NATO and the Bomb: Canadian Defenders Confront Critics by Erika Simpson (review)

494 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 This is not simply the tragic story of the Canadians= internment told yet again, but an in-depth and informed portrait of the bodily suffering that the internees were forced to undergo. As Roland so aptly points out, the reality of imprisonment in Hong Kong was >the reality of constant disease.= Undernourishment, torture, infections, and medical neglect were the almost universal experience of the Canadians. Their suffering was so severe that, of the 1975 who were sent to Hong Kong, 557 never made it home. Some died in the brief period of combat leading up to their defeat, and a few died defying their captors. The rest succumbed either in the unhealthy conditions of the POW camps in Hong Kong or else under the strenuous regime of the forced labour camps in Japan to which some were transported starting in 1942. Roland tells their story with clarity and compassion. The mortality rate among the Canadian prisoners of war is shocking, but even more shocking is the fact, which Roland mentions towards the end of the book, that this rate was only slightly above the overall mortality rate for Allied POWs in Asia, which was 27 per cent. In sharp contrast, the mortality rate among Allied POWs in Europe was 4 per cent. The difference between these two percentages is sufficiently large to indict the Japanese military for its failure to meet minimal standards for the care of its prisoners. The excuse that Japan had not ratified the 1929 International Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War is not tenable, for Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori in early 1942 declared that Japan would apply the provisions of the Geneva Conventions regardless. And yet it did not. In fact, the scale of criminality is even larger than these numbers suggest, for the statistic of 27 per cent applies only to Allied POWs. Add in the even larger percentage of Chinese prisoners of war who died at the hands of their Japanese captors and the number must go even higher. In contrast, German military conduct with regard to POWs was close to exemplary. The puzzle of why the Japanese military was so brutal in its treatment of captured civilians and prisoners of war has no single, simple explanation, and Roland is wise to avoid trying to come up with a ready >cultural= answer. The puzzle of why the Canadian government failed to honour these prisoners of war, provide the traumatized with adequate medical or psychiatric treatment, or seek fuller justice through war crimes trials or restitution is sadly less obscure, given the pressures that the United States, in its anxiety to secure a strategic position in East Asia, placed on its obedient junior ally. It is unfortunate that Roland barely touches on this final piece of the story, for his medical expertise could have continued to illuminate the suffering that went well beyond 1945. (TIMOTHY BROOK) Erika Simpson. NATO and the Bomb: Canadian Defenders Confront Critics McGill-Queen=s University Press. xv, 349. $65.00 humanities 495 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Canadians, as George Stanley once observed, see themselves as an >unmilitary people= fortunate to reside in a very peaceable kingdom far from the globe=s notorious trouble spots. A major domestic military effort, Wilfrid Laurier told a disappointed Lord Dundonald in 1904, was unnecessary because America=s Monroe Doctrine safeguarded Canada against aggression. Today many Canadians take justifiable pride in peacekeeping efforts. Yet the unmilitary myth is exactly that, a myth. Over a hundred thousand Canadians died on the battlefield in the twentieth century, the vast majority to prevent Europe=s domination by a menacing Germany. And for many years, while it declined to develop an indigenous nuclear deterrent despite having played an important role in producing the atomic bomb in the Second World War, Canada allowed nuclear-equipped weapons on its territory and fielded various atomic systems overseas. Only in the early 1980s did Canada finally shed the last of these devices. Moreover, in 1963 John Diefenbaker=s Conservative government met its electoral Waterloo in no small...