This is a Reblog from a column by Mike Carlton:
. . . . . A great Australian died last Sunday. I want to finish this column by telling you about him.
Arthur “Blood” Bancroft was a strapping 19-year-old when he joined the navy in 1940. He left a good job with a bank in Perth, farewelled his girlfriend Mirla Wilkinson and went off to war because it was the right thing to do. His shipmates gave him the nickname for his shock of flaming red hair.
Blood was an ammunition loader in the cruiser HMAS Perth when it was sunk by the Japanese off West Java in March 1942. Half the crew were lost but he survived, to endure the atrocities of the Burma-Siam Railway.
In 1944 he and hundreds of Australian prisoners were packed off to Japan in a hell ship named the Rakuyo Maru, only to be torpedoed by an American submarine in the South China Sea. For six days Blood and a handful of mates floated on a makeshift raft in a sea strewn with corpses and wreckage.
Then came the miracle. Another US submarine appeared out of a rain squall and they were rescued. Burnt by the sun, near naked and starving, covered in stinking fuel oil, weighing perhaps 50 kilograms, Blood struggled to attention on the sub’s foredeck and saluted her captain with proper naval courtesy.
“Ordinary Seaman Arthur Bancroft, Royal Australian Navy. Request permission to come aboard, sir!” he said.
With his war over, Blood returned to Perth, married Mirla and raised a happy family. Every year on the anniversary of his rescue, he would phone the sub’s executive officer in the States, John Bennett, to chat over old times.
He was 91 when he died peacefully in his sleep. Deeply mourned by all who knew him.
smhcarlton@gmail.com
Twitter: @MikeCarlton01
Clarification: The original version of this story said John McGuigan and John Atkinson were from the global law firm Baker and McKenzie. In fact they left in 1998.
AuntyUta 