Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Aussies to retrace Sandakan death march track


MELBOURNE: A group of Australian Defence Force personnel will retrace the infamous Sandakan death march track where almost 2,000 Australians lost their lives during World War II, beginning March 15.

The party will be led by historian and investigative writer Lynette Silver, who was responsible for rediscovering the path. It will embark on a six-day trek from Bauto across the mountains to Ranau, a distance of about 150km.

“Lost behind impenetrable jungle in Borneo for the past 60 years, the Sandakan death march track, where Australian and British prisoners of war died amid unimaginably cruel conditions, has been identified,” said Silver, who spent the past 14 years researching the Sandakan PoW camp and the resulting death marches.

“Almost 2,000 Australians lost their lives in Sandakan and in the resulting three death marches in 1945 across Borneo’s rugged interior, where Japanese captors forced ailing Australian and British soldiers to walk a 250km trail.

“My hope is that the Sandakan track will become as much a part of Australia’s ethos as the Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea and Gallipoli in Turkey,” she said.

Silver added: “The atrocities suffered by Australians and their allies in Sandakan should never be forgotten. Their heroism, sustained over a three-year period, was extraordinary and certainly equals that exhibited on any battlefield,”

She has combined forces with Tham Yau Kong, Sabah’s leading trekking expert, to locate and re-open the original death march track.

Silver rediscovered the track’s route using a highly detailed hand-drawn map

- the only known and complete map in existence given to her by a member of the 1945 body recovery team — and by plotting the location of every PoW body recovered along the entire track.

The first section of the route, from Sandakan to Bauto, can also be followed, but now passes entirely through oil palm plantations.

The project to re-open the track has the backing of the Malaysian and Sabah governments and the general manager of Sabah Tourism, Datuk Irene Charuruks.

On March 15, Silver and Tham will accompany a group of Australians, including a relative of one of the original prisoners of war and nine members of the Australian Defence Forces.

They will be the first people to walk in the footsteps of the PoWs since Australian Army recovery teams searched for bodies in 1946. Silver will be the first woman to follow the path.

The original route, cut by locals and purposely made as difficult as possible in the belief that it would be used solely by Japanese troops, passed almost entirely though uninhabited areas.

Once the war was over and bodies retrieved, the jungle obliterated all traces of it. An attempt was made by local trekkers in the 1950s to locate the route, without success.

For more information check www.sandakan-deathmarch.com.

Source: Bernama

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