The story of Doctor Aidan McCarthy from Co. Cork, who was serving as a senior medical officer with the RAF in 1941 when he was captured by Japanese forces, as told in a new book Irish Doctors in the Second World War by Patrick J. Casey, Kevin T. Cullen and Joe P. Duignan.

 

A prisoner of war is someone who is held captive by a belligerent power during an armed conflict. They are held in custody for a variety of legitimate and illegitimate reasons These include isolating them from enemy combatants still in the field, demonstrating military victory, punishing them, prosecuting them for war crimes, exploiting them for their labour, recruiting them, collecting intelligence from them or even indoctrinating them.

The Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War was signed in Geneva on 27 July 1929 and came into force in 1931. It is this version of the Geneva Convention which covered the treatment of POWs during the 1939–45 war. The Allied armies were ordered to treat Axis prisoners of war strictly in accordance with the1929 Geneva Convention. Germany and Italy also generally treated Allied prisoners in the same way.
Japan had not signed the Geneva Convention by 1941 and so did not feel bound to conform to the protections it afforded to POWs. Cultural differences between Western and Far Eastern nations were also to play a major role in the contrasting treatment between POWs held by the Allied and Axis forces in Europe and those captured by Japan.

Article 12 of the 1929 Geneva Convention states that medical personnel may not be retained after they have fallen into the hands of the enemy and that they should be returned to their parent country as soon as possible. Sadly, this did not happen.

Under the 1929 Geneva Convention, doctors, being commissioned officers, were not required to work, although many were put to work and did so willingly as medical officers in their camp. In general, they were treated well, the main complaint being the lack of food. It was the same for the German and Italian troops, especially in the latter years of the war. They were very grateful for the food parcels which arrived regularly via the International Red Cross.

In some camps the officers were allowed out of the camp into the surrounding towns on condition they did not try to escape. For most officers the camps were an opportunity for learning something different from their regular work and for entertainment, since they put on musical shows on a regular basis.
Also under the 1929 Geneva Convention, POW camps should be open to inspection by authorised representatives from a neutral power. Article 10 required that POWs should be housed in buildings with adequate heat and lighting, where conditions were the same as for their own troops.

Articles 27–32 detailed the conditions of labour. Enlisted men were required to perform whatever labour they were asked and able to do, so long as it was not dangerous and did not support the captor’s war effort. Senior non-commissioned officers (sergeants and above) were required to work only in a supervisory role.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own