This telegram was sent from Rangoon on 18 September 1945 to Fred Smith by Sergeant Ivan Smith to advise his father that he had been released from captivity and would soon be home with his family.

The object is one of a collection donated to Queensland Museum by Patricia Christensen, daughter of Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick Smith, Dental Officer, AIF, who was taken prisoner after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942. Ivan was imprisoned first in Changi prisoner-of-war camp and later transferred to Tha Sao prison hospital camp in Thailand.

Born on 21 July 1912 and raised in Ayr, North Queensland, where his father, Fred, was Queensland Government architect, Ivan Smith joined the AIF 32nd Dental Unit on 9 December 1941 at the age of twenty-nine years. On 13 December, Ivan marched in to Redbank Army Staging Camp and was immediately promoted to Acting Senior Sergeant. Less than a month after his embarkation for Singapore on 10 January 1942, Ivan was captured and reported missing when the British Australian and Indian Allied Forces surrendered to the Japanese after the Battle of Singapore on 16 February 1942.

Following the surrender,Senior Sergeant Smith was marched with several thousand Australian and British servicemen to Changi prisoner-of-war camp in eastern Singapore. Built as a civilian prison in 1936 by the British administration of the Straits Settlements, the name Changi Prison became synonymous with a collection of up to seven prisoner-of-war (POW) and internee camps, occupying an area of approximately twenty-five square kilometres and consisting of three major barracks – Selarang, Roberts and Kitchener – as well as other smaller camps.

On 11 March 1943, Ivan was one of five thousand men - of whom two thousand two hundred were Australians - selected to go to Thailand. This group, known as ‘D’ Force, was organised into three battalions which left Changi in March 1943 and were transported overland by train to work as forced labour on the Thai-Burma railway from Tarso (Tha Sao) about a hundred and thirty kilometres point of the railway’s construction. By 15 April 1942, authorities in Malaya had officially declared Senior Sergeant Smith, and, presumably, all members of ‘D’ forces to be, ‘Missing Believed Prisoners of War’.

As a dental technician, Sergeant Smith was classified as medical personnel and attached to Tha Sao base hospital as Resident Services Manager (RSM). Captain Finimore was Dental Officer and hospital adjutant, or registrar, under British Senior Medical Officer, Lieutenant Colonel William (Bill) Harvey. According to officers’ memoirs, Captain Finimore used a treadle dental drilling machine and also made a mixture of zinc oxide and eugenol (oil of cloves) for use for temporary fillings. Captain Finimore’s own diary records that initially, ‘work was fairly light with three hundred and fifty patients in three wards’. Later ‘the hospital grew rapidly … to two thousand seven hundred and seventy seven patients … one day there were three hundred patients out and five hundred and forty patients in’.

Tha Sao began as a camp hospital but grew to become the base hospital for about thirteen thousand prisoners-of-war. By November 1943, Tha Sao had around two thousand four hundred patients, one third of whom were Australian.

After the railway was completed in 1943, the prisoners still had almost two years to survive before their liberation. In early September 1945, Sergeant Smith and his fellow prisoners of war were ‘recovered’ from Thailand (then known as Siam). It’s likely, though not certain, that Ivan was among the same group as Captain Finimore, who were taken first to Rangoon (now, Yangon) and then to Bangkok on the first transition of their journey to Australia. He left Thailand on 6 October 1945 and from there was taken to Singapore. After returning to Brisbane, Sergeant Smith re-joined the AIF and remained in service until he reached the prescribed age for compulsory retirement on 21 July 1967. He died on 6 March 1974.