The Deadly Cowra Mass-Breakout (1944): Largest Prison Break of World War 2

During the Second World War, a PoW camp in southeast Australia nearby the township Cowra housed mainly Japanese and Italian prisoners. During the night of August 5th 1944, a bugle sounded in the dead-quiet night.

As the camp’s guards would soon find out, this sound was the signal for hundreds of Japanese prisoners to storm the outer-fences and six guard towers, brandishing nothing but makeshift weaponry.

That night, the largest and single-most bloody POW prison break of the entire Second World War commenced. All of it happening nearby that middle-sized quiet township of Cowra, Australia.

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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:44 Background
5:09 The Breakout
8:07 The Manhunt

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By August 1944, Australia housed a bit over 12000 POWs. On Australia’s mainland, a significant POW camp was located near the middle-sized town of Cowra, situated in the central west of New South Wales, inhabited by around 3000 Australians. Its location is a bit over 300 kilometres to the southwest of Sydney.

As for the prisoners, the camp housed approximately 2200. A little over half of them were Japanese, captured during the brutal fighting in the Pacific. A significant number were Italians, either captured in the Middle East or merchant sailors, picked up by the Royal Australian Navy patrolling the Pacific.

The prison complex was a relatively large near-circular compound. It covered an area of over thirty hectares, which is the equivalent of around 56 football fields. Encompassing the compound were three barbed-wire perimeter fences, and in between these fences lay more barbed wire. As the map shows, it was subdivided into four different compounds: A, B, C and D. They were divided by two roads, the so-called No Man’s Land moving from west-to-east, and Broadway moving from north to south.

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Sources:

Carr-Gregg, Charlotte. "Japanese Prisoners of War in Australia the Cowra Outbreak, August 1944." Oceania 47, no. 4 (1977): 253-264.
Dando-Collins, Stephen. The Big Break: The Greatest American WWII POW Escape Story Never Told. St. Martin's Press, 2017.
Gordon, Harry. Voyage from Shame: The Cowra Breakout and Afterwards. Univ. of Queensland Press, 1994.

http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/ajrp2.nsf/WebI/Blankets/$file/Text.pdf
https://www.fairhall.id.au/families/myline/exhibits/cowra-heritage1209_harry_gordon.pdf
https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/cowra
https://anzacday.org.au/cowra
https://italianprisonersofwar.com/tag/cowra-italians/

Map of the breakout points: https://italianprisonersofwar.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/cowra.gif

Written by House of History

Photos, paintings and imagery: Public Domain, Wikicommons

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