Anzac hero finally gets recognition

He was the young Ballarat prisoner of war who insisted he die on his feet.Alex Bell, 29, was a soldier for only three weeks before he was caught up in the Japanese sweep of the Malay Peninsular to Singapore.Bell was a sapper in the Australian Army.Veteran Australian journalist Alan Ramsey said the young man had been working as a metallurgist in Malaya when Japanese forces landed, following Tokyo’s attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941.The former doyen of the Canberra press gallery spent hours trawling through files at the Australian War Memorial and wrote passionately about Bell in a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2003.“Bell’s ‘crime’ had been a simple one,” Ramsey wrote.“He attempted escape from one of the Japanese POW work camps established to build the 420 kilometres of the infamous Thai-Burma railway from May 1942 to November 1943. There were three in the escape attempt, all Australians.”Ramsey said their goal was to walk to India. After 80 kilometres one of the party was recaptured and later shot. A further 160 kilometres on, Bell and a mate clashed with a native patrol. The mate was killed and Bell was badly wounded.“And the day he died at the end of that 13 months Alex Bell would shake hands with the Japanese officer of the firing squad about to kill him. “He thanked the officer for unexplained ‘courtesies and privileges’. “Although wounded, Bell declined to kneel or sit, his hands bound. “He would die on his feet ... and he asked that his commanding officer, Brigadier Arthur Leslie Varley, an Inverell stock and station agent with ‘keen blue eyes and a sparse frame’, be told of his decision. Then they shot him.”Ramsey said the details of Bell’s execution were recorded in Varley’s diary, part of official war history, along with service records and files at the Australian War Memorial.Ramsey, with 56 years’ of reporting experience under his belt, was obviously moved by what he read.“The service records of the dead leave you catching you breath,” he wrote. “So can the prose and detail of the war histories.”Ramsey wrote of 10 of the 27 “known” cases, officially recorded, of Australian servicemen executed during World War?II for abortive escape attempts from the Japanese.“It is to military authorities’ everlasting shame that Australia has always refused to acknowledge the valour of such incidents,” Ramsey said eight years ago. Now, at last, at least part of that shame has been wiped away.The Commendation for Gallantry will be awarded to the family member of Alex Bell in possession of his WW II medals.