MILDURA resident Bill Burrell says there are no secrets to living to 100, it just comes down to good luck and good genes.

The centenarian reached the milestone on March 18, but despite his age, the World War II veteran's memory, sense of humour and independence remain perfectly intact.

Mr Burrell was born at Mildura Hospital and grew up in a block at Merbein.

He was the second child of 10, having six brothers and three sisters, to parents Louis and Maude.

His schooling years were spent at The Lake School and Merbein School, before he joined the Australian Army aged 19 in September, 1941.

After two years, Mr Burrell was deployed to Singapore where he was taken prisoner by the Japanese Army and sent to work on the infamous Thai-Burma railway.

Bill Burrell during his years with the Australian Army. His harrowing experience of forced labour in the jungle was a reality for more than three-and-a-half years.

And he has since had a tough time shaking off memories.

"I don't think most people understand what happened," Mr Burrell says.

"I was (posted in) Australia for a while, and then I went to Singapore and got caught there.

"I was the first one on the Burma Railway and I stayed there right up until the war finished."

Mr Burrell was in the Burmese town of Thanbyuzayat when he witnessed the first bombing of his own people.

He says he was just metres away from where the bomb landed, which blew a hole 10-foot round.

"I was with two other blokes and they both got shrapnel but I missed it, it must've blown right over my head by a foot.

"One of them was right where the bomb landed and he was blown in the air about 10 feet and he was still running.

"I wasn't, I just lay on the ground.

"I could see the bombs leave the plane and I said 'get down because they're going to land with us'."

Mr Burrell says he didn't see any of the Allied aircraft until late into the time he reached the marshalling yards late in the war.

"Then the big liberators came in, they started bombing us there and there was about 70 or 80 people killed in the camp that we were in.

"One chap was right beside me (when he died).

"The plane was down that low we could see the gunmen in the back of the plane.

"Our camp was situated in that place, out in the open."

During this time, Mr Burrell lived every day in fear, he recalls a horrifying time when eight bombs were dropped onto a steel bridge.

None of them detonated and the prisoners were sent to take the charges out of the back of them.

"We didn't know what would happen," Mr Burrell says.

"We had to do it, we didn't care whether we died or not.

"We lived every day in fear, it could be the day you were taken out and shot - you just didn't know."

When the war finished Mr Burrell, 25, was sent back to Singapore.

He says he was "just skin and bones", weighing just 38 kilograms.

With very little to no food for prisoners in Burma, many were forced to eat grass just to stay alive.

"The first camp I was in, there was nothing there only an aerodrome," Mr Burrell says.

"You couldn't see your mate next to you because it was just pouring -- all that was there was a little old aeroplane.

"There was a hut there and there was rice in there, that was the first thing we had to eat and they had white grubs in the rice.

"We had to eat that because we had nothing else, it was eat (the rice and grubs) or starve."

Mr Burrell says a lot of prisoners were dying around him, even when the war finished.

As well as the mental scars from the war, he returned with the physical scars including a bayonet wound in his leg from when he was captured by the Japanese.

Mr Burrell returned to Australia in 1945 and moved to Melbourne to work as a taxi and semi-trailer driver.

He married his first wife Phyllis, who he met before the war, and together they had three daughters – Barbara, Karen and Terri.

Sadly, Phyllis died in 1991.

Mr Burrell remarried in 2000, wedding Mavis and returning to Mildura.

Today, he is a grandfather to "many, many grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren".

He has been a mad Collingwood supporter all of his life, and enjoyed the "finer" things in life such as gardening and fixing old cars.

And age is no barrier for the 100-year-old who still goes to bingo three days a week and enjoys the occasional game on the pokies.