Japanese aircrew bailouts, prisoners?

[Larry deZeng]

Then we disagree. When compared on a per capita basis with the armed forces of other participants in World War II, there were very, very few Japanese POWs, and many of those that were captured were not native Japanese but rather Korean or Formosan. There is a great deal of documentation and literature on this subject and I have read a lot of it. But please do not take my word for it. You should be able to spend 2 or 3 days doing an advanced search on Google and come up with a lot of interesting information. In particular, seek out and read the studies and personal memoirs having to do with the gathering and analysis of intelligence by the Navy and Army in the Pacific, ATIS (Allied Translation and Interrogation Service), etc. A good place to start in the literature would be:

PRADOS, John. Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History of American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II. New York: Random House, 1995. ISBN: 0-679-43701-0. Pages 495-98, 532, 579, 697-98.

As the author says on p.495: "In all of 1942 only 49 prisoners had been captured in the Pacific Ocean area, most survivors of the cruiser Mikuma." How many Japanese aircraft were shot down in the Solomons between Aug and Dec 1942? How many were shot down over the Coral Sea and over and around Midway?

The number increased in 1943, but not dramatically. It was not until 1944-45 that the total number taken by Allied forces approached some level of significance. The total for 1944 was 9,379 by our Army and Navy and another 2,038 in the first two months of 1945. These figures include about 25% that were Korean, Formosan and other non-mainland Japanese. These are paltry numbers out of the some 8,000,000 who served in the Japanese armed forces during the war. Oh, and very, very few of them were air crew.

L.