Dear all,

Australia Day Part II

On this, Australia day 26th January 2004, Billy Young was honoured with the Medal of the Order of Australia.

This story is not so much a fete of Billy Youngs remarkable life, this has been told elsewhere, notably by Lynette Silver, who has painstakingly compiled Billys history and those of his fallen companions.

It is rather the consequence of a elderly chap I met at a little know secluded oases in the heart of Sydney, where away from the madness of the crowd, even on Australia day, there is a chance to take a breath and share a story with a man, Fred, bedecked with medals on his rightly proud chest.

Fred saw me reading about Billy Young, and offered to fill in some of the details, and this is the tale he unfurled, to the best of my recollection and with the help of, for the moment, uncorroborated sources listed later

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Billy Young was born of a father who itched to fight in wars.

His father had run away  to try and enlist in WW1 and would have succeeded if not for his blessed mother storming aboard the troop ship at the last moment and dragging him off by the ears.

There are few men that will try to stay the hand of a determined mother!

Billys father however, never lost the urge to fight for what he thought was a just cause.

And indeed, some years later, Billy's father died fighting for the republicans in the Spanish civil war, and left his mother a widow and Billy without a father.

Fred told me that those were idealistic days, when people flocked to the gflags of noble causes, such as the republican movement in Spain, or the earlier Bolshevik movement in Russia which promised equality for all.

A false dawn, as are so many.

Billy Young joined the Australian army for a less noble reason then did his father; he knew that they would feed him.

He was fifteen at the time.

He celebrated his 17th birthday in Sandakan, in what was known then as Borneo, now the Malaysian state of Sabah.

Billy was captured by the Japanese along with some 2500 other British and Australian troops.

They were held in a camp in Sandakan.

It became home to the British and Australian POWs.

At first they were treated fairly well, the Japanese realising that a happy workforce is an effective workforce, helping them achieve their aim of constructing landing strips for the Imperial air force.

There were even concert parties, and although life was tough, as long as the POWs worked on building the air strips as the Japanese wished, they were fed and taken care of.

However, trouble loomed on the horizon of war.

As the prospects for a Japanese victory faded, so too did the conditions for the prisoners.

The dreaded Formosan, or Taiwanese guards began to arrive and with their arrival the conditions for the prisoners rapidly faded.

Any dissent exacted immediate reprisals, the most common of which was to be staked out in an iron cage in the baking sun.

Those being punished were not to be fed for a week, and although the cooks risked their own lives by surreptisiously throwing them scraps of food, the weakened prisoners had to fight with dogs as they tried to reach the scraps between the bars of their iron prison and the fences of the dogs teeth.

Every day, the prisoners were allowed out for excercise. This usually consisted of being beaten up by the guards.

As the allies bombed the nascent airstrips with increasing frequency, the Japanese realised that the war was not going their way and that it was pointless trying to rebuild the pocked airstrips again and again.

With this realisation, towrds the end of 1943 came a deadly shift of attitude.

Rations were cut to between 160g per man.

The POWs were now surplus to requirements, and the death rates rose as inevitably the rations declined.

At the same time, the beatings got worse and more random, disobediance was not an excuse.

In January 1945, the Japanese stopped feeding the POWs altogether,

The POWs survived only on those rations that they had saved for such an eventuality, and each POW was limited to 85g of rice each day.

Meanwhile the Japanese, fearing an allied invasion of Borneo, decided to move themselves and their supplies to a safer location effectively using the POWs as a mule train.

The destination was to be Ranau, 260 km away over mountainous terrain.

This would become one of the most murderous marches in the history of WWII.

Hindered by heavy rain, swaps and malnourishment, 455 men were splt into nine groups who left on consecutive days.

Those that fell by the wayside through fatigue or illness were bayoneted to death.

The toll was grim.

Groups 1-5: 195 survived out of 265.

Groups 6-9: 46 survived out of 138

But poor conditions at Ranau, starvation and harsh treatment merely postponed their doom. By the end of June 1945, only six out of the original 455 that had left Sandakan were still alive.

Those that had remained behind at Sandakan, fared both poorly and perilously.

In April of that year, following continuous bombing by the allies, the Japanese decided to remove the remaining POWs on another death march to Ranau.

This proved to be even more murderous than the earlier forced marches.

After the war, at a war crimes tribunal, several Chinese people gave witness:

'The Japanese guards gave orders for the prisoners to fall in. All obeyed except those too ill to walk...while those that could moved on, three guards remained behind. They beat the prisoners for thirty yards, and then grew impatient with their lack of progress. So they beat them off the road and, laughing shot them in the back'

Private Botterill reported that on the road the only food that they had between forty men were six cucumbers.

Whenever a member of the forced march fell out, they wer shot or bayoneted to death depending on the mood of their captors.

One of the POWs, Nelson Short, commented:

'And if the bloke just couldn't go on, we shook hands with them and wished them luck...but you knew what was going to happen. There was just nothing you could do. You just had to keep yourself going. More or less survival of the fittest.'

Back at Sandakan, the remaining 288 that were too sick to leave were left to care for themselves. They were aided in this by the Japanese burning all the huts. They were left to fend for themselves in the open.

Before the Japanese left them, one prisoner was crucified and disembowelled for trying to steal a pig for his starving comrades.

An order came through at the last minute for an additional 23 of the 'fittest available' prisoners to be marched to Ranau. The soldiers couldn't be bothered and took them to a deep air raid shelter and shot them in what witnessed later described as a duck shoot.

By the time the Japaenese finally left, there were just 28, barely surviving men.

In Ranau, on the day that Japan finally surrendered, a Major Murozomi made one man bow down before him and beheaded him.

Some 1100 men in total left Sandakan for Ranau in several forced marches.

Only 33 remained alive by August 1945.

Most had been slaughtered along the way.

Six Australians managed to escape on the marches:

Owen Campbell, Ted Skinner (who, being too weak, cut his own throat to give Campbell a better chance), Webber and Emmil (shot by soldiers), Costin (exhaustion and malaria) and Dick Braithwaite, who along with Campbell survived.

None are alive today.

By the end of the war only six people were left alive at Sandakan.

According to Fred, beneath the eaves of our oases, Billy Young had left the camp in search of food, ahead of the forced marches.

At the time, the jungle itself was considered a sufficient fence for the prisoners; inhospitable, dangerous and impenetrable.

Billy was eventually captured, beaten to the point where even his torturous captors believed him dead, and upon his miraculous recovery was sent to solitary confinement in Outram road jail in Singapore.

Many people, including Australians, are unfamiliar with this history. For years the authorities felt that the people could not cope with the story of Sandakan and the forced marches to Ranau; the failure of the same authorities to launch a rescue mission.

Many Australians had been bought up to believe that they had actually won in Gallipoli; the Sandakan atrocity was deemed too painful to acknowledge until recent years.

For many years Billy could not understand why none of his friends had survived the murderous marches to Ranau.

He kept asking himself, where were his mates, those that he's been through so much with?

Billy survives, and only recently understood the fate that befell his beloved pals at Sandakan and Ranau.

Today, on Australia day, Billy Young is proud to wear his medal as he tours schools and relates his story.

And Fred is proud of Billy too.

yechydda,

N.B. According to figures from the Centre For Internee Rights, 37% of POWs held by Japan between 1941 and 1945 died. The number of POWs who died while being held by the Nazis in the same period, was 2%. The death rate in Sandakan was nearly 98%.

Sources:

Sydney Morning Herald, Ron Taylor, Yuki Tanaka, Rogstads Worldwide Military links and finally, Fred.