I'm only part into the story, but I already love it.
The prisoners-of-war were tired hiding their lathe every time they might be searched, that they hung up a sign "workshop" above one of their huts, and timed it so that the new round of guards thought it had always been there.
I wonder if there’s any resource that shows how to build all these tools from scratch. What would it take to bootstrap manufacturing?
That's likely impossible as all easily accessible coal and iron ore are long gone.
Maybe if you have access to scrap metal.
Pretty easy to make charcoal from wood.
The first book in the Gingery series is how to set up an aluminum foundry for casting.
Aluminium casting (assuming already metallic aluminium) is vastly simpler than getting iron/steel from ore. Sure you could remelt scrap metals, but in "deep future" where all metals have corroded away you seemingly can't restart industries on Earth, our only option is not to let ourselves collapse.
corroded metal is ore, copper takes geological time to corrode, and getting iron from ore is hard work but not rocket science.
I guess major equipment items weighing many tons could be used as ore deposits, but most iron is not that. Your nails/screws/whatever are pretty much unrecoverable once corroded.
In other words, humans are not an exception to the global entropy growth.
News today, two killed in Texas when 158 tonnes of steel rolls off the back of four low loaders - a single massive heavy guage pipe segment with in line pressure vessels and bleed off tee pieces likely destined for a oil|gas processing plant.
Point being, there are massive metal deposits in industrial ares and mineral | energy processing plants - raw girders, fleets of 100 tonne+ trucks, crushers, screen sections, etc.
Of some interest, one of many papers* on adaptive metal work by "stone age" people
https://www.asha.org.au/pdf/australasian_historical_archaeol...
turning horseshoes into spear points, etc. Might even be the same paper that describes people making their own forges from scratch to work recovered iron.
Yes, things corrode, but not all things, some get isolated from oxygen and found again.
* Not the one I was thinking of, apologies - there's a good one I'll have to work to find that goes into more detail and range on "outsider" metal working.
There's use of meteoric iron from pre-iron-age societies, too (most famously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun%27s_meteoric_iron_... and see "Bronze Age" on this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoric_iron)
a nail rusted into a lump of hematite is still a lump of very rich ore, and the hazard and labor involved in fishing it out of a pile of rotted wood is not disproportionate to the hazard and labor involved in reducing it back to iron, either by artisanal manual processes or by mass-production processes. artisanal manual processes require tens of person-days per kilogram of iron. see christopher roy's documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ
your point about entropy is confused; it's reminiscent of the creationist argument that evolution is impossible because it produces more ordered structures from less ordered ones. yes, human activities do increase entropy, mostly in the form of slightly increasing the amount of infrared radiation into space from earth, but less so than other biological activities they displace. this is almost completely irrelevant to the question of whether landfills are richer or poorer ore deposits than banded iron formations or karst bauxite deposits, because the contribution of that term to the system's total entropy change is insignificantly small, and can therefore easily be positive or negative
And that right there explains why needing to "bootstrap manufacturing" at this level is a pure fantasy. There's no conceivable future in which it would be necessary. Every country on the planet has existing machine tools that, no matter their condition, would be easier to restore than building them from scratch by smelting iron, melting aluminum, etc.
Even in the case where you can't get old machine tools and fix them, there are people using e.g., old engine blocks and crankshafts as lathe headstocks.
There is simply so much technology cast-offs in the world that can be repurposed into usable items that I think the whole "manufacturing bootstrap" concept is misguided.
But I'll admit that it's a fun mental exercise on a boring afternoon.
Coal is easily accessible on eBay https://www.ebay.com/itm/121215404611
"The early Mediterranean iron smelting started around 12th or 11th century BC. It is assumed the pioneering metallurgists sourced their coal off eBay."
Yes. This is also how gods gave humans fire, don't you know?
There are many trade-offs between purity of original work, processed state of original inputs, effort, availability, and cost.
Perhaps folks in small towns with just an Ace Hardware or Homeless Despot lack access to suppliers in say Richmond, Virginia.
Right, Prometheus got caught shipping dangerous goods and was blacklisted by eagle de-livery.
But that came to a grinding halt when the seller's PayPal account was closed for suspicious activity. This is also believed to be the reason the Roman formula for concrete was lost.
The breakdown of ancient metalworking supply chains was caused by what later became known as Sea Peoples, but was actually a misheard reference to the CEO of Paypal.
You're looking for the Gingery Lathe.
He builds it and bootstraps a home metalworking shop, building new tools with the old ones.
It's a book series.
You could take a look at the Multimachine, an open source combined lathe, mill and drill press from the early 00s web forums. I first saw it mentioned in the Open Source Ecology project ~10 years ago.
Depending on how far you want to go, you might like to read The Knowledge by Dartnell. It covers smelting, etc.
I wonder if there’s any resource that shows how to build all these tools from scratch.
Some photos from the camp here: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/eyewitness/galleri...
Photo of men with artificial limbs built in the camp: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C4416
A wireless set hidden in the sole of a prisoner's sandals: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C14187
Please note:
This website contains names, images and voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
This website contains war-related material, including images which some people may find confronting and disturbing.
how trite
traditional aboriginal people might not want to be exposed to that and close the web page rather than continuing. it's a taboo similar to certain kinds of photographs in cultures you may be more familiar with
It's not really out of concern for people's cultures. Lots of cultures have all sorts of taboos about types of images or information. Muslim fundamentalists for instance don't like pictures of any people, of any ethnicity, alive or dead. This is just a nonsense fashion for the Australian government. All their websites have something like the one at the bottom of the page:
"The Australian War Memorial acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia. We recognise their continuing connection to land, sea and waters. We pay our respects to elders past and present."
It makes a change from chaining aboriginals neck to neck which they kept up after I was born, along with taking babies, and having exclusion zones "boundary roads" in cities.
Is that the era you want to return to?
I'd prefer the happy middle ground between glorifying a race and chaining them neck to neck.
Lack of a warning is "glorifying" (odd word choice, I'd maybe go with "foregrounding"?) the culture that doesn't need the warning.
how trite
How gammon.
I don't quite understand how you think a racist/colorist slur is acceptable here.
In context here "trite" would be the term diminishing recognition of particular race issues, and "gammon" is the term disparging a particular attitude within the UK and doesn't target all with a particular genetic background or skin colour.
As an Australian I don't find the "trite" comment that diminishes recognition of indigenous contributions to the commonwealth war effort to be acceptable here and labelled that comment as gammon.
Curiously, in addition to the UK term which derives from a ham cut, there's an Australian indigenous term common in NSW and the NT with an unrelated etymology that also works here to a degree.
"Gammon" is a clear reference to a ruddy skin color and is intended to be offensive. It is a textbook racial slur.
Claiming that its not is like claiming the "n-word" isn't a racist slur because it was about a particular attitude and doesn't apply to all African Americans (see Chris Rock's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggas_vs._Black_People for an example of this).
You're not from the UK are you?
It seems clear you've never heard it used or how it's used there.
If you are and you have then it would seem you're arguing in bad faith.
It's a slur on character as two people of clearly the same race, age, and gender could overwhelmingly be voted as one Gammon, one not.
It's about a cetrain shoutiness and empire centric values and attitude.
I've seen a lot of Chris Rock and your opinion notwithstanding that doesn't easily apply here.
As a genuine question, how is it that you've honed in on my response to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40194063 which is an actual dismissal of recognition of non western values?
You appear to have latched onto the mote in one comment and ignored the beam in another.
The indigenous warning isn't "trite", it's a culturally sensitive practice that most Australians are used to seeing.
I have no horse in this, but that sounds more like an argument that it is trite?
I believe the word "trite" generally implies overuse to the point of uselessness. These warnings very much have a use to indigenous peoples, and they serve that use well - so I'd argue that they don't qualify.
Wow, as someone that loves vintage machine tools and owns a Monarch 10EE (http://www.lathes.co.uk/monarch/index.html) it's funny to see this little corner of the internet find its way here. This is one of those sites that has information likely not found anywhere else online and few places offline.
a. Unmarried, b. lots of room, or c. very understanding wife unit permits a man cave?
Haha, I am unattached but have no space to speak of sadly (a large home shop is a future goal, just need the home first along with the very understanding wife). It lived first in a friends garage, then a machine shop of another friend, and now in yet another friends garage (in another state). If you are trying to imagine all of that moving about I encourage you to do it with the Benny Hill theme tune playing, that should properly set the tone.
:D Nice. I'm also working towards that goal of a man cave with neon and gold Schlitz sign and a pool table next to the milling machine, table saw, drill press, and central vac. 70's-90's rock playlist sets just about the right mood for making stuff.
That's the dream. I have access to a nice makerspace to tide me over for now. I don't know if you follow the youtube machinist community at all but you may find some enjoyment in This Old Tony, Ave, Tom Lipton, or many of the others in it if the home shop bug has you.
looks at 230kg wood lathe
mutters darkly
My wife practically forced me to get the damn thing. She's not the one that has to get it into the back of the van.
Nice one! I liked the carriage rollers 10EE has so much that I made similar ones on my Chinese lathe instead of finicky gibs it came with.
Sounds like a fun project. How do you find the lathe? I always preferred old American iron to something new from China/Taiwan but having to haul around two tons of lathe when you move is not a trivial task.
Heh right nobody buys the mini lathe over a Monarch as a matter of preference! I got it when I wanted to learn some machining and didn't have a ton of space. Over the years had a few mods including the usual (tapered bearings on the spindle, 4" 4 jaw chuck…) and some funny ones.
It's an okay machine but the design isn't rigid enough, it really needs the double amount cast iron for the bed given its swing. Still I did a lot of precision work on this that came really handy professionally later, when interacting with MEs and toolmakers.
It looks really banged up now, and I had to change the leadscrew that became visibly worn. Funny enough the much derided Derlin change gears look pristine!
Taiwanese lathes are generally good, with some being truly excellent. The common Chinese benchtop lathes are best regarded as a kit of parts - they're crude, but can be made into a satisfactory machine with some fitting and fettling.
This website is a treasure. I am currently working at restoring a South Bend model 420 toolmaker lathe, but looking forward to owning a 10EE and a Bridgeport at some point. Need to build a decent heated shop first, though. The 420 is small enough that it can go in my living room but a 10EE needs a concrete floor, and without climate control it'll just rust.
Unrelated to excellent article content, do we have today an AI solution to enhance the quality and readability of scanned PDFs?
I'd also be curious about this as I am presently dealing with some PDFs with both handwriting and poorly scanned type. I can read and understand these documents but the text is not recognized using tesseract OCR.
I've been looking at handwriting recognition offerings and signed up for ChatGPT [1] to trial access for this task against Irish genealogical records, which it does quite well on. However, ChatGPT itself recommended that I use Transkribus [2]. That looks to be quite an esoteric interface, but my initial test suggests it's pretty good -- I've not made a proper comparison yet as I'm wanting to have a workflow of downloading images, transcribing them and maybe compiling them into a PDF with manual corrections.
[1] an 'expert' like this but it wasn't this one I used, can't locate it right now as am on a different computer, https://chat.openai.com/g/g-LCtICWzCt-historical-handwriting...
My use-case was easier than yours (OCRing scans of microfiche of typewritten pages) but I found this https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF incredibly handy.
I still had to write a bit of Python, mostly for levelling and centering the text blocks, but it really is a PDF swiss army knife.
It doesn't necessarily need to be AI, it could be a simple filter, etc
OCR has been around for a few decades by now: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
I think the solution here is not so much AI as finding some library which has the magazine and making new scans. That would also help with the hard-to-solve-with-ai problem of the missing page.
This is fascinating really interesting to see how these are built first hand. My father-in-law is one of the only companies still building speed lathes and it's basically the same lathe they have built since 1937.
I'm pretty sure their customers range from SpaceX to Pharma co's and they are just a small shop in midwest PA.
These lathes?
https://www.crozierspeedlathes.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzaOsPcaoi4
It looks to me like they're for hand-finishing (deburring or polishing?) parts. I wonder in what kinds of work that comes up often enough to justify dedicated machines?
Aerospace, semiconductor, etc., basically anywhere you have precision round parts. You can debur alot by hand but not so much external diameters which are often done on these machines for low volume / prototyping / reworking / etc.
Ha you found them, yeah that's his company.
My father showed me how to use a lathe when I was around 14. He warned me to never use it unless he was present. Of course I ignored him. The very first time I used it, my shirt sleeves caught in it and my shirt was ripped from my body in a second. I Never touched it again.
Moral of the story: respect lathes.
I wonder if he'd be more persuasive if he explained the reasons for not using it without supervision with graphic examples of danger.
Now the internet is full of examples of such accidents. One glance of those would have been enough.
Rotating assemblies in general, the amount of energy at play is often very deceptive. Ask anyone who has caught a finger in a spinning bicycle wheel.
One of the pages is missing. I wonder whether anyone has a copy of it?
Indeed, someone does!
TFA is a scan of a reprint of the original article. The reprint is "The Machinist's Bedside Reader" by Guy Lautard. The missing page is pg. 159.
The Internet Archive has a copy which can be checked out and read for free here:
https://archive.org/details/machinistsbedsid0000laut
edit: the book is also currently in print, and can be purchased new on Amazon for $50 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1953439063
Machining metal parts is pretty loud. How was any of this done in secret?
Camp cooperation - time it with choir practice and|or any other loud activities, cheering during staged boxing matches, use lookouts to warn when guards get close, work under beds with blankets, sheets thrown over to drown noise, etc.
Using a lathe isn't super loud unless you're doing it poorly or have some horrendous interrupted cut.
Lovely article. But I have my doubts. Were these prisoners really outwitting their guards, or might it have been the other way around?
Is not instructing their captors in engineering subjects, navigation and astronomy, which all have substantial military applications, clearly disloyalty to the Allies at the time?
Is this not just a story about how the Japanese were able to gain military intelligence on Western manufacturing and machine shop techniques from these brilliant craftsmen with their "secret" lathe?
We have all seen the movie The Great Escape and various other prisoner/POW movies, but that's not how things were. Assuming that the bunkhouses were separate from the workshop facilities, and fully under Japanese control, I assume that the Japanese were able to inspect each and any of these marvelous technical works in progress at their leisure.
The most cynical take is that it appears no effort was spared in sharing decades or even centuries of technological progress and advancement in various technologies with the Japanese, who at the time were at war with the Allies.
In other words, you can be pretty smart, but pretty stupid. Or, as a POW you just need to do what you can to survive, and you're also smart enough to rescue yourself from court martial at the end.
The Japanese entered the Second World War with a fleet of aircraft carriers and submarines. Before the war, they were importing Swiss machine tools and exporting watches to Europe and America. A craft-made lathe would have revealed no secrets to a country that already had a highly developed manufacturing industry.
Is this not just a story about how the Japanese were able to gain military intelligence on Western manufacturing and machine shop techniques from these brilliant craftsmen with their "secret" lathe?
Seems pretty unlikely; simple machine tools as described in this article were already an old and widely known technology at the time.
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29645825 - a whole radio built in a POW camp, from scratch.
Made a PDF with the missing page: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/security/1949-bradley.pdf
What I really want to know: where is it now?
I find it hard to believe that they copied the word for workshop (presumably 工房) convincingly enough that it wasn't obviously written by someone without any understanding of how to actually write the language. It's extremely obvious when someone tries to copy Chinese characters without any understanding of stroke order, stroke pressure, etc. The way that someone would show how a character looks to someone without any knowledge (ie textbook form) and how they would naturally write such a sign is also different. You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it.
Actually, signs were also written right-to-left horizontally during that period but it's likely that someone showing them how to write on a piece of paper would have written vertically, so they would probably not even have the knowledge to know the correct order of the text.
If all signs in the prison camp were written right-to-left instead of vertically, they probably would have noted that before creating the sign. Especially considering their lives depended on it.
If you can't read the signs how would you know it's right-to-left? You are only seeing two unknown characters, you don't know which comes first. It's not about vertical vs horizontal. It's that someone who speaks English would assume that all of these signs they can't read are written left-to-right, and write the vertical characters they are copying in the wrong order.
You knew it is rtl when you see a paragraph is aligned to right
No, this doesn't make sense in the context of Japanese.
One of these signs is written right to left:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQdiwLY...
https://auctions.afimg.jp/h1085974646/ya/image/h1085974646.2...
Which one is it? There is no way to tell unless you already know the characters. Unless someone could read the existing signs they would almost certainly assume they were left-to-right and make any new sign like that if they only had the characters to copy.
I appreciate what you are pointing out here. I agree with you that getting it just right would be a challenge.
Did you happen to see the lathe? I ask you, which would be more difficult to get right in the smallest detail?
While most Allied soldiers would not be literate in Japanese, that doesn't mean they would all be completely ignorant, either. It just takes one to know enough to ask about character order.
While I agree that it was high risk, I'm willing to believe the people who were present when they say they pulled it off. Sometimes we dodge bullets without even knowing they were fired.
As someone who both a) does precision fab work as a hobby and b) made the somewhat unfortunate decision to memorize many thousands of kanji without caring about stroke order: it's harder. Sorry. 100% agree with the parent: even though I can read Japanese at a fairly advanced level, having not properly learned stroke order is a massive bitch. I can't handwrite for shit, and that's obvious to me and anyone else who can read Japanese of any degree of complexity. It is so many orders of difficulty above "ask[ing] about character order" that I can't even begin to verbalize what a category difference of difficulty it is. Handwriting Japanese that looks correct to a native reader assumes years of naturalization.
I already agreed that writing kanji without years of practice would be very hard to make look native. But they said they did it and it worked. Maybe it was obviously not native and it didn't matter. I don't know. But I'm not going to say they lied about making the sign.
Can we agree that it seems improbable that they fooled anybody about who drew the sign and also agree that they got to keep their workshop and their tools and have an amazing (and true) story?
This is such a facially bizarre thing to contest. They got a Japanese NCO to write the text, and presumably copied it as he wrote it. Why imagine that the NCO wrote it vertically and the soldiers horizontally? Likewise the article doesn't suggest that anyone thought the sign was written by a native speaker; why even imagine that's a requirement?
I mean, consider this in the abstract - the objections you're making here rest on the implicit assumption that you know more about the realities of life in a Japanese POW camp than TFA's author. (After all, if he fabricated the story about the sign he'd obviously fabricate it so as to be consistent with his experiences in the camp.) Do you really think that premise is more likely than the alternative - that TFA's extremely brief telling of the story simply doesn't include whatever details would answer your objections?
Most likely the circumstance they got the Japanese NCO to write the text in was a conversation about learning Japanese and how to write it too. Nobody is deliberately trying to stop them from learning to write, they are most likely in favour of it, the trickiness was just around avoiding the Japanese running the camp from noticing their interest in workshops specifically. If stroke order is important in this context then I expect the Japanese NCO showing them the characters would have told them and explained the proper order.
I don't think the writing matters a whit.
The only premise the story depends on is: that the camp guards saw the workshop and took it for granted that it was approved by somebody, since it was orderly and operating openly. If you accept that, it doesn't matter if the sign was amateurish or even upside-down - it would just look like something the workers had been told to make, or had made themselves to test the tools or to pass the time.
A bunch of posters here seem to be imagining that the sign was the lone keystone of the ruse, and that for some reason it needed to look like it was written by a native speaker or else the whole plan toppled. But nothing in TFA suggests that, it just says the sign was one of several things the POWs did to make the whole setup look like it had approval to be there.
And yet it worked....
Your knowledge of Japanese orthography gives you an interesting perspective. I'd be fascinated to know, given the obstacles you note, how exactly the prisoners overcame them. Did they have someone in the camp with basic knowledge of Chinese orthography? Did someone know enough to note carefully the way in which the characters were written? Did they keep the paper with the characters on it, and then hand-reproduce the precise structure? Were the guards generally illiterate, and therefore not notice the errors? All of those would be spurs to further research, which your reflexive dismissal of the premise would preclude. An open-minded approach to historical texts usually generates more-interesting questions and answers than a closed one.
Or do the guards just not want to speak out of line or question their superiors. Or do the guards all know but don't care because things are being fixed up around the place. Or are all the signs in the camp created by prisoners?
So much is unknown about the situation to make the claims made above.
Or another (and I think the most likely possibility, given what we know about human nature): one of the guards ran a profitable little side business selling basic machined parts in town made with free labor. In exchange, the prisoners got to make stuff they needed also. Only the high-ranking prisoners were in on the scheme. The rest were told the story about "deception", which is what we see relayed here.
You literally just made this up and you say it's the most likely explanation?
The camp in this article is located in Changi, in Singapore. Singapore has always had a large Chinese population (it actually was originally in Malaysia upon that country's independence but got kicked out for being too Chinese). It would be surprising if not a single one was familiar with some Chinese writing.
They did, the translator communicates to the prisoners in English, and they pass along in Japanese to the guards. The article says they asked the translator.
They didn’t know the word which is different from not having any knowledge of how Chinese characters are written.
Chinese is not 1:1 with Japanese so that’s not surprising.
An alternative possibility is that many other the signs around the camp were made by prisoners over the normal course of their labor and thus this one did not need to hide its authorship. The deception is in acting like it was always there and was supposed to be, not in pretending its was physically written by an official.
Did they have someone in the camp with basic knowledge of Chinese orthography?
This is definitely a possibility, but even then...
This would be unlikely to work, because the characters would be written on paper using a pen or pencil, which produces quite different strokes that a brush, which is what you would have to use for a sign. Even if you know how brush strokes should look like, I can't really say how difficult it would be to produce brushwork that credibly looks like what someone would produce who has been doing it all their adult life, if you lack the experience.
For handwriting sure, but print characters as for a sign would be easier.
How would they print a sign?
“Print characters” is a style of the characters. You can still hand paint them, they don’t have to be printed to be in that style.
Look at this image for example: https://www.ideastream.org/community/2022-09-01/making-it-ol...
That is clearly a hand painted letter but is using a printed style (as opposed to a cursive one)
Japanese writing has the same distinction. These letters on the sign are in printed style: https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanesepod101/3706680254/
The shapes are simplified and regularised. Compared with these caligraphy style letters: https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/70734240/in/photo...
"Print characters" aren't hand painted on signs and you will rarely see it written in any context outside of extremely old books. There's no such thing as "print characters", anyway. Presumably you are referring to 明朝体 (although that sign you linked is actually 丸ゴシック, which is much more recent).
Besides, even if it was written down like that it will still be incredibly obvious. It would be like if you had your child try to copy Times New Roman and pass it off as the real thing. It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.
Copying a shape exactly is absolutely possible. (Any shape.) Yes most people doesn’t have the skills to pull it off, but then again they are also not making lathes in captivity (or at all).
Then you make a stencil.
It will be hard to convince me about that when my eyes can see it. You can choose to not understand what I’m saying.
I assure you it is not called that in English.
It's a prisoner of war camp. All the signs are made by prisoners.
It would be much easier for a random Japanese soldier who actually knows the language to just write on the few necessary signs than trying to direct a prisoner to do so, who will probably end up making mistakes and make it almost illegible. This just sounds like a nice explanation but it's unlikely to be the case.
I'd be kinda surprised if they let outsiders do their calligraphy for them.
What if most of the signs in the camp were already made by the prisoners?
I had the same thought, but as the other responses note, there are many possible explanations.
Yet another one: maybe some of the prisoners actually knew basic Japanese? It would be a very useful skill in their situation, and learning the basics of how to write kanji is not that hard. It wouldn't be calligraphy, but it just needs to look good enough that it might just be sloppy writing.
Or someone who is not a professional wooden sign carver, perhaps? I'm natively familiar with English writing, but if I carved 'workshop' I'm not sure it would look any better than someone imitating me, nor obviously like I'd used correct 'stroke' order.
And that might not be suspicious at all anyway?
As I understood, one of the japanese officer's hut - which is even bolder! Hence why they tricked the translator to have the japanese character for "workshop". A lot of smart and bold moves all along. Especially as the japanese were known for their "harsh" treatments (humiliations, beatings, torture, slow death, brutal death etc etc) toward prisoners, anything that would lead to a cue that they were doing something hidden would have had a radical and definitive answer...
I assumed it was the hut used by the PoW officers. Japan did not treat PoWs particularly well (though British PoWs were treated much better than Chinese) and did not follow the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of PoWs. Under that convention, officers are to be treated with due regard to their rank and part of that means being quartered separately from the other ranks (as well as not being made to work). I think officers would also be separated in PoW camps in Japan.
I don't fully understand why a convention that allegedly tries to protect human rights makes a so bold difference just based on job positions (aka ranks). I mean, I do understand where it comes from, and especially when it applies to prisoners of war, so military forces. They basically can only think in hierarchies so designing a system that works with hierarchies will have more chances to be actually followed. But still, I find it weird.
Because it was written and enacted primarily by recently warring western nation states, not a group of detached philosophical monks living on a mountaintop.
The elites in those societies had a clear interest in carving out special privileges for themselves, which is why officers receive preferential treatment.
The 1929 Geneva convention has other things you may find objectionable, such as Section II, article 9 (paragraph 3)[1]:
Which is there for obvious reasons. Can you imagine the horror of being housed in a racially unhomogenous camp? People in 1929 sure could.1. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/geneva02.asp#art9
I mean we still do this for prisons because you get massive issues if you don't
That's still the case today. Here in Germany, after 2015 there were often issues in temporary housing (e.g. sports halls converted to improptu shelters) when refugees from different backgrounds collided. Say you had two ethnic groups fighting a civil war, and members of both would flee to Germany, and continue their conflict here. Or religion - shiite and sunni muslims each view the other groups as infidels.
Or go back two decades prior, to the aftermaths of the Yugoslavian wars and their refugees that mostly came to Germany (due to a strong diaspora tradition), with the only thing anybody would have agreed upon is that beating a Serb takes precedence over any other internal fight. Balkan ethnic conflicts can even be confusing for people living there, it's madness - but thankfully it has (mostly - excluding BiH/Kosovo...) died down by now.
That Geneva Convention rule makes sense in the end, it aims to prevent conflict from stirring up in camps.
It's a film, but still, one of the things I found interesting in "Grande Illusion" was how the German PoW camp commandant and the British officer got along so well. The strength of their relationship based almost entirely on them both being former aristocrats.
Think about it a bit, its actually practical. Who is more probable to instill a mutiny or escape, a foot soldier with basic education who is whole life just being told what to do and think, or a westpoint captain / russian officer with kgb training?
Also, you want valuable information from officers, so you treat them better and wear them down with soft power (often used in Vietnam, I've read whole book how they gradually befriended some officers treating them nicely, and then one day an officer reads how US is evil into the camera).
Also, you project how you want the other side to treat your higher ranks, there is often quid pro quo mentality.
I can go on and on. To think that people 100 years ago creating Geneva charter were clueless idiots and warfare changed dramatically is... unwise, this worked for millennia and I see no change.
Don't quite follow why the Geneva convention would written to seemingly confer advantages to the captor.
The quid pro quo part makes sense, to some extent allowing the ranking to carry forward behind enemy lines out of respect and to ease post-war tensions as higher ups can segue into positions of political power.
I'm not sure I understand the connection you're drawing with human rights.
Officers and men live separately -- have separate dining halls, quarters, clubs, &c -- to some degree even when they're not in camps. This is generally seen to contribute to the ability of officers to maintain order among the enlisted. The separation helps officers to remain coordinated with each other as well as allowing things to be somewhat less personal between officers and enlisted. It may not sound nice to us, outside the military; but it's not something the people writing the convention came up with and it's not something they had it in their power to do anything about. They were trying to bring some order to the treatment of prisoners of war, not reorganize the militaries of the world on egalitarian lines.
So it's not so much about people on the side of the detaining power who "...can only think in hierarchies..." as it is about the social system that prisoners are a part of immediately before they are captured, and respect for that social system, as offering both continuity and a semblance of order for prisoners. A commentary maintained by the ICRC puts it this way:
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciii-1949/ar...
...leaving the hierarchy of the battlefield intact in prisoner-of-war camps serves the interests of both the Detaining Power and the Power on which the prisoners depend. Retaining a functioning command structure among prisoners of war of one Party will usually have a positive effect on camp order and discipline, which can be an important factor in ensuring the best possible conditions of internment for all prisoners of war. Differential treatment involving privileges for higher-ranking prisoners is one way of maintaining this structure.
Because it's from 1929. The past is a foreign country, and all that. Beyond the 'militaries like hierarchy' angle, there was a huge _class_ aspect there.
To give a charitable interpretation: by requiring the rank of PoWs to be respected, the Conventions helped to maintain social cohesion within camps. The privileges of rank are explicitly safeguarded, but those at the time would have implicitly understood that privileges are inseparable from duties. In many cases, the survival of PoWs hinged on the fact that they retained a strong sense of military discipline and order despite their circumstances.
For an extended read, you may try "King Rat" by James Clavell - same author of the current hit show "Shogun".
The book is set in the same Changi PoW camp where the author was held during WWII. The character Lieutenant-Colonel Larkin is based off Lieutenant-Colonel E. E. "Weary" Dunlop who was the real life surgeon using these tools for creating artificial limbs amongst other things and whom Clavell knew and presumably Bradley too.
It's not exactly a cheery read but very much an inspiring one in terms of survival, ingenuity, and moral complexity.
Thanks, I've read it, don't remember the lathe in it. Awesome book. So much better than shogun or any of his other works from his "trader series".
I recommend King Rat to people who need to get back in to reading books.
How dare you slander The Noble House. I love most of his works, but Straung is peak Clavell.
Joss !
It's not specifically about Changi, but you might also be interested in the book "Rats of Rangoon" by Lionel Hudson which is all about the author's experiences during WWII in the Rangoon prison camps (also run by the Japanese of course)
that sounds like something out of hogan's heroes.
Yeah, social engineering for establishing a workshop!