Military

Jessie Elizabeth Simons's first-hand account of her three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War — one of the Australian nurses captured in the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and held captive until the Japanese surrender in 1945. Simons was Tasmanian. Her account, published in 1954, is one of the earliest first-hand records by an Australian Army nurse of the prisoner of war experience in the Pacific — written while the events were relatively fresh and before the wave of later memoirs and histories shaped how this story was told.