Long Night's Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941-1945 (review)

Charles G. Roland. Long Night's Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941-1945. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2001. xxiii + 421 pp. Ill. $28.95 (paperbound, 0-88920-362-8).

This is a harrowing book. The fruit of more than two decades of research by a distinguished and recently retired Canadian medical historian, it is broader in scope than its title indicates. Although the focus is on those who survived the conquest of Hong Kong in December 1941 and their subsequent captivity there and in Japan, with a special emphasis on the 1,900 Canadians among them, Roland has thrown a wide research net to include materials illuminating Japanese treatment of POWs throughout the Pacific Theater. His bibliography contains the bulk of what exists in the English language on his topic, and matters abutting it. In a previous work he examined Courage under Siege: Disease, Starvation, and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (1992).

Roland tells the story as much as possible with the words of the participants, including testimony from both captives and captors taken at the Tokyo War Crimes trials. But much more crucial is the unofficial testimony from contemporary letters, diaries, and reports, as well as a large number of oral histories— nearly fifty of them conducted by Roland himself—and postwar memoirs. Not surprisingly, medical testimony weighs heavily here, and an extensive array of clinical articles is utilized. Roland points out that "every POW was a patient at some time . . . many of them spending substantial . . . time starving or seriously ill with limited medical assistance. A high percentage . . . did not last the 191 weeks" (p. xvi).

The author's methodology is to describe what was happening in a given camp, or hospital, during a particular period, and then to move on to one of its neighbors. This naturally leads to a great deal of repetition: the effects of beriberi, for example, are dealt with a number of times. But perhaps the repetition, which can be annoying, has a cumulative effect, and it certainly is an appropriate accompaniment to the tedium of the POW existence.

Unlike many works about World War II prisoners in the Pacific Theater, there is no gratuitous Japan-bashing here. Although Roland's emphasis is on the prisoners, he goes out of his way to record acts of kindness by captors, and, in the chapters dealing with those prisoners taken to Japan to work in mines, in factories, and on the docks, he notes the surprisingly sympathetic reactions of many ordinary Japanese civilians. Roland also points out that in two earlier wars in the last century Russian and German prisoners were treated well by contemporary Western standards. But in World War II, Japanese behavior toward prisoners was callous at best—and, as is well known, exceptionally brutal and murderous at worst. And, although their lot is not covered extensively here, Asian enemies were often treated even more abominably than European ones.

In perhaps the most thoughtful book about the conflict in the Pacific, John W. Dower calls it a War Without Mercy (1996). No reader of this book can doubt the suitability of that appellation. It is appropriate to give Roland the last words. He writes:

too often [the survivors] arrived home with unwanted and sometimes unrecognized baggage. They brought nicotine addiction and intestinal parasites. They carried the seeds of restless dissatisfactions and dysfunctions that, for many, led to broken marriages, alcohol problems, difficulty in the workplace, and premature death. Many of the long-term survivors, fast leaving us now, still grapple with the consequences of almost four years as guests of the Emperor. (p. 327)