ABSTRACT
Few people outside Japan are familiar with the name “Sandakan,” and even in Australia fewer still know of the extraordinary events that occurred there. By September 1943 Sandakan POW camp held about 2,000 Australian POWs and 500 British POWs; only 6 survived to the end of the war—a survival rate of 0.24 percent. Sandakan is similarly forgotten in Japan, though for a different reason. All of the guards at the Sandakan camp were Formosans, under the command of Japanese officers, so there were few returnees to Japan who had any knowledge of the incident. The distance between the Philippines and Singapore was too great for Japanese aircraft to fly in one stretch, and so it was decided there should be an airfield at Sandakan to provide a refueling point. The Japanese government had signed the Geneva Convention but never ratified it because of strong opposition from the Japanese military.
