Sandakan: The Untold Story of the Sandakan Death Marches by Paul Ham

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Ex library copy with all external stickers removed. Discard stamp on inside blank page. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Dust jacket has some light creasing at top edge and at spine. Interior and binding are also very good.

The untold story of the Sandakan Death Marches of the Second World War. This is the story of the three-year ordeal of the Sandakan prisoners of war - a barely known episode of unimaginable horror.

After the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the Japanese transferred 2500 British and Australian prisoners to a jungle camp some eight miles inland of Sandakan on the east coast of North Borneo.

For decades after the Second World War, the Australian and British governments refused to divulge the truth of what happened there for fear of traumatising the victims' families and enraging the people. The prisoners were broken, beaten, worked to death, thrown into bamboo cages on the slightest pretext, starved and subjected to tortures so ingenious and hideous that none survived the onslaught with their minds intact, and only an incredibly resilient few managed to withstand the pain without yielding to the hated Kempei-Tai, the Japanese military police.

But this was only the beginning of the nightmare. In late 1944, Allied aircraft were attacking the coastal towns of Sandakan and Jesselton. To escape the bombardment, the Japanese resolved to abandon the Sandakan Prison Camp and move 250 miles inland to Ranau, taking the prisoners with them as slave labour, carriers and draught horses. Their journey became known as the Sandakan Death Marches. Of the 1000-plus prisoners sent on the Death Marches, only six, all Australians, survived.

This essential and harrowing book narrates the full story of Sandakan, as told through the experiences of many of the participants. Paul Ham has interviewed the families of survivors and the deceased in Australia, Britain and Borneo and consulted thousands of court documents to piece together exactly what happened to the people who suffered and died in British North Borneo and who was responsible. (back cover)