Dreams of Food in Any Damn POW Camp in the Pacific
36,000 Americans were imprisoned in Japanese POW camps in World War II, most of them for three or more years. Their chance of survival was not much better than 1 in 2 (by comparison only 1 in 100 Americans in German POW camps died). For those who did survive, life was never the same.
Never the Same is a new documentary about life in those camps. The prisoners tell their own story in the drawings and writings they created in the camps and in interviews with the director.
In a story that would lend itself to emotional manipulation, there is none. The actors read the diaries and other memoirs with the bare minimum of commentary necessary to make the events comprehensible to the audience. Never the Same is all the stronger for the restraint, restoring to those who suffered in the camps the dignity and the humanity that their captors tried to strip away.
Much of that humanity is expressed through food.* As the prisoners’ weight dropped below 100 lbs with no sign of leveling off, as they no longer needed to trim their hair or cut their fingernails, as all appetites except the appetite for food vanished, the prisoners thought about food all day and dreamed about it at night.
“Sweet Dreams. Any Damn Camp.” Copyright Robert Ehrhart. By permission Jan I. Thompson
An empty tin can became a valued possession used to cook anything that could be scrounged to supplement the paltry ration of moldy rice. The very lucky or the very determined sometimes even succeeded in killing a snake, bird, or the dog belonging to a Japanese soldier. The few Red Cross parcels that go through provided a pitifully rare treat and a complex monetary system. The POWs sketched cartoons about food, they drew up gargantuan menus of foods they yearned for, and composed elaborate cookbooks of as many as 800 recipes.
The result is a documentary as compelling as any I have seen. The schedule at the Farm to Table Meeting in New Orleans where the documentary was screened had shamefully been mis-timed so that the promised discussion session had to be cancelled. Even so, the comments I heard later suggested that my reaction was not unusual.
Such works are not created overnight. Three-time Emmy-Award winner, Jan Thompson, whose father was one of the prisoners who survived, has spent the past twenty years putting together this documentary, searching out survivors willing to speak, becoming active in their associations, and getting permission to use the documents they created. She wrote the script, composed the music, and persuaded a stellar cast of actors led by Loretta Swit, best know for her role as Major “Hot Lips” Houlihan in M*A*S*H, to narrate.
In fact, I was not sure in advance that I wanted to see Never the Same, not sure that I had the fortitude to face up to what those men had suffered. In retrospect, I would not have missed it for the world. I don’t want to spoil your experience by saying more. I have said this much because it’s a documentary that demands wide distribution. If anyone is interested, the website is linked above or you can contact Jan Thompson if you would like to know more.
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*The subject of food and cookbooks among starving prisoners has received attention in the past twenty years, perhaps most notably in In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy of the Women of Terezin (1996), edited by Cara de Silva.
There was so much emphasis on the European war that the war in the Pacific sort of went by the wayside. Here’s are a couple of other sources aside from *Memory’s Kitchen* that might be of interest:
Wong Hong Suen’s Wartime Kitchen: Cooking and Eating in Singapore, 1942-1950 (http://issuu.com/edmbooks/docs/001-144_wartime_kitchen_300dpi_issuu – full-text)
Darra Goldstein’s “Women Under Siege: Leningrad 1941 – 1942″ (http://darragoldstein.com/files/2012/12/Darra_Goldstein_Women.pdf)
Yes, that’s one of Jan’s points. And thanks for the additional sources. I’m sure before long someone will do a comparative study of these.
It’s more than just ironic that the two major losers of WW2 became, through the administration of General MacArthur in Japan and the Marshall Plan in Europe, the major bastions in Asia and Europe of post-war democracy. History is full of surprises!
Cynthia’s note that the Pacific war ‘sort of went by the wayside’ is in agreement with Christina Twomey’s 2006 analysis (bit.ly/1n8nMmA) of the reaction to a 1997 Australian film ‘Paradise Road’ (bit.ly/1n8o50y) – not a documentary but interesting because it draws on the experiences of women civilians as distinct from male military personnel in Japanese POW camps. Twomey covers gender and race issues noted or ignored by the film’s critics. She makes some mention of food particularly as a moral dilemma for women who were either forced or “chose” sexual servitude and thus received better conditions including food. Thanks for the discussion and links!
Interesting point. And I wonder if this was just women. Jan Thompson mentioned in conversation that many of the men in the camps were raped and, thus, I would assume, may well have have been bribed or threatened with food.
My comment is not really about food but my memories of that time are different. The Pacific war was definitely NOT “by the wayside” for all US citizens! I was a pre-schooler who lived in Seattle. My mother took care of 5>8 other kids all week so that their mothers could work in the shipyards while husbands/fathers were in the military. We were fighting the Japs! Europe was too far away to really be of concern. We had plane spotters who knew all the configurations for the Japanese war planes, we had black-out drills so that we would know what to do if one of those planes was spotted. Retired people scanned the skies and at night there were huge spotlights scanning the skies constantly all night to be ready with anti-aircraft guns which we were told were in place. The coast was constantly patrolled to thwart an invasion or the landing of submarines, which were spotted from time to time not too far from shore. One surfaced near the mouth of the Columbia River and shelled Fort Stevens though little damage was done. Thousands of fire bomb balloons were sent over western north America. They were technically flawed but did succeed in starting some forest fires and were found as far inland as Nevada, the Dakotas and Alberta. This is insignificant in retrospect but we knew about it and worried. For the people living on the West Coast, the Pacific war was not a wayside issue.
Thanks Kay. Fascinating how limited our perspectives of WW II were. Growing up in England, I was barely aware there was a Pacific war.