SAN FRANCISCO: They were made to stand naked in the bitter cold outside a guardhouse. They were tormented with scarce food and water. And they were coerced into making armaments to be used against their own side.

Allied prisoners of war (POW), most of them Americans, endured everything from starvation and disease to torture and death when they were held from 1942 to 1945 at a prisoner camp run by the Japanese army in Shenyang, known then as Mukden, in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in Northeast China.

The first winter at Mukden camp was just one more hellish ordeal for men who had survived the Bataan Death March and Japanese “hell ships”.

When they arrived at the camp in Nov 1942, the prisoners were wearing thin, tropical clothes, some without shoes or boots. Frostbite was not uncommon.

But how did more than 2,000 POWs captured in the Philippines end up in faraway Mukden?

There was a huge military-industrial complex in Mukden, and the Japanese were in great need of technical personnel to staff the factories, says Gao Jian, a history researcher at the “9.18” History Museum in Shenyang, Liaoning province.

The Japanese army researched the POWs’ backgrounds and transferred those with technical skills and the highest-ranking officers to Mukden, she says.

The camp was an old Chinese military barracks built partly underground, where prisoners slept eight to a shelf. In the first winter, nearly 200 POWs died from failing health and harsh conditions.

This lesser-known history of the Allied POWs at the Mukden camp is being shown through 250 photographs and 42 replicated artefacts at the ongoing exhibition, Forgotten Camp: Allied POWs of Shenyang, in San Francisco. The event has been organised by the Site Museum of Shenyang POW Camp of WWII Allied Forces and China Daily.

“It’s fantastic that the exhibit is here, so that people can have a real sense of what actually happened in the past,” says visitor Norm Arslan.

He says he had studied a lot about World War II but did not know about the Mukden camp.

“This brings to life in a real way what you simply cannot get by reading in a book. It makes the experience very real,” he says.

It’s the first time the exhibits have travelled to the United States and because of its unexpected popularity, the organisers decided to extend the two-week exhibition, which was slated to conclude on Dec 5, by at least another two weeks.

In the photos, the POWs appear thin and malnourished.

Jackie Hallerberg, daughter of late Mukden POW Walter Huss, says the prisoners’ diet was rice and very thin broth with some soya beans, which the Japanese considered “animal food”.

In addition to the physical torture, the POWs also suffered from mental anguish, as the Japanese tried to always debase them.

They were forced to bow in Japanese style to any Japanese regardless of rank. They were beaten if they didn’t bow fast or low enough, according to references collected by the Mukden POW Remembrance Society, a group committed to preserving the camp’s history.

Anna Graves, a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, says she had never heard of the camp but was impressed by the resilience and camaraderie of the POWs and their willingness to help each other and survive.

“I’m grateful because it’s my parents’ generation who fought in this war. They lived with the pain of it all their lives,” says Graves, with tears in her eyes.

“I think here, where life is rich, you can hardly imagine being in a war. We have to remember our past, and we have to remember wars happening all over the world, too, still now. How unnecessary is war? Why can’t we work out things by talking and being fair to one another?”

Despite the harrowing times, there still were moments of humour. Two POWs, who worked in the factory’s drafting department, got their hands on paper and made comical drawings to entertain their friends. Another officer who came to the camp later drew scenes from each of the camps in which he’d been held.

Photos of the drawings, such as training fleas to stand at attention and do a thorough clean-up on their days off, are featured in the exhibition.

Even while working at the Japanese factory, the POWs never stopped “fighting” and assisting China’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression (1931-45), by sabotaging production at the factory, says Gao.

They threw tools into poured concrete, set machines “off level” and put sand into the oil of machinery with moving parts, which made the machines break down quickly, according to the Mukden POW Remembrance Society.

Many POWs made friends with fellow Chinese workers. They gave items stolen from the factory to Chinese friends, who in turn sold the items on the black market and got what the POWs needed. It was dangerous, because discovery would lead to severe punishment and often death for the Chinese involved.

Photos at the exhibition show some POW veterans returning to Shenyang years later to reconnect with their old Chinese friends.

Some Chinese received awards from the US government for helping the POWs. Others had passed away before the awards were given, says Gao.

Scholars have been calling for more studies on the site since it was discovered in 2003. It became a major historical and cultural landmark protected at the national level in 2012, and the museum was opened to the public in 2013.

It’s one of the museums in China that involves more than 10 countries, Gao says.

“However, the research is based on oral history. We need access to more historical materials to better understand this history, which went unremembered for half a century,” says Gao.

— China Daily

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2017