ALEXANDER McCLELLAND
NX732 A.I.F and
Concentration Camp Survivor WW11
He designed and built the following:
1. 1947 ALMAC Surf Ski, half the weight of pre-war surf skis. Used as life saving equipment. This new revolutionary design enabled a life saver to run with it across the soft sands of Australian beaches and it became vital equipment to save human lives.
2. 1958 First safety sailing boat demonstration in 80 years on the Canadian National Exhibition Programme.
3. 1959 First fibreglass boat to survive a safety test over Niagara Falls.
4. 1960 First solid mast and boom with slotted tracks for sails shown at the National USA Boat Show at Chicago, and demonstrated on his boat.
5. 1970, 26 January Skippered Boomerang;, length 9ft, smallest boat ever to cross the Gulf Stream from Miami to Bahamas and return non-stop. (He has personal photos of 3 Astronauts including Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on the moon, wearing his slouch hat and standing next to Boomerang.)
6. 1982 Granted Greek Patent for Cretan Water Bucket Holder named after the Cretan women who gave the Australian walking wounded water to drink on the road between Souda Bay and the hospital near Chania on the island of Crete 1941. All special equipment to produce the Water Bucket Holder.
All of the above was classified as impossible, but needed to be done, and he as an Australian is proud to have achieved it all. While demonstrating the above achievements he always wore an Australian flag on his chest and wore his slouch hat. He was a proud Australian.
An Australian Who Believes in Having a Fair Go, but also giving the other bloke a fair go too.
He believes that you, the Australian taxpayer who has been paying his TPI (Totally and Permanently Incapacitated) War Pension since 1975, should know the truth.
Alexander C McClelland was amongst the first to volunteer in WW2 at Newcastle in 1939 and given the Army Number NX732 after fighting as a Bren gunner in 2/1 Inf. Bn 6th Div in North Africa, Greece and Crete. Wounded and became German POW for 4 years, during the last 3 months of WW2 incarcerated in the top security Gestapo section called The Small Fortress of Terezin Concentration Camp, with the end result of being the last Australian POW of Nazi Germany liberated on 7 May, the last day of war in Europe. While awaiting repatriation from UK he was given 28 days solitary in Chatham Detention Barracks.
After being overseas in UK, Canada, USA and The Bahamas he returned to Australia in 1970 to find his Army Records were false. Not one word about the Nazi Concentration Camp or the English Detention Barracks where he spent 28 days in solitary before returning to Australia. Strangely enough his Army Record contained reports of each time he had diarrhoea. The Government doctors, going on these false records, told him that if he continued to tell people that he had been in a Nazi Concentration Camp and Chatham in UK he would have to be put in a place to receive special treatment. This frightened him very much, since apparantly no-one believed him. Instead they believed the falsified Army Records.
Faced with the choice of spending the rest of his life in a mental institution for telling the truth, or exile, he chose the latter (in UK and Greece).
So his fight for justice begins...
With the help of Airey Neave Barrister MP, who was the first British Officer to escape from Colditz in Nazi Germany and other WW2 heroes.
It took 18 years to convince the Australian Government that he had been telling the truth.
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