The story of the Malayan War is that of a gigantic bluff by the Japanese, and complacency on the part of the British. The Japanese General Yamashita was afraid that the British would discover the Jap numerical weakness and lack of supplies. Winston Churchill, on the other hand, said in 1940 that Singapore could only be taken after a seige by an army of at least 50,000 men, and he did not consider it possible that the Japanese would embark on such a mad enterprise. In only 70 days they in fact defeated a numerically superior British force and captured over 130,000 prisoners, over 80,000 of them in Singapore.

We know now that the Japanese maintained only a light hold on the country, having other commitments in Asia. Nevertheless their occupation for over three years shattered the status of the British, who had failed to defend their Empire against the invader. So much for what Grehan, my first contact in Penang in 1941, had called PWR - the Prestige of the White Races.

It was something of a consolation for me to receive letters from my cook-boy in Kuala Kangsar, Ah Chang, from the PWD Chief Clerk at Kuala Kangsar, and from others, when peace came to Malaya; but I did not return, though in August and October 1944 the War Office wrote telling me that the Public Works Service was to be re-formed, and inviting me to do so.

An unforeseen and distressing aspect of my return home was the bad news of several friends. Frank Duckworth's mother met me in town, and told me that he had been buried at sea. A neighbour in Priestfield, who had asked me to take some lengths of material for her brother in Singapore, was most upset to see me, so that I felt almost guilty in my escape. Worst of all, my fiancee's sister had been told that her young husband had been one of the boy soldiers taken prisoner in Singapore.

My old Headmaster, A. J. Phillips, chided me for not knowing that one of his sons had been evacuated to Sydney, because then I could have met him. He spoke to his son via the BBC some time later, in a nationwide radio contact programme, and they had nothing to say to each other. It was impossible to express filial or parental love publicly in that way.

Once the excitement of reunion with my family and fiancee had given way to sober review of my situation, I reported to the Central Register and to the War Office. The latter sent me a long typed foolscap application form for a commission in the Royal Engineers. I filled it in, but stuck at the item calling for support from an Officer of Field Rank. This was in 1942 - all the Officers, Field Rank or no, were on active service. I still have the form somewhere.

We decided to marry whilst I was waiting for my next move. Less than a month before the wedding date, the Colonial Service offered me a posting to the Gold Coast. I just didn't have the cash to kit myself out, and there was no certainty about compensation for Malaya. The offer had to be turned down, and the Colonial Service and I parted company. That has always been a matter of regret. We were both prepared to go, though the Gold Coast was unknown to us. We simply couldn't afford the plunge.

Eventually the Air Ministry invited me to London for interview, as a result of which I became Resident Engineer for the building of an airfield. The site was Attlebridge in Norfolk, where a small wartime fighter base had been built, and that was to be the nucleus for a four-squadron American Bomber airfield.

About six months had passed from my arrival home and the start of my job at Attlebridge. The delay in resuming meaningful work was demoralising, with friends on active service or doing vital war work. The wedding was a muted wartime event; my book was finished and accepted by publishers, otherwise my sole war effort during that period was firewatching at the Town Hall, in the company of the Town Clerk, Lionel Aubrey Venables, and old friends from the staff. So now at last there was a worthwhile job to be done, an engineering job with a challenge.

The Attlebridge airfield site was a shambles. Old farm buildings were in use as offices and stores, and a Clerk of Works had apparently been sent down to hold the station pending the arrival of a Resident Engineer. The small runways had been laid down in a great hurry in the first year of the war, and the only RAF personnel were one officer and a few police. A day or two before my arrival an American twin-engined bomber had made an emergency landing on the field, and the pilot and navigator were still there. One was an ex-professional baseball player, the other straight out of college.

My lodgings were in a small cottage just outside the airfield, and the overwhelming recollection of the place was the drudgery endured by the elderly housewife. The greater part of the land attached to the house had been requisitioned for the airfield, leaving only about seven acres for the smallholder. He had one cow, one sow, one horse, four young heifers being reared for sale, and a dog. Ernie Gray, the smallholder, still had to grow his quota of sugar beet, wheat and other crops, and still had to fill in the wartime forms as if he ran several hundred acres. He could not afford to pay for labour. For all that, and in spite of his well-chosen words when discussing the Government, Ernie was a happy, simple man.

His wife was not so happy. In addition to the occasional help needed by her husband, she had the house to look after. There was no electricity, no piped water supply, no sewerage, no gas. At night we sat in the light of a single reeking oil lamp on the kitchen table, and used a candle to light our way to bed. Ablutions required the use of a pitcher and bowl, with a jug of hot water from the huge kettle permanently on the farm range. Water came from a shallow well, and an outside privy was the only form of sanitation. A twin-burner oil stove helped with the cooking. In spite of this, Mrs. Gray provided spotless bedlinen on a luxurious feather bed, and overfed me mercilessly with homemade pies and puddings and bread.

The job took shape eventually, in spite of poor material deliveries, inadequate labour, an inexperienced contractor, and bad weather. The contractor's rather small-scale approach to the job was supplemented by a gang of Ministry of Transport concrete layers, and then by a US Engineers team, who brought in their heavy plant.

The airfield never closed to traffic, and we had some interesting experiences because of the visitors. One day a dozen or so Mitchell bombers touched down, and the Dutch and Javanese personnel settled in as temporary tenants of our partly-built accommodation. They were all experienced fliers, but they were to undergo retraining with different aircraft and new tactics. Two specialist RAF Officers arrived to serve their needs. At the end of their training they went on operations, then they left for permanent posting to another RAF station.

On another occasion a Lancaster bomber made a crash landing on three engines after a raid. The rear gunner was dead, and the aircraft was in a bad way. For weeks afterwards the crippled four-engined bomber sat on a dispersal point, being tended carefully by a civilian specialist party from the factory, until at last it was back in service, and flew off to its base station. Lancasters were valuable in those days.

By this time the Germans were bombing Norwich, ten miles away, with some regularity, and we were involved in air raid alerts. It was not until summer came that we noticed the build-up in the RAF replies, and then the American Eighth Air Force. First there were the RAF night raids, then the daytime raids by the American Flying Fortresses. The RAF Lancasters flew in a widely-spaced formation, but the Fortresses flew in close formation, a score or so at a time. At the outset the bombers flew without air cover, but by the end of the 1943 summer we saw fighter escort squadrons flying above them. Occasionally a single fighter would stay with a crippled aircraft as it made its lonely way back to base, the escort weaving and diving as if to encourage its charge to keep going. One weekend a Fortress crash landed at Attlebridge, just over the hedge a few yards from my lodgings.

A Mosquito light bomber crashed one Saturday afternoon, an engine on fire, and blazing fuel poured from one wing, to run into the side drain of the runway. Spectacular columns of flame shot into the air out of the drainage grids every forty yards along the runway. The tiny RAF detachment at the station was overcome, and all the civilians around dashed to the rescue with office fire extinguishers.

All these incidents contributed to the delay in getting the airfield into full operational shape, and there were times when aircraft were taxiing on concrete only a few days old. But gradually the big hangars, each covering three quarters of an acre and capable of housing two big bombers, and the huge petrol tanks, the technical buildings and the dispersed living sites, the 2000 yard runways and the perimeter track neared completion. The USAAF couldn't wait; they sent a flying school, complete with several Liberator bombers. The school used all the wrong buildings, and demanded special lighting and other fittings, which had to be removed when they left, and the bombers occupied areas where we were still working. The situation was near to chaos.

Sanity returned when a Lieutenant Colonel Allan C. House and a small advance party arrived to prepare for the arrival of the bomb group proper. In addition to handling the flying school problems, he organised the cleaning and decoration of hutments; his men cut up the felled trees around the site, thus supplementing the coal stocks; they made good damaged fittings, and got the station ready. There was still a small detachment of RAF, pending the official handing over, and they got on well with Col. House and his men.

The tempo increased, Col. House moved on, and at last the Bomb Group began to move in. The first batch of flying crew were very different from the neat and orderly professionals I had met in Australia. Pasty-faced youths with lambswool caps, jackets and boots appeared on site, dragging huge kitbags and parachute harness from a high six-wheeler truck. They were a motley crowd, tall and short, thin angular types contrasting with thickset swarthy southerners. Their skin colourings and complexions spoke of widely varied backgrounds. They were mere boys.

Liberators began to arrive, standing on newly-completed concrete dispersals on the edge of the field. They flew in for several days, their bomb racks converted to take baggage, with air crews and ground crews flying together. Sentries were posted, security tightened. Over a hundred bombers occupied the field.

On a foggy, damp day in March 1944, Attlebridge Air Base sprang to life. Engines had been roaring all night, and the airfield was a scene of bustling activity. Then the bombers taxied down the runway, their tail fins painted bright red and white, and they took off and circled until all were in the air. When they left, the atmosphere on the site was tense, the ground crews quiet.

They all returned without casualties; their target had been Berlin.

We still had a lot of minor work to do, but the airfield was operational, and the handing-over ceremony was on Easter Monday 1944. My wife came down from Lancashire for the important occasion, and the RAF did the Americans proud in terms of ceremonial. The bombers flew out as usual, they visited Berlin again, and returned having hit their targets without casualties. We celebrated that night at the dance in the Officers' Mess, and it was an emotional occasion.

Next day we left Attlebridge, for me to take up a new posting.

The capital project having finished, my new duties placed me in charge of several operational American stations, covering maintenance and the supervision of civilian labour. They were restless days, with frequent changes of USAAF officers, and after a few weeks I was moved again, this time to Horham.

There was no prospect of outside accommodation near to the Horham field, so I dossed down in my office. I worked late to get to know the place, but the noise of aircraft disturbed me, and there was no sleep either. The planes were in action all through that first night. After dressing and shaving, and having a sort of breakfast from hastily-bought food, I went down the road to find a postbox. An American Captain overtook me on his bicycle.

"Have you heard the news?" he asked. "No - what is it?"

"American and British troops have landed on the French coast", said the American officer. "It's just come through on the eight o'clock News".

USAAF Captain Williams and I shook hands, on D-Day, 6 June 1944.

I later heard that John Reading, the London Correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, made three crossings with the forces on that day.

The bombers went over early that morning, and it seemed that everything that would fly was in the air. When I went to HQ to meet the Ground Executive Officer we had no time for introductions, and when I returned to my office an American Captain of the Engineers was waiting for me. He took me to another of my new stations, Thorpe Abbotts, where emergency runway repairs were in progress. An inspection there showed the concrete runways and perimeter track in a very bad state; they simply could not cope with the tonnage of bomber traffic. The field was in a state of chaos, with American Engineer troops trying to lay a cap of concrete over a section of track, one runway being used as a bomber parking area, and mud everywhere. Bombers were queueing to take off, others were arriving, and in the middle of it all the ground crews were loading the bombers. The USAAF Air Base was bursting at the seams and breaking up on the ground. I had to admire the grim determination of the Yanks to keep the bombers moving on that day in spite of everything.

Back at Horham, the field Tannoy system was connected to the radio system so that we could have a running commentary on the progress of the landings.

After the eruption of activity on D-Day, the bombing routine settled down, and we were able to get on with running repairs. Thorpe Abbotts was in a worse state than any of my other stations, but gradually things improved, and then - of course - AMWD moved me again. They were so disorganised that nobody seemed to be sure who was going where, but at last they posted me to another American Air Base, at Halesworth. That posting led to my taking lodgings in Bungay, an ancient town on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk.

Bungay is a small market town with two outstanding monuments. One is Bungay Castle, a ruin lying behind the town and therefore only to be seen if sought; the other is the Butter Cross, which is not a cross but a domed circular shelter, standing in the central town square. In 1944 the tarmac around the monument was used as a car park, and the Butter Cross was a rendezvous for the American airmen and the local girls, as well as a shelter for bus passengers on the red bus to Halesworth. Twice a week two fishmongers sold their share of the catch brought in to Lowestoft and Yarmouth. Because of the war there was no butter to sell.

Before the war a bronze figurehead capped the lead dome of the timbered structure, but the Town Reeve and Council had removed it for safe keeping, probably because of the threat of bombing. Lodgings had been found for me at a teashop near the Square, and for a short time I was able to enjoy the old-world atmosphere of the town.

Halesworth was in a mess. Its runways and perimeter track were breaking up under the weight of bomber traffic, and very soon AMWD realised that all the new airfields were the same. A massive programme of reconstruction was put in hand, and in the meantime the bombing missions continued.

Another USAAF base under my care was in an even worse mess following a devastating accident one Saturday afternoon. 500 pound bombs were being unloaded from a lorry, when one exploded, and six men disappeared, many buildings were destroyed, and a large area of the bomb store area was wrecked. We found bits of lorries and shell casing half a mile away on the runways.

By this time we were in the target area for the German Flying Bomb - the Doodle Bug - and these held a dread fascination as they sped through the air, a fork of yellow flame behind them, and the rattling noise of their exhausts stopping as they glided down to their targets. At Halesworth the runway repairs involved patching overnight between bombing missions, and we saw the flying bombs come in from the Suffolk coast. Reinstatement of the concrete was done by floodlight, but when the alert was sounded we had to switch off at once, working by moonlight if there was any, otherwise waiting in the darkness. We were on a tight schedule to cut out the holes and relay with rapid hardening cement concrete before the bombers took off each morning, and an unfilled hole could have spelled disaster. One moonlit night a V-bomb glided straight over our runway, and we heard next day that it had landed in Bury St. Edmunds.

The new station at Beccles, which had been completed too late for the USAAF, became a base for the Royal Navy Air Sea Rescue service, and it was a novel experience to have to deal with a Naval Air Station. Without reflecting adversely on my American friends, I had to admire the way the Navy looked after their Station.

By this time most of the war news was good. The Russians, Americans and British forces were apparently winning everywhere. The Allies were well into France, the Red Army took Rumania and advanced to the Baltic, the Yanks took Guam from the Japs.

In September 1944 the Germans launched their first V-2 rocket against England. Some passed over Beccles shortly after my wife and I had moved into a house there. The V-2s were launched from aircraft, and posed a serious new threat.

There was an atmosphere of grim optimism at all the airfields as the chaos gave way to tight organisation, and Halesworth seemed to get most of their men back from their missions. Then the type of mission changed; in place of bombing, the flights were organised on what were known as 'grocery runs'. The first involving Halesworth was to Eindhoven. The bombers flew to another base and loaded up with food supplies, then flew over Eindhoven to drop them for the troops. The drops involved flying low over heavily defended areas, but in spite of this the success rate was high, and Halesworth casualties low.

About this time, the USAAF bombed Tokyo with incendiaries, and the RAF used incendiaries on German cities, creating fire storms which melted the stone pavings in the streets and sucked in trees, buildings and firefighters without discrimination.

The USAAF Bomb Group at Halesworth held its 100th Mission Party. What a party that was. An aircraft hangar was converted into a three-quarter acre bar for the GIs, a complete pleasure fair was hired and occupied an aircraft dispersal, and girls were brought from London and elsewhere.

Not very long after that, the flying operations ceased; Thanksgiving Day was celebrated; and the whole Unit left for home. We had made many friends, and were sorry to see them go. The Group were honoured by an inspection by General Booth of 2nd Bombardment Division before they left; their contribution to the bombing offensive was enormous.

Halesworth was given a breathing space for repairs, then an American Air Sea Rescue unit took over. Metfield became a hush-hush site for hosting American civilians who flew in direct from the States - we understood them to be business executives. Their presence attracted two raids by light aircraft, and four Lufwaffe airmen died when their aircraft crashed after strafing the field. Those raiders were probably the last enemy aircraft to fly over us. The German V2 rockets ceased to fly over at about the same time. The end of the German War was near.

We now know that German Officers attempted on a few occasions in 1944 to assassinate Hitler, but he seemed to have a charmed life. On 20 July 1944 a bomb in a briefcase exploded a few feet away from him, and several thousand officers were executed in reprisal. The war hero Erwin Rommel was identified as one of the conspirators, and he was taken from his Stuttgart home in an ambulance, and forced to take poison on the way to hospital. The Nazis said that he had had a heart attack.

John Reading, my friend who had come to England for the Sydney Morning Herald, stayed with us for a few days in Beccles before flying to America. He was present at Roosevelt's last White House Press Conference before the President died in April 1945, to be succeeded by Truman.

At the end of April 1945 Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were executed by Italian partisans, their naked bodies hung upside down in Milan. Adolf Hitler married his mistress Eva Braun and then committed suicide in a Berlin bunker, and the Red Army took Berlin two days later, their tanks running down fanatical Hitler Youth who were trying to stop them with hand grenades.

At 2.41 am on 7 May 1945 the Germans surrendered unconditionally in Reims, France, and the British people danced in the streets next day, VE Day, 8 May 1945.

The Americans captured Okinawa in June, resistance ended on Mindanao, Philippines, in July - and meanwhile an Atomic bomb was successfully tested at Los Alamos.

Harry S. Truman was required to make the most terrible decision of his life, and one of the most terrible decisions of all time. He agreed that an American bomber could fly over Hiroshima and drop an Atomic Bomb. That was on 6 August 1945. Then on 9 August a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. I cannot recall any jubilation over that.

Japan surrendered on 14 August 1945. Britain had endured six years of a war which had covered the World.

The next challenge was to face the future, rebuilding our lives, and bringing up our children born during the War years. Life would not be easy for those children of the war.