Sandakan: The Untold Story of the Sandakan Death Marches

Paul Ham

oct 2012 · Distribuido por Random House Australia

Acerca de este libro electrónico

The untold story of the Sandakan death marches of World War II.

After the fall of Singapore, in February 1942, the Japanese conquerors rounded up tens of thousands of British and Australian soldiers and shipped them to prison camps scattered throughout Hirohito’s newly won Empire.

The fall of Britain’s ‘impregnable fortress’ was the greatest humiliation in British military history, for which Churchill never forgave the Japanese.

But nothing would surpass the wretched fate of some 2,700 British and Australian prisoners who were shipped to British North Borneo later that year. They landed in Sandakan, on the east coast of the island, after a 10-day voyage on a Japanese ‘hell’ ship, and were herded into a jungle camp some eight miles inland.

Thus began the three-year ordeal of the Sandakan prisoners of war - a barely known story of unimaginable horror.

Acerca del autor

Paul Ham is a Sydney-based historian, and the author of Hiroshima Nagasaki, to be published in November 2011 by HarperCollins. His previous books are Vietnam: The Australian War (November 2007) and Kokoda (November 2004), both published by HarperCollins. Vietnam won the NSW Premier's Prize for Australian History and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Prize for Non-Fiction (2008), a Walkley Award and two other State literary awards. Kokoda was shortlisted for the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction and the NSW Premier's Prize for Non-Fiction. Since 1998, Paul has been the Australia correspondent for The London Sunday Times, covering politics, business and current affairs. He has a Masters degree in Economic History from the London School of Economic, and lives in Sydney with his wife, Marie, and son, Oliver.