TAIPEI, Taiwan – Robert Rosendahl was just 19 – in those days too young to drink a beer or bring a voice – when he was sent to the Pacific Theater during World War II. There, in that deadliest of the arenas of war, he would see things that no human, only a boy, should ever see.
He had just graduated from high school in a small town in Minnesota. His parents could not afford to send him to university, so in 1941 he joined the army.
Immediately after arriving in the Philippines, he was sent to the front during the Battle of Bataan. In that bloody battle, American and Philippine forces tried hard to resist the Japanese invasion of the Philippines – and failed.
More than 30 million soldiers and civilians were killed in the Pacific theater during the war, compared to the 15 million to 20 million killed in Europe.
But remarkably, as the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in Asia approaches, on Saturday, August 15, a few commemoration ceremonies are planned, and it is not because of COVID-19.
On every anniversary, there is no return of veterans to the battlefields, as at D-Day celebrations in France. No meeting of national leaders. No bugles sounding cranes above newly manicured churchyard.
VJ Day, as the anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan is called, receives far less attention than Victory in Europe, or VE Day, on 8 May.
In fact, the US and China – allies then – are increasingly bitter rivals for global economic primacy today. For its part, Japan, unlike Germany, has been uneasy about confronting its war history.
But the 140,000 Allied military personnel taken prisoner, according to UK-based independent website Forces War Records – as well as the tens of thousands of civilians held captive by the Japanese army as prisoners of war – suffered some of the worst atrocities of the war.
Many have not survived the war or have since died. But the testimony of the surviving survivors, along with oral histories recorded by others before their deaths, remind us today of both man’s capacity for cruelty and for frontier courage.
‘People died left and right’
One of the prisoners was the schoolboy Rosendahl in Minnesota.
He and tens of thousands of Americans and Filipinos were captured by the Japanese in the Battle of Bataan. They were forced to march more than 60 miles to prison camps in the Bataan Death March.
Thousands of Filipinos and hundreds of Americans died.
“If you did not march, they would shoot you,” Rosendahl said in an interview conducted before his death in February. The interview is part of the digital collection of oral history of the National World War.
Eventually, Rosendahl reached a prison camp that was full of feces and so full that it had no room for the prisoners to lie.
“We had people who lost their minds and went hysterical,” he said. ‘It was a hellhole; people died left and right. The only duty was to bury 100 men a day. ”
He was later sent to Japanese-occupied Manchuria, in northern China, to work as a ‘slave laborer,’ he said, assembling machines at temperatures that dropped to 25 degrees below zero.
“The hardest part was over that winter of 1942 and ’43. I developed beriberi and my legs were all up… like a pair of rubber gloves full of water. It just kept breathing for you, and when it got above your waist, you could not breathe. ”
Beriberi, caused by a deficiency of vitamin B-1, affects the circulatory system and eventually the heart.
‘Lost the will to live’
Such circumstances were typical of POWs taken prisoner by Japan, according to Michael Hurst, a Taiwanese-based Canadian historian who spent two decades finding all 16 of the POW camps in Taiwan – then a Japanese colony – and surviving interviews. about the circumstances.
Hard work was the rule, he said. The 4,300-plus POWs imprisoned in Taiwan worked in a copper mine, removing stones from a valley to make way for sugarcane, or digging a man-made lake.
Working in the mine was especially detrimental to their health.
“It was so hot that temperatures were at more than 40 degrees (104 Fahrenheit) most of the time, and other holes were very cold and the men got diphtheria and died,” Hurst said. ‘They had to get slaves away to extract copper from this mine, and they got so many cars with ore to fill in one day and drill so many holes in one day. If they did not, they would be beaten after working with mining hammers. ”
The men got rice greens like sweet potatoes. Her body weight normally dropped to half of what it had been before she was captured.
In their diaries, the POWs wrote that they had to work, even when they were suffering from beriberi, which caused their testicles to become the size of footballs. Those considered dead were denied medication.
According to the National Museum of World War II, 40 percent of U.S. military personnel living in Japanese camps died, compared with 1.2 percent in Europe.
Of the 27,465 Americans taken prisoner by the Japanese, 11,107 died.
The men told me, ‘It’s easy to die; living from day to day was the hard part, ” Hurst said. ‘Some men went into the sick hut and gave up. They would die in their sleep. They had just enough, lost the will to live. ”
But even at the risk of their lives, some of the prisoners worked to sabotage Japan’s war effort.
“When the two Japanese guards had a tea break, they would take the gears out of the machines and throw them into the concrete,” Rosendahl said, grinning as he referred to the prisoners. “The machines were just holes when we passed through; they could not be used. ”
“They didn’t catch anyone, but they were terribly crazy about it, and they picked out 150 guys who they thought had something to do with it and sent them to Japan to work in a lead mine,” he added.
Citizens are interns
In addition to POWs, Japan detained some 14,000 U.S. citizens living in areas that became combat zones. Although the civilians were not treated as badly as the soldiers, their experiences still haunt them.
“I have had dreams that are stressful and disturbing,” Curtis Brooks, now 91, said in a telephone interview from his home in Las Vegas. He was 13 in 1942 when he, his parents and his twin brother were put in the Santo Tomas internment camp outside Manila, which housed nearly 4,000 foreign nationals.
“You woke up hungry, you went through all the hunger, you went to bed hungry,” Brooks said. Those who were ill received no treatment, he said, adding, “Those who tried to escape were justified.”
His father died of malnutrition, and later his mother was killed by artillery fired by the Japanese after the camp was liberated and was managed by Americans; the interlocutors still lived there because it was not immediately safe to leave.
The surrender of Japan
Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 100,000 to 200,000 people.
“When word came that the Allies were winning the war, the prisoners fell to their knees and cried,” Hurst said. But not everyone survived the last days of the war.
Fourteen U.S. airmen who were taken prisoner after bombing Japanese bases in Taiwan were abused in the last days of the war. One was in his teens.
And Rosendahl said he and his fellow residents narrowly escaped were massacred; they were rescued by six American soldiers who were parachuting from a plane and the Japanese were told that the war was over.
“The next day they had a speaker and music for us, new music that we had not heard for three and a half years,” Rosendahl said. “Me and another man went downtown and shot the lock of a Kirin Beer Brewery and … loaded all the Kirin beer we could and bought them back to camp.”
Bittersweet homecoming
When they returned, many former POWs did not receive much help in dealing with the trauma they had experienced. They did not tell their loved ones, and their governments did not tell them about their experience, to avoid questions about military strategies that resulted in the imprisonment of the soldiers, Hurst said.
When the men tried to tell their families, their loved ones could not believe the faith stories they told them. Some former soldiers ended up in mental settings, and some died by suicide, Hurst said. For others, the trauma devastated their marriages.
But many had the power to return to their normal lives and raise families.
“They were the heroes of our lives,” Hurst said.
How VJ Day should be remembered
In Taiwan, Hurst’s POW Camps Memorial Society plans to hold a memorial service on Saturday. But no government ceremony is planned for that day, even though the Republic of China (ROC), which is the official name of Taiwan, has been fighting Japan for years, preventing it from invading more countries. A small concert will be organized by the Taiwan Army on August 26 in commemoration of the 75th anniversary, but a few tickets are available for the public.
WWII is a sensitive issue here because of the island’s history as a Japanese colony before the Taiwanese government moved to the island, and it would rather not highlight the uncomfortable truth that many Taiwanese fought on the side of Japan.
For other Asian countries, many were colonies at the time, and it was primarily the colonizers who led the war effort. Most now also want good ties with Japan.
But Hurst, former POWs and interlocutors say VJ Day has yet to be celebrated because it liberates Taiwan and other parts of Asia.
They say it is important to learn history so that they do not repeat it.
“History has gotten a great way of repeating itself,” Rosendahl said. ‘They said we would not have more wars since the atomic bomb, but how many wars have we had since World War II? We had a few of them. ”
Brooks, the 91-year-old survivor, is still hopeless.
“Let this never happen again,” he said.
