Synopsis
In "Behind the Barbed Wire," Chester M. Biggs Jr. recounts his experiences as a young U.S. Marine who enlisted in 1939 and found himself serving as an embassy guard in Peiping (Beijing), China, on the eve of America's entry into World War II. On the morning of December 8, 1941—just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor—Japanese forces swiftly and methodically overran the isolated Marine posts at Peiping and Tientsin, forcing the small contingent of Americans to surrender without significant resistance. Suddenly behind enemy lines and cut off from evacuation, Biggs and his fellow Marines began more than three and a half years of harsh captivity.
Initially held in camps in China, first at Woosung and then at Kiangwan near Shanghai, the prisoners endured overcrowded conditions, inadequate food and medical care, brutal treatment from their Japanese guards, and forced labor that included the laborious construction of a replica of Mount Fujiyama. Biggs details the daily struggles for survival, the psychological toll of isolation and uncertainty, the small acts of defiance or camaraderie that helped sustain morale, and the ever-present threat of disease, starvation, and arbitrary violence.
Later in the war, many of the prisoners, including Biggs, were transferred to a coal-mining camp at Uteshinai in Japan, where the backbreaking work underground compounded their suffering amid worsening conditions as Allied forces advanced. Through it all, Biggs offers a straightforward, unembellished eyewitness account of POW life under the Japanese, highlighting both the grim realities of captivity and the resilience of the men who endured it until their liberation in 1945. The memoir stands as a vivid, personal testament to one Marine's ordeal from the earliest days of the Pacific War to its end.