The book ‘Ultimate Sacrifice’ authored by Reverend Father Cosmas Lee.
Fr Cosmas Lee autographs his book for Sabah senior journalist Nancy Lai .Looking on is publisher, author and Opus production director Datuk C L Chan.
KOTA KINABALU : – AFTER a 15-year search on a piece of Sabah’s lesser known history of the Catholic church towards the end of World War II, the answer has finally been unveiled.
A book authored by Reverend Father Cosmas Lee uncovers questions surrounding the tragic and unaccounted deaths of Catholic missionaries in North Borneo (Sabah) towards the end of World War II (WWII).
Titled Ultimate Sacrifice, this 265-page book has taken more than a decade to be written and has involved poring over documents, some from 150 years ago.
In between sermons and church duties, Father Lee found time and exhausted all resources and acquaintances he had, to counter what the Catholic church in Sabah had always been forced to believe – that the death of nine foreign missionaries in 1945 was just collateral damage.
He followed leads, searched through piles of historical documents and archives, started all over and redirected when he hit a dead end, and even visited Austria to seek answers, as part of his journey.
“Rather late in life, circumstances urged me to study the history of the Catholic Church and after browsing through a massive volume of records covering nearly one and a half centuries, I was left with impressions that both inspired and disturbed,” he said.
He said one particularly disturbing impression was the distinguished difference between the Church of North Borneo, led by the Prefect Apostolic Monsignor August Wachter from 1927 until WWII, and the Church after the war.
In the former period, there was a certain intimacy between those governing and those governed; in the latter, a certain distance emerged, Father Lee said.
He felt that the change in the “way of being Church” seemed directly linked to the sudden and tragic loss of the Prefect and a proportionally large number of eight German-speaking missionaries during the war.
He said these missionaries must have been very close to the people they served and felt compelled to know more about Monsignor Wachter and his eight companions, to give an account of the extreme difficulties they endured during the war, culminating in their ultimate sacrifice.
Father Lee said the War Crimes Section of Allied Land Forces in South-East Asia accepted the Japanese report that after the death of one of the detained missionaries from sickness in Tenom, the remaining eight, together with their three servants, were moved to the Japanese general Headquarters (GHQ) in Sapong.
According to records, they were killed there by an Allied air attack on July 3, 1945, just weeks before Japan surrendered.
“Common sense refuses to accept that a sizeable group of 11 men could have been killed so neatly, blown to disappearance by a single bomb,” he said.
This question marked the beginning of a tedious and lengthy investigation into this mystery.
As information on Japanese military and civil personalities is sketchy in Allied records, Father Lee’s biggest hope was to find out more in the land of the rising sun.
He had the assistance of an old friend Shimomoto Yutaka who searched, found, and translated Japanese records.
“More significantly, he engaged me to look at and understand those records from the Japanese perspective,” he said, adding that a love journal written by a former Japanese high ranking officer based in Keningau, played a huge part in uncovering secrets.
Other than that, Father Lee had help from historian Ross Ibbotson, information from the Mill Hill Missionaries Archives, the Archives of the Catholic Archdiocese of Kota Kinabalu and the Sabah Museum for the use of several photos.
He also mentioned many other names of individuals who have helped him throughout his 15 years of intermittent research, all of which are stated in his book.
Ultimate Sacrifice, which was printed by Opus Publication, was launched on March 15 at the St Simon Church Likas, here. – the star.com
