Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Bundarra New South Wales in New England. I grew up there various ways, in the town for a start and

went to school in town. Then we moved out to the bush and lived on a sheep station for a fair while and then moved from there down to Sydney, went to school in Sydney. And then we moved from the city out to the suburbs in Sydney and I went to school out there,

and I finally left school and started work at Standard Telephone and Cables in a radio laboratory, that was in the daytime, in the night time four nights a week I went to the Marconi School of radio and learnt to be a radio operator. And also at the same time I joined the Naval cadets and learnt to be a signaller. Spent time with the navy

on weekends on patrol boats, keeping a lookout for midget submarines. From there I went and joined the army and did my rookie training at Cowra and from there I went to Bonegilla Signal Station and learnt a bit more about signals and from there I ended up in, the war had

finished by this time and I ended up in Japan in the occupation force where I spent nearly two years up there and returned home. Discharged. Joined the PMG [Post Master General’s Department] as a telephone linesman and a friend I met talked me into joining the Citizens Army, so I spent a few years in the Citizens Army. And then the Korean War started

so I joined up again and went to Korea. And went to Korea in the special force and arrived there on the 28th of September 1950 and then on Anzac Day 1951 the Battle of Kapiong I was captured.

Spent about six months doing marches, at one stage two weeks every night for about twenty-five miles. And on one of these march’s we escaped, myself a Frenchman and another Australian. We were out for eleven days but we were recaptured

and sent to an indoctrination school where we spent the next few months. And after that we were shifted to the Manchurian border where we spent nearly two years and then we were released, came home and the mate of mine that I was in the army with at the

POW [Prisoner of War] camp talked me into going into a dairy farm with him. So that’s what we both did and then we were asked if we were interested in coming to the Northern Territory to start on the rice farms with the option of ending up with a rice farm. So we sold up down there and came up to the Northern Territory

in the start of 1956 and we did quite a lot of rice farming, buffalo shooting and crocodile hunting. And in 1965 I went south to take a load of buffalo skins south and I met my wife to be, I left my truck down in Sydney and we flew back to Darwin.

Within six weeks of meeting her we were married. In 1964. And we have moved from we had three children and we moved from Humpty Doo into town in 1971. I became a farmer in 1975 then cyclone Tracey came and wiped out our house.

In that same year I became the farm manager at the Barrama Research Farm. Where I worked until 1991 when I retired. And that’s about it.

Quick enough?

Quite a bit missed out.

When will I start?

No I mean. Well I started,

to do it quickly, when I was working at the laboratory at the radio place, down at telephone and cables. I was going to the Marconi School with the intention of becoming a radio operator in the Merchant Navy. But when I wanted to join the Merchant Navy they told me, “You can’t join because you are not in a union.” So I went

to the union and said, “I want to join the union because I want to get in the Merchant Navy.” And they said, “Have you got a ship?” they wouldn’t let me join the union because I didn’t have a ship and I couldn’t get a ship unless I was in the union. So by this time I had joined the Naval cadets and I was a qualified radio operator with Morse code and flags and Alders Lamps and all of this sort of thing.

And I thought well I will join the navy so I applied to join the navy, this was in 1944, and they were so long in answering I turned eighteen so I joined the army.

Yes my sister was a nursing sister in it; she is about ten years older than me.

And my brother who is seven years older than me he was already in the army and he was a Tobruk Rat, and he was an anti-tank gunner. And my other sister was a sergeant in the Awars. And my father had been taken in by the, what they called the CCC civil construction

mob [Civil Constructional Corps] and building a road across from Townsville to Mount Isa. Over that way there there was no proper road. So he was nabbed for that. And that’s about, and he was also working at Garden Island when the midget subs came into the harbour, and at the same time

I was doing patrol work and the midget sub fired a torpedo and went underneath the American War ship they had fired at. My father had just knocked off work at Garden Island and was going home from Garden Island to Circular Quay. And the torpedo went underneath a ferry and hit another ferry that was anchored at Garden Island there and killed about twenty-eight sailors. So all a bit mixed

up isn’t it? My sister also came back from the Middle East, well before she went to Cowra she was on a hospital ship, a ship called the Centaur and a lot of her friends she did training with other nurses were on the ship also. In the

meantime just before it left Australia, she married this army bloke that she had met in the Middle East, and they wouldn’t let married nurses go on the ship so they took her off and the ship went out and the Japanese torpedoed it and sunk it and killed everyone on it. So she was very lucky there. From there she went to Cowra,

a big recruit training battalion there. That’s where I went for my rookies and she was there. And just before I were there, there was a big Japanese prisoner of war camp there, a big mob of them escaped, and medical staff were killed and a lot of Japanese killed themselves. And from there on she after that,

later on after that she left the army and her husband ended up pretty high up in the army and used to carry them around all over the place. Whereas my brother he came back and was discharged from the Middle East. My sister was discharged from the army and she went up as a civilian in the Occupation Forces in Japan, working up there.

That’s about all they were, my sister was still married to the army officer when he retired. He ended up a Brigadier General or something.

Well at that time everybody, I think there was only about six million people in Australia during the war,

population of Australia and just about everyone that was medically fit or whatever was in the army, navy, air force, and there was than many in the army, navy, air force they had to, that’s when they started using women on the buses and trams. And a lot of them joined up, they used to go out and do farm work because the farmers

had gone. A lot of land care people they called them or something [Australian Women’s Land Army]. They used to go and work on peoples farms at Burroway to get food, because there was a lot of rationing, food rationing, fuel rationing and everything during the war, even after the war for a while.

I left school and I was selling papers morning and night, and I was selling papers outside a hotel, the Daily Mirror in Sydney when it first came out, the headline, HMAS

Sydney sunk. This was in Maroubra in Sydney and all around Maroubra were brown outs of a night. And I used to help out with the air raid wardens, I had a bike with white painted rims and things and I used to ride around taking messages of a night. It was all mixed up like that.

Everyone was mixed up in it really. They even had school cadets in school, just ordinary public school. Everyone was learning how to march and had wooden rifles, everyone was mixed up in it. And in those days also, as for instance my mother she never worked in a shop or for a wage or anything, all she did was work at home looking after

us and my father, and most wives did in those days too. They didn’t go out and start working until later on. So with the population and the menace to Australia just about everyone was mixed up in it, if not the army or that,

they were in defence, you know air raid wardens and all of that sort of thing.

Oh well the place was full of army people and that on leave, like a lot of Americans and a lot of English. And there was a bit of

drinking and entertainment and that going on. And then of course when I joined up and went away I wasn’t there a lot of the time.

Well originally I was in the Air League I forgot to mention it earlier, I was in the Air League which is the

equivalent of the scouts. I wanted to be a pilot. But because I had a weak right eye I could get in the air force all right but I wasn’t quite good enough to be a pilot. And at the same time I used to go over to Mascot learning to fly a Tiger Moth, we were only young and that’s what we were doing. And I could see that I wasn’t going to be able to be a pilot and

so I then that’s when I started to try and get in the Merchant Navy as a radio operator. From then of course I applied to join the navy and they didn’t answer me quick enough so I, because in those days you could join the navy when you were fifteen and work your way up, but I didn’t hear from them until after I joined the army.

Too late then. When I joined the army see I liked the navy and all that, I wanted to join the water transport as a signaller. And the army knew all of my background at the Marconi School of Wireless and this and that so they claimed me and they wouldn’t let me, and I said, “Well if I am going in the army I want to be a

marksman then, in the infantry.” And they said, “No you’re going into signals.” So they put me in the signal. That’s how I ended up in the signals in the army.

Oh well everything, learnt to be a seaman first went to Snapper Island in Sydney Harbour where we learnt to row boats and steer boats and first aid

and everything you have to know in the navy and then that’s where I learnt to, I had already learnt from the Marconi School of wireless how to maintain radios and send Morse code and all of that sort of thing. And that’s worldwide Morse code like all of the different signals you used to have to send when you were

operating in the Merchant Navy, I learnt all of that there. But in the Naval Cadets I learnt how to use the semaphore flags and the Alders lamps. We used to sit on these patrol boats in Sydney Harbour, we were tied up at the, there was a big net across the harbour to try and stop the midget subs getting in and

it had two gates on it, one gate was open all of the time more or less, where we were parked or anchored, and that used to let the Manly ferries and that go through, small boats. And over the other side there was a big gate and when a ship was coming into the harbour the signal station up on south head would send a signal down to me or our boat

and I would read it and tell the captain and we would up anchor go out of the heads and find the boat out there and get behind it and follow it in. and in the meantime they would open up the big net for the ship to go through .and we would follow behind it and the ship would go in and they would shut the gate again. And we were stationed at a place called Balmoral.

One sub got in there and one of the patrol boats, they weren’t very big they were ex-civilian boats before the war, claimed as the navy to use as patrol boats. And all they had on them was five depth charges, two Vickers Machine guns, a 303 rifle and a Vary light pistol. And one of our other boats had dropped the depth

charge. Got the midget sub all right but also got themselves because they didn’t drop it too deep. And it blew their engine off the mounting and it caught fire. They put the fire out but they had to get towed back to shore. And well that’s what I was doing until, like I said

they wouldn’t let me into the navy so I joined the army.

I wasn’t in the danger zone at that time no, I used to only go of a weekend, Friday night, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, Sunday night and go home first light Monday morning.

and go to work.

No.

I am not sure how they just, it was all on, it hung down it was all on floats and they would swing it, pull it open. Tug like sort of thing.

But they did have from what I gather some big, in the south head down in the tunnels they had some big screens there and they had something set up on the bottom of the harbour where the boats came in, and if anything came in it registered on the screen, and if there was anything more than it should be

they would know something was following it in. But one was hit and sunk, ran aground on the north head, another one got caught up in the net so we got a couple.

Oh well it was mainly about the poor twenty-eight sailors that were killed on the ferry. That’s wasn’t all that much talk in those days really. You didn’t get a real lot in the papers

or anything like that. But there was a couple, as well as the submarines getting in, they also fired a couple of shells over from outside over into the suburbs out Vaucluse way. I wouldn’t be sure on that though what that was.

Oh well it was pretty hectic, pretty dangerous. They could have done a lot of damage we were pretty lucky I think.

Oh I already knew that. I already knew that, with only six million people in Australia and big

mobs of them away over in the islands and the Middle East, there wasn’t’ a lot of people around. Everything was rationed, petrol, you knew it was on you know. Not only petrol but clothes. When we came home discharged, I didn’t get out until the end of 1947 and rationing was still on then.

even for clothes. We were allowed to wear our army uniform we could still wear that to work and that as long as we didn’t have any emblems or anything army on them. And the air force was the same, they could wear their old army clothes. That’s how I met the chap that I joined

up and went to Korea with. I went in the CMF [Citizen Military Forces] with him first. He joined the PMG and I did, joined the PMG. He was, he had only joined the day before me and he was wearing ex-army clothes and I was wearing ex-army clothes and we looked at one another and that’s how we met and became great mates. And he ended up riding the other motorbike in Korea.

We went to Korea together. He had talked me into joining the Citizens Army while we worked in the PMG, we used to go there on the weekend and we had been in that almost two years when the Korean War started and I was a sergeant in there by that time.

But when I joined the special force for Korea I was only a private of course. Had enough sergeants.

The first time?

Well the first time I joined the 2nd AIF.

First night in the army was at the showground in Sydney at Moore Park and my first bed in the army was in the cattle pavilion in a cattle stall, and it didn’t smell like it had been that long before the cattle had got out of there. We spent that night there and the next day we went to Cowra. And I spent three months there as a rookie, learning

infantry but the first night, the second night we were there I think it was only just after the POWs broke out from there, so they issued us with bayonets and everything and we had to patrol around of a night time. That was our welcome to the army, doing patrol work with a bayonet around the POW camp.

Because they were going to break out again they reckoned. Well after doing the rookies training there we went down, they work out what you’re going to go as, if you’re going to go in the infantry or water transport or signals or whatever and they reckoned I was going to be a signals so they sent me to Bonegilla.

just thirteen mile out of Albury. Spent some time there.

Well there was a lot of talk about it because they had killed a few medical staff and that, doctors and that. They killed mainly themselves, jumped under trains

and different things like that. They shifted them after that, as a matter of fact they were on the same train that we were on when we were going to Bonegilla, we were all in what we used to call dog boxes, they were just little one room things with two seats in them and a toilet.

And we were cramped in those, and well at the back was a sleeping wagon with the Japanese in them. I think they did that because they had armed guards on them of course and they could look after them easier in the wagons they were in. There was a lot of Italians in it too. And they went down and they were put out on farm labourers,

for farm work. They all volunteered for it. And just about I think just about all of them remained in Australia after the war as farmers quite a lot of them. And quite I have met quite a lot of them since then and they are a lot of good friends.

Oh bit of a grumble but they understood it was the best way to look after them, otherwise they would be jumping out of the train and all of that sort of thing.

I didn’t really think too much about them good or bad.

Oh they were a lot of people thought they were, even when they were fighting, they were a bit like the ones who don’t like to do it, but they commit suicide sort of thing. They were

fairly good fighters. They used to come in quite a lot at once. But I was fiddling get into combat with them because we were all set to go over to Indonesia when the war finished. I was in what they called the Independent Signals section

and we were all loaded up with supplies and everything and loaded all on the boat, vehicles and everything and they cancelled it all because the war finished. And instead of going there we went up to the Occupation force, all volunteers of course no one was sent up there if they didn’t want to go. But at the time

to get discharged after the war you had to have so many points and we didn’t have that many points that we would be getting out too early. Because they didn’t want to flood the work market or the clothing market they didn’t want to let everyone go out of the army in one big heap. There would be chaos sort of thing. So the ones with the highest number of points, they were the ones

that had been in the army longest and been overseas the longest and that’s how it worked. And they asked us, if we only had a few points we had to stay in the army anyway so they asked us if we wanted to go to Japan. So that’s what we did.

Well in the rookie training wasn’t too bad but it was pretty hectic, we used to do a lot of route marches and unarmed combat and rifle practice, everything you have to know about the army, everything about rank and orders and all of that sort of thing. We had to get all of these needles and things and I had a little

friend there he was an ex-jockey and I was only a skinny runt, and my sister was in the, working in the hospital there at the time. And we had to go over and get the needles and this little ex-jockey was frightened of it and I said, “Don’t worry my sister will be giving the needles she’ll be right.” “Oh okay”, he says. So we walk in and there is my sister holding this great big needle and he fainted.

Anyway we were issued with these baggy pants, baggy shorts, we used to have shorts and socks with gaiters on, and the pants used to come to here and legs about so wide, they originated I think over in India, the troops over there used to wear them.

But they were than big that one morning on parade, we went on parade and this little jockey and I got in the one pair of pants, he had his one leg in one side in one leg, and I had mine in the other. We went out on parade but we got quite a bit of hand clapping and yahooing but ended up doing some guard duty for doing it. And then the, little

odd things like that. And then at the finish we had to go off on route march to finish off our training. And that night there was going to be a big boxing competition so we went out on the twenty-five mile route march and we came in and on the finish of the trip the band

was out there at they played Waltzing Matilda. And led us in and everyone was all bolstered up and came in and that was okay. And then they put the boxing tournament on, and someone had put me in for a fight, and I am only a little runt and the bloke that was boxing me was about six foot three. He didn’t get me though because I could run faster than him and I

could run away from him in the ring. But that’s how that finished; we had a big party after that with a lot of beer on. In those days they didn’t have canned beer and things like that and they used to make, well I didn’t because I didn’t drink, stubbies they call them a large bottle of beer with the

top cut off. And then they used to use that as a glass to drink out of, get it filled up from the keg and that. But I didn’t drink and didn’t smoke so I just watched everyone else.

I just didn’t. But my mate that I spent quite a few years with, all the rest of my time in the army with

he was an electrician and I was a radio operator, we went to Japan together and came home together, built a sailing boat while we were in Japan and used to work sixteen days in a row and have four days off. And we used to go sailing in the Inland Sea in Japan he was at Cowra with me as well.

He got dressed up as an officer put some of rank on and everything and caught a new lot of rookies that came in and putting them on the, giving them charges for doing this and that, and one was every time the bugle sounded they had to come and report to this mate of mine Cookie. Dressed up as an officer and the bugles used to go quite often there, for Reveille

and stand to, and come to the cookhouse door, everything was done by bugle and every time this bugle went these young fellows had to come over and report to him. He finally took it off in the finish. That was, it went on like that, that was the finish.

No. Then we finished there and we went down to the signals place things got a bit better there, at the signals training place one side of the camp was all females, female AWAS, Australian Women’s Army Service, they were all women signallers. And we were on the other side of the camp.

But we weren’t allowed to join together like to mix. So we used to go into Albury, for weekend leave, not weekend, sometimes weekend sometimes only overnight leave, and that’s where the first time I ever got inebriated. I had thirteen dry sherries and

ended up on my back in the park and my mate sitting beside me. And I woke up and this provost, that’s a military policemen tapped me on the chest with his baton, “Wake up wake up. Come on in the paddy wagon” The boys talked him out of it anyway, “He’ll be right we’ll get him home.” So we

there is a big monument in Albury,

At Bonegilla about thirteen miles out of Albury. We did quite a lot of training there, and I first learnt not to volunteer for things. They had a big parade there and they asked,

“We want some people to do different things. We want someone to clean up the, someone that’s interested in music, wanted them to clean up the hall to get ready for a party.” So my mate Billy Cook and I volunteered for that so we ended up

cleaning the dishes and that at the cookhouse. And then another time there was a church parade, and they called out ,”Church of England fall out on the left, RC’s [Roman Catholics] on the right, Sun worshippers stay first.” And I looked at Cookie and he looked at me and we were both pretty interested in swimming and that and

we thought oh we can have the day off to go swimming so we stood fast and we ended up in the cookhouse again for a week. This is cleaning up the dishes and everything, I should have woke up about volunteering for things by then. After spending a bit of time then we were graded then on what, whether we were going to be

electricians or mechanics or operators or whatever so my mate Billy ended up an electrician and I ended up a Morse Code radio operator and they sent us down to a place called Balcolm on the Mornington Peninsula out from Melbourne.

Well I had already learnt that in the Marconi School of wireless before I joined the set-up, I went through it again of course but I didn’t have to learn it I already knew it. What you had to learn was a lot of different abbreviations and things that the army had, that they had brought out since,

the names of things, Able, Baker Charlie and the alphabet, phonetic alphabet they call it. Every letter in the alphabet had a, and that’s how you are supposed to speak. And when you send the Morse code you send different things, like if you are in A company, in the army you are in Able company.

C, Charlie company. Don Company D and things like that. If you were a dispatch rider you were a Don R, and the cheeky things changed it later just before I was taken prisoner they changed it to Dog Roger, and everyone was calling me Dog.

Hello come in.

A B C D right through? Able, well they have changed them now I think they are all different now. Able, baker Charlie, dog, easy, F

Freddie, George, how, item, jig, K ken, love, monkey, Nan, O obo,

P peter, Q, we used to call it queue sometimes Quam. R for roger, sugar, S, T Toby, what's after T?

U, uncle.

Sugar, T Toby, U, T U V, oh victor. William, X-ray, York Yolk, Z for Zebra or Zero. They changed to different ones.

We just kept saying it all of the time and it was written and when you were doing it in the Morse Code it was the same, you just got used to it.

Well I already knew it.

Not so much learning it, once you learn it just the speed. It doesn’t take long to learn the dots and dashes, they are different for numbers, and then there is all of the abbreviations, like I N T is enquiring something. What is that sort of? Then you have got other things like Q signs

Q R A ,what is the name of my station or something like that? Q R M I am being interfered with or something like that. You can imagine what we were saying talking to the AWAS on the radio.

Q R M I N T see? Are you being interfered with? But we

used to, all different things like that you would have to learn it was just on the blackboard just like school and then you had the tests. But then the speed I got up to, for the Merchant Navy you had to do a pretty fast speed, twenty-eight words a minute I could receive, you had to receive it and write it down. But you are usually two or three

words ahead with plain language but when you’re sending code and it is encoded it is just all letters and figures.

Only write the letters down and the numbers because it was coded, numbers meant something, the decipher section used that to decipher that we just sent the figures.

Oh they are longer, like for instance A in Morse code is a dot and a dash and one in Morse code is a dot and four dashes and two is two dots and three dashes. And three is three dots and, one is a dot and four dashes,

dot, dot and three dashes, and dot, dot, dot, dot, number four one dash. And five is five dots, and then you go around the other way, you go a dash and one dot and a dash and two dots and then you add them together when you’re doing fifteen or something like that.

And when you’re receiving it is a bit awkward. When we got up to Japan and I spent the first three months in Tokyo we were up there, doing war crimes and everything and sending the messages down to Hobart in Tasmania, they we got back

down to Kure we our main headquarters were. We worked there and we worked out to all of the other people who had troops in Japan, like we were working for the Indians and the Pakistanis, and a lot of them didn’t know English but they knew the Morse code and that.

And when they were sending plain language if a word was wrong they didn’t really know it was wrong they would just send it. But a lot of them had these bug keys, you hold it on one side and it sends all dots and you hold it on the other side and it sends all dashes. Whereas we only had the up and down ones. Spent a lot of time talking to them over the radio and that.

Worked twelve hours a day for sixteen days in a row and you’re listening to, in those days it wasn’t as sophisticated as it is these days, there was a lot of interference and noise, finally got the better of us and that’s why I have got a lot of hearing trouble now. This high pitched Morse code,

not like the clackety ones the PMG used to use in the old days. It was really in your ears all of the time of twelve hours a day and it has just about sent me bonkers.

Oh a little bit.

Oh we used to, illegally of course.

Oh just hello and what are you doing today and all of that sort of thing.

In the town you could, but we never worried about it. When we went to dances

we used to dance with them and that. Then we moved from, we done our training there and we were allocated to the different things and my mate Billy Cook and another mate from Geelong, he was a radio operator and I was an operator and the other chap was an electrician, we all went to Balcolm and from there

we were put into a proper unit. We were all put into the Independent Signals Unit we ended up in and we were then moved to another little camp by ourselves there was only about thirty-five of us there, and that’s where we spent our time waiting to go overseas. And while we were there spending time we used to go out on weekly exercises

a truck and a trailer would have a generator on it and the truck would have a world wide radio set in it, and one lot would go out from where we were in Mornington area over to Ballarat and Bendigo and right over to the South Australian

border, another one would go towards Sydney, another one would go in another direction and we would all send messages to one another as if we were on active service, living on rations and this sort of thing and sending messages. And we would do that for a week and then we would come back to the area where we were waiting to go overseas. Come the

weekend we would go into the local dance and dance away and have a few drinks and come back. And from there we finally went to Japan, the Occupation Force.

Oh well you go into the office

and you call the other station, if you have got messages for you the messages come in, the clerks they handle the messages and you just sit down at your desk where the Morse code key is and the speakers and radio and that. And you just pick up your headphones and put them on and just listen to see if anyone is calling you and the messages come in and you just write them out.

And you hand them to the clerks they come and pick them up and they drop others that you have got to send, and you just call up the other offices that you have got messages for, you call out their call sign, and they answer it and you send them the messages. Just like the, a post office, but you’re sitting there doing it all day,

like the. And then they gradually got what they call high speed radios and they just put them in a machine and send it in the finish.

Not a real lot.

You would just hear where the other troops were, a lot of it was a lot you didn’t know because it was kept secret, didn’t want thee enemy to know and that sort of thing, like as far as putting it on the radio. You would only know where your brother was or my sister was if you got a letter for them. In Australia you did, you would know if they were up

at Canungra or Atherton Tablelands, that’s where my younger sister ended up up there. She ended up a staff sergeant. But you couldn’t ring them up or anything.

Oh everyone wanted to get overseas and get into the action, I ended up getting appendicitis at Bonegilla before I went down, I ended up in the hospital to get my appendix out. I ended up in a big ward there where it was full of football players

that had been hurt playing football, and people learning to be dispatch riders fallen off their motorbikes. I ended up amongst them and they were all telling me these funny jokes and dirty jokes and making me laugh and that’s the worst thing you can do when you have just had you appendix out. That was my initiation into the atmosphere of things. And then they came around and said,

“Right now you have got three or four days off so you can get a bit better before you go into unit. If you’ve got friends in Albury you can give us their name and telephone number and you can go in there for leave.” So I got the telephone book and grabbed, and my mate as well. Anyway I got the telephone book

and grabbed any old number I could find in the book and gave that, and instead of going to Albury I hopped on the train and went and saw my mother and father. And then, what I shouldn’t have done I went across to Luna Park and got on the big dipper and that nearly wrecked me. And by the time I did that and a couple of other things it was time to go back.

The leave was up.

No they didn’t worry anyway. I don’t know whether they ever gave the people a call on the telephone or not.

Well a lot of celebrations and everything.

Oh well I can’t really remember exactly. Where I was and when I heard it, it was just told to us on parade I think, if I remember rightly it came up while we were on parade.

Well it wasn’t all over at once there, in ended up over in Europe but it was still going on over this side.

Oh well there was, it was pretty terrific because it meant all of the sons and people were coming home.

Oh well they came home and

had some leave and went straight up to the islands. A lot of celebrations and happiness and that. Not real happiness because we were still threatened by Japan. But there was a lot of easing up like,

In the Pacific yeah well I think at the time we were still in Mornington we were on leave in the town hall. Town hall in

St Kilda there somewhere in Melbourne on weekend leave. And we went into town and celebrated with a few beers.

Oh it is pretty hard to remember but it was, people happy everywhere. When the Pacific one was

over, everyone was jumping around in joy. People wanting to get out of the army and air force and navy. Just waiting around because you just couldn’t leave. It was a feeling of relief really.

Oh well it was the atomic bomb, atomic bomb. There were a few people that reckoned the Americans shouldn’t have dropped it. But when we were in, when we first went up in the Occupation Forces we went to a place called Ebatsu and we

were camped up there for some time before we moved, we used to go from Ebatsu into Tokyo everyday to a place called Empire House which used to be called Nagai house. It was changed to Empire House and we had all of our signals gear set-up in there and we used to go there every day and send the messages back down to Kure where the rest of our troops were

And each nation used to put a guard on the emperors palace for a month every, used to change, and then the Australians would be up for a month or whatever, and then it would be the New Zealanders turn or whatever. And so we were busy sending these messages to all of the different people. And we used to come from this Ebatsu camp into there and eventually we moved into there and lived inside there. We were there for three months

all together. But from Ebatsu they had these big ponds and that like big oversized swimming pools, where they used to experiment the midget submarines and that and they were also experimenting with atomic bombs .and we were told that they were that very close to getting it, the atomic bomb, that if

the Americans hadn’t have used it the Jap’s would have. So knowing that I think they did the right thing and a lot of people did also because all around Tokyo, at Tokyo during the time of the war there were more people in Tokyo than in the whole of Australia.

And I have got some photos somewhere that I took myself, and the area around Tokyo was just flattened from normal bombs that they were bombing all of the places with and there was lots of people killed there, women and children and everything

killed and wounded and everything just with normal bombs. And if they hadn’t have dropped the atomic bomb then they did there would have been a lot more killed, it could have taken at least another year, if we had to land there and attack the place and capture it. When we went down to Kure to finish our time in Japan

my mate Cookie and I built this little sailing boat. Got photos of it there and as I said we used to sail around the Inland Sea and the torpedo tubes set up on the islands on the Inland Sea and the guns all around the Inland Sea to land. To come in there by ship they would have been

annihilated and lots of bombing going on and we landed on a few places out of our boat and went into some of these tunnels we saw and they were full of weapons, English weapons and ammunition and bombs and radios and things that they had captured at Singapore earlier on, and China and that.

The army that the English used to have there. They were all underneath, all of these bombs and everything. They would have fought on for a year or more, and as a result of that all of these towns would have been bombed by conventional bombs anyway and there would be thousands killed whereas when they dropped the atomic bombs, well a couple, one Hiroshima and one Nagasaki it was

quite a lot of injuries and death and suffering but it was in one go sort of thing. Whereas if they hadn’t have dropped it, it would have carried on. The only difference I think, the radiation got a lot of people, it even got, see we were there trying out radio there when we first went up there and there was still radiation.

I have got photos there I took. Right where the bomb went off, the bomb went off above this one place at Hiroshima and everything was flattened around it but the thing was still standing where the bomb went off above it. You could feel it was really terrible, and the people that had been burnt by it,

pretty horrible, but I think that it had to happen otherwise, I am pretty sure that they would have got it eventually.

Just a flattened mess. Just looked like more or less like I said the parts around Tokyo that had been flattened and wiped out by conventional bombs.

Darwin here that was wiped out with the cyclone it was flattened sort of thing but there was still buildings standing, but up there there wasn’t, where the atom bombs went off.

It was a bit of an awe. Actually my wife Jill and I went back on a visit up there

some years ago now, about 1991 I think. And we went out there and they have got monuments up there and a lot of photos and that and you can still see it. It was pretty frightening to see. I will show you a couple of photographs I have got there of it afterwards.

Oh well the reception wasn’t that good in the start but finally it was all right. We were only using these walkie talkies and smaller sets.

Oh well at the start there they were just getting back together.

They didn’t have much food and that and the Occupation Force supplied quite a lot. But they gradually got out of there the rice areas gradually got back to production and that there was a lot of black market going on.

Oh people that had food and that would be selling it

for different things. What we noticed a lot there, like when I suppose it is just custom but when you see people walking along, the husband would be in the front and just walking or something, carrying nothing, but

coming behind would be the wife carrying everything. And that used to go on but I think that was the custom. But where we were camped was in the ex-Naval base where we were camped and a lot of Japanese used to come in there to work. Like for instance in our shower room in the old Naval Barracks, it was just one long

shower room with probably about twenty or thirty showers along. And we would be standing there having a shower with no clothes on and in walks these women. Japanese women with buckets and everything to clean the place up. And the toilet was a bit further over, in the same room but just a bit further over. And they had separate

all doors on each little toilet thing, but inside the toilet itself was a couple of handle grips that you hung onto and just an oval what's-I-name hole in the floor. And this is upstairs mind you. And one big tunnel the full length of the building sort of thing. So you would just sit in there like that

and everything from all of the other ones was going past underneath. That was the sort of thing it was.

Well the men were working as well, doing other jobs and that as well. And then knock off time they would all go out, they weren’t camped there, they would all go out of the main gate where the guard was. And the best dressed,

you got on guard for a week and you would have to go on every night, or all through the day and night, take it in turns like, and the ones that would be on guard of a day time, they would be on guard on the main gate as well as in the camp and they would see the bloke coming along and the old girl coming along behind they would stop them and make him carry everything, until they got out and then he could change over, but inside there he

had to carry it and the woman didn’t have to carry any.

Oh it wasn’t too good, but the women did. Once they got out they had to carry it. Otherwise,

Well we were glad we could do something and we wanted to go because as I said before you could only get out on the point system, and we thought we would be a lot better off up there working doing something, than down here doing guard duty and getting dressed up and.

Oh well there was a lot of people ended up marrying Japanese girls there and bringing them back to Australia when they came. Not straight off like but over time. But a lot of them too used to sneak a lot of things outside and sell them on the black market.

We seemed to get on pretty well with the Japanese and they got on all right with us. There wasn’t a lot of animosity or anything.

We went up by ship, I think it was called Passo Victory it was a victory ship.

And my mate Cookie and I had to do kitchen duty all of the way up. All the way up it was a…. we used to wash these big, all of the utensils and things, the big soup thing, you had to get inside them, porridge and soup containers and that. Get inside and scrub them all around .we had to do that all the way up,

yeah all of the way up. On the way back we came back on the Kanimbla and we had to do guard duty all of the way back. Couple of bad boys and they were in the lock up all the way from Japan to Australia and we had to take turns at guard duty.

Oh sort of all the time but only after meals, clean up.

Not too much. Just read and get lessons and not to do this or that while you are up there.

Oh well you weren’t supposed to

take any illegal things in there. There is a shortage of sugar for a start up there, and there was quite a lot of people went ashore with sugar and saccharine tablets, and sold them on the black market.

Oh well you weren’t supposed to go out to any,

you had to watch the VD [Venereal Disease] and all of that sort of stuff. You weren’t supposed to go out with females, you could go out and dance and all of that sort of stuff. But there was quite a lot of stuff going on there, a lot of other diseases besides that that you could just catch from anything. Like, I forget all of their names now.

I think I got one of them. I got some sort of disease, it only started there so I reckoned I got it there, the doctors here reckon fifty percent of us that have got it, its hereditary, and none of my family has got it and they all lived to ninety or something years old. And the other fifty percent that’s got it, they don’t know how they got it.

Where it come from and they can’t cure it.

You watch my hand. It’s cramped now. And my feet are the same, look they have all gone cramped now.

Muscle cramp. It’s worse from here down now. What's that? I started off getting it, I would wake up at night and I couldn’t talk and I would start to yell and nothing would come out. We used to sleep on these little camp stretchers, try and get the bloke next to me and no sound would come out. Eventually it would come out in a yell,

yell out .what's the thing they call it? I think what started me, they gave me some injections.

Yeah.

Naomi asked me a question, what we were doing in the Occupation forces, and what we were not supposed to do.

And I said there was lots of things there you could catch without going with a girl.

And this is one of them.

Well they gave us these inoculations for Japanese B Encephalitis and I only got a few maybe twenty metres

from the first aid centre where I got the needle and I fell down on the ground and came up in these things like hives all over me. And then the doctor told me that I would be all right, “You have got to have another two needles yet.” And they gave us the other two needles, not straight away

and from then on I started to get these funny turns, I would wake up in the night and I would find it a bit hard to breathe and I would try to say something and no voice would come out, and I tried to yell at my mate in the next stretcher bed we were sleeping on. And I couldn’t wake him up because I couldn’t yell. And I would keep going and I would eventually yell

and I’d be all right, I was sort of paralysed slightly and then I got over it. That happened about twice, and I had the other needle and it happened again, and then I got the other needle and it happened again and then it gradually went. And I was all right then more or less, well I still had, of a night time when I would wake up sometimes I didn’t have my voice but it wasn’t quite as bad.

And that went on, when I came home and got discharged I was still a bit like that. Finally it went. And they told me not to worry about it, I reported it but they reckoned it was nothing. Then when I signed up to go to Korea, I got the same needles again and the same thing happened, only I got the cramps in my feet

this time and my arms, it wasn’t’ real bad at that time. It finally went a little bit, and that was all through those needles I reckon. I could have got a little bit more of these cramps later on, I will tell you about

what else happened, could have something to do with it. But what it is I have got now you can’t fix, it is there for good.

Oh just tell you on parade. Get you on parade and tell

everyone at the one time.

Oh they would just tell you about the girls, called it not collaborating, what do you call it? Getting together with the girls. Most of them were all right, but some of them were baddies and you had to be very careful not only mixing with them but what you touch

and what you drink and eat and everything. They were only warnings, nothing to say that the Jap’s were bad people or not they were all right, just have to be careful health wise.

It was quite all right, no worries, and like I said a lot of

Occupation force people married Japanese girls and brought them back home as Australian citizens. Quite a lot married while they were there, not early in the piece but as time went on, it went on for quite a while the Occupation Force, well it started 46 or whatever,

right through to the Korean War they were still there.

Bit chilly when you first got there and it was very sad looking, all of the different places that had been

wrecked and all of that. And it wasn’t’ long after we had been there when they had an earthquake, the biggest earthquake they had had since the 20’s. And thousands, lots of people killed, and there was a lot of fires started outside our barracks, not inside, but outside in houses

and the gas works and the power works and everything like that. I was shaken out of bed. We all had to evacuate out, some climbed out of the windows. Because you had ropes out of the window down to the bottom, in these quarters we were in this Naval barracks.

They had on just about every, not every window but every second window. They had concrete pools filled with water so you could jump out of the, you got fire alerts you would just have to jump out of the window, we had one sergeant got hurt getting out, broke his leg but all the rest of us got out onto the

parade ground and everything, where there was a cricket pitch and the cricket pitch just split up the middle under a lot of guys that were standing on it. And they had a swimming pool there, fifty metre long swimming pool and it just cracked, well the bottom, concrete one, all cracked and drained out. It was a rumble like you have

never heard before when it was going on, the earthquake. But they gradually rebuilt after that.

Well there is a big parade ground there which used to be the Japanese parade ground, and we were supposed to get out of the building and congregate over on the parade ground

where there was nothing to fall on you and hit you or, because at that rate it was going this whole building was going to collapse so everyone had to get out without panicking and get over on, line up on this parade ground, hang around there until it was over.

Pretty scary getting out even. I woke up and it was cold

and I had my great coat which we called an overcoat in those days and they had a little half belt across the back, the great coat in those days. And that was draped over the bed keeping you warm, and the arms were tucked in that little half belt at the back to stop them dragging on the floor. So

when my camp stretch started shaking all over the floor and joined up with the bloke next door, bang, bang. I threw my legs out of the bed and tried to put my boots on, put my right foot in my left boot and my left foot in my right boot. Then tried to put my overcoat on my shoulders and tried to put my hands in my sleeves and they were stuck in the little belt at the back. Buy the time I finally got all organised and finally

got out of the window down the rope and over to the parade ground. It was scary. Everyone made it except this man who broke his leg.

Well a bit shuddery under your feet

where we were. There was a lot more damage done further over from where we were than where we were. I can’t remember how many were killed or whatever, but a lot of damage was done. The Japanese, towards the end of the war they built a lot of tunnels under Kure where we were,

there was tunnelling going with the big Naval barracks there and all of the warships, and you could just about anyway in Kure with these tunnels. If there was any air attacks or anything like that they could go under and go anywhere they wanted to go without going through the streets up top you see? And so a lot of those

in the earthquake it closed up.

I went down and had a look. They were where I went, I ended up going to hospital I was playing football and caught the football right on the end of my little finger. This one actually and broke it in three

places. And I had to go in and get a cast up here and a wire up there and a rubber band pulling it out. And while I was on this island it was called Itashima, it was an old Naval place too and we went for a walk around it, and we went flown these tunnels and had a look down there

and it was another place all full of radio equipment and things like that in there. And that was connected up to these tunnels. You could go right under the water and come out right over the other side where we were camped, from this island. They had lots of things hidden in these tunnels too.

My wife Jill and I went over there and we had a look all around the Naval barracks, went on a ship there when we went back on a visit in 91.

Well they were pretty dark, you couldn’t really see much, just a tunnel through the dirt, they weren’t concrete lined or anything. They could fall in very

easily the ones we went in. The communication ones like, but the ones where they had all of the bombs, they were really done up like an underground thing, they had walls done up and everything. They wouldn’t fall down easily.

I don’t know, don’t ask me. They were just like that.

Oh you could stand up in them. They mainly used for getting message from one spot to another, instead of radio and all of that. Communication trenches underground.

About a metre and a half a couple of metres, you wouldn’t drive a car through there or anything. The ones I saw I don’t know what the other ones, the other ones where they had all of the gear they were a lot bigger of course/. They were like this room, bigger, longer, about this size but longer.

I only went down it about twice I think and had a look. But they also used to have these channels all over the place we had one come right next to these barracks we were in. And the Japanese used to have these sampans boats,

and they would come along, and these showers that I was telling you about before where you would go in and have a shower and use the toilet. And the toilets were one great tunnel under the floor, and they used to go to one big exit point and down to these channels, these canals rather. And they had big openings there. And these sampans

used to come around and collect all of the human waste in, they opened up the door and let it all out into these sampans. And they used to have honey carts we would call them, things they used to pull around the street and collect all of the peoples toilet waste. Take it out and put it on the vegetables and things. We used to call them honey carts and

and the sampans used to come up the canals and collect it we used to call them honey boats. They used to do the same thing. And one night my mate Cookie and my other mate from Geelong, Hochy, but this time my sister and her husband who was in charge of the

supply of all of the clothing and all of that in Japan for the Australian troops. They had moved to married quarters, which in a straight line were only about five or six hundred metres from where we eventually camped in a new place. In between our, where

we were camp and my sisters house there was one of these canals, and she invited me over and my two mates for my twenty-first birthday. Over to their place. And so instead of going all the way around by road to their place, we decided to take a short cut across and we had been drinking a bit. I had had a few beers by now.

Drinking a little bit of rum. And we decided to go across and swim across this canal. And they had dropped some stuff, this honey boats had been up there and dropped a bit of stuff so we got it all over us. And when we got to the other side and we got to my sisters place, we knocked on the door and we had our boots off and my sister took one look at us and she had to go and get some clothes that belonged

to my brother in law and put on us. She wouldn’t let us in the house, then we could go in and celebrate my twenty-first birthday. These things happen.

Oh not that much further probably about five k’s right around. But we had been sent out there from the main camp

in town because, there was about five of us all mixed up with, we had been taking Morse code a bit long and we were all going nutty. Giving us headaches and all sorts of, doing twelve hours a day listening to Morse code and for sixteen days in a row, we were doing it for a fair while so they opened up

what they called a receivers station, out from the main place a little bit. And we had all of these high speed radio sets set up there and all we had to do was tune them in and send them down the telephone line to where the main signal receiving station was. So that’s all we had to do while we recovered from this.

Oh just that you get mad headaches and ringing in the ears. I think that’s what sent me deaf. Plus a few things going off in my years in Korea.

That’s all just sending messages, receiving messages.

And guard duty, that s all the work we do. You sit behind the, receiving Morse code for twelve hours in a row, knock off for lunch of course blah, blah, ditty dit in your ear all of the time it really gets at you.

Oh just guard the camp we were in. We didn’t have it the last place I was just talking about, but the main Japanese Naval barracks we had guards right around the camp itself, and on the main gate a couple on the main gate and used to have twenty-five guards but only twenty-four had to go on duty

the other one had to go on but he didn’t have to go on duty, he just stopped in the guard hut. And he was the best dressed man, the best dressed guy. Man on the parade they had before the inspection ,they had an inspection before you mount the guard and we used to take it in turns my two friends and myself, dress one another up when it was our turn to go on guard, we would dress one another up,

and he was called a stick man and he didn’t have to do guard duty he had to go on but he didn’t have to do the duty. So we used to do one another up and so we used to win it in turns and so everyone used to call us stick, Stick Parker and Stick Hochy and Stick Cook.

Pretty important, one has passed away now but the other one still lives in Geelong, I was talking to him the other day actually on the phone. They were pretty important.

Most of our leave was together, and my other mate that I spent a lot of my younger days with, he was in the Naval

cadets too and he went into the navy. He arrived up there in a ship and came over to our camp and we managed to get hi ma bit drunk and we had to carry him back to the boat. When the boat left it came back to Australia. And eh spent the trip back in the anchor room, locked

up. Because he came back he was drunk and he climbed up the anchor to get onto the ship so he didn’t go past the guard. They usually have a guard on the gang plank. They caught him and they locked him up. He is now residing in Forster, just down from Taree a bit.

No just like I said we used to go out on the boat fishing and sailing around. Mainly just sailing around. We would get the rati’s from the cookhouse, four days rations and away we would go for four days, camping out. No we didn’t play up, except

when you were up in Tokyo we played up a bit on our nights off and that, had a few beers. Not in a bad way or anything, just normal drunk.

Well pretty busy.

They straightened it out, it took a lot of straightening out. Actually about a couple of hundred metres down the road from us was where General Macarthur had his office just down the road from us. And we played up there a bit because we were standing outside his place one day smoking, showing off and smoking. One leg crossed over the other, leaning up, not that

we loitered there, the guards come and shifted us. Anyway.

Oh you were not supposed to smoke there we were doing it on purpose; you rolled your own in those days. Another time we met a Merchant Navy man down in one of the beer halls in Tokyo and he took us

down to his ship, he was the purser on an American ship, he came from Sydney actually, an Australia. And he was a purser on this American Merchant ship, he took us back there and he gave us this drink, pineapple juice was what it was supposed to be, and it was just plain stuff and it had a bit of

crushed pineapple on the top. It turned out it was Ouzo. If you have ever heard what that is. The glasses were about that big. We just went out light like, and we just woke up in the first aid room on the ship, the operating stretcher. Never had another one of those

for a long while. Just before we came up here was the next lot of Ouzo I had. Down in Forster too, that was at Forster too.

Radio operator. Just a radio operator for, we had our signals room set up in this place that they used to called Nagai Building and we changed it to

Empire house because it had Empire troops in it. And we had a radio set-up in there and we used to send signals all over Japan to the other occupying troops, like the Poms and the kiwis and that, but mainly to our troops who were down in Kurei and that

And we were doing that twenty-four hours a day, shift work. And in the same building we were in we had some military police and dispatch riders only they didn’t ride bikes they drove jeeps. And it was right across from the Emperor’s palace, you could look out the window and see right across to

the Japanese Emperor’s palace. But we only stayed there for three months and then we went down the bottom and joined our main body .the troops, each nation used to send a company of troops up there to mount guard on the Emperor’s palace for about a month

and they used to stop it at the same building and we used to look after all of their messages and everything down to the main mob in Kure and Aramura, wherever Australian troops were. We just kept up the flow of communications and traffic.

Yeah we were doing that as well from there, to Tasmania, sending messages to Tasmania by Morse code.

Oh it was all in code. Didn’t know what the messages were just got the code letters that they wrote it out in.

Lots of the other messages, just to our own people and that up there, a lot of that was just plain language. That was only, “I need so many blankets or petrol or fuel.” Anything like this everyday running of the unit.

We only mainly went to the beer halls and had a few beers and dances and came back again.

No. We didn’t others did but. We were mainly, when we moved from in Tokyo for instance, when we moved from there from the

Ebatsu place into town to work from town instead of going backwards and forwards every day, a lot of the people that were on guard duty at the palace camped out there at the same place. We got friendly with the Ghurkhas that were camped out there and they didn’t drink beer or anything like that. And we went out and visited them a couple of times and they made us drink beer.

They even made us, we were walking up to the guard house to go into the camp, and of course they have got guards on the front. And you hear the voice, “Halt.” “Its okay,” we said, because we were half stung by then. We had come by train out to this place. “Halt.” “Its okay it’s only just a couple of mates, we’re friends of yours.” And we kept walking. “Halt.”

We kept walking and we heard this clicking of a round in the magazine and we stopped .Anyway he let us in and we went to the canteen and met our friends in there and they wear these kukri, big curved knives. And anyway the idea of those if they withdraw them they have to take blood, if they pull them out of the scabbard. And this mate of mine Cookie says, “Show us

your kukri.” “Oh we can’t. Not to take draw blood.” “That’s okay pull it out.” So he pulled it out and said, “Right now we have to draw blood.” He says, “We make you blood brothers.” So he gashed our arms and there I am and you rub them together and you become blood brothers to a Ghurkha. That’s what happens when you drink. They were laughing their head off because they were only drinking soft drink.

Great blokes, terrific. I didn’t have much trouble, the only what's-is-name between different troops that I saw up there was a little bit between American and Poms,

but not much and it was mainly between Pakistanis and, even that far back, 1946, Pakistanis and Indians. They used to fight amongst themselves even up there in those days, they’re still fighting. But they used to be on they used to argue a lot.

I couldn’t understand the language. Mainly screaming at each other and throwing rocks and things like that. They weren’t pulling their knives out and fighting one another like that, just arguing.

Oh yes that went on

for quite a while up there. People sold their rations to a girl for a night out sort of thing. Different things like that. Souvenirs, things like that. Souvenirs to send home. Black market wasn’t much on our part, it was more on the Japanese side, they used to use the black market a lot.

I think it recovered all right, they gradually rebuilt a lot of the houses, quite a lot of the houses were only mud and straw but they rebuilt them and other ones as well. And when we went back

there on a visit in 1991 you wouldn’t know the place. You know, all of the modern things out in the paddy fields for growing vegetables and that when it is snowing. They were doing things that they never did before, I think they come along very good.

Oh when I went back the second time; oh it was it had improved quite a lot then. Quite a lot, they had their army mobile again. Everything was mobile again. There was cars and buses but there was lots of people,

oh no it was quite good.

Finishing up? Well we left our time was up, we could get discharged and

we left on the Kanimbla to come home on Melbourne Cup Day 1947. We boarded the ship Melbourne Cup Day 1947 and headed back to Australia to come back via

New Guinea. And then down to Sydney. And we did guard duty all of the way back, my mate and myself. Because there was a lot of bad boys that had actually been selling things on the black market in Kure and they had been gaoled for it.

And they were coming back and we were on guard duty guarding them on the way back. Some of them had been selling stores, like army stores on the black market to the Japanese, getting Japanese money for it and getting different things, or changing it over into Australian money. This is towards the end, when we went up there for instance

we had enough supplied to last us for six months in Indonesia and that was supposed to be all handed back in when we went to Japan, but the persons in charge of us, they let it loaded onto the ship and it went up there. Things like spare tyres and all of that sort of stuff. Sold it up

there and he got caught, he was an officer and he got caught and was sent home. But there was lots of that sort of stuff going on up there. And the people that got caught of course a lot didn’t, but there was some of them on that ship and we were guarding them on the way home.

Oh yeah.

Actually one of them I met up here later on. He was a bulldozer contractor on the road up here years ago. So we came home from that. This chap that I was telling you about before, like

I said the ration was still on, even in 1947 when we came home. Everything was still rationed, clothes and everything. So you could wear your army uniforms to work. So I got a job in the PMG and my mate he went he went, bloke that was in the, he had only just come home from the navy, the other bloke.

Okay when do I start now?

Well we got back here and it was time to start work again because everything was rationed and I was wearing army clothes so I decided I would try my hand, try to get in

the PMG as a telegraphist in the Post Office because I knew the Morse Code and everything, so I went and applied and they said, “We haven’t any vacancies at the moment but you can join up as a telephone linesman until a vacancy comes open and then you can transfer.” So I went over to this line depot which was only a few kilometres from where I lived in Sydney

and I went into the place and I was accepted in there and everything, and then I saw this chap in similar clothes to me. Bits of old army clothing. And he had just come home from Japan too; he had been up there in the engineers. And we became best mates then, from then on. And he was already in the Citizens Army, he said, “Come and

join that with me.” So I said, “Okay.” And I went and joined the Citizen Army. So we used to go backwards and forwards together to the CMF and work all the week together, well different spots. He was a linesman and I was a linesman. And in those days you just had a little trailer with all of your gear in it and when you finished one job you would just ring up the depot and they would come ands shift you to another one.

And we were doing that. He is a pretty good bloke and we were getting on well and we decided. I have lost where I am now.

Well we used to go there of a weekend and some weekends we would go out in the

country and learn about, I was still doing signal work but he was doing engineering work and I was teaching other people Morse code and how to use the sets. And that’s what we would do; sometimes we would go out and operate out in the bush doing that. And we had two camps where you would go out for a whole week.

But you didn’t get paid in those days. Didn’t get paid for it at all it was all voluntary.

Oh they were all young people only eighteen. Seventeen and eighteen. And then I ended up a sergeant and we used to visit the sergeants mess quite a lot. Anyway that went on for a fair while

and the Korean War started.

Well when I first heard about it I was out fixing telephones. Oh before we did that we had to do a six month course before we were allowed to go and fix telephones, that was early on when we first started, I forgot about that, we were linesmen in

training and then we became proper linesmen. I was up a pole fixing telephone lines when I heard that the Korean War, and the Australian government was calling for a thousand volunteers that didn’t really need any training, they could go up there pretty well straight away to fill up the battalion that was already

there in the Occupation Force in Japan. They only had about three hundred troops where they should have had about nine hundred or something like that. So they were calling for volunteers to get up there and get it to strength and send it across to Korea. So I said, “Oh what's the good of being in the CMF

if you don’t go and do the right thing?” so I got down off the pole and got into my vehicle and drove into the military base in Paddington, that’s where you had to go to sign up, went in and joined up. I had a straight eight,

1935 straight eight Buick Convertible with the thing in the back. Back to the, I had already had a motorbike but I sold it. Back to the job, I got up the pole and was finishing the job and I heard this brrm, brrm, and it was my mate that I had met, and he had

a Harley Davidson, 1942 model Dudley Willow Harley Davidson he used to ride to work. “Where have you been?” and I said, “I have been” oh I forgot a piece. Before that before he came along, I was up the pole and the foreman came around. And he said, “Where have you been?”

He was doing his rounds checking that , “Where have you been?”, he said, “ I was around here before.” I said, “I went in and joined up.” He said, “You stupid so and so.” And away he went. So I got back up the pole again, then I heard this brrm, brrm, and this mate Jack said, “Where have you been?” and I said, “I have been over and joined up.” He said,

“Who is going to look after you?” he said, “I am going to look after you.” I said, “Oh all right.” So I climbed down the pole and I took him over in the car and he joined up. Come back again and away he went and I gets up the pole again and around comes the foreman again and he says, “Where were you this time?” and I said, “I took Jack in to join up. “ “So and so, stupid so and so.” Anyway away we went.

And I had forgotten to apply for permission to join up, anyway they didn’t stop me, this is PMG, they said, “All right away you go.” And the same thing for Jack, they didn’t’ stop him. So away we went. And when I come back, when I got back from, I am skipping a bit aren’t I?

Hang on we finished with the Occupation Force and we’re back doing to PMG that’s right .and then there is all of the time I was racing motorbikes I have missed out and everything.

As well as being in the CMF I used to go

motorbike racing. And

I had a twin VSA 1948 model I think it was. Anyway I used to race that and the other bloke Jack that had the Harley Davidson, he used to go to the races, he didn’t race in them, he used to go on the trips up to Bathurst

to watch the Bathurst races, and down to Melbourne we would go on, we were in the Motor Cycle club and we used to go on tours, and if you passed the captain you were fined. It wasn’t like these Harley Davidson gangs that you get now. We used to have motor bike races and everything organised. And if you did the wrong thing you were fined or kicked out.

So it was all pretty well looked after. I have forgot where I am again.

Oh yeah. Well we used to do these races, every couple of weekends I would go on races. And my mother wasn’t very impressed about it. So I sold the

motorbike and bought this straight eight Buick convertible. And also because I had met a young lady called Irene and I used to take my mother out. I bought the car actually so I could take my mother out for drives and that.

And so, now where am I up to?

I took her out a couple of times in it and the way I met her and somehow or other, I hadn’t met her at this time and I went to a party at her place where my mates girlfriend was at.

So we all ended up at her house and she was locked in her bedroom for some reason, she couldn’t get out. And doing the big brave thing I shouldered it open. She was standing the other side and it nearly flattened her, hit her in the face, anyway that’s how I met her. Anyway we started going out together and that, we became pretty good friends

but then of course I joined up.

Well, I have got a photo there I will probably show you later. By this time my mate Jack had found a girlfriend too and the four of us were going out together, on our final leave before I went to go.

When I told her, at first I told her that I had joined up and she said, “You nong head.” Anyway so we went out and sort of celebrated, not celebrated but had a night out the four of us. After that, that’s right, my mate Jack and I decided to go to the pictures

by ourselves without the girlfriends. And we decided to go to the Regent Picture show in Sydney which was showing The Third Man I think it was, the name of the picture. And we decided not to tell the girls. And we came from the, I came from my place and I

met Jack and we went through Hyde, got off the bus and walking through Hyde Park in Sydney, just past the war memorial have you ever seen that there? The big pool there. Walking past that across to go to the Regent Picture show in George Street I think it was. We just get to the memorial there and five

louts accosted us and told us we shouldn’t be going to, they were commos [Communists] and told us we shouldn’t be going to Korea. And they were going to get stuck into us. And in those days we wore these web belts about so wide and two brass buckles on the front and you just click them together and a couple of little buckles on the back. So we took our belts off and you sort of double them over

and grab and you have got the buckles here. And these five attacked us, and three of them we threw in the pool, because we had learned unarmed combat and everything. So we threw three of them in the pool, Remembrance Pool it was called. And the other two took off. So we put on our belts again, we over into the picture show

and we were standing in the queue going up into the thing there, and we forgot our tickets so we had to go out and who should be standing there but one of Jacks girlfriend’s friends, another female like. One of his girlfriend’s friends and she told the girls that we had gone to the pictures without them. So we weren’t very popular but they let us go anyway, and away we went.

Communists you know, they were savage.

They weren’t like the people you see around these days the young people you see around with back to front caps and baggy pants down to here. They weren’t like that, just more or less normal clothes, but they just didn’t look

right.

“You shouldn’t be going over there. “ They were going to do us in, started to attack us.

Yeah because it was not right for Australia to be sending troops over there.

Oh well that, actually a story leading up

to that, when I was working in the radio factory, Standard Telephone and Cables in Sydney and then to be a radio operator of a night time we used to play football, inter-factory football. And also as well as inter-factory football but inter-department, there was different departments

in this big factory that I worked. Valve department and radio department and this, and the opposing team we were playing one day they had this fellow in there and he was calling himself Joe. And he wasn’t all that big, but his mate was a big fellow, and the pretty big fellow used to paly football too, and they were in the valve department, and I was in a different department.

And this Joe was a proper commo and so was his mate. And they were trying to, they issued out pamphlets and everything, trying to convert you to communism. Joe wasn’t his name, I called him Joe because of Joe Stalin. I nicknamed him Joe.

Oh just, it’s that long ago I can’t remember the exact words now, but it was don’t take

any notice of the government here and all of that. Just all Communist talk anyway. This is also while I was going to the night school and playing football. Anyway they kept on they wouldn’t let me rest,

they ganged up on me and gave me a bit of a thumping one day. Anyway I ended up playing football with them, their department the big bloke was playing. And I really got stuck into him. Ankle tackling him. In those days it wasn’t three blokes in to tackle on like they do these days. Just one up around the neck, one around the waist and one the legs, just one bloke would

tackle another bloke around the legs or that and that was that. And so I used to hit this fellow straight on, with my shoulders and around the legs and that. And down he went and he left me alone after that. Anyway why I brought that up because when we came back and worked for the PMG and had to do the six months training for it,

who should be there in this same school but Joe, not the big fellow, just Joe. And I came into the room and we used to sit in these big rows in the school. Had this big bench in front of us like that and we used to sit on these stools and do our work and learn to

do this and that. Anyway this day I had just sat down like this and reading a book and this Joe came in and kicked the stool from underneath me and I fell back like that and hit my head on the bench behind me. So I up and flattened him. I nearly got expelled from school but they didn’t. Before that too I forgot about that too. When I was in Japan and I was

on guard duty on night I heard this voice, “How you going Bob? Going to join the party?” and there he was in the Occupation Force. Outside the gate, I said, “You better get going or you’ll get this bayonet in you.”

I didn’t like them, and that’s one of the things, and the other thing. When I finished my thing at the

Marconi School of wireless learning to be a wireless operator and I went to get a ship and they said, “Oh you can’t become a radio operator unless you have got a ship.” And I went to the ship and they said, “Oh you have to be in a union before you can get a ship.” So I went to join the union and the union was very Communistic, and they said,

I didn’t know whether this Joe had been having a go at them or not, but they said, “You can’t join the union unless you have got a ship.” So there I am, that’s one of the reasons I joined to go to Korea. So where was I now.

The Communist Party disbanded and they all went into the Labour Party. Yeah.

Are we working now?

Before I went over? Only through the news.

Well mainly started, heard about it more or less from when it started. Because being in the CMF and working on telephones we just heard it

like that. It was a bit of a shock I suppose. There was rumours even about them starting something before I came home from up there even they were talking about it, and then it finally happened, so it wasn’t all that much of a surprise for me

when it happened.

Went to Ingleburn and we did a bit of review, what do you call it?

Yeah a bit of a refresher,

that’s all not much. It was only within six weeks we were in the front line. Over in Korea from when I joined up. And so we did a refresher course there and then the first lot of us went over by plane. We flew from Mascot to

the Philippines and from the Philippines we got stuck there overnight for an extra day because there was a cyclone between us and Japan, and the planes weren’t all the big modern ones they have these days.

So we had to spend an extra night there, and that happened to be the American pay day so they got us over in the canteen and shouted us quite a few beers.

It was a DC4 I think.

Well it was pretty good; we didn’t get right into the town

and go out on the town or anything, we only stopped at the airport where the American Army camp or whatever it was was. We stopped there and they took us over to their canteen and shouted us and we had to stay another day because of the cyclone.

Someone pinched my hat there, we were told specifically not to sell your hats to the Yanks, someone stole mine, I didn’t sell it but they didn’t believe me. So the extras we spent there I spent with a towel wrapped around my head to keep the sun off.

Yeah eventually when I got up to Japan.

Oh they didn’t tell us really what to expect. Things were in a bad way when we got there because the North Koreans had sprung a surprise sort of thing and pushed them all the way down to the bottom just about. When we first got there, we went by ship

from Japan to Korea we left on the 27th of September and down at the wharf, had a big send off on the wharf, we were on a Victory ship and funnily enough the ship was the same ship what my brother had been on when he went to Borneo in the Second World War after he got back from the Middle East.

And it left on the 27th and they had a band down there and it played for us and all of that. My sister was still in Japan at the time so she came down to the wharf .And the band was playing We’re a Bunch of Bastards. And then I was very worried that my sister might be upset by it and then I thought oh she is an old soldier anyway.

And away we went.

It’s a song we used to sing,

\n[Verse follows]\n “We’re a bunch of bastards, bastards are we,\n We all hail from Aussie, the a-hole of the world.”\n

And the band was playing music, but we were singing the song. So we got over to

Korea, unloaded and they put us on a train and took us up to a place and we started doing patrols. And that’s when we had our first casualties. One of our Bren gun carriers ran over a mine and blew up and killed the officer that was, and the Bren gun carrier plus the driver, they

were the first casualties. Started doing patrol work there, I didn’t have a motorcycle at that time. I was laying phone lines and doing radio work and this and that and then some of the boys got a little bit tired of this and they shot through and joined the American 24th Division

was heading north, and they wanted to get into the action see? So they went and joined up with the Yanks. Half a dozen or more of them, anyway they went in with the Yanks and then they came back to the battalion. Someone wanted to, someone put a report in over to Japan and the military police arrived

all spic and span in their uniforms and we were all dirty and the CO [Commanding Officer] whose name was Colonel Green at the time. He comes from Grafton New South Wales, and he was having a shave in the rear vision mirror of the vehicle and all of these provosts arrived. And he said, “What are they doing here?” “They have come to arrest the people that went

with the Yanks and take them back to Japan. He says, “Get the hell out of here; I will look after this I am the boss.” He sent them packing, he fined all of the boys that were in it and put them back in their unit. And one of them was captured the same day as me and he was in one of the other companies. And he was one of the ones that was AWL fighting with the yanks.

Terrific, this is the start of how I ended up with him, at this place where I was just talking about, our last patrol there and they put us on planes and flew us up

to a place called, I forget the name. Anyway we flew up to join the American 24th Division and lead the attack up north. Kimpo airfield that’s where we went, and when we got there, all of

the vehicles arrived by road and a motorbike arrived on the back of a truck but there was no rider. Signal officer called for volunteers to ride the bike, and it was offered to a mate of mine, and I think he is a bit cunning, he reckoned his legs were too short to ride that bike, it was a 1942

model American Harley Davidson, and they are only so far off the ground. Anyway he let me open my mouth and volunteer and I became a dispatch rider for Colonel Green the CO. I wasn’t with him all of the time, in-between I would be still laying lines or something like that. But mainly I was with him, that’s how we used to go

into action as a company of infantry folded in the front mounted on the American tanks at this particular time, and a jeep with some snipers in it came next, and then the CO Colonel Green and the intelligence officer

in their vehicle and then behind them, me. I was the get away man. Sometimes they used to send me out the front, I think it was just to see if there was any mines there. Anyway that’s how we used to go along and then come into the action and they would disperse and bring up re-enforcements and attack and we would disperse on the side, and that’s how we kept going up.

Even the Yanks reckoned he was just it. He was the youngest commanding officer in the Second World War, Australian. He was only thirty- something I think. Anyway he was pretty good.

He was he just knew what he was doing and he looked after everyone. One particular spot we were at we had to go across this bridge that was broken, we had just captured this place and he wanted to get across to the other side and get into the enemy on the other side, and there was a low level crossing sort of thing there that the Americans were building.

An American tank chap came up and told Colonel Green that they couldn’t get across because the river was too deep. Greenie said, “I want to send a couple of companies over there.” “Oh you can’t do it till the morning man.” “Like hell I am sending them across!” He waded them across, they went across anyway. Went over and they

did a pretty good job over there, and as he walked off, I was standing there, as he walked off the Yanks said, “God damn he is a man. What a man he is.” Anyway we went across the other side and headed north and got to a place called Chong Neu and we captured that and we were dropped back one and some English chaps took over in front of us

and we were off the side of the road. Not a big road like you see around here of course, just a dirt, and Greenie’s batman set up his little camping tent there for him, and I was about maybe twenty metres down from them and I set up my little half man tent thing. And there was a big explosion and the Chinese had sent over a, not the Chinese, whoever was up there

the Chinese and Koreans, sent a shell over and it had burst in the trees, and he was siting up in front of his tent like this talking to the batman and the shell burst in the trees in the hill up behind him there and shrapnel came down and went through his back into his stomach, and they took him away and he died the next day. Killed him.

Anyway,

Sorrow of course disbelief and sorrow he was a terrific bloke.

I have got a photo of him over there, him and me and another bloke after we came back. He just died down in Adelaide about three or four months ago. Padre Phillips, about ninety-two years old.

Well he talked to everyone separately, not separately but groups. I am not sure where he was at that particular time because they took Colonel Green to the first aid, back from the front line to get medical attention, he either died on the way

there or when he got there.

Wasn’t just long after that, we used to called him Bed Check Charlie, flying around in a little light plane dropping hand grenades over the side.

They used to do things like that. After that we had to withdraw, we were withdrawing and going over in another direction and I had to wait at the side of the road because there was a turn off, I went up and had a look where it went to and it only went to a little village, so I went back and stopped there, and as all the troops came along and the vehicles and that I directed them not o go up there and go the right way and everything

and this Bed Check Charlie came over and drooped a couple near me. I don’t think he was throwing at me, he wouldn’t be able to see me, but at the convoy of things, but they went off near me. Anyway they all went but one vehicle came along and it was the new CO the one that was going to take over, and he said,

I told him not to go up there to go that way and he says, “No we’ll go up here.” I said, “No it doesn’t go anywhere.” And he wouldn’t believe me, and he went up and came back and, “It goes nowhere don’t let anyone go up there.”

Back there, oh well we have gone past there.

Oh well it was very desolate and

we landed right down the bottom of Korea, Pusan and it wasn’t all blown up or anything like that down there. There was a beach there and it looked peaceful, it didn’t look all that bad. Smelt a bit thought,

not a very favourable smell at all, as a matter of fact it stunk. But as far as anything else goes couldn’t see very much because of the time and the weather. I didn’t have much of an impression at all really, good or bad, just indifferent.

Well they put us on a train and it was a terrible trip, all hunched up and going very slow, and we went from there to a place called Taigu where we had a bit of a lecture from the English chap that was in charge of us and the two English battalions that were there.

There was three battalions two English, well one Scotch and the other English and us made up the three battalions in the Brigade, whatever they call it. Called 27th Brigade, and they had this what’s-is-name badge with a nine in

each corner., three nines are twenty-seven. That was, he gave us a bit of a lecture and away we went, we got the lecture when we got to Taigu when we got off the train and we went out to this place and set up our camp and started doing patrols around the place.

His name was Brigadier

Code.

Well usually a company. One of the infantry companies. See we had A, B, C, D company and headquarters company. I was in headquarters company, headquarters supplied the signals and the telephone lines out to each company. But when they went out on patrol a lot of times they would only go in ten men and like that.

Corporal and ten men, they’d all have hand grenades and have rifles and sub machine guns etcetera and they would go out on a patrol to find any stragglers or someone trying to sneak up on you or whatever. Anyone who has come down from north trying to set up down there.

As I said that’s where we had our first casualties when the Bren gun carrier ran over a mine, killed the officer and a driver and after a few of those patrols there we wert back into this Taigu place and they put us on a plane and we flew up to Kimpo Airport where we

joined up with American 24th Division and headed up north.

Battles? Oh hard to remember them all. But the one, we headed up there and towards Pyongyang capital of North Korea

and we were going to this place, American Airborne had dropped a mob of parachuters down to onto the North Koreans. The North Koreans evidently had a

train load of American prisoners of war in the tunnel there, and so the American 187th Airborne dropped a mob down there because they were behind the lines, to see if they could cut them off and see what they could do. And we were putting in an attack to join, they got surrounded and everything

the Airborne mob, and we put in an attack to break through to them which we did and then they found the train in the tunnel and they had all been killed. Been shot. So they said, but later on I met up with one when I was a prisoner he had got away from there and he was still on the other side he was still a prisoner. So they weren’t all

massacred, one I know wasn’t.

Well it didn’t do all of that much, there was a bit of dislike at that moment because when we first went in the English blokes had been in to put an attack on this hill

and they got knocked off it and they put in another attack and the retook it. And one of the blokes that had been wounded, and the North Koreans had cut his testicles out and shoved in his mouth. And then shot him again. That didn’t put

the people out of that bloke’s battalion didn’t go much on that at all. And a bit later on up the road I was standing there and this jeep with this group of North Korean prisoners on it, sitting on the bonnet with no clothes on. These were the ones that were captured from this mob that shot this one that I just said.

Dove up and he jammed the brakes on and they were all sitting on the bonnet and they all went phwick. Straight onto the, that’s what they thought of the, because of what they had done, and that wasn’t the only one that they had done it too either, they were like that so that was a bit of revenge on blokes that probably didn’t’ do it.

But that’s the way it was. And at this place that the motorcycles and all of the other transport turned up, a motorbike and no one to ride it and like an idiot I volunteered.

Oh it was just a road and on the one side was a paddy fields and that and the other side a few hills, and we were going along like that. A tank in front of us with a company of our infantry on it. And we came under

fire from both sides of this place called the apple orchard. And we came under fire from them so the mob on the tanks jumped off. The tanks pulled up and the mob on the tanks put in an attack into this paddy field, apple orchard rather. And I was sitting on my bike and

thought I might as well joined them. And the CO’s radio operator is down on the floor behind his radio, and there is bullets going everywhere, and the company that was on the tank headed into the apple orchard and started attacking. And so I went in with them, and because I had been riding along with my Owen gun

some dirt had got into the bridge part of it, so when I loaded it, on the side there is a silly sort of a safety catch they had, and it had got full of that dirt and it didn’t release properly and as I pulled the trigger the bolt didn’t go forward properly, didn’t even have enough force to push a bullet into the thing. So I hit it on a rock and that fixed it up.

Fixed the gun all right. Anyway the riflemen fixed that up all right and got out of there and away they went further forward and then all of the CO and the intelligence office and a couple of snipers they into it from the other side. There was a bit of a battle went on then.

We were lucky that there was behind us was the rifle company coming up. And then from there we kept on going. We pulled up for a while and then we had an American Air Force officer with us, and he was to be with this leading group, our CO

and the snipers and that and he had a radio and he was to keep in touch with the spotter planes and they used to take it in turns, he was a pilot too, they used to come down and he was to go with one of the infantry mob on the ground and learn what they were doing, see what both sides were. So he would call the, he would see the situation there and he would scall the spotter plane and the spotter plane would get the artillery or the fighter

planes to come in and strafe it or bomb it. And so we had him in the advancing party. And I got left out there by myself at one stage and got dark and there was all of these figures running down off the side of the road, and so I went down, I thought they were Yanks off the side of the road, and I went down and they were all Chinamen.

North Koreans rather not Chinese, all North Koreans, and I could see they had a red patch on their shoulder so I got out of there fast then I was riding behind one of the tanks a little bit after that and there was a lot of dead bodies around and the tank ran over one of the bodies

and it come all over me, clomp. I had my mouth shut though I was right. And that’s the way we kept on going all of the way up, until we got back to where Greenie was killed see?

It stunk, that’s what I thought.

No I was just glad I had my mouth shut, not much you can do about it. Especially there because we didn’t have anything to wash in or bathe in, nothing like that around.

Well it

was a bit of a shock, but there was too much going on to worry about it. Well that was, we got there on the twenty-eighth of September and we got on along up the track and well it was, we went all over the place, we went up, we were nearly up to the Manchurian border

and we had to come back, had to retreat and come back. So it was that was in September / October we were going up there, April I got caught. Going up and back, started to snow

by this time of course and it was very cold up there and we had to pull back. We pulled back and went into reserve like have a spell and that’s when we got called out again to go back up.

By this time it was April.

Well up until I got that you would share a hole, fighting pit or wherever you were, or little tent, two of you together

and you would share the hole and of a night you would have to go on guard of a night, what do you call it? Got to be on guard, in case anyone attacked, and used to have a telephone cable going from one hole to the next so you kept pulling to wake up the other ones that were going to sleep. And the snow was coming in your eyes like that and

we were camped at this school house we were there for about three weeks, not in the school house, out in the thing and I fell over a cliff there about twenty feet, landed on the side of my head and shoulder, kinked my neck and they gave me some Brushes shaving creme, Barbasol to rub on it because they reckoned it had something in it. Something

good for strains and pains, that’s all they did for it. It was in that spot we left, one of the companies went on patrol, five blokes an officer, a corporal and three privates, went on a patrol to check out where the Chinese were and,

because they had come into it by now and they got caught all five of them. And strangely enough after about two weeks I think it was they let three of them go, which included the officer and the corporal and that and they kept two others. One was the bloke I came up here with,

Don Buck and a bloke called Tom Wallace now lives down in Sydney, he is still going. But the other three came home, and I think they have all passed on now. There is only one left now out of the original five that were captured I think.

Don’t know propaganda I think. Because the bloke that came up here with me, Don Buck and Tom Wallace they weren’t very co-operative. Tom Wallace down in Sydney he is about six foot two or three or something, pretty tall. And he is marching along, going crooked at them

and one of the blokes there, from the Chinese blokes, he wasn’t Chinese he was, I keep forgetting what they are called now, that nationality?

Mongolian. He was a big one, about six foot five or six and he had a Burp gun a Russian Burp gun. And he just

swung it out because Tom was going crook at this big bloke swung his gun around like that, only using one hand and just blew the top off a tree and old Tom went. Yeah.

Oh well I had to take messages, as I said I was with the CO and the intelligence officer and the snipers

and as I said the CO’s vehicle has got a radio in it and the radio operator he is in charge of the signallers in each company. So the CO says send a message to A company or B company oo do this or that and the radio can’t get through, so I have to go, me, on the bike.

Away I go, he would give me a message to take that’s one of the things to do that, or go in a different direction and get the mortar platoon to shoot some mortars over there or back to the rear echelon and get them to bring up more ammunition.

This is if see all of the time they had these American walkie talkies, they only had a range of three miles, if it is a clear go., if you are surrounded by hills and that and you cant get through properly I have to go and do these things. Some of the trips I had to do were up the side of a mountain, no roads or tracks, on a stupid great Harley.

Its not like a what's-is-name pommy bike with a high, the thing about them is though they can stand a few knocks., weren’t too bad like that.

Well it was a 1942 one I have got photos of it there. But it is not as big as the ones you see getting around today. The big ones where they have got their feet stuck up like this and the

handle bars up here. More like an ordinary bike, but still looks like a Harley but a smaller scale. And no telescopic forks on the front, getter forks on the front. No tools with them and no pumps or nothing to fix it. If you got it you were just there, and if you run out of petrol,

a few times I had to call in on the Yanks, the first time I went in, “You got any petrol?” “Hey man what's that?” I said, “Petrol you know for my bike.” “Petrol?” “Oh gasoline.” “Ah gasoline man.” Didn’t know the words, they fill it up for me and away I would go. But

no spare parts no nothing., but they were brand new bikes well more or less, the one I had only had five hundred miles on it, not kilometres, left over from the Second World War.

Well up until I got it, as I said before you

always kept in pairs, and you always shared a hole, and after I got that, sometimes I got in with my mate who was in PMG with me and joined up with me and everything, and he got the other motorbike and he is away and I am away, he was the second in command dispatch rider and he was in the rear a bit, but he had to bring messages up to the front as well.

But he, I forget what I was talking about now?

You’re by yourself, like if you are in the field you have always got a mate there to protect you and you protect him and you sleep with him of a night. But if you’re by yourself you are just out there.

One day I was taking a message back I was going back, this is going back from where Greenie was killed I had to go back and get the mortar truck to come up, and I got half way back and they were shooting across the road, machine guns and incendiary bullets flying across the road. And I got down there

what’d he want the mortar truck or the water truck? Anyway I got down there and I got both, I got them to send both of them up. Make sure I was right. Things like that, as I went past one spot I saw the bloke that joined up with me at the same time, he was

an American buddy in the Australian Army, he had joined up, and he was lying on the, he had had it, been shot. And all of the dust was laying on him, just lying on his back in the middle of a paddy field like that. And that really upset me, things like that. I couldn’t stop I had to keep going. That’s sort of

another time I had to take a message up this great hill to the 2IC, Major Brown. I am going up and there is boulders rolling everywhere and I finally got up there and delivered the message and I only went a few yards and I ran over a Chinese soldier, dead one like, and the bike got caught

in his uniform and couldn’t get it off. I am trying to get it off, and dry bogged over his body and two helpful blokes from the company up on the hill came and gave me a shove to get me off. Shoved me off all right, I went down the hill like this, I don’t know how I got to the bottom. You see some of the photos of the hills and you wonder how I

ever got around it. That’s more or less how it went on all of the time you know, sometimes you got some good jobs. The new CO, the new one only lasted a day and then they changed to another one. Memory is going on me like a sieve. Ferguson.

I. B. Ferguson he was CO and

No the bloke before him.

The one before?

I think that’s, I know the name but he only lasted a day anyway.

Well it is hard to say I was standing next to him, not next to him, next to his jeep. And he ordered the signaller to send a

we had attached to us was a land rover with an English corporal in it and he was keeping contact with Brigadier Coe in charge of the whole all of the three battalions. And Brigadier Coe would send a message to that British signaller to give to the CO.

To keep A company up on the hill and hold fast but what this bloke did was ordered the signaller to send a signal up to the hills to tell this company to pull out. And the Pommy signaller corporal that was there said to him, “That’s not what was on the message sir, the message was to hold.” And he just ignored him. So that signaller went back

to his what’s-is-name and signalled back to Brigadier Coe and that’s why he, that’s why they reckoned he went the next day. Because when A Company started to pull out they got the heck shout out of them, they got wounded and a lot of casualties because they were in there holding off the Chinese, because this was when the Chinese first came into it. And so that’s

when they put the other fellow in.

Oh well that’s it, that’s when they came in sort of thing.

Attacking the battalion. Come in attacking us, we were there and we got cut off, we were surrounded, they cut us off and myself and another mate were over on this river,

there was American tanks just in front of us, we were in a little hole we had dug there, the Chinese were putting this attack and this American bloke came over he popped up out of the tank and he said, “If they get down here and start shooting at us, we‘re going to close our bridge down and you just open, if

they start trying to get on the bank you just open up on us with your weapon.” And that’s what happened, they arrived all right and started shooting, the tank took off across towards road, and it must have got hit or something because it stopped there, and that’s where it stayed there. And things started to get a bit hot but this time, not hot, there was that many bullets being

shot at us, and I was using my little back pack for a rest, and after that it died down, it died down after that ,we got out of that satisfactorily, and we got over to the road were I was talking about and we were just talking to, watching the signaller came in with the new officer there,

and we got over there and it started to get a bit chilly and I opened my pack up that I had been leaning on to get my jumper out and it was full of holes. They had shot it up, it was folded up and a couple of bullets had gone through it and put half a dozen holes through it. Lucky there. But from then on, we finally got out of that trap.

But we had a new CO then, and he knew what he was doing all right, pretty good. So I became his dispatch rider. And I was standing there one day having a shave on me rear vision mirror on the handle bars

of the motorbike. I had my slouch hat on the back of my head like that, and shaving away like this and this voice says, “Parker, take that bloody hat off when you’re shaving.” It’s the CO. that’s the way he used to talk see?

Where was I now? Well we got to this place and about this time they were we went right up nearly up to the Manchurian border before we started to come back again. It snowed again and we had to pull back

and the oil froze up in my motorbike. And I was left by myself, I come across this creek, the river and somehow the oil was getting to the motor, frozen in the pipe and so I pulled up and I was all by myself, everyone was gone and I was trying to pull it to pieces to try and free it

and I look up on the hill and here comes all these Chinese and North Koreans and that coming down. And I finally got it off and de-thawed or something and away she went. And I was pretty lucky, but I had all of my socks got wet and there was ice in my socks and all of that sort of thing and when I finally caught up with the mob and the CO was there, he said to his batman,

“Get Parker another pair of shoes, another pair of boots and socks, his issue can be two lots for the work he’s is doing, the submarine work he is doing.” Because I came across the river under water more or less, that’s how the oil got frozen in the. You could cross there all right but it was too deep for the bike. It was only about that deep, but on a Harley Davidson which is only about that far

off the ground on the bottom it just, of course the fuel tank on that was half oil and half petrol see? And the oil wasn’t getting down the line to the motor. But that kept on and then

well first off the new CO I am behind him we’re going up, going to put in an attack on a place called Sardine and Salmon and we were going, heading towards it and the old CO wanted to go a bit

further ahead and check the place out and make sure he was going in the right direction and all of this. And all of the battalions were getting ready in their positions to attack, and we were going out there and all of a sudden we came around in this bend and the road was built up and then we dropped down to the right hand side like that into a valley, and one company of our boys

were going along the ridge up the top and we were driving along the road and right on the edge of the road here is an American machine gun post set up, stopping people going up there. They pulled us up, “No you can’t go up there its dangerous.” And old Ferguson said, “I am going up.” And the Americans sitting behind their machine gun and

I was sitting on my bike and I had my Owen gun slung across my shoulder but sitting like that and I banged it like that, made it bang on the bike, bang, bang. And coughed and I had it pointed at them and I said, “I beg your pardon?” “Okay you Aussies but you’re mad.”

Anyway we went and away we went, the intelligence officer a couple of snipers and us, up away we went. We went a certain distance up and we found out it was not going to be any good that way so we came back anyway. And the Yanks were, certainly laughed about it. Another one of my jobs.

Well we went around and I had to leave my friend on the other motorcycle, he came up and he joined us.

And he and I had to leave our motorcycles at a certain spot and go with the foot soldiers up these two hills called Salmon and Sardine, up towards there. Anyway we got there and they gave us the nice job of taking some hand grenades up to the blokes in the hills so we had

a bag of hand grenades each and off up into the hills to take them up there. And we got down into the valley ready to go up and, come down off our hill into the valley and going to go up to where the companies were. Anyway all of a sudden there is shrapnel and explosions and things going off around us, we

had taken a wrong turn and we had got in-between the enemy and our mob. Got into this little mud hut and it was dark by this time. We heard all of this noise coming and we looked outside and here is about twenty Chinese coming along. And didn’t have the hand grenades ready, didn’t have any detonators in them see?

And we had our Owen guns of course but there was twenty of them and we just sat down there very quietly and away they went and away we went back and found where we went wrong. Got back up to the company.

They were on a patrol between their front line and our front line, and that’s where we were, we had gone out into no mans land.

It was frightening. There wasn’t much chance of shivering and making a noise because I was just frozen.

No. “What took you so long?” “Oh we had to slow down for a bit.”

Oh we spent enough time there. When they call it, there would be a line of hills there and the enemy is here and you’re here. Its not, sometimes you might be way over here, it varies.

Oh yes well the, not much different, both lots sort of came in hordes. You know this, not smaller packs, big mobs of them.

And they used to send out small patrols of course but when they put on an attack they weren’t too bad. But the chaps that caught me they were older, except the one that was leading in charge of them, he was a younger one. What they call

a Commissar, he was leading them and the other ones were older ones that used to be in what they called the Mao Tse Tong 8th Red Army that pushed the Japs down out of China in the Second World War. They were pretty experienced and they weren’t cruel or, they were, you know not too bad.

Well that’s, after we came out of this Salmon and Sardine area we were pulled and we went into reserve for a while and we had just been in reserve and settled down and everything

and it was towards the end of April and the CO got word that the South Korean Army that was in front of us, they were in the front line and we were back in reserve, they were losing control.

We had to go up and set-up positions behind them and reinforce them sort of thing .there was us and the Canadian. The Canadian mob was with us by this time. And we had an American mortar crew near us

and American tanks. And so we had to go up and set-up our positions so the commanding officer and the intelligence officer and the snipers and myself we went up to have a look at the positions and they sent me back down to get the rest of the battalion and show them where to go. And

that’s how it went, and we got up to this position and everyone was settling in and everything, and on the afternoon of the 23rd of April 51, we just got all settled up there. A mate and I, not the mate on the motorbike but another one, we were told, we had to go across and dig a machine gun pit a

Bren gun pit over towards the river, which we did. Then it got dark and the firing started they started to attack and as all of these people come running at us, and they were South Koreans running away, throwing away their weapons. And we stood up and yelled at them to

fight or whatever but they didn’t take any notice. The trouble was they was all Chinese mixed up with them, they were infiltrating, that’s one of the ways they got around behind us. They infiltrated with all of the South Koreans that were running through ,we got down in our hole of course and then a lot of firing started again and then it died down and

our officer came over and got us all, told us all to go back to the signal tent and get ready to pull out. So over we went we weren’t over there long and they put in this other big attack and there was shells going off everywhere and all sorts of things happening and we dived to get in

this hole and another friend of mine in my section, we had already received concussion from an explosion when he was laying a telephone line, and we had been talking to him and we dived into this hole and he started to get in too and the explosion came and blew him in and he got a hole through his cap up here and he got a bit of

concussion I think, and then that sort of died down. And we were asked to go over then towards the river and check up on some fellows we hadn’t heard from in a while, and when we got over there we found them and everything was all right and then we couldn’t get back. Then we got word that we weren’t going to pull out straight away. Then another attack started and the Chinese came from everywhere and they

were shooting fireworks. You should have heard the noise; there was rockets going off and crackers crack, crack all over the place. Horrible noise, you wouldn’t’ know whether it was fair dinkum or just crackers. It made a horrible noise anyway, it finally died down. Just on daylight we got word to go back over the things and pull back down the road, about half a mile further down

and set –up another position down there but all of my company we ordered to go down the river, and I was ordered to pick up my motorbike and ride down the road. And the river was about two hundred metres or so running parallel to the road but over, and there was a deep depression

and the river, and all the rest of the boys were going down the other side of the and here was I riding down the road and up on the hill here was three machine guns. One of them was fixed lines and the other two were sweeping the road. The one on the fixed line was a big calibre one. So I headed down there, I saw my mates motorbike on the side near where he had been,

but he wasn’t there he was over here and he was, he waved to me. And I started to pull up and get him on the back but just then all of these machine guns opened up and dived down there and him and a couple of others went over to the river. So I just went to a spot with a little mud hut down here and I opened the throttle, I was going to get behind the hut because that’s

where I thought he went but he didn’t he had gone over there, and they just got near that hut and I was just going to slide down off the road and get behind that hut and the bike just phht and I was hit. And the bike went over the side and I went over, hard to say what happened to me it was that terrific. The machine guns and that. I had my machine gun over my shoulder but pointing up this way

and it had the short bayonet on it and when I went over I went over head first and shoulder and the bayonet stuck in the ground and it stopped and I kept going. And eventually nearly broke my neck just about. I landed upside down on my back. I didn’t know where I was and I couldn’t’ move. The bike is up the top roaring its head off. About as high as that above me, I was down here.

And I thought what am I going to do now? I had better turn the motor off first. So I tried to crawl up and I couldn’t move this leg. Then I could move it, then I couldn’t move it. So I crawled my way up and just turned the motor off and just as I did a bullet came right though the seat. Just missed me, I slid back down again and

I got my Owen gun off and went to see if it was all right, and what had happened, it had gone off when I hit the ground but it hadn’t ejected the shell, so I had to take it apart and get the spent shell out of the barrel and I was trying to do and I couldn’t move all of a sudden I was paralysed,

then I could move again so I couldn’t get the shell out and I thought well, every time I moved someone would shoot at me so I reckoned I best get behind that mud hut. So I was looking around for people and I put the barrel on, put it back together but I didn’t notice that there was telephone lines running along beside the, army telephone lines

just out on the ground like these, running along the ground and I had looped a, like the sling was on one end of the barrel and the other end was on the butt end of the machine gun. And looking around I moved it under the telephone line and put it back together and when everything quietened down I made a dash to get behind the hut and the Owen was stuck on the telephone line so I dropped it and got behind the hut and

waited until things died down again, and I dashed out and got it and got back again. And just as I got back again I was paralysed again and so I finally gout out again and got the barrel off and got the gun working again, but I only had one magazine on it, which holds roughly thirty rounds, twenty-eight thirty rounds.

The rest of them were in the saddle bag. What am I going to do now? And then suddenly a bugle sounded, I looked down the road, down along the patty fields, down along the road, my bike was up there and the road went down there and I am here, and I looked down along the paddy fields and here comes about thirty Chinese charging up the paddy fields towards me. I have only got one magazine,

and there must have been about thirty of them or so and they wouldn’t be a hundred metres from me, and there was one in the front, he was a young fellow Commissar and he had an American BAR, Browning Automatic Rife and he has got it down running and he is going brrp, brrp, so I thought well I have only got so many rounds I will just set it on,

I just did it all automatically like, just set in on single shots and I just kept shooting at them and then they started, they would go down to ground when I shot at them, they went to ground and I thought well I have to try to get over to the river where all of the other boys had gone. Because there is a little bit of a depression running over there,

and I’ll see if that’s, and they started running again and I shot at them again and they went down to ground again and I took off and I got just into this depression and leg went on me again, my back, I just plonk like that. By this time I reckoned I had about six rounds of bullets left. And when I went down like that

the tanks had been in there and they had churned all of the ground up and the gun went into the dirt and dropped all in ,went in where all of the bullets were and everything, and I pulled it out and had a look at it. And next thing I hear this yelling out and bugle going again, I just looked over the rise a little bit and they were coming straight at me, and I thought oh my God, I was feeling a bit nervous by now.

I pushed the Owen gun into the dirt and covered it over and stood up and put my hands out like this. And this mob they just raced at me and this mad young fellow Commissar in the front he is going brrp, brrp, and the others were going brrp and there was bullets going everywhere. And my hat by this time was at the back of my head, hanging down here, chin strap around here.

And I just put my hands out like this and gave them a big grin. And they came over and crowded around me, patted me on the back, “Why you fight so bravely?” “Oh you’d have to be joking.” Anyway there was about six or eight of them, I forget now all wounded. And they sat down from about here to the window away

from me. About five metres or something, they were all wounded, they sat down in a circle there sort of thing, and put their weapons on the ground and I am standing here like this like a big idiot and then there is this rumbling noise it is an American tank coming along the road right where my bike was. Well it was still there, and I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out since then our commanding officer,

CO was inside the tank too and they were taking some more ammunition up to the troops still up there. And I said, “Oh no what's that?” and this young fellow who was in charge of this mob, the rest of them had gone, all except there was eight wounded sitting there and the others had gone on further, and this young fellow was there,

and he stood up on the bit of a rise and started shooting at the American tank with this little Browning automatic rifle. You can imagine what happened, the tank just put their big gun around like that, and I am right behind him over a bit, and the tank opened fire with a big gun and some small machine guns with tracers in them

and they were all going over my head and hitting the water behind me in the river, and they didn’t’ hit him, he was standing up there. And then they must have got sick of it and just left him and headed off up further. Anyway it all died off a bit then and these eight what's-is-name fellows came over, and one took my hat and the other one took a packet of Kit Kat chocolate

out of my pocket and in my pocket I had already forget about it, was a packet, it wouldn’t have done me any good because I wouldn’t have been able to get them out was a packet of bullets they didn’t even see them. So when they weren’t looking I took them out of my pocket and buried them in the dirt. No far away because I reckoned if this young fellow did the wrong thing or got shot by the tank I probably could

have overpowered these eight wounded old blokes there, they weren’t near the weapons they were just plonked down there and I think I could have got away with it but he didn’t’ then they took me up on the hills.

Oh they treated me all right, and they started taking me up this hill and I passed

a spot where I saw my mate and he was waving to me and there was a hat on the drain next to the road and it had a hole in it and it looked like his hat and I didn’t know whether he had been hit or what. It turned out it wasn’t his anyway. They took me across the road and right past where our headquarters were and our sig tent. Up this hill.

Yes.

Oh everyone else had gone there was no one there now and the CO he had a sort of small truck with a van type thing on it and we used to call it the CO’s caravan, it was on fire. And one of the American tanks was on fire and they took me up the hill and when I got up the hill

I could look down and I could still see my bike lying there and I could see all of our old positions there, and they pointed out where these three machines guns were and I could see them, firing along the road like that. Then they took me over down on the other side of the hill and there was a young, before that this other officer come up and took me over from these other guards, and he grabbed me by the hand

and led me around. I thought I was in a queers outfit. Making sure I didn’t trip over any rocks and this and that, leading me around. I thought I hope none of the boys can see me down there. Anyway he led me over a bit of an embankment and down the other side and this young kid, he might have been twelve or fourteen or something and he had a Burp gun

and he was poking me in the tummy with it, and I am looking at him, fierce look and he didn’t take any notice and all of the time he had his finger on the trigger, and so we went about ten metres and there was this other officer and they started to interrogate me. “How many men? Who am I? Where are you?

Where are you going?” I said, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Anyway I started to shake a bit then, took a couple of days to stop shaking, I got the shakes.

I don’t know just reaction I suppose.

Oh I had had it I couldn’t I was from all of the bullets hitting the gravel and the road and that had all gone in

both eyes and they were bleeding. And I had shrapnel in this hand in four places and I don’t know whether it was a bullet or a piece of bullet in this hip. And I think I don’t know what it was that kept making me fall down, losing power.

It hadn’t sunk in properly

yet. But then they handed me over to this one Chinese bloke and he was told to take me across this valley so away we goes. And I am thinking gee, plugging along, and then there is this American spotter plane, light plane circling over the top and he would be radioing back the

positions of where the Chinese are to our side. And so now, we are going straight across this valley and I thought to myself if I can bonk this bloke when he is not looking and attract the plane I might be able to get out of this. Then I thought I might bop him and the plane might not see me, so I better not so I didn’t.

And lucky I didn’t because about five hundred metres further on we were out the other side of the valley and there was some trees there and this voice yells out, “Am I bloody glad to see you.” Another Australian out of my section, another signaller, the one that was blown in the hole and had a bit of concussion.

He had been pulling back before me with the CO and a couple of others, I think the 2IC, not the CO the 2IC and an American Commodore and I am not sure whether it was one of our sergeants. But Slim had been pulling back, that’s what we called him Slim, Slim

Madden, and the concussion I think was getting the better of him and he this is what he told me, he pulled up for a rest and the what's-is-name sergeant said, “Are you all right Slim?” come on you better get going I will give you a hand.” And Slim didn’t want to hold them up so he said, “I’ll be all right I am just having a rest. Got to do my shoelace up.”

And so away they went and he stayed there. Anyway he recovered a bit and he started off and he got not very far and heard all of these voices, the Chinese were in the trees on each side of the track that he was going along. And they had their guns on him and everything, so there he was, where he was there when he got caught

he saw me coming along the road on the bike and come off and he thought I had had it. That’s why he said, “I am bloody glad to see you.”

Oh terrific. He had been laying lines out for one of the companies when he got concussion the first time, from the explosion, that’s why he ended up back over there where we were. Anyway

so that was that, that was him and I and then they kept us there for a while they took us up on this hill and we were on the side of this hill and you could still see our area sort of thing up in this mountain and spotter plane come around again. And they took us a little bit further and put us in this

big hole about five metres square. Put us in there, we were in there for a while and then more Chinese come along and took us out of there and out us in two separate holes, one each about so deep and so square. Slim was in one hole and I was in another. And all of a sudden these planes came over these American, that’s what these spotter planes were, all of a sudden these

fighter bombers came over and they dived on the hill and they just dived and went around. Hang on I missed a bit. When they took us out, first off they put us in a big hole and then they took us out and put us in two small holes and in the big hole they put about a dozen South Korean prisoners, and in come the planes straight down and you could see the bombs come out of

the plane and straight down and I dived to the bottom of my hole and put my hands over my hand and pulled my hat down and I could hear this screaming and it was me. Because that’s what we were taught to do if we were under bomb or shell attack, if you yell out that’s stops you getting concussion from the things,

but it was me that was yelling out, “Arghhhh!” Anyway they flew over and dropped their bombs and flew over and I popped my head out and yelled over to Slim to see if he was okay and he said, “Yeah look out here comes another one.” Down the hole I went again and he come out this time there was nothing left. Where they put the twelve South Korean prisoners they had gone up and all of a sudden all of the dirt and

and rocks started coming, were blown up from the bombs starting coming, and bits of the South Koreans as well you know it was really hard to watch. There was just nothing, the whole twelve of them gone like that. By our own planes. But that was the sort of thing that happened from then on. A lot of the times when we

got right up on the Manchurian border because all of the villages, a lot of the villages were occupied by Chinese and North Korean soldiers and tanks and everything and there was no markers around to say that they’re there, they’re there and they’re camouflaged and everything and the Yanks know they’re there and the Yanks come down and bomb them and

attack them and of course they killed North Korean civilians as well that hadn’t managed to escape before. And this went on for some time. But they took Slim and I back into the valley to pick up the wounded and we had this stretcher and Slim and I on the front of this stretcher, one handle each and on the back were two

South Korean prisoners. And on the stretcher was a wounded Chinaman we had to carry them straight up this hill like that, I don’t know how we ever got up there I think we dragged the two South Koreans on the back too. But we had had it when we got up the top, and then when we got up the top we had to follow the ridge around like that and then when it finally went down the other side onto a road

and we waited there for a while. And then they took us over to this little mud huts and that there and we had to sit down outside while they all went inside and then it rained. Half rain half ice and we were just sitting there wet as shags, and getting wetter and wetter

and the Chinese bloke was laying there on the stretcher and they finally came out and away we went. They had this line of wounded Chinese from where we were you couldn’t see the start of it, just one big line of wounded Chinese and us carrying this wounded one. And we marched, we must have went fifteen miles,

that’s not kilometres, that’s miles, and we must have gone about fifteen miles and we collapsed and we came under fire again, the shells started to come in. And we collapsed onto the road, on the side of the road sort of thing, and the bloke on the stretcher he was still all right.

Anyway when after that was over we got up, well we hadn’t done the fifteen miles then but we went fifteen miles before we stropped and when we stopped the next morning the bloke we had been carrying all night had died. And then from then on, we got to another little collection point, and here is another Australian there.

By the name of Keith Guyver from Mean Gap in Victoria. So that made three of us there.

Oh yeah we were together we got together. And then we got marching, we started marching north south east and west, they didn’t know where they were going, we used to do up to twenty-five

miles a night, there was well over a hundred prisoners, but out of the hundred prisoners there was only thirty-two or three there was Americans and there was three Australians,

no Poms, just three Australian, two American Negroes and the rest, white Americans made up the thirty-three. And we were doing up to twenty-five miles a night and by this time we had started to go some places cross country

just straight up these mountains. No track or anything, and by this time Slim Madden was pretty crook, he started to go down and he started to get crook and one time we were half way up this mountain and we were going up and slipping back, up a bit more and slipping back.

And Slim started to slip quite a lot and the guard would just come up and belt him in the lower back with the butt of the rifle, “Get up there.” And he finally made it up, I gave him a helping hand, he finally got up the top but from then on he degenerated a bit and we got back down onto the lower road again and started marching again and a couple more days and

I suddenly went. And I was just lying down on the, there had already been a lot pulled out, mainly Koreans and I started to get a bit weak and then this one American, one of the American Negroes he went over and couldn’t

get up. And what had been happening, some of the Koreans that went off, if you couldn’t get back in the line you just got shot. One of the guards would go out and they just shot them. And so when this American Negro Siggy when he fell over and couldn’t get up the blokes from Mean Gap and myself we carried him. Don’t know how we did it, but one of his arms

around our neck each and we sort of lifted him up. And dragged his feet along., we dragged him and dragged him and finally he come good a little bit and could walk a little bit and that wasn’t so bad so we carried along and Slim tried to help, but he was too crook to help. And then

suddenly I fell over and couldn’t move. And I just we had only had one, must have been four or five days after we had been captured and we had only had, no water and two meals of what do they call them? Soya beans.

A couple of hand fulls each time twice. And only half cooked they weren’t cooked like our baked beans or anything. We used to call them mystery beans later on because no matter how you chewed them they still came out the same way.

Okay so I am lying there and what am I going to do now? Just ;lying there like a foetus all curled up on my side, and oh they can shoot me. I suddenly remember just before we went across to Korea when we were in Japan

we went out on this place called Haramura training area to watch a final little bit of firing display and from there back into our main camp was about twenty-five mile and we started marching back and the original idea was for the rucks to come and meet us and take us back and Colonel Green his

orders were no, he sent the trucks back. They can walk. And our commanding officer at the time was a chap called, oh not again. I can’t remember his name, Lieutenant Mackenzie and he

was leading us on the march back and I was already carrying two rifles, mine and one of the other boys that had just about had it. And this Lieutenant Mackenzie feet were just a mess of sore and that and, “You better get a lift back Sir.” “No it will be all right.”

and he says, “bat on, “ he says, “Carry on bat on.” And he walked the whole distance and everyone admired him for that, he was always called bat on. Anyway I am lying down there and I can here this voice, “Bat on.” So I got up, I don’t know how I did it but I got up an away I went. And we

walked further and further and Slim was getting worse and we had to give him a hand. And the American Negro got a bit worse again and we finally got to this camp they called the bean camp, and there was a collection point, there was a lot of people in there they had been there for a while and so we actually we got put inside a house,

not a house but a mud hut I think. Mud floor and that. Wasn’t too bad and we were there for a while and this American Negro got worse and he eventually died and Keith Guyver and myself, the one from Victoria, and there was this other bloke that we met there, the bloke I came up here with, when we came into this camp he is there he is one of the two that were the first ones captured.

And he has got red hair and it was all down there, and here is this bloke with monstrous red hair and beard, and it was Don Buck. That’s when I first met up with him there. We right? Well that’s right that was Don Buck.

And so we were there for a while and the chap from Mean Gap in Victoria and I we buried the American Negro there. Didn’t get him down very deep, no tools and pretty hard ground. And there was quite a few crookies there.

One American had been shot with a 45 bullet through there and it had gone right across and stopped there, and his mouth was open like that and he couldn’t eat and couldn’t talk. Couldn’t move his jaw. And then there was a Turk, from the Turkish battalion he had been shot through the testicles. No treatment.

And then there was another chap had been shot through the artery here. He was spurting out here, the Korean doctor that turned up he stuck a clamp on it, but here is getting around with this clamp sticking on, well he only lasted about four days or something and he went. Another bloke, an American caught the same day as we were,

he had been hit in the arm there and all of the bones were broken, he was picking bits of bone out and throwing it away, there was a lot like that there, they were just.

Yeah well there was a lot like that and then all of a sudden they got everyone into this big schoolhouse

that was there for a talk. And then they were talking about a chap that they had, that was in amongst the mob there, they hadn’t said anything to him or anything, this American bloke, they were talking about this other prisoner of war that they were going to hand back over, like they did those

three Australians or so, just turn them loose down on the front line. And when they got down there they thought it was too dangerous, they might get shot and so might the prisoner, so they didn’t let him go, they brought him over to this little village and somehow or other he didn’t go much on that and he donged

the two guards, killed one of them and escaped and he was going to go, but he got caught again. And the other ones that caught him didn’t know what he had done and didn’t know that he had already been a prisoner see? So they put him in with other prisoners, but they finally caught up. Found him in this place where

we were, they took him out and told him to run and just shot him. Seven times about, it took. Anyway that’s one of the things that went on there. Then there was a pilot American pilot had been shot down and he had only been a prisoner for three months

and he wouldn’t eat, he reckoned he was the son of some general or something and he knew what was going on and he reckoned the war wouldn’t last another three months it would be over, so he wouldn’t eat, he drank a little bit of water but he wouldn’t eat. And he just died. Anyway after a time it came around

they were going to move us all through the Manchurian border. So there was about three hundred prisoners there counting myself, Koreans on this march, three hundred and fifty I think. When they told us we were going to go, Slim Madden couldn’t go and a lot of others couldn’t go because they just couldn’t move, they let them

stay in the collection point for a while longer. All the rest of us they lined us up. And in the meantime while we were getting ready and everything myself and Don Buck that I came up here with and Aris Fantaxi, a Frenchman from the French Army that had been taken prisoner,

and the bloke from Victoria and an American, we all decided we would escape off this next march but five of us would be too many to leave the colony in one go .so we decided that the Frenchman and myself and Don Buck decided to go first and then a bit later the American and the bloke from Mean Gap would go, and

we worked out where we were going from some air force blokes we were talking to, what direction, and we reckoned we would join up after. But there was no chance of that in that place, we could only move after night time. What we used to do after we escaped was move only at night, get up on a higher hill that night and wait until daylight and pick out where we were going the next night.

Stay on that hill all day and at night time we had our direction and away we’d go. So that’s what we were doing but to escape we had to escape first there was a column. We worked it out with a mob of Pommies we were with in the column, they would start making a bit of noise and talking and yak yakking and stretch out a bit and that made the guards stretch out a bit.

And all of the guards had a torch each and they were marching on either side and we had to stretch it out and when we came to a good spot we gave the signal and everyone stretched out and three of us dove, the guards were stretched out then, it was night time and the three of us dived out of the column on the side of the road there was a little bit of scrub there not much.

And I landed on something, I was lying down and something kept pushing my arm like this. I didn’t know what it was, turned out it was a sapling I had fallen on and pushed down and it kept going like that. Anyway the column finally went passed and we started up the mountains, got up to the top and go to go down the other side where are we going?

I said, “I’ll have a look.” And I found a way down and I was about to go back and tell the others and I went over the edge, and I fell about nearly twice the height of this ceiling here. Twenty foot or so I went down. And I hit some rocks and stopped and some smaller rocks came down and hit me on the head and that.

What now? And then I could hear these voices, the Frenchman and the other bloke up the top, “How did you get down there?” “Oh I’ll show you.” I said, “I will find a way up.” I found a way up but by the time I got up there they had found a way down. And then we heard these voices down below us. What the heck is

this? And what it turned out was we escaped here from the column and this big ridge here and we were going over the top and the column went up there and turned around and it was a valley and they were coming back down this side. So we had to wait up there until they had gone, lucky. We were half way down the side and they had gone. And then when they were gone we started to walk across

and Don Buck’s foot hit something and it was a bag about so long about that round, the Chinese used to carry over their shoulders full of rice. Someone had thrown it away somehow or other and they had lost it. And out of all of that big empty space we tripped over it.

Unless someone knew we were coming down there and threw it down. Anyway we let them all pass and away we went. Anyway that’s what we were doing, of a night time we would travel, stay up the top, and we come up to this one place, we were right up the top. It was the highest point around and no one could see us from any other point. So we played up and walked around and spent the day there

and then all of a sudden we heard this noise still daylight and we hid on the ground. This man and a woman came, they had a garden up there and they were tending it. We must have been there about two hours, they finally went anyway, we said right, “It is still daylight. “

and seeing as I knew all about signals and things they said, “Well you can make a signal.” SOS, there was a bit of white rock around the place so in Morse code I wrote SOS the pilots and that could read it, SOS and not a plane came over. And we picked out where we were going anyway so we went down that night,

anyway we were ready to go down and we said, “Oh well we may as well stay here a bit longer just in case.” So we stayed there a bit longer and it started to rain. Daylight the next day and we decided we would go down we could see this

village down there, not a real village just a couple of houses, it was by itself there we decided to go down and raid it for some food. So we went down in daylight and snuck up on it and just as we got to the back there there was a couple of urns there and they had nothing in it, what are we going to do now? And then a door opened and a really old bloke came out and he came out and went across to the corner of the yard,

and he was going over to a go to the toilet and he turned around and he saw us there, all straggly and beards. And his eyes went like that and he fell backwards into his toilet. And he got up out of that and he came over

and it turned out he was eighty-two I think. And he took us inside, and his wife is in there and she is just as old, and he told us where there was Chinese people, then he gave us a bit of millet, cooked up millet with some peanuts on it. So we had a bit of a feed there, and that’s all right.

and we decided oh well it is still raining, we might head across to the next hill while it is still raining. Across the valley, we got half way across the valley and it stooped raining, clear as a bell. Straight up the valley was this big village. Oh oh. . We can’t stop now we may as well keep walking. So we kept on walking towards this other range of hills on the other side. All of a sudden a couple of

shots rang out, someone on the hill we had just left seen us. Started shooting at us, so we off and we get across to the other side to the bottom of this big hill and I want to go to the toilet. So I told Don, “I want to go to the toilet Don.” “Don’t be a silly bugger. Get yourself up here.” And he and the Frenchmen took off and I dropped my tweeds anyway and when I did, pow!

the ground spurted up beside me, someone behind us shooting. And I just pulled up my dacks and phht, I passed the two of them and got to the top of the hill. Damn what are we going to do? Anyway we went to go down the other side. This is eleven days after we had escaped by this time. And go down the other side and we can hear these voices,

okay we can’t go down there. Sounded like Chinese voices, go back the other way there was only one there firing at us. We started going back to other way and there was a mob of them coming up there, and they were North Koreans. They didn’t see us so we went back again and we got into the scrub and hid down in the bushes and up they came. And one of the Koreans was

the leading one he stepped right into the bushes where we are and he saw us, and jumped back and yelled out something. And they started shooting up all of the bushes and there was bits of bushes and branches and things going in all different directions. And I said to Don, we had nicknamed him the old man by this because he was the eldest of us, I said, “What do you reckon old man?” and he said, “Oh I think we had better give in.”

And I said, “Yeah what do you reckon Aris?” to the Frenchman. “Yeah ooh la la.” So we stood up and gave us so they got us and belted us with clubs and things and butts of rifles. About five minutes of it and by this time, the only belt I had,

do you know what a 303 rifle pull through is? But of cord like with a weight of weight on one end and put a bit of rag on the other and you drop it in your rifle and clean it. That’s what I had for a belt and my boots were all buggered, and the others their boots were buggered too and they were barefooted. And I ended up barefooted I was barefooted then.

They took my pull through off my and my pants fell down around my knees, nothing holding them up and I had lost a bit of weight. And so they tied us up then with wire, they tied one wire around the wrist, behind the back, and it was a bit like tyre wire. They brought the wire up here over your shoulder

around your throat, down your back again and tied it to the other hand around the wrist and that’s how they tied us up and they said, “March.” And Don Buck and Aris Fantaxi they had gone about five metres ahead of me, and I was just standing there I couldn’t move because my pants were around my knees and

tied up like this, so were the boys. And a Korean came up behind me and butt stroked me in the back and well I couldn’t go anywhere but down. I had my hands like this I couldn’t do anything with my legs. I just fell straight forward on my face onto the rocky stony ground and then they are jabbing me to get me up and they’re ordering me yak yak. And the two boys

they are going crook at them and then all of these voices that we heard down Chinese voices that we heard down the other side of the hill, they came up over the hill and they yak at the Koreans, they yelled at them and the Koreans stopped doing what they were doing and they stepped back a little bit., and the Chinese, “Yak yak yak” and the Koreans they were saying a few things but

they were saying no evidently, and they were pointing their weapons at us, and the Chinese they cocked their weapons and pointed them at the North Koreans and started to advance and the North Koreans, “Okay okay, there you are.” They gave in and they let the Chinese take us, and then they marched us, still tied up because the Chinese didn’t want to lose any face in front of the Koreans, we marched

a few miles like that, bare feet down the mountain and across, feet were starting to bleed. Anyway we came to an area, a place a bit of a side track. The Koreans went down there and as soon as they had gone and we had gone a little bit further the Chinese stopped us and undid our hands. Freed us, but we had to march another couple of miles.

And we got to this village and of all things they sat us down there and they gave us a bowl each, must have been nearly as big as that wash basin in there, about that round full of rice and green shoots and this and that. And we sat there and we ate and ate and ate. Ate that much we couldn’t move. Anyway the next day

they interrogated us and didn’t get anything out of us because we didn’t know anything. They took us into this place, into this town and there was, they threw us into this lock up, was only a mud

and straw house sort of thing, they put us in there. Who should be in there but an American, from the American Army but an American Red Indian and the other one ordinary American. They had both escaped from the column as well and they had been re-caught and they were in there. And there was a couple of ordinary Korean in there as well, in the goal. I don’t know if they were in there as spies or what. They were pretty knocked around anyway. So anyway they kept us in there,

a couple of days and then we were interrogated by this Chinese bloke and it turned out he was the bloke who was on the first march when we were carrying the stretcher, used to call him Bugs Bunny because he had big teeth sticking down here, we called him Bugs Bunny.

Of all people he should be there, and he was also in charge of the march we escaped from. “What were you doing? Running amok?” he spoke funny sort of English. “Running amok in countryside robbing the peasants.” And he has got this rifle and bayonet and he is doing practice thrusts and he says, “What were you doing?” We said, “We were sick and we fell out by the roadside.”

And he said, he gave a half smile, he didn’t believe us but he said, “All right.” He let us off the hook. Anyway they handed us over to the North Korean then the Chinese, and the two Americans and us, five of us headed off north again.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. They handed us over to the North Koreans and he is supposed to march us to a place called the caves and away we went. It was nearly night time, we had been going all day,

and I just collapsed again like I did before. And he came over and he poked me a couple of times with his sub machine, Burp gun. But he wasn’t all that bad. He said, “Come on.” And they speak a lot of Japanese too the Koreans. “Hubba hubba. Hubba hubba.” Anyway we got on,

I managed to get up and lucky I did because we only went a couple more miles, got to this little village and they put us in a house for the night with a few Soya beans to eat and, but he asked me for my, he took my watch off me. I still had my watch I don’t know how I still had it but I had it. He took it off me anyway and I didn’t complain, it was getting too heavy to carry anyway.

But I had, in my hat I still had my hat, I had some photos that I had had on me when I got caught and I hid them up in the lining in my hat. And I don’t know why I must have got a premonition or something but I hid them on my body then, and lucky I did because they pinched my hat. They reckoned, “It will be going in the museum in Peking. Put it in the museum.”

A few days later I saw it tied on the side of a donkey thing, an ass they used for pulling things around. So I don’t know where it got to. And anyway we got to this place called the Caves, and they were just big caves in the side of a hill and there was water running through them all of the time

and there was people lying around. They were moving, moving but they were dead, they had that many lice on them they just looked like they were moving .and we got lice as well. And anyway we were in this place for a while, a couple of days we were in there and this Korean officer

came over and he said, “You want to fight for peace?” he spoke a bit of English and he said, “You want to fight for peace?” and Don Buck said, “Yeah, a piece of Australia.” And they didn’t know our language or lingo, stuff like that. What do you call it? The way we talk anyway. And

so he said, “There is a camp across the other side of the river and it has got Americans and English and other people in it, and it is in a schoolhouse and they are learning things over there, you want to come over and fight for peace?” and I said, “What do you reckon Don?” and he said, “If we live here we will die

here that’s for sure.” I said, “I am half dead already I think.” So he said, “We will go over and work things out from there.” And we said, “What about the Frenchman?” and he said, “No, he stay here, he don’t speak English.” There’s another Frenchman there he goes with the….” So okay so over Don Buck and myself went over there.

In the meantime the other one from Victoria, Mean Gap, and the American, they had escaped from the column a couple of days after us and they go re-caught too, but they were taken right up to the Manchurian border. And so we didn’t see them until later but at this place the Caves, well they put us on a canoe

type thing, sampan type thing and took across the river to this little village on the other side a bit. And it was a schoolhouse in this village and it had Americans, American Negroes and white Americans and Pommies and us. There would be about fifty altogether I suppose, nearly all Americans were in this schoolhouse.

So we went over there and they let us have a shower, the first time we had had a wash. Not a shower but a wash. First time we had a wash since we were taken prisoner and we hadn’t had one much before that either. So we had a wash and they gave us some lighter clothes. Bit like that stuff I think

and a coat to put on and in the meantime we sat down and we had a few lessons there and we used to get fed once a day, only once a day, still soya beans and this time we still had to use our hands to eat with, they just put it in your hands like. Later on we sort of got a bit of

a tin bowl thing. Anyway they wanted us to write letters and do this and so that. They wanted us to write letters against our government getting us over there and that and we used to say, “No, the government didn’t get us over here, we volunteered.” Because all of the Yanks were sent there see? And all of the Poms,

they didn’t have volunteers. All of the Australian over there were volunteers, they couldn’t say anything because we were volunteers. So we got away with a fair bit but they used to look at us, and the bloke in charge was a big American Negro, We had already decided we were going to escape now, Don Buck and myself we were going to escape again because the river was coming up there and there was a lot of logs lying around and we reckoned

we could get on one of those logs each. And get in the river, we were right next to the river and just float down the river at night and get through the capital Pyongyang in no time at all and float out to the ocean. This was our idea. Anyway just about then still hadn’t had any treatment for wounds or anything.

And my hand suddenly blew up, just blew right up and was just one big mass right up there, this was six months after we had been taken prisoner and nothing had been done. And it hurt like hell and I was outside the school house leaning up against the post and just not far over

there was a convoy and there was a convoy over there and Americans strafing it and some overshoots came across. And just before this happened I got really crook and decided to go in and lie down which I did and just after I did a couple of minutes after I did this plane was strafing the convoy and the overshoots came across and blew a mob of tiles off the roof.

Put a couple of holes right through the post I was leaning against. And a few bullets went inside and hit one Pommy fellow in the leg. Anyway by this time they were having a go at the peace talks, so the Chinese thought well, we had better get some medical treatment onto these fellows. So they

walked us, the bloke that was just shot through the leg and there was a Pommy sergeant that was wounded through the hip like me and me and the crook hand and two other wounded ones we had to walk, I suppose eight mile over to this village where these doctors were and we got

some shrapnel and more shrapnel and stuff. Bombs were dropped by the Americans on the way over and one of the boys was hit. They weren’t dropping them on us; they were dropping them on the roadway near us. We finally got to this village and the bloke that got hit in the leg, he died there, and this Chinese doctor, the whole lot of them, were voluntary and they only came over there for six months and then they go back to China.

Well he decided to operate on my hand. They put me out to it and this Pommy bloke that was shot in the hip, he was in the same room as me at the time. Just a little mud hut. And I laid out on this sort of a table and before he operated he said, “The gangrene has set in, I have to operate.”

I says, “Okay.” He injected me and out to it I went. And when I woke up he had cut it there and there and there and there and got the shrapnel out and he had to scrape it all to get the gangrene out and the Pommy sergeant was there from the Gloucester Battalion he was in ,and he heard me, I must have been delirious when I came out and

I was calling out, “Irene, Irene.” That’s the girl I told you I had met just before I joined up. Then I come to and everything and we went back over to where we were in the little mud straw huts we were living in. back into there and the sergeant had his operation

and he came over and he told me what, that I was saying when I came out of the operation. So I just forgot all about that and things were getting a little bit better, we were there for a couple or three days and we went down we were invited, while we were there, that’s right they had some Communist do [celebration] they have?

Which Commo do was it? Some do they have anyway.

They had a party on there anyway and we were invited into it.

Oh it was all right actually, they had all of the little bits and pieces out for food and everything. And we were invited there and we were there sitting around and then the Chinese and that started getting up and singing and doing this. And then

it came to us and I had to get up and sing. It was the national anthem or something like that and I sung Waltzing Matilda. Anyway they all clapped and everything like that. And everything went all right and we all went back to our hut. And then the Koreans turned up and they wanted us back, back over at the schoolhouse and the

Chinese wouldn’t let us go for a couple more days because, “Not better yet.” Anyway when the Chinese doctor operated on me, took a photo of us, about six of us there. And then I went for a walk with this nurse that was in attendance when I came out of the operation,

and I was calling out for this Irene, she took me for a walk down to the little creek bed there where she would do some washing. So we get down there and she is doing the washing. By the way they way they do their washing there, they just dip it in the water, put it on the stone and hit it with a club. That’s how she was washing. Anyway she is talking away there and she said, “We’re only here for six months and we’re going back.”

“We’re volunteers. And I am going back in a couple of days’ time. And I heard you calling out for your wife, does she know you’re alive?” and I thought to myself, ‘I am not married, if I tell her I am not married she might not do anything or something.’ She says, “I am going back shortly a couple of days and I could take a message for you if

you would like to write to your wife.” And I thought, ‘Well, if she knows I haven’t got a wife she mightn’t take a message.’ and I said, “Do you think you could take one for my mother too?” “Yeah, yeah.” So she gave me a pencil and I wrote the thing out for her and she put it down her dress somewhere and just then these planes came over,

American planes heading towards the capital Pyongyang, and they dropped all of these bombs and these anti-personnel bombs would go off above the ground. And they went off in the trees above us, and everyone started to run. I didn’t but everyone else started to run and this nurse started to run and everyone was so and so, “MIG buhau.” MIG was American and buhau is bad, no good.

They started running, and I stayed there and down came all of these chestnuts out of the tree all over me. Anyway I went back to the thing and I didn’t see the little nurse again, Annie Tutsu Wung was her name, used to call her Annie. And her mother and father owned a, she was in Red China, but her mother and father owned a drugstore, that’s a chemist shop in their country

on the Hong Kong side of it. In Kowloon actually I think. Anyway so anyway she took the letter and away she went and I didn’t see her anymore. And the Koreans came over and we were given to the Koreans and we had to walk back to the schoolhouse. Things seemed to be going all right and they reckoned we were going to be

put in a hospital ship out on the ocean. As a result of that the treatment got a little bit better but then I must have played up or something because all of a sudden they decided we are not going out there and they put us on trucks and drove us north towards the Yellow

River, the Manchurian border we had only gone, not all that far the first night and we came to these crossroads. You only travel at night time sort of thing because there are planes around to see them in the day time. We travel at night time without any headlights.

And we get to this crossroad and some of them turned on their lights and all of a sudden there was panic everywhere. The Americans had a plane with a big searchlight on it, and it was driving along the highway like that with this big searchlight on and lighting up the whole highway and coming behind it was the strafing and bombing.

And there was trucks went everywhere, and there was a little village onto one side of these crossroads, we went there and everybody dived out and we dived under a truck that was there, another truck that pulled up there we didn’t know it at the time but it had forty-four drums of diesel on top of us. If we had have been hit we would have really gone up in flames and smoke. But we were lucky,

but they made a mess of the crossroads, they bombed trucks and strafed trucks all over the place so they cleaned up a bit there. Anyway so we are all jammed in one truck going north and the driver, I don know whether they just couldn’t drive or they were just mad or the road was just slippery from the cold weather and that and wet. All over the place and they wouldn’t stop for a toilet, you had to hang your backside over the

back of the truck and get held by a couple of the other fellows. It was disgusting and painful. Anyway we finally arrived up on the Manchurian border and it was very cold and we were just in these flimsy little clothes, no boots.

Just bare feet. We ended up in the big camp and in this one big mud hut there must have been maybe about fifty of us. And we all had to lie on our side all together like, and the floor was hard mud and on the word of

‘okay’, everyone had to turn the one time and turn onto the other side. And this is how we slept there. And then they took a few out, in the daytime we had to sit up against the wall like that all around the room and these Korean houses,

they have a kitchen up one end and they have these big fire places there, and on the top of each fire place they have a big bowl that they cook rice and millet and other stuff in, normally that happens. Underneath the whole of the hut run these tunnels about so long from the fire, and out the other end they have a chimney going up. So that all of the heat from the fires in wintertime go

underneath the room and warm up the clay floor. The floor is only made out of clay, that’s when they have got fires in it, but they didn’t have fires in this one. And it was cold and we all used to huddle up there like this and you had to sit there like that all day. And they would come around to see how many dead. “Any dead?”

we had a few but we wouldn’t tell them, they were propped up against the wall. So they wouldn’t fall down because if there was any dead they take them away and then they don’t give you so much at the one meal day they didn’t give you so much food. If there was three dead blokes there they give you less, so we ended up with a mob of them propped up there around the wall. Finally we had to let them go.

This went on for some time and then we got colder and colder, got minus forty-five degrees, below zero, forty-five degrees below zero and that’s clod. And it started to snow. And we met up with the bloke from Mean Gap, Moe in Victoria,

he was at the camp. And the bloke that is now living in Sydney, Tom Wallace, he was there. So they were in a different hut. So what happened they swapped over with the, Don Buck that I came up here with, he was captured with Big Tom we called him, it was Big Tom, Old Man, and they used to call me Squiz because I

had my eyes squizzed up, and Keith Guyver from Mean Gap in Victoria used to call him Moe, Mo because he came from Moe M O E so they called him Mo. They were both from the same company, Don Buck and Tom Wallace so they swapped over with him

and Keith Guyver came with us. We got, we lost the Frenchman, he had gone with the French bloke. He was in this main camp too but he had gone with the Frenchmen, so made up five Frenchmen there all together. So Keith Guyver from Victoria came with myself and the bloke we called Tony the Greek.

From the Greek battalion, so there was four Australians there and one Greek that we used to knock around with a lot. He liked the Turks a fair bit he could talk Turkish but he ended up in our hut, we were all together and we started thinking up

our next escape. And it was going to be Tony the Greek and the four Australians and about another twenty. We organised an escape for twenty-five people. To go in groups. But one bloke pulled out and he dobbed us in [informed on them], we didn’t know it at the time

he just pulled out because he wanted to pull out he reckoned. But he was a collaborator. And he dobbed us in. but this didn’t happen for some time because we didn’t escape for a while, waiting until the winter stopped a bit. Anyway in the meantime things were getting worse and worse.

They started to send us out on wood details and other work. Had to carry all of these buckets full of dirt to make a parade ground to line up on. All of that sort of thing. And a lot of people had already died there, probably fifteen hundred died in this camp and as they died they would have to be

taken away and buried across the ice. Across the Inland Sea they called it there. And not the Inland Sea the what's-is-name river. I forget what the river was now, the name of it. Anyway it was frozen, and when it freezes it is eleven foot thick, the ice.

And we had to go out across this and collect wood and stuff and bury the dead ones so when it starts to thaw out, all of the dead would be out buried across the other side, and when the ice started to thaw out, we would be out walking across it, they made us walk right until the last minute, and there would be a big crack

and a big crack would appear between your legs and make a horrible noise. And there was one day there, the Chinese used to walk across it too until the last minute, and it cracked and one of them fell in, and that stopped it, we didn’t go in anymore after that. He was drowned and frozen, and seeing he wasn’t feeling anything I

pinched a couple of buttons of his jacket. Because the Chinese had stolen my identity discs that we usually carry, my discs and my hat, going to put the lot they reckon in the museum. So I reckoned it was all right for me to pinch a couple of their buttons off this dead bloke and I made a medal out of it, joined put the two buttons together and I

had saved a photo of this Irene, and her photo I stuck her photo inside it and a photo I had of me inside in it. And closed it up and then I scratched my army number and name and everything, battalion, on the button and punched a hole in it and put a bit of string I found and put it around my neck for my identity discs.

I have got it in there now. It is on a silver chain now that my mother had given me. What was I up to?

Things went on. And one thing

led to another, when it got to the following year and we escaped, and as I said we all had to go out of this camp and through this village and we were the last, and the twenty that went before us caused that much noise and everything that it woke up all of Chinese in the village and that.

So we couldn’t go that way, we had to swim out. We had to get out of the camp, through the, it was only a small fence going around and they had guards around it. And we had to sneak past a guard about from me to you away it was about two o’clock in the morning. And of course there they have

stays light longer at a certain time of the year. Anyway we had to go at about two o’clock in the morning and it was raining again, sort of rain. And we were crawling past this guard that was standing there with his back to us, that far away. And I am the last one bringing up the rear and we gets past him and we went a little bit further and all of a sudden the ground disappears in front of us

and we went over this edge we only fell from about that picture to the ground .and we fell into a pig pen. And all of the pigs woke up and grunt, grunt. And we saw Chinese coming, the Chinese were way up there and they had torches. What are we going to do? We had to go into the water and we had this big sleeping bag that one of the Americans had saved somehow or other and donated

And we flapped it upside down, we just left the zip open a bit, flapped it upside down, ti was only the cover of a sleeping bag it wasn’t a sleeping bag itself. It was a sort of a, with was waterproof the outside, it was a waterproof cover for a sleeping bag that the Yanks had in those days. It was a marine that gave it to us. And we sort of

unzipped it and then flopped it upside down on the water and caught the air inside so we had a float to go across the river I could swim all right and Keith Guyver could swim all right but the Greek wasn’t too good. He was all right at the breaststroke but his hands kept coming out of the water and flopping the water. And Don Buck he was a bit crook and couldn’t swim too good, so he had to hang on the side

and I had to hang on one side and paddle with my other and keep quiet on the other side, anyway we got over to the other side and we couldn’t get out of the water because the side was straight up like that. So we had to turn and go right along about another hundred or so metres or more, and there was torches flashing around, before we could get out and I had my pants off and when I got out the other side and put them on I put them on inside out.

I finally got them done up and we took off up this hill, sort of bare, and we got up the top of the ridge, and the top of the ridge went right around like that and we followed it right around. And we were out all right for about four days, but we didn’t get far, because there was three other

prison camps in the area, not right next to us but we would have had to pass them, so we decided to rest in one spot for a while and then we started to move and all of a sudden we saw these two Chinese coming at us on top of this ridge. They had been informed of where we were going.

Actually I think it was part of me they saw sticking out from the bushes. Anyway they nabbed us; we couldn’t go anywhere we were on top of this sort of ridge. So they took us back, and they caught all of the others. They put us in what they call a sweat box for a month, thirty days in this little place

about the size of those tiles there, that tiled area, and there was about thirty something of us in there. And they had a platform made a couple of feet off the ground and it was all made out of pine poles with knots in them, all dead ones, that was the floor, that was the platform, and there was a space of about half a meter I suppose between the door

and the platform. And that made the platform smaller than that area. There was only about that much space in it. And it was only as high, bit higher than the top of that there, half way up to the ceiling I suppose above that door. I suppose it would have been eight or nine feet high or something like that.

there was no openings up there, the only openings, there was a little tiny grille up there and there was a grille in the door. That was the only opening there, and there was another one similar next door where they put the rest of the prisoners, the Greek was in there, he wasn’t with us in this one. There was only the bloke from Mean Gap and me in this one. And the other ones had gone, they had taken, they reckoned he was the leader because he was a corpora,l Don Buck,

they took him away and put him in another one and were bashing him up there. And so we were in this one and we used to have to sit all day from four o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night we had to sit with our backs up against the wall and our skinny backsides on

this knobbly pine floor and we had to sit with our knees up under our chin and our hands on them like this. All day from four o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, and that could have been where I got this cramp business, its hard to say whether it made it worse, having to sit like that all day. We could stop for lunch and we only had one meal a day,

sometimes it was a hand full of soya beans, sometimes it was millet, rotated, it was only once a day. Sometimes they would let you out to the toilet and other times they wouldn’t they wouldn’t let me out one day. We had these little caps by then, called the people’s caps. They weren’t woolly caps they were just

something like the caps you see people wearing these days, just a ordinary light material cap. So I did my business in the cap, and then I called the guard and he stuck his head, looking through the grille and I went ‘splat!’ with the hat. I shouldn’t have done that, they came in and the belted the hell out of me.

I had to kneel on the edge of this platform kneel on it like that with my hands on my head like that until I collapsed out to it. And they did that to other people too. And then they would come in and belt you with clubs and pistol butts. And then they had this stick,

they put this hole through the mud wall, they stuck this stick through it and it had a pointy end and you had to kneel in this little passageway between the door and the ramp we were lying and sitting on and you had to kneel with the stick in your mouth and the guard would walk past outside and all of a sudden he would go ‘bang’,

sometimes that way and sometimes sideways, and it cut you in the mouth. Later on I wrote down that it didn’t happen to me but it did, I didn’t want my mother to read about it and upset here, but they’re all gone now so it doesn’t matter. In the notes I didn’t put that in case she read it. And

so that went on for a month like that, they finally let us out. And when we went back down, things had changed a bit when we went back down to the camp where we escaped from; they had us all in different companies. The company we were in when we escaped consisted of American Negroes and us.

Then they had a company consisting of Turks. Then they had a company consisting of Englishmen and one Kiwi, which we used to yell out to from our company. But then they changed things when we come out, they made another company and they had us in a company, they didn’t class us as British

there was Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Columbians, Mexicans, Filipinos, and us. And the Kiwi was down in with the Poms, we used to yell out to him. Then they had all of the Negroes in one company and all of the white Americans in one and they used to play one another against each other. The Chinese

started these lectures on Communism and capitalism and all of this sort of thing.

They tried to teach us that capitalism was no good, we were no good and we should be Communists and all of that. But we didn’t get much sense, we used to call it, it was called Pyok Nong the camp, we used to call it the Pyok Nong University.

And we were only drop outs. But that’s how it went on and one and finally all of a sudden they started putting up POW signs on the camp and taking us down to the village to have a bath in the big pools they had down there and they gave us some more clothes and everything.

Because the peace talks had progressed, and they were putting POW signs on the camp to let the aeroplanes know there was POW inside. And all of this sort of thing. Then we started to get letters from home, they let our people write to us and they let us send letters, about two a month or something like that I forget now. But I got a lot of letters that I sent to my mother there

and some envelopes that they sent for us. I have still got them there. So things went on like that and it suddenly finished and they put us in trucks to the railway and then put us in these goods vans and took us down to the,

what they had set up a demarcation line sort of thing. A no man’s land, it was a big section across the 38th Parallel and it was no man’s land in between there between North Korea and South Korea. So they had this bridge that went across from North Korea to South Korea and they called it ‘The Freedom Bridge’.

And so they took us from the schoolhouse that they put us in, and gave us cigarettes, still on the north side they gave us cigarettes, I had a couple and started to go dizzy, and they gave us things to eat and razors and all things like that. We left our moustaches on of course. And they drove us down to this bridge, Freedom Bridge and we were in the back

of this truck with a mob of Pommies and here is this Australian journalist [Wilfred Burchett] that had come and visited us up in the camp on the Yellow River. He wanted to talk to us and he just got drowned out because he was a Communist and he was on the Chinese side. He visited us once

up in the camp, we only talked to him once for about five minutes. We wouldn’t agree to any of this, he wanted us to tell him a story and things like that, and write a letter and he would take it back to get it back. And we wouldn’t be in anything like that because he had been living

in Moscow in a big hotel and like that. He only came over to Korea; he used to come in and out back to China and all over the place and write up things about the Americans and their napalm bombing, and nerve gas and all of this sort of stuff. He didn’t get anywhere with us. And there he was right down there

at the finish and he just got howled out by all of the Poms and us. He made a mistake with one of the later prisoners that were captured later in the war, he was a journalist, the bloke that was captured he was in the army and he ended up a journalist and he was shot through the groin when he was captured.

And he got mistreated and no treatment for a while and all of that and he when the bloke arrived in Australia and this bloke was there to meet him and he (UNCLEAR). So we were released

and we all came home via Darwin here, in actual fact we were released down there and they sent us across to Japan and there was only two of us and they didn’t release the other two until the next day and we had to wait for them, we waited in Japan. And we had a big get together over there with all of the POWs and then they flew us from there to Australia via Taiwan.

And Hong Kong and Darwin here, and in those days it was as I said, as we went over here it wasn’t a very big plane and we came by QANTAS and the stop over point was here at Darwin at a place they called Camilda College, over near the Burma Research farm and we stopped there at three o’clock

in the morning and the next morning we got the plane to Sydney and a few people there to meet us, a couple of hundred I suppose, and my mother was there, and they had a government car to drive us home to our own places. And after that a bit of a time at home, we reported in and

were taken out to Marrickville and we were discharged out there and that was the end of that.

Well there was this, put us in this big school house and gave us all of these smokes, and to eat and drink and everything. And then they put us on these trucks and drove us down to the exchange point. The exchanged us

and then sent Chinese prisoners of war back. There was lots of Chinese prisoners of war that didn’t want to come back, they stayed there. But there was a lot of die hards that came back and threw their gear, took their clothes off and threw them at reporters and reckoned they had a hard time in the South Korean prisoner of war camp. Which they didn’t.

Any hardships they brought on themselves.

Oh terrific I couldn’t believe it. They exchanged us there and we spent a couple of nights there and we got sprayed and disinfected. And we spent the night with a mob of Kiwis

there at this place there and they all got drunk and we didn’t. We hadn’t drunk for years a couple, two and a half years or something and it didn’t affect us but they were all flaked out when we left. And then we got a plane across to, the gave us some new clothes and everything and they flew us across to Japan

and we spent nearly a week there I think before we went home. Down there, we all put on a bit more weight and looked a bit better by the time we got back to Sydney.

It was a bit awkward. It was a bit awkward but after discharge, we got discharged in December and I

went back over to the PMG where I left without asking permission and they even gave me a few days leave for the time I was away. I was still employed and I went back to work there, my mate was also still employed there, the mate that had joined up with me. He was working back there.

Oh yeah well I forgot about that. While I was in the prison camp and we could get some mail I got a letter from her and she was going with someone else. And I decided, that’s one part I left out; while I was still in the prison camp there I was lying on the floor all buggered and this vision

came in through the wall join of the ceiling and it floated down like this. And it was this mate of mine Slim Madden that had to be left behind, that couldn’t do the march with us, they put him in a carton, belted him up, and he got not very far away

from where we were and he died of mistreatment and malnutrition. Just died and I didn’t know he had died and here he came through this and he floated down through this thing and he looked at me like that and he said, “You’ll be right mate.” And he just floated away. And I thought that’s funny.

Then a couple of nights later I had this vision, I was lying on the side of the road like when I was captured I was lying on the side of the road and this person comes walking along the road like this and who should it be in her same old clothes and everything but Irene and she walked right by me looked down at me and kept walking past and away in the distance.

And then about a week later I got a letter from her telling me all of this business. So I thought well all together I have been away three years just about. And couldn’t help, you know. I couldn’t blame her, she would never know if I was coming back. A first she wouldn’t even know if I was alive or not. For six months she didn’t know whether I was alive or whatever.

So I met up with her, I went to the movies one night up to our local movies and I heard this funny cough just down the row from where I was sitting. That sounds familiar, it was her all right, I saw her at interval and then we arranged a meeting, and we sort of come to an agreement that it had been too long anyway. We were

still good friends.

It’s hard to say I just, we were all the same the four of us that were together there, we used to talk

and we used to say, “Well don’t give in. And if they ask you some questions and that if it really doesn’t mean anything security wise to our forces or anything like that just answer that and go along with it, but if it is anything

that you don’t think it right we won’t answer it.” And that’s the way we went. If we don’t escape this time we will try another time, we just didn’t want to give in that’s all. How I survived, I don’t really know, I survived because I just didn’t want to give in that way.

Oh yes we all had a hand in it. The chap from Victoria, Moe Guyver, he made compasses, I helped him, I drilled a hole in it and he got some wire and that and we made a

magnet, plugged into the power and magnetised the needle so that it would swing around. They didn’t last real long, but they lasted all right. Things like that. And a little Dutch chap he joined the American Army,

he went to America and joined the American Army so that he could become a citizen quickly. They put him in the army straightaway of course, sent him to Korea and he was only there a short while and he was taken prisoner. He was only a little fellow and he could speak High German as well as Dutch and I was teaching him to speak English.

More or less Australian, and he was teaching me how to speak High German, well I confided in him, that we were escaping and he gave me a water bottle that he had managed to keep all of the time he was a prisoner. And that went towards equipment for escape, the water bottle.

I think that sort of thing did, I got a letter from him the other day he is in America, we send Christmas cards to one another and that. And I think that helped and the association with some Scotch fellow and Irish fellows

and things like that, and their examples gave us strength as well.

Oh yeah there was an American from Texas in the gaol with us and he heard about this Irene and he later on, actually so he wrote a song and he could play a guitar and everything, and later on towards the finish

when everything was going good, well not good but better, he even made a guitar. And he played this song he wrote especially for me he reckoned, and it was about Irene. And it was sung to the tune of Goodnight Irene, Goodbye Irene, I told him about this story, about seeing this vision.

\n[Verse follows]\n

Goodbye Irene, goodbye Irene I see you in my dreams,\n I took Irene a-fishing in a boat they called a punt,\n The line got tangled around the motor and we all got sunk.\n Or something like that.\n Goodbye Irene goodbye, Irene goodbye.\n Carry on like this.

This song he wrote up he reckoned or the words but this was just after I had told him about this letter I got, everyone had a laugh. You had to laugh at things like that.

Well blokes dying, not mates?

Since we come home or up there?

Well none of us died there except

Slim Madden but as I said that’s only, we didn’t even know he had gone until after we came home really. Until we met someone that was there with him and he died. We managed all right, had to.

Like I said a couple of times I was really down and at, I would hear those words, “Bat on, bat on chaps.” And the chap that has got my diary to make a book out of it, if you see the cover it is Bat On. That’s what they called the book there.

Well it wasn’t too bad for me because I got a job straight away and Don Buck that I did all of the escaping with he was a bushy and he wanted to go bush. And he didn’t know what to do; he was lost when he got home .and he said, “How about going

into a dairy farm with me?” And I said, “Okay.” I reckon he saved my life in the prison by following him. I reckoned he saved my life so I should go and help him so, I got a transfer in the PMG from Sydney up to Taree, we went ahead and bought the dairy farm about twenty-eight mile from Forster

and he and his sister, his sister went to live with him there. His sister and he lived there and I went up every weekend, every Friday night from Sydney I would drive up to the farm and work all over the weekend with him. Drive back early Monday morning and take a few WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s [fowls] and pigs and that we had up there

and sell them to people I was working with in PMG. And then I got a transfer from Sydney to Taree so I used to milk the cows in the morning, then drive about thirty miles or so into Taree and work my PMG all day and come home and milk the cows in the afternoon

and all of the weekend we used to do work there so his sister used to do the cooking for us. And then of course I got offered the position up there with territory rice to come up and open the rice farms. So we sold all of the cattle, the cows and everything and rented the place out to the bloke next door and

we come up to Darwin.

Oh yeah that kept me going. I was very busy, just going all of the time. When we first went to the dairy farm we had a couple of draught horses doing the ploughing and all of this sort of stuff. We spent all our money, we bought the place for cash sort of thing. And then we bought a Massey

Ferguson tractor and we had to pay all of that back and everything.

No not long range, I am having a lot of short. I have to carry a piece of paper and pen,

Just starting to have a lot lately.

Oh I have tried different ways; I go to bed at half past eight and get up at half past five, six o’clock and going for a walk. And it is all going back to front now, when we were on the marches up there, when I was a prisoner and I was on the marches going all of these miles and that I used to be marching along

looking into the distance thinking of racing motorbikes back here and what we were doing down south and everything, surfing and everything. Now when I go for these walks in the morning, I have been walking every morning since ‘98 when I had the double heart bypass, now I am walking along the footpaths and that thinking of how I got through

up in Korea, I am thinking of that, the opposite to what I was up there. Get what I mean? So now I have started to go to bed a bit later and up until just lately I have been taking my oldest granddaughter to school of a morning, they drop them off

here and I take them into the high school, come back pick up the other one and pick up the other one and take them to school here. That’s been going on for years now and it has all stopped. Because the oldest one has finished school and she is going to Emerald and the youngest one that goes to school up here and she is on holidays. So all of that thing that has been keeping me going busy, has stopped all of a sudden like that. So I have got more time to think,

so what I do a lot now is go to bed later and it seems to have a bit better effect, I don’t lie there thinking and having bad dreams and things. Not quite so bad now. It is still there in the background though.

Oh well I have got a rabbit running around down there and some birds over there, and I have got the old girl to think about I suppose. And the young ones, Bloodnut here, that’s my son’s son, he is down the bush he has just had a split up with his partner,

so he is down the research farm with both of them, the young fellow is down there now so I have got them to think about.

Not to give in. Not to give in and be kind to people.

Do what I can to help people, especially my family. I am getting a bit ancient now though. I have just been given the news that I have got an aortic aneurism right there. Well not just given it, about a year ago now, but they

haven’t done anything about it yet because it is not big enough or something. It’s only four and a half centimetres long; they want to wait until its five. So I can’t do any heavy work or anything.

Oh well if what

you people are doing is any help to future people that see it, future young people that see it they might learn something from it, they might look after themselves a bit better or whatever. I haven’t done very much in my life, bad things I mean,

except play football and sport and race swimming races, and race motorbikes and that, but otherwise playing up with drugs and everything I just kept out of that all together. I mean up there in Korea where we were on the Yellow River it was growing wild the marijuana,

just growing wild, and the Turks used to escape at night and come back in with arms fulls of it. And see some of the people that were caught later, they even had some money when they were captured, and these Turks were selling it to the Yanks, marijuana. And this very good friend, French friend of ours that

escaped with us the first time, him and the other four Frenchmen they got onto it, and that was sad to see because they would have these things we called hibachis, a bowl about this big and you put charcoal in it, and light it up to make you warm in the wintertime and they would put this sort of sheet

over their head about five of them and they would get down in amongst there and they would throw this marijuana on the coals. And breathe it all in, and they would come out of there and they were high as a kite, and they would lay on their backs on the floor and kick their legs like little kids. And then some of the Yanks were on it too and they reckoned they were shooting star jets

and they would go racing at the guards to shoot them down. And the guards would just go brrrp, but by this time things had bettered off a bit and the guards were only using blanks and shooting over their heads. But just show you what it does and they reckon there is nothing wrong with it. Fancy driving a car around the place when you’re on that stuff, and that was really strong stuff of course.