The officers played their part certainly. Lieutenant Colonel Edward Weary Dunlop became one of the most important figures in the entire prisoner of war story. But the organization that saved lives did not come from the top down. It came from everywhere. It came from bloss who had never held rank in their lives looking around and saying, [music] “Right, what needs doing?” Within days, the Australians had established cooking rosters, sanitation details, water purification systems [music] built from scrap metal and cloth, medical stations using stolen supplies and improvised instruments. [music] They set up schools, universities, really men who had been teachers before the war started teaching again. Mathematics, history, languages, engineering. A former law student organized mock trials for entertainment. A group of musicians built instruments from bamboo and wire and started an orchestra. An orchestra inside a

Japanese prison camp. We heard music coming from the Australian section. A British officer named Captain James Whitfield later recalled proper music orchestrated. We thought we were hallucinating. They were not hallucinating. The Australians had simply decided that being prisoners did not mean they had to stop being [music] alive.

And that decision, that furious, stubborn, deeply Australian decision is what Colonel Nakamura could not comprehend. Because in his world, these men were dead [music] already. They had surrendered. Their lives were over. They simply had not stopped breathing yet. The Australians disagreed. Now, [music] the singing.

You are probably thinking the Japanese banned it because it was annoying because it was disrespectful because it violated some protocol about noise in the camps. You would be partly right. But that was only the surface reason. The real reason was much more dangerous. When the Australians sang, they did something that no guard manual, no punishment protocol, and no amount of violence could counter.

They communicated not just emotions, information. The songs had codes woven into them. Verses added, words [music] changed. A man singing walsing Matilda with a slightly altered second verse was telling everyone within earshot that a work party was being moved north. A chorus of click, go the shears with an extra beat meant medical supplies had been stolen and were hidden in the latrines.

The Japanese [music] eventually figured this out. It took them 4 months. They are using their folk songs as a radio. A Japanese intelligence officer named Captain Hideki Sato wrote in a report that [music] was later captured by Allied forces. We cannot decode the variations fast enough. Every time we identify one pattern, they change it.

Sato recommended banning all singing immediately. Nakamura agreed. But banning the singing created a new problem, a worse problem. Because when the Australians could not sing, they talked. And when they talked, they [music] organized faster. The singing had actually been slowing them down because it limited the complexity of what they could communicate.

Without it, they [music] switched to direct conversation networks that moved information through the camp at extraordinary speed. A man in the hospital hut could relay a message to a man in the work detail on the other side of the camp in under 12 [music] minutes. They timed it. They optimized it. They treated it like an engineering problem.

Because several of them were engineers, we made it worse. Sato admitted in a later report. The singing was containable. What replaced it was not. But you still do not understand the full picture. Because the singing and the communication networks were only part of what shocked the Japanese officers.

The deeper shock was behavioral. It was cultural. It was something that went against every single assumption the Japanese military held about defeated men. The Australians would not [music] break. Not collectively. That was the key. Individual men broke. [music] Of course they did. The conditions were beyond description.

Starvation rations less than 700 calories a day in some camps. Tropical diseases with no medicine. [music] Beatings for imagined offenses. Forced labor in killing heat. Men worked on the Burma Railway until their hands bled, until their bones showed through their skin, until they dropped and did not get up.

Individual men broke under that weight. Any human being could, but the group never did, and the Japanese could not understand why. In every other prisoner population they had encountered, British, Dutch, American, there came a point where the collective spirit cracked, where men stopped looking out for each other and started [music] looking out for themselves.

Where the hierarchy dissolved and it became every man for his own survival. The Japanese expected this. [music] They planned for it. Their entire camp management system was designed to accelerate it, [music] reduce the food, increase the punishment, create scarcity, [music] let the prisoners turn on each other. It worked with devastating efficiency in most camps.

It did not work with the Australians. If you beat one of them, three more would step forward. [music] A former guard named Teeshi Mari testified after the war. If you starved one section, the others would share their food. If you isolated their leaders, new leaders appeared overnight. It was like fighting water. You could not grab it.

Like fighting [music] water, that description would appear again and again in Japanese accounts. They had no analogy in their own experience for what they were seeing. Here is what was actually happening. The Australians had implemented without orders, without manuals, without any formal directive a survival system [music] based on enforced collective responsibility.

Every man was responsible for the men around him, [music] not asked to be, required to be. And the enforcement did not come from officers. It came from the culture itself. [music] From the deepest code of Australian manhood, you do not abandon your mates. A man who hoarded food was confronted, not punished, confronted, talked to, brought back in.

Listen, mate, we share or we die. All of us, you included. If he persisted, [music] he was ostracized. The worst punishment an Australian could imagine. Cut off from the group. Alone in [music] a Japanese prison camp. Alone meant dead. Not eventually. Soon almost no one persisted. [music] I saw Boke try to hide a tin of rice he’d stolen from the cook house.

Private William Hartley wrote in his diary, which survived the war. Three men sat him down that night. No yelling, [music] no threats. just talked to him for an hour. Next morning, he handed the rice over to the sick ward. Never did it again. That is how we ran things. Not with rank, with shame. The Japanese [music] camp officers held meetings about this, actual formal meetings.