A Fearful Freedom

This amazing survival story tells how Jim Wright, a Norfolk gamekeeper's son, aged 23, managed to evade capture by the Japanese during the last few days of the battle on the Malayan mainland. It goes on to describe how Wright, wounded in the foot and finally abandoned by his wounded comrades, struggles along for two months to survive and rejoin his comrades on Singapore Island, not knowing that they had already surrendered. Hobbling painfully though the jungle, terrified by its strange noises, betrayed by Malays and often hiding only a few feet from Japanese patrols; starving, often without water and utterly exhausted, he slowly made his way towards Singapore. Eventually, almost dead, he was picked up by Chinese communist guerillas who took him to join twenty-five other British and Australian soldiers who were living in a jungle camp. Within a year all his companions has either died or been captured or killed by the Japanese, except for four. Two of these died in 1944 and Jim and the other one were the only ones to come home in 1945.

This is a very exciting story which tells of his jungle left with the guerillas and the action-packed narrative reads in places like a thriller. There are encounters with wild animals, snakes, Japanese soldiers, traitors and death – encounters whose description leaves one with the same chill of fear which Jim Wright must have felt. Finally he is rescued by British forces and taken to freedom in the most unorthodox way – too exciting to describe here.

Twenty-five years after his rescue he returns to his jungle haunts and this helps to lay some or the horrors which he has suffered after the war because of the death of so many of his comrades in the jungle. Robert Hamond also served in 18th Division and was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore. He later worked on the notorious Burma-Siam railway where so many died. Thirty years after the war he met Jim Wright and persuaded him to tell this extraordinary story, a story which Jim had not revealed, even to his family.