Sydney Morning Herald
3 August 2007
At 92 he mentioned his time spent as a POW
William Young, 1900-2007
AS IF fighting the Germans in World War I was not enough of a challenge – a German shell pierced his jacket but missed his chest – William Young had a nasty encounter with the Japanese in World War II. Captured in Sandakan, Borneo, the starting point for the infamous death marches, he was jailed in Kuching.
Young, who has died in Perth at 107, thus became one of the few people to face the two enemies in the two wars. He was also the last known veteran of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), the forerunner of the Royal Air Force, and one of the last Allied survivors of World War I.
Only five British veterans of that war remain. The war ended before the last Australian to enlist, Jack Ross, could serve. Aged 108, he lives in Bendigo in Victoria.
Young’s good fortune was that he had been a civilian in Sandakan, running a factory, when the Japanese marched in. Civilians and officers were sent to Kuching, in Sarawak, where most survived. In 1945, with Allied forces closing in, the Japanese ordered prisoners left in Sandakan to march 265 kilometres to Ranau. Of 2434 Australians and Britons, only six Australians survived by escaping – 1787 Australians and 641 British perished in the camp, along the track or at Ranau.
Young, who was born in Scotland and married May Thompson between the wars, came to Australia after World War II, set up a tannin factory at Toodyay, a town north of Perth, received the Legion d’honneur from the French government in 1998, and scarcely talked about either war until he was 102. “He was a fairly quiet sort of bloke,” said his son, Alan.
The eldest of six children of Robert Young, William Alexander Smillie Young was born in Lanarkshire, moved to Hayes, Middlesex, with his family at 13, enlisted in the RFC on his 18th birthday, trained as a radio operator and was assigned to the 14th Brigade Royal Horse Artillery, near Bapaume on the Western Front.
During the British offensive in August 1918, he took morse code messages from observation planes so that the brigade’s field guns could bombard the observed target. Two days after the Armistice on November 11, Young contracted the Spanish flu that killed more people around the world than had the war. After recovering he joined the Army of Occupation near Cologne.
After being demobilised in 1919, Young studied for a chemistry degree at East London College, now Queen Mary College in the University of London, and went to work in chemical factories in Argentina.