SANDAKAN HISTORY DOC - Department of Veterans' Affairs

January 1945 saw the Japanese on the defensive throughout
that vast Pacific and Asian territory they had conquered so
swiftly in late 1941 and early 1942. To the Japanese, it must
have seemed only a matter of time before the Allies struck at
Borneo. Fearing that this invasion might occur in the Sandakan
area, they made provision to move the POWs over 260
kilometres westward to Ranau where they might prove useful
as supply carriers in the mountains. A track, or rentis, was cut
by local labour through the low-lying swamps and jungle to
the south of the Labuk River and its tributaries—the Dusan,
the Kolapsis, the Muanad, the Pandan Pandan, and the
Mandorin—up into the dense rainforest of the Maitland
Range, past Paginatan village into the Crocker Range (which
formed the foothills of Mount Kinabalu) and on to a highland
plateau at Ranau. In the swamp lowlands this track was made
of logs and proved dangerous to walk on. It was often easier to
wade through the swamp itself. Through the mountains the
track became narrow, slippery and, in many places, steep.
On 26 January 1945 the POWs were informed that a party
consisting of approximately 455 Australians and British were to
leave Sandakan for another part of Borneo where there was
plenty of food. The prisoners were divided into nine groups
which left the camp progressively between 28 January and 6
February. Bill Sticpewich remembers them leaving:
None of them were fit. They were all suffering from beriberi and
malnutrition. They were all issued by the Japs with crude rubber boots
but nobody could wear them. Some of them had their own boots but more
than sixty per cent of them were bootless.
In this state the marchers set off westward into the swamp and
the jungle.
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