Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Philip Ronald Ranger was a resident in the Ceduna district from his arrival in 1923 to when he died in the Ceduna Hospital in 1949. His residency was only broken by his five and a quarter years of army service with the 8th Australian Division Salvage Unit 2/AIF. For three and a half years of this service Ron was a prisoner of war of the Japanese. The majority of his prisoner time was spent inside the PoW camp and gaol at Changi, Singapore.
Ron Westrup was born in Kent, England in 1907. He must had rather a tough childhood because at the age of just 16 he chose to emigrate to Australia. He arrived in Adelaide on the SS Balranald, a ship that was carrying some 49 “Barwell Boys”. This was an ill-conceived scheme whereby the SA government sponsored English boys to come and work on SA farms. This was an effort to replace the horrendous losses of young Australian farm labourers during the Great War. The scheme folded after two years. No evidence has been found that shows that Ron Westrup was a “Barwell Boy” but he was the right age and on a ship carrying them to SA. It wasn’t long before the young lad Ron Westrup was in the Ceduna district working as a farm hand. It is known he worked on farms in the Goode and Denial Bay districts. His main work was with Herman and Pearl Kloeden both on their land and in Ceduna itself when they shifted in to town. From press reports locally, he was widely liked.
Ten months after the outbreak of war in Europe, Ron Westrup now in his early 30s and probably in a surge of patriotic enthusiasm no doubt enhanced by the defeat of the British army at Dunkirk in June 1940 and the air battles now going on over his county of birth, Kent, travelled to Adelaide with 19 other men from the Ceduna area. They included L R Beattie and N B Yendall. There they undertook medicals for possible enlistment into the 2/AIF. Ron was passed medically “class 1” and earmarked as an infantry soldier on 29th June 1940. He signed into the army as a 2/IF soldier on 10th July 1940. It was noted on his papers following the death of his father in England, his brother Richard who also lived in England, was his next-of-kin.

Now in the army, Ron underwent the rather rough and ready initial training firstly at the Regimental Reception Depot then a couple of weeks later at the No. 3 Infantry Training Detachment both based at a rapidly developing army camp at Wayville Showgrounds, Adelaide. During the next couple of months he underwent fairly rigorous infantry training but suffered from a couple of illnesses which saw him hospitalised twice for a total of some six weeks. He transferred from infantry training to the 8th Division Salvage Unit on 4th December 1940.
It was this unit where Ron was to serve Australia at war. However the unit was first sent to Alice Springs at the end of April 1941 to work as labour troops. Their task was to unload trains coming up from Adelaide then load those goods onto army trucks which would carry everything further up to Larrimah some 550 kilometres south of Darwin. There was no railway line between these two towns in 1941. The unit also helped keep the dirt road between these towns open. They worked in Alice Springs until mid July 1941. Upon returning to Adelaide, they were given a week’s leave then it was off overseas, this time to Singapore where they arrived in mid September 1941.
Ron Westrup worked with his unit as a support soldier for the six Australian combat battalions from then until the whole allied force was captured by the Japanese on 15th February 1942. During the Japanese invasion of Malaya from 8th December 1941, Ron and his unit were working loading and unloading ammunition and other supplies for the combat battalions. They worked under threat of Japanese bombing in Johore Bahru, Malacca, Mersing and Kluang all in Malaya, and right at the end, in Singapore. He saw a lot of front line action when the Salvage Unit was thrown in against the invading Japanese troops in Singapore in the second week of February 1942. He survived all this despite being bombed and strafed by Japanese planes, shelled by their artillery and mortars, and shot at by their soldiers.
He was taken prisoner of war along with tens of thousands of other allied troops when Singapore surrendered. Ron was held primarily in Changi PoW camp and gaol from 16th February 1942 until the prisoners were released at the end of August 1945. He along with all those PoWs were treated terribly by the Japanese for all this time. They were beaten, humiliated, semi starved and worked to the bone around Singapore loading ships, clearing wreckage and later in the war, building underground weapons emplacements for the Japanese army. He along with several thousand other PoWs, worked on building the first Changi airstrip, now the ultra-modern Changi International Airport, Singapore. He would have lost half his body weight over this time and suffered diseases such as malaria, dysentery and beriberi. He was exhibiting all the signs of mental stress when he was released.
Ron came home on the Dutch hospital ship Oranje in October 1945. He returned home to Ceduna a week or two after arrival in Adelaide. In the months that followed, he made several visits to Adelaide to Daws Road hospital for a range of treatments for all his medical issues. Although his physical well being improved, his mental state regressed. He exhibited all the signs of PTSD: sweats and shaking, retreating within himself, lethargy and inability to do much for himself. The Kloeden family members from Ceduna worked very hard to try to help Ron. Although they and the Ceduna community did what they could, Ron’s mental state had been shattered beyond recovery. He took to drinking alcohol heavily. He became even more a physical and mental wreck.
Although so much help was given to him by many people in and around Ceduna, Ron inevitably went the way of so many tortured and torn souls, victims of the inhumanity meted out upon then for three and a half years by the utterly merciless Japanese soldiers.
Phillip Ronald Ranger Westrup slipped away on 16th October 1949 in the Murat Bay hospital. He was just 42 years old. He was buried in the Ceduna cemetery.
RIP Ron. You should never be forgotten.
Tony Wege (Nuriootpa) and Sue Trewartha and Erica Bodger (Ceduna)
6th August 2015
Included with permission of the author, Anthony L. Wege