Jungle Soldier: The True Story of Freddy Spencer Chapman

I’m extremely pleased to see that someone has got around to doing a biography of Freddy Spencer Chapman (Jungle Soldier: The True Story of Freddy Spencer Chapman – Brian Moynahan), the British war hero who fought behind the lines against the Japanese in Malaya and also found time to collect seeds for Kew Gardens!

I first came across Spencer Chapman over a decade ago when I stayed for a few days on the rather pleasant island resort of Pangkor Laut just off Malaysia’s western coast. Pangkor Laut was where Spencer Chapman spent 36 hours during his dramatic escape by submarine from Emerald Bay in May 1945. Emerald Bay is part of the resort – a beautiful natural harbour with primevil forest on both sides and a nice beach. There’s a small monuiment to Spencer Chapman on the beach. He swam out to the sub and escaped the Japanese hunting him. The resort also has a bar, Chapman’s Bar, obviously named after him where I ordered a few beers and a sandwich in far more comfort than Freddy must have enjoyed.

Anyway, looking forward to read the book – here’s the publisher’s blurb

“Brought up in a rural vicarage surrounded by fells, falcons and ferrets, Freddy Spencer Chapman acquired a deep love of nature and became ‘fascinated by danger’ during childhood. 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. Setting out from Kuala Lumpur on 7 January 1942 on a mission to sabotage Japanese supply lines, he became a veritable one-man army. The Japanese deployed 2,000 men to search for what they believed was a squad of 200 Australian guerrillas. Following Japan’s invasion of Malaya and the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Chapman found himself stranded. Under these most desperate of circumstances, the man dubbed the ‘the jungle Lawrence’ by Field Marshal Wavell showed his bloody-minded talent for survival. 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. Chapman returned to Malaya by parachute in August to take the Japanese surrender at Penang. Jungle Soldier is a unique and remarkable account of superhuman bravery and resourcefulness in adversity.”