SANDAKAN HISTORY DOC - Department of Veterans' Affairs

the carrying parties was to take supplies back to Paginatan for
subsequent POW and Japanese groups making the trek from
Sandakan. Most of those who died on these nine-day trips
were either shot or bayoneted to death for their inability to
walk any further. As Keith Botterill, who went on all six
journeys, recalled:
No effort whatsoever was made to bury the men. They would just pull
them five to fifteen yards off the track and bayonet them or shoot them,
depending on the condition of the men. If they were conscious, and it was
what we thought was a good, kind guard, they’d shoot them. There was
nothing we could do.
At Ranau the POWs were herded into insanitary and crowded
huts. Dysentery became endemic and eventually three-quarters
of the available living space was occupied by the sick and the
dying. Dirt and flies covered everything and the weak, but still
relatively healthy POWs, could only watch helplessly as their
comrades wasted away with dysentery or their bodies became
distended with the accumulated fluids of beriberi. Each night,
Keith Botterill recalls, was a night of death followed by a
morning of burial:
You’d wake up of a morning and you’d look to your right to see if the
chap next to you was still alive. If he was dead you’d just roll him over
a little bit and see if he had any belongings that would suit you; if not,
you’d just leave him there. You’d turn to the other side and check your
neighbour; see if he was dead or alive.
There’d be a burial party every morning ... which consisted of two men
to each body. We used to wrap their wrists and ankles together and put a
bamboo pole through them and carry them like a dead tiger. We had no
padre. And no clothes on the bodies, just straight into six inch deep
graves. The soil was too hard to dig any deeper. We’d lay the body in
and the only mark of respect they got, we’d spit on the body, then cover
them up. That was the soldier’s way.
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