I have an Australian friend whose mother was Dutch from Sumatra and whose Australian father was captured at the fall of Singapore. Both survived over four and a half years of Japanese captivity. His mother was marched from place to place around Sumatra with other women as they dropped one by one from tropical diseses, malnutrition and bayonetting. Of hundreds of women taken in 1942 she said "several" were still alive at the end of the war and that she doubted any of them would have lasted another month.
You should read the Nevil Shute novel, A Town Like Alice. It is a story about British women, POWs, marching all over the Malay peninsula during WWII.
Yes, I am glad you posted this. The Japanese were vicious and neither the gender or sex of the POWs mattered when they decided to punish us.
Many people do not know the Japanese put virtually every Caucasian they could find into a number of concentration camps in the Philippine Islands, for example. American historians often are not aware. My mother and my newborn brother, my father and I and thousands of Americans throughout the southeast asian area were in camps for almost 4 years. And, yes, there were atrocities for minor infractions. We were starving to death even as others died from starvation in our camp when the American Army rescued us. They are my heros to this day.
Books are published. You should read one. The Japanese were almost universally fanatically cruel.
I think there are only a few survivors from the two camps f within which my family was imprisoned. No one from the US gov has given two hoots about the US government’s responsibility for disallowing us to leave the PI just prior to Dec 7, 1941, either. Not one time over the 75 years since our release.
Don’t ever think the government cares. It doesn’t.