Two days before the massacre, on 20 January 1942, soldiers of the Australian 8th Division and the 45th Indian Infantry Brigade began a fighting withdrawal from Bukit Bakri during the Battle of Muar. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Groves Wright Anderson, the retreating column -- seven officers, 190 men of the 2/29th Australian Battalion, and two Indian detachments -- moved south in fifty vehicles loaded with wounded, ammunition, and dwindling supplies of food and water. Japanese forces ambushed them repeatedly throughout the day. By evening the column had taken shelter in thick jungle, exhausted and running low on everything. The next morning they pushed on, reaching the outskirts of Parit Sulong at 9:30 on 21 January. The village had changed hands just two days earlier, when the local British detachment retreated into the jungle. Japanese units of the Imperial Guards Division now controlled the village and were prepared for the column's arrival. As many as 300 Allied troops may have been taken prisoner at Parit Sulong.

When Anderson and all soldiers still able to walk departed to attempt a breakout, an officer named Snelling approached the Japanese and surrendered the remaining men -- approximately 150 Australian and Indian soldiers, most of them wounded. What followed was systematic brutality. The prisoners were beaten immediately. Those who could not move were killed where they lay. The survivors were herded into a nearby building, stripped naked, and packed into overcrowded rooms. No medical attention was given. No water was provided. Japanese Imperial Guard soldiers beheaded Indian prisoners and fired randomly into the group. Local villagers later reported seeing prisoners tied together with wire and forced onto the bridge over the Simpang Kiri. A single shot toppled one man, dragging the rest into the river to drown. These were soldiers who had surrendered under the expectation that the laws of war would protect them. That expectation died at Parit Sulong along with the men who held it.

Hackney's survival story borders on the unbelievable. After feigning death during the executions, the lieutenant from the 2/29th Battalion crawled through the Malayan countryside for six weeks, dragging himself forward on two broken legs. He was eventually recaptured by the Japanese and spent the remainder of the war in prisoner-of-war camps, including a stint as forced labor on the notorious Burma Railway -- the construction project that killed an estimated 12,000 Allied prisoners. Hackney endured it all, and when the war ended, he and two other survivors provided crucial testimony to Allied war crimes investigators about what had happened at Parit Sulong. Their accounts would set in motion a pursuit of justice that stretched across years and continents.

The commander of the Imperial Guards Division, Lieutenant General Takuma Nishimura, had a long trail of atrocities behind him. After Parit Sulong, he oversaw occupation forces in eastern Singapore and was indirectly involved in the Sook Ching massacre there. He later served as military governor of Sumatra before a British court sentenced him to life imprisonment for the Singapore killings -- a sentence of which he served only four years. As Nishimura traveled home to Japan, Australian military police pulled him from a ship in Hong Kong and charged him specifically for Parit Sulong. He was taken to Manus Island in New Guinea to face an Australian military court. The trial was not straightforward. When shown Nishimura's photograph, Hackney could not confirm his identity as the officer who ordered the killings, and questions later arose about whether the photograph itself depicted the right person. Nevertheless, other evidence established that Nishimura had ordered the shootings and the destruction of the bodies. He was convicted and hanged on 11 June 1951. Decades later, in 1996, journalist Ian Ward suggested the Australian prosecutor had manipulated evidence, but research published in the Journal of Military History in 2007 found Ward's claims were based on fabricated documents created for political purposes in the 1990s.

Parit Sulong is a quiet place today, a small village in the Malaysian state of Johor. The Simpang Kiri river still flows beneath the bridge where prisoners were forced to stand before being shot into the water. The events of January 1942 are commemorated by Australian veterans' organizations and remain a significant chapter in the military history of both Australia and India. For the families of the men who died there -- soldiers of the 2/29th Battalion and the 45th Indian Infantry Brigade who had fought hard during the Battle of Muar only to be killed after laying down their arms -- Parit Sulong is a reminder that the laws of war exist precisely because of what happens when they are broken. The village's name, once obscure, now appears in war crimes scholarship, military histories, and the collective memory of nations separated from Malaya by thousands of miles of ocean.