Shobun

This is subtitled A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific.

The book is about some men who had flown PBY No. 08233 which went down during an attack on a Japanese installation. The men who survived were captured by the Japanese.

The Japanese were particularly angry with U.S. airmen since there often wasn't much they could do to stop the constant attacks on their positions after the Japanese own aerial abilities had been reduced considerably. So they tended to take that anger out on any airmen they captured, often torturing them and killing them.

The book goes into detail explaining what PBYs were and what their role in the war was, then it goes into biographies of each of the men on this particular flight.

He points out that 3% of the American POWs taken by the Axis powers in Europe died in captivity, but 37% of those taken by the Japanese died in captivity, over twelve times as many.

He then goes into executions and mistreatment of American POWs by the Japanese in various places in the Pacific theater.

This particular PBY crashed and two of the men were killed in that crash, but that still left nine survivors. They were captured and taken to a place called Kendari and were put into the Tokkei Tai prison compound.

A message was sent by a Japanese admiral in late November of 1944 that was an order to kill prisoners at the prison. The deaths of each of the airmen is then discussed along with the trials afterwards of a couple of the men responsible for their deaths.

It's books like this that show just how barbarous some of the Japanese military were during the war.