Vital new research forces a re-examination of one of Australia’s most harrowing wartime events, sparking crucial conversations about historical truth and accountability.
For more than 80 years, questions have persisted about why hundreds of Australian and British prisoners at the notorious Sandakan prisoner of war camp in Borneo were never rescued.
In this book author Lynette Silver challenges many accepted explanations, revealing new evidence of intelligence and leadership failures, poor judgment, and missed opportunities that she argues cost hundreds of lives.
Operation Kingfisher: Unravelling Sandakan’s Darkest Secret is the culmination of more than three decades of research into one of the darkest chapters of Australia’s Second World War history.
At the centre of the investigation is Operation Kingfisher, the highly secret Special Operations Australia mission intended to rescue the prisoners.
Lynette’s landmark 1998 book, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence, challenged claims that the rescue failed because aircraft were unavailable. She revealed that aircraft, naval vessels and Australian paratroopers were ready to launch when the operation was cancelled after intelligence incorrectly reported that the Sandakan camp had been emptied.
This intelligence was catastrophically wrong. More than 1,000 prisoners were still alive.
But what happened next forms one of the major new revelations of Operation Kingfisher.
Since the publication of the first book, claims have been made that the rescue mission had failed due to lack of will, a low priority or international political considerations.
However, according to Silver’s new research, the prisoners had not been abandoned. The rescue remained a high-level priority when senior commanders, on learning that the original intelligence was wrong, revived plans to rescue the remaining POWs. This second attempt ultimately collapsed due to the same poor intelligence collecting that had blighted the first attempt, and failure by the field party to carry out its orders.
Drawing on previously overlooked military records, British archives, eyewitness accounts from Sabah and information provided by POW families, Silver reconstructs both rescue attempts and reveals the price paid in human terms for their failure.
“Behind these statistics are 2,434 individual men, each with a story,” says the author, who has reconstructed the stories of many of the prisoners.
She also reveals the lengths to which those involved in the failed rescue attempts sought to cover their tracks—a disturbing litany of denials, deceit and outright fabrications spanning decades.
Operation Kingfisher also significantly expands the British perspective of Sandakan through newly released UK records and includes untold accounts of Australian and British prisoners.
“Operation Kingfisher is far more than the story of a failed rescue mission. It is the story of how flawed assumptions, poor judgement, missed opportunities and failures of leadership combined to cost the lives of hundreds of prisoners who might otherwise have been saved.”
As one of the final living links to many of these firsthand accounts, the author believes that preserving their stories has become more important than ever.
“Operation Kingfisher: Unravelling Sandakan’s Darkest Secret is about ensuring these men, and the people who risked everything to help them, are never forgotten.”