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One day we heard tremendous gunfire and decided we'd better get back to Jakarta. On the Sunda Strait coast, we were ambushed by Japanese soldiers. I was shot in the back and hip. Hearing the truck door swinging open, I slumped over the steering wheel, feigning death. Soldiers prodded me to see if I was still alive, then moved on to the vehicle behind.

Taking a chance, I leapt out and ran into the paddy fields by the side of the road. Bullets whistled past my ears and I was shot in the arm as the soldiers gave chase. I hid among trees at the edge of the paddy and for four days I lay there, in torrential rain, with animals and insects biting at my wounds, surviving on water dripping from the trees.

Finally, close to death, I was found by a Javanese girl who took me to her village. They were marvellous, patching me up and giving me food - until the Japanese authorities declared that anyone harbouring an escaped English prisoner would have their village destroyed. They had no option but to turn me in.

At the Japanese headquarters, the Kempetai (secret police) tried to find out what equipment the British had and how many aircraft. I was beaten up, had samurai swords flicked in my face, a pistol held to my head, and then the commandant had the idea that I should dig my own grave. I didn't know the answers to their questions but, as I stood by that grave, at gunpoint, I decided to make up the numbers. I never gave away anything about the equipment we had, though, and for that I was tied to a tree in the blazing sun for the day, then left there most of the night.

After that I was moved to Jakarta, then on to Singapore. Here we were viciously beaten every day on the slightest pretext, and the food went from very little to nearly nothing. There were rumours people were killing stray cats just to stay alive.

I feared the worst when I was sent to Kuching to build an airstrip. The indigenous people were the heavily tattooed Dayaks, who'd remove the head of a person just to be eligible to start courting. Thankfully they left us alone. I think they felt sorry for us.

Not so the Japanese soldiers, whose sadistic treatment continued. Often drunk on sake, they'd come in the huts in the middle of the night and carry out brutal beatings. But we knew that what they did to us, their officers did to them, and there was nothing we could do: even if we did escape, we looked so unlike the local people we'd have stood out a mile.

Women and men were separated by a barbed-wire fence patrolled by guards. When an Australian man found a way to burrow underneath and got a woman pregnant, he was sadistically humiliated and beaten, but all of us knew that secretly the Japanese soldiers saw him as a hero. After that he wanted for nothing.

What all of us wanted was food. It was at an all-time low here - three handfuls of rice a day and a watery soup with leaves floating in it.

There was horrendous disease in the camp and vast, excruciating ulcers. Prisoners were given three floorboards' living space each - at one point I had a dead body on each side. I'd been talking to the chap next to me one night; when I woke up in the morning he was dead.

After three years as a prisoner, it was the atom bomb at Hiroshima that saved my life. The Japanese soldiers had been ordered to retreat into the mountains, killing all but a handful of their prisoners, but after Hiroshima the Japanese emperor sent out orders that they should surrender. Planes flying overhead dropped food parcels - and the news that our ordeal was over.

I was on one of the last boats out of Singapore. I felt lucky to be alive, but I found it hard to adjust to civilian life. I was restless, couldn't settle, and was left with a damaged left knee caused by an oedema. I had a fall recently and was taken into hospital, where I was visited by a Royal Air Forces Association officer who found out about £30,000 in benefits I hadn't known I was entitled to. That has made my life a lot easier.

Prisoner of war life changes you. You learn not to get too close to someone because the next day they could be dead. I suppose that was why I never married. I could never let myself care too much.

· Do you have an experience to share? Email: experience@theguardian.com
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Experience: I was a Japanese prisoner of war

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One day we heard tremendous gunfire and decided we'd better get back to Jakarta. On the Sunda Strait coast, we were ambushed by Japanese soldiers. I was shot in the back and hip. Hearing the truck door swinging open, I slumped over the steering wheel, feigning death.

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Alistair Urquhart, a 91-year-old veteran of the British Army's Gordon Highlanders, spent three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese-one of 80,000 Brits who surrendered after the fall of Singapore. "Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse," he recalls, "it did." Urquhart's gripping book, The Forgotten Highlander, recently released in the United States, recounts how he survived slave labor on the notorious Death Railway in Thailand; blindness and paralysis; and the sinking of his "hell ship" prisoner transport, followed by five days alone at sea. His skills, grit, and self-discipline, with bits of luck, ultimately brought him a full and satisfying life. But he was denied an army pension, still needs painkillers, and suffers lingering metabolic damage as a result of his ordeal.
What was the key to your survival?
I learned early on to have the tenacity and mental attitude to do whatever I do to my best. All through my school days I was doing sports and swimming. I was a Boy Scout, then a King's Scout. I loved dancing; I still do. Thanks to all that and my mother's cooking, I was extremely fit-the fittest lad they'd seen when they called me up three weeks after war started.
What was Singapore like?
A lethargic backwater, not the fortress they made out. A sleepy place where they dawdled through everything. No sense of urgency. You went to your bunk for two hours in the middle of every day. I kept thinking: Would the enemy be doing that? It was ridiculous. The racism and snobbery were so bad the coolies and troops felt them almost equally. I had to clear off the sidewalk to let rubber planters pass by. That sort of Raj thinking is why we lost the Empire.
When did the brutality start?
Two days before they came to the army headquarters at Fort Canning, the Jap-anese massacred 300 people at Alexandra Hospital-doctors, nurses, even patients on the operating table. When we were marched to Changi prison camp, they deliberately had us pass a gruesome sight and stench: Chinese heads mounted on poles and decaying bodies. Marching with us a distance away was a column of Chinese, who were later massacred. At Changi, we were hungry and sick, and men began dying, but the Japanese usually left us alone. But I was only there for three months; I was among the first draft of 600 men to go to Thailand to build the Death Railway and bridges over the Kwai.
What changed there?
Everything. Changi had barracks. The British officers took charge-under Japanese control, of course. So there was some sort of discipline. But even then I could see this would be look after yourself ! In Thailand we had to build barracks. The Japanese were in charge; our officers were nothing. The Black Prince [Lt. Kishio Usuki, executed by the British in 1946], Doctor Death [Sgt. Seiichi Okada], a Korean guard called The Mad Mongrel [hanged by the British in 1946]-these bastards were the worst. We all watched Doctor Death behead one of us. He had me tortured and thrown in the black hole. He'd stand on cliffs above us as we worked and toss boulders and rocks down. He didn't care who he hit.
Describe the conditions.
We had a half cup of boiled rice and a cup of water every day-for three and a half years. Can you imagine working in that tropical sun, hewing solid rock with pickaxes and shovels, on those rations? We wore Jap-happies-their kind of underwear-and nothing else. No hats. Bare feet. So we all soon were suffering from a host of diseases: malaria, dysentery, beriberi-that was a real killer. And depression.
What hit you worst?
The very hard work. Your body was not able to stand up to it. The mental attitude...in my case, that's why I went on my own. I could psyche myself up each morning to face that day alone-not the next day, just that day. The next morning was the same. I was only thinking of myself and how I could avoid dying like those around me. When I first saw The Bridge on the River Kwai, I very nearly put my television through the wall. It was a travesty. Imagine: the film had us walking across the bridge, which wasn't like that, all dressed up, pipes playing. Bloody hell! If you'd whistled while you worked, that would have been an excuse to put you in the black hole.
How did your transport sink?
Our convoy was attacked by an American wolf pack; the USS Pampanito sunk my hell ship. Of course, it was unmarked-no Red Cross or anything. I popped miraculously out of the jammed hold, through the open cargo hatch. I swam through water covered with oil, and swallowed some of it. Finally I spotted a life raft and managed to get on it. That was the worst time of all.
Why?
Can you imagine it? Floating in the South China Sea with not a thing in sight? While you're covered in oil, and the sun's blazing down on you by day, and it's freezing cold at night? And you're completely on your own, with no water, nothing? And if you fall asleep you're done for?
What got you through?
My Boy Scout training. I knew I musn't drink the water all around me though I was dying of thirst. I got as much of the oil off me as I could. I thought of the cold and bitter winters in Aberdeen, when I was growing up, and my head soon flooded with memories. That took a full day or two. Meantime, Japanese and American ships were picking up survivors. That's how the world first learned the extent of the horrors we'd been through. But a Japanese ship found me.
Where did you end up?
At Omuta, the mining camps, a few miles from Nagasaki. I was a hospital orderly. My most hateful task was emptying the latrine cans onto the Japanese officers' tomato plants. One morning, I saw a plane flying so low I could see its American markings. I wondered why it wasn't being challenged. Two minutes later came a tremendous clap of thunder from Nagasaki. A gale-force wind nearly knocked me over. I paid it no attention; it lasted just seconds. But rumors flew at the camp. For months we'd sensed the Allies must be winning, and wondered what the Japanese would do with us when they did. Most of us figured they'd massacre us.
How did you learn about their surrender?
On August 15, prisoners came back from the factory and said the manager had made a big speech and broken down crying. Six days later, the Japanese camp commander read us the cessation of hostilities. Soon Americans came and took us to Nagasaki. Unbelievable. Of course, we didn't know what had done it. Utter devastation. Shells of some concrete buildings. No trees, no growth. A desert of black ash. I kept wondering, "Where are the bomb craters?"
How did the sight make you feel?
I didn't feel anything about it, because right at the quayside there were portable showers the Americans erected. We were each given a bar of soap. For three and a half years, I'd never had a wash. You weren't thinking about anything else but that bar of soap, and a wash, and trying to get the bloody dirt and grime and lice and all those things you were suffering from out of your body. When the Americans said, "Come on, lad, you've got to hurry up," I said, "No, no, you'll have to wait for me."

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A Survivor's Horrific Story of Life as a POW in the Pacific

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Alistair Urquhart, a 91-year-old veteran of the British Army's Gordon Highlanders, spent three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese-one of 80,000 Brits who surrendered after the fall of Singapore. "Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse," he recalls, "it did."

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George Cooper had become a prisoner of the Japanese when HMS Exeter had been sunk in March 1942. Like most prison camps run by the Japanese conditions were not particularly good in his camp in Macassar, with very basic accommodation and an inadequate diet. It was around this time however that a particular individual joined the camp and circumstances became a great deal worse for the Royal Navy, U.S. Navy and Dutch civilian prisoners.

Cooper believed that Yoshida Tomano had been given the lead role in running the camp because of his capacity to run 'a campaign of terror'. He was only a low ranking seaman but 'Yosh' became notorious amongst all the men who encountered him. By these means the Japanese were able to keep order in a camp of over 3,000 men with only seventeen guards:

I used to call him "The Magnesium Flame" - he had only to be touched off to flare up into a white hot fury. But when it had burned itself out he would become quiet, subdued and on occasions even penitent and ashamed. He knew he lost "face" by these scenes, yet appeared unable to help himself.

When he was on the warpath he was very frightening. I have seen five or six hundred British sailors including myself standing stiff at attention, not daring to move an eyelid. A flood of Japanese would pour forth from his tongue; and the sound of this shouting was always the prelude to a scene. At night it was quite eerie and not unlike a mad dog. I doubt that anyone who lived in that camp could ever forget it.

Then would come the beat-up. First the punching in the face, usually with the inside of the clenched fist, to save his knuckles, then always the flogging on the backside with the victim leaning at an angle of forty-five degrees against a wall or tree.

Sometimes the victim would be strung up by his wrists tied behind his back with his feet just touching the ground. Yosh was a remarkably good shot and rarely hit off the target area except when he put a special low one across the thighs for spite.

Most of the guards gave a hand in the terrible beatings that prisoners had to endure, but it was Yosh who dealt out the majority. In the early months he used the baseball bat already mentioned - a wicked weapon; but later he devised one that was far worse a club of the same shape, but slightly lighter and about a yard long.

If this was not readily available, he soon found a suitable substitute. During a beating it was unwise to utter any sound, as this only inspired the Nip who was administering the flogging to even greater efforts; on the other hand to stick it quietly earned the victim the guards' respect - they would give him the thumbs up sign and say "Good" in Malay.

The great danger was in falling down. For some reason this made Yosh and any guards in the vicinity go quite wild, and they would rush round the victim kicking and stamping on his face and body with their hobnailed boots; they would in fact kick him back into the standing position. Serious injury was liable to be inflicted to the head, spine and limbs. Burst ear-drums were by no means uncommon.

George T. Cooper was to survive the war but his experiences at the hands of the Japanese are reflected in the title of his memoir: George T. Cooper: Never Forget, Nor Forgive . He was awarded the OBE for services to other PoWs and later became a Captain in the Royal Navy.

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George Cooper had become a prisoner of the Japanese when HMS Exeter had been sunk in March 1942. Like most prison camps run by the Japanese conditions were not particularly good in his camp in Macassar, with very basic accommodation and an inadequate diet.

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Last updated at 22:59 18 September 2007
The sheer brutality of the battle for the Far East defies imagination. And in a new book, historian Max Hastings argues that Japanese intransigence made it far worse.
Yesterday, he explained why America had to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Here, in the final part of our exclusive serialisation, he reveals how the West was stunned when it emerged how cruelly their prisoners of war had suffered...

As the men of the victorious British 14th Army advanced through Burma on the road to Mandalay in January 1945 they encountered Japanese savagery towards prisoners.

After a battle, the Berkshires found dead British soldiers beaten, stripped of their boots and suspended by electric flex upside down from trees. This sharpened the battalion's sentiment against their enemy.

Back in Britain it was beginning to emerge that such inhumanity was not confined to the battlefield.

Men who had escaped from Japanese captivity brought tales of brutality so extreme that politicians and officials censored them for fear of the Japanese imposing even more terrible sufferings upon tens of thousands of PoWs who remained in their hands.

The US government suppressed for months the first eyewitness accounts of the 1942 Bataan death march in the Philippines on which so many captured American GIs perished, and news of the beheadings of shot-down aircrew.

In official circles a reluctance persisted to believe the worst. As late as January 1945, a Foreign Office committee concluded that it was only in some outlying areas that there might be ill-treatment by rogue military officers.

A few weeks later, such thinking was discredited as substantial numbers of British and Australian PoWs were freed in Burma and the Philippines.

Their liberators were stunned by stories of starvation and rampant disease; of men worked to death in their thousands, tortured or beheaded for small infractions of discipline.

More than a quarter of Western PoWs lost their lives in Japanese captivity. This represented deprivation and brutality of a kind familiar to Russian and Jewish prisoners of the Nazis in Europe, yet shocking to the American, British and Australian public.

It seemed incomprehensible that a nation with pretensions to civilisation could have defied every principle of humanity and the supposed rules of war.

The overwhelming majority of Allied prisoners were taken during the first months of the Far East war when the Philippines, Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma were overrun.

As disarmed soldiers milled about awaiting their fate in Manila or Singapore, Hong Kong or Rangoon, they contemplated a life behind barbed wire with dismay, but without the terror that their real prospects merited.

They had been conditioned to suppose that surrender was a misfortune that might befall any fighting man.

In the weeks that followed, as their rations shrank, medicines vanished, and Japanese policy was revealed, they learned differently. Dispatched to labour in jungles, torrid plains or mines and quarries, they grew to understand that, in the eyes of their captors, they had become slaves.

They had forfeited all fundamental human respect. A Japanese war reporter described seeing American prisoners - "men of the arrogant nation which sought to treat our motherland with unwarranted contempt.

"As I gaze upon them, I feel as if I am watching dirty water running from the sewers of a nation whose origins were mongrel, and whose pride has been lost. Japanese soldiers look extraordinarily handsome, and I feel very proud to belong to their race."

As prisoners' residual fitness ebbed away, some abandoned hope and acquiesced to a fate that soon overtook them. A feeling of loneliness was a contributory factor in the deaths of many, particularly the younger ones.

The key to survival was adaptability. It was essential to recognise that this new life, however unspeakable, represented reality.

Those who pined for home, who gazed tearfully at photos of loved ones, were doomed. Some men could not bring themselves to stomach unfamiliar, repulsive food. "They preferred to die rather than to eat what they were given," said US airman Doug Idlett.

"The ones who wouldn't eat died pretty early on," said Corporal Paul Reuter. "I buried people who looked much better than me. I never turned down anything that was edible."

Australian Snow Peat saw a maggot an inch long, and said: "Meat, you beauty! You've got to give it a go. Think they're currants in the Christmas pudding. Think they're anything."

But in the shipyards near Osaka, two starving British prisoners ate lard from a great tub used for greasing the slipway. It had been treated with arsenic to repel insects. They died.

Prisoners were bereft of possessions. Mel Rosen owned a loincloth, a bottle and a pot of pepper. Many PoWs boasted only the loincloth. Even where there were razor blades, shaving was unfashionable, shaggy beards the norm.

In the midst of all this, they were occasionally permitted to dispatch cards home, couched in terms that mocked their condition, and phrases usually dictated by their jailers. "Dear Mum & all," wrote Fred Thompson from Java to his family in Essex, "I am very well and hope you are too.

"The Japanese treat us well. My daily work is easy and we are paid. We have plenty of food and much recreation. Goodbye, God bless you, my love to you all."

Thompson expressed reality in the privacy of his diary: "Somehow we keep going. We are all skeletons, just living from day to day. This life just teaches one not to hope or expect anything. My emotions are non-existent."

Prisoner Paul Reuter slept on the top deck of a three-tier bunk in his camp. When disease and vitamin deficiency caused him to go blind for three weeks, no man would change places to enable him to sleep at ground level.

"Some people would steal," he said. "There was a lot of barter, then bitterness about people who reneged on the deals.

"There were only a few fights, but a lot of arguing - about places in line, about who got a spoonful more."

This was a world in which gentleness was neither a virtue that commanded esteem, nor a quality that promoted survival.

Philip Stibbe, in Rangoon Jail, wrote: "We became hardened and even callous. Bets were laid about who would be next to die. Everything possible was done to save the lives of the sick, but it was worse than useless to grieve over the inevitable."

Self-respect was deeply discounted. Every day, prisoners were exposed to their own impotence. Rosen watched Japanese soldiers kick ailing Americans into latrine pits: "You don't know the meaning of frustration until you've had to stand by and take that."

Almost every prisoner afterwards felt ashamed that he had stood passively by while the Japanese beat or killed his comrades. And prisoners hated the necessity to bow to every Japanese, whatever his rank and whatever theirs. No display of deference shielded them from the erratic whims of their masters.

Japanese behaviour vacillated between grotesquery and sadism. Ted Whincup laboured on the notorious Burma railway, a 250-mile track carved through mountain and dense jungle.

The commandant insisted that the prisoners' four-piece band should muster outside the guardroom and play "Hi, ho, hi, ho, it's off to work we go" - the tune from Snow White - each morning as skeletal inmates shambled forth to their labours.

If guards here took a dislike to a prisoner, they killed him with a casual shove into a ravine.

The Japanese seemed especially ill-disposed towards tall men, whom they obliged to bend to receive punishment, usually administered with a cane.

One day Airman Fred Jackson was working on an airfield on the coral island of Ambon when, for no reason, six British officers were paraded in line, and one by one punched to the ground by a Japanese warrant officer.

A trooper of the 3rd Hussars, being beaten by a guard with a rifle, raised an arm to ward off blows and was accused of having struck the man. After several days of beatings, he was tied to a tree and bayoneted to death.

An officer of the Gordons who protested against sick men being forced to work was also tied to a tree, beneath which guards lit a fire and burnt him like some Christian martyr.

Although Labour on the notorious Burma railway represented the worst fate that could befall an Allied PoW, shipment to Japan as a slave labourer also proved fatal to many.

In June 1944, the commandant in Hall Romney's camp announced to the prisoners that their job on the railway was done. They were now going to Japan.

Conditions in the holds of transport ships were always appalling, sometimes fatal. Overlaid on hunger and thirst was the threat of US submarines. The Japanese made no attempt to identify ships carrying PoWs. At least 10,000 perished following Allied attacks.

RAOC wireless mechanic Alf Evans was among 1,500 men on the Kachidoki Maru when she was sunk. Evans jumped into the water and dog-paddled to a small raft to which three other men were already clinging to.

One had two broken legs, another a dislocated thigh. They were all naked, and coated in oil. A Japanese destroyer arrived, and began to pick up survivors - but only Japanese.

Evans paddled to a lifeboat left empty after its occupants were rescued, and climbed aboard, joining two Gordon Highlanders. They hauled in other men, until they were 30 strong.

After three days and nights afloat, they were taken aboard a Japanese submarine-hunter. The captain reviewed the bedraggled figures paraded on his deck, and at first ordered them thrown over the side. Then he changed his mind and administered savage beatings all round.

Eventually the prisoners were transferred-to the hold of a whaling factory ship, in which they completed their journey to Japan. Filthy and almost naked, they were landed on the dockside and marched through the streets, between lines of watching Japanese women, to a cavalry barracks. There they were clothed in sacking and dispatched to work 12-hour shifts in the furnaces of a chemical work.

Many prisoners' feet were so swollen by beriberi that in the desperate cold of a Japanese winter, they could not wear shoes. Even under such blankets as they had, men shivered at night, for there was no heating in their barracks.

At Stephen Abbott's camp when prisoners begged for relief, the commandant said contemptuously: "If you wish to live you must become hardened to cold, as Japanese are. You must teach your men to have strong willpower - like Japanese."

Yet by 1944 the death rate in most Japanese camps had declined steeply from the earlier years. The most vulnerable were gone. Those who remained were frail, often verging on madness, but possessed a brute capacity to endure that kept many alive to the end.

Out of fairness, it should be noted that there were instances in which PoWs were shown kindness, even granted means to survive through Japanese compassion.

In his camp, Doug Idlett told a Japanese interpreter he had beriberi "and the next day he handed me a bottle of Vitamin B. I never saw him again, but I felt that he had contributed to me being alive."

Lt Masaichi Kikuchi, commanding an airfield defence unit in Singapore early in 1945, was allotted a labour force of 300 Indian PoWs. The officer who handed over the men said carelessly: "When you're finished, you can do what you like with them. If I was you, I'd shove them into a tunnel with a few demolition charges."

Kikuchi could do no such thing. When two Indians escaped and were returned after being re-captured, he did not execute them, as he should have done. He thought it unjustified.

The point of such stories is not that they contradict an overarching view of the Japanese as ruthless and sadistic in their treatment of despised captives. It is that, as always in human affairs, the story deserves shading.

There was undoubtedly some maltreatment of German and Japanese PoWs in Allied hands. This is not to suggest moral equivalence, merely that few belligerents in any war can boast unblemished records in the treatment of prisoners, as events in Iraq have recently reminded us.

Since 1945, pleas have been entered in mitigation of what the Japanese did to prisoners in the Second World War. First there was the administrative difficulty of handling unexpectedly large numbers of captives in 1942.

This has some validity. Many armies in modern history have encountered such problems in the chaos of victory, and their prisoners have suffered.

Moreover, food and medical supplies were desperately short in many parts of the Japanese empire. Western prisoners, goes this argument, merely shared privations endured by local civilians and Japanese soldiers.

Such claims might be plausible, but for the fact that prisoners were left starving and neglected even where means were available to alleviate pain. There is no record of PoWs at any time or place being adequately fed.

The Japanese maltreated captives as a matter of policy, not necessity. The casual sadism was so widespread, that it must be considered institutional.

There were so many arbitrary beheadings, clubbings and bayonetings that it is impossible to dismiss these as unauthorised initiatives by individual officers and men.

A people who adopt a code which rejects the concept of mercy towards the weak and afflicted seem to place themselves outside the pale of civilisation. Japanese sometimes justify their inhumanity by suggesting that it was matched by equally callous Allied bombing of civilians.

Japanese moral indignation caused many US aircrew captured in 1944-45 to be treated as "war criminals". Eight B-29 crewmen were killed by un-anaesthetised vivisection carried out in front of medical students at a hospital. Their stomachs, hearts, lungs and brain segments were removed.

Half a century later, one doctor present said: "There was no debate among the doctors about whether to do the operations - that was what made it so strange."

Any society that can indulge such actions has lost its moral compass. War is inherently inhumane, but the Japanese practised extraordinary refinements of inhumanity in the treatment of those thrown upon their mercy. Some of them knew it.

In Stephen Abbott's camp, little old Mr Yogi, the civilian interpreter, told the British officer: "The war has changed the real Japan. We were much as you are before the war - when the army had not control. You must not think our true standards are what you see now."

Yet, unlike Mr Yogi, the new Japan that emerged from the war has proved distressingly reluctant to confront the historic guilt of the old. Its spirit of denial contrasted starkly with the penitence of postwar Germany.

Though successive Japanese prime ministers expressed formal regret for Japan's wartime actions, the country refused to pay reparations to victims, or to acknowledge its record in school history texts.

I embarked upon this history of the war with a determination to view Japanese conduct objectively, thrusting aside nationalistic sentiments. It proved hard to sustain lofty aspirations to detachment in the face of the evidence of systemic Japanese barbarism, displayed against Americans and Europeans but on a vastly wider scale against their fellow Asians.

In modern times, only Hitler's SS has matched militarist Japan in rationalising and institutionalising atrocity. Stalin's Soviet Union never sought to dignify its great killings as the acts of gentlemen, as did Hirohito's nation.

It is easy to perceive why so many Japanese behaved as they did, conditioned as they were. Yet it remains difficult to empathise with those who did such things, especially when Japan still rejects its historic legacy.

Many Japanese today adopt the view that it is time to bury all old grievances - those of Japan's former enemies about the treatment of prisoners and subject peoples, along with those of their own nation about firebombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"In war, both sides do terrible things," former Lt Hayashi Inoue argued in 2005. "Surely after 60 years, the time has come to stop criticising Japan for things done so long ago."

Wartime Japan was responsible for almost as many deaths in Asia as was Nazi Germany in Europe. Germany has paid almost £3billion to 1.5 million victims of the Hitler era. But Japan goes to extraordinary lengths to escape any admission of responsibility, far less of liability for compensation, towards its wartime victims.

Most modern Japanese do not accept the ill-treatment of subject peoples and prisoners by their forebears, even where supported by overwhelming evidence, and those who do acknowledge it incur the disdain or outright hostility of their fellow-countrymen for doing so.

It is repugnant the way they still seek to excuse, and even to ennoble, the actions of their parents and grandparents, so many of whom forsook humanity in favour of a perversion of honour and an aggressive nationalism which should properly be recalled with shame.

The Japanese nation is guilty of a collective rejection of historical fact. As long as such denial persists, it will remain impossible for the world to believe that Japan has come to terms with the horrors it inflicted.

* Abridged extract from NEMESIS: THE BATTLE FOR JAPAN 1944-45 by Max Hastings, published by HarperPress on October 1 at £25. Max Hastings 2007. To order a copy at £22.50 (p&p free), call 0845 606 4213.

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Beheaded at whim and worked to death: Japan's repugnant treatment of Allied PoWs

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Last updated at 22:59 18 September 2007 The sheer brutality of the battle for the Far East defies imagination. And in a new book, historian Max Hastings argues that Japanese intransigence made it far worse. Yesterday, he explained why America had to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

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World War II -- prisoners of war POWs Japan

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Japan did not sign the Geneva Convention. The Japanese martial code did not permit surrender and thus the Government saw no need to acceed to the Ruropean standards of warfare relected in the Geneva Convention. The Japanese treatment of POWs in World War II was barbaric.

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Sandakan Death March; Japanese inhumanity

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During this period he directed an underground intelligence organisation and arranged delivery of sorely needed medical supplies, food and money to the POWs. He was instrumental in arranging a radio link with the outside world and was also responsible for organising the British North Borneo Constabulary and the loyal natives in Sandakan into readiness for an armed uprising against the Japanese.

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Changi - prisoner stories

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The Australian History Museum is unique in both its collection and its usage, and holds vast collection numbering over 8,000 items reflecting Australia's history from pre-colonization to today and is available for general public and group viewing.