Japanese Surrendered Personnel
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Japanese Surrendered Personnel (or JSP) is a designation for captive Japanese soldiers (similar to Disarmed Enemy Forces and Surrendered Enemy Personnel). It was used in particular by British Forces referring to Japanese forces in Asia after the end of World War II.
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[edit] Military and other forced labor
The JSP were until at least 1947 used for enforced labor purposes, such as road maintenance, recovering corpses for reburial, cleaning, preparing farmland etc. Early tasks also included repairing airfields damaged by Allied bombing during the war and maintaining law and order until the arrival of the British forces of occupation.
After the war the U.K. quickly worked to regain control of its colonial territories, and also worked to ensure that the Dutch and French could regain control of their colonial territories. Due to British manpower shortages in the combat against the local resistance fighters who sought national independence, JSP were often pressed into combat service alongside British occupation troops.[citation needed]
I of course knew that we had been forced to keep Japanese troops under arms to protect our lines of communication and vital areas...but it was nevertheless a great shock to me to find over a thousand Japanese troops guarding the nine miles of road from the airport to the town.[1]
– Lord Mountbatten of Burma in April 1946 after visiting Sumatra
[edit] Legality of the JSP designation
The U.S. repeatedly questioned the validity of the British JSP designation, to no avail.[1]
[edit] Repatriation of JSP
However, at the same time that they questioned the British use of the JSP designation, the US made use of up to 80,000 JSP[2] in the Philippines for the duration of 1946, at one time even lowering the area priority for shipping and rerouting shipping to the British South East Asia Command to slow the rate of repatriation.[3]
[edit] Relevant publications
Several memoirs and other works relevant to the issue have been published. The most famous in Japan, which has been translated into English, is that by Aida Yuji, Prisoner of the British. A Japanese Soldier’s Experience in Burma.[4]
[edit] See also
- Disarmed Enemy Forces
- Surrendered Enemy Personnel
- Prisoner of War
- Combatant
- Illegal combatant
- Laws of war
- Prisoner-of-war camp
[edit] References
- ^ a b "Japanese Prisoners of War" By Philip Towle, Margaret Kosuge, Yōichi Kibata. p. 146 (Google.Books)
- ^ George G. Lewis and John Mewha, History of Prisoner of War Utilization by the United States Army, 1776-1945, Department of the Army Pamphlet No. 20-213, 1955. p.257. Available at [[1]].
- ^ Lewis and Mewha, p.259-260.
- ^ Prisoner of the British. A Japanese Soldier’s Experience in Burma, trs.Hide Ishiguro, Louis Allen, Cresset Press, London 1966.
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