Missing
War, Sacrifice and the Search for Justice
By Ian W Shaw
Published by Big Sky Publishing
RRP $32.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781922896308
As Ian Shaw writes at the beginning of this book Missing ‘was written to tell the story of one man in one war, and the fact that he was Australian and a fighter pilot does not disguise the fact that Daryl Maxwell Sproule was just one of thousand, tens of thousands, who have gone away to war, and not come back to their loved ones.’
And like many of those stories, it is a tragic one of a young life of promise cut short, cruelly on the very day he was promoted to squadron leader of 77 Squadron.
He was a young Hobart lawyer who became a fighter pilot. He survived the carnage in the skies over Singapore only for his aircraft to be forced down over New Britain in August 1943, his wingmen seeing him land close to a beach, wade ashore and disappear into the jungle.
In Hobart, his mother Irene Sproule was informed that her son was “Missing.” Two years later, Daryl was still missing, his fate unknown.
It would take another two years for the full story of his death to be unravelled and the consequences of a wartime atrocity to be played out to a conclusion.
VERDICT: A sad and moving story, endlessly repeated in wartime.
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