WAR stories are not my bag.
I've not read a lot of them - too much blood and guts for my liking.
- Dangerous Days: A Digger's Great Escape, by Ernest Brough. Harper Collins, rrp $35
Oddly, while Ernest Brough saw plenty of blood and guts as a crack-shot soldier at Tobruk, El Alamein and also as a war prisoner in Italy then Austria, there's little of it in this account.
His story - from his time as a 19-year-old butcher in Drouin signing up for World War II duty, through to his incredible escape along with two other men from a POW camp in Austria and eventual flight to freedom - makes gripping reading.
The men crawl under camp-edge wire, hide under piles of leaves, swim freezing rivers at night, hide out in barns and then take up with a band of brutal Partisans for protection, before they make it to the north of Bosnia and their rescue night flight-out.
Yet even at this point rescue looks dashed when the Allied plane overshoots the runway and gets bogged in a swamp. The Yank captain threatens to burn it, as was the practice when stuck in enemy territory, but the men threaten to shoot him if he does.
Ern, now 89 and living in Geelong, did not write this book. Harper Collins editor Kim Swivel compiled it from interviews with him.
This is a powerful perspective on war, demonstrating great ingenuity, pride, resilience and compassion.
