chapter 14 The Trials on Labuan
Georgina Fitzpatrick
1 Introduction
Labuan, an island off the coast of British North Borneo (BNB), was the loca- tion for 16 of the war crimes trials held between December 1945 and January 1946. These trials occurred at the same time as the trials being conducted on Morotai and at Rabaul (and the two at Wewak). Apart from two cases concern- ing the ill-treatment of prisoners of war held at Kuching camp in Sarawak, the Labuan trials dealt with crimes committed against those held in Sandakan camp, in the north-east of BNB; crimes committed during the forced march- es between Sandakan and Ranau in the last months of the war; or crimes related to the final executions of prisoners of war at Ranau. Approximately 1,650 Australian prisoners died in or around Sandakan. Of the 2,200 British and Australian prisoners of war who were still alive in August 1944, 1,200 died subsequently in the camp and more perished during the death marches. Those who managed to reach Ranau, 260 kilometres to the west, died there or were executed. Only six escaped and survived—all of them Australians.1 These statistics made the grim conditions at Kuching, where 592 British and Australians died, mostly of starvation, pale by comparison.2 This essay will consider the post-war investigations into this loss of life, the allocation of responsibility for war crime trials in BNB, the procedures and personnel at the Australian-run trials and the press reportage of the trials, among other aspects. The first question to ask, however, is why were Allied prisoners of war, the victims in these trials, in Borneo in the first place?
Where files have been digitised by the National Archives of Australia, the author has provided the slide reference to assist readers to locate items within large files. 1 The figures are taken from DCS Sissons, The Australian War Crimes Trials and Investiga- tions (1942–51) (UCB War Crimes Study Center, 2006), p. 32
Georgina Fitzpatrick, Tim McCormack, and Narrelle Morris, Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945-51. © 2016 Koninklijke Brill nv. isbn 978-90-04-29204-8. pp. 429-470. 430 14 – Fitzpatrick
2 Borneo, the Japanese and Allied Prisoners of War
Before the Japanese wartime occupation, the island of Borneo was divided be- tween the British and Dutch colonial powers. Dutch Borneo, comprising two- thirds of the island, included settlements such as Tarakan and Balikpapan which were noted for their rich oilfields and refineries (and later as the sites of military campaigns in the final months of the war).3 However, the places named in the Labuan trials (as well as Labuan itself) were places lying in the British part of the island to the north. Kuching, for example, one of the loca- tions of a camp for British and Australian prisoners of war, was on the western coast of Sarawak, a British possession that had been governed before the war by the Brooke family, known as the ‘White Rajahs’. Sandakan and the route from there to Ranau lay in British North Borneo, bordering the Sultanate of Brunei, a British protectorate.4 In 1942, the Japanese invaded Borneo in order to secure the extensive oil and rubber resources of the island—the very resources that had underpinned the earlier British and Dutch colonisation. By the end of January 1942, the whole of Borneo was in Japanese hands. The Japanese Oil Corps followed im- mediately behind the invasion force to take over the operation of the oilfields and refineries from the British and Dutch.5 Sandakan, in particular, was of vital strategic importance for the Japanese as it linked the oilfields of Borneo’s east coast to the Philippines and other areas in the region that were occu- pied by Japan. To build an airstrip at Sandakan to serve as a refuelling stop between the Philippines, Singapore, Java, Celebes and Timor, the Japanese re- quired a large labour force. Accordingly, British and Australian prisoners of war, captured at the fall of Singapore, were transferred to Sandakan in several batches to do this work.6 The first group of 1,500 was sent from Changi in July 1942 and included about 140 officers. They were housed in what had been a British agricul-
3 ‘Borneo: A Historical Outline’, Current Notes on International Affairs (Jan 1946) 17(1), pp. 12–13. The 7th Division AIF investigated war crimes in Dutch Borneo but then handed the cases over to the Dutch military authorities in Balikpapan in January 1946. See Michael Carrel, Australia’s Prosecution of Japanese War Criminals: Stimuli and Con- straints (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2005), p. 120. 4 ‘Borneo: A Historical Outline’, Current Notes, pp. 13–15. 5 Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Westview Press, 1996), p. 12. 6 See Chapter 17, Georgina Fitzpatrick, ‘The Trials in Singapore’ for the role that Changi played in the concentration and despatch of prisoners of war as forced labour units to various parts of the Japanese-occupied areas of south-east Asia and the Pacific.