The Sandakan Death Marches

12th February 1945: 'Horrific beyond description' - only six men survive as thousands of starving, sick POWs are forced to trek through the Borneo jungle

Bayonetted to death in cold blood. Private Richard Murray of the Australian Imperial Force, sacrificed himself to save his mate, Keith Botterill, who managed to escape and bear witness to the atrocity.

It must have seemed that nothing could get worse for the POWs who were prisoners of the Japanese on Borneo. In 1942 about 3,500 men, British and Australian, had been brought to Sandakan camp to build an airfield for the Japanese. At the beginning of 1945 around 2,700 men survived - the death rate having increased dramatically at the end of 1944 when the meagre food allowance was cut again.

… the prisoners being shot, butchered and then eaten by the Japanese.

As the area started to suffer from Allied bombing raids, the Japanese decided to march the POWs 164 miles through the jungle interior to Ranau. It was a decision at first welcomed by the POWs who had suffered fatalities from the bombing themselves. They could not have been more wrong.

None of the approximately 800 British POWs would survive the ordeal of the march and accompanying murders, massacres and atrocities. Only six Australians were alive at the end of the war. Just six men out of the 2,700 who had survived the war until January 1945. Those survivors recalled:

If blokes just couldn’t go on, we shook hands with them, and said, you know, hope everything’s all right. But they knew what was going to happen. There was nothing you could do. You just had to keep yourself going. More or less survival of the fittest. Nelson Short

It was a one-way trip when we started to hear shots, and you felt there was no hope for anyone who fell out. Dick Braithwaite

No effort whatsoever was made to bury the dead. They would just pull them five to fifteen yards off the track and bayonet them or shoot them depending on their condition. If they were conscious and it was what we thought was a good kind guard, they would shoot them. There was nothing we could do. Keith Botterill¹