Billy Young, the last surviving POW imprisoned in Borneo’s notorious Sandakan Camp, and at the equally notorious Outram Road Gaol in Singapore run by the Japanese military police, died on Thursday in Hobart hospital.
The war didn’t kill him, but COVID-19 complications claimed his life at the age of 96.
Historian Lynette Silver, who has written extensively on Sandakan, said: “Always a larrikin, Billy was irrepressible, even in captivity. His will to survive carried him through torture and interrogation, enabling him to endure months of solitary confinement in Outram Road, his punishment for an escape attempt.
“Devastated by the knowledge at war’s end that only six POWs out of 2434 had survived at Sandakan, Billy later worked through his grief and trauma by writing poetry and creating a series of paintings depicting life, and death, in the camp and prison, the only visual records we have.”
“He was always aware of how lucky he was to survive and from the day of his liberation lived life to the fullest. Indomitable to the end, he was a remarkable man and a wonderful Australian.”
Keith William Young was born on November 4, 1925, in New Town, Hobart. He worked as a telegram delivery boy on a bicycle, before deciding to ride around Australia with a mate.
Police picked him up in Victoria, near the South Australian border. Sent to a Melbourne boys’ home, he absconded, put his age up four years and enlisted.
At the time, the 15-year-old was an orphaned delinquent at something of a loose end and knew the army would feed him.
Young was posted to the 3rd Reinforcements of the 29th Infantry Battalion and sent with the 8th Division to Malaya. A month after his 16th birthday, the Japanese stormed through Malaya to Singapore. Young joined the walking wounded on February 12, 1942.
He was among hundreds of other soldiers shipped to Borneo to build a Japanese airstrip at Sandakan in the Malaysian jungle. It was hot, humid and overrun by mosquitos.
Billy spent his 17th birthday in the infamous Sandakan prisoner-of-war camp and much of the rest of the war in the notorious Outram Road jail.
Only six Australians, of 1787 fellow countrymen and 641 Britons, survived the Sandakan camp, the 265km “death march” through mountainous jungle to Ranau, and the wretched destination itself.
After the war Young wrote his story on an electric typewriter and expressed his experiences in poetry. He learned to draw scenes he remembered from his days of imprisonment. He then took to canvas and acrylic paints.
Billy Young was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2004 for helping to bring the Sandakan story to Australians.
LAUNCH OF “BILLY. MY LIFE AS A TEENAGE POW’ [December 2016]
Lynette Silver
This book is Billy’s dream because, although I had a good deal of input and physically collated it, it is Billy’s story. And because it IS his story, it radiates a vitality and energy that no historian or biographer, no matter how talented or skilled, could possibly match.
I remember reviewing a biography on our first VC recipient, Neville Howse. The story was nicely crafted, the narration was competent and the facts were accurately recorded. Despite this, I felt an immense frustration that, somewhere in the pages of that book, was a real, vital human being, waiting to be released.
This is because biographical accounts can only go so far. The same goes for Billy’s story. I know this because others, including me, have written about him, but our versions are just that – stories about him.
I first met Billy at an-ex service lunch in 1993, during a seven-year stint as honorary historian to the 8th Australian Division Association. Billy had come along with an ex-POW friend from his battalion, whom I knew. They were sitting opposite and, as the conversation progressed, I asked which POW camps Billy had been in.
When he replied that had been in Sandakan and Outram Road Gaol in Singapore, it was with the expectation that I would look at him blankly, as most people do.
Not this time. To his astonishment, here was a fellow diner and a woman, no less, who not only knew all about Sandakan and Outram Road, but was also completely au fait with people who had been incarcerated with him.
Before we parted company, Billy asked me if I could identify a New Zealand pilot whom he had met briefly in Outram Road Gaol. Billy knew only his nick-name, Habby, and that he had most likely been executed. It so happened that, as I knew exactly who Habby was, and his fate, I was able to impart this information to Billy, on the spot.
By way of a special thank you Billy sent me a little book of his poems, and so began a friendship that has blossomed and strengthened over the past 23 years.
In 2004, Sydney Morning Herald reporter Tony Stephens interviewed us, just before we received an OAM each for our Sandakan work in the Australia Day Honours list. Fascinated by our banter and obvious rapport, Tony observed that Billy spoke to me as it I had been in the camp, as if I knew him and all his POW mates.
It’s true. I do feel as if I know them – kids like Billy who went off to war but, unlike him, did not come home.
In 2013, exactly 20 years after our first meeting, I suggested to Billy that it was high time he told his story. He certainly had enough material – a memoir that he had begun in exercise books in the late 1970s, loads of recorded interviews and countless conversations we had shared spanning two decades.
Billy asked me to help, so we decided it should be a joint effort. He would provide the autobiographical component and I would act as a narrator.
This unique combination has given us the best of both worlds. On the one hand we have a pacey, engaging first-hand account told through the eyes of a boy soldier - a teenage tearaway kid who exhibits that same cavalier attitude to life as most teenagers today, but at the same time is capable of great insight, revealing at times an astonishing depth and perception. Billy is blessed with finely tuned powers of observation. Even in the midst of almost unimaginable suffering, he takes us on a personal journey that no third party could possibly hope to achieve.
On the other hand, we have my historical input, printed in italics throughout the text, which rounds out and expands elements of the story which Billy, as either a child or a private at the bottom of the army pecking order, could not possibly know about, or which, if he added such detail, would not ring true.
And so we set to work. I knew a great deal about the Malayan Campaign, the Sandakan POWs and Outram Road Gaol and its inmates, but filling in details of Billy’s early life in Hobart and Sydney took some doing. The pickings were lean, but I kept at it, filling in the gaps bit by bit. When I inadvertently asked what would prove to be a couple of sticky questions, Billy realised that before long I would almost certainly uncover some aspects of his youth that he had kept secret - from everyone.
One day he phoned and, after a preliminary chit-chat, announced ‘I need to tell you something before I die. One day, when you are not too busy.’
‘I’m not busy right now’, I replied - a blatant lie, because I was, but I certainly wasn’t going to let an opportunity like this pass by.
Ditching what he called the ‘bullshit version’, Billy started to talk. One he started it seemed as if he could not stop. He never drew breath and I dared not interrupt the flow. I grabbed a pad and pencil and noted it all down - seven pages in long hand - scribbling as fast as I could.
When he had finished, we discussed the situation and both agreed that in the end truth will always out, and the best one to ‘out’ it was him. As I had already finished the first couple of chapters, the new ‘de-bullshitted’ version involved a rewrite.
It was definitely worth it.
What we have now is unique - the definitive, no holds-barred story of Billy Young, teenaged POW. Those of you who know Billy and think you know his story are in for a surprise.
It has been a joy and an honour to physically put this book together with Billy and to share his past, in a way that no one else has done. I am conscious that I have been entrusted to be his confidant, and his co author and, most especially, that he has shared with me such an important part of his life.
It is a privilege to know him, and an honour that he allows me to be his friend.
But ladies and gentlemen, this is enough from me.
It is time to hand over to the star of the show. I take great pleasure in giving you Billy Young – a remarkable human being and a national treasure.
Lynette’s new book – My Life as a Teenage POW, Billy is available via this link: http://www.billyyoung.com.au/