The tide was coming in at Kranji Beach, and with it came the screams.

The Kranji Beach Massacre: When Japanese Bayonets Met Australian Defiance

Singapore's forgotten slaughter of prisoners who refused to surrender their dignity

Australian POWs sang 'Waltzing Matilda' as Japanese soldiers massacred them on a Singapore beach in 1942.

The tide was coming in at Kranji Beach, and with it came the screams. It was August 27, 1942, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anderson's men—survivors of the disastrous Malayan campaign—were being marched along Singapore's northern shoreline by their Japanese captors. What happened next would be buried for decades, hidden beneath the larger horrors of the Pacific War.

The prisoners had been captured during the fall of Singapore seven months earlier, part of the 130,000 Allied troops who became guests of Emperor Hirohito's empire. But these Australians, members of the 2/19th and 2/20th Battalions, had earned a particular hatred from their captors at the Battle of Muar, where they had inflicted devastating casualties on Japanese forces during a fighting withdrawal that earned Anderson the Victoria Cross.

Now, on this humid morning, approximately 300 Australian and Indian prisoners were being force-marched toward what their guards called a "work detail." Private Harold Murray, who would survive by feigning death, later testified that the column was halted without warning. Guards began separating men into groups of ten.

The first group was led behind a sand dune. Shots rang out. Then…

💡 The condemned Australian soldiers' spontaneous singing of 'Waltzing Matilda' so confused their Japanese executioners that the brief hesitation allowed 23 men to escape into nearby mangroves.