For anyone visiting the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, it is not evident that the graves before them, have been relocated to this site after the end of the war. We discover that, in some cases, burial may not have been as straight forward as we would expect. Sometimes there can be an interesting (if a little macabre) story behind a soldier’s burial and their final resting place. This one such story.
The 1st July marks the anniversary of the sinking of the Montevideo Maru in 1942. An incident that remains today, the largest loss of Australian life in a maritime disaster. And what makes it worse, it was a result of ‘friendly fire’.
Very few have heard of Jim Law, an Australian, who went to Malaya (now Malaysia) prior to WWII, to make his fortune. With the threat of Japanese invasion and a sense of duty, Jim was fatefully attached to the Malay Regiment, a local askari unit. It wasn’t long before he was caught up in the events that led to the Fall of Singapore in February 1942. Jim fought bravely against the Japanese until being tragically killed just three days before the allied surrender. This is his untold story.
(Written by guest blogger, Stuart Lloyd, author of the “Malay Experiment”)
Cairns War Cemetery is a small cemetery but is the final resting place of two of Australia’s great generals of WWII. Along with five others, they all have the same date of death. So what happened?
For those who may have had relatives who served in the army during WWII or even if you have done some research, you would have come across a person’s service number. This number was unique to WWII. So, what did it all mean?
Five kilometres west of Kanchanaburi, is the Chungkai War Cemetery. It is the smallest of the three cemeteries which are the final resting place of those POWs who died while working on the Burma-Thailand Railway. Read the fascinating story of this little known, seldom visited but important part of the Railway story.
October 2024 marks the 82nd anniversary of the ‘official’ start of construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway. Something that would be an engineering success but resulting in the needless loss of so many lives.
On a cold winter afternoon on the 21st May 1945, as World War II was coming to an end, a massive explosion killing 26 soldiers, rocked the Kapooka Training Area near Wagga Wagga. It became known as the “Kapooka Tragedy” and is the Australian Army’s largest loss of life in a training accident.
"War is a man's business"!! It was indeed true in 1914 and no women were to be found on the front line. But by the end of WWI, about 90,000 women, from the British Empire, had volunteered as nurses. More than 3,000 were Australians and about 550 were from New Zealand.
