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Captivity In War

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Dr Rosalind Hearder stated that “Captivity in war is a difficult and confronting experience, regardless of the particular conflict.”. In this extended response, I will attempt to explore the ideas behind this statement, while looking into the varying experiences of prisoners during the second world war.

When looking into the treatment of soldiers during war time, it is important to have an understanding of the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention is essentially a just agreement to ensure safety of those caught in the crossfire of war. The idea for the Geneva convention came about in 1859 due to Henry Dunant. He was visiting Italy for business, and witnessed an example of neglect as a direct result of the Battle of Solferino. “[He] …show more content…
“…I was - a white slave. I worked 12 hours a day on a diet of soya beans and seaweed.” (Carver, cited on HistoryOnTheNet, 2014b). Some of the health problems caused from these small dietary allowances included malnutrition, ulcers and cholera. In conjunction with this small food allowance, the prisoners were forced to complete laborious tasks, ranging from working in mines, fields, shipyards, or factories. Because of these difficult working conditions with the small food allowances, prisoners were unhealthy, and many died as a result of their deteriorated health conditions. The group of prisoners who were subject to the most difficult and confronting experience for labour within the Japanese camps, would have to be those who were sent to work on the Burma-Thailand railway. This was because they were expected to work extremely long hours with little to no breaks, furthermore the labour was very intensive as building 260 miles of railway by hand required one to move the ground, build bridges, blast through the mountains and lay pieces of track. of the 61,000 prisoners sent to work on the railway, about a quarter of them died (HistoryOnTheNet, …show more content…
Each prisoner had a different approach to keeping their wits through the ordeal, developing survival tactics to continue on. Keeping morale high was important because the camps created a difficult and confronting experience which could easily discourage prisoners. While some survived on the philosophy of ‘it will be better by the end, so why give up now’, others sought out other things to continue good spirits. Some would steal food from guards, sometimes even from other prisoners, however a large amount would rely on mateship to get them through the ordeal. Ray Mynors believed that “A strong emotion, hate or love, could help men get on the boat home” (Australian War Memorial, 2015b), and this was certainly true for those who had family back home to think of. “I had a wife and a little girl. And the will to live.” (Peat, cited in Australian War Memorial, 2015b). Rowley Richards, chose to detail his experience within a journal, which he later turned into a memoir titled The Survival Factor. A figure from his journal is shown

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