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 empire territories, and also worked to ensure that the Dutch and French could regain control of their colonial empires. 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. Louis Mountbatten took on 35,000 Japanese troops into his command in Indonesia. Retaining their wartime organisation and led by Japanese officers they had to fight alongside the British, with one Japanese even being recommended for the Distinguished Service Order as early as November 1945. The recommendation was done by General Philip Christison for Japanese battalion commander Major Kido. Other examples of action include the Japanese company led by Captain Yamada that had to fight their way into Magelang to assist the British; Japanese Kempeitai (military police) used to guard camps in Buitenzorg, Japanese artillery units used for offensives in Bandung, and the Bandoeng garrison that was reinforced by 1,500 armed Japanese. Japanese saw action in Semarang, Ambarawa, Magelang.
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.
— Lord Mountbatten of Burma in April 1946 after visiting Sumatra
Being aware of the sensitivity and hypocrisy of using Japanese troops for the purpose of by force restoring the European colonial Empires against the wishes of the people, the Americans and British worked successfully to conceal the extent of Japanese involvement in this post-war activity.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Surrendered Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words military and, military, forced and/or labor:
“The military and the clergy cause us much annoyance; the clergy and the military, they empty our wallets and rob our intelligence.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“My faith is the grand drama of my life. I’m a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith. I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colours for those who see none.”
—Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)
“I do not like forced integration.... I do not like forced anything.... as a youngster I lived in a white neighborhood with a white neighbor next door. We would go to them, they would go to us. If they had anything, we had it. We lived just like one. We didn’t think about no integration.”
—Ruby Middleton Forsythe (b. 1905)
“The habits of our whole species fall into three great classes—useful labour, useless labour, and idleness. Of these the first only is meritorious; and to it all the products of labor rightfully belong; but the two latter, while they exist, are heavy pensioners upon the first, robbing it of a large portion of its just rights. The only remedy for this is to, as far as possible, drive useless labour and idleness out of existence.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)