Survival, heroism, courage and mateship in Ambon - a place of nightmares.In February, 1942, Ambon, an Indonesian island north of Darwin, fell to the Japanese army and the Allied forces defending it were captured. Over a thousand of these soldiers were Australian. By the end of the war, just one-third of them had survived and Ambon became a place of nightmares, one of the most notorious of all POW camps the war had seen.Many of the men captured were massacre...

The forgotten story of the worst POW camp in Japan'I think I was very near death that night.' HELL'S HEROES is the story of the prisoner-of-war camp that never was - so dubbed by one old soldier because the atrocities that occurred there went largely unreported at the time. But while the Burma-thailand railway, the Bataan death march and events at Changi became synonymous with Japanese brutality, the experiences of those imprisoned in camps like the infamous 4-B provided a measure o...

Major-General Gordon Bennett played a decisive role in the defence of Malaya and Singapore in World War II. A colourful character, known to sport a straw hat with a rainbow scarf tied around it, his officers found him at times abrasive and cocky, but he was also known as an outstanding commander. He is, however, best remembered for his escape by boat from Singapore in the dying days of the Japanese invasion, which led to the imprisonment of 15,000 Australian servicemen.Bennett’s de...