FEPOWs

Good WWII Read

I really enjoy reading about World War II. In my opinion, people don’t know enough about history and every generation gets even more ignorant about it than the last. World War II is undoubtedly the most important event of the 20th Century and to understand it better makes you aware of why the world is the way it is today, good and bad.

Anyway, I am reading a book called “Surviving the Sword” by Brian MacArthur. It is extremely powerful. It is about the plight of the largely forgotten POWs (aka FEPOWS-Far East Prisoners of War) in the Far East from 1940-1945. Most of them were British, Australian and Dutch with a significant number of Americans as well.

We are all well versed on the Holocaust and German POW camps (even if only through “Hogan’s Heroes”) but the stories of the FEPOWs are largely forgotten. The irony is that the German POW camps were like Country Clubs compared to the Japanese. The Japanese had never signed off on the Hague and Geneva POW protocols and treated the POWs like animals. Their stories are very upsetting and very moving.