Description

Title: Savage Jungle – An Epic Struggle For Survival

Author: Finlay, Iain

Condition: Near Mint

Edition: 1st Edition

Publication Date: 1991

ISBN: 0731801873

Cover: Hard Cover with Dust Jacket – 438 pages

Comments: The true story of an Australian soldier’s courageous struggle to survive in WWII Malaya. VX39088 Sgt Arthur Shephard was a member of the 2/29th Bn AIF.

This is the incredible story of how one man, left to die in the jungles of Malaya during World War II, after his battalion had been decimated during the Japanese drive to take Singapore, survives, living on the run in unbelievably hostile circumstances, without ever being captured. 

In January 1942 British, Australian and Indian forces clashed for the first time with a Japanese army of close to 10,000 that was charging southward down the Malayan Peninsula in a seemingly unstoppable march on Singapore. Arthur Shephard, a corporal in the Australian 2/29th Battalion, took part in the only ‘successful’ battles in the six-week campaign, at Muar and Bakri, in which a force of Japanese Imperial Guards, of vastly superior numbers, were held up for several days. Eventually overwhelmed, the 2/29th and other allied units withdrew, to fall back on Singapore, final defeat and incarceration until the end of the Pacific War, in Changi prisoner of war camp and on the Burma Railroad. 

But, Arthur Shephard and three other badly wounded soldiers, unable to keep up with the retreat through the rubber trees, had been left behind to fend for themselves and…basically, they knew…to die. Here is the amazing account of how he survived for three-and-a-half years, always on the move, in the jungles of Malaya, never to be captured by the Japanese. 

As two of his companions die of their shocking wounds, Arthur and his close friend ‘Lofty’ are led by an old Chinese timber-cutter into safe hiding in the deep jungle. There they meet members of the fledgling Chinese communist guerilla forces who will grow to become a powerful independent force that constantly harries and attacks the Japanese occupiers from mobile camps in the jungle. 

In addition to the military dangers of numerous partisan attacks on the Japanese, Arthur endures bouts of Malaria, Dysentery, Berri Berri, Denghi fever, as well as snake and spider bites, to eventually stagger out of the jungle after the Japanese surrender, a ragged figure with a pistol strapped to his side, to walk into a Malayan town between Japanese soldiers bowing to ‘the victor’.