It is February 1942.

The Japanese have taken the British fortress of Singapore, and hold thousands of Allied prisoners of war.

These POWs are little more than slaves and are transferred to various parts of the Japanese Empire, with some 2,000 Australian and hundreds of British POWs sent to Sabah to build an airfield in Sandakan.

The labour is hard, the Japanese guards are harsh and cruel but the tough fighters can live with it.

Then, the tide of war turns against the Japanese, and the nightmare turns to hell.

After Allied air attacks damage the Sandakan airfield, the Japanese decide to relocate the prisoners to Jesselton, now known as Kota Kinabalu. But there is no transport.

The Japanese make their prisoners march the 350km through an inhospitable, dangerous jungle to avoid the Allies dominating the skies and the sea.

In January 1945, the first of the Sandakan Death Marches to Jesselton began. Most of the POWs would never make it to their destination, some killed by disease, others by exhaustion and many even eaten by their captors!

FMT spoke to Lynette Silver, an Australian historian whose extensive research on the Sandakan Death Marches makes her an authority on the subject.

According to her, the Sandakan Death Marches were the greatest atrocity perpetrated against Australians POWs during the Second World War.

Of all the prisoners who had set off on the marches, only six Australians survived, by sheer luck, to tell the tale.

But were the deaths caused by the Sandakan Death Marches a deliberate result or just the consequence of an uncaring Japanese captor?

Silver said that it is likely the latter; that while the Japanese did not care if their prisoners died, the marches themselves were not designed to kill prisoners.

In fact, the Japanese kept meticulous records of the deaths of their prisoners, recording their names and time of death.

The first march was to Jesselton, while the second was meant to transfer prisoners to a camp in Ranau, deep in the interior, some 200km from Sandakan.

Conditions during the marches were horrendous, said Silver, as the prisoners were forced to march through crocodile-infested swamps, scale five steep mountains and navigate thick jungles.

All the while, they had to deal with mosquitoes and leeches and during the night, they were left out in the cold.

Unsurprisingly, many died of exposure.

The first death march was the worst, according to Silver, as it was the rainy season and food supplies had not been adequately arranged for.

In one instance, a group of 49 prisoners arrived at a food dump to find a handful of rice and six cucumbers; provisions meant for four days.

The Japanese captors had less scruples about where to get more food though. They had no problems eating their captives, if they died.

Sometimes, they even ate their parts when they were alive. Then, the PoWs were bandaged up and made to march on.

“The Japanese cannibalised POWs, removing their hearts and livers. If limbs were affected by sores, they were cut off and the torso kept,” said Silver.

While the second march was somewhat better organised, conditions remained awful, with prisoners killing each other for scraps of food.

Those who were too weak to walk were often killed as they collapsed onto the ground, exhausted and starving.

Again, the Japanese turned to human meat to sustain themselves, with one woman delivering vegetables reporting that she saw POWs tied to trees with flesh being carved out from their legs.

Worst of all, these prisoners had their wounds bound before they were forced onto the march again; they were effectively “walking and breathing” pieces of meat.

Most of the 2,700 prisoners died of illnesses, such as dysentery and beri beri, or exhaustion, although the Japanese also executed many who survived the diseases.

While there were several attempts by prisoners to escape into the jungle, none ever made it to safety, and it is likely that some 60 of them perished in the jungles of Sabah.

Death marches were unfortunately not uncommon in territories occupied by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, but the Sandakan Death Marches stand out to Silver for a reason.

“The most outstanding feature is that no one, apart from the six who escaped, survived. It was an almost total annihilation.”

Surely for the horrors that happened, someone had to face justice, right? Not exactly, said Silver.

While some members of the Japanese top brass who were behind the marches were prosecuted for their crimes and executed, the Japanese guards involved in the march were largely imprisoned.

However, by 1958, not a single Japanese war criminal remained in prison as the Cold War drove the Americans to release Japanese war criminals to secure an alliance with Japan.

As the memories of war faded, the stories of the death march were almost swallowed up by the dense jungle.

However, in 2005, jungle trekking expert, Tham Yau Kong, and Silver herself, traced the wartime route using an original map.

They opened up the route to fellow trekkers, allowing people to walk the path taken by the POWs.

Little remains of the Ranau camp, but the valley in which it was built is worth the visit, according to Silver.

“Now, it’s a place of quiet contemplation and reflection, but for those who know its history it is an intensely moving experience,” she said.

“Skirted by two rivers, and enclosed in jungle-clad slopes, its natural beauty and serenity belie the appalling atrocities that took place there.”

To learn more about the Sandakan Death March and other historical events, visit lynettesilver.com. More information and photographs can also be found at sandakandeathmarch.com.