Sandakan

The untold story of the Sandakan death marches of World War II.

After the fall of Singapore, in February 1942, the Japanese conquerors rounded up tens of thousands of British and Australian soldiers and shipped them to prison camps scattered throughout Hirohito’s newly won Empire.

The fall of Britain’s ‘impregnable fortress’ was the greatest humiliation in British military history, for which Churchill never forgave the Japanese.

But nothing would surpass the wretched fate of some 2,700 British and Australian prisoners who were shipped to British North Borneo later that year. They landed in Sandakan, on the east coast of the island, after a 10-day voyage on a Japanese ‘hell’ ship, and were herded into a jungle camp some eight miles inland.

Thus began the three-year ordeal of the Sandakan prisoners of war - a barely known story of unimaginable horror.