The Cowra Breakout: According to the Geneva Conventions

The Cowra POW camp has disappeared from the landscape so the filming of the camp scenes took place at the Singleton army base just outside Sydney. The actors chosen to play the camp guards are all character actors with a nice line in humour. And it’s always a joy to see Ernie Dingo with his laconic grin lightening up an otherwise grim story.

Major Horden explains that the camp follows the rules of the Geneva Convention to ensure that Australian POW’s will be well looked after by the Japanese. As he speaks, we’re painfully aware of the terrible irony of what was happening to Australian POWs held in Japanese camps.

The Cowra Breakout synopsis

In the Second World War, Stan Davidson (Alan David Lee) and his best mate Mick Murphy (Dennis Miller) are on patrol in the jungles of New Guinea when their patrol stumbles into a small group of starving Japanese soldiers who have vowed to fight to the death. Mick is fatally injured by the last surviving Japanese soldier, leaving Stan, also wounded, to spend the night in a standoff with the lone Japanese who finally breaks his cover at dawn to charge, unarmed, at Stan, seeking death rather than the dishonour of capture. Stan runs him through with a bayonet.

Back in Australia, after his recovery, Stan is posted to the Cowra prisoner of war (POW) camp close to where Mick’s wife, Sally (Tracy Mann) and their three girls are living on the farm that Mick carved out of the bush. Stan is a welcome visitor at the farm where over time, a relationship develops with Sally.

Meanwhile, at the POW camp, Stan is drawn to Junji Hayashi (Junichi Ishada) the Japanese soldier who he thought he’d killed in New Guinea, but who had been picked up by Allied medics and nursed back to life. As their relationship develops, they gain a better understanding of each other’s culture. The Japanese soldier realises that the future of Japan will depend on its young warriors returning to rebuild their country while Stan begins to understand that Hayashi is resisting a strong warrior code according to which a Japanese soldier must die rather than be taken prisoner.

The Cowra Breakout curator's notes

This riveting mini-series is based on a true story from wartime Australia. The series doesn’t simply dramatise the events as they unfolded, but gets inside the various characters to help us understand the vast cultural gulf between the Australian way of life and the culture of self-sacrifice that lay at the heart of the Japanese military tradition.

In the early hours of 5 August 1944, 1100 Japanese prisoners launched a mass breakout from a POW camp near the small NSW town of Cowra. Armed with only hand sharpened cutlery and baseball bats, they charged over the barbed wire into Australian gunfire. Four Australian guards were killed and 231 Japanese soldiers died. For over 30 years great secrecy surrounded what was known as 'the Cowra incident’.

One of the problems in researching the film was in tracing Japanese survivors and their families. Many spoke about the humiliation attached to being taken captive while some have still not admitted to their family and friends that they were prisoners of war.

The creative team included writer/directors Chris Noonan and Phil Noyce and writer/producer Margaret Kelly. All three were involved in every stage of production, research and writing which took over two years to develop. Chris Noonan later directed Babe the very successful Kennedy Miller feature film produced by George Miller. Phil Noyce became an internationally successful director whose credits include The Quiet American and Rabbit Proof Fence, and Margaret Kelly has written for Seachange, McLeods Daughters and Heartbreak High.

This remarkable mini series, shown on prime time commercial television in 1984, exposes a terrible and little understood episode in the bitter history of the Pacific war and has no doubt been a potent factor in helping Australians to come to a better understanding of the Japanese character.

The story of the breakout at Cowra has been recently retold in the low budget feature film, Broken Sun (2007).

Notes by Janet Bell

Education notes

This clip shows Corporal Stan Davidson (Alan David Lee) reporting for duty at a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp at Cowra, New South Wales. On arrival Davidson observes Italian POWs singing as they march past on their way to work, and the camp’s commanding officer, Major Horden (Simon Chilvers), practising showjumping. In the camp headquarters, the elderly Lance Corporal Riley rouses himself from a nap to greet Davidson. The clip cuts to a scene showing Davidson in Horden’s office, where the major tells Davidson that he runs the camp according to the Geneva Convention, a treaty that governs the treatment of POWs. Davidson is disturbed to find that the POW washing the office window is a ‘Jap’, and that he will be guarding Japanese POWs.

Educational value points

• During the Second World War, German, Italian and Japanese POWs who had been captured in theatres of war in Asia, the South Pacific and the Middle East were interned in camps across Australia, including Cowra in rural NSW. By August 1944 there were 2,223 Japanese POWs in Australia, including 544 merchant seamen, as well as 14,720 Italian and 1,585 German POWs. The Cowra POW camp, officially known as No 12 POW Group, held mainly Japanese POWs, most of whom had been captured in fighting in and around the islands north of Australia, and Italian prisoners, the majority of whom had been captured in the Middle East.

• In the clip Major Horden stresses the importance of the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Conventions are a series of agreements forged in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1864 that establish rules for the treatment of POWs and sick and wounded soldiers during war. According to the Conventions, POWs must be treated humanely, which includes the provision of adequate food, clothing and appropriate health care, as well as a range of other standards. The Cowra POW camp was run in accordance with the relevant Geneva Convention.

• Major Horden hopes that treating POWs in accordance with the Geneva Convention will ensure that Australian POWs are also treated well. In 1943, reports emerged that Australian and British troops captured in Malaysia and Singapore by the Japanese were subject to brutal treatment including forced labour, primitive living conditions, starvation rations and poor medical treatment. They were also denied access to the International Red Cross. About 37 per cent of POWs in Japanese camps died, and of the 22,376 Australian POWs captured by the Japanese, 8,031 died in captivity.

• In the clip, Corporal Davidson is greeted by an elderly lance corporal on his arrival at the camp. Guards at POW camps were mostly veterans from the First World War but also included soldiers who had been injured during fighting in the Second World War and civilians who had enlisted but were unfit for duty. Corporal Davidson had been posted to the POW camp after being injured while fighting the Japanese in New Guinea and unable to return to active duty. Davidson’s unease upon seeing the Japanese prisoner cleaning windows attests to his recent experience in a theatre of war.

• The clip establishes that life at the camp is fairly relaxed, showing the Italian POWs singing as they march and the commanding officer practising showjumping, while the rather frail Lance Corporal Riley has to rouse himself from a nap and put in his false teeth before greeting Davidson. The clip also gently mocks anti-Japanese propaganda by juxtaposing a poster that shows an image of an evil-looking Japanese man along with the words ‘LOOK WHO’S Listening’ with the Japanese soldier who cheerfully washes the office window during Horden’s interview with Davidson, and whose opportunity to eavesdrop is not considered a problem.

• The Cowra camp, which was built to house 4,000 prisoners including ‘enemy aliens’, was divided into four compounds in which POWs were segregated according to nationality. It covered about 30,000 hectares, was fenced with thick barbed-wire entanglements about 2.5 m high and was overlooked by six 9-m observation towers. The camp was guarded by the 22nd Garrison Battalion, whose main role was to secure the perimeter of the camp but who were also responsible for supervising work patrols of German and Italian POWs sent to neighbouring farms to work.

• The clip is a segment from The Cowra Breakout, a television miniseries made in 1984 comprising ten 50-minute episodes. The series was directed by noted Australian directors Phillip Noyce and Chris Noonan. Like many of the miniseries made in the 1980s, the clip demonstrates careful attention to character development, and the use of humour and irony in the depiction of a serious subject.

Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia