The Cowra breakout

At about two in the morning on 5 August 1944 a bugle sounded in the Japanese section of No. 12 Prisoner of War Camp near the small town of Cowra in New South Wales. At this signal some 1,100 Japanese prisoners, armed with knives, baseball bats, clubs studded with nails and hooks, hurled themselves in three groups at the wire entanglements with cries of “banzai”, throwing blankets over the barbed wire. At the same time they set fire to their huts. Two privates of the Australian guard, Benjamin Hardy and Ralph Jones, kept firing a Vickers machine gun until they were killed; Hardy still managed to remove the gun’s bolt and throw it away so that the attackers could not use the weapon. According to the most commonly cited figures, 359 prisoners got outside the wire. Within ten days all those who survived had been recaptured. A total of 231 Japanese – many by their own hand or that of their comrades – and four Australian soldiers were killed. It is regarded as the largest mass escape of prisoners during the Second World War and one of the bloodiest.

The shame of captivity

The Japanese soldier of the Second World War did not contemplate captivity for himself. On 8 January 1941 the Minister of War, Hideki Tōjō, issued the Field Service Code (Senjinkun), whose most famous sentence commanded: “Do not live to suffer the shame of being taken prisoner.” The rule expressed a conviction long instilled in the army and in society: anyone who allowed himself to be taken alive brought disgrace on himself, his family and his home village. Japan had signed the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war in 1929, but had not ratified it, and soldiers were not taught what rights they had in captivity. The same logic underlay contempt for opponents who surrendered – such as the American garrison of Guam, which laid down its arms in December 1941 after a brief exchange of fire – and it was for the same reason that Japanese garrisons on the Pacific islands died almost to the last man, as they had done only a few weeks earlier in the last attack on Saipan.

Those who ended up in captivity were therefore mainly men who had had no choice: the wounded, the unconscious, men exhausted by hunger and malaria, survivors of sunken ships, airmen shot down over enemy territory. Many of them gave false names so that news of their fate would not reach Japan; they considered themselves dead to their families and their country. The first Japanese prisoner taken on Australian soil was the naval airman Hajime Toyoshima. On 19 February 1942 his Mitsubishi A6M fighter from the aircraft carrier Hiryū was hit during the raid on Darwin and crash-landed on Melville Island. A few days later he was captured by a local Aboriginal man of the Tiwi people, Matthias Ulungura. Toyoshima claimed to be a gunner from a bomber and took the name Tadao Minami, under which he passed through a succession of camps.

Others had similar experiences. A staff sergeant of the 51st Independent Engineer Regiment, known in the camp as Akira Kanazawa, was taken prisoner after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea in March 1943, when he reached the Trobriand Islands as a shipwrecked survivor. Others were picked up wounded at Buna, Milne Bay or Cape Gloucester. By August 1944 there were 2,223 Japanese prisoners in Australia, including 544 merchant seamen, alongside more than 14,000 Italians and fifteen hundred Germans.

No. 12 Camp

No. 12 Prisoner of War Camp was set up in 1941 about three kilometres from Cowra, a farming town some 300 kilometres west of Sydney. It was originally intended for Italians captured in North Africa. It consisted of four compounds laid out in a circle and bisected by a road which the guards called Broadway; it also held Koreans and Taiwanese from the Japanese army and civilian internees from the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese began arriving in January 1943. Privates and NCOs were placed in B Compound, officers separately in D Compound. By the spring of 1944 B Compound held more than a thousand men, more than had been planned for.

The prisoners worked in the gardens and cut firewood, played baseball and mahjong and practised sumo; they received fish, which was not issued to Australian soldiers. An Australian government inquiry later established that conditions in the camp complied with the Geneva Convention and that no complaint had been lodged before the outbreak. Within B Compound the prisoners governed themselves: they had an elected leader, several assistants in an “office” and forty hut leaders. Toyoshima, the longest-serving prisoner, who already knew some English, was one of the leaders and acted as interpreter; when army soldiers came to outnumber the rest, Kanazawa became leader.

The guard was provided by the 22nd Garrison Battalion of the Australian militia, made up largely of older veterans of the First World War and young men unfit for front-line service. After the massacre at Featherston camp in New Zealand in February 1943, security was tightened and the sentries were equipped with Vickers and Lewis machine guns. In June 1944 a Korean prisoner, known in the sources as Matsumoto, warned the Australians that the Japanese were planning a breakout. The command in Sydney placed two additional Vickers guns at the camp and decided to relieve the overcrowding: all the privates, about 700 men, were to be moved to the camp at Hay, 400 kilometres further west. The NCOs were to remain at Cowra.

A vote on toilet paper

On the afternoon of Friday 4 August 1944 the Australian commandant of B Compound informed the prisoners’ leaders – Kanazawa, his deputy and Toyoshima – that the privates would be transferred to Hay within the next few days. For the Japanese, separation from their NCOs and comrades was unacceptable. At five in the afternoon a dozen or so members of the “office” and the forty hut leaders assembled in B Compound. According to the accounts of survivors, collected after the war by the Japanese researcher Fujio Nakano, most of them stayed silent; one man ventured to say that he wanted to go home and see his family, but no one supported him, and when one of the hard-line hut leaders shouted out to ask whether they were still soldiers, the mood of the meeting turned.

It was decided to ask everyone. In each hut the prisoners voted on scraps of toilet paper, marking with a circle or a cross whether or not they accepted the transfer. The overwhelming majority voted against, which meant an attack on the wire. Nakano, who decades later sent a questionnaire to a hundred surviving participants, found that of the 36 who replied, only six had really wanted to attack at the time; the rest had voted as they thought they were expected to, for fear of being considered cowards. In one hut the leader did not allow a vote at all and handed in all the slips as “yes”.

The plan, circulated to the huts, was simple: seize the machine-gun posts, break through the wire under their cover, overrun the guards’ barracks and gather on the hill behind the camp, deciding on further action there. The sick and those unable to march were to “deal with themselves” beforehand – several of them hanged themselves in the huts even before the signal. Each man was given something that could serve as a weapon: knives and forks from the mess, baseball bats, clubs studded with nails, wire sharpened like daggers, and also a razor with which to kill himself. Kanazawa gave orders that Australian civilians were not to be harmed. He himself, wounded in the leg, took no part in the attack. Before the Australian court of inquiry on 13 August he explained that the aim had not been escape but death, which the participants had chosen because they could not bear the shame of captivity.

The night of 4–5 August

In the evening the prisoners drank a home brew they had distilled from leftover food, and waited. Shortly before two in the morning one of them ran out of a hut to the gate and began shouting something to the sentries, apparently warning them. A sentry fired warning shots. Then, as the Australian official historian Gavin Long put it, “a Japanese bugle sounded”: Toyoshima had given the signal ahead of the appointed time. With cries of “banzai” the prisoners charged the wire. Australian sources speak of 1,104 participants; according to Japanese studies, about 120–140 prisoners, including the sick and those in hospital, took no part in the attack. According to Long, three groups attacked from the north, west and south; Japanese studies speak of about 200 men in the north-west, 200 in the north and 300 in the east. They threw blankets and coats over the entanglements and lay down on the wire so that others could cross over them. Behind them the huts of B Compound, set alight by the prisoners themselves, were burning. The sentries later recalled that the fires and the moon made it almost as bright as day.

Most of the guard was asleep; only the duty men were at their posts. Privates Benjamin Gower Hardy and Ralph Jones manned No. 2 Vickers gun post and fired into the first wave of attackers until they were overrun. Hardy was bludgeoned to death and Jones stabbed. Before he died, Hardy managed to remove the bolt from the gun and throw it into the darkness, so that the Japanese who seized the post could not fire it. A third sentry, Private Charles Shepherd, was also killed, stabbed in the chest. The other machine guns fired on the prisoners in the wire and on Broadway until the situation was brought under control. Many of the Japanese did not even try to escape: they hanged themselves in the burning huts, cut their own throats or begged their comrades to finish them off.

According to Australian figures, 359 men got outside the wire; some studies give 334. About 70 of them gathered on the hill as ordered; with nowhere to go, they surrendered at dawn. The rest scattered across the surrounding countryside. Taking part in the search were soldiers from a training camp stationed nearby, the police and members of the Volunteer Defence Corps, a volunteer home defence force, who guarded bridges and railway lines. During the search Lieutenant Harry Doncaster was killed when he was leading unarmed recruits and ran into an ambush by escaped prisoners. Kanazawa’s order to leave civilians alone was obeyed: no local inhabitant was killed or wounded. There were scenes that are hard to reconcile with the image of that night – one farmer’s wife invited three escapees in for tea and freshly baked scones before the army arrived. Some of the escapees killed themselves rather than fall into Australian hands again. Within nine or ten days all the surviving escapees were back behind the wire.

The toll

A total of 231 Japanese were killed in the breakout and the search (some sources give 234), and 108 were wounded. Four Australian soldiers were killed: Hardy, Jones, Shepherd and Doncaster. A fifth, Thomas Hancock of the Volunteer Defence Corps, was accidentally shot by another volunteer and died later. Among the dead was Hajime Toyoshima: the Australian report spoke of a gunshot wound to the chest and a self-inflicted wound to the neck. He was buried as Tadao Minami; that he was the pilot from the Darwin raid was established only in the 1960s.

On 8 September 1944 Prime Minister John Curtin presented the findings of the government inquiry to the House of Representatives. They established that conditions in the camp complied with the Geneva Convention, that the outbreak had been planned in advance, that the camp garrison, in defending itself, had prevented greater losses and had ceased fire as soon as it regained control, and that many of the dead had taken their own lives or been killed by their comrades. After the war Hardy and Jones were posthumously awarded the George Cross, the highest Commonwealth award for gallantry for deeds for which the Victoria Cross was not conferred. On 1 January 1945 Kanazawa and his successor stood before a military court; the court acquitted the successor and sentenced Kanazawa to 15 months’ hard labour for a breach of discipline.

Place in the war

The Cowra breakout carried the war with Japan deep into the Australian mainland, to a quiet farming district hundreds of kilometres from the coasts on which Japanese bombs had fallen. The external threat itself was clearly receding by then. Japanese air raids on the north of the continent, such as the attack on Darwin in May 1943, had ceased at the end of 1943, and when Japanese ships were reported near the Lombok Strait in March 1944, the alarm in Western Australia proved false. In July 1944 the Americans captured Saipan, which led to the fall of the Tōjō cabinet, and landed on Guam. The Australians, caught by surprise at night at Cowra, saw at close quarters what their soldiers had seen in New Guinea and the Americans on the Pacific islands: men who preferred death to captivity, even when no one was forcing them to fight any longer.

The survivors were moved to camps at Hay and at Murchison in Victoria; they returned to Japan in 1946, together with Kanazawa, whose sentence had been shortened. Many of them kept silent for the rest of their lives about having been prisoners. Some families learned where their relatives had died only years later, because in the camp they had used false names.

At Cowra the dead were buried at the edge of the town’s war cemetery, next to the Australian guards. In the early 1960s the remains of Japanese who had died in Australia during the war – soldiers, airmen shot down over Darwin, civilian internees – were moved there from all over the country. The Japanese War Cemetery, with more than 500 graves, was officially opened on 22 November 1964; it is the only one of its kind in Australia. On nearby Bellevue Hill a Japanese garden designed by Ken Nakajima in the style of the Edo period was later created. Toyoshima’s bugle was handed over in 1978 to the collections of the Australian War Memorial by Major Edward Timms, who had commanded the camp in 1944. Cowra, where the anniversaries of that night are commemorated, has become a symbol of Australian–Japanese reconciliation. The last surviving participant in the breakout, Teruo Murakami, died in Japan in September 2023.