Known as Algie to his family and friends, Driver Reither, 33, from the 4th Reserve Motor Transport Company, died a “free man” after surviving the horrors of the Sandakan Death March in Borneo, a series of forced marches which resulted in the deaths of more than 2300 Allied prisoners of war held captive by the Japanese.

In 1945, a group of more than 2000 Australian and British prisoners of the Japanese in Borneo were taken from Sandakan to Ranau in a series of “death marches”. Of the 2345 men, only six survived.

Algie Reither, had he lived another day, would have been the seventh.

Driver Reither went on the second death march which left Sandakan on May 29, 1945. He reached the Last Camp at Ranau on June 26 and successfully escaped from this camp on July 28 with Warrant Officer William Sticpewich. 

The pair was sheltered by a Borneo native, but Driver Reither, who reportedly had been injured, died of dysentery on August 8 a “free man”, while in hiding. 

The irony is, if he had lived just another day, Algie would have been rescued alongside Warrant Officer Sticpewich, who was one of only six soldiers to survive the death marches and returned home. Sticpewich was one of four of the survivors to give evidence at various war crime trials in both Tokyo and Rabaul. As a result of their accounts of the atrocities, those in charge of the death marches were found guilt of massacre of prisoners of war and either hanged or shot in 1946.

Algie was one of at least eight soldiers from the Ballarat district who endured the horrendous death marches in Borneo and who didn’t make it back to their loved ones.

This week, Algie’s nephew Leo Reither, paid tribute to his uncle, who was remembered as a “lovely man” and a person who would liven up a room.

“The tragic part was it was the end of the war. If he lived another day he would have been picked up with Sticpewich and come home as a rescued prisoner,” Mr Reither told The Courier this week.

Born on October 9, 1906, one of 11 children of Ernest and Marion Reither, of Redan, Algie was a farmhand before enlisting at Geelong on July 26, 1940, as a driver with the 4th Reserve Motor Transport Company, Australian Army Service Corps. At the time of his enlisting, Algie was “unofficially engaged” to a young woman from Melbourne.

After training at Caulfield in Melbourne, he left for Malaysia in April 1941, arriving almost a month later.

A prolific letter-writer, Algie regularly wrote to his parents back home in Redan. While many of the letters were censored by the Australian Army, his regular correspondence was cherished by his family, who today still have many of the letters as keepsakes.

Algie was taken prisoner by the Japanese in early February 1942, during the Fall of Singapore. While many of the prisoners of war were sent to work on the infamous Burma-Thai Railway, the Ballarat soldier was taken to Sandakan in Borneo with B-Force.

“Uncle Algie was on the second death march and he made it to Ranau,” Mr Reither said.

“Bill Sticpewich received warning from a Japanese soldier that if he didn’t get out, he would be executed. Sticpewich spread the word, but Herman was the only one who escaped Ranau with him. They snuck out of the camp during the night of July 28 and over the next four days, despite being very weak, made their way further and further into the jungle where one of the natives hid them from the Japanese. The Japanese were desperate to recapture them to keep the atrocities (of the death marches) from being made public.”

For decades, mystery surrounded the burial sites of the allied soliders who died in the death marches or at the PoW camps.

War historian and author Lynette Silver has written books about the death marches and spent six years of researching to find where the allied soldiers had been buried.

Ms Silver is also responsible for initiating the commemorative Death March walks, which cover the last 100 kilometres of the Sandakan Death March route. The aim of the walks was to encourage young Australians with a sense of adventure and to teach them a part of Australian history “by default”.

“It’s really hard for young people today to understand how hard (Sandakan) really was,” Ms Silver said.

“When the young ones come across here and we tell them the story and they struggle to walk up the mountain in the heat, and all they can think about is a nice cool drink at the end of the day and a comfortable place to put in their head, they should think that when darkness came for the PoWs, they were laying at the root of a tree, covered with leeches as thick as pencils sucking my blood out, racked with malaria, ulcers where your shin bones are showing, beri beri which bloats up your limbs so you look like the Michelin Man.

“The PoWs had no shoes, no clothes, no medical equipment, no food, no medicines. They just had to keep going.” For those soldiers who stopped on the death march, they stopped for good. For stopping meant a bullet through the head or a bayonet through the heart by the Japanese soldiers. That fate actually befell about 1000–or half–of those who were forced on the death marches. The other half died after reaching their destination. The death toll of the Australian soldiers was 99.75 per cent, while the toll for the British PoWs was 100 per cent.

After completing her research, Ms Silver said she was astounded to realise how few people in Australia knew of the Sandakan story.

“I always thought everyone knew about the death march. It wasn’t until I was quite mature that I discovered that very few people did,” Ms Silver said.

She first become involved when she was introduced to one of the six survivors, Keith Botterill and the two quickly become close friends. But the real catalyst for her involvement was when she questioned the claim the rescue operation of the allied soldiers had failed because the Americans had withheld sufficient aircraft.

Ms Silver said a rescue plan of that scale would have needed a lot of planning and permission from General Douglas MacArthur, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army.

“... why, in the middle of 1944, would he allow all this planning to take place, planning that he would have to sanction, then right at the last minute supposedly withdraw ... pull the plug?”

During her research, Ms Silver discovered files had been tampered with, things had been removed. “When I found the signals from the field which had said all the prisoners had been moved in April of 1945, I knew they had still been at the (Sandakan PoW) camp, I knew then there had been a monumental problem with the intelligence.

“To find all that out and prove it, along the way, I got into files which no-one had looked at since 1945, which contained vital evidence about what had happened to the prisoners of war. It started off with a little query and then basically took over my life for about six years. It took me a long time to find the evidence ... doing it 24-7. And putting all this (information) together was like weaving an enormous tapestry.”

Her six years of hard work resulted in Ms Silver’s book, Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence. It was the first time so much information and detail had been discovered and written about the Sandakan prisoners of war. She had traced every single prisoner, what had happened to them and, more importantly for the relatives, she traced what had happened to the soldiers’ bodies.

“The concept was, because there were so few graves at the Labuan war cemetery with names on them, that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people were still laying somewhere out in Sabah, in the jungle. By chasing all the paperwork up, I discovered they were all buried at the war cemetery, but buried as a ‘soldier known unto God’, because they were only wearing loin clothes, they had no ID on them. It was believed that they were all missing, but they weren’t truly missing, it was just that there was not an individual grave with their identification.”