blackdog said:
If you survived the crash, you floated around with your fingers crossed waiting for either the enemy to use you for target practice or for a friendly PBY to see you. Most didn't make it home.
Better to land in the ocean than over Japan. I read Lord Russell of Liverpool's book "The Knights of Bushido" a few years ago and a self-inflicted shot to the head would seem a blessing. And no, I'm don't dislike the Japanese...I actually like most Japanese I meet these days ( I wasn't alive in the war). I'm just saying being an allied (UK/CAN/US) POW in Germany was less bad than being one in Japan, imo from what I've heard. Being a Russian POW in Germany was not a good idea at all as they were not treated like western POW's).
Mainly I think the honour thing in the Japanese military was that surrender or capture alive was total dishonour. They didn't treat POW's well becuase the thought they were pathetic excuses for soldiers - otherwise they would have died fighting or taken their own lives to avoid capture. The Germans had a more european view and both the Brits and German treated each other's POW's reasonably well and in a similar fashion.
An old neighbour of mine when I was a kid was a Brit POW in Germany from 1940-45. He said he'd heard the German Nazi government liked farmers and good simple volk, so when he was sent to a POW interview and processing camp in Germany after being captured in France (aged 19), and he saw most people saying to the German army translator they were clerks, machinists, factory workers, etc before the war, he said he was a farm hand...not that he was, but he used to vacation on his relatives farm as a kid. He was seperated from the rest (who went to an army POW camp) and sent to rural Germany and told his POW task would be to help out a farmer and his wife whose own German 19 year old son had died fighting for Germany in Poland. He said the couple were the nicest people he had met, grew to treat him as the son they lost, and he lived in their house in their son's room with no guards or military rules and ate like a king since they had their own farm food. Every month an army officer would stop by and check up on him for a few minutes and ask teh farmer if he had any complaints, which he never did. After the war when the British army got a hold of the prisoner records and sent a jeep to the farm to liberate him, the family cried that he was leaving and he felt sad too, and exchanged his parent's address in the UK with them and said he'd write and keep in touch. The guys from his unit survived the war too not much worse for wear but they had really small food allowances in their barracks and were under guard. He by contrast went to concerts in the nearby town, dances, etc.
Now one of my high school teachers was also a Brit and he was captured by the Japansese. He was deaf in one ear. I asked him why and he said the Japanese Imperial Army soldiers thought it would be funny to pour boiling oil into his ear one day for kicks.
One thing about American servicemen in the Pacific - the survival newsclips they used to train the men with said if in the ocean to trash about in the water to scare off sharks while waiting to be rescued...which is the worst thing to do and actually attracts sharks...but the navy didn't know that at the time.
