Where did they want to run - to the Australian desert ?
Nah. No desert there, mate. Mild desert starts a long way to the west, and serious desert a lot further west. Parts of Cowra, even then, were almost civilised. We’re trying to civilise the rest now. 
http://australianscreen.com.au/titles/cowra-breakout/map/
What they will eat - kenguroo?
They could have, but you’ve got to catch them on the hop.
Seriously, a decent roo steak cooked the right way beats cheap beef. Better than emu which is hard to describe, but not too bad as an acquired taste. Roo has a lot more flavour and texture than crocodile which is like a tasteless chicken crossed with squid and relies largely on sauces to make its pleasant texture a tasty meal.
It’s very strange - what was the reason of the desperate escape?
I’m very rusty on this event but there’s ? two or three good books on it, the only one of which I can remember being Harry Gordon’s Die Like the Carp which I read a long time ago. I think I still have a copy, but I can’t find it.
My recollection is that, like a couple of German POW examples, a lot of Cowra came down to some zealots controlling the rest.
An awful lot of it also came down to expunging the shame of being captured, which gets into a lot militaristic corruption of Samurai and Shinto ideas and the general bullshit which the Japanese leadership fed to a gullible population which absorbed it because of the communal groupthink which operated in Japan then.
Cowra was a sort of kamikaze break out which would cleanse their souls if they died in the attempt. Which many of them did.
My recollection is that a few of the Japanese dead died by putting their heads on railway lines and being decapitated by trains. Pity all of their countrymen and their colonial Korean soldiers didn’t do the same in Thailand.
The original post doesn’t specify that the breakout involved over 1,000 POW’s heading for open country.
Mst Rising Sun - could you tell us about condition of holding the military prisoners in the Cowra-camp please
Was it the too hard work, bad feeding or maibe it was simply death-camp
No, not a death camp.
We never ran death camps, or even nasty camps compared with what happened in Europe. Never mind what the Japanese did with their camps.
We didn’t need to.
We killed most of the Japanese on the battlefield, or soon after.
If they made it to Cowra, they were in clover.
They didn’t have to work.
They were adequately fed.
Properly housed.
Adequate medical treatment.
Everything that the Japanese didn’t give to the Australian and other Allied POW’s when they starved, tortured, beat, and worked them to death on the Burma Railway and the coal mines in Japan and everywhere else that the Rising Sun shone on the wonders of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere which supposedly liberated the oppressed peoples of Asia from the European colonial yoke.
Every Japanese POW at Cowra was probably a hundred to a thousand times better off than his mates in New Guinea.
This can be demonstrated simply by the absence of cannibalism of their own troops at Cowra, whereas they got their chompers into both Australian prisoners in the field and their own men in New Guinea, without necessarily waiting for our or their blokes to die before they started slicing off bits of long pork (the best bits come from the thigh, apparently, because those were the bits that were most often missing from Australian dead, although the biceps seemed to be a good second choice) for their cooking pots.
That’s when the Japanese weren’t just amusing themselves wiring Australian field prisoners to trees and bayoneting them where it wouldn’t kill them while hacking off their limbs, as they did at Milne Bay and in other engagements where they demonstrated that the Australian Commander in Chief, General Blamey, might have had some reason for his often clearly expressed views that the Japanese were primitive bastards who, although managing to descend from the trees, had a long way to go before they could be regarded as a civilised people. Or even people.
There was a savagery to our war with Japan that, despite the vastly larger scale of the Eastern Front, was never experienced in Europe.
Notwithstanding the bitterness and contempt I have expressed for the vile things the Japanese did to our troops, nurses, civilians and those of other nations, the Cowra breakout has resulted in a highly desirable reconciliation between Australians and Japanese.
Following the cessation of hostilities, members of the Cowra Sub-Branch of the Returned Servicemen’s League (R.S.L) visited the Australian War Cemetery at regular intervals to care for the graves of their comrades. In 1948 they decided to forget the past and also assume the responsibility for the care and the maintenance of the Japanese section of the cemetery in conjunction with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
In 1960 the Japanese Government were considering the repatriation of their war dead to Japan, however they were so impressed with the attitude of the R.S.L members that they decided to bring all their war dead from other parts of Australia to be re-buried at Cowra.
http://www.cowrajapanesegarden.com.au/
On the breakout http://www.anzacday.org.au/history/ww2/anecdotes/cowra.html
