Australian Pows Essay

Imagine putting yourself in a scenario where extreme racial discrimination was in action and you were being taken into an internment camp, whether you were pleaded guilty or not. This was reality for the majority of Japanese American during the time of world war two. In the memoir Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston describes the injustice committed against the 110,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry who were interred by America during World War 2.

Many were innocent children, women and men approximately 120,000, all held in Internment Camps across the country. Children and adults had to stand in line for many things, including eating and going to the bathroom and spent 4 years incarcerated surrounded by barbed wire.

World War One began on the 28th of July 1914, triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. This was the first major large scale war. It had many theatres of war, including: The Western Front, The Eastern Front, Gallipoli and The War at Sea. Britain declared war on 4 August 1914, and Australia’s Prime Minister Joseph Cook pledged our full support. The outbreak of war was greeted with much enthusiasm in Australia and our first taste of action was when the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force took over German New Guinea at Toma on 17 of September 1914, but the more significant battles involving Australians were Gallipoli, The Western Front and The War at Sea The Australian troops had a role in most battles of World War One, however Australia’s most

The Japanese soldiers had no sense of remorse or sorrow for the prisoners instead they pushed them to their breaking point. Many prisoners collapsed which proved fatal because if you fell behind you became a practice dummy for the Japanese to sharpen their bayonet skills and techniques of killing on you. On one occasion, a prisoner was falling behind in the rear so tanks that followed lined themselves up to run over the victim and squish him into the pavement to make it look as if he were from a cartoon. Since the Japanese could

War can be loud and visible or quiet and remote. It affects the individual and entire societies, the soldiers, and the civilians. Both U.S. prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese-Americans citizens in the Unites States during WWII undergo efforts to make them “invisible.” Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken hero, Louie Zamperini, like so many other POW’s, is imprisoned, beaten, and denied basic human rights in POW camps throughout Japan. Miné

War can be loud and visible or quiet and remote. It affects the individual and entire societies, the soldier, and the civilian. Both U.S. prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese-American citizens in the United States during WWII undergo efforts to make them “invisible.” Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken hero, Louie Zamperini, like so many other POWs, is imprisoned, beaten, and denied basic human rights in POW camps throughout Japan. Miné Okubo, a U.S. citizen by birth, is removed from society and interned in a “protective custody” camp for Japanese-American citizens. She is one of the many Japanese-Americans who were interned for the duration of the war. Louie Zamperini, as a POW in Japan, and Miné Okubo, as a Japanese-American Internee both experience efforts to make them “invisible” through dehumanization and isolation in the camps of WWII, and both resist these efforts.

Another aspect of wartime Australia that history likes to forget is the emergence of an intense Anti-German movement. In 1914, within a week of the Declaration of War, all German-Australian citizens were declared ‘enemy aliens’ and required by law to report to government offices to report their residential addresses (NSW Migration Heritage Centre 2011). By February 1915, the definition of ‘enemy alien’ came to include those born in Australia, but with parents or grandparents of German or Austrian decent. Due to the number of citizens now classified as ‘enemy aliens’, it became impossible to intern all of them, and the policy of selective internment was aimed at leaders of the German Australian community, including high ranking officials of

The United States put Japanese people in camps, stealing their rights, and placed them in inhumane facilities that no human being should be forced to withstand.

The topic of POW's is a fascinating one that can be dealt with in various ways. First, one can gain information from primary sources from diaries and journals kept by POWs or their captors and guards. Second, there are secondary sources that can give general overviews of what treatment the POWs received. Another interesting thing in learning about POWs is to compare how the prisoners were supposed to be treated (in accordance with international law) and how they were actually treated. Another interesting viewpoint you can look at is to compare how countries treated prisoners differently, and subsequently, their reasoning to justify the treatment. The goal of the

The great majority of Australian prisoners were taken captive by the Japanese in the Second World War, it is their stories that are the most well known. Over 22,000 Australians became prisoners of war of the Japanese in southeast Asia.

During world war two, the Imperial Japanese army forced an estimated 200,000 women into sexual slavery. This is just one of the many atrocities committed by Japan during world war two. Even though many say that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inhumane, the US was completely justified because the future casualties were minimized and Japan and its allies committed atrocious war crimes.

The camps that the Japanese-Americans were taken to had the worse conditions imaginable. “More than 120,000 Americans of Japanese Ancestry were incarcerated in 10 camps scattered throughout the Western United States during World War II” (Children of the Camps Project 1). Detainees spent many years in these camps. They were locked behind barbed wire fences, and armed guards patrolled the camps. The conditions were comparable to the Jewish camps in Eastern Europe. Entire families lived in quarters that were poorly constructed and horribly cramped. These areas were also unbearably cramped and unclean. There was also no hot water for dishes or showers in the living quarters. In addition, lice was a huge problem in the internment camps. These camps and the laws that our government passed against the Japanese community were atrocious. The United States experienced a terrible tragedy when Pearl Harbor was attacked. However, the American government had no right to make these innocent Americans prisoners of war. During the 1940s and 1950s the Japanese

The Japanese brutality was heavily influenced by bushido, a historic code of honour and morals that dictates how you act and live. The Japanese treated the Australian soldiers the way they did because their code tells them that those who surrender are weak and do not deserve your thoughts, and it is considered an unspeakable disgrace. Although the Japanese Imperial military committed to follow the samurai code of bushido after the restoration of the emperor in 1868, the code that they followed was a falsification of bushido. For the Japanese soldiers, bushido meant giving their life to the emperor; surrender was shameful; those who surrendered were thought of as dead; and sympathy for the defeated was weakness. No sympathy for the defeated was definitely not a part of the traditional bushido, the one practised by the samurai. This

What is Freedom of speech? Well, the definition for freedom of speech is the ability to speak freely without being subject to censorship or without fear of retaliation from a governing body. There are at least two documents, the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that acknowledge that free speech is an unalienable right and protect it for all. There is another form of speech that may or may not be protected, depending on the circumstances, under the same documents and that is hate speech. Some of the limitations that are put in place by Government, employers, and educational facilities are a

Going back 200 years, African Americans were always treated indifferently in this “free” land we call America. Someone had to stand up for our civil rights and the man to do it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Beginning in 1954, Dr. King gathered up serval African Americans to start a nonviolent movement to get equal rights for our race and bring people closer together despite the color of their skin. In the year of 1963 Dr. King and several others were arrested for having a nonviolent protest in Birmingham, Alabama against how blacks were being treated in that town and around the country. In Dr. King’s letter from jail, he demonstrates his usage of rhetorical devices to make the clergymen understand what was taking place in the lives of African American people at that time and to give a more distinct picture of their injustice.