Ronald Jones was 17 when he enlisted in Australia’s part-time army after lying and adding a year to his age in 1941. 

Ross Sayers was 20 when he also added a year to enlist in the Australian Imperial Forces, buoyed by the promise of adventure and seeing the world. 

But both men ended up prisoners of war (POWs) in Serbia during World War II before separately escaping from German prison trains in Yugoslavia.

They never met, but their exploits as double agents, spies and guerilla fighters for British Intelligence are the subject of Canberra author and historian Edmund Goldrick’s upcoming first book Anzac Guerrillas. 

Jones worked directly with Četnik (a Yugoslav royalist group who opposed to the Germans) leader Draza Milhailovic in their efforts to garner Allied support against the Germans, however, his allegiance shifted as he became a double agent, alerting British Intelligence of Draza’s intentions to “cleanse the country” of anyone who did not descend from Serbian blood. 

Nearby, Sayers had also joined the Četniks, however faced execution after entering a village thinking he was going to be liberating it from Axis (German, Italian and Japanese forces) control, finding it instead owned by partisan men who saved his life after he escaped the Germans. Ross was later employed by British Intelligence, earning a Military Medal for returning alone under fire to a Serbian village to rescue his British Intelligence command captain, Robert Wade.

Neither man spoke much of their ordeal, outside of Ross saying: “I never should have broken off the bloody train.”

“Both Ross Sayers and Ronald Jones had fairly extensive intelligence reports, and they were also the two who showed up in other documents,” says Edmund. 

“Ross became a key adviser to a British intelligence mission in southern Serbia, and Ronald turns up in a lot of ex-Yogoslav archival sources under a different name.” 

Stumbling on to a reference of Sayers and Jones in early 2021, Edmund says it has been a “thread” he has been pulling on ever since. 

Edmund’s deep dive into 1941 Yugoslavia began after he was asked to help co-write The Greatest Escape, a book following Aussie POWs in World War II, with Neil Churches in 2022.

“I’m really interested in fish-out-of-water, cross-cultural stories,” he says. 

“It’s a great way to see the world clearly through someone else’s eyes, and there was this extraordinary story which we were seeing through Australian eyes.”

For four years, Edmund has been travelling, piecing together information about the two men, using databases, letter archives, intelligence reports and German records. Now he works as a bookseller at the National Library of Australia, a convenient location to continue his research path. 

Travelling to the National Archives in the UK, the Commonwealth Memorial in Belgrade and across Australia, Edmund says Anzac Guerrillas, has been carefully written to mesh factual records with obtained information (such as the weather from German occupation army records).

By researching small details such as moon cycles, weather and landscapes, Edmund says he was able to fill out a scene in a way that is “both vivid and dramatic, but also truthful”. 

“I don’t think that factual writing needs to be dry,” says Edmund. 

“One of the more interesting things of [using] documents and records of the time, I got a much clearer sense of their motivations and what their driving feelings were.

“If I’d been going off a memoir, or an oral history after the fact, you do forget what you were feeling and what prompted you to do what.

“I think this helped establish moment-to-moment and look at the motivations and stakes of these Australians.” 

Bringing German and South Slavic language knowledge as well as a deep interest in POW and British intelligence records, Edmund says he was in a position to tell the men’s story with the knowledge that he had the skills to do the topic justice. 

An emotional journey, Edmund’s journey from research to writing was full of self doubt and anxiety. 

“They didn’t really talk about [their experiences] and it does feel strange to posthumously overrule them and say: ‘No, your service really meant something and you did a good job’,” he says. 

“These men had a very good reason not to want to talk about it.”

Carrying “tremendous historical value”, Edmund says it was very moving to speak to the families of some soldiers and show a day-by-day of what the men went through. 

Anzac Guerrillas will be launched at the National Library of Australia on July 30. Tickets at library.gov.au