Australian Army intelligence regarding Japanese swords

PNSSHOGUN · July 21

Thought these may be of some interest to collectors:

New Guinea: regarding distribution of swords to soldiers

Dutch Borneo: brief summary of the Japanese sword from RAAF intelligence. Interesting they note "jeepspring sinister" swords in 1945.

Bruce Pennington · July 21

Interesting that the writer mistook the samurai's waki to be for suicide. Also interesting that they made a point to lay out the argument that swords collected after the war's end were to be distributed among all. There must have been some front-line guys grumbling about office clerks getting swords!

David Flynn · July 21

My Dad was in the Airforce. He was at the surrenders in Borneo. He said that after the surrenders, a raffle for any swords left over would occur. He missed out.

Michaelr · July 21

Very interesting John. Thank you for sharing

MikeR

Davis · July 22

Thanks John, interesting reading. I made a note in an old book that I came across, a reference at one time there being 10,000 such swords in Australia, also that a former Japanese soldier spent a lot of time trying to buy them up, in the old Token newsletters somewhere. There were some good newspaper clipping from Australian newspapers sent by Major Brookes? at the time. This is from memory but I think it can be verified.

Bencld · July 23

David. I’ve heard variations of this for the last 35 years or so from Aussie soldiers. Obviously there were never enough to go around so a raffle was the fairest method. Two swords I got in Bendigo were won by this method according to the diggers I bought them off. Some of the swords I bought were gained by “other” methods, combat, skulduggery!

chris

PNSSHOGUN · August 22

Two more documents from Australian Army HQ:

Dutch Borneo: List of surrendered Japanese arms

Disposal of surrendered enemy equipment:

robinalexander · August 22

Great find John.

Please excuse my digression from specific 'sword' info.

In my head, I was trying to correlate the figures in the first Table in so far as the number (ratio) of Officers to OR's surrendering in those specific locations. I soon realised the recorded numbers wouldn't necessarily indicate true numbers. Probably fair to say there was one Officer for each sword but no way of knowing how many troops (OR's) there were as many bayonets...rifles etc could have been in armouries.

Uber analysing again but nonetheless, I find this very interesting...tks :thumbsup:

Bruce Pennington · August 22

Wow, 15,000 swords.....

george trotter · August 22

On 7/22/2024 at 4:25 AM, David Flynn said:

My Dad was in the Airforce. He was at the surrenders in Borneo. He said that after the surrenders, a raffle for any swords left over would occur. He missed out.

Hey, Dave....small world.....my mum's brother was a sapper in the 2nd Field Coy. in the Royal Australian Engineers in the Borneo campaign. He was at the surrender at Labuan and brought back a Type 98 Gunto (gendaito but unsignes and undated).

When I was a kid he told me that he had to chase the Japanese soldier 20 miles through the jungle to get that sword....but he told me 20 years later that in fact, the unit held a raffle after the surrender and he was lucky enough to win this sword. My cousins still have it.

Regards,