Bob Ellice-Flint is one. At 90, he has the energy of someone 20 years younger and he can make a speech more fluently than most politicians. Yet Bob has had a tough life. His father was a farmer whose livelihood was destroyed by the Great Depression. Bob had to leave school at 15 and struggled until he volunteered to join the AIF at the outbreak of World War II.
For Bob, the war went badly. He was caught in the fall of Singapore in February, 1942 and incarcerated in a notorious Changi Prisoner of War camp. In 1943, he was transferred to the Sandakan Camp in northeast Borneo. Eventually, Bob was sent to Kuching in Borneo, where he stayed until the end of the war.
Three POW camps in 3 1/2 years and in all of them he and his fellow Australians were treated with cruelty seldom seen before or since. Last week, Bob returned to the site of the Sandakan PoW camp for the first time since the war.
Every August 15 there is a memorial service. This year, more than 40 of us from Adelaide attended the service before retracing the steps of the Sandakan death march. We were doing this as a fundraiser for the laudable McGuiness-McDermott Foundation.
Bob stole the show. At 90, remember, he stood before a crowd of around 200 people and made a speech about the Sandakan Camp and its horrors and then, with no musical accompaniment, sang solo to verses of Dvorak’s song Going Home. It was a tour de force. We all wept.
All Australians should learn about Sandakan. Of the nearly 2500 Australian and British PoWs in Sandakan at the beginning of 1945, only six survived – and they escaped.
As the allies closed in on the Japanese towards the end of the war, the Japanese marched the PoWs about 250km across northern Borneo from Sandakan to Ranau. These forced marches are now known as the Sandakan death marches. Most died on the marches – there were three. Conditions on the marches were barbaric. The prisoners had no boots, almost no food and no shelter. Many of the PoWs were seriously ill. Stragglers were shot, others just passed away, their bodies kicked into the jungle.
The Japanese surrendered on August 15, but not in Borneo. For 12 days after the formal end of World War II, Japanese soldiers continued to kill the Australian and British survivors of the death marches until no one was left alive.
The Sandakan death marches were arguably the cruellest act against Australians in modern history. We are all familiar with Gallipoli and Kokoda. That’s understandable.
BUT Sandakan stands out as a particularly cruel and indecent act of abuse and murder of a large number of young Australians and Britons. Our group has been retracing some of the track taken by the Australian PoWs between Sandakan and Ranau.
There have been some changes in the landscape since 1945, as you would expect. Some of the route is now oil-palm plantation and some of the primary jungle was logged in the 1950s and 1960s. But a well-organised walking group like ours soon gets a feel for what the Diggers went through.
We have Malaysian guides who know every trick in the forest, we have modern boots and socks, plenty of bottled water and meals three times a day. Even then, it’s very tough going in the jungle.
The PoWs had Japanese guards bashing and abusing them. They had no boots and very few clothes, many of them were ill with malaria or Beriberi and all were desperately weak from malnutrition.
They were lucky to get a bowl of rice a day. The jungle is thick, the track narrow and covered in tree roots, wet leaves – some of which hide leeches – and slippery soil. So climbing hills through the jungle and coming down again makes climbing Mt Lofty seem like child’s play. What is more, it’s hot and extremely humid. All our clothes are soaked with sweat after about 10 minutes of walking. This trek along the path of the Sandakan death marches is not the first by Australians but there have been very few.
The McGuiness-McDermott Foundation has found an outstanding formula to raise money for kids with cancer; get people to join a trek like Sandakan and organise sponsors. For those of us on the trek, many no doubt feel pleased with the physical achievement it represents. But there’s much more to it than that.