The Last Post Ceremony commemorating the service of (VX35128) Gunner John Adam Gray, 4 Anti Tank Regiment RAA, Second World War

The Last Post Ceremony is presented in the Commemorative area of the Australian War Memorial every day. The ceremony commemorates more than 102,000 Australians who have given their lives in war and other operations and whose names are recorded on the Roll of Honour. At each ceremony the story behind one of the names on the Roll of Honour is told. Hosted by Troy Clayton, the story for this day was on (VX35128) Gunner John Adam Gray, 4 Anti Tank Regiment RAA, Second World War.

VX35128 Gunner John Adam Gray, 4th Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery
DOD 9 January 1944
Photograph: P04846.005 (man standing in the middle is Gray)

Story delivered 9 September 2013

Today, we remember and pay tribute to Gunner John Adam Gray.

Jack Gray was born in Nurmurka, Victoria on 4 October 1917, and worked on the family farm. He also served in the militia with a number of other young men from the district in the troop of the 20th Light Horse Regiment that was based in Nurmurka. In early 1940 a group of them, including Gray, decided that once the wheat crop was sown they would enlist in the 2nd Australian Imperial Force. This they did, travelling as a group to Melbourne and enlisting on 28 June 1940. Known as the "Nurmurka Mob", they made a splash in the press and served for recruitment promotion for a time.

The Nurmurka Mob opted to volunteer together to go into the newly-formed 4th Anti-Tank Regiment, and went into training at Puckapunyal. When the 13th Battery of the regiment was sent to Malaya, Gray remained with the rest of the regiment and continued training in Australia. He would depart for Singapore on the HMAT Zealandia, arriving on 9 June 1941 and joining the bulk of the 8th Division there.

By December 1941 the prospect of Japanese forces being in a position to attack Singapore was coming ever closer. On 30 December some of the anti-tankers took their first shots of the war at 16 Japanese bombers that attacked the Kluang aerodrome in southern Malaya. By mid-January Japanese infantry were making serious inroads into Malaya. Guns from the 4th Anti-Tank Regiment encountered their first Japanese tanks, but although they were used to good effect to disable or blow up a number of tanks, the onslaught was too heavy and the Australian forces were slowly pushed back towards Singapore.

The 4th Anti-Tank Regiment, and Jack Gray, continued to be integral to the withdrawal to Singapore Island, but on 15 February 1942 Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, the British Commander in Singapore, was forced to surrender to the Japanese. Gray and his comrades were now prisoners of the Japanese in the Selarang Barracks, Changi.

Gray was assigned to D Force, a workforce of 2,242 prisoners selected by the Japanese to work at the Thai end of the railway, where they built the Pack of Card Bridge, and then went on to work on the infamous Hellfire Pass. Underfed, overworked and under brutal treatment, the men suffered from malaria, beriberi, dysentery, cholera and tropical ulcers. Hundreds died.

Jack Gray was one who survived to see Hellfire Pass completed, but not for long. On 9 January 1944 he succumbed to disease, becoming one of the 12,399 Allied prisoners who worked on the railway to die in captivity. Jack Gray was 26 years old.

His family in Australia had heard nothing of Gray since the fall of Singapore. They would not know he had died until 20 months after he had passed away. After the war his body was reinterred in Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, Thailand, with thousands of other men who died in the making of the Thai-Burma Railway.

His name is listed on the Roll of Honour on my left, along with more than 40,000 others from the Second World War and his photograph is displayed today beside the Pool of Reflection.

This is but one of the many stories of courage and sacrifice told here at the Australian War Memorial. We now remember Gunner John Adam Gray, and all of those Australians who have given their lives in the service of our nation.