The first round of Australian class-B and -C trials began in November 1945 and tapered out over April to July 1946. Large numbers of soldiers, prisoners of war, internees and Japanese personnel were still being moved, and so transport by air and sea was limited. Many Australian troops were still overseas but lawyers and translators were in limited supply, and it was easier in some cases to hold mass trials. The trials often happened concurrently with the public revelation of Japanese atrocities and so became front-page news.

Most of the early trials concerned crimes against Allied prisoners. At Labuan, fifteen trials of 145 defendants were conducted from 3 December 1945 to 31 January 1946 for crimes committed against Australian and British prisoners of war in Borneo. And at Morotai in the Dutch Moluccas, twenty-five trials of 148 defendants (including ninety defendants transferred mid-trial from Ambon for M45, which was started there but never concluded) between 29 November 1945 and 28 February 1946 for crimes against Australian prisoners at Ambon or downed Allied airmen throughout the local area. And at Darwin, three trials of twenty-two defendants between 1 March and 29 April 1946 for crimes against Australian prisoners in Timor. The two trials of two defendants at Wewak, Papua New Guinea, from 30 November to 11 December 1945 for mutilation of the dead and cannibalism.

In this chapter I will look at some examples from Labuan and Morotai relating to the Sandakan prisoner-of-war camp and the Sandakan–Ranau death marches.

Labuan is an island off the north coast of Borneo, formerly in British North Borneo, now part of Malaysia. Both the British and the Dutch established colonies on Borneo, which is rich in rubber and oil, and by the early twentieth century the island was divided into the smaller British north and the larger Dutch south. Borneo’s resources, along with its central position in the East Indies, also made it attractive to Japan. The Japanese launched an invasion of the island from French Indochina almost immediately after the outbreak of the Pacific War, landing in the north on 16 December 1941, and the few Allied troops on the island had surrendered by April 1942.

Japanese occupation policy stated: ‘In general, the Army has been charged with the administration of densely populated areas which demand complex administrative tasks, while sparsely populated primitive areas, which shall be retained in the future for the benefit of the Empire, have been assigned to the Navy.’1 Accordingly, more developed North Borneo was assigned to the army and South Borneo to the navy.

Even by the standards of the Japanese Empire, the occupation of Borneo was harsh. An atmosphere of fear was enforced by the Kempeitai and Tokkeitai. Men were conscripted as rōmusha labourers, the women forced into military brothels. Attempts were made to forcibly ‘Japanise’ the population in South Borneo, and anti-Japanese plots, actual or suspected, were suppressed ruthlessly. The oppression of the Suluk ethnic group of North Borneo, including the burning of villages and the mass execution of men, was one of the war crimes prosecuted by the British Commonwealth at Tokyo.

This brutality extended to prisoners of war. Between mid-1942 and mid-1943, 2,000 Australian and 750 British soldiers captured in the Fall of Singapore were transferred to North Borneo to work on an airfield at Sandakan. It seems they volunteered on the promise of better food and an escape from the drudgery of imprisonment in Changi. Of these 2,750 prisoners, only six survived the war. The others died at Sandakan, or on two death marches between Sandakan and Ranau, or were executed at Ranau at the end of the war.

Between May and July 1945, Borneo was recaptured for the Allies by Australia’s 6th, 7th and 9th divisions in a campaign that remains controversial. Sacrificing the lives of Australian soldiers to recapture territory in the Dutch East Indies once the Allies were preparing to invade Japan itself was seen as a waste. Around 2,000 mostly British prisoners of war and civilian internees were recovered at the Kuching camp, liberated by the Australian 9th Division on 11 September 1945. The death rate among British soldiers there had been two-thirds. Six survivors of Sandakan were also found living in the jungle with the native people, and from them was learned the fate of the others. Once Japan surrendered, the men of the 9th Division moved quickly to arrest suspects among them, and the Sandakan–Ranau death marches became the main subject of the Labuan trials.

These were held under Australian control for simple convenience. Britain did not have soldiers to spare from Malaya and Singapore to send to Borneo, so the 9th Australian Division was left to manage British North Borneo for the time being. The former civilian capital of Jesselton (modern Kota Kinabalu) had been destroyed in the war, so the 9th Division chose Labuan as an alternative HQ. There were not enough ships to transport the Japanese personnel still on the island back to Japan for some months, so it made sense for Australia to conduct the trials, and to conduct them in Labuan. Those sentenced to imprisonment or death by hanging were sent to Rabaul, where there was a semipermanent compound and a gallows. Once the British resumed control in North Borneo, the Australians left took their remaining suspects with them to continue trials in Morotai.

The revelation of the fate of the prisoners left tensions running high, and David Sissons reported being disturbed at reports of the mistreatment of some suspects, but the conduct of the court proceedings themselves was cordial.2 Captain Athol Moffitt, the Sydney barrister acting as lead Australian prosecutor, at one point went out of his way to explain the common law system to the Japanese Army defence lawyer. In return, the Japanese lawyer helped the translators with the exact meaning of certain Japanese phrases. In those early months, with the courts limited to the personnel they had on hand, they had to make do.

The two highest-profile trials at Labuan were those of Captains Takakuwa Takuo and Hoshijima Susumu (also Susumi), described in one newspaper article as Australia’s public enemies #1 and #2 respectively.3 Takakuwa had commanded the men on the Sandakan–Ranau death marches, while Hoshijima had been the commandant of Sandakan POW Camp. Between them they were held responsible for the worst war crimes ever inflicted on Australians, and for over 10 per cent of the Australian Army’s deaths in the Pacific War. Both trials are interesting, but I will look at Hoshijima’s in detail. He was brought to trial at Labuan (trial number ML28) on 8 January 1946, charged with the ill-treatment of POWs at Sandakan between September 1942 and May 1945.4 The trial was high-profile enough that Army Minister Frank Forde came to visit the courtroom himself at one point, the only civilian to do so.

It is possible to take a charitable view of many Japanese commandants of prisoner-of-war camps. They were sent to remote locations with insufficient resources, given unachievable objectives, and left to control subordinates who had been indoctrinated to hate prisoners of war. But some commandants seemed to go out of their way to inflict as much suffering and death as they possibly could. Ikeuchi Masakiyo at Ambon was probably one. And Hoshijima, as far as we can tell from the evidence presented at his trial, was another.

The man charged with being directly responsible for the deaths of 1,100 Australian and British prisoners of war was born in 1908 in Okayama prefecture. He studied chemistry at Osaka Imperial University, where his academic career was distinguished. On graduating in 1934, he was employed as an engineer in the Dai Nippon Celluloid Company. In 1941, married with four children, he was drafted into the army. His youngest son was born only days before he left for the East Indies – he held him once before leaving. His engineering background and ability to speak workable English probably landed him the job at Sandakan.

Hoshijima made an immediate impression on the prisoners who arrived at his camp. Intimidating in appearance and haughty in demeanour, he gave a ‘welcome speech’: ‘You will work until your bones rot under the tropical sun of Borneo. You will work for the Emperor. If any of you escapes, I will pick out three or four and shoot them. The war will last 100 years.’5

He made an immediate impression on the people in the courtroom as well. Almost all the journalists present wrote of the ‘tall’ and ‘arrogant’ Japanese captain.6 Chief prosecutor Athol Moffit, having read the evidence, was curious to see Hoshijima in the flesh. He recorded his first sight of him:

From the moment he was marched into the court by the Ghurka guards, it was apparent that he was an impressive man with a domineering personality. About six feet tall, a powerful athletic looking man, he towered above his diminutive guards and the Japanese defending officers. He clicked the heels of his well-polished boots, saluted with military precision and gazed intently, even defiantly, at those who were to try him. The corners of his mouth were slightly turned down to reveal the face of a determined and cruel man, characteristics to become apparent from the evidence presented to the court and from his demeanour before it in the many days of the trial.7

According to one journalist, he ‘snarled’ his plea of ‘not guilty’ to each of the four counts of the indictment.8

Moffitt had served as an artillery officer in the war before transferring to the Australian Army Legal Corps (AALC). Arriving in Borneo seven weeks after the Japanese surrender, he moved into a house vacated by a Japanese officer. It still had Japanese stationery strewn over the floor and a poster of a geisha girl on the wall. In his address to the court, Moffitt accused Hoshijima of having prisoners ‘flogged like the galley slaves of twenty centuries ago’ and sending them to their deaths on the Sandakan–Ranau death marches.9 The commander of the marches, Captain Takakuwa, had already been sentenced to death (trial ML17).

The main witness for the prosecution was Warrant Officer William ‘Bill’ Sticpewich, one of the six survivors of the second Sandakan–Ranau death march. Born in Newcastle in 1908, he had made a name for himself as a speedway rider before enlisting in Brisbane in 1940. He was assigned to the 8th Division and captured at the Fall of Singapore in February 1942.10 Moffitt wrote of him: ‘He is the typical Aussie – fairly rough, but hail fellow well met with a ton of resource and personality in a rough way. He got on the right side of the Japs and can speak a lot of Japanese . . . [B]eing very handy as a carpenter and good at fixing machines, he made himself invaluable to the Japs.’11

Sticpewich told a harrowing story of slow starvation. One of his tasks as a carpenter at Sandakan was making coffins, but from June 1944 onwards, there were too many deaths and too few materials with which to make them. There were food cuts in June and September, and things became even worse with the beginning of Allied air attacks in October. When work on the airfield ceased in January, the rice ration was a mere 100 grams per man per day. It was further reduced to 40. The prisoners were put to work cultivating vegetables but got to eat little of what they grew. There was notionally a ration of meat or fish, but these rarely appeared and were usually full of maggots when they did. What little food there was could be withheld as a punishment, and entire working parties would go without food for the infractions of one or two men. As in many camps late in the war, Hoshijima imposed a ‘no work, no food’ policy, meaning any men too sick or weak to work would starve.

These policies were often circumvented by the prisoners, who found ways of sharing what they did have. At his trial Hoshijima claimed that everything had run short by early 1945 and he distributed what he had, but Sticpewich maintained that the guards always had large quantities of rice, fish and vegetables. According to the prosecution, there were 80 or 90 tons of rice stored under Hoshijima’s house even as men were dying of starvation.

Medicines also appear to have been withheld. Some medical supplies were received from the US Red Cross, and Hoshijima likewise maintained he had distributed them. Sticpewich denied this as well. The prosecution stated they’d found 160,000 quinine tablets at Sandakan, enough to save the lives of most of the men who had died of malaria. And it was not only the shortage of food and medicine which wore down the prisoners’ health. When the boots they were captured in wore out, they were compelled to go barefoot. Many developed tropical ulcers on their legs and feet, which rotted, leaving gaping holes exposing raw flesh. The worst off were those who developed ulcers on the soles of their feet and could barely walk, and so couldn’t work and were denied food. The use of human excrement in vegetable gardens resulted in deaths from dysentery, to add to those caused by beri-beri (in turn caused by a vitamin B1 deficiency), malaria and starvation. The death rate peaked in March 1945, with ten prisoners dying a night. Then, on 17 May, Hoshijima handed the surviving prisoners over to Captain Takakuwa for the march to Ranau. Of the 2,750 prisoners, 500 had already been sent to Ranau and around half of the remainder had died.

Life at Sandakan would have been hard enough, but Hoshijima made it worse with his many punishments for real or fanciful offences. Men were made to stand for an hour holding out weights and beaten if they dropped their arms. Beatings with sticks or rifle butts were a constant. Men were kicked in the testicles, or kicked in their ulcers to see if they were ‘really sick’, and some had their jaws broken. Cripples were beaten with their own crutches. According to Sticpewich, Hoshijima himself hit one man in the face with a stick so hard he lost an eye. As Sticpewich’s testimony showed, hitting men in the face seemed to be something of a habit with the commandant.

The most striking stories of mistreatment concerned prisoners being confined for days or weeks at a time in a bamboo cage left out in the sun. This was not unique to Sandakan – it was done in various Japanese prison camps. Nor was it unique to prisoners of war – confinement in a cage for up to twenty days was a lawful punishment in the Japanese Army. Three cages of slightly different sizes were used at Sandakan, although the one the prosecution discussed most frequently was 4ʹ6ʺ by 5ʹ6ʺ at the base and about 4ʹ6ʺ high (effectively one and a half metres each way). Caged prisoners were given no food for seven days and had no mosquito net; they were forced to sit at attention and were taken out and beaten if they relaxed. They were let out twice a day to use the latrine and receive additional beatings. Hoshijima always ordered the use of the cage as a punishment himself, and the sentence varied from seven to twenty-eight days. At one point, seven men were packed into the largest cage for four days. According to Sticpewich, many men upon release weighed less than 6 stone (38 kilograms), and fifteen died as a result of the confinement.

Sticpewich gave one specific example of three men, named Barber, Clements and Weeks, who were caught stealing from the prisoners’ vegetable garden and put into the cage:

Hoshijima addressed us and informed us that they had been caught going out of the camp thieving, and he took a very poor view of it and if there were any recurrences they would be shot on sight [one man, named John Orr, was later shot for the same offence]. He said they would be severely punished and he would also punish the camp, which he did by stopping our food ration for one day. At that time the meal was cooked but we were not allowed to have it until the following morning . . . Clements returned to the camp very sick from the cage. He revived somewhat but about five weeks after he came out of the cage he died as a result of the treatment. Clements was a provost and a very big man. Weeks was taken out of the cage on a stretcher as he was too weak to walk. Within a week or a little more he also died and I consider the cage treatment caused his death. Weeks was suffering from paralysis and internal injuries.12

When Captain George Cook, the senior Australian officer in the camp, complained, Hoshijima hit him in the face.

Moffit concluded his opening address: ‘There have been many PW camps in this war with grim records, but the name of Sandakan PW camp and the tragedy it represents will live long as a blot on the barbaric Japanese Army. The man responsible stands before the court.’13

In his statement to the court, Hoshijima brazenly brushed off the prosecution’s allegations. ‘As a result of the defeat of my country, I am now being tried here as a war criminal, something which I do not fully understand as I did my best for the PWs,’ he said.14 He insisted that he neither ordered nor permitted the ill-treatment of prisoners, and divided food and medicine equitably between the guards and prisoners. He was limited by circumstances, particularly the Allied air raids, which cut his supply lines, but did what he could. He was, he said, a cultured man who had had an exemplary career, had never been punished, and had consistently been given work normally allocated to someone of a higher rank. He claimed to have received many letters from prisoners thanking him for his kind treatment, but unfortunately he had burned them all (he did not say why). It was also unfortunate that none of the officers imprisoned at Sandakan were still alive, as he was certain they would have given him a good character reference. In particular, Captains Cook and Mills (the senior Australian and British officers respectively) were his good friends, although he admitted under cross-examination that he did hit them in the face once or twice.15 Hoshijima complained of not receiving good translation, saying the Japanese-speaking Australians who had interviewed him could not even speak Japanese to primary school level. In short, he did his best in difficult circumstances and should be acquitted and allowed to return home to his family.

Hoshijima’s counsel made several arguments in his defence, although between the impossibility of his position and the patchy translation of their remarks into English they sometimes come across as more tragicomic than persuasive. They argued that conditions at the camp had been good between August 1942 and September 1944, but had deteriorated following Allied air raids in October 1944. These had caused shortages of food and medicine, which had an adverse effect on guards and prisoners alike. He admitted some guards had mistreated the prisoners; however, Hoshijima could not be blamed for everything that went wrong in the camp. And while Hoshijima conceded that being put in the cage was ‘not enjoyable’, he denied it was fatal.16 Those who died after being taken from the cage had died of ‘sudden attacks of malaria’.17 And as confinement to a cage was a lawful punishment in the Japanese Army, Hoshijima had not treated his prisoners any differently to his own men in this respect (although he doesn’t appear to have ever caged his own men). In conclusion, Hoshijima had done everything he could for the prisoners of war, but unfortunately they had all died because of their ‘physical unsuitableness as Europeans’ to the tropics, and the mental and physical deterioration caused by the shock of being made a prisoner.18

In his cross-examination Moffitt pushed Hoshijima hard on this last point. If the deaths of the prisoners at Sandakan were caused by the disruption to supplies of food and medicine and the unsuitableness of people from temperate climates to the tropics, why did only one Japanese guard die? Hoshijima stuck to his position, maintaining that while he had issued equal quantities of medicines to both prisoners and guards, the Japanese were physically stronger and so didn’t use theirs up as quickly. His counsel claimed that ‘the white people are more vulnerable to a hot climate than are Formosans or Japanese’.19 The court understandably rejected this unusual argument and convicted Hoshijima on all four counts.

‘It is impossible to make any punishment fit this crime,’ Moffitt told the court when it was considering sentencing. ‘Even death by the ignominy of hanging, which I submit should be the penalty, is too good for this barbarian, ironically self-termed “cultured”.’20 In what was probably a foregone conclusion, the court sentenced Hoshijima to death by hanging on 20 January 1946. He bore his sentence impassively, saluting and then walking from the courtroom. The defence petitioned the verdict and sentence to the Australian military authorities using the same arguments they advanced in the trial, adding that Hoshijima had a young family in Japan and was a ‘bright and broad-minded man’ whom it would be unjust to hang.21 They provided a number of character references, including one from his Formosan servant.22 Unsurprisingly, the petition was dismissed.

Australian authorities also pressed charges against many other guards at Sandakan, either for offences there or offences committed during the death marches. These cascaded down the Japanese military hierarchy to the bottom – the Formosans. The Japanese Empire won Formosa, as Taiwan was then known, from China as a spoil of victory in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Holding it had initially been difficult and required a large army of occupation, but by the 1930s a significant number of Formosans had been assimilated into Japanese culture. The names of the Formosan defendants, for example, were all Japanese rather than the Formosan dialect of Chinese. The Japanese military began accepting Formosan volunteers in 1937 and then began conscripting Formosans in 1944.

All of the Formosans at Borneo appear to have been volunteers. The Imperial Army gave them a higher status than they would have had at home, although they still tended to find themselves in lower-status jobs, such as guarding prisoners of war. There remained language and cultural barriers between the Formosans and the Japanese, and while the Formosans were notionally educated in Japanese, not all had a great deal of schooling and so their ability in the language varied. I will now look at M18, the trial of twenty Formosan guards at Morotai from 7–9 January 1946 in relation to the second Sandakan–Ranau death march.23

In January 1945, as work on the airfield finished, the Japanese authorities in Borneo decided to move 500 prisoners from Sandakan to a new camp at Ranau, 163 miles (263 kilometres) away. They had to walk an extremely difficult track, built in haste by the Japanese Army, crossing swamps and mountains through the rugged interior of the island. It seems that the 500 prisoners on the first march were used as porters, and while it is not known how many died on the march itself, only five Australians and one British prisoner were still alive at Ranau when the men from the second march reached the camp in June.

On 29 May, the Sandakan camp was formally abandoned. The 536 prisoners fit enough to walk set off for Ranau on the second march, leaving 288 stretcher cases behind. Those men were never seen again, and soon after, the camp was burned by the retreating Japanese. After twenty-eight days, a further 183 prisoners reached Ranau – 142 Australian and forty-one British. The others had died on the way or been killed. Two escaped on the march.

On 4 July another four prisoners escaped from Ranau, one of whom died, and then on 28 July two more escaped. These were the last escapees from Ranau before the end of the war. One of these was Sticpewich, who had been tipped off by a friendly Formosan guard that Takakuwa was planning to kill the remaining prisoners. ‘You go now. Go jungle. If you stay you will be mati. All men very short time mati mati,’ the guard, Takahara, said to him.24 The other was his friend, Private Herman Reither. Both were sheltered by local native people, who had apparently become pro-British and anti-Japanese by this stage of the war. Badly weakened from dysentery, Reither died on 8 August, two days before Sticpewich was rescued. When the two men made their escape, there were only thirty-two Australian and eight British prisoners still alive at Ranau. It seems certain they were all shot, possibly after the end of the war.

All of the twenty Formosans were accused of the murder of numerous unknown prisoners of war during the second Sandakan–Ranau death march, from 29 May to 25 June 1945. The chief witness for the prosecution was once again Warrant Officer Bill Sticpewich. A statement he gave to Justice Mansfield on 19 October 1945 as part of the Third Webb Inquiry was given as evidence, and he was flown to Morotai to testify in person.25 Identifying individual guards could be difficult, as they were often known to the prisoners only by their nicknames. Private Nelson Short, who managed to escape from Ranau on 4 July, said he knew the guards by such names as ‘The Indian’, ‘Euclid’, ‘Masturbation’ and ‘The Gold Toothed-Runt’.26 (The court must have been curious about the origin of these unusual monikers, but it was not discussed.)

According to Sticpewich, Takakuwa ordered his men to begin breaking up the Sandakan camp at 9 am on 29 May. At 5 pm, all prisoners able to walk were told they would need to be ready to move within the hour. They were permitted to kill and cook some pigs. Some guards told the prisoners there would be more and better food at Ranau, others said they would all be killed there. Sticpewich thought they were simply boasting.

Shortly before 8 pm, they prepared to move. Takakuwa told the guards to move the prisoners in batches of fifty, with guards in front, behind and all around. There were to be no escapes. They set off as directed, stopping for the night after a few hours at the end of the sealed road.

The track after that was horrendous. There were ridges so steep the men had to struggle up them on all fours, then slide down the other side. In many places the mud was knee-deep. It would have been a struggle for fit, well-fed men, let alone those who had already endured a year at Sandakan on steadily dwindling rations. The prisoners started each day in their groups of fifty at between 6.30 and 7.30 am, and finished between 3 and 5 pm. The most distance covered in one day was 13 miles (21 kilometres), but the daily average was closer to 6 miles (9 kilometres). Many prisoners fell, and anyone who stopped to help was driven on with blows from rifle butts. Each man was given 4 pounds of rice (1.8 kilograms) per ten days, a meagre diet for an exhausting hike through jungle. To make things worse, the guards often demanded the food back some time later. Sticpewich quickly learned to distribute anything he was given among the men in his party, and when the guards later asked for it he claimed it had already been eaten.

The specific charge against the Formosans was that at various times they had been members of a party of soldiers led by Sergeant (or Sergeant Major) Tsuji which was responsible for following the marchers and killing the stragglers. Different men were assigned to Tsuji’s party each day in order to spread the killing around, and the prosecution alleged that taking part in the killing was allowed or denied as reward or punishment respectively. All twenty Formosans pleaded not guilty, either denying they had killed any prisoners, or claiming they had only killed under the direct orders of their superiors, or when a prisoner asked to be shot and put out of his misery (a not implausible scenario in the circumstances). The prosecution claimed those who were in Tsuji’s party without actually killing anyone were still guilty.

The defence made two main arguments: the difficulty of the track meant that deaths were inevitable, and those who killed prisoners on the direct orders of superiors should not be held responsible. The court rejected both, but still faced the challenge of allocating responsibility to each of the defendants individually. William Ballantyne Simpson, who replaced Wilson as Judge Advocate General on 31 March 1946, was critical of this and the other large trials held at Morotai for this reason.27 When each of the guards gave his statement, Sticpewich made a short comment on what he knew of the guard’s character and actions, which was recorded at the bottom. According to him, most of the guards beat the prisoners when ordered to but otherwise left them alone. Some were ‘easy-going’.28

Sticpewich thought one of the worst guards was Fukushima Maso, known to the prisoners as ‘Black Bastard’ or ‘Private Detective’. The latter name apparently came from his habit of reporting other guards to the officers if they failed to properly beat prisoners. He was twenty-one years old at the time of the trial, so he would have been around eighteen when he first arrived at the camp. In his own evidence, Fukushima denied killing any prisoners, although he did describe an execution he witnessed:

About 1st August 45 remaining PWs in 110½ mile camp were killed. I was a member of S/M Tsuji’s party and we took 10 PWs a short distance along the Tambunan Rd. The PWs rested and were given food and tobacco and then asked if there was anything they would like to say as they were about to be killed. They asked for tobacco and water and received them. One at a time we were ordered by Tsuji to bring a PW about 20 metres into the jungle. I took the first. This action was rendered necessary due to the lack of food and medicine. S/M Tsuji told me to kill the first PW but being a Formosan I refused to kill any. Tsuji then scolded me, and taking my rifle said ‘this is the way’ and shot the first PW (Cook). The PWs were killed by taking them one by one away from the group and shooting them.29

Fukushima listed the defendants responsible for the shooting, showing a willingness to report on his comrades that reflected his nickname. The court was not persuaded of his non-involvement, perhaps going on Sticpewich’s character evidence, and he was convicted. He opted to say nothing to seek mitigation of his sentence and was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.30

Another guard with a bad reputation was Yoshikawa Tatsuhito, known to the prisoners as ‘Masturbation’. He was twenty-five years old, so would have been in his early twenties during the events at Sandakan. According to Sticpewich, ‘when opportunity arose he was most cruel’.31 Yoshikawa admitted he had been present at the execution of between fifteen and seventeen prisoners but, like Fukushima, denied taking part. He also named those who did and those who did not.32 Under cross-examination, he said he had taken care of the prisoners as best he could and given them rice and bread when he had any to spare.33 When asked by the prosecuting officer if he knew it was wrong to kill the prisoners he replied, ‘Yes, I think so.’ He was convicted, but requested a lenient sentence, telling the court his family needed him to support them: ‘My father has tuberculosis, my mother rheumatism. I was fifth in the family. My brother above me had died and my second brother is not making much money. My third brother is a hunch back and he cannot walk at all. My fourth brother’s whereabouts is unknown.’34

He was also sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment.

At the other end of the scale was Yokota Kinzo. Sticpewich said, when Yokata was before him during interrogation, ‘This man treated us fairly well, beat PWs under orders but was alright when on his own. He misappropriated foodstuffs and vegetables and gave them to the PWs.’35

Yokata was in Tsuji’s party twice, and saw three or four prisoners killed each time. He admitted to killing a man on Takakuwa’s direct order once. Later, at Ranau, he was sick with malaria and beri-beri and took no further part in events there. Based on his admission he was convicted. When being sentenced he told the court he was twenty-three years old and had enlisted to support his family. He was one of nine children of a farming couple, and his elder brother had a wife and three children but had gone missing. It fell to him to support his parents, siblings, sister-in-law, nieces and nephews, and he sent everything he earned as a guard home to them. ‘I do not know what to say to my mother for what I have done,’ he said.36 He was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment, the shortest sentence at this trial.

Another in Sticpewich’s good graces was Utsunomiya Seichi. He was in Tsuji’s party three times, but denied ever killing prisoners or being present when they were killed.37 ‘This man is a good type,’ Sticpewich said. ‘He always took care of stores and misappropriated some to our favour.’38 The court accepted Utsunomiya’s evidence and acquitted him.

In total, two Formosans were acquitted and the remaining eighteen convicted and given sentences of nine to twenty years’ imprisonment.

The defence submitted a petition against the length of the sentences written in broken English, suggesting it was drafted in Japanese and then translated by someone whose English was solid but not fluent. The petition pointed out that failing to follow orders in the Japanese Army resulted in the death penalty or a prison sentence, and under Japanese military law no subordinate would ever be held criminally responsible for following a clear order of his superior. Rather, he must carry out the order ‘even if judged wrong by the commonsense [sic]’.39 The defence again argued that the poor condition of the track meant deaths were inevitable, and it affected Japanese soldiers as well as prisoners. They claimed that a Japanese force of 500 had lost 300 men on the same track, and a force of 125 had lost 101.40 There were so many dead bodies and skeletons along the track that the jungle was ‘spooky’ and scenery was ‘miserable to look at’. The loss of 353 prisoners out of 560 was therefore not excessive.

In cross-examination, Sticpewich acknowledged that the road would have been hazardous even for fit men, but while he saw some graves with Japanese markers he denied seeing any Japanese actually die en route.41 It was because Takakuwa knew of the difficulty of the road, the petition claimed, that he ordered a party to come behind, to help stragglers. Contrary to the prosecution’s claim, it was not a killing party. Tsuji’s men were assigned to ‘try their best to bring such prisoners along following the main party and any of the strugglers [sic] who were too weak or sick to travel further on and seemed evidently to die soon when they were left behind in such lonely road in the thick jungle, might be disposed of as a means of last resources when it became impossible to bring them along by all means’.42 If Takakuwa had wanted to kill all the prisoners, the defence said, he could have easily done so without going to all the effort of organising and managing the march.

In conclusion, read the petition, ‘it may be considered too heartless to punish these poor Formosan employees with the imprisonments for such long years being charged with their faultless acts which they had been forced to do under such an irresistible circumstances as we had explained above’.43

Judge Advocate General Wilson reviewed the petition and recommended to Lieutenant General Sturdee that the sentences be reduced: ‘I would suggest for your consideration that the sentences should be mitigated. It seems unnecessary and uneconomical that these men should be kept in Australian prisons for such a length of time under conditions which will probably be much better than the conditions in Japan, and I would suggest that the sentences might at least be reduced by half and that even at some later date consideration might be given to mitigating the remainder and returning the men to Japan and Formosa.’44

Sturdee declined to reduce the sentences. Sticpewich returned to Australia, but his lifetime supply of luck had run out in Borneo. Tragically, the man who survived Sandakan and the Sandakan–Ranau death march was hit by a car and killed in Melbourne a few years after the war ended.45

Hoshijima and Takakuwa both went to the gallows at Rabaul on 6 April 1946. It was not a particularly dignified affair, especially compared with the shootings on Morotai the previous month (as described in the prologue). It did not help that the authorities at Rabaul had been criticised for leniency in relation to their last executions, held on 20 March. Then, Sergeant Major Inagaki Masaru (R3) had been hanged for beheading a Chinese civilian, and naval worker Kikkawa Haruo (R4) for killing five New Britain natives with a hammer. According to Sydney Morning Herald reporter Colin Pura, the two men asked for drugs to steady their nerves and were given phenobarbital tablets. Inagaki, who had been anxiously smoking a cigarette, vomited up the tablets and so was given an injection of morphine.46 This news was not received well, and the Housewives Progressive Association of Broken Hill wrote a letter of complaint to Prime Minister Ben Chifley about Japanese war criminals being let off too easily.47

Even had this not happened, it is unlikely Hoshijima and Takakuwa would have been given much sympathy. The night before their execution, their last requests, for beer, cigarettes and morphine, were all refused. Takakuwa asked for a clean set of clothes and was given an Australian Army-issue shirt and trousers. An officer seized them back, telling him, ‘You won’t swing in that uniform!’ They were, however, permitted to write letters.48

Both men were summoned to the gallows at 7.45 am, having been closeted with a Buddhist priest. ‘Takakuwa, heavy-featured and weighing more than 12 stone, looked insolent,’ wrote the reporter for The Sun. ‘Hoshijima, elegantly-dressed in a khaki jacket over a white silk shirt, grey riding breeches and polished leggings, gave a cheeky grin.’

Takakuwa muttered, ‘I will pray for the Emperor,’ as he was led to the scaffold. He was initially cocksure but looked less confident standing on the trap. As the hangman tied a green handkerchief over his eyes, he began shouting, ‘Tenno Heika Banzai!’ The hangman hit him in the face with the rope to silence him and hanged him a few seconds later.

Hoshijima too began to shout, ‘Tenno Heika Banzai!’ at the bottom of the steps to the scaffold. In a final touch of irony, given the commandant’s preferred means of silencing protest at Sandakan, the provost hit him in the face, then hit him another three times after he kept shouting. On the final time, Hoshijima bit the provost’s hand, drawing blood. The men dragged him onto the trap and bound him.

‘This is for all the Aussies you murdered at Sandakan,’ the hangman hissed at him as he pulled the lever.

‘I wish he were a cat, we’d have hanged him nine times,’ said an officer who was watching. The authorities had tried to keep the date of the execution secret, but hadn’t been able to keep out gatecrashers entirely.