...and Gnadberg, maybe you should have added. "...the last of the Sandakan prisoners were annihilated in the two weeks AFTER Japan had surrendered.”
The Japanese 13th Army refused to accept that Japan had surrendered until MacArthur authorised a Japanese military aircraft to fly to Kuching towards the end of August with a personal emissary of the Emperor on board with written orders from the Emperor for the 13th Army to surrender. On the 28th of August, some two weeks after VJ day, the Japanese executed all the surviving Allied PoW officers who had survived the Sandakan march.
What’s really sad about that awful, horrific march is that would never have happened but for one Douglas MacArthur. Knowing that a large number of Allied prisoners on Borneo had been concentrated into one camp at Sandakan towards the end of the war, the Australians trained up their parachute battalion for a drop onto the camp to liberate the prisoners. Everything was in place, except the 60 C47s to make the drop, and most of those would have to come from the USAAF.
But any such operation would not have been able to be presented as an American victory, and questions might be asked in the US why something similar hadn’t been done to rescue US prisoners in Japanese captivity, so MacArthur wouldn’t authorise the use of the American C47s for the op. Instead, he put on an op using US Army Rangers in the Philippines to do something similar (if overland), which I believe is the subject of a recently released Hollywood movie.
As I recall, the aborted Australian op was named ‘Operation Kingfisher’, and there is a book out there somewhere that gives details of it, but I can’t recall its name or author.
*****
Rescuing myself from a major case of tread creep and getting back on subject, I always remember taking my son to the Dawn Service at Martin Place when he was about five. A very careworn and grizzled old WW2 vet staggered up to us, much the worse for wear from too much rum and pressed a two dollar coin into my son’s hand, saying (slurring, actually) how good it was to see a young one who’d been willing to get out of bed to be there. Truth be told, my son had been anything but willing to get up that morning to go, but even at that age, I think he understood something of the deep emotions in that old man.