military press junket came and went in mere hours, Weller left Nagasaki to explore the POW camps about forty miles north. He probably got there using a car and driver commandeered from the general. None of Kyushu’s Allied camps, whose prisoners worked as slaves, had yet been “opened”; few camps were aware the war was over, although many Japanese guards and officers had fled. Some camps had received food drops from B-29s. The prisoners—mainly American, British, Australian, Dutch—were diseased, weakened, yet reluctant to risk leaving, fearful for their lives after years of indiscriminate torture and deliberate starvation. The Japanese POW camps are one of the great omissions in World War II memory. Despite the large numbers involved—140,000 Allied prisoners through the war—they have not been portrayed in films, chronicled by historians, or officially documented as the Nazi camps have been, though they were seven times deadlier for a POW. The Pacific war was as much a tribal struggle of race, with all its mutual incomprehensions, as a struggle of nations.
What do You think about First Into Nagasaki (2006)?
