnight at a pre-arranged crossing site.

At least 30,000, possibly more, German POWs may have died in French captivity, of starvation and malnutrition, of disease and neglect and mistreatment. Around 5,000 are thought to have been killed during work on clearing minefields alone. The International Red Cross certainly considered the French, after the Russians, the most reprehensible of the major powers in their treatment of German prisoners of war.

They brought with them seventeen American POWs who were secretly imprisoned in Villa Marista for advanced experiments with drugs." It was hard to imagine being taken prisoner in Vietnam, tortured there, then being shipped to Cuba for more of the same.

Every morning, the Omori POWs were assembled and ordered to call out their number in Japanese. After November 1, 1944, the man assigned number twenty-nine would sing out "Niju ku!" at the top of his lungs.

In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, "the Quack," was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world's memory.

Both men survived, and as terrible as their experience had been, they were lucky. All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for experiments in biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died.

With communism wicking across the Far East, America's leaders began to see a future alliance with Japan as critical to national security. The sticking point was the war-crimes issue; the trials were intensely unpopular in Japan, spurring a movement seeking the release of all convicted war criminals. With the pursuit of justice for POWs suddenly in conflict with America's security goals, something had to give.

To help students steel themselves for captivity, SERE used a variety of 'stress and duress' techniques. The military's encyclopedic knowledge of these techniques was paid for in American blood because it was gleaned from former POWs tortured by totalitarian regimes. One technique, waterboarding, was a historically well-known torture.