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
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