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In February 1942, with Singapore fallen and the Japanese forces sweeping towards what is now Indonesia, new sub-lieutenant Gavin Campbell was aboard the light cruiser HMAS Perth as it arrived at the Tanjung Priok wharf in Jakarta. Between bombing raids by Japanese fighters, Gavin had a few minutes to lift a glass with senior officers to mark his 21st birthday. Considering what happened next, it was a miracle he was to survive to see another 73 of them.

By this stage of WWII the Japanese had taken 130,000 Commonwealth prisoners, including 18,000 Australians, Darwin and Broome had been bombed and, as PM Curtin declared, the "Battle for Australia" had begun. There was no certainty about that outcome. As a matter of political expediency an ad hoc Allied fleet – including Perth – was pitted against a superior Japanese fleet off the north coast of Java on the last day of February. The battle began at 4 in the afternoon and a number of Allied vessels were soon sunk while others were damaged and withdrawn. At midnight on 1 March 1942, with Perth out of heavy ammunition and torpedoes but under continuous gunfire and torpedo attack, Captain Hector Waller decided the only course for their small force was to make a break for it and fight their way as best they could through to the Sunda Strait and into the Indian Ocean.

However, a torpedo hit as the cruiser started to steam on its new course, causing a reduction in speed. With his ship sinking after a second torpedo struck, Waller ordered "Abandon ship". A third rocked the vessel when most of the men were in the water, many of them injured.

Gavin Campbell meantime had been at his action station at one of the light machine guns on the upper deck. Now amongst the shower of machine gun fire and shrapnel he had just cocked his leg over the guard rail and was readying to go over the side when a fourth torpedo struck nearby. Airborne by the blast, it was not until he found himself swimming for a raft that he realised one leg had been fractured.

Of the 681 men on board the out-ranged Australian cruiser on that frightful night 353 men went down with the ship or, amid the thick fuel oil and crushing blows delivered by torpedo explosions, lost their struggle to stay afloat.

At daylight on a crowded raft, seaman Bob Collins retrieved some timber from floating packing cases and, having cut a leg off Gavin's overall suit, splinted the break. Later in the morning they were pulled onto a commandeered Japanese lifeboat which had drifted off the sunken transport Sakua Maru. Once ashore fellow crew members equipped Gavin with make-shift crutches and with armpits blistered and bleeding, he remained with this group. After 21 days "on the run" with little food and water, many of the men still caked with black oil, some wounded, they received help from a Dutch doctor and nurse in a Javanese village. Next day they were given away by natives in exchange for the Japanese reward. Some 328 men from Perth had managed to gain the land, but all were captured.
 
After a period spent in a concentration camp in Java they were shipped in an old freighter to Singapore and then sent to nearby Changi Camp. Here Gavin's broken leg was examined by doctors at the hospital set up by the allied prisoners themselves. It was found that his leg had started to knit. Rather than re-set it the decision was made to let it continue to heal. With one leg an inch shorter than the other, he was was left with a life-long limp.

Over the next three-and-a-half years many prisoners died as slave labourers on the Burma–Siam Railway, others died in Japanese coal mines and some in the infamous Sandakan Camp; and all were kept on starvation rations and forced to work if fit enough to stand. At the end of the war 218 men from HMAS Perth had survived.

Over the course of three years, virtually all of it spent on the railway, Gavin Campbell survived the ravages of pellagra and the experience of almost drowning in his own body fluids from beriberi, both maladies the result of vitamin deficiencies in the starvation diet. Purely by chance while watching a passing work party he recognised his brother Ian among their number and managed to pass a whispered message: 'Tell Campbell his brother is here.'

Ian received the message and, although they were unable to wangle a united presence, from time to time they communicated. The resulting boost to the morale of the two men may be imagined. Happily, Gavin survived and so too did Ian.

After the war and his repatriation to Australia as not much more than a living skeleton, Gavin recovered and remained in the RAN. He resigned his commission in 1950 to join James Hardie and Company as a manager.

Now, Gavin Roy Campbell has died in Sydney at 94, Perth's last officer. The cruel irony is that, while he was working at Hardie's, he contracted the asbestosis that eventually killed him.

-Biography Courtesy of The Sydney Morning Harold