Links
There is a wealth of material available on the Internet for anyone interested in reading more or researching this area. Here are some sites which have proven very useful to me and which I recommend highly. I should also take the time to acknowledge the generosity of the people behind these sites and projects and thank them for making their material freely available to assist others and to keep the memories of our servicemen and women alive.
The scope and scale of the resources available online through the AWM is phenomenal. Their website is a great repository of images and they have digital copies of a vast array of material.
This is a great starting point for anyone wanting to find details of an Australian serviceman or woman from WW2. If searching for a POW, enter the name first and then go to ‘Refine Search’ and select those who were POWs.
This database of Australian prisoners of war from the Boer War to the Korean War is maintained by volunteers and they do a fantastic job. It makes for a great companion to the DVA roll above because sometimes there are just too many results returned when searching on common surnames or when one does not have a lot of information to identify a specific individual. A tip which helps at this site is, if the POW’s unit is known, enter that in a number only format, e.g. 2/19 or 2/3, no ordinals and no other details and that can narrow the field considerably.
This is a phenomenal site and a great resource. If the process of making the information available for Australian POWs was difficult, the equivalent task covering British POWs was massively more challenging. However, this searchable database has details on British POWs of the Japanese. It is maintained by the Far East POW Association and its webmaster is Ronnie Taylor who must be a very busy and a dedicated man.
Sadly, records here cover those who made the ultimate sacrifice but this website is a wonderful tribute to those servicemen and women and a testament to the ongoing efforts to keep the memory of what they did alive. A way of tracking down an individual is by conducting a search based on where the soldier died. This site will give details of the cemetery or place where the death is commemorated. The more you know about an individual, the better the site will work for you but it can still be a great resource when clarification is required. The breadth and depth of the information available here is extraordinary.
As will be seen, the unit association is part of the 1/19 RNSWR. The site has a lot of information and links. As I look at it now I am feeling rather embarrassed about the poor visual state of my own site but hopefully that will improve over time. The secretary of the association is Mr Bob Pink, OAM; he does a great job and has been very helpful to me.
“The Battle of Bakri” was part of the broader Muar engagement. It was fought around the Bakri crossroads just south of the village of Bakri which was southwest of Johore’s Muar River and east of the village of Parit Sulong. The broader Muar battle was fought between January 15th and 22nd 1942. This epic fight resulted in the virtual destruction of two Australian battalions, the 2/29th and the 2/19th, and the Indian 45th Brigade. Reg Newton played a small part in this battle before being surrounded by overwhelming forces and having to retreat into the swamps and jungles on January 19th. This website gives an invaluable chronology of these hectic and confusing events. It also has a great summary of the material available. Its author is the grandson of Lt-Col. John Robertson who was the CO of the 2/29th Bn and killed on January 18th 1942 while riding on the back of a motorcycle after a conference at 45th Indian Bde HQ. Andrew Warland is now the patron of the Victorian-based 2/29th Battalion Association. He also has been very generous with his time and of great assistance to me.
NOTE: It can be tricky getting onto this page. If you find the link above doesn’t work, go to
Andrew Warland.com.au
Then go to his ‘About’ page, click on his detailed biography and scroll to the end where there is a link to his Battle of Muar material.
There is also a link on this page to a Japanese account of the Battle of Bakri.
It is remarkable that I have not put on the Reg-Related Reading page of this site one of Tim Bowden’s numerous books on the Pacific POW experience since there are a number of them and they are all good. I do have listed there the book that came from the landmark radio series put together by him and his good mate and partner in crime, the boy from Boort, Dr Hank Nelson. That series went to air in 1984. There is a link to it on the ABC website. It is well worth a listen. But some of Bowden’s books are ‘Stubborn Buggers’, a collaboration with George Aspinall called ‘Changi Photographer’ and ‘Larrikins in Khaki.’ They are all quite remarkable, sometimes hair-raising and well worth reading.
I don’t know who put the material on Reg Newton together for this page but it is very good. It gives an excellent summary and is a really useful starting point for anyone wanting to explore his fascinating story.
Roger Mansell is another researcher who has gone to God but he has left behind an impressive legacy of material reflecting a life-long interest in the subject of the POW experience and a dogged determination to record the nuts and bolts information. The website is hardly glamorous but the material here is solid gold and it is worth looking carefully through its contents if your interest is in running quite specific details to ground.
This is the website maintained by Guy Harrison who is the son of L/Sgt Kenneth Harrison, 2/4th Anti-Tank Reg., author of ‘The Brave Japanese’. The book is available to download for free as a PDF and it is one of the great POW memoirs. Moreover, Ken Harrison who was at the ambush at Gemas then went on to fight in the Battle of Muar, was in Pudu prison, Kuala Lumpur, with Reg Newton, went to the Railway as part of ‘S’ Battalion and was then sent to Japan on the Byoki Maru as part of Newton Force and, like Reg, spent the last year of the war in camps on Kyushu: first at Fukuoka then Nakama. So, as an independent source providing another perspective on a wide range of incidents and elements integral to the Reg Newton story, Ken Harrison’s memoir is a compulsory but very rewarding inclusion.
In the time I have been exploring the story of Reg Newton, I have found many people have been generous with their time, shared information freely and guided me along the way. John Larkin was one of the first to do that through his website honouring his father, Frank Larkin, who was a member of the 2/19th Battalion. Frank was an inmate at Pudu Prison with Reg Newton and was in the Ohama #9-B camp as well. Frank Larkin was also a good mate of the redoubtable Pte Charles Edwards whose wonderful quotation about Reg Newton was that he was “the greatest officer that ever pulled boots on.” This website has some wonderful information from and about Charles Edwards who devoted tremendous energy and a lot of time in his long life to telling the story of the Pacific POW experience to a new generation of Australians not steeped in these traditions and perhaps only slightly aware of what their grandfathers’ generation endured. So this is an excellent website to look at; it brings the massive sweep of a global event down to a very human level and makes us realise more fully how these events irrevocably changed so many lives.
When I look at the work done by people like Lt-Col. Peter Winstanley and made freely available for all over the Internet, I feel like a gnome in the company of giants. There is a wealth of material here which will be of interest to anyone wanting to explore this subject further. In fact, there is so much and it is of such high quality that the AWM have archived the website. Peter Winstanley was also involved in tours to the Thai end of the Burma-Thailand Railway and did a power of work keeping the memory of these men and their medicos alive.
This website is a real treasure trove of information. Those responsible, have done a power of work and deserve a hearty ‘well done’ on the efforts here. There are stories and information on individuals and incidents and I have found myself going to this site as the definitive resource again and again. It has helped clarify matters which have been confusing elsewhere and add the kind of details which moves the experience of an individual from a number into the realms of a relatable human drama.
This is not strictly related to the Reg Newton story but it is a fascinating and valuable link nonetheless. Gull Force was the name given to those unfortunate Australians sent to defend Ambon; mainly they were members of the 2/21st Battalion but there were also support units. The Roger Maynard book, ‘Ambon’ is discussed on the Reading page and is a recent account of what happened to these ill-fated soldiers. They fought for only four days before being captured. 300 of the Ambon defenders were massacred at Laha airstrip as a reprisal soon after capture. The next three and a half years served as an object lesson in how POW camps should not be run. The death toll amongst those imprisoned on Ambon was only exceeded by the numbers killed in the tragic Sandakan Death Marches. Apart from his activities with a secret army called the Old Guard, the CO of the 2/21st Battalion, Lt-Col. W.J.R. Scott, had been active in Australia-Japan commerce and friendship societies in the inter-war period. That was thought to have made him an expert in understanding Japanese culture. That knowledge didn’t help much. And it didn’t help his men either. On the positive side, the members of the Gull Force Association have for many years now made an annual pilgrimage to Ambon where they visit sites and memorials and do good works for the local people. The cost to join the Association is a one-time fee of $35 for the life of the Association. Very reasonable and in a great cause.
Caroline Gaden has written a book about her father-in-law, Capt. Bill Gaden of the 2/20th Battalion. The book is called ‘Pounding Along to Singapore’ and includes letters mainly between Bill Gaden and his mother; it is available in a few places including the webpage to which this link points. This page gives a lot of good background information and includes transcripts of some interviews Caroline and her husband conducted with former POWs. One of the people they interviewed was Reg Newton. Capt. Bill Gaden was a senior member of Reg’s ‘U’ Battalion on the Railway. The book and the interviews fill a number of gaps in Newton’s story. When he spoke to Caroline and her husband Bob on Anzac Day, 1992, he was much more open about certain matters than he had been in the interview he did with Tim Bowden ten years earlier. So this webpage and Caroline Gaden’s book add valuable details to the Reg Newton story.