Source: Xinhua| 2017-07-06 20:48:03|Editor: Liangyu

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SHENYANG, July 6 (Xinhua) -- Many years later, 82-year-old Ian Peaty can still recall the moment his father disembarked a ship in Southampton after WWII, languished and weak.

"I did not recognize him," he said. He had no idea what happened to Major Robert Peaty while he was away, fighting the Japanese in Asia.

"My father did not speak about his experience to the family," he said.

It was not until 1986, when a TV program about prisoners of war (POW) was made with Major Peaty's assistance that he first heard details of sufferings of the POWs between 1942 and 1945 in northeast China's Liaoning Province.

"The Japs treated the allied POWs in a disgraceful manner," Peaty said. "All the POWs suffered from malnutrition and related illnesses, and for the rest of his [Major Peaty] life he suffered with stomach pains."

Major Peaty was just one of the thousands of POWs who fell into the hands of the Japanese in WWII.

China was the first country to fight fascism in WWII. Some Chinese historians used to recognize the Japanese attack on the Lugou Bridge, also known as Marco Polo Bridge, on July 7, 1937 as the start of the war against Japanese invasion, but earlier this year textbooks were revised to adopt the phrase of "14-year Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression," effectively extending the official length of the war.

On Sept. 18, 1931, Japanese troops blew up a section of railway under its control near Liaoning's capital Shenyang and accused Chinese troops of sabotage as a pretext for attack, starting the invasion.

During the war, at least 200,000 soldiers from the allied forces were caught by the Japanese. Yang Jing, a scholar with the Shenyang University who spent more than 20 years studying the history of POWs, told Xinhua that the number of American POWs was 270,000, among whom 110,000 died.

Between November 1942 and August 1945, more than 2,000 POWs were kept in a concentration camp in Shenyang. They were from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Holland and France.

"[My father was] put on a filthy Jap freight ship, the Fuki Maru ... They walked into the camp on Nov. 11, 1942. His description was that the mud covered huts were not good enough for his garden shed," Ian Peaty said.

A building in the camp is still preserved, where visitors can see the long bed which slept eight.

"The first winter was extremely difficult for the POWs," said Liu Changjiang, curator of a museum established on the site. "Many of them were caught in Southeast Asia where it was very hot, and they only had thin clothes."

About 16 percent of the POWs there died.

From 1942 to early 1943, Major Peaty also recorded deaths of American soldiers in the camp, usually one or two a day, and sometimes as many as six.

He also recorded details of POWs being mistreated. For instance, on Oct. 12, 1943, four American soldiers were beaten by the Japanese with a wooden sword because the sink was not clean. A POW, number 954, was beaten with a bayonet, because he could not understand what a Japanese soldier had said. He was later taken for medical treatment.

Beatings were not the most horrible experience, and Peaty believes that the Japanese were using the POWs for medical experiments.

In his diary, Peaty recorded: "30 Jan, '43. Everyone given 5cc Typhoid-paratyphoid A inoculation. By 13 Feb, large numbers of deaths were investigated by Jap medics."

Yang Jing found, in the documents of Japanese military order during WWII, that these medics were from the notorious Japanese Army Unit 731, a germ war unit.

"My father was prevented from visiting his men in hospital, [and it was] made very clear that he would be very unwelcome to pry into any sort of sickness or ill-health," Peaty said.

In early 1943, Jack Roberts of the British Royal Army Medical Corps went to the hospital where the bodies were stacked.

"All had autopsies, the masked Japs examined the stomach, intestine, pancreas and lungs, also some brains removed," Peaty said.

In such difficult times, a number of Chinese lent the POWs a hand.

Li Lishui, 92, worked in a Japanese company where many POWs were forced to work as well.

"The Japanese were so harsh to prisoners that they had a bitter time. Without enough food, they are all skin and bones. Some of them would pick up peanuts dropped on the ground to fill their belly," Li said.

But Japanese soldiers did not care much about Li as he was a child.

One day, some cucumbers fell off a passing vegetable cart. Li found that a prisoner, identified by his number 266, was staring at him.

He picked up two cucumbers and threw them to prisoner 266 who hid them immediately.

"Number 266 was a good man. He used to do extra cleaning after work for us," Li said.

Actually, Li was not the only Chinese who had lent a hand to those war prisoners.

Ge Qingyu, a staff of a Japanese factory, helped POWs to exchange axle bearings they stole from a factory for food, while Gao Dechun, who had helped three prisoners get a map and escape, was discovered by Japanese soldiers and suffered in jail.

Li met No. 266 again after he was released. "He gave me some candies, which were bitter like I had never tasted," he said. Later he learnt that the candies were called chocolate.

Later the New China was founded, and it grew stronger as time passed by. The stories of POWs became largely unknown to the younger generation.

"My father was too engrossed in his work to keep his family in the comfortable condition that he expected so did not write about his experience, which he probably felt was likely to be politically sensitive, especially with the State visit of Emperor Hirohito to London in 1971," Peaty said.

In Shenyang, the area where Major Peaty once lived became apartment buildings for a growing population.

Li Lishui had almost forgotten the two cucumbers, until foreign journalists interviewed him in 2001 or 2002. Later veteran soldier Neil Gagliano sent him a photo of himself and a letter, telling him that he was No. 266.

China began renovating the camp site in 2007. In 2013, the site opened to the public. "Some veteran soldiers and their children had returned," Liu Changjiang said.

But Gagliano did not, passing away some years ago.

"If I had met him, we could have become very good friends," Li said, with tears in his eyes. "It is my hope that I could meet his descendants and hear them talk about him, about what he had been through all these years."

Major Peaty never returned either. He died in 1989, 26 years before his diary was published in Chinese.

"I am sure that he did not want to reignite the bad times," his son said.