Vince’s Pacific hell

Andrew Mathieson
AGE might be finally catching up with Vince Scanlon where the enemy wasn’t able to slow him down.
He’s now 95 and a former prisoner of war, one of three left in Geelong and its oldest.
The trio still meets once a month for a feed, a beer and to rekindle thoughts of fallen mates.
Despite still looking debonair in a navy blazer, matching tie and war medals on his chest, the years have taken their toll on Vince.
“I’m not able to do much and I have to rely on someone to lift me up,” he explains.
“My memory is still good but I hobble around a bit.”
Vince settled comfortably back into life at Bannockburn after World War Two, maintaining the town’s bowling greens for 25 years. They are now named in his honour.
As a former club champion, Vince gave up bowls at 93. He was still driving until he handed in his licence eight months ago.
He’s a different man to the 30-year-old captured by the Japanese in 1942 and kept as a prisoner for three and a half years, ending up in Japan.
“I didn’t think I was ever going to make it home,” Vince confesses.
“It’s played on my mind a lot since.”
Vince waited a month for the Americans to finally liberate his Japanese POW camp under a shower of bombs.
The Australians’ location was unknown at the time to their allies, who mistook them for the enemy.
“All these bamboo huts we were in went up in smoke and flames,” Vince tells.
The prisoners fled the open gates of the camp.
A malnourished and weak Vince luckily evaded the second atomic bomb on Japan in the final days of World War Two.
He had a few more close shaves on the way home.
“I had a pretty rough trip up the China coast when we were escaping and was bombed there a couple of times – but nothing hit,” Vince remembers.
“We were also coming through the Philippines on a hospital ship from Nagasaki where the Japanese sank some boats, too.”
Vince went missing in action for six months.
Lethbridge’s Scanlon family didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.
He somehow found his way to an army hospital in Melbourne.
“I wanted to come home fit and I was hobbling about with a walking stick,” Vince admits.
“I didn’t want the family to come down and see me like that.”
As a prisoner, Vince was first put to work on the infamous Burma-Thailand railway line before being shipped off to the coalmines under the sea off Japan.
The prisoners worked in a tunnel and were brought up to surface by a cable train.
“If you said you worked underneath the sea, people think you’re putting it over them,” Vince grins.
He became ill from the experience and his legs eventually gave out.
The scars ran deep.
Vince described some of the guards as “mongrels”.
“But now I forgive all that,” Vince says.
“It’s now a different generation – you can’t take it out on them.”