Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Kempsey on the Macleay River NSW. My father was a business man there and when my brothers and sisters reached a certain age and I did

we came to Sydney. I think mainly for education purposes. I am eighty five years of age, so it’s a long while ago. I went to school in Willoughby, North Sydney, and my grandfather on my mother's side was a stock and station agent and a very good auctioneer and I never wanted to do anything but go into property.

I left school in year nine, as it was in those days - Intermediate certificate, and I joined a real estate firm. Stopped there till I was twenty one, which took me through to about 1917-1939 and I intended stopping in real estate right through

but in 1939 the war came along. I was in partnership in Chatswood in real estate with a First World War man who had been at Gallipoli and in the middle of 1940 when Paris fell there was a big joining up of people in the army following the first lot. We all thought that when Paris fell the war was a fair dinkum war not a pretend one.

My partner, who I say was a lot older than me, a First World War man, came to me and said, “Look you’ve got itchy feet, haven’t you, do you want to join the army?” I had been in the militia - these days of course it is a citizen force. I had been in that since 1937 so I had done two and a half years. I was with 1st Division signals at Crows Nest, the dispatch rider

and of course I had that training for two and a half years. I was in camp at Bathurst, at Greta, I beg your pardon, Bathurst later on, and I decided then to enlist. I was with a group of fellows all who had been in 1st Division signals with me and we enlisted at Greta, taken to Newcastle Hospital

for our check up. Bought back. We thought we would be going to Corps Sigs [signals] because they were forming it then and when we were about to be moved, that was June 1940, a colonel arrived in the camp who had been our adjutant at 1st Div. Sigs, he had been a Duntroon [Royal Military College] man and he said, “Look if

you wait a couple of weeks they are forming the 8th Division and I am going to command 8 Division signals so you will do the same job.” We agreed, he was a Duntroon man as I said, but a fine officer. We waited a couple of weeks. What he did say at the time, is – “I know you want to stick together with me but I will promise nothing because the fortunes of war can change.” Just interrupting my story, when we

marched out to Changi gaol in the war as prisoners of war he was with us and he came over to inspect the bombed out building we were getting, lined us up and spoke about our war service. And we said, “Look you kept your promise—you kept us together and look we are together now!” So that was the part of it. My war service started in Singapore started in Kuala Lumpur really.

I went over with the first of the 8th Division, 8th Division signals. We went on the Queen Mary, thought and hoped we were going to the Middle East, but we hadn't been informed, but nevertheless were wondering because we had been issued with tropical clothing. So we were in a convoy of four. The Queen Mary had the 8th Division boys. There was Aquitania, two or three others, the Nieuw Amsterdam

and the [HMAS] Hobart warship escorted us. In the middle of the Indian Ocean all the boats stopped. We sailed around them and the bands were playing and the others were saying goodbye to us and we headed northwest to Singapore. We arrived in Singapore towards the end of February and retrained there and got off the boat there then

headed for Kuala Lumpur. We did our training, jungle training, rubber plantations and other things till about the end of September when word was coming through that probably the Japanese would come in, the knowledge we were getting, training in Johor Bahru, which is a state close to Singapore. We dispatch riders had

training. Our main training, we all pretty experienced blokes-1st Division signals. Our main training of course was map reading and getting to know Malaya which we did thoroughly. We got to Malaya too- it’s a beautiful country, particularly when you can disappear from the camp on your bike and they don't known when you'll be back. So we were there until the night of the 8th of December

when we heard planes overhead. We counted them and they used to come in flights of twenty-seven and the bombing started in Singapore. There was no declaration of war of course as you probably well know. They did Pearl Harbor, Malaya and Hong Kong. The whole lot. So we went into action there. Our main period of action for the first month or so was

being bombed and in and out of Singapore with the dispatches but then by the middle of January the Japanese had come down into Malaya all the way down. The British forces and Indian forces were doing the first early fighting but it was a losing battle in the beginning because literally we had no planes really. We had a handful but they were no match

whatsoever for the Zeroes for the Japanese planes, and the other thing we didn’t have one single tank and of course the Japanese came down the roads in tanks. We had a few pretend tanks. As a matter of fact when we did our early training in Kuala Lumpur we went over to Port Swettenham on the coast and thought look at all these wonderful tanks we've got.

You could see them in the park. We rode our bikes up to them and they were three ply and painted as though they were tanks. A lot of people don't realise I think just how impossible it was to defend against the Japanese army because what we found, we have no criticism quite frankly, people set out when we came home, and still writers write that Britain abandoned us and so on

but that wasn’t the case at all. The case was this -that Britain was fighting a loner action against the Germans till the Americans came in and the first priority and we knew this, had to be Europe. If Europe went over, and the Japanese were joining them, did join with them, we knew that there wouldn't be a defence of India. No defence of anywhere.

Mr Churchill [British Prime Minister] did exactly the right thing. We weren’t abandoned. That was our job. We did it to the best of our ability. We held the Japs. Our battalions did. Again what a lot of people do not realise is that a division is three brigades, twenty odd thousand men. There were only two brigades in Malaya. The rest were Darwin, Ambon, Timor, and so on, so really it was a foregone

conclusion what was going to happen but you won't find any of the 8 Division blame Britain at all because, as I say the first thing had to be, I mean they had no ships to get us off and so on and so on so all that happened is we ran out of land, we ran out of land, and when we were taken prisoner that was part of what we were destined for, that was our job,

just as much as the boys that were killed at Tobruk and El Alamein and all the others. We would have loved to have been in the Middle East with them but there it goes. So that was up till as I've said when we landed and went into action, the action was a forgone conclusion that we would be prisoners of war. I spent the first

eighteen months not in Changi, we were all taken to Changi, we marched as you no doubt read twenty miles out to Changi and carried what we could. Food was scarce, everything was scarce but I was in and out of Changi, as the Japs had us out on working parties to clean up Singapore and do jobs for them, ships and so on. Anyhow we got around to 1943.

I kept in reasonable health. I was losing weight as everyone was continually. In the middle of, or early 1943, word came though that the Japanese were going to take a large number of us north. What they told our officers was that we were going literally to a place of milk and honey and where health was better and everything would be wonderful.

They told our officers to include even semi-fit men, that didn't matter because they would do well once they would get up there. About the 20th April 1943 seven thousand were allotted to go to Thailand known as F Force. 3,500 British, 3,500 Australians.

We went on trains one day, between each train when we got down to Singapore railway station, there lined up were rice trucks like we found like our wheat trucks. Japanese herded by belting everyone and so on to get into the trucks. Twenty-seven to a truck. And away we went.

We realised the moment we got in the steel trucks what it was going to be like, but as Australians did right through, we looked after each other. We worked out what was the right thing to do and the right thing we found quite quickly was nine could lie down and have a rest while the eighteen others… And we did that in breaks of four hours. As far as food was concerned it averaged about two so called meals

a day, what we called rice pap, which was watery rice, but nevertheless we got fairly used to that. In Singapore we got it. As far as hygiene was concerned it didn't exist. We found out rather quickly that the best hygiene was to push the door open and hold your mates and away it went. It worked and we got through.

Inevitably, it took five days and five nights to get up there and the train stopping constantly and the heat was unbearable. There were a lot of men that got ill on the trip up who never really recovered and who were amongst the early fatalities on the line because they had been sick on the way up and there was no medical attention to really. Our own doctors were absolutely

fantastic but they had practically nothing because the Japanese again had not allowed us to take anything except a small suitcase. But also the Japanese, not that we believed them, had assured everyone that there had been tons of medical supplies up there. So at the end of five days we arrived in Thailand, at Bampong, as it was a very small place then,

a little native village type. There was one fairly large hut which they put us in when we arrived for over night and told us that we would be moving the following morning but when we looked at the hut it was in the foulest condition you could have possibly imagined. Poor old natives in it that had been taken up to work on the line.

They had no organisation. Where we had our officers, there were a few officers with us where we had a doctor with us or two doctors with us. We didn’t get any sleep because very quickly we said we were going to clean this place up and it took us all night to do it. But it was done cheerfully because we did it because our mates were coming up the next day and the next day and so it went on. A lot of

people contracted in my first group. A lot of people. By the way the trains carried about 700 people and a lot of people contracted their first really bad dose of dysentery through the conditions there. We were lined up the next morning outside to be told what was going to happen.

The Japanese interpreter came along and he said, “Travel fairly lightly. Anything heavy here, because you are going to now march through the jungle for a hundred and eighty miles to the Burmese border.” And the condition the blokes were in we were a bit taken aback to say the least. But nevertheless, our friends the Japanese. We only marched through the night because the Japanese would not march through

the heat in the daytime. Just before we moved on we were introduced to a doctor who was going to go with us and he was a big, gangling, rosy-cheeked fellow that looked about eighteen or nineteen. And I can remember somebody near me saying, when we were laying up, “God, we've got a boy for a doctor. How is he going to handle this?”

At the end of twelve days and twelve nights we had one of the greatest men in the world. He was absolutely fantastic. A doctor, Roy Mills, who has been written up quite a bit. I valued him a personal friend, but he was a personal physician to the whole six or seven hundred that doctor had to look after. Where they marched us to, we weren’t anywhere near the other six thousand odd

who had a lot of medical things like Dr Coates, ‘Weary’ Dunlop, all those. This was a young man - the reason he looked like he did was that he had only been out six months as a doctor here Australia. In Newcastle. But he turned out to be the most fantastic man. He died last year.

He is an honorary member of our association. My signals. He was indicative of the other medical men, up and down the line. So away we went. By the way, by coincidence, the day we set out to do the march, after arriving from Singapore. It was Anzac Day 1943, we had a bugler, and as we started to straggle through the night, we used to spread out four or five kilometres with fellows dropping out and mates helping them, and the old bugler

used to do a three o’clock at the moon- he used to play ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’. He died on the railway by the way. So we'd march for twelve days and for twelve nights and so called rest during the day but typical of the Japanese

soon as we'd get in from six o'clock in the morning to the last one of them at 10 or 11 the Japanese would immediately call for working parties to look after them. So there wasn't much rest. When you were marching, you were marching. Really in your sleep you would do it a lot of the time. You can imagine the condition that a lot of people were at the finish. But the day after we

hit the spot where we were where there was no camp. Nothing. Few tarpaulins and so on and they had us out on the line working. Stupid people the Japanese in this direction. If they fed us reasonably and a bit of medicine and so on we would have done a far better job on the railway. Mind you it showed later that the loss of life didn’t mean anything and I've got to say now that

most of us have partly forgiven but we haven’t forgot. We don't believe the Japanese have changed. We have got hatred out of us because we can't live with hatred but by Jove we haven’t forgotten. I would hope that people of your age, but particularly your grandchildren. Be very careful, be very, very careful.

So we set to work early May and we were in this area away from the other group but in the general area away from the other group of the line and we were moved from camp spot to spot. The monsoon set in straight away so that the weather poured

and rained for months and of course cholera arrived and fellows started to die from ill treatment, if you fell out with the Japanese and you did something that really upset them it could be your death warrant because how you were knocked- that's the point you didn't recover, so we learnt pretty quickly. What Australians hate and would hate still is

what some of the Japanese and Koreans started off doing - was slapping your face. The average Australian and particularly some of the tough country boys - a slap in the face-and they'd throw a punch at some of the Japanese guards. Well that was signing a death warrant. I don't need to say much about the treatment because it is part of history now. Everyone knows it.

Koreans. We were inclined to dislike the Koreans more than the Japanese because the things they did as I say were petty things such as slapping a face and odds and ends. The Japanese didn't mess around with that, they went right into what they were doing and when I came home I was not ashamed,

but I changed my thoughts, and we all changed our thoughts about the Koreans. Because history told us when we came home that those Koreans had been POWs [Prisoners of War] for forty years. The Japanese took Korea over in the early 1900s and the Japanese had used them as slaves in Japan and these young fellows they'd been bought up that way. And so I began to think,

how would we be if we had had forty years? And the Koreans of course, when they had been given their freedom, it all came out then so we don't blame the Koreans at all, they were just a very unfortunate people. Yes, so our group on the work was mainly on cuttings or partly on some of the bridges. We weren’t at Hellfire

Pass, we were on a cutting just below that. A big one for about twelve months. The line was joined as you know- there were Australians that were coming in from Burma. They were the first to go up and F Force after them in between several B Forces that went to Borneo and of course none of them came back. They were at Sandakan that was it.

But by the end of October just over six months, we met the boys, or they met us, from the Burma end, so the line was joined then. Then we were doing maintenance work on it for a few weeks and in that six months out of my group

there were seven thousand POWs, and 3,300 were dead. So it was about fifty percent. The figures are quite well known. Two point something British forces and 1 point something Australian forces. I know why our death rate was less. If ever

I hear anyone knocking mateship; they don't know what they are talking about. We would have had 2,500 dead too but fortunately the Australian mateship was there. We consciously or unconsciously from the first day onwards ended up in groups of six or seven mates and if one was in trouble the other five or six looked after him. I never

saw an Australian left to die on his own. Never. Even though the Japs knew they were going to die the mere fact that they were with their mates and looked after to the end. The British didn’t have that mateship to the same extent. They were realistic. Talking to them, they said they were realistic and if a man was going to die

within a few hours, often he was made comfortable as much as they could underneath a bush or something and they all said goodbye to him and that was it. The Dutch went a step further and again, the Dutch were made up mainly of Indonesians as they are now, with Dutch officers. They literally, if a fellow dropped

then they would not move him, they'd walk over him. But that was their attitude too, and we felt desperately sorry for the natives of those countries not just for that but that they had no organisation. They didn't have a doctor angle as we had and so on. So as I said mateship is very alive and well I think. And it does a wonderful job.

We got word about the end of November that our group were going back to Singapore. We weren’t quite sure. We thought that probably we would go back the way that we came, however most of them, our group, were taken into Bangkok and put on a ship and taken down by boat onto a cargo ship,

however, a hospital, a so-called hospital, was set up at Kanchanaburi, at Kanburi as we called it, and we had an officer in our unit, again who was a great man. Captain Ben Barnett. Ben Barnett was vice-captain to [Don] Bradman [famous Australian cricketer] in the 1938 tour. He was an absolutely number one man.

He worked side by side with Roy Mills. Anyway they were setting up a hospital really for the people they knew would die, and in any case as they kept coming down. Again, a so-called hospital but it was really a hut with no proper drainage but at least food could be gained down there to a certain extent.

We got eggs and things like that. Ben Barnett volunteered. They were calling for volunteers to man the hospital for a few months. And then my group of mates, six or seven, we volunteered to stop with them. We stopped there as I say, as there was at least some food around

there. There were eight or nine hundred patients there. They were dying as many as thirty a day, but it was getting less and less. At least we could have a funeral service for them and that is why Kanburi today is the official war cemetery and is beautifully kept. But we fellows worked there. There were some British groups there. There were two British soldiers who were caught stealing drugs from the doctors and trading them.

We had a doctor there that was in charge of that section. A major. He was a wonderful man. He lined them-these two up and gave them a father and mother belting right in front of us. The Japanese thought that was wonderful!

There was nothing more low than to start stealing medicine from the fellows that were dying. I was glad they weren't Australians. But there could have been some Australians that were guilty of that. We didn't have saints all the time of course. So we were working away there. That camp I know saved my life because when the death rate got down

to a pretty low number by February, early March, so what the doctors did, all of us were given a thorough medical examination. One of the big killers was cardiac beri-beri which is heart beri-beri. When you got cardiac beri-beri you didn't get the swelling there, but it happened in the heart. It was incurable and

if it went on, you dropped dead. After my examination I was put on a makeshift stretcher and carried to the end of the hospital and laid down. The fellow next to me. He was in my unit, had cardio beri-beri, and on the second day that I was there he leaned over to get something and he just went bang. The only treatment was complete rest and to try and get a bit of vitamin B

and we were able to get a bit of vitamin B supplements in some of the food that we were able to buy. What they did- the officers everywhere, they pooled their pay which was more than ours, and spread it through the lot of us. We sent ours in. Ten cents a day, we got of course, and they got twenty five and thirty five. So it all went in. Anyway I am sure that it saved my life because

I was given complete bed rest and I didn’t drop dead. When we came to be moved we found we were going back in the same rice trucks again. Unfortunately some fellows died on the way down because we took what was left of the hospital patients. The Japs said you are going to be more comfortable. Instead of twenty seven you are going to have twenty six. We looked at the rice trucks and they were smaller rice trucks than what we came up in.

I was on a makeshift. The stretchers were made from rice bags and I was laid down in the truck and any of us on the stretchers—the boys reorganised themselves so you were left there all the time. You wanted to get up and stand up and take your turn but you didn't. I was carried in after five days. A few died

unfortunately on the way down. The trucks met us at Singapore airport. By the way the favourite saying when we knew were going back to Singapore was we were going home. After where we had been, Singapore sounded just as good as home to us. And particularly Changi. I mean Changi was rough but so different. When we were carried in, as a matter of fact I was only reading recently

how it happened. The Australian officer in charge was [Major General Frederick]‘Black Jack’ Galleghan. He was CO [Commanding Officer] of the [2/]30th Battalion which was one of our absolute best. 9 F Force 500. His boys between 500 and six hundred of his boys were sent to 9 F Force. When they were bought in by truck Black Jack was standing in the square

in Changi to meet them and his two eyes did the usual thing. When they got out of the trucks there was a sergeant-major with them from the [2/]30th. And he said, “Now remember you're soldiers, boys.” Yes, he said,

“Line up and march.” Black Jack's there and when these boys came into Black Jack's sight as we all were, bare footed, or feet bound up with bits of rag and what not and G strings and bones stretching out. I was four and a half stone at the weighing in and I was working fit. Some of these six foot-odd fellows were under four. Dear oh dear.

They lined up those who couldn't march and their mates helped them in. Black Jack broke down and cried and cried and that of course happened to all of us. I was carried in a stretcher. My own crowd were there. Ben Barnett was still nick and he looked after us. I was carried into the square

and laid down and boy I know what saved my life. Two doctors came out to examine us one was a doctor named Billy Bye. Dr Bye was a heart specialist. I often wonder when he sounded me cause he was as deaf as a post but he was a heart specialist. And the other was Dr Cotter Harvey. He was the man that started the smoking… He was a full colonel and Billy Bye

was a major. Both were examining and got down on their knees and examined me and then had a little talk and Billy Bye turned to me and said, “Get up and go for a run mate.” And then he talked to me after and said the doctor who looked after me and who put me on a stretcher was named Bruce Hunt, who is very well known, he was a West Australian doctor, a wonderful man,

so being put on a stretcher saved my life. I am quite saddened. So we were back in Changi. The people who had been in Changi right through. By the way, as I told you I arrived in Bampong on Anzac Day, so I was exactly a year because the day I was carried in was 1934. So it was exactly a year. I was owed two Anzac Days.

Anyhow we will never forgot those several thousand from the top officer down who pulled everything they scrounged and what not and gave it to us, or the cook. Within about three months we were pretty good again. I wasn't ready

to do very much. It took me, a lot of us, from May through to nearly Christmas I suppose, and then the Japs started to have some of us on working parties, just in and out of Singapore first. And we liked that because you could scrounge stuff while you were in there. Particularly if you went down to the wharves and so on and take the

risk of getting back in which you did. Anyhow that went on and we settled down. Food got gradually worse and worse because the Japanese were beginning to feel it themselves and the natives did. I went out to one working camp at a place called Laudy Road which was opposite the Royal Singapore Golf Course and at the back of the barbed wire

was a Chinese cemetery and it was the best place we had found for a long while for there were funerals everyday and the Chinese—one of the things that they do is when they bury a member of their family they leave food on the grave to see them into the new world and we used to go under that wire every night. It rapidly got the name—we said we had

gone out and got the death cake! It was good. I think the Chinese knew but they didn't worry. They probably felt that it was doing something for them. But the death cake was pretty good I can tell you. So the Japanese were beginning to show signs that they…we knew too, we had underground wireless sets as you know and we had the official one because signals

were wireless people, two of our fellows, two brothers, the Arthur boys risked their lives at Changi by tuning into the stations, taking the news to where it had to be taken and then the officers would decide how far down it would go and how much. By the way Nelson Arthur, one of the two brothers, died about three months ago, and we got word his brother

who lives up at Katoomba now had a heart attack last week and he probably will disappear this week. But they did a wonderful job and took their chances there. We went to early January 1945. Early in 1945 the Japanese called for a party of 500 men. They didn't tell us where we were going but all they told us was that we would have reasonable accommodation

and that there was a job to be done. So we loaded on trucks in Changi and we arrived at a place called Bukit Panjang. Which was one of the villages on the island fairly close to the Straits of Johor and we had two or three huts which weren't

too bad. The usual thing. Bamboo areas where we used to lie on and put our shoes underneath. We were marched out the next day to a rubber plantation. I think each day we had to march out each day about three miles and back through Chinese villages. Got out there. Working conditions were not too bad. What we were doing of course and we protested but

the protests were always done knowing that if we didn't do the job they'd just stop the food entirely for everyone if you didn't and what we found was that what we were doing was building tunnels into the side of the hills. The Japanese used tunnels for defence purposes in New Guinea and built them everywhere and you would go in so many yards in and so many yards across. And they were very effective for

the chaps that were in action against Japanese who used the tunnels—they put what we would call a platoon, eighteen or twenty men in these and we were digging these in because the Japanese were getting nervous that Singapore would be invaded. So we were digging away there from about the middle of January.

Working conditions were reasonable. Food was still very scarce. But we went ahead. The usual thing though was that the Japanese—was what they did up on the railway—they started what we called with hurry hurry, that was ‘Speedo speedo speedo’ and they would not allow us to do safety measures that we wanted to do in the tunnels. We had two fellows in our group who had been coal miners

and they knew exactly what to do and over and over again, whoever we had in charge of us, it was generally it was a sergeant or a corporal they would go and protest. Probably get a smack across the face for protesting. But we did it all the time. We used to work for ten minutes on the face—two men—and to do that for the Japanese tunnels you were down on your hands and knees.

You worked on the face and two men carried baskets out with the soil. My closest mate—we started the March on Anzac Day saying we wouldn’t finish but we finished still. Johnny Parkes and I, we had spent on the face ten minutes. Changed over. And two others of our mates took over.

We just got out of the tunnel ourselves when down she came at the back. And we missed it by one minute probably. Any rate, hands and all, anything we could lay our hands on and Fred Wilson, one of our West Australian men—he was dead when we got him out. Fortunately,

very fortunately there was a Jap, NCO [Non Commissioned Officer], in there and he had broken his legs and knocked him about. And from the next day we were allowed to do any safety measure that we wanted to do. We were able to get a bit of timber from the sawmill. Japs had a camp at a sawmill down the road and we were able to get the stuff, so there were no more falls. It took the injury to the Jap.

He was an officer but a non-commissioned officer. They have a rank in the Japanese army that comes in between—a little bit like our warrant officers. Anyhow something fortunate happened to me anyhow I suppose getting out—I had a bit of luck then. On this sawmill they wanted about eight men to go to the saw mill

and Captain Stahl, who was an officer in our unit, and he was in charge of our, another fine man, and he was a South Australian and I was put on this eight man team. But he called me over and he told me why he was putting me on it. We were getting a truck out every day to our camp. He used to bring out some food or things from Changi to the camp. Fred Stahl had a talk with the sergeant

and he said, ‘As long as this is being done we are going to bring out the news of Changi camp.” And Freddy Stahl called me in. I did have a pretty good memory in those days and he knew this and he said, “What I want you to do.” he said, “The news will come out to the sawmill, they’re not going to risk it bringing the news into the camp.

But just out to the sawmill where I'm not there and nobody's there who normally…” and he said, “Whoever's bringing the news out, it will be just a half a dozen sentences.” He said, “Link up with the fellow who’s going to be linking up with you, he knows, and make some arrangements where you can take as little risk as possible to take the news.” It will be as risky as possible for the fellow bringing the news

because if they got him and tortured him, it would go back to Changi possibly and finding the source of the news. Any rate this chap came out and we had a different fellow from time to time. We worked out a scheme where the Japs would allow us to use our toilet and we had a toilet down in the bush just down on the side of the mill. And the sawmill area was a Japanese

camp as well so I became a sawmiller for a while and we used to generally give a nod to each other and I would go down to the toilet and wait for a little while and then he would saunter around too. So I was the news carrier in the last couple of months. And it was interesting naturally. I get the monosyllables. But come the day,

that he came in and said, “Some mighty explosions that had never been heard before, we are going to get some more tomorrow.” But it sounds as if something fantastic has happened in Japan and the next day he came and told me that at Hiroshima the whole city had been flattened by a bomb. Never mentioning an atom bomb because we didn’t know what an atom bomb

was in any case but an enormous explosion. So I came back. What Fred Stahl used to do was I'd bring the news to him and then he would decide the reliable sergeants or sergeant-majors and he would also work out how much of that they would pass on. Hold other for the time being until they knew.

The third day the atom bomb had dropped there was no doubt about that and also the first announcement of the surrender and I think the Japs kept us going for about six or seven days. The working party had us digging the tunnels. But about the fourth or fifth day as we were going through some of the Chinese villages the Chinese were jumping

up with the V for Victory sign and the Japanese attitude was really beginning to change, and finally the Japanese in some way or another said that to Fred Stahl, that there had been an agreement that the war would finish, and that he would let them know more. Anyway, then

the Chinese by the way were beginning to get bolder and get messages in. When we knew that there had been an official surrender we were still out there. It was the worst six or seven days as far as anxiety was concerned because the Japanese general on Singapore Island had said he wasn't going to surrender and he was what come as what may and he had half a million Japanese troops

because Borneo had been seeing allied planes of our type, and we knew it wasn't the old big B29s and so on. They were Lightnings and we knew they were coming from Borneo. He said he refused to surrender and he was going to fight on. Mountbatten did a very clever thing. Mountbatten was in Saigon

at this stage and the [General] Itagaki Seishiro the Japanese emperor's nephew was there and he was a general. And Mountbatten had a talk to him and this fellow flew in from Singapore and as the relation of the emperor he was over this general. So he ordered the general to surrender and he said he was taking over.

He met him at the airport, Changi Airport, and this general who wasn't going to surrender, committed ceremonial hara-kiri [ritual suicide]. So he was going to carry on there was no doubt about that. So it was about eight days after that these trucks arrived and Freddy Stahl by the way, there was a tailor in our camp,

and Fred Stahl for two or three months, had had this fellow—I was able to get a bit of blue stuff from his camp, a bit of blue material and smuggle it. And bit by bit he got red white and blue and what not and he had an Australian flag. We put it up in the camp. The Japanese by the way, by this stage had vanished from our camp

and going back on the truck we carried it back to Changi, and it was the first Australian flag at the gates of Changi. Fred had that up to twenty years ago. It now is in the war museum [Australian War Memorial] in Canberra of course. So we were back to Changi with three people. The island was still a little bit dicky,

and we were under orders for a few days to stick in the camp and the first thing we saw were Catalinas start to come in and drop food. It was interesting what happened there too. The first lot of food we dropped—bully beef and all thought this sort of thing and we really thought this was great—but by God we were sick men for a while. And all we

wanted was more and more rice because our stomachs hadn't settled down to it. After a week or so we decided we would take our chances. We wanted to get into Singapore, down to the wharves, because we knew that boats were coming in. So we were bumming lifts in trucks of course and we went into Singapore. The first lot I went with, again with the remaining six or seven mates went in

and we went straight down to the wharf area. If you went right into the city, there are wharves that are right there, and there is a beautiful little park there where in the old days they used to play test cricket and tennis. Anyway the day we went in we could hear this noise, this terrific noise of shouting

and yells coming and it was from down this park, this beautiful park, we got down there and here is this whole line of Japanese POWs lined across this and lined across them was a line of Chinese and the Japs were there to clean up the park and they were cleaning up bits of papers and rubbish and what not and the Chinese

were behind them tearing up paper and what not and dropping them and guarding them was a complete company of Ghurkhas with their bayonets out. We stood there for a while watching them. And one of my mates said, “We don’t want to stay here watching this do we?” and I said, “No I don't think we do.” I was very proud the way our Australians behaved after.

We had said for years naturally we were going to get our own back. Well of course when the Japanese took Singapore Island before, the way they behaved they killed 30,000 Chinese in the first three or four weeks. There were heads on every pole round Singapore Island, severed heads of Chinese and brutality going on all the time.

Well we said we would get our own back. We decided, sort of collectively, that we weren’t going to be like them. We just ignored the whole thing. I never saw an atrocity committed. In several instances that I knew of, and I didn't blame the chap was when he went up and jobbed a Japanese who had ill-treated him. Some of those who'd been at the Kamapti Gaol[?] and had been tortured. But there

was never one thing from Australians collectively of what the Japanese know. And that was pretty good. My party, my group was by this stage fattening up. We came back not looking the skeletons that we were but we put on weight pretty quickly. Medical teams came in of course. So we were on Singapore Island

from August 1945 and we sailed out about two and half months and we came back on two boats. The Largs Bay [?]and the Esperance Bay. They were coastal passenger steamers, medical teams on them all. And

they bought us back. They took about two and a half weeks. They could have taken ten days but they did it gradually with the medical teams. It was usually one bottle of beer a day by the way. We very quickly found where the beer was. Some of them scrounged a bit more. Those that wanted it. Unfortunately we had deaths coming getting home. They were so close, yet so far, but anyway that happened.

One of the things that upset we people, we were on the Largs Bay. We pulled into Darwin. We knew that we were pulling into Darwin. We thought this is going to be wonderful. Our feet on Australian soil. Gosh. The Esperance Bay went in and pulled up and there was no room for the Largs Bay and they kept us for three days out. And you could hear the bands playing and people round the place and we pulled out.

But they gave us some extra beer and kept us happy! But a very interesting thing happened to me there on the Largs Bay. In 1st Division Signals I was made a lance corporal one day and a chap called George Parker, who was a friend of mine, and we were both made lance corporals, and we thought this is good so that was that. We never saw George Parker because he was with one of the brigades

and the group of signallers who went to Darwin and went to Timor. While we were out there on the second day- out came the little motor boats with fellows on them, mainly officers who would come out to say hello to us and perhaps to see someone who they knew. This day the second boat came out and there was an officer coming up the side and as his head came over he was singing

out, "Are there any signallers aboad. If so go to the rear of the boat, or whatever they call it, and I'll be there.” I recognised him at first and he didn't recognise me. He had braids and so on. So it was my lance corporal friend but he was a full colonel now. I was a signalman by this stage

because when you went into the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] 8th Division from the militia, you dropped a rank and I could only drop one of course, because I was a lance corporal. Anyway George Parker was wonderful to us. He ended up CO of 7th Division Signals and took some of our fellows who had escaped from Singapore. A few, the sergeant in charge of us dispatch riders, leading speedway riders and he was sent back for good.

[General] Gordon Bennett sent back 500 but the most fully-trained Australians from Singapore, two days before the surrender to take back the knowledge that they had. Unfortunately they were treated very badly. A lot were accused of being deserters but they were the best men we had. Any way George Parker got hold of any signallers that came back including Orb Lawson who was Australian speedway champion.

I am godfather to his kids actually. He lived in Willoughby and I lived in Chatswood. He got us into 1st Div [Division] sigs at the first instance. They had no dispatch riders and we took our own bikes there. And they used to pay us ten shillings a day and fourpence a mile. They had no bikes or cars. They did that in the militia. I could tell you something funny that happened as Australians again.

We had a little motorcycle club and in the days like today you'd have an MG [a car – Morris Garages] or something, we weren’t bikies or anything, but I had a four cylinder Ariel motorbike and we did a bit of miniature TT racing. When they came to Orb who is the president of our so-called little club, they came to him and said, “We have no dispatch riders.” and he told them we want your bikes as well as you,

so it only means coming down once a fortnight to North Sydney and have some training and once a year go to a camp at Liverpool for a fortnight. Anyway Orb came back. We used to have a meeting every Friday night. Anyway he persuaded nine of us to become members and he said, “Its pretty good, I'll tell you—they pay you for your bikes.” and he said, you blokes,

as I said we all had our bikes on higher purchase in those days, we were all young, 17, 18. And he said, “It’s pretty good, you'll see when you get down there.” The second day we all went into camp for the proper camp and he said, “Now I'm going to take you map reading from Liverpool through to Bowral, no Camden.” Now he said, “Before you go we've got to fill in these forms and the details of your bike,

their horsepower, as how many miles to the gallon.” because they paid you fourpence per mile. But there was no such thing as speedos [speedometers] on bikes. Pre war. Unless you were upmarket and got one. And he said, “We are all going down now to the army bowser and we will fill up our tanks to the top.” We did that and we didn’t have to pay

for the petrol. And they made a note of how much petrol you'd taken and how many miles per gallon. We did about twenty miles that day, a bit of map reading. About two miles out of Liverpool he went up a lane, we were following him and he said, “Right get off your bikes boys, take the tap off under your tank and only keep enough to get back to the camp.” We did, we went back to the camp and got fourpence a mile for

doing 300 miles or 400 miles. I was a kid of 17 and at that stage I did have a conscience. And when I got back I said to Orb “Gosh this is stealing”. And he said, “God, what are you getting us into?” And I said, “I don't like stealing.” And he said, “You come with me.” He took me up to the officers’ line and the CO was Colonel Laxton.

And he said, “Look at that.” And it was a beaten up old 1923 car. Officer got $25 a day and where we got fourpence I think they got a shilling a mile. This beaten up, I think a 1923 car, and he said, “Colonel Laxton orders his batman to take that car for a little drive and empty the tank.” So our conscience went out the window.

The things you do! And by the way I think two camps in 1937, 1938, two camps and I pretty much paid off my hire purchase! So at the end of the war we left Darwin and came down through the Barrier Reef which was beautiful of course and

arrived on the 4th of October at Woolloomooloo. Again I was terribly pleased and we were. We did the usual thing. The bands were there and there were top officers and there was one man, an officer down there standing on his own and it was [General] Gordon Bennett, and we all think the world of Gordon Bennett.

He was the bravest man I ever saw. And he did the right thing. He had a row with [General] Blamey, who was the chief. And he had a row with the top man and Bennett was a fiery redheaded man, a brigadier general in France, who had a magnificent record but fell out with Blamey and of course was tried as you know. It was a disgrace.

I was one of the dispatch riders with him at Div headquarters Tanglin Barracks. We only had three miles of island left then as you know. Bennett had all of the 8th Division still under his command spread out across the three miles under his command. He didn't order the surrender. It was the British general who was in charge of the island [Percival]. The night of the surrender he was with us.

He paraded us and thanked us for what we had done. He was there two hours after the surrender and he told us that he was going to have a go to get out. [Sir Charles] Moses, chief of the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] he got hold of a boat somewhere. We all went down and tried to get boats ourselves. Couldn’t get them. But it was a disgrace actually,

the treatment. When we saw him a cry went up, “We want Ginger Mick!” And he came up the gangplank and the boys carried him and Blamey was down there and he was livid about that. But Bennett was a marvellous man. I had an interesting experience. I didn’t go back to straight real estate. I wasn't well enough.

I joined MMI the insurance company. I was their property manager. I was there a year or so and I was coming out of the lift one morning and I saw this man in a bowler hat and I thought, “I know you.” And I asked, “Are you General Bennett?” and he said, “How did you know?” And I said, “I'm Jim Ling.” He laughed and he said, “What are you doing in this place?” and I said, “I work here.” and running their property was not a big job then because all they had were

a few little ones but he said, “Are you?” The next thing I found, the general manager sent for me, and he said, “General Bennett told me about you.” and he was deputy chairman of the company, so I worked for him, and he decided. I was called in to him, the general manager for them to go in for property investment all across Australia. So I got a different type of job. And the old boy

used to come with me every now and again and look at the properties and talk about the old days and take me home. I got to know him and his wife. And I thought, “Here I am a signalman, and here I am running around with the general!” But anyway that was all by the way. But yes, we arrived back that particular day and we were taken back to Casula where we were medically examined.

Later on I had to go into hospital. We all had to for a while. I got home. Pat and I had known each other since her school days. I had just left. She was at Willoughby High and I had been at North Sydney High. We had seen each other round Chatswood of course. Got to know each other. And it went on frankly.

And when I was in the army in Bathurst, we became engaged and I said, “Look we'll get married.” because the pay was better, and if we were going for engagement why not get married before I go, which a lot did. Her only relative in Australia were her mother and father and two sisters. They were all Edinburgh people, her mother and father were Edinburgh people. Pat was born here of course,

and so we decided we would and then suddenly her father died. And I said, “I don’t know how long we are going to be but we have to lengthen our thinking.” And well a week after he died I got my final leave. So I said to her,

“We will only be gone twelve months. This war isn’t going to last.” and I was gone for nearly six years. And when we got out to Casula my dad was there and she was there. So we were married on the 8th December. We didn’t wait too long. People who'd known each other. So I am still here! There is only a handful of us.

There are only about thirteen of a whole 150 who are here. But I am 85. Even on Anzac Day we were saying, “Why are we still here?” We wonder why the heck some of us are still around. We've got to be lucky that's all. People used to say to me when I came home from the railway, “Oh you must have been fit or you must have been this or that.” but you just had to be darned lucky that’s all.

One of the things and I could do it and a lot could, well quite a few, and if you could take a day at a time it helped. I had several of my best friends in the unit who did marvellous jobs and helped everyone on the railway. But they came to a stage when they thought I've had it, I don't want to carry on, and if you said that you were dead, there was no doubt about it. I believe you can point the bone at yourself. Well you could.

We had one chap, an old chippie from Melbourne, a bachelor of 35, and he did a fantastic job. He carried blokes on the road, a big strong fellow in his own day and when things were at the worst on the railway, we were working up to 11 o'clock at night from six in the morning, and the monsoon was on, and you were swamping

your way back in and we had a bit of a lean to on a tree, and Noel was with us he was one of our six or seven and he came in this night and he said, “You can have my rice, I'm not going to carry on, there is no one at home, I am not married, there is no one at home who would worry too much about me.” What we used to do if anyone said that was we'd beg them not to and then we'd abuse them, really abuse them and tell

them they were cowards. And sure enough he laid down and wouldn't eat his rice and at six in the morning he was gone. What I often said, and others said too, “I wouldn’t have the guts.” Fancy just having the guts to decide you were going to do that. There it was. So at home health wasn’t very good.

Malaria stuck with me on and off for over a year. The real estate institute—there was were about twenty of us that came back and they set up a seminar to talk to blokes who had come back and they advised us to find something akin to it but not go back into business because they said your health's not good. And also during the war there were a lot of regulations that came in that remained after the war that we knew nothing about,

protection things for tenants and all sorts of things. So they advised us. And real estate people know a few things about insurance companies, because when the agent sells a house they get a cover note for it. I was agent to a company called the Royal Insurance Company before the war. Anyhow there were jobs offered to us by the army

and the army said anyone with insurance knowledge, there is a company in Sydney, a workers comp [compensation] company, are putting on a lot of men who know something about insurance, because the workers comp business were being opened up again. Manufacturers Mutual was the biggest workers comp company in Australia. So I went in and I'll never forget

the general manager was there doing some of the interviewing and he interviewed me and of course you had to have your war record down. He was big tough guy. One of those pre-war fellows who was the boss. A brilliant insurance man, and he was interviewing me and he looked at me and said, “You wouldn’t be able to walk to the end of the street by the look of you.” I put on a bit of weight but I would have been about 5 stone

then and then he started to laugh, and he wanted to know something about what had happened. And he said,” What do you know about insurance?” and I told him, I know what a cover note is! And he said, “That is good enough.” But they were good people to work for, but as I said when they found out I had been in property they put me on the property side until Gordon Bennett came on the scene.

Well they made me their property manager and they sent me overseas three times. Study property in America and Europe. I had a very good job with them. I would have made more money if I had gone back because of all the boom of real estate but that's not everything and they looked after me. I had to retire because of health problems a bit early which I didn't want to do but anytime I got sick which I did now and again,

they looked after me marvellously. And as I said we ended up with a very big investment portfolio both in country towns and in every city in Australia. I had an interesting job. And the first time I went overseas was for five months. America and Canada, Europe. And every place he said, “Take your wife with you.

You want someone with you.” So I had a pretty good job! Yes, I worked with them until I had to retire. I was out in 113 AGH [Australian General Hospital] out at Concord and things weren’t pretty good with me. I was having nightmares and things were going a bit haywire and they recommended—the company—that I retire. I retired five years earlier than what would have been compulsory.

But I realised after six months that it was the best thing. But I kept myself busy with Legacy and so on. And I still do. I think it is important. The mind is a muscle just as much as any other part. If you sit around and look into the distance you will get run down a bit I think. I'm probably not as good as I think I am. Anyhow the balance of our life.

We built the first house in Chatswood. As I said we were married straight away. My old father was a coach- and motor-body builder in his early days and he was living in retirement at Dee Why, and he built a little flat in the home they were in. Pat and I lived there for nearly twelve months until our house was built at Chatswood. We never left the house. We only had one child a son.

We have two bonzer [wonderful] grandchildren, one 25—a girl—and a boy 22. Unfortunately bad luck still stopped with us—our only son was killed when he was 31. He was fine young man doing very well but these things happen. But as I say the grandchildren were only 5

and 2 so our daughter-in-law was left with two young children, but she has been excellent. They have stuck entirely with us and now live at Chatswood themselves. The grandchildren are out every week or two and anything we want them to do they do for us. Our granddaughter got a Bachelor of Arts in business, but majoring in tourism. She worked for a

a tourist company here for two years after she got her degree that looked after people coming into Australia as rewards for working for big companies in America, coming out here for holidays. She wasn't booking people to go away—she had to organise them to go to the Barrier Reef and various things.

Well in 1917 I wouldn't remember much. I went to school in Kempsey. We lived right in the town because my father was a businessman there and I went to the local convent.

To the Sisters of Mercy actually, a little mixed primary school and I went there up to what we called the QC [Qualifying Certificate] as we called it in those days which was the primary school. Good teachers. What was Kempsey like? It was a town of about six thousand people. It hadn't changed I am sure for fifty years.

It lived by dairy farmers up and down the river. There was a Nestle's factory at Smithtown which is just off Kempsey. All the milk was taken there so it was a friendly town, people made their own amusement there of course in those days. I was a one of a family of eight children

and I was the second youngest. But my sisters all played musical instruments. Pianos, violins, and some of them were in the local musical society. So generally, on Sundays they used to come into the house and there was an impromptu concert on. My father made a tennis court

at one stage so we had a tennis court, a social club there. It was quite a good life. The real difficulty for my generation—my generation were looking for a bit better jobs than were available in Kempsey. There was nothing much there. OK if you were a property owner and had a successful dairy farm or one or two other things that were grown. But we people to get a decent job my age, you did

have to go to Sydney. So it was a nice town and I've never lost my love for it and I go back there. It has always been a problem employment. But several things have happened there in the last few years. Akubra—their complete manufacturing plant is in Kempsey. Every Akubra hat that is exported to America.

They employ 300 people. So that has kicked things on a bit in the way of employment.

I was 12 and came down to go to high school. Came to Chatswood. My dad was alive. He was born in 1874. So he'd be 130 odd now, so with me 85 it goes back a fair way there, but I went

to high school at North Sydney and then went and got a good job. But I go back there as often as I can. I love the Macleay, and I get the Kempsey paper by the way once a week which my uncle and aunt founded way back in 1850. But I get the Kempsey paper to keep up on all my relatives and people that I know. Every now and again I go up the Kempsey show.

which was on Monday and Tuesday this week. Wauchope the week before and probably Bellingen the week after. I go back up and it’s a lovely area. But the big kick along it’s had—it fought to get it because there were three or four places including Nambucca—they got last year and it’s nearly up. The local jail came to Kempsey and it employs 500 people. But you can imagine what it will do—for food,

motels, with people visiting, so this will give Kempsey … The two towns that came on of course at the expense of Sydney were Taree and Coffs Harbour. But anyway they have the gaol and of course the jail has made Grafton for the last 180 years. So this will make Kempsey. So as I said they fought to get the gaol.

I was seventeen so I got my first motorcycle. As I said it was a bit like getting your first sports car. There was none of this bikie thing or anything. We constructed this little track

out near Frenchs Forest. Our president was the local speedway champion. So they were identities in those days. They made a lot of money. Speedway riders. They would go riding up the showground here in Sydney and on a Saturday night it was quite common to have 30,000 people there but then the English speedway clubs,

they used to pay our fellows a fortune to go and spend like our winter over there. My friend was captain of Norwich. They used to buy them like they buy footballers now and he was at one stage was world champion. When I was 17 I rode my first little bike which was a tiny little two-stroke bike, and I graduated to one or two others

then a BSA and finally what was a Rolls Royce, a four cylinder aerial. Beautiful. So when we became dispatch riders we were quite skilled on handling the bikes. I was very pleased on Singapore Island when we were always on.

The main road into Singapore, is Bukit Timah Road, where the battles took place and because of the rains over there they have these enormous drains there that are about eight foot deep and about ten feet wide and when the monsoons were on they would carry all of the water and they look after them very well.

They have grass on either side and then the road. And one of the things that you learn when you really start to do things with motorbikes and racing and so on is what we say put a bike down and put it down so that you don't hurt yourself any more than you've got to. Anyway this Bukit Timah Road for about three weeks was a playground of the Japanese planes. Every movement down onto the road they would dive onto you

to about fifty feet away from you and machine-gun up and down the road. And of course dispatch riders were pretty prime figures—they knew you were carrying something. But we blokes had been trained as we were and we could hear them coming and all you had to do was lay the bike over, slide under the grass and fall into the drain. They couldn't get to you then! We did it dozens of times. One of my close mates tried to do it and he hadn't been trained and he

lost his leg. And they got him. We were riding Norton motorbikes in the army. We were issued with BSA bikes and we found they were no good in near jungle or rubber plantations. They were too low slowing where these Nortons were pretty good bikes.

Well they were what we called [side?] bikes. They weren’t racing bikes but they did in old terms seventy miles per hour/eighty. But it was rather sad. Bikes. They were the last bikes that I had control over because they were issued to us. It was rather sad the night of the surrender when Gordon Bennett, had spoken to us

one of the things we did when we found we couldn't get a, oh no before we went down looking for the boats, no Japanese had come we were only a little way away from the water, we rode all our bikes down, revved up the motors, pointed them to the Strait of Johore and away they went. We didn't want the Japs to get them! But that was the finish of our bikes. They are probably still there.

The final thing with motorbikes. It started donkey's years ago. We had a young family living near us in Greville Street and one day one of the boys came over—he had bought his first bike and they used to lend it to me and I'd ride up and down the street and Pat would nearly have a fit. But I do that every now and again.

You get a love of them and I still keep myself very well read about what's happening. I got a bit upset when all the Japanese bikes came out here nobody seemed to write anything about it. But English bikes seem to be coming in now. So there we are—that's my bike history.

Being able to really tear around. As I said we would turn up the speed and really go. I used to love laying it slightly over on a corner. I think we were a little like the men that drive the sport cars now and have straight through exhausts and try to beef it up.

I really loved the wind in my face and the wind in my hair and I loved. There is a bit of mateship amongst other bikies. Every time I see something that I like in the way of a bike, I'll go up and speak to the fellow riding it at the shops and they'll want to talk to you. And they're as enthusiastic as you ever were. I don't bother with the bikies. I think there is a criminal element there and I don't think they've got quite the same attitude

as the people that ride them for the same reasons as I did. So that's my bike history.

I suppose I told you most of what I can tell you. The joining was because we were approached by the militia, because they didn't have any dispatch riders.

No. Not at that stage. See I joined the militia, sometime through 1936, but by 1939 our training in the militia had been pushed up

so the powers that be were aware, and of course a war had started at the end of 1939 so they were pretty right. So I'd say a year before war actually broke out between Britain and Germany and France and Germany. By that stage we were beginning to feel that there was a possibility.

Then of course when the Japanese started to flex their muscles before they actually bombed Pearl Harbor but they were moving into Thailand, they were moving in by an agreement but it was threats that they got in of course, so we were beginning to talk. So when the war started

with Germany we were immediately sent into a month’s camp straight away. We were sent into Raymond Terrace in the park and then every three months, and then we were sent to Greta. Why we were sent to those areas was that there was area allotted to all of the Australian

militia armies. And the 1st Division which I was, 1st Division Signals and all its ancillaries of engineers and etc, we had to defend Port Stephens, and being divisional headquarters, we were back a bit from the water so all of our training was up and down to Port Stevens and through there.

So later on, it was thought that at Port Stephens (we were in the AIF by this stage) if Japan invaded—Port Stephens would definitely be one as you can get a boat in there. So yes, we began to realise that something could happen and as I said earlier it was the fall of Paris.

Up to that stage Australia only had one division, and that was the 6th Division that when the first people went over, then very quickly of course 7th, 8th. The 9th Division was formed before the 7th and 8th strangely enough. Because it was formed when they needed more people in the Middle East, so that was formed by sending some people in from here and some people over there

so it was a bit of a mish-mash. So the 9th is very much an earlier division than the 7th and 8th.

No. I think we were all young enough to be adventurous. I think our attitude was, well again of course you never think that anything is going to happen to you, that's part of that age. That's part of young people growing up too. You've got to take risks. And you do take some chances. I heard a man; he was one of my general managers, who was in the 7th Division say that very much. He was a great businessman.

He was a corporal in the infantry division in the Middle East and he used to get demoted when he was out of action because he would break every rule that was to be broken. But they would give him some stripes because he was a good soldier. I heard him say, you probably still experience it or know of it, if you remember the insurance companies years ago, penalised under 25 year old drivers and they still do,

because you can't drive your mother's car unless she's got…And we had an enormous amount of those. And this general manager even though I was the property development officer, if he was ever doing a public relations trip, he would take me with him, and I could do a bit of my own work. I used to get him onto radio, onto the air. The first television I got him onto was in Orange actually.

And he was president of the Underwriters’ Association of Australia and I'd go and see him, the newspapers, the Orange newspaper ran photos of him and so on and I used to tell them—look he'd answer any question, doesn't matter how hard it is, if he agrees with something that you…. And when that came in we were doing some trips around and they hit him straightaway—what are you doing….our children… your doing…

and he used to tell them—statistics show that under 25-year-old drivers get five times the accident and five times the death and we are trying to save some lives. Make them think. And then he used to say, but we don't want them to think too much. We don't want tame young people coming up. We want adventurous young people and we know that they will do things

and that's absolutely right. Who wants a nation of tame cats? If you are not willing to take a risk when you are young what are you going to do? And he used to say that and the interviewers used to like that because it was quite true. ’Cause he was one of them, he used to do it too. As matter of fact I went up to Brisbane with him on one trip

and he had a company Mercedes, always the top of the line and a driver and he was going to Brisbane, something to do with the property that I was getting built in Queen Street. And he said, “Are you coming with me Jim?” and he said, “The driver's not coming with me. I got the new Mercedes a few months ago and it's just run in.” He said, “You pick me up at Pymble, you bring your car and leave it here.”

And we got in the car and he drove on the New England Highway. It was a Sunday, and it was the first of the Mercedes that came in. The Mercedes have a levelling device and as you go round the corner they adjust themselves. He was driving round the corners at 90 miles an hour and then he would hand it over to me after two or three hours urging me to go faster.

And we went from Pymble to our motel at Brisbane at four o'clock. And if you work it out. Its 630 miles and we averaged well over sixty miles, so we driving at around 100. When we settled in over a scotch at the motel he said, “I don't often order you to do something but if you ever mention one word about what we've done today!

Because if you mention the speedo you'll have the sack tomorrow.” So who wants these tame cats he said.

Not a great deal, he didn’t talk much

about Gallipoli. He was one man who used to said to me we never should have been there. Well we know that about history now. We were like a shooting gallery there as we all know and I had two uncles killed at Lone Pine. Two great uncles. He talked a bit about trench warfare and what it was and I think a lot of the talk

that we have had over your age and even my age is that communication is so sophisticated now. And look what it is now, the Iraq war but the whole war into our room here, your room. So no, John Hathaway, he was a light horseman, they were of course they were ordinary infantry after it settled down, but he was an extremely Australian digger and a nice type of man too.

So any talk he ever had to me I could never relate to it once I had been to war. I couldn't relate any of the things because our war was a slightly different war and we didn’t have the Blitz of course, that the Germans were experts at.

Our Blitz of course was not having a tank to our name—so what could we do? One of our anti tank group, we had two anti tank groups they did a wonderful job and they knocked out about eighteen Jap tanks but the Japs had hundreds and hundreds of them.

Well map reading, first of all familiarisation with the motorbike, the maintenance of it, though we did have a maintenance group attached to us, but day-to-day maintenance. Our kit of tools—and we could have had a fairly good kit of tools but old time motorcyclists like me we reckon

you can get by beautifully on two tools, one’s a screwdriver and the other is a multigrip. A pair of pliers in other words, that's what the big ones are. You can do most things with them. Map reading is most important of course because if you were in action, you are sent to naturally unfamiliar places so you have to plot it on a map first.

Compass reading we trained on. Our arms training was revolvers, because with dispatch riding you don't carry a rifle but you carried a revolver. We trained as infantry because you’ve got to be prepared to do that. We did shooting tests now, again. We were well trained

right across the board I would say. Mounting guard training which we hated and got out of every time we could. That's one thing you could really do as a motorcyclist, if you were going to be on guard duty tonight and you didn’t want to do it and you were out delivering something through the day, you could very much have an engine failure, or a tyre would burst and you weren't able to get back.

But general training right through. We even did war history to a certain extent. We had lectures and that type of thing. No we were. And again coming back to my early days, militia days plus the other, we had four and a half years of good training. See we were highly trained. And there was no doubt about it.

We knew way around training. One of the things, that I mentioned revolvers to you. One of the things that we struck in Malaya when we went into action, the Japanese propaganda was extremely good. In many ways. And one of the things that they thumped into wherever they were, such as Malaya, Singapore,

Java and Sumatra as it was in those days—they had their catch cry – “Asia for the Asiatics.” Now that went wonderfully. Of course it would. Just as if we said Australia for the Australians. And when the Japs first went into action—and they still say it in their own schools—that we liberated Southeast Asia. Well it's probably a bit true

because Britain got out. But they just claim that that's why they went there, they conveniently forget and don't tell the schoolchildren is that after they had so-called liberated Singapore, the natives turned and hated the sight of them because they ill treated them and killed 30,000 Chinese in the first two or three weeks on the island

because they had helped us. But the Japs were stupid. If they treated them reasonably everything would be. But what happened—talking about revolvers, this Asia for the Asiatics had got through to the Chinese

and while the Japs were in action and us in action with them the Malays and Chinese were treated quite okay. Not so much the Chinese because the Chinese had been fighting them in China and Japan had been at China for years but the Malays and the Indonesians—that was okay. As we started delivering our messages to instructions in action, one of the first things that we became aware of

was that as we were going through a village we would find either a wire or a rope across the road which would come across you and throw you off your bike and they were put up and found pretty quickly—we told our intelligence people. A few fellows were nastily injured. And then of course the Malays, some of them,

as the fellow would come out of the bush with a parang [a machete] and there was an attempt to attack them. If you got you revolver out they would run for their lives. So we had a talk amongst ourselves, and we approached our CO who approached Gordon Bennett and we asked to be armed with Mills bombs, grenades as well because what we did, the moment we slowed down

as we came into a village, we would take it out and show it to them and they knew what a grenade was and they got out of the road. So we carried our arms then until the finish of the war. Revolvers and grenades. Grenades—they put a stop to the other. Because what we did, we threw a few of them and it caused an explosion. They knew what happened. So that's what we were armed with.

Very much so, if they were threatened. Yes, there was a war on. But the grenades were very effective and very sensible for us to have. And I understand that that was adopted also by the Australians here once we became POWs and they went to New Guinea and other places. What we

found out. Actually Bennett wrote a very top-line assessment which was used all the way through by the Australian Army on the experiences in Malaya. Because we were the first people in action against the Japanese

Yes, at times it is lonely. What we did once this trouble started. Where we had enough personnel, we rode in pairs. What we did we tossed a penny between ourselves and decided who was the fellow that was going to ride in front first and he’d ride in front until one village and then change over And then we'd change over. Yes, it could be lonely, you were away on your own and at times you were in areas where the Japanese had come through so swiftly which they did.

In some areas we were behind the lines. But the moment you woke up. Mainly the Japanese were working through the jungle. Or they were working behind tanks. If they were coming down and the tanks were fuelling down the front they would come down the road.

Yes, shot at.

Particularly sniper fire. They used snipers and of course, dispatch riders were a fair game for that. But of course, you had a speedy little bike and if you heard a crack you would do anything to protect yourself. Go as fast as you could to get out of it.

Yes, but the main reason was that they weren't at the spot where the commanders had sent us. That was the last known spot. But the Japanese came down the peninsula so fast that to find them wasn't easy of course and sometimes you couldn’t find them and you had to go back to your depot and start again.

And perhaps there would be message back by then that moved to so and so. But the further we got down, the harder and harder it became. And on Singapore Island it was extremely difficult there because the movement. You see it only took a fortnight to capture Singapore when they crossed the straits. And within a week they were in all sorts of spots that were unknown.

The worse thing was to try and find them. The Japanese- the loss of civilians from bombing. What happened was as we shrank into the little areas the civilians shrunk in with us, particularly the Chinese. It was estimated there were well over 1,000,000 Chinese,

in that last three or four square miles. And trying to get to anywhere in that area. It's not a nice thing to talk about. But you were literally riding over bodies of people, women, and kids, the whole lot. It will never be known how many died. See one of the reasons, a very different reason, why it had to be a surrender

was that was happening and of course the Japanese captured the water supply and cut the water off. Possibly it would have been better to do the surrender without trying to defend Singapore, probably been better to do it at the Straits of Johore. See we blew up the viaducts and within twelve hours the Japs had sealed it again. That stage

it was quite obvious and known to General Percival, who was the overall commander, that there would be no evacuation and no chance of holding the island, but Mr Churchill said you had to fight to the last man. But in retrospect it would have been far more humane and we would have lost nothing.

On roads, through rubber plantations which had little tracks through them. I'd have to say practically never in jungles because there was no way you could get your bike through.

Not easy because it was rough, and this is where these Norton bikes were good.

They were big solid bikes but that wasn't easy and of course down the roads you knew you were exposed a bit, then you would head to the rubber plantation to try and work it out.

Yes I did. See we were riding round Malaya

into every area right up into the Thai border into the east coast and the west coast and in pre-war, Malayans were rather lovely people. Very nice to us and of course you would pull into a village and they would give you a pawpaw straight away or soft drinks were there. They were nice people.

See we were doing that from about the middle of February up to the 8th December so we had eight or nine months and got to know the country very well. The couple of times that I have been fortunate to go back I have loved seeing it again.

The tropical landscape,

the coconut trees, the water. You see it’s a narrow country as you know—you are never too far away from the water. Rubber plantations to look at are quite lovely. The rubber tree is a nice tree and you can see through them. The exotic insect life. It is butterfly country. And the wildlife, now and again you would see a tiger

and you would keep well away from him. And elephants everywhere of course. Just the country itself. It is a tropical, rather a paradise country and as I say I have been fortunate to go back two or three times. One of the things that I didn't tell you that I haven’t said that may interest you. We all said to each other when we were coming home, that never

in our lifetime would we want to see the railway area again, because we only had thoughts of how horrendous it was and how many of our mates needlessly lost their lives. The first overseas trip that the company sent me on I went to Singapore. I said that I wouldn’t mind breaking in Singapore for a few days and I went to the Singapore War Memorial

and out to Changi again. The Australian Army had troops naturally, because the Vietnam War was on and they were in Singapore. The barracks, the bombed-out barracks that had been our quarters when we were POWs. While I was there something happened to me in my mind and I rang my general manager and said I am going to take another week at a time. He told me I could take leave if I wanted to while I was away.

I was away for five and a half months. So it was a long trip. And I suddenly had a yen, and while I was there I would like to go to KA Hill first of all. The Australian Army were there and they met the plane, took Pat and I in their car, to a hotel, and I got a yen again to go back to the railway.

and I never ever thought, that was 1970. And Pat and I were the first to go back to Kanburi and put our name in the visitors’ book. See that is 32 years ago and there were no tours back then as there are now. It was the best thing I ever did. The army, the Thai Army, gave me a guide and the army gave us a car and a driver. They had a staging point in Bangkok

for troops going on to Vietnam. They put me in a Mercedes air-conditioned car and I said to Pat as we went through Bampong, ‘This is exactly as it was.”

Well of course, we were naturally wildly excited, but a little apprehensive, and that was very definite because we didn't know how we were going to be greeted. Our first thoughts were

we surrendered and nobody would want to talk to us. These other people had been in a war for three and a half years, all the people that we knew and we really were apprehensive. It wasn't talked about publicly, but amongst ourselves we were all feeling much the same way. We just wondered whether we would be welcomed back to the country that was our home.

Of course we had only, well first of all to see the people that were on the wharf. Our relatives were not allowed to come to the ship. That was guarded right off, Woolloomooloo was, and it was only army personnel. The band was there and so on and a row of double-decker buses of course waiting to take us. So it only took us to get down through Martin Place

in the double-decker buses to begin to think, “Well, perhaps people do want to see us.” The place was packed. There was tickertape, which we had never seen before, everywhere. People were racing out trying to hand us bottles of beer through the doors and the welcome was absolutely overwhelming. And that happened all the way out to Casula.

The buses didn’t travel very fast, so by the time we hit Casula which we had been told was where some of our relatives would be. First of all we were taken into a hut area and we were sprayed really as we walked through it because

they were still uncertain how we were. As a matter of interest, we had to toss overboard, before we came into the Heads some of the things that we carried. When we were in Changi in the early days and we were sending parties into Singapore, they started to bring out of bombed-out homes and buildings, books. As many as we could get. And the Japs didn't

say no to that. Some of them did. But we built up a very, very good library of books and when the F Force was getting ready to go they issued every man with one book and it was just take whatever you get, and we were just in a line, and the idea was that we could set up a library where we go or, if we were moving we could exchange so that every one had a book.

I got a book I can tell you that I could recite some of the opening passage—"Last night I dreamed that I was in Mandalay…” Rebecca! I got! I've seen Rebecca—I saw it the other night—ten times! One of the saddest things that happened to me-I had to throw Rebecca overboard because it could have been infected. By the way one of the first things I did was buy another copy of Rebecca.

Anyhow they wanted to make certain that we were deloused of anything. So we went through there. A funny thing happened. Some of our boys spotted that there were shirts and singlets in a store at the back of this hut. And we forgot that our loved ones were outside. We stole anything that we could. We didn't even need it—because that is what we had been doing for three and a half years. It is funny isn't it?

One of the things that I did bring home with me and some of them did were the parachutes that were dropped with the Catalinas as I said dropping the food. They were pure silk some of them. Pat made a lot of underclothes out of them. They deloused them and they let us bring them in. We were about two hours stealing stuff while our loved ones were waiting for us.

Not that we could see them. They then divided us at the end of the hut and some of they sent straight to hospital at Concord and some they let go home. I went to a hospital at Herne Bay after I came home. So we stole this stuff but as far as then I came out and spotted my old

father with Pat out in the paddock and so I at least said, “Well she has waited this long.” I told you that I wrote a letter to let her off the hook. No I don't think I did. Well we all decided to do this. See we hadn't had communication and only 28 words were allowed by us

and I wrote to Pat three or five times with the 28 words and she never got one that wasn't two years old. My closest friend from Chatswood who I was mates with from 11—we stuck together right through, his mother and father—he'd been dead two years when they got the letter. Part of the Japanese system. Anyway I spotted Pat down there

I met my father and we got on a train and a bus to Liverpool station and a train and we went straight to Dee Why to my mother and we were down there at about 4.00. And the first thing my mother said was, “I don't think you should have done that.” and I said, “Yes, I am going with Pat to her mother and father’s.” Or her mother as it was then.

So I went back to where she lived. And I went back there and I stopped the night and went back to Dee Why the next day and then we were ringing each other up, if it was possible, though people didn't have a telephone, but we were making contact. And we were pulling out everything to get together again.

We didn't want to part. And yes, we used to meet in town and have a meal and a beer if you were a beer drinker. And so it went on. And as I said we were married on the 8th December. That's an interesting date there. Pat says that it comes in order of preference.

I was married on the 8th December. I went into action against the Japanese on the 8th December and our son was born on the 8th December. Pat said I put them in order of preference—the day I went into action with my mates, the day my son was born and finally the day that I married. So being back—Pat was working, she worked for an insurance company, a life insurance company in Pitt Street since she had left school.

And see they were doing all the men's jobs because they were all away. See she couldn’t get into the Australian Army because it was protected they were doing the men's jobs. But she did Red Cross work and the other work that she could do so I married her without a job and she was the one that was working.

At that stage I'd had the instruction—don't go back into real estate. Actually the man that was keeping my job open for me, died and it changed hands and I don't think the new people wanted to talk to me very much about it. So I didn't worry about it because I wasn't going back. First of all

the day that we were married just after the war you couldn't get accommodation in Sydney. It was still packed with Americans. I did a round of hotels and never looked like getting it. Before the war our favourite beach, and just after we came home of course, we had this little flat at Dee Why, Collaroy. And there was no guest house. And it was only sold about six months ago

on the bridge front at Dee why and I rang them up and this was only for the night we were married because we got a little flat up at Terrigal. So one of my mates lent me an old car and we battled down there—we are still laughing about it, and went into this old guest house with a common bathroom down the row and we went into this bedroom

and there was a great big sign across the top of the bed "Advance Australia!" and we still laugh about it. Anyway we went up and had a fortnight in a little—it was behind a little grocery shop. It was a wonderful fortnight of course. We swam everyday because it was December. It was from December right up through Christmas. And then we came back home

still with no job and I was still trying to build myself up a bit so I said to Pat, “Look that photo there, see the old building,?” I mentioned that my mother was the postmistress, and what my mother did years afterwards—she liked to go back to Macleay to her sisters and she had at the back of that—there was this little butcher shop from the days when they used to bring the timber down—the cedar down the road

and there was an old abandoned—and in the early days that was the last stop before Kempsey. It was about nine miles out but that was day with the bullock teams and the cedar. And there was a butcher shop and a wine saloon and a post office and my mother had it converted into a reasonably comfortable weekender.

and we stopped six weeks there. Down the lane opposite, you could walk down the lane and our shower was to swim in the Macleay River. Pat had what we look on as a bikini now and we found out afterwards, our relatives on the dairy farm used to get their binoculars out and wonder what they were going to see next, watching her swim there. And

we had six wonderful weeks and every day in one of those six weeks one of my relatives would be passing and we found out where the milk can used to be left and a cooked WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK or a gramma [pumpkin] pie which I loved and I put on a stone. So we had six weeks, me without a job, and Pat, by that stage had left her job at this stage. So we had six weeks on

the Macleay River there and being very well looked after. No car. Nothing. When my mother manned the post office during the war years she went back up there and she went nearer up so that she could be nearer to her relatives and my father went back too. My father didn’t like the cattle and the horses round the place.

My mother bought an old horse because its name was Jim and she bought the old horse, and my father did up a sulky for her and Pat went up there one day. I think it was the Easter holidays while I was a prisoner and one of my relatives drove her up from Kempsey and when she was going back to get on the train, my mother got out the sulky and got out Jim and they were running late for the train and

my mother was a great horsewoman because she had been born with horses and they drove into Kempsey, into the station yard, screaming in, with my mother standing up and belting horse. And Pat was absolutely terrified. And my mother's older sister who was the one from the newspaper family, and a very proper old dear was horrified. So we had six weeks up there.

Yes, Pat and our friends hired a launch and they followed us along and waved to us from the decks of the boat.

Well, on the water, yes, because word had got around apparently and we were on the Queen Mary by the way. And we had the Aquitania and I told you earlier we circled them in the Indian Ocean and went on from there. Yes, they met the boat.

Beautiful. Again we

had a lucky run with our speedway, world champion speedway rider. The Queen Mary was so big and by the way it wasn't overcrowded then. Later on when it was used on the American run they used to put—I think there was only one thousand on it—and they used to carry eight or ten thousand. But it was only from America of course up to Europe but conditions and the food was lovely. We did

drill and so on and we had a boxing tournament. All that kind of thing. But we were about three stories down. The second day we were on, the chief engineer who was next to the captain on the Queen Mary came looking for a man named Orb Lawson. He was a terrific speedway fan in England, of Orb’s.

And Orb told us what was and there were four of us and he said, “He's giving me a key to his cabin and he's keeping it stocked. We can go up there anytime that he is on duty.” We were to use it, we didn't go and sleep there of course but we could go into this magnificent cabin. But Orb and I didn’t drink even have a beer but the others did. So we travelled pretty well.

Well not a great deal for recreation but the inevitable two-up game started which was supposed to be banned but they looked the other way and the boxing tournament was good recreation because we had some very top line fighters. In the best part of a thousand you always get it. The officers played table tennis and all that type of thing. They had their section.

In the main recreation area we still drilled each day to keep in good nick and signals did all the signal work and dispatch riders on foot did all the delivery of stuff. So to get to Singapore on the Queen Mary, and they didn't worry about subs, they reckoned the Queen Mary could go at such a pace, that they were all right from that point.

we didn't have subs, to get to Singapore we didn’t need sub alarms. We had the Hobart warship which was a cruiser and she was sunk in the Java Sea of course later on but no we probably kept occupied which was sensible when you get a whole lot of men together. If you are not occupied, trouble starts.

No they kept us fairly busy and we didn't growl. After having eight or nine months of army food this was absolutely beautiful. And it was the Queen Mary which was one of the greatest ships in the world and Queen Elizabeth was launched not long after we had been on the Mary.

I am guessing a little bit—but I’d say that it took about ten or eleven days. The Queen Mary. In the old days it was always six weeks by boat to get to England and I think the Queen Mary could have done that in five weeks. She was a pretty fast boat. Beautiful boat.

No. We were hoping that we would be joining all of our friends in the Middle East that was where everybody was. But they had issued us with, what we called ‘Bombay bloomers’. But they were long shorts and strangely enough the ones that they issued us with for mosquitos they got the idea from the British. But they went over your knees

and they had a button either side and you could turn them over or drop them . I suppose they were quite wise in the Indian Army and what not but we hated the things and what most of us did was when we got to Kuala Lumpur in those days it was like Hong Kong. They had these tailors everywhere and most of us got a decent pair of slacks and a couple of decent pair of shorts made.

You could get them done for a couple of dollars. ’Cause they were terrible-looking things but you had to wear them while you were on duty because they were part of the rules.

Yes, we were all disappointed but once we started to think about it. See the older ones. See we had in signals quite a few older people because they were fully-trained telegraph

people from the PMG [Postmaster General] and AWA [Amalgamated Wireless Australia] wireless. Ernest Fisk was the man that set up AWA, well his son Captain Fisk was our wireless officer. But we had First World War men who, probably, let's say they went over to France in 1916,

By 1939 they weren’t that old, most of them—to get in our unit you had to be under 40—but they put it back a bit. And they were very good too. Good men and they were the backbone of some of the wireless and telegraph and operators and so on. No dispatch riders amongst them. We were the young ones.

But they were good.

Well our fear was, was that we would be left there as garrison troops—to garrison the thing—but then we started to think, and these older boys said to us, “Look, what they normally do with garrison troops is they do a tour of duty and then

you go on and then they'd send somebody back from somewhere like the Middle East and new ones coming in.” But it all happened so quickly. The intelligence people were certain, probably about halfway through the year, before the Japs came in, that they would come in, and of course, they did come in. See they linked up with the Nazis. See if they could have kept going

They were held in Burma. General Slim held them in Burma and otherwise part of what they were doing was to go through India and link up with the Italians. So they had the world then. They certainly would have taken over Australia. We still hope and feel that. See the Japs had planned

and all of their correspondence we got and the plans after the war. They planned to take New Guinea and take Malaya in five to six weeks. Well our battalions and ourselves held them for thirteen weeks and that slowed them down in New Guinea and possibly allowed the Coral Sea battle to take, which was the turning point for stopping the Japs. But if they'd got through India and

the Axis had won the war, well that was it. And of course the other thing, the uncomfortable part that I said to you, about Singapore Island, about the Japanese general that was not going to surrender. The other thing we knew very much and that it was confirmed afterwards they had intended

that no prisoners of war were going to be let out alive. They agreed to that. And as Japan was going to be invaded and Singapore we were all for the jump we knew that. At Singapore. The Chinese at the finish, they were smuggling

a bit of arms into us, because they had formed machine gun posts just around us and they were smuggling a bit of stuff in to us and of course they were going to rise and try and help too but I don't think many were going to get out of it, but strangely enough the day of the surrender that was going to be the signing off of quite a bit of where they were going to execute the prisoners. So there has to be a bit of luck lurking around somewhere.

I always get rather amused when I hear people say what a shocking thing it was to drop the atom bomb but if the war hadn’t finished then, America, well we and America we would have invaded Japan and there would have been millions lost. On both sides. So I don't go along with saying we did the wrong thing. It is pity

that the atom bomb was invented, but you can’t stop it. Here's North Korea talking about it at the moment.

I don’t know about Australians in general at that stage because we were broken up into various parties. I can only perhaps answer that question by saying that in my instance as a dispatch rider we got in onto all parts of the island and had a pretty good idea within a day or

two what was going on. This was after the Japanese landed on Singapore Island and as you know the battle for Singapore Island lasted fourteen days. As far as I’m concerned and my fellow dispatch riders and others in signals we were aware almost immediately that there was no real defence on Singapore at all. There’s the story of the guns being pointed the wrong way well that’s

not true. They could have swivelled them around. One of the early things we wondered why it was apparent that the Japanese headquarters for the attack on Singapore was in Johore in Johor Bahru the town and our own intelligence showed that the main commanders were in a palace there and for some reason or other the order was given that you they weren’t

to, we weren’t to fire cannons and so on at the palace because of its sensitive nature but it was known then that the Japanese headquarters were there and why that was done I’m not sure but that came obviously right at the top from the British general who was the commanding officer for the whole of the island then on Singapore.

After the landing we, my signals unit, part of us went down fairly close to where the landing took place. It was again apparent very quickly that our defence there was spread out right along the island front and in no way was it concentrated or could be concentrated enough to defend the whole lot.

Then we were out along Bukit Timah Road which was the main road coming in from the coast right through and we were out in that area and again we were starting after two or three days of pulling back and pulling back much the same pattern as

the followed Malaya were again the forces had to pull back all the way down so my thoughts and many others are that everything that could be down as far as the troops were concerned the battalions of Australian infantry the British battalions they fought and they fought the Japanese but again it was overwhelming. The main trouble of course

was that we had no air cover. I think I mentioned this before. We had no tanks and the Japanese were able to get all this stuff over and it was quite apparent that there would be only one ending to this and the ending would be that the Japanese would capture Singapore Island. As far as what happened to me and to others of my group we pulled back to about

three different spots. As we said running out of land all the time and we came back down Bukit Timah Road to Bukit Timah village then down to one of the other one or two of the other areas and finally of course right back into the city and the roads were absolutely packed with refugees coming down from the mainland

mainly Chinese and again the Chinese had no thought that they weren’t wouldn’t be in trouble because the Japanese had said from the beginning that anything that the Chinese did to help us would be severely punished. I think I mentioned 30,000 of them were executed in the first few weeks of occupation. However they still tried to help us

and we’ve never forgotten that. Finally when we pulled back into the city area the water was cut off. They’d the Japanese had captured the water supply area and they cut the water off and which is what anyone we would probably have done. Well we would have done the same thing if the boot had been on the other foot. The streets were

absolutely jammed with refugees. There were varying various estimates even up to a million refugees in the city which didn’t have a million people ordinarily in it. The streets were a carnage, there were dead bodies everywhere and services were breaking down. As far as my 8th Division Signals unit under the Australians, under General Gordon Bennett,

General Bennett made it clear that he wanted the Australians kept together, he still wanted command over and knowing exactly what the Australians are doing and that actually happened and right up till the actual surrender General Gordon Bennett through his signals unit had contact with all of the main Australian, well the remnants of the units that were left, so he had

his contact there and we dispatch riders in that last area were probably the main source of communication because the lines were out, the wirelesses weren’t operating under the circumstances there as well as they could, so we saw a fair bit well we saw everything that was going on even up to two or three days

or two days before the surrender. Gordon Bennett nominated about 500 Australians or from various units, the most experienced evacuated a couple of days before the surrender with the thought that they were the first troops that had had contact with the Japanese and could hopefully get back to Australia and take their experience back

of jungle warfare and all the other different things that had happened. One of the things that was noticeable was that there a lot of civilians, particularly wives and the children wouldn’t leave the island up till the last moment because they wanted to stop with their husband or the family and it wasn’t a sensible thing to do but you could understand it. They kept

hoping that things would change around which they didn’t and so it wasn’t very nice to see women and children trying to get on boats that they couldn’t get onto but finally some of well most of them did. Unfortunately some of them were on the Vyner Brooke which had our nurses on it and that was bombed and sunk. Some got out of it some didn’t and as you

know 22 of our nurses who managed to get ashore were executed on arrival by the Japanese, just pushed into the sea. There were the last two weeks, the Australians, I saw nothing of the Australian defence breaking down in such a way that they were weren’t under command so they were still a group of men trying to do the best they could and

doing the best they could and casualties, I mean to the Japanese were high as they were with us but that last fortnight as far as I was concerned it was quite apparent that there’d be no evacuation, there was no way because again the that complete command of the air by the Japanese, secondly the complete command of the sea because the [HMS] Repulse and the [HMS] Prince of Wales, those mighty warships, were sunk early and

so the sad story in Singapore but I’ve always felt and I still do that Australian, our AIF group did all that could be done under the circumstances and a lot more than could be done in many cases. If this hadn’t finished up the way it did there would have been some a lot of well earned decorations

for Australians.

Well I felt it came to me when and to probably the signals group that I was with who were in touch with everything when the 500 were

pulled out, it wasn’t said of course that they were going to be pulled out to go back. That’s what they were told and what we were told that they were going to go up and try and land up on the mainland behind the Japanese, but that was just to make certain that this group went because a lot of then wouldn’t have would have dug their heels in and said, ‘We’ll stop with our mates, we’re not going.’ but they thought my signals group, there was a

a small group of ours, the best of our unit and they thought and we thought that they were just going up to do a landing and that that was it. So it’s hard to say. I think the majority of us wouldn’t accept that there was going to be a surrender and we were in shock when the surrender took place, when the order came from the top, ‘lay down your arms’

and you know, you don’t refuse that of course because you’re under command and that’s it, so I would say that by far most of us except perhaps some of the senior officers who would have a better idea of what was going on and conferences with Gordon Bennett I don’t think that most of us and I certainly didn’t realise there’d be a surrender if they told us. That was it and the whole

thought in our minds was that, ‘Well, we’ll have another crack and see what we can do.’ but we wouldn’t accept of course, wouldn’t even think about surrender and of course Gordon Bennett and his senior officers were still there at the surrender and for an hour or so afterwards before they told us. I was at divisional headquarters where he was with other signals and he

thanked us for what we’d done and my memory is that that was about eight o’clock at night, about an hour and a half after the surrender and he pointed out that it was the duty of every soldier to try and escape and told us that he was going so there was no pretence about what happened there, and again I’d say almost without exception we all felt he was doing

the right thing, get out if you can and take your knowledge back, which he did by the way, he did take his knowledge back and after we came home, many years after, it came out that the thesis that he did on fighting the Japanese was used in New Guinea so these things as far as we know were done. So in answer to your question I don’t think any of us

or the majority far the biggest majority would have even thought there was going to be a surrender, but you know we didn’t go beyond thinking what might happen to us if it didn’t happen yes.

Yep.

Well there was bombing of

Singapore from the day they landed up in the north of Malaya. They kept coming over in flights of 27 planes, it was quite a complete pattern but of course before they landed on Singapore Island there was very heavy bombardment from their guns on their side of the Straits of Johore and they were softening up of course the city

and everywhere else, so the bombing just increased and increased and increased and the sad part about it with the just few planes that hadn’t been shot out of the sky, really after they landed on the island there was no planes of ours. They’d all been shot out of the sky. One of the one of the pilots of course was prime minister of

a later date, John Gorton, and you’ve only got to see the scar on his face if you look at the photos to see what happened to him, but he was lucky, he crash-landed on an island off Singapore and was picked up by the navy, the small boats of the navy, so the bombing was quite horrendous. I’d say as heavy a bombing as you would have seen done on any city at any time, and again getting back to

the pathetic civilians who were there, no way of dodging the bombing and I’m sure that apart from the water being cut off, all the other things cut off, probably the main reason for the order of the surrender was to stop the killing which would have gone on of thousands, oh well hundreds of thousands, of innocent

civilians.

Yep.

Well we went well when we heard about it and General Gordon Bennett spoke to our small group just because our job was communication there and he

reminded us, if my memory serves me correctly, but I think it does, that it was a duty. He probably reminded us because he was telling us that he, assisted by Major Moses who used to be a chief of ‘Your ABC’, had planned to give it a go to get out and Moses had got hold of a small boat. It was only like our Halverson cruiser, that type of thing and so three of

my friends and myself, ’cause we were all where division or where the headquarters were in that small three square mile area of the city was right on the water’s edge and Tanglin Barracks where I was only a short distance to the water and we went down to have a look around to see we thought there might have been boats pulling out

there, a little bit like a miniature thing that happened in France when the Germans came through but what we realised when we got down there was that the boats that were still around, and they were only row boats and that type of thing, the thought was you’d get in to one of those and get out and perhaps be picked up, but they’d all been sabotaged, the bottoms knocked out of them

and so we realised fairly quickly that unless something organised happened that there was no way that we could get away, there was the odd exception, there was one man from my own unit who’d always been a bushman all his life and he got a little boat and he was attacked by some Malays off Singapore Island.

There are villages built in the water where they catch fish from and they tried to get him and I’m afraid he attacked them and got rid of them, and he got in this small boat somewhere where he was picked up first, dropped over in Java or Sumatra and he got home, I mean but that was almost a miracle, odd one. There certainly was never any large organised as far as the group of people I was with.

No, I saw nothing of it and I don’t think that happened because it hasn’t come out since, but there might have been some odd incidents, certainly I don’t think anybody would have tried to swim

out. The Japanese were at that stage in charge of all that area they’d come through and so and it was only two days as you’ve probably been told, after the surrender, when they had us on the march to Changi so there wasn’t a great deal of time, but there were odd incidents where people like got into the

little jungle that there is around on the island but there were a few who did I don’t know of any exception, but the few who did finally realised that their best chance of anything was to stick with the group and people joined us in Changi for some weeks after the surrender who had decided to try and give it a go but reached a stage where they realised there was practically no way

to get off.

What we expected?

Well we all knew of course that if we were questioned we were only allowed set answers and so on.

We had a…. some of us, particularly people who’d followed things that the Japanese had been involved in and particularly involved for years in China as you know, we wondered what the treatment would be. In the first instance we wondered whether there would be, after the surrender whether there could be

a massacre on the island. You’d be silly if you didn’t have that in your mind because the Japanese places like Nanking and many other places had behaved in a certain way. The Japanese also were very and practised, that surrender was out of the question for them and they were good soldiers in that direction but no, I think the

soldiers wondered what it would be like. You start to think about it. On the march out to Changi which took all night as no doubt you’ve read, and I was a little surprised that there were Japanese guards of course on both sides of the road, only I didn’t see any

ill treatment of a soldier on that. And we all thought afterwards that the attitude, the original attitude on the island were the attitude of fighting soldiers just as their crowd were and I think they respected that. The ill treatments that started to come at later dates were generally of garrison type troops and so on

but I think the soldier who’d been fighting our fellows with some exceptions, such as Muar that you’ve been told about, I’m sure with whole exceptions I think they respected that they were fighting other people who were soldiers too. The only ill treatment that any of us saw on that march was generally ill treatment

of Chinese who were showing sympathy to us and trying to hand us water and bits of food and so on which they did and now and again, we’d see them get their face slapped or pushed with the butt of a rifle and so it went on but there wasn’t great deal of it, I’ve got to be straight about that, and once we arrived in Changi again we wondered about guards

and so on but all that the Japanese did was tell us to get to work and make ourselves pick out where we want to stop ourselves in the Changi barracks, not the gaol as you know it, it was the barracks for ten years and so I think what we learnt of what the treatment would be like by experiencing it because it had never happened before to

our types of troops anywhere and certainly not with the Japanese, because as you know in the First World War they were allies so there was no…. we were in the learning curve section of what happened and what happened to us was then experienced at Corregidor by the Americans and so it went on but we were all in a learning curve cause

there was no sort of the only history was the history of what happened in China, and there they apparently from all my readings and what we know, there their real treatment was because you were a Chinese not a not a soldier not anything else so it went on but they I feel that we,

well I know we were the first to experience what then became a pattern.

Yeah right. Again being a dispatch rider I had seen the Changi barracks before the Japanese and it was a very, oh you’ve seen photos I’m sure of it, but it was

a typical British barracks, a big square in the centre, buildings right round it, nice homes for the officers because they were garrison troops in those days, just the same as we treat ours now and when we…. well first of all of course some of us had seen the start of the wrecking of a lot of buildings by bombing and we’d seen it so it wasn’t quite as complete shock,

but when we marched into the area and early hours of the morning it was a slight shock because the buildings were wrecked and the first thing that…. again the headquarters group who’d come in first had done the allotment of where you’d go to and

my own group of signals we were allotted a two storey really, semi-detached building on one side, a building on other, not up with the big barracks the battalions went up into those, and it had no roof on it and the sides had been bombed and gone in, so it was nothing much there except a wrecked building so

the first job was to make it as habitable as possible to keep out the rain if we could, but the whole of that area had been heavily bombed and British troops were using the area, and so yes the whole it was only part of Singapore Island all of which well practically all of the main areas had been

wrecked and these barracks had been wrecked because the Japanese knew that they were occupied by British troops, so the whole of the early months in there was to those people who were left there in those early months was to bit by bit get the buildings going. There was no sewerage, the sewerage was wrecked there was never electricity, but our

units who had experience in this sort of thing, the engineers, who had electrical people as far as the sewerage was concerned, we put in bore holes straight away but eventually they got the sewerage going. I don’t know how long it took it was after I’d left to go to Thailand but by when we came back from Thailand the place was pretty orderly you know. They had over the years got the water going again no doubt the Japanese got it going too in other areas but it when we came back it was in a pretty reasonable condition.

Oh well extremely. For instance the whole of those barracks had always been built to

house a battalion and the extra troops. I’d say no more than a thousand and I understand that in the early days in Changi there was about 25,000. Exact numbers would have been hard to ascertain in but bit by bit they would ascertain them so they were absolutely crowded as we were in prison camps wherever we went.

That we were really unlucky was where there was nowhere to house and you spent your time under a bush on the Burma-Thai railway yeah without it, but it was very crowded, but once again organisation, orderliness came in with good organisation. We lived the 8th Division we had good men at the top and experience

in all sorts of trades and businesses. We had amongst the troops tons of bricklayers and builders and so on, so the first thing was to get into it and we got into it and or we got I didn’t see a lot of it as I mentioned to you before, because I kept going with a lot of others out of the working party which the Japs had us doing right from the beginning, whereas the first job was to clean up the city or to make us clean up so they had us working on that constantly

and so I think I mentioned to you before I like any of the so called fit were out working for the Japanese.

Well not just cleaning up first of all with the rubbish in the streets and just getting things at least cleaned up so that people could move around. But what the Japs had us doing too or had

groups doing was unloading ships of course because their boats now had all the anchorage and they were bringing in arms and everything else to continue on the war. So a big group with that. Ironically enough the small group that I was with we were put in a bombed out home at a place called Lorny Road Singapore which was very high class residential area, but it had no roof on it and

it was for just a normal fairly well off family and there would have been probably about 150 of us in that and those who went to homes they all had servants quarters at the back of them and I was one of ten in a two little areas there that…. the cook used to live in one and the cleaner used to live in the other so you were packed in those

just as the Japanese packed us into Changi gaol in their latter part of the war. So I’m afraid you become accustomed very very quickly to being packed in. Generally whatever they allotted only allowed you to lie down shoulder to shoulder but then again with Singapore climate I think half of my time if I was in a place like that you’d sleep out in the open if

it wasn’t the monsoon season just on the path or something else. You were far better off there, but I as you say what we were doing it was a home opposite the Royal Singapore Golf Club, beautiful course, and there was a little dam in the middle of it, water hazard we have at golf and for them

our job there and I was working there I think for about four months…. was to erect a monument to the glorious Japanese dead. They put one of these poles that they put up with markings on it as a monument and they had a group building a little mound out on the lake in this lake and the grass to make it beautiful;

came from the greens on the golf course so we had that that area. One interesting thing that happened there, the Japanese spoke to our people and what, you know, tools and so on we wanted and we had to put a road in and a road through the lake out to the mound and one of the things that we said we would want a roller and they gave us a steam roller.

So it’s typical of the old steam rollers in country towns or like the diesel ones that they use now and they found a fellow who’d worked for a council on the east and he used to go down in the steam roller to the Japanese headquarters each day to get his fuel for it. But what he got was petrol which he got immediately found a way of selling to the Chinese

and the Japanese issued petrol for a steam roller. Anyhow they eventually found out and did this fellow over and knocked him about and some Japanese fellow said, “I’ll get on this.” and he lit the petrol and blew up the roller at the same time and himself but they were peculiar things the Japanese were so clever in many ways but also so innocent

and they issued him with petrol for weeks to run his steam roller. Anyway as I say that was our job there to erect this monument to the Japanese so we there were all sorts of odd jobs but certainly the majority of those in Singapore bit by bit were those who were in Changi bit by bit were on working parties with the exception of course of all the wounded. And there were

thousands, several thousand wounded because there were British troops Indian troops Australian troops and so bit by bit they got us working ultimately the Burma-Thai railway where they took thousands and so that’s the way it went.

We lived on rumours,

‘furphies’ we used to call them of course, and the best place to get the rumours was down at the latrines, but what happened of course, the first group went away quite early, A Force as it was known, put on a boat and taken, they didn’t know where they were going but they were taken up to [UNCLEAR] and again they were told as we were told later on when we were being sent by the Japanese that

there’d be no food worries there was tons of food up there and a nice climate and everything was going to be great. They went and that was several thousand and we saw them go and then we saw what we call B and E group [Forces] which went to Borneo, so with rumour and actual facts we realised

the Japanese were gradually getting parties away to go to various spots. I think part of their strategy too would be to break up these thousands of men, because if they were left in one spot and things started to get sticky on one thing or another, these thousands could be a threat to Japanese but also they would they saw where they had absolutely free working parties. So

up till your name came up what…. the Japanese let our headquarters. The Japanese were very, very shrewd in that they didn’t do these things themselves they ordered our…. they said the Japanese were the first people that we were ever in conflict with that didn’t take officers straight away from the men the day

after we came, put them in officers’ camps but the Japanese did entirely the opposite. They took a few of the absolute top men. They would have taken Gordon Bennett, we would never have seen him again. They took the British commander, the Dutch commander, sent them to Matura, some of them got to Korea, various spots, so they took just a handful, when I say a handful

relative to the balance and took them afar away, but they left everyone from colonel down, that’s where we got Black Jack Gallaghan and men like him, and they told them what they wanted and then said, you get ‘em you know, the group that I went with we knew about a week before that they’d ordered for a certain date for about a week or so afterwards 7,000 men.

Again when told that and there was some competition to get on it. I think the average Australian did what I did - never volunteered for anything but you took it when it came. But we were in that week before ten days before we……I happened to be on the first train up to 700 men as you know and I happened to be on that but we knew, and we

started to talk about it and they never mentioned Thailand they mentioned north we were going… because of which we’d seen happen to the people who went to Borneo to Burma. Not that we knew they were going but going away and the other lots and we knew the trucks that took them in, some of the trucks were manned by our own people and we knew that they were going on the train or boats to Borneo, boats to Burma,

train to the north so we knew yeah, and as I say you didn’t battle it because the old story, you didn’t try to get out or get in you just went with the tide.

No

I don’t think really ill-treatment in Changi registered on us much because we were left to ourselves. We had to put no doubt you know, some barbed wire up, but it was just a sort of a token because you could get in or out of it. What of course what was on the other side is a different matter and they did patrol it, but actual ill-treatment in Changi,

I’ve got to be honest I didn’t see any really sign of day to day ill-treatment of there was things occurred. You heard about the square incident I know that well, you have haven’t you?

Well let me tell you about that. The square incident. The Japanese produced a document

for everybody to sign which was a promise that you would not try to escape. We were scattered around in Changi at that stage, thousands, but in various areas and we refused, under orders from our own people and in any case we would have refused because that is part of your duty, that you don’t sign a promise to not escape. The Japanese threatened

all sorts of dire consequences if we didn’t and took two men down to Changi Beach, took Black Jack and the British general down there and they took a squad of Indian soldiers and executed them in front of our people on the beach saying that they were trying to escape. Well they apparently

had got under the wire looking for food and so on, which was done constantly, but that was the warning and they shot them on the beach. Well now we knew of ill treatment straight away. As far as the document for us to sign, they herded the whole lot into what was a square, the battalion used to

demonstrate work on and train on and they cut the wood or there was no toilet facilities nothing, we had to try and make do and we were there a few days and disease started to break out and finally we were instructed by our commanding officer, Black Jack Galleghan

to sign the document, pointing out that it was signed under duress and therefore didn’t have any legal consequences. But that was quite orderly as I said, then again we had had a fair bit experience at that stage of making do with anything and I felt that the behaviour there in those few days was excellent.

Every order was carried out, everything was done to try and keep things as orderly as possible, disease down. But it started to really come up our doctors know, they’d talked to the superior officers and that’s where we signed under duress, but again getting back to ill treatment, physical ill treatment.

Not a lot of that would have been seen in day to day. This was probably again as I point out to you, I was in and out of Changi and no doubt there would be from time to time a Japanese who was in the camp for some reason, or coming down near the wire got cranky or that was it, but the ill treatment that I became accustomed to of course was the Burma-Thai railway.

Yes.

Yes I can. I was with the first group

put on trains and they sent 7,000 up, so that took two or three weeks and I arrived in that first group on Anzac Day 1985 1985 19 oh what’s wrong with me…. 1943 April the 25th strangely enough Anzac

Day. Now what were you wanting to know on this question?

Yeah.

Right well when we arrived we were housed in an atap hut which was absolutely fouled. Obviously there’d been Malayans and people from Indonesia. They had thousands of them of course

as I told you before and they didn’t have any real organisation and the place was foul. We went in there and we worked nearly all night and cleaned the place up cause we knew another group of ours were arriving in a day or two. We were lined up then the following morning outside that hut and the Japanese officer who spoke in

this told our people what was happening and we were informed that we were to march, not how far but we’d march for some days into the, what would turn out to be the jungle and going up the river for a period. As far as I can remember and also as you say, books have been written about this, I think we marched for about twelve

nights and we did march for about 180 miles, thinking in miles because we did it in then in miles, I still do. We marched for about twelve nights. It was a really trying thing because we weren’t really in that good a condition and of course quite a lot of the people who’d been selected to go weren’t really fit to go, because it had been hoped that they would be going to a place where food

was better and so on. We set out, we found fairly quickly that the Japanese would not march you a day because of the heat in the jungle, and so we marched of a night and the theory was that we went from one day or one night, arrived early morning and had a rest, for those rests were a bit of a pretence cause the Japanese immediately

had us working to make them comfortable, and work in some places nearly cleaning up straight away or there mightn’t have been much shelter, so it got more and more trying. I think to complete the approximate twelve days and 180 miles was quite remarkable in that I don’t remember in our first group anyone dying on that march but

people near us fairly quickly started to need help, so not only were you trying to get there yourself carrying supplies that the Japanese want and trying to help your mates who couldn’t make it. So I’m afraid that went on for the twelve days and nights. Getting back to what you asked me to,

as I’d said mateship really started to show then and fuelled of course by the need to help each other. As far as the six or seven are concerned, I would say it started to happen about six or seven it might have been five might have been eight in my group, it was six seven that started to operate really from the first night of the march. My closest friend, closest friend who’s still alive,

John Parkes, he was a very young solider of, I mean he was 19 and I was 23 and I was an old man and I was with a corporal of ours, Les Lowe who was a wonderful soldier and he’d grouped a few of us. We almost unconsciously came together, your mates, and I saw this rather very young looking fellow milling around

and I realised straightaway I hadn’t seen him before. He came over with some reinforcements only a couple of months before the surrender so… and it was in a different section of signals to me and I’m sure of what I did, he tells me that this is what I did. I’d walked over to him and said, “How are you going? You got anyone here with you?” and he said, “No.” He said, “My group are gone.”

I said to him, “Well come over and be with us.” Turned out he was he was good value too. He was younger than some of us, and that friendship by the way, I was best man, not best man, I was one of his helpers at his wedding a couple of years after and he came to my wedding - my wedding took place just a few months after coming home and so our friendship…. he was

here for lunch two days ago and I watched his kids grow up and he saw my son grow up to the age he did and so that’s the sort of thing that happened and I’d say that that unconscious mateship happened quite quickly cause we realised straight away that we’d better have a bit of a group and be able to help. In our little group a chap called Ken Davidson

that was one of the early ones, when he started work on the railway who got a tropical ulcer on his leg and was unable to walk and it looks as though they might have to amputate his leg, and he said no, and our little group of seven we carried that fellow wherever we went, always. He was just part of

the luggage and we got him out and he didn’t lose his leg and he came home. But that’s the type of thing that happened. To put it just as it was, if one of us went down the other six looked after five or six. So I think I’ve said this many times in my lifetime; anybody who knocks mateship doesn’t really know what it’s all about but what we found in

three years and eight months of it, is that it’s very real and thank goodness it is.

Well the Japs had plan, had their map of course, and the Japs were very well organised in that sort of thing as it was found out by books that we’ve all read. They were mapping those areas

several years before the war started. They were planning all the things that would happen. I only recently read an article where it was shown that they were mapping the railway several years before the war came because they thought, well they wanted to invade India and that was the only way of getting to it and link up with the Nazis

in Europe. This was the whole plan, but they were mapping this so we had to depend, we didn’t know where they were going. As you rightly say, we were in the jungle in the middle of the night and thick jungle in a lot of cases, so we just followed the Japs that was it. But they obviously knew what they were doing. One of the things that started to happen fairly quickly - we all had to carry what

we could carry of our own things and one of the things a lot of us at that stage probably had a spare pair of shorts or a shirt that type of thing. We weren’t carrying food because you couldn’t and the Japs had some rice for us when we get got to eat - not a lot but they had some rice, but these give us clothing and some of the boys were carrying

an extra pair, perhaps a pair of sandshoes that they’d pinched somewhere. We started after several nights being really attacked. You’d lie down for…. we used to march. we were supposed to march for 50 minutes and ten minutes off, 50 minutes and for the Japs as well as ourselves and you’d flop over in the jungle wherever you were and

just have a rest and we found that the some of the Thais were a bandit type Thais. They were after these extra bits of clothing and so on and they started to attack some of the fellows and there was some nasty incidents of them and in some cases they got away with things like shirts and shorts so that had to watched very closely too. Wild animals, I don’t know whether we’d hear all sorts of things -

course monkeys and all that type of thing but it was wild animal country. It was tiger country and so on so but it was a matter of sticking together. As each night went by the line got longer and longer in that the fellows who were dropping back and this was where our doctor Roy Mills was so wonderful.

I did say to you I’m sure previously, that when Roy Mills was allotted to us before we started the march he was a young doctor, almost just out of uni [university] and I think I told you that the word went round we’d be getting a boy for a for a doctor. Well by the end of the march he was the greatest man I’d ever met but we were walked 180 miles we always reckoned that he would have done

at least 100 miles more himself cause he went up and down the mile and you’d see him coming in later and later in the day carrying a couple of fellows with what they had to carry. He was a great big man and carry these fellows in, so that was mateship.

Well we called

it bandits.

Well they were stealing clothes yeah and they they’d sell that straight away you see. Clothes were apparently short. That’s what they were after we found.

Well some of them having a go at….the fellow would be three-quarters asleep and they used to carry what they call parangs which is a blade, a heavy blade

and there were cases where they attempted to use them, but it was contained alright but they were nasty incidents I think that’s the only way of describing it.

It’s hard for me to answer that. No I don’t think really…. I could think of when we took advantage of that.

A little easier.

No, there were two things to make your life I think…. where I was involved was keeping as far away from the Japs as you could and not to provoke them because we learnt very early that if you provoked them you got a face slap first of all, which, no Australian likes to have his face slapped

and there were incidents where fellers couldn’t take that and retaliated by putting a fist into the Japanese face. Well we very early found there was no future in that because you’d get knocked about which would aggravate anything else – dysentery, all the other things you had so one of the early things you learnt if you could learn it and some people can’t quite understand that,

and just retaliate no matter what happens, but I think if you had common sense you learnt to take it as quietly as you can without provoking. Do as little work as you can and that was the main thing that you not so much perhaps to slow the Japanese along, as

to keep your own health or keep your own strength going. But no I can’t really answer that one, because in my twelve months with the Japanese it was on the railway, my twelve months on the railway, it was a matter I feel of using every effort for survival that you could.

Well again your own strength came into it a lot. If you weren’t a physically really strong person

you weren’t doing good. Well you were only doing what you could do and that wasn’t a lot. We had other men who had been in civilian life, road workers and that type of thing were expert and the Japanese too played on that Perhaps not played on that but what they did, they set us….

When we first started on the railway if you were doing a cutting for instance, they set that you had to do a metre a day and it was a metre of work - if it needed depth, well it had to be a metre each way. Some of the very good workers if you got the metre done they let you go back to camp, but that was the reward for getting

it done. What the innocent workers didn’t realise but they come to realise fairly quickly soon as you found you can do that and you got off early, well it was a metre and a quarter the next day and the week after it was a metre and a half and then it was two metres; so the Japanese really were shrewd in that direction and of course they wouldn’t lose us too because as soon as this

was really realised everybody slowed down and got it. But the other thing that the Japanese too again their attitude is so hard to explain. Now they were absolutely fanatical to get this railway finished and improved or whatever, it had to go, it had to be finished about the date it was too about the time. It would have been finished certainly and quicker

if they fed us properly but the people as you know dying all over the place and so they were cutting off their nose to spite their face by not….. and when I say feeding us properly, just a little more than we were getting would have made each bit more that you could get…. there would be less people going down, not being able to go out or as started to happen, where we had to carry sick men out because they wanted their numbers

and sick men, and that’s where some men did become complete and utter…. utterly impossible to work and it’s very hard to understand, one of the things, but on the other side they got that railway finished in October, early November it was finished as I think I mentioned in the early event of the…. I had been only

from Anzac Day up till then about six months and the thing was finished and so they were starting to get trains through, certainly they were getting bombed by the allied planes from India but they got quite a bit of stuff through.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well you know anything that any of us saw that was poor quality you certainly you wouldn’t bring it to the notice of the Japanese you’d use it, of course you would. The stories go right through of even people

putting ants’ nests in timber for it to eat away and so on, but certainly I think probably what I say is in the main correct. It was very hard with the Japanese for the working parties on the railway, they stood over you all the time so very hard to openly sabotage it but anything that you were using that was poor you’d leave it

there wouldn’t you, of course you would. Mind you when we started to be brought down from well up the railway after it had been closed up, I know I looked over the side a couple of times at one bridge that we were crossing, hoped we’d get across that one …

Yeah one of the first things I found particularly in Changi, at the time I was in Changi it was a lovely area all beautifully watered,

certainly bombed out and so on but gradually coming back and the grounds were with trees and coconut trees and that type of things. One of the things I found very beautiful was to be able to look out on a nice bright light at the stars and the moon and feel, well that’s exactly the same as you’d see you’d see the Milky Way in Changi and you knew that was over Australia too

at the same time. I found that particularly the night time, on a lovely night was as lovely as anywhere in the world. I found it very consoling too that, I felt that there was peace somewhere or other but I did find that as far as other places that’s what you’re thinking of too, are you, yes Malaya.

I again being I felt fortunate to be a dispatch rider for from February till the war started in December being a dispatch rider and seeing a lot of Malaya. I really registered how beautiful Malaya is and I’ve never lost that feeling for Malaya even though the Malay people or the Malay government

appear to be a little anti us but the country is a lovely country and right up to the border of Thailand where we didn’t I didn’t get quite to the border but near enough on map reading exercises and so in that peaceful period the Malay people friendly nice to talk to and it was rather the during that period

I wondered why we were there because our mates were fighting over the Middle East and so on that’s where we wanted to be but we knew we were landed there and that that was it up till when things started to happen so the beauty the final part of beauty to me too I never really felt that there was any beauty on the railway obviously because of the conditions and the deaths and everything

that were taking place. The river the main part of the six months that I did actually working on the railway proper six to seven months the river was a muddy river because the monsoons were on. It was just water as far as I was concerned. I the mountains which we when we were on doing the 180 mile

march we were looking up towards mountains but when I went back to the railway in 1970 when I was doing a business trip and I was given some leave and I went back up never thinking I would ever want to go but somehow or other I had been looking at things in Singapore in Malaya and Singapore on the way and I suddenly decided I wanted to and my wife

Pat came with me. When I went to Kanburi which was where I’d finished up I felt afterwards it was the best thing I’d done for a long while because I saw complete beauty the mountains were beautiful everything was peaceful and calm and I’m sure I got the things that were tied up inside

me about the railway faded away a fair bit with the beauty that I saw there however I would never forget what did happen there I’d like to but I can’t, but seeing the place very beautiful and calm, it did something for me too.

Well I think the again you know on the labour and that but I think having your mates around you being

being see we carried that on in the railway as we started on the march because again things were happening to some of your mates all the time so being able or hopefully able to help on that that was I felt the group of us carrying our friend who got the ulcer and that continued for the whole six months.

I felt that that was good because we did it and we wanted to do and we quite determined that that we were not going to let them start cause if it would have meant an amputation. Dr Roy Mills by the way had the proud record of never doing an amputation and yet Weary Dunlop, all of them were naturally Dunlop coached

Dr Coates, all the famous doctors and they saved some lives, but if my memory is correct 80 to 90 percent of the amputations ended in death and so but a lot of those amputations were done because of the pain that was involved, but I think helping each other was the main thing and that continued on the railway too.

I probably unconsciously it did. I must admit I can’t remember thinking of that but thinking in retrospect it probably did. Well I think the whole thing of looking after each other was a really a

consoling thing in anything that happened anything that happened at all.

Let me think.

Look I don’t think there was really any particular incident because it was a continuing thing all the time that you were doing. Little things of course you’d it wasn’t well little things I s’pose but there were quite a lot of case where a fellow was

too sick to eat his measly little bit of rice and he’d insist on giving it to his mate just something else and his mate would probably say to him, “For goodness sake don’t give that to me, that’s yours and you eat it, you’re not well.” Little household incidents like that I think got involved. Again that mate of mine I told you that

still my closest friend alive and strangely enough my second my closest friend went to the war with me where I think I mentioned this, that a chap, Terry O’Brien, I mightn’t have mentioned that in the previous stuff but Terry and I grew up in Chatswood and went to school from about when we were

11 years of age onwards we were in the militia together and enlisted and made a pact that we would stick together and strangely enough and then first Japanese for force for the Japanese to go to Japan C Force that was before F they went in order to Japan they wanted 500 I think it was and I was out at that Lorny Road camp then

or Adam Park which was near Lorny Road and my name was on it there the way our allotment was done by us by our own crowd they decided of course they’d do it on an initial basis and I was on the last of with an initial L and of course Terry wasn’t, he was O, O’Brien, so I went and saw the allotment medical officer who was doing the

Japanese always got the and the medical officers gave us a check up before we went and I told him what the story was and he immediately put me in the so-called hospital room which at Adam Park was a bombed out house with measles you know I didn’t have measles but and the Japanese wouldn’t have anybody on the boat with measles of course, but I was with Terry then the night he died of cholera on the railway

so we did stick together ,but oh what I was going to say, this other closest friend of mine said it was strange that Terry was involved but he came in from the railway this late afternoon, pouring rain, and laid down on the bamboo shelf of the hut and he had Terry on one side of him and

another chap on the other side of him jammed up, and when he woke in the morning both got their rice from the same bucket that was being carried around and both of them were dead beside him of cholera and he did you know, so strange things that happen and yet it had all come out of the same bucket, the whole lot. They weren’t dead, they both had cholera and they were dead within 24 hours but they were unconscious

so strange things that do happen. There’s something in fate isn’t there?

Lucky I think

I’ve said that and a lot of us over and over again. People have often said to any of us that got home and were reasonably well you must have been strong you must have been in good nick and so on. You had up on that railway was a matter and I gave a perfect example of it just then you had to be lucky if you got cholera you died or 99 percent of you got cholera or if you retaliated a Jap

and you could die quite easily and no I think I think there was several things. You had to be lucky basically and the other thing too, you were fortunate if you could take a day to day attitude. I could. I was lucky I reckon I think that’s just part of being lucky too. Some people could, some people couldn’t, and I

could forget yesterday and not worry about tomorrow. Take it one day at a time. There were plenty of examples of fellows who couldn’t take that attitude. They weren’t weak or anything. I often feel that they were strong. I wouldn’t have been game to do what they did but they decided that they’d had enough. Turned up their toes and they did and it there were plenty of examples of that.

There was a chap, Noel Chitty, in my unit, a corporal who was a 35 year old bachelor from Melbourne, did a wonderful job helped people on the railway and so on and he was lying down on this miserable night wet night after we’d been working 14 hours that day and he just quietly said, “I’ve had enough.” and we abused him. We used to abuse them if they said that for a start you know and

called him all sort of names but he decided he had enough and I can remember him saying, “I haven’t got anyone to worry about at home. I haven’t got a wife or children.” We found out after his family owned a big timber business, he was a real playboy but a fine soldier and a fine bloke you know and my God, he was dead in the morning but I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be game to do that.

I would rather take one day at a time.

Yeh well again in the previous interview I think we did on that but what happened the railway was joined as you know in October and then there was a bit of extra work to be done then and

then in November they start to break up the majority of the workers keeping right till the end of the war of course maintenance people there but they sent some of the people to Duprahan they put on boats and unfortunately at least one of those boats was torpedoed by the Americans not knowing ’cause it wasn’t marked and a heavy loss of life after working on the railway

once again fate stepped in but the RAF set up a so-called hospital convalescent hospital at Kanchanburi, Kanburi to us, Kanburi, and volunteers were called for to help run the that that area because

what was really being sent there were the people that weren’t fit to be taken to Japan or back to Singapore as some were and they really were the dying that’s what it got back to and it was a very there was a large number of the AIF in this camp. We had an officer in our unit,

Captain Ben Barnett, who was incidentally Australian vice-captain to Bradman in the test teams before the war and a fine officer and a fine bloke and he came again to me little group of mates and said, “I’m going to stop, I’d like a bit of help, would you fellers like to stop with me?” Probably won’t last for too long because he explained what

it was being set up for so we agreed we’d stop, so most of our unit were put on a ship in Bangkok and taken back to Singapore. That was November I think they arrived down there some time well before Christmas so we went into this camp and we were the workers doing all the stuff round the place.

For the first time there was a reasonable amount of food. You could buy eggs and you could buy a few things. You still only got your 10 cents a day but those who got bigger pay such as the officers and the sergeants we pooled the lot and you we were certainly fed better there than on the railway but we worked there the doctor,

the chief doctor was a Dr Bruce Hunt who was a magnificent man again from Western Australia and he looked after us well, looked after everybody there. I can’t remember the exact date but what exact month but it would have been certainly February no March or early April

so many had died that the working party working men there wasn’t enough work to keep us all busy and what Hunt decided to do was give a thorough medical examination to all the workers just to check up them and see how they were and he did me over and leant over and said, “Well, you’re going to a stretcher son, you’ve

got cardiac beri beri.” and cardiac beri beri, if you didn’t get over it would kill you of course. You didn’t have the swellings outside that the beri beri, legs, stomach and so on, but it was a killer so he said, “You’ve got to lie on your back now till I say you can get up and we’ll just see what we can do.”

and I was put in a hut with other cardiac beri beri sufferers. The fellow next to me dropped dead next door next to me with it. Others did during that period with, I don’t remember exact number. Anyhow by the end of March early April we were told that we would be sent back to Singapore and

I was carried onto the, oh sent back by train by the way, sent back from Bampong where we arrived or by that stage I think we were probably sent back from Kanburi which is only down the track from Bampong. I was put on a makeshift stretcher. It was just rice bags over the two ropes and put in the steel truck with 26 others and I was looked after there.

There were two or three of us probably three from memory that way. The others looked after us. They saw that we were kept on our backs as much as was possible. Wasn’t possible to keep completely because there were things that had to be done and we were our usual four or five days going down there and there were deaths on that train going down. They were probably either like myself

or might have been the remnants of what had been put in the camp sick in any case. Met at Singapore Station still on the old stretcher and put on the back of the truck taken out and carried into the old square at Changi camp on Anzac Day 1944

so coincidentally I arrived up in the other place on Anzac Day ’43 and arrived back on Anzac Day ’44, so we lined up and of course a lot of emotion about coming back and a lot of emotion from a lot of your old mates who come back in the earlier time, come down offering you a bit more to eat and things that they’d hoarded, anyhow the first thing was a medical examination

and the senior doctor, probably the senior doctor in the AIF because Dunlop and some of the others had been taken away elsewhere, was Dr Cotter Harvey who was the man who started the attack on cigarettes here, he was an expert on that. Fine doctor and Dr Billy Bry Major Billy Bry, Cotter Harvey was

a colonel and Cotter Harvey examined me, he made me stand up and put the apparatus on my heart and chest and then got Billy Bry, who by the way was deaf and I wondered what he’d hear as a heart specialist, but he was a heart specialist and that one of the nicest things or the most great things that happened to me, Billy Bry turned to me after

he’d consulted with Cotter Harvey and said to me, “Get up and go for a run.” so they told me I was over the and well really the person that saved my life of course was Dr Bruce Hunt who examined me and put me on my back so return to Singapore, emotional returns saw all our old friends again and we were on fairly light duties for

a while till we put a bit more weight on. They start to send parties out at that stage to build what is now the Changi Airport. It was for fighter planes but that’s where the one of the best airports in the world now is what we started. I didn’t work on that I was still counted as getting over the cardiac beri beri so I wasn’t put out on it

so that’s where I ended up probably Anzac Day 1944 must have been early’45 and then sent out on another working party.

Yes it was always recognised. We if it could be where you were. When we arrived at Bampong it wasn’t because of the circumstances there working of a night though the first night out we had a our bugler with us and the first night out we played I’m sure he played ‘The Last Post’ because it was Anzac Day but he used to blare out a bit of music to make us march

a little bit better and what not fortunately unfortunately he died on the railway too but I’m hazy about what happened on Anzac Days. I am sure though in wherever there were groups it would have been recognised cause when we were training in Singapore in Kuala Lumpur we had a the

they got a big parade ground in the centre of Singapore with a beautiful club the British had on it and so on and we had a ceremonial march on Anzac Day 1941 before that war started there but I’m sure yes I’m sure that Anzac Day would have been recognised in every camp but depending on where you were and what you had what it would be.

Well officers are human beings the same as everyone else is and some didn’t match up and I’m not I wouldn’t go into personalities or anything but some of them didn’t and

you know that’s human nature but we had fine people, Black Jack Galleghan number one, a great big boy and standover merchant and a wonderful soldier he set by example fought for his men flat out wherever they were and absolutely anything that he asked you to do no matter how hard it was you did it and that was it. Not that you were frightened of him but

you admired the man and that went down through officers and the men fine men too but yes Black Jack Galleghan in my own unit men like Ben Barnett another one Captain Stahl, Fred Stahl he was in charge of the last camp I was

in, last working party when the bomb dropped and so on. He was a fine person. They were just top men who looked after their men and stood up to the Japanese as much as was humanly possible to do and they were in an invidious position because they had to stand up for you and for the group and they every time they did they’d strike hostile Japanese who’d knock them about. We always had a saying about

Ben Barnett and Fed Stahl that they ought to be punch-drunk by the time we got home and not be much good for anything else. When Barnett went back to play for Gloucestershire in England and top businessman with [Mayne] Nickless the Aspro people in charge of their European operations. Freddie Stahl ended up number two man in the AMP Society for Australia. I’m glad he’s not around now to see

what’s happened to the AMP Society because he was a wonderful person and as I say a top bloke yet those type of fellows were on tenterhooks the whole time because they were fighting to keep men who were close to dying off the railway and being bashed and knocked about because of it. There you are, so there’s a lot of great men around.

While we were on Singapore Island we were kept fairly up to date because we had our underground wireless sets. I mentioned to you that we had two men from our my unit, Berry Arthur and Milton Arthur two brothers who were wireless experts and they risked their lives for three years and eight months hiding, moving that wireless from spot to spot in

Changi and they knew and we knew that if they were caught that they would be executed, there was no doubt about it. Unfortunately since you were here for how…. what was it would it be two ago you were here?

Yeah a little over both of them have died since I told you about them when you were here. Nelson died first and Berry died a fortnight ago. Any rate they’re both in their 80

and they both risked their lives. What the way it was organised and had to be organised this way was they moved that wireless constantly in one spot and then they passed the news on to some person that Black Jack Galleghan organised. They changed men too on that and they’d repeat the news to them

and then it was then decided how far down the line sometimes there depending on how things were in Changi and what was happening it wasn’t passed around at all it was only passed to the top men and kept quiet but when it was passed around it was probably passed to whoever was in charge

of say the house that my group were in, that the first thing there, and then that person who was in charge then would quietly say, “Oh well there’s been a landing at Dunkirk.” or there has been this and that so it was controlled in that way. While we were in Changi that was kept up to date. I had an interesting experience of having a hand in keeping it

up to date on our last working party and there were 500 of us under Freddie Stahl, under Captain Stahl and he knew I had, or thought I had a pretty good memory and I did then, so the arrangement was made then that a truck came out from Changi, out to Bukit Panjang which is a suburb of

where we were digging these tunnels into the hills, in this last working party, and whoever brought the truck out with some supplies on it used to, in the latter part when I was involved, used to meet me at a certain spot where I was working and we’d get away on our own down to the latrine area, get away on our own and he would repeat

just the headlines he had and my job was to take those headlines back to Captain Stahl and then he would decide who would have them, so yes so on the railway no news.

They wouldn’t tell us much except that it was ‘boom boom the Sydney Harbour Bridge gone’ and they told us Alice Springs had gone and all sorts of stupid

things. Of course our fellows used to joke with them, ‘boom boom the Harbour Bridge’ you know and tell them anything but we’d get news, working parties working on Singapore Island they’d sidle up to a Chinese they’d give them a bit of…. so it was and lots of it were just as I said earlier, furphies they were, I mean it all became so exaggerated in those unofficial

ones not in the official ones, so news was attempted to be got in all sorts of places. In Borneo my neighbour here as I told you before was in Borneo and they used to get it there from underground Chinese. The Chinese were great with us in every way and so some news was

got quite genuinely but some was furphies and so on, but naturally you were hungry for news all the time. The Japanese printed the what they’d call the Shonan Times cause they didn’t call it Singapore, they called it Shonan and they printed an English version of that because of all the people who spoke English and even though

all their news was naturally sidelined for them, like good things good that were happening ,but you could tell you know if they talked about a battle of the Coral Sea you knew it was away down there and then it got to a stage where they even have to put in their news that they had left Lochinwar [?] or they’d left somewhere else. And then of course up in Japan

the news started to come through to the parties in Japan from all sorts of sources there, but there were quite a number of underground wireless sets. Sometimes they only lasted for a month or so but they got enough to keep them going. The thing Berry Arthur used to tell us about had to be very careful, we had this concert party in Singapore and in Changi and had to be very careful.

They used to, Berry Arthur by the way was a very nice singer and a bit of a musician himself and he once he told me he heard Vera Lynn singing something that they’d never heard before and he memorised how to sing it, and he was apparently talking to the chap in charge of the concert party and started to tell him, “Oh hear this.” and they were going to put it on.

They suddenly realised that the Japs might have been listening too, it was something that had never been heard before, they’d know that we got it on the set but the news…. naturally one of the things we were absolutely hungry for was news.

Well the thing

passed on to us see I mentioned I was at Bukit Panjang which was this area. The Japs at that stage had taken all or most of the fit men, certainly some of them were building the railway of course, building the aerodrome and which is now Changi, but they had other working parties too, building defence stuff which we shouldn’t have been doing but there was no choice,

and the group I went with Fred Stahl we were sent out to Bukit Panjang which was obviously on an area that they felt the allies invasion, they knew there would be an allies invasion because there had been invasion of Borneo and they’d got news there. They’d have a pretty shrewd idea that Singapore was actually to be one of the next on the list after Borneo. They were going to put a

parachute group into Changi drome to look after that, but out where we were I don’t think there would have been any parachute fellers dropping in on us. Anyhow this particular day, the first of anything came in of that type of news. We knew how well we were doing in Borneo. We were seeing allied planes coming over Singapore

that were just twin-engine planes and obviously came from Borneo, so we were on the uppity that things were on the move. Also beginning to wonder what was going to happen to us if the landing took place and as we found out later, it was found out of course had taken place we were to be executed and that was it. Everybody was to be executed. The final executions would have taken place

near Japan if there’d been a landing in Japan. That’s part of history now but anyhow when I met this fellow he said, “Look all I can tell you there’s been….” and I think, I mean I’m only thinking now it’s been 60 50 odd years ago but what he meant was that there’d been an enormous explosions in Japan. That would have been

the surrender in Japan was 8th of no not the 8th, the 15th of August so that would have probably been about the 10th I’d say cause there was about a five day gap between that and what finally happened to me yeah. All that he got over to me that there had been enormous explosions

no nobody knew what an atom bomb was or anything else. They just talked about these big explosions and then I took this back to Stahl to Fred Stahl, and the Japanese also were edgy, we were noticing they were very edgy and Stahl in his wisdom said, “Look well what we’ll do, we’ll just tell them that the war’s going well that

there’s been another advance or two, see what happens in the next day or two.” so probably the next day, it might have been two days but I think the next bit of news was that there’d been a second big explosion, that was Nagasaki and so it was little bits and pieces like that and then came the 15th

and the Chinese - we used to march where I had to go, we used to had to go about three kilometres to where I was getting this to use, there was a sawmill there where I told you before about they were getting the timber to use in the tunnels where our mate had been killed, as you know in the tunnel, went in, anyhow probably the next I haven’t got a

clear memory because there was so much happening and so edginess….was the Chinese giving the V for victory sign that began to…. really were doing it and were getting away with it as our guards were gunning us down the road. The 16th, the next day we were sent out to work as though nothing had happened again

and then news came through and I was told or it may have come from Chinese that the emperor of Japan had agreed for a surrender but we weren’t told and Stahl wasn’t told by the Japanese. We had a sergeant-major Japanese in charge of the camp wasn’t told anything but after that second

day or two, after the news that the surrender was on, we weren’t sent to work and then I think the day afterwards and the Chinese had got some news in to us that the Japanese major-general allegedly in charge of the troops on the island and they had an enormous number,

they knew Japan had proclaimed that he would not surrender he would fight on so that was a naturally a pretty edgy time, but what we heard later was that Mountbatten had arranged for I think a nephew of the emperor of Japan who was a major-general in Saigon, I think you’ve read this in books but

he did a very masterly thing, arranged for him to be flown down to take that message down to the men and again allegedly, we heard that the major-general took the order and then committed suicide hara-kiri on the ground where the order was taken, but all that is sort of hearsay.

I’ve never been able to get hold of a book that has followed that part of it about Mountbatten and that right through. but I know it. I’m sure that’s what occurred. So we were there then for four or five days and then the major, the Jap in charge came to and told him that an agreement had been reached, wouldn’t use the word

surrender, and that an agreement had been reached between the two armies and so on that the war would cease. Then I think the guards disappeared, the few guards we had, then the whole lot disappeared and then a truck arrived out which would have been probably the 15th probably be about the 20th arrived out from Changi to load us

or trucks, not a truck to load us aboard and Fred Stahl had had somebody working on an Australian flag that was produced and flown from our truck when we went back to Changi so that’s where it all was.

Yes.

Right well you mean my contact during the years I was prisoner of war? Well the Japanese allowed us to fill in a little card, 27 words from memory we were allowed

but we were banned from mentioning anything about atrocities and so on. Naturally they didn’t want anything like that out, so there were little set words you know that you did, unfortunately they took sometimes to…. Pat probably got four or five in the four years but they were generally two years old. Terry O’Brien my mate was with me, his parents got

one saying you know, things were pretty good and he’d been dead two years you know, so it goes on and so they didn’t mean much but they meant a lot of course to get anything during that so we were all allowed do that. Naturally as soon as we were released well we tried to get letters away quickly again. They did take quite some time because the Red Cross weren’t organised, they weren’t allowed in those areas and so it went on

so they were the only contacts. What Pat did get a few days after I got back to Changi the ABC news people arrived in Changi and we were allowed to….. it was set up lines of about 40 and say a few words on it and it

was transferred back to Sydney and apparently the ABC here had said what times they’d be on and she said it started at about six or seven o’clock and went till midnight on the ABC and she heard me come on the last in the line. Of course 12 o’clock at night and so

she knew then that I was alive at any rate, but nobody knew who was alive up until things like that started of course, and then we as I say, we were about the group I was with back in Changi, we were about three months ,well it was August September October, about two and a half months before I got

back in October. Came back in the Largs Bay, a boat which came into the harbour at Darwin, I think I told you I didn’t get off the boat there. There were two boats, they were well known old passenger ships on the coast Largs Bay and Esperance Bay. Esperance Bay took the last berth in Darwin

and we couldn’t get in. For two days we had to sit out and hear these bands playing and whatnot and all of our mates on the other boat were ashore and we were out on our own. Any rate we came down through the Barrier Reef and came straight to Sydney to Woolloomooloo Bay and I’ll never forget the greeting there, all the brass in the wide world were there and there was this little bald-headed man

in civilian clothes down there and it was Gordon Bennett and the chaps on the boat, on our boat in particular battalions and that they went roaring mad, “We want Gordon Bennett!” ignored all this brass down there. Did I tell you about getting the Changi piano aboard the boat? The concert party got a piano

fairly early in the piece in Singapore, a working party was cleaning out homes and that sort of thing that had been badly bombed and there was a piano in one of them and apparently they struck a sympathetic Jap who knew the concert party had got going and he allowed them to bring the piano back which became the Changi piano. Anyhow

I got mixed up with it a bit after we came home and we all knew it, the Changi concert party was still…. I made some tapes after we came home and it was used. Any rate it was on our boat coming home and when we got into Woolloomooloo Bay the idea of course was to get the

piano off the boat and the blasted wharf labourers they went on strike and refused to allow the crane to be used and the fellows in charge of it were a chap called Jack Boardman who was our top pianist, beautiful pianist too, and there was a fellow named ‘Happy’ Harry Smith who was

a comedian so they went up and saw the captain and told him the story and the next thing that happened the wharf labourers, they were eight organisers all came aboard and the captain took them up, he’d sent down a message that they were all to come up, that he was sympathetic with their strike and he had unlimited bottles of beer up there for them; they all came up and while they were up there we got the crane going and got the

the piano back and that’s still in use that piano, part of the family of the concert party had it down there so that that was getting home. As far as getting home was concerned I would say we were all fairly apprehensive. We could always sympathise with the Vietnam boys between you and I, and we were all quite

apprehensive as to what sort of a greeting we’d get because we’d surrendered even though we were under orders and everything else we still felt what are people going to think of us and when the 6th and the 7th and the 9th [Divisions] and all the others that fought in New Guinea and all these places. Anyhow as I say all the brass was there and the band was playing, well we knew that’d be organised and we were put on

double-decker buses to be taken out to Casula and we didn’t need to get more than a hundred yards from the wharf to realise everything was alright. The greeting in Martin Place was absolutely…. we couldn’t believe it.

Well we needed each other very, very much. Again because of our own feelings

about the effect of being a prisoner of war all those years so we did need each other very, very much and almost immediately we started to meet in town where you know the whole group, and we’d meet and go and have a meal somewhere together and a couple of beers together and that and the knowing of that, Pat and I had been engaged before the war.

I think I told you we’d end up in her office six or seven blokes still in old AIF uniform, her in a really strict office and not trying to steer us out of the place you know. But we did we need each other very much and I was the only one of that particular group who was planning to marry because the others hadn’t been in the same

situation as me so Pat had to become involved every now and again too, but no we didn’t, we stuck together and gradually over the months to start to slip a few they started to work and they were by the way the whole group that was here, the whole five all came to we were married at St Mary’s Cathedral

and they all lined up in there and they’d all been enjoying themselves a bit before. I was a little apprehensive that they were going to play up but they didn’t at all, they respected it so yes, we and frankly that need’s occurred to this day what’s left. There’s only three of us left so and that’s not a bad proportion out of seven.