I knew my father was a prisoner of war in the Far East and that at the end of the war he was repatriated back to the UK via Canada. He never spoke about what happened during that time. It was only after reading "Sparrow A Chronicle of Defiance" that I learnt that he was part of the 79th LAA and the Sparrows.
Sadly I only read the book after he had passed away. I think he would have found that the book would bring back many names and faces. He kept an address book that I found in a tin of old possessions that has many names and addresses of many of the people in the book, UK, Australian and USA personnel, including Charlie McLachlan. Also among the possessions was a part of a silk parachute hand written with names of places he had been.
Before he was posted to the Far East he served with the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1939. Post the war my father stayed in the army serving in Hong Kong, Ghana and Germany before retiring after 25 years in 1961.
