quote from above:
"In many cases the Japanese frontline commander did not know what horrors their Allied prisoners would soon face in the prison camps, so the Japanese general was probably quite sincere in what he said, Amos.

In other cases, however, Japanese frontline commanders and soldiers were utterly brutal and merciless to Allied prisoners. It all depends on who, when, and where.

And for that matter, American soldiers were often totally brutal to Japanese prisoners, torturing and executing them without reason or justification...just a vendetta mentality. (revenge for Bataan and other such incidents) My family knew a US Marine Corps sergeant from that war who fought through the island campaigns, and he told me that a lot of that happened, despite his efforts to prevent it from happening. He wanted the enemy prisoners kept alive and treated decently, partly from a sense of honor, partly because live prisoners can sometimes provide valuable information...but a lot of his men didn't have any intention of sparing the lives of any captured Japanese...and he couldn't watch them all constantly in the heat of battle."

This brainless posting is just the kind of thing that would be settled by actually watching the show that is being talked about in the topic Ken Burns: The War

If the writer had bothered to actually see the episode referred to he (or she) would have seen a description, eloquent and brief, at the disjunction between the Allied attitude and that of the Japanese.

"Will my men be treated well?"
"Of course, we are not barbarians."

But the Japanese by culture and training believed that surrender was a sign of cowardice, hence they treated the prisoners as sub-humans. The Bataan death march recounts the emptying of canteens, the casual slaughter of the laggards, or those who merely couldn't understand orders barked in Japanese.

As for the allied soldiers, the series has recounted in their own words that after finding their own buddies dismembered and disfigured, they stopped taking prisoners.

What part about "War Is Hell" do you not understand? If you are not interested in the specifics of THIS particular hell, start your own thread about how you feel about NOT seeing the series.