THE POW CAGE NEAR WEWAK

Dozens of Allied airmen were kept in a barbed-wire cage near Boram Airfield, in the vicinity of Wewak, from July 1943 to April 1944. It was alleged that when Japanese units were ordered to evacuate to Hollandia around the end of March 1944, all of the prisoners in the cage were shot. No proof of this ever surfaced however, although the reality is that not one airman committed to this cage survived the war.

The caged compound was built right on the coast on the West Side of Boram Point (near Wewak) in July 1943. Post-war estimates of the number of Allied airmen kept in this cage increased as the war progressed, and at one stage about forty men were kept there. The original site was abandoned in January 1944, then it was reconstructed briefly on the northern side of Koigin village in March 1944. This site too was abandoned as month later. Not one survivor emerged alive from this camp. Were they executed, or did most just die of Beriberi and Malaria as claimed by the Japanese ?

Those in the camp came under the supervision of Captain Takahashi Kiku and his subordinates. Takahashi died of wounds in March or April 1945, so was unable to be questioned about his role in the matter. The camp was built on the orders of Lt-General Mano Goro, Commanding Officer was the Imperial 41^st Division, who arrived in the Wewak area in July 1943, and in fact Goro signed an affidavit acknowledging this post-war.

In December 1945, as part of an Australian Warcimes investigation, a female native of Kavieng named Semel, signed an affidavit stating she had been raped in the POW cage at Boram towards the end of 1943. She alleged that the perpetrator was a 2^nd Lt Igusi, and that at the time of her incarceration there were about thirty Allied airmen in the cage. The Japanese in charge was Komori, and other Japanese doing guard duty at the time included Kassari, Sataka, Tagaka, Tagasi and Karinu. Ominously, Kaling gave evidence that the Japanese would often order the airmen to be regularly beaten, especially following Allied air-raids of the Wewak area,

“Beatings were usually done by a native called Kaling who had been given rank by the Japanese. He always did it on the order of the guards and not on his own initiative. When he had finished the beatings he used to go back to Igusi’s quarters”.

War crimes such as this were commonplace in New Guinea during WW2. There are thousands and thousands of pages of such evidence, in storage at the Australian Archives and Australian War Memorial, still to be properly indexed. The process could take another fifty years. Who knows what else lies in these records ?

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