Most of us have heard the horror stories that came out of the Japanese POW camps of World War II.
From being forced, upon threat of death or worse, to perform back-breaking labor from dusk to dawn
on just 600 calories a day to having limbs amputated without anesthetic for "experimental
purposes," the Japanese ran some of the harshest wartime prisons the world has ever seen. But have
any other camps in modern history been just as bad? Have any been worse? Let’s take a look.
The Vietnam War was brutal. Both sides were guilty of atrocities,
and both horribly mistreated their POWs. In North Vietnam, they ran prisons that
are now famous for their ruthlessness. But none more so than the Hanoi Hilton.
This wasn’t the prison’s real name but rather a sarcastic nickname given to
it by those unlucky enough to be held there. Its real name was Hỏa Lò Prison,
built by the French in the 1880s and 90s to house political prisoners. During the
Vietnam War, it housed American POWs, rats, and cockroaches, and death stalked its halls.
Most prisoners were kept in solitary confinement for months on end as a
form of psychological torture. But they were also subject to many other kinds of torture,
including suspension from rusty meat hooks.
Texas Representative Sam Johnson, a former prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton,
described the meat hook torture in his book Captive Warriors: A Vietnam POW's Story.
“In a routine torture session, the Vietnamese tied a prisoner's hands and feet, then bound
the hands to the ankles, sometimes behind his back, sometimes in front. If tied at the back,
the ropes were then tightened, straining his shoulders and arms toward his feet
until his back was bowed and his ribs pulled so tight against his lungs that
he could only draw tiny gasps of air. If his hands and feet were tied together in front,
the guards tightened the ropes until he was folded in half at the waist and unable to
breathe. Then bowed, or bent in half, he was hoisted up onto the hook to hang by the ropes,
letting the weight of his body pull the ropes even tighter, cutting off circulation to his limbs.
Guards returned at intervals to tighten the ropes until all feeling was gone and the prisoner's
limbs turned purple and swelled to twice their normal size. There he would hang for hours,
even days until, crazy with pain, he would agree to write something, anything that would appease
them so they would let him down. Sometimes weeks passed before a man could feel or use
his arms and legs after a session with the ropes and hook. Many suffered permanent nerve damage.”
Another favored instrument of torture was the old stocks left
behind by the French. POWs would have their arms and legs strapped down with
iron stocks that were tightened until their appendages blackened.
By far the most famous “guest” at the Hanoi Hilton was late Arizona Senator John McCain,
who was taken prisoner after his fighter jet was shot down over the city in 1967.
After learning that his father was an admiral in the Navy, the Vietnamese offered to let McCain go,
but he refused, not wanting to abandon his fellow prisoners. As a result, he was thrown
into solitary confinement, where he remained for two years and was repeatedly tortured.
Atrocities weren't solely perpetrated by the North,
however. The Americans gave as good as they got.
In 1967, the International War Crimes Tribunal met in Denmark to discuss the United States’ conduct
in Vietnam and found it guilty of war crimes like: “genocide, the use of forbidden weapons,
maltreatment and killing of prisoners, violence and forceful movement of prisoners.”
In 1971, a group of Vietnam veterans met in Detroit to take part in the Winter Soldier
Investigation, a series of hearings detailing the atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam.
Many have tried to discredit the investigation and those involved,
but time and declassified documents have only served to strengthen the arguments made.
The US didn’t have formal prison structures like the Vietnamese, but that didn’t matter. Veteran
Ernie Sachs, a captain in the 1st Marine Division, testified that soldiers were
purposefully given vague information on how to treat prisoners so they wouldn’t question if
what they were doing was in violation of the Geneva Convention. Which it absolutely was.
He went on to describe a so-called game that helicopter pilots would play when transporting
prisoners “They'd bind their hands, bind their feet and maybe bind them into a fetal position
and upon landing, rather than releasing them so they could walk off the aircraft,
they'd throw them out … [and] mark how far they could throw them and have little contests.”
Veteran Scott Camile, a sergeant of the 1st Marine Division,
witnessed POW tied to the ground and eviscerated Braveheart-style
while he was still alive. There didn’t seem to be any reason for doing this.
David Stark, an E-5 in the Military Intelligence Detachment, recounted
another fun method of torture. Prisoners were stripped naked, tied to a seven-foot fence,
and sprayed with a high-pressure hose for an arbitrary amount of time. He also described a
table with an electric device with exposed wires that were used to shock POWs during interrogation.
Former Vietnamese prisoners of war came forward after the war and confirmed the
methods of torture they had endured. We're talking shocks, burns, waterboarding,
and most horrifyingly, sexual assault by means of sticks and snakes inserted into their bodies.
So, would you rather be a prisoner in a North Vietnamese or American camp?
We'll now go back a few decades to the often-overlooked Second Sino-Japanese War.
The Empire of Japan invaded the Republic of China in July 1937,
hoping to seize land and natural resources. The war was savage,
and the Japanese committed countless atrocities, including the Nanjing Massacre,
in which somewhere between 40,000 and over 300,000 Chinese people were murdered.
Because of the depravities the Chinese faced, they were, understandably, pretty upset with
the Japanese. This was reflected in the way they treated the Japanese and Japanese sympathizers
detained in Chinese POW camps. For the Chinese, these camps were instruments of revenge.
We know little about what actually happened in these camps because the Chinese hid their
records from the public or didn't keep them in the first place. What information we do
have was gathered by a Swiss national named Tom Simmen. He worked as a photographer in
Shanghai at the time and wanted to document the Chinese treatment of Japanese POWs.
Though his photos are quite grainy, they're still too graphic for YouTube,
so we've linked them in the description below. Viewer discretion is strongly advised.
In Simmen's photos, we can see decapitated bodies and a man in a torture device that
suspended people by the neck in wooden cages. People subjected to this torture
would be left there until they died of starvation. According to Simmen, the Chinese people enjoyed
this spectacle. After decapitations, they would play football with the heads of dead Japanese.
Those who'd been shot, starved, or beheaded were tossed into mass graves. Many of the POWs
who were beheaded were Shanghai residents who had worked with the Japanese. Often they were beheaded
with large swords. To the Chinese, they were traitors and, therefore, worse than the Japanese.
Simmen’s images were kept secret for a long time. He destroyed the negatives before he
left China and smuggled out the prints in his then-pregnant wife’s clothing. It was actually
his son John who released the photos to the public decades later, in 1996, upon Tom’s request.
Thanks to Tom, evidence of Chinese atrocities
in the Second Sino-Japanese War wasn't lost to history.
So, do you think any of the three POW camps we covered today were worse than
the Japanese camps of World War II? Please share your thoughts in the comments below
and let us know if you can think of any POW camps that were even worse.