For general info on Sandakan survivors.
Different kind of torture for Sandakan survivors
By Alan Ramsey
August 6, 2003
Keith Botterill, a Katoomba textile printer, was 19 when he enlisted in the army at Sydney’s Victoria Barracks on August 7, 1941. Six months later, after the fall of Singapore, Botterill was a prisoner of the Japanese in Changi.
In July 1942 he was shipped to the Sandakan POW camp in North Borneo. Somehow he would survive the next three years. He would also survive the infamous Sandakan death marches in January-February and May-June, 1945.
Volume four of the official war histories says, at page 604, that “some 2500 British and Australian prisoners” died at Sandakan, Ranua or during the 100-kilometre death marches between the two. The exact number, as recorded by the Australian War Memorial, is 2428 “known” dead: 1787 Australians and 641 Brits. Botterill was one of only six POWs, all Australians, who survived.
Botterill’s is a remarkable story. So is that of the other five Sandakan survivors. Gunner Owen Campbell, a Brisbane labourer aged 24 when he enlisted in 1940, was picked up near Ranua by an Allied guerilla party in July 1945 after almost 3 years of captivity, beatings, starvation and illness. A second guerilla party found four others a month later. They had escaped after a friendly Japanese guard warned them that all surviving POWs at Ranua were to be shot. Botterill was one of the four.
The other three were: Private Nelson Short, of Enfield, Sydney, aged 22 when he enlisted on July 11, 1940; Lance-Bombardier Bill Moxham, a 28-year-old station overseer from Toongabbie, NSW; and Warrant Officer Bill Sticpewich, a meat inspector from Wickham, NSW, the leader of the escape group. The sixth Sandakan survivor was Bombardier James Richard Braithwaite, of Brisbane, 23 when he enlisted in June 1940, who would later write of Sandakan in the journal Stand-To.
Braithwaite had escaped from Ranua on June 8, 1945, and was rescued a week later by an American PT boat. The official war history records: “These six men were the only survivors of some 2500 British and Australian prisoners at Sandakan after the transfer of their officers to Kuching [in September 1942] … All were dead by August 15 [1945].” Three weeks earlier, when Sticpewich, Botterill, Short and Moxham slipped away from Ranua camp, “only 32 were then alive, six of them unconscious”.
Half a century later, in her book Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence, a terrible story of official obfuscation over an aborted proposal to liberate the Sandakan POWs in early 1945, author Lynette Silver records what happened to all six Sandakan survivors. Sticpewich, after living through the worst of POW bestiality for three years, was knocked down and killed in Melbourne in 1977 “while crossing the road”.
Moxham, who “thrived on living dangerously” before the war was “so profoundly affected” by his POW years that he committed suicide in 1961, not yet 50. Braithwaite died of cancer in 1986. Short did not survive a heart attack in 1995. Botterill lived to see Silver complete her book before dying of emphysema on the eve of Australia Day 1997. At the time of publication, Campbell, the last of the Sandakan Six, was a recluse. He died a month ago.
It is a melancholy closure to a terrible period of Australia’s military history. Silver records in her book: "The POWs, sent from Singapore in 1942-43 to work on airfield construction, endured frequent beatings and other, more diabolical punishment. Many died of malnutrition, maltreatment and disease. In 1945, in response to an order from the Japanese High Command that no prisoners were to survive the war, those still able to walk were sent on a series of death marches into the interior. In late 1944 the Allies, aware that POWs were being ‘eliminated’, had evolved a plan for their rescue - a rescue which, after months of bungling, was finally cancelled in April 1945 in the erroneous belief the Sandakan camp had been evacuated.
“Gross incompetence was to blame for the failed attempt. When it was realised that mistakes and stupidity were responsible, those at the highest level shifted the blame before embarking on a policy of wilful and deliberate suppression.”
At Sydney’s Burwood Park three days ago a commemoration ceremony was held at the Sandakan Memorial and its roll of honour, dedicated by the Keating government 10 years ago. The ceremony got four paragraphs in this newspaper the following morning. I thought you should have a thumb sketch of the terrible history behind those four paragraphs.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/05/1060064186644.html
