On the 15th of August 1945, the same morning Emperor Hirohito told Japan the war was over, a 15-year-old Chinese kitchen worker named Wong Hiong climbed a rubber tree inside the Sandakan prisoner of war camp in North Borneo and watched a Japanese sergeant major draw his sword. Below him, four foremost guards had dragged the last living prisoner from a leanto made of blankets and ground sheets.
The man was Australian. He was tall, dark-haired, naked, except for a loin cloth, his legs covered in ulcer so deep that bone showed through. He couldn’t resist. A cloth was tied over his eyes. He didn’t speak. He was forced to his knees over a drainage trench, and Sergeant Major Morizumi, took his head off with a single stroke.
5 hours later, the emperor’s broadcast reached Borneo. The war was over. The prisoner, later identified as Private John Skinner from Tenderfield in New South Wales, didn’t know that he was the last of 2434. Of those, 1,787 were Australian. 641 were British. Six Australians escaped and survived. Every single British prisoner perished.
The death rate among Australian prisoners at Sandacan was 99.75%. On the Burma Railway, the worst force, FORCE, lost 44%. [music] At Sandacan, the Japanese didn’t just work men until they collapsed. They marched the survivors into the jungle and shot them when they fell, bayonetted them when they stopped, and executed the ones still breathing after the surrender.
And the allies knew where they were. The camp at Sandacan sat on the northeast coast of Borneo, 16 km outside the town on the site of a former agricultural research station belonging to the North Borneo Chartered Company. The Japanese chose it in 1942 because it was flat enough for an airirstrip and remote enough to disappear from view.
The first Australians to arrive were B force 1,496 men shipped from Changi on the transport Ubimaru. They left Singapore on the 8th of July 1942 and reached Sandacon on the 17th after 9 days in the hold. Lieutenant Rod Wells looked at the coastline as they came in and thought the red chalk hills were impressive. He allowed himself to hope for a moment that this place might be free of the Japanese. It wasn’t.
The men were marched 12 km to a compound built for 300 civilian internes. They were there to build an airfield for the Japanese military and they were put to work immediately. Conditions in the first year were tolerable by prisoner of war standards. The men received enough food to function. They earned 10 cents a day. A coconut or a banana cost a scent at the camp canteen.
In April 1943, 776 British prisoners arrived, followed between April and June by another 500 Australians from Eforce. The camp population reached approximately 2,700. Captain Lionel Matthews of the ETH division signals had arrived with Bforce and wasted almost no time. Within weeks of reaching Sandacan, he’d built an underground intelligence [music] network that ran from inside the wire to the local population and beyond.
Matthews made contact with an Australian doctor, [music] JP Taylor, who ran the government hospital in town. Through Taylor and members of the British North Borneo Constabularary, local police still operating under Japanese supervision, he secured maps, medical supplies, a revolver, and parts for a wireless receiver.
By September 1942, he’d consolidated the network, established radio contact with guerilla forces in the Philippines, and begun organizing escape parties for Australian prisoners. He also recruited members of the local Chinese community, civilian internes on nearby [music] Burhala Island, and even the governor of British North Borneo, who was himself interned.
Matthews was building toward an armed uprising, timed to coincide with an Allied landing. The whole thing ran under the noses of the Japanese for nearly a year. In July 1943, [music] the network was betrayed. The Kempe Thai Japanese military police swept through the camp. Matthews, Wells, and several others were arrested.
The Japanese tortured Matthews for months trying to get him to give up names. He didn’t give up a single one. He was transferred to Outram Road Jail in Singapore, then to Cuching on the western side of Borneo. He was sentenced to death for espionage and contravening prisoner of war regulations.
On the 2nd of March 1944, Matthews was executed by firing squad at Cuching alongside two members of the North Borneo armed constabularary and six other Asians who’d helped the underground. He was 31 years old. After the war, he was [music] postumously awarded the George Cross, the highest award for gallantry outside direct combat.
The citation read that he had shown courage of the highest order and steadfastly refused under brutal torture, beatings, and starvation to implicate any of his associates. The destruction of the Matthews network changed everything inside the wire. The Japanese stripped the camp of its officers, transferring most of them to Batu Lintang camp at Cuching in August 1943.
With the officers gone, discipline collapsed. the Japanese kind. Captain Hoshiima Susumi, the camp commandant, was an engineer by training, physically large at 180 cm and a satist by disposition. He’d greeted new arrivals in April 1943 with a speech the survivors memorized word for word. You will work until your bones rot under the tropical sun of Borneo.
He told them the war would last 100 years. Any man who escaped would cost three or four others their lives. The Formosan guards who’d replaced the older Japanese contingent in April 1943, made things worse. The cage, a wooden punishment box measuring 130 cm x 170, barely large enough to sit in, became routine.
No talking inside the cage, no bedding at night, no mosquito nets. Keith Bodil spent 40 days in one for stealing [music] rations. Beatings on work details became a daily occurrence. One work party would be progressing normally, then the guards would order everyone to stop and the beatings would begin. There was no logic to it. It was policy.
Through 1944, [music] the prisoners continued building the airirstrip while their rations shrank and their bodies broke down. Tropical ulcers ate through skin to bone. Baraberry bloated limbs until they split. Malaria, dysentery, and pelgra circulated through the camp without interruption because the Japanese withheld medical supplies they had in storage.
In September 1944, Allied bombers found the airfield and started hitting it. By December, [music] the runway was wrecked beyond repair. The Japanese had no further use for the prisoners. The daily rice ration dropped to between 140 and 200 g per man, about a cup, despite adequate supplies sitting in the Japanese stores.
By January 1945, the rice issued to prisoners stopped entirely. At that point, approximately 1,900 men were still alive in the camp. The Japanese knew the Allies were coming. American forces had landed in the Philippines and Borneo was next. The decision was made, attributed to Lieutenant General Baba Masau, commanding officer of the 37th Japanese Army, to move the prisoners 260 km west through the jungle interior to the town of Rena in the mountains near Mount Kinabalu.
The official justification was to use them as supply carriers. The real reason was to get them away from any Allied landing zone. An unwritten order circulated through the Japanese chain of command. No prisoner was to survive the war. Local headmen were ordered to cut a track through the mountains linking existing bridal trails.
They didn’t know it would be used for prisoners, so they deliberately routed it through the worst terrain they could find, away from any settlement, across swamp, through dense rainforest, over mountain ridges. The track was designed to be unusable. The Japanese sent the prisoners down it anyway.
The first march left [music] Sandacon on the 28th of January, 1945. 455 men were selected as the fittest available. Though every one of them was malnourished, sick, or both. They moved in groups of roughly 50, one group per day. They carried Japanese [music] supplies and baggage. 60% of them had no boots.
The route ran through waistdeep swamp, over tree roots and loose stone, up steep mountain slopes, and through mud that sometimes reached [music] their necks. They were given rations for 4 days. The march took 17. Anyone who fell behind was dealt with by a designated rear detachment. The guards shot them, bayonetted them, or beat them with rifle butts until they stopped moving.
The bodies were dragged a few meters off the track and left in the jungle. Keith Bil was in the third group to leave. Of his 50, 37 reached Rena. He saw men shot and bayoneted because they couldn’t keep pace. Five were executed on a single mountain [music] slope in half a day because they couldn’t climb.
By March, approximately 195 of the original 455 had reached runout. They found nothing waiting for them. No shelter, no food supply, no medical facilities. It rained without stopping. The survivors built lean tubes from branches and crawled [music] underneath. The only food was 70 to 75 gram of rice per day, less than half a cup.
Drinking water had to be carried by hand from a creek 800 m away. [music] The men who could still walk were sent on carrying parties, hauling 50 lb loads of rice over 12 or 13 miles for the Japanese. By April, another 110 had perished from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. The rate was roughly seven men per day. Back at Sandakan, 885 prisoners had already perished before the first march even began.
But the Japanese weren’t finished. On the 29th of May, a second march was ordered. Captain Takakua Takuo had taken over command of the [music] camp on the 17th of May. He ordered the 536 remaining prisoners to march for Runau, then burned the camp behind them. Compound number one was destroyed to eliminate evidence. The men on the second march were in far worse condition than those on the first.
Many knew they wouldn’t survive. Nelson Short, who [music] was on the second march, remembered men shaking hands with mates who couldn’t continue knowing what was about to happen. There was nothing anyone could do. You kept walking or you stopped. Once you stopped, you stopped for good. 113 men perished within the first 8 days.
A group of about 35 were massacred near Tangul. The survivors ate snails and tree ferns because the Japanese provided almost nothing. After 26 days, [music] 183 prisoners reached Rena on the 27th of June. They found six [music] Australians and one British soldier alive from the first march. Everyone else was gone.
A third march left Sandacon in midJune with 75 of the weakest men remaining. None of them made it past 50 km. [music] Every man who fell was shot. The entire group perished on the track. At Sandakan, roughly 290 prisoners had been left behind because they couldn’t walk. The camp was burned. There were no buildings, no shelter.
The men lay in the open on stretchers, dying at a rate of 10 to 12 per day. A young Chinese worker managed to smuggle yams to them. When he delivered food in August, only five were still breathing. They asked him when he was going to bring more. They hadn’t eaten in a week. On the 13th of July, the Japanese led 23 prisoners who could still stand out of the camp toward the airirstrip they’d spent 2 years building.
Wong Hiong heard the shots. When the guards came back, he asked what they’d been shooting. They told him ducks. He asked how many. They said 23. The remaining 28 wasted away over the next three weeks. The Japanese guard Gooto Yashiro testified after the war that the prisoners at the end were too sick [music] to feed themselves, that the Japanese didn’t cook for them, and that those who could crawl cared for the ones who couldn’t.
Then he claimed they’d all perished of natural causes by the 15th of August. He failed to mention the beheading Wong Hyong watched from his rubber tree. At Rena, the situation reached its final stage in August 1945. The remaining prisoners, roughly 32 men, were too weak to walk. The Japanese carried or forced them to crawl up a hill to a makeshift graveyard.
They were reportedly given water and tobacco, then shot. Evidence gathered after the war indicates this execution took place on or around the 27th of August, 12 days after the official Japanese surrender. While all of this was happening, Allied intelligence knew about Santa. The services reconnaissance department had been gathering information since late 1944.
Z Special Unit launched Operation August [music] in March 1945. A series of reconnaissance insertions into Borneo. Major Gortchester and six operatives landed near Santaon in Agus 1 and established contact with local informants. They compiled reports on conditions in the camp, Japanese troop movements, and cargo schedules. The intelligence went up the chain.
A rescue plan existed. It was cenamed Project Kingfisher. The concept involved Australian paratroopers dropping into the area to evacuate the prisoners. Shipping, aircraft, and troops were placed on standby. The first Australian parachute battalion was assigned but not briefed. The plan required final intelligence from the Agus team before launch. That intelligence didn’t arrive.
Sometime between the 16th and 19th of April 1945, the Agus1 team was reassigned to a West Coast mission. The official reason was vague information received about the prisoners of war. Chester continued compiling reports through May and June requesting instructions on how to act. He received no response.
[music] Then the Agus team reported incorrectly that the camp had been abandoned and the prisoners were gone. That killed any remaining momentum for a rescue. General Thomas Blamey, [music] commander of the Australian military forces, later blamed General Douglas MacArthur for withholding aircraft. In a 1947 speech, Blamy said the parachute regiment had been ready, the contacts with [music] prisoners established, and the operation would certainly have saved the death march.
He said destiny didn’t permit them to carry it out. Paul Ham in his book on Santaan was bluntter about the military arithmetic. The brass had no intention of approving the project. The rescue would have required carrier-based combat aircraft. No carriers were operating south of the Philippines in early 1945. A 600 bed [music] hospital ship and a large task force.
MacArthur’s staff considered the whole thing impractical and unacceptable. Whether the failure was intelligence error, bureaucratic paralysis, or a deliberate calculation that 2,000 prisoners weren’t worth the resources is a question historians still argue over. Gary Fawill, who spent years researching the topic in archives in Australia, Britain, and the United States, published his findings in 2023 under the title Operation Kingfisher.
He used recently declassified files, including one released from the British National Archives in 2016, to argue that mistaken intelligence caused [music] the cancellation, and that the mistakes were made at multiple levels of Allied command. His conclusions differed from every previous theory on the subject, but is beyond dispute as the outcome.
The prisoners weren’t rescued, the marches went ahead, and 2,428 men perished. The six who survived did so because they ran. Owen Campbell escaped from the second march on the 7th of June with four other men. Private Edward Skinner, Private Keith Cen, Corporal Ted EMTT, and Private Sydney Weber.
An allied plane flew over during the march, causing chaos, and the five of them slid down a 60-m bank into Bracken while the guards were distracted. They split up after that. Campbell stayed [music] behind with Skinner, who was too sick to move. Skinner was the brother of the last man beheaded at Sandakin, John Skinner.
When Campbell went to find food, Skinner cut his own throat on a serrated tin to give his mate a chance to move faster. Campbell was eventually found by locals and survived. Three of the others in his group were ambushed and handed over to the Japanese. Dick Braithweight, also on the second march, slipped behind a fallen log while the guards weren’t looking and hid until dark.
Riddled with malaria, he made it to the Lubach River where local villagers hid him under banana leaves in a canoe and [music] paddled him upstream for 20 hours. On the 15th of June, his 28th birthday, an American patrol torpedo boat picked him up off Liin Island. A week later, an Australian colonel visited him in hospital and told him they were going in to rescue his mates.
Braithweight rolled over in the bunk, faced the wall, and wept. [music] He told the colonel he’d be too late. At Ranau, Keith Bteril and Private Richard Murray stole rice from the Japanese to stockpile [music] food for an escape. When the theft was discovered, Murray stepped forward and took the blame, knowing what it meant. He was bayonetted and thrown into a bomb crater on the 20th of May.
He did it so Bil could live. On the 7th of July, Bil Nelson Short, Bill Moxom, and a fourth man named Andy Anderson broke out of the Rena camp and disappeared into the jungle. Locals from a nearby village hid them and fed them for 7 weeks until the war ended. Bill Stikp Pewitch, the last to escape, got out of Rena on his own and was sheltered by villagers until Allied forces reached the area.
The six survivors testified at war crimes trials on Leuan. Their evidence led to the conviction of 63 Japanese personnel. Eight camp commanders [music] were sentenced to death. Captain Hoshiima was found guilty and hanged on the 6th of April 1946. Captain Takakua and his deputy, Captain Watanabzo, were also convicted and executed.
Sergeant Major Morazzumi, the man who beheaded the last prisoner at Santa, was already serving a life sentence for other crimes at the camp by the time Wong Hiong’s testimony came to light in April 1947. After the trials, the records were sealed. Families received telegrams confirming their sons and husbands had perished.
Most received no further information. British families found it especially difficult to get answers. The full story of Santaon didn’t reach the Australian public until the 1980s and9s when historians and former soldiers forced the archives open. For decades, the families of 24,428 men had a date of death and nothing else.
The survivors didn’t come through clean. Bil struggled with alcohol for the rest of his life and passed away in 1997. Nelson Short had a heart attack in 1995. Dick Braithweight was taken by cancer in 1986. [music] Stick PeeWee was hit by a car crossing a road and passed in 1977. Owen Campbell, the last of them, went in 2003. Among the survivors, there was a deep rift.
Butteril Short and Moxom [music] despised Stickpitch because he’d arrived at Rena looking wellfed while everyone else was skeletal. Stickpich had lived in separate quarters at [music] Sandakon, received extra rations, and avoided the airirstrip labor. The other survivors [music] believed he’d collaborated with the Japanese. Moxom wanted to end him with his bare hands.
Bil and Moxom eventually agreed to let Stickpic live because his memory was so precise that he was the most effective witness against the guards at the war crimes trials. They needed him to lie for them in court. Bil said later to get the Japanese, they needed Stick Pew more than they needed revenge.
The death rate at Sandakan was higher than the Burma Railway, higher than the Baton Death March, higher than any recorded Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Pacific. The Burma Railway took roughly 20% of its Australian prisoners. Sandakon took 99.75%. The allies had the intelligence, the paratroopers, and the shipping.
They had a plan with a name, and then they reassigned the reconnaissance team, lost track of the prisoners, and filed the reports. By the time anyone with authority looked at Borneo again, the camp was ash, and the track was lined with bodies that would take Australian war graves units months to find, guided by locals who remembered where the guards had dragged them off the trail.
The recovered remains were buried at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery on Leuan. Those who couldn’t be identified and those whose bodies were never found are listed on memorials at Labuan and Singapore. The Sandakan campsite is now a memorial park. The airirstrip the prisoners built with hand tools is the present-day Sandakan airport. Planes land on it every
