Operation Kingfisher
The cancelled rescue mission that sacrificed Sandakan POWs to the Death Marches
By Gary Followill
Published by Big Sky Publishing
RRP $32.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781922896681
This book began life as Gary Followill’s Masters by Research thesis of 2020, under the supervision of Professor Peter Stanley who has written a foreword to the book.
Followill explores the chain of events that led to the death of over 2,500 Prisoners of War – one of Australia’s worst wartime tragedies – and the cancellation of the rescue mission Operation Kingfisher.
In the end, only six men survived the Sandakan POW camp.
Followill’s determination was to unravel the reasons why the men were left to the terrible fate ordained for them by the Japanese imperial command that ordered the killing of all POWs before the Allies could free them.
Of the 17,501 Australians killed in the war against Japan, 8,031 died as POWs, a shocking figure when compared with only 200 Australian POW deaths of the 9,572 who died fighting the Germans and Italians.
Over the years any number of theories have been put forward as to the reason for the cancellation of the rescue mission but Followill concludes there was no one defining reason but rather a complex web of competing priorities overlaid by personal and professional relationships as well as incompetence and distrust.
VERDICT: Unravelling the facts of this cancelled mission can’t have been easy. In doing so, he does not seek to apportion blame, only to lay out the facts as he understands them, knowing that, with the greater knowledge that comes with hindsight, it is easy to pass judgement except that there is never an absolute way to put ourselves in another’s position. Words of wisdom indeed.
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