treatment and cannibalism. The most notorious use of forced labour was in the construction of the Burma–Thailand Death Railway. After 20 March 1943, the Imperial Navy was ordered to kill prisoners taken at sea. After the Armistice of Cassibile, Italian soldiers and civilians in East Asia were taken as prisoners by Japanese armed forces and subject to the same conditions as other POWs. According to the findings of the Tokyo Tribunal, the death rate of Western prisoners was 27.1 percent, seven times that of POWs under the Germans and Italians. The death rate of Chinese was much higher. Thus, while 37,583 prisoners from the United Kingdom, Commonwealth, and Dominions, 28,500 from the Netherlands, and 14,473 from the United States were released after the surrender of Japan, the number for the Chinese was only 56. The 27,465 United States Army and United States Army Air Forces POWs in the Pacific Theater had a 40.4 per cent death rate. The War Ministry in Tokyo issued an order at the end of the war to kill the remaining POWs. No direct access to the POWs was provided to the International Red Cross. Escapes among Caucasian prisoners were almost impossible because of the difficulty of hiding in Asiatic societies. Allied POW camps and ship-transports were sometimes accidental targets of Allied attacks. The number of deaths which occurred when Japanese "hell ships"—unmarked transport ships in which POWs were transported in harsh conditions—were attacked by U.S. Navy submarines was particularly high. Gavan Daws has calculated that "of all POWs who died in the Pacific War, one in three was killed on the water by friendly fire". Daws states that 10,800 of the 50,000 POWs shipped by the Japanese were killed at sea while Donald L. Miller states that "approximately 21,000 Allied POWs died at sea, about 19,000 of them killed by friendly fire." Life in the POW camps was recorded at great risk to themselves by artists such as Jack Bridger Chalker, Philip Meninsky, Ashley George Old, and Ronald Searle. Human hair was often used for brushes, plant juices and blood for paint, toilet paper as the "canvas". Some of their works were used as evidence in the trials of Japanese war criminals. Female prisoners (detainees) at Changi Prison in Singapore, recorded their ordeal in seemingly harmless prison quilt embroidery. Research into the conditions of the camps has been conducted by The Liverpool School of Tropical