What's On
The Doomed Battalion … Petrarch’s Saturday, Hobart Bookshop Nov 7
Doomed Battalion is the story of the men of the 2/40 Battalion – mainly Tasmanians – and its associated army units, sent to garrison an airfield in Dutch Timor immediately after the Japanese entered the Second World War. Assigned a hopeless military task within a misguided strategy, they were captured a week after the fall of Singapore in February1942. They were then scattered in prison camps across east Asia, including Java, Sumatra, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, Japan and other places. Their experiences are in general a microcosm of those of Australian prisoners of the Japanese between 1942 and 1945.