Kokoda Spirit Managing Director Wayne Wetherall has been working closely with Historian and Author Kevin Smith OAM in regards to Sandakan.
Recently Kevin wrote to Wayne in regards to the following article.
Wayne,
Several years ago I was guest speaker on an occasion where the audience included the Chiefs or Deputy Chiefs of each of Australia's armed services and many of their senior officers such as General Peter Cosgrove. If you would like to copy the article and put on your web site, which is attached for each of the members of your forthcoming visit and give it to them with my compliments I would be most grateful.
Best wishes to you all for the trek.
Kind regards, Kevin
Sandakan and Project Kingfisher
Address at The Australian Golf Club, Sydney for their War Memorial and War Service Day 28th August 2008 Dr Kevin Smith OAM
I would like to thank this long-established and prestigious Australian Golf Club for your kind invitation to be with you all this evening, and my friend Wesley Browne for making the suggestion to you. I join you in your tribute to the men and women you honour on this War Memorial and War Service Trophy Day.
When some day you go to Sandakan -- and you really should go -- you will no doubt want to visit the Sandakan Country Club. You will be made most welcome, for Australians are held in friendly respect in that Malaysian state of Sabah.
Perhaps while in Sabah you would like to visit a couple of their world-class golf courses, such as:
* Mt Kinabalu at 1500 metres or 5,000 feet, where floating clouds are a common hazard on the fairways, with a mountain half as high as Everest as a backdrop
* or on the west coast, Sutera Harbour’s 27 holes offer day and night golfing with spectacular views of the South China Sea
* or magnificent Shan Sui at Tawau on the east coast, with its 15th hole, The Creek, ranked as one of the best par 4s in the world.
If you went to Sabah in August you could join in the annual commemoration of Sandakan Day, our VP Day, on 15th August.
63 years ago if you had been in the First Australian Parachute Battalion on the Atherton Tablelands you would have been booked in for a direct flight from Morotai to the Sandakan Country Club, free tickets even, but unfortunately your flight was cancelled. It just vanished from the planned schedule at the end of March 1945.
Unfortunate for you -- a matter of a certain lifelong regret, especially if you were one of the younger battalion members, for you were thus denied the opportunity for any World War 2 active service. Well, perhaps lucky for you.
It was certainly unlucky for over fifteen hundred Australian POWs who died there in Borneo during the final eight awful, captive months of the war, in 1945.
Your flight to Sandakan was to have been part of a dramatic rescue mission, meticulously planned by Colonel Overell’s battalion, and for which you had trained hard for many months. You may not have known your exact destination , but your training scenarios, your officers’ Tactical Exercises Without Troops (their TEWTs) made it pretty clear you’d be heading for a large island in the tropics. The battalion had long guessed that big things lay ahead. Between September ’44 and April ’45 there were at least six visits by VIPs, including three by Lieut General Morshead. Such visits do not occur casually nor at random. Behind the ceremonial inspection parades and the demonstrations by the diggers, behind closed doors there were confidential discussions and briefings for Overell and his senior officers about the unit’s imminent operations. The Sandakan Country Club was to have been your Drop Zone.
Tonight you are the first audience to which I have spoken about a tragic and scandalous sequence of events over 60 years ago. In 1942 and 1943, 2,026 Australian soldiers, one airman, two sailors of HMAS PERTH and one YMCA officer had been sent from Changi to Borneo to work on a military airfield for the enemy. Over 90% of these men were destined to perish, most at Sandakan, many on the death marches and many at Ranau beneath Mt Kinabalu -- beaten, ill, starved, murdered, ignored.
Sometimes it is said that only six survived that long and terrible Borneo captivity. In fact 218 survived to come home. However of the 789 Australians on the death marches there were only six who came home.
By the end of 1944 there were 120 Australians who had died at Sandakan. Another 1,692 would die in the first eight months of 1945. I tell some of their many stories in my two books about that horrifying captivity, stories of men who did not live to return to their families or to play golf in a contented twilight of their years.
I was still at school in 1945 so how, you bask, can I presume to tell their story? Well, let me tell you another story, about the fellow who ordered a double scotch here in your clubhouse:
“With ice, sir?”
“No, straight, but put just two drops of water in it please.”
“That’s unusual sir.”
“Not at all. Over the years I’ve learned to hold my liquor quite well. Unfortunately as I grow older I have increasing difficulty in holding my water.”
It’s often said that old soldiers are reluctant to share their stories with family or non-service friends. They hold their more awful memories deep within themselves. As they’ve grown older however, they are a little more able to release that hold on the past, more able to tell what their war was like for them. They realize that when they pass on their stories will be lost forever. In my books I try to preserve some of those stories for posterity, and I am grateful to those veterans of the Borneo years for trusting me to do this.
As well as dozens of interviews, I have analysed hundreds of original wartime documents in the national archives, such as reports from the commandoes of “Z” Special Unit in enemy-occupied Borneo, many at the time marked “Top Secret”. On one occasion I was told to wait outside my Sydney hotel at a certain time. A car pulled up, double-parked, the driver got out, went to the boot, lifted out two large boxes of tattered documents for me, and then drove off. They proved to be original documents from the 1940s and very useful for my research.
In mid-July 1944 planning was authorized for a secret mission to reconnoitre the east coast area of Borneo around Sandakan in preparation for a rescue mission in late’44 or early ’45 -- Operation KINGFISHER. The planning did not at first get very far.
The archival records tell us that planning would commence when the designated leader, Major Gort Chester, came back from leave. It was a well-deserved leave, following his nine months hazardous intelligence gathering duties on Operation PYTHON in wild coastal country 150 kms south of Sandakan, for five of those months hunted by patrols of Japanese marines. He had really reached the end of his tether, physically and mentally, by the time he and his five younger comrades were extracted from that exhausting mission, north-east of Tawau. Always highly regarded by most of those who served with him, Chester’s tactical awareness now seemed to be increasingly suspect, and in quite bizarre ways.
The archival documents reveal no sense of urgency in the headquarters planning to rescue POWs at Sandakan on the east coast of Borneo. The initial planning proved unacceptable to MacArthur’s General Headquarters., and indeed the planned reconnaissance was located far, far to the west of Sandakan, over 200 kms as the hornbill flies, covering territory known to Chester from his pre-war days as a plantation manager just south of Sutera Harbour on the west coast.
You have been told that KINGFISHER failed because MacArthur would not make available the necessary thirty C47s (DC3s) for the Australian parachute battalion. That erroneous belief still persists today.
During the war many members of the Armoured Corps, fretting at their inability to get away from Australia, had found their way into the Parachute Battalion. At the 2nd Annual Conference of the Armoured Corps Association in November 1947, General Blamey stated that he could not get the necessary aircraft allocated for a rescue operation. Yet at the time, it seems that 71 C47s were here in Australia. It seems that there was a certain fudging of the facts, or perhaps simple confusion. General Morshead had a preference to use his parachute battalion for the Balikpapan amphibious landings in July. For that attack, aircraft were ultimately unavailable I understand.
In Federal Parliament soon after Blamey’s newsworthy announcement to the former members of the Armoured Corps, Prime Minister Chifley stated – upon advice – that Army authorities had no record of a rescue plan.
Now back to 1944. Fresh plans were drawn up for MacArthur’s GHQ and they proved acceptable. Then Gort Chester crankily demanded that the operation would need to be delayed until after the wet season. That is probably until February 1945. This, despite the fact that reinforcements for the earlier Operation PYTHON had been sent to Borneo in January 1944 -- in the wet season.
As it turned out a submarine insertion, a reconnaissance for KINGFISHER, was eventually activated in January 1945. Yet somehow Chester’s profound influence ensured that the insertion plan developed as a west coast operation. I’ve been to their intended landing place, a long and lonely beach even today, but the operation was aborted there.
A tall, dead tree inland from the anticipated point of insertion was mistaken for a radio tower, indicating the presence of the enemy. Chester decided not to land, and the party returned all the way back to Australia !
On 18th February Chester flew an aerial reconnaissance over the Sandakan POW camp and reported that it seemed to have been evacuated -- at a time when there were something like 2,000 Australian and British prisoners still there.
Nevertheless, on 24th February a renewed recce mission led by Chester departed Darwin by submarine, arriving at an east coast point of insertion in Borneo on 3rd March, still over 60 km across Labuk Bay, west of Sandakan. A new Zealand member of this group has suggested that Chester considered it too dangerous any closer to Sandakan. There is no evidence that this mission ever seriously probed around Sandakan. Instead, Chester relied upon not entirely reliable native rumours for his frequent radio reports back to Darwin.
For example, in “Z” Unit’s headquarters in Melbourne, in the secret Services Reconnaissance Department, Intelligence Report No. 65 on 4th April 1945, consistent with Major Chester’s earlier signals, stated that: “ All signs indicate an enemy evacuation of Sandakan.” . In fact, over one thousand Australian POWs were still there.
There is no further mention of Project KINGFISHER in the planning documents after 31st March 1945. If, according to aerial reconnaissance, there was no one to rescue, then aircraft were not needed. KINGFISHER simply vanished because of faulty intelligence.
On 25th May the First Australian Parachute Battalion at Atherton reluctantly stood down from its readiness for a rescue mission.
LEST WE FORGET.
http://www.sandakandeathmarch.com.au/
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