By Sears Eldredge

During July, the further removal of POWs from Changi to overseas worksites continued as the Japanese mined the enormous supply of free labor for construction projects in support of their war effort. The 2^nd of July saw 1,500 Australians (“B” Force) ship out of Changi for Sandakan in North Borneo to build an airfield.^[1] Among them were Captains Claude Pickford and John Rowell, and Lieutenants “Tod” Walker, Bill Peck, and George Forbes. These officers will become responsible for producing an astonishing series of choir concerts, original musicals, and plays under the most adverse conditions in their camps at Sandakan and later, when they, along with other officers and batmen, were separated from their Unit and sent to the Australian Officers’ Camp at Batu Lintang outside Kuching, the capital of Sarawak. They were the lucky ones. Before the war was over, those left behind at Sandakan would undergo a series of death marches that would kill all but six of them.

[For more on these men and the entertainments they produced, read the forthcoming blog on Borneo.]

---

[1] This was 2/10^th Field Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery under the command of Lt. Col. Walsh.

Note that all the documents in this series of blogs reside in Sears A. Eldredge Archive in the De Witt Wallace Library at Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota, 55105

Sear’s book, Captive Audiences/Captive Performers: Music and Theatre as Strategies for Survival on the Thailand-Burma Railway 1942-1945, was published by Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2014, as an open-access e-book and is available here: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/thdabooks/22