Taiwan POW Camps

Japanese forces interned Allied prisoners at more than a dozen camps across Taiwan between 1942 and 1945, most of them supplying forced labour to mines, factories, and construction projects. Upwards of 4,300 British, American, Australian, Dutch, Canadian, and New Zealand servicemen passed through the system and some 430 died of malnutrition, disease, overwork, and mistreatment; conditions were worst at Kinkaseki (金瓜石), where prisoners were sent down the copper mine on the site now occupied by Taiwan POW Memorial and Peace Park. Almost nothing survives of the camps themselves, several of which became ROC military bases after the war, though some sites are marked by monuments erected since the 1990s through the work of the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society.