Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012. x, 255 pp., [12] pp. of plates. (Map, Illus.) US$33.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-61251-114-6.
Guam, 200 square miles in area, is the largest of all the small islands and coral atolls that form Micronesia, an area scattered across the central and north Pacific between the Philippines and Hawaii. Guam was of strategic importance to both America and Japan in World War Two.
Prior to the outbreak of war, life on Guam was very relaxed and was like a posting in paradise, according to the US military and Pan Am Airways personnel stationed there. This changed dramatically when the island was invaded by Japanese forces and the almost 800 Americans there were captured and transported to POW prison camps in Japan. There they endured three and a half years of brutal treatment, starvation and disease, as they worked as slave labourers for the Japanese.
The late Rodger Mansell was widely known as a researcher into American POWs in the Pacific in World War Two. He compiled a vast database and shared his information with the families of missing POWs and others researching the subject. He spent the last ten years of his life completing research and writing about the experiences of the Americans captured on Guam. After Mansell’s death in 2010, his manuscript was edited by Linda Goetz Holmes, who also prepared a bibliography and index for the book, which was published in 2012.
The book tells the little known, previously largely untold story of the men from Guam. It describes the camps where they lived, the places where they worked and how they managed to survive life as prisoners of the Japanese.
The strength of the work is that the author interviewed many ex-POWs and recorded their stories first-hand. For every particular event of interest, for every unit involved, military or civilian, he seems to have at least one firsthand account. Often Mansell quotes directly from his interviews or from the diaries the POWs kept while in captivity. This provides a lot of interesting information and detail which make the book a gripping read. But in addition to collecting oral history from the survivors, Mansell has backed this up with thoroughly researched archival material which is well used and documented in the endnotes.
The early part of the book deals with the capture of Guam by the Japanese, transport of the prisoners to Japan and their lives in several POW camps. Initially they were all taken to Zentsuji, Japan’s first POW camp in World War Two, situated on Shikoku Island. As time passed and more prisoners arrived at Zentsuji, the men from Guam became split up, with groups going to new prison camps: Kobe, Hirohata, Tanagawa, Osaka and Rokuroshi, all on the main island of Honshu. As the war progressed, conditions for the prisoners worsened. The 160 men sent from Zentsuji to Tanagawa found the new camp to be one of the most brutal in Japan. Had Japan not surrendered when it did most of the prisoners would have soon died of starvation and maltreatment.
The latter chapters of the book tell of the ordeal of the indigenous people on Guam under two and a half years of Japanese rule; the last months of the Americans’ imprisonment in Japan; the dropping of the atomic bombs and the return of the prisoners to America. There are also moving stories of how some Japanese guards showed kindness towards prisoners and how, after liberation, prisoners showed their compassion and helped the starving Japanese civilians with gifts of food.
The main text of the book occupies some 200 pages, split into 26 chapters. This makes the individual chapters rather short. Some chapters take up only three or four pages. Perhaps the material could have been organized differently, with fewer, longer chapters. For example, the three separate chapters dealing with the Japanese attack, invasion and occupation of Guam, could have been amalgamated into a single chapter. Similarly, a single chapter about Zentsuji prison could have replaced the three short chapters titled Zentsuji, Life in Zentsuji, and Labor in Zentsuji.
The bibliography is adequate and the endnotes thorough but the index is poor. For a book with an extraordinary amount of information and detail, the index is extremely brief and basic. So much so that it is all but useless. The index was not compiled by the author but was the responsibility of the editor.
There is only one map in the book. This is a good descriptive map of Guam, presented as the frontispiece. The book would have benefited from the inclusion of at least one map of Japan, showing the locations of the prison camps and the islands where the prisoners were taken.
I found errors in details in the book. When writing about the British prisoners who were captured in the Gilbert Islands, the author mistakenly refers to these islands as the “Makin Islands” (60). The modern name of the Gilbert Islands is Kiribati and there are two references to Kiribati in the book, each with a different spelling, neither of which is correct (225, 249). Names of some Gilbert Islands are spelt incorrectly: Betio (231), Abaiang (225). Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands is incorrectly called “Juliet Island” (225). In one sense perhaps these and similar minor mistakes could be forgiven because Captured is such an interesting story containing much new information and is obviously well researched. On the other hand, a simple spell-check of the complete manuscript would have raised many questions and provided opportunities for corrections to be made.
Peter McQuarrie
Independent Researcher, Auckland, New Zealand
pp. 402-404