Parit Sulong Massacre, Johore, Malaya, 22nd-23rd January 1942


 Parit Sulong Massacre, Johore, Malaya, 22nd-23rd January 1942


On the night of the 22nd January 1942, the Parit Sulong Massacre in Johor, Malaya was committed against British, Australian, Indian soldiers by members of the Imperial Japanese Guards Division. A few days earlier, the Allied troops had ambushed the Japanese near Gemas and blown up a bridge there.


During the Battle of Muar, members of both the Australian 8th Division and the 45th Indian Infantry Brigade were making a fighting withdrawal when they became surrounded near the bridge at Parit Sulong. The Allies fought the larger Japanese forces for two days until they ran low on ammunition and food. Able-bodied soldiers were ordered to disperse into the jungle, the only way they could return to Allied lines. Approximately 150 British, Australian and Indians were too badly wounded to move, and their only option was surrender. Some accounts estimate that as many as 300 Allied troops were taken PoW at Parit Sulong.


The wounded PoW's were kicked and beaten with rifle butts by the Imperial Guards. At least some were tied up with wire in the middle of the road, machine-gunned, had petrol poured over them, were set alight and (in the words of Russell Braddon) were "after their incineration, they were systematically run over, back and forwards, by Japanese driven trucks." Anecdotal accounts by local people also reported PoW's being tied together with wire and forced to stand on a bridge, before a Japanese soldier shot one, causing the rest to fall into the Simpang Kiri river and drown.


Lt Ben Hackney of the Australian 2/19th Battalion feigned death and managed to escape. He crawled through the countryside for six weeks with two broken legs, before he was recaptured. Hackney survived internment in Japanese PoW camps, and was part of the labour force on the notorious Burma Railway. He and two other survivors gave evidence regarding the massacre to Allied war crimes investigators.


The commander of the Imperial Guards, Lt-Gen Takuma Nishimura, was later in charge of occupation forces in eastern Singapore. He was indirectly involved in the Sook Ching massacre in Singapore. Nishimura retired from the Japanese army in 1942 and was made military Governor of Sumatra. Following the war, he was tried by a British military court in relation to the Sook Ching massacre. Nishimura received a life sentence, of which he served four years. As he returned to Japan, Nishimura was removed from a ship at Hong Kong, by Australian military police and charged in relation to the Parit Sulong massacre. Nishimura was taken to Manus Island in the Territory of New Guinea, where he faced an Australian military court. Evidence was presented stating that Nishimura had ordered the shootings at Parit Sulong and the destruction of bodies. He was convicted and executed by hanging on 11th June 1951.


In 1996, Australian journalist Ian Ward published Snaring the Other Tiger, which suggested that the Australian Army prosecutor, Captain James Godwin, a former RNZAF pilot who had been ill-treated as a PoW in Sumatra, had "manipulated" evidence to implicate Nishimura. Ward states that Godwin took no action on the testimony of Lt Fujita Seizaburo, who reportedly took responsibility for the Parit Sulong massacre. Fujita was not charged and his fate is unknown. Extensive research conducted by Professor Gregory Hadley and James Oglethorpe and published in the Journal of Military History in 2007 subsequently showed that the evidence that purported to indict James Godwin was a latter day fabrication created to further political causes in the 1990s


Photo: Wreckage of the 45th Indian Brigade still littered on both sides of the road at Parit Sulong on 26th September 1945. Some of the gear of some 150 British, Australian and Indian troops massacred by the Japanese can be seen on the left.

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