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Through the Eyes of a Woman
Chapter Three
I began to put those war years together to understood him more.
Dad had come home from WWII in December 1945, a battered and badly damaged man, nothing like the boy that went to war in 1940.
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Mt Martha 1940
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Like others he was so eager for adventure, so willing to go off and fight for his Country in a time of great peril, as his father had before him in WWI. Lying about his age he went off to the promise of this great adventure. He joined the newly forming Victorian 2/29th Battalion in July 1940 under Col Robertson and was quickly outfitted and sent to train in desert warfare at Bonegilla and then Bathurst in NSW in readiness for their departure in July 1941. The men thought they were going to the Middle East conflict but once aboard ship they were informed Singapore was their destination because a Japanese invasion could no longer be ignored.
Arriving in Singapore in August 1941 the 8th Division were quickly put to work training for jungle warfare; their far sighted senior Australian Army officer, Lieutenant General Henry Gordon Bennet, knew his Australian troops would need to know how to meet the enemy that was on its way. His timely and knowledgeable instructions on jungle warfare stood them in good stead in the days to come. This made the Australian forces so effective that the 2/29th, the first AIF to meet the enemy, were able to stop the Japanese advancement in the Battle for Singapore, at the Battle of Bakri on the Malaya Peninsular albeit temporarily. The 2/29th & 4th Anti Tank Company, (600 strong), were the first AIF to catch the Emperor of Japan’s elite Imperial Guards 4th and 5th Regiments commanded by Lt General Takuma Nishimura, (around 7000 strong) by surprise with their fierce and effective defence that even their enemy recognised them as a worthy foe. Being so outnumbered the 2/29th were soon falling back and when the word came that their withdrawal was to ‘every man for himself’ the ingenuity of these ‘boys from the bush’ saw a greater number making it back to Singapore Island before the causeway was blown. Some were captured and imprisoned at Padu Gaol in Kula Lumpa. Six members of the 2/29th actually made it back to Darwin evading capture for an astounding 3500 miles through, by now, occupied enemy territory. This six were thrown into gaol and accused of desertion because they should have been prisoners, which is rather questionable. These men did not know of the surrender and had been trying to get back to their own troops, successfully evaded the enemy troops and procuring boats to island hop etc. No charges were laid against them in the end. One of these men was a neighbour of ours, Harry Gray of the 2/29th, he felt isolated and shamed by the treatment he received by the AIF hierarchy. The men of the 2/29th never held it against him, rather they were proud of his achievement, but he wasn't a POW and he always felt left out and marginalised. It was really sad that these men never received the recognition they deserved.
Communication was so poor at this time between Head Quarters and the Battalions that it was believed the 2/29th had been lost completely. Back in Australia the major newspapers carried the story of the “Lost Battalion’ much to the heartbreak of all of the Victorian families. Despite having been listed as ‘missing in action believed killed in action’ my grandmother never lost faith and wrote to him every week for the whole of his POW days, he never received one of these loving letters!
The Fall of Singapore, on 15th February 1942, saw Dad, along with an estimated figure of 300,000 of Allied forces and civilians, prisoners for 1276 days. Numerous records are available of the death, degradation, brutal treatment, torture, starvation and many murders, too numerous to recount here.
In 1945, at the end of a six year war viciously fought because of the greed of two Countries who thought they were superior to every other nation in the world, Dad was finally freed. That any survived at all was a miracle in itself and like all the other survivors he came home with survivor’s guilt and memories too horrifying to forget. He was young when he went with such high hopes, perhaps it was his inability to truly put it all behind him, perhaps it was his disappointment to find the dreams, that he held on to help him fight for survival, were not to be, perhaps it was his frustration that he had found himself with no direction.
Whatever turned him to drink, it was never a solution but as the years went on it did become a curse to him and his family
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