Japanese Women Were Ordered to Line Up for ‘Punishment’ — U.S. Soldiers Stepped In and Stopped

In August 1945, 127 Japanese women—nurses, radio operators, and administrative workers—stood trembling in a dusty Philippine internment camp, certain they were about to die. For years, Japanese propaganda had warned them that American soldiers were barbaric monsters who showed no mercy to women prisoners. Some had been given cyanide capsules to avoid capture. Three medics had already died trying to reach them during the war's chaos. When they were ordered to line up for "punishment," they believed this was the end.
But what happened next shattered everything they thought they knew about their enemy. Instead of violence, they received water. Instead of cruelty, they found medical care from American nurses who treated them as patients—and later, as colleagues. Instead of punishment for alleged disrespect, a tired American commander investigated the complaints and dismissed them as misunderstandings. Day after day, small kindnesses accumulated into an undeniable truth: the propaganda had been lies.
This is the untold WWII story of how Japanese women prisoners discovered their "barbaric" captors followed rules called the Geneva Conventions, provided better medical care than their own military had, and showed mercy even to those who tried to escape. Watch as 19-year-old nurse Keiko and radio operator Sachiko slowly realize that everything they believed about honor, strength, and civilization had been backwards—and how that revelation transformed their understanding of the war, their nation, and themselves.
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