Sandakan Death Marches
[3] As on the Burma Railway the prisoners were forced to work at gunpoint, and were often beaten whilst also receiving very little food or medical attention.
In August 1943, with the intention of controlling the enlisted men by removing any commanders, most officer-ranked prisoners were moved from Sandakan to the Batu Lintang camp at Kuching.
It was at this time, with Allied landings anticipated shortly, that camp commandant Captain Hoshijima Susumi decided to move the remaining prisoners westward into the mountains to the town of Ranau, a distance of approximately 260 kilometres (160 mi).
In several groups the POWs, all of whom were either malnourished or suffering serious illness, started the journey originally under the intention of reaching Jesselton (Kota Kinabalu).
As on the Bataan Death March, any POWs who were not fit enough or collapsed from exhaustion were either killed or left to die en route.
[6] The new Sandakan camp commander, Captain Takakuwa Takuo, ordered the prisoners towards Ranau in groups of about fifty with accompanying Japanese guards.
Most prisoners were so ill that the Japanese initially intended to let them starve to death, forcing many to scavenge in the surrounding forest for food.
All remaining prisoners left at Sandakan who could not walk either were killed or died from a combination of starvation and sickness before the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945.
[1] There is no specific recorded date for the cancellation of the operation, though the reassignment of the Agas 1 team to a West Coast mission due to "information received about the POW's" places the time period of the abandonment at around 16–19 April.
Reports produced by the Agas team in May 1945 ruled the evacuation of prisoners by air infeasible due to the destruction of the Ranau airfield.
[1] Due to a combination of a lack of food and brutal treatment at the hands of the Japanese, only 38 prisoners were left alive at Ranau by the end of July.
During the second marches, Gunner Owen Campbell and Bombardier Richard Braithwaite managed to escape into the jungle, where they were assisted by locals and eventually rescued by Allied units.
Of the six survivors, only four (Sticpewich, Botterill, Short, and Campbell) gave evidence at the various war crimes trials in both Tokyo and Rabaul.
Although, records were eventually rectified the information immediately proceeding the war presented a very complex and contradictory recounting of the camps events.
[1] However, after the war crimes trials in 1946, the reasoning behind this concealment changed from lack of reliable information to that of sparing families the grief and torment, with the rationale that the events of the marches were too terrible to be disclosed.
In the midst of the trials, the Press, while not explicitly asked to conceal information, agreed with the government to only disclose the basic details of the camp.
[1] It is worth noting that there are some that attribute this withholding of information as an attempt to conceal the military's lack of intervention in this matter both in regards to the relative failure of the Singapore campaign and the abandonment of Project Kingfisher.
It wasn't until the efforts of investigators, historians and soldiers brought these narratives to light in the 1980s and 1990s that Sandakan entered the public consciousness again and, for many families this was their first exposure to a full account of what happened to their relatives.
[20][21][22] The argument was set to rest as Lynettes' evidence was supported by two of the last remaining trail cutters, Tuaty Akau and Zudin, who lived at the time to establish the route under forced labour for the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) as well witnessing the horror of the death march.
[26] In 2016, 27 Sutton Valence School (SVS) Combined Cadet Force (CCF) from the United Kingdom including seven girls visiting the route to mount a five-day trek through its forested section from Bauto to Muruk.
