Happy 2020, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends!
I plan to be posting a more general, roadmap of sorts for History Impossible in 2020 soon, both here and on the Patreon page, but in the meantime, I wanted to provide my usual source list for the final episode of History Impossible in 2019. Make sure to check out these books (especially Lomax's memoir) if you want to learn more about the details I left out. There are countless books about the Pacific Theater of World War II, from all sorts of perspectives, but the ones I used were great for dealing with the subject matter specific to this episode and I can't recommend them enough. Note that I've placed a link to Takashi Nagase's memoir to the only place I was able to find it on sale, but this is no guarantee since the publisher never returned my email inquiry about its condition; I was only able to find bits and pieces of his work in various other sources. But if you can find a way to get a copy, I can't recommend it enough since it will round out this story nicely.
1. Eric Lomax, The Railway Man: A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality, and Forgiveness, 1995
2. Takashi Nagase, Crosses and Tigers, 1990
3. Brian MacArthur, Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 2005
4. Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House, Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons, p.113-126, 1950
5. Christopher Hitchens, "Believe Me, It's Torture", Vanity Fair, July 2nd, 2008
5a. Video of Hitchens' waterboarding session
6. Steven Casale, "9 Torture Methods of the Ancient World", The Archive, 2015