Dan Snow's History Hit - The Biggest Prison Breakout of WW2

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

During World War II, in the town of Cowra in central New South Wales, thousands of Japanese prisoners of war were held in a POW camp. On the icy night of August 5th they staged one of the largest prison breakouts in history, launching the only land battle of World War II to be fought on Australian soil. Five Australian soldiers and more than 230 Japanese POWs would die during what became known as The Cowra Breakout.In this episode historian and podcaster Mat McLachlan joins Dan to tell him this extraordinary story of negligence and complacency, and of authorities too slow to recognise danger before it occurred - and too quick to cover it up when it was too late.This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges and it was edited by Thomas Ntinas.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In this episode of this podcast I'm going to be talking about the largest prison break of the Second World War. In fact, one of the largest prison breaks in history and I can guarantee you're going to guess where it was. This was not a prison break in Germany, in occupied Europe, even in Britain or Canada. This was a prison break around 100 kilometers north of Canberra in Australia, in New South Wales. West of Sydney, a place called Cowra, which was the largest prisoner of war camp for Japanese prisoners in Australia.

On the 5th of August 1944, they took the fights, the Australian guards, managed to break out of the camp, killed some of their Australian captors and some of the soldiers sent to round them up. It is a truly remarkable story. I'm very grateful to the guests on this podcast for bringing it to my attention. He's Matt McLachlan. He has been on this podcast many times before.

He's an Australian podcaster, broadcaster, TV host, author, brilliant guy, tour guide, great friend, and great friend of everything we're doing here on the podcast. He's just written a great new book about the Cowra breakout. Please check it out. I had to get him on the podcast to ask all about it. It's brilliant. You can hear more from Matt at his Living History podcast, or you go to battlefields.com.au to book yourself on a tour with the great man himself. Go and do it. In the meantime, though, folks, this is the story of really the most extraordinary prison breakout in the Second World War. Enjoy. Matt, good to see you man. How's it going?

Great to be here Dan. It's going well. I hear it's pretty warm over there in the UK. Well we are recording this in the middle of July, a couple of weeks before this podcast is broadcast and yeah we're all getting very excited because it's temperatures that are approaching the kind of temperatures you might expect to get in Australia. So obviously, we're having a national emergency here. Well, it's chilly over here, mate, the middle of winter. So we're doing our best to carry on. Yeah, it'll survive. Okay, so tell me about this extraordinary. I did not know anything about this story. This is remarkable. I guess let's start with how many Japanese prisons of war ended up in Australian hands

in the early years of the war? Well, it's a fascinating story, isn't it? And the part that I think always gets me is the fact that we were sending these prisoners from so far away to come and keep them actually within Australia. I think most people wouldn't have realised that, that the troops that were being captured by the Australians as far afield as Italians in North Africa, Japanese obviously throughout the Pacific, were thenield as Italians in North Africa. Japanese, obviously, throughout the Pacific were then being actually sent back to Australia. So thousands is the answer. There was 2,000 or 3,000 Japanese that were eventually being held in Australia during the Second World War, in addition to thousands of Italians, some Germans as well. So we really had the full mix of enemy forces contained here on our shores. Now, I don't want to embrace the

cliches, but obviously the Japanese were prone to take their own lives rather than surrender. Is it fair to say they regarded surrender in a way that was different to some of their European allies? And if so, how did that affect the atmosphere, the behavior of the Japanese prisoners of war? Well, it's an important point to make. It's not really a cliche because it absolutely is true that the Japanese were quite indoctrinated in their strict military code that no Japanese person would ever be captured, would ever allow themselves to be captured. They would take their lives before that would occur. And this was a line that the Japanese government used throughout the war. Whenever the allies would say, let's have a discussion about the treatment of Japanese prisoners in allied hands, the Japanese would say, well, we don't have to,

because there are no Japanese prisoners in allied hands because they won't allow themselves to be captured. So if you can imagine that's the official position, whenever a Japanese person was reported missing on the battlefield, it was just assumed that he'd been killed. His family was told that he'd been killed. His family would hold a memorial service, a funeral for him back at home. And the Japanese soldiers knew this. So the concept that they had been captured when their family had been told that they had been killed was just horrendous to them. And they felt they could never go back to Japan. The shame that would weigh on their families and their communities if they reappeared at the end of the war and had been living out several years of the war in the relative comfort of a prison camp. It was way beyond shame. I mean, the word

shame is probably the best example we have in English to sum it up, but it was way beyond that. These men called themselves ghosts. They were trapped between their comrades who'd been killed on the battlefields and the life they could never return to in Japan. So, you know, a horrendous situation for them mentally. And so it's not surprising it bred discontent in the camps. And you mentioned relative comfort there. How were the camps? The camps in Australia were actually pretty good because one of the things that I thought was fascinating about this story was the gulf of understanding that existed between the mentality of the Japanese prisoners and the mindset of the guards and the authorities who were looking after them. So I think the Allies, the mistake we made was we looked at it through

our own lens. And we felt that if an Allied prisoner was captured by the Germans, for example, in Europe, if he was aircrew that was shot down and ended up in a camp, he would know that pretty much he was out of the war, unless there was some incredible opportunity to escape. And we all know the stories of the Great Escape and other various things. Unless there was that very limited opportunity to escape, an Allied prisoner would say, well, I'm out of the war. I've done my bit. Now I just have to try and keep alive. And they would hope that the Red Cross would provide for them. German guards would look after them. They would be given food and comfort and they would wait for the war to end. And that's how we expected the Japanese would respond to capture. And so the feeling was, well, let's look after them. You know,

there were a lot of Australian prisoners and allied prisoners in Japanese hands. And the feeling was, if we take care of our prisoners, they will hopefully reciprocate with allied prisoners in Japanese hands. So we gave them food and great shelter. We allowed them leisure time. The Japanese played baseball. They conducted sumo wrestling matches. They built a theater in the camp. There was lots of leisure activities. They were allowed to write home to their families quite often, but I couldn't find any records that a single Japanese prisoner ever wrote back to his family in Japan. So conditions were actually pretty good for them, especially compared to what they'd been through in the battlefields of the Pacific. So it wasn't a terrible life for them here in Australia.

It wasn't a terrible life, but we hear a lot about the Japanese prison of war camps and the conditions, the barbarity inflicted on the prisoners of war in Japan. What would you make of the way the guards treated them? Who were the guards and how did they treat the Japanese? Well, it's a really interesting part of the story that at this camp, the one we're talking about, firstly, there were about seven prisoner of war camps throughout Australia. Most people don't even realise that, that we had this number of prison camps. The one we're talking about at Cowra in New South Wales was garrisoned by the 22nd Garrison Battalion. And these were quite a mix of men. They were men considered, for whatever reason, inappropriate for frontline service.

So they were either too old. There was a lot of World War I men who maybe had missed service in the First World War and now were too old to fight in the Second. There were men who had been fighting but had been wounded or evacuated ill and were now not fit to go back to the front lines or just men for who whatever reason the army still wanted to hang on to them but didn't think they were fit for frontline service so a pretty mixed mob and it wasn't considered a particularly auspicious gig to be guarding a bunch of Japanese in the middle of the bush in Australia compared to fighting on the front lines of the Pacific so the guards were a fairly mixed group there was was a feeling in my research, there was a strong feeling that there was a lot of resentment against the Japanese. They heard all the propaganda. They probably had relatives

fighting. They might've had brothers fighting on the front. They might've lost brothers, or they might've already encountered the Japanese themselves and been wounded by the Japanese. So there was a lot of animosity towards the Japanese prisoners, but it doesn't seem to be enacted on. It doesn't seem that the guards took much retribution against the Japanese in the time that they guarded them until, of course, the Japanese decided to turn everything on its head and break out of the camp. Before I do, I need to ask you, as a historian, what are the sources here? Were you lucky enough to have sources on the Japanese side as well as the Australian? Japanese side, there were a couple of very good manuscripts written, a couple of really good

memoirs written by the Japanese, which provided just a really great insight into the mindset of the prisoners. So there were two or three really good memoirs that I used as a source. But overall, that was a difficult part of the picture that a lot of the Japanese, the vast majority of the Japanese who had been through this captivity for the rest of their lives, even though they'd survived the war, often didn't even tell their family and friends that they'd been a prisoner. They usually would lie about it and say, I was just fighting in New Guinea for that whole time, even though their family knew that the fighting in New Guinea had ended years earlier. So the majority of the prisoners never admitted that they'd been captured. They never told these stories. So we're lucky that

a small handful were brave enough to put their stories down on paper. From the Australian side, we have a lot of information. There were several military inquiries. We have a lot of the guards who wrote memoirs. A lot of the people in the town were interviewed about their experience when this occurred. So there's a lot of sources on the Australian side, not so many on the Japanese, but the few that we have are excellent. Okay. So tell me about early August 1944. So you've got what, 4,000 prisoners in the camp. And what happens? Well, I think the thing we should remember about this, Dan,

the most important point about this is this is not like the Great Escape from a Starlag camp. Even though it's technically a prison break and one of the largest prison breaks in history, it was not about freedom. That's the first thing to say. So this action that occurred at Cowra in the early hours of the 5th of August, 1944, was a battle in every sense of the word. The Japanese wanted to take the war back to the Australians. And basically there were about 1,100 Japanese

in one compound in the camp. It was severely overcrowded. There were a lot of rumors. The Japanese were discontent and were intending to do something about it. There was an informant who told the Australian guards the Japanese were planning something. And so the Australians made the decision to move the bulk of the prisoners out of the camp to another camp at the town of Hay and to basically separate the Japanese prison population to ward off this trouble. The Japanese got wind of it from the Australian guards and decided that they had to take action. So early on that morning at about 2am on the 5th of August 1944, the Japanese launched an attack on the Australian guards. So they attacked in three main groups. They charged at a machine gun, which they tried to capture to turn on the Australian guards. About 300 of them broke out of the camp, actually

got through the fences and broke out into the bush. And a large number of them just charged the guards in the middle of the camp. And the opened fire and effectively over several hours there was just a huge battle with the Japanese armed with baseball bats and knives charging wire and machine guns and the Australians opening fire so by the time the smoke had cleared and it took more than a week to round up the last of the escapees. And by the time the whole thing had settled down, 234 Japanese were killed in the breakout and five Australians. So again, you tell this story to people, most people have never heard of it. And yet that's a huge loss of life.

This was one of the most dramatic incidents of the Second World War. One of the only ones of its type that occurred in the entire war and just an unbelievable story that most people don't know about. It is extraordinary. Did they enjoy any local tactical success or did they manage to grab the machine gun or was it really a kind of very one-sided slaughter? It certainly was one-sided. Whenever you've got people armed with bread knives charging machine guns, it's always only going to have one result. But again, we have to remember what the Japanese were trying to achieve. And even for decades, people who did know the story couldn't quite understand it. They thought, well, why would they break out? They were well

fed and they were warm. I grew up in that area in a small town near Cowra and my grandparents remembered the breakout from the days of the war. And they told me that they thought the Japanese were trying to get back to Japan. They didn't realise how far they were from Japan and were trying to link up with their comrades to continue the fighting. What we now know is that's not the case. It's somewhere in between. It wasn't a suicide charge in that sense. They did want to take the fight to the Australian Guards, but they also hoped that they would meet a noble death in the enterprise.

So the loose tactical plan was the Japanese were going to capture a machine gun, which was near the perimeter fence. They were going to turn that on the Australian guards and basically take over the entire prisoner of war camp. And then they were going to launch an attack on an army training camp, an entire separate Australian army training camp that was a couple of kilometres down the road. So it was a very grand scheme. And the basic idea was at some stage during this big endeavour, we will kill as many Australian

soldiers as we can before we ourselves are killed and erase the shame that we've been carrying for years since we were captured on the battlefield. You listened to Dan Snow's History Inn. We're talking about the biggest prison breakout of the Second World War. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's put some names to this. I was so fascinated by some of the individuals you've picked out,

including the first prisoner of war who was captured by the Australians in the Second World War. Tell me a little about him and his role. Yeah, this is a really iconic story. And again, the little threads of history just coming together. Because you and I know, Dan, we tell these stories in isolation. We're here talking about one night in 1944. Dan, we tell these stories in isolation. We're here talking about one night in 1944. But for the people involved, there was a whole tapestry of events that led to this moment when they all came together. And the man you were talking about, Hajime Toyishima, he's probably no better example.

He was a young man. He was a zero fighter pilot flying off aircraft carriers. And I discovered during the research for the book that he actually flew at Pearl Harbor, which was extraordinary. So, he was flying combat air patrol over the aircraft carriers while the attack at Pearl Harbor was going on. He then flew on a couple of operations around Wake and in other areas of the Pacific. And then he also participated in the big Japanese attack, the first Japanese attack on Australia on the 19th of February, 1942, when the Japanese bombed Darwin. So the same aircraft carrier fleet that had bombed Pearl Harbor 10 weeks earlier now came down and attacked Darwin. And Toishima was a zero

pilot flying his fighter in that attack and was shot down and crash landed his plane. And it was captured by local Aboriginal people on a remote island off Darwin. And he became Australia's first Japanese prisoner of the war. And this is, again, bearing in mind, this is in February 1942, he was captured and eventually ended up in Cowra. And the breakout didn't occur until 1944. So he was a prisoner for two years before this breakout occurred. And he was the camp leader for a long time. He spoke good English. He'd learned English while he was in captivity. And he was a key instigator of the Cowra breakout. And he actually had an army bugle that he smuggled into the camp and he blew the bugle and that was the signal for the breakout to occur. Incidentally, that bugle is now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial. So when you go to the War Memorial in Canberra,

you can see that bugle that Toyishima blew and he was wounded during the breakout and then either he had a knife with him and either asked one of his friends to finish him off, he was shot and asked one of his friends to finish him off or he was shot and asked one of his friends to finish him off, or actually cut his own throat. So pretty gory, but sort of brave stuff. And there's so many stories like this. One of the things I really enjoyed during the telling of this story in the book was to explore the stories of each of those men before the breakout. Their role in the breakout was pretty important and pretty instrumental and an amazing part of the story, but most of them had done so much more even before the breakout occurred so just like i love doing telling personal stories that's what that's what really brings this history to life

well give us another one just give us someone that you've come across i mean it must be so excited because this is something that hasn't really been written up before right so this is yeah people use the expression forgotten history but you're reconnecting us with a remarkable history here tell us another story about a person that you've been very struck by. I should say there were a couple of good books written about this probably in the 60s, particularly a guy called Harry Gordon did some amazing research, which revealed this for the first time. So I'm following on the good work that's been done before me.

But probably the other story that strikes me, one of the Australians was a lieutenant called Harry Doncaster. And he actually worked, he was a training officer at the military training camp, not the prisoner of war camp, but the other camp that I mentioned, the training camp. And the day or the afternoon of the breakout, so the Japanese broke out about 2am. And then for the rest of the day, there was a search to try and round up prisoners. Late on that day, Harry Doncaster led a group of about 20 young recruits out to round up Japanese prisoners. And Dan, it's just one of those things where you shake your head when you read these stories. You can't quite believe it. But because these were recruits who were not fully trained, their commanders felt that it would be

unsafe to equip them with rifles and have them roam around the countryside. So the recruits, the 20 recruits that Harry Doncaster led were armed only with bayonets in scabbards. So only carrying a bayonet in their hand. And Harry Doncaster, as their officer, was ordered not to take any weapon at all. He was completely unarmed, leading these men. And they encountered a group of Japanese in the bush, and the young blokes, armed only with bayonets, of course, couldn't do much when Japanese came at them with baseball bats in the scrub. And so most of them turned tail and ran, as you would imagine that they would. And Harry Doncaster was last seen throwing rocks at the Japanese and then eventually fighting them with his fists as

they overwhelmed him and he was beaten and stabbed to death in the bush and it's just one of those stories you just shake your head how could they send soldiers out to round up dangerous Japanese prisoners several Australians had already been killed in the breakout and yet they sent him out completely unarmed it's just just a ludicrous, you just shake your head, just a ludicrous situation. What kind of terrain is it around there? You mentioned the scrub. You grew up around there. Was it particularly difficult? Was it an easy place to evade capture? It probably was. It's kind of funny about Cowra is that it's all farmland. There's not a lot of features except for farms in the area. But the nature, it's quite hilly countryside and very

rocky for whatever reason. I'm not, a geologist would probably be able to tell me why there's huge boulders throughout the countryside, but whenever you drive through that area, I'm always amazed how rocky the terrain is. And this action in which Harry Doncaster was killed occurred on a sort of a scrub covered hillside with big boulders and the Japanese kind of emerged from the trees and behind the boulders. So just as dark was falling, it was winter in Australia, so it got dark pretty early, probably about five o'clock in the afternoon. So night was falling. The young recruits were terrified of the Japanese. The Japanese had already killed, as I said, several Australians. Three Australians had been killed at the camp during the breakout. So they knew that these were armed and fanatical men. And then the Japanese emerged from behind these boulders and

from out of these trees and sort of overwhelmed them. So just frightening stuff. And how long before all the Japanese were recaptured? Well, this was a fascinating, again, part of the story that the people of Cowra knew something was going on. They'd heard all the shooting, but there was a big cover-up from the authorities because they didn't want the Japanese to know that there'd been a big breakout, that all these people had been killed. And so there was a big cover-up. And so even the people in the town weren't really informed about what was going on, but it took them nine days to round up the last of the Japanese escapees. Of the 300 or so who broke out of the camp, most of the Japanese who were killed were killed within the camp. They never got out. But of the 300 or so who did break out of the camp, it took nine days to round them

all up. And a lot of the ones that had escaped out of the camp committed suicide. A couple of them threw themselves in front of a train, which was dramatic and pretty horrendous. A lot of them committed suicide, but a lot of them just hung out in the bush, waited to be rounded up, spent freezing nights without food and just really waiting for the authorities to come and round them up. And there's a number of interesting stories about interactions with civilians as well. The one thing we should say is the Japanese had a very strict code when they planned the breakout. All the prisoners were informed that you do not harm civilians. This is an attack against people in uniform. So no civilians were harmed during the breakout. But there's a number of really fascinating stories about Japanese escapees,

basically just walking up and knocking on the doors of farms and asking for food and blankets and farmers letting them in. There's one famous story about while the farmer's wife gave them leftover lamb chops from last night's dinner, the husband rang the camp and said, come out and round up. I've got a couple of said, come out and round up. I've got a couple of Japanese here for you to round up. So there were, again, really interesting stories about the local people who, in most instances, were fairly compassionate to the Japanese that they encountered. They didn't seem a huge amount of animosity in spite of the fear that there were Japanese

warriors roaming the countryside. So that was a really interesting part of the story. Did anything change for them after the breakout in terms of their conditions? Were they treated less harshly and more harshly? Divided up? What happened? Yeah, it was interesting. I said it in the book that the fight seemed to go out of them after the breakout. So even though they'd been fanatical about wanting to die, and now they'd been denied this sort of noble death twice, and they'd been captured by their enemy twice in the war. So you would think

that that would compound the problem, but it seemed to, once they'd taken action and lost so many friends and seen so many friends either killed or commit suicide, the fight seemed to go out of them. So ironically, the incident that prompted the breakout was this suggestion that they'd be moved to the camp at Hay. But in the course of the breakout, they'd caused so much damage to their own camp. They'd burnt down a lot of their sleeping huts and caused so much damage to the camp that after the breakout, they were moved to Hay anyway, because there was nowhere to keep them in Cowra anymore. So the bulk of the prisoners moved to Hay camp where they spent the rest of the war, another year or so in captivity until the war ended. And sending Japanese home, Japanese

prisoners, sending them home after the war wasn't a high priority. So it was 1946 before most of them got back to Japan. And again, some of them, most of them, never told the story of their captivity or the breakout. Some did. The Japanese that survived and went back to Japan formed an association where survivors of the Kaora breakout could come together once a year, but only a small number of men,

only a couple of dozen men ever joined that association. Most of them just melted back into Japanese civilian life and never spoke of the ordeal in Cowra. There might be one or two still alive somewhere. There is one left. I met him at the 75th anniversary in Cowra. He was 98 at the time, and he came back. Because we should say that the people of Cowra have done a wonderful job of reconciliation. There's a very strong association between Cowra and Japan. And in fact, the only Japanese war cemetery outside of Japan is in the town of Cowra with all the men that were killed in the breakout, plus every other Japanese national who died in Australia during the war.

They're now brought together in Cowra. And there's a beautiful Japanese garden, which is a sort of a living monument to the men who died on both sides. So the people of Cowra do a really good job remembering it. And over the years, over the decades, many Japanese survivors have come back to pay their respects at the camp, in the gardens and in the cemetery. But as I said, most of the prisoners never did, but enough did and family members came back for us to remember and to cross that bridge of reconciliation. Would that garden be on the banks of Lachlan River, Matt McLaughlin? It's not far away.

It's not far away from the Lachlan. So Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who stamped his name on just about everything in the early part of the 19th century, got his name on the river as well, out near Cowra. So anyone who's been to Sydney knows that half the sites in Sydney are named after Lachlan Macquarie. They're called Lachlan or Macquarie. And even the river way out in the middle of New South Wales near Cowra, he got his name on that as well.

So he's everywhere. He's hard to avoid. And your second name is just a coincidence, I guess. Yeah, it is indeed. Proud Scottish heritage, you know, from the highlands of Scotland. Argyllshire in Scotland. You went to the right place. Exactly.

Thanks, dude. That was amazing. The book is out now in Australia and the UK. What is it called? It's called The Cowra Breakout. It's a pretty straightforward title. And it's been a pleasure to tell this story because it is, as you said, we don't want to talk too much about forgotten history, but it is a story that has probably slipped through the cracks a little bit and I've really enjoyed telling.

Great, man. Well, I'm looking forward to meeting you in the flesh when you come back to the UK this autumn. See you soon. Cheers, Dan. Good to talk to you. See you soon. Cheers, Dan. Good to talk to you. Thanks, folks. You've made it to the end of another episode. Congratulations.

Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do here at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference.

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