Tragedy, triumph and a priceless legacy
Published on: Sunday, December 15, 2019
By: Lynette Silver
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Fifteen thousand men of the Australian 8th Division became prisoners of war when Singapore fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942. Incredulous that such a thing had come to pass, they were ill-equipped mentally and emotionally for captivity, let alone captivity so brutal that one third of them would die.
Australians unfortunate enough to fall into Japanese hands had arguably the worst wartime experience imaginable. An experience that is almost incomprehensible to those who were not there.
Apart from the mateship that held the captives together, it was an experience that was without any redeeming feature, save one – the compassion of many local people, who extended the hand of friendship to complete strangers in their hour of need.
For many Australians, this friendship began in Malaya in early 1941, long before a single shot was fired. As most of the troops had never set foot outside Australia, they had attended lectures while at sea on how to behave towards the local, non-European population.
Keen to put the lessons they had learned into practice, on arrival at their various posts they were perplexed by the absence of women and children. The mystery was soon solved. Stories had been circulating that no female was safe while Australians were around and that they beat and kicked children on sight.
So strong were the rumours that many women had fled into the countryside. However, fears were soon put to rest by the friendliness of the visitors, who treated everyone as their equal.
Unused to Europeans behaving in this way, the local people responded warmly, offering their hospitality and friendship. To the consternation of British expatriates, who were not at all keen for their well-entrenched social structure and its pecking order to be disturbed, invitations were not only extended, but were eagerly accepted by the free and easy, egalitarian Australians.
It was this egalitarianism, this total disregard for the existing British class system, which resulted in the Australians being counselled by concerned British expatriates, anxious to put an end to this interaction and to maintain the ‘prestige of the white man’.
The Australians, who were well aware that the British regarded them as ‘colonials’, took absolutely no notice. Gregarious by nature, they had no problem in accepting hospitality and acts of kindness from those considered ‘inferior’, especially when those who believed themselves to be superior remained stubbornly aloof.
The Chinese, who were particularly hospitable and showered the troops with kindness, showed their true mettle immediately after the fall of Singapore.
Intent on humiliating the Allied soldiers of the great British Empire, the Japanese marched the defeated army the 25 kilometres from Singapore to Changi by a most circuitous route, passing through the most populated areas of the island. As the Australian troops tramped from their base at Tanglin Barracks, it was obvious from the number of Japanese flags displayed on shops and houses owned by Indians and Malays that they had accepted the inevitable.
Not so the Chinese. Fiercely anti-Japanese, they risked punishment, even death, by pressing small gifts, food and cigarettes on the troops as they passed by, and offering them water at every opportunity. Sergeant Fred Howe, from the NSW country town of Boorowa, later spoke for all his comrades when he declared ‘the Chinese were the salt of the earth’.
Once the prisoners reached Selarang Barracks at Changi, the Chinese living nearby continued to risk life and limb by supplying them with food and commodities whenever possible to make their incarceration easier. When working parties were sent further afield, the Australians always knew that they could rely on the steadfastness of the Chinese community.
Although members of the Indian army, which comprised a large percentage of the Allied force, remained loyal to the Empire, a good number of military personnel and civilians switched their allegiance, making contact risky. The Malays, most of whom had no allegiance to the Empire, were also given a wide berth.
Acts of barbarity perpetrated by the Japanese occupation force against the Chinese community appalled the Australians, who took risks to alleviate the situation when they could.
Shortly after arriving at Changi, Fred Howe and a small group of Australian POWs were marched at gunpoint to a beach about two kilometres away to bury the bullet-ridden corpses of scores of young men, some not much more than boys – all victims of Sook Ching, an ethnic cleansing operation that took the lives of an estimated 50,000 Chinese civilians. It was a distressing task, made even more so as some of the victims they were forced to bury were still alive.
However, Fred and his mates managed to save one of them – a boy aged about 11 who had been wounded in the chest and arm. While the guards were occupied elsewhere, the Australians moved him to the shelter of the trees and covered him with banana leaves.
That night Fred and another soldier slipped away from the camp. After retrieving the still unconscious lad from his hiding place, they made their way to the outskirts of Changi village, where they persuaded an elderly Chinese lady to take care of him.
The boy survived his injuries and the war, as did his rescuer Fred, who endured terrible privation on the Burma-Thai railway until Japan’s surrender in August 1945. Returning to Singapore, his first task was to seek out the old lady. The boy was now a strapping youth who, on learning who Fred was, said ‘It is through you that I became a Christian, so that I could pray to your god every day for your safe return home’. Shortly afterwards Fred was repatriated to Australia, to his wife and family.
This amazing example of camaraderie and friendship, and many others like it, forged in peacetime and honed through the shared deprivations of life under the Japanese, was the catalyst for the formation of the Malayan Nursing Scholarship. In November 1945 the returning diggers concluded that the best way to honour and remember their mates who had died at the hands of the Japanese was not with a statue forged in bronze or an obelisk erected in stone.
What they wanted was a living memorial, to express their eternal gratitude to the Chinese people who risked their lives to help them during a time of terrible adversity. It was agreed that the scholarship, therefore, would be limited to Chinese and Chinese-Eurasians who could speak English.
By February 1947 sufficient funds were raised to sponsor the first two students, with former POWs contributing £11,000 and the Australian Red Cross donating £5000 from unspent money raised for POWs during the war. There was a good deal of publicity about the scholarship and its recipients for the first few years of operation but the Scheme then ran into trouble.
Malaya had achieved independence in 1957 and, after uniting with Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore to form Malaysia in 1963, local health authorities became increasingly wary of participating in a project that still bore some colonial overtones. Apart from restricting candidates to ethnic Chinese, the selection remained in the hands of Australian and British expatriates, rather than Malaysians and Singaporeans themselves.
Consequently, by the early 1960s the scheme was in abeyance, for the want of cooperation of local authorities. In 1966, the Malaysian Red Cross wrote to the Scholarship Fund, stating that ‘The Malaysian government does not like to support any scheme whereby all benefits are to be conferred on a particular nationality. It prefers that the offer be made to Malaysians irrespective of race.’
Because of local sensitivities and the restrictive nature of the Scheme, the Australian High Commissioner in Malaysia also refused to sit on the selection committee and, in 1968, the Melbourne-based Board was forced to alter its constitution to allow nurses of any ethnicity to apply. Furthermore, the heads of Malaysian and Singaporean medical services were no longer European expatriates; they were university-educated people from the region itself.
In order to keep the Scheme alive, selection was handed over to the local health authorities and, with their cooperation, scholarship nurses were coming to Australia again by the 1970s.
The Scholarship, established in 1945 by ex-POWs captured in Singapore to acknowledge the assistance of the local Chinese, was limited to Chinese applicants from Malaya and Singapore. There was no one to speak in support of the people of various ethnic backgrounds in British North Borneo, now known as Sabah, as all but six of the 1793 Australians imprisoned there had perished.
When finally repatriated to Australia, the survivors, who had all escaped captivity and owed their lives to the Dusun villagers who succoured and sheltered them, were hospitalised for months. Very few therefore knew of the risks taken by the villagers who saved the escapees, or of the unstinting help given by the community to the POWs at the Sandakan Camp throughout their imprisonment.
The vital role played by local people and their unwavering support has only been acknowledged in recent years. It was not until the stained glass Windows of Remembrance, a memorial to the POWs and a thanksgiving to the people of Sabah who risked, and gave, their lives to help them, were unveiled in the church of St Michael and All Angels in Sandakan in 2005, that most people learned of the many acts of kindness, compassion and bravery.
One great benefit from the incorporation of Sabah into Malaysia is that the Nursing Scholarship is now open to all Sabahans. Because of my work in relation to Sandakan POWs and the notorious death marches of 1945, Sabah is particularly dear to my heart, as is a deep commitment to acknowledge in practical ways the sacrifice of the local people who helped our prisoners of war.
The first of these was the Windows Project but, with the help of a silent army of POW families and others, my husband and I have instituted a number of other initiatives to improve the lives of Sabahans.
One is the Sandakan Memorial Scholarship Trust, which educates disadvantaged Dusun girls from remote villages in Sabah’s interior to the required standard of secondary education to enable them go on to tertiary level.
Consequently, when invited by Mike O’Brien to travel to Perth to help celebrate the academic success of Pauline Wong, a Sabahan, I was delighted to accept, and would like to take this opportunity to extend to her the heartiest congratulations on behalf of the Sandakan POW families.
As we all know, she is the recipient of a scholarship created to acknowledge the assistance provided by local people to our prisoners of war – assistance which, in Sabah, was outstanding.
The relationship between Australians and Sabahans began in July 1942, when 1500 Australian POWs captured in Singapore arrived in Sandakan. Their task? To build a military airfield for the Japanese. The Japanese, who were just as keen as their counterparts in Singapore to see the white man humbled, sent the new arrivals on a march of humiliation to their POW Camp, 13 kilometres away.
The Chinese were visibly distressed and, as was the case in Singapore a few months before, they risked beatings, or worse, to thrust food and gifts into the prisoners’ hands, and to offer water.
The Australians arrived at their camp, unaware that a well-organised underground movement had been operating for some months, following the occupation of Sandakan by the enemy on 19 January 1942, a month before Singapore fell. Designed originally to provide assistance to Europeans civilians interned on nearby Berhala Island, the underground’s activities were expanded to assist the Australian POWs.
Money, much needed medical supplies, war news, food and vital components to build a radio were smuggled into the camp by various means, including furtive exchanges at the cemetery with a senior member of the underground, who had appointed himself chief grave-digger.
Other meetings took place at the airfield, where many local people of all races worked as labourers. One young man who constantly risked his life was Chin Piang Syn. Aged 19, Sini, as he was known, had received his education at St Michael’s Church Mission School. Fiercely patriotic, he was a passionate and dedicated member of the Scouting movement and was proud to live in a country that was part of the mighty British Empire.
Sini started out his subversive activities by procuring radio parts, but was so anxious to help in other ways that he changed his name to Chin Chee Kong and took a job as a labourer at the airfield. Because he was small, slightly built and looked far younger than his 19 years, the Japanese regarded him with some affection, allowing him to ride his bicycle freely all about the place.
Exploiting their benevolence, Sini pedalled unimpeded between Sandakan and the camp, and was soon responsible for carrying important messages to Australian officers, as well as contraband. Mindful of his youth and his deep involvement in the underground, Australian Ken Mosher asked Sini if he was aware of the risks he was taking. ‘Yes Sir, I know what will happen if the Japanese catch me, but I must do my duty. I am British and I am also a Boy Scout’.
Members of the constabulary were heavily involved in the underground, particularly Corporal Koram, a Murut tribesman, Sergeant Abin, a Dusun, and four Indians ranging in rank from inspector to private.
Working alongside them were Peter Lai and Richard Low, who were employed at the local hospital. With the help of the resident doctor, who made false entries in ledgers, the pair was able to smuggle to the camp substantial quantities of drugs, ether, sterile bandages, iodine, disinfectants and surgical instruments, which were left under bushes for collection.
Shortly after arrival at Sandakan, two small parties of prisoners escaped. Some were hidden by Chinese farmers, but ultimately the escape attempts failed and they were recaptured. Later, the helpers paid dearly for their involvement.
Another 500 Australians as well as 700 British arrived from Singapore in the first half of 1943, swelling the POW population to around 2,700. Before transferring to the main camp, the Australians were housed for five weeks on Berhala Island in huts vacated by the civilian internees, who had been moved to a larger camp at Kuching, in Sarawak. From here, with the help of the underground, eight POWs escaped by sea to the nearby Philippines, where they joined the Philippine Liberation Army.
However, in July that year, the underground was betrayed. Australian POWs and many underground members, including Sini, were arrested. All were tortured and names were inevitably named.
In October, at the end of an appalling reign of terror, 52 local people and 20 Australians were sent to Kuching for trial, where the most senior POW and eight locals of various ethnic origin were executed by firing squad. The remaining Australians were shipped to a punishment gaol in Singapore. The local conspirators were sentenced terms of imprisonment with hard labour from six months to 15 years.
Almost all the officers were transferred to the main POW Camp in Kuching, a decision that saved their lives. Left without effective leadership and with the Japanese now on the alert for any signs of subversive activity, life for the POWs who remained at the Sandakan Camp became much more difficult.
Security was tightened considerably, the level of work was stepped up, bashings and beatings became more frequent and privileges curtailed. Locals were warned that to come within 400 metres of a POW would result in summary execution.
Despite this, members of the underground who had escaped arrest continued with their work. Perhaps the most notable of these was Lillian Funk, a beautiful Eurasian married to Johnny Funk, of Chinese-Dusun descent and son of John Simon Funk, Sandakan’s wealthy pre-war magistrate.
Although Johnny had been caught in the net, he had avoided the death penalty, along with his brother Paddy. They were sentenced to four and six years’ gaol, respectively. Their other brother, Alex, was executed.
With the family men folk dead or in custody, Lillian carried on alone, and continued to supply medicine to the POWs for as long as possible. To fund the purchases, she used the proceeds of her personal fortune - gold sovereigns, British currency and jewellery – sewed into the hems of her clothing, or secreted in a wide pouch, wound around her waist.
Although a slender woman, she deduced, quite rightly, that if anyone noticed she had put on weight they would contribute it to pregnancy - a condition that, in those days, was not commented upon.
As Japan began to lose the war, conditions at the POW camp deteriorated further. However, despite constant ration cuts, and few medical supplies and drugs, the death toll was quite low – between 1942 and the end of 1944, only 103 Australians died, a death rate of just 5 per cent.
However, with the American invasion of the Philippines, the airstrip came under constant Allied attack until, by Christmas 1944 it was wrecked beyond redemption.
Wanting to make use of the large but now idle POW labour force, at the end of January the Japanese ordered 455 of the fittest POWs to march to the west coast, a journey of 250 kilometres over a rough foot track that crossed precipitous mountains, crocodile infested swamps and uninhabited jungle.
There was no shortage of volunteers for the journey. The Japanese said they would be going to a much better camp with more food - a great inducement, as the ration, which in 1942 had been set at 750 grams of uncooked rice, per man, per day, had been slashed to just 70.
The marchers set off one day apart in nine groups of about 50, carrying equipment for a regiment of Japanese troops accompanying them. There was no medical assistance and, as the route passed through largely unexplored territory, anyone who could not keep up, prisoner and Japanese alike, was ‘disposed of’ by a specially designated killing squad. Food dumps were supposed to have been organised for the POWs but the further into the interior they went, the more hit and miss the supplies became. Once the groups left Sandakan, there were no villages for another 134 miles.
At one stage, a party of POWs subsisted on just six cucumbers shared among 49 for four days. That members of this group survived at all was due to a chance meeting with some Dusun men who were hunting in uninhabited forest and gave them enough food to continue. At the village of Paginatan, a Dusun woman named Bureh also gave what food she had, although she had little for herself and her family.
Due to Allied air activity on the west coast the surviving prisoners were unexpectedly halted at Ranau, where they were crowded into a makeshift bamboo hut. Dysentery soon broke out and food was scarce. Taking pity on the starving prisoners, Dusun and Chinese villagers carried small parcels of food with them, in the hope of passing them on.
Children too played a part. Balabiu, an 8-year-old girl, wrapped rice and fish into small banana leaf packets, which she tossed to the starving men as soon as the guard’s back was turned. Yee Sing See, also aged 8 and son of a local shopkeeper, gave them bananas and other food, supplied by his parents. Distressed by the sight of the prisoners being beaten as they passed by, a woman named Patuk left cooked rice hidden beneath banana leaves at the side of the track.
Many others risked their lives including the entire village of Marakau, to the east of Ranau. Despite these acts of compassion, starvation and illness took their toll and, by the end of June, just six of the 455 who had sent out from Sandakan were still alive.
Meanwhile, a second march had left for Ranau, following a massive sea and air attack on Sandakan on 27 May – a ploy by the Allies to convince the Japanese that invasion from the east was imminent, thereby diverting attention from the west coast, where an invasion fleet landed unopposed on 10 June.
The Japanese at Sandakan, taken in by the attacks, were certain that locals must be somehow involved with Allied forces in the Philippines. Killing squads rampaged through the town, beheading anyone who spoke English or was suspected of having western affiliations.
Whole families were annihilated. Most of the Japanese troops then pulled into the interior, taking with them 536 ill and skeletal POWs deemed fit enough to walk. Another 288 were left behind in the open, in the belief that invasion forces would soon arrive.
The food was better organised on this second march, but the POWs were in very poor shape. Suffering from malnutrition, malaria, beriberi and dysentery, and with tropical ulcers exposing leg bones, they shuffled along at a rate of about 800 metres every hour. It took them a month to reach Ranau, a journey that the first marchers had completed in just over a fortnight.
They were in such a pitiful state that Tuaty Akai, a Dusun man maintaining a mountainous section of the track, tried to give them food, only to be beaten back by the guards. Further on, Domoit, a Dusun farmer forced to act as a runner for the Japanese, came across an Australian POW hiding in the jungle. Using secret hunting trails, Domoit took him to his village, Kampong Miruru, in an adjoining valley, where villagers built the fugitive a shelter and kept him supplied with food until strong enough to be handed over to a headman further down the river, who had harboured other escapees.
Unfortunately, despite Miruru village’s best efforts, the Australian did not survive.
This story was not known until 2009, when I visited Miruru and met Domoit. To thank the village, which is very poor, the ‘silent army’ supplied sufficient funds to build and outfit a much-needed pre-school, and supplied other essential goods to make their lives easier.
At Paginatan village Domima, the small daughter of the village headman, left rice and fish for six prisoners who had also left the column and were hiding in the nearby jungle. The headman offered to hide them in his house, but the POWs refused, saying it would be certain death to the whole village if caught. Domima left out food for the six days that they were in hiding. On the seventh, she found a cigarette tin containing six gold wedding rings - the fugitives’ most precious possessions. Some time later she heard shots fired. She didn’t know what this signified, but she never saw any of the POWs again.
Balabiu, the young girl who had tossed the banana leaf packets to survivors from the first march, had now moved with her mother from Ranau to the village of Nalapak, about 20 kilometres away. As the column passed by on the second march, they were able to slip food to the emaciated men.
On 26 June, just 183 POWs out of the 536 who had set out on the 2nd march reached their destination - a small jungle camp hidden deep in a valley, 8 kilometres south of Ranau. Thirty-six days later, on 1 August, only 33 POWs were left alive. Seventeen who were very ill were shot that day. The remaining 15 were murdered in cold blood on 27 August, 12 days after the war ended. Their deaths brought death toll on the marches to 1047.
No one left behind at Sandakan survived. Although local Chinese defied the very real prospect of death to push food beneath the wire, when the sun rose on 15 August only one POW, an Australian, remained alive in the compound. At 7.15am John Skinner was blindfolded, forced to his knees and beheaded. Less than five hours later Emperor Hirohito announced that Japan had unconditionally surrendered.
Skinner’s death brought the Allied death toll at Sandakan to almost 1400. In all, 2428 POWs died at the hands of the Japanese at Sandakan or on the death marches. All 641 British were wiped out. A total of 1787 Australians perished - a death rate of 99.75 per cent.
The Japanese, understandably, were confident that no one was left alive and that their heinous crimes would not be discovered. However, not everyone was dead. Six Australians had escaped from the death marches. And it is due entirely to the bravery of the local people that they lived to tell the tale.
Two escaped in mid-June on the second march, about 60 miles from Sandakan. Owen Campbell, after wandering in the jungle in a semi delirious state for some days, was found by Galunting, from Kampong Muanad on the Labuk River.
Under the direction of the very anti-Japanese headman Kulang, the villagers concealed Campbell behind a false wall in one of the houses for about three weeks, by which time he was sufficiently fit to undergo a journey by boat and make contact with an Australian commando, operating behind the lines. From here the escapee was evacuated to the Philippines by flying boat on 26 July.
Dick Braithwaite, who escaped two days after Campbell, had the good fortune to be found almost immediately by Abing bin Luma. He was headman of Kampong Sapi, where Bede Willie, of Chinese-Dusun parentage and working for the Australian commandos, was currently based. Braithwaite, who was in relatively good shape, was quickly evacuated by boat to Libaran Island, at the mouth of the Labuk River, where the villagers hailed an American PT boat on its way to shoot up Japanese outposts.
Like the people of Marakau, Muanad, Miruru and Paginatan, the Sapi rescuers knew they were taking an enormous risk. They knew exactly what the Japanese were capable of doing. Two villagers had recently witnessed the massacre of an entire community, with adults mown down by machine gun fire and babies tossed into the air and impaled on bayonets.
The remaining POWs escaped from the final camp at Ranau in July. The first four to leave, Keith Botterill, Bill Moxham, Nelson Short and Frank Anderson, were found by Barigah, the Dusun headman of Kibas village, to the west of Ranau. The villagers hid them in deep jungle on the slopes of Mt Kinabalu for five weeks, until word was received on 24 August that Australian troops had parachuted into the jungle to the north. By this time Anderson had died. The Japanese, who were still active, were offering a reward for the escapees, dead or alive. However, Kaingal and Sumping, Barigah’s cousins, led them via back trails to the commandos and safety.
The fourth man, Bill Sticpewich, escaped thee weeks after the first group with another POW named Herman Reither, after a friendly guard warned that orders to kill all the prisoners had been received. The pair was given shelter for the night by Dusun farmer Ginssas, before moving further west, where they were found by another Dusun farmer, known as Godohil. He and his wife hid them on their farm for over a week, but Reither did not survive. On 8 August, word arrived that a small ground party, which had spent six weeks trekking through the jungle from the northern part of Sabah, was now in hiding to the north of Ranau. The next day Sticpewich too was led to safety.
The four escapees were finally evacuated from Ranau by air on 20 September.
Sandakan and the death marches were the worst atrocity perpetrated against our nation in World War 2. The six who survived what has been described as Australia’s holocaust, owed their survival to the courage of many Sabahans, who selflessly laid their lives on the line to help fellow human beings.
With so many details of the Sandakan story only revealed with the publication of my book in 1998, it was not until 2008 that the relatives and friends of the POWs had the opportunity to let the people of Sabah, and indeed the world, know how much they valued their friendship. The thank you came in the form of stage 2 of the stained glass Windows Project, the beautiful and aptly named Friendship Windows, celebrating the bonds of friendship between Australia and Sabah – bonds that have strengthened, not lessened with the passage of time, which now spans more than 75 years.
For many of those years, Malaysians like Pauline Wong have been the beneficiaries of this priceless legacy, a strong and abiding friendship that has turned tragedy into triumph.
After the unveiling of the Friendship Windows, plaques of appreciation from POW relatives and friends were presented to three of Sabah’s finest surviving wartime heroes: Domima who, as a 12-year-old girl had left food for the six prisoners at Paginatan; Kaingal, Barigah’s cousin, who helped save the lives of three of the escapees at Ranau. And Sini, the Boy Scout, who put his duty to his King, country and fellow man above all else.
Dignified and unassuming, these three elderly people were among the last of the many Sabahans who had so willingly and selflessly offered their unconditional friendship to strangers in distress. As their names were announced, the entire congregation of more than 300 people rose to its feet, in thunderous and spontaneous applause - a reminder to all that brotherly love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust - that brotherly love still stands when all else has fallen.
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