SANDAKAN

The Sandakan Memorial Park commemorates a tragedy and an atrocity. The tragedy was the death, between January and August 1945, within sight of Allied victory in the Pacific War, of approximately 2,400 Australian and British Prisoners of War held by the Japanese in the Sandakan POW camp, North Borneo. The atrocity was the manner of the death inflicted upon them by their captors - starvation, overwork, beatings and punishments and the forcing of over 1 000 sick and weak POWs on three marches under brutal physical conditions.
In 1942 and 1943 the Japanese brought to Sandakan about 2,700 Australian and British POWs, the great majority of whom had been captured at the surrender at Singapore in February 1942. They were used as a labour force to build a military airstrip. In late 1944, as the Allies advanced in the Pacific, the airstrip was bombed and destroyed. Early in 1945 the Japanese decided to move the POWs 260 km west into the mountains to the small settlement of Ranau. On three forced marches between January and June approximately 500 prisoners died. The remainder died at the Ranau and Sandakan camps.
Of all those who had been alive in January 1945, by the end of August only six - all Australians - survived. Two of the six escaped into the jungle during the second march in June 1945. Assisted by local people, they were eventually picked up by Allied units. Another four escaped from Ranau in July and again, with the help of local people, were fed and hidden from the Japanese until the end of the war.
Today the POW dead, whose bodies were recovered, are buried in the CWGC's Labuan War Cemetery. Those who could not be identified or who have no known grave, are commemorated on Memorials to the Missing at Labuan and Singapore.