Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Six: Private G. V. Lynch, Australian Army, who was wounded and taken P.O.W. in Greece in April 1941

1939-45 Star; Africa Star; Defence and War Medals 1939-45; Australian Service Medal 1939-45, these last three officially inscribed, ‘NX. 4493 G. V. Lynch’; Greece, War Commemorative Medal 1940-41, a little polished, otherwise generally very fine (6) £250-300

Gerald Vaughan Lynch was born in Sydney, N.S.W., in September 1913, and enlisted in the Australian Army in October 1939.Embarked for the Middle East in October 1940, he was posted to 6 Divisional Ammunition Company and, in common with some 2000 other Australian troops, was taken P.O.W. in Greece in April 1941. As succinctly put by a fellow P.O.W., ‘we got down to the foot of Greece and had nowhere else to go ... A few thought we had been betrayed, but we didn’t have a hope. We had the sea at our feet and were surrounded by the Germans’.

For his own part, Lynch was removed from the list of missing when the International Red Cross located him at a P.O.W. hospital at Kokinia in July 1941, from whence he was entrained for Stalag 317 (XVIII C) at Markt Pongau, near Salzburg, Austria - many of the camps inmates had to perform forced labour and by the War’s end some 4,000 of them had perished, most of them Soviet prisoners. Discharged in October 1945, Lynch died at Nambour, Queensland, in September 1983; sold with the recipient’s original Greek Commemorative Medal certificate of award, dated 15 May 1980, together with a wartime photograph and a file of research.