Breakout At Cowra Still Fresh In Memory
Newcastle Herald
Saturday August 7, 2004
THE infamous Japanese prisoner of war breakout at Cowra took place 60 years ago but Jim Carney remembers it as if it happened just days ago.
"Something like that you never forget " Mr Carney, 73, of Merewether Heights, said. Mr Carney was a 13-year-old schoolboy in the area when panic spread rapidly throughout the Blayney district during this week in 1944, with news that 1100 Japanese prisoners had broken out of the Cowra POW camp, in south-western NSW. "But because this was in World War II and there was newspaper censorship, most of Australia knew little of those events which happened 60 years ago," he said."And many people still don't know about it but for those of us who were there, it was a very traumatic time." The Japanese prisoners, shamed at being captured alive, stormed the camp's barbed wire fences en masse at 2am on Saturday, August 5.Armed with baseball bats and home-made weapons, most of the POWs were intent on suicide. "Some 231 Japanese and four Australian soldiers died," Mr Carney said. "It was the largest POW escape anywhere in the world." Though he and his family lived about 40 kilometres from Cowra, at Lyndhurst, everyone in the area remained terrified for a week until the emergency was over. Mr Carney said a veil of secrecy was drawn over the district about the breakout."I remember it was either the army or the police who came around to all the homes to ask us not to even tell relatives about the incident," he said. "Families were told to stay silent because of possible repercussions against our soldiers captured by the Japanese should any word get out." POWs were buried in a mass grave but after the war a friendship grew between the Japanese and Cowra.
© 2004 Newcastle Herald