Women as Prisoners of War

Abstract

American women are increasingly becoming involved in combat-related roles. Inevitably, our country will have several killed and taken prisoner. No National Academy of Science/National Research Council or VA study has ever been undertaken to examine the chronic sequelae of the experiences undergone by these captured women. This paper examines the after-effects of 3.5 years of incarceration on the 79 American women taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II. Emphasis is given to their living conditions in a prisoner-of-war camp and their resulting long-term disabilities. Comparison of data reported in this paper with those of several epidemiological studies of male survivors of Philippine camps allows several novel points to be made. Overall, half of the women had a service-connected disability, exactly like the men. Furthermore, although the average degree of service-connected disability, 37%, is the same as that of the men, not one of the women in this study was service-connected for tuberculosis or peptic ulcer disease. This is a major finding, since, compared to age-matched combat controls, the men had a higher post-repatriation death rate for the first 7 years due to tuberculosis; likewise, peptic ulcer disease is so common in the male survivors that it is a presumptive service-connected disability.