Like many people with a strong interest in World War II, my knowledge has always been firmly rooted in Europe. I could talk at length about the Eastern Front, D-Day, the Blitz, Dunkirk, and the fall of Berlin. I’d read countless books, watched endless documentaries, and even walked the beaches of Normandy trying and failing to make sense of the enormity of it all.

But, embarrassingly, I knew next to nothing about Australia’s role in the Pacific and even less about the shocking ordeal of Australian prisoners of war.

That changed recently, and in quite an unexpected way.

Narrow Road to the Deep North

I had just finished watching the television adaptation of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, based on Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel. It follows the story of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian army surgeon who is taken prisoner by the Japanese during the war and forced to work on the infamous Burma Railway.

It shook me up somewhat, especially how his latter years in the late 1980’s were, despite being a hugely successful surgeon, were still dominated by rage, guilt, irrational behaviour and horrendous nightmares.

Up until that point, the war in the Pacific was, for me, a kind of blur. Something vaguely remembered involving jungle warfare, island hopping, and Enola Gay. But this drama dragged me out of that ignorance. It was raw, intimate, and fucking brutal. The story wasn’t about battles or victories. It was about survival, cruelty, and memory.

So I started digging around AI, Google and so on, to learn more.

Why Were Australians Even in the Pacific War?

I’d always associated Australia’s military involvement with North Africa or the Middle East — desert campaigns and Anzacs at Tobruk. But after Japan entered the war in December 1941, all that changed. Japan stormed through Southeast Asia with terrifying speed, conquering Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and eventually bombing Darwin. Australia was suddenly on the front line.

In response, thousands of Australian troops were diverted from Europe to defend their own region — especially in places like New Guinea and Borneo. But they also found themselves stationed in one crucial location: Singapore.

And that’s where things went badly wrong.

The Fall of Singapore and the Capturing of Australians

I had always assumed Singapore was a fortress. I don’t know why but I always thought it was a last stronghold of the British Empire in Asia. But in February 1942, it fell to the Japanese in a swift, brutal and humiliating defeat. Over 130,000 Allied troops surrendered. Among them were over 15,000 Australians.

This was the largest capitulation of British-led forces in history, and it led to a dark chapter that either rarely gets the attention it deserves, or it does and I somehow missed it. A bit embarrassing for someone who thought they were a fountain of WWII knowledge.

Anyway, the captured soldiers, including Australians, were marched away as prisoners of war. Some were sent to Japan to work in mines and factories. Others, and this is where The Narrow Road to the Deep North focuses its attention, were forced to build what became known as the Burma-Thailand Railway, or more hauntingly, the Death Railway.

The Burma Railway: A Hell Few Survived

The Japanese idea was simple: build a railway connecting Bangkok to Rangoon so supplies and troops could move more easily through Southeast Asia. The reality was utterly horrific.

Working in searing heat, with almost no food, medicine, or tools, the POWs, alongside hundreds of thousands of Asian forced labourers, were subjected to a level of brutality that’s difficult to comprehend. Beatings, torture, starvation, and tropical diseases were part of daily life.

Of the 13,000 Australians sent to work on the railway, around 2,800 died. That’s more than one in five. And these were not soldiers dying in combat. They were men wasting away, breaking rocks, burying friends, and trying to retain some shred of humanity while the jungle and their captors conspired to destroy them, sometimes beating one individual for hours until he finally died. Just to teach the others a lesson.

It’s no exaggeration to call it of the most horrifying episode in Australia’s wartime history. Yet somehow, it rarely gets the attention it should especially outside Australia where all the attention is focussed on the holocaust, D Day, VE Day and the Battle of Britain. Speak to some of Britain’s biggest dumbos and they think we won the war single handed.

Liberation, But Not Quite Freedom

When Japan surrendered in August 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the remaining Australian POWs were finally liberated. Those who survived were skeletal and unrecognisable. The trauma they carried would last a lifetime.

And, as so often happens with the victims of war, their stories weren’t always easy to tell, or to hear. That’s part of what makes The Narrow Road to the Deep North such a powerful drama. It doesn’t just show what happened. It asks how anyone lives with it afterwards.

A War That Feels Forgotten

It’s strange to realise how many gaps there can be in our understanding of history. I’d always thought I had a good grasp of World War II. Yet I have missed an entire war within the war.

A war that Australians fought not in deserts or trenches, but in jungles and swamps. A war where the enemies weren’t just bullets and bombs, but malaria, malnutrition, and madness. And a war that, for thousands of captured Australians, never really ended.

If you haven’t watched The Narrow Road to the Deep North, I’d recommend it. But more than that, I’d recommend reading about the Burma Railway, the fall of Singapore, and the Australians who went through hell — not just for their country, but for each other. That’s what I am going to do.

It’s Not all Tanks and Strategy

Because war history isn’t just about tanks, battles, or strategies. It’s also about those who are often forgotten. We should have learned by now but as I write this, the war in Europe and the genocide in Gaza can all be traced back to the World Wars of the 20th Century.

Europe may have been liberated in 1945 but across much of the world the aftershocks continue. This time, Israel have their turn at being the Nazis and the arms dealers are literally making a killing.

How twisted is that?