Serving as a private soldier, fighting on the streets in the brief and bloody 17-day battle for Singapore (which ended in the ignominious surrender of the Island – the 'fortress that never was'), he was wounded in action and taken Prisoner of War on the 15 February 1942. He spent 3 years and 8 months as a Japanese Prisoner of War, the majority of this on the infamous "railway of death" in Thailand. Saved from virtually certain death by the timely dropping of the Atom Bomb on Japan, which led to the almost immediate unconditional surrender of the Japanese. In August 1945 he was flown to a hospital in Rangoon, Burma weighing just over 6 stone (84lbs).