Answer:
Answer
This is an extremely complicated question. First, you have to answer what is a Prisoner of War (POW). While it was clear that some men, like USMC Major Devereux's Marines on Wake Island, were captured in combat operations, others, like the Marine detachments in Shanghai, were contested by the Americans and Japanese through Swiss channels. Then, you have to take into account the civilians on islands like Guam and Okinawa. Many were impressed into military service, but did not wish to take an active role in the fighting. In Europe, the situation is less complicated in some battles, as often the civil population was in opposition to the Axis after a long and brutal occupation. Others, such as the Italian Campaign, has men in the same uniforms fighting both for the Germans and for the Allies after the Italian surrender in 1943. So whom do you count as a POW? Does one person's death mean they were mistreated during captivity? Or did they attempt to surrender and were gunned down as an expedience or did they intend to trick their captors into coming closer and attacking? Could combat teams under fire spare men to escort POWs back to the rear? Was the journey safe for the captors? Many times, at Anzio and at Okinawa, for example, Allied soldiers were just as likely to come under fire escorting prisoners to camps behdin the lines as they were to stay at the front; sometimes the front was safer. In many cases men attempting to surrender were shot by both sides because the combat unit could not or would not take POWs because it was not safe, or it was not possible. Finally, the safety of a POW depended on when they chose to or were able to surrender. More than 3,000 of the 10,000 POWs taken on Okinawa were taken in the last three days of fighting, even as more than 4,000 Japanese died. A German soldier who surrendered in North Africa in 1942 was more likely to get decent food and shelter than the 250,000 men who surrendered on the Western Front in April-May 1945, when the Allies' POW intake system to process the Germans was crushed by the numbers of men who surrendered, leaving many without food or shelter in open-air fences. It took Eisenhower's direct intervention to clean up that mess. Just as Germans fought hard to give time for civilians to make it to the West to surrender to the British or Americans instead of the Russians, Germans who surrendered to the Americans or British were better treated than those who surrendered to the French or Polish units, who harbored bitter anger towards the Germans. All of that said, Americans were better off in German captivity, where 75%-90% survived captivity (including Allied bombing). Only 51% of Allied soldiers survived Japanese camps. Out of the 28,000 Japanese taken by the Allies, only a few hundred were killed during the mass riot in Cowra, Australia. Very few Germans died once they reached an Allied Camp, but they were often under fire immediately after surrendering (for example, on D-Day 6/6/44) and many were killed while attempting to surrender. However, tens of thousands more Japanese and Germans died in battle, and many of those probably attempted surrender and were killed, so an accurate figure is hard to come by. Only 17 Japanese and a few hundred Koreans survived the Battle of Tarawa out of over 5000. Generally, assuming that the Allies are not overwhelmed with prisoners and you're not talking about the end of the war in Europe, your chances of survival were marginally better falling into Allied hands than if you were captured by the Germans, and your chances with the Germans were much better than if you were captured by the Japanese.
_____________________________________________________________________ ___________________The annual death rate for Germans in US hands was pretty much the same as the annual death rate for US POWs in German hands, 1%. Both annual death rates rounded to 1%.