WAPLING
James Herbert
Vic. Paybook photograph, taken on enlistment, of VX48817 Corporal James Herbert Wapling, No. 1 Company, Australian Army Service Corps. He was one of over 2000 Allied prisoners of war (POW) held in the Sandakan POW camp in north Borneo, having been transferred there from Singapore as a part of B Force. The 1494 POW's that made up B Force, were transported from Changi on 7 July 1942 on board the tramp ship Ubi Maru, arriving in Sandakan Harbour on 18 July 1942. Corporal Wapling, aged 25, died as a prisoner of the Japanese on 22nd May 1945. He was the son of Arthur Henry and Teresa Agatha Wapling, of Essendon, Vic. He is commemorated on the Labuan Memorial Panel 21. (Photograph copied from AWM232, items 4 and 5. Personal information from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Database.)
Labuan Memorial http://www.roll-of-honour.org.uk/Cemeteries/Labuan_Memorial/
Roll of Honour
WAPLING, Corporal, JAMES HERBERT, VX48817. A.I.F. 1 Coy. Australian Army Service Corps. 22nd May 1945. Age 25. Son of Arthur Henry and Teresa Agatha Wapling, of Essendon, Victoria. Panel 21.
Different kind of torture for Sandakan survivors
By Alan Ramsey, Sydney Morning Herald, August 6, 2003
Keith
Botterill, a Katoomba textile printer, was 19 when he enlisted in the
army at Sydney's Victoria Barracks on August 7, 1941. Six months later,
after the fall of Singapore, Botterill was a prisoner of the Japanese
in Changi.
In July 1942 he was shipped to the Sandakan POW
camp in North Borneo. Somehow he would survive the next three years. He
would also survive the infamous Sandakan death marches in
January-February and May-June, 1945.
Volume four of the
official war histories says, at page 604, that "some 2500 British and
Australian prisoners" died at Sandakan, Ranua or during the
100-kilometre death marches between the two. The exact number, as
recorded by the Australian War Memorial, is 2428 "known" dead: 1787
Australians and 641 Brits. Botterill was one of only six POWs, all
Australians, who survived.
Botterill's is a remarkable
story. So is that of the other five Sandakan survivors. Gunner Owen
Campbell, a Brisbane labourer aged 24 when he enlisted in 1940, was
picked up near Ranua by an Allied guerilla party in July 1945 after
almost 3 years of captivity, beatings, starvation and illness. A second
guerilla party found four others a month later. They had escaped after
a friendly Japanese guard warned them that all surviving POWs at Ranua
were to be shot. Botterill was one of the four.
The other
three were: Private Nelson Short, of Enfield, Sydney, aged 22 when he
enlisted on July 11, 1940; Lance-Bombardier Bill Moxham, a 28-year-old
station overseer from Toongabbie, NSW; and Warrant Officer Bill
Sticpewich, a meat inspector from Wickham, NSW, the leader of the
escape group. The sixth Sandakan survivor was Bombardier James Richard
Braithwaite, of Brisbane, 23 when he enlisted in June 1940, who would
later write of Sandakan in the journal Stand-To.
Braithwaite
had escaped from Ranua on June 8, 1945, and was rescued a week later by
an American PT boat. The official war history records: "These six men
were the only survivors of some 2500 British and Australian prisoners
at Sandakan after the transfer of their officers to Kuching [in
September 1942] ... All were dead by August 15 [1945]." Three weeks
earlier, when Sticpewich, Botterill, Short and Moxham slipped away from
Ranua camp, "only 32 were then alive, six of them unconscious".
Half
a century later, in her book Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence, a
terrible story of official obfuscation over an aborted proposal to
liberate the Sandakan POWs in early 1945, author Lynette Silver records
what happened to all six Sandakan survivors. Sticpewich, after living
through the worst of POW bestiality for three years, was knocked down
and killed in Melbourne in 1977 "while crossing the road".
Moxham,
who "thrived on living dangerously" before the war was "so profoundly
affected" by his POW years that he committed suicide in 1961, not yet
50. Braithwaite died of cancer in 1986. Short did not survive a heart
attack in 1995. Botterill lived to see Silver complete her book before
dying of emphysema on the eve of Australia Day 1997. At the time of
publication, Campbell, the last of the Sandakan Six, was a recluse. He
died a month ago.
It is a melancholy closure to a terrible
period of Australia's military history. Silver records in her book:
"The POWs, sent from Singapore in 1942-43 to work on airfield
construction, endured frequent beatings and other, more diabolical
punishment. Many died of malnutrition, maltreatment and disease. In
1945, in response to an order from the Japanese High Command that no
prisoners were to survive the war, those still able to walk were sent
on a series of death marches into the interior. In late 1944 the
Allies, aware that POWs were being 'eliminated', had evolved a plan for
their rescue - a rescue which, after months of bungling, was finally
cancelled in April 1945 in the erroneous belief the Sandakan camp had
been evacuated.
"Gross incompetence was to blame for the
failed attempt. When it was realised that mistakes and stupidity were
responsible, those at the highest level shifted the blame before
embarking on a policy of wilful and deliberate suppression."
At
Sydney's Burwood Park three days ago a commemoration ceremony was held
at the Sandakan Memorial and its roll of honour, dedicated by the
Keating government 10 years ago. The ceremony got four paragraphs in
this newspaper the following morning. I thought you should have a thumb
sketch of the terrible history behind those four paragraphs.