Cowra breakout
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- Date:
- August 5, 1944
- Location:
- Australia
- Cowra
- New South Wales
- Context:
- World War II
Cowra breakout, (August 5, 1944), mass escape by nearly 400 Japanese prisoners of war from a prison camp in Cowra, New South Wales, Australia. It was the largest prison break staged during World War II.
The town of Cowra in east-central New South Wales was the site of one of the largest prisoner of war (POW) camps established in Australia during World War II. The camp opened in 1941 and eventually consisted of four compounds, named A, B, C, and D. The camp was roughly circular in shape, with each compound representing a quarter of the circle. The four compounds were divided by interior causeways: a roughly north-south road known as “Broadway” and an east-west road known as “No Man’s Land.” Compounds A and C housed Italians who had been captured during the North Africa campaigns; compound D held Japanese officers and Korean and Chinese labourers who had been forcibly conscripted by the Japanese. Compound B housed Japanese enlisted men, and by August 1944 it held 1,104 Japanese soldiers and naval aviators. Whereas the Italian prisoners largely accepted their imprisonment, the Japanese found surrendering to be a humiliating and disgraceful experience. Many of them had adopted aliases in captivity, so as to ensure that friends and family in Japan would believe them dead instead of captured. Although the Japanese prisoners chafed at their confinement, the conditions at the camp and the conduct of the Australian guards conformed to the 1929 Geneva Convention.
The camp was encircled by three barbed wire fences and patrolled by a heavily armed garrison. Six guard towers overlooked the avenues traversing the camp, and it was believed that any escape attempt was tantamount to suicide. Japanese prisoners had no real hope of blending into the local populace or reaching a ship that would return them to a friendly port. In June 1944 a Korean prisoner notified guards about a planned mass escape attempt, and the Australian garrison responded by placing a pair of Vickers guns in positions outside Compound B. On August 4 camp officials informed Compound B inmates that many of them would be relocated to a POW camp in Hay, some 250 miles (400 km) west of Cowra. The Australians were acting in accordance with Article 26 of the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which requires advance notification of all prisoner transfers, but this news proved to be the impetus for the breakout.
At around 2:00 am on August 5, 1944, a Japanese bugle call signalled the start of the breakout. Most of Compound B’s sleeping huts were set alight, and at least 900 Japanese prisoners, armed with baseball bats, knives, and other improvised weapons, began attempting to break through or scale the fence surrounding Compound B. Two groups hit the outer fences and two groups went over the inner fences onto Broadway. The latter two groups were tasked with breaching Compound D (to enlist the aid of the Japanese officers) and assaulting the camp’s main north and south gates. The Australian garrison responded by opening fire on the attacking prisoners, and the groups on Broadway were pinned down and neutralized. Pvt. Benjamin Hardy and Pvt. Ralph Jones, roused from sleep by the noise, raced to one of the Vickers guns and began firing at the prisoners who were scaling the outer fences and closing on their position en masse. Dozens of prisoners were killed by machine gun fire, but their numbers were too great and Hardy and Jones were soon overwhelmed. In a remarkable display of bravery and presence of mind, before they were killed, the pair managed to disable the gun to prevent its use by the Japanese. For their efforts, which undoubtedly averted far greater bloodshed, both soldiers were posthumously awarded the George Cross. Nearly 400 prisoners managed to escape to the surrounding countryside but within nine days all had been recovered. In total, 231 Japanese prisoners were killed or committed suicide during the breakout and 108 were wounded.
The postwar era saw a rapprochement between the two former belligerents, and in 1963 the Australian government ceded to Japan a plot of land near the former site of the camp to serve as a war cemetery. Bodies of those killed during the Cowra breakout were interred at the cemetery, as were Japanese war dead from elsewhere in Australia. This latter group included Japanese airmen who had been shot down over Australia. Adjacent to the Japanese war cemetery is the Allied war cemetery, where 26 Australians—including the four soldiers killed in the Cowra breakout—and one British airman are buried. In 1978 ties between Cowra and Japan were further strengthened when construction began on the Cowra Japanese Garden and Cultural Centre. Designed by landscape architect Ken Nakajima, the Cowra Japanese Garden is the largest Japanese garden in the Southern Hemisphere.