The cloak-and-dagger WWII hero who fought behind enemy lines

He survived two daring escapes from POW camps but Australian officer Jock McLaren remained determined to fight the Japanese behind enemy lines for two more years.

Australian officer Jock McLaren.

After twice escaping Japanese POW camps, witnessing atrocities, and cheating death several times, it would be understandable if Jock McLaren wanted only to return to Australian soil.

Instead, after fleeing first Changi and then Sandakan, and paddling a dugout canoe across open sea to escape, the Scottish-born Queenslander fought on for two years behind enemy lines with American-led Filipino guerillas.

McLaren is the subject of the 96th episode of the In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters, available today.

The cloak-and-dagger army officer’s story is told in a new book called Bastard Behind the Lines, by Sydney author Tom Gilling.

In the Philippines, McLaren helmed a small but heavily armed whaleboat, which he sailed into Japanese-held harbours to take on the enemy head on.

“He put guns on the front and back of it and he christened it the Bastard,” Tom says.

Jock McLaren (left) helmed a whaleboat called the Bastard and fought the Japanese behind enemy lines in World War II.

Jock wanted it to be even more heavily armed, but was persuaded that adding a mortar as he hoped would “blow the back off the boat”.

“It was a very dangerous vessel, and Jock sailed it around the coast of Mindanao, disrupting Japanese supplies, because they had a lot of outposts around the coast, and shooting up installations where he got the chance, then slipping away as quickly as he could before the Japanese came after him.”

Captain Jock McLaren (centre) in October 1945 on Berhala Island at Sandakan, from where he had earlier eascaped a POW camp. Picture: Australian War Memorial.

Once, while desperately ill on Mindanao, McLaren, a vet before the war, cut out his own appendix without anaesthetic using a razor and two dessert spoons as retractors.

“Jock knew that if he couldn’t get that appendix removed then he was a dead man,” Tom says.

“So he got some shelter from a local Moro chieftain and his wife, who allowed Jock to stay in their hut. They made an operating table out of floorboards.

“And Jock conducted the operation himself.”

One account of the incident said McLaren held a gun to the head of a terrified Filipino medical student to force him to assist, saying “You’ll stand by me and help me, or I’ll blow your bloody head off!”

McLaren even wrote out and signed his own death certificate first, so the student couldn’t be held responsible to absolve the student if anything went wrong.

New book Bastard Behind the Lines

Tom Gilling, author of Bastard Behind the Lines. Picture: Ciaran Gilling

While McLaren survived the war, he never recovered from the torment of his war experiences and hatred towards the Japanese.

“From Singapore onwards, he’d seen atrocities committed by the Japanese against civilians, but he’d also seen the appalling conditions that he and other prisoners of war had had to endure,” Tom says.

“And I think the last straw would have been when he realised all those men he’d left behind at Sandakan had died.”

Listen to the interview with author Tom Gilling about the life of Jock McLaren in the In Black and White podcast on iTunes, Spotify or web.

See In Black & White in the Herald Sun newspaper Monday to Friday for more stories and photos from Victoria’s past.