Every night when Les Drew came home, he would turn the corner and look at the four flagpoles in the garden, one for three of his brothers and his father who were away at war, The Canberra Times reports.
A flag at the top of a pole meant one of them had returned alive. The flag for Ken was never raised.
The three brothers and the father had all been in the Salvation Army. Ken transferred his musical skills from a Salvation Army band to the battalion band in New Guinea.
But he was captured by the Japanese. He became one of the 1054 people – mostly Australian – who drowned when the Japanese prisoner-of-war ship transporting them was torpedoed mistakenly by an American submarine in 1941.
The full report is here.
