Stories from Sandakan: 2/18th Battalion A.I.F

Only one in ten of the 174 men of the 2/18th Australian Infantry Battalion sent as prisoners of war to Borneo in 1942 and 1943 survived to return home in late 1945. This horrifying figure is virtually the same as the percentage of survivors for all of the captured Eighth Division men sent to Borneo. Sandakan and Ambon were the locations from which very few of our men came home at the end of the Second World War. Overall in South East Asia the Eighth Division POWs had only a 66% survival rate. The many stories told here reflect the peacetime training experiences and the wartime ordeals of all of these Australian soldiers, but most especially they tell what it was like for the ill-fated Diggers of the 2/18th Battalion who were sent to Sandakan. This then is the story of an Australian infantry battalion, told through the individual stories of its members. Here the reader sees something of the daily life in peace and war and captivity of the members of a very special Battalion. The book started merely as an idea for a conference paper, but then took on a quite insistent life of its own, and good friends started to comment about "That new book you're writing", and so it became a manuscript. Then there were those who said to me, "There's nothing new to say about Sandakan" or who respectfully but with distinct doubt posed the query, "How can you tell the stories of so many men no longer with us?". I readily admit to my own occasional moments of doubt, but that is really when I definitely knew that there was going to be a book, and that this book was going to have each of those 174 walking somewhere across its pages.