The Final Betrayal provides sensational new evidence about the little known but shameful delay in rescuing allied POWs between the unconditional surrender of Japan on 14 August 1945 and the arrival of Allied liberation forces in Japanese-occupied territories after 2 September 1945.
The Japanese used this golden opportunity to destroy vast amounts of documentation concerning war crimes and to set their house in order before Allied war crimes investigators arrived. POW facilities and medical experimentation installations were either abandoned or destroyed. During this period groups of Allied POWs were brutally murdered and countless more died needlessly from starvation, disease and ill-treatment.
The Final Betrayal reveals that the blame rests principally with General MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific. Incredibly MacArthur expressly forbade any Allied forces from liberating Japanese occupied territories before he had taken the formal Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. Vice Admiral Lord Mountbatten, Commanding Allied Forces in South-east Asia protested against this perverse policy, convinced that MacArthur’s vanity would condemn many starving and sick POWs to death; the majority of American POWs were already being liberated in the Philippines and elsewhere.
The inescapable and uncomfortable conclusion of this fine study is that MacArthur’s hubris and the American leadership’s obsession with sidelining the British in Asia caused the unnecessary loss of hundreds of British and Commonwealth lives.
