History detective

For decades, military historian and author Lynette Ramsay Silver’s research on Australians at the frontline in the Far East and the experience of World War Two (WWII) prisoners has helped families find answers that assuage the pain of not knowing. Her efforts in tracing “unknown” prisoners of war (POWs) and identifying unmarked graves in Borneo — 38 since 1998 — have brought closure to many who lost loved ones between 1942 and 1945.

Unearthing POW stories is the most satisfying aspect of being a “history detective” for Silver, who lives in Sydney, Australia. “It enables relatives to know what actually happened after decades of wondering. As no one was ever told what occurred in, say, Borneo, what they imagined was generally much worse than the reality.”

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What then stirred her to search for information and piece together cases where the dust had long settled?

“All the subjects I have investigated were prompted by discovering something that warranted further enquiry. I have never written a book that recycles previously known history.”

Sometimes her curiosity leads to a dead end. But in almost every case, it has triggered a major probe, she says.

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Silver had been examining little-known aspects of Australia’s past since the early 1980s. While researching her family tree, she stumbled across a story from the gold rush era that had been covered up by the authorities.

Many had suspected something was amiss but nobody could find the evidence, which had been filed under another name in the Colonial Office in London. After locating documents that had been “lost” for 134 years, and urged by experts in mining history, she wrote what she thought would be her first and only book, A Fool’s Gold?

“I was told my methodology was not the same as that of researchers. It was my ability to think outside the box that enabled me to break open my first ‘case’.”

Tham Yau Kong (left) and Silver with a forestry official on a reconnaissance

In 1989, Silver delved into another lost story from her homeland’s early convict days — The Battle of Vinegar Hill, about an Irish rebellion in the colony — before branching out into Australia’s Special Operations in the Far East and South-West Pacific.

Her interest in secret Allied missions carried out behind the lines in Singapore led to an in-depth examination of the fall of Singapore and Malaya, and later extended to POWs captured by the Japanese.

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Her debut publication on WWII POWs, Sandakan — A Conspiracy of Silence (1998), describes the fate of Australian and British soldiers held in that city, including the killing of those who were deep in the jungles of Borneo after Japan’s surrender. It reveals how attempts to rescue the prisoners in early 1945 were undermined by poor intelligence.

Following the book’s release, Silver was inundated with letters from people wanting to know what happened to their family members. “I had traced the fate of every single POW as part of my investigation. Even 80 years after the event, I receive at least one enquiry every week.”

Only six of the 2,434 prisoners incarcerated at the Sandakan camp in Sabah, Malaysia, survived. Those who did were sheltered and fed by local villagers after escaping the brutal punishment, malnutrition and disease suffered on the death marches organised by Japanese commanders.

A wayside tribute for a POW who died on the death march

Silver had been interested in the POW experience from an early age because of her grandfather, a veteran of two world wars who had deep respect for Australians held captive by the Japanese. She read about these men and the army nurses massacred on Bangka Island, off Sumatra, in the first books on prisoners published in the 1950s.

One was by an Australian who had been in Sandakan but managed to escape. He had attended the same primary school as Silver’s father, who bought the book. “I read it, of course, so I knew something about Sandakan and the death marches from the age of 12,” recalls the precocious and avid reader.

The 1999 opening of Sandakan Memorial Park to commemorate those who perished intensified interest among POW relatives and veterans in visiting the death camps there and in Ranau, more than 200km west, where the prisoners were herded. Many wanted to see where their loved ones had fallen, and Silver agreed to escort them on a non-commercial basis.

So began the first of her trips in August 1999, when she stood with about 16 relatives and organised a simple service at the site in Sandakan. The following year, a group went for Anzac Day (April 25) and held a maiden ceremony at the same place where the POWs had gathered in 1943 and 1944.

Silver, who turned 80 last October, continues to lead groups to Sabah for Anzac Day, which was first observed in 1916 to commemorate Australian and New Zealand soldiers who took part in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign in Turkey.

Besides the Anzac tour, for Sandakan Day (Aug 15), which she helped inaugurate in the early 2000s, she organises an annual trek that she pioneered in 2005 with trekking expert Tham Yau Kong. It takes participants along 95km of jungle and farmland covering some of the middle and final sections of the original 250km death march route.

Local children in a mountain village wearing clothing knitted by POW families

Over 11 days starting last week (April 23 to May 3), Silver is guiding a group of 18 from Australia and the UK on a “very personalised tour, with each POW individually remembered... It is essentially a pilgrimage geared to the needs and expectations of those who come”.

Tham’s son Kim Leng, who has followed in his footsteps since 2014, takes care of the ground operations in Sabah.

As more people want to visit than there are places, there is an extra trip with an identical itinerary for Remembrance Day in November, with stops at key places connected with the war story. Among them are St Michael’s Church, where prisoners spent the night after arriving from Singapore; the Kundasang War Memorial Gardens; and Labuan War cemetery, where the dead are buried.

“People who come with us are all given a POW to follow, a constant and silent companion, if you like. When we reach the spot where he died, the trekker tells that story.

“We opened up the trek route so people will understand the enormity of the suffering of emaciated, ill soldiers for whom it was a one-way trip. Nevertheless, they did not give up their fight for survival. Their resilience in the face of great adversity was astonishing.

“We hope even those not committed to the story will, by the end of the journey, have a greater understanding of what war is all about, and admire and honour the courage of those in whose footsteps they are walking.”

The emotional ordeal of not knowing has haunted many POW families she met. Their gratitude for being able to retrace the steps of those who never returned home is deep and overwhelming.

“I’ve had people who go across with me who couldn’t say the word ‘Sandakan’ without crying. When they get to the cemetery at the end, this trauma just falls away before your eyes and they are able to speak about their fathers. They could not even begin to do so before,” Silver, a consultant with the Office of Australian War Graves and Commonwealth War Graves Commission, once shared in an ABC Sydney podcast.

In a recent case, recovery teams came upon a wooden POW tag in 1946, alongside the remains of a British soldier who had perished on the death march, but they did not know who he was.

“As I had a list of POW numbers I found in Japanese records, this particular identification was easy. He now has his name on his grave, instead of ‘A Soldier of the 1939-45 War. Known unto God’. You can imagine how special this is for his family,” she says.

Australian army personnel working for Unrecovered War Casualties, a unit set up to locate missing soldiers in Vietnam, use her method of cross-referencing information and documents to find the graves of those buried as “unknown” in the two world wars.

Silver feels privileged to have the knowledge and expertise to be able to do this work, “basically a forensic investigation. There is usually no neatly labelled file and it takes a fair bit of lateral thinking to find what I want and need”.

She always starts with documentation recorded at the time, from every source she can think of, before approaching individuals who may have a story to tell. “Once I have assembled everything, I start to piece it together, like creating an intricately woven tapestry.”

Gathering contemporaneous information and cross-referencing it allow her to determine if informants have accurate recall, are exaggerating, mistaken or lying. Deponents have been known to perjure themselves to get a conviction during war crimes trials. Also, recollections of the past can become muddled with time, and lying by omission is always a problem.

“I overcome that by gathering as much primary source material as possible to determine what the informant is leaving out. I immerse myself totally in the research, coming at it from different angles, until I get close to what I hope is the truth.”

What about those who attempt to rewrite the past or push different narratives?

“I deplore politicians who wrap themselves in khaki or the national flag for political gain,” Silver replies. “I have never had any criticism from other historians, who regard my work with great respect, and have received substantial recognition for it from the Australian, British and Sabah governments.”

Silver received her MBE from Anne, the Princess Royal, at Windsor Castle

In 2009, she was presented a Minister’s Special Award by Sabah for her research and contribution to the state’s war history. She went on to receive two major honours. The first is her appointment as a Member of the Order of Australia in 2019 for keeping the memory of POWs alive and for the philanthropic projects she and her husband, Neil Silver, initiated to improve life for Sabahans.

The second is her appointment as a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE), awarded by Queen Elizabeth for services to British personnel who died in the Second World War and their families. Silver received the MBE from Princess Anne at Windsor Castle in 2024.

Neil Silver with a boy who has had harelip correction under the Buy-A-Smile project he and Lynette initiated in Sabah

These accolades fired Silver’s early interest in history, which had been kindled by her grandfather. Her uncles and father also enlisted in the Second World War, serving mainly in New Guinea and Dutch Borneo. “As such, I had a good sense of what war was about when I attended my first Anzac Day march in Sydney at three.”

There was only one POW in her family: an uncle who was taken prisoner in Greece, escaped from northern Italy into Switzerland, and remained there until the end of the war.

Despite her connection with the past, she did not teach history during her years as a teacher. But on school breaks, her father took the family to historic sites, where they followed explorer trails that she found fascinating. Now, as a mother of two and grandmother of three, she writes books that go further.

In 2007, the Parit Sulong Memorial was unveiled in the tiny Johor village where about 140 Australian and Indian soldiers were imprisoned and then slaughtered. Silver convinced the Australian government to erect the monument. The local community was then inspired to restore the ruined buildings integral to the POW story.

Silver’s 2004 book, The Bridge at Parit Sulong — An Investigation of Mass Murder, tells how the small, gallant troop tried to hold back 10,000 Imperial guards at the Battle of Muar in 1942.

“It is a terrible story of man’s inhumanity to their own kind and was all but lost because what happened did not emerge until years after the war, when the Japanese general responsible for the massacre was tried and hanged in 1951.”

The trenches hold untold stories of both horror and heroism, and Silver has heard many.

“The most appalling [involve] acts of unimaginable barbarism, so barbaric I cannot comprehend how a human mind conceived them, let alone carried them out.”

These include removing organs from captives while they were alive and slicing flesh from POWs for consumption, then bandaging the wound so more flesh could be removed later.

Heroic incidents she retells include a POW who took the sole blame for stealing food to save his mates, knowing full well it was a capital crime, and another who suffered terrible beatings from Japanese guards to protect his men.

Silver obtained posthumous gallantry awards for both. “It was a very emotional moment when I learnt that, after 10 years and appearing before a tribunal, I had succeeded in having them honoured.”

Her books also bring reconciliation and vindication long after the guns are silent. In At War with My Father, a woman confronts her POW parent’s ordeals, which have “imprisoned” her for six decades. In Sister Bullwinkel: The Untold, Uncensored Story, a nurse speaks out about rape, torture and army gag orders to keep war crimes secret.

But Silver’s writing is not all bleak and distressing. She has come out with children’s stories and craft books, “stocking fillers” that appeal to the masses at Christmas time. One such effort, Making Friendship Bands, was extremely popular, she adds.

Sometimes, fact and fiction overlap, with characters based on actual people. “If a real name is used, everything about that person is entirely true.”

In the Mouth of the Tiger is a fictionalised account of the adventures of Denis Emerson-Elliott, a real-life MI6 spy she first met in 1996 at Sydney’s Central Railway Station.

Co-created with his barrister son Derek and told through the eyes of Denis’ wife Nona, this love story spiced with adventure, intrigue and action is set just before and after WWII.

Silver’s “surreal” meeting with British naval intelligence officer Denis was the catalyst for Deadly Secrets: The Singapore Raids 1942-45, about the final days before it fell to the Japanese.

Soon after the book hit stores in 2010, she found out his secret service number was BB 7 — the letters standing for British Bureau and the figure showing he was the seventh recruit — and that he was close friends with novelist Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Could he have been the inspiration for the suave screen icon?

Unlike many war titles written by men who usually concentrate on strategy, armaments and the conduct of military conflict, Silver’s focus is everyday people drawn into combat by choice or circumstance.

Putting human faces on the battlefront will help readers fathom the real picture, she thinks, and understand that “wars are not measured in terms of territory lost or gained or by material captured, but in the lives of very ordinary men and women whose sacrifice was absolute”.

She recently participated in a major Australian project aimed at helping youngsters of 14 and 15 grasp what war really means, by highlighting the deaths of Sandakan’s teenage soldiers who thought it would be an adventure but were cut down in the primes of their lives.

In 2010, Silver had continued her Sandakan story with Blood Brothers, about Sabah’s development from the 1870s to post-war, from the viewpoint of its own war heroes. A third book, about to go to print, will reveal previously unpublished information on Sandakan.

Crucial details on what took place in Borneo came from three of the six survivors who were still alive when she began her investigations in 1993. After their return, well-meaning army officers advised them to forget about the war and get on with their lives.

One was killed in a street accident, another committed suicide and the third succumbed to cancer. She was fortunate to meet the three surviving men in their later years, “when they were facing their own mortality and spoke to me about things hitherto kept secret”.

Looking across the killing fields, Silver sees war as a terrible thing. “Although I write about it, I abhor it.”

She laments that despite the tomes on its evils, people do not seem to have learnt anything at all in the thousands of years since civilisation began. “We are still engaging in warfare and ordinary men, women and children are paying the price for their leaders’ ambition, greed, fanatical ideology and intolerance.

“The world’s biggest problem is not climate change. It is the inability of nations to respect one another and live in harmony and peace. There is absolutely nothing glorious or noble about war.”