Prisoners of war (POWs)

    "No matter what they had to endure, they never gave up..."

The battle against the Japanese at Leuwiliang on Java was the last action that the first recruits of the 2/3rd Machine Gun Battalion were to see for the rest of the War. On 9 March 1942, obeying orders from the Dutch Allied commander-in-chief on Java, all Allied troops on the island surrendered to the Japanese occupation force.

    The Australian troops, who had been sent to Java as part of a futile attempt to foil a huge Japanese invasion force, were to remain prisoners of war (POWs) for three and a half years.

    While some survived their captivity in relatively bearable conditions, even managing to study at a makeshift prisoner-of-war school, most were sent to prison camps along the Burma-Thailand Railway.

    These men had to overcome malnutrition, tropical disease and cruel treatment from their captors. Medical officers - such as Colonel 'Weary' Dunlop and Major Ewen Corlette - helped many through the terrible conditions. Nevertheless, by War's end, about one-quarter of the machine gunners who landed in Java had died in POW camps. Most had died working on 'The Railway'.

      " Let's look at the period of 18 months when two-thirds of the original Battalion was enforced to toil on the Thailand-Burma Railway... They had no boots, no socks, no shirts, only makeshift shorts, no money... They were hungry continually... In these extraordinarily primitive and debilitating circumstances, they were forced by their sadistic Japanese masters to carry out back-breaking tasks which could rightly be termed as beyond the physical endurance of normal healthy men who had been well fed and well clothed... There was certainly something in the mental make-up of those many men of the 2/3rd MG Battalion who endured this period which has become a clear beacon, signalling the possibilities of the human spirit."

      (Rod Allanson, ex-POW, Burma-Thailand Railway)

    Many 2/3rd POWs survived the Burma Railway and its tropical diseases, only to be sent to work in coal mines in Japan and battle pneumonia and other problems caused by the extremely cold conditions.

    Some of them were on board the Tamahoka Maru, a Japanese ship carrying POWs, when it was torpedoed by a US submarine in Nagasaki Bay just before midnight on 24 June 1944. Of the 773 POWs on board, 561 were killed or drowned. Only eight of the 35 machine gunners on board survived.

    One of these was Lieutenant Lance Gibson, who spent 14 hours in the cold and dark, clinging to wreckage in rough seas. Next morning, the POW survivors were ignored by Japanese rescue boats until a whale boat with a Korean interpreter persuaded the captain to pick them up. The men were left on the boat's exposed, icy foredeck. Still, their luck held out. After they landed, they were put on a train headed for the Fukuoka prison camp. Twenty minutes after their train left Nagasaki railway station, the station and surrounding area was wiped out in an air raid.


Battalion Formation and Training | Middle East | Java | POWS
POW School | Burma-Thai Railway | Weary Dunlop | New Guinea
War's End