Sandakan Memorial Site

An empty and quiet site when we visited. Not part of our travel plan but we had to come to pay respect for lives lost. There are plaques explaining the horrors that once unfolded here. We stood by a shaded hillside which was the POW Camp for the British and Australian soldiers of WWII. We climb the hill to a small Museum to view the photos and stories of the POW’s.

The Sandakan Death Marches were a series of forced marches including the Death march from Sandakan to Ranau. The marches resulted in the deaths of more than 3600 Indonesian civilians and more than 2400 Allied POW’s. At the end of the war only 6 Australians survived.