Sandakan
Product details
- ISBN 9781784164348
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 129 x 197mm
- Publication Date: 02 Apr 2020
- Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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After the fall of Singapore in 1942, the conquering Japanese Army transferred some 2500 British and Australian prisoners to a jungle camp on the north-eastern coast of Borneo: Sandakan.
There they were beaten, broken, worked to death, thrown into bamboo cages on the slightest pretext and subjected to tortures so ingenious and hideous that the victims were driven to the brink of madness. But this was only the beginning.
In late 1944, Allied aircraft began bombing the coastal towns of Sandakan and Jesselton, and the Japanese resolved to abandon the prison camp and move the prisoners 250 miles inland. The journey there became known as the Sandakan Death marches. More than a thousand prisoners set out on the epic marches. Only six survived.
This is the story of the survivors and the fallen.
Paul Ham is the author of twelve books, including The Soul: A History of the Human Mind, Hiroshima Nagasaki, Passchendaele: The Bloody Battle that Nearly Lost the Allies the War, 1914: The Year the World Ended, Sandakan: The Untold Story of the Sandakan Death Marches, Vietnam: The Australian War and Kokoda.
Hiroshima Nagasaki is being made into a six-part radio drama by Goldhawk and Thoroughbred Studios, due out in 2026.
All Paul's books have won or been shortlisted for major literary prizes in Australia. Vietnam and Kokoda were made into ABC documentaries, which he co-wrote and presented.
A former Sunday Times correspondent, with a Master’s degree from the London School of
Economics, Paul now lives in Paris and devotes his time to writing history and (when possible) teaching a course in Narrative History at Sciences Po, France’s preeminent tertiary school for the humanities.
