Doctors in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Taiwan in the Second World War and their personal accounts of captivity.

Abstract

Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895 and in the Second World War was geographically central in Japan's wartime possessions and strategically important, with military airfields, ports, and a copper mine. Its sixteen prisoner-of-war camps included four labour camps. Taiwan was also the first place to which senior officers and colonial officials were dispersed after the Allied surrenders in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Forty-five doctors from the British, Australian, Dutch and American forces were identified who spent at least part of their captivity on Taiwan. This article uses their personal accounts, official documents and secondary sources to describe them and their work. Although the oldest had experience in the First World War and some had practised in the region, others were young, recently-qualified generalists. Most were transferred between several camps, with one consequence that few contemporaneous medical records survive. Doctors shared the risks and hardships of all prisoners: they lost weight and had the same nutritional disorders, infections and infestations as their patients. Two died. They became significant, scrutinised figures in the camps. Their patients valued their work and understood that they lacked resources for fully effective medical practice.