SHENYANG, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) — A bleary-eyed man jolts awake, staring in disbelief as a neat row of fleas on his blanket stiffen their spindly legs and angle their tiny our bodies towards a swaggering Japanese officer at his sharp command.
The scene comes from a hand-drawn cartoon sketched in secret by Allied prisoner of battle (POW) William Wuttke greater than 80 years in the past throughout World War II (WWII). The quiet act of defiance was not meant to be humorous, at the very least not in a carefree means, because it captured even the smallest creatures on the camp, which appeared sure by its brutal guidelines.
The drawing was created inside the previous Mukden POW camp, which was established by the Japanese military throughout WWII in Shenyang, then generally known as Mukden, in northeast China’s Liaoning Province.
Known as “oriental Auschwitz,” the Mukden camp was one of many largest POW websites in Asia and infamous for its brutality. From November 1942 to August 1945, greater than 2,000 Allied prisoners from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and France had been held there. Nearly 300 detainees died earlier than Japan’s give up.
Lice and fleas had been fixed companions for the POWs held there, burrowing into their garments, their bedding and their pores and skin. Hunger gnawed. Disease unfold. Sleep, when it got here in any respect, was shallow and uneasy.
According to British Major Robert Peaty, who was a senior-ranking Allied officer held on the Mukden camp, the Japanese military had handled the Allied POWs in a “disgraceful manner.” Hunger, beatings and humiliation had been all a part of every day life there.
Under strict Japanese guidelines that banned written data, a number of American POWs, together with Wuttke, Barton Franklin Pinson and Malcolm Fortier, risked extreme punishment to secretly draw cartoons documenting the battle crimes on the camp.
More than eight a long time later, the cartoons have reemerged as probably the most hanging photos in Comics and Bayonets, a documentary movie directed collectively by American and Chinese filmmakers, bringing renewed consideration to WWII’s lesser-known POW camp.
Richard Anderson, the American director of the movie, has visited the previous web site of the camp in Shenyang many occasions. Each go to left him shaken. The perimeter partitions and barbed wire are lengthy gone, however the grim Japanese guard towers, the towering chimney and the memorial wall engraved with the names of fallen Allied troopers nonetheless stand.
Meanwhile, he was struck by how little the story was recognized within the United States.
“People know Flying Tigers and General Stillwell, but they don’t know there were thousands of American, British, and other Allied POWs being held in Shenyang until the end of the war,” mentioned Anderson. “It was a story that just had to be told to the world.”
That sense of urgency sparked a cross-Pacific effort. Liu Yangeng, the producer of the movie, searched the archives of the museum constructed on the previous POW camp web site for data on U.S. POWs, whereas volunteer teams within the United States tracked down surviving former prisoners one after the other.
“In 2015, Richard and I contacted more than a dozen American veterans and led a film crew to document their memories of the camp,” Liu mentioned. “Many of the former POWs were already in their twilight years.”
Anderson believes the outstanding tales of POWs had been by no means totally captured in books and shortly realized they needed to doc their experiences on movie earlier than it was too late. “I still remember Oliver ‘Red’ Allen, the former POW, who passed away just a few months after we interviewed him,” Anderson recalled.
“We were racing against time,” Liu instructed Xinhua. “We traveled almost the entire length of the U.S., from the East Coast to the West.”
As long-buried experiences lastly got here to mild, many veterans discovered long-delayed solace. One case left a deep impression on Liu, a former POW from a small city close to Boston, Massachusetts, who returned dwelling after the battle and quietly labored as a mail provider with nobody round him conscious of his wartime ordeal.
“Only after we uncovered his story did the town learn what he had endured during WWII,” Liu mentioned. In the ultimate months of his life, the veteran’s hospital room was usually full of flowers despatched by strangers.
In 2015, when Anderson lastly positioned veteran John Moseley, the previous POW was on his deathbed. Appearing within the movie, his daughter, Kay Moseley, a lawyer, mentioned her father, an architectural designer by occupation, was additionally an avid artist. Some of the cartoons displayed on the POW camp museum had been his work.
She mentioned she might acknowledge her father’s drawings even with no signature, just by the handwriting beneath them, noting that he all the time wrote as neatly as a printed web page. She believes his optimism helped him endure captivity. “My father remained positive. I think that’s how he managed to survive three and a half years as a POW.”
The optimism on the POW camp resonated deeply with the filmmakers.
“They could not protest to their Japanese captors about the treatment they received, so poking fun at their situation, by drawing cartoons using paper and pencils stolen from the factory offices, was a way for them to comically laugh at their lives and share the situation with each other. It was another way for them to resist,” Anderson mentioned.
In June 2025, Richard Anderson returned to Shenyang as soon as once more, accompanied by Steven Rodriquez, the son of former POW Gregory Rodriquez. The youthful Rodriquez mentioned that his father did not converse a lot about his hell-like expertise on the camp. “Before participating in this film, I knew very little about my dad’s experience in the Mukden POW Camp. I had heard a few stories, but he seldom talked about what he went through.”
“I escorted him several times to some of his POW reunions where he met up with some of his fellow POWS and they would talk about some of the horrific acts that the Japanese guards would inflict on not only the POWS but the Chinese people,” the 72-year-old recalled.
Standing on the grounds a long time later, Rodriquez described the expertise as surreal. For many POW descendants like him, the positioning is now peaceable, the brutality gone, however the reminiscence stays.
“It’s hard to believe that such a peaceful place was once filled with hatred and horrific violence,” he mentioned, believing that their tales should be remembered, not only for the struggling, however for the humanity that endured.
Looking again, the struggling, resistance and sacrifice endured by Allied POWs stand not solely as irrefutable proof of the battle crimes dedicated by the Japanese military, but additionally as a testomony to how Chinese troops and civilians stood shoulder to shoulder with their allies within the world struggle towards fascism, mentioned Jing Shaofu, former director of the Shenyang archives.