Against the Rising Sun An Australian POW’s Survival
Don Graham served with the ill-fated Australian 8th Division as a signaller, he fought in the disastrous campaign in Malaya as a sig posted to 2/15 Field Regiment, following the retreat to Singapore, and the brutal reality of surrender - the greatest military catastrophe in British Empire history. Now a POW, he was sent first to the notorious Changi prison camp and then to the infamous Selarang Barracks, where disease, starvation and fear ruled.
Marched out of Changi to an uncertain fate, Don and hundreds of others were taken on a hell ship to Japan and forced into slave labour at the Kawasaki shipyards in Kobe, and later the deadly Yoshikuma coal mine near Nagasaki. Each day was a gamble of exhaustion, punishment or death – until he witnessed the strange, mushroom-shaped cloud that would signal the war’s end.
Japan had surrendered, yet peril remained. The Japanese commandant ordered Don and the prisoners to dig trenches – their own mass graves. Could they survive when freedom seemed within reach?
Against the Rising Sun is the true story of an Australian soldier’s endurance under the Japanese. Amid unimaginable horror, Don became a lifeline to his fellow POWs, using humour, song and sheer will to keep hope alive – a testament to courage found not in victory, but in survival.
