U.S., World War II Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945

In 2005, the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (ADBC), a World War II veterans group, was considering destroying group registration cards they had gathered over the years. Knowing the information would be of historical interest, the Descendants Group of ADBC stepped in and assembled 20 volunteers to extract information from those cards. The project later expanded to include details from other reliable sources on prisoners, such as the NARA collection Records of World War II Prisoners of War, 1942–1947, the Center for Research: Allied Prisoners of War (POWs) Under the Japanese website created by Roger Mansell, unit rosters, and histories.

Their efforts produced these records, which provide military details on almost 30,000 military (and a few civilian) prisoners held by the Japanese during World War II. This is one of the most comprehensive lists of American prisoners of Japan during WWII available.

Searching the Records

Fields included in the database are name, rank, service number, arm or service, source(s), subordinate unit, assigned unit, parent unit, POW camps/notes. Not all fields are filled for every name. For example, few have information in the POW camps field.

You can find a list explaining abbreviations that appear in the database here.

The records include the names of 17 men listed as POWs in other NARA records who were actually killed in combat or evaded capture.

This is an electronic database only. There are no images.