Australian and British soldiers suffered, laughed, and died
side by side in countless hellholes throughout the Second World War.
While positivity and mateship can get you through some seriously tough times,
they couldn't save the Aussies and Brits whom the Japanese subjected to the misery of the Sandakan
Death Marches in the final year of the war. In this video, we tell that atrocious tale.
In February 1942, Imperial Japan's 25th Army crossed the Johor Strait
onto the island of Singapore and crushed the defending Allied forces so thoroughly
that they surrendered some 80,000 troops. Many of these men were consigned to forced labour, which,
under Japanese supervision, was synonymous with a slow, agonising death. In July, 1,500 Aussies were
shipped to Sandakan on the island of Borneo. A further 500 Australians and 770 British joined the
first group the following year. Held at Sandakan POW Camp, these men were forced, at gunpoint,
to build the Japanese a military airfield without heavy machinery, using hand tools instead.
The conditions were terrible.
Before it was a POW camp,
Sandakan was an experimental farm owned by the North Borneo Chartered Company.
During the war, it was divided into an Australian compound, a British compound, and
a site for the Japanese guards to live and chill when they weren't tormenting their prisoners.
In charge of Sandakan was Japanese Lieutenant Suumi Hoshijima,
chosen because he was a military engineer capable of building an airfield and he was also a huge,
huge A-hole. When new POWs arrived at the camp, this is what this career sadist said to them:
"You will work until your bones rot under the tropical sun of Borneo. You will work
for the Emperor. If any of you escape, I will pick out three or four and shoot them.
The war will last for 100 years." We'll call him Hoshi, because why not?
The fences surrounding the compounds were electrified and fixed with barbed wire.
If a prisoner was caught stealing food, the guards would throw them into a wooden cage without food
and in minimal clothes, often just a loincloth. The mosquitoes were well fed, at least.
No matter what, the prisoners could only use the loo twice per day. The
guards also punished them with methods of torture involving electricity and water.
Other methods included hammering meat skewers into their ears.
Such was the fate that befell Lieutenant Rod Wells, who described the experience as such:
"I think I fainted some time after it went through the drum. I remember the last excruciating sort of
pain, and I must have gone out for some time because I was revived with a bucket of water.
Eventually it healed but of course I couldn’t hear with it. I have never been able to hear since."
It didn't matter if the prisoners were sick or starving or wounded or a second from dead—they
were forced to break their backs day in and day out, working their hands to the bone to build an
airfield that would undoubtedly be used to wage war against fellow Aussies and Brits.
In August 1943, the Japanese further crushed the prisoners' morale by removing Australian
and British officers from the camp, sending them to suffer in Batu Lintang camp instead.
According to an article on the Australian Government's Anzac Portal,
885 Australians and British perished in Sandakan, and it does seem that the Allies
knew what was going on there, for, in October 1944, they started bombing the airfield.
They also planned a rescue operation, codenamed Kingfisher, but never bloody went through with it.
Just why Operation Kingfisher fell through remains unknown. Either way, by January 1945,
the Japanese airfield was so frakked that Hoshi, now a captain, decided he would move
his operation to the town of Ranau instead. It didn't matter that Ranau was 260 kilometres or
160 miles away—through mountain ranges and sweltering jungles and swamps—nor
that his prisoners were already on death's door. And so began the Sandakan Death Marches.
The first group of POWs left in January. There were 455 of them. They had to carry
all of the Japanese guards' equipment and were only given four days' rations.
The journey required nine. Along the way, prisoners dropped like flies. If
they couldn't keep up, the Japanese just killed them. Australian Private
Keith Botterill—one of the Sandakan Death Marches' survivors—described it better than we ever could:
"I've seen men shot and bayoneted to death because they could not keep up with the party.
No effort whatsoever was made to bury [them]. There was nothing we could do. We climbed this
mountain about 30 miles out from Ranau, and we lost five men on that mountain in half a day.
They shot five of them because they couldn't continue. But I just kept plodding along. It
was dense jungle, I was heartbroken, but I thought there was safety in numbers. I just kept going."
It doesn't seem that any of the POWs escaped during this first march; when the survivors
arrived at Ranau, however, where they were forced to build a temporary camp, some men
tried. What follows is an anecdote featured in an article by the Australian War Memorial
"Gunner Albert Cleary, a young man from Geelong, tried to escape into the jungle.
Recaptured after a week, he was beaten and tied to a log. For eleven days guards beat him, spat
and urinated on him. 'If you escape the same thing will happen to you', a Japanese officer warned.
At last, when he was close to death, the prisoners were allowed to free him.
They carried him to a creek, washed and placed him in a hut, where he died."
By May, just 30 of the POWs from the first march were alive.
The aforementioned Kieth Botterill was among them, but only because of his comrade Richard Murray,
who took full responsibility for some rice the pair had stolen from the Japanese.
In answer to the theft, the Japanese bayonetted Murray and tossed his corpse into a bomb crater.
By the time the second march arrived on the 24th of June, just six prisoners from the first march
were alive, the dead having either succumbed to starvation, disease (including dysentery,
which would be a horrible way to go), or Japanese bayonets; a further four, including Botterill,
had somehow managed to escape into the jungle, where the locals took them in. After the first
march departed Sandakan, Japanese Captain Takakuwa Takuo was left in charge of the camp. He sent 536
prisoners to Ranau on the 29th of May. Their journey took far longer than the first—a march
of 26 days—and only 183 of them actually made it to Ranau; 142 were Australian and 41 were British.
Two Aussies managed to escape into the jungle along the way: Gunner Owen Campbell and Bombardier
Richard Braithwaite. The locals took them in as they had taken in Ranau's four escapees.
Now only some 250 POWs remained in Sandakan. On the 9th of June 1945, the Japanese departed
with 75 of them on a third and final march. The rest were left to starve to death in the camp.
Some resorted to cannibalism to survive,
but all of them ultimately died. So too did every prisoner on the final march.
Over at Ranau, every single POW perished, too weak to work and thus shot by the Japanese. Of
the six Aussies who escaped, two ultimately died as a result of their maltreatment,
Botterill not included. The Sandakan Death Marches are largely considered
to be the most heinous atrocity inflicted upon Australian soldiers during the Second World War.
After the Japanese surrender and the end of the war, the Allies put Hoshi and the equally
sadistic Takakuwa on trial for war crimes. Both of these miscreants were found guilty and executed.
People have since hiked the route between Sandakan and Ranau to both honour the men
who died upon it and to understand, to at least some degree, the hell they experienced.
So, had you heard of the Sandakan Death Marches before today?
Do you know anything about them we didn't cover in this video—any
anecdotes that illustrate just how bad they were? Would you consider walking from Sandakan to Ranau
to honour these men? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.