Sandakan 1942-1945 by Richard Reid

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges, particularly right tail corner of front cover. Some minor scratches to front cover near spine.

This book includes a Roll of Honour and the Australian War Memorial Sandakan portraits. Extensively illustrated. The text by Richard Reid was initially published with DVA in 1999 as 'Laden, Fevered, Starved'.

Sandakan is today a large city on the northeast coast of the island of Borneo. In 1945, Borneo was still occupied by the Japanese. At the end of the Pacific war in August, Australian units arrived in the Sandakan area to accept the surrender of the Japanese garrison.

Just 16 kilometres out of Sandakan, in a north-westerly direction, was the Sandakan POW Camp. Here, between 1942 and 1945, the Japanese had, at different times, held over 2700 Australian and British prisoners.

The POWs were brought from Singapore to Borneo to construct a military airfield close to the camp. However, by 15 August 1945, no POWs were left at Sandakan Camp. During October and November 1945, the campsite and some of the jungle area to the west were searched by Australian War Graves units and 3 POW Contact and Enquiry Units. Similar searches were also conducted in a small settlement called Ranau, 260 kilometres west of Sandakan, in the mountains close to north Borneo’s largest mountain, Mount Kinabalu. Eventually, searches were also done all along a jungle track, or rentis, which ran from near Sandakan, through low-lying river swamps and up into the mountains to Ranau.

In these areas at various times, between 1945 and 1947, the personal relics and bodily remains of over 2163 Australian and British POWs were found. The remains of a further 265 known to have been at Sandakan in early January 1945 were never found. Sandakan camp itself was a burnt-out ruin—careful excavation and searching uncovered hundreds of bodies at different burial locations.