Sandakan Death Marches

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October 24, 1945. Sandakan POW camp. A few months after it was vacated and demolished by retreating Japanese troops, little remains of the burnt-out camp. In an area of No. 1 compound (pictured) graves containing the bodies of 300 Australian and British prisoners were discovered. They are believed to have been the men left in the camp after the second series of marches to Ranau. Each grave contained several bodies, in some cases as many as 10. (Photographer: Frank Burke.)
October 24, 1945. Sandakan POW camp. A few months after it was vacated and demolished by retreating Japanese troops, little remains of the burnt-out camp. In an area of No. 1 compound (pictured) graves containing the bodies of 300 Australian and British prisoners were discovered. They are believed to have been the men left in the camp after the second series of marches to Ranau. Each grave contained several bodies, in some cases as many as 10. (Photographer: Frank Burke.)

The Sandakan Death Marches are the most infamous incident in series of events which resulted in the deaths of more than 6,000 Indonesian civilian slave labourers and Allied prisoners of war, held by the Empire of Japan during the Pacific campaign of World War II, at prison camps in North Borneo. Of all the prisoners held at the camps, only about 6 survived the war.

In 1942, Indonesian civilians, imported from Java, along with Australian and British POWs, who had been captured at the fall of Singapore, were shipped to North Borneo, to build a military airstrip at Sandakan. As on the Burma Railway, the prisoners were worked hard at gunpoint, were often beaten and received little food or medical treatment. They were held in the area once construction was completed. Most had died as a result of their treatment by early 1945. When Allied landings in the area appeared increasingly likely, the camp commandant, Captain Susumi Hoshijima decided to move the remaining prisoners inland to Ranau, a distance of approximately 250 kilometres (160 miles).

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[edit] The first marches

A first phase of marches — through swamps, jungle and mountainous areas — occurred between January and March, 1945. In several groups, 455 POWs, all of whom were malnourished and/or suffering serious illness, started the journey. Although the route took nine days, they were given and made to carry four days' rations. As on the Bataan Death March, POWs who were not fit enough to complete the journey were either killed or left to die en route. The worst was yet to come for the roughly 140 men who completed the journey. In the words of one historian: "Those who survived to reach Ranau were herded into insanitary and crowded huts and many died from dysentery. By 26 June, only five Australians and one British soldier were still alive." [1]

[edit] The second marches

Meanwhile, at the Sandakan camp, some 885 POWs died of hunger and illness between February and May. A second wave of forced marches to Ranau began on May 29, when the camp was closed and destroyed by the Japanese [2]. A group of 536 POWs were sent towards Ranau[3]; almost 300 prisoners who were not well enough to move were either killed, or left to die in the ruins of the Sandakan camp. The marchers were even less fit than those in the first phase, were provided with fewer rations and were forced to forage for food along the way. Only 183 POWs remained when the group reached Ranau on 27 June.

[edit] Aftermath

October 26, 1945 Sergeant Hosotani Naoji (left, seated) of the Kempeitai (Japanese secret police), at Sandakan is interrogated by Squadron Leader F. G. Birchall (second right), Missing Servicemen Section, Royal Australian Air Force, and Sergeant Mamo (right), a member of the U.S. Army/Allied Translator and Interpreter Service. Naoji confessed to shooting two Australian POWs and five ethnic Chinese civilians. (Photographer: Frank Burke.)
October 26, 1945 Sergeant Hosotani Naoji (left, seated) of the Kempeitai (Japanese secret police), at Sandakan is interrogated by Squadron Leader F. G. Birchall (second right), Missing Servicemen Section, Royal Australian Air Force, and Sergeant Mamo (right), a member of the U.S. Army/Allied Translator and Interpreter Service. Naoji confessed to shooting two Australian POWs and five ethnic Chinese civilians. (Photographer: Frank Burke.)

By the end of July, when four prisoners escaped, the last to do so, there were only 40 POWs still alive at Ranau and none of these 40 survived the war. They were killed by the guards in August, possibly up to 12 days after the war ended on August 14.[4]

Of the six Allied survivors, all of whom were Australian soldiers, only three survived the lingering effects of their ordeal to give evidence at war crimes trials in Tokyo and Rabaul. Hokijima was found guilty and hanged on April 6, 1946.[5]

It is believed that almost 4,000 Indonesians, 1,381 Australians, and 641 British prisoners died at, or between, Sandakan and Ranau.

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World War II (1941–1945)
Battle of Malaya (1941–42)
Parit Sulong Massacre (1942)
Battle of Singapore (1942)
Syburi (1942–1945)
Battle of North Borneo (1945)
Sandakan Death Marches (1945)
Malayan Union (1946–1948)
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The Sandakan Death Marches have been dramatised in the 2004 play Sandakan Threnody — a threnody being a hymn of mourning, composed as a memorial to a dead person. The play was written by Australian composer Jonathan Mills, whose father survived a term of imprisonment at Sandakan, in 1942-43.

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Marches Australia's War, 1939-1945
  2. ^ Laden, Fevered, StarvedSandakan POW Camp, 1942-1944
  3. ^ Sandakan Death March The Japanese commander of Sandakan, Captain Takakura, forced 536 prisoners on a second death march on 29 May 1945. They marched toward Ranau in groups of about fifty with Japanese guards on all sides. The guards had been ordered to kill instantly any prisoner who collapsed from exhaustion or tried to escape. The main camp was razed to destroy any evidence of its existence. Those left behind were left out in the open. Only 183 survived the second Sandakan Death March to Ranau which lasted for twenty-six days. The other 353 prisoners on the march had died on from a combination of starvation, sickness and exhaustion, or were killed by the Japanese guards because they were too weak to continue the trek. When the marchers reached Ranau on 24 June 1945, they only six prisoners from the 470 who had left Sandakan in January were still alive. The survivors were then put to hard labour and the death toll soared.
  4. ^ Remembering Sandakan: 1945-1999 "Captain Hoshijima Susumi, was able to reveal from his knowledge of the war crimes interrogation documents that the last POWs had been killed at Ranau on 27 August 1945, well after the Japanese surrender. They had undoubtedly died, in Moffitt’s view, to stop them being able to testify to the atrocities committed by the guards."
  5. ^ Stolen Years: The War Crimes Trials

[edit] External links

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