Ernest Brough

This is a fantastic true story about Ernest Brough, an Australian who signed up in World War 2 when under age, who excelled as a soldier and who was eventually made a prisoner of war. After being captured at the Western front, he was sent to a POW camp in Yugoslavia. The story really begins after he and 2 other men escape and make their way across war-torn Europe, trying to get to Italy. They do not know who to trust as there are many underground groups that offer sanctuary, but some would be willing to sell them to the Germans as hostages. They are constantly looking for food, fighting extreme cold and the possibility of being shot, but in the midst of all these extremes they are offered both shelter and sanctuary by the ordinary Europeans they come across - this despite the fact that they themselves have barely enough food to eat. At times, I was moved to tears by the generosity of these poor farmers and villagers who showed the absolute best of humanity in their actions. Although it is told in a simple, straight-forward way, the book conjures up powerful emotions just by the events that occur.
An excellent book for teenage boys to show EXACTLY what is involved when you fight a war; especially the LICE....ick!… (more)

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/dangerous-days/

When I was ten or eleven years old, I read and enjoyed Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse, a POW escape story. It came with parental recommendation (my mother was amused by the POWs’ christening a cow Venus di Milko, or was that a different book?), and seemed to me to be a tale from the distant past. In fact, it was published in 1949, and the events it narrated had happened barely fifteen years before I read it. Ernest Brough’s story, written when he was in his 80s and when the events he recalls were more than sixty years in the past, nonetheless has some of the same qualities that caught this little boy’s imagination way back then.

The book is Brough’s story of his war experience. He was one of the Rats of Tobruk, and his account of how the war was conducted there almost makes one long for the good old days when the Geneva Conventions were respected. Taken prisoner, he was kept in camps run first by the Italians ()horrible) and then by the Germans (less horrible), then escaped with two companions. The story of the trio’s privations and difficulties as they made their way from the prison camp in southern Austria, through Slovenia, Croatia and into Bosnia, a good part of the way in the care of Tito’s Partisans, is a compelling read – the larrikin camaraderie of the Australians and New Zealanders in training, in combat and in the POW camp is transmuted into an almost mystical solidarity.

Perhaps more than The Wooden Horse, in fact, the book reminds me of Bert Facey’s A Fortunate Life. It’s a tale of survival, told without bitterness but pervaded by a sense of good fortune. And as I like my morals to be explicit, I was grateful for the final chapter, ‘Take it from an Old Bloke’, where he spells out his views on war, peace and life, including this:

"War’s a damnable thing. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. The damage runs deep. All those nights for decades afterwards I would lie in bed thinking, I’ve got to get under the wire tonight. or gotta make it to the riverbank. … Most soldiers will bring the war home with them in some form. Some will never forget it; some will die from it, from suicide or alcoholism, years after the guns have packed up and gone home. You see, it’s just not natural for human beings to go out and kill other humans. And that’s what war’s all about."… (more)