Kempeitai : Japan's Dreaded Military Police

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Summary: survey of Japan's "Gestapo"
Review: I'm all in favor of books like this. As time goes on and memories fade, more and more Americans have come to regard the Japanese as victims of World War II. Sure, they bombed Pearl Harbor, but was that any reason we should have dropped an atomic bomb on them?

In fact, Imperial Japan and especially the Imperial Japanese Army (it's worthwhile to distinguish between the two) ran a killing and torture machine that in many respects was the equal of Hitler's Germany. The Kempeitai did much of this work. Officially, it was only the army's police force, but it was feared by Japanese civilians, by the captive populations of Asia, and especially by prisoners of war.

Unfortunately, Lamont-Brown is a professional writer of books, with 50-odd to his credit in a bit more than 30 years--a British Martin Caidin, if you like. Nobody can turn out books at that rate and spend the necessary time in research. As a result, this is mostly a collection of anecdotes and unrelated themes--whatever Lamont-Brown turned up, he shaped the book around that, or so it seems. So it fails both as a serious history of the Kempeitai and as an indictment of the Japanese way of making war.

But it's the only one we have, and therefore worth reading. However, if your interest lies mostly with the fate of Anglo-American prisoners of war, then a better book to start with is Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese.

Rating:
Summary: kempeitai: japan's dreaded military police
Review: Japan's military police were as evil as the more well known german geatapo. The daily lives of the military police and their prisoners is glossed over. More detail is put into the administration and organization of the military police. The book is very dry reading and not much of a story. Time moves quickly in this book, with not many pages devoted to any one area or incident, but with only 168 pages i suppose that is to be expected. An interesting title, reduced to very boring reading, i am disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: An Important chronicle of World War II History.
Review: The author talks more about atrocities than the counter intelligence role that the organization played. The only intelligence type stuff they discuss is the Ricard Sorge(Soviet Master Spy in Germanys Tokyo Embassy) capture and interogation. The author does catelouge the atrocities committed by this organization well though(Hence the title Japan's dreaded military police). The author explains the disgusting things that this organization did like make sex slaves out of Korean and other Western Women captured by them during the war, decapitating allied airmen, biological experiments on POW's, stuffing prisoners in Bambooe baskets and liteing them on fire. He also explains the sickining fact that many in this organization went unpunished.

Rating:
Summary: An Important chronicle of World War II History.
Review: This could have been a brilliant book - the subject certainly has spectacular prospects - but it was not to be. Fifty years on there are few survivors of the legions of the Kempeitai, and even fewer survivors of their victims. It could have been a timely piece of scholarship. Instead we are treated a poor collection of anecdotes which lack suffcient breadth and analysis to be evidence of anything other than the incidents they describe, not the Kempeitai as a whole, nor their operations. More disappointing is the author's unconcealed antipathy towards his subject, as a result of his father's wartime experiences. If you need a book on the subject then consider buying it, but otherwise look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: A great opportunity missed
Review: This could have been a brilliant book - the subject certainly has spectacular prospects - but it was not to be. Fifty years on there are few survivors of the legions of the Kempeitai, and even fewer survivors of their victims. It could have been a timely piece of scholarship. Instead we are treated a poor collection of anecdotes which lack suffcient breadth and analysis to be evidence of anything other than the incidents they describe, not the Kempeitai as a whole, nor their operations. More disappointing is the author's unconcealed antipathy towards his subject, as a result of his father's wartime experiences. If you need a book on the subject then consider buying it, but otherwise look elsewhere.