We Australians have a quirky way of looking at our past, particularly when it comes to war. When we reflect on World War I, we tend to flit lightly over the triumphs of the Light Horse in Palestine and Monash's Australian Corps in France. These were mere victories. We prefer to linger on Gallipoli. It might have been a defeat, but it has a hypnotic quality and we can't get enough of it. Beersheba and Amiens are for military historians; Gallipoli is the stuff of mythology, our Homeric legend. We like to think that it tells us much about the Australian character, and maybe it does. In our eyes, it had honour.
      The soldier we remember most tenderly from World War I is not General Sir John Monash, even though he is the finest commander this country has produced. We prefer to honour John Simpson, a private in the field ambulance, a tough man with a big heart and a rough sense of humour who (as Patsy Adam-Smith has written) was dead before Australians knew he was alive.
      When we look on World War II, we think of the Ninth Division's part in the victory of El Alamein and the grit of the Seventh Division on the Kokoda Trail and elsewhere in New Guinea. We remember generals such as MacArthur, Blamey and Morshead. But, again, the stuff of mythology comes from defeat: the fall of Singapore in 1942, and the terrible events that followed from it.
      Our Eighth Division became prisoners of the Japanese. About one-third of them (and other Australians captured on Java, Timor and Ambon and at Rabaul) died in captivity. They died of disease and beatings and massacres and malnutrition; they died from being worked to death. In one sense, they died in the most degrading of circumstances; in another, they died in the most exulted of circumstances. Their mates sat with them, talking and joking and maybe holding a hand, until all life left the body. That was the way things were done. No one wrote down the rules. No one needed to: this is the way Australians looked after their own.
      These men are our popular heroes of World War II. If they too were victims of a defeat, their story, like that of Gallipoli, has honour. We see in these men a celebration of the best Australian virtues: mateship and good humour, a God-given skill at scrounging and improvising, an independence of spirit, a refusal to take too seriously little things like amputations and cholera and captors with a tendency towards hysteria.
      And, shades of Simpson, the man we remember most fondly from World War II is Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Edward "Weary" Dunlop, a medical officer who became a Christ-like figure in the camps along the Burma-Thailand railway. No matter how bad things were, Weary always had a smile on his face and rebellion in his soul. The Japanese only thought he was their prisoner.
      The story of the Fourth Anti-Tank Regiment has already been told in It Happened To Us, also edited by Colin Finkemeyer. And an extraordinary tale it is. These men enlisted as boys of 18 or so. They fought in the battles of the Malay Peninsula and it wasn't their fault that their struggle was unwinnable, mainly because the Japanese held superiority in the air and on the sea. It wasn't their fault that a generation of Australian politicians had let the nation's defences run down.
      The anti-tankers went to Changi Prison. From there, many were sent to work on the Burma-Thailand railway, a succession of hell-holes in the jungle: fetid heat and dysentery and guards obsessed with "speedo". Some anti-tankers went to Borneo and were killed by the Japanese in the Sandakan death march. Others, after returning from Thailand, were sent to Japan to work in the snow at the Nagasaki shipyards and in the coal mines at Nakama. One day at Nakama, the Australians saw a huge orange and white cloud over Nagasaki. "Nagasaki's really copping it this time," one of the boys said. He didn't know it, but he had just seen the atomic bomb go off.
      This second volume is mainly about humour, the dry and laconic humour of adversity. Again, it is a peculiarly Australian thing. You are reminded of its flavour when you stand in a bare paddock with a farmer and he squints as he tells you that the drought has gone on so long that if it ever rains again you'll see frogs carrying life jackets.
      Only an Australian could think it amusing that the railway line he was laying in Thailand was stamped "BHP". When Japan surrendered, Australians at Nakama were punctilious about doing things in the right order. They first hit the local bank for cash - then headed for the brewery.
      Only Australians could set up frog-racing at Changi, complete with bookies, a committee, stewards and a colourful racing identity who was suspended for livening up his frog by attaching a drawing pin to its belly.
      We read of a Japanese guard trying to hit Weary Dunlop, who was very tall as well as being a former boxer. In the end, the guard stands on a box to find Weary's chin - and still keeps missing before losing his balance and falling off.
      In Thailand, we see Australians shifting the goal posts - the markers the Japanese put out to designate how much rock and earth had to be moved in a day.
      We read of Australians assembled in Singapore and given saki with which to toast the birthday of Emperor Hirohito, who, three years later, should have been prosecuted as a war criminal but was given immunity in an exercise that was a triumph of politics and a travesty of justice. What to do? The Australians wanted the saki but not at the price of saluting the emperor. Read about the inspired compromise in The Emperor's Birthday.
      Colin Finkemeyer has again done a loving and painstaking job in assembling these anecdotes. He has no pretensions about what he is trying to do. This book is meant to be humorous and a good read, and it is both. 
      But it becomes something else as well. It reminds us what mateship is all about and what another generation of young Australians did in another world. This book sets out as a series of yarns and jokes; it ends up being about the triumph of the spirit.
 
LES CARLYON 
August 1998