Military History of Australia During World War II - Prisoners of War

Prisoners of War

Just under 29,000 Australians were taken prisoner by the Axis during the war. Only 14,000 of the 21,467 Australian prisoners taken by the Japanese survived captivity. The majority of the deaths in captivity were due to malnutrition and disease.

The 8,000 Australians captured by Germany and Italy were generally treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. The majority of these men were taken during the fighting in Greece and Crete in 1941, with the next largest group being 1,400 airmen shot down over Europe. Like other western Allied POWs, the Australians were held in permanent camps in Italy and Germany. As the war neared its end the Germans moved many prisoners towards the interior of the country to prevent them from being liberated by the advancing Allied armies. These movements were often made through forced marches in harsh weather and resulted in many deaths. Four Australians were also executed following a mass escape from Stalag Luft III in March 1944. While the Australian prisoners suffered a higher death rate in German and Italian captivity than their counterparts in World War I, it was much lower than the rate suffered under Japanese internment.

Like the other Allied personnel captured by the Japanese, most of the thousands of Australians captured in the first months of 1942 during the conquest of Malaya and Singapore, the NEI and New Guinea were held in harsh conditions. Australians were held in camps across the Asia-Pacific region and many endured long voyages in grossly overcrowded ships. While most of the Australian POWs who died in Japanese captivity were the victim of deliberate malnutrition and disease, hundreds were deliberately killed by their guards. The Burma-Thai Railway was the most notorious of the prisoner of war experiences, as 13,000 Australians worked on it at various times during 1942 and 1943 alongside thousands of other Allied POWs and Asians conscripted by the Japanese; nearly 2,650 Australians died there. Thousands of Australian POWs were also sent to the Japanese home islands where they worked in factories and mines in generally harsh conditions. The POWs held in camps at Ambon and Borneo suffered the highest death rates; 77 percent of those at Ambon died and few of the 2,500 Australian and British prisoners in Borneo survived; almost all were killed by overwork and a series of death marches in 1945.

The treatment of the POWs prompted many Australians to remain hostile towards Japan after the war. Australian authorities investigated the abuses against Allied POWs in their country's zone of responsibility after the war, and guards who were believed to have mistreated prisoners were among those tried by Australian-administered war crimes trials.

Thousands of Axis POWs were held in Australia during the war. A total of 25,720 POWs were held in Australia: 18,432 Italians, 5,637 Japanese and 1,651 Germans. These prisoners were housed in purpose-built camps and were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. A total of 16,798 civilians were also interned. These included 8,921 Australian-resident 'enemy aliens', while the remainder were civilians sent to Australia for internment by other Allied countries. On the morning of 5 August 1944, approximately half of the 1,104 Japanese held at a camp near Cowra, New South Wales attempted to escape. The prisoners overwhelmed their guards and over 400 broke through the wire fences; however, every escapee was either recaptured or killed within 10 days.