Able Seaman Bancroft had survived his second sinking: he had been on the Perth. Fearing the outbreak of disease and knowing that all men were suffering from the limited food and water, senior officers told the men to sign—assuring them that a statement signed under duress was not binding. A few days later, sixty officers and eighteen women—the civilian, mission and army nurses and Kathleen Bignold—were shipped to Japan on the Naruto Maru. Their involvement has strengthened the celebrated Anzac legend in Australian culture. The men at the middle and lower camps had the advantage of being able to trade with Thai food sellers, sometimes buying life-saving duck eggs. It was, for Australians, an acceptance that their fate was to be determined in their own region. When the war ended, senior Australian government and military officials had no more than indications of the location and health of many prisoners. It was 29 August before the prisoners from Zentsuji were found in Hokkaido, and it was a month after the end of the war before they were on their way home by train, then by air to Okinawa and the Philippines, and from there most men came home by ship. Then, in the 1980s, there was an unexpected resurgence in interest in the history of war. But other airmen, such as Harvey Besley (captured in April 1944) and Lionel Hudson (captured in December 1944) both survived their time in Rangoon gaol in Burma. After the completion of the Burma–Thailand railway, the fittest of the men from Burma and Thailand were gathered in Thailand, and in 1944 many were sent to Japan to meet a labour shortage in the homeland. Over half of some Japanese battalions died trying to reach their new positions. Only a minority of Australians endured captivity, but the experiences of those imprisoned by the enemy did not sit comfortably within the overly heroic and masculine self-image that … AWM 116149, Aided by friendly natives following their escape from the Japanese prison camp at Ranau, having survived the Sandakan death march, Private Nelson Short, Warrant Officer William Sticpewich and Private Keith Botterill were flown out to the Labuan airstrip by RAAF Auster pilots on 20 September 1945. The last units and re-enforcements to arrive on Singapore had gone into a battle already lost. By the war’s end more than one in three of these prisoners – about 8,000 – had died. On 30 August it was announced that there might be 17,500 Australian prisoners of war coming home. Even after his experiences in battle and as a prisoner on the Burma–Thailand Railway, Don Wall of the 2/20th battalion said: 'this was to be one of the most memorable events of our overseas experience'. A fortnight before the surrender, he arrived in Singapore as a gunner in the Royal Artillery. From the 2/30th Battalion, about a quarter of the men fell out as a result of sickness and exhaustion, and in spite of the threats of the Japanese most were able to rejoin their comrades later. Weary Dunlop, byname of Sir Ernest Edward Dunlop, (born July 12, 1907, Wangaratta, Victoria, Australia—died July 2, 1993, Melbourne), Australian physician, one of the most famous Australian World War II veterans, remembered for the compassionate medical care and leadership he provided for fellow prisoners of war (POWs) captured by the Japanese. The Thai police who picked him up allowed him to be taken away by an Englishman who hid him in an internment camp. Many knew of the brutal treatment of the Chinese in the Nanking massacre, and a few had heard of the killing of British men and women in Hong Kong in December 1941, but many were hopeful that the Japanese would feel bound by international law. After five or six days, they stumbled from the trains at Bampong in Thailand. If some of those who were known to be prisoners but who died in suspicious circumstances are added, then nearly half of the RAAF prisoners of the Japanese died by execution. The float-plane landed, picked up the Reverend Len Kentish of the Methodist Mission, left the rest of the crew in the water, and flew off. Most of the patients had their legs amputated because of uncontrollable tropical ulcers. The men of Sparrow Force who were captured on Timor were gathered into a camp at Usapa-Besar on Koepang Bay. In the foreground, left to right are: Mother Martha (Dutch), Sister M Flavia (Australian) and Sister Berenice Twohill (Australian). AWM OG3552, photographer: John Thomas Harrison, Private Kenneth Reid, 2/29th Battalion, was captured in Malaya in April 1942 and spent three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese before his release in late 1945, with severe malnutrition. Having arrived exhausted and ill-fed they were given brief respite to build camps, before they were forced to begin labouring on the line. The piers for timber bridges were sunk by teams of men who hauled on ropes to raise a weight on a primitive scaffold and then let it crash down on the top of the pier. Smaller groups, including the senior officers from Singapore, had gone to Taiwan and then Manchuria, and a few Australians were in Korea. You could have your own little vegetable garden, keep your own chooks, have your own eggs ...'26 Tempted by the general laxity, the proximity of Australia and the friendliness of the Ambonese, Lieutenant Bill Jinkins and six others escaped, made their way through the islands, picked up four other Australian escapers, and after seven weeks of risk and luck sailed into Darwin. On May 22, 1938, 792 or 795 prisoners of war and political prisoners escaped from Fort San Cristóbal, near Pamplona, Spain. 'Scrounging', they soon learnt, was essential for survival. Those men of the 8th Division not in Singapore and Malaya were at three points across the north of Australia. Those divisions continued into the postwar period. On a reconnaissance flight on 21 January 1942, Flight Lieutenant Bob Thompson was captain and Flight Lieutenant Paul Metzler was co-pilot of a Catalina. Many were eventually delivered to grateful families in Australia, the first letters received from prisoners of the Japanese. Relief that they had survived their first battles was tinged by the humiliation of defeat, regret that they could no longer defend their homeland when it was under threat, and some apprehension about how they might be received at the end of the war. Shifted further north, 'A' Force was joined by other Allied prisoners and by October 1942 they had began work on the railway. The day that all prisoners had lived and longed for, came late and without drama in most camps. Finally, he too decided that the risks were too great and he destroyed his camera before his return to Changi in 1943. In addition some 300 men who survived the sinking of the HMAS Perth in the Battle of Java Sea in late February 1942 were taken prisoner. The prisoners continued to die at Ranau and at Paginatan, where some had been delayed. There they were paraded through town—what the men called a 'gloat parade'—and were installed in houses previously occupied by Dutch families. Relatives, anxious for news, cut out the report and pasted it in scrapbooks or filed it with last letters received. Of the men deployed to the north, only those in Port Moresby, a few in the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles on mainland New Guinea who withdrew towards Wau, coastwatchers, guerrilla forces on Bougainville and Timor, some RAAF personnel ordered out just ahead of the ground fighting and a few evaders and escapers (including General Gordon Bennett of the 8th Division) were still free. And in Thailand the geography posed greater problems: the supply line was longer and more difficult and the Japanese administration was not only indifferent to prisoner welfare, but prone to failure. The next day he had some: some 'gallant fellows' had walked several kilometres up the line, climbed telegraph poles, smashed the insulators and taken out the sulphur. The crowds meeting the ships at the wharfs and at central railway stations were so large that relatives and friends were instructed to meet the prisoners where there was more space—such as Melbourne's Flemington Showgrounds. The doctors, encountering what for them were new diseases and with few resources, were under extreme pressure. They also found that the police were in contact with men still sailing between the islands in the Sulu Archipelago, and that opened communication with guerrilla groups who were operating in the islands and the Philippines. After two days in the water, 136 prisoners were taken on board Japanese ships, others were probably shot in their life boats, and more died of thirst and exposure. AWM 118879, The amputation ward of 'Bamboo Hut Hospital' at a prisoner of war camp on the Burma–Thailand railway. Our collection contains a wealth of material to help you research and find your connection with the wartime experiences of the brave men and women who served in Australia’s military forces. Few Australians have been able to visit the Thanbyuzayat cemetery, where more than 1300 Australians reinterred from burial sites along the Burma–Thailand railway are buried. They took on much of the hard work in the camp that was necessary for basic hygiene; they looked after the health of others; and, having managed to shift a piano into one of their houses, they contributed to entertainment. In about May 1942 they might have received an official letter saying there was 'no definite information available'. The returned prisoners felt that they had had three and a half years of their lives stolen, and many of them had been away for over four years. In a small town of 1000 where every one knew everybody, three or four were prisoners of war. On 6 April 1945 while working south of Bampong on the Singapore line, he escaped. Other men with bag stretchers or cane baskets carried away the rubble left by explosions or teased-out by prisoners of war with pinch bars, picks and shovels. But on 16 August the Japanese admitted that there was an 'armistice', and the men were no longer to be considered prisoners. At the other end of the educational scale over 400 illiterate men began their schooling. The loss of over 1000 men on the Montevideo Maru was only one of several disasters experienced by the prisoners who travelled in unmarked Japanese transports through seas increasingly dominated by American submarines. This photograph was taken by Private George Aspinall, lying on the roof of the AIF building and taking advantage of a bomb hole in the brickwork. While most armies in the fury of battle or its immediate aftermath are likely to kill prisoners, the Japanese had killed prisoners in many places, often several days to a fortnight after battle, and sometimes the executioners were not troops that had been in the immediate fighting. The death rate in the Hintok and Konyu areas, less than halfway to the Burma border, where much of the work was done by 'D' Force and the men from Java, was comparable to that in Burma. By January 1945, 1850 were still alive, but many of them were malnourished and ill. On 29 January, 470 prisoners, 350 of whom were Australians, left in groups of about fifty, each man loaded with Japanese equipment. More Australians had died on the railway, but Sandakan was the greater atrocity. AWM P00406.026, Allied prisoners of war build a bridge at Tamarkan, near Kanchanaburi, on the Burma–Thailand railway, circa February 1943. The imprisonment of more than 22,000 from a population of 7 million meant that nearly one in 300 Australians was missing. By the war’s end more than one in three of these prisoners – about 8,000 – had died. AWM P00406.031, Prisoners of war suffering a range of injuries and illness caused by their captivity lie on sleeping platforms in the hospital hut at Wampo on the Burma-Thailand railway, cApril 1943. The Perth and Houston kept firing until they had exhausted ammunition, and both were sunk with shattering torpedo blasts. But by the time the men from Pudu arrived in Changi, they found 'our army had succeeded in establishing something very close to pre-war discipline and procedure'. He died on 20 March 1945 after almost three weeks of torture and beatings. Of the few civilians who remained in Rabaul and the prisoners later captured in the New Guinea area—most being American, Australian and New Zealand aircrew—few survived. At Tol plantation on New Britain, the Japanese gathered about 160 surrendered men, bound their hands, led them into the bush and killed them. AWM P00406.011, Australian prisoners of war chop and saw wood in front of the cookhouse at the prison camp at Kanchanaburi, Thailand, in 1944. We could have given him lessons'. His fears had some basis, for at several camps the Japanese were prepared to dispose of prisoners. To get wood for cooking fires and sea water from which to extract salt the men pulled trailers, often trucks from which the engines had been removed. They shook hands, staggered and crawled to a road and waited for capture. P01433.020, An Australian prisoner of war showing the effects of malnutrition from working on the Burma–Thailand Railway.P01433.020. Rescued and taken ashore by some Chinese, he was captured trying to make his way to friendly troops. Most families had received little definite information, and all of it old. Director: Sidney Lumet | Stars: Sean Connery, Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, Alfred Lynch. By the end of the war, over 10,000 Allied prisoners of war had died at sea. With the Japanese crowding between twenty-five and thirty men into each cattle or goods wagon, about 600 prisoners packed each train, but it still took over ten trains to carry the largest forces. Les Cody, Ghosts in Khaki: The history of the 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion 8th Australian Division AIF (1997); Peter Henning, Doomed Battalion: Mateship and Leadership in War and Captivity, the Australian 2/40 Battalion 1940–45 (1995); A. W. Penfold, WC Bayliss and KE Crispin, Galleghan's Greyhounds: the story of the 2/30th Australian Infantry Battalion 22nd November, 1940 – 10th October, 1945 (1979); and Don Wall, Singapore and Beyond: The story of the men of the 2/20 battalion told by the survivors (1980) have been quoted here. The Japanese had placed a bomb dump close to the Tantui camp and in February 1943 it was hit in a raid. Pilot Officer Maxwell Gilbert, flying out of Tarakan on 7 July 1945, baled out of his Kittyhawk, was captured, and is thought to have died on 24 July, aged twenty, just three weeks before the end of the war. Despite receiving some help from locals, Hackney was recaptured and interned at Pudu Gaol and later Changi Prison. All prisoners then knew that as individuals their lives were of little value to their captives, and there was no obvious safety in numbers. The revelations of the soldiers, and 24 surviving nursing sisters, also prisoners of war, are now part of Australian history. That increased the logistic problems, because all food for workers had to be transported long distances by difficult river and road routes. While a surprising number of prisoners risked the wrath of the Japanese and kept diaries, understandably, few were prepared to keep and use a camera. On 12 February 1942 the last sixty-five nurses went on board the Vyner Brooke. 'Changi University' enrolled thousands in its most popular courses of agriculture, teaching and business principles. Reacting to the escape, the Japanese tightened conditions, and the Australians became only too aware of their vulnerability after the 'Dutch Garden Party'. To get fluid into the desperately ill cholera patients, they made their own saline solution and injected it using 'needles' fashioned from copper taken from Japanese vehicles, and even bamboo. The Japanese made him stand on the running board of a car, put his arms either side of the door post, tied his hands together, and with their prisoner trussed on the outside of their car, they drove him into captivity. Most became victims of their captors’ indifference and brutality. After a year in Burma, the Australians had lost ninety dead, but they now entered rougher country; the wet season began with drenching rains and black clouds hanging low over the camps; they had their first cholera cases; and the Japanese increased pressure on the work gangs to finish. A year later, 25,000 Australians were deployed in south-east Asia and the Pacific and all were at risk. By going from tree to tree, one could take a stormy passage down the Channel with the Yatchmen's Club, take a leisurely tour through the waterways of France with the Travel boys, or find oneself caught in a blizzard in the Alps with the Mountain Climbing group. Of over 500 who set out, 142 Australians and 61 Englishmen reached Ranau. The first 110 prisoners arrived in Sydney on flying boats on 17 September, and were greeted with cheering crowds and showers of torn paper and confetti. Spurgeon was the only member of the crew to survive the attack, the forced landing on the waves and a night drifting at sea. When the ships arrived later, most men were driven by bus through welcoming crowds, and many were given another welcome at home towns where bands and flag-waving school children lined railway stations. Australians of the 22nd Brigade, 8th Division, on the deck of the troopship SS Queen Mary, 4 February 1941, the day they sailed from Sydney for Singapore. The members of the Catholic mission were first allowed to stay in their own quarters at Vunapope, east of Rabaul, but later were shifted inland to Ramale, where they were more protected from Allied bombing but suffered deprivation. On Ambon, about 800 prisoners from Gull Force were contained in their old barracks at Tantui outside Ambon town. In June 1943 'E' Force joined the Australian and British prisoners at Sandakan. Within Changi, men could go for days without seeing a Japanese. The 55 Kilo base hospital, under the control of Lieutenant Colonel Albert Coates, soon had 1800 patients. After sighting the Japanese fleet on its way to invade Rabaul, they shadowed it until attacked by fighters. The loss of 845 prisoners of war and 208 civilians was the greatest single disaster suffered by Australia in the Second World War. AWM P01538.003, Crowds welcome home ex-prisoners of war, Sydney, 1945. They still wore the grey dress, red cape and white veil; they were yet to be issued with the jungle green slacks, shirt and slouch hat that so changed the appearance of the nurses in the tropics later in the war. The discipline was strict; slapping and sometimes more brutal punishment was imposed. AWM 030261/19, Sister Jess Doyle, 2/10th Australian General Hospital, soon after her release with other nurses from a POW camp on Sumatra. In June 1944 just under 200 Australians died in the sinking of the Tamahoko Maru within sight of Japan; and when American submarines attacked a convoy off Hainan in September 1944, their tally of blasted ships included two with over 2200 British and Australian prisoners on board. When the Australians were being pushed back on Kokoda a number of men, including Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Key, commander of the 2/14 Battalion, were captured. In all, around 13,000 Australians went to the railway, and close to 2800 died, a significant proportion of the 12,000 Allied prisoner deaths. AWM 041107, A Japanese soldier stands on guard near the entrance to the prisoner of war camp at Thanbyuzayat, Burma, in late 1942 or 1943. AWM P00761.046, Australian ex-prisoners of war, Osaka, Japan, 1945. 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