They had the 'Cowra breakout'...we were able to keep all ours - bar one - in tact.
An Italian soldier Lt. Edgardo Simone was the only person to escape from Hay.
As a soldier he thought it his duty to try to escape, and he did try - frequently.
However; if he was taken outside the camp for work and the guards asked for a promise that he wouldn’t try to escape them, he always kept his word. On his successful escape, he worked his way along the Murrumbidgee River down to Melbourne where he found work as a salesman. He was so successful he even won a ‘salesman of the month’ award before being spotted by an alert policeman and returned to the military.
Years later he returned to Hay intending to follow the exact route he had taken on his escape, however he found the going much too difficult due to recent rains having made the vegetation too thick to negotiate, and when he spotted a distant farmhouse he made his way there and decided not to continue any further.
Japanese POW numbers were boosted in 1944 when some of the escapees from the Cowra Breakout [Cowra] were relocated to Hay.
The Japanese POW's knew they had been relocated to God's Country. They knew that to think of escaping was Pie in the Sky" stuff. :lol:
Source -
http://ftfmagazine.lewcock.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=247
