SQJ Taipei

Patrick Cowsill has a really interesting post about POWs in Taiwan during WWII. If you remember… Taiwan was under Japanese control until the end of WWII… so the POWs were Allied forces.

Patrick’s grandfather served in the Pacific and writes…

Actually, my grandpa hated the war; he rarely talked about it.

Same with my grandfather, who also served in the Pacific theater. I never got a *single word* out of him about his time in the Navy. He shuddered each time he saw war footage or simulation on TV and either changed the channel or left the room.

I’ve recently been reading March To Victory covering the last year of WWII and read some things about Taiwan. There actually isn’t much… because Taiwan was seen as too difficult to take over and too close to the Japanese mainland. The Allies considered an amphibious assault on Taiwan but instead took control of the Philippines. The Allies bombed Taiwan on a few occasions, as Patrick mentions in his post, - and suffered terribly with much infrastructure destroyed and thousands killed - but was spared from ground attacks.

Patrick posts a letter he received recently regarding eywitness accounts of POWs in Hualien.

For anyone interested in Taiwan… or in WWII… the letter is an interesting account.

Thanks for posting the letter Patrick.

The March to Victory: The Final Months of WWII