PLEA TO FLEE: THE FEDERAL SEARCH FOR PRISON ESCAPEES Luis Delfin & Daniel Antoun 25/8/1944

Soldiers and guards are frantically searching with lethal equipment, for the Japanese prisoners that managed to escape.

Shortly after midnight on 5 August 1944, an unauthorised bugle call suddenly blasts out across the Cowra Prisoner of War Camp in outback NSW. The bugler is Sergeant Hajime Toyoshima, the first Japanese soldier ever to be captured in Australia, and he was signalling his comrades to launch a mass prison breakout like the world has never seen.

One guard accounts that, “Hundreds of Japanese Prisoners of War were armed with household items such as baseball bats, studded clubs and sharpened kitchen knives surged.” These items were supplied from their prison huts. Some raced directly to the perimeter fences, using blankets and T-shirts to haul themselves over the barbed wire (shown in Figure A).

Figure A

The guards fired at the men, which left hundreds of bodies lined at the fence. Many other Japanese attempted or committed suicide. Some set fire to their huts; some are incinerated inside the burning buildings. A total of 334 Japanese POWs successfully escape into the countryside. Within nine days of the breakout, all surviving escapees were re-captured.

In the end, 231 Japanese POWs died in the escape, 31 of them committed suicide. Four men of the Australian 22nd Garrison Battalion were killed.

Nelly Gould, a member of the AWAS says that, “Looking back, it is hard to understand why the Japanese soldiers attempted such a dangerous mass escape, especially given that living conditions at Cowra adhered to the Geneva Convention's regulations.”