New Mountain of Materials in Palo Alto: The Mansell Collection on Allied POWs of Japan

The Hoover Institution’s website reports:

In September [2010], the Hoover Institution Library and Archives received a large donation of World War II–era research materials from Roger Mansell, a retired businessman from Palo Alto, California, who has spent the past twenty-one years researching the fates of Allied prisoners of war from the Pacific theater of that war. Consisting of more than fifteen linear feet of documents, some fifteen hours of video recordings, and approximately four hundred published titles, the Roger Mansell Collection will be a valuable resource for those interested in studying the roles of prisoners of war during that conflict.

Since the beginning of Mansell’s project, his chief goal has been to compile a database of more than 100,000 records to document what happened to every Allied soldier who was captured by Japanese forces during the war. The database thus contains information on when soldiers were captured, where they were interned, and whether they died or were repatriated at the end of the war….

Among the materials that Mansell has donated to Hoover are dozens of firsthand interviews conducted by Mansell with former prisoners of war or their families; more than twelve boxes of material about various prison camps throughout East and Southeast Asia; and countless files on individual prisoners, including diaries, photographs, maps of prison camps, correspondence, and other materials that former prisoners shared with Mansell over the years. Other research materials collected by Mansell include copies of archival documents from repositories in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, as well as original materials produced or published by the prisoners themselves. In addition, many of the donated books include hard-to-find titles, such as self-published memoirs by former prisoners of war and other materials produced for limited circulation.

The documents are consequently available for research in the Hoover Archives in Palo Alto, California, on the campus of Stanford University.  The full story on the Mansell Collection can be read here.

About Adam Cathcart

Lecturer of Chinese history at University of Leeds
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