The other Holocaust
I saw something unsettling (to put it mildly) on tv last night. It’s about the Burma railway, and the horrible conditions under which it was built by forced labour. I knew about it, but not enough; not nearly enough. I especially didn’t know that it was built not only by prisoners of war but also by (as the show called them) Asians – simply conscripted people from South India, Malaya, Thailand and other places. Their death rate was much worse than that of the prisoners, which was bad enough.
There was one memorable segment where the film maker and the Indian engineer who accompanies him hike laboriously through dense jungle to arrive at the top of what is revealed to be a constructed embankment. The FM gets the engineer to climb down the embankment. The engineer takes only a few struggling steps down before saying how difficult it is; the FM says ‘And remember most of them were barefoot.’ ‘They had no boots?’ the engineer says. ‘Most of them had no boots.’ The engineer struggles all the way down; the FM calls down to him ‘Now find a 20 pound rock and carry it up.’ The engineer is very miserable, but finds this heavy rock (which stands for the basket of soil the workers had to carry up) and sets off; he falls down almost at once. With immense effort, panting, grunting, wretched, he finally manages it. The FM calculates the length and volume of the embankment and the number of baskets needed to build the embankment then brightly says ‘Now you need to do that only 12 million more times.’ One trip was a nightmare, and the engineer was fully dressed, rested, well fed, and not ill or injured; furthermore it wasn’t monsoon season. The people who did the work for real were all starving, exhausted, injured, ill, underclothed, and much of the time it was monsoon season. It’s hard to imagine.
Though records are sketchy, approximately 61,000 Allied prisoners of war are believed to have labored on the railway, including 30,000 British, 18,000 Dutch, 13,000 Australian, and 700 American soldiers. An estimated 16,000 of those troops died, many of them from diseases like cholera, beri beri, malaria, and typhoid, most during an intensified period of construction known as “speedo” that commenced in January 1943. Another 200,000 Asian laborers, mostly Thai, were forced to work on the railway. More than 80,000 lost their lives.
First thing today I googled Burma railway.
The construction of the Burma Railway is only one of many major war crimes committed by Japan in Asia during the war. It is regarded as a major event in the “Asian Holocaust”, during which millions of civilians and POWs were killed by Japanese personnel.
I didn’t know there was an Asian Holocaust – at least I didn’t know it was called that, and I didn’t realize how bad it was outside China. Something else I need to know more about. The narrator of the tv show did say the death rate among the Asians is not as well known (presumably in the West) as that of the prisoners of war. Well clearly it should be. And what about those Japanese textbooks…
Holy shit. I’d definitely say I didn’t know nearly enough about the Burma Railway, either. Thanks for the info.
Its a very intresting part of history that has tended to be forgotten or only seen through the eyes of the surviving allied p.o.w.s I read a great book on this a few years back I will see if I can find the name of it for you.
Those who survived did not want to talk about it, usually.
It WAS appreciated, at the time, by the allied prisoners, that the conscripted forced labour were having at least as bad a time as they were, but they were deliberately kept separate by the Japanese in charge.
It was interesting that Siam/Thailand was oficially neutral or pro-Japanese, but this did not stop them from forcing many thousand Thai to work for them ….
One of my uncles, who had served in France in 1917-18, and emigrated to Australia in 1922, was captured on Sumatra in early 1942, and sent on to the railway.
He survived, though, typically, it was not realised that he was alive until AFTER the A-bombs were dropped, and Nippon surrendured, because they did not list him among the captured.
Ther atrocities committed by the armies and security services ( Kempai-Tai ) of Imperial Nippon in China, and across the whole of SE Asia were not quite as systematic as those of the Nazis or Communists, but they were extrememly widespread and brutal in the extreme.
When my Kilkenny Grandfather at a very young age died, my Grandmother one year later married a British Army Captain, [from Mayo Ireland]. He had retired [in his forties] having served over twenty five years during the first W.W.I in Burma and India. Whilst in Asia he had thousands of soldiers under him, and was a very hard taskmaster. The poor Indians/Burmese there had to polish his shoes and wait on him hand and foot. He went on to have a big family, and unfortunately they as well had a fiery, fearsome time under him. He was known to have thrown buckets of water on the children to wake them up in the mornings. I thought it was bad in Goldenbridge, when on awakening children, mattresses/children were habitually, and agressively so flung on to the floor.
More than 80,000 lost their lives for the sake of a bloody railway that ‘was dismantled soon after the war’s end with the rest lost to the Thai and Burmese jungles’. Yeah, that’s mans inhumanity to man. Bricks and mortar had more value than human lives.
“aggressively” < last post. “He survived, though” That must have been a fantastic relief for the family? Re: “Asian Holocaust” ‘Tenko’ springs, immediately, to the mind.
Sheesh. I’m going to have to read up on this ‘Asian holocaust’…
16,000 from 61,000 and 80,000 from 200,000 look like pretty comparable death rates to me, though. Or did I miss something?
And what about those Japanese textbooks…
OB,
I read,
“In 1993, Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro, who headed the first non -Liberal Democratic government in four decades, publicly admitted that the war had been “aggressive” on Japan’s part – the first such admission by a prime minister Fujioka Nobukatsu, Kyōkasho ga oshienai rekishi (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1997), introduction. In pursuit of the goal of educational reform, the members of the Liberal Historiography Study Group formed a second organization, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishikyōkasho o tsukuru kai in Japanese; the group’s English name differs somewhat from its Japanese one), which aims mainly to remove references to Japanese war crimes from junior high school and high school history textbooks. This second organization has vehemently attacked the Ministry of Education’s 1996 decision to allow references to ‘comfort women’ to be included in textbooks. The group has written its own textbook, New History of Japan, which was approved by the Ministry of Education.
Re: Tenko, Lavinia Warner’s television series Tenko, examined the Asian war through the eyes of a group of ex-pat European women who were captured by the Japanese while fleeing their homes in Singapore. They soon find themselves interned in prison camps run by brutal officers who believe the task of guarding ‘third-class citizens’ is beneath them.
Of topic but while we are looking at forgotten holocausts 1.5-2 million european gypsies were murdered by the nazis! and the Nuremberg trials barely mentioned them,its another facinating part of history that deserves a mention.
Konnichiwa, Hajimemashita, or should I say, guten nachmittag, yeah, or; as the Americans say, on t.v. – whatever!
A complete, highly speculative and racist theory of “Aryan” and anti-Semitic history can be found in Alfred Rosenberg’s publication, Race and Race History. Rosenberg’s account of ancient history is very well researched, but his conclusions require great leaps in logic. But the seemingly scholarly nature of such works was very effective in spreading Aryan supremacist theories among German intellectuals in the early 20th century, especially after the First World War
“All men have spiritually and physically the same origin” and that “mankind is essentially of one and the same essence”. On the other hand, in The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky states: “Verily mankind is ‘of one blood,’ but not of the same essence.
These and other ideas evolved into the Nazi use of the term “Aryan race” to refer to what they saw as being a “master race” of people of northern European descent, going to extreme and violent lengths to “maintain the purity” of this “race” through a far-reaching eugenics programme (including anti-miscegenation legislation, compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and the mentally deficient, the execution of the institutionalised mentally ill as part of a euthanasia programme, and eventually the systematic targeting of “die Untermenschen,” or lesser races, of Jews and Roma people in the Holocaust). This usage now has nearly no meaning outside of Nazi ideology.
It is noteworthy that Heinrich Himmler (the Reichsfuhrer of the SS), the person ordered by Adolf Hitler to implement the final solution (Holocaust), told his personal masseur Felix Kersten that he always carried with him a copy of the ancient Aryan scripture, the Bhagavad Gita because it relieved him of guilt about what he was doing — he felt that like the warrior Arjuna, he was simply doing his duty without attachment to his actions. Gosh, What hope would those who were the products of fallen women have had under the Nazi regime…ZILCH!Am also completely off topic, entchuldigung sie bitte es tut mir wirchlich leid.
Oops, <> “wirklich”,<> really,< yeah, yeah, whatever! Gott! Verdammt es noch mal. Werde ich nie lernen. God damn it again. I will never learn.
Two things related to this:
The Japanese war denial:
Excellent (very long, because of the interpretation) lecture here: http://chiasmos.uchicago.edu/events/takahashi.shtml
Also, regarding the Burma railway, there was a very interesting (and long) discussion between Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty I found a long time ago:
http://www.samvadindia.com/main.php?pg=guest&art=amidip
I don’t think I ever finished reading it because I stopped at one particular paragraph, amazed, and went off to research the Burma railway. I had had no idea that Indian workers were in any way involved in the bulding of it. It was an entirely new idea to me, and I started to think about why, and got distracted.
The paragraph that stopped me was an anecdote (so suspect, but still) and I’ve pasted it here so you don’t have to wade through the entire thing:
“At the other end of the spectrum were the hundreds of thousands of Indians who lived through the population transfers that were set in motion by colonialism. I wonder if you have ever looked at the (very scant) material on the transportation of Indians to South East Asia? What these people endured is truly horrifying: the truth is that India was to the late nineteenth century what Africa was to the eighteenth a huge pool of expendable labour. An anecdote: you will have heard of the death railway built by the Japanese to link Thailand to Burma. From the Bridge on the River Kwai we get the impression that this railway was built mainly by “European” POWs.
In fact the labour force was about eighty percent Asian and a large part of it consisted of Indian plantation labourers from Malaya. Stranger still: many of the Indians actually “volunteered” to work on this railway (other employment opportunities having ended with the war). One such Indian “death railway” survivor, a Tamil, was still alive until a few years ago. A reporter heard about him and went to do an interview. In tones of horror he asked the old man, about the hellish conditions on the railway the hunger, the disease, the torture, the unbelievable death toll. For a while the old man answered in mono-syllables and then his patience ran out. “You are right,” he said quietly, “the conditions there were truly terrible for the Europeans, who had never lived through these things before. But you know, for us Indians the life there was not much different from what we lived through here in the plantations.”
Thanks, BA, very interesting and helpful.
I found the brief bit about the transported Indians the most electrifying segment of that tv documentary – because it was an entirely new idea to me too, and because the stats were so terrible. The two in combination are shocking – why isn’t this better known here? (Here being I guess anglophone West. I’m surmising it may be much better known in Australia and New Zealand, if only because they’re geographically a lot closer.)
Plantations…plantations and mass death. Sugar plantation, cotton plantations, rubber plantations; they all seem to stand for death by overwork in tropical heat.