The secondary sources relating to Indian prisoners of war in New Guinea are scanty. British, Australian and Indian military historians have all overlooked them, as have historians of captivity under the Japanese - Gavan Daws's otherwise excellent Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War in the Pacific deals only with European prisoners. There has been no Indian Hank Nelson to record their memories and tell their story: and now virtually all must be dead. The only secondary work specifically devoted to them are Ms Genevieve Thompson's 1996 Australian National University Honours thesis, "Nobody's Heroes": Indian Prisoners of War in New Guinea, and Ms MAEKAWA Kaori's paper, "Forgotten Soldiers in Japanese Army: Asian Personnel in Papua New Guinea". Ms MAEKAWA's paper is particularly valuable because it draws on Japanese as well as Australian records.
The main primary sources relating to these men are held in the official records collection of the Australian War Memorial, mainly in the series AWM 54, in the records of the war crimes trials. They tell their story with a moving directness. Many of the records comprise either their direct testimony or their paraphrased responses to interrogation. Collectively they provide a detailed picture to be constructed of the conditions of their imprisonment and their reactions to it.
The C.H. Campbell collection in the Noel Butlin Archives at the Australian National University includes letters from liberated Indian prisoners of war to Australian welfare organisations. This collection is one of the few sources of direct testimony from them besides the war crimes files.
In addition to the documents two visual sources provide evidence. Several hundred photographs were taken by Australian official photographers in various places, including Balikpapan, British Borneo, the Halmaheras, Morotai, New Guinea and New Britain. These photographs not only illustrate the appearance and demeanor of liberated prisoners, but also often include evidence of the nature of their treatment and the prisoners' reactions to it which supplement the written documents.
At least three Australian official war artists depicted liberated Indian prisoners. In Borneo, Douglas Watson drew several members of the 2/15th Punjab Regiment, whose men had trekked across Borneo before being forced to surrender in 1942. At Aitape, Geoffrey Mainwaring drew Indians in Australian hospitals. On New Britain, Sali Herman produced oil paintings of Indian prisoners and of their camp - depictions that suggest the horror with which Australians regarded the state of destitution to which many had been reduced by the Japanese surrender.
Records obviously exist in British collections. In the Public Record Office, the records of Allied Land Forces South East Asia (ALFSEA) include a series of files relating to Recovered Allied POWs and Internees. While ALFSEA's responsibilities did not extend to New Guinea (from 15 August 1945 the boundary of Australian and Dutch New Guinea marked the border between South-East Asia Command and the South-West Pacific Area) these records may contain reference to the return of liberated Indian prisoners to SEAC. The series FO 916 (the records of the Foreign Office's Prisoner of War Department) contains three files, 756, 1069 and 1367 dealing with "welfare" of Indian prisoners of war in the Far East. It is likely that the Oriental and India Office Collection in the British Library (which contains extensive archivesof the military records of the British Indian Army) holds relevant material, as would the National Archives of India in New Delhi.
Indian POWs:
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