by Ted Sherman

Created on: April 16, 2008

Within days of when World War II ended in August 1945, my ship, a Navy attack transport that had participated in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, was sent from our base in the Philippines to Shanghai, China. Our mission was to take aboard Allied POWs who had been imprisoned by the Japanese during the war.

When our assault boats approached the dock, we were greeted by thousands of living skeletons. They were cheering us, waving handmade flags of their countries: England, Australia, New Zealand, Holland and America. The first thing we did after giving them decent meals on deck when they came aboard was to hand out soap, and then turn hoses spouting sea water on them. They danced around like little kids, and then after basic medical treatment by our corpsmen, we tossed away their rags and issued tropical uniforms for them.

These men were survivors from Bataan, Corregidor, Batavia, the Dutch East Indies, Guam, Wake Island and other lost battles from the first months of the war in 1941 and 1942. Whenever I read about POW camps of the U.S. Civil War, I think of those wasted men who were so thin they couldn't even sit down comfortably on their bony bottoms. It always bothered me that then, as in all wars, POWs are always treated with extreme neglect and often mindless and murderous cruelty. However, Japanese and German POWs in American camps during World War II lived in comfortable barracks, at the same food as American GIs. They were so well treated, many of them applied to return after the war to start new lives as citizens in the United States.

Both the North and South captured prisoners throughout the Civil War, and estimates are that by the time Lee surrendered in 1865, more than 80,000 were being held in camps. Unlike the Japanese in World War II, where brutality, murder and starvation were deliberate, most of the estimated that more than half of all Civil War POWs died in camps from sheer neglect, disease, gross overcrowding and poor food.

The most notorious POW camp was known as Andersonville, a Georgia hellhole that has been written about and portrayed in movies as the worst of the camps in Rebel territory. More than one out of four Union soldiers of the 30,000 who who were kept there died, mostly from the horrible sanitary conditions and the rampant diseases they caused. As the war went against the South, and supplies ran short, they simply died of malnutrition. The worst of the Union POW camps was Elmira, an old Federal prison in New York State, where

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