P R I S O N E R S O F WA R

Hanson & Ryan

 Location

Ambon Island was located in the

Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia),
and was of strategic importance to
the invading Japanese.
 The Ambon camp was found in
December 1941 and gets shut down in
TIME PERIOD the early 1942.
 PRISONERS

Just over a thousand prisoners were interned at Ambon, two-thirds of which did
not make it through the war. The majority were Australian soldiers captured
when over 20,000 Japanese swamped Ambon in 1942.
 In the camp, those prisoners were force to
work as slave. Many of them died because of
hunger, disease, and beatings. The discipline
of prisoners were close to collapse.
HOW WERE
THE
PRISONERS
T R E AT E D ?

The image of a bony man lying on the bed

was a key evidence of the life of those
prisoner at Ambon camp.
 Max Gilbert was a member of the Gull Force, a squadron
deployed to Ambon in 1941 to prevent a Japanese invasion.
Unfortunately, the forces were still heavily outnumbered and
caught by surprise when the Japanese invaded in 1942, and
almost all the soldiers were interned in a POW camp on Ambon.
Conditions in the camp were abominable; it had the highest per
P O W- M A X capita death rate of any Japanese POW camp.
Mr Gilbert recalls that the prisoners of war had to become
G I L B E RT ‘professional thieves’ just to get food at all, while many prisoners
simply disappeared, never to be seen again.
He was finally rescued in 1945 by American and Australian
soldiers, after three gruelling years of squalid conditions and
starvation. The soldiers were not told by their Japanese captors
that the war was over; they only knew after they saw the
Australian warships in the harbor.
A picture of Lieutenant Colonel William Scott, DSO, the Australian senior officer of
the prisoners on Hainan. He took command of the Ambon POWs only a few days
before the Japanese landing. The photo was taken after torment by the burden of
command while getting captivity by the Japanese crew for three-year time.
This source was recorded by the Australia War Memorial.
Accession Number: 030359/06