In The Anguish of Surrender, Ulrich Straus recounts the painful dilemma that intensely indoctrinated Japanese soldiers and sailors faced when forced to confront the reality of becoming captives, something forbidden by Japan’s no-surrender policy. He examines in depth how Japanese POWs dealt with this dilemma in extremis – between life and death – leading many to drop their illusions and reveal themselves.

Straus shows how trained Allied linguists, especially Japanese Americans, extracted useful intelligence from their psychologically unprepared captives by affording them humane treatment. For his research, Straus interviewed and corresponded with former POWs in Japan and delved deeply into POW interrogation records at the National Archives, interviews with America’s Japanese language officers and enlisted men, Japanese source material – including publicly and privately published books and articles by former Japanese POWs – and later writings by their U.S. Army and Navy interrogators.

Combining scholarship, expertise, and empathy, Straus conveys, for the first time in English, the truly dramatic and deeply human stories of Japanese POWs, from their prewar indoctrination through unexpected prison camp experiences to postwar reintegration. In the process he advances our understanding of the paradoxical wartime roots of postwar Japanese-American friendship.