In Extremis - Stories from the Edge of History

When the 1,600 tonne coastal steamer Giang Bee was intercepted by Japanese destroyers 50 nautical miles off the coast of Sumatra, Robert Heatlie Scott did something extraordinary. He climbed into a 13-foot harbour dinghy and rowed toward a warship to negotiate surrender.

It didn't work. It was never going to work.

In this episode, we follow Scott's improbable journey from that dinghy back to Singapore, through a series of POW and in...

A warning to listeners: this episode contains detailed descriptions of torture and imprisonment. It is not suitable for children.

When Elizabeth Choy arrived at the YMCA building in Japanese-occupied Singapore, she believed she was being taken to see her husband. She was not. She was being arrested.

Part Two of The Heroine of Singapore begins inside the Kempeitai's detention centre. The converted billiard rooms and corridors of the Y...

The Heroine of Singapore — Part One

On the morning of September 27, 1943, Major Sumida Haruzo of the Japanese Kempei Tai was woken by explosions in Singapore Harbour. As the day lengthened and reconnaissance aircraft found nothing — no Allied submarines, no enemy vessels — Sumida arrived at a conclusion that would have catastrophic consequences for the civilian population of occupied Singapore.

The attack, he was ce...

In the final episode of the Jaywick arc of Britain's Greatest Soldier , Major Ivan Lyon and 13 other operatives move to the execution phase of the most audacious commando raid of the Pacific war.

After a tense passage through the Lombok Strait, with Lyon's hand on the detonator that would obliterate the Krait if Japanese capture became inevitable, the men sail acros the Java Sea to the Riau Archipelago — making landfall on Pan...

In November 1943, an Australian merchant mariner steps off an American submarine alone, and rows for the shoreline of an island held by the Japanese. He is at least 50. He has no support. Within three days, he has been betrayed and captured. Within nine months, he is dead — but not before showing his executioners what a man can endure.

This is the story of Bill Reynolds' last mission, and of what happened to the operation he h...

Eighteen men. One vessel. And an ocean that offered no second chances.

In Part Two of Britain’s Greatest Soldier, Ivan Lyon takes command of a 25-tonne Sumatran prahu — a vessel with no keel, threadbare sails, and a dangerous tendency to roll under pressure. It is top-heavy, temperamental, and wholly unsuited to the journey ahead.

And yet, either they sail or they will be captured by the Japanese.

What follows is a voyage ...

Long before Ivan Lyon led one of the most daring raids of the Second World War, he carried the weight of a family steeped in duty, service, and legend, from Flodden to the Western Front.

Raised on those expectations, Lyon became an at times solitary, but always driven, child who was drawn to extremes. A sailor, an endurance athlete, a man more comfortable at the edge than in the centre.

In this episode of In Extremis - the first in a...

After nearly two months stranded behind enemy lines on Japanese-occupied Timor, Bryan Rofe and his party of Australian airmen face their most desperate moment. A submarine has attempted a rescue, but the rendezvous has been missed. Now, with four men dead, supplies exhausted and illness spreading, time is running out.

Worse still, the Japanese have dispatched a force of 300 soldiers to hunt them down. They are only days away.

This is...

The escape has already begun to unravel. The flying boat meant to lift the stranded Australians from Timor is destoryed during the Broome air raid. What was meant to be a clean extraction turns, in an instant, into a nightmare as the men begin to succumb to illness and starvation.

In desperation, a new plan is set in motion. The submarine USS Searaven is dispatched into hostile waters. But her captain, Hiram Cassedy, faces a brutal ...