Former PoW wants more recognition for WWII veterans

A WWII veteran has encouraged people to remember all the Australians who sacrificed their lives in war, not just the Anzacs of Gallipoli.

Harold Martin visited Geraldton last month on tour for a documentary about his time as a prisoner of war working on the Thai-Burma railway at Hellfire Pass.

Mr Martin said he was disappointed the present generation of young people knew virtually nothing about WWII.

“Some of them have never even heard of Singapore, but when you think that over 80,000 Allied and Australian prisoners were taken, and nearly 15,000 died on that railway line it’s absolutely horrific,” he said.

“They all know about Gallipoli, but for many killed at Gallipoli it was a quick death with a bullet.

“Up there in Singapore it was weeks of slow, lingering death — and these are the sacrifices of men which should not be forgotten.”

Mr Martin said he and a friend joined up as volunteers in 1942 as part of an armoured maintenance unit in a last-ditch effort to get overseas to the frontline, but when the friend was called up for other duties he was the only West Australian on the ship over.

Anzac Day services in the Mid West and Gascoyne

Ten days after he arrived in Singapore the city fell to the Japanese and Mr Martin was captured.

“It was a very glorious armoured career,” he joked.

“But I’m here and a lot aren’t.”

Mr Martin was part of the first group to be forced into labour on the Thai-Burma railway, but said Australians fared much better than later prisoners because they were under frontline Japanese Imperial Guard who had been repelled for weeks by the Australian 2/4th Machine-Gun Battalion.

“Every time one of the Japanese saw a man with the 2/4th colour patch he’d race up to him and say ‘No. 1 fighter’ so the appreciation was from one soldier to another,” he said.

Conditions were terrible, however, with men subsisting on a handful of rice porridge a day, a sparse meal which some even gave away to local child labourers, who were forced to work without being fed.

Many diggers succumbed to starvation or disease, as cholera ran rampant.

In 2011 Mr Martin returned to find the graves of three mates who had died working on the railway with him.

“It was standing in that beautifully kept cemetery, looking at all those silent stones that I thought; these men must not be forgotten,” he said.

“That was years ago, and I’ve been in front of bloody cameras ever since.”