/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/93/b2/93b2606a-1623-4018-8a40-5857fe0dd865/gettyimages-453574876.jpg)
Why Has History Forgotten World War II’s Largest Prison Break, Which Claimed the Lives of More Than 200 Japanese POWs?
During the 1944 Cowra breakout, over 900 prisoners attempted to escape from an Allied camp in Australia. The uprising resulted in the deaths of 234 Japanese men and 5 Australians
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/meilan_headshot2.png)
:focal(2492x1638:2493x1639)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/93/b2/93b2606a-1623-4018-8a40-5857fe0dd865/gettyimages-453574876.jpg)
Around 2 a.m. on August 5, 1944, a Japanese man in distress climbed over a fence at the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp in New South Wales, Australia. He “was weeping and appeared to be in great fear,” an observer later recalled. A guard fired two shots to signal that something was amiss, but before he could investigate further, a bugle call pierced the night air. Suddenly, more than 900 prisoners stormed out of their huts, wielding baseball bats, gardening tools and cutlery as improvised weapons.
The Cowra breakout initially left 231 Japanese POWs dead and another 108 wounded. (Another three men later succumbed to their injuries, bringing the Japanese death toll to 234.) Those who managed to survive and escape the camp were all recaptured shortly thereafter. The uprising also claimed the lives of five Australians, two of whom were killed while sabotaging a machine gun to prevent the prisoners from using it. Among the dead was the man whose shouts and tears had first alerted the guards that something was amiss, his warning arriving too late to make a difference.
Little known outside of Australia, the Cowra incident was the largest prison break in World War II history. (The Japanese escapees easily outnumbered the 76 Allied airmen who freed themselves from a Nazi camp in March 1944—events immortalized in the 1963 film The Great Escape.) Eighty-two years later, the revolt underscores the unique position occupied by Japanese POWs, who viewed surrendering to the enemy as a shameful act that would humiliate their families and country.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/14/29/1429fe5b-958d-477f-ac5c-ca00faa46df6/baseball.png)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b3/5e/b35e1338-7998-4cdd-abd9-6ffb122a1be8/bats.png)
“It was preferable to die,” documentary filmmaker Yasuhiro Mitsuda told Nippon.com in 2021. “The Japanese prisoners believed their own lives were worthless and that they had nowhere to return. They took part in the breakout expecting to be shot.”
Japanese wartime culture
Why did the vast majority of the 1,104 Japanese POWs held at Cowra take up arms against their captors despite facing insurmountable odds? The answer lies in Japan’s wartime culture, which emphasized fealty to the emperor above all else, giving rise to a nationalistic, militaristic society. As Joseph C. Grew, the former American ambassador to Japan, wrote in 1942, Japanese schoolchildren quickly learned “the power of the group and the discomfort of which awaits him if he asserts his individual desire over the collective will.”
This mindset was even stronger in the military. “By the time a Japanese soldier reached the battlefield (particularly an enlisted man), any notion of individuality or independent thought had long been extinguished, and the military code was the only moral rulebook that shaped his behavior,” author Mat McLachlan explains in The Cowra Breakout.
The code in question was the “Senjinkun,” a pocket-size document issued in January 1941. Among other directives, it instructed each soldier to “be determined always to sacrifice himself” for his army unit “without giving even the slightest thought to personal interest and to life or death.” The text offered a dim view of surrender, noting, “If alive, do not suffer the disgrace of becoming a prisoner; in death, do not leave behind a name soiled by misdeeds.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/9d/9d/9d9d2c0e-3274-4a17-9268-52ea4284eef8/statelibqld_1_80019_japanese_prisoners_arriving_at_brisbane_from_new_guinea_ca_1945.jpg)
The Japanese took this message to heart. During the war, the Western Allies captured an estimated 35,000 Japanese service members, compared with nearly 8 million Germans, including some 340,400 imprisoned in camps across the United States.
Troops from Western nations who fought as best they could during the war, only to surrender in the face of “hopeless odds,” survived with “their honor and reputation unimpaired,” according to a 1977 journal article by Charlotte Carr-Gregg, then a scholar at the University of New South Wales. Meanwhile, Japanese soldiers entered battle expecting to die in service to their country. Many were taken prisoner while severely wounded, exhausted, ill or even unconscious, meaning they had little opportunity to resist.
Did you know? The Japanese soldier who refused to surrender
- Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi was one of around 5,000 holdouts who refused to give themselves up to the Allies after the 1944 Battle of Guam.
- Yokoi spent 27 years living in the jungles of Guam, only rejoining society after two local fishermen overpowered him in 1972. “I am ashamed that I have returned alive,” he said upon his return to Japan.
If Japanese service members survived the bloodshed only to end up in enemy hands, they viewed their lives as “essentially over,” the late U.S. diplomat Ulrich A. Straus wrote in The Anguish of Surrender. These men believed “that they had committed the most heinous lapse imaginable by allowing themselves to be captured, and that they would never be able to return to the home they had known, except to be executed.”
Officially, the Japanese government sometimes classified POWs as dead, telling families that their sons and husbands had been killed in action despite knowing otherwise. To avoid bringing further shame on their loved ones, prisoners often gave their captors fake names. Although POWs held by the Allies were permitted to send letters home, McLachlan notes that no records of such correspondence survive, as few soldiers could bear “to shatter the illusion that they had met a glorious death on the battlefield with the truth that they were instead languishing in an enemy prison camp.”
The Japanese preference for death over surrender was and continues to be difficult for Westerners to understand. An exchange in The Night of a Thousand Suicides, a 1967 novel by Japanese author Teruhiko Asada, who based his work on recollections shared by a former Cowra prisoner, illuminates this ideological divide. In the book, a nisei, or second-generation Japanese immigrant to the U.S., confronts a new arrival to the POW camp who plans on attempting suicide.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/66/24/6624772d-17c7-44a5-9afe-c87dc664c2a2/japanese_pows_guam_aug_1945.jpeg)
“Have you committed a crime that deserves death?” the man asks. “Aren’t you proud of the fact that you have fought to the utmost of your power? You’re not a criminal but a victim, bound hand and foot by that outmoded morality called Bushido,” the samurai code of conduct. “Far from being moved if you do suicide, we’ll despise you,” he says. “The Japanese notion that death solves all problems is sheer vainglory.”
The prisoner refuses to answer, but internally, he acknowledges that the man’s words appear logical when “seen through Western eyes.” Still, he adds, “that didn’t alter the fact that I was a Japanese and that standards of conduct other than those that had been handed down in thousands of years of tradition and religion simply could not exist for me.”
Japanese prisoners of war
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/0d/2e/0d2ebc7e-5e5a-4451-9732-65d655352ef0/hajime.png)
In February 1942, naval pilot Hajime Toyoshima became the first Japanese prisoner of war captured on Australian soil after his plane crashed on Melville Island. Toyoshima was detained at two different camps before being transferred to Cowra in January 1943. Initially built to house Italian POWs, the camp was later divided into four compounds. Enlisted Japanese men resided in compound B, while Japanese officers and Korean and Taiwanese laborers conscripted into the imperial military stayed in compound D.
Cowra was well equipped to support a sizable POW population. The camp boasted a canteen, a theater, recreation huts, a barber and tailor shop, and medical and dental centers, in addition to standard facilities for dining and sleeping. Prisoners were permitted to play soccer and baseball and plant their own vegetable and flower gardens.
Under the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention, which Japan had signed but failed to ratify, POWs were supposed to be treated humanely and afforded certain rights. Australians, as “relative newcomers on the international scene, were anxious to ‘play the game strictly by the rules,’” according to Carr-Gregg. Their attitude toward prisoners stood in stark contrast to the Japanese government’s stance on Allied POWs, many of whom endured brutal treatment, starvation and hard labor while held captive in Asia.
Japanese prisoners who “witnessed or heard about” their nation’s mistreatment of Allied POWs “believed that retribution and revenge would be the obvious, inescapable” response by their Australian captors, Straus wrote. They were surprised, then, to be treated fairly and afforded the same level of medical care as their Allied peers. Teruo Murakami, the last survivor of the Cowra breakout, later described the conditions at the camp as “almost heavenly.”
Despite the prisoners’ material comfort, many struggled to come to terms with not only their imprisonment but also their very survival. Some interpreted the Australians’ treatment “as a sign of weakness and played on it to the fullest extent,” lulling the camp guards into a false sense of security, Len Whiteley, Cowra’s mayor at the time of the breakout, told the Sun-Herald in 1993. As news of Japan’s military losses filtered down into the camp, hard-liners pushed their peers to fight back against their captors. The general sentiment, according to former prisoner Marekuni Takahara, was that “we cannot sit idly by and watch Japan go down. Now is the time for us to take resolute action.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/53/c2/53c2bf20-3a22-4f67-8730-68cb9d67a094/japanese-pows.png)
The Cowra breakout
On August 4, 1944, Cowra officials informed the Japanese that prisoners below the rank of lance corporal would be transferred to a different camp to alleviate overcrowding. The men’s leaders objected to the plan, insisting that lower-ranking younger soldiers viewed the older officers as father figures and would struggle to cope if separated. But the Australians remained unconvinced.
Later that day, the prisoners of compound B gathered to discuss how to proceed. The most radical contingent dominated the conversation, proposing a mass breakout as a way for the men to redeem themselves after the humiliation of surrendering. (Proponents accused “any opponents of failing to live up to the high standards set for members of the Japanese military,” in addition to arguing that news of the uprising would boost morale among soldiers still on the front lines, Straus noted.) An estimated 80 percent of the prisoners voted in favor of the plan, but as one survivor said in a 2021 documentary, “There was a mood in which we had to say yes when we actually wanted to say otherwise.”
As Kerry Neale, a curator at the Australian War Memorial, explained in 2019, the men “knew they wouldn’t actually succeed and that they would probably die during the night, but it was the attempt that was important. They were desperate to lose the stigma of being a prisoner and were willing to take whatever measures were necessary.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/82/c2/82c2344c-9b4f-4f81-bc1c-db9141287768/blankets.jpg)
In the hours leading up to the breakout, the POWs collected makeshift weapons and bid each other farewell, with some promising to reunite at Yasukuni, a shrine for the Japanese war dead in Tokyo. The pilot Toyoshima was tasked with signaling when the uprising should start by sounding a bugle. On his cue, the prisoners set fire to their huts and advanced toward a barbed-wire fence, using blankets and baseball gloves to protect against injury. (Of the 1,104 Japanese men housed in the camp on the day of the breakout, all but 138 participated in the uprising.)
The Japanese split into four groups, each with its own objective. One team headed for a Vickers machine gun manned by two Australians, Benjamin Gower Hardy and Ralph Jones, who’d rushed to their post in their pajamas after hearing the commotion. Prisoners swarmed the pair, stabbing Jones to death and clubbing Hardy with a blunt weapon. Before he was killed, Hardy managed to remove a piece of the gun, ensuring that the Japanese wouldn’t be able to use it.
A group of 50 men made their way into compound D, where the Japanese officers were housed, and remained there until daybreak. Still others headed for the camp’s perimeter fence, only to be mowed down by gunfire. Prisoner Masayoshi Yamada recalled lying in a ditch to avoid the bullets. Before the breakout, he said, he’d “wanted to cling to life.” Once the group decided to act, however, Yamada felt resigned to his fate.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b2/db/b2dbfc48-0864-4e72-8faa-59661bcd6f70/survivor.png)
By the time the gunfire stopped, around 6:20 a.m., hundreds of prisoners had escaped from Cowra. Authorities recovered all 334 men over the next nine days, including 25 who died after breaking out, most of them by suicide. Several POWs made their way to a farm in the countryside, where a local woman served them tea as they awaited recapture.
Approximately 183 Japanese prisoners died from gunshot wounds. Another 31 died “from violence inflicted by … themselves or on one another,” according to an investigative report. Twelve died of “causes unknown,” their charred remains found in the ruins of the burned huts. Five succumbed to a combination of gunshot wounds and self-inflicted injuries.
In addition to killing Hardy and Jones, the prisoners stabbed Private Charles Henry Shepherd to death in the initial melee. Escapees ambushed and killed a fourth man, Lieutenant Harry Doncaster, later that day. The final casualty on the Australian side was Thomas Roy Hancock, an older man who was accidentally shot by another volunteer while searching for the escaped prisoners on August 7.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/57/8e/578e750f-63e3-486d-bd84-2a07fa09f9d3/burial.png)
The aftermath of the Cowra breakout
The Australians were woefully unprepared for the breakout, despite receiving a warning that June from a Korean prisoner who’d overheard whispers of impending unrest. (The August 4 notice served as the spark for the uprising, but the POWs had been discussing their plans for months.)
To thwart a potential breakout, camp officials had installed a pair of machine guns outside of compound B and placed the guards on alert. But as McLachlan writes in his book, the Australians “simply couldn’t get their heads around the fundamental concept that Japanese prisoners” preferred death to imprisonment. They “could only view the Japanese through their own lens,” he argues, “and that distorted perspective bred a dangerous complacency.”
Although the surviving prisoners expected to face severe punishment or even execution for their participation in the uprising, the Australians were surprisingly lenient. According to Yamada, the guards gave the Japanese only bread and water for several days, eventually adding jam and butter back into the rotation. Murakami recalled being put to work on cleanup duty. The guards who’d failed to stop the uprising, meanwhile, were disciplined by being kept in the camp “for six weeks after the outbreak” and granted “no leave whatsoever,” according to Sergeant Ashley Cooper.
After the breakout, the remaining Japanese were moved to other POW camps, where they remained until their repatriation after the war’s end. As Straus observed in The Anguish of Surrender, “No other prisoners of war have ever returned to their homeland with as much uncertainty about how they might be received as the Japanese.” The government had paid out death benefits to their bereaved loved ones. Veterans were unsure how their families would react to their survival, especially given the stigma surrounding capture as a POW. But most former prisoners received a warm welcome. “When I finally got home,” Murakami told the Japan Times in 2013, “my family said a ghost had returned from the war.”
Today, the prisoners killed during the breakout are buried alongside other Japanese POWs and airmen at the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery. Jones, Hardy, Shepherd and Doncaster were laid to rest in a separate cemetery nearby; Hancock’s remains are buried elsewhere. In the decades since the uprising, the cemetery and an accompanying Japanese garden built in the 1970s have emerged as symbols of goodwill between Australia and Japan.
“In many ways, the cemetery is a place which links the violence of the past with the restoration of the present,” Neale said in 2019. “The Japanese gardens and the peace bell are symbols of hope and harmony set against the reality of the violence of the past.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/60/3d/603df446-cbb9-422c-b316-4e465491ebae/burned-huts.png)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/meilan_headshot2.png)