Sandakan Massacre Memorial
On the night of 27 May 1945, Allied PT boats shelled Sandakan harbor for three hours. Some of the town's officials even managed to meet briefly with American soldiers who came ashore. Then the boats left. The Japanese, who had been rounding up suspected resistance members for weeks, now had all the pretext they needed. Twenty-seven people already sat in Kempeitai custody, most of them leaders of Sandakan's Chinese community. After a sham trial by the District Court, Captain Nakata Shiruchi read the sentences. The prisoners were led up a hill behind the military police headquarters and shot in groups of four with a machine gun. Some sources say they were beheaded. The bodies were placed in ten graves that had been dug before the sentences were even pronounced.
The Arrests
The roundup began on 6 May 1945, when the Borneo Kempeitai arrested Kwan Yun Hin, the former chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce Sandakan and the most prominent representative of the Chinese population in British North Borneo. Seven others were taken with him. As the Japanese position in Borneo deteriorated -- it was clear by this point that Japan would lose the war -- the occupation authorities grew increasingly paranoid about local resistance. The Allied raid on 27 May accelerated the process. By the time the PT boats departed, the Kempeitai held at least 27 people, the majority of them drawn from the Chinese commercial and civic leadership of the town. These were not combatants. They were businessmen, community representatives, and professionals whose influence made them targets.
Beyond the Chinese Community
The executions were not limited to Chinese victims. Among the dead were MS Patel, a pharmacy owner; Mrs. Linck, the wife of a German pharmacist; KA George, a town council member; Richard Watson, an accountant; Dominic P., a retired customs officer; Alfred Funk, co-owner of Radio and Sons; and a dealer named Jappar, along with an Indian doctor whose name has not been preserved. Not all of the executed are known by name, and it is widely believed that the actual number of victims exceeds the names recorded on the memorial stone. The killings were an act of collective punishment against a town's entire civilian leadership, reaching across ethnic and national lines.
Justice and Memory
After the war, 420 Japanese officers who served in North Borneo were indicted for war crimes. Captain Nakata Shiruchi of the Sandakan Kempeitai, who had read out the death sentences on the hillside, was among those sentenced to death. Shortly after the war ended, Sandakan's surviving residents erected a monument on the spot where the massacre took place -- the very hill where the victims had been buried. On 17 September 1946, Sir Malcolm MacDonald, the British Governor-General of Malaya and British Borneo, inaugurated the memorial. In 2004, it was renovated and expanded to include two flanking monument stones, bringing the total to three: a central stele approximately three meters high with red Chinese characters, flanked by stones listing the names of the dead.
The Hill Above Town
The memorial stands near the entrance to the Sandakan Chinese Cemetery, on a hill above the old town center. It is surrounded by a tiled square roughly six meters long, with stone pillars connected by link chains framing the three monuments. Every year on 27 May, descendants of the victims gather here for a memorial ceremony organized by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce Sandakan, which has maintained the site since its construction. The location is deliberate: the memorial occupies the exact ground where the executions occurred and the bodies were buried. It is a place where history has not been relocated to a more convenient site or softened into abstraction. The hill is the story, and the story is the hill.
From the Air
Located at 5.843N, 118.120E on a hillside near the Sandakan Chinese Cemetery, above the old town center. Nearest airport is Sandakan Airport (WBKS), approximately 10 km west. The memorial sits on elevated ground distinguishable from the surrounding urban fabric. Best viewed at 1,500-2,500 feet on approach from Sandakan Bay to the north.