Shortly after 2:00 a. m. on August 5, 1944, a bugle sounded inside a prisoner of war camp outside Cowra, New South Wales. The call came from a Japanese airman, and within moments, 1,104 prisoners in Camp B rushed from their huts in what became the largest prison breakout of World War II.
The official court of inquiry later counted the results. Of the prisoners, 588 broke through the inner wire into the wide lane guards called Broadway. Some 378 made it through the outer wire into open paddocks. Another 138 stayed in their huts, and 20 of those took their own lives before or during the rush.
The cost to the guards was severe. Privates Ben Hardy and Ralph Jones, aged 45 and 43, ran to a Vickers machine gun positioned about 50 meters from the wire. They managed to fire no more than 85 rounds before they were overrun and killed. The government kept the details of their deaths secret and did not announce their medals until September 1950.
The camp had been built in 1941 for Italians captured in North Africa. It was laid out like a giant hot cross bun, a 12-sided ring about 650 meters across, divided into four separate camps by two roads. Italian prisoners held two sections, Japanese officers with Korean and Formosan prisoners held a third, and Camp B held Japanese sergeants, corporals, and privates. Each camp was ringed by three barbed wire fences about two meters high and ten meters apart, with coils of concertina wire strung between them.
By wartime standards, conditions were comfortable. The prisoners received the same rations as their guards, about 3,753 calories a day, and their huts were heated, which was more than the recruits at a nearby army training camp could claim. A Red Cross inspector from Switzerland visited in March 1944 and reported the treatment excellent. At the time of the breakout, the Japanese prisoners had 20,000 Chinese cabbages growing in their vegetable plots.
The guards were men kept from frontline service by age or health, many of them veterans of the First World War. Sergeant Ashley Cooper later said that most of the garrison could not see why anyone would attempt escape, since Japan was too far away. There had been a warning. On June 3, 1944, a Korean prisoner told an Australian interpreter he had heard Japanese prisoners discussing a breakout.
The garrison commander, Lieutenant Colonel Brown, was called to Sydney. He requested two medium machine guns, eight submachine guns, and 100 grenades, and asked for Camp B to be reduced to between 300 and 400 men. The guns arrived at Cowra on June 9. The same day, another officer inspected the camp and filed a written assessment that described the coming night almost exactly.
On June 19, army headquarters in Melbourne responded. Camp B would be thinned by separating sergeants and corporals from the rank and file, with the lower ranks being moved to Hay, about 400 kilometers west. Historian David Sissons, who later reviewed the entire file, judged that splitting the prisoners by rank was little more than an afterthought. The camp already knew how fragile the wire was.
The year before, a Japanese officer, Second Lieutenant Masao Naoi, had escaped at 11:00 p. m. and remained free for five hours. At the inquiry into his escape, he demonstrated his method, crossing all three fences and the tangles between them in two minutes and 43 seconds while smoking a cigarette the entire time.
Brown had been given two machine guns but no additional men. Manning both guns around the clock with covering crews would have required another 48 soldiers. Instead, the crews slept in their huts and were expected to run to the guns when the alarm sounded. Hardy and Jones were two of those crewmen.
Ben Hardy was a tall, shy driver from Sydney who never married. He fixed his neighbors’ cars, brought home stray animals, and in 1926 won the championship of the Chatswood Rifle Club. The army had judged him too old for active service and placed him in a garrison battalion, where he became known as an authority on the Vickers machine gun. Ralph Jones was born in Gorleston, Norfolk, the youngest of 14 children.
He served in the British Army near the end of the First World War, was discharged sick with tuberculosis in 1920, and came to Australia around 1926. When he was called up in January 1942, he named no next of kin. Later, he listed the wife of the farm worker he lodged with, and beside her name he wrote friend. Notice of the move to Hay was given on Friday, August 4.
The Japanese camp leader, Sergeant Major Akira Kanazawa, had the hut leaders put the question to their men. They voted on sheets of toilet paper, and the plan passed. One prisoner, Motokuni Takahara, later said he voted yes even though he had wanted to vote no. The plan they settled on was to attack the soldiers and leave civilians alone.
A month later, Kanazawa explained the reasoning in a letter. They had, he wrote, always craved an opportunity to die, and the order to move had given them one. Colonel Mitchell, who commanded the recruit training brigade a mile from the camp, had served on the Western Front, in Libya, and in Greece. After inspecting the wire in June, he wrote that prisoners would throw blankets and straw mattresses over it, that hundreds would die on it, and that hundreds would get through.
He even named the conditions to watch for: a wet, drizzly, dark night. The night of August 5 was frosty. Around 2:00 a. m.
, a prisoner ran to the gates shouting what sounded like a warning to the sentries. The court of inquiry placed the start of the event at 1:40 a. m. Then the bugle sounded.
The man blowing it was Hajime Toyoshima, a navy fighter pilot who had crash-landed his Zero on Melville Island after the first raid on Darwin in February 1942. He had become the first Japanese prisoner taken in Australia. At Cowra, he had registered under the name Tadao Minami. The prisoners came out in groups organized by hut, wrapped in blankets and heavy coats.
Some wore baseball gloves to grip the barbed wire and carried sharpened kitchen knives, baseball bats, and clubs studded with nails and hooks. Behind them, 20 of their huts burned. Some crawled under the wire, while most, according to the Australian War Memorial, threw themselves onto it so that others could climb over. Hardy and Jones pulled gray coats over their pajamas and sprinted to the number two gun, which stood on a trailer.
Prisoners coming through the northern breach had reached it before the crew of the number one gun was even in position. They went straight for the trailer. Hardy fired while Jones fed the belt. The gun got off no more than 85 rounds.
Both men were killed beside it, and the bodies of 15 prisoners were later found around the trailer. What happened to the gun afterward depends on the source. The War Memorial says Hardy’s last act was to put the gun out of action. Sissons, working from the court of inquiry, says the gunner was still firing when he died, and it fell to his mate, who was untrained on the Vickers, to disable it by pulling out the ammunition belt and the feed block.
Harry Gordon, who wrote the best-known book on the breakout, says the prisoners did swing the gun around and it jammed, most likely because they had left the belt behind. None of the accounts has the gun firing on the garrison. Private Charles Shepherd was stabbed in the chest as he came out of the guard room and died. In Broadway, one group of prisoners turned north toward the main gates, where rifles and light machine guns in the towers killed about 30 of them.
Another group went south toward the pen holding 12 Japanese officers, and about 37 died on that side. Many survived by lying in the large stormwater drains. The sentry in tower F had a submachine gun that could not reach far enough and a rifle, and he ran out of ammunition. By daylight, the garrison had fired 11,922 rounds.
A group of 73 prisoners who had escaped gathered on high ground above battalion headquarters, and the party sent after them held them there until morning without firing. Toyoshima was found dead in a ditch just outside the wire by his own hand, according to the War Memorial. The town learned of the events at 7:00 a. m.
The army sent out search parties, and many from the training brigade went out unarmed. On the Weir family’s farm, three escapees in maroon prison clothes came to the house asking for food. May Weir gave them tea and scones. Her daughter Margaret remembered her mother calmly pouring tea and being the perfect hostess.
The men thanked her and walked down to the creek, where the army found them. Her brother Bruce, out hunting rabbits, came across a prisoner lying so still he took him for dead and said nothing about it until evening. Lieutenant Harry Doncaster of the 19th Infantry Training Battalion led one of the unarmed patrols into timbered hills north of the camp that afternoon. Shortly after dusk, prisoners ambushed the patrol and clubbed him to death.
Soldiers carried his body back around midnight. An armed company returned to the hill and found eight prisoners who had hanged themselves. During the search, another volunteer accidentally shot Thomas Hancock of the local Volunteer Defense Corps as he climbed down from a truck. Hancock later died of the infection.
The patrols brought back 334 men: 309 alive and 25 dead. Some had traveled 15 kilometers from the camp, and the last were picked up eight days after the bugle sounded. The final count has never fully settled. The court of inquiry put the Japanese dead at 231, the figure most accounts still use.
Sissons, who had been a young soldier at the training camp that week and was sent out with a search party, later reviewed the coroner’s inquest and found three more prisoners who had died later of their injuries, making 234. The War Memorial now uses his figure. The injured count is given as 108 or 105, depending on the document. On the Australian side, four soldiers were killed.
Including Hancock makes a fifth, though most counts leave him out. The court of inquiry under Colonel Christison heard witnesses at Cowra from August 8 to 15 and found the firing controlled and not excessive. Prime Minister John Curtin gave its conclusions to the House of Representatives on September 8. Sissons, reading the file 40 years later, found that army headquarters had told the court its essential job was to show the shooting was fully justified, and that the court asked no further questions about two isolated shootings during the recapture.
Brown and the officer commanding B company were removed from the active list. The breakout also cost Colonel Mitchell his position because his patrols had gone out unarmed and one had lost its officer. Being right in June did him no good in August. In January 1945, the army charged Kanazawa with murder over the death of Ben Hardy.
The court acquitted him. The surviving prisoners were split between camps at Hay and Murchison in Victoria, where they remained until they went home to Japan after the war. The Cowra camp kept running until the last Japanese and Italian prisoners left in 1947. For Hardy and Jones, the silence lasted six years.
The government kept the details of the breakout secret for fear that Japan would retaliate against Australian prisoners in its own camps, and the secrecy continued long after the war ended. Their George Crosses were announced in September 1950 with a citation stating they had continued to work the gun until they were killed. Hardy’s mother died a few days after the announcement. His sister Beatrice received his cross from the Governor-General, Sir William McKell.
King George VI handed Jones’s cross to his brother Walter at Buckingham Palace in February 1951. The Cowra Shire Council holds it today. In 1964, on the twentieth anniversary, a Japanese war cemetery opened beside the Australian one at Cowra. It now holds 524 graves.
One of the graves listed Tadao Minami until a joint Japanese and Australian review of the files in the 1980s revealed the man was actually Hajime Toyoshima, the bugler. The last survivor of the breakout, Teruo Murakami, died in Japan on September 14, 2023. The bugle itself never returned to Japan. After the breakout, the camp commander, Major Edward Timms, a Gallipoli veteran, picked it up, took it home to Sydney, and hung it in his sitting room.
It stayed there until his death in 1978, when his widow gave it to the Australian War Memorial. It remains there today: long and brass, with a chain, a silver mouthpiece, and damage to the bell end.