Australians at War Film Archive

Well, I was born in Austin Avenue, Elwood, the family lived at Princes Hill prior to that then we moved from St Kilda to Ivanhoe,

had three different homes in Ivanhoe. Went to the Ivanhoe State School as a young boy, then we were pretty ‘churchy’ people, Presbyterian church which was built in 1927, it was my second youngest brother was the first christened in that church, we were really quite ‘churchy’, we were.

Then after the Ivanhoe Sate, I went to Westgarth Central School, then to Scotch College, after Scotch I took a position with an accountant and I didn’t like it at all. Then to Dunlop Perdriau, which was then controlled by an English company, it became Australian about the time that I was with it.

Then from there I went to Myers Emporium and I was in Myers when I joined the ‘services’, I was actually in the CMF [Citizen’s Military Force] from 1936 on, that was the Victorian Scottish Regiment. We had different camps, camps at Bitten and other places prior to the war. When the war broke out I got a telegram the night that war was declared

Mr Menzies [Australian Prime Minister, 1939-1941] made the announcement and we had to report to the camp, we reported to our Sturt Street barracks actually at that time, there were lots of barracks along Sturt Street, Light Horse [Australian Light Horse Brigade] and other people like that. We went on the Tuesday 5th of September…..

My early life?

Well, we were down at the Portsea Golf Links was our first camp

prior to that we had two weeks in Franklin Barracks [Fort Franklin] and the Franklin Barracks were in Portsea, that became the Lord Mayor’s Camp [Lord Mayor’s Children’s Camp] later on. We had quite a few months at the Portsea golf thing, it was a marvellous area there, we did a lot of route marching through sand dunes and that area.

We had the bagpipes of course, which was always in the background, the sound of the pipes. A lot of route marching, mainly on roads, small roads and tracks but over sand dunes also in Portsea. It was a good are because people could get access to it at weekends, we had visitors at Portsea.

After the Portsea Camp we went to the Balcombe Camp, from the Balcombe Camp, we had some months there and then up to, I joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] on 23rd of May that year and we went to Puckapunyal

we had about four months in Puckapunyal and then we went to the Middle East with the 7th Division, on the way to the Middle East we went to Bombay for a period of time, or North of that. Then through the Middle East, that was Palestine, the western desert towards Libya,

then back to Palestine and the Syrian campaign, from the Syrian campaign, back to Palestine and then down to Port Tewfik and Aden, and were shipped to Bombay. Back to Colombo from Bombay, we were on our way to Java from Colombo after leaving Bombay

and we were only about twenty-four hours off Java and we heard, or the people on board heard the Japs [Japanese] had taken Java so we went back into the middle of the Indian Ocean and eventually back to Australia, then we had about two weeks in Australia, in Victoria

and South Australia. We then went up to Glen Innes for some weeks and from Glen Innes to Yandina in Queensland, and from Yandina we then went to New Guinea. I was in New Guinea for twenty months at that time, then I came back to Brisbane for a short time, then to Melbourne, then I went forward to the

South West Pacific again to Morotai and from Morotai to the Philippines in a POW [Prisoner of War] reception group. I was there for about three months interrogating prisoners and then they flew me back to Melbourne and I was out of the army on the 26th of November, 1945.

After the army, I went back to Myers for a short period of time because I wasn’t keen on being inside. Actually, Kenneth Myers sat next to me in merchandising operations office for about six weeks when he was being inducted into the company.

I then went into another little manufacturing business and that was very hard work so I joined a Sydney company, Max Wurker, they were in sensitised paper and from then on I was in the paper industry until I went out of the industrial or the commercial life.

I was with Wurkers for many years and went from Wurkers to another sensitised company. From there I went to an American company which was an international company, they were all around the world. I was more or less the finance manager of that company in Australia, I was very

fortunate that I was could stay with them until I was sixty-eight years of age because they were putting off the engineering fraternity at the age of fifty-one in America. Then we were living in Mount Eliza at that stage so I just came down here where we are now and I’ve had a very quiet and enjoyable life, but a very busy life. I’ve always been

busy, I’ve never had a minute time to sit about and do nothing, I’ve always kept myself very busy, but that’s the sum really, of my life. I’ve been very fortunate that I had a marvellous wife, not only a marvellous wife, but a excellent cook, which has kept me going as I am now,

I’m quite a fit person even now, which I’m eighty-four going on eighty-five, but all this sort of, married life is tied up with eating well, being busy, playing sport well, having generally harmony in the house and we’ve always had harmony in our house,

even without children. We were very fortunate that we had no problems as we know that they do occur in the world that we live in today. But very fortunately our children were educated before there were problems with drugs and things like that, they were assiduous and they were quite good

students and as I said before, they were very agreeable, but they were busy. That was the whole thing, they were very busy. Living in this area its sort of a holiday atmosphere we live in here, you get in the car in the morning and drive to Melbourne, you work your day in Melbourne, for some years I caught the train up from

Frankston, but I’d leave here at about seven in the morning, catch the twenty-one past at Frankston, my daughter was at Mentone Girls’ Grammar [School] at the time

Yes well, when we went to New Guinea we landed at Port Moresby of course, got on the trucks and went up to McDonald’s Corner, from McDonald’s Corner we marched to the head of the track, as I knew it. We had three days

to get to Malalaua, which is an area where they thought they could drop supplies to the troops. It didn’t work out that way because when the aircraft went over and dropped the supplies they just went straight into this morass, even tins of biscuits disappeared into this area, but that was from the 23rd of August.

We left early morning on the 24th and then we started towards the Isurava area, it took a few days to march to that area. We had very heavy packs

There’s Templeton’s Crossing, where we had to walk across a native made bridge, then to Alola and then Isurava. (UNCLEAR) went off on the rights from the track at that stage, that’s where the 16th were, the 2/16th [Battalion].

We had quite a battle with the Japanese there [Battle of Isurava, 27th–30th August, 1942], there was lots of Japanese just running, scrambling through our lines actually. We were emptying our magazines into where we could hear, knew where Japs were coming. We had a rear guard action,

I was in a standing patrol with Lieutenant McIlroy, there were about 15 of us in that group who were stationed outside Templeton’s Crossing to stop the Japs from coming around and circling us.

From Templeton’s Crossing we went out over the mountains, where no white man had ever been, and we eventually got back to Efogi, Kagi, Menari, and Menari back to Ioribaiwa and Ioribaiwa back to Ubiri. Then I went to

a CCS, Casualty Clearing Station, back to Moresby or just north of Moresby in a place called Sapphire [Creek] and then from there I spent, well lets say twenty months in New Guinea, in various areas of New Guinea, I was with that unit.

Then back to Australia for a short period, of time to Brisbane and Melbourne, then from Melbourne back to South West Pacific to Morotai, and from Morotai, I was seconded to a unit in Manila or north of Manila, the Philippines, and from the Philippines I came back to

Australia and was discharged from the army.

I was one of seven children, my parents lived in Princes Hill,

which was near the Carlton Football Ground, that was then known as Princes Hill [Park]. My mother was suffering from hay fever and the Doctor suggested that we move to Elwood and that was where I was born, in Elwood. So we were there for only a matter of some years and it didn’t prove to be good for my mother, so we moved to Ivanhoe.

The last four children were born in Ivanhoe, we lived in St Elmo Road and Russell Street, up near the Yarra River, and eventually my father built a home in Carn Avenue, Ivanhoe, which was near Eaglemont. That area was the original home

Carn, and that was a sheep station that ran right down to the Yarra River Ivanhoe. That was a bluestone place, which was opposite where we were living. We had a marvellous life really, you had to walk to school at Ivanhoe which was a mile at least, I would say from there, but that was all part of living in those days.

It was a good life because we had a lot of enjoyable mates and friends. Our teachers were strict there, the headmaster of Ivanhoe State was Mr Julius Schilling and he was of German extraction, very, very strict man, and very military. I remember his walking, although I was

quite young at the time, I can quite remember him, the way he used to strut around the place. The girls in particular had a very good life in Eaglemont, the home in Eaglemont area. There was a lot of friendship with different young people.

We were fairly ‘churchy’ people, so we used to troop down to the Knox Presbyterian [Church] at Ivanhoe, every Sunday, the whole group and we had, in that church there were quite a lot of Scottish people and everybody had their pews, there was the Camerons in front of us the Irvines behind us and we were nine in out pew, it was quite a big church, it seated 750 people.

Well, the life was just so easy really, we were kept bust because we had tennis courts close to where we lived and we were always on the tennis courts, if we weren’t playing cricket out on the unlaid streets. Later on, when I was the age of fifteen we would go to Bible class and then we’d walk down to the Yarra

from the Presbyterian church and walk from Ivanhoe right round to Heidelberg, right round the Yarra River, and every now and then you’d see a snake; in fact one of our members, one of the girls that was with us one afternoon trod on a snake and fortunately she wasn’t bitten; but we’d go round to the Heidelberg Gas Works, and that was all Chinese gardens,

Chinese vegetable gardens in those days. Well, rather than go right out onto Burgundy Street, we quite often ran through the gardens and the Chinese had saltpetre in their guns, my eldest brother was a very poor runner, he got shot in the pants a few times. We didn’t pinch any vegetables, we just thought we would run through the gardens

‘for the heck of it’ to get back home, late on the Sunday afternoon that would be. Sundays were always be a big day in our home; my mother had lots of friends and all the children had friends, we all had friends. There’d be sixteen around the table on Sunday evenings, we didn’t read newspapers, that was out, you had to read a ‘classic’ or a book of classical

type, if you did want to do anything of that type, but mostly it was walking on Sunday afternoons. Later when I was at school, at Scotch, I played a lot of tennis with different boys, one of the courts was asphalt with a cork surface, it’s the only cork tennis court I’ve ever played

on and it was magnificent to play on. The balls used to kick up quite a bit, which gave you a good chance to hit a ball back, but it was just from one tennis court to another tennis court. I took on hockey, prior to that the two boys had played Lacrosse. I had a half a season of Lacrosse and about three or four bashes

across the skull with it when I decided to take on hockey rather than lacrosse, so I played hockey for many years. I played with a team in the army at one time. In India the English people at the Dulally camp said, ‘Does anyone at this camp play hockey?” and we had a team going,

so they put out a ‘scratch’ team that afternoon, they beat us three-one, and they said they would get a proper team together tomorrow. They beat us ninteen–one! They just ran with the ball, like Indians were allowed to put the ball on the stick and run with the ball then flick it, that wasn’t in our rules in Australia at that time. But however, getting back to our early life,

we just had, it was a dream life in our early days, as I say, we were always busy and we had lots of get-togethers with our relatives, we had big get-togethers about every two years, in the Fitzroy Gardens. There’d be say sixty or eighty of our relatives. My mother

was one of six children, five of her brothers went to the First World War and my father was one of six children, so we had quite a lot of relatives, calling and staying for dinners and, principally Sunday nights, we had always a lot of people at the ‘sitting’.

My father was very much involved with the Masonic Order. He was the Director of Ceremonies at one of the Lodges, at the Ivalda Temple, in Ivanhoe. He also got involved with masonry in the country, at that time he was travelling with a company called

Henry Berry, which was quite a well-known company at that time. He was establishing being with people that wanted to be in the masonry. I joined the masonry, when I came back from the Middle East I met a couple of blokes in the army that were Freemasons and they said, “You ought to get into it”, so as soon as I came back from the Middle East

I was inducted into a Lodge at Ivanhoe. They put me quickly through a few degrees and I went back up to New Guinea and eventually in Freemasonry I was the only Australian that was… our Brigadier in Manila, he said, “Are there any masons here?” and I put my hand up

and was the only one in twenty-two people. He was a mason, the ‘Brig’ [Brigadier] himself. he said, because the Philippine people want to start their Freemasons business or association again. We did have some officers that we had got out of the POW camps, they were still in Manila at the time, there was a couple of Scottish Officers,

Canadians and there was English and a Dutchman and there were the Philippine men, there were five Philippine men who were still masons who came to that first meeting and they used an American tin hat as a gavel.

Everyone else thought that my father was strict, but I got on quite well with him actually, my brothers… he was a godfather because

we used to camp and shoot, from the age of nine, he gave me a rifle when I was nine and we went, well, all round Victoria; that was Alan my older brother, myself and either I had a friend or Alan had a friend and my father had a friend Les Tredinnick, he used to come with us shooting.

When the girls would go to a guesthouse for a holiday, then we would go shooting and camping. My mother was a home-maker, she had lots of friends, so there were always people in our house that were friends of the children. And later on, during a paralysis epidemic

the Austin Hospital, which was the next Heidelberg, they took over all the nurses quarters for all the people that were afflicted with Infantile Paralysis, so we had four nurses living with us for some years in our home, ‘gratis’. At that time the government said, “Can anyone in the Ivanhoe area

accommodate nurses?” and my mother immediately said, “Yes, people can move into our home.” They provided the beds of course, but we did have four nurses, mainly country girls, living in our home.

Yes, I don’t think that we ever had any food given

to us, my father and mother provided the food for those nurses. They came in different shifts of course, it was about a mile to walk to the Austin Hospital from our home, but my youngest sister Marjorie, and my eldest sister they both became nurses. My second sister

and Gwen my eldest sister, they were at Austin [Hospital], they formed life long friendships through that of course. Then well we, as I say, we always had people in the house, not just our family. At that time, after the First World War, there were lots of women without husbands,

their fiancés had been killed in the first world war, in our street alone we had five single women and it wasn’t a very long street, my mother lived most of her life in Euroa, she was born in Ballarat actually, but one of her girlfriends as a young girl was a

lass that lost her fiancé in the war. Well she lived with us for quite a number of years. The house was quite a big house, but it only had one toilet, which was the norm in those days, you only built a house with one toilet and one bathroom. So you can imagine, there were seven children, some very young of course, and they didn’t want to have a

turn in the bathroom, but it was quite an orderly life, we had to fit into the routine in the morning. We all went to schools outside of Ivanhoe after the age of say thirteen, twelve or thirteen. My sister went to PLC [Presbyterian Ladies’ College], my youngest sister to Ivanhoe Girls Grammar, my eldest brother was at Northcote High School

and then he did accountancy. I went to Scotch College and it was through me going to school like that and getting home late at night and upsetting the normal family routine by getting home late that my Mother decided that the three youngest children would go to the Ivanhoe schools, and that was the two boys went to Ivanhoe Grammar and my younger sister

Ivanhoe Girls Grammar, but as I say, we all had to pitch in; when you are in a big family, you all take your turn. My eldest sister was quite a good organiser, she was a charge sister in hospitals in Melbourne and my Mother became ill on one occasion and my elder sister just made up a roster as though she was still in the hospital,

said, “Well, you are on duty” and this, this and this, washing or drying the dishes or carpet sweeping or what-have-you. And we of course, had lots of fires, open fires in those days and a big oven in the kitchen, so there was a lot of wood chopping, my eldest brother and I

we did the chopping of wood regularly. That was just a part of our duties, pushing the mower, we had quite a big area of grass n the back and the front, so it was just routine that you did what was your duty.

The ‘depression years’ were quite, you could see these people with one-legged men coming up past our home from the Eaglemont Station on crutches. There were people that were, well ‘swaggies’ [swagmen -homeless], they were walking the streets in those days and my

mother, even when I was a small child, I can remember she would give a ‘swaggie’ breakfast, bacon and eggs. She’d bundle us off to school’, at that time there were the two young children, Betty and Bruce, were very young then, this is when we lived in St Elmo’s Road, Ivanhoe, but there were a lot of ‘swaggies’ around at that time.

They’d have just a small lot of clothing and a blanket wrapped around and held over their shoulder by a piece of string, but my mother being a country girl never ever refused to give people food,

but that was the norm in our household, even when we moved to Eaglemont. Well there were a lot of wide, open spaces at Eaglemont, big areas of just, grassed areas and about 1939 there was a drought and these sheep were even brought right down through the Ivanhoe and Eaglemont Streets,

drovers brought flocks of sheep through that area and they ate all the grass on the roadside, they were only tracks because roads hadn’t been made in that area. So we had uncles who were wounded in the First World War, they were in the Caulfield

repatriation [hospital] at the time, they used to come out to our place say on a Tuesday night mainly, and have some home cooking.

Well in the First World War people were like, like some of us now, we don’t want to talk about things like that. No, I can’t say we did, my mother taught piano

as a young person and we used to go to bed and my mother would sit at the piano and my uncles would be in the lounge room, in the dark and my mother would be playing the piano, Chopin, Mendelssohn and so on and so forth and they’d catch, say the

9.30 train back to Melbourne and out to Caulfield. There was a lot of, well, harmony in the atmosphere in our house which was really good living, excellent living, but there was always somebody who had been involved with the First World War, with the elderly people.

It was in our minds all the time that people were injured and still incapacitated, even in those early days we could recollect that. I remember when we used to go on to the Anzac marches and there were people, soldiers marching. All of a sudden they would just fall over in front of your eyes, and of course that was

very upsetting for young children, it upset us because we all thought that this sort of thing could happen to anyone that we knew. There used to be, in those days on Anzac marches, a lot of men who were gassed in the First World War and they’d only march a couple of hundred yards and then keel over

and this is near, we used to go near St Paul’s Cathedral, because we came in from the Heidelberg line into Princes Bridge there, and we’d only just go out a short distance and they hadn’t marched very far those chaps and they were collapsing even in that short distance. So you always thought, well I always thought from the early stages that war was a horrible thing.

But of course in the stages of living yourself you join the ‘services’, or join the Victorian and Scottish, I did, it was just routine that you should be in something of that nature, other chaps near us were in the navy, joined the naval ‘services’ as mid shipmen and it was just routine that the chaps I went to school with were in the CMF.

Well on Anzac day, of course, every morning you had to stand and

the flag was up and you’d say, “I honour the flag, I will serve the King and chiefly obey my parents, teachers and the law” and that was said by every student in every State school and other schools throughout Australia, which reiterated to the children, the young children, all children that the first and most important thing was your country and your family,

and of course that was the mode of living in those days, so we just abided by that. There were a couple of people even in my early days, there was one particular family in Ivanhoe who bombed the Ivanhoe Police Station, which was unheard of and those boys. Well two of them in my class were twins

and they were, well they were rouges, I don’t know what happened to them in later life at all, I’ve no idea what happened to them in later life, but they were of lowly living unfortunately, but the general populous was very peace loving and well, everybody did pull their weight because that was our way of life.

Ivanhoe was, I’d say middle or upper-class, probably because there were a lot of people at Ivanhoe who wanted to send their children to public schools, even in those early days. If they didn’t go to a

public school they were fairly intelligent in that they got into the University, higher school, you had to pass an examination for either Melbourne High [School] or Uni High [University High School] or Mac Robertson’s Girls High [School], those schools were very hard to get into because you had to have a fairly good academic approach to life and past examinations.

Well, with the other schools there were some scholarships and only the better students got scholarships at Wesley [College], Melbourne Grammar [School], Scotch etc.

I was living in Eaglemont, Ivanhoe. So we used to catch the train at Eaglemont to go into the city, we’d catch about the ten-to-eight

and that train was practically full of students going to PLC, Scotch College, Wesley, Swinburne Tech [Technical College], they used to go in there and out to Hawthorn and Swinburne. I used to go in there and then out to Kooyong and the tennis courts well, just over from the

Kooyong area, as a matter of fact when I was at Scotch I was a ball boy for Adrian Quist and a few of the other players. The Germans that came over then were Von Cramm and Henkel, Perry was from England when I was a schoolboy, so I became involved with that sort of thing through one of my teachers, he’d say, “Anybody want to be a ball boy for

tennis this afternoon?” and you’d put up and that would be it, that would involve me getting home very late incidentally, which rather upset the family, but I didn’t persist to much on that, perhaps once a fortnight. Everybody was, well we were all focussed on living for Australia

is the way I think of it, it was sort of, the fact that we had people thumping the pulpits saying, “Well you’ve got to have a good life” and, “You put your family first”, that was the theme of living and we all listened to it in those days, these days they won’t listen to that sort of thing, they won’t put up with it.

Yes, well I think there’s a different, the whole thing is that it’s money these days, people think of money, but money was never talked about in my early days, you know, you wouldn’t. You’d start on twelve and six a week,

which was a dollar twenty-five, but that was the norm, well you had to spend money to get to your place of work, you had to get up early, everybody moved and were not lazy. These days I find that the average Australian, even the average Australian

mother is selfish, she doesn’t want to do her own housework, it’s just a whole different MO [Modus Operandi].

Well, they would rather work and get someone else in to do their housework instead of being house-proud

and wanting to do everything themselves and getting everything in ‘ship shape’ order, they want to put their children into kindergarten at and early age, whereas in my day, well the children were kept home until, well they could go to school at five.

Yes, I joined the Victorian Scottish Cadets about 1936, I was in the

school cadets for a time. It was just the norm to get into the CMF or get into the navy; at Lonsdale there up in Port Melbourne, some of the blokes at Ivanhoe, mainly the Sea Scouts, they went to the navy.

I went to Scotch college, Presbyterian college and that was at Kooyong, out near Kooyong, but the boys that were in the Sea Scouts, Scouts [Boy Scouts] were a pretty predominant thing and Girl Guides in those days, I think there were two Land Scouts troops in Ivanhoe and one Sea Scout troop

and of course the Girl Guides, they were there. They all had their own Scout halls, they were built by the people living in the area in those days, they just set to and build a Scout hall, which was quite a decent sized hall, probably sixty feet by thirty feet internally,

so that you could play some sports in the evening.

Yes we did, every body, I don’t think there was any family

in our area that didn’t go to church, and you didn’t think anything of say, walking a mile and a half to church on a Sunday. In the morning we had Sunday school before church, so we’d leave home at about 8.45 and then we’d walk down to the Presbyterian church in Ivanhoe

We’d go to Sunday school, and from Sunday school straight into church and then my mother would mainly stay home quite often, unless she put on a roast, my father would drive her to church and we would all go back for a Sunday roast dinner, that was the norm. Sunday night there would be lots of trifles and fruit salads,

things of that nature and there were always a lot of people around the table on a Sunday night. Everybody went to church in those days and children you’d see would be walking hand in hand, it was just routine to attend a church

and as I mentioned before, we had a lot of sport, we were fortunate where we were, we had tennis courts laid on, not on our property, but close by. And then we also played a lot of cricket on our unmade street, different boys around the way, kicking a football or playing cricket. We even laid our own cricket pitch,

an area a couple of hundred yards away from where we lived which was wide-open paddocks, even in the Eaglemont area in those days. From where we lived we looked out across a valley to where a railway line went out to Heidelberg and further, it was all open paddocks on the other side with cows just moving around a dairy farm.

That was starting to be built on fairly, well, there was houses going up and gradually less and less a rural atmosphere, that would be in, say the 1930’s, ’32…‘33. Eventually of course, that was all built on, by ‘39 most of that area

which had been a dairy farm was then houses, but you didn’t have to go very far, Watsonia, Rosanna, they were all wide open spaces, farm lands and of course, we did on Sunday afternoon sometimes, when we were young, my father would drive us out

to areas like Templestowe, Doncaster.

Well my elder brother was in the Army Service Corps that was in Sturt Street South Melbourne.

He was CMF and I,

well having been at school I just, well when I came of age about seventeen or so I just automatically went into the Victoria Scottish Regiment just there, my mother was of Scottish origin, we always had a book of tartans in the house, as I have now.

My wife is of Scottish origin but that was, I knew my wife in those days because I nursed her when she was a baby, which is rather unusual, but her mother and my mother were good friends.

She’s six years younger than I am. So it’s been a life long friendship.

It is unusual yes, but we just automatically, the chaps at Ivanhoe, we automatically went into the CMF and well, you know, you get on a train on a Tuesday to go to the drill hall and there’d be a couple of hundred

blokes even, from that area going in to various regiments. 6th Battalion, that was the Royal Melbourne Regiment. Well there were blokes going into there drill hall which was up near Carlton, they had their big drill hall just adjacent to the swimming area there which was a big pool. And there was the

14/32nd Battalion [AIF] at Prahran and as I say, I went to Sturt Street South Melbourne & Victoria Scottish Regiment, but there were a lot of horses around in those days, because the mode of transport in the army or the ‘services’ wasn’t, nobody had transport in the early days so it was all horses and limbers [cannon support]

and there were lots of horses even in Eaglemont, lots of people riding horses in those days.

It was just typical infantry training, which I was used to and by the time I got into the AIF of course it was just regular for me to be able to march

twenty miles out and back. We had Lewis guns [light machine-gun] in those days and of course we had the kilt, some of the blokes didn’t wear underpants and one bloke in particular had problems with his backside and we would say, “How are they tonight?’ when you go down behind the Lewis gun,

but one of my sisters was doing a course in dress making and she made me underpants that were orange and green and very loud colours, so when I went down to the gun… the boys all thought they’d have to do the same, so in our section I think we had all sorts of underpants on chaps.

When you went down, you’d have to go down quickly behind the gun in your training and well, they had also had Vickers guns [heavy machine-gun] which were long range guns, they had a range of 1,200 to 1,500 yards, the Lewis gun was shorter, they had a

magazine of about sixty-four and was quite heavy to carry. The gun itself was quite heavy to carry but when we went to the AIF they had Lewis guns in the early days, we had to get to the Middle East to get the Bren gun [light machine-gun]. Well you learnt grenade throwing, there were no live grenades of course, but it was march,

march, march, which made you fitter and fitter so it was no effort to walk miles, even as I say, on a Sunday afternoon we’d walk down to the Yarra River, down at Ivanhoe and walk right round to Heidelberg to the Yarra, and the Yarra was in and out and over boulders and over tree trunks

so on and so forth. So you had a very busy life, you didn’t keep yourself fit you were just fit because of the life you lived and this is why a lot of people in that time also played a lot of sport, it was just, there was no TV and there was nothing like that to

sit down and, well you would sit down and read, but you didn’t read very much because you didn’t have time to read. There was no radio of course in the early days, I remember when we got our first radio, and that would be about 1930 or something like that, we had crystal sets of course, and you’d exchange the earphone, you’d have three or four sets of earphones

and unless it was something really special, as a family we didn’t listen to the wireless. The routine during the week, there was, we had a big breakfast room as well as the dining room and lounge room etcetera and my eldest sister always

sat at my fathers (UNCLEAR) and we’d all, my elder brother and my second sister and myself, we’d always have areas on the dining room table to do our homework, it was just routine that you just sat at the table and did your homework. After that, on a Friday night I used to play chess and we’d play a lot of card games

there were a lot of guessing games, even if you were guessing different car makes; in those days there were, I’d say a hundred different cars being built in those days, that were on the road in Australia, from Spain, Italy, Germany, America, not so much America,

no Australian manufacturers in those days, one or two but they were called the Australian car, but they were very rare, an Australian manufactured car. We played a lot of table tennis of course, but the routine was that you finished your evening dinner, you’d go and do your homework and after that on a Friday night in particular,

my father used to like playing chess so I played chess with him and my other brother to. But my elder brother was working at that time and he was a very studious type of person and he wanted to pass examinations, extra examinations in accountancy and he finished up with quite a lot of

AFI, ACCI [Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry] ICA [Institute of Chartered Accountants] and so on after his name as an accountant.

Well, that was a Sunday night. We were listening into the radio and

we had my great-uncle and his wife, his daughter and son, they were visiting us that night. Sunday night dinner and it was about O o’clock and Mr Menzies, we knew that there was trouble in Europe because Mr Chamberlain [British Prime Minister, 1937-1940] had gone across to talk to Hitler and say, we don’t want you

to invade Poland, which he said he wouldn’t do it to Chamberlain, the then PM [Prime Minister] of England, but he did; and that night Mr Menzies, who was our PM, announced that we were at war with Germany. Well the same night at about 10.30 a chap came up on a bike and delivered a telegram to our

place, which he would have to all the people in the CMF that were in active units, they would have been called up for service and either the Sunday or the Monday or the Tuesday, and our telegram said that we were at war with Germany and report to the drill hall on Tuesday morning at 10 am.

Which of course we all did, then we went to quite a lot of drill hall exercises and gun and other things there, then we were told that we had to report for duty the following week to go to a war area for that particular battalion, well the battalion that I was with,

5th Battalion, our war area was the Mornington Peninsula, so we had to be ready ourselves to go into camp on Tuesday 12th September. And we went into camp and we did a period of camp at Fort Franklin and

then Portsea Golf Links and eventually, well I joined, then we went to Balcombe Camp, which was a brand new camp then. The Balcombe Camp was on, well they were sheep stations and other things of that nature, owned by some of the big people in the area like the Fairbairn family, they

owned a big area of Mount Martha and our camp was in that area. We had quite a lot of marching, all through the whole of the Mornington Peninsula, down to Cape Shanck, which was no effort, to march on the Mornington Peninsula. Not all the roads were made, a lot of the roads were unmade, you had 10 minutes to the hour

in which you would get down off your feet, put your feet up on the wire fence or whatever was in the area at the time. The officers were on horses and they had an easier time, one of my officers who I knew right through the war, he had a horse

that was very much in foal so he was walking the horse rather than riding the horse and in any case I think he suffered from haemorrhoids, so I don’t think he was that keen on being on the horse, but it was just routine infantry training. When on the Fairbairn property one night there were a whole lot of sheep there

and we were on an exercise down the hill, and a couple of the other companies up the hill stampeded the sheep down onto us, but that was just part of being an infantry man, you know, everybody wanted a bit of fun out of it and that changed the routine a bit.

No, we were given the option. When we finished the Balcombe camp which was about a three month camp, those who felt they would like to join the AIF, and I was one of those, there were 93 chaps out of the 5th Battalion that went to the AIF,

well I’d say 50 per cent of those went to the 2/14th Battalion. A friend of mine, Norman Robinson, who was one of eight children and seven of those children were in the ‘services’ eventually, he went to the navy and finished up on the [HMAS] Australia when the kamikaze [suicide] attacks, later on Norman was on the Australia.

A couple of the chaps went to the air force. The air force wasn’t so well known and I don’t think, it was only people that were sort of getting interested in air travel or air, anything to do with air, who got into the air force because it seemed to be so far away to go to, Point Cook and that was the training area at that time.

My brother-in-law, he was in the air force even at that time, he married my elder sister, and I never ever met him. He married her when I was in the ‘services’ myself and I tried to meet him in New Guinea, but unfortunately he was killed before the day I went their unit.

He was killed that day, so I never met him, but there were not so many people going into the air force, mainly the army. And in the army of course, we had a lot of country boys in the infantry, a lot of country boys. And our platoon was mainly made up from chaps from the ‘Victorian and Scottish’ [Regiment], which made it pretty hard to get

any advancement because chaps going in that were sergeants, went in as corporals or even as privates and then of course, they had priority over those who had no rank and this sort of thing, well it was quite prevalent right through the war, but there were people coming over to the unit from

Australia when we were in the Middle East, reinforcements. There’d be quite a group of officers who had little or no experience with infantry, but they had done a course in Australia and therefore they had to have a few officers to send over with the troops, the reinforcements.

We had about five intakes of the 2/14th, five intakes of reinforcements.

I went into camp on the 23rd of May 1940 and then we sailed for the Middle East

on the 18th of October so, we had quite a long period at Puckapunyal, which was a new camp, a brand new camp. It was a very cold area and wet, it seemed to be very cold winter that winter. A lot of chaps got the ‘‘Pucka’ throat’ and I got that too and also pleurisy and pneumonia actually,

but there were little or no army hospitals about, so people were just sent home from the camp to be rehabilitated back to good health in their own home, and this was just the routine that the army had at that time. Later on of course, they would organise things a lot better, so if you got sick while you were in the ‘services’ you went to

a military hospital or naval hospital, but it was hard work up at Puckapunyal because they wanted to try and tell us that we might be going to trench warfare again because the Germans, being in Europe, they thought well, it could be trench warfare, so they were ‘digging in’ trenches up at Puckapunyal.

You know you had to dig a certain sized trench, about fifteen or eighteen feet long and six feet deep with a firing step in, and it was hard digging because it was clay, there were mountains of soil everywhere where we were, digging away and getting the soils out.

Eventually our CSM [Company Sergeant Major], Les Tipton, he came round and said to our platoon, “Well, that’s okay” you know, “It looks alright to me, so fill it in again”, so you just send the dirt back in. While we were up at Puckapunyal there was quite a lot of artillery firing, the 2/4th

Field Regiment was up there and we could hear the guns going off. We had a lot of rifle practise, machine-gun practise of course, with the Lewis gun and we threw a few grenades then, but not exploding, in the Middle East we were throwing live ammunition.

That was the area that they used, the old city of Jaffa, which became Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv was a new city. From Tel Aviv incidentally, the German people were Jewish people and all the Jews of Europe were being hounded by Hitler and Mussolini

and the ships were just coming across and going into the sand, quite big ships up to say seven or eight thousand tonnes, with thousands of Jewish people on them. They just run the ship onto the sand, near to Tel Aviv and then get ashore any way they could, and that was the first of the influx of German-Jewish people

into Palestine, which was actually the Palestinians’ country at that time, by mandate from the First World War. It was easy living in quite a good atmosphere and quite a good temperature in Palestine, we then went to the western desert in Libya

after our term in Palestine, that was very cold in the nights in the desert areas, the days were alright, but in the night it got bitterly cold. We were in various areas in the western desert, they’d send out just a group of say

ten men to occupy the oasis, little oases along the Mediterranean sea, because the Arabs were used to, they were nomad Arabs with goats and they were used to going from oasis to oasis and we thought, or at least the army ‘red caps’ [British Military Police]

thought that they would give information to the Germans, which they would have in any case, if all the oasis were not occupied by us, and our battalion was on the Mediterranean, the 27th [Battalion] were inland and the 2/16th [Battalion] were further inland on a perimeter. We were not involved with direct warfare then, we were having air raids

from the Italian Air Force and mainly they came over at about twenty-eight thousand feet, so didn’t hit the target much. Their anti-aircraft guns in the area which kept them up to a high altitude, but the German Army had come across from Europe to take over from the Italian Army and their

first assault the Italians made, well, there were over thirty thousand prisoners taken by our 6th Division and 9th Division.

First combat action was at Syria.

Yes, we went across the border at Litani

and into Syria and that was in about May/June in ’41.

The Syrian campaign was quite a vicious campaign, there was a [Vichy] French Foreign Legion, they were our opposition when we went across the border, that was made up of a lot of German, Dutch, French,

and people from North Africa, there was also an Englishmen with it, with the French Foreign Legion and one morning they had attacked us and we had repulsed it. I picked up a register,

the platoon register and it had ‘H. Oliver deserted’ in French, in enemy lines, our officer Bill Landale spoke fluent French and I handed it to Bill. This Oliver had been shot through the back of the head

He actually wasn’t deserting to our lines at all, but I think they were mainly French officers in the French Foreign Legion, they thought he may have deserted to us, so they just knocked him off, which was pretty grim, however that’s war. We went across the border, our first casualty

was at the border and that was, our adjutant at that time, his brother was our casualty. We went to a place called Tyre, which is a biblical town on the border, while we were tired this aircraft came across, which was a British Lancaster

aircraft [bomber] and they just, only a couple of hundred feet above us and they just circled us, the whole of the battalion was in the little village area of Tyre with mud brick houses and some very old sort of temple, going back to the time of Christ

and we wondered why they kept going round and round and then the following day when that particular bomber bombed near us, they were actually trying to bomb heavy artillery pieces, they were English artillery pieces, they were on the reverse side of the slope and we were right under the gun

(UNCLEAR) our section put in there by Captain Howard, he said, “Go up there and make sure nobody attacks the guns, you’re there to protect those guns in case people come out of the mountain area towards them.” Every time they fired those guns they just about lifted you off the ground, the percussion

of the gun report, because they were just over the hill from where we were. Then we realised that that aircraft, they changed the markings of the wings, the French markings, the red on the outside, white with a blue round circle in the centre. The British was blue on the outside circle and then a red central circle

and the French had captured that aircraft in France and flown it across to Syria and use it against us actually, and they also pinched a Hurricane [Hawker Hurricane, fighter] which strafed [low-flying attack] us. The following day we were out in the open and this Hurricane aircraft whizzing along

and the bullets just went, both, we were in line fortunately, our section and the bullets went each side of us just made a line of dirt, that was really quite an experience to be strafed from the air, that aircraft came back once or twice and tried to clean up

the troops in the area. We had captured about thirty Frenchman and they were standing on the road, at least thirty there were, there was a John Hetherington, one of our war correspondents, was near that area, he later told us. And this aircraft came back,

and in turning in the air it shot at these French Prisoners and shot up quite a lot of their own men, unbeknown to the pilot of course. He was shot down that pilot, as he was flying up towards Beirut, by anti-aircraft weapons, that was a very flat area

just near that area in Syria and there was a couple of mounted machine-guns that opened up on the aircraft after they shot at their own men. From that area we, well when we were under the muzzle of these big guns there was a magnificent property

owned by a Sheik, white, beautiful property and there was quite a lot of geese there and ducks and what not, and one of our chaps knocked off a duck and plucked it and it was half cooked when our Captain Landale came up that morning to take us away from that position

and we were, well, the duck was about three quarters cooked I’d say, and he went mad because we had actually pinched the duck that belonged to someone else and cooked it. The legs were alright, I didn’t get a leg, I didn’t even try and eat it because the bloke that did it, we called him

‘Nippon Jackson’ because he looked like a bit of a ‘nip’ in those days and he was the cook and he was the one that knocked the duck off, in that area there was quite a lot of dead French troops actually, still hadn’t been attended to, I would say at least twelve dead. They were mainly Senegalese troops

they weren’t in the French Foreign Legion, that was another battalion of French troops that were apposing us. People wondered why we were fighting French, well the trouble was in France there was a group of people…

Yes well, we had a

quite a difficult area to go on, we were taken away from the coastal area in Syria and were taken into Jezzine and from Jezzine up to Mount Kharat it was very hilly country. Mount Kharat was set in an area were the

surrounding mountains were higher than it, so in effect the French troops had the position, the higher positions, right round from where we were on Mount Kharat. Some of our troops were pushing them back from the eastern area of the surrounding mountains,

but we eventually got up around the lower areas of Mount Kharat and Bill Landale went up with Rupert White, who was in our section, the intelligence section. Rupert White, although he had a stainless steel mirror in his pocket a sniper got him

and just up from where we were and Bill pulled him down to where we were and then that was the end of Rupert White, it wasn’t so good because I knew Rupert as a boy in Ivanhoe, but we were in this rather invidious position of being, we could be sniped at by the French,

that was the first two days, then we went round the following morning and picked up quite a lot of French on the reverse before the sun came up, or before even there was a first vintage of light, we went round behind and captured

quite a lot of French on the slope ahead of us. I was on the top of Mount Kharat with Bob Roberts and Lou Waller, we collected quite a lot of rocks, about six feet wide and about two feet high and we had a Bren gun out to the right,

well, as soon as the light came up the French got the range and that with a long range automatic weapon and every few minutes they would let fly with a few bullets and it hit the ‘can’ so we couldn’t move all day, we had to stay there. Once in a while we’d roll out and let fly with a few bullets.

The ‘can’ yes, it was a rock ‘can’ in front of us, only about say two feet wide and at least two feet high it was, and about six feet wide it was, and Roberts, Lou and myself, we are in behind this and as I say, we just could not move, because

if we moved, you’d roll out and fire a few shots with the Bren [gun] and then get back in, by the time you got back in the bullets hit the ‘can’. It was a bit stupid to be there at that time, we could have run across, but we would have had to run across an area of, say about

fifty metres to drop down behind the area so that we would be out of gunfire, but also the artillery were firing at that area mainly, the artillery would have had all their ranges set before they started firing, they would have known exactly where all the shells were landing.

They mainly landed in the township of Jezzine, which was down in the valley behind us. One of our chaps, Oliver Dossiter [?], was in our platoon, he was killed down there by a shell, every forth shell, they were First World War shells they were, about every forth shell didn’t explode, actually quite a lot of shells hit the top of the mountain

where we were and then they’d spin off, so they didn’t explode when they landed or hit the mountain top, but they didn’t, they didn’t get the range of our ‘can’ fortunately, otherwise we would have been blown to smithereens, but that was quite an eventful day, that day.

We were there and Roberts, just to make sure we were still alive, every now and again he’d pick a pebble at and hit our tin hat just by way of a bit of amusement for himself and to make sure that we were still alive. From Kharat we went forward.

Well, for protection from bullets.

Oh the whole day, we went up there in the morning and were there all day, we just couldn’t move. The following day or two days later we had advanced, the French were also under fire from the 2/4th Field Artillery and the 2/5th

Field Artillery were back in Jezzine and that area, they could out shoot the French guns and the French infantry they actually retreated back towards Beirut and then we went with the them as they retreated, we went forward

and we were in an area, it was a Roman Catholic area, monastery area and we heard that particular day that the Germans had attacked the Russians and

Russia had declared war on Germany, well, we all cheered then because we all wondered when something good was going to happen that was going to be good for the allies. Up until then the German Army had just run all over France, they had taken up positions in the North Africa and they were being successful in North Africa. So we were

very delighted to hear that the Russians were in the war on our side. Well we eventually advanced up to Beirut and there were twenty-seven thousand odd Frenchmen that we encircled around Beirut. We were in a place called Aley, which was

a high feature on the eastern side of Beirut, we had all these Frenchmen in there, General Dentz was the brigadier and commander of the French troops and he struck an armistice deal [13th July 1941] with our commander who was General Lavarack [Lieutenant-General John D. Laravack, 7th Division] that we provide

thirty-six truck loads of flour, salt and other things and we call an armistice and allow the French to decide whether they wanted to be shipped back to Marseille, well twenty thousand Frenchmen went on board these French ships and seven thousand odd went across to a new camp near Damascus

and they were the nucleus of the De Gaulle army at that time, those Frenchmen. There were other Frenchmen that went to Egypt, and they became part of the Free French army also, but we were in surrounding Beirut, some of the French who wanted to,

or tried to go to De Gaulle’s, they were shot by the [Vichy] Frenchmen. There were a lot of differences of opinion between the Frenchmen, if they should fight on or go back to France, however I then went north

there to Tripoli. Now Tripoli is about fifty miles north of Beirut and the whole of the battalion finished up at Tripoli. We weren’t sure whether the Turks would go with the British or German Army, the Turks were with the German Army in the previous war, so we had to

put up barbed-wire and entanglements in the area just north-east of Tripoli and the French barbed-wire was very heavily galvanised and a lot of our chaps got infected hands, they didn’t have gloves to wear so you had to handle the wire with your bare hands and

quite a few of us got poisoned hands through it, however we did all that sort of thing and it was known then that the Turks wanted to remain neutral in the conflict. I was sent, our CO [Commanding Officer], Captain Howdern,

he said I could go back to Tripoli with Lieutenant Pochon, who was one of our Lieutenants in ‘C’ Company at that time, he said, “Go back with Pochon to battalion HQ [headquarters] and be under his command” to do

whatever he wanted to do, because all the ‘I section’ [intelligence] had been sent back to Palestine to do schools and intelligence. So this was a real surprise to me to get that appointment because Andy Pochon immediately acquired a French Army vehicle, it was a Renault sedan that was probably used

by one of their generals or whatever. We were ‘whizzing’ all over Syria and Lebanon in this car. We went across to Damascus of course, past the French Army. The French Army, before they set up their own tents, they set up an area for their ‘women’.

The French Army always had a lot of prostitutes attached to the army and the place absolutely stank to high heaven, they weren’t very keen on looking after their health that way, anyway at that rate, keeping themselves clean. Wherever we went about the first thing was

told for us to do if we were in a dug out, even in the western desert, we had to dig out a hole as a latrine and you dug it in the night as it was dark at any rate, and if you had to get out of your area, then you went to the latrine, but the French just made a mess all over the place, and as I say, it stank to high heaven that area, when we went to Damascus

we went further North to Homs where…we also saw some of the trucks with Australian flour and salt going up to areas where other units were, up towards Aleppo, which was along the border of Turkey and Syria. Well that had to deliver

truck loads of food in various areas that the French brigadier had told in the armistice arrangements what had to be delivered in areas there. But Andy Pochon and I, we went round, there was also a heavy fall of snow on Mount Lebanon, well there hadn’t been snow there since 1919,

when the Australians were there previous to us, rather amazingly. And in our battalion they said, “Anyone that’s done any snow skiing can apply to go to the school up in the snow fields”, well one of our chaps Stephen, he applied and a couple of other chaps from the battalion.

We went up to the snow school, Andy Pochon and I, just to have a look around. He was a ‘free agent’ being the acting intelligence officer for the 14th Battalion, well he could just go wherever he pleased as there wasn’t anyone else to tell him what to do. I don’t think ‘brigade’ [headquarters] were terribly interested in what an ‘I’ [intelligence] officer would do

we had a real ball just ‘whizzing’ all around, we went to Baalbeck which was a very old biblical town that has temples there, the Temple of Jupiter, its magnificent old ruins. The size of some of the rocks that were hewn out of mountains were about

sixty feet long by say ten feet by twelve feet, and how ever they ever moved those rocks, well one never knows how they did it, well the same with the pyramids, how they moved those rocks to get them into position to make a temple, its absolutely incredible. I very much doubt that the equipment we have these days, they wouldn’t be able,

it would be impossible to lift those rocks. Well from Syria we were ordered to go back to Dimra in Palestine as we were probably, they thought the Germans may come back up, they might

have success in going back towards Egypt, that happened later when we were on the ship coming back towards Australia, the German Army was eventually stopped at El Alamein there. We went back to Dimra for quite some time and during that time I was very fortunate to get Cairo leave. We had to have

25 pounds Palestinian in our pay book to apply for ‘Cairo leave’. One other bloke in C Company and myself, he had 25 pounds as well, outside our company HQ tent and we flipped a coin and Clive Reed calls out, “Heads” and it happened to be tails and I won the trip

to ‘Cairo leave’. Bill Landale was there at the time and I had 25 pounds which I was allowed to get out of my pay book and he stuffed in my pocket 40 pounds Palestinian and I said, “I can’t take that sir” and he said, “That’s an order Smith, it’s in your pocket, keep it. If you want to pay me back do so.” Well, the Landale family

was of landed gentry family from Deniliquin, they owned tens of thousands of acres up there and 40 ‘quid’ [pounds] to him was absolutely nothing. But however, it was just as well I got that money, because when we were in Cairo the Germans bombed a railhead, Zagazig, which was between Cairo and El Kantara which was where the rail came up and

went North to Gaza and up into Palestine. We were in Cairo and as I say, the Germans bombed Zagazig and really gave it a hell of bombing and the transit officer, an Australian officer in Cairo gave me another 2 weeks leave, because he said it would take a couple

of weeks to get the rail going and from that well, I went down to the Valley of the Kings, I was very lucky. When I was in Cairo there were three nurses off the Manunda, the hospital ship Manunda, and they wanted somebody to go down to the Valley of Kings, and apparently they didn’t want officers, and there was another chap on leave there,

he was with an anti-tank regiment, he and I went down with the nurses. They organised with the transit officer some transportation to get us down as quickly as possible to that area, because they had less leave, or they had the same length of leave as I did, then because of the bombing

of Zagazig, but we all went down, we were with those nurses when they were down in the Valley of the Kings, it was very interesting going through some of those ruins which are 1,500 years old, going back many, many centuries. We also went with those nurses to the races

up near Cairo and to various gardens and things in the area. One of those nurses Margaret de Mestre she was in the Manunda when it was bombed in Darwin [19th February 1942] and she was killed, I was writing to Margaret from that day on,

she took back from Cairo. We went shopping in Cairo and I got quite a lot of perfume, it was the perfume centre of the world in Cairo. It was the French companies were the companies that were mainly manufacturing and making up perfumes.

When we were in Cairo we went to Solomon’s Perfumery and sat on these ‘poofs’ around and this Jewish gentleman would walk around and touch your shirt with a particular perfume and say, “What’s that?” Well we knew what it smelt like, but we couldn’t

say, well, definitely this that or the other, there was so much perfume around the place, anyway it was Australian wattle, it eventuated. But I bought quite a lot of vials of perfume there, which Margaret de Mestre took home to my home, also she took all my photographs that I had taken up until that time. When I was walking around Cairo

I had this little camera and I was taking a, lot of photographs and I took one of the station, Central Station in Cairo and then the next thing is I had an Egyptian Air Force officer next to me and a couple of policemen with 12 gauge shot guns saying, “You come with me”, so they marched

me from there to the British Army HQ of the Provost [military police] and said, “Stay there and you’ll be attended to”, they thought I was a spy actually, although I was in an Australian uniform they thought I was photographing a target for aerial bombing,

but however I had to sit there from about 4 in the afternoon until about 6.30 at night. This British colonel came in and said, “What have you been up to?” and I said, “I photographed the gates of the palace and also the Central Station”, he said, “The Palace gates would have been all right, but the Central Station, not so good”.

The camera was there, he said, “You can get all those developed tomorrow”, you could get films developed in an hour in Cairo, even in those days. There’s only (UNCLEAR) and he said “Bring the negative back to me and you can have the prints” this is an English colonel and he’d been well dined that night,

you know, you could smell the Cognac on his breath. Another night when we were in Cairo we were at the Metropolis Hotel.

Oh, I took the photos back. I got them developed the following day and I took the negative back to the HQ and left it there. But another evening there we were in this

Metropolis Hotel, we weren’t supposed to be in there, being privates, this other chap from the anti-tank regiment he was there with me and we were sitting round where they had the platform and there were people doing the Can-can and what not on the platform, other dances.

And all of a sudden there was a blast on a trumpet and all the staff, and there were hundreds of staff on, they all ran towards the entrance to the hotel and they all lined up, they were all in white, white jackets to there, between their knees and their buttocks

and King Farouk [of Egypt] came in with the a (UNCLEAR) of about 50 men and women and he came in and, well there were three big reception rooms in the Metropolis Hotel, a magnificent hotel. And he came marching through and the line of all the waiters and everything in these white coats were there standing there to attention,

and he went up past where we were, this other soldier and myself we both stood up to attention, and he marched up further up the same area that we were in, where the music was, and they arranged themselves up there, this party for King Farouk. His wife was not there with him, a lot of the chaps

had their girlfriends with them or their wives. One of them came down, and Egyptian gentleman came down and said, put a big bottle of French wine in front of us, Champagne, and said, “Here you go Aussie, drink this, have this” and however he said, “If you want

to dance well, you can come up”, he said, “I don’t dance, but you can come up and dance with my partner”. Well it wasn’t his wife, it was quite obvious, he was 55 and the girl he had with him was about 17 or 18. She was of French decent and well, I went up and had quite a few dances with that girl that night,

we were there until 3 am in the morning and of course they were there when we left, King Farouk and his party. Another day I was walking around Cairo and a carriage went past and these faces came out and it was Farouk’s wife, and just can’t think of her name now [Queen Farida], but its the most beautiful face I’ve ever looked at, she was the Sha of Persia’s sister

and she was King Farouk’s wife, she looked out and I stood to attention and saluted which was an unusual thing to do for seeing a carriage go by, and she and her lady-in-waiting stopped the carriage and smiled, beautiful smile, I can’t think of her name, but I’ll never forget the look of her face, it was a magnificent face she had, beautiful face, and then she just told the driver to ‘drive on’ and they went into the palace area.

Cairo was a very interesting and old place, but its hygiene wasn’t that high. When you went to some of the buildings that were not in the main area like Shepherds Hotel, The Metropolis and the Victoria. We were staying in the Victoria initially,

which was right in Cairo proper. But we did go to some of the back areas, more for just interest more than anything, me having three sisters I wasn’t that interested in girls as girls, but there was always a number of soldiers that are interested in going to the

‘seedy’ areas. I did go to a ‘seedy’ area one night and we were only there a few minutes and the Indian military police were in charge of that area at the time, so we were actually hounded out of the area, it was called ‘The Burqua’ in lower Cairo.

When I got back to the battalion from ‘Cairo leave’ I was on a train going from El Kantara up towards our camp at Dimra and there was a young girl there from Ismali who was the daughter of the pharmacist or apothecary as they like to call them over there,

her grandmother was with us, but she wanted to speak a bit of English and we talked, be about a two hour journey, I suppose, at least, we were on the train together talking away. Her name was Christine Arastidies, she was Greek, the population in Egypt is very mixed, there are

German, French, that lass was Greek, so quite a lot of Greeks, particularly up in the northern area, Alexandria. When we were in Alexandria one night we were AWOL [Absent Without Leave] with Oliver Dossiter, Cameron Irvine, who I knew in Ivanhoe, at home, and Don [Donald] Blair.

Oliver Dossiter was a cadet journalist with The Age newspaper so he picked the phone up, no doubt there were people listening in from the hotel exchange, but however he picked up the phone and got a reply-paid arrangement with The Age, he also spoke to his family and The Age newspaper.

He didn’t say where we were, but they had a good idea I think, even at The Age, in those days they were in Egypt, so we could have possibly been in Alexandria, and Cameron Irvine spoke to his people in Ivanhoe also. Another chap I met from Ivanhoe during the war was Jack Fenton. When we were in Syria

Jack and I got Malaria and we had five days in a French hospital north of Beirut near Tripoli, then we were taken up to a convalescent area, magnificent hotel, The (UNCLEAR). That was right up on an escarpment, looking right out on the Mediterranean Sea

towards Cyprus and that area. While we were there, Jack was a very accomplished pianist, both jazz and classical, and he played on the grand piano in the hotel, Grand Hotel it was called, and there were a lot of French people in Syria still

and these French people invited us to their homes, it was only because Jack could play jazz and classical music but still, we did get into some of the homes of some of the French people who were high officials, who didn’t want to go back to France at that time, their husbands were

content to stay in Syria, that was a little interlude that was very nice. Getting back to Dimra, when we went back to Dimra from Egypt, we were only there for a short time then we were ordered that we had to come back to Australia, at least we weren’t to come back to Australia,

Mr Churchill [Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister 1940-1945], wanted us to go to Burma and bolster the British Army in Burma. We came down to Port Tewfik in the Persian Gulf area and we boarded the Isle De France, which was a magnificent ship

one of the French best passenger ships, magnificent ship it was. The furnishings in it were gold and chocolate and we all had, well I think most of us had cabins, we only had about a four-day trip across the Persian Sea back to Bombay.

In Bombay we had 24 hours leave, we went to the Grand Hotel and some of the other better hotels there. I went round to the (UNCLEAR) burial ground, that was say, 30 odd miles, near the coast from Bombay. So when they die they are put out

on this big concrete structure, the bodies are just put out on the concrete structure and the vultures are there, and they just pick at them until the bones are left only and they just let the bones fall into the pit on the inside, it stank to high heaven as you can imagine. That was something that you wouldn’t see anywhere except for that part of the world.

We went back and were in a transit camp for some 3 or 4 days and we were put on a little ship called the City of Paris [?], a 10 thousand tonner. It was a coastal transport ship normally, however we were packed in like sardines into this ship and we left Bombay

and went around the foot of India and while we were at the foot of India Mr Curtin [John Curtin, Australian Prime Minister from 1941] said to Winston Churchill that the Australians were wanted home and that they were not be under the British command in Burma. So we continued down to Salon

Colombo. That night we were moved out from the docks, out about a mile or two miles out. They hadn’t taken on water and food and other things that the captain wanted, so we were out some miles from Colombo, that night the Japanese bombed the shipping in Colombo,

including an Australian ship with a whole lot of wheat on it. They bombed the whole top of the deck out, and the wheat was pouring out of the ship because it was bulk filled, the hull was bulk filled and the wheat was just pouring out like water. The Ceylonese chaps with their little canoes were

paddling through this area, so that the wheat would go into the canoes and then they’d keep going and go straight onto the beach and get someone to turn the canoe up on the beach, we were watching this because we had come back after being out. That night we came back to get water and other things from Colombo and we were watching this,

it was really quite amusing watching these guys paddling through this wheat that was just pouring out, one chap didn’t paddle quickly enough and the canoe just sank with him in it, it was really quite funny, somebody else grabbed him and pulled him in. We then took off from Colombo

and we were then to go to Java. Well, we were about an hour off Java that the order came that we were to turn south, which we did, we turned south into the Indian Ocean. Very fortunately there was very heavy cloud overhead because you could hear the Japanese aircraft

flying around overhead and they couldn’t see us, that couldn’t happen these days, they just got equipment to go through cloud and see what’s below it. However, we got down to the middle of the Indian ocean, we were running short of flour for the chap to make bread and getting a little bit low on water. We were taken down there by

HMS Cornwall and Dorsetshire, two English cruisers, they took us down passed the centre of the Indian Ocean towards Fremantle and out of a morning mist the [HMAS] Perth took over from the Cornwall and the Dorsetshire,

she came out of the morning mist, I mostly slept on the decks of these ships, on the Aquitania and on the Oldfreinds and also on the City of Paris I slept on the deck. I was awake this morning with early morning mist and the two English ships, you could see the flash of their

lights signalling and then the Perth appeared, and they both took off. Well they were both sunk near the Andaman Islands, they just left where we were and went north and they didn’t, all those sailors on both ships went down, The Cornwall and Dorsetshire. The Perth took us back to within about a day from Fremantle and the same thing happened.

In the morning mist I was awake and was looking around and I could see flashes of lights from the ships and the [HMAS] Kanimbla was an armed merchant ship, she cam out of the morning mist and the Perth gave a couple of flashes and signals, and the Perth turned, almost in her own length,

she turned and went off at a terrific speed, it was quite an amazing thing, to wake up in the morning and look out and see this sort of thing happening. Well, we arrived in Fremantle and there were 17 American subs [submarines] lined up like cigars, one next to the other in Fremantle, you’d never seen anything like it in your life.

They were good and bad though subs, because they sank a few of our chaps in ships that were going, the Japanese were taking their prisoners from Rabaul back to Japan and one of those ships with a friend of mine on, 500 of our chaps on board, they all drowned. However the Americans generally, well they had to do what they did,

but it was just an amazing sight with all these submarines lined up like that. Well when we got to Fremantle two of our blokes shot through, they must have run all the way to the railway station because the train left only an hour after we came into port there, and they got on the train back to Victoria

two blokes, that I know of. The rest of us were out back on board and we went to Adelaide to a place called Springbank, which was a new camp just put up by the military in Adelaide. We were in Springbank for I’d say three weeks, we didn’t have any interstate

reinforcements then, all our reinforcements had come from Victoria until that time when we were to go north to New Guinea. Some of the more elderly men, the first lot of elderly men that were drafted out of the battalion, that was at Julus in Palestine, that would be just before Christmas in 1940,

they were put into a guard battalion because there had been so many Italians captured, 30 odd thousand had been captured and they had to have guards for them. And we naturally thought, ‘well they’ll be used as guards to take them back to Australia or wherever they’re going’, however that guard battalion by just an amazing thing, they were sent to Crete.

There were over a thousand men that were 35 and over who were drawn out of the infantry and other units to make a garrison battalion and they were shipped across to Crete because we were holding out against the Germans in Greece and Crete. But that was an unfortunate part of our war because those men were

all captured, but being POWs of the Germans they were treated like humans, the German Army was a clean army. However we went down and arrived back at Springbank

and I got about a five day leave in Springbank and then I had to come back to report to a drill hall down here. Then we went on, the troops all got onto these trains that Princes Bridge Station [Flinders st?], the Princes Bridge Station was the longest station in Victoria,

it could have two trains, two troop trains and we all got on that and we went up to Glen Innes. Now Glen Innes was a freezing place, very cold, we were there for some weeks until they reformed and we took in a whole lot of new reinforcements, young boys they were.

They’d had some military training naturally, before they came into us, but they were from all states, WA, Tasmania, SA, NSW. We must have got at leat a hundred reinforcements at that time.

No they were just recruits out of Puckapunyal and Singleton

and other army camps around Australia. They had enlisted to go into the AIF. Some of them were still coming out of the CMF, but quite a few we got were young boys who just wanted to ‘see the world’, they thought, but of course, they weren’t going to ‘see the world’, all they saw was New Guinea.

Yeah, they came into the 2/14th Battalion.

Most of those young men didn’t last long at all because they got into areas and positions and exposed themselves and that was the end of it as far as the Japs were concerned, they didn’t think twice about killing people. We were in

Glen Innes for a couple of weeks until we reformed and then we were taken up, as a battalion, to Yandina, which is a mountain Ninderry , which is just between Yandina and the coast. While we were there we had to put in barbed wire along the coast because they thought the Japs would land in that big

area there, which was just hundreds of miles of just coast line, so we were just putting up barbed wire near the water on the sand, we put a lot of barbed wire along there. We were taken to different places there, we were in an area up near the Bruce Highway and we

were in a pineapple plantation actually, owned by an old bloke. He reckoned that we were pinching his chickens and at any rate we went and had a look at where the chickens were another time, and there was a carpet snake in there, still had chickens in it, it had just swallowed that night, so we raced up to the farmhouse and said,

“Come down here, its not us pinching your chickens, it’s the carpet snake.” But he also said we were eating his pineapples, they weren’t in season, but he put a bill in to the army I believe, for quite a lot of money, which we disputed, as a section. We were only a section in a platoon in this particular area, but we did have to dig weapon pits.

From Coolum we dug a set of weapon pits about quarter of a mile in, areas there. At Palmwoods we had s second set of weapon pits, in case the Japs landed, the artillery were behind us all the time and generally that’s the Blackall Ranges [Coast Range] in that area, that’s where we were

setting up the weapon pit in the defensive area in what they called the ‘Brisbane Line’, that’s what they called the ‘Brisbane Line’ during the war. Well eventually we were all sent back and formed as a battalion at Yandina, during this time we had to do lots of route marches. I went with Lieutenant Boddington, who was

our lieutenant in 15th Platoon at that time. We marched from Yandina up through Nambour and right along the top of the Blackall Ranges, we took some bully beef with us and were supposed to live off the country. One or two of our blokes, there were nine of us, one or two milked a cow

once or twice, there were quite a lot of dairy farms in that area, beautiful country, magnificent country. We got right down to Melany and we marched from Melany right through to Caloundra, we were right next to the Post Office, on a vacant lot in Caloundra near the sea front, and a lady next door came in that night,

we had just settled that night and she came in with this big tray of newly made scones and Bill Boddington said, “They’ve got to live off the land” and she said, “You mind your own business, you don’t have to eat any of them”, this was to our lieutenant, and Bill was a very nice bloke, he sort of said, “Well, let it go”, so we had beautifully

cooked scones for tea that night and the following morning she came in with a few other delicacies, very early in the morning because we had to get back to camp. We were supposed to try and do that in one day, from Caloundra back to Yandina, Mount Ninderry. We had to swim the rivers, the Maroochy River was quite a big river,

and keep our guns above water level as far as we could. We waited for the tide of course, it was a matter of jumping from one little island with a tree in the middle of it and all this swampy ground going up the coast there, inland from the sand area. We were pretty loaded up, couldn’t walk on sand too long because, you couldn’t, physically.

The kangaroos were jumping in the islands ahead of us as we went up this soggy area, and eventually we got back to camp, and no sooner were we back at camp when we were informed that we were to be shipped to New Guinea. Our colonel at that time,

Colonel Cannon, left us in the Middle East and Colonel Keys took over our battalion. We all went up on a ‘Liberty ship’ from Brisbane, while we were in Brisbane we noticed that there were some ‘wharfies’ there, were actually dropping

cases on the wharf and the cases were marked ‘whiskey’. They weren’t for our ship they were for somewhere else, but any rate one or two of our chaps didn’t like the idea of that and this chap had an army pannikin [small pan or cup] and he put the case on a corner and drained the whiskey out

from the corner. He actually got down on his hands and knees to lick whiskey off the concrete and one of our blokes out his foot on his neck and flattened his nose against the concrete, there was quite a to do from the ‘wharfies’ for that, but when a few more of our big blokes went down they said, “Buzz off” and that was it and we got on the ship and sailed.

Even in those days the ‘wharfies’ were playing ‘funny business’ and they refused to load our ship, which we thought was pretty poor. There was ammunition amongst it, but there was also a hell of a lot of food-stuffs, but the whiskey wasn’t for us it was for someone else because we weren’t allowed to have drink up in New Guinea at that time,

there was an embargo on taking any intoxicating liquor to New Guinea. We arrived at Port Moresby and it was fairly early in the morning because we were put straight onto these trucks, open trucks they were, about 30 tonners, 30 hundred weight, I should say. And taken up this very precarious dirt road

from Moresby, about 40 odd miles north, and the trucks to negotiate some of these horseshoe bends, had to back up, and you’re looking down a precipes behind you, and a couple of us thought, ‘we hope the breaks hold’ because they had to make two ‘bites’ to get around the bends.

However we got up to Koitake, we were taken off those trucks. Eventually we went up to McDonald’s Corner, and from McDonald’s Corner along to the Imita Ridge area. We had a couple of days up at Koitake, that was an area that had a rubber plantation,

many thousands of trees, rubber trees, there was also some cattle up there that had ticks in them, the people who had lived there, they were told to move away and go to Moresby and of course, the cattle had to be dipped every week, otherwise the ticks just took over, and they were hundreds of ticks on these animals and we were instructed to shoot them and burn them.

Well, that’s a part of what we had to do on the islands before we took off for Imita Ridge. We’d only got into the jungle a short time and we got to what is known as a ‘golden staircase’, it was originally built for troops to go over,

but there was so much rain there that in no time it was just mud, mud up to your ankles, in parts at any rate, not all of it, but parts. We were loaded up ‘to blazes’, I had more ammunition and more magazines because, as I mentioned earlier, I got them from this English soldier at Litani river in

Syria. We then got through the first night and the chaps were all very tired, but we were very fit, really very fit, we got to Myola on the 23rd of August and Matt Power had his 21st birthday

that night, which was Bully beef and dehydrated potato, we’d never ever had dehydrated potato before. It was quite palatable compared to a lot of other things. Normally we had apple,

a lot of apple overseas, the tins of apple were like a 2-gallon tin, a big tin. They used to call it, I can’t think of it now, but it was mainly from Tasmania the apple, apple pulp. We had rice that night, at Matt’s 21st and

that was it. At Myola they were trying to drop supplies, but it was sort of supposed to have been a lake, but it wasn’t a lake, because there was more dirt than there was water, and as they dropped things out of the aircraft well, they just went straight in.

In fact, one tin of biscuits hit one of the soldiers and flattened him, so that was the end of his existence. We had to pick up as much as we could from the area and take it up to the camp area. Then we took off the following morning early, and we were all loaded ‘to blazes’, but it was like going to a picnic,

the attitude we had at the time, we knew we were going to meet the Japs, but it was really sort of, we were sliding and slipping all over the place, when you went down hill, as we got to Isurava we heard gunfire. It was Japanese mainly letting fly because they were probably

at that time, ten to one against our people until we got up there, we had about 530 chaps in the 14th [2/14th]. We came up and then the 39th [Battalion] came out of the jungle or some of them were already back near Isurava. They came in behind us.

The thing is, you couldn’t see, unless a chap came near you, you couldn’t see him, because you just didn’t see people, unless you were standing. And the following morning, that was in the afternoon, well, they were shooting that afternoon, shooting at us and we shot at the Japs, well, you’d hear a gun firing and then you’d let a magazine go in that direction

and if it didn’t fire again, you knew you had got what you wanted, you see. But I didn’t see, I’ll be perfectly honest, I didn’t see one 39th chap. Matt Power, he went down to our company HQ and he was told to go somewhere and he did see some 39th chaps.

They did have weapon pits from somewhere up the hill from where we were, behind us, but Matt and I were right on the sideline. He was an ‘I’ [intelligence] sergeant at that time, Intelligence Sergeant. He said that this was the area to go,

well, 13 Platoon were in the forward area, 14th Platoon and 15th Platoon there. The Japanese could see, well they probably could see movement maybe, I don’t know. They were shooting in our direction when we were higher up the hill, rather than low down.

Bill Boddington came up and said, “You can come down here, but don’t shoot, there’s some blokes coming out of the jungle and they’re our people.” The first afternoon that our people went out, that was 14th Platoon went out,

well they went up towards Deniki, but they were on the side of our mountain and the Japanese were in the valley, there must have been more in the valley because 2/16th had gone out to Ubiri which was out on the side of the next hill up, the hills go up just out of a valley at 45 degrees in New Guinea,

they’re very, very steep mountains. And even little hill was a very steep hill, very hard. A lot of water between them, a lot of creeks, but however Boddington came and said, “Come down here”, and that’s the afternoon I was standing on the edge of an area that had cleared a little bit,

apparently it might have been a part of the village originally, and this chap came out next to me, J.K. Bryce, he was the Captain in the 53rd and he had these boys with him, well I say ‘boys’, they would have been 18 or 19, but they were just ‘striplings’ [adolescents]. They came past me, I didn’t have time to talk to J.K. Bryce, I recognised him straight away because I went

to school with him and also he was in the ‘Victoria and Scottish’. However they went behind us, but were told to move further, I was told later on, but while I was in that position a lot of New Guinea natives came up with bags of rice and ammunition,

boxes of 45 ammunition, Tommy-gun ammunition, and the Japs started to shoot, firing at something, fortunately not at the natives. They just dropped what they had and they ran back along the track and Tipton, he was our company sergeant major, but at that time he was

the battalion regimental sergeant major. For the first time ever, he used to call me ‘Smithy’ until then, that afternoon he called out, “Hey Lionel, come over here and give us a hand” to move this stuff that had been dropped on the track, which could have been in sight of some of the Japanese positions, any rate we had to move it from that area onto an area where it couldn’t be visible

After Les Tipton and I took the ammunition and the rice out of sight at the side of the track, we went back to our positions, which as I mentioned earlier were almost on the skyline.

D company were in behind us, the 39th, I learned later were there, but you didn’t know where your troops were because there was just no communication whatsoever.

No, no, we knew the 16th, the 27th were kept back in Port Moresby

with the 2/27th with the army, well, head area of the army there, General Blamey etcetera, they kept the 27th there, they shouldn’t have actually, they should have let them go forward also, but we knew the 16th were immediately on our heels.

And we didn’t know that any other battalions were at Kokoda until we got to Isurava and that’s when we thought probably our brigadier knew, Brigadier Potts at that time and our colonel, Colonel Keys, who was a new colonel for the battalion from the Middle East, but we never saw Colonel Keys until we got to Yandina. When we were in Yandina he said,

“I want everyone to train very hard, really train to your utmost” we also had jungle training before we went up to New Guinea in the deep forest ranges of the Blackall Ranges.

The Blackall Ranges are, they are inland from Caloundra up to

Nambour and that area, and the ‘Sunshine Coast’, now known as the ‘Sunshine Coast’.

No that’s further back, a distance back. Canungra is in behind the Gold Coast.

Well we did, the battalion went back to the Atherton Tablelands,

but I was still in New Guinea. I actually lost a lot of weight, I was put in a convalescent depot and then after the convalescent home, I then went to Ely beach [?], this is after the campaign up at Isurava. I went to Ely beach

to where the survey section of the army was because I played hockey with Alan Howard and he said, “If ever you want to join our unit come and see me”, so I happened to run into him again in Australia before heading north. I though, “Well I’ve had enough of this shooting Japs and being shot at by Japs” so I thought I’d go to the survey section. They put me on strength

and then the numbers that they wanted.

No that’s after. At Isurava we had three days of heavy fighting against the Japs there, they were shooting as much as they could

and they had ‘mountain guns’, I’ve got a photograph of one of their ‘mountain guns’, which I’ll show you later. They were letting fly at us with everything and they had a lot of troops and we were just shooting back as best we could, but as I said you didn’t know whether you hit your mark or not.

Only on one occasion did I see Japanese soldiers when I went down to company HQ, which is where the CO of our company was. He was in a ‘fox hole’ [small dugout] actually, it was a pretty dangerous position there, silly really, in my opinion

because our lieutenant was shot right there, I saw Japs from there, they were down on a plantation from the valley a little way, so I was with Lou Owen and he said, “Knock a couple off” so we had shots and the bloke I hit, I didn’t hit him properly and Waller said just, “Silly bastard, why didn’t you make a good job of it?” sort of

business, but however we had to go back to another position and the Japanese were attacking all the time. When we were on the track, Matt Power and I were on the track, our section was down from us a bit, we could hear the Japs coming up the valley on our left,

stumbling up, it was a creek, a fast moving creek I’ve learnt since, but they were told to surround us and attack, it didn’t matter what the terrain was like, when their officers told them to do something they would just, they did what they were told irrespective of the noise they made and even ‘gabbling’ [talking] to each other

So the only thing we could do was to throw bombs, if we could, far enough into the valley to have any effect, when you threw a grenade you’d be damn lucky to get it past 20 or 30 feet in some places before it would hit a tree or sapling or something, in fact the first

night we were at Isurava, Bill Maxwell was just below me, he was the corporal of another section, he woke up in the night and he saw this thing towering over him and it was a Jap, in amongst our troops and Bill grabbed the bayonet and

pushed him aside, Bill was heavily built chap, an ex-farmer from down in the Gippsland area, and he actually threw the Jap off his feet. The Japs were the emperor’s guards, some of those Japs were six feet, most of them were only 5 footers, but there was the Emperor’s Guard Battalion in those people who came towards us.

But Bill lost a finger that night, but Harry Dahmes was down there with Bill and he heard the skirmish and he threw a grenade and the grenade hit a tree and bounced back amongst our blokes, but fortunately Harry had forgotten to pull the pin, so it didn’t go off, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen, the Japs were so

cheeky that they came up amongst our troops at night and there was one that night, there was a couple of Japs who came up amongst our blokes, we had, that was the first night, we had been marching all day, marching like hell and well, we were ‘knackered’ [exausted].

There were so many of them that their officers could, they didn’t mind expending lives, that’s what it amounted to, they said, well, the general idea of the Japanese Army was to surround people and then finish them off, and that was going on, they were coming up the valleys and trying to come round the other way, the 2/16th

stopped them coming around the other way. So they then started to come up this way, but as I say, they didn’t care about losing lives the Japanese, they were fanatical, that’s what it amounted to, fanatical. They’d never lost and never been repulsed before in all their coming right down the South West Pacific, they just

rolled over everything, so at any rate we did actually stop them those three days and they had to fight every inch of the way.

Well, we held them up.

Well, Isurava back to Templeton’s Crossing.

We were coming back, but every time we’d come back we’d try

and get in a defensive area where we could shoot and we also had, although we lost a lot of mortar bombs when they tried to drop them at Myola, they just went into that morass there and they would still be about 6 feet or 8 feet into that because the DC3s [Douglas DC3 transport aircraft] came over at about 100 ‘k’s’ [kilometres] and then

they’d push the goods out and anything that was heavy just went straight in, it was lost, you couldn’t find it, as I said biscuit tin would even go into that, but we did take up quite a lot of 3-inch mortar bombs. When we were at Isurava our

platoon HQ had a 2-inch mortar and they were fired and the Japs shouted out, “Two-inch mortar no bloody good” and it wasn’t either because you had to be lucky to get it through the trees, so it would go down onto them and if it hit a tree then it would explode.

So the warhead on the 2-inch bomb, well they were very lucky to explode them, you were very lucky to get it out of the canopy.

There were American Japs amongst them, you know.

They were American Japs because they spoke, that bloke spoke with a sort of American accent, “Two-inch mortar no bloody good” he yelled out. But however with the 3-inch mortar we did a lot of damage to the Japanese, they didn’t know we had as much ammunition as we did have

and our mortar lieutenant he was killed there, our 14th Platoon officer was killed on the 28th and our bloke was killed on the 29th, Bill Boddington was killed on the 29th.

Well we just thought that they were bloody cheeky, we treated them as ‘cheeky buggers’, sort of business. So the more bullets we could send off the better we liked it, that’s what it amounted to. And fortunately as I said before, I’d moved this Tommy-gun ammunition with Les Tipton to another position, and when we came

down from that position well, I grabbed some more ammunition, 45 ammunition or Tommy-gun ammunition, filled my magazines again. But I’d emptied quite a few magazines in the direction of the Japs from where I was because I was shooting over the top of 13th and 14th Platoon, the Japs were out there and they were down here, below, on the lower area,

but not until you look at the site of the Isurava Memorial, that was actually C Company’s site where that memorial is. Not until you get there and you see how quickly, the flattened top, because they flattened it for the memorial service, but it did go down very quickly that mountain.

And as I say our blokes were down further, but you don’t know where you are when you’re in jungle, that’s what it amounts to.

Well I’d say there was a tree every 6 feet in some parts, and I’m not talking about, fortunately trees that are wide enough to cover a man if

he stands side onto it, this is where our young recruits didn’t, the Japanese were as I say, fanatical, they were cheeky and they would get up as close as they could to you before they’d take a shot you.

Well one night, this was further on, a Japanese chap was saying, “Where’s my section leader, Charlie, where are you?” and well, one of our chaps knew it was a Jap of course,

straight away and he just, as he went near him he just gave him a ‘burst’ [shot at him] and that was it, that’s the sort of thing, they were so cheeky, but they were so confident that they could keep conquering all that was ahead of them, but the thing is that they ran out of food, that’s actually what happened to them. With the

bombing of supplies, the dumps that they had back along the track like Menari, Menari mainly, they were big dumps there. The air force started to get to work on those and bomb them and well the Japanese ran out of supplies. The bags of rice that Tipton and I removed

before we moved back from that position, ‘Tippy’ [Tipton] put a couple of primed grenades in underneath the bag of rice and of course as soon as the Japs saw rice, better rice than they had, well they pull the bag off and the grenades went off, so they would have only been caught once with that.

Once, they would have only been caught once with that sort of thing, but it wouldn’t have worried them because the officers would say, they wouldn’t care if another bloke got killed pulling bags of rice off, those bags of rice, as I say, that was better food than they had brought up to the lines themselves. But fortunately there were only about seven bags of rice.

You were out in the open and you knew where the gunfire was coming from and you knew where you were shooting and you knew

if you lined up something well, and you had any sort of riflery, well you were pretty sure that you got your mark, but in the jungle you’re mainly listening at noises, that’s what you mainly do, and work out where the gunfire is coming from, and there’s a hell of a lot of gunfire going on, I might mention,

so it didn’t matter really if you just ‘sprayed’ a whole magazine, 20 rounds, there’d be a lot of shooting coming up and a lot of bullets flying, so you would just empty a magazine. One day, that was on the

29th, Matt was right near me, Matt Power, who was our groomsman at our wedding incidentally, he came, he might have been out for ‘the bog’ [toilet] or something, but he came back and the next thing, he spun like a top as a lot of bullets were flying and it hit him and spun him, I just looked round there like that, and there’s Matt spinning like that and then down.

Well, the next fuselage of bullets that came up well, that took the top of my haversack, I had my ground sheet rolled up on top of my haversack and half a blanket. Well when we got back to the next position I unrolled my groundsheet and you could see daylight through the whole lot of it,

they shot my shaving gear off my back, because I didn’t have a razor from then on, but I don’t think many of our blokes had time to use razors, so I don’t think it mattered that much. But when we did go back to, our 50th anniversary, up to New Guinea in 1997

it was I think, when we got back to Isurava I said, “Has any body found a razor?” and the head men of Isurava village brought my razor, and also I said, “There’s 48 magazine of a Tommy-gun

near where that razor is too” because once I’d shot all the bullets out of my circular magazine, I left it because it was too heavy to carry and I had 20’s from then on, 6 magazines of 20’s and you could fit them into your kit, but that chap, the head of Isurava,

he came up with the razor and he said, “We found that in the area” and also the magazine that I’d left near that. But it was, as I said, bullets flying everywhere and you were lucky if you didn’t get clipped with one.

They had two classes of machine-

guns, they had one that had a very quick action and very, it was ‘ping, ping, ping, ping’. We called that the ‘woodpecker’.

I don’t know what the particular make of it was.

Well there are two guns apart from the ‘mountain guns’, that they were using against us and there were two different tones from there gunfire, but as I said, you just emptied a magazine into where you knew that Japs were and hoped that you did the most damage that you could do.

So well, we went back and when we were near Templeton’s Crossing we were told Lieutenant McIlroy he was the lieutenant for the anti-aircraft for our HQ Company, that platoon. Well he was put in charge of about twelve of our blokes, we were sent out, the numbers were depleted,

sent out as a standing patrol to stop the Japs coming round on us and as I might have mentioned earlier, we were actually cut off. At early morning he and I and another chap went forward and we could see the Japs in single file, or more than single file, there were just dozens of them coming round.

And if we had of opened fire well, they would have just wiped the lot of us out, so McIlroy, he said, “We’ll retire and come back further” well, we went at that time west from Templeton’s Crossing and we went over the top of the Owen Stanley Ranges

and we were going through sago palm, on the top of those mountains you were right up amongst the clouds and everything is wet, and there’d be a tree stump that high, you’d try and clamber over it and you’d go in right in up to your waist, it was just rotten, so old and had been there for so long you just

went straight through it. We eventually came onto, at one time we came onto a native village, quite a lot of them were up on the air [on stilts] because you couldn’t have them down. They did have some pigs there, they had there pigs tied actually and their women, the only women in that village, they ‘screamed blue murder’ [became agitated]

and ran. We didn’t even go through that village, we sidestepped it and went further afield and away. The Japanese had gone out in that area we learnt later, and they had shot anything that moved they’d shoot.

It was Seventh-day Adventist people who told us, later on, that they’d been out that way. We then came back eventually, we got back towards Efogi and we got a couple of, 27 blokes there that had left their own battalion areas and they got ‘bushed’ [exhausted] by the jungle. We were shot

at by our own aircraft when we were coming round the side of a mountain at Efogi towards Kagi, these aircraft were going out to bomb and strafe further north and somebody in the last air craft saw a few blokes on the side of a hill and at the last minute let fly with some bullets, but fortunately they

were well down the hill from us. At that time I was carrying ‘Harry’ [Henry] Salter’s rifle, ‘Harry’ Salter wanted to ‘give it away’ [give up], and we all kept saying, you know, “Keep at it, you’re all right” so on and so forth, but eventually he did lie down and die [30 September 1942], he just, he lost faith, that was what it amounted to, and you’ve got to really

‘stick to your guns’ and keep going when you’re in those circumstances. You can’t think of otherwise because otherwise is no good, its just hopeless.

No. The thing is that we were all ‘chopped up’, the battalion was ‘chopped up’.

Well there were patrols

and then you’d get cut off and then you’d have to fight your way back to get to your own troops, the thing was that when we came back, whenever we came back, well the Japanese had advanced you see, from Isurava they had advanced through Efogi, Kagi, Menari and further back from there. We ran into them in Menari,

we were ambushed at Menari, the Japanese. That’s where I went out as a scout, because we did stumble into a Seventh-Day Adventist mission station, and we were there for only a few minutes and a native arrived and he said, “I’m from this mission” so on and so forth

and Lieutenant McIlroy said to him, “Can you put us on the track to get back to our troops’ and he said, “Yes.” Well, he was out ahead of us, there were about fifteen of us at that time, he was out ahead of us and I’m not kidding, he was only a couple of feet

ahead I’d say, and McIlroy was there and I wasn’t very far away, and somebody else was here with us and then the troops were coming up, or the patrol. And this chap just went into thin air, this native, just absolutely disappeared and we went down that way and we went down that way and he had just absolutely disappeared.

Out of vision and out of sight, no noise from the jungle, no noise whatsoever. So McIlroy stopped and said, “Righto we’ve come this far, we’ll just see what’s ahead of us now” and he called for volunteers to go ahead as scouts, well, Lou Waller and Bluey Bell, I gave Lou my Tommy-gun. Lou Waller had got weak

and he threw his Tommy-gun away and a few of our blokes threw their rifles away because they hadn’t eaten for about eight days or more accept what we took with us, we took three tins of Bully beef for four men, that’s what we were given when we were last with the battalion, and that

was all they could probably give us at that time just to go out and have standing patrol, thinking we would rejoin the battalion, you see. However, you could live without food, there was plenty of water, lots of rivers and creeks and things, but we were very fit, we were very fit but one or two chaps, you know

they were ‘belly-aching’ [complaining] all the time, but they normally were the type that always ‘belly-ached’ you see, so you didn’t take any notice of that anyway, however when we were at this area where this native boy just disappeared, a man of about 40 I’d say. I went to the right, Lou and Bluey Bell went forward to the left, I went to the right and

I went probably some hundreds of yards in the jungle. I couldn’t see, I said to Lou, “Try and keep some sort of contact”, I didn’t know how far he was to my left, but I went forward and I saw these Tolai boys.

Now they’re the boys from Rabaul that the Japanese brought across as carriers and they were a group of about ten or twelve Tolai standing, I just came out of, I was in the jungle and they were in the jungle too. I said, “Where’s the Australian soldiers?” and I had already walked passed two Japanese weapon pits.

They were 15 feet behind me and I looked, he said, “Japanese soldier over there” and if he hadn’t talked as loud as he bloody-well did, well the Jap wouldn’t have heard anything, but the Jap looked up as I looked across and he had, both of them had Australian ground sheets, they loved the Australian ground sheets because it rained every afternoon

at 2 o’clock or thereabouts, you put the ground sheet up and get under it. They had these ground sheets rigged up over their weapon pits, tied to the saplings around them and it was that really, that Jap tried to pull the gun over and he couldn’t because of the saplings and also having the ground sheet tied he couldn’t pull the thing over, so I didn’t have time to throw a grenade actually,

I didn’t have one in my hand actually at that time, and so I just took off to the right and I saw tracks and I started to go down the tracks. And down the track were more Tolai boys with, I worked out that it would have been mountain-gun ammunition they were carrying. They wondered what the hell was coming towards them and they all dived into the jungle

on the left and I dived into the jungle on the right. And I went probably for 20 minutes or more, I went into the jungle on the right and then I struck a little rivulet, only say 6 feet wide, very dense it was. I went down that for a way and there was a river, it was the Menari River.

I got onto the side of the Menari River and I thought, “If I walk down here for a while and cut back up to the right, straight up the hill again I’ll probably get back to our group of blokes”, I did hear gunfire from there. I heard gun-

fire and any rate I did go back into the jungle from the creek or river it was, for a little while and the next thing I did have a grenade in my hand then, I heard this crashing and bashing about 20 feet to my left and out onto the river bank came Roberts, A.G., Alex Roberts and you know

I said, “What’s happened” and he said, “They let fly at all our blokes up there.” So however, we decided, I said, “Well look there’s no point in going back up there it will be mayhem, so we might as well try and make it on our own.” So we then started to go in the direction I had seen this track and the people going down further back, I said,

“If we go in this direction we’ll be going back towards our troops at any rate, even if we keep parallel to the Japanese”. So we went up and there was an area there where a lot of trees had been shot down, that was the ‘brigade hill’, what they called the ‘brigade hill’ later, I read the battalion history and the Japanese had

decimated that with their mountain-guns, they just let fly and all the saplings were snapped off at the base and so on, there’d been quite a dust up. We did across a grave there, that was Archie Noble’s grave I learned later, and that big pile of earth had been, they put his body underground.

There were quite a lot of wild pigs about through New Guinea and I would think that quite often if a body had been left it would have been eaten by the wild pigs, but you don’t know these things, you really don’t know if that did happen or it didn’t happen. A body would,

in that sort of jungle country that area and with the humidity and all the rainfall, well, a body wouldn’t last long at any rate. When they got back to Isurava well, quite a lot of those chaps were just bones you know, and they did have the formation of a human form, but the body had

just sort of decomposed.

Alex Roberts and, well we came back and when you’re on a track you have to be on the top of a ridge all the time, otherwise you can’t move very

easily at all. It would take you a long time to move any distance at all so you keep on the ridges. One morning we were sitting own talking, Alex Roberts and myself were sitting down talking and saying, “Well, which way should we go.” You know, you couldn’t see the sun because there was a lot of cloud, you had no idea exactly

where the sun was, the cloud cover was so thick and we were sitting there and I looked up and saw this Jap from over a valley, and up on a ridge next to where we were, on a parallel, looking around. He was moving and I didn’t much, I moved my eyes probably. And I said to Alex, “Freeze”

and he had blonde hair and a blonde beard, Roberts, had bright blue eyes and very fair skinned. I just said, “Freeze, there’s Japs looking down at us from up on the hill there” and within half a minute, there were a lot of ‘Brush Turkeys’ up there as well, you know, the turkey that we’ve got in Australia, similar bird.

This turkey gave a ‘squawk’ and then there was, “Gobble, gobble, gobble” and another ‘squawk’ and the Japs, one looked at the other, there was more than two of them, as I could see that there were other people behind. He ‘garbled’ something in Japanese and they thought that Alex and I was the turkey that was still ‘gobbling’, so it was the turkey that really saved us

because all they had to do was let fly with a burst of machine-gun fire and it would have been ‘curtains’ [the end] for us. But fortunately we sat a while and heard them recede, well up the side of this hill, over from where we were, and then we got up and went the way we’d come and then we went back along the next bridge,

which would be the (UNCLEAR) to theirs and about every 30 or 40 feet wherever the Japs had been they’d pull a leaf off and the point of the leaf would be in the direction they were walking. And quite a lot of tracks there we got onto, the Japs had been there before us and we just followed where the leaf was pointing,

knowing sooner or later that we would run into our troops or run into Japs. However we did come up to an area that was in a flat area and in this flat area there were quite a few haversacks and there were at leats 20 tins that had been punctured with bayonets.

It was baked beans, spaghetti and there were some tins of meat that had been punctured. There was also this haversack that was intact, I opened it and got letters out of it actually and the letters in it were,

it was a NSW battalion, a CMF battalion and this chap was describing in these letters that were in his haversack of what ships were in Sydney harbour. You wouldn’t believe it, we weren’t allowed to write anything about that sort of thing, but of course they knew nothing about it the CMF boys, what you could write and what you couldn’t write.

When we were in the Middle East a lot of my letters were censored, in fact I got a card the other week with W.G.A. Landale and a tick on it to say, “Okay”, it was all right to come, that was from Palestine to Australia, but an officer had to put his signature on a photograph

that there was nothing in the background and so on and so forth. W.G.A. Landale it was, our 2IC [Second In Command] at that time. But we were getting back towards our troops and we thought, “Well this is Australian, these are Australian things’. They must have been in that position and the Japs must have come up on them and they must have come up on them, dropped everything and ran. There was a

Bren gun there still with the magazine in it, so I took the magazine out of it and threw the block out of the gun into the jungle area there, but I opened up the other end, I still had my bayonet on, as I always carried my bayonet although I always carried a Tommy-gun, I opened the other end of those tins and ate from the opposite end where it

hadn’t gone off and it was very sustaining that, it would keep you going. And Roberts, he had that morning, there was a tree like a plum tree, like a blood-plum tree, and we were told not to eat any of the fruits up in New Guinea as it was poisonous and silly Alex he ate a couple of

these and told me he was throwing up, and he had nothing to throw up of course but he was vomiting his heart out. I said, “For heaven’s sake, get some of his food into you.” He didn’t feel like it at all, but he did try and eat some of it, but was pretty sickly, but I did, I ate every bit out of those tins that I could get out of it

without getting to the part of it that was definitely off. Well, we went from there, we were on pretty level ground there, we weren’t sure if we were going to run into Japs or run into Australians really, you just didn’t know.

No we couldn’t,

but it was over that hill and the next valley, that’s where the fighting was going on there. And we came onto this hill which was a very steep hill and was called ‘Porters Lookout’. Now General Porter, he was a Major General I think, that was named after him because

before the Japs got up to that position they had this lookout sent out by an independent company. Now I don’t know what independent company it was, but they were young boys and they were out there on their own, they weren’t with a battalion, they were out there on their own. Well we came to this thing and I said to Roberts that morning, “I think we were getting near our blokes”, I said,

“I look like a Jap and you don’t look like a Jap, you look like an Australian” you know, white beard and so on. Any rate he wouldn’t go forward, with due respect to him, he was always a bit backward, so I started to go up this hill and the next thing there’s a

whole lot of bullets went just next to my left ear, right there passed my ear and I yelled out, “Don’t shoot” and this young bloke stepped out up the hill from me, a young Aussie. Well he didn’t say anything, he didn’t say ‘sorry’ or anything, but however

we went up there and they took us back to the troops further back, we had to go along that ridge and then down into the valley and up to another ridge, they took us back, Roberts and I. And then we eventually got back to Ioribaiwa and then as I might have mentioned earlier, Damien Parer,

who was one of the official cameramen, he came up to me about two mornings later and Ken Hutton, he was The Argus war correspondent, he came up and he interviewed me. I can’t find that interview it was cut out of the paper

Damien Parer looked at me and by that time I had got the lend of a razor and I’d taken off one side of my face you see, and he said, “Oh you’ve buggered it up, I can’t take your photograph now”, half on and half off, he said, “If you’d left the beard on it would have been a good photograph” however he didn’t photograph me, but we talked for a while.

And then I went back to the second CCS, that’s the Casualty Clearing Station. I was kept there and was fed. When you have your first proper meal, although I had about a third of about four tins of food a few days before and I had ‘gripes’ [sickness] from that of course,

but actually baked beans are one of the best foods and even spaghetti in tomato sauce, it’s not bad on your stomach and I hadn’t eaten food for something like nine or ten days at least. When we went to that Seventh-Day Adventist, we did eat some of the pawpaw there,

but pawpaw on an empty stomach is not good, even if it’s a nice ripe pawpaw, it really gives you the ‘gripes’. However when I did get back, I tried to eat rice and it just stuck halfway, I was really in trouble to get it down to my stomach. Hot tea was okay, I poured hot tea into myself quite a bit and

then we had to go back along the track quite a bit before we got out. Actually I was very fit, I kept eating, when we were in the Middle East some blokes would say, “Oh I’m not eating that stuff”, you know. Their food that they had at their table wouldn’t be

anywhere near as good as the food my mother gave me. My mother was a marvellous cook and we had beautiful food the whole time, my whole life, and as I say with Greta, I’ve had excellent food the whole of my married life and this is why I’m as fit as I am. The thing is that the chaps that were, they were always ‘whingers’,

it didn’t matter whether there was condensed milk or condensed cream, we used have these little tins of condensed cream, Nestle’s Condensed Cream, which you could get after the war, and that was a delicacy, and absolute delicacy. We did get some of that on Christmas day in Julus

‘per favour’ [courtesy] of the 2/14th Battalion Ladies Auxiliary. They sent enough money over, I think it was 11,600 pounds they had collected at that time for somebody to go to the NAAFI [Navy, Army, Air Force Institute] canteen and buy up food, but they must have sent turkeys somehow

or another because we had turkey, and there are no turkeys in the Middle East to eat, I know that for sure. So they got some refrigerated, well one of the ships that was going across to feed us because there were no air craft carrying goods in those days, no air craft at all carrying goods or ammunition, to my knowledge, I don’t think it was thought of.

The aircraft were all for bombing or strafing and so whatever we got in the Middle East or whatever we got, not so much in New Guinea because they did have DC3s flying up to New Guinea. After I came back from Australia I went north again in a DC3 and they could only do some hundreds of miles before they would go down for petrol again.

I went down from Melbourne to Brisbane and up the coast and we went to Higgins Field. Now Higgins Field was on the very top of the Cape York Peninsula, you could see the sea there, and the sea there and the Torres Straits there, when we went down to put petrol in at Higgins Field.

And then of course, I finished up in Morotai at that time, but you just had to look after your body to make sure that you were right for the next day, which I always did.

No I wasn’t, this was when I said or thought that I’m not going back there again

I’m going to join the survey section and as I might have mentioned earlier, I did run into Alan Howard when I was back on leave, from the Middle East, I ran into him in Melbourne and he said, “If ever you want to get into a unit outside of infantry, I wouldn’t be in the infantry for all the tea in China.”

Yes, he said to me…

Well you knew that you were going to be shot at, there was less chance of living in infantry than there was in anything. However I was in the infantry and that was all there was to it. I did go to HQ units when I went back to Moresby and I said, “Where is the survey section” and they told me it was at Ely beach

in a house. So I went to the house and I didn’t see Alan Howard, he wasn’t there.

There were some Frenchmen amongst the Legionaries [French Foreign Legion], I would say there was a predominance of French, but they did fight and they tried to stop you advancing, but if things got really tough for them well,

they were prepared to surrender, the same with the Italian soldiers, but not so much with the German soldiers, the German soldiers in the Middle East they were fanatical Nazis.

Because when we went to a position and we had

to go to get our breakfast, we had to go along this wire entanglement and wire in which, behind, were German POWs, and they kept spitting at us, spitting at us through the wire as we went passed, they were really fanatical Germans.

A German nation as a whole has always been very military and well, have been very successful.

Well when we were in the Middle East the Germans were just 80 miles away and we knew that the Germans were there because we would get reports. We didn’t move back, we kept moving forward the until

the South Africans took over from us. We took over from the British, the Scots Greys [Royal Scots Greys, armoured cavalry regiment], we took over from a Scottish Battalion in the western desert and then, when we had to go back to go to Syria an African Battalion took over from us, and it was really

quite amusing, because we moved mostly at night, but they actually had a band, a pipe-band and it was the Cameron Highlanders of Capetown [The Capetown ‘Cameron’ Highlanders], that regiment, and they took over from us in the western desert, and they actually marched from the railhead

to near where our positions where, well, they would have come up by trucks. Well, the Germans were, they were kept back by our troops at Bardia and Derna and Tobruk, they bottled our blokes up there so they were sort of trying to knock them out the German Army, Rommel’s [Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel] Army.

And that’s why they didn’t advance further to where we were, so really we didn’t have any active contact against the German Army, the only Germans we saw were the POWs who had been captured by the British 8th Army and our chaps.

Well, the Japanese were fanatical, they didn’t mind dying. It was an honour for them to die for the emperor so therefore, as far as killing us, they were, a lot of the Japanese

were actually, I’d say, they were of a lower-class Japanese. So therefore they had nothing to lose you see, compared to the present day Jap, well up to say, 10 years ago the Japanese were brought into companies,

I dealt quite a bit with a Japanese company after the war and Japanese themselves are very, very good businessmen to deal with. They were ‘fair dinkum’ [true to] what they said, they wouldn’t give you an answer until they rang Japan, but when they said they would do a thing, they would do it, and when they said they would ship a thing on a time, they would even send a

telex to us in Australia. It was electronics equipment we were getting from the Japs at that time, “Your equipment is on the Tiki Maru, it will be leaving Osaka at 9pm on such and such a date, it will arrive in Brisbane on such and such a date and will arrive

in Melbourne on such and such a date, at 2.30 in the afternoon”, that sort of thing and if, the night before, which did happen once, there was a terrific snow storm in Japan and that ship got frozen up. And the equipment on the ship, even the ship one deck down froze, and it was electric equipment and it was effected by

freezing conditions, so it did affect it as far as giving absolutely, it was numerical drafting equipment it was, had to be absolutely spot-on and kept in a room temperature.

Yes, they were fanatical, the German soldier was, I think, the best soldier although we didn’t come up against the Germans, but from what I heard from the Japs in the 6th and 9th Division well, they are clean fighting, but ‘fair dinkum’, absolutely ‘fair dinkum’ in them trying to get a position or getting

over the top of their position, which were our blokes and the British soldiers. The Americans weren’t in the war at that time, well they were not involved at all in warfare there, accept for further out of Algeria and places like that, Dakar. But they were not involved against the German Army until later on

when they went from Britain into France. But I’d say well, I believe from my uncles in the Great War that the German soldier was a very good soldier for his fatherland, as much as our blokes were for our country. But the Japanese were fanatical and

they did nasty things like beheading people and that sort of thing.

Oh yes, well the thing is that it was only when they were in retreat, they did tie some of their grenades up

so that if you walked passed it you’d get your leg blown off so on and so forth, but not when they were in the advance. It was only probably tactics that I think any army would use, as I said before, Les Tipton put grenades under the rice bags so that when they moved the rice bags they would explode and they’d

you know, keep them away from the rice bags, the bags could not be carried again, they had to be left were they where, so you put a booby-trap there to try and stop things happening. But the French were a mixture, they had a lot of Senegalese and the officers stood behind the Senegalese

and just ordered them to do what they wanted them to do and if they didn’t do it, well they were shot, that’s all there was to it. They were big, heavy men, the Senegalese and they were bigger than the Frenchmen themselves, but there were quite a lot of Senegalese killed in Syria.

Well, they did what they were told to do.

I think they would have rather kept down than put their head up.

Well, unless they were out in the open, that’s when they got knocked off. I don’t, I think most of the

bullets that came at us came from, some of them would have come from the Senegalese, but more from the European. The Senegalese were there because they were taken there to fight the war for the French, and I don’t think the Senegalese were like all nations, I don’t think they did want other people in their countries, which well,

as soon as the war was over Senegal became Senegal and the French moved out, the same as the British moved out of a lot of places in Africa, as we know. So they did their duty as they were told to do it, but as far as using initiative, I don’t think they would have gone forward to get a better position and take a ‘pot shot’

at who was coming towards them. And when they did get caught well, they got shot like flies, not purposely, but they were enemy and they would have to be put out of action if they didn’t put their hands up. The Japanese would put their hands up and then throw a grenade from behind their head, put their hands up like this and if they had a grenade in their hands they’d go like this.

No, it didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to our chaps up in one area, I know for a positive fact that they used that tactic and as I say, they were fanatical and they didn’t mind being shot. As soon as their hands came up with a grenade, well the Japs would shoot them, but not in time for the grenade to come towards them.

But we know that they did that sort of thing the Japanese. But that was up in the Kunai grass areas, Kunai grass is a bad area, anyone that got into Kunai grass got ‘scrub typhus’, and if you had to get down on your hands and knees to get out of sight, well you got ‘scrub typhus’, and ‘scrub typhus’ meant that you nearly always died.

And one of the chaps, when I was down in a rehab [rehabilitation] area, one of the nurses that I knew who lived in our home earlier on during the paralysis epidemic, she found out where I was and said, “We’ve got a 2/14th bloke in here” and she sent

through a friend, she sent a Jeep for me and I went back to the hospital and I saw Stephenson IR, Ivan Ralph Stephenson. And she took me to his ward and he did actually look up, his eyes were all glazed and he had ‘scrub typhus’, and he did recognise me. But the next day, I said I would go back the next day,

but he died that morning you see, so ‘scrub typhus’ is a really bad thing to get up there.

Gympie, dengue fever?

I don’t know Gympie bush, but dengue fever.

Well, that was up in Queensland that particular sort of growth, it was a creeper.

They had that in some of the valleys up in Queensland.

Probably is, Gympie bush. Well, we were just south of Gympie, but there was one thing they called ‘wait-a-while’ there

it had barbs about every two inches and you couldn’t move. If you got tangled in that you had to slash it out with the hatchet, you know, cut yourself away from it. We called that ‘wait-a-while’.

It’d just catch on to you, if you didn’t stop it, would tear your skin, so you had to stop and try and

disentangle yourself before you went forward again. I didn’t strike ‘wait-a-while’ while we were in New Guinea, but we did have it when we did some jungle training in Queensland, in the valleys of the Blackall Ranges. But we actually did call that ‘wait-a-while’ up there. But there was that other stinging nettle thing. We had,

some nights you’d be looking down at your feet and your boot would be full of blood through the leeches that would get on you, so you have to try, if you had extra socks then you’d have to change socks and try and wash them out in a creek if you were near a creek or river, but the leeches were, there were a lot of leeches up in New Guinea

all the time wherever you were, even up on the mountains, the humidity and the moisture up in the mountains, there are leeches everywhere there.

Well, if you didn’t know they were there, they just stuck to you until they were full and then dropped off, but if you did know they were there, you’d try and dispatch them.

You shouldn’t pull them straight off, if you pull them straight off and the blood has started to flow, well the blood will continue to flow, so you should try and edge them off with a blade of your bayonet or anything else, you just sort of wipe it off, rather than pull it off.

But my boot filled up a few times with blood, but I had plenty of blood fortunately to keep me going.

Yeah, I gave over 120 litres of blood, in fact, after I got to 70, you can’t give any more, and I applied under a slightly different initial and I gave it for another four years

because I had plenty and I felt good after giving blood, but when I got to 70 again, I went back to 65, I went up to 70 again and got a letter saying that I was of age, you can’t give any more blood. But giving blood is quite a, for some people anyway, it didn’t have any effect on me whatsoever, I had an unusual blood group, B3+, which is,

four in a hundred have got it and so it wasn’t generally, they had to powder my blood I think, to use it, whereas A2 and O4 blood group, they could use that on anybody.

Well, the mosquitos were a problem.

When we were at Myola they gave us some stuff, it was lemon, it had a lemon smell anyway, very strong lemon smell. They gave us some of that stuff, but it didn’t last very long really, you know, you’d use it well, when you though of it, you’d put it on your face more than anywhere.

But the mosquitos were a part of life up there and malaria, well I had BT malaria which is the benign version, I had that in Syria and I got it again in New Guinea, I got dengue fever up there too. So the malaria I got up in New Guinea, I had to take (UNCLEAR) plasma (UNCLEAR) for quite a time. When I came back out of the army they gave me

tablets to keep taking. So I probably took that for 6 months or more, after I got out of the army because I still had the malaria in my blood stream I guess, that was what they said at the time, but I’ve never had another attack of malaria since I got out of the army.

But it was very prevalent of course, in New Guinea amongst the indigenous people that were there.

No, we weren’t. We weren’t really on the Kokoda Track

there, we were. It would have been, we were west of it. Coming down west of the ‘Track’, we had taken out quite a distance with Lieutenant McIlroy and then well, we just kept coming down that area. The Japanese sort of, they

sort of surged forward, but they kept virtually on the main track or near the main track all the way when they advanced. I went back and we were in a parallel area to them, particularly after Menari, I mentioned that we did see the tracks that the Japanese had been on,

the leaves, well we just kept on those tracks because we knew we were going in the right direction. But I didn’t have any further combat with the Japanese at all from that time, from Menari onwards.

Yes well that, it was an

army survey group, second army survey [2nd Company Australian Army Engineer and Survey Corps], I think they called themselves. The man that I wanted to see was not there, but it was a sergeant and he said, “Well I’ll put you ‘on strength’ [on the unit roll]” and well, the arrangements were on hand and the next thing, within a day or two, yes, it would have been three days later,

some of there own people were sent up from the mainland, they then said to me that, “You’re supernumerary to our allowed strength in New Guinea, so I will have to release you again”. So I went back to the rehab depot and then I did go into Moresby on leave, I got a leave to go in and

I ran into Ian Macintyre who had been our pay-master in the 2/14th Battalion in the Middle East, and he had joined this unit and he said, “Come and see Colonel Farrell, we can fit you into our set-up here.” Their head office was in the

Burns Philp Building, right in Port Moresby, a big concrete building, and I met Colonel Farrell and he said, “Yes we need somebody in our organization”, in the Myers office and the shipping office and various other offices. When you join Myers, in the office, you go through about 6 offices

and then you go to a selected area where they need you or think you are better at, and I ended up in merchandising, which was import and export, not so much export, but mainly import of course. Colonel Farrell said, “We could do with someone like you, that’s been in shipping.

and merchandising”, so I finished up with that unit, I was them in New Guinea for about, I’d say 18 months.

Well, I was in the accounts division and the shipping division that was in Burns Philp Building in Port Moresby. Then they sent me

down, to give me a break from New Guinea, they sent me down to Brisbane. I would have been there four months in Brisbane and then they sent me down to head office which was in Melbourne. I was in Melbourne probably for about two months and then I asked to be transferred back into a war area

and I went up to Morotai. I went back through Wewak of Moresby, Dobodura, Lae. Wewak and then up to Morotai and I was at Morotai…

This is in 1945

it would have been about, let me see, I was there about 6 weeks in Morotai and I went to, that was in about May ’45. The German Army had collapsed by the time I had left, but

the Japanese Army were still our main opposition. So I then, I was in Morotai for 6 weeks and then I was seconded to the Second Australian POW Reception Group, which was at a place called Parananque, which was 22 miles north of Manila.

It was at the 17th American Replacement Depot, now that had something like 20,000 American soldiers in it, that replacement depot. They were just getting ready to go and occupy Japan, that American Army. The Japanese had

capitulated on the 11th of August and I arrived up there on the 17th of August. The Japs were still shooting at aircraft, those of them that hadn’t been told that the war was over or didn’t take notice and still wanted to shoot at aircraft. When we went in to get petrol, and island Mindanao (UNCLEAR)

well, there was Japanese still up on the hills and they shot at the aircraft as we were going north. When we landed at Clark Field [airfield] in Manila there were still Japanese shooting at aircraft and that was on the 17th August, although the Japs had surrendered before that, the 11th I think, was the official

date when they signed the papers. However we got up to Parananque and we were getting these, mainly they were airmen and mainly soldiers from the various armies that had been captured by the Japs, they were coming back from Manchuria

and Mukden and actually from the Japanese mainland, they came back through the reception camp. They weren’t in very bad condition because most of those men were officers that came back through that camp. There was a sprinkling of Australians, who had been

used in mines in Japan. I didn’t have any contact with them myself, but there was a lot of talk about it, their not supposed to be used in mines, as we all know, when you’re a POW, but they were. But the person that I mainly spent a lot of time with was Colonel Kent Hughes.

He became a well known politician after the war and he was in the 8th Division and he got captured early on and well, he hadn’t heard anything about Australia for about two and a half years, he was a POW and of course, he wanted to talk to somebody. The first night he came into the camp somehow or another

our brigadier said, “Has anybody got any correspondence or what?” and I had quite a few letters. So I went to Colonel Kent Hughes’ tent, he had a tent to himself, being a colonel. And we sat and we talked until about four in the morning

about the war and I gave him all my letters, a lot of them were from my family, so they weren’t of great interest, but I did have Mrs Rogers, Hazel D. Rogers, who was the wife of the Dean of Melbourne University was a great friend of my mother’s and she wrote to me when I was in the Middle East and kept me up with politics and other things.

So I handed over letters to Colonel Kent Hughes and he, well, that was ‘right up his alley’, to get that sort of stuff to read, but he and I talked for days and then by that time he was on his feet, they didn’t have a lot of good food in Japan,

but they were a lot better off than the ordinary OR [Other Ranks], but they had to be. Before the doctors up in Parananque would let them get on a ship or on an aircraft to come to Australia they kept them there and fed them. Some of the blokes were

a little bit effected mentally, not Kent Hughes of course, he was as ‘sharp as a tack’, even after all that and being incarcerated all that time, but he had all his, everything was in place [mentally] and he was in reasonably good condition too.

But we did keep some of the chaps there for months and months, that were disturbed and were also in a very poor physical condition and, eventually they had the information, about certain commanders of the Japanese Army, had agreed or had allowed

war atrocities and they then disbanded. Most of us came back to Australia on the 23rd of November, I arrived in Melbourne on the 25th of November and I was demobilised from the army at Royal Park in Melbourne.

But we had to keep some of those chaps there, because health-wise they were pretty feeble, It’s a matter of, in anything even in the army, if you’re fed the same food as someone else, well if you don’t feel right or are of that sort of temperament that can’t take

problems, well it doesn’t do you any good, but if you’ve got a positive attitude, it didn’t matter what I put into myself, I know that some of, it was pretty lousy food compared to what I was used to, but I ate it, because I thought, ‘if you do eat it,

you’re not going to suffer, but if you don’t eat it well, it’s going to have an effect on you’. So many is the time I haven’t eaten a lot of it, but I’ve eaten the food that was put in front of us because in a big family, your mother cooks food and puts it on the table, well we had

to eat the food put in front of us, if you didn’t eat that well, you didn’t get sweats, ‘finish that and you’ll have your sweats’. And it wasn’t ice cream in those days it was fruit, you know, stewed fruit or something like that.

Well the first question you asked was, “Did you get any contact with your people in Australia?”

Now, one chap I knew in Ivanhoe was a lieutenant, a POW for two and a half years, he had not heard from, the Japanese hadn’t given any of that correspondence to any of those POWs, for over 2 years, and he got those letters

when we left Parananque in the Philippines, and this letter told him that his girl had married another chap, and he was a lot bigger than I was, and taller than I was and say, 4 or 5 years, 5 years older than me, and he wept on my shoulder. Mind you, we were

both men then, not boys. But that was the sort of thing that the Japanese did, they did not do what was normal to do, which was give people their mail, they were always trying to, from what we heard from the POWs, they were always trying to undermine and give favours to people

they thought might be able to give them information and favours back. There was one man in the camp, at one of the camps in Manchuria, who did actually inform on his own, on our men. There was somebody

who was capable of building a radio to get to listen in to what was going on around the world. This particular officer, lieutenant, he told the Japanese that there was a radio in the camp and that they were getting information

and eventually the Japanese found out who it was and that, the chap that was doing that got a very bad time, a hard time for, not just for weeks, but for the whole of the rest of his time in the camp. And they, about three or four or more maybe named

this particular chap as an informer and well, you know, well, I did see that chap on the streets of Melbourne after the war a few times, but I didn’t ever want to recognise him. But they were also talking about the food they were given and so on and so forth, as I mentioned, they were

reasonably well off, they did get some of their Red Cross parcels there, but I know in other areas they got none whatsoever. It was very sort of, monotonous for those people, they weren’t given any sort of

encouragement to try and do anything of any useful purpose whatsoever, and this was the main belly-ache, because after the First World War, anyone who was taken prisoner by the German Army, they were given the opportunity to read books, these chaps

in the Japanese…

Well you asked

them to write down what had occurred in the camp and give an opinion of what they though their treatment was like by the Japanese or the Koreans,, they were under control by the Koreans, a number of them.

We just asked them to write down their thoughts on their last two and a half years and whether they thought it was a fair set of circumstances that they found themselves in and quite, I only had a few, being officers, I was

a warrant officer then, being officers, the brigadier wanted say, a major to talk to a captain. There were about, out of the, there were twenty-two of us in all, four were air force and well, we went down to say

16 strength after a while, so I only spoke to people of lieutenant or lesser rank. There were quite a few colonels, lieutenant colonels, a number of majors. In the air force they were wing commanders,

but even with the air force most of the interrogation of the airmen that came back to us, were interrogated by majors and lieutenant colonels, it was only, I was not asked to interrogate anybody, and there were very few ORs who came through.

Most of the ORs that came through were in pretty poor physical condition so they were hospitalised. So I didn’t have a great amount of contact with people, but we were just asked to ask them

to write down their thoughts on the way they had lived over the last two and a half years. Most of them that I did speak to, well they had that ‘gripe’, that particular person who I mentioned earlier. They went straight to it and said that this chap should be drawn and quartered

because he, through him not one, but more than one person had suffered in that camp. We got some nurses back through us and they were pretty poor, poorly in health, very poorly in health, and the brigadier asked me and two other chaps to take them out.

We took them out quite a few times, to different places just to get them away from the camp. There weren’t sort of, nightclubs, there were nightclubs trying to start up in and around Manila then, and just out on the outskirts of Manila. We were well, given vehicles

and American drivers, if we wanted them, which we didn’t always take. But to take these nurses out well, we took these nurses out I suppose two nights a week for at least six weeks before they got back on their feet, they were treated badly by the Japs.

So in that way I was sort of, well I was one of the people that was asked to do that sort of thing and it more or less became, sort of a routine thing, Tuesdays and Fridays, Until these girls got back on their feet health-

wise, we were asked to do that sort of thing.

Well it was, my three sisters were all nurses and none of those nurses, well one of them knew of my sister, because she’d trained a year ahead or something like that, but we didn’t, it was just a matter of taking them out and letting them eat different food.

We did talk, I suppose I talked as much to them as I talked to you, just to, sort of get them back to thinking, and then they started to write to their people in Australia and they even got letters back from people in Australia, and of course, they likewise in some instances,

were upset about what had happened to the people who they had thought that they would have been betrothed to. So it was really sort of, you were trying to be careful what you said to them, but they appreciated it,

that’s the main thing, that’s what Brigadier Wrigley said, “It doesn’t matter if you know the girl or don’t know the girl, as long as you keep her occupied and try and get her mind off what’s happened, that’s it.” We tried a few different types of nightclubs, pretty crumby nightclubs, because they didn’t have the food. The food we were getting in the American base depot was much better food

than you could get in a nightclub, much better food. So they were better off just to have the food in the camp, then take them out and go to the side of the mountain and sit and look at the outlook and talk about the trees and the valleys and the clouds and the stars and

that sort of thing, you know. We went to a nightclub one night and they did have music and those girls were, that was fairly early in the piece, they didn’t have the energy to dance. One girl got up, I loved dancing and Greta and I did a lot of dancing, before the war I did a lot of dancing too.

But they were just not fit to dance, they just wanted to sit, relax and talk, and well, it was just a matter of keeping them, well their mind of what had happened and keep them

happy, as much as you could to get them back to reasonably good health, so that they could be put on an aircraft and be flown out, but they were not allowed, as I said before, the medicos [medical officers] there were pretty much ‘on the ball’. They said, “No, you can’t go back to Australia yet, because you’re not fit enough

to go back, you’re not well enough to go back.” And particularly as I mentioned before, when that chap got the letter to say that, who he thought was his fiancé had married another chap, well that set him back a lot, he was already down quite a bit but that set him back, and he was there for about another month before he got over that, because all the

time he was in that camp, thinking about this girl, who I happened to know too, a delightful girl and you can’t blame a girl after two years of not hearing from somebody, not getting a letter and that was the fault of the Japs, from him, you can’t blame a girl for marrying someone else at all, or in the case of the nurses, you can’t blame

the chap from marrying someone else, and this was the sort of thing that you had to try and battle against. While we were there, I may have mentioned before, that Brigadier Wrigley said, “Is there anybody here that is a freemason” and I said, “Yes”, I was.

Well, the freemasons, one person had dug a whole in St Thomas’s University grounds and buried the list of the freemasons in the Philippines.

They buried the roles and all the addresses

of the freemasons in the Philippines.

Well, because the Japanese are not Christians and they would have thought that that would have been a secret society and somebody told the Japs where this was and this is where the first three

meetings that we had, there were about five Filipinos who were still alive who were masons, at that time, they were trying to find more. They said, “Who told the Japs and who gave the information to the Japs about the names and

addresses of the freemasons.” Well the Japs went round and the decapitated every freemason that they could lay hands on. Now the chap that was acting, he was the acting grand master, he actually wasn’t the grand master, the grand master was decapitated by the Japs, but he was a mason and he came

down from the hills and he was a painter by trade, he had his painting garb on, with lots of pain marks all over it, not a normal suit. And we went in, we had to clean out the Masonic area, that had been absolutely smashed up by the Japs, all the masonry around it.

They had a tessellated floor that had been desecrated and everything that was in it had been smashed, but they only had a very small temple. The temple was only as wide as this wall to that wall, and at its widest, that wall to there, very small temple and a very small tessellated area in the middle where

you did all the degrees and so on and so forth. They found out eventually that the information was given by, a priest actually, gave the information to the Japanese and as I say, they killed every one of the masons they could lay their hands on. But I went to the first three meetings of that, there was a lot

of argument and bitterness by the men that were there as to who was responsible for this calamity. So there were quite a few chaps who had been made POW that were masons, but we did have say, at that first we had about 15,

5 of which were Filipinos and I was the only Australian, there were quite few Scotchmen from the Scottish Regiments and the Canadians and American’s didn’t come into it, we didn’t have anything to do with the American POW, until, they were handled by the Americans themselves. Dutchmen

and there were a couple of other nationalities that were taken prisoners from cities and they were high people, I think they were high people, but I didn’t have any contact with them, from the diplomatic Corps, that sort of thing. They were incarcerated and they came to that camp.

Generally speaking, it was pretty horrifying listening to some of those chaps because they were so bitter with having been made POW and done nothing for ‘the cause’, that was the main thing on their mind all the time, and you just had to sit and listen and bare with it.

Well, mostly they took it away and wrote it up independently of you and then you would see them later.

Brigadier Wrigley was very attentive, he was around the place all the time overseeing everything and making sure everything came to his hands. Everything went through his hands, so you really,

he had the first and last say about information, but as I say quite a number of them had one blank mind about vilifying one person, most of their writings was on that matter, but they all had the,

they all were incensed that they never received any mail and that their mail had apparently never got out. See, they didn’t know, until they came into that camp and they wrote their first letter to Australia and it was flown down through the air force and they got a letter back while they were still in the camp, that none of their mail had got to their

people during the war. And this is one of the things that really upset them more than anything, and as I said before, it set some of them back quite a bit mentally and physically, to think that nothing had happened, and that’s why a lot of those chaps hated the Japanese.

Really hated them, well they did in Changi, because they were so terrible the way they treated the people and the ‘railway [Thai- Burma Railway], that was also very bad.

Just move a finger

Well it started when we went across the Litani River. In A Company, Hugh Buckler who was the brother of our adjutant, they were to blow [up] a bridge, but they didn’t blow it,

so we actually, part of our company got across from the bridge and the others of us went across the river. Then as I said, we went across an area that was open and open air and quite a lot of shooting from, it was

the Legionaries mainly there in that area, and it was very difficult to move forward until the 2/4th Field Regiment came up and, well point blank within about five hundred yards they just trained the barrels to shoot into the side of this hill or where all these placements were. We got past that area,

then we had to go into an orchard areas where the French had, they had the areas pretty well ‘taped’ [ranged] for their artillery, they had been planning a defensive war against anyone that came across the border,

particularly when the French nation was divided into whether they should fight or not fight, so wherever you went in Syria you had quite strong opposition, because they did not want to be defeated, so therefore you had to fight your way all the way against the Frenchmen. When you got inland

in the mountainous areas, well you had little bit of a chance there, if you were on the flat you could be knocked off. We had about four tanks came through our area, French tanks, very antiquated tanks but still effective, they

did quite a bit of damage to our troops, mainly they were went down ‘wadis’ which they knew as ‘wadis’ so that they wouldn’t be hit by our artillery, so we just kept advancing bit by bit and the Frenchmen retreated bit by bit. But it wasn’t

easy going at all, we knew that we were in a war, it wasn’t sort of, an easy time in that area. However we didn’t suffer a great number of casualties, comparatively to what we inflicted.

So therefore, you don’t feel so bad about it, you feel that you are doing something for a cause and getting some place. So really, when the whole thing was a bit upsetting, when we knew, at the end, that 20,000 of the Frenchmen went back to France;

that upset us to think that we’d been fighting these people, then they had been allowed to go back to France, whereas we had captured 30,000 Italian soldiers in Northern Africa, so that was a bit of a ‘pain in the guts’ to us.

At that time?

Well we were told that France, the predominance in France, through the

leadership of Pétain [Vichy French President] was in favour of not fighting the Germans. So thereforewe naturally, we didn’t think that the French were that ‘fair dinkum’, then we were also told that the French and possibly the Turks in Syria, I think more particularly the Turks,

that if they went in on the German side, now the Germans were trying to infiltrate, not infiltrate they were welcomed into Syria from, our spy information was telling us that the Germans where beginning to fly into Syria, and they didn’t want the Germans to be in Syria. So naturally,

that’s when they said, “It’s time to act” and, ‘its time’, so that we got in before the Germans got in. This is what we were told and it was a fact actually, because the Germans were going into Syria to try to swing them their way, with the French. The majority of the Frenchmen in Syria were going along with what was going on in France itself.

Well, as I said before, 20,000 went back to Marseille and about 7,000 of them went across to Damascus, to join up with General de Gaulle. So we were told that the Germans wanted to get into Syria and we had to do something about it and that, as I said before, they weren’t sure which

way Turkey would go, so sooner we went into Syria and took over that area, well, things were in ‘6s and 7s’, so that’s the way we were told at the time what the international situation was there.

Well, you don’t know really, you don’t know whether, we didn’t know whether the French would put up a solid fight or not. We did learn that they didn’t want us to go in there, they definitely didn’t want us to go in and they were going to make it hard. So it’s not until you get into these situations that you find out the truth of the matter.

But they actually did fight all the way back to Beirut, they really made it hard to advance.

Yes, there are quite a lot of chaps who were shot up in that area through there, but I hadn’t, well Lou Waller was one bloke that I was very friendly with,

Bob Roberts, but not as much as after we came back to Australia, by that time we were really bosom mates, you know, we knew each other so well, we’d lived in the same tent with each other and we went on leave together to different places, that’s the sort of thing that cements a friendship more than when you’re out, well it does

to a great degree, when you’re out in a campaign. You do get to know how people think and then also whether you can rely on them completely or otherwise, but going on leave with people and hearing them read extracts from their letters and having a laugh with them over things like that,

well that’s really what makes comradeship, as much as anything else.

Well not really, things just sort of happened quickly,

and unless you are right there, you couldn’t say, Captain Landale going up on the feature of Mount Kharat with Rupert White, the ‘I’ section sergeant, was heroic, because they didn’t know that the French had been lined up with all their guns, and the next thing of course, one of them went down.

There’s one little bloke went round, he got an MID [Mentioned In Dispatches] actually, he was the runner for C Company and Russell McConnell. Well he had to move around between the different platoons and keep

informing the officers, well, he got killed, he got hit by shrapnel down near Jezzine and our company HQ was in Jezzine, which was down a hill from Mount Kharat, well he got an MID. Another little bloke in our set-up got an MID, he went round one early

morning, almost on his own, he talked somebody else into it and he went round and captured about six or seven Frenchmen on his own. One Frenchman put his hands up and then he put his hands down to grab his revolver and, Jimmy Stevens was the name of this little bloke,

he shot the French Officer and then another Frenchman objected and so he shot him too, then he brought back the Senegalese, brought them back through us, with this other bloke that was there at the time, but he got an MID for that. But I can’t say, I did not see any one of our chaps, I know it happened,

who ran out in front and picked up another bloke, another friend from D Company, Alan Pullen he got an MM [Military Medal] because he actually went forward and picked up one of the chaps that was wounded and threw him over his shoulder and ran back with him, and there were bullets flying everywhere, so he got a decoration for that you see. But in my case,

well, nothing spectacular happened at all. Our chaps got sprayed with bullets, some got a bullet in the leg, others got it in the hand and others got it elsewhere and were killed, But it was just warfare.

When we were behind that ‘can’, a bullet hit my tin hat

just there and bent it down a little bit, just in that area there, see it came over the top and they had to shoot from there, and the trajectory came down just over the ‘can’ and it bent my tin hat a little bit. When I ‘copped it’, up in New Guinea,

I just had sort of, burns, they weren’t penetration, they were just bullet burns.

When I almost had my haversack shot of my back, I was lucky that the bullets kept going straight and didn’t turn off, but it was quite a tug, it was enough to throw me off my feet. See, I was

‘only the good die young’, and well, the people who really, well they take risks, they do actually take risks and they do a lot of damage themselves, but of course, they get it themselves then. But I fired as much as I could fire,

but as I said before, you’re not firing at anything, its not like when you can see someone out in front, you know whether your action had been effective, you just hoped that it does some damage and this is what the warfare in New Guinea was like.

No, there was always some sort of, not in our company on Mount Kharat, but some of the others were further over, they went into ‘pill boxes’ [concrete reinforced redoubt] or into an old building and they found Frenchmen there who wanted to fight or were prepared to shoot,

but they either got shot themselves or they shot the people in there. In our position, C Company, we were out in the open more, we were not with buildings, little buildings.

Yes, but

by that time the French had moved back, each time, well there was artillery fire all the time, as they retreated they kept their guns going back and they took a certain amount, they had planned a campaign against anybody going into Syria quite well, because when they moved their guns back

they had ammunition stacked there. So when we took over at [Mount] ‘Kharat’, there were a lot of artillery shells still left where they had their guns originally, but they had taken their guns to another position and they had artillery shells there. So they had been planning that defensive campaign for probably a year or more.

At least a year anyway, to do what they had done in gun replacements and in having ammunition ready to go back to, this is what we found as we advanced, we found these areas where they, we’d overtaken areas where there was still a lot of artillery shells to fire, but had never been fired.

So really it was, for C Company it was quite a few chaps who were knocked off and it was open and there was no hand to hand fighting with C Company. With B Company and A Company, who were the other side and they had these little mud brick houses a lot of them.

A bullet would go through it easily, but of course, the people were out of sight and it wasn’t until they came within sight of the people in those areas, that they came under fire and then of course, they had to get those people out of those, shoot them or take them prisoner and quite a lot of Frenchmen did put their hands up and were prepared to be a prisoner,

so I don’t know about the percentages of prisoners taken who wanted to be Free French or wanted to be pro-Pétain.

No, when we were in Almeria in Egypt, there were these other camps of various nationalities, there was quite a,

in fact, the Free French that were in Damascus and that area, they were all taken down to Egypt eventually. Not while we were there, but there was a Polish camp, a Czech camp, Free French and there were other nationalities there. They were each setting themselves up. There were quite a lot of airmen

who were accepted into the air force that had got out of France and particularly at that time, and Polish, there were Polish airmen. How they got out I’ll never know, but they were in that camp, airmen as well as army.

They wanted to talk, but we didn’t have much time, we only had a few days in that camp in America and those areas, before we moved on, that was only transit for us. So we really didn’t, but some of our chaps did speak to the Poles [Polish], of course they were very bitter, the Polish people,

the way the Germans had, and then the Russians who came in on the other way and, well killed. The Russians took off their officers and they told some of our chaps, not me, that the Russians had taken off some thousands of officers from the Polish Army and just shot them. So they were bitter, in fact there was quite

a lot of tension in some of those camps there, even between individuals. But I didn’t personally have that sort of contact because not a great number of them spoke English, they were speaking in their own language all the time. We were, as I said, our 2IC

Bill Landou, he spoke French and he could interrogate the POW in French, so he could get some information out of them because he was talking in their language, otherwise people just didn’t, they just didn’t talk at all.

Well no, you knew that your people were around you in areas. When I was across track and I wanted a ‘bog’, so I went up

over the hill and at the back a bit, and I was there with my pants down and there was a Frank Dolphan, he was a corporal and there was a sergeant. They came into me, they saw me there and they said, “You go and ‘shit’ in your own backyard”,

so I thought, ‘it’s getting a bit hot down there’, you’ve got bullets flying everywhere, and they were over the hill a bit, Gordon Kolb was the sergeant and it was him that said that to me, he said, “Don’t come up into our area, go and shit in your own backyard”,

but of course, then the Japs were coming up that valley and D Company got very much involved then too you see, but they were really coming up at us, C Company. So I knew that D Company was there, but it was only the fact that I went up there and they told me to ‘get the hell out of it’,

that I knew that D Company was there. But you see, when you came up to what would have been battalion HQ, there were intelligence, ‘I’ people who said, “Well”, Colonel Keys would have said, “Well C Company, you’re taking this position, D Company that, A Company that, B Company that” and so you were just

taken through the actual jungle at times, to get to a position. You didn’t even know, well, you knew that 14 Platoon went down there and 13 Platoon went down there, I didn’t know until they day following, when I reported to

company HQ, Matt Power got hit, so I went down to company HQ and I didn’t know until that day that 14 Platoon had been out on a patrol and that their officer was killed, and he was a new officer,

Davis he’d just joined the battalion, when we were in Queensland. Our officer was a (UNCLEAR) officer, Bill Boddington. Well, he ‘copped’ it the following morning, he was shooting at a sniper and the sniper got him first, you see.

In New Guinea yes, the thing is that

the Japs used to get up trees, they used to get up trees and to get a better vision and they’d out there belt around them or anything around them to tie them in the tree, they’d skim up a tree and shoot from the top of a tree. A number of them were left hanging when they were shot.

They did go up trees quite a bit to try and get some vision to where the enemy was, where we were. I don’t think any of our chaps ever climbed a tree.

Well yes, they were, you see, I know that they did get better vision than we did.

But of course, as I said before, their officers didn’t give a damn about life, the Japanese officer would say, “Go up that tree and see if you can see something” and if they went up there and they did get a vision of something, well, it could be effective for them. As far as, none of our officers or anybody

would have thought of, well, there were to many Japs around for us to go up a tree, you’d be a ‘sitting’ [easy] shot absolutely, straight off, because they were about five to one. Five Japs to one of us there was, something like that.

Ha, ha, ha, I thought that question might come up. I’ll say that the fact that they were CMF and that they were sent up there virtually as garrison troops and that they weren’t meant to be in warfare and they did equip themselves well,

that they had been given a very good publicity, more so than the Middle East, the people who came back from the Middle East and broke the back of the Japanese. The 39th have had a lot of friends in Melbourne and as a consequence their name has been kept in front of the public, more so

and they have kept themselves in front of the public, I might mention, I think, myself.

Well they, somehow or another they can get into the newspapers fairly regularly.

It could well be that, the fact that

they were planted up there and they were the first unit to have contact with the Japs and that they, well they did come back through our lines behind us, but the fact is that they were the first unit to have contact with the Japs, and the Japs, well they came, in

the early stages probably 2,500 and by say, six weeks later there would have been 5,000 at least, landed up to Guanabana and Lae, and there was only one battalion.

They’ve got a relationship, we’ve also got a very

strong relationship with the 2/16th. The 2/16th have been our ‘buddy battalion’ more than the 27th. Somehow or another it was unfortunate that the 2/27th were left back in Port Moresby, but we didn’t have much great contact with the 2/27th in

Syria, we had the 16th on our flank and therefore we’ve had more contact now. We had this, recently there was a football match, but they asked, they got a of the New Guinea chaps together, from all around Australia. Well I didn’t sit at the table with

the 14th blokes, I sat at the table with the 2/16th chaps and we talked for a long time, I hadn’t seen one of those blokes since the Middle East, which I happened to meet up there at a weapons training school, so we really had a rapport with the 2/16th, but we never really had that rapport with the 2/27th.

We went across, after the war, to Adelaide, on an occasion, to a special dinner the 2/27th put on, it might have been the 20th anniversary or something, could have been the 20th or 25th anniversary. But we went across over there because we had a few of our friends over there.

That was just the way it was, there has been quite a good rapport between the 39th and ourselves.

Well, the thing is you can’t give an opinion if you don’t know what goes on, you can only go from what history tells you and I don’t know anything about them

the 53rd, I didn’t even know about the 49th, but the 53rd they, I saw one officer and about twelve or thirteen boys I’d say, and none of them were armed, except the officer, and that was just because they came back through our lines at Isurava and I don’t know anything about them. Colonel,

he was the colonel of the 2/16th at the end, I’ve got his book over there. He lived up in Mount Eliza after the war for twenty odd years, I used to take him to army things and he said that the 53rd acquitted themselves quite well, considering

that they’d had little or no warfare practice or really any sort of thing to do with warfare.

And that’s lieutenant, I can’t think of his name, but I’ve got his book right over there, and as I say, I had a lot to do with him after the war. He used to come to our Battalion

Association meetings. He was well decorated, DSO [Distinguished Service Order], MC [Military Cross]. He was the colonel of the 2/16th in the end of hostilities. Frank Sublet was his name, Colonel Frank Sublet.

None,

Definitely not.

No, our chaps were trained ‘to the minute’ [well] and I personally didn’t ever feel that any of our chaps didn’t equip themselves well to the tasks that were given to them. You don’t really

know how people feel, you know how you feel yourself, but you don’t know how people feel when they’re put under pressure. I don’t think, the only chap that really ‘laid down and died’, he just lost faith in what was ahead of him, and it was just a matter of

wanting to live and keep going with your mates or not, and as I said before, we kept him going for days and as much as you tried to help him, he just didn’t have it in him to want to keep going, and there’s nothing you can do about that sort of thing. You’ll

carry his rifle for him and you’ll talk to him and you’ll even grab his arm, you’ve got your own weapon to carry so on and so forth, but that is not cowardice that, that is just that fact they haven’t got the faith to really keep going in the face of the enemy.

Well, everybody got times when they thought that it’s not a very happy position to be in. But we were under fire a whole day on Mount Kharat, but we sort of, made fun of it.

Well you know, you roll out and pull the trigger on the Bren [gun] and roll back straight away, because the next minute you’d hear, ‘rat-tat-tat’ over on the hill and you’d know that the bullet had hit, sometimes the bullet hit before you heard the noise, but there’s really nothing,

I’m a fatalist myself, I think that if your going to ‘cop it’, you’ll ‘cop it’, but I am an optimist too, but I am a fatalist and I think, ‘what’s to be will be’ and in the meantime, make the most of what you’ve got to live for, and I’ve had a lot to live for.

Well all I would like to say is I thank the government for thinking that there should be some record made of people who have, well put their life on the line, not my own sake, but everybody that was in the fighting forces, airmen as well as others.

I didn’t mention my brother in law that was shot down by the Japanese, that at Milne Bay, the very day that I went to see him in New Guinea, taken there by an American Air Force man who fortunately gave us…