the way down on to the lowest ranks. In POW camps, this meant that prisoners received the worst beatings of all, partly in the belief that such punishments were merely the proper technique to deal with disobedience. War crimes The Imperial Japanese Armed Forces during the 1930s and 1940s is often compared to the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 because of the sheer scale of destruction and suffering that both of them caused. Much of the controversy regarding Japan's role in World War II revolves around the death rates of prisoners of war and civilians under Japanese occupation. Historian Sterling Seagrave has written that: According to the findings of the Tokyo Tribunal, the death rate among prisoners of war from Asian countries held by Japan was 27.1%. The death rate of Chinese prisoners of war were much higher because—under a directive ratified on 5 August 1937, by Emperor Hirohito—the constraints of international law on treatment of those prisoners was removed. Only 56 Chinese prisoners of war were released after the surrender of Japan. After 20 March 1943, officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordered and encouraged the Navy to execute all prisoners taken at sea. On May 14, 1943, a Japanese submarine torpedoed the Australian hospital ship, AHS Centaur, sinking it within three minutes and killing 268 of the 332 people on board. The Centaur was painted with red crosses and well lit. The submarine knowingly sank a hospital ship. According to British historian Mark Felton, "officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordered the deliberately sadistic murders of more than 20,000 Allied seamen and countless civilians in cold-blooded defiance of the Geneva Convention." At least 12,500 British sailors and 7,500 Australians were murdered. The Japanese Navy sank Allied merchant and Red Cross vessels, then murdered the survivors floating in the sea or in lifeboats. During Naval landing parties, the Japanese Navy rounded up, raped, then massacred civilians. Some of the victims were fed to sharks, others were killed by sledge-hammer, bayonet, crucifixion, drowning, hanging and beheading. Attacks on parachutists and downed airmen As the Battle of Shanghai and Nanjing signaled the beginning of World War II in Asia, fierce air battles raged across China between the airmen of the Chinese Air Force and the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Force and Imperial Japanese Army Air Force, and the Japanese soon gained notoriety for strafing downed airmen trying to