Derek Emerson Elliott Livres

I had never experienced a regular home environment, and certainly nothing even approaching what people take for granted today. I had never experienced the feeling of belonging to a proper family, or the warm comfort of a family home. Life for me had always been a game of chance; a matter of heads or tails. Yet it was here, on that faraway island, while chained to a cable on an old timber wharf, that I had my first yearning for home. - Billy Young. Billy: My Life as a Teenage POW has been compiled from a personal chronicle penned by Billy Young throughout the 1970s, supplemented by hundreds of conversations that Lynette and Billy have shared in the course of their close friendship spanning more than two decades. It is the only first-hand published account by an ordinary soldier imprisoned by the Japanese at the infamous Sandakan POW Camp, and one of only three books by a survivor at the Kempeitai's equally notorious Outram Road Gaol. Billy is now the only soldier left alive from Sandakan, and the only Australian prisoner still alive from Outram Road. Lynette Silver provides historical details gleaned from years of combing archival documents, and Billy gives his unique narrative immerse vibrancy and life as he takes the reader on a very personal journey. Through the eyes of a tearaway teenaged soldier, Billy shares his thoughts and experiences, some of which have never before been revealed secrets that he has kept even from his closest family

It is August 1945 and World War II is over. Japan has surrendered. As the Western world rejoices, deep in the jungles of British North Borneo the small number of remaining Australian and British prisoners of war are massacred. Of the 2434 prisoners incarcerated by the Japanese at the Sandakan POW camp, only six, all escapees have survived. The POW's sent from Singapore in 1942-43 to work on airfield construction, endured frequent beatings, and were subjected to other, more diabolical punishment. Sustained only by an inadequate and ever diminishing rice ration and with little medical attention, many died of malnutrition, maltreatment and disease. Lynette Silver, through painstaking research and interviews with survivors, as well as a study of Japanese records, has pieced together a detailed and highly readable account of the lives and ultimate fate of Sandakan's POW's. She tells a totally gripping and horrifying tale, not only of the prisoners, but the reasons why they, and their story, became World War II's most deadly secret.

Set in the turbulent years around World War Two, this gripping novel--based on a true story--has it all: adventure, romance, and international suspense. Nona Orlov, a refugee in colonial Penang, falls in love with an Englishman who catapults her into a life of luxury. But his dark secrets put Nona in danger, facing treachery, violence, and death. Has she the courage it takes to survive?

A fascinating account of some of the most daring, and politically motivated, missions undertaken by Australian soldiers behind enemy lines in WWII Singapore.