The Japanese captured some Australians in the Burma Campaign (1942 to 1945). In addition, the Japanese sent more than 4,800 Australian prisoners of war (POWs) captured elsewhere to southern Burma between September 1942 and July 1944. Around 800 Australians died in Burmese POW camps during this period.
Arrival at Burma
It was a gigantic Via Dolorosa of the halt, the lame and the blind ...
[Rohan D. Rivett, Behind Bamboo, (first published 1946), Ringwood, Penguin, 1991, 244.]
The first of the major workforces sent to Burma was A Force, drawn from Allied prisoners of war (POWs) interned at Changi in Singapore.
They left Singapore in mid-May 1942, in a suffocating and crowded 'hell ship'.
More than 1,000 of A Force disembarked at Victoria Point, in southern Burma. One-third went to Mergui. The rest were sent to Tavoy, now Dawei.
All prisoners initially worked building airfields.
The conditions for prisoners in Burma were adequate but basic. The Japanese control was fairly lax. The Australian commander Brigadier Arthur Varley had a good working relationship with the Japanese.
Despite this, and amid protests from Australian officers, the Japanese executed, without trial, prisoners who attempted to escape. This included 8 men in June 1942.
Work on the railway
In September 1942, the Australian prisoners went to Thanbyuzayat to begin work on the Burmese end of the Burma-Thailand Railway.
Nearly 600 Australians from the camp at Java joined them in October 1942. This group included some survivors from HMAS Perth, which had been sunk in the Sunda Strait off the Netherlands East Indies on 28 February 1942.
In January 1943, 385 Australians arrived from Java with more Dutch, British and American prisoners.
By this stage, there were more than 9,000 prisoners, mostly Australians and Dutch, in camps south of Moulmein, now Mawlaminye.
In April, Burmese rǒmusha from the so-called 'Sweat Army' heavily reinforced the prisoners.
The route of the railway line in Burma, while not as challenging in engineering terms as in Thailand, was remote and difficult to supply. It didn't follow a river and there was no good road.
The work camps along the railway took their names from their distance in kilometres from Thanbyuzayat. For example, 55-Kilo camp.
Work on the railway included:
- felling trees
- clearing undergrowth
- building embankments
- excavating cuttings
- constructing bridges across streams and gullies.
Workloads were reasonable at first, as the railway route crossed easy territory.
But the pace of construction soon increased. By mid-1943, some up-country units were working shifts of 24-hours on, 24-hours off.
The prisoners were often the victims of gratuitous violence, particularly from the hated Korean guards.
The Japanese administration was less efficient in Burma than in Thailand. The further the railway advanced, the greater the supply difficulties. This got worse when the monsoons came.
Without adequate food and medical supplies, by late 1942, many prisoners were falling ill.
The condition of the prisoners worsened in 1943. Illnesses such as cholera, smallpox, dysentery and malaria broke out. The effects of malnutrition became endemic.
The Japanese workforce was also exposed to allied air raids from early in the war. Despite requests from the allied leaders, the Japanese would not allow Thanbyuzayat to be marked as a hospital and POW camp.
On 12 and 15 June 1943, the Allied bombing killed 23 prisoners, including 18 Australians, with many more wounded.
When the Japanese finally agreed to evacuate Thanbyuzayat, many sick prisoners had to walk to camps further up the line. Some travelled on the railway line they had helped build. As Rohan Rivett recalled:
The train seemed to bounce from rail to rail, and at corners there was a lurching and a groaning which was ominous in the extreme. But the real fun came at the bridge, forty to sixty feet above the swollen rivers ... the connexion of the rails leading onto [one] bridge was so bad that we had to make three runs before the engine could get up and pull us across.
[Rohan D. Rivett, Behind Bamboo, (first published 1946), Ringwood, Penguin, 1991, 249.]
Movement to Thailand
The railway was finally completed in October 1943.
Over the next 2 to 3 months, the prisoners began to move eastwards to Thailand. Some stayed in the jungle until March 1944. They cut fuel for the locomotives, before they too moved to Thailand.
Despite the many hardships, the death toll of Australians in Burma was not as high as on the worst sections of the railway in Thailand. Up to January 1944, A Force lost 13% of its men.
At least one officer attributed this to Varley's leadership and the effect his strong personality had on the Japanese commanders.
Varley returned to Singapore in January 1944. He died in September 1944 when an American submarine torpedoed the Japanese transport, the Rokyo Maru. Although the Americans rescued more than 60 surviving prisoners, Varley disappeared. He was last seen in command of a group of 7 life rafts.
Commemoration of those who died
The prisoners of war who died in Burma are buried in the Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery. The site includes 3,149 Commonwealth personnel and 621 Dutch personnel.