‘Nobody else knew’: Allied prisoners of war held in Taiwan
By AFP
August 12, 2025
A man walks past the names of prisoners of war etched into granite at the Taiwan POW Memorial and Peace Park - Copyright AFP I-Hwa Cheng
Allison JACKSON
In a small urban park in Taiwan, more than 4,000 names are etched into a granite wall — most of them British and American servicemen held by the Japanese during World War II.
The sombre memorial sits on the site of Kinkaseki, a brutal prisoner of war camp near Taipei and one of more than a dozen run by Japan on the island it ruled from 1895 until its defeat in 1945.
For decades, little was known of the PoW camps, said Michael Hurst, a Canadian amateur military historian in Taipei, who has spent years researching them.
Many survivors had refused to talk about their experiences, while PoWs held elsewhere in Asia had been unaware of “the horrors” in Taiwan, and museums and academics had glossed over them, Hurst told AFP.
After learning of Kinkaseki in 1996, Hurst spearheaded efforts to locate other camps in Taiwan, build memorials for the veterans, and raise public awareness about their bravery and suffering.
Starting in 1942, more than 4,300 Allied servicemen captured on battlefields across Southeast Asia were sent to Taiwan in Japanese “hell ships”.
Most of the PoWs were British or American, but Australian, Dutch, Canadian and some New Zealand servicemen were also among them.
By the time the war ended, 430 men had died from malnutrition, disease, overwork and torture.
The harsh conditions of Taiwan’s camps were long overshadowed by Japan’s notorious “Death Railway” between Myanmar and Thailand, Hurst said.
More than 60,000 Allied PoWs worked as slave labourers on the line, with about 13,000 dying during construction, along with up to 100,000 civilians, mostly forced labour from the region.
Their experiences were later captured in the 1950s war movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai”.
But as stories of Kinkaseki slowly emerged, it became “known as one of the worst PoW camps in all of Asia”, Hurst said.
– ‘Starving and overworked’ –
Canadian filmmaker Anne Wheeler’s physician father was among the more than 1,100 prisoners of war held in Kinkaseki.
Wheeler said she and her three older brothers “grew up knowing nothing” about their father’s ordeal in the camp, where the men were forced to toil in a copper mine.
After her father’s death in 1963, Wheeler discovered his diaries recording his experience as a doctor during the war, including Taiwan, and turned them into a documentary.
“A War Story” recounts Ben Wheeler’s harrowing journey from Japan-occupied Singapore to Taiwan in 1942.
By the time her father arrived in Kinkaseki, Wheeler said the men there “were already starving and being overworked and were having a lot of mining injuries”.
They were also falling ill with “beriberi, malaria, dysentery, and the death count was going up quickly,” Wheeler, 78, told AFP in a Zoom interview.
Trained in tropical medicine, the doctor had to be “inventive” with the rudimentary resources at hand to treat his fellow PoWs, who affectionately called him “the man sent from God”, she said.
Inflamed appendices and tonsils, for example, had to be removed without anesthesia using a razor blade because “that was all he had”, she said.
– ‘They kept it to themselves’ –
Taiwan was a key staging ground for Japan’s operations during the war. Many Taiwanese fought for Japan, while people on the island endured deadly US aerial bombings and food shortages.
Eighty years after Japan’s surrender, the former PoWs held in Taiwan are all dead and little physical evidence remains of the camps.
At 77, Hurst is still trying to keep their stories alive through the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society and private tours.
His book “Never Forgotten” is based on interviews with more than 500 veterans, diaries kept by PoWs and correspondence.
A gate post and section of wall are all that remain of Kinkaseki, set in a residential neighbourhood of Jinguashi town, surrounded by lush, rolling hills.
On the day AFP visited, a Taiwanese woman taking a tour with Hurst said she had “never” studied this part of World War II history at school.
“It’s very important because it’s one of Taiwan’s stories,” the 40-year-old said.
Hurst said he still receives several emails a week from families of PoWs wanting to know what happened to their loved ones in Taiwan.
“For all these years, maybe 50 years, they just kept it to themselves,” Hurst said.
“They knew what they’d suffered, and they knew that nobody else knew.”
Dutch child survivor of Japan’s WWII camps breaks silence
By AFP
August 12, 2025
Japanese camps survivor Tineke Einthoven, 87 - Copyright AFP Frederic DIDES
Vincent-Xavier MORVAN
It has taken Tineke Einthoven 80 years to be able to speak about what she lived through as a child in brutal Japanese internment camps during World War II without breaking down.
“Now I can talk about it without crying,” said the Dutch woman who was four when she and her family were captured and held in “horrible” conditions in a camp on the Indonesian island of Java.
Her three-year nightmare began early in 1942, a few months after the Japanese attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
“There was a lot of bombing and the Japanese arrived. We had dug a big hole in the garden to shelter my parents, my brother and my two sisters, as well as the family of our servants,” the 87-year-old psychologist recalled, speaking publicly for the first time about the ordeal.
Indonesia was a Dutch colony at the time, and Imperial Japan was keen to get its hands on its oil fields and rubber plantations.
The Japanese separated her father, Willem Frederik Einthoven, from the rest of the family, and they did not hear from him for a year.
The son of Nobel Prize winner Willem Einthoven, the inventor of the electrocardiogram, he was an engineer who headed Radio Malabar, the communications link with the Netherlands, but he refused to collaborate with his captors.
– One in 10 perished –
His wife and children were sent to a camp in Tjibunut, near Bandung, where they were held with thousands of other Dutch, British and Australian civilians.
The vast majority of the 130,000 Allied civilians held by the Japanese during the war were Dutch, with more than one in 10 dying in the camps.
The fact that there were more than twice as many Dutch civilians as military prisoners of war has meant that their ordeal is more “vivid in Dutch collective memory”, said historian Daniel Milne of the University of Kyoto.
“We often had nothing more than a bit of rice to eat,” said Einthoven.
“Since I was the smallest, I would slip under the fence to find food outside the camp, but I could only get weeds,” Einthoven added. Parents were punished if a child was caught. “We risked the death penalty.”
“We suffered from hunger, lack of water, the heat, a total lack of hygiene and hours spent under the sun being counted and recounted.”
One of Einthoven’s friends named Marianne, to whom she had given a doll, died of diphtheria.
“I wondered if that doll would also cross to the other side; it was my first questioning of death,” she said.
– Convoys bombed –
Then, in January 1944, the family was reunited and deported to Japan, where the Japanese military wanted her father and his team to invent a radar system.
During the journey, their convoy was bombed by the Americans, but their ship was spared. Many were not so lucky, with thousands of Dutch POWs perishing on the voyage, their ships sunk or torpedoed.
The 60 or so camps that held “some 1,200 civilians in Japan” are little known, said Mayumi Komiya of the POW Research Network Japan.
Some of the prisoners did not survive, including Tineke’s father, who died of pneumonia at 51, weakened by the lack of food and the long march to the laboratory that had been set up for him.
The family was then sent to a temple 300 kilometres (185 miles) west of Tokyo, where they survived in isolation.
They heard about Emperor Hirohito announcing Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945 from “some Italians, who were also prisoners not far away. One of them threw himself into my mother’s arms, and she was very embarrassed,” Einthoven recalled.
She still remembers licking soup off rocks with other children from cans that had shattered during a failed American parachute drop to them.
Repatriated via Australia to the Netherlands, Tineke worked after the war as a psychologist in Geneva, Nice in France, and neighbouring Monaco, and had two children.
But she never shared her experiences of those years with anyone beyond her family.
“I am speaking out today to show that even if one has lived through something horrible, one doesn’t have to suffer your entire life. You can move on if you choose to free yourself from the victim status,” she said with a smile.
By AFP
August 12, 2025
A man walks past the names of prisoners of war etched into granite at the Taiwan POW Memorial and Peace Park - Copyright AFP I-Hwa Cheng
Allison JACKSON
In a small urban park in Taiwan, more than 4,000 names are etched into a granite wall — most of them British and American servicemen held by the Japanese during World War II.
The sombre memorial sits on the site of Kinkaseki, a brutal prisoner of war camp near Taipei and one of more than a dozen run by Japan on the island it ruled from 1895 until its defeat in 1945.
For decades, little was known of the PoW camps, said Michael Hurst, a Canadian amateur military historian in Taipei, who has spent years researching them.
Many survivors had refused to talk about their experiences, while PoWs held elsewhere in Asia had been unaware of “the horrors” in Taiwan, and museums and academics had glossed over them, Hurst told AFP.
After learning of Kinkaseki in 1996, Hurst spearheaded efforts to locate other camps in Taiwan, build memorials for the veterans, and raise public awareness about their bravery and suffering.
Starting in 1942, more than 4,300 Allied servicemen captured on battlefields across Southeast Asia were sent to Taiwan in Japanese “hell ships”.
Most of the PoWs were British or American, but Australian, Dutch, Canadian and some New Zealand servicemen were also among them.
By the time the war ended, 430 men had died from malnutrition, disease, overwork and torture.
The harsh conditions of Taiwan’s camps were long overshadowed by Japan’s notorious “Death Railway” between Myanmar and Thailand, Hurst said.
More than 60,000 Allied PoWs worked as slave labourers on the line, with about 13,000 dying during construction, along with up to 100,000 civilians, mostly forced labour from the region.
Their experiences were later captured in the 1950s war movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai”.
But as stories of Kinkaseki slowly emerged, it became “known as one of the worst PoW camps in all of Asia”, Hurst said.
– ‘Starving and overworked’ –
Canadian filmmaker Anne Wheeler’s physician father was among the more than 1,100 prisoners of war held in Kinkaseki.
Wheeler said she and her three older brothers “grew up knowing nothing” about their father’s ordeal in the camp, where the men were forced to toil in a copper mine.
After her father’s death in 1963, Wheeler discovered his diaries recording his experience as a doctor during the war, including Taiwan, and turned them into a documentary.
“A War Story” recounts Ben Wheeler’s harrowing journey from Japan-occupied Singapore to Taiwan in 1942.
By the time her father arrived in Kinkaseki, Wheeler said the men there “were already starving and being overworked and were having a lot of mining injuries”.
They were also falling ill with “beriberi, malaria, dysentery, and the death count was going up quickly,” Wheeler, 78, told AFP in a Zoom interview.
Trained in tropical medicine, the doctor had to be “inventive” with the rudimentary resources at hand to treat his fellow PoWs, who affectionately called him “the man sent from God”, she said.
Inflamed appendices and tonsils, for example, had to be removed without anesthesia using a razor blade because “that was all he had”, she said.
– ‘They kept it to themselves’ –
Taiwan was a key staging ground for Japan’s operations during the war. Many Taiwanese fought for Japan, while people on the island endured deadly US aerial bombings and food shortages.
Eighty years after Japan’s surrender, the former PoWs held in Taiwan are all dead and little physical evidence remains of the camps.
At 77, Hurst is still trying to keep their stories alive through the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society and private tours.
His book “Never Forgotten” is based on interviews with more than 500 veterans, diaries kept by PoWs and correspondence.
A gate post and section of wall are all that remain of Kinkaseki, set in a residential neighbourhood of Jinguashi town, surrounded by lush, rolling hills.
On the day AFP visited, a Taiwanese woman taking a tour with Hurst said she had “never” studied this part of World War II history at school.
“It’s very important because it’s one of Taiwan’s stories,” the 40-year-old said.
Hurst said he still receives several emails a week from families of PoWs wanting to know what happened to their loved ones in Taiwan.
“For all these years, maybe 50 years, they just kept it to themselves,” Hurst said.
“They knew what they’d suffered, and they knew that nobody else knew.”
Dutch child survivor of Japan’s WWII camps breaks silence
By AFP
August 12, 2025
Japanese camps survivor Tineke Einthoven, 87 - Copyright AFP Frederic DIDES
Vincent-Xavier MORVAN
It has taken Tineke Einthoven 80 years to be able to speak about what she lived through as a child in brutal Japanese internment camps during World War II without breaking down.
“Now I can talk about it without crying,” said the Dutch woman who was four when she and her family were captured and held in “horrible” conditions in a camp on the Indonesian island of Java.
Her three-year nightmare began early in 1942, a few months after the Japanese attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
“There was a lot of bombing and the Japanese arrived. We had dug a big hole in the garden to shelter my parents, my brother and my two sisters, as well as the family of our servants,” the 87-year-old psychologist recalled, speaking publicly for the first time about the ordeal.
Indonesia was a Dutch colony at the time, and Imperial Japan was keen to get its hands on its oil fields and rubber plantations.
The Japanese separated her father, Willem Frederik Einthoven, from the rest of the family, and they did not hear from him for a year.
The son of Nobel Prize winner Willem Einthoven, the inventor of the electrocardiogram, he was an engineer who headed Radio Malabar, the communications link with the Netherlands, but he refused to collaborate with his captors.
– One in 10 perished –
His wife and children were sent to a camp in Tjibunut, near Bandung, where they were held with thousands of other Dutch, British and Australian civilians.
The vast majority of the 130,000 Allied civilians held by the Japanese during the war were Dutch, with more than one in 10 dying in the camps.
The fact that there were more than twice as many Dutch civilians as military prisoners of war has meant that their ordeal is more “vivid in Dutch collective memory”, said historian Daniel Milne of the University of Kyoto.
“We often had nothing more than a bit of rice to eat,” said Einthoven.
“Since I was the smallest, I would slip under the fence to find food outside the camp, but I could only get weeds,” Einthoven added. Parents were punished if a child was caught. “We risked the death penalty.”
“We suffered from hunger, lack of water, the heat, a total lack of hygiene and hours spent under the sun being counted and recounted.”
One of Einthoven’s friends named Marianne, to whom she had given a doll, died of diphtheria.
“I wondered if that doll would also cross to the other side; it was my first questioning of death,” she said.
– Convoys bombed –
Then, in January 1944, the family was reunited and deported to Japan, where the Japanese military wanted her father and his team to invent a radar system.
During the journey, their convoy was bombed by the Americans, but their ship was spared. Many were not so lucky, with thousands of Dutch POWs perishing on the voyage, their ships sunk or torpedoed.
The 60 or so camps that held “some 1,200 civilians in Japan” are little known, said Mayumi Komiya of the POW Research Network Japan.
Some of the prisoners did not survive, including Tineke’s father, who died of pneumonia at 51, weakened by the lack of food and the long march to the laboratory that had been set up for him.
The family was then sent to a temple 300 kilometres (185 miles) west of Tokyo, where they survived in isolation.
They heard about Emperor Hirohito announcing Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945 from “some Italians, who were also prisoners not far away. One of them threw himself into my mother’s arms, and she was very embarrassed,” Einthoven recalled.
She still remembers licking soup off rocks with other children from cans that had shattered during a failed American parachute drop to them.
Repatriated via Australia to the Netherlands, Tineke worked after the war as a psychologist in Geneva, Nice in France, and neighbouring Monaco, and had two children.
But she never shared her experiences of those years with anyone beyond her family.
“I am speaking out today to show that even if one has lived through something horrible, one doesn’t have to suffer your entire life. You can move on if you choose to free yourself from the victim status,” she said with a smile.
MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE THEME
BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI TRAILER
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