May 19, 2011 06:39 |
![]() Yours sincerely, |
Mon, 16 May 2011 21:26:02 +1000 |
![]() It was not for the physical challenge nor to seek adventures in the Jungles of Sandakan-Ranau that I trekked this sacred path. In the dark history of WWII in this then unknown part of the world the majestic tropical rainforest ran supreme. It was here Australian and British soldiers were held prisoners by the Japanese Army largely unknown to the world until late 1990s when Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence researched and written by Lynette Ramsay Silver was published. It was here I was born long after the war had ended. I had known about this war and the plight of the White POWs from stories my parents told about their experience of the war though not in detail as told in Lynette’s book which unveiled horrors unimaginable that human beings could do to another. In commemoration of the POWs I trekked the Death March route in whose footsteps I pay homage in the inhospitable terrains which offered unfathomable human miseries courtesy of the Japanese Army decades before: hunger, thirst, fatigue, indignities, illnesses, torture, and death. In honour of the families I dedicate my Death March trek to: Private Robert Charles Harris, Private Robert John Greenwood, Gunner Wright Albert Sheard, Corporal Norman Arnold Allie. POWs by the hundreds perished in abject conditions on the Death March in 1945 and all unreservedly deserve acknowledgment and remembrance. Lest We Forget |
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