Burma Railway

Those Australians who have trekked Kokoda, they get it.

Those Australians who have visited the Burma Railway and read of Weary Dunlop, they get it.

Or those who have crawled through those Viet Cong tunnels in Vietnam, they get it too.

Now, these vandals in Canberra, including the passive bureaucrats in defence, should be ashamed of themselves.

John has pieced together his understanding of his father's war from various sources, from things his father and his relatives told him, from what he's read, particularly the war diaries of his dad's CO, legendary Dr Weary Dunlop, the Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, and the biography of Weary Dunlop by best-selling historian Peter Fitzsimons, as well as from John's personal visits to camps where his father and uncle were held.

Their time as POWs took them from the bicycle camp, the former Dutch barracks of a bicycle infantry unit, which was filled with a huge stockpile of left-behind bicycles, to Bandung, to transit through Singapore's Changi Jail and then Bangkok, and to Konyu, the start of the Thai-Burma railway.

From there, his dad and uncle lived in camps that the prisoners built themselves as the railway progressed north-west towards Burma.

After the railway was completed, Norman and his brother were shipped to Japan to work in a Nihama copper mine.

And they were taken there, they were transported up towards Thailand by train, were they? Yes.

Yes, from Singapore up to Bangkok by train.

And then by train, they went west of Bangkok to the start of the Thai-Burma railway, which is in a town called Konyu, K-O-N-Y-U.

So that was one of the camps that the prisoners made themselves when they were being forced to help construct this Thailand to Burma railway.

One of the most notable incidents of the mistreatment and even murder of prisoners of war by the Japanese was the Bataan Death March of April 1942, during which American and Filipino prisoners were marched for almost 70 miles in searing heat across Bataan in the Philippines, resulting in between 5,000 and 18,000 men dying of exhaustion, lack of water, and by execution.

Another example of the Japanese Army's mistreatment of prisoners comes from the infamous building of the Burma Railway that involved as many as 250,000 local civilians and allied prisoners constructing over 250 miles of narrow gauge railway in tropical heat across Japanese-occupied Burma in little over a year between 1942 and 1943 that resulted in the deaths of nearly 100,000 men from dysentery, beatings, beheading, exhaustion, and starvation.

A stark statistic regarding the death toll of Allied prisoners is that 27% of all prisoners of war died under Japanese care, whilst in Europe the figure was around 6%.

However, Tojo himself claimed during his trial that the mistreatment and murder of prisoners of war was the responsibility of commanders in the field and not himself, although once again he and his government could have stopped the abuse and killings had they so wished.