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Through the Eyes of a Woman
Chapter Four
I miss the Dad he was when he was happy; he was then a funny, generous, kind and caring man. He loved his family, each and everyone including cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews. He loved his POW mates and would give his right arm to help them, he brought them into our home, no matter how wounded they were, in his efforts to help them just as others cared for him. It was nothing to find some drunk staggering around our home, making himself right at home no matter, or ignorant of, the looks we would give them if they were behaving badly. However we mostly accepted them as part of our family. One of Dad’s friends was so drunk every time he came to visit he would use the wall to help himself get around. We had permanent dirty hand marks at his height on the walls from the lounge to the back door. Dad painted every eighteen months to get rid of them and Mum would start again trying to wipe them away after each visit to, no avail, until the next painting. Dad always picked the colour GREEN it was always green! We never did understand why.
My daughter remembers a loving and very special grandfather who took such an interest in everything about her life. He loved her and all his grandchildren very much and would buy them anything their little hearts desired. He was finally able to be as generous as they needed in his later life; this is the man I prefer to remember.
In my later years as I reach the age Dad and his father were when they died; I looked much closer at what they went through when they were really just boys. Dad spent his 21st birthday as a POW of Japan in Changi Provence in December 1942 at Selarang Barracks where the conditions were so crowded; food, clothing and medical supplies were at a premium.
Photo available on the Australian War Memorial web site
Eighteen thousand men of the AIF were crowded into accommodation built to house the Gordon Highland’s 800 men. ‘Only three taps were working, and latrine pits, kitchens and hospital beds were crowded into an area of about a square kilometre’
I have read many first-hand accounts of what these men went through and have found some accounts that would have followed the same journey as Dad. The importance of having mates to care for each other was an integral part of the POW survival. One British soldier said that he saw the higher survival rate of the Aussies as their dedication to their mates so he decided he would attach himself to an Aussie group. This mateship continued long after the war ended and was in place right up until the day he died. He was on Singapore Island until he was sent out in H Force in June 1943, suffering with Dengue Fever, to work on the Death Railway. He returned in December 1943 to find that they now considered their internment on Singapore Island to be the paradise they were promised when they were sent to the death camps in Thailand and Burma.
Those of the AIF who were left behind on Singapore Island in 1944 were moved to the Changi gaol, the ingenuity of the POW’s was amazing, the things they were able to create out of scraps, and things they could scrounge, made their living there much better.
The Allied Forces on Singapore Island were left to their own officers to organise as year after year went by without any sign of the end of the war. To keep spirits up concerts, books to read and classes to learn new skills for ‘when we go home’ were the order of the day. When the stragglers came back from working on the ‘Railway of Death’ hardened officers left at Changi could not believe the state of the poor skeletons that returned nor the depleted numbers.
One such officer was heard to chokingly ask “Is that all there is? Where are the rest of my men?” Discipline was never relaxed and even though they were prisoners of war the men of the AIF and other Allied Forces never forgot they were soldiers. It was this pride of being a soldier and belief they would one day go home, that helped those to survive who were able to defeat the death and disease that stalked them daily, not an easy task given the lack of everything needed to survive – but survive so many did. Many Battalion Associations including the 2/29th Battalion Association continue to this day and the caring tradition of our fathers is carried on by the descendants of these unsung heroes of yesterday.
I think of the man Dad could have been, if the war had not come along, and wonder what his life would have been like; then I remember that his life wasn’t a waste as he, along with thousands of young men, went to fight and gave their youth and many, their lives, for the freedoms we all enjoy today and I say, Thank You!
“Lest we forget”
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