Sandakan - The Untold Story Of The Death Marches by Paul Ham

Author:Paul Ham [Ham, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War II, World
ISBN: 9781448126262
Google: 9w-tFuT-cakC
Amazon: 1864711418
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-07-17T14:00:00+00:00

25

THE GUARDS

One [Australian] was puffed up with beri beri in the legs and face and was getting along all right on his own and could have made it; but the Japs would not leave him alone, they tried to force him along, and eventually he collapsed. They kicked him on the ground . . .

Private Bill Moxham

Ranau in 1945 is a village of earthen streets, bamboo and palm-frond kampongs, and cinnamon-coloured atap shops set on a river flat in the shadow of Mount Kinabalu. The tranquil appearance is deceptive: a Japanese garrison occupies the town. Most of the inhabitants have left, to join the fighters in the forests. In the foothills of the sacred peak live the Dusun and other tribal groups, still flush with the spirit of resistance after the collapse of the Double Tenth. Stories of rape, murder, cannibalism and torture by the Japanese foment fear and loathing of the occupying forces. Japanese reprisals have been thorough after the terrible end of Kwok’s Kinabalu Guerrillas. The villages around Ranau have been torched or occupied, forcing thousands into the forest to live off the land, using their blowpipes to kill wild boar, monkeys, birds – and Japanese stragglers. Locals tell grisly tales of tribesmen being tied up and ‘eaten slowly’, kept alive to preserve the uneaten flesh – a practice also recorded by Papuan natives during the Japanese occupation in 1942.

At the village of Sinarut, near Ranau, the survivors of the First March are ordered to stop; here, they will camp temporarily. They are incapable of reaching Tuaran – even the guards can see this glaring fact. All have dysentery, beriberi and/or malaria. They are now corralled into a wired enclosure – ‘No. 1 Prison Camp’ – containing a few atap huts, close to the airstrip, under the command of Lieutenant Watanabe Genzo, who has recently arrived from Kuching.

Their severely depleted numbers, and broken condition, disturb Watanabe’s estimations. How, he wonders, will these men complete their new duties? Specifically, how will they carry rice to the Japanese garrison back in Paginatan? His concern is a matter of military pragmatism. The war is rapidly coming to Borneo; even in Ranau, the threat of air bombardment is ever-present. A sense of being isolated, cut off in the South-West Pacific, gradually pervades the Japanese garrison, as the Allied armies swirl around this great green island.

The men no longer observe the exacting standards of fairness they did in Sandakan; ‘[W]hen they arrived at Ranau most of them developed the habit of keeping all they could get for themselves,’ according to Jackson’s account. ‘Jealousy and suspicion was rife, and maltreatment and starvation had affected some of their minds to such a state that they acted like primitive people and animals . . . quarrelling over food.’ It is an accurate, if callously worded, description: what on earth are these men to do other than scrape and beg and fight for their next meal?

The natives witness the rapid rate of attrition with helpless dismay. Some try to give food to the passing lines.

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