Why Did The Guards Treat The Pows So Badly

Why did the Guards Treat the POWs so Badly? POW stands for Prisoner of War and to become a POW, like Louie, he was captured by the Japanese and taken to a POW camp. To be captured, Louie and his team crash landed in the ocean and they drifted to Japanese territory and they were imprisoned by them and taken to a POW camp and then they would torture all of the Prisoners there. “Beatings were almost constant. Men were beaten for virtually anything: folding arms, cleaning their teeth, talking in their sleep, and most often, for not understanding orders issued in Japanese” (149). The one usually doing all of the commands and the beatings were Mutsuhiro Watanabe, also known as the Bird. POWs were beaten, tortured and starved while they were staying at the POW camp. Furthermore, the guards or soldiers were beaten in their younger life because that is what the Japan’s military culture was. The guards treated the POWs so badly by reason of no one

Along with, the guards did not want to feed the prisoners a ton of food because they wanted the prisoners to be scronney so then the prisoners could overpower all of the guards. “Meals usually consisted of a bowl of broth with a bit of vegetable and a bowl or a half bowl of rancid rice, sometimes mixed with a little barley” (149). The low caloric intake made it so the POWs would lose a couple of pounds a day. Not just by an undernourished meal, but also by having diarrhea and vomiting all the time. The Red Cross team started to send supplies to the POWs because they knew they have not been getting their nutrient they needed to survive. Yet, the guards would hide the supplies or just eat all of the supplies and not even tell the POWs. Still, the POWs knew where the guards hid their food so they would try and steal some more food for themselves, but usually ended in a beating from one of the guards or the