Sandakan POW Camp & Australian Soldiers
It remains the single-worst atrocity against Australians at war. Yet many Australians have probably never heard of Sandakan. So few men returned from the Japanese prisoner of war camp on the island of Borneo after World War II it has become a neglected chapter in Australia’s wartime history.
In fact 2,000 Australians spent time as POWs at Sandakan. And of the nearly 1,800 still captive there at the end of the war, only six men survived.
All of which makes Sydney man Billy Young rare indeed. He spent three years as a POW under the Japanese.
He is the only surviving rank and file Australian soldier who spent time at Sandakan. And he is the only POW still alive who was imprisoned at Outram Road Jail in Singapore.
Now aged 90, he has written a book about his inspiring story. “Billy: My Life as a Teenage POW”, co-written with historian Lynette Silver.
Mr Young would never have gone to war if his mother had not abandoned him as a baby. Adora Shaw walked out on Billy and his father William in Hobart in about 1927 and returned to Sydney with another son Kevin, from an earlier relationship.
Billy never saw her again. One of his earliest memories is of his father taking him to Sydney to search for her, and later showing him her grave. She had apparently died of tuberculosis.
A decade later his father also died. He had joined the Australian Communist Party and gone to Spain to fight in the civil war, but was caught and shot by forces loyal to dictator General Franco.
“When he was gone, I was like a wild animal,” Mr Young says from his home near Hurstville. “I was a rebel. I wanted my dad. He was the only person of authority I could listen to.”
At 15, a fellow student told him he wanted to enlist in the army. It was 1941. Australian troops were fighting overseas. Billy decided to join him. “The fella said to us ‘what mob do you want to join?’ And we said the one that goes overseas. He said ‘that’s the AIF’, and I said ‘that’s us’. He said ‘how old are you?’ And we said ‘how old have you gotta be?’ He said 19. We said ‘well, we’re 19’.”
See Billy Young, only a short 1:41
With no parents to give consent, the boys took the enlistment forms and signed each other’s paper. At 15 they were soldiers.
Hoping for a boys’ own adventure, they joined the 100,000 allied troops in Singapore. Mr Young says initially there was no fear of the Japanese. “Intelligence officers used to say to us: ‘Those Japanese — they’re nothing. They’re blind. They all wear glasses, they’re short-sighted’,” he says.
“But when they came down it was no laughing matter. They knew what they were doing.”
Soon after Billy’s 16th birthday the allied forces crumbled under the Japanese. Billy was suddenly a prisoner of war at Changi.
Then, with hundreds more soldiers he was shipped to Borneo to build a Japanese airstrip at Sandakan in the Malaysian jungle. It was stinking hot, humid and overrun by mosquitoes. But it was nothing against the brutal treatment of the Japanese.
The lack of food and water, torture and beatings were all common. “Sandakan was tremendously brutal towards the end of the war. Food was cut back to below starvations rations,” co-author Ms Silver says.
“And as Japan was losing the war, the punishment handed out was far more brutal than in the beginning. People were placed in a cage for 40 days and 40 nights. And some of them actually died in the cage.” Mr Young survived the Japanese brutality. But he watched other POWs suffer from starvation and the worst violence.
One such victim was a young Aboriginal soldier Jimmy Darlington, who had dared to strike a Japanese soldier for washing his clothes in the prisoners’ cooking pot. He was bound and tied to sharp stakes of wood and left to suffer.
“One of the Japs grabbed a bucket of water,” Mr Young says.
“Another was grabbing ropes and he put it in the water, and knelt him on the platform and tied him down with ropes, or wet ropes. The sun started to shine and dried the ropes. And the ropes tightened up, and cut right into his wrists and his legs.”
Only after Mr Young and his mates created a diversion to distract the Japanese could another Australian soldier — an ambulance officer — move in to cut the ropes. Without it, Mr Young says Darlington would have died.
But far worse was in store for Mr Young. After a failed escape he was tried and sent to the hellhole that was Outram Road jail back in Singapore. He spent six months in solitary confinement — forced to sit cross legged for hours at a time.
Food rations were so pitiful prisoners, including Mr Young, became skeletal. He sat by while one of his fellow prisoners, a Dutch man, died of Beri-Beri in his arms.
“I put his head on my lap. I chatted to him and I pushed his chest and felt it. And you could feel it going up and down as he was panting for breath,” Mr Young says. “But death must have had slippers because he died and I didn’t know. So I waited.
“I put him down and I didn’t tell the guard, and I waited till his box of rice came and I put Peter’s bowl by him. And I got mine, I ate mine, and then I ate Peter’s. And that’s the only banquet we ever had between us you know.”
The bombing of Hiroshima signaled freedom for Mr. Young. Returning to Sydney, he couldn’t wait to reunite with his old mates from Sandakan.
But he couldn’t find them. “I waited and waited and waited. It took me ages to find out,” he says.
Only six men of the nearly 1,800 Australians in Sandakan at the end of the war survived. Many had died in the so-called Death Marches, when the Japanese forced them to walk as near-skeletons, 250 kilometres across Borneo.
Hundreds more starved to death. Still others were executed even after the war ended.
“The death rate at Sandakan for the Australians, 1,787 died, was 99.75 per cent,” Ms Silver says.
Some of Mr Young’s mates from Outram Rd also didn’t last long.
“One of my dear friends got home in Tasmania and not home long and he went into his mum and dad’s orchard and blew his brains out with a rifle,” he sobs.
Mr Young was only 19 when he returned to Sydney. He had his own demons to confront. “We had no one who understood the trauma. Not the. Even now… at 91 almost, there are still stories I cannot tell. I bawl like a little baby,” he said.
But 70 years on, the wounds have finally healed. Mr Young today is an avid painter. His home is filled with paintings of his time at Sandakan and Outram Rd Jail.
“He very rarely has a down moment. He is just so positive, and I think that his positive attitude has gotten him this far,” his daughter says.
Mr Young’s paintings — and now the book he has written with Ms Silver — will remain a lasting record of the mates he lost at Sandakan. “For Billy and me they are frozen in time,” she says. “We know them as they were – as 18-year-old men. And that’s probably the great thing about the ode that we say – they shall grow not old as we that are left grow old…”
“For the two of us they are still the people that left Australia as young people, young men with hope for the empire and their country. Taking on the Japanese, and who never came home.”
Click on images to enlarge.
Article contributed by Beari
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Military Humor – from Lt. Ronald Williams, POW Java
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Farewell Salutes –
Ila Albert – Belmont, MA; US Army WAC; WWII, ETO
Robert Anderson – Omaha, NE; US Army Air Corps, WWII, radar operator
Eric Boyd – Bathurst, AUS; British Navy, WWII
Charles Carlson – Queens, NY; US Army Air Corps, WWII, ETO, Lt., P-47 pilot, KIA
Gennis ‘Pete’ Elks – Farmville, NC; US Navy, WWII, Korea & Vietnam, Sr. Chief Petty Officer (Ret. 32 yrs.)
James Garner – Bridgeville, PA; USMC, WWII, PTO
Dick Helf – Wichita, KS; US Navy, WWII/ US Air Force, Korea
Effie (Robertson) Morton – NZ; RNZ Army WAAC, WWII # 813367, gunner
Ara Parseghian – Akron, OH; US Navy, WWII, (Hall of Fame coach of Notre Dame Univ.)
Amory Shields – Toronto, CAN; RC Navy & Dept. of National Defense
Garnet Winfrey – Bramwell, WV; US Army Air Corps, WWII, PTO, Sgt., 11th Airborne Division Honor Guard
Posted on August 3, 2017, in First-hand Accounts, Uncategorized, WWII and tagged Australia, Borneo, History, Military, Military History, Pacific War, Sandakan POW Camp, veterans, WW2, WWII. Bookmark the permalink. 197 Comments.
Reblogged this on Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News.
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Thank you, Ned.
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HaleluYah they rip….amen
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The government may wish to forget these men, but the people will not!!
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PS. I tried to go back onto your site, but could not locate it. Is the url correct?
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I came across this book twelve months ago and was shattered by it. I have read a lot of book about Australian POWS, loving the history, and more importantly, the stories of their tenacity under extreme circumstances, resilience of the human spirit, and the humour. Yep, humour. Magnificent bloody humour. This one, however, I could not read in bed at night – it just left me utterly “wiped out”. Thankyou for sharing. We need to remember, we need to learn.
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That is probably the reason why it is so forgotten by today’s generations – it is a roough tale to hear about – much less remember.
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I’ve put this on the Facebook page:,World War II True Stories: https://www.facebook.com/World-War-II-True-Stories-879652208804003/
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Thank you very much, Mary! This story has been lost in the archives of history for far too long.
[PS. I edited True Stories for you]
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Thanks.
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Sure thing.
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A youngish Japanese woman once told me how shocked she was when in Paris, and some Parisians shouted at her, and threw fruit… she had no idea what the Japanese had done during the war, and of course, she did not want to hear…
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Every nation has eras of history they would like forgotten, but how then can we learn from it? I know many countries fail to teach their history properly and we are quickly becoming the same way.
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yes, indeed, too true…
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Amazing painful story but one of survival. Thank you for sharing this post!
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History brushes over things like this and they become more and forgotten as years tick away. I feel it’s up to us to hold the remembrance.
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It’s not even like it is a distant history. This is the story of our fathers and grandfathers. Somehow after the horrors in days of victory it was decided to paint a cheery face on life once everyone returned. But the horrors remained, hidden. No recognition of PTSD, no acknowledgement of traumas. I remember a cleaning lady in our hospital in 1967 who suddenly seemed embarrassed as she pulled down her sleeve because the number tattooed in the prison camps was showing. It is up to us and everyone we can rally.
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I completely agree, Chris. The first family doctor we had sported a numbered tattoo on his left arm. He was a German Jew. I remember how I froze when I first noticed it. Even as a child, I knew what it meant.
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A deeply moving story. To treat prisoners in such a way is beyond despicable.
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War has been described as many things – I don’t think any quite do it justice in depicting the reality.
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So much work here hope can come and read more in a few days
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I understand Mary Lou, don’t worry. I know what it’s like to be behind schedule!!!
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Thank you for sharing this GP, Sandakan rings a bell and the death marches are well known. Yet the details I was not aware of. I knew Billy’s photo but not his story so thank you.
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You are very welcome. Stories like Billy’s are difficult to read, but need to be told.
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The cruelty we show to one another just brings me to tears. While painful to read I am glad you share these.
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I thank you for reading through these stories. I know how difficult it can be, but I feel these men suffered more and should be remembered. And I believe that is exactly why you read it.
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Reblogged this on Musings of a Penpusher and commented:
The truth emerges, but why must humans cause such suffering?
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Excellent intro, Maureen, thank you.
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Reposted in part w/ linkback. https://profilesincourage.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/sandakan-pow-camp-death-rate-99-75/
All these decades later, I become enraged reading about the brutality. Related:
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I appreciate you helping me to share these stories. So many of these men have been forgotten.
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This story details the horror of being a POW of the Japanese, who, it seems, were even more cruel than were the Nazis.
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I suppose their culture allowed it at the time and they were pretty much out of food and supplies even for their own troops. There are more than 2 sides to every story.
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Every time I read about the experiences of a Japanese POW, I think I’ve read the most horrifying story and then along comes another such this one. Thanks for sharing his story with us.
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You are very welcome, Maryann. I keep hoping people will learn from these stories.
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So sad. This story broke my heart. I’m glad he found some peace despite his terrible experiences. Thanks for sharing, GP Cox.
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I feel these stories must be shared so that these events will not be repeated and for the younger generations to realize what that generation went through for their freedoms.
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Wow, such a sad yet good story. It’s never too late to tell your story. Way to go, Billy.
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Thank you for reading it, Jennie, I know it must be difficult.
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You’re welcome, GP.
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Thank you very much.
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Thank you very much.
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