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Braithwaite, Richard Wallace: Fighting Monsters: An Intimate History of the Sandakan Tragedy

Braithwaite, Richard Wallace

Fighting Monsters: An Intimate History of the Sandakan Tragedy, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2016

Only six escapees survived the Sandakan death marches of 1945 in North Borneo, the worst atrocity ever inflicted on Australian soldiers. 1787 Australian and 641 British POWs perished. Previous descriptions of the numerous violent acts have yielded little understanding of a situation where the real struggle was to keep one’s humanity when so many were losing theirs, whether Allied POWs, local residents of Borneo, Javanese slave labourers, or Japanese soldiers …

Richard Wallace Braithwaite’s father was one of the six survivors of the Sandakan death marches of 1945.  He died in 1986, still wanting the story to be properly told. This led to a project that has lasted for much of the last forty years of the author’s life, culminating in this book. (blurb)

Peter Stanley reviews the book for Honest History. John Braithwaite writes about his brother’s book. And again. Relics were donated to the Australian War Memorial.