Australians at War Film Archive

I was born on the 2nd October 1921 in Kensington in South Australia I had a fairly happy and normal boyhood days and I use to go hunting for frogs and tadpoles. I went to the then Wellington Road Primary School now called Trinity Gardens. I also spent

a lot of time at the Molands Methodist Church morning, afternoon and evenings, I did that as a lot of my social life as a boy was around that church group. From there I joined the Lyndon Park Scout group and they were very happy days indeed and I made a lot of friends there who still exist today.

As a result of that I also attended a Boy Scout jamboree in Sydney, which in those days was a big deal with a long railway journey from Adelaide to Sydney. Then later on I became an apprentice at Clarks Limited who makes mirrors, memorial windows, lead light windows and that was quite a good trade. Later on I joined

the 48th Militia Battalion as a regimental cadet and I really loved that. Also as a boy where we lived I could hear the bugle calls coming from Kensington Drill Hall in behind the church, so I’d run all that distance from there to the drill hall and sit on the fence and watched my heroes, and I loved the bugle call that use to draw me like a magnet

and it still does. Back to the regimental cadet days, you use to have to work on Saturday mornings in those days so I’d go off from home in my uniform and take off my jacket and put on some protective clothing and then off down to the rifle range or whatever was happening in the afternoon. Those were happy days and I also became a crack shot with a machine gun and rifle

which was to serve me well later on, but I didn’t realise it then. Then of course came the outbreak of World War II and at that time we were based at Woodside for the first of the three months of camp, which came into being because of the outbreak of war. Then up at Woodside they called for volunteers to join the 2/27th Infantry Battalion, so I stepped forward and

it was then that I had my first real disappointment in people or a person. In short my platoon sergeant whom I idolised then said to him, “Will you come with me?” I said, “Not me, not on my life. I’m not going to go away and get shot at.” From that day onwards he went down on my sights and I lost all respect for him. The period at Woodside was mostly drill in many ways

and I was a regimental cadet and I adapted very quickly to the routine of army life. The things that stick in my mind and they may not seem important to a lot of people but there was a song going around in those days called “Begin the beguine,” Trick Henderson was the singer. I think we will all agree that certain songs belonged to certain people, and that song belonged to him, it was like a magnet. A friend of mine

who is now dead he was a school teacher and I was barely out of school and he and I became friends and we had a three-week stint of mess orderly, which means you wait on tables and wash dishes and all that type of stuff, peel potatoes. If that song came out of the camp theatre I’d race outside and listen to it because it had me really drawn in. Also in the evenings we’d hear the bugle call retreat from up on brigade hill

and I’d race outside and listen to that and I really loved that. One of the big highlights of those days was when it came time to get our tunics back from the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association], Salvation Army hut the wives of some of the service people, mainly officers I think had sewn all our colour patch on our tunics and we felt big time then, we at last had an identity for the

2/27th Australian Infantry Battalion. One of the humorous things also up there was one day I stood in the doorway of hut number two with a greatcoat on and an officers cap. Both items belonged to my platoon commander Seymour Tongs and he was over six foot tall and I was standing in the doorway with his coat and cap and my big ears kept the cap from falling down

over my face. The RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] came down the camp road and said, “Charge that man with impersonating an officer,” how ridiculous and as a result of that I coped two days CB [confined to barracks], but in retrospect it was a stupid charge anyway. Then later on a big time of my life came when I was promoted to lance corporal

and I was very very proud of that stripe and I use to walk sideways like a crab so everybody could see it. Then came a time when it looked like we were going to move overseas very shortly because our Pioneer platoon started to mark boxes with ‘not wanted on voyage’, packing gear up to go away. Before we sailed my mother died and that was very upsetting but I had to be honest about this because there was so much happening

in my life at the time that the impact was softened a fair bit. Then came the time to leave Woodside and we got on a train and went to Port Melbourne and there was this great ship the Mauritania and from a boy from a fairly humble upbringing this was something unbelievable, so we

went aboard. The Mauritania then was still a luxury liner it was absolutely unbelievable in side, what an eye-opener. We all had a bunk to sleep in with sheets and pillows, talk about luxury. We sailed from Melbourne and then we had our first dramatic experience we joined the ship called the Aquitania and the Queen Mary and we formed a convoy and went across the Great Australian Bight

which at that time it was the roughest trip on record, it was incredibly rough. I had never been seasick in my life and that was a bonus but many of my friends were and they suffered the poor devils. The bonus I had was that every time I went down for a meal, even if it was a cold meal everything was laid out on the table and all the number of troops missing made me have a good time hopping into plenty of food.

Then we called into Fremantle and it was the only ship that could do that because all of the others were too big. There we picked up other soldiers but mainly the 2/16th Battalion who were all from Western Australia. Eventually we set sail to who knows where at that time. Another dramatic experience was when the two cruisers and I forget their names now, I don’t want to get it wrong,

I think it was the HMAS Perth and the HMAS Sydney and they exchanged escort duties. The ship that was going back to Australian waters had all the sailors lined up on the ship and we cheered them and they cheered us, all very dramatic as I said. Eventually we reached Bombay and then we were ferried ashore in small vessels

and we moved up into a place called Deolali, which was a British Army staging camp. First was that I use to see soldiers lined up outside brothels which was an eye opener believe me. There was a place called Grant Road in Bombay and this was the recognised

area for brothels. It was really pathetic to see these Indian women in their little hovels enticing soldiers to come in and that was a bit of a shock to me. I might add here that at this stage I was still a virgin soldier, in most ways anyway, non-drinker, non-smoker and I was still pretty young. We stayed in Deolali for a while waiting for the convoy

to take us to the Middle East was assembled and back to the wharves of Bombay and looking for our ship, and there it was below the level of the wharf. The ship called the City of London, I think, we shared the ship with cockroaches and all those sorts of things. It was a dinky-di troops ship with hammocks swung from the ceilings but off we sailed up the Red Sea and things were fairly quiet on that

part of the trip. By the way was I was in the anti-aircraft platoon and this great vessel the Mauritania had two machine guns up on top of the bridge, they were twin machine guns in fact and normally you have a number one, number two on the gun. What somebody had forgotten that with two machine guns you need an extra hand to change magazines but that didn’t eventuate, just as well because we would have had a spot of trouble there

if we were attacked by bombers or fighter aircraft or something like that. Eventually arrived in Port Tewfik and sailed up the Suez Canal and I never ever thought in my life that I would see the Suez Canal and this man made this was such an amazing sight so we sailed through the Suez Canal in our small ship. We eventually arrived at a place called El Kantara

which was a British staging camp and off we went and we had a good meal there, and I still remember it, it was officially served up and tasty as well. Then onto a train up into Palestine and eventually we reached a place called Julis which was to be our camp for a number of months. There we settled in and carried out training, and Palestine is a very flat country and most of our exercises were

hauling stuff around the countryside and doing various exercises. My first command was with two men, me as the lance corporal and two privates and we did have to carry a fair old load. There was a tripod for the machine gun and the machine gun itself and a couple of packs full of ammunition magazines, twelve magazines for a pack plus our personal gear so it was a pretty heavy load.

This sort of thing went on for quite some time in the interim of course we had leave into Jerusalem and the eyes popped open there because that was the place where Christ crucified, the Mount of Olives and I never ever thought that I’d ever see that either. Then eventually we had our marching orders to move up into the Western Desert

via Cairo in Egypt. Up to this place called Mersa Matruh which was a huge defensive position and there we were putting up a lot of barbed wire entanglements, laying mine fields both anti tank and anti personnel. We did a bit of patrolling in case the Germans came down and we had to spot them before they attacked the place.

It was here that I lost my proud stripe and that really hurt me, briefly the story goes that my friend Mick Scuds who is now dead he had a bad ear and instead of waking me up he went down into the dug out and the gun was unmanned. At five o’clock in the morning my company commander came around so I lost my stripe. Really I suppose in retrospect I should have told Mick, “If you don’t feel well to wake me up

and I will fill in for you,” but that was something that I had to learn as time went by and there is a repeat story to that later on as well.

After I lost my stripes I was re-posted to another platoon the 13th Platoon, C Company that in fact it turned out to be pretty good. One night we were bombed and I was on a standing patrol

and it was about a mile out from the actual position and that is an early warning setup.

One of the things I really loved about Mersa Matruh was swimming when we had a chance and I’ve got a funny story to tell about that area as well. The time came to move out of the Western Desert and we weren’t quite sure what the plot was at that time but we travelled back through Libya, Egypt

and Palestine then started the Syrian Campaign. The Syrian Campaign was to be a shock to me in many ways but I learnt a lot. I was not frightened at any time of that experience. The Syrian Campaign our battalion performed as a magnificent team and in fact the battalion got complimented for it.

Then came the entry of Japan into the war so back to Australia but via Ceylon. We were headed for Java initially after leaving Colombo and word came through that the Japanese had a task force set to blow the convoy to pieces so it was back to Colombo

and then back to Australia, which took six weeks. Back to Port Adelaide we had a bit of leave and then we eventually move up to a lovely little town called Glen Innes and then to Canungra and eventually to New Guinea for the commencement of the Owen Stanley Ranges, Kokoda Track and Gona campaigns. That was a pretty awful experience in many many ways and it still lives with me today those

memories. Back to Australia again and more leave and we got an incredible amount of new members in the battalion for obvious reasons. Back to New Guinea for the Rabaul, Markham Valley campaign and Shaggy Ridge and so on. Back home again and re-equipped and more re-enforcements and eventually we sailed for Morotai

and then took part in the invasion of Balikpapan where all of the 7th Australia Division operated there in that area. Eventually unbelievable the war was over and back I came home. I got a bit of a disappointment when I was discharged at the manner in which we were all treated but I went back to Clarkson’s but I could not settle down at all, not one bit could I settle down.

The smell of being inside after being so long outside. I left there and had a number of other jobs until I enlisted for interim period of two years and from that experience I learnt my love of instructing, and I became very good at that. I also had a trip to Italy and Germany taking back prisoners of war. Home again to Australia and I thought,

“It looks as though I should not have ever left the army,” so I enlisted in the regular army. My first posting was with College and High School Army Cadets which I enjoyed and then came time to go to Woodside as an instructor with the 16th National Service Training Company and then that closed down and I was posted to the 2nd Battalion The Royal Australian Regiment

and from there I served in South East Asia in quite a few countries there. I also became a member of the Royal Car Company when the present Queen and the then Princess Margaret was on her way to Australia and her father had died King George V. After Malaya back to Australia where I was posted to Mount Gambier and that was a very very happy posting indeed.

Then I was promoted to regimental sergeant major as a warrant office class I and came back to Adelaide and was posted to the Adelaide University Regiment. Then eventually I was discharged medically unfit and that hurt a bit but you live with things. Then I moved to the Supreme Court for three years as a judge’s offsider, I had a good job but I use to go to sleep in some of the civil cases, that wasn’t for me thank you very much.

Then I went to the Education Department for eleven years and the job I had there I really liked and I was good at. In my school days they were called truant officer now they call them a school attendant officer. From there I retired and went on with life camping and all the rest of it.

At that stage both Val and I went to night school and we both matriculated and secondly I’ve always had a dread of sharks. My young daughter Cathy and Greg and Brian all qualified as scuba divers and I was frightened of sharks because I had seen what they could do to the living and the dead. I thought, “I better beat this thing,” and

so I did a scuba diving course at the age of sixty two years of age and I’m very very happy about that.

I was always a bit puzzled because I lived in a house with my mother who I thought was my mother, a her daughter and a granddaughter,

it was a spotlessly clean home and I was treated wonderfully well of course. As I said earlier I use to go hunting frogs and tadpoles and go hiking and all the rest of it. They were happy days but there was always something milling in the background.

We lived in

Trinity Gardens and I was with these older people all the time but at one time there was this smaller boy around the place and his name was David, I don’t know how he fitted into the picture. Then I had a memory also of my uncle coming down from Broken Hill with his five and three boys, I was very interested in them and of course

and we are still friends today. A lot of my time was spent at the Molands Methodist Church, I was a bit of a villain in some ways because the ladies of the church use to run fetes and money raising things and it’s pretty common even today. There was a small laneway up the side of this hall where they had their kitchen area and I’d go down that side lane and stand on a box

with a wire hook and hook baskets of cream puffs to my other little stinkers down below, they wouldn’t do it so I was the guy who used to steal these things. The ladies would say, “There’s that dreadful Baldwin boy again,” but I use to make good because I use to help them wash-up dishes and I think they use to like me. Then I joined the scouts and they were very happy days indeed. I went to

the jamboree and as I said earlier and I met a lot of overseas people and they were really happy days. Then came the time when I became a regimental cadet and I really like that. From that time onwards was where my, grew my love of soldiering and I still have it today.

Yes, it was very restricted really the Methodist, they had very narrow ideas and as a boy we had a minister when we were twelve, thirteen or fourteen and he use to tell us dreadful stories about the Roman Catholics. Being at that age you believe these things and I went into war still believing in that

and I will get back to that later on in my narrative.

The things that I remember are the nuns use to have babies and throw them down wells inside the monasteries, if you did the wrong thing you’d go to hell and all the rest of it. Even today in country towns if you go to old cemeteries

there are Catholics buried on one side of the area and Protestants on the other side, it’s ridiculous really and I will get back to that later. It did have an impact on my thinking, which was pretty bad.

Only Mum and myself, the lady I called Mum. The other daughter and her daughter went to the Clayton Congregational Church

and we’d all go there occasionally, most of my boyhood days were in that sort of setup.

No but I wondered what was going on, there was always older people in the house, obviously much older than me, about Mum’s age, in the days of horse and buggies.

Aunt Fanny and Uncle Henry and all that sort of thing. It wasn’t until I joined the 2/27th Battalion and I had to get a birth certificate and I can still picture it today, it was up in the spotlessly clean dinning room and on this table was this birth certificate and my full name really is Raymond Gordon Wilson Baldwin, I didn’t know about the Wilson part.

Then of course Mum died as I told you very soon after that and I didn’t have time really to check out very much, I should of asked what it was all about but there was so much happening, the excitement of it all I guess. This bugged me for a long long time because in those days to be illegitimate was not good in the eyes of everybody

and that worried me a lot – was I illegitimate? but it turned out that I wasn’t. Eventually I found out that I had two brothers and a sister somewhere in Australia, I never ever met them. I don’t know the circumstances, my sister Joyce and I were fostered out apparently, there are various stories floating around one that both of my parents were killed in an accident.

Things got so tough on the land, and he was a farmer, that he had to just give the kids away. I still don’t know and I still worry about it a little bit but I haven’t found out anything definite at all. It is my fault because I had the chance once but I gave it a miss.

She was not my sister she was a cousin, her Mum, her daughter Eva and Eva’s daughter Joyce so I was suppose to be a brother to Eva and a brother to Tom and Stanley Baldwin, who were all very much older. That was what started things buzzing in my head I couldn’t work it out.

No, I had the chance but as I said and you might find this hard to understand but there was so much going on I didn’t really have enough sense I suppose, “Please tell me,” sort of thing and I never ever did find out. It’s a bit hard to live with I can tell you that too, I just wonder and I will probably just wonder until the day that I die.

This is true, I believe there was a foster system going on in those days. You were fostered out and today everything is recorded but in those days apparently it was not. At one stage of the game I heard I was born in a Catholic Monastery so perhaps my mother had slipped of the rails somewhere

I don’t know.

Because I got a birth certificate from the registry office and had all the details on that which I’ve still got today. All that it listed on there was siblings three, it doesn’t list the other names of my sister and my two brothers.

Yes,

my father’s name was Herbert Wilson and my mothers name was Helen Manser and she married Herbert Wilson so there for my real name is Raymond Gordon Wilson but on adoption I became Baldwin.

There is a certain amount of feeling amongst her own children that they were a bit jealous of me I’ve been told, because she really did love me there’s not possible doubt about that at all. She didn’t have much money of course and in those days that were pretty common. If I wanted something within reason she’d get it. On one occasion I got my shoes wet and she stuck them

in the oven and they shrivelled up so she had to get a new pair of shoes. I think maybe she might have been getting some financial help from whatever agency it was in those days she would have had to. To feed a growing boy must have taken a strain on her.

He died and I think she was married twice in fact,

her first husband died at a younger age and then she married later on and the offspring that I refer to as brothers and sisters are of that union, that’s my understand of the situation.

Yes.

I ate well, the meals were

good basic meals, I didn’t know what the word basic was in those days, they were good solid meals. You ask about the Depression and one of the things that I was appalled along the River Torrens banks there was that people were living in shanties made out of galvanised iron and bags. People find that hard to believe today but yes it was the Depression time and she was really up against it. I don’t know how they managed but they did.

I use to go to the butcher shop and I’d bring home a piece of white butcher paper and he had scribbled something on it, that was sort of a record so she must have been getting some sort of relief, she would have to of because she wouldn’t of gotten through it I don’t think.

Yes

on one side there was a Catholic family and the other side was a dear old biddy. Yes my boyhood days in that area were happy, I got on with most people and I still do.

Yes it was, everything was around the church until later on when the scouts came along.

Yes.

Not very much except my Uncle Tom from Broken Hill he got terribly knocked around and had a terrible time and he was gassed. I remember on one occasion he came down to go into hospital and he had a lump of shrapnel taken out of one of his knee caps. Not much is known about Stanley Baldwin I

think he was in Field Ambulance but he was the quieter one of the two and he was non combatant where as the other one got really hammered around the place.

No I did not, but getting back to your first question Mum as I refer to her she had these huge war books and I’d pour over them hour after hour,

countless pages of ‘Killed in action’, incredible. I don’t know what happened to those they probably had to be sold when Mum died to pay for the funeral but I wish I still had them today.

Yes.

No very much, there were no films around in those days. I spent most of my time looking that these photos of these soldiers who were killed in action, but I didn’t do very much reading about the war, I didn’t know much about it.

Yes and

I’ve still got friends today, they were very happy days and I loved camping and all the rest of it.

In those days it was a pretty big deal but in retrospect of course it was fairly amateurish in many ways, you kidded yourself that you learnt bush skills but in fact it was pretty weak really

in some ways but happy.

I’ve never been a brilliant person but I held my own at school, I didn’t shine out like some of the other boys did, but I was comfortable. I did a lot of reading I loved reading but not in-depth stuff either mainly comics. I use to go over to the Norwood picture theatre on the Saturday afternoon and see my favourite film and I earned my money by carting manure for my school teacher and he was a keen gardener so I use to get tuppence a load, three loads

was six pence and that was enough to get into the picture theatre.

At a place called Debbits Paddock and in this day and age there are a lot of houses through that area, it was quite a big area in a boy’s eyes and they use to grow a lot of maize and things like that in that area so that’s where

I got the cow manure from.

No it was a hand pulled cart, a cart full of manure plus a bag on top, you got good value for money.

Yes.

In those days Tom Mix, anything to do with cowboys and Indians was a big deal,

plus Laurel and Hardy.

Film Fun, Quakers that’s about it, that’s all that my memory can bring back.

I enjoyed being

at school, I use to salute the flag and all that sort of stuff on those days, I made a lot friends, a lot of girlfriends as a matter of fact and that was good. I wasn’t very good at arithmetic, I hated arithmetic and still do today, English and all the rest of it I handled pretty well. I loved

woodwork and I fell in love with the woodwork teacher’s daughter she was a lovely girl that one. Overall to answer your question they were happy days yes.

From the back entrance there was a huge school area, boys on one side and girls on the other, on the left hand side was the garden plot area that the grade seven

boys use to go. The toilet block straddled the back entrance, which was for both the boys and girls. There was a bell tower in the middle and what’s known today as the quadrangle these days. We had a drinking trough where you’d go and get a hand full of water. The buildings were red brick and a high dome type of thing, on the left of the complex was the headmaster’s office

and I had an occasion to visit more than once and got a couple of whacks. Then on the right hand side were smaller buildings, which housed grades six and seven. On the front entrance, which is facing Portrush Road today, it looks more like a prison now when you have a look at it, in those days

it looks just like a school. Down the street a bit was a tuck shop and for a meal on Fridays I would go and buy a meat pie for tuppence or something.

Yes, a sandwich or something like that with a bit of fruit.

His name

was Mr Roast and he was rather a formidable character he use to take the grade seven boys as a class every now and again. I use to sit in the front row in this particular class room and he had the awful habit when he was talking that he’d throw out an awful lot of spit. One day he did that and I did this sort of thing and flick it and I got a cut over the ears for that

little action. I had another very good teacher and his name was Mr Vickery and I liked him very much and he was a good teacher and everybody really loved him.

The old six handed job with a cane that was fairly liberally used at times. I remember on one occasion I did something but I can’t remember what it was and I got six cuts and you

had to get it in front of the classroom too, that was sort of an occasion not to chicken out you had to be tough and show them that you could take it.

No not at that time.

Until I reached aged fourteen, then I had to leave because of

a financial situation. Which was a pity really but I made up for it later on.

As I said earlier I think my Mum was on some form of relief, assistance from the state government. Even a few pounds or pence in those days was a big help, even though it might have been pretty small. They couldn’t afford

to keep me at high school although the education was still free there was still some financial commitments in those days that they would of found hard to meet, or Mum would of found hard to meet.

I wouldn’t have the slightest idea because I didn’t go there.

I became a messenger boy for a chemist and his name was Mr Shepard, they were good days. One of my fostered sisters wanted to become an apprentice upholsterer but for some reason or other that didn’t come about and that’s when I went to Clarkson’s Limited as an apprentice there.

I was a messenger boy I was delivering bottles of medicines.

Only for about six or seven months, very short time and then I became an apprentice for Clarkson’s.

Making mirrors and memorial windows for churches which was very interesting.

As a boy you did a lot of manual tasks like I had to

fill up an oil tank with oil, lift a forty four gallon drum up from the horizontal to the vertical, I must have been pretty tough as a kid. I had to haul that thing up and pump the oil into an overhead tank and sometimes I’d have to strip off old mirrors with nitric acid and that was quite a nasty job, if you get doused it can get down inside your lungs. There weren’t any precautions like they are today in factories.

Then I use to have to paint the backs of mirrors, which they call backing, then eventually I went over to another section and started cutting glass for memorial windows and then the lead for it.

It’s a paint, a special type of water proof paint, battleship grey I will call it,

it was quite a job and I became quite good at it actually.

By this time the silver had been poured onto the glass and it sets and then wiped off with a type of chamois cloth and then comes the paint part, that’s after the silver had dried. You can’t paint straight away you have

to wait about twenty four hours.

Not at that stage, but when I eventually went back there I did after the war.

There use to be a template on this flat table and you put the glass on top of the template and cut through with a diamond cutter

and follow the trace marks that came up through.

I don’t know, not me, it must have been some master craftsman I guess, or perhaps the designs were brought in by a qualified person, I don’t know the answer to that question.

I was learning to do that when I was called away to the war, when I joined the 2/27th Battalion.

As I said earlier I became a regimental cadet with the 48th Militia Battalion and by the way we use to be able to march on Anzac Day and that was a big deal and I really like that.

When I joined the Militia it was what they use to call chocolate soldiers in those days but when the war broke out and I joined the 2/27th Battalion. Prior to that we went into three months camp at Woodside I’ve always try to keep myself better as a soldier and now I’ve got to try and prove it.

When I joined up. It was time to do something definite about it and that’s why I volunteered to join the 2/27th Battalion and I never had any regrets about that at all.

You learnt to live out in the open for one thing, although I had experienced that as a scout anyway so that was quite easy. I became a

very good crack shot with a machine gun and a rifle of those days. I liked the feel of being in the army, a family type feeling which I’ve embraced for a long long time.

Two of them, my immediate friends did and we served together until they died after the war years.

We had a battalion parade at Woodside of the 48th Militia Battalion and around about that time the 2/27th Battalion was formed so on this parade they called for volunteers to step forward and join the 2/27th which I did, and quite

a few of us did but I didn’t know many of them at that time of course. You can’t get to know everybody but eventually I did get to know a lot in my battalion. That’s what happened we all stepped forward and from there we handed in our gear and went down to Wayville where we had a medical and that was a rough old medical too, but I got through that.

As I remember it we all striped off and was standing there feeling quite funny about it all and the doctor examined your mouth, your eyes and ears. I suppose they must of checked one’s heart I can’t remember, it wasn’t a very intensive medical at all because they had to get everyone through in a bit of a hurry. Some people kidded their way through with things that they shouldn’t of

got in with. I only recently found out that to be true from a friend of mine who had feet stuck to a table but he got through. It was a pretty basic medical.

None whatsoever.

Yes. First of all the feeling that started to mould within the battalion

was incredible. I served a stint as a mess orderly for three weeks with a man who was a teacher and he and I were rarely out of school more or less and we became very good friends, purely mountains of spuds and waiting on tables and washing up the dishes. Trick Henderson’s famous song in those days

was ‘Begin the beguine’ and that use to fascinate me and it still does today, it’s one of my favourite songs. It use to come over the amplifier at the camp theatres and I’d race outside and listen to that and then go back in and finish up whatever I was doing.

I won’t sing it but I can hum it.

Back up to Woodside where we got kitted out with a uniforms and the work dress was a dreadful combination, there was sloppy trousers, sloppy jacket and a sloppy hat we looked like a lot of misfits around the place, but that was our work dress.

We were fitted out with out field service dress, which was trousers, jacket, boots and a hat as I remember it, and certain other items like underwear and they were hideous damn things, long underpants and great thick singlets.

The slouch hat of today.

Good, on the way to whatever the future might hold.

Tan boots they were tan or brown, good old army boots, they were comfortable they took a while to adjust to them but I had no problems there.

About mid ankle I would say, half way up the ankle, they were laced up.

Yes. In many ways I like it better than some of the uniforms of today, but you had to be lucky to get a good fit, some of them are pretty bloody awful I suppose.

We did a lot of route marching to toughen people up, there was a fair bit of living out in the open. We spent a lot of time going down to Port Adelaide, it was called the D Rifle Range to do what they called long distance firing and we camped overnight there

I think, either that we went back by bus, depending on the program of the day and I liked that very much. We also did a lot of firing at Woodside on what they called the military range that’s twenty five or thirty yard range, you had very very small targets and you fired your rifles at that.

In those

days we thought it was a pretty big deal, we really were pretty ill-equipped to go away for war. For example when we went on an exercise and you had to have an anti-tank weapon, a gun you hauled around a bit of stove piping from the kitchen and that was suppose to be an anti-tank rifle. You also what they called gas rattles and they were a product that was left over from World War I.

In those days when there was a gas attack the people in command would race around and rattle these gas rattles and make a noise and that was for everybody to put on their gas masks. That use to be machine gun fire, quite true.

No we took it quite seriously because we were training for war. I should mention also we had blank rounds for the rifles that you used on an attack situation or if you were being attacked. Nothing like the boys get today in there training its very realistic today ours was fairly elementary. We use to also go to a place called

Kanmantoo which is still up that way today and there would be what they called field firing you’d have cut out figures of men some hundreds of yards away and you’d go them with rifle and machine gun fire. The anti-aircraft platoon which I was a member of that at that time we use to blow up condoms and release them into the air and they were shot down by the wonderful machine gun fire from the anti aircraft platoon.

That was the nearest thing they got to firing at something up in the air.

Yes that’s right.

Yes it was and it was a good one. I’m pretty short and I had what they called a short butt rifle

and it was a beautiful rifle and I became very good with it.

It was used in the First World War but whether that particular weapon was I don’t know. I forget the serial number of it of course, I had far too many weapons to handle and fire, I liked it and I was good with it.

Yes, actually a rifle never straight shoots

its in the eyes of the fellow who aims it, you had to know how to handle it.

Yes I was.

First of all the battalion was raised in May 1940 and we left Woodside in October in 1940 and we

went to Port Melbourne by train and arrived at the docks and went onboard the Mauritania.

My Mum died a week before we left Woodside, the boys send down a wreath and she was buried the Hindmarsh Cemetery. As I said earlier there was so much going on and the only time I had grief

was at night time but not much time to think really apart from that.

Yes I had what they called emergency leave to attend the funeral. She died in the Royal Adelaide Hospital from cancer as it turned out.

I felt alone for quite some time especially at night-time later on this night time feeling became more intense as the war progressed and I lost my friends.

In relation to my mother?

Yes, the impact didn’t hit until

I had been in action for the first time and you saw dead people and in some cases we helped to bury them that’s when it started to hit home pretty hard.

I remember looked at this huge vessel and we walked in this small walkway and I was

astounded that there was so much beauty was inside this beautiful vessel. I still remember it today a beautiful stairways, and statues, the whole thing was incredibly bewildering really, and it was so easy to get lost. We were down I think on C deck which was a fair way down inside the ship but it took a while to adjust.

We were lucky we had a cabin, I think four of us shared a cabin with clean sheets and pillows. At that time she was still a luxury liner inside and I was told they striped everything out and turned her into a dinky dye troop ship but we lived in the lap of luxury, you can put it that way, to me it was anyway.

No it was strictly taboo.

Actually the group from Woodside was suppose to be a secret but this was going back a bit, but a lot of relatives showed up at Balhannah Railway Station and they were annoyed but the top secret job didn’t work did it. There was a different story in Melbourne they had quite good security there, no screamers or anything like that.

No, they wouldn’t have been able to get there.

My memory fails we a little bit there but I guess about two to three weeks all up, from Melbourne to Fremantle and from Fremantle to Bombay.

No we had a lot of lectures going on, map reading and a bit of this and that, a bit of PT [physical training] but there wasn’t much room on this luxury liner to do anything at all, it was all taken up with cabins and swimming pools. We had a good time mind you the crossing of the equator ceremony and people being thrown into the swimming pools and all the rest of it and concert parties,

the battalion band played quite often. The officers use to get on the stern of the ship and do clay pigeon shooting which I’d never heard of before in my life but it was a good life and I enjoyed it. I loved getting up on the bridge where I was posted with my machine gun and my friends and I also loved getting up on the bow of the ship and I still do, watching

the ship plough it’s way through rough weather, I love sea travel and I still do.

I did have a trip on a thing called the Caratara from Port Adelaide to Edithburgh I think it was, that was sort of a holiday trip for a few hours, I enjoyed that but that was as a boy.

When I was on the Mauritania I really loved every bit of it.

Never and I’ve been very lucky but I feel for people who do get seasick because it must be pretty awful.

No we did not have much knowledge, of course there was always rumours but the biggest enemy in wartime was rumours. We use to refer to it as ‘seat number six’

that’s a row of toilets: “Have you heard from number six today?’ So that’s how the rumours would fly around. I suppose some of the people had a bit of an idea by the way we were going but I certainly didn’t. I remember calling into Fremantle and we had shore leave and in those days as I said earlier I was very much a virgin soldier in many ways. I remember clearly this group in Perth

the evils of drink, they hauled me up and I said my peace about the evils of drink, “You know it should never be allowed in war” and they loved that of course but it was a different story later on in my life I might tell you, at that time I was a strict teetotaller.

That’s right.

Then we proceeded to Bombay and we anchored out a bit and we were ferried ashore by lighters, then we moved up to a place called Deolali, which was a British army staging camp. We caused a bit of a problem

there because the British soldiers were on a lesser rate of pay than we were, although we weren’t on much of a fortune either. We were able to pay some of the local Indian people to wash our feet after a route march and they’d get us a cup of tea and we thought that was a pretty big deal and we gave them whatever we gave them. These Indians came to us rather than going to the British and that cause a bit of a problem so I understand although I wasn’t

aware of it at that time, we were there for a short while.

I got the greatest shock of my life to see such so much poverty in those days and it still worries me today, there is far to much of it around today isn’t there? In Bombay itself there were beggars, just about everywhere begging for money

and they’d sleep in the gutters sometimes or on the footpaths, it was very very depressing and it was quite a shock to me. I had a pretty good boyhood life, not a wealthy up bringing but a comfortable one and to see this sort of thing it really got to me, it was quite a thing.

There wasn’t much you could do about it really, you’d walk past and felt sorry for them and really there wasn’t much else we could do.

Yes and it never will be, that was really something, it was really depressing, it was unbelievable.

Yes they were indeed and some of the smells you could do without. The sights were wonderful, very educational. Sometimes as a boy you can look at books and mainly at pictures of course and see these things but it never entered your head that you’d actually see it in real life.

First of all

we barely scratched the surface to be perfectly honest we were passing through. What I did see was one day these boys lining up to go into a brothels and that came as a bit of a cultural shock to me. I didn’t know what a brothel was before I went to India. To see these women in the road called Grant Road and living in little box probably about the size of this room and sitting in

their window ways and waiting for somebody to go in to be accommodated, I felt that was pretty bad, it’s not for me thank you very much, no.

Mainly soldiers and sailors, there were a lot of servicemen around the place, the brothels must have done quite well in those days, if I can put it that way.

Some of them yes,

and some of them my mates.

Not much at all. I thought, “If that’s what they want to do then that’s their business.” I still maintain that today, although Val would laugh at that one. I get upset with some things even today. I don’t really recall thinking much about it at all but to be perfectly honest with you I was scared

to get venereal disease that fear stayed with me right though my service, and there were cases of venereal disease.

We would have been although I can’t remember much about it except if you went to some of these places you may get into trouble with venereal disease, we must have been told something but can’t remember much about that.

I don’t know they could of but I really don’t know. I know damn well know that I never ever got any. I suppose they could have been available on request or they might of said, “If you want them, here they are,” sort of thing but I don’t know can’t answer that truthfully.

I can answer it truthfully because I can’t remember.

About three or four weeks that’s all because the convoy had to get ready in Bombay to take this vast number of troops to go to the Middle East.

We didn’t have very much contact with them really we were all there in the staging camp situation and plus the staff so we didn’t see much of them

and I didn’t mix with them much either.

It wasn’t a major issue but I was told later on that some of the British boys were a bit upset about this but it never affected me personally.

Mainly marching around the place,

a bit of weapon training, fairly basic and I don’t even remember doing any physical training of any sort apart from marching.

We left Deolali and went back to Bombay and went down to the wharves and we were all looking around to see the Mauritania and eventually there she was below the level of

the docks most of the ship and we went aboard the ship. I think I gave a wrong name earlier on reflection I think the ships name was Deolali anyway it was a troop ship we went down a gang plank into the ship with thousands of cockroaches and the crew were all Indian I suppose and

we had hammocks. The style on this ship was entirely different from the beautiful Mauritania days.

No there was no trunk all we had was a kit bag, we use to call them the sausage bag plus our big pack on our back and a haversack on the left side.

The sausage bag you’d put these dreadful long underpants and heavy singlets and socks and bits and pieces.

I had a gold watch that my mother gave to me on my pre-embarkation leave it was an Omega gold watch, really it was wrong to give me because it was such a beautiful thing, and

it was too good to take away on a trip like that but she gave it to me as a keepsake. I might have had a little bible that I got from the Methodist Church, a mouth organ but that’s about it.

No.

Yes, I’m not bad at it actually and I still play it today.

Oh God.

Yes.

First of all again we had lectures and PT you had to rotate because of the size of the ship, you couldn’t all PT at once on the top deck there wasn’t room. Lectures,

physical training, weapons training all the things that a soldier has to get to move with especially weapons. I use to always sleep on deck at night time and so did a lot of my friends because we thought if we get torpedoed we’ve got a better chance of surviving rather than being down below deck. You had a bit of a disadvantage there because at five o’clock in the morning the Indian

crew would turn the sea hoses on and swab down the deck, and if you didn’t get out of the way you were right out of luck, it taught us to wake up pretty early and get on the move early. I will always the smell coming from the galley because the Indian crew predominantly had the curry pots, it went right over the ship. We often thought if a submarine surfaced and we were travelling at night time and they were eating their curry

the Germans will smell it out anyway, but that was a bit of a joke I guess. One of the things that fascinated me was watching flying fishes, that was an incredible sight and you never got tired of watching them. In the Red Sea there are huge sharks and I use to loved getting up at the bow of the ships and watching this all the time, hour upon hour.

Arms flinging and legs bending and bodies twisting, touching your toes just general stuff.

I only had on occasion where I was pretty close to the side of the ship and I decided that I’d move out of there because if you started to roll a bit, I thought I didn’t want to roll down that lot.

Personally I’d always try to find a nice little spot that I would feel pretty safe in.

Yes, I think there was a great deal of imagination in our minds at the time, everybody was very much aware that you could be torpedoed. Although we had escorts

submarines could get right inside a convoy and not be detected until they start using their torpedoes, everybody was aware of that possibility.

No, if it was to be it was to be, that’s the way that you started living life I guess.

We arrived

at Port Tewfik which is the entrance to the Suez Canal and these ship all decided that they could go up through the canal without any problems. So eventually we arrived at a place called El Kantara and that again is a British Army staging camp and we disembarked. We went to have something to eat, I can’t remember what we did eat but it was all so well laid out, it was presented to us very very efficient.

Then we got onto trains and proceeded up into Palestine to a camp called Julis.

We left the staging camp by rail and went up into Palestine

and eventually arrived at a camp called Julis that was already setup for us by the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion they had erected all the tents, the cane bed and all we had to do was move in and we were home. From there we started to do our training in Palestine and most of that was over flat

terrain it wasn’t very arduous really we were pretty hardened by now, physically fit anyway. We were getting exercises at a battalion level in the plains at Palestine. We had leave in Tel Aviv which was a bit of an eye opener this modern city in Palestine amongst all the orange groves. We also had leave in Jerusalem

and I remember going to a Christmas service in one the places, I forget what it was called. Even there I had a bit of a downer because in this place where Christ was crucified and died and all the rest of it, you go through these churches and there were people sitting in each corner with little bowls begging for money I guess for the up keep the place.

I didn’t quiet expect that sort of thing, that was quite interesting actually.

Lovely weather over all, I don’t remember much rain at all while we were there so it was quite pleasant. On exercises the boys would follow us around with their donkeys loaded down with bags of oranges so we had plenty of oranges and pretty cheap,

and they were very nice oranges and I really enjoyed that part of it.

No I didn’t really if you asked if I did read or anything no I didn’t I just took it as it came, but I took it all in, I had a pretty accurate memory for a lot of it.

I guess it was but that’s a good question because it came as a bit of a surprise really for instance the farming techniques were the same as they were x number of years ago, the ox pulling wooden ploughs and single ploughs, the irrigation system was what I read in the Bible was way back. Jerusalem for instance

getting around as in the Bible, I suppose to me that was how it was thousands of years ago.

It might be a bit of a brag but I think no matter where the Australian soldier goes they are generally well liked and I think it’s because we have got a pretty even outlook on other people.

We also feel for them and especially when there are signs of great poverty and need. Mind you I’m not saying that everybody would feel that way, but some Australians have done some things that could upset some people too. To answer your question in the main they received us pretty well.

Yes they were friends

but there aren’t many of them left today, friendships are quiet unique there isn’t anything like it anywhere else we claim anyway.

Back in camp there was. I remember on one occasion I had a friend and he was the only Western Australian member in our battalion all

the rest were all South Australians at that time and I still don’t know how that happened. I use to be a retriever, being a non-drinker when one or two of the boys had a few sherbets [drinks] I’d go and pick them up and bring them home. Old Les said to me one day, “Baldwin, come with me I’m going to ring up home.” In between the tent lines there was a thing we use to call a piss-a-phone, it was a funnel shaped gadget that ran into the

ground and the boys use to urinate in it. He said, “I’m about to ring home,” and he dropped some money into this thing and started to speak to his Mum and Dad on the phone, that little story sticks in my mind quite often.

A make-believe phone, he was six parts under the weather.

I don’t think so but

I often reflect on that point because as I keep repeating for me this war was very exciting but some of the fellows in many ways I’m glad I wasn’t married at that time because it must have been pretty hard on many of them. Most of them would miss their homes a lot and I suppose in one or two cases they couldn’t of cared less. Overall I think there would have been some homesickness. For all of us there was so much that was happening that was new

to relieve the burden. I use to write fantastic letters page after page of letters home to all my foster relatives.

As I said the irrigation systems, the dress, the people at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, carrying on

as they do, what the Jewish faith carried on. The national dress, their long flowing gowns and all the rest of it, not very in depth after is it?

We were blessed in the 2/27th Battalion

with our group of officers especially the ones that went with the battalion in the first instance. The commanding officer was highly respected, our padre was highly respected he’d get a bit upset with us now and again and I will tell you about that in a minute but over all the officers were good. On Sunday mornings, back to this religious thing again the Catholics fell on one side and the Protestants were marched down to the camp

theatre for a church service and Padre Whereat was the padre there and one of his favourite hymns was ‘Oh come all ye faithful’, and it would go something like this:

\n[Verse follows]\n‘Oh come all ye faithful;\n have another bloody great plateful;\n

The padre would waggle his finger and say, “You bad lads,” he’d say, but he was a good man Padre Whereat.

He must of but I never had recourse to go to him because at that time I was becoming fairly independent for obvious reasons and I had good friends.

Yes.

In Palestine? In camp the normal routine was

you’d get up have a shower. That reminds me breakfast, we’d had tin dixies in those days and one of the meals that we all hated was goldfish, we called them goldfish it was herrings and tomato sauce, we’d look at these things wobbling inside the dixies but there wasn’t much else around the place. In around about sort of way normal camp routine,

there was battalion guards, camp duty, and weapons training again.

We got up at six o’clock, reveille at six o’clock and probably around seven o’clock and go back to your tent and clean your weapons, whatever weapons you might have

and get ready for the day’s training. Again would have been weapons training, map reading and navigational exercises and stuff like that. In the life of a soldier it’s fairly routine after a while. We didn’t have to do any cleaning tasks because that was done by the local Arab population who were always looking for work.

One of the things we did at night time was a night time guard routine and we had to remove the bolts out of our rifles and secure them, we’d chain the rifles themselves to the upright pole because the Arabs had a reputation for being able to get into your tent without you knowing. Sometimes I think that’s a bit exaggerated but in other words we had to be aware of theft of weapons,

very much on the alert for that. At night time there was what was called a perimeter guard around the camp site and you’d link up with each other.

I was too young to even thing about it I think, so I can’t answer that question.

Yes. To the best of my knowledge they were not anti

Australian at any time of the game at all. I think the only time they might have been a bit anti was when some of our boys would slit the bottom of the orange bags and the oranges would tumble out on the ground. Over all I think it all went smooth travelling.

We had what we called full fire exercises which we would fire over the top of your head and you’d get some idea of what it was like to hear bullets and stuff around the place. The situation then was very fluid at this time the 6th Australian Division was in the Western Desert

and they had been committed to battle and they had done a good job. Our role was uncertain for quite some time it, looked as if we might go to Greece or Crete. We really didn’t know much at all at that stage, I didn’t anyway.

Word eventually came that we were going off to the Western Desert. We went up through Egypt by rail

right up to a placed called Ikingi Maryut that’s where we detrained and went by truck up into the Western Desert. We fought for a situation called Mersa Matruh and this was the one last bastion before Alexandria and Cairo so, if the Germans had come through Tobruk, Mersa Matruh would have been the last stumbling block to

capture Egypt. We took over barracks from I think an African regiment and it was a bit of a mess and we settle into underground dugouts and there we started to put up immense amounts of barbed wire entanglements, laying mine fields both anti tank and anti personal mines. It gradually improved the sandbags situation and so on.

If sandbags are carried out well they can stop and immense amount of bombing and strafing, you get pretty good protection. In other words you need a direct hit sometimes to have any ill effects.

Even with the filling of a sandbag it’s a skill on it’s own, you don’t fill them top up with sand

you fill them three quarters full and then you lay the tongue back under and you flatten them all out and then you lock them together like builders do today with bricks, and you get an immense amount of strength if you do it properly.

Yes, and laced into each other or tied into each other.

Yes.

No very much, we

did more training of course by the way there were also some concrete block houses around the place which were in the main machine gun posts. We had to patrol late a night time to make sure that the enemy hadn’t got a group through to attack the place. Also in the daytime with the sand storms, sand storms are horrible, you can see them coming from miles off, just a rolling sand sort of thing

and it’s very unpleasant. It gets that bad that you had to hang onto the bayonet of the man in front of you whose got a compass so that he can see where he’s going hopefully in case you get lost so you hang on to each others bayonets.

In those days we didn’t have any protection at all, although some fellows use to use what they called

gas mask goggles. You use to have a respirator in those days we wont go into too much depth but briefly it’s got a canister with a mouth piece and these Perspex sort of eye shields to put over your eyes. You weren’t suppose to use them but a lot of us did, they were suppose to be kept for the real thing in case of a gas attack.

No none what so ever, all that ever happened was in concert parties, we use to take the Arabs off a bit.

Not where we were none. One of the things that we use to have to do was to put out what they called a standing patrol, at least a platoon strength one officer and if you were

up to full strength about thirty three ORs [Other Ranks]. You would be a couple of miles out in front the battalion position and your job was to give early warnings should there be raiding parties or any form of attack about to be mounted against us, that was a setup called a standing patrol. You were there for a number of days and nights.

We were bombed and strafed and that was about it, there were no great problems if you took good cover you were pretty safe. On one of these standing patrols we got bombed one night, a stick of bombs fell right across our platoon position and four of them did not explode, we didn’t know that until the next morning when we got up and started to poke around the place. A little mate of mine

who lived at Tenterfield and he’s now dead, we decided that we’d pull one of these things out of the sand which was quite a stupid thing to do really. We figured if the thing hadn’t exploded there wasn’t much chance of anything happening. So we pulled it out and laid it on it’s side. Then we proceeded to unscrew whatever we could unscrew and even today his relatives have got a little propeller on their mantle piece at home which he took home. By this time the

higher ranks, the higher command came to see what all this bombing was all about and if anybody had been killed or wounded I suppose. From the battalion commander a lieutenant colonel and a brigadier they all came in a staff car or whatever were standing around this thing and Fred gave it a kick and said, “Well the bloody thing can’t hurt anybody now,” and they all flattened and hit the ground, which was a bit late actually.

I can’t remember the exact times but it was a time when it was decided that the Allies would invade Syria because they thought the Germans would come down through Turkey and Syria into Palestine, if that had happened it would have been quite a problem. So we went back through Egypt to Palestine

and we camped at a little village place called Kfar Yehezqel and these were Jewish people who had been pushed out of Europe but they were wonderful to us they really were, and they adopted us to no uncertain manner. We had meals with them and concert parties and all the rest of it.

No, I don’t think it ever enter

my mind it didn’t raise it’s head at any time. We knew what was happening and if I could just hark back to Tel Aviv. Laying off Tel Aviv was a ship and that had brought Jewish people from Europe to Tel Aviv but the thing had become wrecked and beached. One day I decided I would swim out to that, I was in a convalescent depot at the time,

but I didn’t get very far because it’s very hard to judge distance over water and this was a long way out so in the finish I had to turn back otherwise I wouldn’t of got back at all.

We knew that things were looking black because Rommel had made

a great impression in the Western Desert Campaign, we didn’t really get much feedback except for a local newspaper that was put out by the army. We knew that things were back in England of course and that France had fallen and the British had to pull out which was an incredible exercise on it’s own. I’d just like to remind you that I was just eighteen then and still not very

world-wise I guess, we were wondering what part we would play eventually in the whole big picture.

Yes, all it was really was gloom and doom, the Allies were being pushed back here and there, even the leave that the village had to pull out and go back to England was something that was completely unexpected.

No there were some British troops left in the desert but I can’t tell you who they were, my clear memory of British troops was anti aircraft battery at Mersa Matruh and they had the big weapons there. I got friendly with some of those, but England stretched to the limit with her troops,

she was committed to so many places and trying to recover from some of the disasters one after the other, the fact that we ever got out of it still amazes me today.

I find that hard to answer because my contact with the British was limited except in Syria and even there

it was limited because of the situation as it was. I guess the boys who were in Tobruk would have had a greater understanding of the British and were mixed up more together. The British navy played a leading part in Tobruk too and the British air force so ours was fairly restricted I think if I can say that safely.

I didn’t really know, I do remember looking at a prisoner-of-war camp at Mersa Matruh and seeing some Germans there and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I wish I could talk to them’, but we also understood that they were a pretty formidable sort of foe as well, they could fight like hell, but no personal experience at that time.

Yes.

Eventually word came through that we were going to have a go at Syria so we moved out of Kfar Yehezqel into the grove that you just mentioned and we laid up there for a while, and hopped into a whole bed of cucumbers as I recall,

and I will take my hat off to them because they were working at the time. We were laid up there waiting to get conformation that the French Foreign Legion forces and the Vichy French would fight to hold Syria. A patrol from the 2/16th Battalion first went into Syria and yes they came back with news that we could expect a fight.

For a while it was sort of a waiting period while things got sorted out and all the rest of it, for the plans to be made.

As you now know France was a divided nation, divided between the Free French and Vichy French. Syria was occupied by Vichy French forces and they are pro-German with elements of the French Foreign Legion.

As a boy I always read they’d fight anybody around the place, it would be pretty good to beat them.

Yes.

You might find it had to believe but at no time then and during the whole of the Syrian Campaign was I frightened,

it’s a bit of a lie but overall I was not frightened at all it didn’t worry me what might happen. We felt confident in our own abilities too by the way, the battalion was a marvellous team my battalion.

I should explain at this stage that the

21st Australian Infantry Brigade was made up of three battalions. First of all the 2/4th were all Victorians, the 2/6th Battalion were all Western Australians and our battalion all South Australians, with the exception of one man whom I spoke about earlier. Then the other brigade of the 7th Australian Division made up of the 2/25th Battalion

the Queenslanders; the 2/31st Battalion I think New South Wales; and the 2/33rd Battalion they comprised the 25th Brigade of the 7th Australian Division. The other brigade the 18th Brigade was still in Tobruk. Syria was invaded on two levels, one along the coastal sector and the other in the central sector heading for Damascus. Our brigade went along the coastal

sector with the objective of capturing Beirut which we eventually did. Getting back to a very personal side of things here because it’s too big a picture to go into too much depth. We started off on the coastal sector and I was in 13th Platoon C Company and things went fairly quietly for a while we travelled by truck where it was possible, while the other troops ahead of us were on foot

and clearing our position we came up against. Eventually it came our turn to carry out a midnight attack on a place called Adloun this was recognised in the army as being one of the most difficult operations to carry out, a night attack. It’s not so bad during the day you can see where you are going, you know where the enemy is because of the stuff coming at you.

At night time it’s a bit harder, it was made easier by the fact that we were on the coast and the sea was our left flank and the mountains on our right flank, so not too bad overall. This was the first time that I showed fear but it only lasted for a couple of split seconds, what happened on the move up we threw grenades into several blockhouses but there was no opposition at that time. Until all of a sudden

in this midnight attack the whole thing opened up on us on from this defended position by the enemy. They were heavily fortified with machine guns with the tracer ammunition coming towards us. Quite honestly for a couple of seconds I was petrified until suddenly common sense took over and I hit the ground pretty hard and then it was on all night long fighting each other.

The chap along side of me he was our machine gunner he was killed instantly in the first couple of minutes. I could see the tracer coming up towards him and I remember screaming out to him, “Roll over, roll over,” but he was too late he didn’t suffer fortunately and then I took over the machine gun. There was a non stop all night fighting

business going on and you couldn’t see the enemy in most cases except for the flashes so you hoped that you’d hit the target and the same with us.

I wouldn’t say exciting I repeat I wasn’t scared for some reason, I suppose we all had part of a job to do.

I think the worst part about fighting is the lead up to it the waiting to go in. Once it starts up you’ve got so much on your mind I don’t think it really enters your mind to be really scared.

Yes.

Initially

as I said we moved off in trucks, until you got to a certain point then the troops in the front had to get off and start tactical moves along the coast road or up in the mountain area, but in the main it was on foot. Not every bit of ground is defended by the enemy, they had a certain spot where they think they can inflict casualties on you, and you might go

half a mile before you strike further opposition or a mile even, so in that period you might get a bit of a truck ride, but overall it was mostly foot work.

I suppose at that time we didn’t have to worry about carrying food because that was brought up later on by the other people about thirty five forty pounds all up, with weapons,

ammunition and grenades.

Yes along the coastal sector it was fairly flat going. Being short distances then it started to get hilly and then mountainous, Syria is notoriously mountainous country.

After is more to the point, we were in an attack

formation for this midnight attack. When that was over and after you had rested up and cleared the dead out and then the casualties were taken out you get a bit of a meal. Other troops would have past through you by this time to go on further up and to carry out their attacks, or reconnaissance whatever might be required.

On this particular occasion my company C Company was on the left flank on the sea side itself and then into a depth of about one hundred yards and then linking up with us on our right flank was B Company, so there was a whole sponge of about two platoons up and one in reserve, so there are four platoons up front and two in reserve, that’s roughly it.

Fairly close to the sea and not far off the road itself. The French, we very very well dug in, they had good fortifications, they didn’t intend to leave there until they got knocked out of it which they did.

If they were anything like me it was feelings of apprehension, wondering what it was going to be like, how you are going to shape up, what will be the outcome, what would it be like to be hit and all that sort of thing, they are the type of thoughts that goes through a soldiers mind, or the fellow that does all the attacking anyway.

No.

To answer that question I hope you ask me that later on.

The same old doubts were there, what would happen, what would you expect, I think at that time we looked back and see the flashes of artillery way back behind us

shelling the place before we got there. You just hoped that you perform well and do you bit.

I don’t know and that’s a good question that I’ve never been asked before. You would have thought on reflection it would have been better to do it by day, perhaps they thought that this would be a complete surprise to the enemy forces, perhaps they hadn’t experienced that before. We were very highly trained, we were

ready, quite honestly we were itching to have a go and prove ourselves. I think that might have had a bearing on the matter. Perhaps the intelligence side of the situation was that maybe the enemy wouldn’t expect us to attack at midnight and that’s a very disturbing situation for the attacker and those who are being attacked.

No.

You can get shot at any time but the first thing you do it hit the ground, there is no sort of digging in there you’re short whatever comes you can find, natural cover that is even a very small fold in the ground can protect you from direct fire. It’s only if you are going to do that for some considerable time that you even think about digging in, but there was no thought of that on this night.

The fighting was continuous but non-stop firing by both sides so you do whatever you can to find a bit of cover.

I don’t know. To answer that question completely when we got almost to the start of this flares went off, so whether they were triggered by our fellows or by the French I don’t know to this day. On reflection I guess

they could of heard us coming or expect to come and triggered these things off and lit up the whole place just like daylight because there were flares all over the place, and that’s when everybody hit the ground hard and started firing their weapons.

You have got to counter fire otherwise you are going to loose the battle.

You couldn’t manoeuvre at night time very well, you were facing frontal fire. Remember B Company was on our right and they started to get around a bit to the right on the flank up on the foothills and look down on this French position that could have had a good effect, they could of seen something more than what we could of on the flat ground. By the way we were on flat ground as opposed to this hilly ground where B Company was mainly.

On the flat also with their forces resting on the sea a certain

extent I don’t know how far out towards the low laying hills of this particular area.

You could tell by the intense fire that there was quite a considerable force that was very obvious and we had a bit of a

ding-dong going on there for quite some time.

You name it, all sorts of loud noises, all sorts of different types of weapons firing, the single rifle shot, a burst of machine gun fire, grenades going off.

Yes exactly.

In our immediate area there was our battalion, four rifle companies two forward and two in reserve, behind is was what we called the rear echelon who look after the ammunition and food and the evacuation of casualties. In front of us as far as we knew there was at least one battalion of French Foreign Legion, the Vichy French dug in on that particular position. As far as the rest of the enemy

strength is concerned at that time I don’t know how many were there.

No we were trying to clear them out so that we could advance forward they had no idea of attacking us we attacked them and they were in what they call a defensive position.

Yes.

This is a good question and you never know. There is so much firing going on you couldn’t hear individual voices. Even the chap along side of me he died without a murmur and I screamed out to him to roll on his side, if he had of lived

he wouldn’t of heard me I don’t think, that was the situation. You couldn’t hear any noise from the enemy position at all, voice wise, there was so much firing going on it was a fairly intense battle, and I don’t recall hearing any voices.

All night, at dawn the next morning we put in a bayonet charge and that solved the situation. I think by then the enemy had had enough because they didn’t put up much resistance. Once we moved in with the bayonet that was more or less it.

Yes.

Yes quite close. One of our fellows got a Military Medal there, the oldest man in the battalion in fact for attacking them with a bayonet too. I didn’t use the bayonet, I didn’t have to and I was rather pleased about that.

No they had just surrendered, they put their hands up in the air. I think we inflicted a lot of casualties on them because we

didn’t stop firing all night at all. In my case I used every round that I had in my equipment, I’m just one person but the firing was constant from our side to them and vice versa.

They would have had to get up and really start to use the voices to try and get forces to get up and to go with them. It wasn’t necessary because it’s one of those situations where everybody was bogged down, they were pinned down with our fire and we were pinned down with their fire. There wasn’t very much room to manoeuvre anyway, because B Company as I said earlier who was up on the side of the hill and they were putting fire right in on top of their position, which would have been rather unsettling for them which was good for us.

When first light came in we started to see bodies ahead of us and the buildings that were in that vicinity we could see that they had been blown up and some were still burning. We could see our fellows up on the side of the hill still firing at the enemy position. From somewhere and I don’t know where the

order came: ‘In with a bayonet’ and that’s what happened, so we just upped and went into them.

My own personal first contact yes, prior to that the battalion had had engagements further back along the coast before our midnight attack.

Yes.

The whole thing was a

relief to see that we got through the night without getting hit, although we lost quite a few that were wounded and killed ourselves and we didn’t see those until later on when we started to move around the place. Our first concern was to take that position which we did and they surrendered as I said and that made it much easier.

Once they started to raise their hands up

and B Company came down from the foothills and came around the backside as well there wasn’t any need to give orders the whole thing more or less resolved itself when they surrendered.

They were taken to the rear and there was no harm done to them at all, they were taken under escort. You asked me earlier about the troops behind us 2/14th and 2/16th Battalions

were well back behind us as a reserved force so they would have passed back through them to be taken back as prisoners of war positions, but I don’t know what they did with them in the finish.

It’s vague and I’ve never troubled to collate them but I think it was something like twenty dead and thirty-odd wounded,

not bad for one nights attack. When you fire at night time as well you tend to fire up over the heads of people rather than directly at them, you wake up to that and it took us a while to wake up to that and then you start to have a telling effect on them. I think by the time we took that position they had suffered pretty badly.

No most of them were of mature age and that was quite common right throughout that campaign. You do not remember seeing one young looking soldier.

That’s right. The French Foreign Legions they are professional soldiers or career soldiers and I don’t know what the Vichy French were, no I did not see one young

person at all in the whole of the Syrian campaign and by young I say twenty five minus sort of thing.

I was the youngest NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] , I was the proud lance corporal remember but I was the youngest NCO but there was another boy who now lives at Kingston along the Murray River he and I were neck and neck for being the youngest,

I was still eighteen then.

Its sort of a feeling of relief and oddly enough pride to think that we had licked them, gee whiz big time. Then you looked around and saw the dead soldiers, so that was a bit of a sobering effect. That was rather a distressing way for anybody to

end their lives, whether it be our own or the enemy.

Depends where they got hit, some dead people you can’t see a mark on them, maybe because the bullet penetrated the clothing at the time. We used a lot of hand grenades and stuff, now that’s fairly obvious

they had marks all over them and so on. Sometimes you can’t see a mark on them. You asked me that question and I will answer I remember before this midnight attack I came across a bit of a cave along this coastal sector, I don’t know what made me prod along there but I was on my own. Here was this French Legionnaire officer in full brigade uniform and quite a display of medals and he was dead and there was not a mark on him anywhere

that I could see. I reported back to my platoon commander but I don’t know what happened after that but how he died I don’t know, but there was no visible marks or damage on him at all, it could have been concussion or something. Later on you start to look at bodies more I suppose

and some of these horrific bodies it’s a bit upsetting.

Yes. That wasn’t so bad there because the recovery of the dead and wounded was pretty quick, and we had transport to take them back out of the place as quickly as they could and

especially the wounded of course. But it wasn’t to be the case later on in New Guinea which we will go onto later.

Yes. I forgot to mention the machine gunner who had died immediately on my right he went to school with my foster sister as it turned out and he was much older than most of us. Dick Petherick his name was and he must have been about thirty five I think at the time. I had another young

friend and he was wounded and then later he died and he was a little friend of mine. You get to know the people close to you intimately, in your section and your platoon, up to about thirty odd people. Then you get to know others but not so many, when you are in a platoon group that’s a close knit family and yes I saw some of those.

Yes, you know that it’s going to happen and you hope that it’s not going to be you of course. It’s a very upsetting experience to go through it didn’t impact on me as much as New Guinea did later on.

That’s right, I mentioned earlier I didn’t have any fear in Syria and nor did I. It was all sort of a big adventure I suppose, being part of this plot, just a small part but never the less.

I never thought about that much but we were all obviously

very very tired by the time it was all over. Then they brought up some rations and we had a bit of breakfast and you started to chat amongst ourselves and compare how much ammunition that you used and talk about what you did and what they did and how the thing unfolded. I hadn’t given much thought about that quite honestly.

Yes. When I was a boy as a regimental cadet I had a pear tree in the backyard which I use to charge, visualise it was a dirty one.

No.

Yes.

All the time, there was no mishandling of prisoners of war what so ever and we will get onto the question later on as well. What happened after that?

We then became reserve and I think it was the 2/16th Battalion or one of them that passed through to take up the advance along the coast. We settled down where we were and cleaned up a bit and got

fresh ammunition and looked at our weapons and cleaned them and so on and got ready to move up to where we were needed.

I think so, we weren’t there long because the battle was a fairly fluid battle we didn’t much around for long we just attacked a place and then kept moving on. Once you have got the enemy on the move you keep punching them and they keep pulling back all the time

and our commanding officer was good at that. We did a lot of what the called encircling moves that is get up into the mountains to get in behind them, they didn’t like that very much at all, very discouraging.

There weren’t any Syrians in the army that I knew of, there was either the Vichy French forces from France or the French Foreign Legions there were no Syrian soldiers there to the best of our knowledge

and if they had an army god knows what it was.

That’s right. Not soldiers anyway but you pass through villages on your coastal drives and some places you would be having a shot at somebody up on a hill and they’d be down there in their little gullies hand reaping their crops, quite a unique campaign that one.

Once we had taken a place then the villages were good to us, we could buy cooked WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s from them or a hot cup of tea, they were ready to help us. I don’t the French Foreign Legions would of ill treated the people but maybe they were pleased when the French Foreign Legions and the Vichy French were being pushed out of the place,

that’s the only reasoning I can come up with. They were not anti-Australian by any means.

You advance by stages, I had to back track a bit from the Syrian border to a place called the Litani River that was a crossing made difficult by enemy fire and the British command they had lost some men there.

You kept moving forward to the next objective. As I said earlier there are only certain places where you can make a stand, what they call ‘killing ground’.

As far as Beirut.

Yes. The actually last

battle was at a place called Damour the Damour River Battle and once that was captured then the enemy then surrendered and then Beirut fell quite easily. There was no opposition to the city at all.

It’s interesting because Syria is a beautiful country by the way I think it was made better because we were right on the coast, it’s a very picturesque country. Although slugging through the hills was hard work

but nothing like we encountered later on either. We were young, we were fit and we were confident, and the battalion works as a beautiful team, there’s no doubt about that.

Yes. I wasn’t actually at Beirut but at Damour itself. When the fighting stopped and the enemy tended to hold a peace flag to surrender we didn’t take much part in that. The hierarchy moved to Beirut

under escort where they exchanged surrender terms and so on, and we were still stuck back in the Lebanon hills and standing by in case we were needed for any outbreak of any violence.

Yes and the French. I don’t know about the British, there was a British force there only support units no combat units from the best of my memory.

No. The nursing sisters of those days and how much I respect them, they were back in base hospitals and all the casualties would be moved back by transport, there were no nurses near that fighting at all.

The battalions

bands were usually first-aide-qualified people and stretcher bearers and they would give you a shot of morphine on the spot or bandage you up, or do whatever they could to get things under control and then you were escorted back to a dressing station. From a dressing station eventually back to a base hospital to undergo surgery or for whatever was needed.

I suppose it must of come down through our battalion headquarters or from higher to our battalion headquarters and the word filtered through by telephone lines, we didn’t have wireless in those days just hand telephones and gradually the word would get through right down to the people who were fighting right at the front.

Yes. A sense of we had done it: “We have taken this place.” It was an interesting experience. There are a couple of things that stick in my mind and I am talking strictly on a personal level here. On one occasion we were moving up in trucks on a night move by a British army transport crowd and the young driver fell asleep and our truck turned over on it’s side

and we were all muddled up in the back of this thing. I felt some warm liquid running down my leg and I thought, “Oh my God, I’ve got blood there.” As it turned out the water tank had fallen cross my legs with warm water, I put my hand down and tasted it and it was water. I got out, and only one boy got injured there by the way which was incredible. We picked the truck up and pushed it back on its wheels and we went on our way again.

Another incident that sticks in my mind it was the French destroyers came along the coast and they shelled our position from the sea of course. I climbed a tree and had a bird’s eye view of this whole thing, I was safe because the shelling was further back. Then the Australian 2/4th Field Regiment Artillery opened fire on the destroyer and it’s on record as one of the few cases anywhere where

a destroyer has been hit by a ground base artillery fire, it keep on firing and it went back up to Beirut to it’s naval base up there.

There were British destroyers and I think an Australian destroyer I can’t be very sure about that because I’ve never really delved into that, and that was quite interesting that. We also got

shelled by French destroyers as well, they came back and gave us a bit of a pounding and that’s when I climbed the tree to have a good old look. On another occasion the British had army service corps soldiers they are the fellows that bring up rations and so on and they had mules with the rations strapped to the mules. A British Army officer came riding up in the low foothills

on a beautiful horse and he was all done up to the nines with a polished cap. He looked down at me and said, “Would you be sixteen yet my boy?” I don’t know if he had his eyes on me or not.

I was still a boy at heart I think.

I wish of thought of that earlier, can I go back to Mersa Matruh? We were up there one day and there was this fellow who had that little bit of bomb on his family shelf he and I did something, I don’t know what it was to this day but something wrong that we shouldn’t of done. Our officer Captain Justin Skipper his name was and he was a man that I idolised and he was killed later on.

We were hauled up before Justin and he said, “You have got to be punished” and he said, “You can start digging a new company latrine,” and I said, “That’s a bit of a shitty deal isn’t it?” Very quietly he said, “Yes getting close to it, dig,” so we dug. Discipline was no real major problem honestly, you respected each other, you respected your officers in the main, everybody around you you were all part of a team.

Yes. Occasionally you’d find somebody would can’t take the heat, and I don’t condemn anybody for that, what so ever. I had a bad case of it in New Guinea which I will tell you later, but no.

What happened after the campaign was over six men in our battalion who applied for a transfer out into a base unit. I remember the officer who dealt with this he said, “You will live to regret this application. I will grant it but you will be sorry.” In a way he was right and in a way he was wrong, if you can’t stand the heat of battle then the best thing

is to get out of it without loss of face. It can be granted on medical grounds, and you are just not able to face up to fire, and it takes a lot of facing up too, believe me, because you just don’t know do you when you are going to get hit, from one second to the other. There were a couple of cases where the fellows couldn’t stand the heat.

No, not by those

in immediate contact with them but overall the feeling was, “It’s better to be without them than with them,” because if a man cracks under fire he could have a disastrous effect on your own little group. When you most need him he’s not there.

Yes, absolutely you have got to have faith and confidence in each other.

Yes, that was quite true and in fact the 2/27th Battalion got a high commendation from all of the hierarchy of the day on the performance of the battalion. We did work as a contact team and it’s quite incredible really, got highly commended for that.

That was quite true and in fact the 2/27th Battalion commendation from all of the hierarchy of the day battalion, we did work as a contact team, we got highly commended for that.

There was really nobody to hold any esteem for us really, the supporting British people we had with us, and yes they were full of praise. ‘The infantry are an identify on their own’, we always say that, they are the ones that do the actual fighting

except in artillery battles. Overall they were highly praised worthy of what we had done. We didn’t hesitate to do a job once it had been given to us either individually or collectively. As an individual you didn’t want to show that you were scared, you didn’t want to run, you had to be there part of the team your pride wouldn’t let you do anything else.

Yes. I want to tell you about an incident when we were strafed by some Vichy French fighters. That was near a place called Monastery Hill that was quite upsetting and that officer I spoke about Justin Skipper he and I landed in a hole together. It’s quite a frightening experience to be strafed by enemy fighters.

There’s a terrific din of noise, our Bren gun knocked for six and nobody was hurt but it was a very upsetting experience. One of the fighters was shot down and it landed in B Company area and it injured about twelve others and they had to be evacuated from the burning fuel.

Yes.

When you face an enemy on the ground you expect some sort of result, this was so spectacular and bloody awful. The volume of fire pouring down on this hill, I don’t know what these fighter aircraft carries in these days but fixed

machine gun setup and the whole area is splattered with flying bullets and the noise of the aircraft pulling out of a dive, it’s quite an experience to go through.

Yes it was. He must of done his run, his strafe and then he was off again. In that very short space of time you learn to

appreciate life.

I was dumb-founded. I couldn’t talk at all. Justin Skipper and I landed in this hole together and he said, “Are you all right Baldy” he use to call me Baldy and that’s just about all and then we got out of the hole and looked around the place and picked our bits and pieces up

and then got ready to move again. It a was devastating experience, it caught us by surprise.

That’s right, it was something unexpected.

Yes it was, it was after the Damour Battle

and the boys got some chickens from the local village in my particular section and I was that sick I even knocked that back, that’s when they sent me out with sand fly fever.

I suppose in a way its like a mild form of malaria but I just felt flat as a tack and I didn’t want to eat, I was vomiting a bit I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Funny you should ask me that when I went back to the medical officer our battalion medical officer I was laying on my back at the time and he said, “Get up,” so I sat up and I don’t know whether he thought I was joking or what, but it hurt like hell but I sit up and he said, “No further result. Take him out” and that was all that had happened,

but I felt quite sick.

Back to base hospital as I said and I don’t what it was that they gave me whether it was aspirin or what, it wasn’t like an anti-malarial treatment, which I had a lot of experience with later on and I gradually came good again, but I felt quite sick I really did.

Yes.

Do you know what, I can’t answer that, I was in a hospital I had sheets and a pillow again which was lovely, it was all very quiet. None of the wounded were there they were sent back even further back to base base hospital. There were generally sick people there and I wasn’t there long. When your young you recover very quickly

and I hate hospitals anyway I always have so I got out of there I suppose and then they sent me to a convalescent camp for a couple of days and then flew me back to the battalion.

Yes wonderful.

Yes, I had the utmost admiration for our Australian Army nursing sisters, we are jumping the gun a bit here but some of the things they

went through later on were unbelievable. I have never yet and I don’t think they have received the publicity and gratitude of this nation that they should receive, wonderful people.

Yes absolutely. I remember one nursing sister she tried to be tough and hard and one of the boys said, “God she’s got a face that could kick

start an aircraft,” but she had a heart of gold, and ‘my boys’ she’d call us, and they are all like that, I think so anyway.

That’s exactly right.

Yes.

It was up in Lebanon outside of Beirut and I met up with some other young soldiers there from Queensland and one of them we were friends until he died recently. We were in a big old hotel that they took over as a convalescent depot and we had a bit of snow and stuff up there then.

Very much the same thing

it was just general sickness no wounded or anything, I suppose like mine, minor sicknesses. They had to get them out of the battalion because they were a bloody nuisance, if you can’t work you are no good to anybody.

Back to the battalion and then we went up into the Lebanon hills again just outside of Tripoli.

We were billeted into ex-French army barracks for a while and it was there that we saw the effects of the bombing that had taken place before we started the attack. Ammunition dumps had been blown up and there were great craters around the place. We did general guard duties there for a while and then we moved further up again into the Lebanon hills and we started to put up defensive positions on the Syrian-

Turkish border. That was to help construct concrete pill boxes weapon boxes and put up more barbed wire and do a fair amount of extensive patrolling up towards the Turkish border. They still thought that the Germans might come down through Syria but they didn’t, so that generally occupied our mind. They were happy days, I had a letter addressed to my daughter from a dear friend of mine

who had died in Canada and he and I were together from start. We use to strip off and get into these icy cold mountain streams of water, from the snow covered hills to have a clean up and everybody thought that we were nuts and they were probably right anyway. Then walking from our little camp area the village I use to follow a mountain track along a creek and watch the fish in the water with the birds,

I loved that place, it helps to heal any hurt that you might have had or any feelings of lose and those you’ve left behind.

Yes. It happened in New Guinea as well and I found

something very beautiful to look at, it wasn’t much I can tell you.

We weren’t there long and I have to be honest with you the memory is not good on that side but I guess about three or four months and we had heavy down falls of snow I can remember that clearly and we use to go on leave into Beirut. We’d go and have a chicken

meal which was beautiful in the cafes there, they were happy days really for me. I was still a teetotaller and a non-smoker and when the boys got a beer ration I was very much in demand they’d swap the beer for chocolate and they’d get my beer, so I was popular for quite a while and I had a bit of a problem with trying to

satisfy all of them. Also some of the boys use to get stuck into the grog and cherry brandy and we were camped at one stage near a cemetery and the Syrians bury their dead above the ground. One little man he and I were soldiering together in the fighting. One night I had to go and pick him up out of the mud he said, “Baldy they are coming to get me,” and he was pointing at these bodies, I was recognised as the platoon retriever for the drunks, put it that way.

Two of them actually. One was with a chap by the name of Bob Johns and he was my

platoon sergeant in Syria and he went on to do very well for himself. We went out one day on an attack feature right ahead of our own troops. We went in under our own artillery barrage and they had what’s called a creeping barrage and it lifts every so often every so many minutes and he and I got right under our own artillery barrage. We captured about six prisoners and

I remember it so clearly first of all we found a chap that had been hit with shell fire just before we got there and the whole of his head was lifted back and you could see his brain still beating. I put my rifle to his chest to finish him off but I couldn’t, I hadn’t reached that stage of being brutal I guess. It would have been the best thing because when we found him later he had died anyway.

The second little thing was these prisoners and I was in charge while Bob went ahead to be a bit of a look out and they must of thought I wasn’t much to worry about because they were chattering amongst themselves and to lower their hands. But they changed their mind very quickly when I put a bullet between their legs, and they very quickly put their hands back up into the air again, small things but important to the old soldier. Another occasion was we attacked a feature called Monastery Hill

and the monastery was on top and we took the place after a bit of a fire fight. At that time I was armed with a Thompson submachine gun and I was given the job after we took the place to check out a cave sort of situation. In I went and in I went and there were three French Foreign Legionnaires in there and I motioned for them to put their hands up and one quite foolishly gave me a stab in the right arm here

which I had seven stitches put into it but that was a silly thing to do because as I said I had the Thompson sub machine gun so that was the end of that story.

Commonly called a Tommy gun and a close quarter weapon using a forty five calibre bullet, it’s got two types of magazines, a drum magazine which held

from memory, forty five rounds I think. Also an ordinary magazine, a boxed magazine which held about twenty two rounds or something like that, so you could use either depending on the situation.

Yes. A good man who knows his weapons can tap out single shots but the main purpose of the gun is short bursts in close quarter fighting.

By this time I had seen many

dead and injured people but this one I just couldn’t pull the trigger, which would have been merciful but no, I hadn’t reached that stage where I could do that without being worried about it.

No, just a feeling within myself.

They were lined up in sort of a half circle in this cave, it wasn’t really a cave it was sort of an indented rock you had to go down sort of an incline to get into the thing and bend down to get inside it. They were just standing there with their weapons in their hands. One I do remember very distinctly with his rifle and bayonet and the others I’m not too sure about. As I said he

made the wrong move and they paid the price for it.

Yes I’ve got a scar here on my right arm, they stitched it on the spot at the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] and I refused to go out to leave the battalion, there were seven stitches in it and I got a bandage around it and that’s how I carried it all the time.

Yes.

They were just left there and we moved on to do some other job. There always was a retrieval party that would come up behind and pick up the wounded, dead and weapons or whatever has been left behind, intelligence papers and so on.

That’s right.

There are so many memories and you can’t seem to recollect them all but on one occasion we were about to be attacked by enemy tanks of the day.

The only weapon we had in the infantry level is what they called sticky bombs and this is a glass globe inside this nitro glycerine with a handle attached to it and on the handle there is a tape. The idea of these confounded things is you race up along side a tank, bravely, and you pull the tape off and then strike it against the tank and you then stick it to the side of the tank

and it blows up and inwards. You carried on as a soldier so if you got hit with a bullet and we never did have that happen there but there wouldn’t have been much left of the carrying bloke with this thing in his hand. Fortunately the 2/4th Anti Tank Regiment came along and they put them through short order, also the navy was called in and they shelled the tanks, and so they withdrew.

Yes.

No.

Yes.

British air force as I know it.

No not in Syria, whether they were in the central sector I can’t answer that question because we are dealing with my side of it.

As I said Syria is sort of a narrow strip of coastal ground and you can expect some help along there in the way

of transport or artillery, but you’d get artillery from anywhere for that matter. In the main we knew that a lot of it would be hard slogging through the mountainous country which is typical of Syria.

At my level then as a boy no I can’t remember much about that at all whether the information was given to our officers and didn’t come down to us I really can’t remember. I do remember a lot of it was up in the mountains working our way up hill and down vale and hard slogging, but no I can’t remember much about the intelligence reports at all.

No.

We had boots on.

Yes the army boots, what they called Boots AB, Australian boot and they were a good solid boot.

I can’t remember the exact time at this stage, but

we spend Christmas there I can tell you that much and things settled down again for a while. Then apparently Japan’s entry into the war meant that pressure had been put on the Australian government for us to come home, and that’s what started to happen. We went back down through Syria, Palestine and back to Port Tewfik.

It would have been Christmas 1941.

Not very much. The big deal was that the officers as always had waited on the tables and get a bit of chiack in front of the boys. The officers would come in and the boys would say, “Come on, hurry up,” and that sort of thing. They had pleasure in giving us Christmas turkey or pudding or whatever was on the menu,

it was a happy occasion and a bit of fun.

Yes I was very lucky I use to write good letters to myself even though I bragged a bit I suppose. I liked writing and I liked telling them all about what was happening. Many of the letters I got was full of holes because of the censorship by the officers but they had to do that. In the main I got a lot of letters

and I use to write to my foster relatives and friends.

I don’t know quite how to answer that because again it happened so quickly I suppose in ones life time,

nobody particularly wanted to stay in Syria but we certainly didn’t know much about the Japanese side either. Except what was being filtering through and it was pretty fast and the world got a shock with Japan entering the war. I remember personal feelings like, “What, the Japanese? All they were good for was making toys.” When I was a boy you would go along to Coles and buy nothing over

two and six pence and most of it was from Japan, so we had a false idea of Japan’s abilities. Even though I did read at one stage as a boy the Japanese navy in World War I had helped to escort troop ships and supply columns on the naval side. I was still young and reasonably uneducated I suppose, and I didn’t really know much about world affairs anyway.

But to think that Japan was doing what she was doing in such a quick time was unbelievable, it seemed such a shock.

And then through Palestine and then we got onboard the Ile de France another big troop ship in Port Tewfik and the whole convoy sailed for Colombo.

As far as I know the whole brigade and eventually the whole division and we got back into Colombo and we were based up there for a while and again we came down and got onto smaller ships once more. As far as we knew we were headed for Java, by this time Malaya had gone. The entire convoy left Colombo, it was a huge convoy of ships and we had bang smack in the middle of the convoy

a British battle cruiser called the HMS Royal Sovereign. When we looked at this great ship we thought, “Oh what confidence in the British Empire still, how could anybody hit that and sink that great thing?” As it turned out later on I found out it was an old battle ship due to be broken out just before the outbreak of World War II, so she was very back in service again. We headed for Java and a fair

way into the journey the entire convoy and I don’t know how many ships were in it because you couldn’t see there were so many ships you couldn’t count the darn things. The whole entire convoy turned about and went back to Colombo and the reason for that was that word had come through from intelligence that a Japanese naval task force was sweating on us and they would have blown the lot out of water, they had naval superiority.

Of course Java had fallen and the Japanese were very much in control there so it was back to Colombo again and we waited a few more days. Eventually the entire convoy set off and went well down south on their way back to Australia it took six weeks to come back to Australia. Eventually they arrived in here at Port Adelaide and never before and never since have they seen so many ships crammed into Port Adelaide.

That’s a good question and I should of mentioned it. To the best of my knowledge the 9th Australian Division came up and through Syria and took over our role of preparing defensive positions until that threat was removed and as history records they went back to El Alamein.

I don’t know the

answer to that at all, I really don’t know. I suppose really the situation was the 9th Division was in so much control in the desert at that time to have got them out of a more critical position rather than Syria but I don’t know the overall tactical answer to that.

Yes.

That was after we had turned back to Colombo the six weeks was from the second time we departed from Colombo to Australia.

Quite relaxed because we couldn’t work out why we went so far south before getting back into Australian waters. But obviously submarines have a limited range with fuel and supplies as well and I guess their attention was more on the Atlantic and the European theatre of war rather than this way, although there were submarines in Australian waters.

I found out later that thirty seven ships had been sunk of the east coast of Australia, but as far as I was concerned we were pretty safe overall, and we had a good convoy with warships.

When we came home the local Adelaide people had seven days leave, and a lot of the interstate boys

were billeted out into private homes. A few marriages took place after that little exercise. There was a sense of disbelief to me in a way it hadn’t quite cottoned on to the feeling around Adelaide, mind you you don’t have to get around with long faces all the time and gloom and doom, people have got to live. They didn’t seem to have a real awareness that there was a war going on that was my way of thinking. People were complaining about food rationings,

so many eggs and a bit of butter a week and so on. The reality of war I don’t think hit many Adelaide homes or South Australia homes at that stage.

Yes but I think we were the first soldiers to arrive in South Australia who had had any overseas service at that time.

Most of the others were young lads in the militia, air force personal and a few navy people and a few what we call Rosella’s, the city bound military police the Provo corps [Provosts – Military Police] and we called them Rosella’s and they weren’t very highly regarded. There were uniforms around but nobody had had any actual experience in fighting.

I can’t recall and if they were I didn’t know about it. I don’t know because censorship was a very strong influence in all the publications of those days, what was in the paper I couldn’t tell you to this day, I didn’t even look at any I don’t think.

I went and visited my foster

relatives and friends, took a whole group out to lunch and paid for them when they should of paid for me, they wanted to pay for me but I wouldn’t have a bar of it, I was a big-time boy with a bit of money in my pocket. I just relaxed and enjoyed my friends and so on.

I went back to where my mother was buried from and I went down and had a look at that, and I

went down to the cemetery. Not much really, I went camping with Lyndon Park Scout troop, they were mostly young lads and most of them were in a service of some sort, it was just a fairly quite time I think.

I think we had seven days leave

after almost two years overseas which wasn’t much. We were camped out at Springbank at the Repatriation Hospital at that time and people were coming back from leave and sick leave and gradually we regrouped as a battalion, we had fairly quiet days and had good food, we had milk to drink and things like that which we didn’t get elsewhere. We gradually formed up again and then headed up by rail

up to a place called Glen Innes in New South Wales, a delightful town and they adopted us. From Glen Innes we went to Canungra and in those days it was a very quiet area as opposed to today, that’s natural isn’t it. That’s where we started to dig in at the shops and houses and built machine gun posts and put up bits of barbed wire around the place, because the Japanese were expected

to land there. We did a bit of training, when I look back on it there wasn’t much value at all really. The jungle in Queensland is nothing like New Guinea at all so our training was fairly limited.

No the authorities

fully expected the Japanese forces to land in that Queensland area and the whole of the 7th Division was located in different locations with a certain area to look after, area of responsibility, getting ready for any landing that might come. Also a very strong backup and I didn’t see them of armoured units in Australia. The Australian army had some very fine armoured units

but they were committed to battle, not as divisions but as small groups maybe. They were there in case the Japanese had landed and they would have had a very good effect on any outcome of any fighting that would of taken place, but it wasn’t to be, it didn’t happen.

Yes and also there were other battalions but to this day I don’t know where they were position but they were militia battalions young lads. At no time were they ever highly trained it wasn’t there fault it was just the way that the cookie crumbles if I can’t put it that way, the fortunes of war. As it turned out later on some of them did pretty well and others did not.

Had they landed in Australia there wasn’t much to stop the Japanese from getting a good old hold on the country, they could of established a very very strong base and the capital cities of Australia would have been bombed, from airfields and so on. So yes it was a big responsibility. I don’t know whether we would of done much good either because gradually American forces were coming into the country, their air forces were starting to get

better and bigger with more aircraft I should say, so who knows it’s one of those unknown things and we will never know the answer to. What we were quite concerned about was the horrible reports coming down through the system of the brutalities that were committed by the Japanese armed forces of the day. As long as I’ve got breath in my body I will hate certain elements of the Japanese army especially,

they were nothing else but beasts and I will leave it there at this stage.

Yes.

In all

honesty I can say to you and look you in the eye and say I don’t know one case of brutality at that time by Australian forces on an enemy force. It might have happened in individual cases I can’t say that they did or didn’t but certain sections of the Japanese armed forces, even as far back as the Rape of Nanking. I saw a film taken out of Nanking

which was smuggled out of China where they would throw babies in the air and impaling them on bayonets. Chinese soldiers being tied hand and foot and bayoneted on the ground, and these stories come down through the system. The 2/29th Battalion in Malaya under Lieutenant Colonel Anderson he got a Victoria Cross with his battalion. The Australian banished the Japanese force

but the Japanese overran them, the Australia’s like all the rest hadn’t pulled back down the peninsula, they had to leave all there wounded behind. All the wounded were bayoneted to the death as well. The Japanese did the same thing in Singapore in a hospital ward when they got Singapore and they rampaged through this ward and bayoneted the the staff and patients a like, that’s what the Japanese are like. Do you know the story of the nursing sisters at Banka Strait the very people who would of helped

look after the wounded and the sick they shot in the water. At Rabaul the 2/22nd Battalion they did their job and they tried to do their best to stop the Japanese from landing but they were overrun, they weren’t strong enough and what happened to their wounded they were tied to trees and bayoneted to death. They are unnecessary actions of war. Later on their overall commander General Yamashita, he was put before the

War Crimes Tribunal and he was hung because of him permitting these sorts of things to go on.

Without a doubt that was accepted by the Japanese authorities, there was no other way out of it. You do not commit atrocities like that on a continuing basis.

That’s a very good question and on a personal level I was terrified that I would be taken prisoner, absolutely terrified and one of the most hideous forms of executions to me is having your head lopped off. In fact in New Guinea

where individuals were taken prisoner that was the end of the road there’s no two ways about that and I can vouch for that in a later account. None of us wanted to be taken prisoner as an individual or as a small group of men.

Yes.

Yes without a doubt. You are at the end of the road and it happened again

and again and again.

I still talk about it amongst my old mates today and there’s not many of us left now but we all still agree yes.

On what they call an American Liberty Ship and those ships were turned out by the dozen,

a ten thousand ton vessel, purely was to carry cargo but the shipping was so short they had to carry troops up into New Guinea as well. To put it quite bluntly the conditions onboard were quite primitive to say the least, but you weren’t going on a holiday anyway, so you just excepted it as part of the plot.

No you slept on a steel deck

down in the hole of the ship, old rust-buckets they were.

Only about five or six days’ trip, seven days I think.

Nothing much on the way up there.

They were anxious days because we knew we were heading into trouble and that’s why we were being sent up there. I think it was just a matter of chattering together and wondering what the future holds, there was no beauty around the place what so ever.

“What the hell are we going to be in next?” “What sort of food are we going to have?”

because it was going to be rough. There were no latrines on the ship as such, they were ready made drops up on the top deck and it was washed down with a sea hose every now and again, it was primitive to say the least. We would be longing for a good hot shower, that was something we were dreaming about. I think we were all concerned about the situation in New Guinea how again we would perform, what could we expect,

the unknown at this stage of the game.

I don’t recall, I do remember one day and I always laugh about this they had photos somewhere on the ship with two naked soldiers, one was a Japanese naked soldier and the other a Chinese naked soldier and their hair on their body differed. I often use to think to myself “What do we have to do strip them

off so that we can identify them?” The information was practically nil at our level, we didn’t know much at all.

Port Moresby and we quickly got on the trucks and went up past Ramu Falls that’s right up on the Highlands of New Guinea just at the foot of the Owen Stanley Ranges

and we were billeted there for quite a while. We still had on our Middle Eastern clobber [clothing], tanned boots and khaki shorts and shirt and the old slouch hat. In our packs we’d have long trousers, we still had the gear we had in the Middle East.

No, in fact I still marvel today some people who still wear shorts up in that place and they are bloody mad. When we went up there we were billeted on this rubber plantation in bits of lean-to tents and by this time

I had been promoted to full corporal in charge of a section. We did not have any of the gear that you really needed for those days, I recall they brought up some dye from Australia and put it into forty four gallon drums and we dunked our shorts and shirts and stuff into the dye and then put it back on again. With the first decent down pour of rain the lot would almost wash out again

back to the khaki more or less. The preparation for New Guinea long before we got there was absolutely dreadful. A lot of this is hindsight but we did know that ahead of us were young militia soldiers very poorly trained and very poorly led in most cases, schoolboys a lot of them.

When they arrived at Port Moresby their job was to unload ships, and build roads very limited training of actual fighting. So they sent these poor little people over the track to face a formidable enemy. Back to us, also our boots we had to leather strips tacked to the sole

of our boots trying to stop it from slipping in the mud, and that was useless. We set off on the Kokoda Track with about forty five pound of gear, that was our personal weapon, plus spare magazines, spare ammunition, hand grenades and at least five days rations carried on our backs, ground sheet and half a blanket which we called a bum roll and we rolled it up and strapped to your back

onto your belt. In short the thing that the government had lacked in was the lack of supplies and that’s the whole story really.

We had been told that the Japanese had landed in force at Milne Bay, Buna, Sanananda and Gona, we also were told that the Japanese had executed a five or six year old boy and they had executed two missionaries,

and nursing people at Gona by beheading them, that was their wonderful track record at Gona. We knew that the troops ahead of us were initially the 39th Militia Battalion, the 53rd Militia Battalion both with varying degrees of efficiency. They had tried to stem the flow of the Japanese landing but they weren’t in the race

and that’s a long story on it’s own, but eventually they were pushed back. We were held on a plantation area as a reserve battalion so before we went over the 2/14th Battalion went over and they were Victorians remember at this stage and they set of at company by company that’s all the track would take, because it’s such a muddy horrible place to traverse. They were

committed for battle piece by piece, it’s incredible really that they did as much as they did. Then following them was the 2/16th Battalion piece by piece and eventually we set off as well.

Before this time by the way history had repeated itself a young boy by the name of Mickey Diamond he had a bad ear would you believe the same as what had happened in the Western Desert and he didn’t wake me up either. In the morning a manger cow one of the few manger cows up that part of the world got into my company commander and chewed his underpants and singlet, he wasn’t very happy about that.

Do you know that I copped it again I lost my stripes on the very day that we set off on the track and that hurt like hell.

Yes we knew there were

concentration camps and I think that would be about the extent that we did hear at that time. I can get back to that question later on after the war years.

Yes.

No because at that time there wasn’t much awareness of who was at fault. We were lead to belief that on the Kokoda Track there were supplied dumps of food and ammunition and how the troops before us felt

about that because they wore the brunt of fighting before we got involved and so such was not the case. That had very serious effects on the whole campaign on the Kokoda Track.

No we did not. As I said a strip of leather tacked onto the sole of our boots to stop you from slipping in the mud but they got filled with mud anyway so it didn’t have any useful purpose

whatsoever.

No. We had khaki shorts and shirt and long trousers in our bum roll to put on at night time, everyone was very ill equipped indeed.

At the platoon level each soldier had either a rifle or he was a machine gunner, or a Tommy gun. Every soldier carried ammunition for his own particular weapon and we also carried a spare magazine or maybe two for the Bren gun, reserved supply of ammunition. Also we had hand grenades which were quite heavy

on it’s own, plus five days supply of food. All up it would have been anything up to fifty kilos or more of weight on our back and that use to drag like hell after a while.

Yes. Up hill and I should add down hill because going down hill was almost as strenuous as going up,

it was the weight on your whole body.

Yes, there were very few cases that I know personally who fell out along the track and some of them caught up later on. Looking back on those years I was young and fit and nearly all of us were in the same group. There were a few older ones amongst us who felt the pinch very badly. It was hard going and physically

demanding and I might add mentally demanding as well. You would set off in the morning and go up a bloody great hill then you’d get to what you thought was the top and then there was another one ahead of you again, and this went on again and again and gain along the track, physically it was very very demanding indeed.

As I said earlier we were lucky with our officers and we had good officers,

friends, there was no distinction really on a rank basis we were all friends. Really they were concerned with their own morale as well as ours. There wasn’t much you could do about it it was just slog slog slog and keep up and not give in.

Itiki Plantation

at the foot of the Owen Stanley Ranges on a rubber plantation which was pretty common in that area.

We were issued with Atebrin that’s all and at that stage we did not have a mosquito net, we did not have a have shelter as was the case in the second campaign so things were fairly basic.

You were suppose to be taking it and you could tell if they weren’t because with Atebrin your skin turns yellow, there was a yellowy tinge about it so yes we took it if you could get your hands on it.

Yes that story went around and at my age I didn’t give a damn whether it did or not. I think that was a bit of a joke to be quite honest.

No I don’t think so, it didn’t effect me.

I don’t think it did because there was an appalling type of malaria later on, not only once but repeated attacks of it.

If that is the truth I’d suggest that is only one of many things that helped us to beat the Japanese?

I can’t believe that the Japanese army as efficient as it was would of neglected malaria control because they had it right down

through the south east area of operations.

Yes, their equipment was much superior to ours and they carried a lot of food with them but it was much lighter in weight, dried fish and rice and whatever else they had. I never delved much into their diet personally, I didn’t like the buggers that much.

They were very confident as well and they had been at war now going on for three years in various theatres of war and they were confident, they were very confident. When you look upon it the old soldier the infantry soldier the Australian fellow would have been exhausted at times and he would of longed for his home land as well and the love of his family. The life of an infantryman isn’t the best in the world.

All infantry soldiers would have had kindred feelings about their home and where they’d rather be.

Yes. I got busted to private the very first morning we set off on the Kokoda Track and my little friend Mickey Diamond fell asleep and that hurt again, I got a lot of hurts in the battalion but I loved it,

I bounced back like a rubber ball I guess. I remember it we set off and it was a fairly easy leg, the first leg was the easiest of the whole lot. We set off for a place called Uberi still at that stage of the game we anticipated a supply dump there, a hot cup of tea or facilities in which to make one and when we got there there was nothing. The troops before us had experienced that same let down

feeling and said, “If that’s it, what’s it like up ahead,” a feeling of, “What a lot of crap of what we had been told.” We dropped in the mud and slept where we fell at that particular spot Uberi.

There wasn’t any at this stage of the game apparently, we had been lied to about food dumps and

ammunition dumps and they just did not happen. The government in Australia was under that impression and the army I commanded apparently we didn’t know this of course at that time. We thought, “Things are pretty rough.” Then I think on the second leg we set off on a long long haul that one we started eating into our own rations we had with us,

beef and biscuits and a cup of tea. But again you slept where you dropped in the mud and we thought, “What the hell does the future hold?” I do remember thinking that sort of thing and we all did. On the morning of the third day we set off we had a ration drop from the air by two American-piloted DC-3s,

supply aircraft that were called the “biscuit bombers.” They came over and I can still remember looking up through the canopy and seeing them pushing the stuff out with their feet, it would all free fall because there were no parachutes at all, except for one instance where I saw it floating off into the distance and that probably had medical supplies in it and I don’t know what ever happened to that.

Little Mickey Diamond the boy who lost my second set of stripes he was killed instantly when he was hit with a box of jam, he was sheltering in a hut and his body was smashed so we buried him where he died. Six others were so badly injured they had to be sent back to Port Moresby and most of the stuff was lost in the jungle, and the bags of rice burst on impact.

I remember coming back from a bit of a walk down the track doing something laughing my head off and making a bit of a joke about, “God we had trouble picking up this rice. We needed straws to pick the bloody stuff up.” A chap by the name of Bull Wise said to me “Baldy you wont last because you know what’s happen,” but I didn’t see it happen. So Mickey Diamond died and every time I see that statue in the mall of the boy

Peter Pan. Mickey Diamond was always one of those boys who always laughed, he was a happy soul but he met a terrible death. At that time also we had Damian Parer in the area and he filmed that actual happening of what happened on that morning. He was with our company commander Ron Johnson, a man who gave me a rough time but I admired him to the day he died.

Yes but you had to live and you had to keep going otherwise the whole show would of fallen to pieces but he was a wonderful lad he really was even though he lost my stripes for me. I have a very clear picture of him sliding down the side of a hill,

he lost his footing and he was covered in mud and then he got up laughing his head off, that was the sort of person we served with. We moved on and by this time some of the wounded from the earlier fighting up at Isurava started to group back through us. When the soldiers came back some had no weapon at all

and pretty well warn out. One young fellow said to me, “You can’t see them,” and rather cruelly I said to him, “Well, did you bloody well look?” but on reflection that is one of the cruellest things to say, he was one of those young militia soldiers through no fault of his own was in a position that was almost impossible. Then we went along on our way and eventually we finally arrived at a place called

Brigade Hill and that was a hard slog a very hard slog and we got there at night time. I remember myself falling face down in the mud and wondering what the hell I was doing there.

Yes there was but I didn’t speak with him personally. He spent a lot of time with our company commander Ron Johnson, and he was a good man.

Absolutely no doubt about that.

Yes he was. I don’t know where

he joined us, whether he was coming back or going forward with us I don’t know to this day. He was an incredible man and he was a much admired man.

I was still young and I keep emphasising on this point I suppose in many ways I didn’t know how to speak up for my own rights, there is a better story about that when I got a bit older.

To bust me on the spot for something that I hadn’t done on two occasions really hurt, if I had been wiser and perhaps had a bit more brain power I would of thought, “It wasn’t my fault blah, blah blah’ and I might have had a bit of a change but to drop me like that it hurt. Because I got commended in Syria for my performance, I didn’t get a medal for bravery but I got commended for action and I never let the team down ever

but I guess that’s life.

No I don’t think so. Ron Johnson was an incredibly brave officer he got wounded on three occasions, he was a lawyer or training to be a lawyer, he could of got himself a base job just like that but he preferred to stay with a battalion and

he got a DSO [Distinguished Service Order] in the finish and he should of got more than a DSO but that’s not for me to say I don’t suppose, we all agreed with it thought he should have been more decorated than what he was. We also felt he was probably flat out to love his mother, that might have been an unjust statement to make at the time. He was very ruthless with his dealings with people, but a brave man as well and he and I had a

good old friendship later on.

Yes I suppose that’s a good point, he never gave in, yes, you are probably right.

Yes and I guess you have heard this before by day you are covered in perspiration, your clothes were literally drenched

with perspiration and at night time whey were drenched with rain. It didn’t just rain it came down in buckets, and it was a fairly miserable existence to say the least.

Again at a

personal level I keep thinking to myself “Why can’t we sit on this bloody hill and wait for the buggers to get to us, instead of us doing all this sort of thing?” That was the way that it was meant to be I suppose and you did wonder about the futility of it all and what would happen when you started to fight. If we had to withdraw would we be strong enough to withdraw under control or would you panic and run, it was a funny old situation

to say the least.

No. We had with us Brigadier Arnold Potts, he was the overall commander of the 21st Brigade – the 2/14th, 16th and 27th Battalions and we did admire him immensely. But I don’t know who was in charge of the actual operations on the Kokoda Track itself, if there was a commander. I believe the hierarchy.

General Thomas Blamey and Rowell were at each throats but that’s not an in depth study on its own. It was very much the man on the spot who controlled whatever we did. That was first off all Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Cooper our immediate commanding officer then Brigadier Arnold Potts.

Absolutely, yes.

They were on foot only they were not hurt, they were unhurt that was the first group we came across but later on the stretcher cases started to dribble back as well and some of those

of course were terribly hurt.

It’s a good question and I cannot in all honesty remember at that time and later I cannot remember anyone ever complaining, incredible. I mean some we so badly hurt you wondered if they were going to make it, and of course many didn’t either.

These were native carriers that did it that at that time. You have heard many stories about them no doubt. You had to admire their courage as well and the fact that the job that they had was incredibly hard to carry those stretchers up and down hills, across watercourses the lot, bridges made out of not a lot of wood.

Many Australians owe their lives to those natives’ carriers of that time.

Yes. In the main they were Papuan of course in New Guinea and some of them had served with the Japanese and they deserted the Japs for obvious reasons, they started to knock them around and rape their women folk that was much earlier in the piece.

There was a bit of a story going around at one stage that it was never hard to find people to carry a stretcher, that was amongst the native boys because they knew they were getting out of the danger area, eventually. I personally think that was a pretty cruel observation, I think they deserved all the accolades that they got.

Yes, they were very much admired by the infantrymen who were the most effected.

Not much and I had very little memory of my own person being involved with them, I use to get out of their way to make it easier for the native boys to get through. They were usually pleasant, “Good on you mate,” sort of thing. “Would you like a cigarette?” because we had cigarettes

and tobacco with us and they didn’t. There was a case of let them get through quickly and out of the way and back to safety. If other people had pleasantries I don’t know.

I think I use to keep out of the way and give them free access to the track it was bad enough being congested than it ought to be.

No. It all kicked off at the Kokoda Airfield and that changed hands at one time I believe, I wasn’t there. Eventually they pulled back to Isurava the 39th Battalion and the 53rd Battalion. The 53rd cracked up in no uncertain manner,

more or less packed up and ran and the other boys did not and they bore a lot of fighting there as did the 2/14th Battalion, but eventually they had to withdraw as well. The whole thing on the Kokoda Track was there were very few places where you could stand and have a fixed battle, the ground just didn’t permit that sort of thing. It was ideal for ambushing positions, hit them and run, you know withdraw. But in the main there were very few

places along the track where a fixed battle was possible.

After a while we did when the boys for the forward positions started to withdraw back through us, they past through our position to a place called Brigade Hill and we knew then that it wasn’t long before we went in for a bit of a time, and that’s exactly what happened.

Some of those continued on to Port Moresby because they were in pretty bad shape but the others formed positions behind us further up the hill and sort of all around in a football shaped position according to the shape of the ground and took up positions.

The night before the first attack at dawn the next morning, first when we got to Efogi we were well fought on this position and Brigadier Arnold Potts I thing he suggested that we pull back further up the hill because we are far too exposed and indeed we came under heavy calibre machine gun fire there and we were vulnerable.

We withdrew up the hill a bit further and scraped out a bit of a hole in the ground as best as we could. That night we could see these Japanese way on the other side coming down the side of the hill with their torches, carrying their supplies and getting into position, very confident but we couldn’t do a damn thing about it. We didn’t have the type of weapon that could be used against them

and changed our outlook on life, they had it pretty easy. The next morning they came in full blast and attacked our front position. For almost two days we held that position on that hill but eventually the Japanese got in behind us. In doing so they suffered poor casualties

from our forward position and we did not break. If the battalion had broken that feature would have been lost. The Japanese eventually got in behind us and cut the whole lot off, almost got Brigadier Arnold Potts and he got out by the skin of his teeth. Some of the other boys got back to a village,

before that started we then started to mount casualties of our own. Some of the walking wounded were able to get out safely, but the stretcher cases couldn’t. It got pretty bad in the finish and we were cut off and surrounded. For some unknown reason at a certain part of the game the Japanese stopped attacking our front position

and that enable us to get the stretchers out and we had sixteen stretcher cases at the time. To the best of my knowledge there were no native carriers there, but some say there were but I don’t remember. We had one boy from the 2/14th Battalion, two from the 2/16th Battalion and the rest were our boys that were stretcher cases. We had at this stage lost almost thirty seven killed on the spot.

Then because of this break in the attack by the Japanese we were able to pull out from these positions the stretcher cases, and it was hard slog believe me. The stretcher had to be passed hand over hand over this column of men on both sides and pass them up onto the hill and then drop them over the edge, and get up to the top again and take over the stretchers again

and this went on for quite some time. We knew that some of those boys would not make it, they were so terrible sick and hurt. Come night-fall on the first night on the side of the hill almost at a forty five degree angle we had to put our feet against the trees to stop from sliding down the hill, and you had to try and brace the stretchers in whatever way you could, so they wouldn’t slide down too. In the first

two or three mornings one or two would have died overnight and you had to leave them there, you couldn’t bury them so we pressed on.

This is what they did in Malaya and they did it right down through that area they always out-flanked the positions

and we knew that this was a possibility always. To stop that out-flanking position you’d need more troops than what we had. What they did was to hold us in the frontal position with their attacks and we were busy trying to hold them back or knock them off. Then of course they had a free run, they didn’t care how they penetrated around to your flanks if the country was suitable they would do it. I recall I

think on the eastern side of our battalion position that they got around in behind and cut off the entire force, and they were good at it and it was part of their military training. They were prepared to accept any number of casualties to achieve it, they were past masters at it.

Yes.

We were concerned that if we were attacked by the Japanese that would be the end of the road, they would of killed everyone of us. There was no way out of it until this unexplained lull that came along, and that enabled us. Under the command and control of Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Cooper to get the wounded out as we did, it

was an incredibly hard slog but we did it. Then we tried to get back into a little village and I can’t remember the name of it, we sent a couple of men forward to checkout the place but they Japanese had beaten us to it. The 14th Battalion and 16th Battalion elements had already withdrawn further back even still we were virtually cut off completely now.

We set off on the track with company strength which would have been one hundred and thirty men and we would of had about one hundred men in each company that’s four hundred of us, less the casualties and the wounded that we got out already, we were probably down to about three hundred and fifty maybe less men. The order came through after a while and I don’t know who delivered it:

“Every man for himself,” but fortunately that didn’t happen because we got the stretchers out. If we had ‘every man for himself’ that would of resulted in panic, and that’s the last thing you want in a situation like that. We were fairly well-controlled and I guess it’s that inner discipline that helped us out of that situation.

This is only an estimate but about three hundred and forty odd men and we set off in a main party up this bloody great hill initially with the stretchers. As time went by some men were a little bit fitter than others, so we broke down into smaller groups to find their way back to Port Moresby. It got so bad in the finish

that we had to leave the stretchers in an isolated village high up in the mountain range in the care of two of our fellows. There I think four of the boys died there under their care, there was no medical treatment for them there was nothing to give them. They ran out of morphine, the bandages were soaked and rotten. At a personal level again we broke off into smaller groups

and we past by a native hut one day and there was a bag of mouldy flour there full of weevils and we walked passed this thing and an officer by the name of Charlie Sims, another officer I had the utmost respect for and I will get back to him later. He gave us each a handful of this stuff and we ate it like it was, there was no food and no shelter and it rained like hell every night, afternoon and night,

we were drenched to the skin. As I said eventually the stretchers were left behind while we pressed on in ever smaller groups according to ones fitness to find their way back to Moresby. There were no maps you went by the stars where you thought the mountain ranges were running the right way. It was incredible really the getting out of that place. In my own case I

had a very dear friend by the name of Les Bond and he lived at Clare in South Australia, he and I finally paired off and headed off on our own. But before that I loved church hymns and popular singing, ‘Begin the beguine’ and all that sort of thing. I was starting to hallucinate because all these songs were sort of floating up out of the top of my head and drifting off into the air.

All these songs and of course we were starved and we had no food at all. Most of us were out for fourteen days.

Yes.

Yes.

It happen to be by mutual consent, there was no orders given. It was a matter of you wanted to stick with a certain group so you did, but if they got too exhausted and were holding you back and you set off in even smaller groups, until eventually Les and I set off on our own. We didn’t know by the way what was happening after we left this battle area. We had no idea

that another force of men had landed in Port Moresby. We decided that we’d head off and hit the coast and we were going to build a raft and sail back to Australia. We had no idea how we would make it or what with, but that was our plan and thank goodness it didn’t come about. It is an incredible sense of relief when one day walking towards us was an Australian officer and I think his name

was Major Robinson, he was at the base camp further back behind them. He said, “Ok boys, you are saved,” unbelievable.

No.

We didn’t even see them where we were because we were so far in the jungle to get around this area back into Port Moresby, no we had no contact, and my group didn’t anyway.

No. They hadn’t gotten that far by then and they were still heading on the main Kokoda Track itself they hadn’t penetrated. Apart from this encircling

movement when that was completed they reformed I suppose and went along the main part of the track.

They were mainly popular songs of the day which I can’t recall now. I’m not very well inclined towards religion these days, but I do love the chants of the churches, I love hymns from my younger days,

that’s what was going through my head.

Yes, ‘Rock of ages’ and all that kind of thing, quite nuts really.

Yes it is.

He was okay. Les and I we served to the end of the war but he’s dead now, he lost a brother at a later place,

he was a good man.

Yes.

I think we looked at that side of things so badly, we had hoped that things would turn out for the better while you are alive you hope for the best. I don’t remember giving much thought to survival, we were so weak I suppose. We were down to about

forty to forty five kilos was the average weight of most of us, except for the bigger people of course, according to their physique, we were skin and bones when we got out of that.

We talked about that quite a lot and I hadn’t heard of a similar case like mine, which I had quite gone bonkers I think, more a less high, none of them said they had a feeling like that. They knew what starvation was all about, getting drenched with rain the physical down side of it.

Yes.

Yes in fact I remember one day a young fellow by the name of Monty Monteith looked at me and said, “Baldy you’re skin and bones,” and I looked at him and laughed my head off because he was similarly affected,

it was a bit of a problem.

We wondered what the situation was. If we had broken at Brigade Hill or Efogi the Japanese would have beaten us to Port Moresby. I think if the tables

hadn’t been turned as they were eventually the infantry people on the Kokoda Track would have been rounded up and done away with. Because we had inflicted severe casualties on them there was no doubt about that. You know when you hit somebody because you can hear them moaning, the same as any other human being they hurt. The Japanese in the overall context of their New Guinea campaign they lost ninety percent

of their men, in all of the engagements that they were engaged in, that’s an incredible high number of casualties. They paid a pretty high price for their adventure, and they would of done us in no doubt about that.

We lost three people at Efogi itself before we had to pull out and they were well fought down on the slop and they were captured.

That is another side of the story and if you like I can tell you later, Les and I found them later on.

After we had been saved shall I put it from this ordeal, we went back Itiki again in the peaceful area and we got good food and we were sick all over the place because of the sudden intake of food.

Then Les and I were sent for by an officer by the name of Nick Rice, he had the nickname of Sago, Sago Rice. We were given a job and that job was to escort twelve native carriers, or Papuan carriers, I prefer that term. Back over the Kokoda Track to a place called Myola. While we were being cut off others had landed and the Japanese

were starting to have the problems that we had, running short of food or ammunition so they started to withdraw. This place called Myola which was a flat like area a huge football arena was now a supply dump and they had dropped rations from the air and a lot of stuff that had been carried in by natives so this was now a supply dump. We were given the job to escort these native carriers back to Myola

with bags of explosives and it was quite an interesting situation. I said to Captain Rice, “Who do we report to?” and he said, “Well I don’t know,” and I said, “Ok, what do we do with the stuff when we get there?” He said, “I don’t know,” and I said, “What do we do when we finish our job? Keep going and join up with forces ahead of us or do we come back to Port Moresby?” He said, “I don’t know, you will have to make up your own minds.”

It was all pretty vague. Off Les Bond and I went with these native carriers and we got back to Efogi where we had this battle and that’s where the dead were still unburied including the Japanese, there were bodies everywhere and it was quite a sight. We bumped into a padre by the name of Padre Begby, and I will get back to Padre Begby later on. He was there and he turned on Les Bond and I and wanted to know

why we hadn’t buried the dead, he couldn’t understand why we hadn’t done that, I don’t think he had any idea of the actual situation, been under heavy fire and so on. When we explained the situation to him he had a better understanding of things. When Les and I got a bit further down towards our objective we found our three fellows who had been taken by the Japanese, one had been beheaded and two had been bayoneted to death.

They had been taken prisoner and bound to trees with signal wire, that was the sort of situation that you’d expect if you were taken as a prisoner.

Only the two from our battalion saw it. The fresh battalions had passed through that area

they had seen it and they were the boys from the Queensland and New South Wales battalions.

They were chasing the Japanese licketty-split. When you’re dead that’s it, until better times come, more time is taken to bury the dead where we had that experience at a place called Gona later on. Some of our fellows were buried on the track

but in a very shallow grave barely covered in fact, and it was so impossible to dig. We didn’t have at that time picks or shovels, we use a bayonet or steel helmet whatever you could lay your hands on to dig a bit, but in the main you had to leave them where they were.

Yes, it was a bit demoralising in many ways and you never forget it,

obviously.

I don’t know if they even thought about that but I suppose you could be right about that, it had a demoralising effect. By this time I think we had become attuned to the possibility of what

we had said and experienced what we could expect, but I think in short nothing was new by then, we had seen the lot.

We had tents to live in and we had a bed to sleep on, I think the beds were stretchers I can’t remember. We had good food

given to us and we gradually started to build our strength up and get a bit more mobile. I suppose licking our wounds would be one way to put it.

That’s a good question. There was a great deal of sickness for a while, vomiting and so on with the new intake of good food that we hadn’t had for so long. For a little while there wasn’t much

control over that sort of thing, apart from our carers who were in this position waiting for us everybody was so damn tired and exhausted we just sort of looked for ourselves and nobody wanted to bother us either they wanted us to rest as much as we could. After a while we tumbled to the idea that you just had to take things a bit quieter.

Those that had survived the trek out we all met up together in Moresby or the rest area, I should of added earlier I think to help

answer your question. When we landed in Port Moresby we had a strength I think it was something like eight hundred and thirty men or something like that. The actual number of people who set off on the Kokoda Track would have been about six hundred and twenty or six hundred and thirty, what happened to the rest you might ask? First of all you have always got what they called a ‘left out of battle group’, they are kept back in the base camps

until a battalion becomes no more, they then have the backup set up with the troops to still bare the same name as the battalion. Others by the nature of their weapons could not go on the Kokoda Track, the mortar platoon for example they were grouped into a brigade group and they had a certain area of responsibility in Port Moresby in case the Japanese had landed there. The Vickers

platoon they were also grouped and didn’t go over the Kokoda Track and some of the transport boys didn’t go over either for obvious reasons. The actually number that went on the track was six hundred and twenty, six hundred and thirty. Eventually and this is jumping the gun a bit, eventually when the whole rotten business was over and we came out of a place called Gona, we came out of Gona with three officers and sixty seven on our feet

out of that number.

Yes, something like that.

What happened at Gona is another story of course and that was a kill or be killed situation there.

First of all lets back track to Myola and by the way the night before Les and I was due at Myola the native carriers had deserted, just left the place along with their explosives and we never did find out what happened to them.

We got to this supply dump and we couldn’t find anybody in control of the place at all, they wouldn’t replace the stuff that we had eaten on the way up so we pinched it anyway. An infantry soldier will look after himself no matter what. They wouldn’t give us rations would you believe these base wallah-ing bludgers I call them, unkind maybe. To answer your question Les and I talked it over and decided that the best thing to do was to go back to Port Moresby again which we did. While that was going on

some of our fellows who had recovered was sent off on a special force, separate from our battalion but they formed another group which is another story. Then from those of us who are left in the rest area eventually flew to a place called Popondetta and from there we went to Gona.

We walked, it was pretty easy going really

there were no problems.

Before we got to Gona we went through an experience that was pretty bad. This hospital was formed and was bombed and strafed by Japanese aircraft, and we were passing through that area at the time to get to Gona.

I was down at the creek at the time having a good old wash and this thing happened, lot of the patients and staff at the hospital were killed or wounded. To answer your question more fully we then set off for Gona from Popondetta by foot and we arrived on the outskirts of Gona and things were pretty bad there.

The fresh troops who relieved the Kokoda Track had also had a very bad time with casualties and so it was our turn then to take over their role while they withdrew back to Port Moresby. Gona was a kill or be killed situation, the Japanese had withdrawn to all these beachhead areas, Gona, Sanananda, Buna and they were dug in, it was a pretty bad

place all up. I recall we didn’t have much time to look around the place, we knew where the Japs were that was pretty obvious but how to go about attacking that was another matter. A matter of hours after we arrived there we were put into an attack on the beachhead. A Company attacked along the beach and we went around to the left again on a

cut off situation to get in closer to another position. We went through kunai grass which is horrible and especially when it’s set on fire, intense heat. We attacked across the front of A Company who were back further into this very strong fortified position that the Japanese had built, what we called field engineering the Japanese were masters at it.

They had had time to dig weapon pits into the sand and soil, they had burrowed underneath the roots of trees, right on the edge of the sea and sand are huge buttress type trees and they burrowed underneath those. The field engineering was superb they had cut down coconut trees as overhead shelter for their bunkers and a bullet wont go through a coconut tree. It was a matter of getting in there

and kill them or they would kill you. On that very first attack I got knocked off with hand grenades but my wounds were not life threatening but I don’t remember getting out of the place either which is a funny one, I must have had severe concussion. Eventually I came too in the Port Moresby area in the base hospital and they had taken out

numerous bits of shrapnel, my wounds were not life threatening but it put me out of action for a while. After a while I could get up and walk around the place with bandages stuck all over me here and there. One day I thought, “Bugger this I’m off.” I was a bit irresponsible in those days I might add and a lot of people thought I was a bit nuts and maybe they were right.

I pinned a note on my pillow at the hospital and thanked the wonderful sisters and doctors for looking after me and I just left the hospital under my own accord. I went down towards the airstrip and bluffed my way onto a biscuit bomber and got back to Popondetta again. I didn’t have a weapon at all and then I set off to go back to Gona to my battalion. The battalions to me

in those days meant everything, it was my battalion, its hard to understand to a lot of people. I thought to myself, “On my way back if the Japanese see me first I will run like hell, and if I see them first I’ll hide in some scrub somewhere in the jungle,” because there parties of Japanese trying to get out of their situation and going up the east coast to other positions.

I got back to Gona quite safely and they all said that I was bloody mad and they were probably right. They also said ‘welcome back’ because that also meant there was one more weapon that could be used and I was there for the final part of the fighting, which was pretty bad. Then came one of the worst things in my lifetime and that was the recovery and burial of the dead. All

we could do there was to move around this battle area and get whatever was left from our fellows and put them on a ground sheet or whatever and take them back to this little cemetery. I remember we had a burial service and I mentioned Padre Bigby earlier and he was there at Gona and we had a burial service, it rained of course and I cried.

I remember I sat on a palm tree and I cried because, do you remember me talking about Roman Catholics and Protestant earlier? So and I sat on fallen palm tree and I thought, “Well there they are, Catholics, Church of England, Protestants and non-believers side by side.”

We left there and we proceeded to a place called Amboga River and that was further down the coast going west this time. Our job was to just side on the side of this river and dig a bit of a weapon pit, and we were down in quite a few number now,

we were so badly down in numbers all we could do was send out two-man clearing patrols every so often to see if the Japs hadn’t come from their side of the river, we weren’t sure they were there but we suspected as much. About three nights before Christmas morning Japanese barges came down the coast and they tried to land where we were. By this time we had two three-inch mortars, they had been

flown to Popondetta and it was easy to get them to Gona on a vehicle, plus a Vickers machine gun. So we were able to fire on these barges and we could see the sparks coming from the barges but we probably didn’t do much harm anyway. They were wooden barges and the Japs would have been well down on the bottom I would of thought. They went off on their escape up further along the coast.

Come Christmas morning this officer named Charlie Sims who I respected immensely he came down to Les and I, we were still sharing a pot hole together and he said, “What about going over the other side and seeing if there is anybody over there?,” just like that sort of thing. Normally when you get an order to do a patrol you get sort of a intense briefing on what to do, what time to go out, what time

you’re expected back, what weapons to take, the whole kit and caboodle but this was so simple, so we did. We went across on this homemade raft and got right inside the village and they were there all right and they had a crack at us, I was armed with a Tommy gun [Thompson gun] at that stage again. I fired on the position where I could see movement but I probably didn’t do much good anyway because their positions were so well made. Then we turned

and ran like hell back to this creek and onto this raft and back home again, as we called it. There was Charlie Sims my dear friend and he just said two words, “Merry Christmas,” and that was it, this was Christmas morning 1942. Eventually as I said we came out of there, out of our entire force of eight hundred and thirty odd men whatever the number was, three officers and sixty seven of us on our feet,

and I still had bandages on me from my earlier wounds. That was the end of the story in New Guinea.

Yes hand grenade shrapnel, fortunately they were Japanese hand grenades and their grenades weren’t as lethal as ours were, I think had they been Australian hand grenades I would be here talking to you now,

there is a vast difference in their effect. In a close area they are pretty bad but we were on the beachhead, so I was lucky.

They were forced out they were killed, none of them got out of there at all.

The barges went further down that was another part of the campaign which didn’t concern us after that, but the actual position of Gona itself.

I think there were a couple taken prisoner but I think they were so badly wounded you couldn’t do much anyway accept to be taken prisoner, but the rest were killed. You either kill them or they kill you.

Yes, they were quite close they were from here to that corner of the room you had to be quick with your weapon.

When I got wounded I still had a rifle,

a submachine gun was after I went back after getting out of hospital on my own accord, that’s when I had a Tommy gun.

When I lost my stripes before we went off on the track I would of rather of had my Tommy gun again at Gona, there was always a section there carry a Tommy gun, so I lost that when I lost my stripes and I lost the Tommy gun too. I was pretty good with it, and I wasn’t bad with a rifle either,

but a Tommy gun would have been much better because I was right in on top of this position with the rest of them. The officer I spoke so highly of Justin Skipper he was killed there and I saw him go down and I saw another officer go down, his name was Joe Cummings. Both highly respected but that’s war, some must go, I guess that’s the way that it goes, as sad as it is.

It’s an incredible feeling to get out of a place like that and still be able to walk.

The worst part about it was collecting the dead and burying them. You can live with almost any other situation but that was really something, it pulled you to pieces.

Yes always.

I do remember piles of Japanese bits in native huts and they were stacked on top of each other but I don’t know who looked after them. There were what they called ‘war grave commission people’ who took our dead back to Port Moresby

later on. I know that some battalions dug bloody great holes and shoved the Japanese in them in a massive grave but I didn’t personally bury any Japanese at all, nor did I see any of them being buried, but there were so many of them to be buried.

Given that I had looked the area over completely when I went back the second time I would say at least five hundred desperate Japanese still in that beach head area. It doesn’t seem many me really but when you consider they were so well dug in.When you attack this position they have got lines of criss-cross machine gun firing and we do do the same thing. They criss-cross each other and make it harder for you

to get through to your objective. I think five or six hundred would be a fairly accurate estimate of the numbers who had to be killed. There might have been more but that’s my estimation.

We flew back to Moresby and got fresh clothing and so on and we came home on leave to Adelaide. I said earlier I was a non-drinker and a non-smoker. After Gona and especially Gona that horrible place. I suppose this is a bit of self pity but I started to drink and I enjoyed beer but was drinking too much and I suppose most of us were.

There were some fellows in the battalion who were teetotallers throughout the war and good for them. I started to get my taste for beer after that place.

Yes, Kokoda was tough physically and mentally but Gona was the place where it really was a gut wrencher, it really was.

You wondered how man could finish up like they did, a heap of nothing sort of thing, collect what was left and put them in a hole in the ground and that was it. From that day onwards my feelings about religion had changed dramatically, I had very little faith at all. Perhaps that’s a sign of weakness but I cannot stand hypocrisy at all in any shape or form. I still love church

hymns and sacred singing oddly enough but as for going to church and having much of a belief, no I haven’t go that. For those people who have got it good luck to them, to find strength in their religion so be it, but I don’t, I don’t have much feeling at all about that.

The degradation of the bodies, why

would it happen, where was this Almighty God who was going to look after everybody, every nation in the world calls on some form of God, to help with salvation and so on. To me I think it’s a big nothing, he just can’t possibly be, that’s my way of thinking.

Yes. I came home and had a bit of leave and I went smack down with malaria and I was sent to Northfield Hospital at that time which was a military hospital. I had another bit of shrapnel that popped out of my neck so they dug that out.

They had taken some out but they hadn’t got it all out, it must of gone in a bit deeper. Many years later I dug some out of my right shoulder,

but it had been undetected, that was after Val and I were married.

Yes.

Yes. We had no nets but as I said earlier we did have Atebrin. Sometimes we didn’t have Atebrin either because the stuff just ran out so nothing was available so you become pretty vulnerable to the little mosquitoes,

horrible little buggers aren’t they?

I can’t remember. You go through a very bad stage for a while with a temperature up to one hundred and five was not uncommon. The biggest risk with malaria is your spleen I’m lead to believe and you have to rest a lot from this treatment, they’d give you raw quinine to take, well they did in those days.

So eventually your temperature goes down and you start to spark up a bit and you wait for the next one to come along. I would have had in the whole time of both campaigns in New Guinea and back here in Australia I suppose six attacks of malaria which is not uncommon.

Yes but not all in a

combat area I had some of them here in Australia. In fact I went to Port Pirie for a holiday with one of my young friends up there after the second campaign and got a whack up there, it was in-out of battle situations. I will tell you a little story about one of my good friends and he’s still a friend today. He got as far as Popondetta and he got malaria and he said the best

person he met in his life was a doctor and he had a temperature of one hundred and four and he said, “You are back to Moresby?” he thought it was wonderful he missed out on Gona the lot and he made no secret of the fact.

No. I’m very proud in a funny sort of a way to have been part of it and to be a survivor of it. The down side of it of course is that I lost so many very very

good friends.

Yes we had a bit of a get together and they came out and saw me at the hospital.

It was back to the battalion again and the morning of the day I arrived

was bang smacked down with malaria again and we were up at the Atherton Tablelands. When I came back out of hospital I was appalled because in one batch of reinforcements, in one day we received five hundred and sixty new members into our battalion. What happened to the rest was this, that they were either killed

or wounded in New Guinea and the Kokoda Track. Or they were medically down graded because of their wounds or sickness so they were sent to a base unit where they’d be of some use. Every man to a tee hated it, they had left their battalion.

Most of them were very young of course

to an old man talking now. They mostly came from armoured units that had been disbanded or from motorised infantry battalions. When the retreat to Australian from the Japanese landing was very much in the vogue these young fellows would have been very ill enforced against any attacking force. They were highly trained but

when the Japanese threat came their units were disbanded. All the infantry battalions who took part in any of the New Guinea fighting got an influx of these new soldiers and we were so lucky because they were so wonderful, they really were. But I felt a stranger in my own battalion for quite some time, you had to walk around to find somebody that you knew, but it’s true there was so few of the originals left after that New Guinea business.

Not at all. By the way I got promoted at Gona up to a corporal again but then when I got wounded and absconded from hospital and the hospital people weren’t very happy about that situation so they laid a charge,

so again they took my stripes. It only lasted a fortnight because I got it back a fortnight later but the hospital people were satisfied that the punishment had been met sort of thing, up and down like a yoyo. A highly experience soldier but I didn’t get very far up the ranks.

Yes and they are still friends of mine today. Most of them were from New South Wales and Queensland, tough young soldiers and they did a sterling job in the second campaign in New Guinea.

In many ways it started from scratch, we did a lot of

weapon training, because these young fellows hadn’t had that much because they were mainly dealing with guns and tanks but not much of the basic infantry weapons, so we had to start that all over again. Section and platoon training, there is more to soldiers than moving through scrub and attacking someone than just doing it, there are tactics involved and you have the rely on each other for whatever weapons they are using. It was really back to scratch

in some ways of section, platoon and company-level training until gradually this team spirit started to evolve again. Then I remember eventually we had a huge exercise up on the Tablelands which was a 7th Division exercise when the whole division was put through this intense training exercise to get us back into some form of a fighting force.

Yes.

They performed brilliantly later on these young soldiers.

I went and served on other situations and never ever again did I get that same feeling that I did in my 2/27th Battalion,

its an incredible feeling. But yes the young soldiers fitted into that pattern as well, and everybody was very proud of them and pleased with them.

I’m friends with so many of from interstate and I made it my business to

make friends with people and they opened up their hearts to me and me like wise, yes, they felt satisfied that they had been accepted. We were lucky there were only one or two bad eggs who couldn’t come up to scratch, they didn’t last long anyway they were out, if you don’t fit into the pattern there is a short trip to the gate.

They are anti army for a start,

many of them were so hurt from leaving their original units, you train together as an armoured division or motorised infantry battalion member you get that same team spirit like what we had, but not on such a level because they hadn’t been exposed to enemy action, but the feeling was there. After the war they went back to the original organisation when they formed post war organisations like we have,

they went back to their armoured division crowd or motorised battalion.

Only from what I’ve read and heard and the fact that the

RIF [Reduction in Force] Battalion before we went to New Guinea were all called on to supply a number of experienced officers to go to these militia battalions, and the 53rd Battalion was one of them. In fact the brother of a dear friend of mine he was my platoon sergeant and his name was Adam Isaachsen and he went to the 53rd Battalion and they were ambushed and they virtually ran off and left him,

and he was killed. There was another officer who was in a similar situation. I don’t point the bayonet at these people because as I stated earlier they had a tough start anyway. In Moresby they were not trained as well as they should have been and they were sent over the Kokoda Track to a situation where they came up against veteran troops and they were expected to stop the Japanese advance, so they just weren’t in the race.

Again it depends a great deal on leadership, if you have good officers then it counts a lot. In that place they didn’t have very many good officers and the ones that they did have were killed anyway. You can understand them braking out I guess and their morale was pretty bad.

Oddly enough that’s an interesting question

they were amalgamated into another battalion the 55th Battalion I think, where as the 39th Militia Battalion who performed so well in Isurava their unit was disbanded for God’s sake by the hierarchy and nobody ever knew the reason why.

Yes.

Yes.

That was part of it. We were based in Port Moresby for a while and the whole of the division, almost all of the whole division were flown this time up to the Markham Valley and Ramu Valley area and some landed at a place called Nadzab, and then to a place called Kaiapit

and so started the second campaign from the 7th Division’s point of view. Initially the going along to Dumpu was flat easy country, it was physically demanding but you couldn’t compare it to the Owen Stanley Ranges, the food supply was good. We crossed numerous rivers at that part if you liked but you took that in your stride.

So all in all the going was pretty easy and we did not have any casualties at that stage at all until we got up to a place called Dumpu. In fact one night I couldn’t believe it we pulled up at Dumpu we were given boxes of steak for goodness sake, steaks in a battle area. This was due to the American supply system of course, so we had steak that night and it was unbelievable.

Then eventually we started to work our way up into mountain ranges and before we set off again we could see the Japanese on top of a feature and they knew we were coming in know uncertain manner, a division on the move is something to behold. Eventually in Dumpu it had established a very big base, it had a hospital if you got hit or got sick you had a good chance of

getting out okay. None of the turmoil of the Kokoda Track and Gona. The campaign went it’s way up through the ranges, a lot of section and platoon work relied on groups of men to go out on reconnaissance patrols and try and track down where the Japanese were and establish their firm positions. So that they in turn could be bombed and strafed by the air force

or shelled by our artillery. Getting back to these young new soldiers we had a major battle at one point of the game before Shaggy Ridge and the Japanese were thumped well and truly and there was team spirit on behalf of the whole battalion. They did pay a very dear price for their folly and attacking up the valley towards our positions.

Again the battalion works as a magnificent team, and we also we had artillery support which was very comforting. It’s bad to be on the receiving end of artillery of course, but we were rather pleased about the whole deal. Then came the Shaggy Ridge ordeal and by the way I’m back to a corporal again at this stage. I went down again with malaria went back to Dumpu to the field hospital there and eventually

got back to my battalion base. It was still being a bit impetuous I suppose and I was told to sit tight until word came through from my crowd up on Shaggy Ridge what to do. But not me I decided that I’d take off anyway. I went back to my company but I went the wrong way, which was much harder going and for my efforts I was busted again to a private, but it didn’t really worry me.

I took part in the Shaggy Ridge campaign in a very much smaller scale attacks against the Japanese who were dug in so incredibly on what they call the Pimple, and they had to be killed in their fox holes there again. Despite the intense shelling and aerial attacks they still held out against these incredible odds, but eventually they

tossed in the towel they were either killed or they were pulled out to base positions further back towards the coast. I’m speaking of this second part of the campaign very briefly because everybody had a different outlook on this one, there were a lot of individual company groups, and platoon and section groups doing various jobs. Again the battalion performed remarkably well, the casualties were no where near as heavy as

the first campaign in New Guinea and they wouldn’t damn well need to be. The boys had their hardships, there were times when you wished you were somewhere else, you only had to be shot at once and you changed your outlook on life. Overall it was a very successful campaign.

Are we talking about New Guinea the first time, Kokoda and Gona?

To answer the first one at Gona most of them were so sick they couldn’t move anyway, so they were stretcher cases out. You had to wonder about the stupidity of the Japanese sometimes, many of them finished up at a place called Cowra

in New South Wales and that’s another story. But briefly there was a prison breakout and three hundred odd were killed, they had no need to do that because they were well looked after, they had their own gardens and the war was on the downward slide. We took a few prisoners at Markham Valley and Ramu area and they were taken back quite safely and they were interrogated for whatever information they had, but there was no brutality ever.

The only case I know personally where a defensive Japanese was killed along the outskirts of Gona and he was so sick, he was an incredibly sick soldier. One of our boys put an end to his life, that is the only known case that I’ve got of that sort of happening in New Guinea at all.

In the first case the one that I spoke about he was killed by a veteran soldier of the Middle East,

Kokoda Track and Gona we had very bad feelings against the Japs in that situation so it wasn’t much of a problem, really. In the second campaign and the younger soldiers came into the picture the atrocities were not there that we had experienced earlier so there was no feeling about wanting to kill a defenceless soldier, they were taken prisoner and see that they got well treated.

No I did not.

I don’t know. We had this major fixed battle with this Japanese and they had terrible casualties so they weren’t really in the race. I don’t recall that we got any prisoners out of that either, but there might have been. You all operate in different areas on a battlefield, so

you don’t always hear the full story either. To the best of my knowledge there were no prisoners taken there, because they just didn’t want to surrender.

Yes. I read a story once by a so-called veteran

and it was listed in the New South Wales Reveille magazine and he told a pack of lies and I was so incensed about that that I wrote a letter to the editor. You hear stories from different people and I sometimes doubt in fact that they really were frontline soldiers. It might of happened but I do not know personally.

Yes it is. I spoke to you earlier about

Syria and about wounded soldiers and my feelings towards the Japanese were entirely different to that situation but I would still find it difficult to shoot a sick, wounded or a unarmed soldier.

No but not until the day I died I will hold hatred against certain elements of the Japanese army

for the things that they did. For the ordinary Japanese soldier they were just like us, all they wanted to do was to go back to his village and fish and grow rice, the same as we did in Australia, it was good when the whole rotten business was over.

That was part of it, and there are other features

of it that brought fire to bear on the Japanese, that was the keen spot if that had been overrun it could of had an effect on the outcome of the battle. Bob Johns my friend from the Syrian days he was the officer who was in charge of that group and he did a sterling job again.

Yes.

There weren’t many good times at all. There wasn’t anything in New Guinea where we had any joy what so ever. Just an incredible sense of disbelieve that you walked out of the place.

No.

They were intent on taking this country of ours and so we had a job to do and you did it to the best of your ability.

Yes.

After the second campaign was over it was back to Australia again and up on the Atherton Tablelands which is a lovely area.

I became a flamethrower operator there so then it was to the Balikpapan landing an entirely 7th Division landing. Here again was an eye-opener, when you stop to think about the war in England and Europe and the invasion of France by their Allied forces we were one division landing in Borneo this incredible amount of fire power, the bombing, strafing and the shelling.

We got ashore without hardly a casualty at all, in our particular section. We did get a few more as we moved back into the hills and started to find the odd pocket of Japanese while others in another area had more casualties than we did. They are the fortunes of war and always will be.

They called for volunteers to go and do this course as a flame thrower and I was a private soldier again so what the hell,

it was something different so I put that to good use.

Briefly it’s a man packed thing on your back and it’s got two cylinders both with fuel in them and one with gas. Its got a hand-held trigger mechanism with a match head system of the thing and it’s got five exposures, you can press the trigger five times with a burst of flame onto your target area.

There are two types of flames, one that it called thin fuel and that’s the one that you put into tunnels and built up areas. The other is a thickened fuel that sticks onto wooden buildings or wooden constructions and sets the thing on fire and you had to get close to your target. One of the down side is if you get too close you get what’s called ‘roll back’ that’s when the flame hits the air and comes back

on top of the operator.

Yes, well that’s the life of an infantry soldier and all of us were in the same boat. It’s not one of the best jobs in the world but it has to be done.

Yes.

When we got further off the beach area and up in the hills side of it these tunnels were quite obvious and in one place on the second or third day we came across a place that I’ve forgotten the name.

The Japanese were dug in on a hillside feature and they had an artillery piece inside a gun enclosure with sliding doors on it shielding it. We had tank support there, there were a troop of tanks, there were three tanks and the Japanese knocked the three of them out, one after the other. I and another young soldier

from the 2/14th Battalion we were given the job to get forward on our stomachs with these flame throwers on our backs and get right up to this tunnel which this gun was in place and when the doors open give them a squirt. Thank God it didn’t come about because on the way up there the Japanese fox holes and weapon pits were all over the place we wouldn’t of gotten anywhere near it. What happened in the finish was they brought up an artillery piece and put a

shell right inside this gun placement and blew the lot to pieces so that saved us a bit of an ordeal.

I didn’t ever go inside one to any depth I used the flamethrower and left it at that.

After the war I went back to Balikpapan on a Australian remembrance mission and we had a change to have a look at these tunnels in some depth. They were extensively dug out by the Japanese and in fact after the war people wanted to build houses on some of these cliff areas. They were building down to put their foundations down and they broke threw into the tunnels so they

had to stop building and fill the tunnels with concrete before they could go any further. They had done an incredibly good job with the tunnels over quite a few years it would appear. They rotated their force in Borneo like they did everywhere else, so the first one to come in would continue with the work, they mainly stored ammunition inside these tunnels.

To the young lads who came into the battalion for the first time and that was their first exposure to war it was pretty scary for them but for the old hands it was just another ordeal. We had just had this incredible support and our casualties were minimal you could feel fairly confident that

you weren’t going to bump into much trouble at all. If you did you could whistle up the artillery or whistle up the air force, just a like that it was just a different kettle of fish altogether, so much more confidence, and so much more of a confident feeling about the whole thing.

Sometimes I wonder why Balikpapan was necessary the oil fields were blasted out of

existence and you wonder about the plot by the oil industry was to get all new equipment, that’s just my reasoning. Fortunately the casualty rate was very low and that was the good thing about it but to the man on the ground with a rifle he was still under a lot of tension. There was a fair amount of confidence that we had no experience before. Before we landed the whole beach area were we landed

was a mass of dust and muck going up into the air from the shelling and bombing from the air, never had it before to that extent.

Yes not the best of jobs. But you get to that stage I think that you

don’t really give a damn. In retrospect I often think about it and what a dreadful way it was to leave this world but it was a job that had to be done, and they had no remorse about doing it to us anyway, as they had proved earlier.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Yes and that will never fade as long as I keep my faculties, and I hope that will be a long time yet.

Yes.

Again this incredible feeling that I’ve made it, I’ve come through all this stuff and still alive. Not very many of the

original battalion that was formed can say that, so that was really something to have gotten that far or be it that I had been busted to a private six times which was a bit hurtful but at that time I was single and didn’t have any ties with the world so it didn’t really matter that much, but a bit of disappointment sure.

I don’t know if it was by word of mouth or by a wireless message

but all of a sudden on this particular night the artillery boys opened up, prior to that they had been doing night time shelling with what they call harassing fire and they would fire the odd couple of shells at odd times of the night on specified targets in case they were able to pick up a couple of strayed Japanese wondering around the place or to keep them on edge. All of a sudden this great barrage opened up which we hadn’t heard since

Syrian days and we thought that something has gone wrong here or right, But it turned out that that was the signal that the war had ended and they were able to use up their ammunition in that sort of way.

They must of I guess although I never found out and I suppose they were as pleased as we were about the whole rotten thing was over. I remember them coming in as prisoners of war and they came in by the truck

load, you sort of tried to say hello to them and give them a sort of smile or pass over the odd a cigarette, everybody was so pleased. Then we had this 7th Division parade on what was the original airstrip at Balikpapan and we all marched on the parade and there were these Japanese that were there in these barbed wired cages watching it all and we had various speeches made and that was it,

the war was over.

In may case I came under what they called the ‘long service discharge scheme’ and we were camped right on the beach in tents and swam every day, it was wonderful. While the other younger soldiers from the battalions went to occupied forces in Macassar our boys went to, but we had it pretty easy while we were waiting for

the ship to come and take us home.

I don’t know about jubilation so much as this wonderful contentment in yourself that you made the grade there and of course you thought of those that haven’t, you never forget that of course.

I’ve never looked at it that way at all, I don’t believe in blessing I think it’s a sheer matter of luck,

some were lucky and some were not and you have to wonder about that at times. I will be honest with you here there have been time in my life that I had wished that I had got it but had got it quickly and ended my life because of my lack of background, and perhaps a man with a family could of lived, that is true.

I didn’t want to suffer I was too good of a coward to have wanted to suffer but if there had of been death the quicker it was the better, and I think that would apply in life no matter what we do in life really or where we go in life. People who suffer today like these road accident victims, and as dreadful as they are and young lives are taken we don’t see the suffering of these paraplegic and their parents,

friends and relatives. It’s just an on going horrible business, so that’s my thoughts about that.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

One of the things that stuck in my mind when we came to the barracks down here for our discharge procedure. We walked into this office and there was a major sitting at the desk with not one single ribbon on his chest. He found my discharge certificate and threw it across the table at me,

you don’t expect the red carpet and a nice ice cream or something but he went onto talking to somebody else and that was it after nearly six years in an infantry battalion. I thought, “Hell is that it?” It felt like a bit of a let down there.

Maybe it wasn’t his fault either but the fortunes of war are such that if someone has got to do

a job that doesn’t have much action to it, on the other hand he might have had medical grounds. Whatever the cards that are dealt that how they have to be accepted. It was a bit of a downer I thought.

Yes and I didn’t.

I went back to Clarkson’s Limited as an apprentice and Mr David Clarkson who was the manager he like me a lot and even as a boy. He welcomed me back and I went back into the silvering room and I became a silverer who makes the mirrors. After all these years out in the open no matter what the conditions were I could not hack it. There was a smell of ammonia, nitric acid,

paint, oil the whole indoor claustrophobia I suppose it was. In the finish I just couldn’t stay there any long and he was sorry to see me go. I went and joined an interim force for two years. I couldn’t settle down by the way and I did try several other jobs but I just couldn’t settle down and I was drinking a fair bit of beer and as Val said, “Trying to make up for lost time?” And she said, “It took you a while didn’t it?”

I joined the interim army for two years and I went to a place called Greta in New South Wales which was a recruit training camp and that’s where I got my love of instructing. When you like something you are usually pretty good at it and I had had a lot of experience by now so I knew what I was talking about too. Then came the chance to go to Italy and Germany so I grabbed that, and by the way I had to drop from a sergeant to a private to get on that trip that didn’t worry me either,

I was still young and single and to get on that trip it was worth it. We took back soldiers to Italy but only touched the outskirts of the country itself. Then we went on to Bremerhaven in Germany and we dropped off sailors there off the German ship Emden that sank the HMAS Sydney. We handed them over to the German authorities and then

we moved up into Hanover where we were billeted in German army barracks. We had a look around the place and Hanover was a mess, just rubble. I came under the care of a Canadian major he was my escort there and he took me down to a place called Belsen which was a concentration camp and I wept again there because there were mass graves there, the smallest grave with five thousand bodies.

The graves were either of five or ten thousand bodies bulldozed into these great trenches they had, they had no other alternative but to do it that way or be stuck with the mess. Then I went and witnessed three executions of Germans who had shot some of our airmen who had parachuted across and they were hung up in trees so they shot them before they had a chance to get down to the ground.

The allies caught up with them very quickly and they tried by the wartime crime tribunals so I went with this Canadian major and witnessed these executions.

I was invited to do that on behalf of the Australian government believe it or not, I don’t know what part I could of played in signing papers

but there it was I did it.

It didn’t worry me because they had carried out an evil against unarmed prisoners who should have been prisoners of war. There were a lot of horrible things that went on during World War II, and that was just one small incident, but it was pretty awful.

On the brighter side as well I gate-crashed an officers ball one night in Hanover one time and all these officers from all over the world had beautiful uniforms on, mess dress they call them, scarlet uniforms, all sorts of colours of the rainbow and there was lots and lots of grog around the place. I’m wondering around the place, as a private soldier in a uniform and nobody tumbled to who I was

and I’m thoroughly enjoying the champagne especially. In the finish somebody realised that I shouldn’t of been there so two big military police man from the British Army, Red Caps they call them , they were big fellows and I’m still short. They got hold of me one on either side of me under the elbows and lifted me off the ground and I’m riding a bike. They got to the front door and they lifted me and threw me out of the place and into the snow. I was lucky they didn’t throw me into the brig,

because they are pretty rough the British MPs but I got off lightly.

That’s right.

But that was a real fun night. Before I got thrown out of the place I also went to the bar and I found this beautiful little bottle opener and I decided that I would like to have that so I put it into my pocket.

I tried to help the staff to find it but they didn’t succeed did they, it’s in the back draw out there now.

Yes.

Yes,

it was very interesting. So much had spun from that place hadn’t it? It was a sense of unreal-ness really.

Yes I had done a bit of reading and was informed about a lot of it. But really I don’t suppose I had a real insight to what they actually did, I knew they were there

as for the death rate I don’t think we have much of an idea until I went to Belsen, that was devastating. At Belsen there is a simple little sign stuck on the ground there and the exact words were ‘Earth can seal not, the blood shed on me’ and that was in English and other languages as well, I will never forget that.

No.

Back at home and I joined the regular army then and I had a lot of happy postings. I met her brother first when I was an instructor with the CMF [Citizens’ Military Forces] and from him I met Val and she’s eleven years younger than

I am. There must have been something about me because eventually after a bit of a stormy courtship we married, it went on for five years. A lot of it on religious grounds again and she was Catholic and when we got married we got married in the Rostrevor College Chapel and they liked me up there with the cadets and I signed the papers to say that I agreed that the children would be educated in the Catholic system,

it didn’t worry me. Because at that time I was very much in favour of good discipline education and I change my thinking a little bit later on in the way that some of the brothers were pretty ruthless towards their students. To answer the question yes we got married and I was a bit rough on Val a couple of times mainly through grog and being with the boys. So she had to endure a bit of this

after-war feeling that had me in a grip for a while. Brian came along then Greg then Cathy and thanks to her that we are here today she’s been a marvellous manager and she’s put up with me over my troublesome days and I love her dearly of course and she loves me. She doesn’t say very much but it’s there, it’s always there.

I have often said that she was my salvation I don’t know what would of happened if she and I hadn’t married, I might of married somebody else or I might of become an alcoholic I don’t know. We no longer enjoy partying together or family dos together but to put it into my own terms ‘gradually I came good’ and saw a better side of life than what I had been through.

Yes it must of I suppose.

I was discharged in 1970 and I had another fifteen years of civilian employment, about forty five,

fairly young anyway and it hurt me when I got out of the army because I loved the army believe it or not. There again a lot of my mates said I was stupid and mad they’d say “How can you love the army after all that?” but it drew me like a magnet to put it that way.

That’s right. Why I joined the regular army before Val and I married I looked at it this way, “They’d fed me, they’d cloth me and if necessary bury me.”’ That was my thinking.

Yes. Val put up with a fair bit still and in the regular army we moved to Ingleburn and that was the first time that she had experienced married quarters which weren’t the best in the world but we had an enjoyable time there. Then eventually we went to Malaya and they had very nice married quarters there in the British Army base. I was away a fair bit on border operations

on the Thai and Malayan border trying to find Communist elements. Val got a job at the local school and that helped her should couldn’t stand the thought of drinking coffee every morning with the ladies she had to do something. It was quite pleasant up there really.

Nobody in their right frame of mind would not have thought about war, what is the point of it all, what did we achieve? Sure we saved Australia there is no doubt about that at all those American, British and Australian forces and had the Japanese got here you and I wouldn’t be talking here tonight.

With so much hatred in the world now supposedly on religious grounds it’s a wonder why it’s still going on and I find that repulsive. I find terrorism acts repulsive as everybody would anyway. You wonder what would be the final outcome all supposedly in the name of some religious beliefs and I find that very hard to come to terms with.

Another thing that really gets to me is the on-going poverty of so many people in the world, genocide, how and why does it go on. These things are beyond my understanding and there’s not much that I can do about it. I don’t believe in the power of prayer any more for those that do well good luck to them.

I suppose I make the sense out of the fact that I’m now happily married, I’m loved by the family and I love them. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have gotten to where we are today, we are not wealthy but if we want to buy something we can without worrying about it too much. I love my surroundings,

I love the bushland, flowers and music and all that sort of thing. I tend to think about the good things in life today than I ever use to, perhaps that something to do with being eighty two years of age I’m getting to the stage where we are about to drop off the perch. Within myself I have much better feelings about myself and my family and friends.

I don’t know if anybody ever wants to run off to war but if the need be that this country was imperil then I would have to encourage them because I think it was Lord Byron who said many years ago, “He who loves not his country loves nothing.”

If this country was ever invaded then every man, jack and women, women and man and young person should have a part to play in defending this country. If they don’t want to take up a weapon then that’s fine, but they should not hide behind religious beliefs and I’m talking about conscientious objectives I feel they should be into the services in a nursing capacity

because the wounded and the sick must be looked after, so therefore that’s where they can serve their country and mankind to the best of there ability. But as for running away from something then I wouldn’t have a bar of that.

No.

No not really but I think its not a sense of achievement

but a sense of having belonged to a battalion which was so much a part of my life and still is. Having met the people I have met in my lifetime. I might be bragging a bit here and having a lend of myself but I don’t think I’ve got an enemy in the world and when I die I die with that belief. I’m not saying that everybody likes me or I like them that’s

human nature but I do have a very wide circle of friends which I’m very happy about and I value that friendship very much and I value this country Australia immensely.

I thank you both for understanding, thank you.