Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Fremantle, 24th November 1921.

Yes

Well I didn’t spend much time growing up in Fremantle because shortly after I was born I was taken to the country where my father was a builder and he was building so my mother had

me and straight back up to the country where my father was building.

It was in Trayning, a town called Trayning.

Near (UNCLEAR) It’s on the North East line going up from Cunderdin, all these small country towns. Not big towns though.

Except those yes.

Yeh yeh and my uncle was farming up there so my father built his house on the farm and they developed a farm themselves. And so I lived there till I was 6 years of age, and I started school there at 6 years of age and then we came down to the city because the Depression was on and my

father was finding difficulty getting building work. So he came down to the city and he did a lot of copy bulk handling for the wheat silos. And often we went out, I went Wongan Hills for 12, 18 months while he was building a nurses quarters there, so we travelled right from the start, I had a bit of a travel bug in my system.

No not really, I think it made it easier because you had to fit in, and I think to my benefit I was a very keen sportsman, so that when I came in the Services I fitted in very easily because I was used to playing football, playing cricket and what not.

Well football and cricket mainly because from the school days

and when I was in the final year at school I got in the State football team, and this is where I met my wife because her brother was in it. And so then we came back from there and started playing junior football together. We both eventually, her brother and I played league football for Subiaco and we both played first grade cricket for Subiaco, so we were, just fitting into the scheme very easily.

Oh at 18 yes we were only 18 and fitted into that.

Oh not as much as now, it was still competitive but not the same as it is now. Because your purely amateur there’s no payment, except once, I got paid 10 shillings once, because a grateful supporter, because we won the match, gave everybody 10 shillings and we

reckon we became professionals with 10 shillings.

Well you had to get away from working and training 2 days a week, and you get there nearly in the dark and so your training with mainly ring work, out on the oval and punching the ball, kicking the ball. Not like they have now, but we’d be working, catching a bus or tram, whatever,

by the time you got to Subiaco Oval from wherever you were working it was dark. So different sort of training to what they have now.

Oh yes, yes more so now I think, because AFL’s [Australian Rules Football] taken over a lot of the spectator side of it. Are we on or?

Oh sorry.

I see I see hmm.

Well in my particular place I was a youngest of 7 children and the Depression was very tough. And my father being a builder had to search wide and far to find work, and

so yes it was bit tough. I got my hand me downs [used clothing] from my brothers and we didn’t have any money to spend. I used to be very envious of the kid buying an ice block or an ice cream or anything like that. We didn’t have those during the Depression, not for big families. But I think our family was a very close knit family, I had 4 sisters and 2 brothers.

And being the youngest they used to spoil me a bit I think.

Yes it was, yes. I was, I only had one name as Arthur, I always reckoned they ran out of names. Everybody else had two names.

Well in the country a sort of weatherboard tin place,

it was down in Crawley where we first moved into, quite a nice house, little house, rental house. And then we went from there to Subiaco Road and I changed schools to Thomas Street State School and that’s where we started getting associated with the Subiaco football club, my eldest brother started playing for them and then the next brother starting playing for them, so it was in my system that the Bancroft’s were part of Subiaco football club.

No I was a fairly keen student, I wasn’t a star by any means, I had to work hard. But I managed, of course in the year that I had to go to South Australia with the football team was my junior year where my parents said I’d have to work harder when you get back to catch up on what you missed out

on. And which I did and passed my junior alright so. But it was well worth going to South Australia for the football trip.

It was, it was, it was an exciting time because we went by train, and I’d never been on a train trip like that before and it was marvellous. And then we were billeted out in Adelaide,

people who had their sons interested in South Australian football. Not very exciting.

Well, in the national event every state was represented. And we just got Victoria won, only just and the South

Australians just pipped us for 2nd place so we did well. Mirl’s brother was our goal sneak and he got the first and best for the whole carnival so very close to winning because he kept us in it. No it was quite an interesting event, we played against Canberra, Tasmania, Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales, Canberra, all the states were

represented. Avery very good event.

Oh yes and in 1937 yes.

No I was, my uncle, my father’s brother he went to Gallipoli and

France and got home. And my father couldn’t go because he’d lost an eye through the building game and they wouldn’t taken him. So that was, and on my mother’s side he was lost, he was in the army. He died, he didn’t come home. Cause with our family I was the first to join up when I was 18, and then my other brother went into the army ,

he ended up in the Middle East. And then my eldest brother went into the air force, so out of the 3 boys we were in all 3 different Services, but I was the youngest and I was the first. I think at that age you’re very anxious to get into it.

Yes.

I don’t really think so, I didn’t know him that well. Because Uncle Ernie was an uncle that we didn’t see him much and he died of a fairly young age. These days I think he was in his early 50’s or late 40’s, didn’t have that much to do with him. So I never

really talked to him about his experiences, never had a chance to.

I was 15, just turned 15 and I went straight into a bank at the age of 15. This is the start of a long service in the bank, oh 42 years as a banker then, except for war years.

Well my eldest brother’s wife her brother was in the bank. The Union Bank of Australia and he was in State Administration and he said to them “Well look if young Arthur wants a job in the bank tell him to go down and report to Fremantle branch because they’re wanting to take on the first juniors since the Depression years.

And if he gets down there in a hurry he’ll get the job”. So my parents said “Off you go” so I caught the train down to Fremantle and said “I’m Arthur Bancroft I’d like to apply for a job in the Union Bank”, “Oh yeah okay” and that’s how I got the job.

That’s right, that’s right.

Oh as a junior, those days you had to mix the ink, you had to make your ink, your

red ink and your blue ink. You had to change the blotting paper every day on their desks and on the customer’s tables and put fresh ink in the ink wells. See those days there was no biros or anything like that, there was ink, pen and ink. So you had to go and check that every customers table had a good pen to write with and that the ink wells were full, so this is the sort of job you had.

Then I had a very ominous task, the accountant there was a, what’s that guy Merlyn Bracken Jones and every morning I had to go out and get a packet of cigarettes for him.

Well it was in powder form and you had to mix that, a basin out in the….and then put it in a bowl and go round and top up everything with the red ink or blue ink whichever. Oh a very important task,

that was my first job in the bank.

You never used them I suppose

Yes well we had to write everything, everything was hand written. We didn’t have an adding machine or anything like that so you

had to use your brains a lot. Cause that was a follow on from school cause at school you didn’t have calculators and all that so you really came to the workforce fully trained to use your brain. No that was interesting.

No you just learnt on the job, just learnt on the job. Now of course they have school, they send their staff to the schools to learn

on how to be a banker and all that. We had to learn, I had to learn quickly, by the time I was 17 the bank sent me out of the country to relieve somebody more senior to me. So…

Oh you learn by enquiry from them. You know you had to be able to adjust very quickly

because if Curly was off sick you had to fill in and do his job. So you had to learn on the job, and it was interesting you had to do that.

Well say in the bill department when you get international documents coming in from overseas and you had to enter those up and take them out to customers, that was interesting. And then just for your ledgers

all hand written, you didn’t have any machines and you had to learn how to do very neat handwriting to write up your ledgers and write up your passbook. Every customer had a passbook, no statements in those days and you had to be able to write clearly for the customer to read. Oh it was quite different to these days.

Oh very quickly yes, I was 17. As a matter of fact I was

at Beverly, a country town called Beverly and the young lad who I took over from, he was older than I was, but he’d just been called up into the army because he was in, what’s it called the National Service, Militia. And so I went up to take his place while he went into the Militia. And whilst he was in the Militia, the war with Germany was

declared. So I was left there because he became quickly absorbed into the army. So that I was only 17 and the war started in September, in November I turned 18, so I went up to the Post Office and got a application to join the air force, cause I was 18 I was allowed to. So I sent that application down to my parents to sign and they came back unsigned.

They said “We’ll talk about that when you come home”. So I took, I went from there to a country town called York because he got called up to the Militia, from there I went to Northern because of the same situation. So it took me 3 months before I got back to Perth and I said to my parents “I’d like to become a Pilot,

you know the war’s going to be over if I don’t get in now”, so eventually they said “Okay you’ve got your mind set up”. So I went and made an application to join the air force, passed all their tests, health tests and everything, education tests. And they said well alright but we don’t want you straight away, we’ll call you up when we start recruiting, because the war had virtually only just started….

We didn’t know much about the war starting until it started really. At the age of well nearly 18, well I was 17, we knew there was something going but we didn’t read the papers as well as we do now.

So when the war did break out we just thought it was one of these things happen and it would be over, that’s what I said to my parents, it will be all over before I get there, and news for them.

Well they started recruiting females then because at Fremantle where I had joined the bank we didn’t have any females on the staff.

And just before I left there we had one girl join the bank and she was a better typist than I was, because I had to do all the typing up until then. Oh you had to learn to type, so with the girls starting to be absorbed in because of the ones who had gone into the Services, it became interesting. Because the girls had a different attitude

to what we did, working in the bank without any females around, its quite different to today, there’s more females than there are men.

We thought it was good because they did all the jobs we were doing, like typing and mixing the ink and stuff like that, we could palm that onto them. Oh no it was alright.

Yeh, that’s delegation.

Oh well they accepted it very readily, because they were never, as tellers they were never dealing directly with the public, they just did all the typing and the….strange enough once we got the girls we got an adding machine, so that was great.

It wasn’t a very good adding machine. It used to lose 10 shillings in the additions every time and you had to do it mentally to make certain you were right. Oh very interesting life.

Didn’t add too well.

Yes men were tellers. And you had to be at least 25 to be a teller, so by the time

I went to the country at the age of 17 I became a teller. So I started learning very fast, because the bank realised they had to use we young people in these jobs where they couldn’t expect to hold the men who were going into the army and the air force and the navy. Cause they didn’t, thought we were too young to join up. But I eventually joined up in November 1940

which was 12 months after the war started.

Oh I enjoyed it because you dealt with the customers and you had to be very very accurate, because at the end of the day your cash had to balance, right or wrong. Even if you stayed there till 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock at night you had to balance.

Oh it was, it was all part of the learning curve,

you know what the job entailed so you applied yourself to it.

Hmm.

Well I thought exciting to think of being a Pilot in a Fighter Plane you know. That’s what I was interested in, being a Pilot, nothing else.

And as things worked out I didn’t become a Pilot. I didn’t join the air force. Because at 18 you get very very impatient and I heard that the navy were recruiting men for Communications as long as they had the junior certificates and all that. So I got a day off work and went down to Fremantle and said “I’m the man you want”. And

cause I was a good swimmer, had been in swimming clubs, been in the Sea Scouts and they said “Yeah okay alright, you can take your medical now” I said “Yes”, and they said “Right all we want from you is a letter from your parents”, if you’re under 21 you had to get your parents permission for everything, you couldn’t even go into a hotel under 21 in those days, and you had to get your employers permission. So I went home that night

and I said to my parents “I’m not going to join the air force”, my mother said “Oh I’m so pleased” I said “No I just joined the navy”. And I’ll never ever forget the look on my mother’s face, she said “At least I know you can swim”. She never realised…being able to swim was a great asset to me.

Well we were down at

Pelican Point, Evans, do you know where that is? And we used to learn to tie knots and sail boats and do all the….we were only….I was only 10, 11 and I got up to Scout stage. So this is the sort of thing you learn, Red Cross procedures and all this sort of stuff. So really when I…and

you learnt to mix at that level. So when I went into the navy I found it no trouble mixing with it, particularly with my sporting background. No I found fitting into the scene very easily. And I never found the navy discipline a problem, because I think if you’re a member of a sporting team it is discipline and you’re used to it.

The Captain tells you to do something and you do it, so I found no trouble in the discipline side.

No, no only my education qualifications and my health that was all.

No just on my own, that’s what my parents couldn’t work out. And I had no trouble, no trouble, cause the day I had to

report down to the navy base I just walked in and about another half a dozen or so joining up the same day, and we all met each other. We still know each other from back in those days, thought we had different careers, different happenings, big difference.

Well it only took me about

1 week to get a letter from my parents, 1 week to get a letter from the bank and 1 week for the bank to give me approval. And I just went down to the navy at Fremantle and said “Here I am”. So I was suppose within the time from when I applied to the navy it was about 3 weeks to 4 weeks, and I just went down and became a Serviceman.

Oh well I

went into the training, well that’s why they accepted me really because of my education qualifications, as a Communications man. I learnt how to, Morse code and all this sort of stuff, so I moved straight into learning that. And they built up a nucleus of about 25 gradually to get them further trained in Melbourne into Communications. And that’s where things happened and

little Arthur Bancroft, cause the week that we were all going over to Melbourne to, for the more senior training, I got a throat infection and ended up in hospital. And so I missed out on going over to Melbourne.

Oh it was, and especially as the Doctor was the Doctor that brought me into the world. He didn’t know that but I did, my mother told me that. But we

then….

Down in Fremantle, Cliff Street Fremantle, now it’s called Leeuwin Barracks. That was during the war. But this was down Cliff Street, down near the fish market end of Cliff Street, down there.

Oh an average day you had to be there by a certain time. If you were on

duty you had say 2 days on and 2 days off or something like that. And those days you went home and the other days you stayed on duty and you had to be on watch and see that everything was kept in order, sweep the decks and you know all this sort of stuff. And the training for the Communications was something different to what a normal Seaman does.

So we were the elite of the Communications.

Oh about 25. And they all went off to Melbourne and left little Arthur to himself in the hospital.

At that stage, signalling, hand signalling……Morse code signalling,

that sort of training. Everything was done by Morse code or by hand signals in those days. Anyway I ended up, when I got out of hospital I found there was a Seaman’s draft going over to Melbourne the next week. So little Arthur applied to the Captain of the Depot for approval to join them and he said “Why do you want to

join the Seaman’s Branch? You’re a Communicator and we want you”, I said “Well Sir I joined to fight a war and I’ve been here for nearly 3 months now my draft has gone to Melbourne without me. It’s going to be another 3 months before another 25 men are got together. There’s a Seaman draft going next week and I’d like to be on it”, “Oh” he says “That sounds a fairly reasonable request, approved”. So instead of being a Communicator

I became a Seaman, and off I went to Melbourne as a Seaman and saw all my Communication blokes there and they said “How the hell did you get out of this to become a Seaman?” I said “Oh, bit of luck”. But it was it worked out well because I started playing football for the navy over there and oh I had a great time and learnt how to

be a Seaman, how to be a Gunner and all that sort of stuff.

Yes well our first training was basic learning how to march and how to salute properly, all this basic training. Then you’d go through Torpedo School and Gunnery Schools, a lot of physical type…you had to

play a lot of sport. You had to play whatever sport they told you to play, one Wednesday you might play soccer, the next Wednesday you might play hockey, the next Wednesday you might play rugby union, the next Wednesday you might play Australian Rules football. So you had to do all these things, they made you learn to be a member of a team. It was no trouble to me, because I was a pretty able sportsman so fitted in very well.

Well they were, what we thought was very basic knowledge that we had to learn. Because once you went to sea and became more attached to that training, you had to go back to this Flinders Naval Depot for further training if you were going to be more proficient at Torpedo work

you went to Torpedo School, if it was Gunnery you went to Gunnery school. Well in my case I went from, did all the basic course of everything for 3 months. And then I passed, they had an education qualification there and I passed that and they offered me a chance to go into officer material. And I said “What does that entail?” they said

“Well” they said “You’ll go to sea for 3 months then you’ll come back in here for 3 months”, and I was listening to all this, I said “I don’t want to be an Officer. I want to go to sea”. Anyway that’s what happened, I declined the opportunity you know as officer Class, and I went straight from there, after the 3 months were up, went to, our draft went to Sydney. And most of us were there

a matter of short time and were put on the HMAS Perth, Crew Member.

Big Base, called Flinders Naval Depot.

Oh they were very good living conditions. They had huts, they had very good permanent dwellings but because of the war they started building huts to take

the extra number of recruits wanted. And that was interesting because we arrived there at midnight and the train that pulled up at the Flinders Naval Depot where the railway station was, was about a mile out of the base. So we had, at midnight, had to double march all the way into there and it was a

bitterly cold night, compared to us it was in April. So we got to our quarters and the petty officer said “Look all get your hammock strung”, was all hammock in those days, but the following 3 ratings, must tell you the story, Mirl gets sick of it. This petty officer says “Now you’ll just go over and get some hot ki” that’s cocoa, “Austic, Bancroft and Bruce”,

so off went Austic, Bancroft and Bruce and came back with big dixies of hot drink for the men. The next morning the same the petty officer came round and said “Now the following 3 ratings will go over and get breakfast and bring it back here for the troops, Austic, Bancroft and Bruce”, so…. lunch time came round and the same petty officer said “Now the following 3 ratings will go and organise lunch for the men, Austic, Bancroft and Bruce” I looked at him and I said “Excuse me Chief do you know the letters of the

alphabet?” and he said “Are you trying to be funny son?” I said “Not at all Chief but Austic, Bancroft and Bruce are going to win this war on their own”, and a big grin came over his face and he said “Fair enough”. So that was my introduction to the navy that was my first day over there.

I was but…

Yes oh yes and still are. Cause a lot of them

we all joined HMAS Perth together. Not all of us but most of us did. And I’ve only got one left in this State, might be 2 left in this State, we lost a lot. One in particular, no he’s the only one left out of the 2 of us in my class, the

others all got killed.

Oh yes, well that was the name of it. Having been in the swimming clubs and things like that and having been a keep sportsman I wanted to go out and the ocean attracted me. I wasn’t frightened of it, so no was very keen to go.

I don’t know I think it was a bit of luck, whether they wanted you or whether they didn’t. We just arrived in Sydney when they wanted another 100 men, and it was just being on the spot at the right time.

Well we were sent to Sydney not knowing what we were going to do.

We had to report to all different bases, out of our class of 25, 25 were going to different ships we thought. We went to another Base Depot and they couldn’t put us up there, so there were 4 of us who they said “Well you’ll have to go and live

ashore and we’ll pay you the money for living there and you come back to this Base every morning”. So it was right on the outskirts of Kings Cross, so off we went and we found a nice little flat in Kings Cross. And the 4 of us shared this flat between us and we never wanted the war to finish, it was marvellous. So we were there for nearly a month and eventually then we got appointed, we had to do

various jobs on the base on the launches and taking people round the boats, it was quite interesting. But then we all got appointed to HMAS Perth which is alongside being repaired from damage done over in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

It was, I was 19 years of age by then,

our eyes were really opened up. We didn’t get into much nonsense because what you earnt and what you had to, although the navy paid for our rent, but you never really had much money to spend. Everything you got was free, we spent a lot of time at Luna Park, it didn’t cost us anything on the ferries, didn’t cost us anything at Luna Park. We had

eating houses in the city where you got free food, so we lived that way really. It was good we enjoyed it.

Oh the Red Cross and various units were formed up to help Serviceman, so it was very interesting. And of course we liked going over to Luna Park because it was just a short ferry drive, ride over there

and there were always dances on there. And we’d walk in and they started playing and all the nice girls and we thought it was pretty good and it was a free night, bloody cheap and a good way of filling in the evening.

Oh we were, we found we were popular.

Oh I was girl frightened, I was,

I’d walk across a street rather than pass a girl, but you learn to get out of that.

I think so, yeah I think so.

Yes well the 4 of us that shared this one flat together, Norm one mate who’s still alive now he actually went to school with my wife. And he was a handsome fellow, still

is, and we used to hate him because all the girls would go for him, not for us. Old Norm yeah he was a character. He was a Robert Taylor sort of a, don’t know whether you remember him as an actor? Yes he was like him and the girls used to flock around him, and we used to say we’re better than him, but he looked better.

Yes that’s right,

he’d say “Oh you can have this one and I’ll take that one”.

Yes.

Oh thrilled to bits and this ship had a great war record even then. It had been over in the Mediterranean, it had been in the evacuation of Greece, evacuation of Crete,

Malta convoys up all along the ports of the Mediterranean. But then it took a bomb down the for’ard funnel and when they were evacuating troops from Crete and so they had to come home for damage repair and that’s when they had it alongside Garden Island being repaired, that’s when we joined it. Because they took a lot of the seasoned sailors off

who’d been in the Mediterranean and who’d also commissioned the ship….

The Perth was alongside what was known and still is known as Garden Island over in Sydney, and this is where the repair base was. And the Perth had quite a bit of damage done, rectified from this bomb that had hit it. So we had to, there was a hundred new recruits that had been based on the Perth because they took a hundred of the trained men off to go to

other ships. And I was in the 100 that went. They thought we were just all recruits with a bit of training, and they sent 100 of us up to an army camp called Liverpool out of Sydney. And we were based there with the, doing army exercises, land exercises. And the army fellows,

AIF were quite amazed that we were just as good at marching as they were and just as good at firing rifles as they were, as a matter of fact we beat them in a rifle competition. And here’s all these kids 19 years of age were beating these seasoned AIF [Australian Imperial Force] men. So that was all part of our training which we didn’t realise.

Oh yes, yes we had a lot of fun there, we were only there for 2 weeks but it was a marvellous 2 weeks. The

first time ashore, and all these sailors in a little town. Liverpool wasn’t a big city as it is now. And we were lined up by the Sergent of Police and said “Now what are your sailors doing in our town?”, we said “We’re up here Sir, we’re with the army”, “Well this is an army town we don’t want you sailors messing it up”. This is the attitude, by the time the

night was out 4 of our chaps were in jail, hadn’t done anything but this Sergent was going to teach us a lesson. Because we’d all gone and had a couple of drinks and gone to the dance, and even the one who was on duty with a side arm and bayonet and that, the Sergent came up and took his rifle off him and said “You’re too young to have this” and took it off him and put him in jail. So the next morning

our officer in Charge had to go down and get him out of jail, there was no charges laid, it was just pig headedness, because it was an army town.

Yeah, anyway it was all part of education.

No not really, no no we had a lot of shiking. The army fellows were AIF, they were a lot older than we were and they treated us with a lot of interest really, cause

having sailors in an army Camp was quite unique. No it was good.

Yes well of course also in the army Camp were National Service, they weren’t called National Service then, they were militia and they don’t have to go overseas like the AIF had to go overseas. And we were in the middle and we had to keep those from fighting each other,

we were the goodies. We kept them apart, that was interesting. Cause to jump ahead from that, that militia crowd when the Japanese came into the war whilst we joined the Perth, that militia crowd were one of the first ones to go up to New Guinea on the Kokoda Track which you’ve heard of?

And we convoyed them up there and they gave us a cheer.

Yes so quite unique that they’d gone through being chiacked by the AIF and they beat the AIF up to New Guinea.

Yeh amazing, quite unique.

Well we came back, we went out from Garden Island and we had to do a lot of shake up cruises first because we had to test the

Gunnery again and test everything. And usually because it had a dock yard work, that had been working all night on the ship to get it ready. See the war with Japan had started on the 8th August, you know why we were on side, and it was suddenly you were called to action stations in Sydney Harbour and that’s when we found out about Pearl Harbour [the bombing of the American naval base in Hawaii].

We couldn’t, didn’t realise what the depth of it was all going to be until, then we found out the war on dinkum, not only we joined up thinking we were going to fight Germany but eventually it was the Japanese that became the enemy to us.

Yes well we thought it’s rather strange that they call us to

action stations in Sydney when Pearl Harbour was the place that had been bombed. So we soon learnt that they’d attacked the Philippines, they’d attacked other places, we realised then that it was on an earnest. And our ship had gone through various training and we were pretty well trained to go to sea.

Well we, see in

my particular case I was a Seaman and had to do all the Seaman’s jobs, painting and sweeping and cleaning up ship. We all had action stations, and my action station was down in the, above the magazines, right down in the bow of the ship. Not very keen on down there. Anyway I heard that somebody that was up in the 4 inch gun. They were short

one bloke on the loading. I was up there like a shot. Saw the petty officer in charge and said “I’m the man you want Chief” cause I was 6 foot and pretty muscly. He said “You’ll do me son” and so it was the best move I ever made in my life because nobody ever, when the ship sunk they all went down with it and everybody up top got off. So it was a good move.

680.

Oh good, good we done our 3 months at Flinders Naval Depot and then we got extra training on board, no we fitted in well. We had to fit in with the old crew because they looked upon us as what they called macka’s, just raw recruits.

Mackas is the nickname,

macka is an untrained personnel, I don’t know where they got it from, macka, macka oh you’re a macka. Well one of the chaps on the gun I was posted to he’d been through the Mediterranean and all the bombing of Greece and Crete and they looked down on us because we were raw recruits.

Green yeah, and he gave us hell and I wasn’t one to take that sort of stuff so one day I said to him,

I said “We joined this navy to fight a war, you joined this navy for a job. Now if a war’s going to start lets start it now and find out if we fit in or aren’t we fitting in”, and he took one look at me and realised I was dinkum, so from there on we were alright. But he was just trying to be funny.

Yes his name was Cunningham

and I think his nickname was Jock, but he’s name was Cunningham I remember.

He must have been I think, he didn’t survive our ship. When the ship was sunk he didn’t survive it.

Oh just giving us all the dirty jobs around the place and slinging off at us and saying “You blokes don’t know what the war’s all about, we’ve been through it,

we’ve been on bombing raids. You, you’re just raw recruits you don’t know what life’s all about”. That’s alright you can take so much of that and then you stand up for yourselves, that’s what you’ve got to do in the Services.

Yes well my role was to be a loader, you had twin 4 inch guns so you had

about 3 loaders each side. You had to pick up your shells which were 60 pound in weight and ram them into the gun to load the gun and then they’d put the……whatever distance they had to go. So you had to be fairly strong

to handle these 60 pounds…

Well we used to in practice fire about 32 to 35 rounds a minute. Which was good going, that’s twin, each gun doing that, so you had to be really on the move to do it. You know 3 of you going, one is ramming while the other one going and getting the next

one and he’s ramming that one, so you’re on the move all the time. It was pretty hard work but you’re young and fit you can do it.

Oh well one fellow he got his hand jammed in the, when he was ramming the shell in, he jammed his finger and they had to put him down into the sick bay, he’d badly damaged the hand. And he was the only one that

suffered any damage from it. But when the accident, when we got up, he came back to the gun, he didn’t like being down in the sick bay, he reckon he’d rather be up, so he was given another job to do. But he, I met him a few years ago in Tasmania he came through with him, he couldn’t swim but when he eventually had to jump overboard somebody grabbed him and put him onto something,

he got home.

Oh we had anti flash gear yes you had to have that on. Which is a white helmet over your face and you had to have gloves right up to your elbows. Anti flash gear, because if any flash back from the guns you had to be protected in case, not that we ever did have flash

back but you had to be protected against it.

Oh just a premature explosion in the funnel.

Yes instead of going out it would come back. Never ever happened but you had to be prepared against it.

Oh very small, I never heard of it happening, it’s part of your training.

Faulty, could be a faulty,

see in our area faulty shells, they were all in one piece where a 6 inch you have a separate, you have your projectile and you have your separate charge, which that goes off first and then blows the shell out. With the 4 inch shell it’s all one piece and so if anything went wrong with the charge at that base, that would be the

flash back. I’ve never ever heard of it happening.

Oh it used to be noisy. With two of them going, and usually especially in air raids, you got, we had twin there and two twins on the other side. And when they were all going oh terrific din. Then when you’re going and you’ve got

two 6 inch mountings up that end and two up there and they’re going at the same time it’s deafening, really deafening.

Oh yes they had ear plugs to put in but we ended up with our mouth open, let all the noise just down through your system.

What was that? No

strangely it didn’t, no it didn’t affect my hearing.

Oh yes they rotate yes. We were the first ones, the first of the cruisers to get the twin mounts because we’d been through the Mediterranean. The ship had and they realised that a lot of anti aircraft fire had hit it and the twin guns you can get much more in the air than you can with single mounts.

See HMAS Sydney which was only lost yesterday, yeah.

Anniversary yesterday, she only had single mounts, didn’t have twin mounts. Not that it would have made much difference, because the type of action she was lost in didn’t have much chance.

Yeah, well she would have been the next one to get the

dual mounts put on her I guess. See the Sydney, the Perth and the Hobart were the 3 modified landier class cruisers they took over from England at the beginning of World War II. That was in 19…in September 1939. The Sydney was first, then the Perth was out in the

Atlantic when the war with Germany was declared. So suddenly from just being newly taken over by the Australian Government it was in the war, before it even got home.

Well she was part of the Royal Navy and that was the amphion taken over as HMAS Perth and then it became part of the Australian Fleet attached to the British Fleet for the

initial part of the World War and going out towards America and looking after the merchant shipping and all that to protect them from submarines. That was the start of Perth in the war.

No we knew she had a great war record and we knew we had a job to do.

A great example had been set by the…most of the blokes on, the Senior fellows on the Perth who had been through the Mediterranean were very good. There was only this one bloke on our gun tried to be funny but we straightened him out….

No that was Cunningham.

But this other one that I got very friendly with, he was on the other gun,

I meet him now every Tuesday for lunch.

Every Tuesday we met for lunch.

Yeah we went through POW [Prisoner of War] life together and everything together.

Clarrie Gloset.

Oh we are, yeah. I said to him Tuesday, I told him about this, I said to him “Did you get approached from them?” he said “I never heard from them”. But he wouldn’t want to be, he’s a very quiet unassuming bloke, he doesn’t, oh Clarry’s a bit

older than I am, I’m 82 Monday, next Monday and he is just turned 83, he’s 84 in December I think. But were great mates, yeah.

Well see

you’re all Messes and you had to have 20 odd in a Mess and you had to go to the galley one, you had to be a Mess Cook and 2 of you would be the Mess Cook for the week and you’d have to go to the galley and draw the meals for the other men, and then dish it out to them. Bit different to today, and that was interesting.

Yeah,

lovely now.

Oh well, we’d just go and it would already be prepared for us, it might be sausages and mash one day it might be a stew another day, you had a very good feed, very good meal. There was plenty of it.

Oh that’s a good question, I can’t quickly think...oh it had about 4 different

messes going. So in the 684 Crew, 20 odd, oh….

Lot of messes yes, in various parts of the ship to, you had various parts of the ship.

Yes well we’d go in the fo’s’sle [forecastle] mess, going forward

towards the bow on the left hand side you had your petty officer’s mess, the chief petty officer’s mess and the petty officer’s mess and then you’d move into the Seaman’s Messes. And so we’d have, we’d have 2 on this side, port side and 2 on starboard side, then go through another set of doors, that eventually would get locked if you’re in an accident, and you’ve got another couple of messes in there. And they are called the Folksall Messes

or the Floor top Messes, they each had different names to them. And down further the Stokers had their own messes down further. Yes so everybody had to sling their hammocks in those messes, you didn’t have bunks like they have now. And then you’d, they’d take your hammock down each morning and tie them up and stow them

out of harms way and that was the routine. And you never ever had a bunk you could get into during the day time, there were always only hammocks being slung at a certain time of the night. Then the watches would go to their hammocks when they were off duty. Yeah it was a great way of living.

Yeah the table setting would come from underneath the outside portholes, you’d have portholes alongside and then your mess, your mess decks would move into the side of the ship. Then you had benches to sit on either side. Sounds pretty rough these days but that was normal those days. And it

was much better than what Nelson’s mob had I guess.

Oh marvellous, cause you roll with the ship, you didn’t realise the ship was rolling because you just move with it, oh no comfortable, very comfortable.

Oh better, better. I’ve been in ships since, the HMAS Perth was a destroyer

here. I had a trip from here to Esperance on it. And we went down here and I was in my bunk and we turned the corner down at Leeuwin [Cape Leeuwin] down here and suddenly I plonked, change of the sea. You’re going this way and then suddenly you change that way and the sea came from a different direction and I woke up and thought what’s happened?. In a hammock you wouldn’t notice it, wouldn’t notice it.

Yeah.

Yeah well the 4 inch, the Perth had twin 6 inch guns forehead and twin 6 inch guns aft. So that was 2 turrets each with 2 6 inch guns and 2 turrets with 6 inch. Up on the 4 inch gun deck you had 1

twin mounting of 2 and we called that P1, port 1 on portside, and then P2 was down on the other side, and that was P2, port 2. On the starboard side you had S1 and S2 and they were opposite each other and in between was an ammunition lobbies and thing like that. They carry

ammunition, where you use ammunition, so suddenly if you have action stations you had ammunition to call on. Because the rest of the ammunition was down below in the ammunition place where they had to bring it up physically.

By hand, 6 inches were different they came up inside the turret. But ours had come up from the magazines

by hand and that was a part of the ship of action stations, of cooks and all the ones who didn’t have action stations like firing guns, they’d then became ammunition lobbies. They go down in the lobby and bring up a shell and ram it up to you up in the gun, so that was, it seems a rather difficult way of doing it but it’s the only way to do it.

Oh well the magazine would be about underneath our Mess deck area and the 4 inch guns were up around and after the funnel, so a fair distance. So you’d have a team going from port and starboard and don’t really know how many would be involved, but they’d be non action stations men, like Cooks and Stewards, ones who had

other jobs that they didn’t have action stations. They didn’t have to be involved with guns or torpedoes or anything like that.

Along the port and starboard wastes which is the empty space along port and starboard side, which runs from the Mess deck and the ammunition area. And they just run along there carrying them and ramming them up through a

place on the underdeck. And we’d be up there to grab them as they were pushed up.

Oh I don’t think it would worry much. We didn’t actually try it.

No.

No, no.

Well, first of all we went up and took the Aquatania which had the militia up to New Guinea and we escorted them into Port Moresby. From there we went out to Suva, Noumea, we went to

meet up with an American convoy which was bringing some troops. We found out later they were bringing them out to go to the Philippines. Because with the Philippines being landed on by the Japanese they decided to bring them through to Brisbane and so we convoyed them from there into Brisbane. Interesting because the American troops on that Troop ship

were called the……the, just trying to think of the correct name, I’ve got a different name for them. But they were oh…I’ll think of it in turn, but they called themselves the Lost Battalion later on. They were an Artillery Unit which were heading for the

Philippines to become an Artillery Unit. Because the Philippines had been landed on by Japanese they didn’t know what they were going to do with this crowd. But eventually they took them up through, from Brisbane right up through to Darwin, then from Darwin they took them over to Java to become part of the defence in Java. We eventually got tangled up with them in the Prisoner of War Camp.

Yeah

and they were eventually called to the rest of the world ‘the Lost Battalion’ and they were taken Prisoners of War and it took a long time before they found out where they were. And I said to one of the Americans at one of the reunions in America a few years back, I said “Why did they call you ‘the Lost Battalion’?”, he said “I don’t know Arty I knew where I was”. They were ‘the Lost Battalion’ because they ended up in Java and they should have been in the

Philippines and they just nicknamed them ‘the Lost Battalion’.

Not for a while, no.

Well that was very peaceful. There were no signs of the war at that stage. Because they’d started bombing Port Moresby but there’s were no signs of it when we were there. But when we were landing the troops there, they were going over to the Kokoda Track.

The Japanese had landed on the Northern side of New Guinea. But then we only stayed for a while and then refuelled and off, going out to meet the American convoys.

Oh yes, yes quite, it was our introduction to the war. And they didn’t do any bombing

whilst we were there but you could see the results of it.

Oh they were quite unique, quite different to what we’d been used to seeing, coming from sand groper country [Western Australia] we didn’t have any of that sort of stuff. And we hadn’t seen much of Brisbane, we hadn’t seen Brisbane, we hadn’t seen any of the forest country up there. No it was quite unique.

Oh it was, our very first, except for our training runs out to sea.

Oh yes I was quite happy, quite happy yeah.

Oh well it was a good sailing ship, good sea ship so there was no rough water to worry about, the ship could handle anything, it was a marvellous ship.

Oh around about the cruising speed of 25 to 24 knots. The top speed is going to be 32 knots, but that’s when she’s really flat out. But when we eventually came round the South of Australia to come to Fremantle I think we averaged something like 28 to 30 knots, because we were in a hurry,

we had a mission to go to.

That was in the February 1942.

This was from, we’d been down from Brisbane back to Perth, oh back to Sydney then we went out again and met another American convoy out at New Guinea and took them into Melbourne and whilst we were

in Melbourne we got the message to head West.

Oh yes we landed in Sydney on Christmas Eve so we were allowed off, ashore there. Matter of fact we missed out because we thought we’d get plenty of Christmas food, it was hard to get into restaurants.

Yeah they were booked out.

Yes it’s strange you should say that. We went to a hotel we got to know pretty well in Kings Cross.

Oh you’re testing my memory.

I just can’t quickly think, it was good. We’d taken a lot of cigarette supplies up, cause we got duty free cigarettes on board. I didn’t smoke

but always took some with me in case somebody else wanted a smoke. And then in this hotel we all had stacks of cigarettes everywhere and somebody snuck in and pinched them all. Anyway it didn’t worry me because I didn’t need them, but we knew it was a system of barter, if somebody wanted some cigarettes and we wanted some beer we could do a swap.

Yes that was it we had our lunch there, we enjoyed it.

Well the one that lives in Subiaco, no doesn’t live in Subiaco, now he came from Subiaco, Norm Fuller. He was in the same flat as me in Kings Cross, we had dinner together and some mates of the 4 inch gun deck ended up there. The ones we’d been through initial training with,

you all end up with your little cliques, it was all good fun.

We met another convoy out of New Zealand, we didn’t actually get in, we didn’t actually see New Zealand. We took the convoy over after they’d left New Zealand and bought them into Melbourne.

We had another days leave there as a matter of fact. Me and my mate, he was on the same gun as me, and we got….he was a great character, I’ll tell you more about him later, he only passed away a few years ago. But he and I used to go everywhere together. I was a shortie. I was only 6 foot, he was 6 foot

3 and ¼, no he used to always add the ¼ on, 6 foot 3 and a ¼. So in Melbourne we went ashore and we went to the Young and Jackson, the hotel the Young and Jackson and that ran out of beer cause the Americans were in there from the American ships that were in. So at that stage they were only opening the hotels, this

was just after Christmas in 1941, so the war being on and the hotels were starting to run short of beer because there were a lot of Troops everywhere. And where there’s troops they need beer don’t they? And when the beer started flowing at the Young and Jackson a bit of a fight developed between some

American sailors and some Aussie soldiers. And one of the Aussie soldiers said “When are you bloody Yanks going to start fighting?” and the Yank said “Right now”, so they were into it, so we, Marcus and I ducked out the door and went up the next hotel and had a few quite beers there. We didn’t want to get stuck into the fight. So we went to another hotel

and this is the only way you could do anything, ashore there was nothing else to do. And we eventually got back to, we found out that we had to go back to the ship, they had a recall, and so we got back to our ship at 6 o’clock in the morning to find out that we were due to sail as soon as everybody was back from shore. And that’s when we took

off from Melbourne not knowing where were going, but we headed West. That was the trip that we went in a hurry and we knew that we were going somewhere cause of the speed the ship was going, and…..

Yes. Well by the time

we reached Perth was in the early February 1942. And we were out ashore in the watches, from Fremantle and so I went home and saw my family and I went and saw little Mirla, my girl’s

youngest sister and my mate. I think we went to the pictures or something like that, by this time I was 19, no I just turned 20. I was an old man by then, 20 and she was about 18 or 17. And I think we were starting to think that we did really like each other, cause we had been writing

to each other in between time. So we had to go back on shore that night, off shore back on board, and we didn’t come off again. I said to Mirl “I’ll see ya tomorrow” but there was no tomorrow, the ship left. The ship left, it was supposed to leave on Friday the 13th February and that sounded a bad day, Friday the 13th .

So the Captain left the ship till after midnight, so we actually sailed in the early hours of the 14th instead of the 13th and Mirla was trying to ring me on the phone to see when I was coming ashore but couldn’t get any answer, we didn’t come back.

Oh on board there was a bank of phones where they had to ring

the number, the ships number, and if one of those were free they’d put it through, but very antiquated system.

Yeah, yeah no so. She found out, that’s when she found out the ship had gone.

To get to Java to escort ships up to Java.

Well two fold, one was to refuel and the other one was to lighten ship. They had to take anything that made the ship too top heavy had to go off. Like we had a piano in the mess, in the canteen, that would go off, anything that was overweight, above water line

so that she….we knew that we must have been going into war waters because all the precautions being taken. So they put more ballast into the ships so she sat more in the water. So when we took off we were in a different ship to when we landed, came into Fremantle.

Yes, yes. We really thought that we had indicated,

I said to my parents and to Mirl’s mother “Well there is something happening and I think we’re going towards it but we don’t know”. So we took a convoy from Fremantle up towards Java which had a couple of tankers and other things, and we got up about opposite Geraldton way and got the message for the convoy to come back. Apparently it was too

dangerous to take them up to Java and cause they were going up to get fuel and the Japanese had landed on Sumatra where mainly fuel was obtained and so we just did a, all the convoy about half a dozen ships turned round to back and we just sailed up between them and gave them a bit of a wave and

they gave us a wave and they came back and we never came back…..

We headed, we kept going to Java.

We did the convoy came back to Fremantle. So by the time, we did not know it but we were up about level with Darwin the first time Darwin was bombed and we didn’t know anything about that.

More than likely the Captain knew but other ranks didn’t know about it, because we didn’t have radios or that in those days. And we ended up going through what they called Sunda Strait, the night we passed, going through there’s a volcano, Krakatoa and we passed that, oh all eyes.

We didn’t really know where we were but we thought this looked like a pretty big mountain compared to what we’d been used to seeing.

Yeah.

Oh that blew up years back, early in the century I think, it was a long way back.

There was still smoke coming out of it so it was semi active. But then we came through there

into the Port of Tandjungpriok. And that was our introduction to the war because the Japanese started bombing it shortly afterwards and so that was our first taste of action. The Japanese coming over and bombing it.

Well

you’re too busy to be shocked or frightened, on the 4 inch guns with aircraft you’ve got to be shooting stuff up as quick as you can to the sky. So you’re a bit too busy to be frightened or concerned about it.

Yeah, well the day itself we’d gone out and we’d pulled in alongside a tanker out in the

harbour and we pulled alongside to get more fuel and that’s when the bombers came over. I think there were 3 lots, 27 bombers came over so we just pumped everything up at them, we had all our 4 inch guns going, our 6 inch guns were going and the Japanese had come in at a fairly low level and once we got in amongst them they

went right up high to get away from us. I think we hit one, one sort of went into flames and disappeared out to sea. That was the only one we think we did get. But that was our introduction, well most of us, a lot had been through to the Mediterranean and had bombing raids, but that was our introduction

to warfare really.

Oh in the Harbour at that stage there were mostly likely a few Dutch destroyers, quite a number of merchant vessels, but not too many at that stage.

Oh it was, they were bombing the

oil tanks so that’s what they were aiming for. And by the time the bombing raid was over they were all in flames, they’d set alight. Like at Fremantle where you have all the tanks there, a lot of them were on fire. So yes it was quite a change of scenery from quiet old Fremantle to this sort of action.

Well the action stations, the alarm goes off and everybody’s got to immediately go to action stations. Now if you’re on the 4 inch gun deck and you’re down on the… and they say action stations, the first ones to get to their guns are the 4 inch gunners, because we’ve got to be the anti aircraft

guns. And if anybody gets in your road you knock them out of the way and say “Make way for gun crew, make way for gun crew” and they get out of the road. Because wherever you are on the ship you’ve got to get up to those guns in a hurry. There are ones already on the guns but the basic crew is there but the rest are doing other jobs you see. So when they say action stations you just say “Make way for guns crew” and you go streaming through and anybody gets in your way you just knock them over,

you can revenge on somebody this way.

Not really, not really. You clean up ship of course, you’ve got to clean up all the empty cartridges lying around the deck and you’ve got to clear those up. So really you

compare notes with the other Gunners, how’d do you reckon you went and all this. No it was, an interesting introduction to the war.

No not to us no. Nor to the tanker, except I found out since after we’d left, the Australian cruiser Hobart came in and that

was alongside the same tanker that we’d been alongside and that got hit by the next air raid. But not the cruiser, it was the tanker itself that got hit, but they didn’t sink it.

Oh we were in the harbour then for 3 or 4 days. But after we’d left the tanker we went alongside the wharf,

and during the next air raid, another air raid came over, we were the ‘go downs’, do you know what ‘go downs’ are? The sheds on the wharf there, the big sheds, like A shed B shed in Fremantle, there the ‘go downs’ they call them. And the army the AIF men were on duty on that and they said to us “Come over and help yourself” these ‘go downs’

are full of cigarettes and whiskey and all sorts of things and they said “Were guarding but there’s nothing to guard”, because the bombing raid had flattened the doors. So we all jumped over the side of the ship and bought back cartons of cigarettes and cartons of whiskey. Anyway the Officer’s said “We’ll keep all the cigarettes but put all the whiskey on the quarter deck, under our control, not under your control”. So

then shortly after that we left to go to Surabaya, we didn’t know where we were going but we ended up going to Surabaya to meet up with another fleet.

Yes.

Well they again were attacking the fuel depots and that’s the one that the Hobart had come with and they hit that tanker

and they did a bit of superficial damage around the harbour, but they didn’t sink any ships. They were really going to knock out the fuel sources, and they made a mess of those.

Oh we don’t really know. Everything in the harbour that had guns were firing at it. We had an Australian

Corvette alongside us and she was firing at the same time as we were. And they really I think damaged our aircraft because their guns were too close to our aircraft, which was not used to us from then on. And so the next morning we left to go to, we found out Surabaya which is down the coast and we joined up there with what they called the ABDA Fleet.

There were American, British, Dutch and Australian ships in the fleet. Which was made up on combined ships of America, Britain, Dutch and we were the only Australian ship. So that we were in Surabaya Harbour for 24 hours then we all moved out and we were heading out to intercept an invasion fleet that was coming

towards Java.

Of the combined Fleet, well we had 2 Dutch cruisers, 1 American cruiser, 1 British cruiser and HMAS Perth. Then we had something like 4 British destroyers, 2 American destroyers and a couple of Dutch destroyers, so that

made up our fleet. And we didn’t make contact with the invading fleet for the first day and we turned around to come back and we got the message that they had been sighted so we went out on the 27th I think it was of February and we made contact with the invasion fleet.

Out from North of Surabaya and Java, up

North towards I suppose…..

Yeah well a bit further along from that. We were right out in the Java Sea itself, we weren’t in sight of land by this. But the Japanese sent aircraft over spotting us and this is where our aircraft we couldn’t use because it had blown the fabric of it in the

air raid. The American aircraft couldn’t be used, they’d been damaged. The British aircraft cruiser, that couldn’t be used so the Japanese had aircraft hovering over spotting us and we couldn’t do anything about it. So then the Battle of the Java Sea started about 4 o’clock in the afternoon I think, and all the cruisers were line

ahead with the Dutch cruisers first then the American cruiser, the Perth and the British cruiser. The first one to be hit was the British cruiser, got taken a 8 inch shell into the engine room and that slowed her down, so we had to put a smoke screen around her.

Oh they put something down in the engine room and black smoke comes pouring out of the

funnels and you had floats tossed over, and that hides the, what you want to hide from the enemy. And by the time the battle finished, unfortunately we were in the line ahead, the Dutch Admiral was in the first one then his other ship the de Ruyter, then the American ship the Houston.

Now she was a 8 inch cruiser but only had one 8 inch working forehead, the other had been damaged by an earlier air raid, and the Houston and the Exeter were the only two 8 inch ships we had. Perth was 6 inch, main armament, the Java and the De Ruyter the Dutch only 6 inch, all the Japanese ships were 8 inch. So

we were watching, we could see them in the distance firing and vroom we’d hear the shell go through our rigging. And land in the water over that side the starboard side, so the Captain would shift the ship around so the next one would land short and the water would splash up and then come over us, and we couldn’t fire back because we were out of range. It was rather scary hearing these shells whizzing above you,

shooom and then splash, the water would go up everywhere and we thought, only because we had a good Skipper [Captain] that we didn’t get hit.

Only by, in that case, shifting ship. Once the ship is going along here and the shell goes over there and lands there so their going to adjust and bring it back there aren’t they? So he shifts the ship up there, so the next

shell is short. So this is how the Captain manoeuvres the ship. Anyway.

Well because the Japs had more 8 inch cruisers than we did. And they had air craft up telling the Captain of the Japanese cruisers, what movements we were making, because we didn’t have any aircraft telling us what they were doing.

Oh definitely, it was the Dutch. They should have put our Captain in charge, it would have been different. See our Captain had been over in the Mediterranean and knew how to fight a battle. He was the only one amongst them that really knew what to do we think.

No, we didn’t have a chance. In Surabaya we

called in there, we didn’t even go ashore, so we didn’t meet anybody. The Captain went and had a confab and came back on board and we went to sea so we didn’t get ashore in Surabaya at all. So never saw a Dutchman not until they were Prisoners of War.

Oh marvellous man, we had the highest regard for him. And he’d been

such a well seasoned Captain in the Mediterranean, he was Captain of the destroyer flotilla [Captain of HMAS Stewart and later commander of the flotilla] and he was based on the, in the Mediterranean and the British thought he was a very marvellous Captain. And we were very proud of him, we thought well if anybody’s going to handle our ship it’s going to be him, and he was a marvellous man.

Not personally, but except he’d come from his cabin and we’d be on our gun deck, he’d walk through our gun deck and sometimes we’d be throwing a basket ball around and he’d catch it and throw it back and carry on and he’d just keep walking. No very human man, very human man. We had a chap on board the

ship called Mee, and when the Captain first joined the ship, up on the bridge, he said to this Harry Mee “What’s your name Sailor?”, “Mee Sir”, he said “Yes I know it’s you, but what’s your name”, he said “Mee, Harry Mee Sir”, he said “Why didn’t you tell me”, we always joke about that, he’s still alive Harry Mee and he often tells that story about himself. “What’s your name Sailor?”

“Mee”, “I know it’s you and what’s your bloody name?”

It started at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and I think we broke off at one stage and then made contact I think at 10 o’clock at night. And that was when the Exeter had to pull out of the Battle because of the damage and

late in the night the Japs sunk the Java and the De Ruyter with torpedoes. Was left with only the Houston and the Perth, the big ships, and so our Captain was put in charge. And the Dutch Admiral he’d gone down with his ship. And so Captain Waller took evasive action and we

headed back towards Java and then into Tandjungpriok, because we were running short of not only ammunition, but by this time we had got in range and we were firing 4 inch at the aircraft. So we had to get back and get some more ammunition and also some more fuel so there was only 2 of the big ships, the destroyers had got back into Surabaya to get more fuel,

because they burn up a lot. So out of the fleet we lost the Java and the de Ruyter, the Exeter was damaged, 2 or 3 of the destroyers had been sunk, so we virtually lost the battle. But the Japanese had control of it by air, but anyway.

Well we were all very critical of the Dutch control of the…we couldn’t understand why we were sailing along with shells going over and we couldn’t fire back. It wasn’t until later that we could fire back, and we’d said “Why didn’t we put Captain Waller [Captain Hector Waller] in charge that would have fixed them”, but he wasn’t in charge.

Well we had to dodge around, yes we saw them. But we couldn’t get a very good look, because by this time it was dark, but we’d see them go up, but you couldn’t see them individually no.

Well at one stage we heard the whistles being blown

in the water and we actually cruised through what must have been off one of the Dutch ships that was sunk, and they were blowing whistles and trying to attract our attention to pick them up, we couldn’t stop, we had to leave them. So what happen to them we don’t know.

Yes cause you couldn’t stop in the middle of a battle to pick up survivors. We didn’t know who they were even, we didn’t even know if they were

Jap or whether they were Dutch, or British or American, we didn’t know. All we could hear was the noise they were making and we could see from the 4 inch gun deck we could see them. It seemed a bit tough not being able to stop and pick them up but you couldn’t.

Well we think he would have broken off the, split up the 8

inch and 6 inch cruisers and got the three 6 inch cruisers in towards the enemy so they could use their 6 inch guns, instead of just having the 8 inch guns sitting out. And the 8 inch guns firing at us we would have got in amongst the destroyers, the Japanese destroyers and their cruisers at closer range. Oh I think we could have done more damage that way.

No we didn’t. The Houston took a shell through her bow, the Exeter took a shell in her engine room and the two Dutch cruisers were sunk. The only ship that didn’t get hit amongst the cruisers was the HMAS Perth. And we give our Captain credit for that because of his manoeuvring, no we didn’t get hit. We were

there but didn’t get hit.

No we had to then out of the Java Sea and the idea of calling into Tandjungpriok, the port of Batavia was to get more fuel and get some more ammunition if possible. Well by the time we got into

Batavia or Tandjungpriok, was in flames, the Japanese had been bombing it more. See they had air control and they, we got a bit of fuel but the Japanese had set alight all the fuel tanks. And we could only get so much fuel, not enough for what we wanted, and they couldn’t give us any ammunition cause they didn’t have any. So when the

Houston and the Perth left there around about 7 o’clock at night to leave the Java Sea battle area because that was a write off that one, and we were going to go out through Sunda Strait to….. I remember the Captain giving over the speaker “This is your Captain speaking, we are now departing, we will be heading towards Tjilatjap which is on the South Coast of Java,

the Sunda Strait is clear of the enemy. They are sighted heading out in the opposite direction and we are going in the opposite direction”, we said “You beauty”. And we arrived at Sunda Strait entrance at 11 o’clock at night and that was, the Dutch information was wrong,

another invasion fleet was already there, landing their troops on the shore and the Perth and the Houston went straight into the battle fleet.

Well they found out when we hit the invasion fleet coming through….

Yes well when we were

all in action stations ready for any action, and at 11 o’clock at night another ship was sighted and they flashed the recognition signal to the other, it looked like just a destroyer. And they got a signal back that didn’t make sense, so then the wireless said “Open fire”, they knew it must have been the enemy. And that’s when the Battle of Sunda Strait started.

So that destroyer disappeared under a smoke haze then and within minutes we were virtually surrounded by Japanese destroyers. See something like you hear various figures, 13 Japanese destroyers and about 3 Japanese cruisers, we arrived in the middle of them, I’d like to think in a area between Cottlesloe and

Rottnest, we were surrounded by ships in that area. And everything we had was firing, every 4 inch gun was firing, every 6 inches gun was firing, every anti aircraft gun was firing, machine guns were firing, anything that could be fired we were firing, it was deafening. And the Japanese destroyers were coming in with search lights on us and we were firing star shells

out of our 4 inch to light them up. And at one stage I could see Japanese sailors behind their guns on the Japanese destroyer they were that close. So it was just bedlam, bedlam. If anyone’s going to go deaf we should have gone deaf. There was going to be oh 6, about 12 o’clock before we started, a bit before 12,

11 the Battle started about quarter to 12 we took our first hit and then from there on we started getting hit fairly regularly. So I surfaced not by, it wasn’t until about quarter past 12, after midnight we took our first torpedo and in a matter of minutes the ship was sunk, it got hit by 4 torpedoes.

And the Japanese had….we had no, we’d fired our torpedoes at them, don’t know what happened to them, but eventually all I heard on 4 inch guns deck was the Captain saying “Prepare to abandon ship” and a little while later, the last torpedo hit he said “Abandon ship, every man for himself, good luck”. Because all our lifeboats had been shot to bits, nothing, anything that floated we just threw

overboard and the ship was keeling over on the portside very quickly. And that was the side I was on so I headed off over to the starboard side and jumped over the ship there, off the ship and then swam away about 50 yards and looked around and saw the ship just roll over and the propellers were just gradually turning and then down she went, just like that.

I suppose my first reaction was “Gee that’s my home”, just like you would if your house burnt down. And you’re really not concerned what you’re going to do. We had life jackets on, ‘Mae West’s’ as they called them, just blow them up. But I wasn’t scared. I was safe in the water, I knew I could look after myself in the water, but I was sorry for those who couldn’t.

And the Houston was still firing, one gun still firing when we were sunk, but she got hit by 4 torpedoes, but she was on fire, we weren’t on fire. Then she went down and the Japanese are still firing shells around, and when the Houston went, well everything went quiet, it was down. And you could see Japanese destroyers

cruising round and they were looking for survivors off, they had no idea who we were. We were all black with oil, and I remember little Billy McCall [William McCall] a Fremantle boy, he was on one of the rafts and a Japanese destroyer came alongside and yelled out through a megaphone “Who are you?” and Bill McCall said “We’re Aussies and bloody proud of it”. And they just kept moving.

They had no idea who we were. At one stage in later reports they thought we had a Battle ship in amongst us, but there was just the two of us and we must have given them a hell of a fright. As I say we were even firing machine guns at them, that’s how close they were. No it was an unusual battle, something like the old drake [Frances Drake] days, waiting to bring out

your cutlasses and board them, but it was so close, very close.

Its an unusual feeling, its just like going up in a lift, you just go up and you think “Where am I going?” and then suddenly down you come. Just like going up in a lift, the whole ship was lifted, cause of the terrific explosion going under water and it just lifts the ship up. And the first time

you wonder what had happened, and then when you got another one straight after you realise they were torpedoes. But then at that stage you had enough confidence in our ship that it could take a couple of torpedo hits and still sail. But after you got 3 and another one 4, that’s when the Captain gave the order to abandon ship. It was every man for himself.

No I think the 3rd torpedo I thought, and that’s when the Captain said “Prepare to abandon ship” and when the 4th torpedo hit he said “Abandon ship, every man for himself, good luck”. And he got hit on the bridge himself and he didn’t survive.

The first hit was on the starboard side underneath the 6 inch guns in that area. Then another one a bit further up, then another one on the portside and then another one down starboard, on the portside there was the 4th hit. And once that hit

you knew, and she started going over cause the water had been rushing into the ship, before water must have been balancing itself with the 1st and 2nd torpedo, but when the other two hit the amount of water that came into the ship must have rolled it that way instead of going that way, it rolled that way. No it was a strange feeling to

see your ship disappear like that. I don’t think I could say I was frightened I was just, I just wondered what was going to happen next. We could see land, see Java head was not far, there was fairly high land and you could actually still see it, so we were only 4 or 5 miles out, so we knew we could make land.

But there was a terrific current going through the water there, strong current goes through Sunda Strait out into the ocean. And that was very, we knew we could get to land, but those who made it to land where the Japanese troops were landing they would have been slaughtered. So I swam toward where you could see islands in the Sunda Strait, and I got

nearly to that when the current was taking me away through Sunda Strait and I had to get away, out of that. So I came back and tried to get to the island at the other end. But about that time, this is around about, see we got sunk at 20 past midnight and by the time we’d floated around, dawn broke and I could see the islands clearly so I knew where I was heading for, but

when I was coming out of the current to come at the other end of the island a lifeboat of one of the Japanese sunken ships came along with our fellows in it. So they picked me up because we were going to try and get through Sunda Strait in the lifeboat. But as we came back the Japanese destroyer came along and we had about 30 in the lifeboat by this stage, and some wounded men.

Well ones, mainly leg wounds. One, they wouldn’t pick him up, see the Japanese started picking us up out of the lifeboats so they saw one of their own lifeboats from one of their own sunken ships. And they came alongside and made us come on board, we didn’t want to, we wanted to get to land, but we had no choice. They took us on their destroyer but they wouldn’t take the two wounded

men on the boat, they wouldn’t take them. They were badly wounded, they didn’t survive. So when we got on board we were covered in oil and I had a pair of football shorts on that’s all, I’d taken everything else off, had to throw that off, we all had to throw our gear off and they gave us g-strings. That’s our introduction to g-strings. But the Japanese sailors were quite human, humane. They

gave us water to drink and eye drops for our eyes, cause all water in our eyes, dry biscuits to munch on, they were very civilised. I think these are the rules of the sea, you look after each other at sea, and whether we’re enemy or not they looked after us, which is very very good.

Yes, yes there’s groups of us yes. Well

being in the dark most of the, well there was moonlight, but with everybody with oil over them you didn’t know who was who. Gradually you recognise your blokes and say “That’s you Lofty” or one of them, Charlie Thompson who passed away a few years ago, old Charlie he was an old Subi boy from Subiaco, and he was paddling along there and he said “I’ll see you at the Shence”, do you know what the Shence is?

Shenton Park Hotel. See you at the

Shence. So he went paddling on and I was paddling the other way.

Oh you had to.

Well you try to, you’re looking out for number one, but you’re also caring for anybody else. I think in the early stage I had a knife, I was tying a

lump of wood onto an empty can, to make it help float. You try and do something to improve your situation. They only had a couple of what they call cardie floats that survived the bombing, or the hits on the ship and that was mainly for the wounded, lots of wounded in them. And I hung onto the side at one stage and

then I drifted off, cause I could see it was getting towards the land and I was wanting to swim to land, and as it was I didn't get there. I’m sure that had I got to the main bay where the Japanese were landing I think they would have been slaughtered, we don’t know. Wasn’t until later on we found out that out of our 682 there was only 320 odd that survived. In one of the Japanese life boats

they, 12 of them actually got to Sumatra on it. And we didn’t know anything about them until the end of the war. They got captured by the Japanese on Sumatra about 12 days or 14 days after, before they got captured. Another Japanese life boat had 10 men on it, there was 12 in that one that went to

Java, 10 got in one and sailed through Sunda Strait right around the South Coast of Java and called into Tjilatjap to get some food and that to go to Australia only to find the Japanese there, and the Japanese said “Come, yeah come here” and they got captured there. Quite a few got through in other Japanese life boats onto Java itself in the Sunda Strait.

So they were all mixed up for a long time.

Anything that floated was there, we had planks of the ship that had been sunk, we had, off our own ship we’d taken on little one man floaters, we took them on in Tandjungpriok, and they were floating everywhere, so you could grab hold of those.

A lot of, amazing what floats, there was ladders off the ship floating, you know wooden ladders, anything, and this is the sort of stuff you grab onto to, even though you had a Mae West [Life Jacket] on you needed other support as well. Yeah.

Oh yes, you had to save your strength. But there’s a

big advantage to not being frightened of the ocean. I was not frightened. One little (UNCLEAR) that had his hand injured, he got picked up and put on a raft. So I would think not being able to swim properly would be a bit scary, yeah.

Well you,

I think at that stage you felt that you’re still going to get to land, you can still see land, so it was only a matter of getting to land and we could get in with the Dutch and the Australian troops where they were fighting the Japanese and we’d be safe. But didn’t work out that way, didn’t work out. So when we, see the ones that got taken by the Japanese on the destroyer, they picked up 200

odd and they were just lying around on the after deck…….

Well I had nearly 2 days on the Japanese destroyer, as I said before they were very kind to us, except the sun, by the time the sun got up and it was about midday when they picked us I suppose and it was hot on that steel deck all just in a g-string. And well we convinced the Japanese that we needed some cover over and so they got a big tarpaulin and draped it out over so we could get

under it away from the sun. Well they, I suppose when dusk fell, don’t know what time it would have been 5 or 6 o’clock, the next time I opened my eyes it was 6 o’clock in the morning, I just passed out. I think we all did you know our energy had been taken away from us and soon as the darkness fell our eyes

just shut and I slept for 12 hours without any trouble.

We were exhausted yes.

How many on the….

Yeah well we think there were Americans as well as ourselves, mainly Perth, we might have got a couple of hundred onboard. And they took us from there the next day, they got their lifeboat and we had to

row ourselves over to one of the invasion vessels. They were all anchored in the bay, and this is where we could see sunken ships in the bay. That’s all you could see is masts sticking up, one had a big red cross on it, so looked like we sunk a Red Cross ship I don’t know. We don’t know who sunk it because the Japanese hit us with 4 torpedoes, they hit the USS Houston with 4 torpedoes,

after the war the records showed they fired 83 torpedoes at our two ships. And we wonder what happened to the rest of them, we think they sunk some of their own ships, some of their landing ships.

Oh yes, well they couldn’t keep missing them.

Well I don’t know, half a dozen at least in the bay. All you could see was their masts sticking up out of the water. I believe we found out

from the Japanese, the invading General, he was on one of the ships that was sunk, he got his feet wet just the same as we did.

Yes, we found that out from one of the Japanese. After the Japanese destroyer they took us over to one of these invasions, empty invasion vessels and put us down in the but…..

Bilge and

left us there for 6 days. We were, they fed us twice a couple of time, rice they put it down in buckets and we just ate rice with our hands, we did that for a couple of times a day. I think one thing I didn’t like was the Japanese crew were dropping cigarettes down amongst the blokes down below and the smokers were fighting over cigarettes and I thought thank god I don’t

smoke. And the Japs are laughing their heads off, our blokes fighting over getting a lighted cigarette. That’s the mentality of the, they weren’t sailors they were Merchant men not navy men. I don’t think a navy man would do that sort of thing.

It is, it is yeah. So we had

6 days living that way. We had no idea what was going on.

Just buckets, just the buckets to piss in.

Oh just on the hard deck, on the….see they had platforms underneath where their troops had been, see it was a troop ship and so where the Jap’s had been lying, we lay, but they

didn’t have any comfort there just on bare boards. But if you’re tired you’ll sleep anywhere.

Oh definitely, definitely. So after 6 days they took us in a landing boat and took us through the Straits into a place called Merak, and that’s in the Sunda Strait itself, and loaded us onto trucks and took us inland. We didn’t

know where we were going until we arrived at a little town we eventually found out was name was Serang. And they had a jail there and an old theatre, and most of us were put in the theatre and those that couldn’t fit in theatre went around into the jail. And there was just enough room in the theatre, concrete floor, for everybody to

sit down, but not enough room for everybody to lie down. And we were there for 6 weeks I think it was and you had to sleep in numbers sort of thing because you couldn’t all lie down together. So that was, and things started going wrong, luckily we were getting a lot of rain storms at night time, keeping as clean as we could, we were still covered in oil.

Diarrhoea and that, mainly diarrhoea because we were just eating out of our hands, they give buckets of rice around and you’d just pick it up in your hands and eat it, and of course your hands are dirty and everybody started getting, not so much dysentery at that stage but diarrhoea. And out in the yard of the theatre had a great big hole dug with planks across it

and that was the only toilet area. And the trouble is when the 4 o’clock storms used to come over this would get filled with water and everything would float out and oh, not a very pretty picture. One poor fellow he was squatting down over this pit and he went to get up and he blacked out

and ended up in the middle of it and had to fish him out. The Japs took him down to a canal going nearby and gave him a wash. So anyway everybody helped each other and…

I suppose the only officer in charge there from memory

was Doctor Stenning, he was a Doctor off the Perth, which was useful because he could help, cause we had wounded blokes amongst them too.

Mainly shell splinters from the hits on the ship.

Shell splinters?

Well when a shell hits the ship the steel there, zroom and all these bits of shell

go everywhere, and if your in the road it hit you, goes through you. So a lot of them had the wounds on their legs from these shell splinters, just if you get hit by the shell itself you just get (UNCLEAR), but with this stuff splinters being sprayed around after the bomb, shells had hit the steel decks it went everywhere. And so had quite a few wounded there, badly wounded.

Not a high percentage luckily, because I think the ones who had been heavily hit would have drowned, I think. I can quickly think of we might have had a dozen or 20 we had to look after, because we had to carry them out to go to the toilet. And this is where everybody did help each other.

Well we only try and clean their wounds up as best we could. Eventually the Jap guards found some cloths to help us wrap up their wounds, but they were front line troops themselves, they weren’t permanent residents of the town. So they didn’t have much they could help us with.

But I’ll never forget a chap Freddy Lasslett, he’s still alive, lives in Melbourne, he was a wireman on the Perth, Electrician. Anyway we were taken down once a day down to a canal that went through the town so we could wash some of this oil off, because we were just filthy. Our hair was just covered in oil.

And we would go in and wash the best we could in the canal, but the canal was also the sewer for the town so you had to do a lot of dodging whilst you were in there. But this Freddy Lasslett, he went adrift, he went missing on one of these swimming parties and he escaped. Anyway the natives found him and handed him back in to the Japanese.

The Japs bought him round to the theatre and bashed the hell out of him with rifle buts and this man no good this man….so they took him round to the jail with the idea they were going to kill him round there. Anyway a couple of days later but who should walk into our theatre but Freddy Lasslett, with an arm band round showing he was the town Electrician, he had a ladder over his shoulder. What had happened around at the jail,

the lights in the Japanese quarters went out and he being an Electrician, he said “I fix and you leave me alone okay”, “Okay, okay”. So he fixed it and they made him the town Electrician cause see they were invading troops and they didn’t have anybody that could do this sort of thing, so they said “Good man” and made him the Electrician.

Lucky yeah, never forget that old Freddy Lasslett, still

alive he’s in Melbourne?

Oh we talked stories about what had happened to each one of us in the water, what happened when the ship was being hit. We just compared notes with everybody.

Quite a number of them, you wouldn’t know 600 of them but you knew your own ones in

your Mess deck and your ones in your gun, on your guns and that area. See on the guns that I was on we ended up with, 3 of us ended up very very close cobbers [friends], very close, right through war with them. But I was the short one, Marcus was 6 foot 3 and a ¼ , Lofty was 6 foot 2 and I was only a little 6 footer,

so we looked after each other. You had to, you had to sort of, you developed what they call mateship, you had to look after each other cause if somebody got sick you had to look after him, and this is what happened. And that happened the next 2 ½ years as far as I was concerned.

Oh yes some did start new mates yes. Oh that did happen because then you found

a different side of one person that didn’t fit in with your way of thinking, and yeah it did happen. Very necessary to find your own comfort zone where you’re going to get along with. And I had a few of these mates that I’d been joined up with and unfortunately I’m the only one left. No

you had to, you know the…..they lasted well into it but they didn’t, that’s a pity.

Oh yes, oh yes that was the example they were going to set,

yeah Freddy Lasslett, they bashed him with these rifle butts and bad man, bad man he no good.

Not, that was regularly there yes. They went through, you know when they counted you twice a day to make certain they didn’t lose anybody, and they’d go through and they’d

count the heads then the guards would get a wrong number so they’d have to start all over again. So I remember one stage they came through and a bloke he had a billiard cue in his hand, and you all had to be standing up to be counted, so as he hit you on the head with the cue you had to sit down. And then he’d hit the next bloke and then he’d sit down, this is how they went round and they could never get the right number. They had two of them doing it and

ohcha, ohcha, ohcha, we used to laugh our heads off, we thought it was quite funny.

They didn’t realise we were laughing at them, they thought we were laughing with them.

Well when we were there for 6 weeks we, they pulled up, trucks pulled up outside and we were loaded on trucks standing up,

there’s no room to sit down in the truck, you had to all stand up and hang onto each other and off you went. And we ended up about 3 or 4 hour run into Java, in Java into…….I get mixed up with names sorry……isn’t it silly you suddenly lose a name.

Batavia

Batavia when we

landed up and pulled up outside a big, what was a army camp, Dutch Army Camp, had been used for the native troops. And we were unloaded off these trucks to go into this big POW Camp, they had POW’s everywhere. Jap’s had the control over this side, there were Dutchman, there were British, there were Australians and some Americans.

And here we walk in, we had g-strings on that’s all we had, and we all hadn’t shaved for 6 weeks, we still had oil in our hair and all that, and barefoot of course, and these army fellow said “Where in the hell have you blokes been?” and we said “We’ve been swimming round the ocean where the hell have you been?”. Then they found out the story of the Perth and the Houston,

they were eventually…the Japs…. well virtually I stayed there for the rest of the time. The army fellows had their equipment, they had their eating equipment, they had their shaving gear, they had their combs, they had their toothbrushes, they had their boots and they had their trousers and their shirts, they had everything and we had nothing, we had nothing. We only had a g-string and that’s all we had, and from there on we had to live on our wits. When we

went out on the working parties, anything that we could, wasn’t bolted down, into the g-string, we pinched. And I made a little dixie out of a bit of tin and out of bamboo I made some, what do you call them…

Chopsticks out of that. So we could eventually make something out of a bit of tin or something to

eat with, but that’s how we had to eat for a long time, long long time.

Yes well they didn’t, they only had enough for themselves. There was some who had an extra shirt, they’d give us an extra shirt or extra pair of shorts or eventually we got stuff. They helped as much as they could but they had no idea of what was ahead of them so they had to keep their basic, they’d been captured in

battle so they only had what they had. But they certainly had better stuff than what we had.

Oh out of a bit of tin and just bashed up the edges of it, just something to hold, it was easier than the hand. Amazing what you can do when you’ve got to improvise, improvise. I became a

horder of anything that as I said was not bolted down was mine. I think notebooks and pencils, I had these little books about that size and they were Dutch ones they’d used in I think their areas and oh they went down and I eventually converted those into make, I’ll show

them to you later on, they became a diary. And sketches I did and my Marcus Clark, my big 6 foot 3 and a ¼ mate, I left him behind in, what do they call….. Serang, he was too sick to move, he had bad ulcers on his leg and when I was selected to go to Japan I knew I couldn’t take all this stuff to Japan as it was I’d been burying it

so the Japs couldn’t find it. I gave it all to Marcus and said “This is yours mate, smoke it, you know use the paper if you want to smoke it, but don’t get caught with it. If you get home, get it home”. He got home, I’ll show it to you later on.

Well

you had to make drinking materials and we found bamboo was very good for that. You know you get rather large bamboos there and you cut those and convert them into drinking things, this sort of thing. Cause as I said the army fellows had their knives and their spoons, but they haven’t got all those to hand out amongst us so out of us in the Camp there would have been something like 250 or so,

well they helped as much as they could but they had to look after themselves. But the Japs weren’t big about giving you stuff so you had to improvise and it’s amazing what you do.

Oh yes, as I say anything that wasn’t bolted down was pilfered. Not amongst your own, not in the camp, when you went out on working parties oh yes.

Yeh well we bought back into camp, I suppose the most valuable stuff was a big bottle of pure alcohol. We were working around in the dock area where they had the oil holding tanks and we found

drums of pure alcohol, they’d be for aircraft fuel and stuff like that. So we used to get, I got a big bottle of that and stuck that and took it back into camp. But those days they weren’t too fussy about searching us and took that and gave it to the RAP [Regimental Aid Post], or the hospital, because….and quite a few of us did this. Anyway one night we got called up from, to go up to the

hospital and picked out the biggest ones, and we had one guy there he’d gone berserk he’d been drinking this pure alcohol. And if these Japs had of got him they would have shot him and we had to hold him down. It took 6 of us, 6 of us to hold him down, he went berserk but he was as strong as an ox. Anyway he eventually passed out, he lived, he lived but by gee he was lucky.

Yes

so.

That’s an interesting question, they were either marked in Dutch or something like that. Anything that we could get at we could sample and try what was in it.

Yes, yes that’s why I took it to the hospital because we all had very bad tinea. You know your genitals were raw with tinea and

they found that raw spirits were good for it. But gee it would give you hell, you’d see blokes running along huff huff….. but it did help to contain the tinea. Amazing what happens when you’ve got to look after yourself.

Out on the, we well we did all sorts of work. I remember

once Marcus Clark and I were given the job of clearing out a drain under a tap in Japanese Headquarters. And we were part of the work party that had to go in there and do work for the Japanese, and so this under the tap was all blocked up and they said “You man you clean you clean” we say “Okay then” start, then along came another Jap and say “You men go, go” and he wanted to have a wash underneath

there, so we went and sat down, okay. And along came a Sergent, Japanese Sergent, bash, bash, bash, he bashed….every time he knocked this poor old Private down he got up and he bashed him and knock him down again. Then off, “You men now you clean”, we said “Okay we’ll clean now”, but we were having good fun watching this. Oh they’re mental, strange people.

Yes

so that was the sort of jobs we often did. No the…

Oh there they were good, they were good. See there had been a barracks for Javanese Troops. And they were for married quarters, so you had a little area about the size of this area for 4

men and it was good. We had to sleep on the concrete floor but we were used to that. But I ended up with some pencils that I’d pinched from around the place, I was a bit of a sketcher and I had Subiaco Oval there with footballs out on it, and all this over there, so every night we’d go….and the Palace Hotel there the bar there, everybody standing, so we’d say

have a drink. It was a way of filling in time and the other fellows, the other 3 of us would say “What are you going to draw next Bud?”, and yeah it filled in time. Anyway I made, I got hold of a lot of Dutch cigarette packs and tore the bits and made playing cards out of the, from the inside of the, so we had cards to play with. So we used to

sit around on the floor then and play cards, I drew cards, you know everything on the, oh it was a full set of cards. But one day I was sitting there and I was watching and suddenly Marcus said “Don’t move”, “Why”, “Look down to your right”, and I looked down to my right and their was a bayonet coming out between my body and my arm, a Jap guard had come through and we’d hung a rice bag down

outside our little, just for privacy, oh we were very private there, and the Jap could hear us in there but we should have been out bowing to him. And so he jabbed his bayonet through this see and it came out there, didn’t touch me, but Marcus said “Don’t move” and I wasn’t going to move when I saw that. So we all jumped up and pulled that down and bowed, okay, okay off he went.

See had to bow to them.

Every time he passed you had to bow to him. That was their way of saluting.

Oh yes you used to get a rifle butt if you ignored that, yeah.

Oh well you’ve got to, you live and you let live, I never looked for trouble. If I saw a Jap come around one corner

I went around the other corner. But some of the others they were silly, they’d make a point of going past you and not bowing and they used to get a slap in the back with a rifle, they reckon it was funny, I didn’t think it was very funny myself, but I never looked for trouble.

Oh just the isolated one or two. You’ve got some mixed blokes, we had army blokes there, must have been

oh 500 or 600 of the army fellows plus the Americans, plus Dutch you had a lot of people there. I was given the job there, we had a section of this camp allocated for the Officers, and in there they started growing a few vegetables and things like that for something to do I guess. Anyway we had to go and stand centrally on their gate to stop anybody wandering through.

So I’m standing there just new to it and this Aussie came over, just had a slouch hat on and a pair of shorts, barefooted, brown as a berry. And there was a tap next to me and he was getting a bucket of water, and I said “What are you doing mate?” he said “Oh I’m just watering the garden, were just trying to get a few vegetables going” I said “What a bunch of pigs”, that’s the Officers, “Why don’t you get them to do it themselves?”, he said “I don’t mind”. When

we fell into parade that night that was Lieutenant Colonel Jack Williams.

I didn’t know, he could have been anybody, he laughed it off, I laughed it off. We ended up in his camp right through the Burma jungle, marvellous man, marvellous man.

Well he was a, not a big man a very

wiry man with piercing eyes, if he looked at you he looked through you. And he hated the Japs, he hated the Japs. He’d been right through the Middle East with his Unit, the 2nd Pioneers, and we ended up when we left Burma, left Java to go up to, eventually go up to Burma and the railway we were with him.

Yeah, I will I’ll take you. Well when we were 6 months in Java and doing these sort of works and we’d built up our strength because we had our own cookhouse again. And we had, we were fed better than what’d we’d been having.

Oh yes they’d get meat now and again and they made bread, oh things were quite good.

And then they had a group got together to go somewhere so you go wherever your pointed. So we Perth blokes most of us, about, would have been about 240, 250 of us, were allocated to Williams’ Force, which was Colonel Williams’ Force. And they were Pioneers that had been through the Middle East and then they got captured in

Java. So we made up numbers, see the Japanese had 50 men in a kumi, 50 men and that was a kumi. So when it came to a solider doing that then they wanted another kumi of 50 men so we’ll take 50 of the sailors, so we got split up a lot like that. And we were fortunate being with the

Pioneers because they were, a lot of them were ex miners, ex farmers, men who worked with their hands and knew what hard work was about. So when we got into that sort of work they were a great help to us, cause by this time were only 20 years of age, were kids virtually.

Oh those blokes were in their 20’s to 30’s.

Oh Jack Williams he only died a

couple of years ago, I reckon he would have been in his mid 30’s. You know an old man as far as we were concerned, but a great man. He would not give into the Japanese, he would not. He used to say “Don’t you ever give into them”, he knew what he was doing. When we went up through, we ended up in Singapore in this troops

ship that we went up on. And we were virtually barefooted and in g-strings. If we wanted a shave we had to find an army bloke with a razor and say “Give us a quick shave will ya?”. So when we arrived in Singapore we were still hair down to our shoulders and beards and g-strings and barefoot. They called us the rubble from Java, cause the army blokes are still in pretty good gear.

Oh yes

we couldn’t care less. The army, they took us out to the army camp at Changi which they reckoned was a terrible place, we reckoned it was a rest camp compared to what we were going to have. But the army they found that they had a small supply of Red Cross parcels and the first and only Red Cross parcel we ever saw. So they gave us

navy fellows a Red Cross parcel, 1 parcel to 5 men. So we went through and those that smoke you have that, chocolate you have that, and I ended up getting a pair of socks, that’s a great help when you haven’t got any boots on, a pair of undies, a great help they were with a g-string.

No, no just like undies, underpants that sort of thing.

And a tin of condensed milk, they said “Good we’ll have that on our rice tonight”, I said “No that’s a later day you never know”. Anyway to jump ahead, 2 days later we were put on another ship heading north and we ended up in Burma. But on the way up there I saw a Dutchman with 2 water bottles, and I said “What do you

want for one of your water bottles mate?”, he said “What have you got?”, I said “The only thing I own in this world is a can of condensed milk”, he said “Good”, so I got a water bottle and he got my condensed milk. That water bottle went right through the Burma jungle with me, the best investment I ever made.

Oh I had a lot of mates, cause

army blokes all had water bottles and we used to go out in the Burma jungle and we had to take water with us. And the army blokes they took water in their water bottles but we had nothing, except little Arthur had a water bottle. So we used to have to take boiled water, you couldn’t take raw water. So I’d always take a bottle out with me on the working parties and we’d share it with me mates, best investment I ever made.

Well we arrived in Moulmein which is the Southern

port of Burma and we first arrived at night time and we were put in a jail, big jail and we were just sitting there on the floor and what not. And it wasn’t until the next day we found out it was a jail for oh…….what are the ones they have up

north there? Leprosy. It was a jail for lepers and here we are being thrown in amongst that, luckily we only had a couple of days there and we moved out. But we went down, walked down to the railway station and the Burmese locals were very kind to us they were throwing cigarettes to us, cigars, oranges and anything…

Yes

Burmese’s cigars, there about that long about that thick, oh yeah. They became very popular, the Burmese cigars yes. No they were very kind, they were throwing food to us and the Japanese were belting them to stop them doing it but very good.

Oh no you hid it pretty quickly, you’ve got to use your…

you won’t get caught.

And then we got to a little place called Thanbyuzayat and we were greeted there, and that was a rail head for the railway line that was going out of Moulmein down South along the Coast. And we were greeted there by a Japanese Colonel called Colonel Magatomo, great gentleman he was. He gave us all a talk, we had no idea

where we were, what we were doing, where were going, and he spoke in Japanese with a Dutch interpreter who interpreted in English for us, and I’ve got a copy of it, he spoke for nearly an hour and “Here you are, the rubble from Java we” oh he made us feel really good. He said “Were going to build a railway line through jungle where no white man has ever trod”, he was dinkum he was, no white man

had ever trod. And he said “And we’ll build the railway line over white man’s body if necessary”. He’s dead, he’s right. He got executed at the end of the war anyway, which is some consolation.

That was our welcome to Burma, we had no idea Burma was rough, we knew we were going to build a railway that was all.

Out on a little camp near

the rail head, where the rail from Moulmein had stopped. And there was a camp there with bamboo and rattan huts and we were just in there lying on bamboo flooring. And they had one section for the Officers and the rest for the other men. And the Japanese had their guard house and their quarters.

And we were only there for a few days before we were put on trucks and taken out to our first camp which was 35 kilometres going south from there.

Yes.

Oh no when we were walking up the station from the jail, yeah but by this time the Burmese weren’t around this area no.

Yes and our first camp was called 35 kilo camp, that means 35 kilos [kilometres] from Thanbyuzayat to there. So all the, what happened from there on was all kilos right through to where we reached 105, 105 kilo camp. 115 kilo camp that was just short of where the

ones working from Thailand were coming up, and so we joined the line at a place called Three Pagodas Pass and that was the border of Thailand and Burma. We worked thorough to there and the Thai side worked from Thai side up to there. And that was the hard part, the last oh we’d started off in the dry season

which wasn’t bad going but when the wet season started, that was murder just working all day and sometimes night, just pouring rain. It was hard physical work, we weren’t used to it.

What they called chunkles, chunkles are like little hoes and shovels and picks and you had to, first of all we used to

try and hide them, lose them, do all sorts of things but the Japs woke up……

Used bikes to get around on, they call it the bicycle camp.

Well it was well built brick and tile houses, because they had the native, the Javanese couples housed in them. And this is when we were in a little sort of cubicle, each

had a cubicle for husband and wife. And they had the toilet facilities all properly done, they were done in a drain sort of system which you squatted over and flushing water going through all the time, which was much better than what we’d been having. Then the toilet facilities were huts, I told you I’ve got my drawing and that down

below…

I’ll show you in the hut they had big ponds we used to call it, full of hot mineral water and we used to use that for bathing, you just sort of bath it over you, oh it was living first class.

Oh it was very good, it was a properly designed army barracks, they called it the Bicycle Camp.

Yes

we had our own cooks, no they were good.

Oh rice most, everyday and then they had facilities to cook bread and every now and again got some meat, wasn’t bad the quality of the food was quite good.

Oh we’d leave the camp around about 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning and get back around 4 to 5 o’clock in the night. And out on the jobs they give us rice to eat. Rice, you had to like rice.

Yes, yes.

The Changi Camp

were big concrete and tile units, they were built for the British Army so they were well constructed. And we were just put in there in groups, lying on the floor of course, you never had any luxuries like beds. No the conditions were quite good there and they had outside oblations and showers that you could use.

No, you know you often read about the horrors of the Changi Prisoner of War Camp, we reckon it was marvellous compared to what we were going to go to.

Oh I think those are related to the Changi jail, see there was a jail and the camp. Now the camp was built for British Troops who were occupational, they used to live there all the time. And they were

well designed and that was Changi camp. But Changi jail was a big jail and quite a few were put in jail there for misdemeanours and that was not so good. But there is a mixture between the Changi Camp and Changi jail and it became know after the war, Changi, oh Changi Camp that was terrible but that was the jail they were talking about more so than the camp.

Especially in Changi jail, but in the Changi Camp when we were there the Japs sort of kept out of it, they just looked after the perimeters, big area. And there were thousands of allied troops in there and so the Japs just let them run it themselves. But I think the brutality would be

more in the jail.

I think the British under the trying conditions of the railway line, the Burma Thai railway, I don’t think they had a good knowledge of

hygiene as Australians did and I think they suffered more that way. Cause Australians when we moved from camp to camp, what we called the mobile force, the Williams Force, as we went along and laid all the tracks we kept on the move a lot, sometimes we’d run into a camp that had been occupied by British or by natives and they were shocking, terrible the hygiene.

Yeah well, where a camp had been occupied by Malaya’s or mainly Malaya’s and Indians, ones who had been captured by Japanese, and they put them on, they were going to pay them to build the railway line. But they paid in life because they lost somewhere between 90 and 100 thousand

of them. Now prisoners we only lost about 25, 20 odd thousand but they lost a fantastic lot of people. One night we got to a camp in the middle of the night, we had to march, moving from one camp to another, we arrived there and there were dead bodies everywhere, they’d died of cholera and we had to bury them before we could settle into the night ourselves. Oh no they….the British weren’t that bad but they didn’t

seem to have the high standard that we had set. Our Colonel Williams Force over there they were very fussy about, when we moved from camp to camp, had to dig fresh latrines, had to do everything and start off from scratch, which made a difference.

Well everything had to be not only boiled once but double boiled to make certain that the

water you drank or used for cooking was suitable. And there was always the control of flies because, you always think of bush flies in Australia but they had some friendly flies up there too. So you had to control your flies a lot.

Well mainly through keeping your food covered, see some careless people

would put their rice down and the next thing it was covered with flies and that. Now you had to be very careful that you didn’t get flies get onto your food because it wouldn’t have been the best way to keep your stomach under control. No the hygiene, we had to make certain the latrines were kept, they were just holes dug in the ground and covered over to try and

keep the flies under control. And you had very strict ways of doing things. I remember some years after the war a chap came out from Wales and he’d been a survivor of the Battle ship the Prince of Wales and he always said that he wanted to come back to Australia and visit his Aussie mates. Well he ended up in the same camp as me

as one stage and I had my diary down there, we were joined today by some survivors of the Prince of Wales. And his cousin lives opposite me in City Beach and so he came out, he sold his farm in Wales and came out on holidays. We met him and took him to Anzac Day and he marched with us and I said “Why did you say that we saved your life?” he said “Well if I had of stayed with the British troops their hygiene was not the

high standard that you people had” and he said “I think if I’d have stayed there I might of died, but I did pretty well with you guys”. Isn’t that interesting? And they had a better, I think the British had their Officers were a bit more, real officer class, they didn’t sort of consider their men as much as our Officers did. Our Colonel Williams and ones like that, they were very humane people,

but the British Officers were or one of the other ones, but our Officers mixed better.

We didn’t get tangled up with them really. We didn’t have any English Officers in our camp, mainly they were on the

Thai side and they came up from Singapore in one big group. And they lost heavily and I believe through lack of diet, well not diet so much but their lack of control of flies and things like that. They had a different way of looking at hygiene to what we did.

We had quite a few Dutch, mainly they were on the Thai side compared to the Burma side. But they were a different race again, they were very, what can I say, like Germans they were very much, they reckon they were the chosen

race you know. But that didn’t cut much ice with us, they were very arrogant, and arrogant to each other. But they didn’t fit into the scene as well as the Australian did. I think I can safely say the Australians fitted in to it far better than any other race, far better than the British and far better than the Dutch, and certainly far better than the Indians.

Well the Indians they lost

heavily too, they were not as well educated, but there again we didn’t have them in the camps with us, they were in separate camps.

A lot of it, a lot of it was. See when you couldn’t stop malaria, everybody ended up with malaria but you had guys getting other jungle diseases. I ended up with beri beri which is when all your body swells up through fluids, and if it got to your heart, got up to your heart it killed you. But I got rid of mine by the time it got to my knees, but only by

Vitamin B. And we got the vitamin B from the husks of rice, and they used to clean the rice and get the rice sweepings and they were just the outside that had all the vitamins in it. And I had a lot of that and it cleared up the beri beri.

Well your feet, it starts at your feet and

swells up, it gets right up into your testicles and your testicles swell up to about that size, you know it’s all fluid. It’s a lack of Vitamin B in your system.

Oh shocking feeling, you can’t walk and until you can control it it’s going to keep spreading unless you can control it and as I said if it got up to your heart it could be deadly.

No, haven’t got any facilities, the only facility for it is lack of vitamins, vitamin B 12 and B 6 are the main dietary deficiencies, and early in the piece the Doctors still had vitamin tables from their army days.

But eventually they ran out and the best one to use was the rice husks, they’d get bags of them from the Japanese and use them as dietary supplements.

Yeah they’d be all, yeh it would be crushed and it used to get into your teeth and all over the place, but it was necessary to get as much vitamins into you as you could. But that was a vitamin deficiency,

everybody suffered from it.

Yes well the very first attack of malaria I had, I could feel something coming on so I thought it must have been malaria. So that morning I reported to our Doctor and that was the stage when

you had to be very sick not to be working.

On the railway. And they had a Japanese next to the Doctor and if you didn’t look sick then the Japanese would say “Work”, and the Doctor will say he can’t, he’s got to work. If you had a bit of a bandage around your leg, it looked as if you were sick the Japanese might let you off. This day I went up and I knew, I was talking to others that had malaria, I felt this was coming

on, I was feverish. I was feeling weak, and I said to the Doctor I said “I think I’m getting malaria” he said “How would you know?” I said “I just feel I’m getting the symptoms of it”, and the Jap was there, and he said “I’m sorry I think you’ve got to go to work”, I said “Okay”, so I went out and fell in to go to work. The next thing I knew I woke up in my bunk with rice bags all over me and sweat pouring out of me. And I was non compos [very sick with little energy] for a couple of days, and it was malaria but the Doctor couldn’t let me off work because the

Jap said I looked alright. What had happened I fell in with the other soldiers and apparently I just fell forward on my face, I just passed out and that was the start of malaria.

Well the Japs did have some control over the malaria tablets that they got in…….Sumatra.

There was a great source of the tablets or the, what you take for malaria I just can’t think.

Yeah and so they had the whole source there from Sumatra. So we did get a supply of those, Atebrin, they did get a supply of Atebrin from the Japanese, not all the time but most of the times you could get hold of some Atebrin.

See most of the guards on the Burma railway as far as we were concerned were Koreans. And they were under the thumb of the Japanese and they were badly treated by the

Japanese themselves, so the only way they could kick was downwards and that was us. So they were very cruel, the Koreans are very cruel people, more cruel than a lot of the Japanese. But the Japanese took it out, they had little regard for the Koreans, and of course the Koreans didn’t like that and they didn’t like us and they were very cruel towards us.

Well

even just on a small scale they’d come along and you’d all fall in and they’d come along and flick you under the nose, you flick yourself under the nose…

And it makes your eyes water. Oh that was a great thing they’d come along and go toong, and you’d try and dodge it but you didn’t. Little things like that, they’d do anything to annoy you. Then if you’re in a camp and still even though you’ve been working all day and you’re tired,

they’d come along to the camp and you had to stand up and bow to them, and all this sort of stuff. And if you didn’t bow to them they had a rifle butt and they just hit you with a rifle butt. Very arrogant people.

Oh anything that they didn’t agree, they might have you standing up at attention outside their guard house for 24 hours if necessary.

Sometimes Colonel Williams, our Colonel he stood out in the sun for a couple of days there once because we wouldn’t agree to some order given by a Japanese common. He was made to stand out in the sun until they reckoned he had enough, and he had to stand there for 24 hours sometimes. And that’s the sort of punishment they’d give you for some minor problem that you had. Now when

we first got up to the jungle, see you weren’t surrounded by barbed wire or anything, if was just jungle. And we found little roads that went out into native kampongs and that was where I did another good deal, I was a good deal man. I had this pair of underpants I got in the Red Cross parcel and I took that out with me to this kampong and I held up, okay, okay,

you give me and he had a block of salt, you know the salt they give cattle. I said me you have this so I got that, so me and my mates had salt all the way along the railway line, because we didn’t have much salt. And we’d scrape a bit of this on our food, which made a difference to the taste of it. So that lasted me pretty well all the railway line, it’s the deal, you’ve got to make deals.

Yeah.

All the way along the line.

In the camps they had just bamboo construction, upright and coated with palm leaves, and up top

there was palm, you know it won’t hold the rain out or anything like that. That was it and then inside you had bamboo slats about 2 feet off the ground, so the rain would go underneath and you just sleep on top of that. And you’d have enough, each man just enough to lie down and if you turned over too quickly you might bump the bloke next to you, but that was it. But bear in mind

right up to now we sailors didn’t have blankets or anything like that. The army fellows had their army blankets, but then we eventually found we could get to the cookhouses and get the rice bags after they’d been finished and we cut and made them into blankets. There was always a will there’s a way. In the dry season the nights got bitterly cold

so you had to have a rice bag or something to cover you. You get by. But they were very basic, the huts. It didn’t matter much about the wind or anything cause there wasn’t that much wind to worry about but there was enough coverage for you to be protected from the rain, until it became the west season and then you’d find the ground would be

wet all the time. But there was enough on top to stop the rain coming through on you, so very basic but adequate for what you had to exist under.

Have been hints of escape but they were, it’s a strange country, where a white man stood out amongst the coloured people.

There were several escapes and they were captured and executed, so there was little chance of an escape because you were out in the jungle anyway so if you had to go escaping you had to go deeper into the jungle and there was no way of escaping your health under those conditions. If you had an

attack of malaria out in the deep jungle you wouldn’t have much chance of getting back anyway. So really the ones who tried to escape were quickly captured and executed so there was very little point in trying to escape, cause there was no where to escape to. I think it was Colonel Magatoma said to us “Well there’s a jungle to the north of you, jungle to the east of you and there’s no way

you can escape the jungle”, and there wasn’t. And the ones who did try were captured, usually handed in by the local natives because they got a reward for doing it. Very few, very few tried to escape because it was futile.

Oh you talked about what you did back home, talked about what you were going to do when you got home. You talked about food, that was always a favourite item.

What you’d like, I always dreamt I’d go into a manicurist and say fix my hands and my fingernails, do all this, this is the sort of thing you’d say this is what I want to do.

No…

Oh massages, you’d say I’d just like to lie down and somebody give me a lovely massage. This is the sort of thing you’d dream about and talk about. But you all got each other’s life story, you spoke very openly to each other about your hopes and desires in life, what you

think you’re going to be. You had to talk, you had to do something. And usually you were so dead tired once you’d started talking at night after working, sometimes up to 8 o’clock, 10 o’clock 12 o’clock at night you came back and you didn’t want to talk, you just wanted to sleep.

Oh when we first started in the dry season they gave

us a day off every 8 days. And then the wet season came on and the work got less equal to keep up with conditions you know, you had to dig so much one metre square, cubic metre of earth a day each person. This wasn’t bad in the dry but when the wet and you’re working in the pouring rain all day long that, became very difficult. So

that was why you had to work. Cause the Japanese had targets and you had to finish so you might work right through. At times we had to light the bamboo around it to give you enough light to work by. And so they had bamboo, a fire going so you could see what you were doing. And towards the end of it, before the line was just being finished sometimes you went out for a whole 24 hours

without coming back to camp. So it got very very difficult.

No, well you’ve got to try and build it on a level, so you’ve got to build an embankment up to 1 foot, 2, 3 whatever height you had to and you had to get it above the creek level, cause there were a lot of creeks running through the place. And we had to build our bridges,

the bridges you had to build physically by, you’d have, I’ll show you a drawing of one later, of a great big pylon that went down like that and you had to raise that pylon to drive the pylons into the ground. Then you had 20 to 30 men either side on ropes and you’d pull it up and raise the

monkey vents right up there and then let it go and it would come down and hit that and drive the pylon into the ground a bit further. And this is going all day, it was very monotonous work and not too good on your hands either. So the Japanese would say “Ichie, nee, song, ja” that’s 1, 2, 3, ichie, nee, song, ja and on ja you let go of the rope so down it will go.

Then you go back through the singing of this. Doing that all day it gets very monotonous, besides not being too good on your hands. All your pylons for your bridges were hand driven.

Oh whatever size that is, a fair size. You see them, we wouldn’t use similar ones here,

but they are strong enough, they just carved out of the jungle, they were strong enough to hold up railway, you know trains. They would be about 18 inches to 2 feet wide in diameter. And in some camps they used to get elephants in to drag these logs in, then the men we had to lift then and get them into position.

Then you start the driving from there till you got down to whatever level they wanted driven down to. That was the back breaking part of the work, just digging the sand wasn’t so bad.

Well it’s just like blue metal, you’ve got to lay your track on, you build your sand up, or whatever type the

soil was, up to whatever level you wanted and it would be wide enough to take 2 tracks of line, and a bit spare. And that was I think (UNCLEAR) and when we went along laying the track we’d have to physically carry it, and then built, we had to lay the

sleepers and the sleepers were all sleepers they’d taken from somewhere else. They’d taken them from Java or Malaya or somewhere, so they were old jarrah type sleepers. Then you had to drill holes in there and drive pegs into the hole, the line itself. And that was a very long arduous job.

No a

sledge hammer yes. And I think the hardest part was laying the blue metal, you know the blue metal that you see on the line. We had to lay all that and then pound it in under the sleepers and under the line. And that was an arduous job, especially when you’re working in bare feet.

It’s not only the conditions themselves but the lack of adequate clothing, adequate footwear anything like that. And when you had fare skin like I have you felt it quite a bit out in the sun all day. You had a straw hat, they gave us sort of a straw hat. I think they were old Dutch Army hats they gave us. Luckily under the, I didn’t burn

as much up there as I’d burn here, I think in the tropics you get a little bit more, the sun doesn’t come right down through the haze like it does here. We get very strong sunlight, but they don’t get it so strong up there. So I didn’t burn as much as I thought I would.

Oh yes, yes.

Blisters, the army fellows taught us how to fix the blisters on your hands and that was to pee on them. And we soon learnt that because when we first started oh we had blisters all over it and they used to say oh sailors, do what we do, and that’s what you did. You peed on your hands until it hardened. And it hardened your hands, silly but it’s just a simple

remedy.

That’s a new one yeah.

Yeah piddle on them, but use your own, not somebody else’s.

Hmm.

Well leg ulcers particularly. they were

deadly, if you didn’t get that under control you lost your leg, simple as that. I had a bad one starting on my leg which had gone down right through to the bone and the Doctor said “Sorry I haven’t got much I can give you but try maggots” and so I started feeding, the ulcer developed about that size right down nearly to the bone, it was a stinking thing. So I

got the maggots and fed them in there and wrapped some banana leaves around and wrapped them up and let them go to work. And each day I’d get rid of those ones, they’d get too fat and put fresh maggots in, it saved my leg. Not a nice feeling to feel the maggots eating your own leg but it worked.

Yes. If you didn’t you run the risk of losing your leg. You had to get it early in the piece before it got too out of control, cause the ulcers would eat right through, have you seen them at all, ulcer? Eat right through your bone and once it gets to that it just spreads. I was very fortunate I got rid of the worst one I had by doing that,

the maggot treatment.

Ulcers? I had only about 3, but I got rid of them before they got too deep.

It is it is, but you’ve got to live. And you’ve got to try to control what you can control. If the Doctors haven’t got anything for you, you’ve

got to do something else. And the Japanese didn’t supply the medicines, that’s the trouble. I think they accepted Red Cross supplies and used them themselves, didn’t hand them onto the prisoners. See they didn’t have any, they didn’t believe in the Geneva Convention [war convention to protect the rights of Prisoner’s of War], they didn’t believe in having to look after men, they weren’t concerned how many died because they had a ready supply of others to take their place.

Now the Red Cross supplies we used to see Japanese smoking Red Cross cigarettes, they were getting hold of the Red Cross supplies, we knew that, but they weren’t handing them onto the prisoners. So they, very unusual people, they could have saved a lot of lives by letting the Red Cross supplies come in

to treat ulcers, all this and they would have saved a lot of lives. But as it was they lost something like I said 80 to 100 thousand natives, I don’t know any idea of the exact number. Australians we lost about……we lost about 20 thousand Prisoners of War we lost. Now I’m sure a big percentage of those would have been saved if the Japanese had allowed Red Cross supplies to

come in and give us proper food and proper treatment for these things, but they didn’t. And they would have saved more men and had more work out of them, but their mentality didn’t work that way.

Well you’ve got to have the will to live,

you’ve just got to say “I’ll see this through”. I think that’s all it is, those that gave in usually died, you can’t give in.

Oh yes, yeah. I had to look after a bloke in one camp and he was going a bit off his head because of his main

trouble, he was missing home. And he had a little daughter called Dawn, I remember her name as clear as that, and I had to look after him, because we were taking turns looking after him because he was wanting to walk out the gate into the jungle to go home. And once he tried that the Japs would have shot him, so we had to make certain he was looked after so he wouldn’t go away. And it was my day and I was looking after him and he had this

photo of his daughter and he said “That is my daughter I’m going to go home and see her” and that’s why I remember her name, her name was Dawn. And he was losing the will to live because he couldn’t see his little daughter Dawn. He died a couple of days later, he just gave up, gave up hope. So we had things like that, it was a mental breakdown rather than anything else. Yeah it was a lot

with that.

Oh it helps, it helps, you had to have mates, and mates helped each other. You all had to have your bad days, if it was my turn to have a malaria attack my 2 mates would look after me and make certain that they could eat my food, if you get the idea, because they’d

still draw my ration and I couldn’t eat it so they’d eat it. But when it was their turn I’d eat their rations, so you looked after each other this way.

I just wanted to get

home, I knew there was going to be the end of it somewhere along the line. I never ever gave up the thought that we were not going to win the war. We knew that we’d be able to exist until, we’ll be home by next Christmas and when next Christmas came it will be the following Christmas. So you had to have an aim, just say the war’s going to be over and you never gave up. Very

very important to have that will to do things. I found out that later when we had to survive another sinking of the ship. That was a rather, a very demanding role to play because we had 6 days without food and water and that, and you had to be mentally strong to do that.

Well definitely yes. No I think, there again so are your mates, see that’s the sort of mates you had that they had the same ideal, they wanted to get home, they wanted to look after me and they knew I was going to look after them, very important.

Yes what just came to mind is the Japanese decided they’d better pay us, by giving us some money we could get the natives to bring eggs into the camp and we could buy some egg or cigar or salutes or things like that. And they paid us 10 cents a day, but being Able Seamen were put into a Lance Corporal so we got 15 cents a day if you worked. But if you had a

sickie [sick day], if you were down, you didn’t get paid and you didn’t get fed either, so you had to look forward to working and get 15 cents a day. That’s a lot of money isn’t it?

You could buy for 15 cents you could buy 1 egg, if there were any eggs. Or you’d buy yourself a couple of Burmese Salutes

so that’s for a days work.

Oh certainly would.

Each, once a month they Japanese would give the money to our commanding officer who would then give it to our Officers in Charge of you kumis and they’d dish it out to you. So that was one sort of benefit of

working, you knew you were going to get some money to buy an egg. I didn’t smoke so it didn’t matter, but an egg itself was really worth having. If you read some of the other books that come from Thailand they had more eggs than we did, but we were in pretty well virgin jungle. And the only ones who had eggs were the native kampongs where they had their own

laying WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and they were mainly bantams, so they were very small eggs. But oh they were beautiful when you could get one.

Oh yes I had the salt, I had some mates, where’s the salt? Out came the salt.

Oh I thought so, I thought so. But my two mates were smokers, Lofty and Marcus and if I was out on a working party and we found a kindly guard who offered you one of his cigarettes I’d take it, and let him light it and then I’d put it out and put in the g-string and hold it and take it back to camp and give it to one of my mates.

I always did that.

Yeah.

Oh yes it was very dehydrating and that where that water bottle of mine was a good send, that was the best deal I ever ever made. I’ll tell you the secrets of it later.

Well they used to take containers, bamboo containers out. You’d get big bamboos about that round and about a foot deep you’d cut it and you’d cart water in that. But then they used to take out buckets of water so the men could go and help themselves to it. Much easier if you had your own supply.

Yes.

Well we had each kumi would have in our case we’d have a petty officer in charge of it and then we’d have say 3 or 4 kumis then we’d have a Sub Lieutenant overlooking the whole lot, so that’s how. Within your kumi of 50 men you might break

yourself up into 3 groups and they’d have a Leading Seaman or equivalent helping to control within that. So it’s, then we’d have an officer come out, they didn’t have to work physically, but they had to come out and see that we were being reasonably well looked after. I remember one instant the Japanese guards, or the Koreans had been playing a game of,

about a 10 foot long bamboo between them and they had to toss each other over with, it’s a skill of balance. So they said “Australians you have a, Japanese we do that” so all the boys said “Go on blood you can do it” see blood was always a mug you see so I said “Okay I’ll go”, cause I had very good balance being a sportsman. And I just kept tossing the guard over because

go this way and just flip him over, oh he didn’t like. So then he got very mad with me and he said “You Australian you box and me Japanese I jujitsu”, I said “I don’t like the sound of this” and the blokes “Go on blood your right” I said “No I’m not right”, anyway an officer came along and I said “Get me out of this”, I told him what was happening and he said “Okay men all back to work, lunch is over off you trot”

and it was all over. But if I had have hit him, if I’d have hit the guard I’d have been in big trouble.

I’d have been in bigger trouble, with his jujitsu, I didn’t know much about jujitsu. Yeah little things that happen that you recall.

Oh well we’d go out in the morning and we’d have to walk back a

kilometre. We’d work a kilometre away from the camp and then have to walk back at the end of the day to get back to camp. The next day you’d have to walk out the extra kilometre to start, then you’d build another kilometre and then have to walk back 2 kilometres to you camp, till eventually you had to change camps until it got to far away from it.

That was cleared by I think the natives, they had them going through doing that sort of work.

We didn’t have to do the actual clearing, that was already done for us. And I think that’s where they had lost so many lives of the indigenous people, the natives, the Malaya’s the Singaporeans, anyone they could recruit to work, and they were being paid to work but also they were dying too, but they went through and cleared the jungle.

Yeah well we had a basket in between big bamboo, so they’d fill up the basket with sand or blue metal and then you’d lift it with your bamboo rod, one on your shoulder and one on your mates shoulder and off you’d go and carry it that way. Then get up to the bank and dump it and then come back again. By that time they’d have another

bag ready for you, off you’d go. You might have seen in the films of Chinese doing it this way and that’s the way we used to do it.

Oh there were instances of it, yes. And that was usually if they were getting over an attack of malaria they were too weak. Well they’d give them a job they could do without doing that lifting.

Oh well if they collapsed they were taken back, they were left there and taken back to the camp when you went back to the camp. Cause it was hard physical work and an inadequate diet it made it much more difficult.

Yeah.

Oh from the time we started up at the

35 kilo camp, cause it was only 35 kilos from the start of it, until we got to the Three Pagodas Pass. The Three Pagodas Pass was nearly 15 months, and then we went through from there to Tamarkan which is at the Bridge River Kwai. And that was heaven, we thought that was great because the food was better, plenty of eggs and the Thai

farms around the place had plenty of vegetables. So it enabled our health to pick up there, which was great because we were all suffering from skin diseases and things like that. I got to the stage where the Doctor said the only treatment they’d give me a scrubbing brush and I’d go down to the creek and scrub all the head of all the scabs on my arms and my legs and that was the only

way they could treat it. Not a very nice way of treatment either.

Yeah, they didn’t have any medicine to give us, you just had to dry them out.

No well then you’d be allowed off work until they covered up again.

Oh I might have 3 or 4 days at a

time when you have a problem like that. Cause you didn’t get paid but your mates were being paid and they’d look after you. So if you were off because of a malaria attack or if you have dysentery or anything like that you wouldn’t get paid. But if you had your mates, they were working they’d get paid and they’d give you an egg or whatever. So eventually they’d

catch up because you’d do it for them.

Yeah the old waxing system, haven’t heard of that for a long time.

Oh yes, yes. We were fortunate, that we only lost 56 men I think along the railway line. That was,

not all sailors. We didn’t have a bad rate, but there was army, in our camp we lost about 50 odd. I think over the whole of the railway line I think on the Thai end, we had a few others that came up from Java, out of our 280 or whatever we ended up losing 50 men in the jungle.

Well

to bury them you buried them in rice bags, because that’s the only way you could, we didn’t have blankets we could wrap them up in, so we used to use rice bags and take them out when everyone else is working you’d bury them. We had our own Padre who was the, from the Perth and he was marvellous man.

The army called him Padre Matterson, but he was a very thin, insignificant little bloke, but had a very good mind. And he was great, the army adored him, reckoned he was marvellous. He virtually attended pretty well every burial in our camp right along the railway line. Then we had our

bugler off the Perth, Alan Gee who got a bugle from an army man and he was nearly blind, his eye sight was going, so they made him the camp bugler. So he’d get up in the morning and sound the valiant at night time he’d sound the treat, but he also officiated all the funerals, and the Last Post and all that. And he reckoned that was harder than working, because mentally it was

fairly hard on him to go out to every funeral and playing the Last Post for his mates sometimes.

Yes I’ve tried but I can’t do it but he was good. Alan Gee he only, Alan died about 10 years ago I think.

Oh the Japs wouldn’t give you time off so they’d only keep a few of his close mates together and take them out.

Yeah they had a little area pegged out as the burial ground. Afterwards, at the end of the war, they bought them all back into Canterbury or to a central point in Thailand, a central point

in Burma and they bought the dead all back down there and we buried them.

They had no other desire than to get as much work out of you as they could. I had a mate of mine, well one of our survivors, Keith Miles, he eventually died in Japan, Keith. But he

broke something out on the sledge he was working on on the railway line, the blue metal he was putting it down and he broke his sledge and the Jap with his rifle just hit him straight across the head and broke his jaw, just because he’d broken the equipment. So he hit him and broke his jaw, poor old Keith.

Took him a while to get over that. But that’s the sort of treatment, they didn’t understand any other, but they treated their own men the same way.

That was Marcus, he didn’t pick up his, I forget whether it was his pick or his shovel. We all had to pick it up when the Japanese came because

up until then we’d been throwing them in the jungle and burning them and they didn’t like that, so when we were going back into camp, we all had to fall in and have our shovel or our pick with us. And Marcus didn’t, casual bloke didn’t pick his up did he, and this is when the guard came and “You chunckles”, Marcus said “Hmm” and bang hit him with his rifle. And Marcus, casual bloke said “What’d he do that for?” I said “You klutz you didn’t pick up your

shovel”. He was very very casual Marcus, God he was a great guy, great guy.

Oh marvellous, he was getting, he had a foot nearly half eaten off with a tropical ulcer. And we’d go up and see him in the sick bay and they’d be scraping the pus out with a scalpel, and he’d be lying and they’d give him a cigar to suck on,

but very painful and frooooo, “How you going mate?”, “Never been better” take a suck, “Hey cut it out” frooo, take another suck, no a great character. We were saddened the other day, he only passed away here and lovely person. Yeah so he was a character you never forget.

Well we weren’t, we were in the camp Tamarkam which became the bridge on the River Kwai as it became know. We didn’t have to do any hard physical work, we had a river, the big Mekong River came down and we all had to go down once a day and have a swim. And we

were pretty well eating better, putting weight on that’s we’d lost out in the jungle, and so we, it was easy work. I think I gave a hand in the butcher shop and I’d never ever carved up a lump of beef before, but I soon learnt. And so you did, you found work to do.

Oh it was.

The British built that bridge, the bridge in the River Kwai?

The British did that. The film, did you see the film?

That was based on truth but not completely true. But they were, that was built before we got there, we can’t take any credit for it.

Oh I liked it but realised that

there’s a bit fiction stuff in it, which they do. They did another film later on called the Return from the River Kwai, that was on the TV [television], did you see that one?

And that was based on our episode when we went to Japan and got sunk and all that. Again they spoilt it by bringing fictional stuff into it. And we knew it was fictional and just to try and make

something out of something, and we thought, well they didn’t have to because there was a story there on its own.

Yes and we were very critical of it.

Yeah, oh silly, typical. There was an American type film that was based on the, there was a man from a petty officer from HMAS Perth and

he was Australian, there was a Doctor in the film, he was British and there was another one involved he was an American. So obviously to sell the film in America, Australia and England, so they had these 3 actors from different races. Just half rubbish but to sell the film.

Yeah for marketing

purposes yeah.

Oh we were only there for about 3 months. And that was, oh that was like a holiday camp for what we’d been through.

Well then they collected about, I think about 90 odd men from the party, they picked out what they thought were the fittest to go to Japan to work in the coal mines. And Lofty and myself were picked,

but Marcus our other mate he had this bad leg, bad foot so he couldn’t come so we left him behind. And so we made up eventually a group of 1500 that went on the ship to go to Japan. But first we went down by train through to Bangkok right down to Indochina then to Phnom Penh then we had about 3 pleasant days

there. And we were being waved to by white girls they were French, and they were Vichy French, they were allies of the Germans who became allies of the Japanese. So they were free and these girls would wave to us and we’d you know.

Oh they looked marvellous after 15 months in the jungle, not seeing a white woman let alone

one that would wave to you.

Oh yes they were just, they were up on verandas smoking cigarettes and having drinks and waving to us.

That was a sight for sore eyes.

Yeah well we just, again it was virtually a holiday. We’d come from Tamarkam by

train to there and we just lay around until they had boats ready. They had boats then and put us on boats and took us down the Phnom Penh River down to Saigon.

Oh little steamers that they run on timber. We had to lie on the timber and as they fed it we went down lower and lower, but we used to hand the stoker

the timber and they’d stoke. It was like a river holiday as far as we were concerned we didn’t have to do any physical work. And it was nice to see the countryside, until we got down to Saigon.

It took us about 2 days, 2 ½ days and that was a great trip. Compared to being in the jungle it was great. And in Saigon we were put in a camp right alongside the wharf, they always

put you in strategic positions so that when the bombers came over, they thought they’d dodge us because we were prisoners, but they didn’t know we were prisoners. So when they started bombing the harbour facilities they were bombing us too you see.

No we didn’t have any causalities. I think a couple got wounded on the outskirts, we were bombed, went down to the outskirts of the camp, but nobody was killed.

They were, the first one was a night time raid and the Japs up until then, they wouldn’t allow, we’d been having warnings and we wanted to build slit trenches and the Japanese said “No”. But after that first night air raid we went out and started digging slit trenches and the Japanese are down digging their slit tenches too. It was the first lot of bombings of Saigon they’d had. But when they found out that

we wanted to build slit trenches and they saw why, they started digging, we had to dig them outside their quarters too.

Oh yes, yes. And we had 3 months there and we were busy working out on various projects, out in the aerodromes and doing all sorts of work.

Well I think the, well

one in particular was out at the main bomber aerodrome, and what we had to do there was build up, instead of a railway line we were building up barriers for the bombers to be kept in, keep away from air raids. So we used to build up these barricades either side so where the aircraft would fit in. It wasn’t over hard

work compared to what we’d been used to. Alongside us were a lot of the Annamites, or the local Vietnamese and I spoke a bit of French from my school days, so I could get myself known to them what I wanted. And I’d take out a spare pair of shorts or something I’d got in the camp and I’d say “You give me food I give you this” and you do a

deal. And they understood my schoolboy French alright, I used to do a few deals.

Yes.

Yes, well onboard the ships that we worked on in Saigon Harbour we found a box of silk and stuff, materials so I used to get hold of that, and get strips of that and wind it round and

round my waist and in the g-string and get them back in the camp and I used to make shorts for the boys. Just with string and a wire needle and make a pair of shorts out of them. Amazing what you can do when you set your mind to it.

It was indeed.

About 3 months I think altogether, which was very pleasant,

very, the climate was good. But when they started bombing it it wasn’t so good we realised we were in the wrong place.

Oh they weren’t too bad there because inside the camp we weren’t working we didn’t have to do anything physical work. Only when we had to go outside in truck loads to the air strips or whatever, or down the wharfs we’d go down working there.

And so it was not hard work and it was better food, there was adequate food, more rice more meat and more eggs and we were eating a lot better than we’d been for the last 12 months.

In a similar type to what we’d been having up in the jungle but they were better constructed. They were still built

partly of bamboo and partly of timber but they had a far better construction. And so when it rained you didn’t have any water coming in at all. No that was quite good and we had concerts there.

Yeah, we had concerts up in the jungle too. On the odd occasion when we had a holiday it used to be every 8th day then it got to 10th day. We had some very smart

artists in the camp and they would put on a concert, say Snow White and the 7 dwarfs, amazing what they could do. They’d make up costumes out of rice bags painted a different colour, oh marvellous what they did. Then another one at 105 kilo camp it was the Melbourne Cup 1943 and we

just finished the railway line, that was where we finished the railway line, and we hadn’t had a holiday for something like a month and so our commanding officer convinced the Japanese commanding officer that Melbourne Cup was a very biblical holiday in Australia and we should have it. So the Japanese said okay you finished the railway line you can have a holiday for this Melbourne Cup and that was a marvellous day, the Melbourne Cup day. We had everybody

was dressed in rags and we had girls done up in, dresses made out of rice bags. And we had one man there who knew every Melbourne Cup winner forever and what their colours were and who the jockey was. And he was put in a big bamboo radio about that size and then he had to call the 1943 Melbourne Cup.

And every year a runner in the Melbourne Cup event was a previous winner, Phar Lap and Rainbird and all these, and were allowed to have a bet on it. All this 15 or 20 cents a day we were earning we all had money, we had bookies [bookmakers taking bets] going round and calling odds and you go up and have bets on it. It was a marvellous day, anyway when the Melbourne Cup races he had everybody, nobody had any idea who was going to

win except him. And we all thought Phar Lap would win, and Phar Lap is just coming up around the bend and she just clipped the horse in front and he’s gone over Phar Lap’s out of it. And we think he knew who the winner was, he had a bet on it, but oh a great day the Japanese were so sore about it, they reckon we’d have another one the next day and we said “No only one a year” anyway they couldn’t understand that.

Yeah they reckon it was great fun.

Yes, yes. No we had a lot, there’s a lot of enjoyment made by people to entertain people, great for the morale. That Melbourne Cup was a great morale booster.

Oh well I got a little book of poems down there that was written by different blokes who one, I’ll give you a quick look at it later called Ode to Rice. Oh it’s a masterpiece all about rice. And I take it round to school when I give talks and that and I read this out to them this Ode to Rice, there’s a couple of strips I’ve got to go blank,

but kids can’t, they roar with laughter. It’s very humorous.

Oh yes it was. The Padre, he used to every Sunday for those who, we had Catholics as well and they always on a Sunday those who were in camp and weren’t

working could go to any of the service. Oh no it was well done, it helped people to unwind in a different way. I was never a great biblical person but I believe that there’s an almighty somewhere but he wasn’t looking after us too well.

Yeah.

I can tell you yes, there was one by the name of Horiushi, and he was a Christian and he was, did anything to help us. He was the only one we ever struck up a friendship with. We came, we were at a camp once that had a creek going past it and on our day off we used to go down and have

a swim in there. He came down one day and we thought he’d kick us out but “You Australian teach me to swim and I give you eggs”. So he came in the water and we taught him how to dog paddle and he sent eggs round to us. No he was a nice little fellow. But he got maltreated by the Commanding Officer, Japanese Commanding officer because he was too kind to the prisoners.

Anyway he left the camp and went down to the base camp, see Colonel Horiushi to tell him what was going on. This Japanese in the camp was going round with a loaded revolver and he was always high on saki, he shot a couple of blokes, lucky he didn’t kill them. But he was mad

and Horiushi went down to base camp to report it. So when he was away the Base Commander, we think he was off his rocker [crazy], he was certainly drinking too much, he got all Horiushi’s gear out and burnt it, he didn’t like Horiushi cause Horiushi was too kind. So asking that question, yes he’s one you could say, he had a Christian upbringing and he

was very kind to us.

I’ll think of it in a minute.

No it wasn’t Saki, no just can’t quickly think of it. I will, I’ll ring up tonight and tell you……

I nearly had it, no I just can’t quickly get it.

Horiushi.

Don’t know. I hope he got home safe and sound.

Mainly just to talk to men and he’d say “War will be over one day, you will be okay”. He

was very much, very sympathetic towards us and he knew we were being maltreated. And he didn’t like it, he didn’t like it, and he was a very nice man.

Oh it was, well the only one we ever struck.

Hmm, yes it was nice, very nice to have someone on our side and he wasn’t with us in every camp. He went

from camp to camp so when you did strike him you could get a nice smile out of him. You’d say “Hello Horiushi” and he’d say “Hello, hello”.

How old was he?

Oh Japanese 20’s I suppose.

We left Saigon September……we left……

in about July 1944. We went down, they started as I say bombing Saigon but also the submarines, the American submarines had Saigon Harbour bottled up, any ship that went out got sunk. So they decided they wouldn’t take us by ship to Japan, they took us back down to Singapore to send us from Singapore and that was….

By train, it took us 12

days in cattle trucks, all the way down the Malay Peninsula.

Oh very slow and very uncomfortable. With about 25 to 30 men in a cattle truck there wasn’t enough room for you all to lie down at once, so it was a long long trip, a long 12 days. And then twice a day they’d pull the train up and you’d line up and they’d give you rice to eat and then back on the train and off you’d go again.

What was the?

Yeah well they had a door, sliding door and the Jap guard would look after that, he’d be sitting on the floor leaning against the open door getting all the breeze and leaving us to sweat in the rest of it.

Well it took us back right through to Singapore station,

then we were taken through to what they called was River Valley Camp. And River Valley Camp was a camp filled up mainly with Ghurkas, you heard of Ghurkas?

Yeah they come from India, part of India, very British, British Army men very good fighters. And they were in this camp

and we arrived in the camp and they had WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s running everywhere and they said “You’d better put your WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s away cause the Aussies are coming” and they said “But Australians are our friends”. So they gave us some of their WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s to save us pinching them. But the Japs had left all the Ghurkas in this one camp because they were frightened of them, they were great fighters, and they’ll cut your throat as soon as look at you. And so they put the Ghurkas, the Indian Ghurkas

who’d been transferred over to the Japanese, the Imperial Japanese Army for India, and they put these Ghurkas to look after the, not the Ghurkas they look after the Ghurkas, they were Sikhs. And they found the Sikhs with all their throats cut, the Ghurkas, one of them would come in the camp see and they’d cut his throat see, they didn’t like this, a turncoat [traitor] signing on with the

Japanese to be in the Imperial Indian Army, so they just left, from there on they just left the Ghurkas in the camp on their own. Because they used to slip through the barbed wire at night and go to the town anyway, cause they looked like all the locals, they just, they’re a tough mob.

Oh yes.

They treated us very well.

Oh you couldn’t converse much with them cause they had their own lingo. I think the Officers and that could speak English, but mostly they just spoke in their own language. But they were very friendly towards us. We were in one section of the camp and they were in another section. We only had a

short time there and then they took us over to a little island called Pulau Dama off Singapore, we nicknamed it Jeep Island because just a little Island with palm trees on it and they used that as a base for use to work from on the mainland of Singapore, they were building a graving dock, you know to putting ships in for the repair work and that. And so they took us to work from the island

just across in boats across to the mainland to build this graving dock…..

I’m glad you asked that question cause I don’t know. The week of us getting together and they had the big ceremony I was off sick with these sore arms, I wasn’t out working, I didn’t see it, I didn’t actually see the linking. So it would have been quite exciting to see it. I was just happy they only ended up with

one railway line, they could of just missed and building them and ended up with a double railway line. But they must have been good engineering, they met and got together.

I don’t think they had too many men working out on the site that day because they had all the big wigs from Japan, Burma and Thailand altogether, with

Japanese doing a bit of work. I think it was all done for show and films and all this sort of stuff. I don’t think the prisoners would have got highlighted in the films.

Well it gave me something to concentrate on.

So each day when we came back from work I’d, when the others would be sitting around talking I’d be sitting down scribbling in the diary. Then put it away again because I had to be careful the Japs didn’t see it. Nothing untoward in it against the Japanese but I was very careful what I put in case they did find it. But it was of interest

now because I think the museum wants to get hold of it but the family wants to keep it. But I’ve got to try and find, it’s all done in pencil, I’ll show it to you, to find some way of keeping it from falling to bits because its getting old. I can still read it, but give it another 10, 15 years you won't be able to read it. So I’ve got to find

Some way to protect it. Do you know any way to protect those things?

Where are they?

Oh is it yeah.

That’s the one over the railway line.

Yes.

Well before we got that far

on this little Jeep Island the tide used to go out and leave fish and crabs and all that in the little pools. And so we ended up getting these and having a feed on them, and I got a poison one. And I thought I had, I was on my death bed. I was spewing from both ends and they took me up to

the Doctors and so they got a bucket of sea water and I had to sit there and drink cup fulls of sea water and everything would come up, drink more and more would come up. And in the end I just passed out, and the next morning I woke up and I was alright, but another one, he didn’t wake up, he couldn’t get the salt water down. So through that they put me on light duties because I couldn’t go over

then and work on the mainland. And I struck the cookhouse there, there was a warrant officer by the name of Bill Smith and 3 of his mates were cooks in the galley, cooking the rice and all that. So they had me doing odd jobs for them to help, chopping wood for them and doing all that. So I became quite matey with them, so I’ll tell you more about them later. But that’s how I,

before we left there to go back to River Valley Camp before we ended up on the troop ship that was taking us to Japan, so that’s where you’d like me to be with.

So the Rakyuo Maru was the name of the Japanese ship we were put on, 1300, about 900 Ausssies and 400 English were put on this one ship. About 8,000 ton ship.

Then there was another ship there, the Katsidoke[?] Maru, had about 900 British Prisoners of War on that one. And we were both, those prisoner ships were taken out and we sat in, out in Gage Roads [where boats wait before being able to dock] for a few days sweating in the hulls until they took off. Well we left Singapore on the 12th September 1944 and headed for Japan.

And the Japanese guards, they were very frightened, they said “We may fishmucken” that means fish food, oh they were very unhappy they didn’t think they’d get to Japan. We said “Oh don’t you worry” that was on the 12th September on the, 6th of September we left Singapore and then in the early hours of

the 12th September about 2 o’clock in the morning there was some gun fire and this big explosion and we wondered what it was. And we found out later a submarine had sunk one of the escorts following the convoy, then around about 5 o’clock in the morning, as best we can guess the two tankers in front of the convoy just exploded.

The submarines were waiting on them and just put torpedoes into these tankers and they just exploded. And the water around them just blazed with flames and our ship was pretty well right behind it, the Vacurah Maroo. And shortly after, we thought well something might happen because if that’s the same line where the submarines are out there attack here, we’re here, and no sooner we thought that, than a torpedo hit

the Vacurah Maroo in the engine room and virtually stopped dead. Another torpedo went through the bows, but where the prisoners were, we were in the hulls in front of the bridge and no torpedo hit there, no water. So we eventually got everybody out of the hulls.

Well we got out of the hull as quick as we could, cause

you didn’t know when the water was going to get in there and with the ship dead in the water, cause the torpedo had hit it, it started drifting towards the burning water where the tankers were. So generally a decision was made that we ought to abandon ship, because the Japanese had already abandoned ship, they’d taken lifeboats, they’d gone, left the prisoners. We were all free men, we were

in charge of the boat but nowhere to go. And we decided we’d better jump off, throw everything off that would float, we had toilets hung over the side, we undid those and threw them away cause they’d float, they were only timber. So anything that floated we threw into the water then we jumped in. It was still, dawn hadn’t broken

but we got in and swam away from the boat in case it sunk quickly as it was it didn’t sink quickly. Then once we got in the water the Japanese destroyers were whizzing around dropping depth charges everywhere, and you could feel that in your stomach, just the percussion going through the water. And suddenly one of the Japanese destroyers were busily

signalling to another one and whoosh up went that. One of the submarines said “Oh we’ll have you mate” and blew that one up, and you could feel that in the water too, the explosion. So they, we didn’t know there were 3 submarines in the attack on the convoy, we didn’t know at the time, we knew there was a submarine but there were actually 3 of them.

So that night they sunk the two tankers, ourselves and 2 other ships. Then they chased up the rest and sunk the rest the next night. But we ended up just in one big huddle of 1300 people, all covered in oil coming from the sunken tankers. And so when dawn came I remember so much we had in the

midst of us we had a Japanese Officer. Even had his sword still on and we said, and we had a timber thing “You stand and signal the destroyer” the Japanese destroyer. So we helped him up on there and he signalled for the Japanese destroyer and that came across, dropped one of their sea boats and came over and held us off with pistols and he just swam over and they pulled him into their

boat and off and got back on the destroyer and left us. If we had known that we would have drowned the bugger but…

Well if they’d pick him up, they’d pick us up. But they didn’t. The one thing in mind was to pick him up and leave us. So we were far from happy, but the Japanese cruiser came round back towards us and we thought they were going to drop depth charges

in amongst us, but as they got near us they just jeered us, went past. What we’d say jeering us, yelling out something to us as if to say well goodbye were going to leave ya. So by late afternoon the same day the Vacurah Maroo sunk, was full of rubber so it took until late in the afternoon before that sunk.

When that sunk there wasn’t another boat on the horizon, everything had gone, all we could see was 1500 heads bobbing in the water.

We didn’t know at that stage, could have been. That night we came through the night, we all huddled together hanging onto whatever you could find. Some had got, I had a life jacket I had found

on board, I had that on. So we went right through that night, some were hallucinating even at that early stage, they reckoned they could see lights and there were no lights, and they reckoned there was another boat coming to pick us up and there wasn’t. So we went right through that night, so Day 2 we were all still huddled together in this great group of 1500, 1300 and….

Oh you just compare notes about how you think you’ll see the day out, do you think there’s any submarines around? You’re just talking on the hopeful side that something might happen. Cause we sailors on board we had something like 41 sailors off the Perth on board, we were in demand because they wanted to know what do you do, because you blokes have been through this. Well on day, we got through

Day 2 and that night, the water was warm and day, Day 3 started and this Warrant Officer Bill Smith from Jeep Island, remember I mentioned this in the cook house. He and his mates swam over to me and said “Blood you’ve been through this nonsense, how are we going to get out of it?” and of course I was quite matey with them, I said “Well look we’ve got to get out of this water, we can’t just

float in this water for ever and every” I said, but looking about 50 yards away I could see a lot of timber floating, no body else on it, I said “If we got over there we’d be able to take our pick at what we want”. They said “If you say, lets go”, and Lofty my mate, who’d I’d been right through the jungle with, must go back a bit. I had my water bottle on this first day Lofty said to me

“Look can I have a drink of our water”, he said “My mouth’s very dry, got oil in it” I said “Yeah but you’ve got to be very careful we don’t know how long this water’s got to last, and also you can’t afford to get oil or salt water in it, so be careful”, so he took it, got the cork off and all the oil on the water bottle it just slid through his hand straight down into the ocean, didn’t get one drink out of my water bottle. Anyway we go onto Day 3, so when I decided

with these army fellows that we’d break away from this group and try and find something more suitable. I said to Lofty, and he’s sitting up to his waist in water, “Come on Lofty were going over there” and he wouldn’t come with me. He said “No, no I’m bloody right” he was right in the middle of a group of people and I think he was secure that he had others with him and he never came. I met his mother when I came home and she said “Why didn’t you make him go with you?”

I said “I couldn’t”. It’s only a decision he could make, if he’d have come with me he would have got home. Anyway we swum over this 50 odd yards….

And Bill Smith the warrant officer and 3 of his mates from the galley and from the cookhouse on the Jeep Island. And they were all ready to put their weight in with me you see,

they were all army fellows. And when we got over there we found, we ended up with 6 little table top rafts, they were just Japanese rafts, they were about 6 feet square and you sit on top of the water. I said “Look if we tie all these together, we can have one each and have a spare which means we can travel first class, which we did. It got us out of the

water, so that was Day 3.

Oh well you can’t last in it forever cause you get water logged. And you lose all sense of feeling eventually if you’re just in the water indefinitely. So by getting and doing what we did, we got on these little one man rafts

and in the daytime we could just stretch out on it and then roll into the water to, if it got to hot roll into the water then get back on the raft. We could control what we did, and one would always keep an eye open for sharks cause we didn’t want to have any nasties around. So we spent the first day that way and that was good.

Oh within an hour we were out of sight of them, we drifted at a different rate to them. And by the time that day was gone we were the only ones on the ocean, you couldn’t see anybody else. So on the 3rd night we were right, on the 4th day we had, we could only see dead bodies floating past and

one of them put his hand up. So I said to Eric Leo, one of the Queenslanders I said “I think that blokes alive out there let’s swim over and get him”, so two of us went over and got him and bought him back and tied him onto the spare raft, we had a spare raft. And he’d been drinking salt water and he was a bit, didn’t really know what was going on. But anyway we tied him on the raft and that day the

rain started coming. You could see rain clouds developing, and we thought, cause we hadn’t had any water, and it started raining and we didn’t get one drop. It rained over there and it rained over there and our raft went down the middle of it without one drop of water, amazing. So that was the 4th day and we started getting a bit desperate then for water. So I said “Fellows I read the

Captain Bligh story the Mutiny of the Bounty and when he was put on the lifeboat when he left the Bounty they had plenty of rain water when they were going along but one time they ran out of water. So Captain Bligh allowed them to put salt water in their mouth but not drink it just spit it out, and I’m going to do that, because we’ve got to have something

in our system we can’t be dehydrated”. So they said “You’re in charge” so I said “I’m going to do it fellows you can do what you like”. So I got some went brr brr and spat it out, didn’t drink it. We all did it except the bloke who was non compos. Anyway to jump ahead when we were eventually rescued by the submarine, we

were the very last ones to be rescued and we were the fittest of anybody, because we’d been doing this system of stopping dehydrating. That was Day 4, we didn’t get any rain, and Day 5 rain developed and it was beautiful, you just lay there with mouths open and you had this rain water pouring down our gullets, and we’d already picked up a little rice bucket, which had floated past and

we picked that up and drained rain water into it with rubber, we had slabs of rubber and we shaped them and got to the rainwater so we got a whole bucket full of fresh rain water. Bit oily, the bucket was a bit oily but it didn’t matter. And so that gave us rain water for the rest of the day and it rained for the rest of the time. But on Day 6,

on the end of day 5, from flat water, the water started getting rough, very rough and we knew that we were in trouble so we started tying the rafts together more and we tied ourselves individually onto the rafts cause there was ropes hanging around. On Day 6 the sea got rougher and we could

up and down, on Day 4 the 2 submarines had come back and picked up the ones in their vicinity, we saw them but they couldn’t see us. So that was, I’m doing that again, I know what you mean, stop playing with myself.

Sorry and so we found the rough sea

we knew there was something brewing, what we didn’t know was there was a typhoon moving in and so we had seen the 2 submarines on Day 4 and they didn’t see us and we assumed they were American submarines. And on Day 6 in the late afternoon we heard the submarine noises again and sure enough 2 submarines came along and they were the Barman and the Queen fish, they were 2 days sailing north

of us and they’d been alerted by the other submarines to come down. So they came down and got down on the edge of the typhoon, and they were that rough that half their crew were sea sick, it was so rough. We weren’t sea sick cause we’d been in the water for so long. But they came alongside us and down as low as they could and then dragged us on

one at a time, they only got 16 of us. And on the other submarine I think they go 14 and of the 16 that we got rescued we were the very last, 2 died after they were picked up. The submarine tells strange stories but I believed them because I was non compos I was on a high, oh you jumped onto, I took the rope

they threw to me and tied all our rafts to the one and they all came through my raft onto the submarine. And they made certain that I kept the rope tight so they could get on, so virtually I was the very last one to get on board. And apparently when I got on board I saluted and said “Able Seaman Bancroft permission to come on board”

and they reckoned this was great. I waved to the Captain and said “I’d knew you’d save me thanks”. I didn’t realise I said all this but I think I was on a high. Anyway the other 15 were army men, 4 English and the rest Aussies. I was the only sailor from the 41 picked up by them. So they moved me down into

there, where their bunks were and had me lying down, no clothes on, I’d been stripped off again and except they had semi nude girls all painted, all stuck over the ceiling, and I thought “I’m dead. I’m in heaven”. And they said “How long since you’ve had something to eat Aussie?” I said “6 days”, “Oh you must be hungry”, “You could say that”, “What would you like?”, I said “Sausages”,

I’d dreamt of sausages cause that was the last meal I had on board our ship. Do you have to stop doing something?

Oh sausages so the yank sailor said “What would you like to eat?” and I was a great sausage eater when I was a lad [boy] my mother would have roast lamb and I’d have a pound of sausages. But on the ship the last meal we had at

our guns was sausages, and we didn’t eat them all when the fun started, and I could imagine sharks eating my sausages. So during the POW days I thought I’d love to have a sausage, so when the yank said “Would you like anything to eat?” I said “Yes sausages”. So they bought out a big tin of sausages for me and I was just going to take the top off it and their Pharmacist mate, who was their Doctor, came along and said “We just saved this guy now you’re going to kill him” and away went my sausages again,

so I didn’t get my sausages until I got home.

Oh well we just, they took me down to the forehead torpedo hatch where the other survivors were and we had hot broth and stuff like that, just something to steady your insides down, because we hadn’t stopped to really think that what we were going to put inside us might be rejected by our digestion. So

for the first day I had that, then the ones of us that were fit enough, as I said 2 died, so they had to bury them at sea. So they were very careful what they were giving the rest of us, but on Day 2 they said “We’ve just baked some bread” they bake bread on submarines these days “And were very sorry that the ice cream machine has broken down” so they couldn’t give us ice cream

so they came in with a lovely loaf of bread, fresh bread all sliced up. They went round and they came back with butter and jam and honey and that and they said “Where’s the bread?”. We’d eaten it, it was like cake. So they went and got some more bread for us and they said “It looks like you guys are good enough to eat” so from there on they started giving us more solid food.

Oh yes,

yes we were.

Not so much burns, yeah I think I did have a bit of sunburn yeah. But I had a lot of, I had skin complaints and they were exacerbated by the exposure and the water and the sun and all that. I’ve got a copy of the reports from the submarines and these are the points they made. That I had damages to my legs and

arms. But I was alright. I was alive.

Yeah the submarines picked up 150 of them. But then unbeknown to us there was another 150 that got in Japanese lifeboats and on Day 3 I think

they were picked up by a Japanese destroyer and they got to Japan. So out of the whole 1300, 300 survived.

Loss yeah. Out of the 41 Perth survivors on Vacurah Maroo, 4 of us got picked up by submarines, we all got picked up by different submarine. Another 8

got to Japan via these lifeboats, 4 of those got killed in air raids in Japan. So 4 of them got back to Australia and we got back. So we got 8 out of the 41 got home out of that. Loss to us, cause there was very few of us.

Hmm, yeah, very very fortunate.

We had 7 days in the submarine and that was a marvellous experience. Suddenly you’re on the surface and boo booo boo and down it would go. Little Brooklyn lad next to me, Arti Grandinetti, he said “Don’t worry Blood don’t worry if the Japs have seen us they’ll be depth charging

us any minute” I said “Thank you very much”. They were great, the crew, they were very kind to us. They’d, even one of the Officers helped scrub the oil and that off me, and all that cause again we were covered in oil. But no it was quite an experience 7 days on a submarine. I’m a member of the Association now cause I reckon I’m entitled to be.

A member of the Submarine Service now.

We headed through north of the Philippines and across through to an island called Sibuyan. And they were actually still fighting on Sibuyan up in the hills and they put us in the hospital, the Base Hospital and the first night there we were woken up by gun shots, we said

“What’s going on?”, apparently the Japs were sneaking down from the hills to get at their water bags, cause they couldn’t get any water up in the hills. And they found this Jap at the water bag so they shot him, but they didn’t tell us about it and we wondered what the shooting was that was going on. That was a marvellous stay. We had 3 days in the hospital there and the nurses. Well we hadn’t been used to being cared for

and we had a nice soft bed, soft sheets, everything. And food, you know just whatever we wanted, so it was only a short stay there, but very memorable one.

No American. And they then put us on a,

of the 150 only 92 Australians the rest were British, and the British Naval Officer came over from Honolulu and he made the decision that the British troops would go back through Honolulu, then to America and then to England that way. And the Australians would go back, as directly as possible by ship.

We were a bit disappointed. We thought we’d been away from home so long, an air trip to America would have been good. But that was not to be.

Oh we were good, most of us, some were still very sick I might add. Out of the 92 I think we had to leave 3 or 4 back in Sibuyan to come home at a later date. On the troops ship we were going back,

we didn’t know where we were going but we ended up at Guadalcanal, we had the Marines who’d done the landing on Sibuyan and we were curious of them. We were given 3 meals a day but they were only given 2 meals a day. And they were snaking about that “You bloody Aussies getting all our food” but they were very decent about it.

Yeah, on board the, I’ll get rid of that.

On board the Liberty ship we were on I got hold of some American, not Red Cross but something that sort of paper. So I wrote, strangely enough not long before I left to go to the Japan trip I got 2 letters from my mother and 2 letters from a girl called Mirla,

and it was the first letters I’d received, the Japanese didn’t give us letters. My parents had been writing every week or whatever, Mirla had been writing, never got them. But I got them just before I left Singapore, so I wrote to her, you know Dear Mirla I’m a free man, just been rescued on a submarine blah blah, have you married a

yank yet? She hadn’t and what I’d forgotten, it was a leap year, and she reckoned I proposed to her but I reckon she proposed to me.

Yes that’s it anyway. So that was back to civilisation, we ended up at Gratal Canal and

spent several days there, we were based in the hospital again. It’s somewhere to keep us. And they had an empty American mine layer in the harbour so they said “Oh you can take that to take the Aussie’s back to Australia” and we were popular with the crew cause they were getting shore leave in Brisbane, in Australia. So we were very popular so a lovely trip across to Brisbane and landed in Brisbane and we were the

very first Japanese Prisoners of War to get home. And the 4 navy men we were taken by the navy straight away, the army fellows were put in hospital. The navy didn’t do that, they took us round and they questioned us a lot about the details of the HMAS Perth, the Crew of the HMAS Perth.

Yes right as yeah, actually they sent two naval officers out in a ship and met the

American ship out in Gades Rhodes and they came right up the river and had us in the Captain’s cabin talking to us all the way up. Wanting to know, went through all the ships company “Where did you see this man last?”. All this, blah blah blah. And when we got into Brisbane itself they took us into Navy Headquarters again, continued the questioning about conditions and they fed us with numerous cups of

tea. So Jack Horton was a married man he was, lived in Brisbane. They sent him home in a car, and his wife wasn’t home. She was down the street and saw an American standing at her gate, cause we were dressed as Americans, and she wondered what this American was doing standing at her gate, it was Jack. Anyway all our parents and she’d been advised by cable or

telegram by the navy that we were safe, in allied hands and we would be home shortly, that’s all they knew.

No. We were allowed to send little cards. We sent a card from Burma, we’re in a Prison Camp in Burma. Conditions are quite good. We are well or we are sick and you crossed out whichever, it was a Japanese prepared card. All we had was about 2 lines.

We are keeping well, thinking of you, words to that effect and parents got those cards. I think they got 3 cards while I was away. When in Brisbane they sent the other two, they were New South Welshman, put them on a train to send them home. Then little Arthur, what are they going to do with little Arthur he had to go all the way to Perth didn’t he? So I had to wait another day and they had an aircraft

going over to Perth so they put me on that, still dressed as an American and with strict instructions not to talk to anybody about my experiences.

I’ll tell you in a minute

Because at Melbourne, Senator Dorothy Tangney, ever heard of her? Yes she was the first female Senator in Australian, Senator Dorothy Tangney,

who happened to be my school teacher at school. So when she got on the aircraft and sat opposite me and the plane took off, got up I didn’t look at her at all. She looked over and said “Aren’t you Arthur Bancroft?” I said “Yes Ms Tangney” she said “What are you doing here? You’re a Prisoner of War?” I said “I was” and she just came from Parliament House and they knew nothing at all about this. And still the Navy

Board and the Department of Army were still trying to work out what attack to take against the Japanese and they hadn’t even reported it to Parliament, that’s why I wasn’t allowed to talk. But Dorothy Tangney said “You can talk to me can’t you?” and I said “Yes of course I can Ms Tangney”. She said “You’re parents expecting you home?” I said “I don’t really know”. She said “How are you going to get home?” I said “I don’t know yet”, “Oh” she said “I’ve got a car waiting for me I’ll drop you home” but as it turned out

my parents were there.

I think it was a good thing cause it kept us mentally geared to it, because they had no indication of how the ship was sunk, how the Perth was sunk. My report on the Queenfish submarine

about the USS Houston was the first advice that America had had of how the Houston was sunk, so yes they got information like that that they may have had to wait another 12 months to get, you know. So I didn’t mind, I thought it was necessary that you had to talk to these, they were interested to know the conditions of the camp about, particularly on the submarine they were very interested on

ammunition bases and things like that. As a matter of fact there was a reunion in later years and I bumped into one of the air crew. The Pilot of an American aircraft that used to do a lot of bombing around, he did the bombing on the bridge at the River Kwai, he actually bombed that, and he said cause the information we gave them it gave them a chance to pin point where all these ammunition dumps

which we had worked on and he said it was a great help to us he said…..

Yes well when the Senator who was my school teacher at school, got on the plane and I didn’t acknowledge her at all because I’d been instructed by the navy in Brisbane not to talk to anybody, and I was dressed as an American. So when the aircraft took off, Senator Dorothy Tangney went over and said “Aren’t you

Arthur Bancroft?” I said “Yes Ms Tangney” cause she was my school teacher so I had to recognise her and she said “I understood you were a Prisoner of War?” I said “I was” she said “What do you mean you was?” I said “I’ve just been rescued from the Japanese” and she’d just come from Parliament House and they knew nothing at all about this. We were told it was all top secret until such time as the navy, army and air force got their heads together over what attitude they were going to take to the Japanese

about their treatment of Prisoners of War and so and so. So she found out from me what she hadn’t found out through Parliament.

Straight from the horses mouth yes. No that was quite interesting cause she said “Do your parents know you’re coming home?” I said “I really don’t know” and she said “How are you going to get home?” I said “I don’t know” I said “I’ll get a cab or something”, she said “Oh I’ll have a Government

car waiting for me and I’ll drop you home”. But when we landed my parents were there.

At the old Maylands aerodrome, not the current one, this was the original aerodrome. And so the Red Cross picked up my parents and took them to our home and my two sisters were there but my eldest brother was up in

New Guinea in the air force, my other brother was in Borneo in the 9th Division. We only had a few of my family there to welcome me home. Oh Mirla my wife, my girlfriend then, she and my mother were there and that was all. Wartime they didn’t have the people around that you wanted to see in a hurry, you know.

And they didn’t even have a camera to take a photo of me, which is a pity, they weren’t so readily available in those day, films and all that.

Yeah I guess so, I’m sure they were.

Oh yes I was the first one to arrive back in Perth.

Yes, the other 12 left in Brisbane, army fellows they were put in a hospital in Brisbane and it took them 2 weeks to get home,

the navy had me home in 2 days which is pretty good.

No it was all hush hush. No, there was no camera at the airport to say here’s Able Seaman Bancroft, nothing, nothing. These days you would have TV cameras and all that around.

But no, no nothing. It wasn’t until some time

later when we announced our engagement Mirl and I they got us in the West, they took a photo of me and Mirla engaged and a War Veteran and is engaged to Mirla Wilkson and that was all. That was the big announcement.

Oh she reckoned it might have been the night I got home, I can’t remember, I can’t remember that night.

No just a little party at home that was all. My father and my mother and my older sister and another sister and the 3rd and 4th sisters, one was in Sydney and the other one was in the air force, she wasn’t home. So it was only, and then my eldest brother was away in the

air force and my other brother was away in the army, so very small crowd of us there until the war was over.

Oh I started talking about it fairly soon, I can’t remember what I said on that night I got home. I’ve got no clear memory of what happen that night, I haven’t, I know, I

most probably talked my head off but just can’t remember the night. It’s just a haze, you know?

Oh yes, yes it was. Well it’s the experience of a lifetime.

No well I declined a discharge because I felt I had something. I

could, be of use to the navy by talking to recruits about survival and how to get over sinking of ships and all that. The navy weren’t interested. So they eventually sent me back to Flinders Naval Depot, where I’d been before to take some raw recruits back, which I did. And going through the Depot, the day I arrived, or the night I arrived,

the morning I arrived they were busy re-ballasting the railway line in Flinders Naval Depot. And I thought it would be funny if they asked me to do that with them, sure enough they gave me instructions, go down and report to Petty Officer Joe Bloggs and get a shovel and report to the Depot railway line. I thought okay so down I went had a shovel in my hand and the petty officer said “Do you know what to do son?” I said “Yes” so I stuck the shovel on the ground and sat on it.

And he said “Are you trying to be funny?” I said “Ha Funny” I said “I just finished building one of these things through the Burma jungle do you think I’m going to do it here, you’ve got another thing coming”, they all knocked off, they said “Hey tell us all about it”. So all the sailors who were busy re-ballasting the railway, they all just dropped their shovels and started asking me all the questions in the world, how the hell I got there. So that was, filled in the first day and the next day I got called up

before a naval officer who had been put in charge of returning German Prisoners of War, cause the German war was over and there Prisoners of War were coming back. So I was called up to see him and he asked how I was and he said “And what are you doing now?” I said “Nothing, they’re trying to get me to work on this Depot railway line and I’ve refused” he looked at me and said “I don’t blame you” and he pressed the button and

somebody came in and said “Look take Able Seaman Bancroft over and get his gear and there’ll be a staff car waiting and get him back to the convalescent home” they didn’t know what to do with me. So I went back to the convalescent home. There I struck one of the German returning Prisoners of War at the convalescent home and they wouldn’t give him a discharge, like they’d offered me. He said “But I don’t want to stay on here” they said “Look the only way

we can put you out is on medical grounds”, he said “Okay I’ll take that” and I said “I’ll have one of those” and they said “What do you mean? You declined a discharge”, I said “Obviously I’m an embarrassment to the navy” and this is June 45 “I’ve been to see my General Manger at the Union Bank in Melbourne who made me very welcome, more so than you blokes have and

he’s offered me a job anywhere in Australia. So I’d like to go back to the bank”, they said “Okay we’ll put you out as physical unfit” which I did and I came back and within a month I was back working at the bank. War was over, nobody was interested in Able Seaman Bancroft anymore.

We were in Northern, the country town Northern, Mirl and I,

in the bank. And we got the news that the war was finished, so I got hold of her and we went down the street and called in every, well she didn’t drink of course, drink in every pub we’d drink and I had a drink with the locals I’d met and yeah it was quite a thrill. We didn’t make a night of it I just sort of went down and had a mini celebration and then went home.

It was indeed,

it was indeed. But it was a strange feeling because I felt lonely. Sounds strange, I wasn’t lonely cause I had a wife not to be lonely with, but I was lonely because of my mates, I didn’t have any. That’s a strange feeling. I found it very lonely not having my mates.

No I missed more the ones I was a Prisoner of War with, we went through so much. Now we’re very close still, last week, I organised it here, there’s only 8 of us in the whole of Western Australia, the last few years I’ve been getting our wives and our widows and survivors together and we have a Christmas lunch, had it last week and we have a lovely time. We’ve got as many

widows as we have survivors, were a dying race.

They were, some came through by train, they were going over to the convalescent home and met some of them. I was at Northern when I met the train they were on. And then they had a reunion every

year at the end of February every year, cause I couldn’t come to those cause out in the country, the bank had a balance night on that same date every year. So it was going to be nearly 5, 10 years before I could get down to the reunions here in Perth.

Yeah because the bank, I had to work in the bank. And we

eventually had to, the bank changed their balancing day so then I could start getting to the reunions. But as I was saying, we just had this Christmas function for our wives and widows last week and we ended up that there were only 5 of us, 5 survivors there because 2 couldn’t get there, 1 was in hospital and the other one had to go to a family golden wedding anniversary or something. So

there were 5 survivors down at Hilliers Boat Harbour, 5 wives, 5 widows and 2 other invitees there. So we’re a bit low on numbers now.

Oh marvellous, the wives and widows reckon it’s marvellous. And last February we hold a Headlands Yacht Race here,

it’s held every year, 42 years they’ve been doing here and 50 years we’ve been holding a church service in St Johns Church in Fremantle and they’re a must every year. This year were going to include the next generations, children of ours to come along to these functions. And they’re marvellous. Last

February we had a woman come all the way from Melbourne to attend, because they didn’t have anything like it in Melbourne, so she came all the way. She lost her father on the Perth and we sat her and her husband next to one of our Signalman who knew her father on board the Perth, he got lost on the Perth. Oh she was thrilled to bits and coming all the way from Melbourne just to do that.

It is, we’d be the

most, in the whole of Australia, were the most tied together group.

Australia wide there’s something close on 40 and we got 8 here. Melbourne and Sydney have got something like 15 each that’s 30 and the rest make up our 40. See the Melbourne

and New South Wales and Victoria had more on the ship than W.A did [Western Australia]. But were named after the City of Perth, and we are invited every year to a dinner, by the Lord Mayor to celebrate the HMAS Perth. Then once a year we have another invitation by the City of Perth for the Sister City Amalgamation between the

City of Houston and the City of Perth and the HMAS Perth and the USS Houston were two ships sunk together, so we have that once a year too. So very very, we appreciate it very much.

Hmm.

Oh I won’t miss them. I think I was mentioning it

earlier, I go in every Tuesday to Anzac House, we used to have about 4 or 5 of us meet every Tuesday and now its down to 1 or 2, or 2 or 3 of us every Tuesday we meet in Anzac House and have lunch.

Oh it is, yeah, which is quite unique cause we do that which a lot of others don’t do. We’ve got the idea going now in Sydney they meet every

once a month, we meet every week.

Well we have our own flag now. We have a joint banner with the other HMAS Perth crew. Because we’re down, 2 of us march every Anzac Day, only 2 of us left to march, others aren’t fit enough to march. I hope my knee will be alright by next Anzac Day so I can march, always do.

And the chap I meet every Tuesday at Anzac House he marches, another one he marches. So we have at least half of our survivors left and capable and they march on Anzac Day.

Hmm, we feel it’s very important.

Growing more it is, we’re good indeed we’re very pleased. I

mentioned earlier going to schools and giving talks, also go to school to commemorate Anzac Day, no it’s very important I think. And I find the children are getting very enthusiastic about it.

I think there’s been a bit more publicity about it. And I think the teachers are starting to again convey the message of

Anzac Day to the students. Now when I get to some of the schools and help them with flag raising and Mirla comes with some of them too. You get a lot of interesting questions from the children, really interesting. The boys are at a different level to the girls, the girls are wanting to know what sort of food you had and all this sort of stuff and whether we were writing home. Where the boys ask how many did you shoot, different…

Oh you just, have an answer, think up an answer.

Well those are the junior schools up to 12 years of age. I’ve been to the Ladies….Hale school here because my son’s 2 boys and my son went to Hale school and his 2 sons go to

Hale school. And mainly they, at the St Mary’s College around about the 14 year age and they’re thinking at a different level, and you see them taking notes and they’ve got to give a report to their class on what it’s all about. No they show a lot of interest.

Well they want to know about “What do you

do when a ship gets sunk?” they ask. You talk to them first of all and then they ask you questions. And they ask questions live you’ve been asking me, not as in-depth but they want to know what happens when a ship gets sunk? or what happens when you’re a Prisoner of War? What do you eat? You know all these questions. Interesting questions.

Well it does and I don’t mind,

I said earlier that I’ve got to watch myself on certain notes of emotion. I can get a little emotional if it gets too close.

Oh I like the idea, I’ve had my grandson march with me and he’s proud, he strides along, he was only about 8 or 9 at the

time. I think if they want to, yes encourage them to.

No I don’t know why. There are all different reasons I suppose, I’ve got an open mind about it. I think it’s great since the youth have been more involved, you can see that by the swelling of the crowd,

during the march everybody’s got little flags, oh it’s really grown out of all bounds in recent years. It’s good, its something to be proud of.

Oh I can’t understand their mentality. I think they’re the ones who are losing out.

This is something for Australia to be proud of. And bear in mind right up to now, it might be after the current war’s are different, we were all volunteers, we were not forced into going to war but we were very proud of our attitude of our British Commonwealth of Nations that we feel it’s got to be maintained. And the only way you can do that is by

fighting for your rights. I think it’s a very important that we keep that tradition going. I don’t believe in men just going to be slaughtered I don’t, that happens unfortunately, I think we’ve got a tradition that was worth maintaining.

Yes well

I went back to the bank before the war finished which was, I was one of the very few to go back in the bank. It didn’t do any harm as it turned out because I advanced in the bank very quickly and by the time I was 30 I was relieving Managers all round the place, whereas others came

back from the W\war and they were just doing minor jobs even though they were Wing Commanders and all sorts, the bank didn’t have any jobs for them. But I’d got in early enough and I got hold of the jobs. I suppose it worked to my advantage.

Well I served in the bank in the country towns, I was in Northern for 5 years, I was President of the RSL [Returned and Services League] there. I was a Foundation

Member of the Apex Club there. I was Captain of the Football Club. I was Captain of the Cricket Club. I was in everything like a ham sandwich. And then I went from there to Albany and again I became a Foundation Member of Apex at Albany. I was in the football and the cricket and the basketball, all sorts of things in Albany. Then from there I went to, I was in the RSL, I was President of the RSL in Northern and the Treasurer of the RSL in Albany and then I went from there to Wongan Hills

and became Secretary of the RSL in Wongan Hills. Only had 14 months there and came back to the city and I went into administration here in the city and from there I….whilst I was out in the country still in Albany the bank and I’d only by this time was only 30. They sent me round all the

country towns reliving all the Managers so they had enough faith in me already at that stage that I could handle it, which I did. And so then when I came back to the city I eventually got made a Manager in South Australia, which I accepted because I knew it was step in the right direction, cause I eventually organised to come back to Western Australia. And again everything worked out well for me,

I always did my best whatever I did. So I eventually became what they call a Regional Manager in the bank, I used to control branches from here right up to Derby in Western Australia. Then I was Assistant State Manager here quite a while, I used to do that 6 months of the year, till eventually I found out at the age of 58 that I was overdue for retirement cause I’d joined the bank at 15.

And you had to do 20 years, 40 years service to earn a pension and suddenly I found that I’d already done 45 years and so I decided I’d retire at 58 instead of going through to 60. And that’s what I did. I retired and a good thing I did because I was very happy and I’ve had a very happy family. I’ve been able to help the

family a lot, no I’ve got a lovely family life.

I think so, I think that for a while, while I was always a very shy retiring person, except very active in sports and all that, but I didn’t want to push myself. But then I found that you had to push yourself as you got involved in that I

went through, you had to stand up for yourself. I found that a lot, that I had been a bit too lessened to stand up for myself. I found a lot, it helped me a lot in that way.

Oh yes, oh yes very important.

I think so, I think it has. I’m very, I think I’m a very humane sort of person. I’m a very great family man. I’ve got a lovely association with my children and my grandchildren so it’s great. I think I can look back now and know what my parents

went through, now that I’m a father myself. At one stage they had me in an unknown capacity in this Prisoner of War camp, my other brother bit older than me, he was in the 9th Division in the Middle East in the Battle of Alamein and my eldest brother he was in the air force and he was up in the islands in the air force, so here are my parents had 3 sons and all away at the war. And I haven’t had to suffer that, I haven’t had to suffer my children

having to go away because of a war.

Very thankful. No my parents must have had a very worrying time, very worrying having them all overseas and not knowing what was happening half the time.

I was going to say I think it took them 6 months or 8 months, Mirl tells me before they even knew I was alive, and

what a worry for a parent.

Oh yeah. So really I’m very grateful I’ve had children that haven’t had to go through that because I know it would worry me.

Oh yes, my father too. When I was back from the navy back in the Luien Barracks at this stage

and somebody said “You’re wanted on the phone” and so I answered the phone and it was my brother Les who’d been at Alamay and up in Borneo, he was a fighting man, a tough nut. And he phones and he says “Where in the bloody hell are ya, I can’t wait all bloody day to buy you a beer?” that was my greeting. I said “I’ll be right up” so I got a cab in Fremantle and down to the WA National Football League and we lived right behind

there and my father was a head Steward there when he retired from building. So I went over there and there’s my Dad and my brother Les into it, cause he’d only just come back from Borneo and all the action up there, and so we got stuck into it. My brother Les hadn’t even been home to see his wife and oh we had a session and a half.

Yes well imagine

my father was so pleased to have both of us together. Yes so my brother was just getting over malaria and he passed out eventually, we took him over home and put him to bed, and he hadn’t been home to see his wife. Anyway that’s your priorities, he wanted to see his little brother, he knew he’d be able to see his wife later on but he couldn’t see his little brother.

So that was quite an interesting little event.

Yeah, oh yes. These are little important events in your life that you never forget.

Yes I’ve been back twice, we’ve been up to, in

1987 we went, I took Mirl and when I retired from the bank, 1987 yeah anyway I took a trip on the, by boat up to Singapore then up to, no, no not by boat that was a different trip, this one we flew by Qantas.

We ended up in Bangkok and the Qantas party I was with weren’t going up the River Kwai. So I said to the local girl who was in charge of the party “I don’t want to do what you want to do. I want to go up to the River Kwai” she said “Why?” and I told her, she said “I will ask some of the others whether they would like to go with you”. So out of the

20 in the party 15 said “We want to go to the River Kwai” so they got a mini bus and with a guide and took us up to the River Kwai. I had to tell the guide what it was all about, he knew nothing at all about it. And so we went up and saw the River Kwai and did the bridge walk across it again, had a river trip on it, and went to find where my old camp

was but that’s all gone back to jungle, but the big memorial they’d built was still there. Yeah that was an interesting trip. Then Anzac Day 4 years ago I took the whole family up there. I took my 2 daughters and my son, Mirl and myself up and that was a great trip. They enjoyed it, they said “We didn’t realise what it was all about Dad until, we’re glad we came with you”.

Oh…….what have I done now.

Oh well no the kids reckon they got a lot out of it because they’d heard me talking about it. It wasn’t until we actually got up there. So when we got up to the railway sighting at Ban Pong where the railway started, there were some locals

working on the railway line, so I went up and gave him some money and took his pick and started working on the railway again, while my family took photos. They got a lot of enjoyment, lot of information out it, they said “Well we know what you’ve done Dad, we know what you did”. So it was very interesting from their point of view.

Oh it was,

I said “I’m taking you under the ski club”, and they said “What’s a ski club?” I’m spending the kids inheritance, so you’re getting it now, not when I’m dead. But it was the best money I’ve ever spent, I would have loved to have taken their wives or husbands with them, but it wouldn’t have been the same for them. My one daughter that passed away and left a young family would have loved to have been with us.

But no that was a great trip family wise, great trip.

Yes it was, it was. I could explain things to them, what I’d seen before and what it’s like now. And they heard about the bridge and the River Kwai and they hadn’t seen it. I went up, it was Anzac Day there and the Prime Minister was giving a talk,

after the talk the dawn service, magnificent dawn service on the railway line, magnificent. And John Howard [Australian Prime Minister] did a magnificent job, but after that he was giving the opening of a museum there so the girls and Colin my son said “Go on Dad go and talk to him”, I said “Oh he doesn’t want to listen to me”, “Go and talk”. So I just went over and I had this on and

my name on, had all that on there. I said “I’ll just let you know Mr Prime Minister that the navy were up here too”, cause there’s never any mention of the navy. It’s only army and I get browned off [annoyed] with that, and I said “Just to let you know Sir that the navy were up here too” he said “Thank you Mr Bancroft thank you”. Well on Anzac Day they had the opening, a big service at the cemetery there

and the Prime Minister got up to give his address and anyway he said “I must make special mention, to the men of HMAS Perth”, straight out of my mouth, yeah very thoughtful of him. We do get browned off that everything is based on the army and we were few in numbers and we’re very proud of our…. And so I think the Prime Minister got the message.

Hmm.

Oh we did.

Yeah, oh I think we had a much more difficult time than they did. And this niggles [annoys] us as they take all the kudos [credit and adulation], so we let them know.

Oh yes the destroyer Perth yes that was on

my 80th birthday yes.

Well the lady Mayor of Albany asked me to do it and I’d written to her and I was a bit reluctant because I thought it should have been somebody off that ship that should do it. See there’s an Admiral that used to be a Captain on board, I thought they’d ask him to come over, but apparently they thought it would be nice to have somebody involved with the other Perth,

me. And so I approached the President of the Association here, they’ve got a bigger Association we have, he said “Go for it, we’ll be proud to have you do it”. So once they said that I said to the lady Mayor I’d do it. So in that case I took all the family down there and had my 80th birthday down in Albany. But that was quite a moving service, to actually sink a ship when every other ship I go on goes down, but this

one I sent it down.

Yes, I was yes. Pushed it down and see all the flames come up and zrrrr, yeah it was quite a service.

Yes, people say to me “What did you do on your 80th birthday?” I say “I sunk a ship”. No that was an interesting day and we had my 80th birthday in Albany.

I think the Lady Mayor possibly thought I was ex-local cause I’d been in so many things in Albany, in the bank, I think I mentioned I was a Foundation Member of one of their clubs there and Treasurer of the RSL there and I was involved in a lot of things in Albany, and she most probably though I was an ex-Albanian. But very nice person anyway.

Oh it had

run out of time, you know it was obsolete, these day they become obsolete. See the Perth and the Hobart, and Brisbane they were all American destroyers, they were guided missile destroyers but they still had the old oil burners. Now there gas turbine, there’s different sort of ships now

so they’d outdone their service. Our Perth, the one I sunk had done 35 years, our ship only lasted 5 years. But the modern ships now have got an aircraft engine in them, when they want to service them they just take a crane down and pull them out and it goes onto Qantas and they service it, come back and put it in and away you go again.

Oh marvellous.

No, no couldn’t do it.

Yeah, the new ones, there’s a new Perth coming out, this will be, her keel was laid only last year, or early this year, this year and she’ll come on stream in about 2006 I think. I hope I’m still alive to go over and see it.

More than likely in Melbourne, in Melbourne

I think.

No, no I don’t tell them about my history.

No the joke goes around now, don’t go on that, Bancroft’s going on it.

No. I’ve had an interesting life, interesting life.

Thank you it’s been a pleasure, thank you very much.