Personal Accounts

Alf Sheppard, Ex-POW, Burma-Thailand Railway
(Excerpt from Wanderings of a Warrior)

"At the camp in Bandung, the main problem was to keep ourselves busy. To keep the men's minds occupied, a University of Bandung was organised by the British officer, Colonel Laurens van der Post.

I volunteered to run a course on the internal combustion engine. I knew there were some wrecked trucks nearby that I had seen when out on working parties.

One moonlight night I decided to go out of camp through a hole in the fence used by some others for trading with the locals for food and anything else anyone wanted. I was lucky with the first truck for I found a bag of tools and a good workshop manual.

Next night I returned with a starter motor and generator. Bruce Gregory, a member of my platoon, was a radiator specialist so one night he came with me and we got hold of some radiators.

Over a week, I collected a carburettor, air filter, water pump, petrol pump and a few other things and hid them nearby. Then I had to get them into camp. I decided to go in by the main gate after the working party went out. I just pushed the barrow straight past the guards at the front gate.

One chap indicated my load and asked, 'What is all that for?' Well, that's what I reckon he meant, so I just pointed to all their Jap trucks in the compound. He just nodded and off I went. Before long I had sufficient equipment to run good classes."

Rod Allanson, Ex-POW, Burma-Thailand Railway
(Excerpt from The Lost Legion)

"In the second week of August 1945, I was walking about 9 a.m. in the [prison] camp grounds when I heard the distinctive sound of a B-29 bomber.

The morning was clear, the sky a bright blue and there was little or no wind. I looked up and could clearly see the large American plane high in the sky. It was all alone, which was most unusual. About five minutes later, I heard a very loud explosion, followed shortly after by a series of smaller explosions.

Within minutes I saw a huge cloud of white smoke rising high into the sky. I'm sure what I saw and heard was the US aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which we later discovered was about fifteen miles as the crow flies from our camp."

Evan ('Shorty') Foster, New Guinea veteran

"We had been in this shocking place about a week, when out of the blue again arrived [Padre] Terry O'Brien. As usual no escort with him and he risked his life time and again moving from Platoon to Platoon and Company to Company; on his back, a portable gramophone and about a dozen records; poked into the front of his shirt were numerous paperback books. Add to this his normal gear and of all things, a rifle. He stayed the night and played the records, my favourite and still is 'I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen'. Funny how much some things mean to you because of circumstances."

Joseph Morris, Middle East and New Guinea veteran

"My father had joined up again just before I left for the Middle East. He went up to Malaya with the 8th Division.

With the Jap threat looming and it looking like we would be away fighting Britain's war, I asked him to put in a claim for me to join his unit, the 4th Motor Transport Company. This came through towards the end of November 1941 while we were billetted at Fih in Lebanon. I made the fateful decision to stay with the unit. Had I gone on on my own I would have landed in Malaya just in time to become a POW statistic.

By some queer reason I cannot even now work out, I volunteered to fill in for a couple of missing vehicle drivers to convoy the transport to Suez for loading onto freighters which would follow the Orcades. Where would I have been if I hadn't volunteered for that driving job. The second fateful decision!

My father got out of Singapore three days before it fell on the last hospital ship."

Geoff ('Paddy') Fox, Ex-POW, Burma-Thailand Railway

"The end of the War was dramatic. We were in a very isolated area (Pratchai) and the news filtered through that we were free. Pure elation. We were doing guard duty in Bangkok and by the time we got to Singapore all places in the ships had been taken. I was very lucky to get in a flight home in a Catalina flying boat, direct non-stop from Singapore to Crawley Bay, Perth. It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky - 8th October, 1945."

Bob McPherson, Ex-POW, Java

"The end of the War and our release from prison was a great feeling but was overshadowed by a burning desire to return to your native land and in my case to greet once again my wife after an absence of five years and to first see my daughter whom I had never seen."

Jack Lever, New Guinea veteran

"On the night of January 27th we were almost drowned. It started to rain very heavy in the Torricelli Mountains several days before and a landslide had blocked a huge volume of water off. Suddenly it broke through and turned the river into a raging torrent. There was a track on the other side of us which also turned into a raging flood. We were trapped between the two.

Soon the water was about 15 feet deep, the noise was so loud that we could not hear each other. As soon as darkness fell, we were really in trouble, huge trees were uprooted...All through the night we battled to survive in pitch darkness as tree after tree toppled over with men clinging to them who were swept away...One of my best mates was one of those who made it to high ground. He had never driven a vehicle in his life. He grabbed a jeep, tore the blackout shades off the headlights and drove it to the edge of the flood and shone the lights across. Only for him, we were goners.

It took 50 years to find out it was my good mate Shorty Foster who saved my life that night by learning to drive."