Brought up in a rural vicarage, Freddy Spencer Chapman acquired a deep love of nature and a craving for the thrill of danger. Thirty years later, as an SOE-trained guerrilla soldier of exceptional ability and courage, the orphan boy would prove to be one of the British army's deadliest agents.
In 1941 Chapman was dispatched to Singapore to train British guerrillas for the coming war with Japan.
Relentlessly hunted by the Japanese army, he was afflicted by typhus, scabies, pneumonia, blackwater fever, cerebral malaria, dengue fever and ulcers before finally being rescued and evacuated to Ceylon on 13 May 1945.
