And it is where Gilbert's close friend, Rex Crane, claims to have been incarcerated after he was captured by the Japanese in May 1942. At just 15 years of age, Gilbert and many others believed Crane had been one of Australia's youngest POWs. Crane, who is now 83 and has been on the highest-level service pension since 1988, is the federal president of the Ex-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 Herald confronted him this week.

For more than 20 years, Crane lived as a man who had survived a horrific wartime ordeal. To his wife and children, to his friends, to the hundreds of members of the association he led, Rex Crane was a hero. But the reality is not one word of his story is true.

His family had been living in Malaya since 1938, he had told them, where his father William was working at the Raub Australia goldmine. After the Japanese landed in Singapore in December 1941, Crane had maintained that his father took his mother, Florence, and his 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 an enemy invasion. Forced to enlist in a volunteer militia, Crane claimed he later joined a guerilla, behind-enemy-lines unit run by British intelligence. Raymond survived the war only to die in 2007, he said.

Captured by Japanese soldiers, incarcerated in Outram Road Jail, Crane described being later sent to the Burma-Thai 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, and he got the dreaded ''rice treatment'', his stomach pumped full of uncooked rice and water and stomped on by guards. Worst of all was the day he was crucified, one of his hands nailed to a tree, and his head smashed in 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 until well into 1941.

''It is me living a lie, isn't it?,'' he sighed down the phone. ''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 ''absolute and utter disgust'' for Crane. ''He has desecrated the memory of all of those guys that were heroes,'' she said.

It was the day after bushfires ravaged Victoria. Lynette Silver, military historian and author, took her seat at an official service at Ballarat's prisoner-of-war memorial. She sat two seats from the Minister for Veterans Affairs, Alan Griffin.

Silver had yet to meet the new president of the ex-POW association. But when Crane was introduced as one of Australia's youngest POWs, who had not only fought in a secret ''stay-behind'' party in Malaya but had also been imprisoned in Outram Road, Silver's blood ran cold. For years, she had taken a particular interest in these 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.

Silver had experience in exposing military frauds. In 2004, she discovered Marcel Caux was not the World War I hero Australia believed him to be but was, in fact, Harold Katte, a deserter. Listening to 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 that 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-Thai railway and Sandercock's father-in-law had died at the infamous Sandakan POW camp. It was their efforts since that Sunday that brought Crane undone.

On Wednesday, the Herald telephoned him to seek an explanation. There was none.

''I suppose it was just a sort of fantasy,'' Crane eventually said.

Since 1988, he has been getting a pension reserved for totally or permanently incapacitated soldiers. He has received at least $380,000 and a bonus $25,000 ex-gratia payment made to ex-POWs, as well as a Gold Card which covers all medical expenses.

''It got to the stage where people push you,'' Crane said. ''You don't have a pension?'' 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.''

Silver is dubious. Had he said only that he was a prisoner in Changi, or on the Burma-Thai railway, others, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, could have easily cross-checked his name against the public record. ''That story has been concocted very, very cleverly. He has chosen the most obscure background for himself, which a normal person could not trace, and which most people would not question,'' she said.

Crane admitted to the Herald this week that he had copies of several famous books on prisoners of war in Malaya. He had read, for instance, the John McGregor book about the horrors of Outram Road Jail, Blood on the Rising Sun. He also had a copy of The Jungle is Neutral, by Freddie Spencer Chapman, which detailed the adventures of one of these ''stay-behind'' parties.

''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 in May 1942.

It was a claim that would have required expertise to disprove. Chapman names many men in his book, including all those who were members of his personal party. But official lists are difficult to find because these parties operated in secret.

Silver, Elliott and Sandercock trawled through service records. They read through the infamous ''Pudu Roll'', a list of captured soldiers typed onto 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. They checked the list of Outram Road Jail inmates at an archive in Canberra. Crane's name was conspicuously absent from all of them.

Crane might have been aware of the story of ''Ringer'' Edwards. The Fremantle-born soldier and two others were sentenced to death on the Burma-Thai railway. In Prisoners of the Japanese, James Bourke 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. Incredibly, [he] somehow survived.''

Crane had told his mates an almost identical story - he has a damaged eye and a scar in the palm of one hand. Crane told the Herald 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 some time after 1978, because for the 15 years before then, Crane ran the Globe Hotel at Yongala, a tiny town on the edge of the South Australian scrub. One of the Globe's regulars, Bob Miller, remembers Crane well and says he never saw a scar on the publican's hand as he passed him his beer.

''He didn't talk about the war at all,'' Miller said.

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 telephone and dialled a number in Utah.

Knowing that Crane's brother Raymond had settled in Calgary, she had previously made cold calls to 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.'' Silver recalls: ''He said, 'ask him yourself. He lives in Salt Lake City'.''

This was Crane's dead brother. Instead of just the absence of records, here, suddenly, was proof that Crane had been lying.

When Silver called Raymond Crane at his home, the 87-year-old was happy to talk about his family in Australia, even when Silver brought up the war years.

''The entire family lived at 53 Gordon Street, Prospect, for the whole of the war,'' her notes record. ''[The] younger brothers Rex and Gary were at school, far too young to enlist.''

But only a few weeks ago Sandercock found the smoking gun - Crane's Adelaide High School report card from 1941, the year he was meant to be living in Malaya, abandoned by his parents and forced to enlist.

In fact, Crane's real story is far more pedestrian.

Born into an observant Mormon family, Crane grew up with his two brothers, both adopted, and his sister. He attended Nailsworth Central School before moving to Adelaide High between 1939 and 1941. His school records show he was interested in becoming a doctor or an industrial chemist. But after completing just one term that year, Crane told the Herald he left to pursue work. ''I went into boilermaking,'' he said. ''I worked in town [in Adelaide]. I was doing an apprenticeship.''

And what did you do in the years between leaving school and buying the Globe Hotel? ''I did all sorts of things.''

Pressed about 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. I tried to join the navy. Half a dozen of us, we rode our bikes down to the navy depot and we were turned away, and they said, 'get back to work, and [they] kicked our arses and [they said] don't be stupid'.

''That was the start of it. I would have been 15.''

Later, Crane expanded a little. ''When this all started, I went along to a POW Singapore day that was advertised … and they invited me in for afternoon tea, which I did. I suppose I thought this would be quite good.''

Cyril Gilbert, when he heard the news, was bewildered.

''He would not speak about the war very much. I knew he was in Outram Road Jail and that he got the rice treatment and all that business … And that the only thing that saved him was his name [because the crane] was a sacred bird for the Japanese … I'm not angry. I'm astonished.''

Gilbert is the real thing. Earlier, his voice had choked on the telephone as he remembered the war. ''I get very emotional when I think of my mates. There is not one of my close mates I enlisted with alive today. The Japanese were not human. Animals would not do what they did.''

After confessing to the Herald, then a few hours later to his wife, Crane did the same at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He expects to lose his house. He 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.''

To the real Ex-POW's, both living and deceased, I offer that that timeless prayer:

Lest We Forget

To Rex Crane, this fraud, this imposter, this absolute and total disgrace to all Australians and especially those who have served, I offer this instead:

May you get what you truly deserve and may we in time forget.