How many Australian officers and soldiers became Japanese prisoners of war during World War II?

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The Pacific War broke out in 1941. After the Japanese navy raided Pearl Harbor, it moved south to attack Southeast Asia. On the third day after the war, Japan defeated the new British battleship Prince of Wales and cruiser Repulse, known as the unsinkable ship, and the British naval fleet suffered a devastating blow. On the battlefield in Southeast Asia, the Australian 8th Army Division participated in the battle to defend Malaya and Singapore. However, because the Allied forces were distracted and lost the protection of the sea and air, they were eventually defeated by the Japanese 25th Army commanded by Yamashita Toyotomi. When Singapore fell in February 1942, more than 15,000 officers and soldiers of the Australian 8th Division became Japanese prisoners of war.

Before and after the fall of Singapore, the Japanese army killed Australian nurses. In February 1942, a team of nurses arrived in Malaya with the Eighth Regiment of the Australian Army. Before the fall of Singapore, they evacuated in two groups. On February 11, a group of people boarded the Empire Star. After repeated bombings by Japanese bombers, they reached Badlia and finally returned to Australia. At 6 a.m. on February 12, another ship carrying 65 nurses boarded the Wynerbrook. On the afternoon of February 14, due to Japanese bombing, the ship sank off the southeast coast of Sumatra in less than half an hour. Some of the nurses and most of the civilians on board perished. Although the 53 people tried their best to swim to the nearby Banka Island, the Japanese army ruthlessly shot and killed the 21 survivors who had come ashore with machine guns. The remaining 32 people became Japanese prisoners of war and began their three-and-a-half-year life in the concentration camp. Eight of them died in custody.

Japanese soldiers who surrendered in Malaya and Singapore were imprisoned in Changi Prisoner of War Camp, which was originally an Allied fortress. Changi Prisoner of War Camp was the largest prisoner of war camp established by the Japanese army in the Malay Peninsula during World War II. Its main role was to serve as a labor transfer station for the Japanese army. Most of the prisoners of war in Changi Prisoner of War Camp were forced to work by the Japanese army, and most of them participated in the construction of the Yunnan-Thailand Death Railway, with a very high mortality rate.

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From June 1942 to October 1943, Allied prisoners of war departed from Changi, Singapore and were transferred to the Thailand-Burma Railway construction site. On each departure, Japanese guards would tell the Allied prisoners that they would be sent to a good spot in the mountains to the north to meet other Allied soldiers and rest there. But in the next ten days, we will walk hundreds of miles on mountain roads until we finally reach the camp in the jungle. The next morning, they were rushed to the construction site to help the Japanese build the railway.

The Thailand-Burma Railway was once called the "Death Railway". Its purpose was to transport reinforcements and supplies from the Malay Peninsula to the Japanese army occupying Myanmar through Thailand. Based on the rugged mountainous terrain, Japanese engineers estimated that the railway would take at least five years to complete, but the Japanese army forced more than 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and more than 300,000 Asian laborers to engage in intensive labor, and it was finally completed within 18 months. The movie Bridge on the River Kwai made the brutality of the Japanese army's forced conscription of prisoners of war to build the Thailand-Burma Railway during World War II widely known, and many of these prisoners of war were from Australia. Among the prisoners at Changi was an Australian lieutenant colonel named Edward "Tired" Dunlop. Dunlop went to Bandung, Indonesia, at the end of 1941 to manage a rear hospital. He had a chance to escape the Japanese, but he insisted on staying with the wounded.

According to Dunlop’s diary, the so-called railway site was simply hell on earth. Disease was rampant, the guards were brutal, and food was so scarce that even the young became emaciated and looked like skeletons after a few days. Japanese and Korean guards brutally forced naked, blind, and sickly living zombies to work endlessly in the jungle. The cruelty of the Japanese is appalling. During World War II, the Allied mortality rate in German prisoner-of-war camps was 4%, but the mortality rate in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps was 29%. Three

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The situation on the Thailand-Myanmar Railway is even worse. ***12,000 Allied prisoners of war died here, 29% of them were British prisoners of war and 69% were Australians. Many died of cholera, dysentery, malaria, and miasma, and most died of malnutrition, actually starvation. Prisoners of war were given only two bowls of food per day, which made them susceptible to various tropical diseases. The Japanese also brought in a large number of Asian laborers, and their fate was equally tragic. As many as 5,500 people died when the railway was built, including 2,650 Australians. Nearly every person sleeping has a corpse.

In the autumn of 1943, the prisoners of war who participated in the construction of the Burma-Thailand Death Railway returned to Changi Prisoner of War Camp, and then all prisoners of war were transferred to Changi Prison in May 1944. Eventually, they were liberated from Changi Prison. Among the Allied prisoners of war in Changi Prisoner of War Camp, the mortality rate was 26% for British troops, 33% for American troops, and as high as 36% for Australian prisoners of war. There is an extremely shocking photo at the Australian War Memorial. In the photo, Australian prisoner of war Ryan Severi is blindfolded and kneeling on the ground. Standing next to him is a Japanese officer holding a saber high and cutting off the prisoner's head. Seifert volunteered for the Army in 1941. His family did not learn of his death until 1946, and his remains were nowhere to be found.

The highest death rate among Australian prisoners of war was in Sandakan Prisoner of War Camp. More than 2,000 Australian and British soldiers were imprisoned here at the time, and they were regularly beaten, starved, and worked hard enough to make them sick and weak. In early 1945, when the Allied forces were about to attack Sandakan, the Japanese army forced 1,577 prisoners of war in the Sandakan Prisoner of War Camp to walk 250 kilometers through the jungle to Ranau.

More than half of the prisoners died on the way. Others died of disease, starvation or violence within 6 months. Only 6 escaped on the way. Of course, none of the old, weak, sick and disabled people left in the prison camps were spared.

There are many similar atrocities, and the Australian trial revealed some of the most serious crimes. In a New Guinea court, a Japanese officer is accused of cannibalism. He ate the flesh of an Australian prisoner of war. War criminals were hanged. In another court, a Japanese man accused of crucifying four pilots on Celebes was also hanged. In December 1943, Rear Admiral Takashi Tamura, commander of the 83rd Japanese Naval Guard Brigade, ordered the execution of 23 Australian civilians at the Cavan concentration camp in Papua New Guinea. Second Lieutenant Taluo Wang Yue and others were responsible for the execution and drowned 23 civilians. After the war, the Australian military court sentenced Tamura Koichi to death, and the other five related war criminals were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from 4 to 20 years.

During World War II, more than 30,000 Australian soldiers became prisoners of war, of which 22,000 were captured by the Japanese army. Only 14,000 returned to Australia alive in 1945. After the war, Australia, which was suffering from the war, advocated severe sanctions against Japan in order to prevent Japan from rising again and causing harm to countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

Among them, as punishment for the wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese army, Australia conducted severe trials on Japanese war criminals. In addition to participating in the trial of Japanese Class-A war criminals by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Australia also has military establishments on Labuan Island, Wewak Island, Morotai Island, Darwin Island, Rabaul Island, Singapore, Hong Kong and Manus Island. The court tried Japanese war criminals. According to post-war statistics from the Japanese Minister of Justice, Australian military courts tried 294 cases of Japanese war criminals, involving 949 people, of whom 153 were sentenced to death, 38 were sentenced to life imprisonment, and 455 were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment.