The prisoners at Cowra also included 2,000 Italians, Koreans and Taiwanese (who had served in the Japanese military) as well as Indonesian civilians, detained at the request of the Dutch East Indies government.

[2] A riot by Japanese POWs at Featherston prisoner of war camp in New Zealand, in February 1943, led to security being tightened at Cowra.

Eventually the camp authorities installed several Vickers and Lewis machine guns to augment the rifles carried by the members of the Australian Militia's 22nd Garrison Battalion, which was composed mostly of old or disabled veterans or young men considered physically unfit for front-line service.

[citation needed] In the first week of August 1944, a tip-off from an informer (recorded in some sources to be a Korean informant using the name Matsumoto)[3] at Cowra led authorities to plan to move all Japanese POWs at Cowra, except officers and NCOs, to another camp at Hay, New South Wales, some 400 km (250 mi) to the west.

In the words of historian Gavin Long, the following night: At about 2 a.m. a Japanese inmate ran to the camp gates and shouted what seemed to be a warning to the sentries.

They were armed with knives, baseball bats, clubs studded with nails and hooks, wire stilettos and garotting cords.

Within minutes of the start of the breakout attempt, Privates Benjamin Gower Hardy and Ralph Jones manned the No.

Among the findings were: Privates Hardy and Jones were posthumously awarded the George Cross as a result of their actions.

was accidentally shot by another volunteer while dismounting from a vehicle, in the process of deploying to protect railways and bridges from the escapees.