WWII commando survived brutality of captivity

Australia has lost one of its last surviving World War II special forces operators with the death of Captain Alfred James (Jim) Ellwood.

Captain Alfred James (Jim) Ellwood died just a fortnight before his 100th birthday.

OBITUARY
Captain Jim Ellwood
World War II veteran. Born Casterton, Victoria, December 16, 1921; died Melbourne, November 27, aged 99.

Australia has lost one of its last surviving World War II special forces operators with the death of Captain Alfred James (Jim) Ellwood, just a fortnight before his 100th birthday.

Ellwood, who also survived two years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese in East Timor, was born in Casterton, Victoria on December 16, 1921, the eldest of five children of World War I Flanders veteran Alf Ellwood and his wife Alma.

The family lived on a soldier-settler block at the tiny settlement of Paschendale, east of Casterton, named after the infamous Western Front battlefield.

After attending the local bush primary school Ellwood enrolled at Hamilton High School in western Victoria, where he completed the leaving certificate. He was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship before he took up a job with the Army Finance Department in Melbourne, where he met his future wife, Mollie.

After enlisting in December 1941, just five days before his 20th birthday, he was posted to Darwin where he trained as a signaller/ciph­er operator.

He then joined the Commandos and was deployed to East Timor with the 2/4th Independent Company, attached to the legendary Sparrow Force headquarters.

After the evacuation of Sparrow Force, he stayed behind as an operator with the 2/4th, which became known as Lancer Force. Lancer operated behind enemy lines between September 1942 and January 1943, and when the force was evacuated on January 9 Ellwood volunteered to remain with the “stay behind party”, known as S Force.

After he returned to Australia on board the US submarine USS Gudgeon in February 1943, exhausted and sick with malaria, Ellwood was recruited to the top-secret Z Special Unit to train for a covert mission back to Timor.

Aged 21, he was redeployed to East Timor alone in July 1943, and after three months operating alongside Timorese and Portuguese guerrilla fighters in the rugged mountains he was taken prisoner on September 29, 1943.

Transferred to Dili jail, he suffered the brutal interrogation methods of the feared Japanese Kempeitai (military police). He spent months shackled, starved and in solitary confinement with only maggots for company as the interrogators bashed and tortured him while leaving his malaria, wet beri-beri and dysentery untreated.

He survived in captivity for two years before he was recovered to Singapore via Bali in October 1945, six weeks after Japan had surrendered.

Ellwood didn’t carry a grudge against the Japanese people but he was blunt in his views about the Japanese military. During a Japanese government-sponsored visit by five Australian ex-prisoners of war to Japan in 2011, the then 90-year-old Ellwood described how he and other POWs were treated.

“I was bound up like a turkey, handcuffs on the wrists, wires on the upper arms, and hobbles and ropes in front and back,” he said.

“I was blindfolded most of the time. The only toilet facility was a wooden barrel. That soon became filled, overflowed, flyblown, maggoty, and the maggots were crawling all over the floor and all over my body when I was resting.”

Ellwood praised the modern-day Japanese people for renouncing war, which he described as “a failure of intelligence, a failure of diplomacy, a failure of politics and a failure of leadership”.

He said: “Of course, it’s the old people who run it who are the leaders, the politicians and the diplomats who send the young people to war and destroy a lot of lives.”

After the war Ellwood graduated in law from the University of Melbourne and launched a long and distinguished legal career in Warrnambool and Melbourne, where he joined the State Bank before becoming chairman of the Land Valuations Board and a royal commissioner.

He and Mollie reared five sons: Damian, Simon, Stephen, Nicholas and Christopher. Ellwood lost his beloved Mollie in 1997 before marrying Loretta in 2015. The couple had known each other at the State Bank and Loretta had lost her first husband to cancer.

Ellwood was an avid reader and jazz music fan, and a proud and dedicated member of many ex-service organisations including the RSL and Legacy.

He was the last of the 2/4th Independent Company veterans and the second last Z Special Unit operative to have served on combat operations during World War II. Only Allan Russell remains.