Wage Slave wrote:Screwed-down Hairdo wrote:happened on the Burma Railway, whose victims were largely Australians.
Not at all. About as many Dutch as Australians.More than 180,000—possibly many more—Southeast Asian civilian labourers (Romusha) and 60,000 Allied prisoners of war (POWs) worked on the railway. Of these, estimates of Romusha deaths are little more than guesses, but probably about 90,000 died. 12,621 Allied POWs died during the construction. The dead POWs included 6,904 British personnel, 2,802 Australians, 2,782 Dutch, and 133 Americans.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma_Railway
And even more British, and even more non-mentioned ethnicity, which probably means they were brown-skinned.
Reminds me of a Professor of Dutch-Indonesian ethnicity in my university days, who also worked on the Burma railway. When I met him coincidentally the week before I traveled off to Japan a couple of decades ago, he asked me why the Japanese had offered me a Postdoctoral fellowship, and I replied somewhat ironically that they probably wanted to know how to deal with Westerners, upon which he remarked sarcastically that "he could have taught them that too".
But yeah, those POWs have been extremely unforgiving to Japan. Very sensitive topic in the Netherlands, but there are only few of them still around these days.