WWII veteran and 2013 Returned & Services League WA Anzac of the Year Peter Dimopoulos, who was a Japanese prisoner of war, has died in Perth aged 90.
Mr Dimopoulos enlisted in the Australian Army aged just 16, having fibbed about his age.
He was posted to the 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion in 1941, serving before Singapore fell to the Japanese.
During his time in the POW camps, he learnt Japanese and was later used by his captors as an interpreter.
Ric Giblett, president of the RSL’s Serpentine-Jarrahdale sub-branch, which Mr Dimopoulos founded, said his language skills were invaluable during his imprisonment and again during war crimes trials in Papua New Guinea, where he worked as an interpreter.
“Peter’s incarceration at the hands of the Japanese was both brutal and long-suffering, but despite this, his first thoughts were for his fellow soldiers, using his self-taught language skills to rescue them from life-threatening situations within the POW camps,” Mr Giblett said.