Baker, Richard: Party B and Japanese Prisoner of War Propaganda

This book provides the first comprehensive account of the experiences of a group of one thousand British and Australian prisoners of warknown as "Party B"who were shipped from Changi camp in Singapore to Korea in 1942 for propaganda purposes. It traces their journey from their arrival in Singapore to their eventual release, offering the first account of Japanese propaganda directed at prisoners of war during the Pacific War. The men of "Party B" were exploited for every aspect of Japanese propaganda: they were filmed, photographed, used for audio recordings, and publicly humiliated. They were forced to write letters home and draft messages for radio broadcasts describing their supposedly humane treatment; journalists interviewed them to gather reports on Japanese military superiority intended to boost morale among the Japanese public. They were required to write essays and complete questionnaires designed to yield information for propaganda production. Furthermore, they were permitted to keep diaries, which the Japanese read to gain insight into the enemy's mindset. In addition to the three Korean campsKeijo, Jinsen, and Konanthe book examines conditions at the Mukden (Hoten) camp, where one hundred men from the group were later transferred. This camp is notorious for visits by Unit 731, a group specializing in biological warfare; the book expands our understanding of the camp by demonstrating that much of the alleged "evidence" of experiments performed on prisoners was, in fact, linked to the camp's propaganda function. Drawing on archival material from the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, the work also provides important new insights into the organization's activities during the Second World War and reveals that it was permitted to maintain a presence in Japanese-controlled territories solely for propaganda purposes.