Flag stitched from Japanese rags tells story of mateship; widow, nearly 106, plans bequest to War Memorial

As the war sputtered to an end in the days after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American bombers flew unchallenged overhead and Japanese officers were observed whispering to each other, some tearful. One of the Australian POWs, gunner Tich Hudson of Box Hill, Victoria, worked with scissors and an ancient sewing machine to carve red and white strips from the dismembered Japanese flag, forming the Union Jack. He cut stars for the Southern Cross and the Federation Star, used blue bordering material from Japanese mosquito nets for the base, and cord from a parachute for a halyard. When the flag was finished, all 68 Australian POWs in the camp signed it, and it was hauled up the pole where the Japanese flag had flown, believed to be the first Allied flag raised in a liberated POW camp in Asia.

The flag came into the hands of Private Alan James “Jimmy” Donaldson, a member of the Australian 8th Division who had fought against Japanese forces storming the shores of Singapore in February 1942. After the British surrender, Jim spent three months in Changi Prison and then worked on the infamous Thai-Burma Railway on starvation rations, where dozens of his close mates died from starvation, malaria, cholera and Japanese brutality. He made a break for it with an American POW, Otto Carl Schwarz, intending to fight with Chinese guerillas in Malaya. They travelled 480 kilometres through the jungle before being recaptured. Their Japanese captors bound their wrists with wire, looped the wire around a tree, and left them for three blistering hot days and nights without food or water. Fellow POWs risked their lives to crawl out to give them water-soaked handkerchiefs, canteens, and finally hard biscuits and small portions of rice saved from their own rations.

By the war's end, Jim was in a POW camp in Saigon with 68 Australians, 200 Americans and a small number of other Allied POWs judged too sick to be sent to the slave labour camps in Japan. When news of liberation came, the Japanese flag was torn down and Tich Hudson set to work. Weeks later the men were heading home.

Hazel, then Hazel Pryor, had come down from Tamworth to meet the troopship Highland Chieftain when it pulled into Sydney Harbour on October 11, 1945. The man she farewelled five years earlier had been a robust son of the Southern Cross; the ghostly scarecrow coming down the gangplank was no more than 38 kilograms, about half his former weight. “I gave him a cuddle,” she said, “and never really let him go after that.” Jim showed her the flag and told its story. They married within a year, and Jim served as a police sergeant in Cootamundra. Through the decades the flag was brought out for special occasions and regular reunions of the signatories, men Jim described as “closer to me than brothers”. All those men have since died; Jim was one of the last, in 2009. He left the flag to Hazel, asking that it be bequeathed to the Australian War Memorial.

Australian War Memorial director Matt Anderson said: "The Australian War Memorial would be honoured to receive the Australian National Flag into our collection, should that be Hazel's wish. Here it will tell the story of Jimmy and his mates, their resilience, mateship and courage, to generations to come. And we are more than happy to wait a decade or longer." Hazel, who reports "I still feel strong," confirmed: "And that is what I will do, when my time comes."