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ABLE SEAMAN ERIC BOND W942 RANR

Eric Bond was born in Williamstown Victoria on the 22nd of February 1915, the third child of Alexander and Agnes Bond.  His parents would separate when Eric was about two years old. His older brother Alexander Bond served in the RAN as a Leading Stoker, mainly on corvettes.

 Eric was called up for service in the RANR on the 2nd of September 1939 and rated as an Able Seaman, indicating that he had been a member of the RANR pre-war. His nickname, like many men called Bond, was “Chesty” after the famous brand of singlets. On joining he was immediately appointed to an examination vessel, which were patrol vessels inspecting ships entering and leaving Port Phillip Bay.  In February 1940, Eric married Grace Florence Zanoni in Geelong, their daughter Lorraine would be born later that year.

Eric would have a series of short postings to minesweepers until the 20th of January 1942 when he joined the Light Cruiser HMAS Perth in Sydney. Perth would sail from Sydney on the 26th of January and that would be the last time Eric would see Grace and baby Lorraine. Perth would sail via Western Australia before heading north to become part of the doomed ABDA Force defending the Dutch East Indies.

HMAS Perth was sunk in the Battle of Sunda Strait fighting alongside the USS Houston. Of the 681 men in Perth, only 328 survived the sinking of whom106 including Eric would die as POWs.

Those who survived did so in a myriad of ways.  Some swum to shore, others were picked up by Japanese ships and others survived in boats and rafts from the Perth and Japanese ships sunk in the battle.  Eventually most of the Perth men, along with survivors of Houston were housed in POW Camps on Java.  In the middle of 1942, they were shipped to Changi in Singapore and very soon after to Thailand and Burma to work on the infamous Burma Railway. Eric would survive the Burma Railway and in late 1944 he was shipped to Japan to work in the coal mines on the Japanese ship the Awa Maru.  Enroute the ship narrowly missed being torpedoed and it would not be until the 15th of January that he arrived at the Fukuoka Internment Camp.

The men were immediately put to work below ground in freezing conditions on brutal 12 hour shifts.  A few days later, Eric was punished by the guards for some trivial offense. Eric, dreadfully malnourished after years of slave labour and poor food was made to stand for hours at attention in the snow. He collapsed and passed away on the 22nd of January 1945.    His body was initially buried at Fukuoka, and later reinterred in the Yokohama Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery.

It would be many months before Grace knew of her husband’s fate. In 1949, she remarried, to Henry Kennedy a veteran of the 2nd AIF.

References/Sources:

NAA: A6770, BOND E

Cruiser, Mike Carlton, William Heinemann 2010.

CWGC – Stories - Able Seaman Eric Bond, W942, Royal Australian Naval Reserve, H.M.A.S. Perth | CWGC