Sandakan
The Harrowing True Story of the Borneo Death Marches 1944-45
Penguin Random House 2020
Near the end of WW2 the Japanese Imperial Army force-marched 1200 Australian and British prisoners-of-war into the heart of North Borneo. Six survived. This is their harrowing story.
Few episodes in the annals of human suffering match the torments inflicted on these men by their Japanese captors - broken, beaten, worked to exhaustion, thrown into bamboo cages on the slightest pretext, starved and then force-marched to death.
And yet, even under such inhuman treatment, the prisoners of Sandakan managed to organise an underground resistance movement. Together, a secret network of soldiers, the native people and foreign civilians built a radio and got messages to the US and Australian Special Forces. And when they were discovered they were hideously tortured and the ringleaders, executed.
In 1945, the Japanese, fearing Allied air attacks, drove the surviving prisoners into the heart of the island. In reconstructing what happened, I walked across North Borneo in their footsteps, interviewed many victims’ families and consulted hundreds of court documents.
In telling their story, I aimed to establish who was responsible for the Pacific War’s worst POW camp .