Sparrow After-math

Photo 51: A wreath laid by the Author at Hobart’s Cenotaph on 23 February 2004 on behalf
of The Sparrows.

Luck

For this book, the same question was asked to every person interviewed:
“Considering so many others died, why do you think you survived?”
Their responses were almost unanimous: “Luck!”
If one takes into account all the challenges the Allied prisoners of war faced on a
daily basis, the chances of their survival are startling.
In calculating the odds of Charlie McLachlan’s survival, it is nothing short of a
miracle that he returned home in one (somewhat dented) piece. Here is a brief list.
 Only one member of the Sparrows was killed in action and Charlie was
on sentry duty next to him.
 The one other member of his unit killed by the Japanese bombing at the
surrender was next to Charlie.
 There was no known cure for cerebral malaria until Dr. Leslie Poidevin
injected Quinine into Charlie’s spinal cord.
 Charlie’s gangrene was disinfected with M & B tablets.
Even by Charlie’s admission, he should not have survived. He lost count of the
number of close shaves with bullets, bombs, and torpedoes.
Charlie wasn’t the only lucky one. The whole of Sparrow Force were lucky. If
Singapore hadn’t fallen a few days earlier, the Japanese would have massacred
Sparrow Force much like what occurred to Gull Force on Ambon.
Sparrow After-math

Table 3: Table of Sparrow Force casualty numbers.

Sparrow Force 79 LAA Bty RA

Unit Size 1852 189 (Timor)

61 (Malang)
Not Captured 434 -

Total Deaths 417 66

Australian Army 369
British Army 47 47 (Timor)
19 (Malang)

Killed in Action 64 1
Missing Presumed Dead 29 0
Wounds 21 3
Executed 16 1
Accident 12 4
Illness 128 (Total) 40 (Total)
 Burma-Siam  72  5
 Japan  33  23
 Malaya/Singapore  5  1
 Java, Sumatra  14  1
 Australia  4
Drowning after Hellship sunk 120 (Total) 17 (Total)
 Tamahoko Maru  114  6
 Rakuyo Maru  3  4
 Junyo Maru  3  1
 Suez Maru  0  6
 Other hellships  0  2

Fortunately, for Sparrow Force travelling on the Dai Nichi Maru, the United
States Navy was still using unreliable First World War submarines and torpedoes.
None of the torpedoes that hit the hellship detonated.
Others in Sparrow Force were not so lucky. Many Australians were sent to Siam
to work on the Death Railway to Burma. Later in the war, they were transported to
Japan on hellships where they encountered U.S. submarines with more effective
torpedoes.
In Japan, many Sparrow Force died within weeks of arriving, mostly due to
disease caught during their journey. Others died during freezing cold winter
conditions.
Later in the war, several died from friendly fire, either from bombing or coastal
bombardment by warships. While many saw the Nagasaki atomic blast, several
survived within the blast zone.
Sparrow After-math

After the war, the men still faced danger. Sea lanes were mined and typhoons
raged. Charlie was witness to the worst aviation disaster in peacetime as more than
thirty planes transporting almost a thousand liberated prisoners of war between
Okinawa and Manila crashed into the South China Sea.

Prisoners of war from China, the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada, India,
the Netherlands, New Zealand and the Philippines held by the Japanese were
subject to murder, beatings, summary punishment, brutal treatment, forced labour,
medical experimentation, starvation rations, and poor medical treatment. The most
notorious use of forced labour was in the construction of the Burma–Thailand
Death Railway, where 16,000 Allied POWs died as a direct result of the project.
The dead POWs included 6,318 British personnel, 2,815 Australians, 2,490 Dutch,
about 356 Americans and a smaller number of Canadians and New Zealanders.
After March 20, 1943, the Japanese Imperial Navy was under orders to execute
all prisoners taken at sea.205
According to the findings of the Tokyo Tribunal, the death rate of Western
prisoners was 27.1%, seven times that of POWs under the Germans and
Italians.206,207 The death rate of Chinese was much higher. Thus, while 37,583
prisoners from the British Empire, 28,500 from the Netherlands, and 14,473 from
the United States were released after the surrender of Japan, only 56 Chinese
were.208
No direct access to the POWs was provided to the International Red Cross.
Escapes among Caucasian prisoners were almost impossible due to the difficulty to
hide in Asiatic societies.209
Allied POW camps and ship-transports were sometimes accidental targets of
Allied attacks. The number of deaths from US Navy submarine attacks on Japanese
hellships was particularly high. Gavan Daws has calculated that “of all POWs who
died in the Pacific War, one in three was killed on the water by friendly fire.”210
Dawes states that 10,800 of the 50,000 POWs shipped by the Japanese were killed
at sea211 while Donald L. Miller states that “approximately 21,000 Allied POWs
died at sea, about 19,000 of them were killed by friendly fire.”212
Although Allied headquarters often knew of the presence of POW’s aboard
vessels targeted for attack through radio interception and code breaking, the general
policy was to sink the ships anyway, evidently on the basis that the interdiction of
critical strategic materials was more important in the long run than the deaths of
prisoners-of-war.213
205
Blundell, Nigel. Alive and safe, the brutal Japanese soldiers who butchered 20,000 Allied seamen
in cold blood. Daily Mail, 3 November 2007.
206
Yuki Tanaka. Hidden Horrors. 1996. pp.2,3.
207
Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich—A New History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. Of the
232,000 Western Allied POWs, 8,348 died (3.5%). pp.512–13.
208
Ibid. Also Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, 2001, p.360.
209
Dawes, Gavin. Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific. Melbourne:
Scribe Publications, 1994.
210
Ibid., pp.295–297.
211
Ibid., n.209. p.297.
212
Miller, Donald L. D-Days in the Pacific. Simon & Schuster; 2005. p.317.
213
Michno, Gregory F. Death on the Hellships: Prisoners at Sea in the Pacific War. US Naval
Institute Press, June 2001.
Sparrow After-math

Of the 36,000 POWs who reached Japan, around 3500 POWs died (9.7%) –
proportionally higher than Allied deaths in German POW Camps (3.5%).214 Many
died within weeks of arriving in Japan or from Allied bombing.
To contrast this, 560,000 to 760,000 Japanese were POWs in the Soviet Union
and Mongolia. About 10% died (50–60,000), mostly during the winter of 1945–
1946 in labour camps.215
The West German government set up the Maschke Commission to investigate the
fate of German POW in the war. In its report of 1974, they found that about 1.2
million German military personnel reported as missing more than likely died as
prisoners of war, including 1.1 million in the USSR.216 In contrast, 3.3 million
Russian prisoners (57.5% of the total captured) died during their German
captivity.217

Most of Sparrow Force who survived the war were lucky in their own way. Here
are some examples:
 Val Richards and Keith Hayes survived firing squads;
 Noel Close’s cigarette tin prevented a bullet to the heart;
 Don Woolley survived the Sandakan Death March;
 Claude Longey and Arthur Richardson were rescued from shark infested
waters by the US Navy after their hellship was sunk;
 Many survived the Burma Railway;
 Some survived the Tamahoko Maru sinking; and
 A handful survived the atomic bomb explosion in Nagasaki.
Peter McGrath-Kerr and Frank Fitzmaurice survived the Burma Railway,
Tamahoko Maru, and were close to the epicenter of the Nagasaki explosion.

Any way that you look at it, Charlie was right. Taking into account the other
possibilities of Charlie’s travels, he did come this distance for the better of it.

214
POW Research Network Japan.
215
Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. Doubleday, 2003. p.431.
216
Maschke, Erich. On the history of German prisoners of war of the Second World War. Bielefeld,
E. and W. Gieseking. 1962-1974 Vol 15 p.185-230.
217
Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II. Historynet.com. Retrieved 14
July 2012.
Sparrow After-math

Photo 52: The letter from King George VI welcoming liberated prisoners of war home. Charlie
kept his letter folded in the pouch of his service and paybook over the page.