A Digger's diary
A World War II veteran, who was captured by the Japanese and held as a prisoner of war for three-and-a-half years, has opened up about his ordeal.
Bob Christie, 92, of Brisbane suburb Bayside, says mateship helped him survive, and tomorrow he will honour those mates who did not come home.
When Bob Christie joined the AIF he was only 19. He kept his journal a secret when he was kept a prisoner of war.
He said: “We went with the second transfer regiment to Malaya and fought the Japanese and unfortunately we couldn't run fast enough and they caught us.”
What followed was horrendous.
He was held captive at Changi and on Anzac Day in 1943 he was set to work on the notorious Hellfire Pass, the most brutal section of the Burma-Thailand railway line.
“Conditions at Hellfire Pass were terrible, we lost a lot of our mates there,” he added.
They were overworked, beaten and starved. The sick were forced to keep going.
“We used to carry them to work and we'd lay them down during the day and a few of them would die. We had a lot of blokes with one or two legs taken off.”
Bob also became ill and at one point weighed just 35 kilograms, spent his 21st birthday as a prisoner of war, says mateship helped him survive.
When the war ended he remembers ‘hugging each other, crying and laughing’.
He has attended every dawn service at Wynnum since the war ended and this year will be no different.
Once again, tomorrow, he will be remembering his mates.
Of the 875 men in his unit, 12 are left.
In tears, he added: “I see all the faces of me mates as they are having the service. I remember them.”
The 92-year-old has this message of hope, for our modern day diggers: “They've done a marvellous job .. and they're only kids as far as we're concerned.”
