Linda Goetz Holmes - Guests of the Emperor: the Secret History of Japan's Mukden POW Camp September 17, 2010

In World War II, more than 36,000 American men, mostly military but some civilian, were thrown into Japanese POW camps and were turned into forced labor for companies working for Japan's war effort. At Japan's largest fixed military prison camp, Mitsubishi's huge factory complex at Mukden, Manchuria, more than 2,000 American prisoners where subjected to cold, starvation, beatings, and even medical experiments, while manufacturing parts for Zero fighter planes. Those lucky enough to survive the ordeal required the efforts of an OSS rescue team and a special recovery unit to make it home alive. Linda Goetz Holmes, who spent two decades tracking down the POWs, shows conclusively for the first time that some Americans at Mukden were singled out for experiments by Japan's infamous biological warfare team. Holmes was the first Pacific War historian appointed to advise the government's Interagency Working Group declassifying documents on World War II crimes.