Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Len Burgess was a son of Thomas and Louisa, and was born in Birmingham, England in 1913. When he enlisted in the Second Australian Imperial Force at Singleton, New South Wales, in June 1940 he was single and working as a labourer in nearby Newcastle. After initial training at Newcastle and Liverpool, Len was posted to the 2/10th Field Ambulance. A field ambulance was a front line medical unit that usually supported an infantry brigade, and was allocated to the 8th Division. Len was trained as a nursing orderly, and his unit embarked in Sydney for Singapore on 29 July 1941, and disembarked at their destination on 15 August. The 2/10th Field Ambulance supported operations against the Japanese in Malaya from mid-December 1941, and then as the Allied forces withdrew down the Malayan Peninsula and crossed to Singapore before surrendering on 16 February 1942. Len was officially posted as missing, along with all the other prisoners of war, and officially reported as being a prisoner of war in Borneo in March 1943.    

On this day in 1944, Len Burgess died of malaria while in Japanese captivity at the Sandakan camp, aged 34. He was initially buried near the camp, but after the war the Australian Army Graves Service considered the area to be too prone to flooding for a permanent cemetery, so disinterred all the remains and reinterred them at Labuan War Cemetery. Unlike many of the dead at Labuan, Len’s grave is known and marked with his name and details.