A Medical Officer In Two World Wars
In 1914 Charles Huxtable sat for his final medical exams and volunteered to serve as Medical Officer in the British Army. He was posted to the Lancashire Fusiliers and decorated twice for bravery before joining the AIF in 1918. In World War II Dr Huxtable again volunteered. Stationed in Singapore he witnessed the fall of the island to the Japanese and spent the next three and a half years as a prisoner of war.
This is Charles Huxtable's account of his experiences in both World Wars. The diaries Dr Huxtable kept while a prisoner of the Japanese give an account of day-to-day life and conditions in tragically underequipped hospitals. He writes of camp concerts, of lectures and seminars on subjects ranging from medical procedures to English literature and polo; of the fine example set the prisoners by their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel "Black Jack" Galleghan; of the moral malaise he saw as contributing to Britain and Australia's fall from world leadership and to the loss of Singapore.
Underlying all this is a sense of hunger and privation. The story of the Burma Railway unfolds at the pace at which information came to hand and is especially moving to contemporary readers who know what the diarist then did not. When the few survivors of the construction gangs arrived back in Singapore it was the job of Huxtable and other doctors to treat them as well as the conditions allowed. After World War II Charles Huxtable worked with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and in the Highlands of New Guinea. He died in 1980, aged 88.
