Four members of the 2/19th Battalion watch from their train as it pulls out of Lawson, en route from Bathurst, where the 22nd Brigade had been training, on 2 February 1941. (AWM P00102.041)
Australian War Memorial
The men were headed to Sydney for embarkation. (From left) Privates Graham Bartley, Harry Gibbons, Gilbert Mant and Bill ‘Shorty’ Bridge all managed to survive the war – statistically against the odds. Mant, who at 38 was older than most of his fellow infantrymen, was returned to Australia in late 1941 on medical grounds and discharged. He went back to Malaya as a war correspondent, reporting from the forward areas, and after his escape from Singapore in the last days of the siege he published one of the first books on the AIF in Malaya, Grim Glory. So strong was the demand from families and friends of men and women missing in Malaya and Singapore for information about the campaign that Grim Glory was reprinted several times during the war.