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Hundreds of prisoners of war from allied nations were held in brutal Japanese concentration camps Nagasaki when USA The atomic bomb was dropped 80 years ago.
Their presence in the Aug. 9, 1945 bombing is little known, and family members and researchers have been collecting and releasing testimonies to tell the stories of these often unrecognized victims.
In September, dozens of relatives Dutch Descendants of prisoners of war and survivors of Japanese bombings gathered to commemorate those tortured in the concentration camps and the tens of thousands of Japanese who died that day. The dead included at least eight prisoners from a concentration camp in Nagasaki.
Descendants and survivors look back on painful past
Andre Schram, who represents the Dutch family in the Nagasaki memorial unveiled in 2015, was the son of a sailor and one of nearly 1,500 prisoners of war held for three years in the Fukuoka 2nd Camp and forced to work at the Kawawa Shipyard.
Many of the prisoners were Dutch servicemen captured by the Japanese in Indonesia and transported to Nagasaki on so-called “hell ships”, where they were held in two main concentration camps – No. 2 and No. 14 – and used as slave labor.
According to the Japanese Prisoner of War Research Network, approximately 150,000 Allied prisoners of war were held in dozens of concentration camps across Asia during the war, and 36,000 of them were sent to Japan to make up for labor shortages as Japanese were drafted and deployed to battlefields across Asia.
Nagasaki also had prisoners from the United States, Britain and Australia. No one was killed in the atomic bombing of Camp 2, but more than 70 people had died of malnutrition, overwork and disease.
Andre Schram’s father, Johan Willem Schram, returned to the Netherlands four months after the war but did not tell his son that he was being treated as a slave until near the end of his life. Japanese officials repeatedly apologized for wartime atrocities, “but John, like many other victims, had doubts about their sincerity,” his son said.
“He felt disrespected by the way he and other prisoners of war were treated by Japan and the Netherlands. He never wanted to have anything to do with Japan again,” Andre Schram wrote in “Johan’s Story,” a booklet about the Dutch colonization of the Dutch East Indies, the war with Japan and their aftermath that was based on research conducted after his father’s death in 1993.
Peter Klok said his father, Leendert Klok, also a Dutch prisoner of war at the camp, told him that Japanese civilians at the shipyard were friendly and helped him find parts to repair his watch. Military police later beat him for asking for help.
Klock called the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki horrific but said Japan must reflect on its atrocities.
A blinding flash, a violent explosion, and then the war is over
British prisoner Tom Humphrey wrote in his diary that when American B-29s dropped the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, prisoners in Camp 2, about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from Ground Zero, saw a huge orange fireball, purple smoke and a three-layer mushroom cloud. Portions of this are quoted on the RAF website.
He wrote that windows in the camp were shattered, doors blown off and the ceiling of the clinic collapsed.
Another camp, Fukuoka Camp 14, was even closer to the explosion. The brick building was destroyed, killing eight people and injuring dozens more.
Former Dutch prisoner Rene Schafer recalled that he and other prisoners were digging new shelters when Japanese soldiers warned of approaching American planes. They jumped into a bunker, but his roommate was severely burned and died nine days later.
As everyone fled to shelters, Australian survivor Peter McGrath-Kerr was reading a book. An Australian prisoner dug him out of the rubble, but he had been unconscious for five days with broken ribs, cuts and bruises on his hands, and radiation burns.
Researchers examine a largely ignored history
In the days after the atomic bombing, prisoners from Fukuoka Camp 2 provided rice and other aid to their comrades from Camp 14.
Schramm’s father and fellow POWs from the 2nd Battalion were officially notified of Japan’s surrender on August 18, and U.S. B-29s delivered the first food shipments to Allied POWs on August 26.
On September 13, the survivors of the prisoner of war camp left Nagasaki and sailed to the Philippines on a US aircraft carrier.
Kazuhiro Ihara, whose father lived through the atomic bombing and worked to reconcile with the prisoners, said the ceremony at a granite monument in Nagasaki with three inscriptions was the result of a joint effort by the families of Dutch prisoners of war who returned home with painful memories and the descendants of atomic bomb survivors.
In Hiroshima, decades of independent research by Japanese survivor Shigeaki Mori led to the United States confirming that 12 captured American service members died in the August 6 atomic bombing.
former president barack obamaIn 2016, he became the first U.S. leader to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, mentioning in his speech “more than a dozen Americans imprisoned” as one of the victims. He recognized Murray’s family in search of Americans, believed their loss was equal to his own, and later gave him a hug.
A 1957 Japanese law allowed medical support for certified atomic bomb survivors and has since gradually expanded its scope. The number of certificate holders currently stands at 99,000, down from a peak of 372,000 in 1980.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare said there are about 4,000 certificate holders living outside Japan, many of them Koreans and Japanese in the United States, Brazil and other countries.
At least 11 former Nagasaki prisoners of war – seven Dutch, three Australians and one British – received survivor certificates, according to the POW Research Network.
“This issue has been swept under the rug,” said Taeko Sasamoto, co-founder of POW Research Network.
Sasamoto said the research required a time-consuming examination of historical documents that have not attracted much scholarly interest. “This is an important issue that has been ignored for a long time.”
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AP video reporter Mayuko Ono contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Outrider Foundation for coverage of nuclear safety. The Associated Press is solely responsible for all content.
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Additional AP coverage of the nuclear landscape: https://apnews.com/projects/the-new-nuclear-landscape/