ABSTRACT
Captain Alan Rogers of the Australian Army was a conscientious diarist throughout his time on active service with the Australian Army Medical Corps. His experiences are meticulously recorded and his feelings about situations and individuals also noted. On Sunday 29 May 1943, Rogers entered the following thoughts about his activities of the previous week: ‘On Wednesday night we were fortunate enough to get tickets to the Palladium and to see “I killed the Count” – a good play and magnificently acted.’1 There are many conclusions that might tentatively be drawn from a brief diary excerpt such as this. Firstly, perhaps, that Captain Rogers was on leave in Sydney or even in London and that his efforts to forget the war, albeit temporarily, were proceeding according to plan. Such assumptions, however, would be wrong. While Captain Rogers was definitely remote from the front line, and the war in general, he was similarly removed from Sydney and London and any of the conventional notions that one might associate with the details of what Rogers himself provides. In fact, Captain Alan Rogers had already seen action with Australian forces in the jungles of Malaya. Rogers had also been present at the siege of the ‘impregnable fortress’ of Singapore during January and February of 1942. Rogers, along with thousands of British, Australian, Indian and other assorted allied personnel, endured the surrender of Singapore, an event famously summed up by Winston Churchill as ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.2
