The Sandakan Death March

Private John Skinner awakens on the morning of Wednesday August 15, 1945, to discover he’s the only one left alive at Camp Sandakan. His companion Walter Hancock died during the night, leaving Skinner alone in a place so terrible to him that death would likely be a welcome relief.

Three months earlier Skinner was part of the second march to Ranau, which left Skinner and nearly three hundred other sick and dying soldiers behind. I try to imagine his feelings of fear and loneliness on that fateful morning when he finds himself all alone; his memories of family and friends back home in Tenterfield, New South Wales; the awareness that three years earlier 2,434 Australian and British troops were incarcerated by the Japanese Imperial Army, at this remote jungle outpost in North Eastern Borneo, and now the realization that he’s the only one left alive.

It’s just after 7:00am when Private Skinner is roused from his makeshift bed and marched outside the camp perimeter and up a dirt slope to a slit trench. He is blindfolded and forced to his knees. Even though his hands remain untied, he remains motionless, balanced on the edge of his 31 years. Then, in one powerful swipe, Sergeant-Major Murozumi slices his sword down upon Skinner’s neck. His life is ended. Just five hours later, Emperor Hirohito’s crackling radio broadcast is beamed around the world. Japan has surrendered: the war is over.

Between November and late February each year, this part of Northern Borneo sees prolonged deluges of rain unload so much water on the landscape it quickly overwhelms the ground’s capacity to absorb it. The monsoon season is nature at its most unrelenting, as torrents of water perform their annual destructive dance with gravity, scouring and eroding everything in their path. There was perhaps a time when this road I’m on carried vehicular traffic, but its surface now seems more like my furrowed brow, raked and tortured, as I struggle to walk a straight line. Debris from the slope above is scattered over the pitted surface of the route as we negotiate the first day of our trek.

We had lit out from the village of Boto, several hours earlier, and are presently high on a ridge, gazing at the chocolate brown Labuk River as it pushes its way through the dense green blanket. It’s a magnificent place, but I don’t imagine the men who marched here 61 years ago ever noticed.

Borneo: The mysterious cloud-covered island of impenetrable jungle where the spirits of head hunters still roam, where super-sized bats the size of seagulls guard the night sky, and prehistoric man-eating crocodiles abound. Recently, while casually surfing information about the region, I stumbled upon a shocking tale that played out in the jungles of North Borneo during World War II. It was 1942, after Singapore and Borneo had fallen to the Japanese Imperial Army; a PoW camp was established just outside of the port city of Sandakan on the North Eastern coast of British North Borneo (the region presently known as Sabah) to intern over 2,400 British and Australian troops. The Japanese needed to protect their recently captured oilfields on the island, and were prepared to use the prisoners as forced labour to construct a military airfield. Conditions at the camp quickly deteriorated, and in a short space of time, torture, starvation and disease became the norm amongst the incarcerated.

The momentum of the war had shifted by early 1945. Allied bombing had rendered the newly constructed airstrip unusable, eliminating the need for a PoW work force. Anticipating an imminent Allied invasion of Borneo, the Japanese Imperial Army moved the bulk of its forces overland to the West coast, using the prisoners to hump the supplies. Over six months the sick and emaciated PoWs were force-marched—some as far as 250kms—in three separate groups through dense, primary jungle to the village of Ranau, on the flanks of Mt. Kinabalu, Southeast Asia’s tallest mountain. The track would have severely challenged even the fittest of healthy soldiers, but for men beaten down by disease, starvation and torture, it was a near impossible task. Anyone unable to keep up was executed. And so the blood-letting began.

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