USA prisoners of war: From the American Revolution to the Civil War

Warning: This blog post contains some disturbing pictures. One of these in particular is very graphic, and may merit special caution.

I grew up on prisoner-of-war movies – like “Stalag 17,” “The Great Escape,” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” They are particularly popular when depicting World War II, or certain other wars of the twentieth century. But relatively little has been said about American prisoners of war in prior conflicts. For example, little has been said about POWs in the American Revolution and the Civil War. Thus, I wanted to fill in some of the gaps here, and talk about our “POWs” (or “Prisoners Of War”) in some of these other periods. I should note that most of these periods were before the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions. Thus, modern rules and laws about the treatment of POWs did not yet apply in some of these periods. The stories of captured Americans, and those that we captured for ourselves, will tell us much about who we were as a people – and who we are today.

A review of “Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II” (BBC)

Warning: This blog post contains several disturbing pictures. One of them shows the body of a child.

The Japanese were racist against other Asians and Pacific Islanders, not just Whites …

Apologists for the Imperial Japanese seem to have multiplied in recent years, even in the West. They do have some valid points, including that there was some real racism against the Japanese in the West – including in my home country of the United States. But there was also racism in Japan as well, and not just against the “White Westerners.” They were racist against anyone who was not Japanese – including the Chinese and other fellow Asians and Pacific Islanders, whose countries the Japanese would soon be invading. Some of the Japanese officers interviewed on camera here admit to such racism, as do some of the Western officers fighting against them. Japanese propagandists used the slogans of “Asia for the Asians,” and a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” But the truth was far different from these grossly misleading slogans, because they wanted an Asia exclusively for the Japanese. No other Asian groups benefited from Japanese imperialism, as the record shows.

A review of “War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin” (BBC)

Note: The Russians usually refer to their own part of World War II as the “Great Patriotic War.” Some Eastern European countries use this same term. But in Germany (and in most other Western countries), it is known as the “Eastern front” – or, more informally, the “Russian front.”

They call it the “War of the Century” here – the massive conflict between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. To me, World War II as a whole is better-deserving of this title than any one of its parts, even this part. Nonetheless, I should acknowledge that the Russian front really was quite massive, and was cataclysmic for both sides. It is a war between two of the cruelest superpowers of the twentieth century. There were innocent victims on both sides, and there were cold-blooded murderers on both sides – with both sides having plenty of each. To me, this documentary seems to cover them in the right proportions, by painting both sides in a negative light. The war was a vicious and brutal conflict which lasted for nearly four years. Thus, it seems to make for great television, particularly with the moving way that the BBC covers it here. They show the human drama of the story, and tell it with a flourish.