In the early months of 1942, more than 22,000 Australians were taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Asia-Pacific. They were captured in Singapore, Ambon, Dutch Timor, New Britain and Java. Most of the prisoners were from the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), about 21,000. A further 354 were from the Royal Australian Navy and 373 from the Royal Australian Air Force. Fifty-nine were women from the Australian Army Nursing Service.
From late 1942, more than 13,000 Australians were sent from Singapore, Java and Dutch Timor to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway. There were also large numbers of British and Dutch prisoners, as well as forced labourers, known as rōmusha from across South-East Asia.
Of the 22,000 Australians, more than 8,000 (around 35%) would die during captivity. More than 2,800 died working on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
Australians
By any quantitative measure the imprisonment of so many Australians is a major event in Australian history. For many soldiers it was living – and dying – in captivity which made World War II different from … World War I.
[Hank Nelson, Prisoners of War: Australians under Nippon, Sydney, ABC, 1985, p 4.]
More than 22,000 Australians were taken prisoner in the Asia-Pacific region in the early months of 1942. In contrast, the Germans and Ottomans only captured about 4,000 Australian prisoners of war (POWs) in the whole of World War I.
In all, more than 8,000 POWs (around 35%) died during captivity, of which over 2,800 died while working on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
Most of the Army POWs were from the 8th Division. Nearly 15,000 were captured in Singapore in February 1942, and over 1,000 in each of:
- Ambon
- Dutch Timor
- New Britain.
The second-largest group of prisoners, more than 2,700, were captured on Java. These were men from the 7th Division who had been brought back from the Middle East to help defend the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) from Japanese attack in early 1942. They were joined in captivity by 300 survivors of the sinking of the HMAS Perth in the Battle of Java Sea in late February 1942.
In the years that followed, the military units to which the Australians belonged were broken up into work forces to meet the Japanese need for labour. From late 1942, more than 13,000 Australians were sent from Singapore, Java and Timor to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
Australians were not the largest national group on the railway. They were outnumbered by the British, the Dutch and large cohorts of Asian labourers, the rōmusha, particularly Burmese and Tamils from Malaya. Yet in relative terms, Australian POW deaths were very significant, accounting for around 20 per cent of all Australian deaths in World War II.
Little detailed research has been done on the background of Australian POWs and how this affected their chances of survival. However, we know that all of them had volunteered to serve. Under Australian legislation, before 1943, national servicemen could be used only for the defence of Australian territories.
A study of Australians who joined the Army in World War II shows that they were generally young and unmarried. In 1939, the age limits for enlistment in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) were 19 to 35. Officers and some non-commissioned officers (NCOs) could be older. In 1941, the limits were broadened to 19 and 40 years. Most recruits were in their 20s.
The youth of many Australian POWs is evident in this portrait of Bombardier Hugh V. Clarke, 2/10th Field Regiment, who enlisted in July 1940 at the age of 20.
Australian Army recruits were also not highly educated. Fewer than 10% had completed a full secondary education, and an estimated 1.5% had a university degree or diploma. Most were manual or factory workers, or in clerical and commercial employment in civilian life. Contrary to the World War I mythology, therefore, the World War II soldiers were not predominantly bushmen or farmers. They were, however, likely to have been medium to tall in height and in good health at the time they enlisted.
The officers, unlike the other ranks, were better educated and had some pre-war military experience.
The men came from all over Australia, although some battalions had strong regional roots. For example:
- the 2/40th Infantry Battalion captured in Timor was established in Tasmania
- the 2/21st Infantry Battalion captured at Ambon was established in Victoria
- the 2/10th Field Regiment were Queenslanders, mostly from the Darling Downs and the south-west.
The vast majority of the men of the 2nd AIF were also of European descent and raised under the country's White Australia policy. Their captivity in the hands of the Japanese – a people seen as quite foreign in most places of Australia – was possibly more challenging.
Little is known of why the men of the 2nd AIF volunteered to serve. Some probable motives however, were:
- a desire for adventure
- a sense of duty or nationalism
- becoming part of the Australian military tradition dating from Gallipoli
- a need for a regular income with postwar benefits.
Since the 8th Division was raised during the crisis of the fall of France in mid-1940, these men would also have chosen to play a role in averting an Allied defeat. We can only speculate how these motivations sustained them during their years of captivity.
After the war ended, some Australian POWs remembered their captivity as a time in which the 'typical' qualities of the Australian soldier came to the fore. Even though defeated, they displayed the Anzac skills of:
- resourcefulness
- laconic humour
- mateship
- survival against the odds.
Undoubtedly, some Australian POWs did display such qualities on the Burma-Thailand Railway and elsewhere.
It is also the case that Australians' distinctive national characteristics did not give them a greater chance of survival, as is sometimes assumed. Their death rates on the Burma-Thailand Railway were little different from those of the British and higher than those of the Dutch.
In terms of survival, what mattered most in captivity included:
- specific situations and locations of where they lived and worked
- access to food, medicines and medical care
- genetic inheritance
- sheer luck and the will to survive.
British
… the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history [British Prime Minister Winston Churchill describing the fall of Singapore]
[Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, 1951, p 43.]
When the Japanese conquered much of South-East Asia in late 1941 and early 1942, they captured more than 50,000 British military personnel. Some 30,000 of these POWs later worked on the Burma-Thailand Railway. More than one in five of them died there.
The majority of British troops who worked on the railway were captured when Singapore fell on 15 February 1942. They consisted of:
- the 18th Division, which had arrived in Malaya in January 1942 in a last-minute bid to halt the Japanese advance
- members of the local militia, the Malay States Volunteer Forces
- thousands of service and fortress troops.
Survivors of the HMS Repulse and the HMS Prince of Wales, which sank off the coast of Malaya on 10 December 1941, were also taken prisoner, as were airmen from the Royal Air Force.
The 9th and 11th Divisions of the Indian Army, which had failed to stop the Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsula, were also captured by the Japanese in early 1942. However, perhaps 20,000 of these 40,000 men were later persuaded or coerced to fight for the Japanese in the Indian National Army, in the hope that a Japanese victory would liberate India from British imperial rule.
Elsewhere in the Pacific, some 10,000 British, Canadian and Indian troops were captured when Hong Kong fell in December 1941 and a further 5,000 in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) in early 1942.
The first contingent of British to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway were sent to Burma (now Myanmar) from Sumatra in May 1942, as part of the 500-strong Medan Force. This was at the same time that Australians in A Force left Changi for Burma.
The British only formed a minority of the Allied POWs in Burma. On this end of the railway, the workforce was largely Australian, Dutch and local rōmusha. Most British POWs, nearly 29,000 of them, were sent to Thailand.
The first contingent of around 3,000 reached Thailand months before the Australians, in June 1942. They were made to work on building a camp at Nong Pladuk, which would form a base for future groups of POWs.
In October 1942, a similar-sized group of British POWs left Singapore for Thailand. They were employed around Kanchanaburi and on the construction of the steel bridge at Tha Markam (known as 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'). Another 13 'letter parties', L to X, soon followed, taking the number of British working on the railway at the end of 1942 to around 20,000.
During the first half of 1943, the British POWs continued to be sent to the railway as part of multinational forces. They were included in:
- D Force (2,780) in March
- F Force in April (3,600)
- H Force in May (about 1,950).
Around 200 British medical personnel also contributed to K and L Forces. They were sent to Thailand in June and August 1943 to address the catastrophic health situation among the rōmusha.
The British POWs suffered the highest number of deaths of any Allied group on the Burma-Thailand Railway. There is a popular perception that they also died at a higher rate than Australians. This owes something to the fact that in F Force, where British and Australian numbers were roughly equal, some 2,036 British died compared to 1,060 Australians in the period up to May 1944.
The Australian commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kappe, attributed the lower Australian death rate to:
… a more determined will to live, a higher sense of discipline, a particularly high appreciation of the importance of good sanitation, and a more natural adaptability to harsh conditions … [and to] … the splendid and unselfish services rendered by the medical personnel in the Force.
[Lionel Wigmore, The Japanese Thrust, p 581].
In reality, the death rates of British and Australians across all sites on the railway were scarcely any different – 22% and 21%, respectively.
The higher deaths in F Force were probably attributable to the fact that British workers contained a high proportion of men who were already ill when they left Singapore.
The larger number of British deaths overall reflects the fact that there were simply more British working on the railway than Australians or Dutch POWs.
Possibly, the traditional Anglo-Australian rivalry dating back to World War I fed the belief that Australians were more resilient in captivity than the British. Australian POW, Russell Braddon, for instance, wrote later that:
It's the old Australian thing, we need to sustain our own morale even to these days by talking about dirty poms and everything else.
[Russell Reading Braddon, 1982, AWM S03005]
After the war ended, British POWs were repatriated by the same organisation as Australians, the Repatriation of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees organisation (RAPWI). They spent nearly 6 weeks at sea, travelling via India, before reaching their homes in the United Kingdom (UK).
British POWs received a small compensation payment of £76 (around $199) after the signing of the 1951 peace treaty with Japan. In 2000, after years of campaigning, former POWs and civilian internees of the Japanese also received a one-off ex gratia payment from the British government of £10,000 (around $26,000). This payment formed a precedent for a similar sum paid to Australian POWs in 2001.
In the postwar years, the experiences of prisoners of the Japanese tended to be marginalised in British national memory.
The central character in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai was British, loosely based on the commander at Tha Markam, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey. But even though the film was a huge commercial success, the image it portrayed of the British was hardly flattering.
The memory of defeat and loss of Empire in 1942 didn't inspire celebration. The dominant memory of captivity in British cultural imagination became one of escape from German POW camps, particularly from the Saxon fortress of Colditz and from Stalag Luft III in Sagan (now Zagan, Poland). These narratives gained fame through successful memoirs, films and television series.
Dutch
The Dutch had two different enemies during World War II: the Germans who occupied the Netherlands; and the Japanese who occupied the Netherlands East Indies. Even today, remembrance of both enemies has the power to summon up strong emotions.
[Eveline Buchheim, 'Hide and Seek', in Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack (eds), Forgotten Captives in Japanese Occupied Asia, London, Routledge, 2008, p 264.]
The Dutch formed the second-largest contingent of Allied POWs on the Burma-Thailand Railway, after the British.
Estimates vary, but the number of Dutch POWs working on the railway may have reached 18,000. They were some of 42,000 army and naval personnel and 100,000 Dutch civilians who were captured when the Japanese conquered the Netherlands East Indies in early 1942.
Since the Netherlands East Indies had been under Dutch control for centuries, the Netherlands' POWs included
- Europeans
- Eurasians who had acquired full civil rights
- indigenous soldiers (Ambonese, Javanese, Menadonese and Timorese).
The indigenous troops served in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL), the Royal Dutch Navy and the auxiliary forces of the KNIL. After their capture, some indigenous soldiers, mostly the Javanese and Sundanese, were freed by the Japanese and encouraged to join pro-Japanese militias.
The Dutch POWs were interned at first near the places where they were captured, including Java, Ambon and Timor. From late 1942, however, many of them were shipped around the Asia-Pacific region to work on Japanese projects.
In October 1942, the Dutch POWs formed half of the contingent sent from Ambon to Hainan, while over 100 men were sent from Java to Burma. They were followed in December 1942 and January 1943 by 3 more groups. These groups sailed around the same time as Australia's Dunlop Force went to Singapore and Thailand. The final group of Dutch POWs arrived in Burma as part of Group 5 in April 1943, raising the total of Dutch POWs in Burma to around 4,600.
In 1943, Dutch POWs were sent to Thailand, where they suffered the same hardships as other Allied POWs. They were treated brutally by the Japanese. They struggled with tropical diseases and the effects of malnutrition. However, the Dutch suffered a significantly lower death rate (15%) than the Australians (21%) and British (22%). This was possibly because they had previously lived in the tropics and had more experience in treating tropical illnesses. Also, no Dutch POWs worked in F Force, which suffered the highest death rates on the railway.
The Dutch experience was also different in that the ethnicity of some POWS made it possible for some of them to escape successfully. Whereas Westerners could not blend into the local population, some Eurasian and indigenous Dutch POWs were able to hide as monks and farmers. One even worked as a gardener at the headquarters of the Japanese secret police in Bangkok.
Around 8,000 Dutch POWs who survived working on the Burma-Thailand Railway were later sent to Japan. Around 3,600 died during the voyage. In a single instance in 1944, more than 1,300 Dutch POWs died when a British submarine sank the transport ship Junyo Maru.
Dutch and Australian POWs were often interned in the same camps or near each other. Their relationship seems, by many accounts, to have been strained. Perhaps differences in language and culture exacerbated the tensions between men in captivity.
The Dutch POWs also had considerably more resources than the Australians. Many of them were captured near their homes. This initially gave them the capacity to buy more food and other supplies from sources outside the prison camps.
The diaries of the Australian surgeon Lieutenant Colonel Edward 'Weary' Dunlop are sprinkled with complaints about the Dutch POWs in the prison camp at Bandung:
Began the move from new quarters from which D have already seized many of the comforts and furniture. Crowning annoyance reached when Maj. Morris in my company took back a box from their area which was previously ours. Dutch officer rudely seized this from him … I gave him the full blast of my wrath, comparing his officers to carrion birds and refused to speak to him any more in the presence of other ranks …
[E.E. Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop, Melbourne, Nelson, 1986, p 29.]
Whatever tensions there may have been during captivity, the Dutch, British and Australian POWs who died on the Burma-Thailand Railway were buried together after the war:
- Chungkai War Cemetery in Thailand has 314 Dutch graves
- Kanchanaburi War Cemetery in Thailand has 1,896 Dutch graves
- Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery in Myanmar has 621 Dutch graves.
The Dutch headstones do not carry personal family messages like the British Commonwealth graves.
It was a Dutch officer and former civil servant, Colonel Johannes Karel Warmenhoven, who took over command of the Burma-Thailand Railway immediately after the war. Warmenhoven played an important role in keeping the railway operational, which allowed the safe return of thousands of POWs, rōmusha and Japanese soldiers.
The return home of the Dutch POWs in 1945 was conducted by the Repatriation of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees organisation (RAPWI). However, their repatriation was complicated by the outbreak of the Indonesian independence struggle in the Netherlands East Indies.
More than 10,000 Dutch survivors had to wait in Thailand and were even joined by 4,000 women and children escaping the violence in Java. They were repatriated from April to November 1946.
Many Dutch soldiers, having survived prison camps, were then conscripted back into the army to serve in the Netherlands East Indies. The same was true for former Indonesian KNIL personnel because they were attacked in the general turmoil after the Japanese surrender. Joining KNIL again was a strategy for survival.
Dutch POWs received compensation as part of the terms of the 1951 peace treaty with Japan. In 1955, the more than 100,000 Dutch civilians interned by the Japanese also received a small payment as part of a settlement between the Netherlands and Japanese governments.
In the Netherlands, the experience of Dutch prisoners and internees of the Japanese is well remembered. This is in part due to the historical importance of the Netherlands East Indies as a colony, and in part to the large numbers of internees who migrated to the Netherlands during and after Indonesian independence. They brought with them memories of the Pacific War, which complemented other national narratives of resistance and occupation by the Nazis.
Rōmusha
In 1943, under pressure to complete the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway, the Japanese recruited approximately 200,000 labourers from Asia (rōmusha) to supplement their workforce of about 60,000 POWs.
The treatment of these labourers epitomised the exploitation by the Japanese of the countries they had occupied in 1941 and 1942.
Although it's difficult to be precise about numbers, up to 90,000 rōmusha died on the railway.
Recruitment of labourers
The soldiers forced me to get into the lorry. There were already thirty other people there. I was wearing only a pair of shorts [Thailand] and sandals. The Japanese soldiers did not allow me to go home; instead they sent me directly to Kuala Lumpur and loaded me onto a freight train for Siam. There we started cutting dense jungle. I had to work in the jungle and sleep on the bamboo floor in a hut, half naked and without any blanket.
[Mooniady Ramasamy, quoted in Nakahara Michiko 'Malayan Labor on the Thailand-Burma Railway' in Paul H. Kratoska (ed.), Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown histories, New York, East Gate, 2005, p 257.]
The Japanese recruited labourers through a mixture of financial inducements and outright conscription. In some locations, they worked in association with local government and social hierarchies to recruit workers.
Some rōmusha seemed to have been persuaded by the Japanese claims to be freeing Asia from the former European colonial powers.
However, when the first intakes from the railway did not return after their contracts expired, and money promised to families failed to materialise, recruiting became more difficult. Consequently, the Japanese resorted to forcible conscription.
Women and young children also travelled to the railway, often accompanying family members. This practice was common enough for the Japanese to have a pay scale for children under the age of 12.
Few rōmusha left written records of their experiences. However, many Allied POWs commented on their suffering.
Australian surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest 'Weary' Dunlop, witnessed rōmusha marching past Hintok Mountain camp in July 1943:
Endless streams of wretched Coolies from Malaya are plodding their slippery way to the jungle road. Those who speak English frequently have sad words to say about the recruiting methods the Nipponese [Japanese] used to secure their services. These poor wretches are dying up here in countless thousands.
[E.E. Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop, Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin, 1989, p 264.]
Burmese and Malayans
The largest group came from Burma and Malaya, the regions closest to the railway and under complete Japanese control.
In Burma, the railway was portrayed by the Japanese as a part of their efforts to reduce Burma's isolation from the rest of Asia. Local officials raised levies of workers, which were then employed in the so-called 'sweat army'.
Around 90,000 Burmese worked on the railway. The exact number is difficult to determine because thousands deserted before or soon after reaching the railway.
In Malaya, the Japanese recruited workers by advertising in early 1943. Men were initially attracted by the prospect of pay and a Japanese promise of 3-month contracts.
In some instances in Malaya, free films were shown, the doors to the 'cinemas' locked and all suitable workers rounded up for forced conscription. Often those taken were sent with nothing more than the clothes on their back.
From Malaya, around 75,000 workers were recruited or conscripted, including Malay, Tamil and Chinese people.
Javanese and Singaporean Chinese
In Java, local headmen chose who would work.
There were about 7,500 Javanese and about 5,200 Singaporean Chinese people in the conscripted workforce. Over 5,000 Chinese people living in Singapore were also recruited, as well as around 200 Aminese people.
Thais
Thousands of Thais worked on the railway, particularly during the first construction phase in 1942. They were employed on the least difficult section of the railway line, between Nong Pladuk and Kanchanaburi.
Thailand was not formally an occupied country in World War II. So, the Japanese were restricted by the need to negotiate with rather than coerce their Thai workers.
The Thais proved difficult for the Japanese to manage because they were working in their home country. This made it easier to abscond – and thousands did.
Rōmusha on the railway
A new embankment and cutting are being built by Tamils [at Compressor Cutting] to skirt and avoid the bridge. In the wake of the railway is left a wreckage of humanity, stupidly broken by inefficiency and design.
[E.E. Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop, 1989, p 270.]
The hardship and suffering of rōmusha recruited by the Japanese to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway was often far worse than that of Allied POWs. The POWs' chances of survival were increased by their education and military organisation, particularly their discipline and medical personnel. But the rōmusha had few such advantages.
Up to 90,000 rōmusha died while working on the railway. Most who worked in Thailand were recruited from Malaya (Tamil, Chinese and Malay people) and Java. On the Burma side of the railway, they were predominantly recruited from Burma.
After arriving at the railway, rōmusha were grouped into 4 main units, or butai, under Japanese commanders. Within these units, they were divided, according to the needs of specific projects, into companies (tai) and sections (han).
Japanese gunzoko (overseers) commanded the rōmusha units. These men had absolute power over the rōmusha and were often callous or indifferent towards their charges.
If he beat a coolie who died as a result, he reported the death as due to malaria, and that was the end of the matter. Coolie-camp commanders were certainly not picked for their 'brightness', and the coolies off duty were at the mercy of an illiterate, usually a drunkard and often a sadist, but more often just plain stupid.
[Report on coolie camp conditions on the Burma-Siam Railway during the period November 1943 to August 1945, quoted in Paul H. Kratoska, The Thailand-Burma Railway, 1942–1946, Documents and Selected Writings, vol. IV, London, Routledge, 2006, p 20.]
Like the POWs, the rōmusha were used as manual labour. They built bridges and embankments and excavated cuttings. They worked long days with little, poor-quality food. Despite being promised decent pay by the Japanese, many received little or no money. Many were forced to spend their wages buying overpriced food from Japanese canteens or local traders.
Although the Japanese promised to supply clothing, little was actually provided. If it was available, the Japanese used clothing as a reward for hard work. The situation was so bad that sacks used for rice became prized possessions.
Rōmusha were housed in camps separate from but often near the POWs. Conditions in these camps, which could hold from 100 to 2,000 people, were generally appalling. The accommodation was extremely crowded, and the areas surrounding the camps were usually unsanitary. As an Indian worker, S. M. Tharcisius, later said of arriving at his allocated tent at Ni Thea (Nieke) in Thailand in July 1943:
When we entered the tent we saw a rotting dead body of a man whose nationality could not be recognised. The tent was absolutely filthy.
[Summary of examination of S.M. Tharcisius quoted in Kratoska, Thailand-Burma Railway, vol. IV, p 20.]
These filthy conditions, when combined with the rōmushas' lack of knowledge about sanitation and poor organisation, produced horrendously high rates of illness and death. As POW Robert Hardie recorded in his diary:
We hear of frightful casualties from cholera and other diseases among these people, and of the brutality with which they are treated by the Japanese. People who have been near these camps speak with bated breath of the state of affairs—corpses rotting unburied in the jungle, almost complete lack of sanitation, a frightful stench, overcrowding, swarms of flies.
[Burma-Siam Railway: The Secret Diary of Dr. Hardie, 1942–45, London, Imperial War Museum, 1983, p 104.]
Few doctors accompanied the rōmusha. As their death rates soared, the Japanese recruited a handful of medical personnel from among Allied POWs. These doctors and orderlies from K Force and L Force were assigned to rōmusha camps along the railway to offer what help they could.
Some base hospitals were set up for rōmusha:
- 2 large hospitals at Kanchanaburi
- hospitals at Wang Yai, Kinsaiyok, Tamajo, Ni Thea (Nieke) in Thailand
- hospitals at Tardien, Apalon, Mezali and Anankwin in Burma.
These facilities were understaffed and poorly stocked with medicine and equipment.
After the railway was completed, most maintenance work was completed by rōmusha. Although their numbers were fewer and the supply situation had improved, the Japanese continued to neglect them. With frequent Allied bombing and heavy workloads, conditions for the rōmusha continued to be harsh.
Rōmusha beyond the railway
The ruthless occupier, who fagged us out and allowed us not a single free day and was guilty of the death daily of dozens of rōmusha, who were made to do slave labor, received very bad and insufficient food and almost no medical treatment. Those weakened rōmusha had practically no resistance to disease, and countless numbers fell victim to malaria. The Japanese did not care what happened to them, after all there was a new supply of rōmushas every week.
[R. Sadhinoch, quoted in Harry A. Poeze 'The Road to Hell: The construction of a railway line in West Java during the Japanese Occupation' in Paul H. Kratoska (ed.), Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown histories, East Gate, New York, 2005, p 257.]
The creation and defence of the Japanese Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere required millions of troops and millions of labourers. These rōmusha came from every Japanese-controlled territory, and while some worked voluntarily, most were subject to some form of coercion. Despite their large numbers and their suffering, their history has been neglected in the wider narratives of the Pacific War.
In China and Korea, the use of local labour was a part of a system of Japanese control that pre-dated the war. In northern China, over 1 million labourers were used as 'unpaid volunteers' (forced labour) between 1940 and 1942 alone. In Korea, almost 1 million people were forcibly recruited to work in Japan between 1939 and 1945.
Hundreds of thousands of labourers were mobilised in the territories the Japanese conquered in 1941 and 1942.
During the war years, just under 300,000 Javanese people were conscripted and transported around South-East Asia to work.
On a single day in May 1944, some 300,000 Filipinos in Manila were turned out for compulsory labour to grow food.
On a smaller scale, the Japanese used local labour wherever it was available. In Papua and New Guinea, for instance, local people were recruited or forced to carry supplies to the front.
Some groups cooperated with the Japanese, especially after their initial military successes and their promises of 'Asia for Asians'. Japanese promises of decent wages and working conditions helped to induce Asian people to work. Given the economic disruption caused by the war, some workers exchanged one colonial master for another. They prioritised feeding their families over their employer's nationality or politics.
As word of the conditions under which rōmusha were working spread, fewer and fewer labourers volunteered. In response, the Japanese turned to forced labour, usually operating through local power structures to meet their labour needs.
Rōmusha were used for a variety of tasks depending on the needs of the Japanese war effort, including:
- working on the docks in Japan and Singapore
- building infrastructure, such as railways and roads
- working on farms
- working in mines.
Having captured the mineral and industrial resources of Asia, the Japanese used this civilian labour to exploit them.
At the same time, workers were also used directly by the military. The Japanese used local labour to dig trenches, construct fortifications, build airfields and improve infrastructure supporting their front-line troops; for example, in New Guinea and Papua.
When circumstances demanded it, thousands of rōmusha were transported across the Pacific. The importing of rōmusha from Malaya and Java to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway is one example, but small groups of labourers from Malaya and China found themselves as far afield as New Guinea and Papua. Just under 300,000 workers from the Netherlands East Indies were deployed throughout the Pacific.
A particularly infamous example of the Japanese exploitation of the civilian populations of Asia was their conscription of 'comfort women' or sexual slaves for their military forces. The Japanese operated over 400 brothels across Asia, and estimates of comfort women range from 50,000 to 200,000.
Most of these comfort women were Korean, supplemented by locally conscripted women. They were taken by deception or force.
As one Malayan woman who was raped by invading Japanese forces and then forced to suffer the pain and humiliation of prostitution for 3 years said:
I had a big room with a double bed. I got two simple meals a day … I was forced to have sex with ten to twenty men a day. Sex was excruciating. Oh, you have no idea how painful it was. If I didn't perform well, I would get beaten. Some of the men would be drunk and beat me anyway.
[Anonymous, quoted in George Hicks, The Comfort Women, 1995, p 13.]
Rōmusha repatriation and memory
They were simply left to their fate and wandered around everywhere in the hope of managing to get a bite of food somewhere. They however were strangers in this land, and could not find shelter or even a small plate of rice anywhere. Some simply lay down on the side or the road … to die alone.
[Henk Hovinga, 'The End of a Forgotten Drama: The Reception and Repatriation of Romusha after the Japanese Capitulation' in Paul H. Kratoska (ed.), Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown histories, 2005, p 228.]
When World War II was over, the suffering of the rōmusha working for the Japanese on the Burma-Thailand Railway and elsewhere ended. However, unlike Allied POWs whose governments made their repatriation a priority, rōmusha were not quickly returned to their place of origin.
Although rōmusha provided the most workers on the railway and suffered a far higher death rate than Allied POWs, they did they receive the same public recognition of their suffering.
Scattered around Asia, the civilian rōmusha did not expect to be rescued by military authorities when the war ended.
Cut adrift by the Japanese, who thought that any contract they might have had with them was void, many wandered aimlessly across the region. Some turned to banditry. So bad was the threat the rōmusha posed in Burma and Thailand that the Allied War Graves Commission (now Commonwealth War Graves Commission) survey party had to post armed guards at every stop.
On the other hand, some rōmusha were employed to keep the Burma-Thailand Railway operating while captured Japanese personnel, POWs and other rōmusha were being transported from locations further up the line.
In other Japanese-occupied territories, rōmusha were given supplies of food and medical attention by US troops arriving from August and September 1945 onwards. However, Allied authorities in Thailand and Burma prioritised their own military personnel, leaving rōmusha last in line for supplies.
Several authorities managed the repatriation of rōmusha after the war, including:
- Allied Bureau of Refugees and Displaced Persons
- British Military Administration in Malaya – sent missions to Thailand in November 1945
- Dutch authorities in Java – sent missions to Thailand for their colonial subjects
- The Red Cross.
Repatriation efforts by Dutch authorities were made more difficult by the Indonesian independence uprising.
The return of rōmusha to their homes was a slow process, given the worldwide scarcity of shipping and the priority accorded to the repatriation of POWs by Allied authorities. While most Australian POWs had returned home by the end of 1945, the last ship carrying Javanese people from Thailand to Java did not leave until July 1947, nearly 2 years after the war's end.
Given these difficulties, many rōmusha remained in Thailand or started new lives elsewhere in the Pacific.
Once back in their home towns or regions, rōmusha were often left to fend for themselves. In Malaya, some received some clothing and a small amount of money, but many received nothing.
In contrast to Allied POWs, the experiences of the rōmusha were not paid much attention in histories of the Burma-Thailand Railway and the Pacific War until relatively recently.
There is partly because the rōmusha kept few written records of their suffering and published few accounts of their experiences. The fact that they didn't speak English also inhibited their ability to share knowledge of their suffering with a broader international audience.
While Allied POWs came to occupy a prominent place in their various national memories, the rōmusha did not fit easily into the postwar narratives of the Asian nations from which they originally came. These nations have preferred to recall their heroic struggles of resistance, independence and nation-building. In the case of the post-1949 Indonesian leader Sukarno, there was a troubling record of having been complicit in helping the Japanese to recruit rōmusha in Java.
Few of the rōmusha received any formal compensation for their suffering. One exception has been the 'comfort women', whose campaign for recognition and compensation has attracted international attention since the 1990s.
The Japanese government has recognised, through the Kōno Statement, that the military was involved and women were recruited under coercive conditions. It has offered formal expressions of apology and remorse as part of broader statements. It also established relief funds, such as the Asian Women’s Fund, and contributed to bilateral agreements with South Korea to provide financial and welfare support to some survivors. However, it has not made individual compensation claims.
On the Burma-Thailand Railway, meanwhile, where up to 90,000 rōmusha died, there are some memorials to their suffering. Privately maintained memorials to the rōmusha can be found in:
- Kanchanaburi near the Chinese cemetery
- World War II and JEATH Museum near the 'Bridge on the River Kwai'.
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