Another fraudster exposed

World War II General WWII Discussion
#1

At least it’s a change from the usual wannabes who claim to be special forces heroes. It always beats me how they manage to convince people who were actually there that they were too.

Hero to zero: the lies of a 'POW’LINTON BESSER
October 3, 2009

‘‘The days dragged on, slowly, relentlessly. Solitary confinement was becoming unbearable, as was the daily sight of stretcher-borne bodies being carted unceremoniously along the corridor …’’ Blood on the Rising Sun, John McGregor

THIS was life inside Outram Road Jail, a Singaporean punishment compound, during the Second World War. Cyril Gilbert, a survivor of the Burma-Thailand railway atrocities, calls it ‘‘the worst jail there ever was’’.

And it is where Gilbert’s close friend, Rex Crane, has told family, friends and authorities he was incarcerated after being captured by the Japanese in May 1942.

Gilbert and many others believed that, at just 15, Crane was one of Australia’s youngest POWs.

Crane, now 83, has been on the highest level of service pension since 1988 and is the federal president of the Prisoners of War Association of Australia.

And Arthur Rex Crane is a fraud.

‘‘It looks like the past has caught up, doesn’t it?’’ he said when The Age confronted him this week.

For more than 20 years, Crane has lived as the survivor of a horrific war-time ordeal. To his wife and children, to his friends, to the hundreds of members of the association he led, Rex Crane was a hero.

He had told them that since 1938 his family had lived in Malaya, where his father William worked at the Raub Australia goldmine. He maintained that after the Japanese landed in Singapore in December 1941, his father took his mother Florence and sister Delsa back to Prospect in Adelaide.

But 15-year-old Rex and his 19-year-old brother Raymond, he swore, were abandoned in Malaya in the face of enemy invasion.

He claimed he was forced to enlist in a volunteer militia and later joined a behind-enemy-lines guerilla unit run by British intelligence. Raymond survived the war and died in 2007, he said.

Crane told of being captured by Japanese soldiers and sent to Outram Road Jail, later being sent to the Burma-Thailand railway, where more than 2600 Australians perished.

In these years, he had told his friends, he had survived unspeakable things. The soles of his feet were hammered, he said, and he got the dreaded ‘‘rice treatment’’, his stomach pumped full of uncooked rice and water before it was stomped on by guards.

Worst of all, though, was the day he was crucified, with one of his hands nailed to a tree and his head smashed by a soldier wielding a baseball bat.

But there were gaping holes in his tale. Electoral rolls put his family in Prospect, Adelaide, from the late 1930s, right through the war. His brother, Raymond, was alive and well living in Utah. And state records placed Rex Crane at Adelaide High School until well into 1941.

‘‘It is me living a lie, isn’t it?’’ he sighed down the phone when challenged about his past. ‘‘Oh shit. I am going to have to resign from everything. And then I’m buggered if I know what’s going to happen from now on. I can see me doing 15 to 20 years here.’’

Liz Heagney, official researcher for the Australian ex-POW memorial in Victoria, said she felt ‘‘utter disgust’’.

‘‘He has desecrated the memory of all of those guys that were heroes,’’ she said.

In February, military historian and author Lynette Silver took her seat at an official service at Ballarat’s prisoner-of-war memorial.

Silver knew Fred Hodel, the previous president of the ex-POW Association, pretty well. But Hodel had stood aside and it was the new association’s president who was to thank Silver for delivering the keynote address.

Her blood ran cold when Crane was introduced to the lectern as one of Australia’s youngest POWs, who had not only fought in a secret ‘‘stay-behind’’ party in Malaya but had been imprisoned in Outram Road Jail.

For years, Silver had taken a particular interest in these sabotage guerilla units that operated behind Japanese lines, and ‘‘I knew the names of all involved’’.

‘‘We were asked to believe that someone aged 15 was with the stay-behind people. But I knew that no Australians were put in with stay-behinds,’’ she said.

Listening to Rex Crane that Sunday, Silver realised the man was lying. ‘‘I also knew that he definitely could not have been in Outram Road Jail. We have got the complete list of people who went into that jail. I knew that Rex Crane was definitely not on the list.’’

She enlisted two friends, Di Elliott and Jenny Sandercock. Elliott’s father had been a POW on the Burma-Thailand railway and Sandercock’s father-in-law had died at the infamous Sandakan POW camp. It was their painstaking efforts that brought Crane undone this week.

On Wednesday, The Age phoned him to seek a plausible explanation. There was none. ‘‘I suppose it was just a sort of fantasy,’’ he eventually said.

Since 1988, Crane has been receiving the top pension awarded to returned servicemen. He has received at least $380,000, as well as a bonus $25,000 ex gratia payment made to former wartime prisoners, as well as a Commonwealth Gold Card covering all medical expenses.

‘‘It got to the stage where people push you,’’ Crane said. ‘‘You don’t have a pension?’’ he said others asked him. ‘‘They knew people in Veterans’ Affairs, and they asked me to go in. And I could not go in there and say this is all bullshit. So I went all the way with it.’’

Crane admitted this week that he had copies of several famous books on prisoners of war in Malaya, including The Jungle is Neutral, by Freddie Spencer Chapman, which details the adventures of a stay-behind party.

‘‘I put up a scheme,’’ Chapman wrote, ‘‘the substance of which was that a chain of small self-contained European parties should be installed in the jungle at strategic points.’’ Crane had claimed he was one of these men, and that he was attached to Spencer’s forces before being captured and sent to Outram Road Jail.

It was a claim that would have required expertise to disprove. Chapman names many men in his book, but official lists are difficult to find because these parties operated in secret.

Silver, Elliott and Sandercock trawled service records. They read through the infamous ‘‘Pudu Roll’’, a list of captured soldiers typed on toilet paper in 1942 by an Australian officer in Kuala Lumpur’s Pudu Jail. In Hobart, they found a list of every Australian who had served with the volunteer forces in Malaya and returned home. And they checked the list of names of Outram Road Jail inmates at an archive in Canberra.

Crane’s name was absent from all of them.

Crane might also have been aware of the story of ‘‘Ringer’’ Edwards. The Fremantle-born soldier and two others were sentenced to death while on the Burma-Thailand railway for killing cattle for food. James Bourke, in Prisoners of the Japanese writes: ‘‘Bound at the wrists with fencing wire, the men were suspended from a tree and beaten with a baseball bat. When Edwards managed to free his right hand, his punishment was continued with the fencing wire driven through his palms.’’

Crane had told his mates an almost identical story: he has a damaged eye and a scar on one hand. Crane said this week: ‘‘I did have an injury to the palm. A nail had gone through the hand, but not as a POW.’’

The injuries probably occurred after 1978, because for the 15 years before then Crane ran the Globe Hotel at Yongala, on the edge of the South Australian scrub. One of the Globe’s regulars, Bob Miller, says he never saw a scar on Crane’s hand as he passed him his beer. ‘‘He didn’t talk about the war at all.’’

There were two ‘‘Eureka’’ moments for the three women as they continued their investigation. The first came on March 8 when Silver picked up the phone and dialled a number in Utah. Knowing that Crane’s brother Raymond had settled in Calgary, she had previously cold-called entries in the Calgary white pages asking about Raymond Crane. One of the voices at the end of the line said, ‘‘Yes, that’s my father. He lives in Salt Lake City.’’ This was Crane’s ‘‘dead’’ brother.

When Silver called Raymond Crane, the 87-year-old was happy to talk about his family back home. ‘‘The entire family lived at 53 Gordon Street, Prospect, for the whole of the war,’’ he said.

A few weeks ago Sandercock got more proof: Crane’s Adelaide High School report card from 1941, the year he was meant to be living in Malaya, and forced to enlist.

Crane’s real story is far more pedestrian.

Born into a Mormon family, he attended Nailsworth Central School before moving up to Adelaide High between 1939 and 1941. After completing just one term in his final year, Crane said he left to seek work.

‘‘I went into boilermaking,’’ he said. And what did he do in the years between leaving school and buying the Globe Hotel? ‘‘I did all sorts of things.’’

Pressed as to why he had chosen to live such a giant lie, he said: ''It might sound naive but I always wished I had been able to get into the army and that I could join.

‘‘I tried to join as a youngster … Half-a-dozen of us, we rode our bikes down to the navy depot and we were turned away.’’

Cyril Gilbert was bewildered when told of Crane’s lies. ‘‘I’m not angry. I’m astonished.’’

After confessing first to The Age, then a few hours later to his wife, Crane on Thursday did the same at the Veterans’ Affairs offices.

He expects to lose his house and may also face prosecution.

‘‘I have always just been hoping that I would peg out and that would be it and no one would know the difference.’’
http://www.theage.com.au/national/hero-to-zero-the-lies-of-a-pow-20091002-ggl2.html

#2

More truth in silence for the real POWs

MARTIN FLANAGAN
October 15, 2009

Rex Crane is the impostor who played the part of a Burma railway survivor and became the head of the Ex-Prisoners of War Association of Australia, where he is said to have worked hard for the cause. He is also said to have received more than $400,000 in war pension payments but claims he got pushed into applying.

My father, a Burma railway survivor, believes that part of his story. ''Blokes’d be saying, ‘You should be getting a pension. Look at what you did.’ ‘’

And, as Crane told the story, there was literally nothing he hadn’t endured. The Japanese had even crucified him - the image of barbarity Neville Shute relied on in his novel A Town Like Alice.

The Japanese beheaded two prisoners in a camp my father was in, but it happened before he got there. Once, when I asked about it, he said, “Thank God, I didn’t see it”, and I gathered some sights are so awful their awfulness never leaves you. I understood at a fairly early age that you don’t play around with this stuff.

In 2005, with my father, I wrote a book titled The Line, which combines four pieces he wrote about his experiences as a prisoner on the Thai-Burma railway with a narrative by me about growing up with a largely silent father I always liked but didn’t really understand.

He was sick for 15 years after the war with the various illnesses he contracted as a POW. At Hintok, where the Australians had a high death rate, he was diagnosed with suspected cholera, which probably saved his life since the guards kept away from the cholera victims, fearing it was contagious.

My father was with Weary Dunlop and, in 1985, I went back to the Burma railway with Weary and a group of former POWs. I was actually standing in the Hintok cutting when an old digger told me a story from that dreadful time that cast my father in what could be construed as a heroic light.

I was, I have to admit, somewhat disappointed (though not surprised) when I got back and related the story to my father and he simply said it wasn’t true.

As much as anything, what I learnt in doing the book was that if my father permitted himself any self-deception of that sort he would lose something fundamental to himself. He’d lose his relationship with the men who died there.

He never thanked me for writing the book with him, but while I saw the book as a father-son thing, he didn’t. For him, it was about his relationship with those who didn’t come back. As a project, it was like some Aboriginal stories I’ve worked on - once you get the picture, why would you want to be thanked? The compliment lies in the fact that you don’t have to be.

Part of the reason Rex Crane got away with what he did for so long is that Australia is overly accepting of its warrior mythology, although I suspect that is true of all cultures.

In Australia, Anzac Day goes over the top each year. Each year, we ignore the fact that Gallipoli was a military disaster - there is no discussion of the responsibility for that. Each year, the mistruth is trumpeted that the Anzacs died defending Australian freedom. The Anzacs died invading another country, Turkey, with whom we had no difference beyond imperial alignments.

Is it dismissive of the Australian military tradition to speak in this way? No. If you want to talk about Australian soldiers fighting and dying to stop Australia being invaded, talk about Kokoda.

Does it diminish the power of the Anzac myth to speak about it in this way? No, it enlivens it. Part of the Anzac myth is as familiar to me as the faces in C. J. Dennis’ “Ginger Mick”, but to accept everything uttered in the name of the Anzacs is to lend their story to parody in the way that Rex Crane’s story is a parody of the Burma railway experience.

I wrote in The Line that growing up with my father was like growing up with a hard old monk. Not much impressed him. When he received the $25,000 former POWs were given by the Howard government, he handed on $1000 to each of his six kids on condition they pass it on to someone less fortunate than themselves. I took that to be an expression he learnt in the camps and never forgot.

Tom Uren, a minister in the Whitlam and Hawke Labor governments, dedicated his entire political career to the lessons he took from experiencing Hintok as a 21-year-old. I once said to Weary, ‘‘Tom Uren became a socialist because of what he experienced in the prison camps under you,’’ and Weary laughed and said, ‘‘The prison camps were what cured me of socialism.’’

You can argue about the politics of the Burma railway story, but, in the end, it transcends politics and even war. It’s a great human story.

When Rex Crane’s step-granddaughter was a child, he told her how the Japanese rolled him up in barbed wire. My father didn’t talk about the war when I was a child. Last week, when I asked Dad, now 95, what he thought of Crane, he said, ‘‘He’s a poor, misguided coot.’’ He didn’t feel anger towards him but, he said, ‘‘I know those who do’’.

Dad has a mate who was log-tortured. He doesn’t say a lot. But he did say Rex Crane has put back the POW cause. There are some judgments I would fear hearing in this world, and that is one of them.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/more-truth-in-silence-for-the-real-pows-20091014-gxcr.html

#3

This is sad story. We have had our share of impostors over here as well. We had a close family friend who was in the KNIL who also worked on the Burma railway. He NEVER volunteered anything on the subject.

#4

There seems to be quite a spate of this recently. There have been several cases in the US of ‘Holocaust survivors’, a couple of whom made a LOT of money from their stories, who weren’t even in Europe in WW2. Lots and lots of French ‘resistance heroes’ who, in reality, did what most Frogs did and kept their heads down for four years, claimed amazing ( and totally imaginary) actions against the Germans.
Those who are profiting from their false stories derserve a good kicking, but as most of their contemporaries die off and the ones who remain get REALLY old–I wonder if their minds are going. My own Father who did nothing really exciting-- Volunteer fire brigade in 1936, RAFVR in 1938, RAF in Britain, then India from 1940 to 1946 started telling the most outrageous yarns about his experiences as he got into his late '80s. He had seen so many movies and documentaries (but read very little actual history) that I think he just personalised what he had seen on TV. ( I am still trying to work out how he could have been on Guy Gibson’s squadron in the UK in 1944 and personally shot the dog ,‘Nigger’, and at the same time be in India giving Lord Mountbatten advice on the deployment of Chindits in Burma!).
But then, one can come unstuck by being too doubting. My Father-in-Law, Nick Nel, a South African, would claim, after four or five drinks, that he was Jan Smuts personal driver during WW2. He would also claim how he was seconded to Dan Pienaar ( the senior SA officer in North Africa 1941-1942), how he had been trapped in Tobruk and made his way out through enemy lines and just missed getting a DCM, for which he was nominated, but not awarded.
Yeah! Yeah!, I and his own children would say. I researched his history in 1998 and applied to the SA Defence Force for his WW2 campaign medals. Guess what? Everything he had told us was true! He wasn’t a talker and everything had to prised out of him with Brandy. I would guess that most of them that talks–didn’t and those that did, don’t talk.

#5

I used to be a co-owner of a small contracting firm. One day my partner said that he had hired a new guy and that he was a POW in Vietnam. The guy lived near the house we were building at the time, so I drove by it every day. He had an American flag and 2 POW/MIA flags flying from poles in his yard. Inconsistensies in the stories he would tell caused me to begin to wonder about him. My father retired after 27 years in the army and I told him about my suspicions. I gave him all the guys statistics from our employee records and he got in touch with some people he knew and found out that the guy was NOT a POW and, in fact, had never served in Vietnam. I confronted the guy about it and he finally admited that he had been lying. He was in the army during Vietnam, but he was stationed in the US for the duration of his enlistment as a quartermaster. Fortunately, he never received any benefits from his lies other than the undesrved respect of others. The guy didn’t know a hammer from a drill bit and my partner, who WAS a Vietnam vet, would have never hired him if it wasn’t for his POW story.

Also, a local sheriff’s department fired a deputy several years ago when it came to light that he had lied on his application by saying that he had been in the US Army Special Forces. Come to find out, he was rejected when he tried to enlist in the army.

Being a veteran is a very special thing and it makes me mad when people lie about it to try to improve their self image or try to gain from it. I respect and admire all true veterans and would never try to pass myself off as one. I wanted to make the military my career but, unfortunately, diabetes prevented me from doing so.

#6

Aren’t some of the imposters from the Vietnam War being prosecuted now? It degrades the memory and the honor of all who have served in the military in any armed conflict…

#7

You can’t be prosecuted for making claims in general.

The ones being busted are wearing awards and making claims for benefits.
There are some folks in Missouri who are actively involved in this.
They have a website and are happy to investigate phonies and wannabees.
They have open records of those exposed, prosecuted or not.

http://www.pownetwork.org/
Lots of good reading here.

It’s amazing, recalling how hard some fought to avoid service at the time, that so many are now claiming it.

I belong to a closed board of SF vets who work very hard at this.

#8

How’s this for a fraudster/imposter/loony-tunes

A man who marched at a Remembrance Day parade with an impossible array of medals was named last night as carpenter Roger Day, 61.

Neighbours said the keen amateur actor was once thrown out of his local pub in a row over an SAS badge he was wearing.

Mr Day denied he was a conman and said the 17 medals - including top bravery awards - were ‘pukka’.

But medals expert Martin Harrison said: ‘He would be world-famous - and some sort of Rambo character - if he had been awarded them all.’

A drive to identify the mystery medal man was launched after he was pictured marching alongside brave servicemen at the November 11 parade in Bedworth, Warwickshire.

Mr Day was tracked down to his home in Earl Shilton, near Hinckley, Leicestershire, where it emerged that he is a regular churchgoer who sings in the choir

Read more: But medals expert Martin Harrison said: ‘He would be world-famous - and some sort of Rambo character - if he had been awarded them all.’

A drive to identify the mystery medal man was launched after he was pictured marching alongside brave servicemen at the November 11 parade in Bedworth, Warwickshire.

Mr Day was tracked down to his home in Earl Shilton, near Hinckley, Leicestershire, where it emerged that he is a regular churchgoer who sings in the choir

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233634/Fake-war-veteran-Roger-Day-Medals-pukka–Im-sworn-silence-I-won-them.html

#9

Blokes masquerading as war veterans are usually easy to identify. they talk about their war experiences. Every vet I have known rarely wants to share their often traumatic experiences.

digger:)

#10

Exactly!!

#11

Agreed.

They’ll tell funny stories and talk about places they went, and sometimes tell stories about combat or related matters but rarely of anything personally revealing about what really happened unless it was bizarre or humourous.

The one thing they’ll never do is boast, at least if they were really in the thick of it.

Some of the REMFs will build themselves up, like someone I knew slightly years ago who told heroic stories of going out on long patrols with the infantry.

But the fraudsters almost always go for the top, claiming to be some sort of special force hero.

Which just reflects their inadequacy.

#12

All I can say is that after spending a few mths reading up on this forum on what PDF, Nick and RS write, one can gain enough knowledge with great accuracy to pretend to be a war ace. There is only one source of knowledge one has to go to, and it is this forum. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Fraudsters didn’t at one point in time learn a lot from this forum.:army:

#13

A total of 5000 South African troops ever served in Angola between 1975 and 1988. In 1975 at the battle of Luanda there were less than 100. I have met every one of them 30 times over!!!

#14

Only 30 times? seems a bit low don’t you think? Nothing worth bragging about in my opinion. Ho hum…

#15

Umm… what makes you think everything we say is totally accurate? It’s the things we don’t say, or which come out slightly garbled, that will give away people big-timing on the forum. We’ve had several so far, and they get picked up very quickly indeed in the main…

#16

Yeah, 'cos I’m a war ace.

On the basis of about thirty seconds in uniform.

The only shots I heard fired in anger were accompanied by the RSM bellowing “Give me another mag. I would’ve hit that running RS arsehole if he hadn’t loaded the last mag backwards.”

#17

I can spin glorious yarns of my time as a Chairborne Ranger…

#18

#19

Can’t quite agree.

I had two grand-uncles who both fought on the Eastern Front, and they would always talk about it whenever they met on family reunions.Though admittedly usually only among themselves unless approached, not so much towards others.

I have absolutely no reason to doubt the validity of their claims - especially since being a Wehrmacht veteran isn’t considered prestigious in Germany.

Sadly, I was too young and too ignorant to actually listen to their stories when they were still alive. I’m still pissed about that.

#20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSPCww0JDUQ

:lol: