ass grave. In the evening high tide the remains would have been washed out to sea. The perpetrator of this foul crime was Lt-Gen. Takuma Nishimura, 62, who gave the following order: "Instruct the officer-in-charge to execute all the prisoners by firing squad. Kill them all. The bodies of the prisoners are to be cremated on completion of the execution and all traces of their disposal obliterated."
Nishimura later faced trial before an Australian Military Court and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was previously convicted of massacres in Singapore and sentenced to life imprisonment by a British Military Tribunal on April 2, 1947. After serving four years of his sentence, he was being transferred to Tokyo to serve out the rest of his sentence and while the ship stopped temporarily at Hong Kong he was seized by the Australian Military Police and taken to Manus Island where his second trial was held. In this trial he was found guilty and hanged on June 11, 1951.
TOL PLANTATION ATROCITY (February 4, 1942)
On the morning of 22/23 of January, 1942, Japanese forces, estimated at between seventeen and twenty thousand, landed at Rabaul on the island of New Britain. Defended by 1,396 men of the Australian 2/22 Battalion of the 8th Division, AIF, (Lark Force ) The New Guinea Volunteer Rifles and men of the 2/10 Field Ambulance Unit, they were soon forced to retreat in the hope of escaping via Wide Bay about 90 kilometres south of Rabaul. On the 3rd of February, 1942, Japanese troops landed from five barges on the shore of Henry Reid Bay, an indent on Wide Bay and near the Tol and Waitavalo plantations. They immediately set out to round up all Australian soldiers hiding out in the surrounding jungle. The first ten taken prisoner were immediately bayoneted to death. The others, worn out and hungry by their trek from Rabaul, simply surrendered. Their hands were bound together, their identity discs and other personal items taken off them and then marched into the bush on the Tol Plantation in groups of ten or twelve and four separate massacres took place, the victims shot or bayoneted in a most cruel fashion. At the nearby plantation at Waitavalo eleven other prisoners were shot from behind by rifle and machine guns.
The Japanese didn't have the decency to bury these men, only to throw a few palm fronds over the bodies. Miraculously, six men survived these killings. When the 14/32nd Australian Infantry Battalion recaptured the area in April, 1945, they discovered a number of areas littered with the bleached bones of 158 victims who had escaped from Rabaul. It is not known how many of the victimes were civilians. The Japanese unit responsible for the murders was the 3rd Battalion of the 144th Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel Masao Kusunose who was tracked down on December 17, 1946. It was discovered that he had committed suicide by starving himself to death during a nine day fast. In Australia, the official Government report on the massacre was not released until 47 years later, in 1988. (Of the 1,396 men of Lark Force, only about 400 returned home.)
MASSACRE ON BALIKPAPAN (February 24, 1942)
After the destruction of the Tarakan oil-fields the Japanese were determined that the same thing would not happen when they invaded Balikpapan. Two Dutch officers, captured on Tarakan, were sent to Balikpapan with an ultimatum stating that if the oil installations are destroyed, all Dutch personnel in the area would be shot. The two emissaries were directed by the Dutch commanding officer, Lt. Col. C van den Hoogenband, to escape to the island of Java after which he gave the order for the oil-fields to be destroyed. Japanese troops of the 56th Regimental Group, under the command of Major-General Shizuo Sakaguchi, invaded the island on January 23, 1942 and outraged at what they saw, proceeded to round up every Dutch soldier and white civilian they could find. Even eight patients from the local hospital were among the group of 78 victims marched to a beach near the old Klandasan Fortress. Two of the victims were then beheaded on the beach, the 