Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Son of Thomas Dalton Wood and Catherine Robina Wood

Died while Prisoner of War

Bob Wood was a son of Thomas and Catherine, and was born at Fremantle in 1912. When he enlisted in the Second Australian Imperial Force in May 1940 he was a 27 year old single truck driver and was living in North Perth. Initially allocated to artillery, he was transferred to engineers and posted as a cook to 2/6th Field Park Company. In May 1941 his unit embarked for Singapore, disembarking there on 9 June.

A field park company provided the workshop and stores elements for the engineers of an Australian division, in the case of the 2/6th Field Park Company, the 8th Division, which formed the core of the Australian troops sent to Malaya and Singapore as part of the Allied defences. His unit was forward deployed into Malaya to support the divisional engineers. In November Bob was hospitalised and reported as seriously ill, with a case of cerebro-spinal meningitis. This diagnosis was followed by concerns about his mental health, but by mid-January 1942 he had been discharged back to his unit.

Along with all prisoners of the Japanese captured at Singapore, Bob was officially posted as missing on 16 February 1942.

In July 1942, Bob was among the 1,494 Allied POWs that made up B Force, a group of 8th Division troops which was transported to Sandakan on the eastern coast of Japanese-occupied North Borneo on the tramp steamer Ubi Maru, and arrived at Sandakan on 18 July. Over 2,000 Allied POWs were held at Sandakan camp, and they were employed in airfield construction. Bob was officially reported as held as a POW on Borneo in April 1943. On this day in 1944, Bob Wood died of malaria while in Japanese captivity at the Sandakan camp, aged 32. 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, Bob’s grave is known and marked with his name and details.