Bamboo Round My Shoulder – Changi: The Lighter Side

AUSTRALIAN MILITARY World War II POW –

This book was 35 years, take a year or two, in the making? Why so long…longer than the gestation of an elephant?

It was years before the ex-prisoners could forget the horrors of those years of incarceration and admit that anything humorous had occurred. But as the years faded humour, often of a grisly kind, began to emerge.

All aboard the Burma Railway, folks, here you can be privileged to meet such unsavoury characters as ‘Boss-eyes’, ‘Dracula’, ‘Mr Peters the Ice Cream Man’ and the ‘Angry Ant’ among the guards, and, among their reluctant charges any number of Snowys, Loftys, Shortys and Bluies. Not forgetting the memorable Tattooed Soldier, Rusty the Olympo Swimmo, the Man Outside Hoyts (Happy Harry Smith) and that palpable pest the Man from Tamworth.

• 70, [18] p. : ill. ; 24 cm. #130126 SCARCE

• • Australian prisoners of war. Singapore. Changi, 1942-1945. Stories, anecdotes
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