Saturday 11th July
After arriving back at the marina in Sandakan, we jumped back in the car and headed off to the Sandakan-Renau Death March Memorial.
If you were following this blog two years ago, you may recall that we visited the memorial at Kundasang, a small village not far from Renau. Renau was where the Death Marches are said to have ended, upon the death of the last 40 or so soldiers who were involved. They were executed by firing squad.
The memorial in Sandakan though, is built on the actual site where the POW camp was located during the closing years of the Second World War. Not sure why, but when we visited today, the only section that was open was the Australian part of the memorial…
A brief recap for those not familiar with the Sandakan-Renau Death Marches:
The Japanese invaded Borneo around 1942, and were quite merciless toward the locals as well as to their POW’s. Eventually, the POW camp at Sandakan held around 2840 POW’s and toward the end of the war, the Japanese high command issued orders for them to all be exterminated, but they weren’t prepared to shoot them. So the order given was to march them through the jungle, no food, no water, no shoes… just march them until they died of malaria, typhoid, hepatitis, snake bites, or just plain malnutrition.
Of those 2840 POW’s, only 6 men survived, and they only survived because local villagers helped them to escape. To date, the Sandakan-Renau Death Marches (there were 3 of them) hold the record as the highest mortality rate of any single wartime conflict (99% mortality).
Reading some of the stories told by the six men who survived brought me to tears, and I had to leave the memorial before Cath and Max.
Remember I said the Japanese were just as hard on the Borneo locals? During their occupation of Borneo, 16% of the local population was killed. Those were civilian casualties, too
After we left the memorial, we began what I knew was going to be a long day in the car.
The drive from Sandakan to Kudat (near the northern tip of Borneo) is only about 400km, but the roads here are all single lane, lots of twists and turns, and full of both potholes and palm oil trucks. The maximum speed limit is 90km/h, but most of the time, you AVERAGE just 60km/h. The entire journey ended up taking us just over 6 hours.
We arrived at our second last destination, the North Borneo Biostation just after 16:00, desperately in need of a shower and a cuppa.
Again, a day of no shooting.
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