A 91-year-old former prisoner of war will draw on the tenacity that sustained him during battle, deprivation and illness to return to the place where he became a captive.
Frank Smith of Narromine is one of only a few surviving World War II veterans who will travel to Singapore to mark the 70th anniversary of the island’s fall to Japanese forces.
He was not to know in February 1942 that his war would continue as forced labour on the infamous Burma-Thailand Railway that claimed the life of his brother and about 2650 other Australians.
When he makes the journey once more to honour the dead and the survivors, his wife and daughters will be by his side.
Mr Smith enlisted in the second Australian Imperial Force at Narromine aged 20 years.
Brothers Les and Bob also joined up, some of the 990,900 who were enlisted or engaged in the three services in the war.
Mr Smith was part of the 2/20th Infantry Battalion, which was deployed to Singapore as part of the 22nd Brigade of the eighth Australian Division.
The history books record the advance of the Japanese across Asia to control the Malayan Peninsular and Singapore island but Mr Smith can give a personal story.
To this day he remembers vividly what he was doing as part of the defence against the Japanese.
He was a driver of an armed car that patrolled the road between Mersing and Endau on the peninsular.
In the weeks before the fall he was stationed at a gun position on the Mersing River.
Out of food, his two companions went for supplies about 7am and did not return by the time they should have.
“It was coming to the end of the day and I was having a bit of a panic, I was by myself in position all day,” Mr Smith said.
“Just at dark I heard a noise, the two fellows were back.
“They said pack up your gear, the army’s left us.”
Their gear included two machine guns and a rifle each.
In the dark they met a provost officer who said there was nothing he could do for them, they should just head south.
The provost officer also warned them the Japanese were only a mile or two behind and they were on pushbikes, he said.
“We knew we had 100 miles to walk back to Singapore . . . we arrived nine days later . . . it was touch and go,” Mr Smith said.
They braved the causeway that connected the peninsular and Singapore island, which was under enemy fire, just before Australian troops blew it up, he said.
But nobody’s efforts held up the Japanese for long and it ended with the surrender of Singapore on the night of February 15.
He and the rest of the force walked the 17 miles from Singapore to Changi prison camp.
At first Mr Smith got a break by volunteering to work on the docks, where food was plentiful.
But he knew his brothers, who were building a monument to the Japanese war dead, worked all day, were locked up at night and “did it tough”.
Then Japan’s ambitions stretched north to a Burma-Thailand railway - to be built by their ready supply of prisoners.
Mr Smith remembered the terrible trip to Bangkok within a steel carriage where “the facilities were non-existent”.
His next two years were spent doing back-breaking work in miserable conditions and fighting off malaria, ulcers and other illnesses.
But a few of his stories demonstrate that given the chance, he had the will to live.
In a nighttime march from Bangkok north to the railway he tripped on a rice pannier, “two foot, six inches across”.
Without assistance from others he carried the heavy but necessary implement for camp life on his back.
When he was ready to give up an officer told him to keep going just 10 minutes more until they reached their destination and he could have a job in the kitchen.
Mr Smith did it and stuck to his claim as two cooks demanded the booty.
The officer came good on his promise, deploying him to carry water to the cookhouse.
It was “quite a good job” but everything changed again a week later.
New troops arrived and when Mr Smith looked up “who should come in but the two brothers”.
“Word was further north up the railway was worse,” Mr Smith said.
“The brothers said they had to march out north that night.”
Mr Smith decided he and his brothers stood a better chance of surviving together than apart.
He found someone bound north who wanted to stay at the camp and swapped identities with him.
“I became Andrew W Pierce for the next two years,” he said.
On arrival at the new camp he and his brother found banana leaves from the jungle to make a roof for their unfinished hut to shelter them from the incessant rain.
He counted as a triumph - if not a succulent meal - the slaughter of a worn-out bullock abandoned by the Japanese.
“Each of us got four or five pounds of steak - it was like leather,” he said.
Mr Smith was back in Singapore by the last days of the war, digging a “bloody, great hole, 30 yards by 30 yards” when he had terrible apprehension, which he took to an officer
“It dawned on me, what do you reckon this hole is for,” he said.
“It would make a good burial for the troops.”
Later that day Allied planes came over and the officer told Mr Smith he might be right, but not to say it to the other men.
The next day the Japanese ordered everyone to abandon camp in three trucks.
The officer told Mr Smith to get on the tail end of a truck.
“If we go north, you know what’s going to happen - you’ll get shot,” he said.
The trucks went north first and then turned around and went south.
“In those few minutes I thought it was the end,” Mr Smith said.
One man in the truck said the war was over - he could see flag signals from a truck ahead, but no one took any notice. Then they arrived in Singapore and Chinese children approached them with flags, which suggested the conflict was over.
“But there was no reaction from the men,” Mr Smith said.
“They were that close to being dead it didn’t mean anything to them, they were brow-beaten to that extent.”
Back at Changi, Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived at the camp and circulated among groups of six or eight men to confirm the war was over.
The soldiers were supposed to stay in the camp, but Mr Smith and a Coonamble friend ignored the order.
No longer a prisoner he looked at his situation with wry humour.
“I thought, what a bugger, not a penny to bless ourselves, standing in Singapore in a g-string,” he said.
They went down to the docks and were kitted out in new gear, but the satisfaction didn’t last long. “After three and a half years without wearing clothes we were sweating and our boots rubbed,” he said.
They stayed the night for the Japanese capitulation the next day, watching as Mountbatten accepted the sword of surrender and inspected the troops lined up on the big oval.
His army days at an end, Mr Smith returned to Narromine and started a water-drilling business.
He and wife Pam had three daughters, Wendy, who lives at Dubbo, Marilyn and Sue.
Mr Smith has been back to Singapore twice before but this time will be the first accompanied by his two younger daughters.
Also making the trip is 2/20th Battalion Association president Peter Salter and other veterans, family and friends of the eighth division.
In the years since the war Mr Smith has seen his six good mates from the war dwindle in number.
He has used his time to visit Narromine school and to attend Anzac Day marches.
“I think it’s a good thing to let them know what it was like,” he said.
* Information and statistics about the 2/20th Battalion and the Singapore campaign were taken from the Australian War Memorial website.
Break out
Frank Smith
- enlisted in the second Australian Imperial Force aged 20
- taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942
- was one of 27 men trucked inside one steel rail carriage on a train full of prisoners bound for the Burma-Thailand Railroad
- worked 70 days straight carrying 70-pound bags of rice between camps on wet ground
- suffered a severe ulcer on his foot that laid him up for two months
- watched the Japanese surrender in 1945
- will return to Singapore for the 70th anniversary of its fall
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