National Sandakan Remembrance Day Commemorative Address 2024

I was born at the tail end of World War 2, November 1944, in a place far from war … the north coast of Ireland. Warships still passed our little town heading into the Atlantic seeking German U Boats. Those submarines had tried to bring Great Britain to its knees but that battle, the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, had been firmly won when I appeared. In Europe the full horror of what had happened there was soon to be revealed as the death camps were captured by the advancing allies, camps like Belsen where, in the six months after liberation, roughly 14,000 people died from the results of forced march, privation and starvation. Film was taken in the camp and shown in Australia where, apparently, some threw up as they saw the thousands of emaciated bodies. An official Australian war artist captured something of this in painting and photograph as well as the plight of Australian POWs being marched in deep mid-winter back out of the reach of the advancing Soviet armies. Just months later the Australian POWs of the Asia/Pacific war were recovered: we have a wealth of image, drawing, and much else relating to their experiences.

Then the POW extraction teams reached a camp at a place called Sandakan in Borneo. Unlike what happened in Germany, south east Asia, Japan or Korea, there was nobody to rescue, nobody to give medical attention to, nobody to fly home to Australia to waving crowds lining wharfs, or to an anxiously waiting family. Apart from six men, all Australians, who had escaped captivity, there were no survivors at Sandakan. Some 2428 Australian and British POWS – 1787 Australians and 641 British - lay in graves in the camp, spread out in mostly unmarked sites along a jungle track leading to a place called Ranau some 260 kilometres west of Sandakan, and at a makeshift camp at Ranau. War Graves teams and investigation units, such as the Third Australian Prisoner of War Contact and Inquiry unit, went into the camp and into the region. They found bodies, hundreds of them. The bodies were disinterred and they lie today in Labuan Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery. Many were never identified. Some were never recovered. The Australian ‘missing’ of Sandakan are commemorated by name on the Labuan Memorial. One of the saddest photographs of all this shows two investigation unit officers picking through and listing dozens of personal, everyday objects recovered from the camp.

In 1999 I was tasked by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs to write an account of what had happened at Sandakan. The result was a little booklet I titled ‘Laden, Fevered Starved’. Those were not my words: they come from a poem by ABC journalist, Colin Simpson, who made a program in 1946/47 about what were by then becoming known as the ‘death marches’ – the forced marches of undernourished, half starving, physically weakened POWS from Sandakan to Ranau. Simpson wrote:

They rested at, this creek,

This climb that runs the sweat into your eyes –

Though you aren’t laden, fevered, starved …

You tell yourself you know how they went by.

This terrible story is why we are here today.

In 2005 I was invited to address, on the subject of Sandakan, a general Asia/Pacific war conference being run by the 2/15th Field Regiment Association. I told them a specific Sandakan story and it struck me, when I received the invitation to address you today, that that story deserves to be told again here beside this beautiful memorial, the national Sandakan Memorial, dedicated to the memory of the Australian POWs, inmates of the Sandakan Camp, who died between roughly January 1945 and August 1945.

I like to think that those Australians would have no problem with the idea that it carries also something of the memory of the British POWS who died beside them. They too, like Simpson’s Australians, were ‘laden, fevered, starved’. I began that little 1991 book with the story of Australian Ted Ings, remembered by name out at the little village of Binalong on a plaque set on the top of an arch leading into the Binalong Anglican Church. But while the book concentrated on the fate of the Australian POWS, I finished it with the story of Englishman Christopher Eliot and his daughter Anne visiting Ranau in 1996 to honour his brother, Corporal Donald Elliot of the Royal Air Force, who died there in 1945. Anne wrote a poem in memory of her uncle. The opening lines of Anne’s poem would surely move anyone who had a relative, Australian or British, who died at Sandakan:

You don’t know me

But I know you

Through my father, he has not forgotten you

And never will.

His life has been greatly affected

By your death.

He always looked up to you, you were his hero.

I will never forget.

Hope you are at peace here.

The Australian story I want to tell you, the one I told that 2/15th Field Regiment conference, had it origins in a file in the National Archives of Australia’s Melbourne repository. I felt that to tell it here, in a very different context, I should go to Melbourne to handle again the pages of that file, handle the original pages of typescript report, testimony, maps and much else, produced and signed by players in the great tragedy that was Sandakan in the mid-1940s. I am glad I did. What I found there was something I had not seen, or perhaps if seen, paid much attention to in 2005. I suspect this material had subsequently been added to the file but I am not sure … perhaps I just missed its significance.

The file’s title indicates its importance to the Sandakan story -   Affidavit File - Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees - Investigation File [COMPONENT 2 Borneo 8: Execution of last prisoner of war at Sandakan [includes 33 photographs, 5 negatives][component 2 of 2]. There is no time to explain why this file is not in the Australian War Memorial where the bulk of the official material about Sandakan has been deposited. It was generated, I think, by personnel conducting war crimes trials in Rabaul, New Guinea, between 1945 and 1947. So, I am pretty sure it was these war crimes people who, around late March or early April 1947, asked for an official investigation of a story told by a young Chinese worker on a Borneo rubber plantation. His name was Wong Hiong, 21 years old. Wong told his story on 30 April 1947 to Captain John Burnett, commander of the 31st Australian War Graves unit. His statement was considered an official ‘affidavit’, taken under oath. Wong repeated this affidavit statement on 27 September 1947 and, being illiterate, signed with his thumbprint.   

In August 1945, as the Asia/Pacific war drew to a close, Wong was working for the Japanese as a servant to Japanese Sergeant Major Morosumi Hisao, the last Japanese commander at the camp. In mid-August 1945, according to Wong, there was one prisoner, an Australian, left alive in the Sandakan Camp. Wong was not sure of the precise date, but in mid-August Wong saw Morosumi, shortly after he finished his breakfast about 7 am, take his sword from its sheath. Wong was told not to come with the Japanese Sergeant Major but, being suspicious that something was afoot, he secretly followed Morosumi, and a group of Formosan guards, as they headed into the camp’s Number 2 Compound. There Wong hid up a coconut tree from which he was able to observe Morusumi and the Formosans. In his own words, and in somewhat abbreviated fashion, this is what Wong saw:

I saw four Japs [Formosans, and he actually named them] dragging the last PW to be alive at this camp from his shelter of blanket and groundsheets. These [four] guards beat and kicked the PW brutally and moved him up to where Morozumi was waiting … The PW’s description is as follows. About six feet tall, black hair, had a beard, had false teeth. I used to see him wash them when he washed his face at the water hole. I did on several occasions give the PW food …

[A guard] forced the PW to kneel down … then a piece of black cloth was placed around the PWs face covering what appeared to be his eyes. The PW was facing North and Morozumi was standing on his left with the sword in his hand facing east. Morozumi then lifted the sword up over his head gripping it with both hands and with one downward motion he brought the sword down with terrific force on to the neck of the PW.

The soldier’s body and head were kicked into an open slit trench and buried.

I read all this in 2005. What I recently saw in the Melbourne file, something I had not seen, or paid attention to, in 2005 was a series of photographs taken in 1947 when this execution was being investigated. One photograph shows Wong standing in that slit trench, the position marked, precisely, on an accompanying map of the camp. The body was recovered from the trench right beside where Wong was standing. The position, where the POW was made to kneel down, was also marked on the photograph. And there, in another photograph, was Wong’s coconut tree from where he watched the execution. These small, fading black and white images corroborated his story. On the back of each photograph is Wong’s official thumbprint and the date, 2 September 1947. They added a sense of immediacy, of awful reality to the documents – the ‘Execution of the last prisoner of war …’

All the stories of the British and Australian POWs of Sandakan are awful stories. It is important to keep telling them at this spot, the place of memory for the Sandakan dead in our national capital. And the fate of the last POW at the camp has a special poignancy. Wong was unsure of the exact date of this execution. On the back of the photographs it is recorded as ‘about 19 August 1945’. This prisoner’s name was, in 1958, on the Labuan Memorial and the date of his death recorded as 15 August 1945.

How can we reconcile these dates? There must have been some other evidence, which I have not seen, about this. Assume 15 August is correct … and much official effort went into getting such dates correct … this was the very day the Japanese Emperor went on air, some four hours after the execution, to announce Japan’s unconditional surrender. The last of the Sandakan prisoners, survivors of the death marches, died at Ranau days after war’s end. But for me this execution at the camp, an execution about which we have such dramatic, first-hand evidence, seems even more pointless, more hopeless, more meaningless, than all those hundreds of other pointless, hopeless and meaningless deaths at the camp, along the trail to Ranau, and at Ranau. A deliberate, ritualistic, killing carried out within sight of peace.

There is a meaning here, a personal one. On the AWM’s website description of this Sandakan Memorial are these words:

As a sundial, the memorial refers both to the passage of time and to our remembrance of the past. Engraved lines trace the shadows cast on 11 November and the summer and winter solstices. Sunlight reflected through the glass cuts across these lines, symbolising lives cut short.

As the Australian War Memorial’s official representative at the disinterment of Australia’s Unknown Soldier in 1993 in France, I accompanied the soldier’s coffin home to Australia. He was ceremonially entombed in the AWM’s Hall of Memory at 11 am on 11 November 1993, Remembrance Day. I like to think that the Sandakan Memorial’s tracing of the line of the sun on 11 November points to that Unknown lying in his tomb. His presence remembers all the dead, the dead of the Western Front, Sandakan, and of every other theatre of war where Australians have served and died. On the day of his entombment we asked people to come, not with a wreath, but with a single flower to lay on the tomb. By day’s end it was covered in flowers.

I would like to go and lay a single flower on the tomb for this last Sandakan camp death. His name was, many years later, discovered by research. He lies now in a marked grave at the Labuan War Cemetery, John Frederick Skinner, the son of Frederick and Isabella Skinner of Tenterfield, New South Wales. He was 31 years of age when he was killed. Today, here at the Sandakan Memorial, we may allow his story to stand for all the dead of Sandakan.