http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1644
00:36 | When were you born, Robert? I was born on the 11th November, 1918, Armistice Day of course, and I tried to be born again in the Second World War too, because I reckon I stopped the first one on being born. Whereabouts were you born? In Perth. West Australia, yeah. |
01:00 | At home or in hospital? Oh, at home. In those days it was all births at home. In fact the nurse came on her bicycle who was brought from her place, no telephone connection. My father rode his bike to her place and alerted her and she came to the house in Loftus Street, Leederville, actually, for my birth. My two sisters were born in a similar |
01:30 | manner but a different address. What are you earliest memories of your childhood? I suppose going back to five years of age; I can remember being given a Cyclops scooter from an uncle of mine. It was a three wheeler pedal device and that was my first vehicle. |
02:00 | There are many other memories. The care of my mother and father. They looked after us all well. My father was a tradesman. He was an electrical fitter and he worked for the electricity and gas department which later became the SEC [State Electricity Commission] and these days of course, Western Power. And he was one of two personnel who worked for the Perth City Council which ran the, what was the beginning of |
02:30 | E&G [Electricity and Gas Department] and he ended up as foreman of the electrical instruments shop in SEC days. Sounds like a pioneer. Oh, yes. Yeah. What kind of a relationship did you have with your parents growing up, Robert? Oh, excellent. Hard working, money was not too readily available. |
03:00 | I even have a tin now that my father made out of a cigarette tin, about that long, and it has compartments soldered in to it and my mother, on getting his wages, would put so much for the baker, the grocer, the butcher and that sort of thing, and the rent, and if anything was left that went in to the last compartment. But things were as tight as that, you know. My |
03:30 | father’s pay in the early ’20s would have been about, oh mid ’20s, would have been about 4 pounds 10 [shillings] a week in the days of pounds, and I remember the rent being paid back to pay off the house to the Perth Building Society was 36 [shillings] and twopence, which meant to say you were getting nearly two-fifths of the wages gone in rent alone. So, it was a case of all hands to the |
04:00 | pump, you know. But my father was never out of work. He was too useful I think. Many others, when the Depression arrived in late ’29, some were simply sacked. There was no money to employ them. But my father was retained right through, luckily for us. What effects did you see of the Depression on perhaps other families in your community? Well, |
04:30 | many were really struggling. I don’t think people today really know what poverty was but, and you understand of course there were no social services. There was no compensation. In employment, people had one week a year holiday and if you broke a leg or an arm or something you weren’t much good to |
05:00 | an employer and as such you’d have to be sacked, and there was no backstop. And you may well say, “How did you live?” And in the people in that boat, well they relied on friends and backyard vegetable growing and that sort of thing. And to give you some ideas of values, people cannot, unless they went through the Depression days, they cannot really reconcile the values clearly. To give you an idea, when the wages were even |
05:30 | five pounds a week to trade wages, it was a full-blown trade wage. In 1929 a full-blown trade wage was five pounds a week but you could buy a small rabbit from Corney’s in Hay Street, they were a delicatessen, for threepence. And there were two hundred and forty pence to the pound of course. A big rabbit was sixpence. A chocolate, New |
06:00 | World chocolate was twopence, a Nestlé’s chocolate, as got in the vending machines on the stations, was one penny. I’ve just forgotten the price of some of the other food stuffs like bread and all that sort of thing but it’ll give you an idea. Oh as far as a meal went, well for one and threepence you could have quite a meal, you know, in a restaurant sort of thing. What kind of |
06:30 | meals did you eat at home? Plain meals of course, but my mother varied at as much as possible from, I can remember her meat pies as being of some account, Yorkshire pudding. We had some tinned fruit on occasions but altogether, and in short, plain food but all good food. And there were no |
07:00 | frills. There was no imbibing Coca Cola and all that sort of carry-on as the kids do today and such forth. My father never drank. He did smoke until he got to the age of about 70 or so and then he had a terrific bout of flu which he normally got annually, and by that time education had come along enough to say don’t do it and so he knocked it off and he didn’t smoke thereafter, and he lived until the |
07:30 | age of 86. My mother died at the age of 67, but her mother, my grandmother on her side, was actually born in the old barracks at the end of St George’s Terrace and I actually knew the room and which one she was born in before it was demolished when the Parliament House set up was put in and so forth, and her father was one of the old |
08:00 | guards so-called from England who stood over the convicts. So, I’m getting fairly close to the convicts you know. What were the household rules when you were growing up? They never impressed us as being restrictive in any way. Not like the kids of today accusing the parents of yelling at them and all this carry-on. But put it this way, there wasn’t the availability of |
08:30 | money to get off the rails. As for motor cars, the youth of today at 17 wants a licence and a car and if she or he hasn’t got such they’re looked upon as rather freakish, aren’t they? You know, you’d have to have that. And, admittedly, apart from the fact there was no money anyway for such items, for example, I went to work when I was not quite fifteen, had left school when there was a job. There wasn’t much point in going on |
09:00 | for educational levels because there were no jobs to go to. So, if a job turned up, that was the important thing. So, I left school prior to my being 15. I went to work in a motor warehouse which was in Murray Street, Perth. Perhaps we could return to your work at the warehouse a little later. We should begin with where you went to school please Robert. Where what? Where you went to school. I first of all went to |
09:30 | school at North Perth Primary School, and in those days of course six standard was the topmost class. And when I left there I then, that level now is called 7th Grade of course in the modern primary, but from there I went to North Perth Primary School for nearly two years and then I went to work from there, as I said, when there was a job available. What are your earliest memories of going to school? The first I |
10:00 | suppose memory on day one, and I was actually six years of age being born in November, they were taking children up to five and a half. When they became five and a half they went to school, normally. But due to being out of step in the year, I didn’t start until the following year after I was born, after my birthday in November, and as such I was actually six. But I do remember |
10:30 | on day one, Mother had given me my lunch and to my absolute disbelief and disgust, the teacher demanded I didn’t start eating my lunch during the class period, you know, I was a bit dismayed about that. But otherwise, discipline in those days was possibly quite different from what it is now. Kids respected teachers. I suppose they were afraid of them to a |
11:00 | degree. But that didn’t mean to say the treatment was in any way unfair, that everyone knew where he or she got on or got off. And it was a good mental discipline, no doubt about that. What was the discipline in the classroom? Do you mean as far as behaviour went? Yes, what was the accepted behaviour and how were you disciplined if your behaviour was unacceptable? Well, nobody got off the rails too far in the first place and I think that’s |
11:30 | important, but should they do so then a cane was waiting and you know that stopped a lot of nonsense ever starting with the threat of that sort of thing. Later on with the upper school, that was the standards from three to six, then the principal used to deal out what’s known as benders. You were bent |
12:00 | across his table and whacked on the backside with a cane, and I look back on it now, having taught in schools for donkey’s years [ages] myself, today, how on earth you’d ever take that risk I do not know. Because on the backside, I mean to say the sternum and things like that, could be injured or even if they weren’t. If the kid had the accident going home on a bike and said, “I had benders during the day.” and litigation could be on for, accusing the principal |
12:30 | or whoever. It’s certainly a different environment today, isn’t it? That’s right. What behaviour would you be disciplined for? Disobedience in short. I can’t imagine anybody ever giving cheek or using blasphemous wording to a teacher. But just disobedience – not behaving to some playground rule, something of that nature. |
13:00 | During lower school, what kind of activities did you enjoy in the playground? In the playground we had simple things, anything from chasing to football and cricket in the recess times and at lunch time and so forth. That was kick-to-kick football, not organised teamwork, and it was as simple as that. There was no other provision as there is today. And as far as the eating quarters went, I |
13:30 | can well remember now the smell of the lunch sheds. Over the years, I don’t quite know why, but there was a sort of a stale food smell went in the lunch sheds, not like today. It was sand and gravel in the playground. Today of course they’ve got lawn and a glass screen to stop the wind upsetting you while you’re having your lunch, that sort of thing. The toilets were purely |
14:00 | toilet latrines. There was no other provision. Today in the toilets in schools you’re going in to easy-clean taps and tiled walls and floors and that style of thing. It’s different altogether. When you moved to upper school, did you have any subjects that you were particularly interested in? I suppose the new thing was another |
14:30 | language, and we had French at Perth Boys’ and we… It was a boon in later years. My wife and I have been to Europe five times and in France particularly, you can imagine my relying on memory, and I only had two years of, you know, a few hours a week but nevertheless, by scratching around and piecing stuff together I was able to |
15:00 | hold some sort of a laughable conversation with the French, and the French attitude was, well if you try they will applaud you. But you daren’t sort of get obstreperous and say, “For goodness sake, why don’t you learn a decent language like English?” you know. But it wouldn’t matter how much I fool you mate, you sort of like put, piece stuff together and it was a godsend really. Were you interested in any of the other regular subjects? Yes. |
15:30 | I suppose one of the most outstanding contributions that we were given were teachers who were well versed in basic English, and that started back in North Perth Primary School with the fifth and sixth standard teachers, and any basic grammar knowledge I have, and same with composition knowledge, came from then. And into Perth Boys’, we had a couple of, in turns, seven and eighths standard it was in those days. |
16:00 | Now it’s eight and nine respectively. That served me well in latter years, so much so I became quite critical of some of the stuff written in the paper, the ill usage of the language. So language has always been of an interest to you? That’s right. What about competitive sports? Yes, at Perth Boys’ we had one afternoon a week on competitive sports. It could be anything from running to hop, |
16:30 | step and jump. It could be football, cricket, swimming and so forth. Did you compete with other schools? No, no and I can remember, it’s a bit of a lark looking back on it but the so-called physical education periods at Perth Boys’ was just running around Perth Boys’ playground. Just running around. That is all. That’s utter nonsense you know. And in primary school days it was a case of, you know, |
17:00 | legs apart, hands up, hands down this sort of carry on. Nothing like it is today. A son of mine is a physical education head of department and the knowledge that they have now’s like that of a doctor, and the work they go through and the competitive inter-school competition and even lectures about hygiene, etc., and physiology. Different altogether. |
17:30 | Did you wear uniforms to school? Uniform? There was no money. You were lucky to have clothing of any sort. No. What about shoes? Shoes. Many kids went barefooted, all through their primary school days up to six standard, barefooted and, admittedly, in secondary school I got Perth Boys’, people had footwear then |
18:00 | but it would have been a struggle. And certainly, well my own father was the one who repairs your shoes with leather and so forth. Had their own boot last and was simply re-soled and re-heeled and stuck themselves. If you had a person who was incapable of that they’d have to pay a bootmaker to do it. But money was so tight that, you know, that didn’t happen too often. Was the dress code |
18:30 | more strict at Perth Boys’ High School? We were still in short pants of course, socks and shoes of some sort, a shirt, and in the winter time you wore a guernsey over the shirt. I can’t ever remember having a hat at Perth Boys’ of any sort, you know; it was as simple as that. What kind of things did you do after school? |
19:00 | Once I left school I then went … Sorry, I was just referring to in the afternoons following school? Oh, you mean as a diversion after school hours? First of all, even in my late primary school days but certainly in Perth Boys’, I… By that stage I’d joined the model aero club, and this was rubber-driven duration models and so forth, |
19:30 | and then, during that time, I don’t know if you’re interested in this, but as an aside, a competition was run for 12 months on rubber-driven duration playing, that sort of thing, for a 10cc petrol motor, and the Texas Oil Company, now known as Caltex, put up this motor, which was pretty rare in those days for model aeroplane work, |
20:00 | and I happened to win that motor after 10 months’ competition. Now the motor was worth 10 pounds. It was 2 weeks’ wages virtually, so I was a very lucky boy. And with that model I built, well I’ve got pictures of these models and so forth; I built models and had state records with them and all that sort of thing. An interesting point, one morning at West Subiaco Aerodrome, by that stage I was in the gliding club but some of my mates |
20:30 | were still on the model aeroplane stuff, and one had a petrol motor there that he could not get started so they came down to the hangar and got me up there to glare at this thing, and they’d been trying for so long to get it started. They’d been filling more and more petrol in of the tank, you see, and what we used to do is have an eye dropper and simply one eye dropper would keep it going for about twenty seconds, or you register your |
21:00 | eye droppers to know what power flights went for and then take the risk on it not hitting a thermal or something and so on and so forth. Anyway, I got this thing started and the model, which was about 8 foot span, took off and 9 months later it was found in the bush at Wanneroo by a wood cutter. And we used to have our names and addresses on these things in case it ever happened and it was returned to him. |
21:30 | He incidentally was killed as a pilot later on in the war. But those are the sorts of things you know that we used to do and self-made fun. Nobody had any money to get up to tricks. You weren’t going anywhere away from home in a motor car out of your parents’ control. In any case, always the family wanted to know where were you going. “When are you likely to be home?” |
22:00 | And, “Who will be there?” And when you came home, “Who was there?” And this was not a sort of Gestapo detective thing. It was accepted as being a fair thing, so… And as for drugs and all that sort of thing, of course there was no money and no thought of drugs. What are they? Some, some could manage to smoke and that reminds me. I didn’t smoke at all, luckily for me, |
22:30 | my whole time, but I can remember a small packet of Woodbine cigarettes. These apparently weren’t considered to be much standard. They cost us a threepence a packet of 10 or so. But very few smoked because there wasn’t the money to get into that silly habit. How did you develop the interest in model aeroplanes? To answer that one, I don’t really know how I became biased towards that. But the |
23:00 | natural progression then, having gone with the model aero club, when you became 17 you were old enough then to join the gliding club. And we used to actually design and make gliders we used to fly in and I’ve got pictures of them in a… And now you couldn’t kid me out of that for anything because looking back on it, the risk, you know. Anyhow, teenage confidence and ignorance, you know. It was quite something. But I’ve got |
23:30 | number 4 gliding licence of the state you know, as one of the pioneer glider pilots. Mind you in those days, as far as gliding went, we worked darn hard for many months to get a second in the air. It was as bad as that. But we were absolutely content. It kept us totally interested and it formed a great bond, you know, with the rest of the members of the club of whom, I suppose, |
24:00 | while there might have been 40 on the books, 24 you’d consider as really active, useful members. And of those 24, 6 were killed as pilots and one in the navy. I was in the army, which is another long and involved story. How did you get in to the army when you were biased towards, you know, aeroplanes? That’s another yarn. We’ll probably come back to that point. Being interested in model aeroplanes |
24:30 | sounds like a relatively, well a luxury really in terms of the Depression and the kinds of hobbies you could afford? That’s a question in view of what I’ve told you. But we didn’t buy kits and have that sort of money to spend. We actually designed and made the things out of raw materials ourselves. That’s a totally different story and cost. We’d go out |
25:00 | and buy a sheet of balsa that would, it would be that long, that wide, 16th of an inch, 8th inch thicker than the whole measurement scale, and from that we’d cut it up in to strips by cutters we’d used to make and make spars and ribs and all the rest of it. So, otherwise it could not be afforded, in the modern kid’s thinking. In the same manner that a kid today. He only imagines buying a thing |
25:30 | done, complete or maybe at least kits. Someone’s done the thinking, the designing and the manufacturing of the bits and you put it together style of thing. I went on in later years, this is much later on, to model engineering and ended up on 3½ inch gauge steam passenger haul locos [locomotives] and kids used to say to us, over at the track, “Where did you get the kits, mate?” |
26:00 | There are no kits. Jolly well make the stuff out of raw material. I’ve still got the loco I designed and made. It’s the only one of its type in the world but it ran for ten years and would still run for another ten years. But then I couldn’t be two people and, to cut a long story short, 30-odd years ago I merged into the car business, you see. Sounds like you had a natural talent for engineering? That’s right. Did you have any interest in perhaps becoming an engineer when you finished school? |
26:30 | Nobody had a thought unless you had money to be able to get down to uni [university] to get an engineering degree. But when it, if you said, wait a minute what about trade practice? I always imagined I’d be a fitter, engineering like a fitter, and when the Depression hit there were no jobs available in that line. I was |
27:00 | very lucky to get the job for a 44-hour week for 12 [shillings] and sixpence. It was at JA Dimmitt Limited in Murray Street and the motor warehouse, which was retail and wholesale, and I was there for a couple of years or so and I ended up starting with a messenger boy. I went on to the counter selling motor spare parts and that sort of thing. And the |
27:30 | various firms had not advertised for apprentices or anything like that for donkey’s years, couldn’t afford it. But on the other hand Midland workshops WAGR [West Australian Government Railways] suddenly advertised for apprentices, including fitters. I got time off one morning from Dimmitt’s. I was interviewed and I got a call up to be a fitter a few weeks later. And when it came to the point, my father, who I imagined who would |
28:00 | fall for this, to my astonishment, he said, “Now it means you’ll go to work in the dark, you’ll come home in the dark and the way things are, I think you’ll have to go to sea to apply the heavy fitting work of WAGR. You won’t get a job locally.” So, being about 17 at this stage, you know, the devil you knew is better than the one you didn’t so, of all people, my father |
28:30 | myself and all that, I did not go to WAGR but I stayed at Dimmitt’s for another year and a bit. My mother, who thought her bright boy could do better, she used to keep her eye on the papers and the education department had advertised for monitors. They were cadet teachers in training and to cut that story very short, I applied and got one of the, I think it was six |
29:00 | positions in the state. I was in for a 4-year monitorship but suddenly I got a call-up. They ran short of teachers. The teachers’ college, incidentally, had been closed for some years, couldn’t afford to run it, but they’d opened it again. I think I came back on about course 2 or 3 after it began again. Is that the teachers’ college in Claremont? That’s correct. And the courses were 12 months only. But anyway, instead of being 4 years of monitor and 16 |
29:30 | months I was shot down to Claremont and I was there for 12 months and then I went out, and my first appointment was Eastern Goldfields High School. It’s a long way away from home. Yes, and it was the first time away from home, what’s more. How did you get there? By train, and Craig Foss, the superintendent of the manual arts as it was, with the teacher outgoing from Kalgoorlie |
30:00 | for whom I was taking the place, they met me on Perth Station to see the boy off. You know, I was 20 years of age and I’m at the other end and one of the masters up there met me at the station at 7 in the morning when the Kalgoorlie Express came in and took me by the hand. Then I lived with an aunty and uncle of mine on the slime dumps, as they’re called. My uncle was tending to the slimes on a particular holding there, just off the main road. What holding was |
30:30 | that? The Barren boys. They were two brothers who ran a slime dump processing plant and the… Do you know what slimes are? Yes. You know a bit about it? Well, they were re-processing the old dumps through the vats to get the gold out, and every fortnight they’d have a few ounces slug of gold. And I remember my uncle, |
31:00 | when the fortnight was at an end and they’d collected this stuff, he would have to hang, or drain out of the bag up in a little humpy, up on the slime dump, and he’d have to go up there and, you know, sleep there overnight to protect the bit of gold, sort of thing. But I was up there only for a few months when the war broke out. I might just interrupt and ask you quickly what the living conditions were like with aunty and |
31:30 | uncle? Well, that’s a good question too. Like most living conditions in those days I was on an open front veranda. I had a bed and of course I had my meals provided by my aunty and washing and ironing and that sort of thing. And the house was a timber-frame house. It was later shifted from the dumps down |
32:00 | into one of the streets in central Kalgoorlie. They could pick it up on a jinker you know and take it down there. And I used to walk from their place across the ground about I suppose half a kilometre to the high school. And none of the mines, even the big ones, were fenced. And you had to be very careful, incidentally – all the ground up there at that stage was pitted with shafts that people had sunk |
32:30 | in the search for gold and they weren’t fenced, and the rise there was a telltale however. There was a mullock heap where they’d thrown the stuff out from the shaft and if you were in the dark and coming home you didn’t just walk willy-nilly. As soon as you found yourself starting to walk up a bit of a rise you backed off because the next thing was a three hundred foot drop, many of them. Later on they did put some sort of guard rail around them. What kind of school were you monitoring in? |
33:00 | What school? What kind of school were you monitoring in? Was it a small school? Oh, the monitorship was spent at junior tech school, technical school in Newcastle Street, West Perth and I had an interesting time there. Sorry I was meaning in the goldfields. Oh, well I was in the manual training as it was called. They’re now called manual arts department and that involved woodwork, metalwork, |
33:30 | drawing, blacksmithing and so forth. And to give you some idea of the school’s condition, the school was a well-built, typical of a goldfields’ building, well-built school. But the manual arts school building was over in the playground, and when I first went to the school that morning I went to the principal’s office to tell him who I was and from where I was and what I was about, and the principal was on leave. But the |
34:00 | deputy was hanging up a curtain in his office, you see, and he sort of gave me the nod. He understood it all. He said, “I’ll take you over to the pigsty in a minute.” And the pigsty wasn’t quite such. It was quite a good setup except the forge shop and that was a little annexe on the back. That was a bit pigsty-like, but that’s by the way. It’s a good subject to have been chosen to monitor |
34:30 | given your interests in manual arts or engineering and creating … Gliding and all of that. The other thing was they asked me if I could describe some of the gliding practice, you know, which of course I could quite readily have done it all. But yeah, I don’t know how much detail you want here but … I’ll stop you if I think we’ve heard enough. All right, well to give you an idea of the gliding bit I can show you pictures of the gliders and whatnot, |
35:00 | but it was… We used to use a shot cord, which is like a big catapult, and you hit about 30 miles and hour and 30 feet, catapulted off, which is very convenient. You’re jumping off cliff faces and that sort of thing to get airborne. But when we got from City Beach where we had a hangar there on a bit of leased land, we were given the lease of Subiaco Aerodrome, |
35:30 | it’s near Perry Lakes and that sort of thing now, and to take off there, so the… And the aerodrome, incidentally, was surrounded by a track which is made for racing cars and racing motorbikes and it was called Brooklands, and what we were able to do is maintain the car doing the tallowing on the track so it didn’t have to go across the rough part of the aerodrome. But there were two thousand |
36:00 | feet of manila rope laid out up the aerodrome on this side of the glider and flags sitting on it and whatnot. The car would take off, the rope was taken around what we call a lazy pulley which was roped to a tree down at one end in the westerly end, it was usually a westerly breeze, and you simply took off and when you got to a height you simply pulled a release and that released the cable. The cable at the glider end had a small |
36:30 | parachute on it so that when the… It went down instead of going up into knots and things, the parachute would tend to lay it back down the aerodrome. Now just in case, and it never happened, I might add, thankfully, but just in case the release did not work up at the glider end everything was provided for. We had a man with an axe and a stump at the lazy pulley position to chop it if required. Yeah, |
37:00 | when I look back on it you know, and when we’d take off, larrikin sort of act. You just lay the stick back and go up and almost in reverse to climbing, and that was all very clever but if the cable snapped you’d go right back and kill yourself, no doubt about that. Just getting back to your story, Robert. How long did you say you were in the goldfields? Well, our course at Claremont College went from mid year to mid year, and as such I came out of that obviously in June in 1939. War started on the 3rd September, ’39. By the end of December the Australian nation had got partially organised. They were caught with their pants down with war really and all age 21 personnel, the whole population, it didn’t matter who you were, what you |
37:30 | were, what you were doing, if you 21 you could be conscripted. And although I was a certificated teacher I was conscripted and I was signed up in Lord Street when I was down on Christmas holidays in late January 1940, and of course I put engineer – they gave you a choice of application. So, engineers went first and AASC [Australian Army Service Corps], which is the |
38:00 | motor transport, stuff second, down, down you went. I put infantry last, of course. I got a notice a few weeks later saying that I was appointed to the 35th Fortress Engineers, which meant you’d be polishing the guns at Rottnest. You’d be sunbaking, fishing and amusing yourself in general I think. I thought this was great stuff. However, and I had seen in the drill hall where it said if you |
38:30 | change your address then you would notify them. Now I joined up when I was down on holidays and the Christmas holidays in Perth, when I went back to Kalgoorlie I dutifully changed my address and then another notice came and before I ever got to the first camp – it was going to be a three month camp for all these 21-year-olds – and another notice came and it said, ‘Owing to the fact that you’ll be doing similar training between camps you are hereby reappointed |
39:00 | to the 28th Australian Infantry Battalion in Kalgoorlie.’ weren’t you. Oh, you know and of course knowing nothing about that sort of thing I didn’t argue. That’s how I got on the 28th. You might say, “Wait a minute! Why didn’t you go to the air force?” Which you could volunteer for you see, or the navy or whatever. Well, I was wanting to complete some teachers exams after my college |
39:30 | days. I ended up with like two certificates and they only had the exams once every two months and because of that I just went along with the tide for the moment you see and there… The main thing was I suppose was I got home with a whole skin, but I was over five years in the army and at one stage in the army I’d had a, I rose through the ranks to get a commission in early ’42 |
40:00 | and I’d had a commission about six months I suppose, and the air force then had a right to apply to any service for any volunteer who’d become aircrew. So I went to the CO [Commanding Officer], the conversation was quite short. I told him what I was about to apply and he just looked at me and it was an order and he said, “Don’t apply. You’re not going. Get |
40:30 | out.” That was an order. So, I smashed to a salute. I said, “Yes Sir.” turned about and went. But he probably saved my neck. He probably saved my neck just like that. Perhaps. That’s right. Just the luck of the game you know. |
00:33 | Robert, I’m just wondering how did it work with the teachers? Teachers were declared key personnel so theoretically you couldn’t get conscripted. Ah, yes that’s a good question of what I’ve said. After I was conscripted and you couldn’t get out of it, three months after I was conscripted, teachers were declared as some |
01:00 | of the key personnel. But once you’re in you couldn’t get out, which takes a bit of believing because some of the men with me in Melville Camp, in the first camp, were miners and they were suddenly declared as key personnel and were taken back to the goldfields, to their joy, to get out of it. But I couldn’t get out of it you know. And, as I say, I tried to switch services, the air force, and you heard that story. |
01:30 | If you had the option to get out of the conscription, would you have done so? Yes, I’d have gone to the air force. Undoubtedly. Mind you I wasn’t the type to be looking for fights or anything like that but all factors considered and all my mates in the gliding club, you know, volunteering early on and getting in before the conscription was really |
02:00 | enforced, then I would have done the same on the strength of my background. Did most of them end up in the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force]? Yes, yes. One in the navy who was killed. But otherwise, yes, the RAAF. I was the other odd one in the army, yes, because of circumstances. So did you in fact go back to Kalgoorlie |
02:30 | to…? No, when I came home the superintendent said to me, “Well, I suppose you’ve seen enough bush and jungle to keep you quiet for a while.” I agreed with him wholeheartedly and he said, “There’s an appointment comes open in another few, couple of weeks or so.” I went to Victoria Park area. The centre, as it was called. It was called a centre because it was |
03:00 | fed by half a dozen primary schools coming and kids in six standard, in those days the topmost primary school class, started manual training at that stage. And that’s why it was called centre. But the centre was a building at the back of the Victoria Park Primary School and I used to have lunch and morning tea and whatnot with the staff of the primary school there, and on that primary school staff |
03:30 | was the late Fred Cheney… See now, he’s still a Fred these days, but he was a, along with some others, they weren’t primary school staff they were secondary school staff taking over the extra classes from Kent Street High, and to get accommodation they were using part of the old two-storey building of Victoria Park Primary. But a lot of the others there too were ex-air force or ex-army. |
04:00 | What happened to you after you were conscripted? What was the next step with the CMF [Citizens’ Military Force]? First of all we were simply CMF until, I suppose the pressure applied. The next thing was the unit became, if you wished you could change over to a WX number [Western Australian enlistment number] from your W number and become AW, which |
04:30 | meant to say you were available to be sent anywhere, and 95% of the gang immediately did that and then from the Melville area here over a succession of tertiary camps we then went to bush as a unit, down to Dandaragan, for example, for some months for a toughening exercise. Tents were not allowed. You had to live |
05:00 | with what you could find and you weren’t allowed to sort of suddenly find say, a sheet of galvanised iron from somewhere and protect yourself. That was unfair to the next fellow. And we lived in mia mias [aboriginal shelters], in a hole dug in the ground and covered up, and wurlies like natives and all that sort of thing, a toughening exercise. Was this some of the first camps that you were a part when you were in the CMF? Yes. So, where were they? Was it Melville and…? Melville, |
05:30 | yeah, and from those camps then when the unit started to shift, they went to, for example, for a short time to Chidlows area in the bush. Then to, down Dandaragan area for some months, exercises were done there, out to Jurien Bay and so on. That’s another story and all that stuff you know. I’ll try to go through it chronologically. |
06:00 | What was the first camp that you did? In date you mean? Was it in Melville that you started out? Yes, Melville. What were some of the first things that you did as part of your initial training? Well, it was a mixed bag starting off with new recruits. You were suddenly confronted with the army practices; you lived in tents. The thing was |
06:30 | relatively well organised considering the flying start and off the ground you know, caught with the pants down all the way. The things to remember at Melville were tent lines, mess huts, the mess huts were the only decent building apart from the officers’ mess. The latrines were galvanised iron structures. |
07:00 | The hygiene was always very well cared for; otherwise you’d have a whole battalion down with dysentery if you didn’t look out. The flies at Melville, it was in the bush just immediately alongside Carrington Street but it was South Street in front of you, and the other battalions, the 11th and the 16th, the 44th, were strung along there beside us and the flies were so bad, bush flies, that to eat your meals you had to have, you had steel helmets |
07:30 | on, you can imagine those steel helmets! You know, to think the Japanese were going to arrive any time and on the steel helmets you had a fly net, complete with corks, some of them. And then to eat your meal, except down in the likes of the officers’ mess later in my case, but earlier on, you had to put your dixie up under the fly net and eat your meal and keep walking. So it was as bad as that. Sounds like the blowfly plague. Well, they were bush flies |
08:00 | mainly, more annoying than anything I suppose. What were you sleeping on in the barracks in Melville? There was a thing called a palliasse. A palliasse is virtually a chaff bag as it were and you grabbed a bag, you were sent up to a heap of straw, it was in an actual heap up on the parade ground, and then you stuffed your palliasse with the straw and you came back and that was your bunk. Doesn’t sound |
08:30 | very comfortable. Well, we were so darn tired with the training that, and [UNCLEAR] a long way down it, you know, it was quite, that was the least of our worries I think. Well, how intense was that emphasis on fitness? |
09:00 | Being infantry you were treated like a racehorse – you were never left alone. You were always at it and at any stage, even in Darwin days, you were always at it. Even if you had nothing to do they would find you something to do. If it was running out of exercises it meant playing cowboys and Indians with each other and all this carry-on in the bush. Then they would organise something, even if it was just a route march, and we had a big route march at Darwin. They would have a daily route march of 15 miles up and down the road, all this carry-on but not reliable about that sort of mileage. Here in the bush in |
09:30 | Melville days at one stage it started and it went on two more, there were three occasions when the battalion walked overland for ninety miles in three days. That’s thirty miles a day. We’d walk for twenty miles carrying all our fighting gear. That’s the other big point. When you were in full fighting order, with your boots and all the rest of it, you had about sixty |
10:00 | pounds on your person, that was the weight and that was done, you know, at ninety miles in three days. You may well say, “Well where did they get that idea?” And particularly, later on, the mileage was kept up even though… We were trained for jungle work as well, later on, and the reason was from the Middle East they’d learnt that suddenly their transport had been shot up and having the luxury of trucks to cart themselves and all their gear |
10:30 | was suddenly defunct. So they were forced to march. And this sort of nonsense went on for us and when we hit jungle of course, I can assure you there was no more of this long march business. In jungle a thousand yards meant something and, you know, on patrol work if you covered a thousand yards or a thousand metres, bit more than a metre these days if you like, |
11:00 | or less than a metre, but if you covered that in an hour, because of fear of ambush, you were doing very well. But that’s the sort of training we had. In other words they were sort of trying to cover all the waterfronts I suppose. It was pretty hard going. How about skills? What sort of skills were you learning? Well, they had a full program apart from a parade ground drill. There was bayonet training. You used to go out every morning for a couple of hours and I can assure you after a few weeks of that you could |
11:30 | actually leap a six-foot fence, no worry at all. Bayonet training. You could leap a six-foot fence with bayonet training? That’s right. But well, I mean to say, but you were so fit, you know, the physical exercises, the bayonet training. There was weapons training, of course, map reading. What sort of weapons were you using? Well, that’s a good question. Obviously the SMLE [Short Magazine Lee Enfield] rifle was the standard |
12:00 | issue and it was a very good rifle too. Absolutely suitable for open warfare. I had, for example, one of my men who was a crack shot. He, with a telescope on one day, but his first try, at six hundred yards. We’d put up a whisky bottle and at one shot he shot at six hundred yards and that’s how accurate the Lee Enfields were, very rugged |
12:30 | rifle. A very good rifle. Ten-round magazine. And apart from that we had Lewis guns. But the Lewis gun was so worn from World War I days and having been stripped and assembled and all that sort of thing for donkey’s years in drill halls with the cadets of the day and so on, that you could almost shake them and strip them with that sort of treatment. They were so worn. But we used to use them on Swanbourne Range, you know, for firing exercises and so forth. |
13:00 | Apart from that the special platoons had mortars, three-inch mortars. There was a machine gun company using Vickers. Then the day came when two Bren guns arrived, two for the battalion. They were put on show. We were paraded at a company at a time in a single file to view these royal gems. But it wasn’t long afterwards, you know, that they got |
13:30 | into full production and all the Lewises were dumped and we had Bren guns. Did you find the fact that you were training on Lewis guns slightly ludicrous? Oh, no. They were quite effective as they were in World War I, but when it came to lack of possible ill treatment, stoppages, that sort of thing. A Bren for mobility’s sake was a far better gun of course, far better, and the other thing was that as far |
14:00 | as handling went the Lewises had a drum magazine about that diameter, that thick and they were fifty-round mags [magazines]. The aircraft version of them had a hundred-round mags and deeper. But the old Lewises, as far as their day went, are good. They would have been quite an effective weapon but the Bren was far superior. Then of course we had Thompson submachine guns, the Al Capone [gangster] stuff. And the Thompsons |
14:30 | used 45, .45 Colt pistol, revolver, automatic pistol ammunition. And then those things, they were complicated thing as far as their cocking mechanism went and in jungle, oh I’d hate to think of trying to use them there because of modern muck and all the rest of it would have had stoppages. Was it hard to clean? Yes, and complicated innards sort of thing. But the |
15:00 | Owen gun arrived and it looked like a kids’ toy but it was very, very clever and very good and very simple. As an aside on the Owen gun, it was the only army weapon I ever dealt with whereby when you applied the safety catch it didn’t lock everything. All the other army weapons, when you applied the safety catch it not only stopped the trigger operating but you locked up all the firing mechanisms. That was automatic. But the Owen didn’t, due to its |
15:30 | simple structure, and it meant, even with the safety catch on, it was possible it happened twice in my career. A man jumping into a weapon pit at night, holding it up like this and he’d go in and bump the butt on the parapet and the jolly bolt would go back and fire a round up past his ear, you know, because it didn’t lock the bolt. But they were just a rare thing. But otherwise they were very, very good as you can follow from what’s been said about them. |
16:00 | The Owen was a somewhat similar to an English Sten but the Stens, you know, are quite a successful submachine gun but I think I’d back our Owens any time. Sounds like you quite enjoyed training on some of the weaponry? Oh, yes. It was new; it was interesting and so on. What would you use for target practice? Well, when you’re on the rifle |
16:30 | range you had standard targets, and depending on the range, it was two hundred, four hundred, six hundred [yards long]. So, the target size differs and the ball area, etc., and the other brings out a difference size. But when you’re on exercises there were all sorts of devices used. Might just be a tin can or a lid of a biscuit tin or something like that. What other sorts of exercises stood |
17:00 | out for you? You mentioned before that you went to Jurien Bay? Yes. Now Jurien Bay, some of the exercises there were virtually playing cowboys and Indians. What they used to do is say have one platoon of a company would be sent out and if they bumped into either of the other platoons they were their enemy for a week, or something of that nature, see. So, it was tactical sort of |
17:30 | employment. Apart from that, at Jurien Bay, they had coast watching patrols. Our battalion didn’t do too much of that. They did a bit of it and there were all sorts of funny yarns there too. One of the things comes to mind, it came in as a report that there were red flashes from inland towards the sea, and of course there’s always this funk of Japanese submarines wandering up and down the coast, you |
18:00 | see. And these red flashes would occur at night and someone reported this and lo and behold someone else reported it and another patrol reported it. So, there was hell to do about this, you know, someone obviously flashing Morse code just, one of these Nip [Japanese] submarines at sea. Anyway, search parties went out and there was no sign of anything in the bush, you know, from where this was sighted |
18:30 | and suddenly somebody woke up. The ration truck used to come from Moora at eleven o’clock. The fact was too that it happened about the same time every night. Ration truck used to come from Moora, out to feed us at Jurien Bay, and as the ration truck went back, the tail-light in going over the undulating bush track flashed and flashed and, you know, that’s all. Yeah, they were just one of the incidents. Wasn’t Morse code at all? Yeah, no, oh no. What was the threat |
19:00 | of the Japanese subs [submarines] being out off the coast? It did occur I think once or twice but it’s pretty rare indeed, and by that stage of the game I think the Yanks [Americans] were here with their submarines in Fremantle. And from there they did a very good job. They were out of the way of getting attacked as a base and they did a lot of damage, you know, to Japanese shipping and so forth north of Australia. You also mentioned that you were wandering |
19:30 | around with your tin hat on because of the fear of Japanese. Can you extrapolate on that? How fearful were you that they were going to start dropping bombs? Oh, no we, you know, I suppose it’s like all war. “It can’t happen to me,” stuff. But we had slit trenches in case we were attacked, dug at Melville and all that, but I think in our youthful exuberance and so forth didn’t worry too much about it. |
20:00 | I mean did you believe that it was a possibility? Oh, yes. Yes. Another occasion when we went bush for a while to Moora there was a sudden panic on as it was quite truthfully reported that there was a Japanese ship in force, coming on to our nor-west coast. And this is what we’d always feared and the only thing to repel them, you know, was the thin red line of our brigade, |
20:30 | a total of, possibly about, even with a auxiliary arms of our artillery there was probably a total of four thousand bodies or something to repel the Japanese force. Anyway, we were given this order in Moora days to get aboard the trucks in readiness to go the moment the flag dropped, to go. Go to Broome or wherever the devil they were about, it was unknown where they were going to land. It might have been at Fremantle. |
21:00 | So, we were ready to go and we sat on those trucks for fourteen hours and suddenly someone said, “No. Not happening.” To the disappointment of the gang. Everybody was disappointed, you know. They kill the lot of us, that had been. But that convoy was a fact and it sheared off and went somewhere else but, luckily for us but this, this was to be our means of repelling them, you know. Going back to Jurien Bay, were there any |
21:30 | other incidents that you remember from the time that you were doing the training out there? No. The only other bit of domestic detail was the fact that I’d detailed a company off to stand waist deep in the water and fish all day and feed the company for a break away from the company rations. That used to happen. Sounds like a lot of hard work. But mind you that was just one company a |
22:00 | day, otherwise it was pretty hard going, exercises and things and living like Aboriginals. So, with most of these camps you were literally just laid out on the ground. Oh, yes. In Moora, come down Dandaragan area, I’m not exaggerating but every metre, each way, would be a scorpion hole. The scorpions are absolutely alive and when you came home at night and unrolled your |
22:30 | blanket, you didn’t just hop in to the blanket you unrolled the blanket and shook it to make sure the scorpions therein were tipped out. But the joke was too, you know, in those days I can remember one day there was a hailstorm and I’m not exaggerating, the hailstones were as big as golf balls. They were clouting our steel helmets and they were very large indeed, and notwithstanding that sort of |
23:00 | living condition, no-one got a cold. Ever. There was just one big draft, you know, and so forth. I remember one morning, Bert Hammond, who was our company OC [Officer Commanding], Bertie was a Kalgoolie-ite and he had ended up as the Mayor of Kalgoorlie in post-war days. And we were lined up there one morning and I was with him, out the front of the company, and it was about six in the morning and it was |
23:30 | raining and going on, you know, and all the company are looking pretty dejected and standing there and Bertie gave an order and he could roar it out. He said, “Company, don’t look like that! Shiver yourselves in to a sweat!” Yeah. I don’t think anybody managed that but that was an order, yeah. But away from that the |
24:00 | army, if it interests you at all, my own battalion and brigade, they were very strict about hygiene. Deep holes or latrines were always dug. There was never any privacy of course. And at the same time when a camp was evacuated, those latrines were filled in and there was always a sign put |
24:30 | on marked ‘Foul Ground’. In other words it was absolutely free of any rubbish. There was never any rubbish left or anything like that. It was a case of, you know, the old adage was you burnt it and bashed it and buried it. The three Bs. And they were very, very strict about it in all camps. In Darwin days, ditto. Very, very careful about that. The kitchens, for example, always were |
25:00 | flywire netted and so on. And there’s a funny, I just told an association there. I wrote this in the Melville, in the unit notes, but in Melville days at one teatime I was in the mess hut. I was a private at the time and the stew was dished out and of course you went past the cooks with their dixies and with your dixie you got your lot and |
25:30 | sat down. Anyway, all of a sudden somebody sights white things about one and a half, two millimetres diameter, about six millimetres long floating about in the stew. Well, and a lot of these people were Kalgoolie-ites, you know, they were rough diamonds. And the rest of the recruits were from Northam and from Perth. Well, there was hell to do and they ended up, they wanted to cut this |
26:00 | sergeant cook’s throat and all the rest of it. And the next thing was somebody started it and it was a case of get your back to the wall. They threw the stew all over the mess. Anyway, the orderly officer and the orderly sergeant and the sergeant cook were brought forth in all this hubbub and when things were settled a bit, everyone became sane, the sergeant had a look and then pointed out these were the |
26:30 | shoots of the haricot beans in the stew. Oh, golly. Yeah. It a nice old to do. Well, I suppose it’s reflective on how important food was to you at the time. Oh, yes that’s right. Yes. Well what sort of food were you getting fed? This is when you’re still in Melville camp and training. Yes, it was obviously quite |
27:00 | plain, sustainable stuff and even on the perimeters on New Britain we lived on bully beef and biscuits with an occasional issue of fruit, bit of fruit for months. And we were working blooming hard and in the tropics at that and the patrol work was hard going and New Britain, as anybody will tell you, is covered with dense jungle. It was canopy jungle. We lived in a gloom sort of thing and the |
27:30 | topography was razorbacks. So you were always hard, hard going. Up and down and the mud, you know, you sank to the mud up to your ankles and your boots, and crawling up some of the razorback trying to remember at times just grating our teeth and pulling ourselves up by the roots of trees and all the rest of it. We’ll definitely get on to more of that in detail a little bit later on in the day. But just going back to your initial training, at what point were you informed that |
28:00 | you were selected to go to officer training? It was about 1941. I think about September or so. And then we went to Bungulla, or Bonegilla if you like, alongside the Hume Weir in Victoria and we had three… How did you actually get to Bonegilla? By train. |
28:30 | Troop train. What were the conditions on the troop train like? Well, you’ve heard about the cattle trucks, haven’t you? Well, I’d like you to tell me about it. Oh, I think we went over in compartment carriages but it was just a troop train, you know, and stopped at various places across the Nullarbor [Plain] and there’d be some sort of kitchen facilities set up to give you a feed sort of thing. What sort of food would they be |
29:00 | giving you? Stew, I’d imagine. But I can’t honestly remember accurately. But I imagine it was stew. There was nothing wrong with the stew. What sort of things would you do in order to pass the time on the train? Well, we had all sorts of diversions. Cards were on, of course. What sort of card games? Oh, I’m not a card player but I suppose they |
29:30 | probably have got into something where a few bob [shillings] changed hands or something like that. But on the matter of troop trains, later when we were going up to Darwin, it was here to Adelaide, up through Alice Springs then you’ve got on the Ghan and that’s another story. Not the Ghan of today at all, I can assure you, went to Larrimah, you then got on another train |
30:00 | which was commonly called the Spirit of Protest [Spirit of Progress], up to Darwin. But on that occasion, I can remember on my mates had a primus stove and the carriages on the Ghan were 1914–18 level, old steel-type roofs and things and the seats weren’t this way, they just, parallel to the windows and he had a primus stove. He used to get busy with that in the middle and tins of sausages and things. We used to |
30:30 | puncture a couple of holes with the bayonet and cook these things and all that sort of carry on, you know. But they also played chess a lot. Portable little chess sets. That was another diversion. Was that on the troop train up to Bonegilla? Yes, yes. Was it Gilla or Gella? Gilla. A lot of people, we used to call it. Bonegilla, Bonegilla rather. But over there they call it Bonegilla. But B-O-N-E |
31:00 | G-I-L-L-A is the spelling of it. It’s a very big camp, very tough school. Three months, first month was all weapon training. Everything in the book from Vickers to mortars to rifles to light machine guns such as Brens, Owens, that style of thing. Did you find that was repetitive in the fact that you’d already gone through what, about |
31:30 | nine months worth of training? Ooh, yes, you know. It would be repetitive I suppose but and that was mixed up by exercises and firing this stuff. Was it any more specific than what you’d already accomplished at places like Melville and Jurien Bay? Well, that was the first month, severe weapon training, absolute. But then the next month was a whole month spent map reading, |
32:00 | theoretical, theory on tactics and all that academic type of thing, and exercises involving map reading and so forth. But because of the more or less sedentary time lecturing, listening to lectures and that sort of thing, they didn’t let you go at that, no. From when you woke up in the morning to when you got to bed at night, you ran. And if you were ever seen not running to anywhere at any |
32:30 | time you got a penalty called a drill, which doesn’t convey much by name but the drills were occasionally getting up at six in the morning before the main, normal time. You were then given hellish exercises of the most brutal nature and so forth. Like what? Well, as a punishment for not running you got this, you see. I mean what would they do to you? Well, they’d line you up. You’d get into formation. The |
33:00 | next thing they’d draw out, “Gas.” So, out with the respirator, on with the respirator. Then you get about say a hundred yards of sprint you see. “Double.” You then get the order, “Down, six rounds rapid fire. Reload.” And then ten rounds. “Reload. Up,” you’d get again. “Gas clear.” You’d no sooner get, “Gas clear,” and it would be, “Gas,” again, just to muck you around. Then they’d start this other |
33:30 | stunt as a real prison punishment thing, your rifle held above your head like that. It’s ten pound, nine or ten pound of rifle, and running with it and I can assure you that doesn’t become very amusing and that sort of thing. And how long would this torture go on for? About an hour. Yeah. You’d be exhausted. That’s right and then you got back to the ablutions and having your breakfast and getting on with the day’s antics. Then the third month was a combination of |
34:00 | weapon training, tactics, map reading and all that, exercises, all the time that involved all of that stuff. Well, what would they teach you as part of tactics, for instance? Well, tactics on battle formation, in the case of procedures and the case of ambush, the case of procedures when it came to a sort of a company attack and that would break down the platoons and sections in attack. And there are certain, you know, |
34:30 | adopted practice and theory that you’d have to adopt there which had been learnt the hard way from people from New Guinea and so forth. And by that stage of the game a lot of information was coming back from New Guinea on Japanese behaviour and procedures and so forth to sort of combat it. When they were teaching you tactics, were they teaching you in a lecture sort of situation or was it more of a practical way that they were teaching you when you were out there? Well, when you’re in the middle |
35:00 | month, that’s when all the theoretical stuff was on, but then once you got into the third month that was the time that all of those things were combined and put together. Oh, I see. Mm, and some of the practical pranks at officers’ training school, as it was called, were quite clever. A man would come home from leave in Melbourne over the weekend, find his bed gone. They were beds there. I mean in the barrack rooms. His bed gone. But there’d be a |
35:30 | note giving you compass bearings around various parts of Victoria. You had any sense you’d get down and plot it and to your astonishment you’d find the blooming plot go right back to base where you were standing inside the hut. Where was your bed? It was there except it was under the floor of the hut. Yeah, There were all sorts of tricks there. Can you think of any others? What, in the officers’ training school? Yes. Oh, dear. Well, one of the |
36:00 | things that’ll go down in brigade history. You have to understand this school was a very tough school. If you were naughty at all you got sacked back to your unit, which would be a disgrace. And because of understanding how tough it was and what it meant, some of my mates and my own course there |
36:30 | thought up this brilliant one. Every six weeks, that was half the three months’ course, every six weeks a new group came in. And knowing they’d be in a funk and in strange territory, these six peanuts from my own brigade thought up a great idea to have a short arm inspection [inspection of the genitalia] of these new recruits. Short arm meaning inspection of the old middle, and all this business, you see. Of |
37:00 | gonorrheae, diarrhoea and whatever. So, the idea was one of them, who was the orderly sergeant of the day… You had your turn being orderly sergeant of the day or whatever. As this new crowd came in late afternoon and went to their first lecture at night, as they came out of the lecture hut, this sergeant announced the fact there’d be a short arm inspection in number 22 hut or something, up in |
37:30 | the camp. Well, they didn’t ask any questions of course. There were about a hundred or a hundred and twenty bodies in that of whom twenty-two were lieutenants. They were already commissioned. But they’d got to a commission without going to an officers’ training school and the unit had sent them. Now notwithstanding the fact that they were, you know, officers, they fell for this and they got up to this |
38:00 | hut, and like boys they’d get in to a single file on orders and they came in one at a time. The normal thing would be to be inspected by the doctor and his underlings. Now Harry Cohen, who’s since dead in latter years, Harry was what we call a WO2, warrant officer [class] two, and a warrant officer had a crown on his cuff, now by transferring that crown on to your epaulette you could masquerade |
38:30 | roughly as a major. So, suddenly Harry Cohen became, from a corporal, he was suddenly a major and he took the part of the doctor. These other blighters, Bob Boyd, who’s well known even in current army circles, he was one of the near offsiders. Another fellow was Johnnie Andrew, was a bank manager, since retired he’s gone east, |
39:00 | and a fellow named Max Carpenter, who was an international rugby player. Now these blighters during the afternoon came around to all of us and told us what was afoot and wanted to know if we had any old coloured bottle of what looked like medicine or whatever, you see, and they had, “Anybody got any tweezers or scissors?” Now all this rubbish was laid out on the table, as it would be, you know, as a fake. And you know they inspected every man |
39:30 | jack, twenty-two officers. And the officers of course normally would not be inspected. They were officers and gentlemen. So once you became an officer you weren’t subject to this. You were believed to be such a nice type that you’d report anything of that troublesome nature. Well, they all went through it and at the very end… And in the meantime we’re up outside this room looking in through the windows |
40:00 | propped up on something, either a box or something, laughing our silly heads off. Anyway, at the bitter end… They went through the lot and they were just about to gather all the gear up and get, you know, before it was all found out, and two blokes ran in and apologised for not being in it because they’d been over at the canteen and missed this message. And these blighters simply said, “Well, look, you report to the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] first thing in the morning.” “Yes Sir.” But |
40:30 | that goes down in history in the battalion, the brigade. They all know about that. But when they did find out they were pretty lousy, you know, especially the lieutenants, my God. But funnily enough we waited for the backwash and none came until about two weeks later and we were doing an exercise, and typically at the end of it we were sat down and there was a |
41:00 | general discussion and criticism of the whole thing, and one of the beasties, as we used to call the instructors, said, “And Doctor Cohen, what is your opinion?” We knew then that they knew, Doctor Cohen, you know. But there was no more was said about it. I think it was so good that even the beasties, you know, could scarce forbear to cheer. They probably had a good laugh about it themselves. They did. They would have, yeah. Do you think humour was a really |
41:30 | important thing to have, because you mentioned that the NCO training school was really hard work. Do you think that humour was a really important element of being there? Oh, absolutely. Anything you didn’t know from previous training was polished and certainly on the latest on Japanese procedures, tactics and so forth. Oh, yes. And also, apart from other things there, we had to |
42:00 | learn more |
00:30 | Describe the camp at Bonegilla please, Robert? It was a very large camp. There were thousands of men there in training. The officers’ training school to which I went was only part of it and that was the part immediately alongside the Hume Weir wall. The camp itself was constructed of sleeping huts, kitchen, |
01:00 | lecture halls, parade grounds and I suppose that’s about the lay of it. And of course the surrounding countryside lent itself to exercises and all that sort of thing. I don’t know whether you’re interested in this sort of thing but there was a Lone Tree as it was called up on a farmer’s property on… It was quite hilly country up near out of the camp and Lone Tree was always used as a reference |
01:30 | point. It was a case of, in relation to Lone Tree mountain water, or in relation to Lone Tree take this and that aim, and all this carry-on. Anyway, the group that came in six weeks before us, they decided they’d get rid of Lone Tree as a sort of a grand finale and when it was mooted round the instructors or beasties they said, “Oh, yes we’ve heard that from every mob that came through. |
02:00 | Won’t happen.” Well, this crowd, they were due to leave at six o clock in the morning to get bussed and then on train in Albury to go back to wherever. And they made preparation, they got a cross cut saw from somewhere and in the dead of night, before the morning they were to leave, the idea was to leave when everybody was caught napping, the tree would be done, they’d be gone and that would be that. So, they got this cross cut |
02:30 | saw and they got busy sawing away, and not late enough to stop this happening. Anyway, the darn tree had heart rot and they only got half the way through it and down came the tree, so when the beasties woke up in the morning, there was Lone Tree down. Well, that gang were immediately rounded up. They had to pay the farmer so many shillings each as a |
03:00 | fine because it was saved for the sheep or some other yarn. They were required to get saws and saw it all up in to one foot blocks, you know for firewood’s sake as a penalty. That was a by the way. But that was one of the other tricks at officers’ training school. So, they should have left the Lone Tree alone by the sounds of things. That’s right. Yeah. How many men were doing the officers’ training in your course? A hundred and twenty. And they were from all parts of the country? That’s right. |
03:30 | Yes. All over Australia. You mentioned some of the areas of training that you were doing earlier when you were speaking to Denise [interviewer], can you describe the weapons training that you were doing in detail? Well, rifle, light machine gun, mortars. We didn’t have much Vickers work there. But we knew how to apply all of those weapons as officers in training and officers |
04:00 | later, we were schooled in all that sort of stuff and to the degree when I came back from there and I got a commission granted, then we were given Bren guns, carrier driver training in case of an emergency. That sort of a thing as an extra. Was that at Bonegilla? No, that was back here. While we’re just at Bonegilla, can you describe how your were instructed to use the various |
04:30 | arsenal of weapons? Well, there were such things throughout all of this from anything you like to mention connected with the army on pamphlets so-called, army, little booklets. And there was a full description there of every procedure. There was squad drill, you know, how to slope arms down to anything you like, marching, various formations, weapon work. There |
05:00 | was one on rifles, on light machine guns and all the rest of it and the complete drill was there on the handling of it, the stripping of it, the assembling of it, loading, unloading, safety measures and all that sort of thing and practical firing of such to give you accuracy. Also, revolvers. I’ve forgotten about those 38s. Can you describe how you would strip some of those guns? |
05:30 | Stripping it? Yes. Oh, well a rifle’s pretty simple. On the SMLE .303 you simply lifted the arm of the bolt and pulled it back, and on the firing pin end of the bolt was a knob that you used your knuckle just to bring that up and unlock the bolt and you withdraw the bolt |
06:00 | completely. You didn’t strip the bolt any further. The firing pin was within that, etc. But a magazine of course was detached from the catch under it quite readily. It was a ten-round magazine. The stripping was taken no further than that. In the butt of that rifle there was a brass shoulder pad on the end of the butt |
06:30 | and there was a little flap there that you lifted and that exposed a hole, and in that hole was a brass oil container and also what’s called a pull-through, which was a lump of cord with a weight on the end of it, and that was for cleaning the barrel and the weighted end allowed you to drop it down the barrel from the muzzle. And also from within that hole was flannelette. It was actually |
07:00 | marked two-inch wide bit of flannel about four inches long. You tore a bit off, you put it in the end of the pull through and by dragging it through the barrel, you cleaned the barrel. But that was the end of the stripping of that. Of course you know assembly was more sort of a reversal of that. To give you an idea of the possible firepower of the .303, we were taught there to get maximum firepower out of the rifle and |
07:30 | we’re not talking about machine gun, we’re talking about, you know, not even repeaters, just hand bolt-action rifles. And there was a competition won and one of the instructors and myself in a group ended up at the start of that competition. There was a target put up at two hundred yards and, do you savvy of the yards and metres? |
08:00 | Whip about a tenth off and you’ve got metres. At two hundred yards a six foot square target, now that target is more or less as big as a house to you, you know. There was no bull or magpies or outers marked on the thing. It was just a big six foot square target. And the idea was you could hit it anywhere within six foot square at two hundred yards, which is virtually point blank range. And he put through thirty rounds in sixty seconds and I put through twenty- |
08:30 | nine rounds in sixty seconds. And you might say, “How on earth was that ever done with an ordinary rifle?” you know, that wasn’t at least semi-automatic. Well, the way it was done, you’d fill the magazine with ten rounds and that was put in with two clips of five. The clips were held with five rounds together and it was quick loading. It was about as quick as that. You put a clip into your magazine and another one and then one in the breech also in readiness. Close the bolt, |
09:00 | apply the safety catch and when it all started up with the safety catch with your thumb and actually you never let go of the bolt. You held on to the bolt arm as you normally wouldn’t do and the index finger on to the trigger and you took aim at the six foot square – you couldn’t miss the thing – and let drive with one round, immediately worked the bolt and do that ten times. |
09:30 | Oh that was after you’d fired the initial round which was in the breech. So you’d got rid of eleven. Well, from here on that was pretty straightforward and you’d immediately whip in another two clips of five each, that gave you another ten, so you’re up to twenty-one now. At that stage the clock’s ticking by and you had to decide whether you’d use the time to put another ten in, if you weren’t going to use the lot, or put only five in, you know, it was just a case of |
10:00 | balancing that against the clock which is, I put another ten in sort of thing. And I got twenty-nine. He got rid of thirty. But to anybody at the receiving end as the Germans in World War I said, they thought all the British forces there were fitted out with light automatic weapons but they weren’t. They were just a rifle being used to the full. You get very slippery at it. But of course when it came to accurate firing you wouldn’t try those tricks. I mean to say you’d settle down and |
10:30 | use the thing as it should be used. It was just a bit of a gimmick really. But it certainly plastered everything at two hundred yards with one rifle, yeah. That’s pretty impressive shooting by anyone’s standards. That’s right. What about some of the light machine guns? What was it like being introduced to some of them? Well, by that stage it was all Bren work at OTS [Officers’ Training School] and a Bren is very accurate. It was said too accurate because of |
11:00 | not giving what they call a beaten zone. When you’re using a Vickers, the chattering of the gun and so forth, say at six hundred yards then there’d be a swept beaten zone, as it was called, at perhaps at about thirty or forty yards, peppering all of that and a certain amount of width too. So, the Bren wouldn’t chatter like that but a very good gun. The magazine would hold thirty rounds but later on |
11:30 | it was proved that some of the springs in the platforms in the magazines were getting a bit depressed by the full number of rounds so that was changed officially to twenty-eight rounds maximum. And the magazines were taken off and put on in a matter of seconds, a split second. You were off like that and pick one up and ram it on, it was all done, I suppose the whole movement would be maybe five or six seconds sort of thing. You get pretty slippery at it. |
12:00 | As far as magazines went, in New Britain days, the Bren gunners, there were two men, there were three men per platoon one Bren to each section and in the finish about six Owens each section, the rest rifles. As time went along there were more and more submachine guns supplied instead of rifles for jungle work was ideal and with the magazines for the Bren. The Bren gunners |
12:30 | would carry two mags on each of their basic pouches, that was four spare. Every man in the section would carry two and even as the platoon commander I would carry two in basic pouches. So, in other words everyone was carrying something to feed the Brens like that. How were the Brens operated? From what aspect? Do you mean the mechanics of the beast |
13:00 | or? Well, perhaps mechanics, the crew involved and how you would sight a target? Yeah, there was one, each Bren gun had a crew of two. There was a gunner, a number one so-called and his number two. And if number one was knocked or anything like that, number two would take over and somebody else would leap in to it. As far as the Bren went, |
13:30 | quite surprisingly it had no air cooling on the barrel at all. No water jacket as a Vickers machine gun has, because, well I must admit the Vickers were a different story too. You were dealing with a weapon firing a belt of a thousand rounds straight off if necessary and more. So, things got very hot in the barrel and it needed a water jacket and water cans to circulate it. With the Lewis guns of the |
14:00 | First World War and our early training, they have a heavy aluminium fin jacket around the barrel and that is encased with a steel sleeve, and as the blast went out from the muzzle, as the sleeve was reduced down it caused extra velocity and drew air from the ear over the fin so that a cooling… On a Bren there was no provision at all. It was just a solid steel barrel. Out in the breeze there was no wooden |
14:30 | protection for stock as on a rifle, but it did have a handle on top of the barrel, you carried, whereby you carried the gun. You didn’t have to get your hands burnt anyway. But with the Bren it was said, and we never put this to the test, but it was said you could fire them until the barrel was red hot and then throw it in water if you had it available, in a creek or whatever and it wouldn’t distort the thing, you know, but there were always, there was always a spare barrel with every Bren anyway. But to really change it |
15:00 | over, rather than get to the situation where you had a red-hot barrel. But they were quite remarkable that way. The mechanism was pretty simple, sighting and so forth was quite straightforward. It could be fired from the hip, it could be fired from a prone position while you were down on its bipod and I suppose, when firing from the hip of course there was a sling on it. The gunners would normally |
15:30 | have to carry the gun and the sling was simply around the shoulders and the back and the chest and they’d simply fire from the hip, you know. It was a sufficiently vibration free gun to tolerate that. With a Lewis it might be possible, a bit more awkward and of course a thing like a Vickers a totally different thing, a heavy machine gun. Different altogether. The Brens did have a |
16:00 | fixed firing capability. There was a tripod supplied with a turntable top and the Bren could be mounted on that. And its main purpose would be for indirect firing at night, and quite remarkably it was possible, we never used this incidentally in jungle, but it was possible in open warfare at least, this would apply, to take aim at a |
16:30 | known target and instead of giving yourself away by day, if you opened fire you’d get picked up. Instead of that you’d take aim at the thing, take a reading on the turntable scale and note that, and then to make sure you could see that in the dark you… Over on your left, two or three metres forward, there was a shielded light and you could |
17:00 | take by trial that reading and go and go and take that reading. The enemy couldn’t see that because the light was this way – notice that difference in traverse? And at night you could pick up the light here and just swing the thing until you got to the same registration, and then by indirect firing when you couldn’t even see the jolly target and the range set of course to drop it where it’s supposed to go, you had a means of firing indirectly in the dark. But we never, in |
17:30 | practice never used that, no. How much did the Bren weigh? Twenty-two pounds. Isn’t it marvellous, I remember? That’s pretty heavy. Oh, yes. And each magazine filled up with two and three quarter pounds. Did the Bren suffer from any stoppages? No, providing, if a round failed which was very rare indeed. It only meant just re-cocking |
18:00 | it and slinging the handle forward and getting on with it, but eject the dud round. That’s all. But generally speaking, I cannot remember a Bren failing at any time I don’t think and if they did it was only because of a, like a poor charge. But remarkably, imagine the hundreds of thousands of rounds made, you know at Lithgow and they didn’t fail. Incidentally, |
18:30 | in jungle days, every sixth months we were required to destroy all ammunition because they were afraid the tropic air and whatnot, moisture might upset the round and catch you, caught at the wrong time. So we were ordered to destroy the stuff. And of course when we were back in Jacquinot Bay, the first landing point on New Britain, it wasn’t the front line. Wide Bay was the front line up the |
19:00 | coast a bit. When we were at Jacquinot when this order was given and we amused ourselves just getting a Bren and sawing down trees and all this carry on, larrikins you know. And with the Owens I remember you could unclip the butt of an Owen, use them like big Mausers and take potshots with that. You mentioned, just a moment ago, that you were using hand guns or you were trained to use hand guns as well? Yes, revolvers. That’s right. I’ll have you know I was a |
19:30 | first-class shot. Were you a noted marksman? I was a first-class rifleman, a first-class shot with the pistols. That was the topmost thing. And with a Bren, you were termed as a marksman and I was that also. So, I had fair eyesight, you know, and so forth. How does firing a handgun differ to |
20:00 | a rifle or machine gun? Well, funnily enough in our day, to fire a pistol or revolver you kept your eye on the target and brought it up, which I see in the pictures these days, they bring them down. They use two hands. We only had one hand operation on the thing and we brought it up so you could keep the target in view. Coming down on the edge you’re blinding your target momentarily, and because it’s |
20:30 | only a powder charge, it is not a cordite charge… Once you get in to high velocity ammunition such as Marks 7s were in rifles, Brens and so forth and Vickers, they are a cordite charge. Now you’re dealing with a totally different force there. A thing that will propel a bullet for a considerable distance accurately. In fact a Lee Enfield held at forty-five degrees |
21:00 | giving you a maximum range will go for three miles. But I admit in the last mile or so the thing will be wobbling all over the auction. But nevertheless it was a very, very dangerous weapon and at point blank range from here to that wall with a boiler plate we used to… It was not armour piercing, just ordinary copper and nickel jacketed 303 Mark 7 cartridges you could put holes through the boiler plate that thick. It was quite amazing. |
21:30 | So they were more of a close range weapon? Well, if you want it that way. But it was just silly in jungle because in jungle on patrol, for example, our greatest fear on patrol, and it could happen any time, was ambush. And the vision at the outside would be ten metres and a lot of the time nothing, with jungle vines and thick jungle, and New Britain was heavily jungled. It |
22:00 | was canopy, so much so the moon didn’t get through a lot of the time, nor the sun. And because of that it was in a gloom. And I remember there was one beach there where we used to call the Golden Beach, one of the few beaches alongside the Walwut River. It was sand and we’d come out of the jungle on patrol and you couldn’t see for twenty minutes because of the blooming gloom, you know our eyes were all wacky. But, oh no the |
22:30 | 303 as I said prior to Denise, you know at six hundred yards one of my men with a telescope on admittedly, even with a scope, even if he was a crack shot, but a whisky bottle at six hundred yards, his first trial with a telescope, wallop, a man’s head, got him straight him away, you know, quite remarkable. So, they’re accurate, robust, after all they have all rifle drills thumping the ground and such forth. If you’re going up |
23:00 | over a palisade on jungle training, one man would grab one end of a rifle, another one the other, another one like that, withstand that and it would never upset them in any way. On the matter of rifles, of the last patrol I did, at that late stage of the war. This is |
23:30 | towards the end of ’45 before they turned it up in the 15th August ’45, they turned it up [surrendered]. It must have been about July I suppose. Their battalion was offered two modified Lee Enfields for jungle work. Now these were a standard Lee Enfield rifle. They’d woken up at last. You didn’t need the accuracy of a normal open warfare rifle. It had a |
24:00 | flash eliminator on the muzzle, which was a good idea. The fore stock was all cut back. The thing weighed about seven pounds instead of nine. It had the normal magazine on, a normal butt. But I was given one of the two to go on my last patrol. But that was too late in the piece. We’d been humping these other things all those years, quite ridiculously, you know. But |
24:30 | admittedly… Incidentally, as an officer, all that stuff you’ve seen on the pictures of the officer out front with his Webley [pistol] or something like World War I, they say come forward men or get behind and say, “Forward men.” No such animal, as an officer you quickly got rid of the 58 Smith and Wesson when you left Darwin. Dumped that quick and got a rifle. As a matter of fact from Darwin we got rifles too. You couldn’t be bothered with a pistol. A pistol |
25:00 | with its powder charged on was only fit for very, very close range work to be lethal of course. And as far as accuracy goes, well it depends on the firer. But, and incidentally in training with the pistols, the army didn’t play around. To get a pistol qualification, use your right hand firstly if you like, then they made you use your left hand, whichever hand you were. You |
25:30 | had to use both hands and pass those tests. You had to fire from the hip. You had to fire, aim shots at shoulder height. So, I went through the whole gamut of what you’re likely to encompass with pistol work but that didn’t apply in jungle anyway. You wouldn’t, for two reasons, one is the uselessness of it and secondly, being identified as I wrote in the notes to the battalion. Once we left Darwin and got on to New Britain |
26:00 | and particularly after we left Jacquinot Bay and went up to the line, all badges of rank are off quick and lively. No-one dares salute anybody. He’d thump him if he salutes you anyway, you know but it was a case of absolutely losing identity as anybody, like an NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] or officer, you get picked off first. That was one of the old known Japanese tricks you see, but even the ones with an oil compass as I would have. That was in its little pouch |
26:30 | but you didn’t even have that on your belt as an extra, look like something different from anybody else. You put that inside the basic pouch, you get rid of it. You looked as ragged tail as anybody and all the rest of it. And at IOTS did you learn specifically how to lead troops? Oh, yes. That, I suppose that came as a sequential thing. |
27:00 | You start off as a private; you were being led by a corporal in a section. He in turn is being led by the sergeant. He in turn is being led by the officer, our lieutenant normally. So, you had a schooling of what leadership in front of you meant and what we would do and the OTC [OTS, Officer Training School], the officers’ training school, certainly, you know, finished that off in all manner of things. |
27:30 | One is, example was a big thing. Your behaviour as an officer. You had to be a leader in the sense that you made an example to follow. That was the big thing I felt. For instance on the perimeters, and Wide Bay rather foolishly perhaps I’d take my sergeant and myself to link up and disconnect the booby traps inside the barbed wire while the troops were in their |
28:00 | holes. So, here you had your neck out but at least we were showing them, saying, “Well, you know, up the enemy and they can do this, don’t be afraid of them.” sort of thing. Yeah. What were some of the dos and don’ts of being an officer in terms of what makes good leadership? Well, I think straight away, I think of the word fairness. |
28:30 | There was military and everyone knew, both officer and troops, everybody knew where they got off and got on and the army or in another service, navy or air force had ways and means of bringing people to heel who thought they could thumb their nose to the service. There was always the thick end of the stick waiting and you might say, well how? Did |
29:00 | they whip anybody or shoot them? Of course that wasn’t on. But particularly in early camp days at Melville, for example, and I suppose Darwin to some degree, the hip pocket had an amazing effect on people. They got fined and the pay wasn’t that great and a fine, somehow had an absolute salutary effect. It was amazing. I’ve seen some |
29:30 | very tough men, you know, try to buck the issue but the fine would bring them to heel. Quite amazing. More so than jailing. They were the camp and army jails, guardhouses they were called, and people would be put in them for a week or two or something like that but the hip pocket, it’s always rather amused me to think that somehow that would bring the toughest egg to heel. |
30:00 | Incredible. But fortunately that wasn’t necessary too often but it did happen. People going AWL [Absent Without Leave], for example, they call it AWOL these days. I suppose absent without leave, okay. We used to call it AWL but they particularly would end up in the boob as it was called, the jail or guardhouse. Why was it called the boob? I don’t know why it was called the boob. You young devils these days think boobs are something else. Are you |
30:30 | listening to this? Do you think some officers learnt how to measure discipline better than others? Oh, yes. I suppose on that score, some of them had never had command of anything in their lives and you did strike the odd one or two but that is all, quite |
31:00 | a number who were ‘exercising the rank’, as it’s called. In other words they were behaving rather in a beastly fashion just because of their rank, pushing people about. And some were loathed because of it. Most were respected and loved but in my own battalion, for example, I can think of one particular officer. He ended up as a |
31:30 | major and he was a self-styled tough nut and that alone got him into a lot of disfavour with troops. They hated the sight of him, you know. But he was only one of a bunch and the rest we all got on very well with each other. And the men, any man of a battalion can talk to any of us now, you know. We all just talk like any decent, normal people would and we’ve got respect for each other. |
32:00 | I have absolute respect for all the gents I dealt with. You mentioned earlier today that during your officers’ training you began to study Japanese tactics. Yes. What involvement had the Japanese taken in the war at this stage and what were you learning about Japanese tactics? Well, I think the greatest |
32:30 | lesson was Singapore. The fall of Singapore and the approach of the Japanese down the peninsula to Singapore and the way they took it, the tactics were completely new to the British regime, you know. Both in equipment, tactics, completely different. Instead of the front line being a line. That all went west [was discarded]. It was all perimeter stuff. |
33:00 | So, there was no front line in that sense. There was a series of circular defence positions and they were more or less, yes in a front line as it were but not necessarily in line either, got to be staggered according to the topography to give you a maximum tactical vision or power or whatever. But the lessons learnt in Singapore I felt had a big |
33:30 | bearing on the matter and they caught them by surprise. It was even said in Singapore that some of the British troops, which included Australians and all the rest of it were bluffed out of a lot of it because the Japs had even run around in the jungle, on the flanks and lighting strings of crackers and you pop, pop, pop, pop, cripes. Another machine gun, another machine gun. They were like machine guns everywhere. They were just lighting these blooming strings of crackers. That |
34:00 | sort of bluff nonsense and you had to be very careful. We learnt a lot of lessons from it. At night, for example, on New Britain I went up as an observer, so-called. The head of battalion and I wasn’t the only one up in observation, there were half a dozen before me. Some were killed. I learnt from the ones in the line that at night a Jap [Japanese] would say from the jungle, “Are you there, Mr White?” |
34:30 | Or Mr Green or Mr Brown or something, you see, and someone would think, “Oh, that poor devil’s got, you know, separated from a patrol. He’s trying to come in.” you see. And they’d answer him. There’d be no further reply and next morning you’d have a dawn attack on your lap. And this stunt was to tap out the boundaries of the perimeter in preparation for a dawn attack. So, those sorts of tricks you know were relayed to the |
35:00 | likes of myself which was relayed back to the company when it came up and so on. In what setting did you study the Japanese tactics? Classroom, lecture room? Yes, particularly on a perimeter formation and drills because that was completely new, away from the open warfare of the Middle East that was going on or previous world war |
35:30 | tactics you see. A different germ altogether, and also the likes of patrol speeds because of the possibility of ambush. The action in the case of an ambush. I never had the joy of practising it but the rule was if you were ambushed, if it looked like any chance of it succeeding without any further orders, was, “Charge the ambush. Just charge it.” It was no good sitting there to be |
36:00 | or standing there to be killed, just charge it. Take the risk on who was killed in the process. But I never had the joy of getting in to that one thanks. So Robert would it be true to say that you used the Malaysian [Malay] Peninsula and the fall of Singapore as a case study during your officers’ training on Japanese tactics or how were you examining it? That would be the background of their lectures surely. Did the information that you received during that study change your |
36:30 | perspective or understanding of why Malaysia [Malaya] had fallen and Singapore had fallen to the Japanese? Oh, absolutely because of the behaviour of the troops there, drilled and trained for frontline warfare as a line rather than this perimeter stunt and also the rapidity of movement. Japanese of course used bikes to come down the Malay Peninsula, a thing unheard of, but you could shift a lot of people on bikes fairly quickly |
37:00 | compared with ordinary infantry marching. And of course quiet. There’s no rumbling of trucks and motors and tanks and all the rest of it come. It’s absolutely quiet. That was another little completely different, but mind you that was coming down a main road on the Malay Peninsula. But in jungle they’re only tracks and that was why the Kokoda so-called Trail should be called Kokoda Track. They were all tracks. Somebody called it |
37:30 | trail and it stuck but you see in arguments of late probably it should have been called Kokoda Track, which it should be. Well, I think trail’s an American term, isn’t it? We use the term ‘track’ here in Australia. Oh, well I suppose this is going back to Davey Crockett stuff, trail, isn’t it? Up in Alaska or wherever it was. Yeah. Did your officers’ training change your perspective of the Japanese as an enemy? Not only at OTS but also at other jungle schools we |
38:00 | went to in this state. Fellows who’d got back and when I was seconded as an instructor at Northam for six months we had one or two lecturers came in to the camp and gave lectures on the likes of Timor, how they’d been on with the Timor commandos there and we learnt a lot from them too about you know, Japanese behaviour and tactics and so forth. Can I just interrupt and ask, when were you |
38:30 | seconded to Northam? Yes, I was there for six months and… Was that directly after your officers’ training? Yes, soon after. I think it was about three or four months after I came back from Bonegilla and I was at Northam for six months and I think I got out of Northam about |
39:00 | November in ’42. Yeah. So, these chaps were coming back from the 2/2nd [Battalion] were they, or…? Some of them were, they’d escaped. They were brought, the remnants of that crowd often submarines eventually. They did a very good job there. Caused a lot of damage and annoyance did the Nips and that reminds me a sergeant who, from the 2/2nd, gave one of the |
39:30 | lectures at Northam and at the end of his lecture one bright spark when we were asked for any questions, he said, “What was your best weapon, sergeant? And sergeant said, “Our feet.” He said, “We used to make an attack on something and run for thirty miles in jungle.” He said, “Thirty miles, that’s a very long way.” In other words they had no back up, no anything to support them or, in a case of a jam, if you had a |
40:00 | casualty, you had to get him out best you could with what you had and they just used to run, you know and make quite sure they covered so much distance the Japs couldn’t catch them in time and absolutely lose them as far as where the devil where they on Timor. But that was his reply. It startled us a bit. Our feet. So as infantry types you looked after your feet. |
00:31 | After Bonegilla, what did you do next? Came back to Melville in due course just to bridge the gap. I was a corporal up until then and to bridge the gap they made me a lance sergeant but that was just a theoretical stepping stone. You couldn’t very well, well it could be done but not jump from corporal to a lieutenant so you were given a sergeancy, and do you |
01:00 | understand what a lance sergeant meant? Not really. Well, you got the full appointment of a sergeant but you were paid the price of a corporal. That’s what you were paid. That’s the lance bit. If you see a lance corporal he’s acting as a corporal with one stripe but he’ll only be paid a private’s pay, and hence the lance sergeant was only paid a corporal’s pay but then that was only an academic stepping stone, and then I was given |
01:30 | the commission and I stayed as such for about three years and I was told at the bitter end that I’d been recommended for captaincy in the field twice but the 10th Armoured Div was a big armoured division formed who were General Grant tanks. Their purpose was to go to the nor-west area and protect us from the Japanese invaders, assuming the Nips would land |
02:00 | somewhere around Broome, up around that area. Well, when the Nipponese threat dissolved eventually obviously this regiment was negative so they disbanded it, but they had to something with the troops, the NCOs and the officers. They couldn’t sack the officers and the NCOs quite. They couldn’t demote them so they formed a pool in Adelaide and from that pool |
02:30 | any battalion requiring a reinforcement officer for example had to draw from the pool initially. You could not promote within your own battalion while that was available. So, I dipped out I believe on a captaincy twice but that doesn’t matter. Didn’t matter two hoots to me. Did you celebrate getting to be a sergeant in any way? No. No, you just had the privilege of |
03:00 | enjoying the sergeants’ mess for eating and that was it. The fanfare and so forth wasn’t on to a large degree in those days. We had a march through Perth before we went bush I remember from Melville, a big march for the brigade. What was the big march in aid of? Just to display to the public that they had a force, you know. Such as it was. How was it received on |
03:30 | the streets? Very well. Oh, people in those days used to turn out in thousands wanting to see these brave boys and so forth. And that reminded me, back to Kalgoorlie days, when we were going to camp, the Kalgoorlie-ites are real rough diamonds in yet they’ve got a soft heart and we’d marched from the drill hall in Cheetham Street Kalgoorlie to the railway station to get on the troop train to go to Melville. Well, |
04:00 | the performance of all the women and girlfriends on the streets. They were like the brave boys going to the Middle East to war. They were crying and going on and all sorts of things you know. We were only going down to Melville to camp. But that sort of interest was there and it astounds me, really does, in these latter years, the turn out in Perth for Anzac Day parade. You know the people that line the streets umpteen deep |
04:30 | and there’s a sort of a regenerated interest somehow. Even the kids get in on it. Was it after that march that you were sent to Dandaragan, or were you at Dandaragan before? I’m just a bit confused. No, that would be before we went to Dandaragan, that’s right. So why were you sent to Dandaragan? A toughening exercise. |
05:00 | That was to make quite sure you could take it in the way of rough conditions and as I said before no tents, nothing like that. Lived in mia mias and under whirlies, a bit of a lean-to of leaves and things. What’s a whirly? A whirly is simply an Abo [Aboriginal] shelter that worked to stop the wind, really. It’s was just a lean… |
05:30 | Bit of a, made of branches and leaves, you know they made a bit of a windbreak virtually. But your sleeping quarters and so forth is in a hole. You dug a trench and put boughs and leaves over the thing and down there you know, even in the winter time it’s not too bad. Better than being on deck. Yeah, yeah that’s right. Were you taught any bush survival skills? Oh, yes. Like what? I don’t think |
06:00 | it went too far. As a matter of fact when I’ve seen the whatnot man on TV [television], you know the major. Whatnot man? Yeah, I think he was a good bloke you know but… Are you talking about the ‘Bush Tucker Man’? The ‘Bush Tucker Man’ [Major Les Hiddens]. Now the ‘Bush Tucker Man’, he’s a major of all things, but when he drops the Gs and drops the Hs off and things like that it’s amazing. Anyway, I think he’d be a very good soldier |
06:30 | anyway and that reminds me of other rough diamonds who were good soldiers but a bit rugged in speech and so forth but he goes in to all sorts of survival on native this and that which you have to be very, very careful what you did and what you didn’t eat and we didn’t get in to that sort of depth that he goes on with. What did you get in to? Well, I suppose the main thing was direction finding, to know |
07:00 | where you were in the bush. How would you do that? We had compasses, of course. We had maps of some sort. A lot of the maps were simply piecemeal things from civil days of survey teams or whatever and on the island they weren’t very detailed or accurate, but apart from direction finding by compass and that style of thing. Directions were mainly be the stars and as my wife |
07:30 | will tell you with some amusement, I told her on our days going together early on, when I was home on leave, I could tell the time by the Southern Cross and she doesn’t fail to let me know that you know. But that is also true. But away from that I can’t honestly remember much else except bush survival in the sense of shelter, direction finding. That’s about it, I think. How about water? |
08:00 | What if you ran out of water? What would you do? Well, with water, we were taught of course that dew often occurs at night in the bush and as such you can lick the water off the leaves of trees for one thing or collect it. How would you collect it? Well, you’d have to make some sort of a leaf chute and collect it in to your water bottle, hopefully. But you know you’d hope that that never happened. I think the main thing was not to get lost in the |
08:30 | bush, the same as the jungle. You had to know where you were going, what you were doing. Especially if there was a real enemy there, you wouldn’t want to walk in to his lines, would you, willy-nilly [without care]? Was there anything in the Australian bush you could actually eat? Except for livestock, I can’t think of any, I just can’t think of any, you know, flora at all that you |
09:00 | could eat as far as kangaroos went and rabbits and all that sort of thing. Oh yes we shot those and ate those. In the Darwin days we shot plenty of crocodiles; didn’t eat those. So was it just camping out really rough when you were sent to Dandaragan that you did that whole time, or was there any other sort of training that you did in Dandaragan? |
09:30 | Exercises galore. On Jurien Bay as I told you, some coast watching and I suppose that’s about the ins and outs of that. But its main purpose to kick us out of camp and get us in to some really, what may be really necessary, especially if the Nips had come in on the north-west coast we would have been in the bush then without any back-up or camps or anything of that nature. So, we had to be trained to |
10:00 | cope with that possibility which never occurred. I hate to think if it ever had done. And a very thin red line I can tell you. How are you coping with the rough conditions in Dandaragan? Everybody, well I think there was a general feeling, you know there was a war on and we’re in the trap as it were, and that was the end of it and nobody complained, got on with it. Though I must |
10:30 | admit by the time Darwin days arrived, we were months up there and the repetitive training and all that sort of thing with no apparent real need. That’s what the Australians didn’t like. If you had a real need, nobody ever failed at all. But if there wasn’t a real need there was a certain amount of, “Oh, cripes not that again.” sort of attitude, you know. And boredom was a dangerous thing in Darwin days. Before we get to Darwin, |
11:00 | was it from Dandaragan that you were went to Darwin? Personally that didn’t occur to me but the unit, yes. They went from Dandaragan via train to Adelaide, up to Alice Springs, with trucks to Larrimah on the Spirit of Protest as it’s called, a sling off to the Spirit of Progress, to Darwin. But I went from there, I was seconded |
11:30 | with about half a dozen other officers and NCOs to instruct incoming new recruits and by that stage of the game some of the recruits were, you know sort of getting down to the dregs of the barrel sort of thing. We had foreigners and all sorts that didn’t speak the language. Foreigners? From where? From WA [Western Australia], local foreigners. There’d be Italians and all sorts of |
12:00 | people and you know I’ve seen an NCO labouring away, teaching the stripping say on the assembly of a Bren gun and after he’d finished he’d say, “Any questions?” And one of these fellows would say, “You tella us just the one more time, corporal, how it works.” or something like that. Oh, you know, break your heart. But that’s what we were sent for, it was called the |
12:30 | 13th Training Battalion, purely for recruits. How did you go with training men? Well, I suppose the bit of schoolteacher, you know teaching before that helped considerably, even helped trying to make myself explicit. Some men were simply off the streets, off the mines in Kalgoorlie and farmers at Northam and so forth and it was all |
13:00 | completely new to them. But for myself I don’t think there was any difficulty. I always felt that if you have knowledge of something honestly there’s no difficulty in talking about it. If a person has to get it from books and artificial sources, something of that nature, that can be a difficulty. But I think if you’ve got a story and it’s from experience there shouldn’t be any trouble in that. Would the men have been |
13:30 | a similar age to yourself, that you were training? Yes. Well the vast majority with me would have been snaffled in the age twenty-one group and then they had another call up a little later, all the eighteen-year-olds. Then another call up of all the twenty-four-year-olds, then another call up of the twenty-eight-year-olds. And they were all conscripts. And I suppose the oldest one in my platoon was an old |
14:00 | soul, a fellow named Solway. And Sole was a miner and I suppose he’d be thirty years of age, by gee he was old, you know. He was considered pretty old. But to answer your question, yes, most of them were a similar age or very near, within a couple of years or so. That’s right. Most of them. By this time were you hearing anything about the 5th Column [spies and infiltrators]? Oh, yes well of course that was even [UNCLEAR] |
14:30 | were a 5th Column. You know, there’s an old army saying, “Girl who sleep in four poster bed look out of fifth column.” That was an old, in answer to that, you know. But oh no, we knew all about this. In other words, shut your mouth and don’t be shooting your trap off in public [speaking] about anything. And I was saying previously that jumping ahead a bit to New Britain days, |
15:00 | we received a letter or photograph from home you read it, looked at it and burnt it immediately for fear of being captured. And the enemy would use this sort of thing, it had all been learnt from people in New Guinea and elsewhere you know. So we got rid of that straight away. Never carried anything on your person except your identity disc around your neck and that gave your number, your name and your blood group but not even your rank, and that was |
15:30 | all you had in the way of identification from any other person. It was like that. How long were you actually seconded in Northam? Six months. So, that’s quite a reasonable amount of time. Were you at all disappointed that you weren’t following the rest of the men? The unit? Yes. When I left the unit from Dandaragan it wasn’t known then that they’d go to Darwin. So, I was |
16:00 | in Northam and learnt that the unit had been ordered to go to Darwin. And then I caught up with them not, about three months I think or four months after I got there and they suffered some of the end of the more serious air raid. But the time I got there the air raids were still on but we considered them a little bit of a joke because the orders were no searchlights when the raids were on, |
16:30 | no firing anywhere, nothing. And in this way it was deemed to be more successful than opening up on them because they could then orient themselves and find a target. And you’d have to understand that all units were deployed so much that it was unlikely they were going to find a decent target if you went doggo [laid low] and didn’t get a, and at night, you know, they only came at night because of what the |
17:00 | Spitfires were doing to them then and this was the way of combating it. Before we really look into Darwin, while you were still in Northam were you going away on leave at all? Yes. I think every month from memory we’d have a weekend’s leave. What would you do? Go home to Perth. Yeah. What did you observe of the civilian war effort |
17:30 | in WA and Perth? Well, a lot of people were working at it, you know. Women were joining various forces. My mother, for example, became a driver in the Red Cross, that’s right. And of course there’s all sorts of other auxiliary you know units doing work. In nursing staffs |
18:00 | they had not only the army nurses but they had the VADs, the voluntary aid detachment women, and thereby a hangs a few tales and so forth. So a lot of people were doing all they could to contribute and I had to smile at times, you know, and world war greeting, people in England and Australia and elsewhere knitting socks for soldiers and all this business. And the poor |
18:30 | devil, they probably wouldn’t care about socks or not, but that’s by the way but it’s all good thinking and I suppose in the days of World War I the poor devils and they’re freezing, scarves and things had some effect, knitted scarves, but everybody in general was trying to make contributions and keep the home fires burning as far as lack of men went in trade practice and professions and all the rest of it. How about air-raid shelters, were there any of those being built around the town? Oh, yes. |
19:00 | I lived in Buller Street in the West End. There was an air raid-shelter and they picked on say a blank block of paddock and put it out on, there was one about six houses down my old home and all throughout the city and everywhere else there were air-raid shelters for people to, you know, in preparation. My father dug an air-raid shelter in the backyard of my old home. He got a hernia in the process, you know, but that’s by the |
19:30 | way. And of course people used to, in that case used to have a bit of a stack up of tinned food and stuff they’d get their hands on, but that sort of thing became pretty rare. And stuff like tinned cream could not be bought, from my memory, from the shop because it was sent to the army. We had it in Darwin days and but that was… The shelters generally were scattered throughout all the suburbs and the city and even in the |
20:00 | homes, backyards. So, how were you informed that you were going to go to Darwin? Oh, army orders. You suddenly got an order you know, a written army order through your unit, CO and so on. What was your reaction to this news? Oh, I was delighted. Oh, yes you know. I mean to say training troops, going through the hoops, you knew all about it and |
20:30 | became sort of, it was done but I mean to say oh gee whiz, you know, Darwin. A new area. A new life. Oh, yes. And your unit was still up there? Oh, yes and they were there, the unit was there for a total of fifteen, no twenty one months total. So how did you get to Darwin? By train from Northam to Adelaide |
21:00 | to Alice Springs and as I say, truck then to fill the gap, there’s a line now been built, onto Larrimah which was the end of the line coming down from Darwin. What was that journey like? Well, it’s just a laugh you know. The present Ghan with all its modern equipment was one thing. They call it the Ghan for old time’s sake. But the original Ghan was a steam loco with these World War I type carriages and |
21:30 | it was so inept on getting up some of the rises on the way to Alice Springs, we used to jump off and beat it up the hills and jump on again so I nearly got caught there. Doddemeade, he had the primus stove, now they felt that a bit of boiler plate on top of the primus stove would help dissipate the heat better than putting the tin of sausages on the thing directly. So, what to do, so we’re going up through Peterborough, which is |
22:00 | on the way between Adelaide and Alice Springs, and there was a railway running workshops there and I thought, “Well, there’s every chance a bit of boiler plate knocking around there, isn’t there?” Well, the train stopped at Peterborough so I jumped off the train, ran to the workshops and sure enough I got a bit of boiler plate about that square, just right, about that thick. And I was coming back and I thought I could see the guard’s van disappearing and indeed it was and I’d have felt utterly |
22:30 | stupid had I hadn’t caught the thing. And I ran my heart out with the boiler plate and the blokes are hanging out the side you know, got me aboard the last moment. But that was good for the primus stove anyway. Well worth the effort. Yeah. Yeah. Did you stop over at Alice Springs at all? Yes and I’m just wondering whether… I can’t honestly |
23:00 | remember being on a staging camp there or not. I think they must have transferred us straight on to trucks from the train then on our way up to Larrimah. At Larrimah, that’s where the trucks were unloading the stores and so forth, put on the train all the time. A mate of mine, he was sent down from Darwin from the unit to run the loading parties there and the loading party was comprised a lot of |
23:30 | Aboriginals and they were paid by the army for their efforts you see. But Gerry told me and hard fact, they’re lazy. He said, “You supervise this crowd loading that truck.” or unloading that truck or the train. He said, “You move off but as you move off they’d sit down and you stir up the next lot,” and that went on as he did the round, all the way around. So he wasn’t too pleased with them you know. With good reason. Oh, yes. |
24:00 | Break your heart. What were the trucks like on the way to Larrimah? The trucks were all army trucks. The army truck constituted several brands. There were Chevs [Chevrolets], there were Internationals, there were Fords. The Fords were V8s. Ford trucks of various tonnages. The Ford V8s were prone to, in hot weather, prone to |
24:30 | engine stalling through air locks and goodness why they didn’t do better, but they were, in hot weather the V8 Ford was subject to these petrol air locks and the silly asses, there must have been a better way to do it to stop the heat getting on your petrol lines to do that but the Internationals didn’t have as much punch as the Ford V8s but they were rugged, a little bit sort of low on power |
25:00 | trucks but they were quite good trucks. I suppose out of the bunch of them the Chev 6s were the best trucks. They were the ordinary sort of truck. There were Blitz Wagons so-called, the four wheel drive sort of stubby shortened up chassis trucks and things. And of course the company commanders had a Chev 6 ute [utility truck], that was their vehicle. Each company commander had |
25:30 | one of those and a driver. So when you arrived at, because Larrimah I just need to make sure is just outside of Darwin, isn’t it? It would be, I forget how many miles down, but it’s well down. I’d have to look at a map or pick up some information as to how far down that was. Adelaide River was one of the |
26:00 | other main stations that way and Adelaide River was seventy miles South of Darwin. Larrimah must have been south of that again and I’d be guessing on the distance down from Darwin. It was quite a, it wasn’t just a suburb sort of thing. It was well done. A couple of hundred Ks [kilometres]? Something like that. What did Larrimah look like? Well, there wasn’t much there at all and from memory and |
26:30 | in the brief time we’d have going through it, we would be more concerned with getting on with it rather than worrying about the landscape but I don’t think there was more than, from memory, a couple of corrugated iron huts sort of thing. It must have been some sort of a station there for the train to come in and load to and from. I’m just wondering if you’re using that as some sort of a base or if you’re out in the open during your time in Darwin and around that area? |
27:00 | In Darwin our camp was at the forty-nine mile peg from Darwin down the main road and that’s because all the battalions and all the airstrips and everything else where possible, the navy didn’t have much option. I had to, you know, stay in Darwin Harbour area and around there. But everything else that could be deployed was deployed. And my own battalion, for example, which was a typical sample, was deployed over half a |
27:30 | mile down the road. In other words spread right out over half a mile. In a battalion you’ve got about eight hundred and fifty men. But nevertheless it was deployed over half a mile to cut down the air risk and so forth. Luckily when we were there and as I say, the rage had quietened down considerably and the Kittyhawks in the airport had been replaced by Spitfires. And Bobby Gibbes was the |
28:00 | squadron leader and he was ex-Middle East and one of my riding club mates was in his squadron, and my mate was killed. But that crowd certainly cut down the Japanese air attacks which came over, twin-engine Betty Bombers. But these cheeky Nips, we could see them on moonlight night at two hundred feet. We could see them glasshouses, in the cracks coming round you know. And I remember one of my mates, |
28:30 | he’s in a hole, as we all were at this stage, an air raid, red on. And he said in an Americanised voice, “Hey, fellows. This is not the Hollywood sound effects. It’s the real thing.” Witty humour. But on those occasions the Nips would get confused and get so sort of frustrated they’d drop the bombs where they could and mostly land in the bush. One morning I went in to Darwin, we did a lot of work in Darwin, a lot of exercises, |
29:00 | beach landing exercises on Mindil Beach , and that’s where I went up one morning and after a raid and a stick of bombs had gone straight across the powerhouse and it was bang, bang, powerhouse, bang, bang. The stick was dead over the top. The powerhouse was in the middle of number two and number three, you know. Just sheer luck. That’s one thing they could identify and they missed it anyway. And that would have taken out all of the |
29:30 | electricity in that area? Oh, yes. Yes. And thereby is another yarn, things come to my mind. Immediately in the road in to Darwin there was a minefield of quite a sizeable nature and the road went straight through the middle of it and of course there was a skull and crossbones, which was a normal minefield sign, all around the barbed wire. And up until that |
30:00 | time we’d been very religiously sticking to the road through the middle for a clear go. Anyway, one of the Beaufort bombers was coming back from a raid, got in to trouble, ran out of engine I suppose, was shot up as many were and he had to land somewhere. So, he had a look around and hello, there’s a reasonably clear patch, one of the few around the |
30:30 | place except the beaches. So, he brought the Beaufort in, wheels up to do a belly landing, skated to a stop. The crew stepped out, the two of them, they look around and there’s skull and cross bones on all the barbed, all around there you see. Well, they realised they were sitting on minefield, why it didn’t blow up? Had them tricked. They didn’t worry about that. They sort of crawled and tiptoed carefully out and |
31:00 | then the cat got out of the bag [secret got out]. Being early war that minefield was laid by the engineers, learning of course. They were five-pound tank attack mines. They were about that big and a very nasty bit of goods. Anyway, when it came to as to why didn’t this thing blow up you know, well and truly. Because they went over umpteen of them you see. In |
31:30 | the base of mine there’s a great brass screw plug that you took out, put in the igniter set as you did with grenades, put the plug back except that all the igniter sets were back in Lithgow waiting to go with them. And every mine had been planted there quite innocuously. Yeah, that’s why. Well, lucky for the crew of the Beaufort. Absolutely, yeah. |
32:00 | Yeah. One of those odd things you know. But that’s how Australia was caught with its pants down too, you know. Just completely lost at the beginning. But to the credit of the nation, having had such a very sudden start as it were in a pretty short time, they got off their knees and they got busy, you know. Rifles were made in Lithgow galore and |
32:30 | Brens were made and Bren gun carriers galore were made and so a wonderful effort really. Bren gun carriers were used well, stupidly enough as trying to be used as tanks on our training and I thought, “Rubbish. They weren’t made for that at all.” Is this in Northam? And Melville |
33:00 | and Darwin. A Bren gun carrier was designed by the Brits [British] initially for open warfare stuff for reconnaissance vehicles to give someone protection while they were reccying [reconnaissance] positions. How can you use them as tanks? Well, as I got really hurt, the CO ordered, when we were in Dandaragan, that all officers would learn to drive a Bren gun carrier in case of |
33:30 | emergency. And some of that training was tearing along a track across which was laid logs of that diameter, they’d be about that, you know, broadside and leaping these things in a carrier, flat out. The carrier weighs four tons and with that treatment, hitting with breakneck speed you could get the carrier airborne and land the other side. Well, this was great fun until the next day and my back felt absolutely broken and |
34:00 | it’s been bad ever since. But that’s the sort of thing they used to do with them and even in exercises, using them as you wouldn’t dare use them in the position where a tank would be doing the job because all the Bren carrier was, at best was a Vickers and normally only Bren guns because they were Bren gun carriers. That’s all. What sort of equipment were you given to go to Darwin with? |
34:30 | Right from the word go all our webbing and that sort of thing. It was webbing, rather than World War I stuff of leather, you know and all that, that was not on. It was all webbing equipment to the degree that the pack on your back was more or less like it always was but |
35:00 | of course made of like webbing. The basic pouches on the front were an innovation of World War II. The belts… Well, apart from the webbing shoulder straps, belt and all that sort of thing and the pack on the back. There was thing called a haversack which was on your right-hand side |
35:30 | but we only had those initially. I mean we never used them after that. There was a water bottle hung on your left-hand side, no it was on your right-hand side, and a bayonet and a scabbard hung on a belt on the left-hand side plus the rifle, which was the normal general run of the mill equipment, and of course the odd Bren gunners and so on and so forth but… Footwear? Beg your pardon? Feet. |
36:00 | Boots thankfully. The army boots of the infantry were pretty thick soled. They were heavy. They were very, very good boots though. You could walk, march and kick things out of the way and protect your feet and they would support your feet. Any other footwear would have failed I’m sure. Although when we were in jungle, the |
36:30 | Jap, you see, they’d had training in a stoush [a fight] in Manchuria for years. They knew all about jungle tactics and all that sort of thing and they developed equipment that was probably more suitable. Boots, for example, they were like a, they wore a canvas toe boot. You know, the one toe sticking out thing and for jungle work you’re walking on mud and that style of thing and they were, |
37:00 | and quiet. Our boots would crunch anything of course. But I was very thankful for our boots really and in jungle we were issued with jungle boots. They were different in that because you were on coral islands, that’s why the islands were even surviving. The mud and the compost heap of jungle droppings over the years just sitting on top of coral and with the |
37:30 | razorbacks and whatnot on our jungle boots. There were five cast brass plates about that by that with four spokes on them to let you crawl your way up, you know, the steep ground and so forth. And also the tongue on those, the tongue on the boot came right up to the top of the boot but it didn’t matter very much because any ideas about keeping water out. We were up to our waists and necks in the rivers at times |
38:00 | and we never got out of our clothing. A friend of ours was here a few months ago and she was ex Holland. She’s Dutch and in talking to me one day she said, “How did you get on for showers on the perimeters?” And I said, “Maria.” They have no idea. We were living in holes like ratbags. I said, “Showers! Well, to give you some idea, I didn’t have my boots off at one stage for |
38:30 | two weeks!” And it only ever, it rained every day in New Britain and at least it rained every day at five o’clock. Didn’t rain other times. And then when we could we were coming home from patrol we’d go in to the rivers, put some blokes on the banks to cover us with Brens and don’t take anything off. Go from boots to berets, just walk in underneath and come out. You didn’t worry about drying yourself because the tropic, you know, air that |
39:00 | off, was a pleasure. But we must have smelt like pole cats. Just going back to Darwin, because we’ll get to the Pacific a little bit later on in the afternoon, what did you have for head cover? Berets. Thankfully. The gang ahead of us that did the dirty work, and we took over from them, they still had slouch hats. Now a slouch hat in jungle with vines and leaves and branches and goodness knows what is just not on. |
39:30 | Just in Darwin did you have slouch hats? No. Yes, in Darwin yes. Oh, yes. Yes. I just want to sort of try to keep to Darwin for the moment. Well, in Darwin slouch hats definitely. Were they useful for that sort of climate? Oh, yes. And of course we must have had had steel helmets there too I suppose in case of air-raid stuff, but in New Britain we suddenly forgot about all these steel helmets and things and thankfully forgot about |
40:00 | slouch huts. Berets were ideal. With air raids, what would be the procedure in Darwin? Air raids, there were different degrees of air-raid warning. With an air-raid red you simply dive in to your slit trenches, which we had dug all round the huts and all the rest of it. Yes. So you’d hear it and just dive? That’s right. They’d come over from the, battalion headquarters would be alerted from Darwin. |
40:30 | They in turn would alert each company, orderly room. They in turn would alert the company at hand and we’d all dive for holes How often would you see an air raid when you were there? Well, they’d got down to pretty low numbers. I’d forgotten the number of them but it’s on record how many raids did occur, even at that stage. But as I said, we considered them as a little bit of a joke. It wasn’t the hair-raising devilish stuff of the early raids when the Nip had it all his |
41:00 | own way, could do what he liked, had a great time. What did you hear about casualties from air raids in Darwin? You mean in the initial raid, you mean? Yes. We learnt more or less what the public learnt and that was, well the post office group or crew were killed, |
41:30 | full stop. But one of the men was a Victorian; he was in my company in Darwin and Rabaul days and Wide Bay days on New Britain. And Ned was part of the Australian force in Darwin when the first raids occurred and he told me he helped bury a few hundred. And he told |
42:00 | me some of the detail of that. |
00:30 | I don’t think we established earlier Robert that when you re-joined the battalion it had been changed from CMF to AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. That’s right. I’m just making sure that change did occur in Darwin. Was that while you’d been seconded to Northam? No. I was seconded to Northam from Dandaragan area here simply because they wanted |
01:00 | some trained people to go and train new recruits and there was a demand for them and hence my being amongst others, called up there. But having said that, it was back in Darwin days that all of us were offered the opportunity to change our numbers to WX numbers and go AIF, which we did about ninety five per cent or more. So, as a whole battalion. |
01:30 | And that simply meant as against the restrictions before and militia numbered people they could then send you anywhere overseas, which of course we went on to New Britain. But I must add that the W numbers, notwithstanding that initial rule, they ended up with us anyway on New Britain so, you know, it was more or less a bit of a farce whatever you were. |
02:00 | What separates the CMF and the AIF? Well, the CMF were simply the Citizen and Military Forces organised, a voluntary organisation pre-war of course, and there were certain limitations on it such as not going outside Australia. But as I’ve just said, the time came when |
02:30 | they all went, our side, if required, anyway, as a unit. And the AIF was simply signed up to go anywhere in the world as required. And of course the Middle East is the thing plus New Guinea; some of the very early clashes in New Guinea were Milne Bay where a CMF did a lot of good work, long before a lot of the Middle East was even got in to action. As far as training went, |
03:00 | without in anyway skiting [boasting] about it, we were better trained over a longer period than many of the ones who went to the Middle East. They did a lot of their training when they got there and they did a good job, but at the same time we were very well trained. When the Middle Easters were brought back to Australia, when the German had retreated out of that, |
03:30 | surprisingly and rather unfairly those people from the Middle East were brought back for a bit of leave, they went to Queensland, they were converted to jungle soldiers in the rainforests there then sent up to New Guinea. And it was pretty unfair; they’d had a thrashing in one theatre. They came back for another thrashing and many of them said, “What are all these choccos doing in Darwin and elsewhere, |
04:00 | that haven’t been in to bloody action yet. We have had enough of it and what’s the big idea?” But of course it made no difference; they still sent them to New Guinea and so on. Where did the term chocco come from? Chocolate soldiers, meaning we’d melt in the sun. That was the sort of facetiously slang term and that was assigned to any CMF member, |
04:30 | which annoyed us considerably of course. Why were the CMF viewed facetiously? Well, they weren’t viewed facetiously but this tag was stuck, you know, from early day stuff. But why were they tagged with the negative? Well, the fact that we weren’t in a bloody scrap, a real bloody fight, you know, something that was a pretty gruesome sort of thing |
05:00 | but many, as I say, initially they wouldn’t even know many of them, but the CMF were in action at the likes of Milne Bay long before they ever got to the Middle East and so forth and proved themselves, no doubt about that. Did you ever take offence to the term chocco? Oh, no, no, no I couldn’t, not, below my dignity. Any other men in the ranks take offence to being called choccos? Well, I would think it probably |
05:30 | was the cause of ruckus and so forth in some of the hotels. When people got too many, you know, sherbets [beers] down their neck and looking for lash, and there were fights and things and stupidly enough troops, you know, even Australians going through to the Middle East, they’d run in to, apart from the local CMF and so forth and hotels and things on leave, they’d run in to Americans who |
06:00 | were coming through here on their way who were the ones permanently stationed here and there were bar fights and it was all pretty stupid, you know. But my own brigade had what’s called a civic patrol. A patrol party, a picket, they were called a picket party, picket duties was sent in to Perth to act as a sort of a roving police force to keep law and |
06:30 | order amongst Australian troops and the Americans, on the other hand, they also had their pickets and they got around with batons which were simply wooden batons like baseball bats. They were pretty long and they had no compunction if any of their troops got in to a fight and wouldn’t cut it out, they wouldn’t worry about hitting them over the head or the shoulders. They simply broke their hands, smashed their fingers. That stopped them fighting and they were quite, |
07:00 | you know definite about them. So, it was a warning to their troops to behave themselves and if they got out of hand they got that treatment. Just like that. Earlier on when you were talking to Denise, Robert, I think you said something about training a lot of ethnic men when you were in Northam. What about internment? Were a lot of people interned? Well, either the nation had come to its senses and cut out that nonsense by that stage |
07:30 | and the rules must have been lessened or something and I don’t think they would have been volunteers. I think they were caught up in an age draft as a conscript. I can’t be sure of that and the joke is in recent reading, the gent who was writing, the author of the book on our battalion, he cites there was one man on our battalion had a father and |
08:00 | his brothers interned. He’d be an Italian I think, but that was the ridiculousness of it. Gwen grew up with a lot of the Italian people in Harvey and there were German people and so forth. Well, and truly Australianised and working hard and working well and by the rule of the game they were interned. It was just nutty. Whereabouts were |
08:30 | those people interned? A lot of them, the joke was Harvey Camp, the military camp that initially was an intern camp and there were other intern camps which I can’t cite but I know that Harvey was and just going on a bit, Harvey Camp also was the staging camp for the Kormoran prisoners who came ashore from the Kormoran after |
09:00 | sinking [HMAS] Sydney. They were brought down here and they went to Harvey intern there and my original company OC, my own battalion, selected some from other platoons in the battalion and they were the escort for those prisoners by train to Adelaide, to the internment camp there. But that was another sort of thing by the way. On another occasion in Melville Camp days |
09:30 | a ship loading stores and ammunition for the troops in New Guinea probably had its loading stopped. The lumpers would not load any more. They weren’t going to load these things for people at war or some such rot. Anyway, one of our captains, OC of a company. He was a tall man, Charlie Stanbull by name, Charlie went down with a, I think it was |
10:00 | about probably a platoon strength and a company strength along the wharf, and got between the lumpers and the ship and the lumpers refused to get on with it you see. So, he had a brain wave and of course he and others since wonder how it all worked but he roared out an order, “Fix bayonets.” Once they fixed the bayonets the lumpers just got on with the loading. I doubt if he would have skewered anybody and if they’d taken to the |
10:30 | troops I don’t know what would have happened actually, you know. They couldn’t or they wouldn’t be that ruthless as to carry out an order and charge them. Just returning to internment, did that cause much division within the community? Did it down at Harvey when the Italians and the [(UNCLEAR)] were interned. I think… |
11:00 | It must have been horrible for those families. Oh, ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. But the law was the law. It was done. I think there’s a bit of misgiving since, definitely. But such was the panic, you know and it’s early on of course when that happened. Was there a panic? |
11:30 | Well, definitely over the whole of Australia, you know they were locking up anybody with any sort of ethnic background, fearing they all were spies. That’s what they feared but of course it was utter nonsense. I think Denise asked you earlier about the 5th Column activity here in Perth. I don’t remember any definite information like that. But the Japanese had been, I can remember when I was a kid, |
12:00 | Japanese were coming in on ships to Fremantle and there is a map taken off a Jap soldier in New Guinea later on. It sat in that heap of stuff from Cliff Tamberlin[?] and you know, the sad part about the map taken off this Nip shows Australia and quite a bit of information around. They would have picked it up from |
12:30 | commercial shipping times and they obviously had a few plants on the ships to keep their eyes open and plot the place in readiness. I’ve even got, I’ll show you some notes there which were printed by the Japanese. I got these from Rabaul. These bank notes were to be used by the Japanese in Australia when they took it over and declare all our money void and then use their money so they had control of it and that’s the sort of belief they had. And Australia |
13:00 | was wary of because Mother England, you know, was in dire straits with Singapore falling and two capital ships being sunk by aircraft. These naughty aircraft. That was something new. You know, aircraft sinking ships, battleships. What are you talking about? But it did happen and it was a great jolt and added to the panic and then of course the raid on Darwin, oh dear that was, you know a bit of a shock. But as we’ve talked about, it was |
13:30 | nothing like what did happen there was relayed to the public for morale’s sake. What do you think of the contention that the Japanese didn’t have any real plans to make a real invasion of Australia? Well, that’s utter rubbish. They did have plans. They didn’t print this money for nothing. For example they had put themselves out over a number of years to get quite a bit of information about the place and I don’t think they would have risked |
14:00 | man or machine to come down as far as Exmouth on the West Australian coast alone or send submarines, one man or two men submarines into Sydney Harbour at the risk for nothing. I think they had every intention of taking over the place just like that. As a West Australian, how do you view the Brisbane Line? That was a disappointment. |
14:30 | We didn’t like that idea but of course we didn’t know about it at the time. But the official decision, that would be it and don’t worry about us. Let us sink but when we got to hear of it post war, we’re not too pleased about that of course. I don’t think any West Australian would be. Bad business. What armaments were there in Perth? That’s a bit of a joke. Well, there were two guns on Rottnest [Island] |
15:00 | and at Buckland Hill near Fremantle there, they had some fort-type guns there facing seaward. What else did we have? We had American anti-aircraft crews here with their guns. There was one right outside our front gate at Melville Camp. The navy worked out of Fremantle. |
15:30 | The American base there that I’ve talked about was a good idea. It was well away from possible attack. They did a lot of good work out of there and also we had what is known as the naval auxiliary patrol. Now the navy auxiliary patrol was made up of men in the various yacht clubs with their launches and they used to patrol up and down the coast looking for Japanese submarines |
16:00 | and things. Can you imagine what hope they’d have if they saw anything and it saw them? It would be hoped they weren’t seen. And that reminds me, I was given the job of the platoon’s strength of checking Rottnest on one occasion out of Melville Camp, to test the defence measures they had there. My job was to capture the aerodrome. Well, at about ten o clock at night or some such thing we |
16:30 | got down to Royal Freshwater Bay Yacht Club. I had a platoon’s strength. That’s about a total of thirty three people and I was duly assigned to a skipper on his launch, which was a fair size. He had a thirty foot or so. He couldn’t only take one section and myself to platoon headquarters. The other sections, each of the others were put on another launch and in the darkness we took off to get to |
17:00 | Rottnest, you know not seen. And when we got just about to land there at a given point, just before dawn, still in the dark, I found the launch I was on was there but the others were missing. They were lost somewhere in the sea and around Rottnest you see. So, brave like, we pressed on to attack the baddies, you know, that would be defending the place |
17:30 | and when we were within about fifty yards of the shore I said to the skipper, “Crash the beach.” We’re going to crash it and fall off and fight the enemy you see. He said not on your life to wreck his boat crashing the beach. So, we got the dinghy and three or four at a time we rode ashore and we said to the enemy in imagination, “Bar this, while we’re doing all this.” We came in dribs and drabs and we’ve got them all ashore eventually and we attacked the aerodrome and allegedly |
18:00 | we did a bit of good. In any case it stirred up Rottnest on their lack of security. It made a difference. But of course all that, the guns on Rottnest and the guns on Buckland Hill, it’s of no account whatsoever in what was available with aircraft which could have come off carriers. They don’t have to put their nose in to the hornets’ nest at Fremantle. You can |
18:30 | land anywhere on the coast, you know, thousands of kilometres of it and get into us that way. There was no need to be silly enough; in any case the couple of guns on Rottnest were about World War I calibre. There were big guns but I mean to say modern warfare and aeroplanes and all that sort of thing just wouldn’t be of any account at all. So, I’d say in short the place was defenceless. What do you think would have been the most likely landing place for the Japanese |
19:00 | had they invaded from the west? Well, briefly I suppose anywhere between Fremantle and beyond Broome. There’s plenty of landing places, you know, suitable beaches for landing. And they would have come overland. They would have landed vehicles without any bother at all. We as the thin red line would never have stopped the avalanche in the force they would have mounted, |
19:30 | wouldn’t have meant a thing. So, I think they would have had transport. If they didn’t have roads, then bush tracks were quite tractable, and get down here, take the place over. In the eastern states possibly a little better defence there. But nevertheless, with their aircraft carriers and aircraft and that sort of thing I don’t there would have been any trouble. They would have got into the place anyway and |
20:00 | made a nuisance of themselves. Whether they could control it then, I don’t know. But they certainly would have made a great impression. When you were patrolling the coast north of Perth and in the northern wheat belt, how real was your concern that the Japanese may be preparing to invade? I don’t think, well put it this way. The threat was serious enough and |
20:30 | we at least realised that it was a definite serious position because it wouldn’t have to be real defence. I think when they’d have got through the thin red line then they would have just taken over. At the time, well you may say well were you worried? Well, we weren’t, you know. I think in any war situation nobody thinks he’s going to get it anyway so there’s always fear |
21:00 | if necessary. There’s definite fear but there’s not, if you can understand it doesn’t stop you, you know, put it that way. How seriously did you take those patrols? Oh, they were done with earnest but I think at the back of our heads we realised what a lot of rubbish. You did call it cowboys and Indians earlier. That’s right. Yeah. But that was training you see and you know in the likes of |
21:30 | the services the persistent training and the repetition which soon gets pretty boring. If it comes to the point, however, and the obedience to orders without any argument or question, it can save men’s lives. How did you view the decision when you were posted to Darwin? Well, different situation. Different sort of environment. Interesting and |
22:00 | we didn’t worry about it at all. Did you consider it a more serious role? Well, I don’t think we’re… I don’t think we had any option, really. You just did as you were told and I think once were in the groove, you know, we just stayed there. But you wouldn’t have much chance of dodging it anyway. |
22:30 | But that’s not really my question. I’m just wondering whether or not you took your role more seriously once you’d moved to Darwin? To Darwin, oh yes, that would be true. In case anything did come in. But I think behind the scenes we probably wish it hadn’t, or hoped it wouldn’t happen because it would have been a pretty serious situation. But Darwin had thousands and thousands of troops up there including navy and air |
23:00 | force in no mean numbers so when that, when the number up there got so great and also the aircraft was modernised and you know there was quite a number of them, and I think we felt a darn sight more confident. What was your battalion’s role in Darwin? Simply defence of Darwin and Australia, you know. The case of |
23:30 | of attack. But the air force used it as a great base. They did a lot of work out of there in bombing the islands and Japanese positions north of Australia, oh yeah. What was your role? You were obviously a part of the defence but what was your battalion’s role? What were you actively doing in Darwin? Well, |
24:00 | you, in preparation for the invasion, put it that way, exercises were planned and framed to cope with that, you know your imaginary forces coming in and including beach landing exercises on Mindil Beach, crossing of rivers by all sorts of means when there were no bridges. We trained for example in the Adelaide River, which was |
24:30 | alive with crocodiles, alive with them. And I can remember what they used to do is send down half a dozen men in the morning with grenades and hurl the grenades in to the river and the crocs in that section would beat it for the day, and we’d train in the river backwards and forwards all day and no croc ever attacked anybody after the grenade treatment to start off the day and there was such simply tricks. To [UNCLEAR] coming |
25:00 | back from the jungle experienced information from New Guinea and elsewhere such as to cross a river when you had no means other than just your own gear. We’d get out our groundsheet as it was called, and it used to serve as a cape as well, and it had eyelets in the side and all that sort of thing, and by filling that with weeds and reeds and things and pulling it together with the pull-through from the rifles as a cord, |
25:30 | pulling all the ends together then that thing would let you float across the river with your steel hat on top of it and your rifle and you could put your boots on top if you had any sense because they were an absolute dead weight for boots, and filled with water they were worse of course, and you could, you know, kick your way or paddle across the river with this, all the gear floating with clothing on top. Quite a good trick |
26:00 | and little things like that all the way, in preparation again, for what turned out to be work on New Britain. Did you spend much time down there just for recreational purposes? No, there wasn’t a lot of time assigned to that. They had some, what we call rest and recreation camps but they were few and far between indeed. A place called Berry Springs where swimming and so forth |
26:30 | could occur and so that was used quite a deal by the various units but your own turn, I think it happened about twice in our time there in twenty one months. So, pretty rare. What about croc hunting? Yes. For want of something better to do and nowadays I wouldn’t be so interested thanks very much. I wouldn’t be bothered but the crocs then were plentiful. They were hunted |
27:00 | and as such they were afraid more or less but if you were in water of course, they were afraid of nobody. But to shoot crocs you had to virtually stalk them and make it pretty quiet getting through the tropical bamboos and all the rest of it, and we used to shoot the things just for something to do I suppose, but since those days and croc hunting has been banned except by |
27:30 | very few licensed shooters, the crocs have got cheeky and they will coming out looking for people. Now anybody stupid enough to camp near a river bank or anything is very, very stupid. And these people that take risks with them are very, very silly because a croc is a vicious, dangerous, powerful animal and the front end of the jaw is one thing but the tail is the other dangerous bit. They can bring that around and |
28:00 | swipe a big animal let alone a human being into the water, in a flash. As far as speed goes, I’ve seen them going as fast as a running man on a mud bank. You know, those great lumbering things you see, don’t kid yourself. If they’re hassled they can really move and Steve Irwin [television personality] puts his neck out all the time. He’s only got to make one false move one day and he’ll be got. |
28:30 | Much as he thinks he knows about them. Whereabouts were you positioned in Darwin? At the forty-nine mile peg, down the North Australia Road and, as I say, while we were there, that was because of getting the units out of Darwin and deployed all over the area, while that is true, we did a lot of work in Darwin; working parties, |
29:00 | exercises, all that sort of thing. Even walking carefully through that minefield. Yeah. So what kind of accommodation and facilities did you have at the forty nine mile peg? There we took over a camp that had been built for the 27th Battalion, which was a South Australian battalion, and therefore we went into the bush as it were but in a virtual |
29:30 | ready-made camp. They went on to Bougainville. We took it over. The huts were made by the unit that specialised in this sort of work under government payment. The huts were timber frame, galvanised iron roofs. They would hold so say half a dozen officers or perhaps eight, |
30:00 | eight to ten men I suppose. The walls, what we call the pandanus palms are the palms that grow all over the Northern Territory and they used to cut the foliage top off, and the palm usually is about that diameter and goodness knows how many of those things were used, but they were laid side by side to form the wall around the huts except as a door, there were no doors of course, just openings each end and |
30:30 | the wall started about that high from the ground and went up to about that high, just to stop the rain coming in. And the roof purposefully was overhanging the walls by about nearly a metre to stop driving rain coming in. And then within the hut from the central post holding up the ridge of the roof was a rack on which gear could be put. The beds were four sticks in the |
31:00 | ground and a couple of sticks, bush sticks to act as the longer runs as it were. There was split bamboo slats for the mattress and that was wired with a whole signal wire like lace through it, you see, and that was your bunk. And on top of that was a palliasse, you know the usual bag and straw business. It sounds reasonably comfortable. Well, absolutely |
31:30 | weatherproof and you know, they were quite satisfactory, there’s no doubt about that. After the war there was a crowd that must have I suppose sort of tendered for them and all those and all those huts and frames and galvanised iron, all that was taken out. And Gwen and I were up in Darwin about four years ago and I was able to walk on to the exact place where I used to sleep in the |
32:00 | Northern Territory because the hut and our company was on the end of a feature which went down like that at the end. As such, the huts had their floors built up to a level stage and that meant putting rocks and things to build it up. Well the rocks are still there. The huts are gone. I was able to stand in the corner where I used to sleep. It’s quite interesting. As I approached it on the parade ground was a bit of cleared bush, five kangaroos went across from |
32:30 | here to the organ in front of me and you know there were other signs. I could see where all the various buildings were and so on and so forth. What were your thoughts of when you returned to visit that site? Well, it was quite something to be able to do that I thought and especially to identify the exact place. Not only the company area but also the remnants of the hut foundations. |
33:00 | Quite a surprise really. I might add a bushfire had been through it and everything was black and filthy so I rolled my pants up to stop them getting too marked, and we had a car hired out of Darwin and Gwen stayed in the car just on the road about two hundred metres away. And from the marked camp entrance there are sign boards there telling you of the 27th’s prescence and the 28th taking over and where |
33:30 | each unit went from there and from that entrance position I estimated. I said to Gwen, “Well, I reckon if I go down about six hundred metres that will bring us in line with where my company was.” And we drove down the six hundred metres and stopped the car. I walked into the bush and right in front of me. Just like that. And the fact that this feature went down, there was the feature, you know couldn’t miss that, and from there it was easy to identify the rest of it. It’s interesting. |
34:00 | How long were you in Darwin? After I went back from Northam I was there about a total of, it would be something like nine months and at one stage, just prior to going to New Britain we had one month’s leave. But that meant instead of doing the obvious thing of coming overland back to Perth by any means, we came by ship to |
34:30 | Darwin and because of the nearness of Timor, off the north Australian coast, which was Japanese based and they were afraid of aircraft jumping off there and getting at troop ships, to get back to Fremantle we had to come right round the east coast, across the [Great Australian] Bight and into Fremantle that way. And by the time we got home and had our month’s leave and got back, oh it would be about two and a half months I suppose. |
35:00 | Well, before we explore that in a bit more detail, how many air raids would you experience during those, what is it probably eight months in Darwin? I’ve forgotten the actual number but they had been reduced considerably because by that stage the Spitfires were in force and they weren’t so keen then. When the Kittyhawks were there and so forth they were a bit more cheeky and prior, in the early days as you can gather from the first |
35:30 | raid, they virtually came unopposed. Having a great old time. And before I got up there, about two months before or so, my unit was in a working party at a place called Parap which is a suburb of Darwin, and the Nips came in, in daylight, and they strafed and bombed the place. They had a great time. Quite unopposed and you know it was quite disgusting |
36:00 | really the fact that they could do that even at that stage. But it was later the Spitfires arrived and that was the end of their daylight antics. They used to come over at night instead. But I can’t answer the question accurately, how many. But there are records of it. Matter of fact in some of that stuff out there that Cliff’s Tamberin[?] brought in, it’s got the whole, every raid that was ever on Darwin. Date and all the rest of it. Were there ever any casualties in your battalion? Yes. We didn’t |
36:30 | have many at all. We had a very lucky war. I mean specifically in Darwin? Oh, Darwin, no. We had, I remember one fellow on that Winnellie raid. I wasn’t there. I was back at Northam. But he had a lot of shrapnel through a thigh but he lived and I think they were all in slit trenches of course, they’d dive for those. It was a bit of a |
37:00 | joke that the fellow that went in last in the same slit trench, he was cursing the man who was right down the bottom. They often went to the nearest hole you know and sometimes it would be three in the blooming slit trench but the bloke on top was cursing the bloke telling him to get lower below, the poor devil – he’s facing the dirt anyway. But no, the only casualty I know about was that raid and that was the casualty. What was the procedure for an air raid? |
37:30 | Well, simply got an air raid red it came in stages. I think it was yellow, green, red. When a red was on you could do nothing but dive for a hole. How would you know there was a red alert? The battalion headquarters would be notified from Darwin who had lookouts and all the rest of it and also information coming from Melville Island, which was north of it again, warning of an approach. The battalion headquarters would get wind of it, |
38:00 | they in turn would ring all companies who of course would tell us all on the spot. Just verbally or would there be a sign or flag or…? Just telephone conversations. And when it hit the company there’d be a runner sent to at least the platoon commander or something like that. And was there ever an air-raid alarm? No. No. No. No sirens? No sirens. No, no. So, you’d |
38:30 | purely be on alert until you visualised or heard the planes and then run for cover? That’s right. Oh, no well, when you got a red alert it was time to get in the hole. Prior to that the greens and yellows and things, oh yes you could decide, wait for the red before you got busy in a hole but otherwise as soon as the red was on you took no chance. How did you receive news that you were being posted to New Britain, |
39:00 | that you’d have a month’s leave at home? Well, the idea was that I suppose in Darwin days boredom, you read about this elsewhere. Boredom was starting to take hold because of the sort of apparent pointlessness of it. It was training and training and more training, |
39:30 | exercises and training. More of it and really you weren’t applying it. As I said, when the Nips came over in aircraft funnily there was no firing, no searchlight, nothing at all. Let them guess where they were. It was a better way than opening up on them to give them some possibly orientation of where they were and what they were trying to bomb. So, there was a boredom factor. So, people in general were quite, I think excited, |
40:00 | to go to New Britain, even though they knew that some would not come back. So, the attitude was just to tolerate the Japs when they’d fly over? Yes, because not being able to orient the weather themselves or a target, in desperation often they’d just drop their bombs and they landed in the bush and the place was so deployed the damage was very |
40:30 | little at that stage. But the Spitfire pilots in getting out of the Betty Bombers in daylight particularly, a tropically fitted out Spitfire has a one and a half hour’s duration only and they’d chase the Betty Bombers who by this time had turned tail, turning tail for home and they’d shoot one down, and in their keenness they’d get after the next one |
41:00 | you see, and of course they’re getting further and further away from Australia and many of them then made the mistake of getting too far away and come back and land in the sea off Darwin or Mindil Beach or wherever they could. We’re getting the wind up, but I might possibly ask you one more question? What kind of… How closely did you follow what was happening with the air force and the aircrews and the planes that were based up there? |
41:30 | We did a lot of exercises with them in conjunction, you know. Ground and air exercises. There were several incidents and the one particular one, the Mitchell bombers, they were on Batchelor airstrip, not many, just a few miles down from our camp, and the crew of one of those Batchelor aircraft were, they were Dutch crews incidentally, |
42:00 | American… |
00:32 | Robert, we were just talking about ground to air exercises with the RAAF. Yes, well, Big Hans, the Dutch skipper of this particular Mitchell and his navigator used to come up to our mess and as such we sort of knew them personally, and because of that obviously on this exercise we were asked to purposefully break cover and go to open ground to give them practice strafing |
01:00 | exercise. Well, the general topography in Darwin area is more or less plain country, fairly flat except all the creek and river lines are bordered with heavy tropical bamboos for about, I suppose ten metres each side and bearing all that in mind we broke cover for their benefit. What are they strafing you with? This was just, |
01:30 | most of it was just dummy running you see, mock strafe but we did do exercises with the Beaufighters who had fought, they had six twenty-millimetre cannons on them and they actually came in over our heads in an attacking, imaginary, as if we were in an attacking role and come over your heads and open up the ground in front of you, you know with a twenty-millimetre sort of thing no trouble at all. But on this occasion this particular Mitchell came |
02:00 | over us and he was so busy showing off, almost, a lot of the men were ducking and going to ground sort of thing and coot came over you see. He was so busy at it he was forgetting about the bamboos ahead of him which were quite tall. I suppose they’d be about oh fifteen feet, sixteen metres high. And when he woke up to it he had to haul back and hope and he ploughed through, some of the treetops |
02:30 | were at hand also and it’s hard to believe but the two bomb doors were ripped out of the fuselage and the nose-wheel flap was ripped out and those three doors fell to our feet more or less. Well, he flew home to Batchelor, what he did, he had the sense to keep his nose down and keep air speed. If he’d tried to pull up any harder he’d have stalled the thing and gone in. Anyway, the next day |
03:00 | we had visits from some of the ground staff at Batchelor looking for these doors that had kind of disappeared from… Well overnight they’d been converted to a thousand brooches and all sorts of things, sent home to people and you know, to amuse ourselves. That was another sideline up there to stop you going mad. We got our hands, I had a couple of tools sent up from home and we used to, any crashed dural [duralumin] from |
03:30 | aircraft we’d turn in to something. Like what? I made a pearl bracelet for Gwen out of pearl shell and so on but that was just a bit of an aside, all this business of aircraft and amusing ourselves with manufacturing something to do, do something. I’m must curious as to find out what you can make out of a couple of bomb doors? Oh, yeah. Oh, use the |
04:00 | dural, cut it to bits and make brooches and necklaces and rings even, all this sort of business, and I’ll have you know… This is the height of fashion. Some of the rings had genuine toothbrush handle plastic coloured inserts. This was, some of the innovation and desperation, yeah. So, did they come out looking all right? Oh, yes. And we didn’t have any mechanical |
04:30 | buff or anything, all hand polishing with bits of army ammunition packing felt and some of the ruche abraser from the canteen, which was sold to sharpen your razorblade and all this business. There was all sorts of tricks like that you know. I can show you amongst other things, a twenty-millimetre shell case. We’ve got that. On the air strip we used to get these things and |
05:00 | hacked around looked like a yacht but that’s out there on the table. That’s a sample of what went on you know, yeah. But the air force, we worked many times like that and the Spitfires on one occasion came down also on mock strafe. They came down so blooming low that a friend of mine, he’s still alive. His platoon got the most near treatment. I was about twenty five |
05:30 | metres to his left and the blighters you know, they’d come down so much near your head you could smell the glycol coolant and all these gum leaves and rubbish camouflage on him just blew off with the slipstream. These monkeys. They were very clever pilots. They were ex-Middle East, a lot of experience and just as perhaps an interesting point. The airstrips on many occasions were |
06:00 | built right alongside the North Australia Road or what became, what’s the Stuart Highway, and because of that they simply temporarily stopped the traffic at each end when two fighters went off in the afternoon or morning’s patrol. It was a ritual patrol and these, you know two high-speed fighters, wingtip to wingtip, would bore down there and bet each other who could get off first apparently, and coming back. I’ve seen them, I’d |
06:30 | estimate them about three thousand feet, simply put the thing on its wingtip and slip and slip and slip and you think, “Gee well these skites will never get out of this, you know.” And at the bitter end they’d level off and land on the end of the strip perfectly. They were clever, very clever. Yeah, skilled. Seems like a bit of madness really. Oh, yes. Oh, there’s plenty of that went on. Yes, they’d get bored |
07:00 | you know, and do something nutty which would… Can you imagine today the modern aspect two high-speed aircraft fighters going down, wingtip to wingtip jogging, you know, together, all this sort of thing and carry on. One day we were on one of our fixed route marches up towards Darwin and we saw a bit of a commotion just off the road, oh about a hundred metres away and air |
07:30 | force breakdown trucks there and this sort of thing and it turned out the Spitfire pilots were hedge hopping, tearing around at ground level and jumping over the bamboos, and down the other side you see and you can guess what. One came up on one side of the bamboo, one from the other side and met head on in all places of the Northern Territory. Both were killed instantly of course. But that’s the sort of thing that did go on. Why were they doing the hedge hopping? Oh, I think something to |
08:00 | do. They would be pretty bored, you know. It’s a case of day after day after day and same old routine and all that sort of thing and by that stage, of course, the Nips were getting a bit more afraid to put their nose in. What were you doing to combat the boredom? Well, an NCO, an officer, had a bit more to worry about that other troops and I suppose that stopped us, |
08:30 | well even admitting to being bored. You had work to do. You may say, “Well, what sort of work are you talking about?” Apart from exercises and looking after the gang. Well, one thing a platoon commander had, you had to censor letters and you’d come home from the mess at night, probably ten o’clock and you’d find a platoon strength of thirty men say |
09:00 | and letters writing home. They had nothing else to do but write home. So it was nothing to come home to thirty letters to censor and the censoring was done. You had your own private Tilley lamp or pressure lantern. I had my own and you’d get busy and censor those letters, sign your name on them and so forth. Now as far as the censoring went, I’ve written notes about this in the notes to the battalion, |
09:30 | it was an unsavoury practice. You hated it. It was a case of sticking your nose in other people’s business. So, what we used to do and I used to do anyway. Don’t read the thing word by word. I used to pick say the left, right or middle, about a third of the page and go down there and you probably could pick up anything which was against security by that method but those letters |
10:00 | incidentally, even after you’d signed them, on random checks by the Australian security were picked up and if any officer had missed the bus you know, he got it all right. So, that was one of those unsavoury things. But one of the most amusing instances and I’ve written about it and I was hoping that I wasn’t contravening the rule at this stage of history. But one of the most amusing letters I had to censor, |
10:30 | no names mentioned in the text or anything like that. One of the batmen, that is your minder as it were, one of my mates in the company next door wasn’t game to take the letter to his officer. He brought it down to me to censor. As another officer in another, it wouldn’t be so near connected you see. And this gentlemen, he had a bit of a speech defect, sort of |
11:00 | thing. Anyway, he was to get married on the next leave which duly turned up by the Duntroon and all that business. He was to get married to a girl in Kalgoorlie from where he came and he was talking about all sorts of things you see of a pretty personal nature of what his intention was when he got on leave and got married to her admittedly. And on top of that he was illustrating the various positions by stick |
11:30 | figures. Well, my eyes were popping out you know but it was to be censored and it wasn’t against security. It didn’t mean a thing to me and I said in the prelude to this part. I said, “I hope I’m not,” it was, utter confidentiality was the thing you see. But there was no names mentioned it was a long, long time ago. Anyway, I’m sure you wouldn’t be offending the chap now. The funnier part was that in reading the text of the |
12:00 | letters here and there, I gathered that the girl who’d had previous letters with the stick figures was suggesting alterations to the positions by stick figures. It was the most amazing stuff you know. Oh, God. Yeah, Oh, dear, dear, dear. Were you getting an education, Robert? Oh, yes you know. Yeah, yeah. Was it hard to go without the company of women up there? No. |
12:30 | Some men were married, most weren’t, and it rather amuses me when they find excuses for these sailors coming in from the sea. They’d been at sea three months, you know. Well, they’d almost got an unwritten right to get to women; rape them if necessary as an excuse. Now that is absolute rubbish. The last time we left here after leave |
13:00 | I wasn’t home for two years and all my mates, you know, with me and I don’t think there was any thinking of a right to do what you liked just because of it. That’s absolute nonsense. It’s finding excuses for these birds that ought to behave themselves, oh yeah. Did you hear of cases of rape within the navy? Well, I wasn’t close enough to the navy. You’d have to speak to naval crews |
13:30 | but… I’m just wondering what you heard yourself about that. No. Well you’d intimated that some of these blokes had just been for a couple of months would just about rape women. That’s right, yeah. So how did you hear about that? That was really post-war time. You know, you’d read it like currently. Oh, right, currently. I thought you were referring to… No, no not. No, not during war. No, I think that mental discipline and |
14:00 | you know the seriousness of it all is too solid to even suggest that, but since that time you hear it on TV and in the papers that, well you know there’s sort of an agreement as it were, unofficially. Well, this is fair enough. It’s not as bad as you think it is but it’s still as bad as ever. Were there any women actually in Darwin? Yes. It took quite a long time before it was granted but women were allowed at the… |
14:30 | No women were allowed above, I think, the 26th parallel. There were women brought up to Adelaide River. Their job was nursing staff, there was a hospital there, a military hospital and clerical duties and so forth but none was allowed above Adelaide River. Was there any particular reason for that? I think the basic reason was simply |
15:00 | security for them, because it was a war zone and you don’t want non combatants, you know on a… That’s the trouble in Iraq where you’ve got civilians, you’ve got counter tribes having a crack at each other, a lousy feeling of kick these invaders out and they’re quite non disciplined. There’s no fair play. The war is over but not for us, you know, we want to have a stoush at the Yanks anyway. It’s completely |
15:30 | different in those days. Oh, yes. But with Darwin, could you do anything in Darwin when you had a bit of time off? Crocodile shooting. My boss was known as Nimrod the Hunter, the OC, and he was great on kangaroo shooting and anything else that moved which is, looking back on it all, just a stupid practice. But the crocodile shooting was something novel I suppose. What about pubs? Well, there were no pubs there. Oh, |
16:00 | no. It was a total war zone and no pubs. There were in civil days but no such thing in war, none. Was there anybody that you could go and visit in Darwin? No. All civilians were out to start with and if any visiting was done it would only be to someone you knew in another unit. That’s all. I |
16:30 | had an occasion when I first went up there to ring one of the air force stations. I forget which one it was now, be the Beaufighters, when I come to think of it, yes the Beaufighter squadron. And I was asking after a flight lieut [lieutenant] who’d taken my younger sister out here in early war days before we went to Darwin. And the voice came back, a Sergeant Clarke in the orderly room down there you know. He said, “Well, I’m |
17:00 | sorry sir. But he went in last week.” Oh, God. And the way he went in. Another Beaufighter in company with him, both went in on the same target over one of the islands up north and didn’t see each other and collided in mid air. The Japs must have laughed their heads off. But that’s one of the tragedies. On aircraft tragedies, I can start thinking about them you know. One night about tea time in Darwin days |
17:30 | we saw a Mitchell go over and instead of being all blacked out in the dark, apparently all the cabin lights were alight. All the windows were lit up. So, I thought, “That’s blooming odd isn’t it?” you know. But next morning we heard news the whole battalion was to make an emu bob drive [a search]. That’s a single rank drive across the Northern Territory and look for the wreck. And what was happening was that |
18:00 | plane was up on a test flight. It was getting near dark and as they came in to the Batchelor strip they fired a Very flare to light it up out of what we call a flare tube inside the fuselage, and the thing stuck and the flares were magnesium and magnesium will even burn in the wettest of jungles, terrible stuff. And they couldn’t get it out. And eventually what we saw was the windows |
18:30 | lights on was fire in the whole fuselage. So, the pilot said to the crew, “Righto, abandon it and jump out,” you know and one fellow was having a joy ride, a mechanic. He did not have a parachute of course. The aircrews did and he, the pilot said, “Well, you grab hold of me and we’ll go down together.” And the bloke flatly refused. He said, “We’ll both have it if you do.” So, he flatly refused to get out and he hung on in there and the thing |
19:00 | eventually crashed and the biggest part we found was one wheel and that was just another aircraft tragedy up there. Did the fellows who managed to bale out, did they survive? Oh, yes. One walked in the next morning we arranged to do this emu bob and they’d been going an hour and they told us to stop and come home to roost because they’d all been accounted for. One walked in to the brigade camp canteen, |
19:30 | another walked in further up the NA [North Australia] Road. But they all survived. Were they given supplies just in case they came down in that area? You know like water or food? I’d imagine so and my brother-in-law, one of my brother-in-laws. He was on Bostons, twin engine like bombers, in Noemfoor in New Guinea area, and he was in the air above me on New Britain when I was down below. We didn’t know either one was there. |
20:00 | But I know he arranged privately with the hangar crew, well the insert crew, to supply them with a thirty calibre American rifle. They were lovely little things for jungle use. And supply some emergency food and water just in case he came down you know. So he provided, I suppose in the aircraft they’d have well you know as typical service behaviour. |
20:30 | They’d have all sorts of emergency supplies. There’d be an axe and a shovel probably and things like that. But with ourselves on patrol some of our patrols was three and some were five days and you’re out on your own. We had what was called an emergency ration tin. It was a tin about that big and in there was everything from, there was a chocolate. You may laugh at that but it’s a |
21:00 | sustainable, a special chocolate and other dried fruits, stuff and so forth. This is to survive, you know. It wouldn’t keep you going for too long. But otherwise we had to carry all our food of bully beef and biscuits and water and so forth. But there was plenty of water on New Britain, not only in the rivers but it rained every day. Typical tropic stuff all the time. So this is New Britain that you’re talking about? That’s right. Just getting back to Darwin, was |
21:30 | it common to spontaneously come across wreckage or would you know that wreckage would be out there because you were looking for it? Well, they didn’t know where it would come down. There was no clue and that’s why we were virtually single ranked across the area just to comb it. They used to call it emu bobbing. If anything was lost in the army, they’d call it an emu bob and it’s, you’ve got to line them in like you see the detectives and the forensic boys here were |
22:00 | looking for something now, just line up and if you comb it, it’s surprising what you’ll find, a thing most elusive otherwise. Incredible. Would most of the planes just completely disintegrate on impact? Oh, on impact yes. I saw a virtual hole in the ground. Admittedly Territory ground is pretty hard. It was like downright rocky, sandy sort of stuff. I saw a hole it would be |
22:30 | three metres deep. I suppose a crater, a diameter of probably three or four metres at the top and a Kittyhawk had gone in there and the two fifty calibre gun barrels were bent at right angles up against the ring routes. You know when they went in there were, that would be an absolute dive straight in of course. But it depends on the terrain and most would of course have, most of the Northern Territory was light |
23:00 | bush. It’s not thick bush. It’s usually light, and as I’ve said before, plain country in the main. Thereby, hangs another bit of a yarn. When the wet season’s on and it was a terrible climate for three months, a woeful climate, Darwin. But mind you that’s speaking now of infantry now in the bush. We’re not talking of people in airconditioned hotels and motor cars these days and all that. Is this because of the heat and the percentage of humidity? That’s right. It was |
23:30 | dreadful. For example when you’d wake up in the morning the old term of fiddling with a wrung out dishcloth. That’s exactly what you felt like. But of course you might have felt like that but the army sorted that out in about three seconds flat. You know on parade and everything else, run and so forth and so on but when there’d been plain country in the wet, the rivers would overflow; the water would go across the plains and the various deep holes like lagoons |
24:00 | would be filled up you see. Saltwater crocs would come from the sea, they’d be in the river too and you know the old croc would be wandering round and the waters there, he starts swimming and suddenly the tide would start to recede and the tides up in Darwin, be thirty, forty, fifty. And well you’d say, “Goodness gracious,” you know. So you’d be looking for some water and the lagoons were the obvious place so you’d drop in to there. Meantime when the dry season came, it could be cut |
24:30 | off with a, you know half a kilometre of land between him and getting back to the river. So he’d stay in the lagoon so it meant to say for the inexperienced, wandering around in the bush, so I’d go for a swim in a lagoon. It’s miles from the river as it were, nothing here. You could be a bit surprise. In many of the lagoons were Johnsonian crocodiles. They’re the ones that only grow to about two, two and a half metres and they’re not man-eaters |
25:00 | like the saltwater big fellows and they were in lagoons quite repeatedly. We weren’t afraid of them too much but the big crocs, you never got in to a lagoon willy-nilly just because it was removed from where you’d think they could be. But the inexperienced could do just that. Did you ever hear of anybody getting taken by a crocodile up there? Not alive. But we had experience of a |
25:30 | sister battalion of ours, one of the 11th crew. They were fishing in the Adelaide River. What they used to do was string, and our crowd used to do it too, string camouflage nets together. This is some of the innovative practices, you know. String camouflage nets together, put them across the river, wait for the ingoing tide then probably wait for the return tide and in the process fish would get gilled, |
26:00 | hooked up in the camouflage nets. Well, to retrieve the fish they had an engineers, what we call a folder boat. It was a canvas cum wooden structured collapsible boat which they could stack a dozen of them on a truck and they were quite sizeable things when they were opened up and all that. They’d get one of these folder boats, start up from one side, go along the net pulling it up and pulling the fish out as they went and one fellow fell overboard and then he couldn’t swim. |
26:30 | This is just a bad business. Our battalion made sure anybody that went there could swim. We had to test for it. Anyway, they could not get his body and it was missing for a few days and crocodile practice is for a croc, saltwater, likes to eat flesh that’s rotten rather than fresh you see. And a croc normally, if they get hold of a body like that dead, and he drowned, |
27:00 | would be to take it and snag it under a log or under a fallen bough, wait until it goes rotten for about two weeks and then eat it. Well, of course his associates were pretty upset about this and they hunted like mad things the next day and down the river they found this bloke, you know, snagged and they got his body and he was buried at Adelaide River. But the crudity of the, it was pretty |
27:30 | sordid but a coffin was made of something or another and I know that the coffin bearers, when they were getting to his burial site, the black ink was starting to run on their shoulders out of the homemade coffin, oh golly. But… Was there a cemetery up there? Yes, made at Adelaide River for servicemen, that’s right. Would there be any |
28:00 | special sorts of ceremony particularly for the RAAF chaps who went down literally in a ball of flame? Well, I never witnessed a burial there but I can imagine that probably might have been a bit of a salute you know, few shots fired. But wartime, there’s a certain amount of acceptance of the hard fact and all the frills and nonsense not on. Didn’t happen. And as for |
28:30 | New Britain the crowd that did the dirty work ahead of us and we took over from them and I toured the battlefields as an observer and the Nip bods are still lying around, left where they fell and some of them who had been knocked just prior, a day or two and the Nips had time to bury them, as it were, but only in a shallow grave with about a hand |
29:00 | span of dirt above them. But you know there’s an acceptance of, I read Daryl Clohessy, the author of the book to be. He’d got wind of two or three incidents and he asked me to elaborate and put the story down and I mentioned there that my batman and myself, we looked at these Nips that had been knocked and |
29:30 | oddly enough although you’d have the greatest compassion for anybody knocked, there was a sort of feeling of no compassion. It was funny. Peculiar. Probably also cultivated because of these stories of the Japanese atrocities and even the gang ahead of us that did the work, the real work, they had no respect or |
30:00 | consideration towards the Nips at all. They’d had them. They, and I say even now, viewpoint seem to be just rubbish around the battlefields, just like that. And they were human beings or were a fortnight before. Well, did you see them as lesser quality human beings than yourselves? I think that would be a common belief by all Australian forces, American forces |
30:30 | but I think, I’m making a broad statement here. I think the Australian forces would still have some regard and respect for the Nipponese cunning apart from their ruthlessness and certainly how dangerous they were because of their sheer discipline. The discipline was iron. They had no option and as such, and their |
31:00 | numbers were such they were very, very dangerous and I think that we kept that in mind. Never treat it too lightly, don’t take undue risk unless you were expecting bother. And that’s where a lot of the Americans made a mistake. [General] MacArthur and the Americans going back towards Japan, he was cunning enough to leap frog a lot of places. Like with Rabaul, it was a hornets’ nest to be. He said, “Well, we don’t worry about it. Let them rot.” |
31:30 | Which they were. They were short of food and medical supplies when we got there and he was saying, “Just let them rot.” “But you ….” “Let it rot. That’s all right.” We just go in to Japan. He didn’t want to know about Australians anyway. He wanted the whole glory to be American and with that sort of, that was a Japanese tactic too. If they struck any hot spots in their initial successes they just went round them. |
32:00 | Coming from the back if necessary or ignore them and have a crack at something else. Keep on getting back to your base and that of course is pretty unnerving. Instead of the thin red line business, they weren’t worried about that. Just go around it. Get it at your base. Different sort of warfare going on. Oh, different altogether. Just a question that I forget to ask you earlier about censorship, what sorts of things were you looking for to cross out? Any reference to time, place, |
32:30 | intention of the battalion and brigade and the force in general. Anything that would be of use to the enemy in planning an attack or giving away some tactical plan or tactical sort of rule, anything like that at all. But everyone knew that their letters were going to be censored |
33:00 | so were they careful? Ah, on that score. I admit by the time Darwin days arrived troops had become sufficiently mentally disciplined and also probably aware of misdemeanours so it was rare, I can’t ever remember cutting out anything of a letter from Darwin or New Britain. As I’ve said in the notes, by that stage the troops were sufficiently |
33:30 | solid and drilled and mature and you name it, to not put such stuff in but they still had to be looked at and signed. Were you getting any Red Cross food parcels? Yes, we did and they, that was always, they were a minor contribution that were on the spot after all the great efforts to send such |
34:00 | quantities up there. But we did appreciate it and the stuff was a break from our normal food for example and so forth. It wasn’t anything else but food in our day. We didn’t need clothing. You stood in your stinking clothing as required week after week, sleeping, working, whatever. But the Red Cross were appreciated for that |
34:30 | effort and one of the greatest efforts and you’ve heard it all before was our Salvation Army officer, Reg Cronat[?] by name and he was an Eastern stater. He was a Sydney-ite and he was marvellous. When we left the Australian shore all the other denominations stopped. New Britain looked a bit rough didn’t it? You know, there was no anything and you were going to live like a dog whoever you were and Reg |
35:00 | Cronat was a Salvo and he surprisingly, wanted to be in anything. Absolute, wanted to participate and I took him on his request to the CO on two patrols, only three hour jobs, what we used to call front garden patrols. But I was hoping to goodness I didn’t strike anything because he’s unarmed, a non combatant. What do you do? You know. But he wanted to be in it. Just |
35:30 | like that and he was extremely good and he would walk the perimeters with an army haversack and anything he could get his hands on sent from Australia, like ‘A New World’ or whatever. He would walk the perimeters and dish this out. He was much appreciated. So much so that there was a collection voluntarily put up for his benefit. It was a couple of hundred pounds which was money in those days. But professionally |
36:00 | he couldn’t accept it. It had to go back on the Salvo funds so that was that. When you say that there were other religious denominations that got left in the wayside, I wasn’t aware that there were other religious denominations that were actively supporting. Oh, yes. Church of England, RCs [Roman Catholics], I think they are the only two apart from the Salvos connected with our battalions. There could have |
36:30 | been other denominations with some of the other sister battalions. But RC, Church of England, Salvos. That were the ones coming with us and all of the reliable dinkum ones, the Salvos were the only ones. Well, what were the other ones doing? Damn little. I can tell you that. When you say damn little, were they offering you religious…? |
37:00 | No. They really didn’t have, I might be a bit too cynical but really I doubt their purpose really much. If we had been in some bloody action there might have been the last rites and all that sort of caper and perhaps some psychological condolence but we weren’t in a bloody action and they, without being too |
37:30 | critical about it, I can remember one or two of them in particular. When it came to Sundays when there had to be a church parade for their benefit mainly, it was getting that way that having done nothing the rest of the week but enjoy the officers’ mess, they were given an honorary captaincy for the purpose of the exercise. Sunday morning have to do something, got a bit irksome. You know, this is how dinkum they weren’t you see. And it got to the stage were the troops would |
38:00 | wake up to this and the ones attending church parade, if we weren’t out on a stunt this was, we’d call the exercise, if we were in camp there had to be a church parade. And the ones actually getting to the church service were dropping so greatly that the CO had to step in, I think to say, face these padres and order that at least all officers would go to church. |
38:30 | So, we had to have a church parade in the company and every other company and they’d give an order, a company sergeant major, “All RCs over here. All Church of England over there.” And break them off to go back to their huts. “Any Church of Christ here,” and something there you see. And in the finish what was left went to the church service. Just like that. Because one of the reasons |
39:00 | why men weren’t showing up to the religious service because they really had no respect for the padres? That’s right, that’s right. And I think because of the padres’ behaviour. They were doing nothing? Nothing. I would, you know I’m, except enjoy the fruits offered to an officer with this honorary captaincy. To give you an idea, we’d been to Canungra. You mentioned this early tonight. |
39:30 | We were sent to Canungra from Darwin. We were to go by aircraft. Now it would be absolutely pointless sending us to Canungra, we’d been through all the Canungra type training for years. We knew it all backwards and thereby is a story on Canungra but we were getting back from the overland, oh incidentally the aircraft business was eventually knocked on the head because there were no aircraft available to do the job they intended to do. So, because of |
40:00 | other duties they were required for. Anyway, we were going back by truck up through Canungra, Mount Isa across the top, Elliot I think and up. And at Elliot we had a staging camp stop there overnight and there was one truckload of AWAS, this was the Australian Women’s Army Service coming up to Adelaide River to take up duties. Now those |
40:30 | AWAS were put in tents away from the men over there and we were over here in tents for the night. Now our padres at that stage was with us and he, at about ten o’clock at night, decided he’d like to go and see the women so he tottered off on his own. Nobody else in this and when he got up near the women’s camps he ran in to a sentry. The sentry told him to stop. “Halt.” And padre’s said, “Now look, stand |
41:00 | aside soldier. I’m captain so-and-so.” And he got the bayonet against his chest and he said, “If you come another inch, I’ll skewer you.” So he, “Stand aside,” and the sentry says, “You do come and I’ll skewer you.” And he shooed the padre off. Next morning the OC of the camp who got wind of this, obviously the sentry reported to his sergeant or whatever and got back to the OC camp. The OC |
41:30 | paraded our padre. This is a damn disgrace to the battalion, though. We didn’t want to know. This coot was paraded before the OC and it ended up in the cross-section argument that the OC said, “You are a disgrace to the cloth.” Well, this antagonised the man so much he took his blooming coat off, tunic off and wanted to do him with fisticuffs. Oh, dear. That made it even so much |
42:00 | worse. |
00:33 | You mentioned earlier that you sailed back to Perth for a month’s leave before going to New Britain. That’s right. That’s right. What ship did you return to Perth on? Duntroon. Ten thousand, three hundred and forty six tons. What were conditions like on board the Duntroon? All troop ships were hell ships. The Duntroon was an east-west ship in civil times. |
01:00 | She was designed to carry six hundred passengers and the trip from Darwin round to Fremantle was carrying sixteen hundred troops as a brigade. As officers we were living lords as it were in cabins, about six to a cabin which is a bit compressed, but you know it was quite a good life. The troops to |
01:30 | accommodate that number were down in the holds and in a ninety by sixty foot hold because of six tiered bunks, there was six hundred troops in one hold. When the man was seasick on the top bunk, all down past the others overnight, they all copped it as well. And when I used to go down and see my platoon there in the morning before boat drill, if a man was absolutely as |
02:00 | sick as a dog he had to get on the boat deck and do boat drills so he was manhandled to the deck if required, to carry it out. But they were just hell ships. And if you can imagine trying to feed sixteen hundred men. What they used to do was have a meal time in broken sessions of course. Some every other half hour, all this carry-on and some poor |
02:30 | devils, they’d get in to the queue early and by the time they stayed there for perhaps an hour you know and all the great snake of bodies down the companionways and all the rest of it, got to the dining room. When they smell the food it would get the better of them after all that way, race to the rail and start laughing at the water [vomiting]. These were some of the things about troop ships. The latrines were simply about six or eight holes, shelves as it |
03:00 | were, with a galvanised iron trough below it and running saltwater that went through there. But all these troop ships I think would have been overstretched, overloaded and the life was just hell on earth really for the troops. As an officer I was jolly lucky. When we went to New Britain later on an ex Dutch ship, six thousand tons only |
03:30 | called the Swartenhondt. She was an old steamer that had been used as a cattle carrying ship between the islands pre-war and this blooming old thing… When I had a look at it for the first time up in Darwin it was moored to the harbour jetty and I had to look over the edge because the tide was low to sort of, where the devil is it? It was like a picket in the water. It had a Lascar crew. |
04:00 | It had Dutch officers for the ships officers, controlling them. It had an American anti-aircraft crew and then they had us to carry us. That was the score on that one. And that had all sorts of funny incidents too. If you could just return to the voyage on board the Duntroon to Perth. How did the troops feel about the different conditions that they endured while you were in relative |
04:30 | comfort? There was never any comment. Put it this way, even if we’d said, “Well, let’s participate in this in the hold.” we were so few in numbers compared with the bulk of troops, they’d have taken no notice of us. In any case in the services there would have been an acceptance of that without even a thought. Wouldn’t |
05:00 | care, you know. The least of worries. But they were just hell ships as far as I was concerned for troops. Did you feel awkward about the double standards? I don’t suppose I felt happy about it, particularly when I used to go down the hold of a morning. But it was pointless thinking about it, wasn’t it, because there was nothing you could about it, yeah. What kinds of things did you do on board during the journey back to Perth? |
05:30 | The CO, when we were coming across the Australian Bight, for example, ordered there would be physical exercises on deck, regardless every morning. Well, coming across the Bight we had an aft beam sea. The ship was, the Duntroon, was noted for rolling and she was rolling through thirty degrees. That was official, a thirty degree roll. Well, if you touch your toes on a deck, on a thirty degree roll you have no control of |
06:00 | yourself and you end up in the scuppers, but it was going to go on regardless and it did. How long was the voyage? The voyage was about a month. When we got in to Fremantle we wondered why, up until that point we’d been diverted getting across the Bight, suddenly sent to the South Pole direction for some time and then it started to come back on course and came round to Fremantle. When we came in to Fremantle harbour, ye gods! There |
06:30 | were American ships right, left and centre, aircraft carrier, [USS] Lexington. Yank crews were coming ashore in their boats, you know for leave and such forth, and we learnt then that there’d been a scare again come with a Jap convoy coming from the nor-west area and this American fleet had been whistled up and they were there in large numbers, and |
07:00 | when we were coming in to the harbour it was a summer morning. We were dead still. Dead quiet. And a lumper[?] of all people lounging on the bow rail of a Liberty ship which was moored in the water, he said, “Hello you bastards.” you know. Well, the whole ship, including the two AIF sisters that were in the crew, there’s one big roar of laughter, went up straight away. Echoed round the harbour, quite amusing. |
07:30 | And as far as Australians went of course, the uproar sorts of humour, tricks and things, but when these Yanks were coming ashore in their pinnaces and boats and things to go on leave the general information the Australians were giving them about their doubtful ancestry and a few other things. Imagine it. Yeah. But of all people, a lumper, coming out with this language. It’s quiet, and the roar of laughter you know, just went up, |
08:00 | amazing. I imagine there was quite a bit of antagonism between the Aussies and the…? Oh, well it was one of those ridiculous things. When the New Zealand troops were coming from New Zealand through here to go to the Middle East, they’d buy fights you know, and the Australians would buy fights with them in the towns, in pubs and things like that. Actually you might say, “Well, why?” It was just nonsense. When it got dinkum in the islands and all that sort of thing, we worked with the |
08:30 | Americans all the time. There was never… Too many other important things to think about. Never mind about that sort of boy-like rubbish, and there was never any of that when things mattered at all. It was probably when they were getting full of alcohol or something they’d even think that way. Quite ridiculous. Did your family know that you were coming home on leave? Well, we would know but pretty near the time |
09:00 | and we did not know we were going to New Britain until we got back to Darwin. Then we had that news as we’re off to and there was all sorts of… Sorry, how did your family greet you when you got back on leave? Well, they were pretty pleased about that and actually the stuff I’ve written for Daryl Clohessy lately, I’m thankful my |
09:30 | mother and father didn’t know about it. I suppose they had a few sleepless nights wondering where their boy was and what he was doing, but some of the stuff or the risk taking… Gwen had a cousin here recently and her husband was in the air force as a clerk and to my astonishment, although we had a lucky war indeed, to my astonishment she said, “Were you ever in danger?” I said, “Danger?” I said, “Well, |
10:00 | once we got to New Britain,” I said, “Your neck was out all the time.” You know, you never knew. On patrol it could be an ambush any split second and jungle you can only see a metre there, you know, nothing, all this carry-on. And other incidents, you know you were in danger all right. Just curious to know about the leave, month’s leave you had before you went to New Britain, how did you spend that time at home? I don’t honestly remember |
10:30 | any specifics, probably just glad to be home, have a dry bed and the same one every night, decent one, decent meal. My stomach had shrunk. My mother produced the normal size meal and couldn’t make out why I couldn’t eat it. In the army I can’t remember us going honestly hungry. We got hungry but even on the very meagre rations on New Britain, |
11:00 | bully beef and biscuits, you might think, “Oh yes, I’ve heard that from World War I, pretty grim stuff.” That’s not quite so. We were very glad of it. There was enough of it to satisfy us. We were all absolutely fighting fit and the bully beef and the biscuits were especially made for the army. They weren’t just ordinary bully beef and biscuits. They were doctored up to be full of nutrition. So, that was quite good and you know |
11:30 | it kept us going quite well. The other thing I haven’t mentioned so far, although it started in Darwin. We were put on Atebrin tablets to keep malaria at bay and we were on Atebrin tablets in Darwin well before we went to New Britain. There was no malaria in Darwin. There was dengue fever. A dengue is a small flying insect, something like a mosquito in miniature, and it could give you a fever. I’ve suffered it |
12:00 | myself for a stretch up there but, and of course with the Atebrin then a rumour got going. There was always rumours in the services, where you’re going next and all this, it was wonderful bait. Anyway, with the Atebrin no sooner had the stuff been issued to be taken voluntarily, the rumour got around anybody having Atebrin will be impotent for life. So, what the |
12:30 | troops used to do when they were on parade, get out the Atebrin tin, pick out the tablet and with the officers and NCOs watching they pretend to throw it in their mouth but pitch it over their shoulder you see. And when this was found out you were required as an officer to pitch it into the back of each man’s throat to stop that. And of course it was all hoo-ha anyway, about the impotence bit. |
13:00 | Were you seeing Gwen by the time you returned home for leave prior to going to New Britain? Yes. I was away for two years in the finish but prior to that on any leave I managed to get down to Hervey, but the leave times were, we only had the month home prior to that |
13:30 | and I was at this Hervey army camp when, on training, when I ran in to her. Would you mind telling us that story? I think you only mentioned it to us between tapes so far. Yes, that’s right. Well, the way it all happened was, I was on a one month course at Hervey and we were given a six hour leave pass from there at times between six o’clock at |
14:00 | night and midnight, and certainly you had to be back in camp at midnight, the old twenty-three fifty-nine hours was one minute off midnight. And another fellow, and there’s a story on him, but another fellow, a Victorian, another lieut and myself for something to do we wandered down to the town to the main street and we hear this piano playing, and it was in a corrugated iron shed on the main street. |
14:30 | We went in there and it was obviously… It was Gwen playing the piano and her mate singing, and I think we might have had some of the charity cup of tea or coffee or something. That sort of thing, that was a bit of a thing for troops you see and that’s how contact was made and from then on, just in my way, times and things in Australia and I used to write to her and she’d write also |
15:00 | and then the time I got out of New Britain things were getting a bit more dinkum and when I got home I proposed to her, you know, and we were engaged for twelve months and then I married her. We had two kids, a girl as the elder and a boy and the girl, Megan, is now the principal of Rushmore Senior High School of some fame and |
15:30 | Robert, he’s a head of department at Kwinana in phys ed [physical education]. So, and each of those has a girl and a boy as it happens so there we are, that’s about the… And more importantly, we’ve been married for fifty-six years and people these days look you up and down saying, “Oh, goodness, what’s wrong with them?” Five years is about enough. Yeah. It’s a great accomplishment. Yeah. Yeah, that’s how good it’s been though. |
16:00 | How difficult was it for you departing at the end of that one month’s leave and leaving your family and Gwen behind. Yeah, how old was I? How difficult? Oh, difficult. I suppose it was difficult in the sense of what you’re going back to. It was a pretty grim life compared with you know civil conditions, but |
16:30 | I think in your mind you knew you had to anyway, the same as all service staff. You know that was in the back of the mind all the time. You did as you were told, that was the end of it. And therefore no further worry about it, couldn’t, otherwise you’d go mad. Did it make it difficult for you to discuss the future with Gwen? Oh, |
17:00 | on that leave you mean? No, my attitude was that I hoped I’d get home in one piece, and had I come home with a leg or an arm missing or not come home at all I was rather diffident about getting married or making, you know, real promise type of thing for that reason only. Otherwise it would have been easy. Many people got married in the circumstances and |
17:30 | then they’d be off gone and the woman was left, and some were left with a baby to look after and all this carry-on but I was a bit wary about that. I feared getting knocked about or getting knocked at all and leaving some sort of unnecessary upset. So you discussed whether or not you should get serious or wait to get more serious in your relationship? That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. |
18:00 | And you erred on the side of caution. That’s right. Yeah. But it’s all been worthwhile you see. As it turned out it was the right decision. When you went away, did you know that you were going to New Britain? No, no, wasn’t until we got back to Darwin that we learnt of that. What was the voyage like back to Darwin? Well, what they did, instead of sending us by ship they sent us overland so it was a train |
18:30 | and so we went up there. How did that journey compare with the voyage by sea? Well, the ship boys as far as food went, it was superior to army stuff but, well you know, as I say as far as the troops went, as far as I was concerned the troops were better off on the train than what they were on the confounded ship. How were you fed on board the train? |
19:00 | Going across the Nullarbor I remember stopping at certain points arranged and there’d be a sort of railside temporary kitchen set up. It was the dixies and tables all that rigmarole and we’d get off the train and have a feed and get back on. In Adelaide now wait a minute, I wasn’t in on… |
19:30 | I’m speaking more of my own journey back, but the trip has gone back to, oh no of course we were all together again. That was after leave. Then from there up to Alice Springs, the train was stopped at certain places for meals and that must have been a trackside job as well and then onto trucks and there would have been some sort of a ration truck and I suppose |
20:00 | some facility. There might even have been just a tin tack we had between Alice Springs and Larrimah and then on the train ride between Larrimah up to Darwin, well I suppose it was a relatively short time, relatively, so that wouldn’t have been much trouble. They probably issued us with some sort of a tin meal or something of that nature. But when we got back to Darwin |
20:30 | all the gear that we didn’t take on leave and that was all our kitbags and that sort of thing. We’d stack them in the quartermaster’s store in the company and his company did the same thing and the white ants had got busy, they were on the ground, white ants had got busy and they were big white ants. They were that long and about that fat and they’d wormed their way up straight up through all the kitbags things, you know gone through the lot. Just an amazing business. |
21:00 | That must have been a terrible discovery. Yeah. Did you have to replace equipment? Oh, yes. There was never any bother with that. By that stage of the war they had enough equipment to deck anybody out immediately like that. What did your kitbags contain? Well, your kitbag contained the all-important blanket I can remember straight away, but such things as any cosmetic gear, towel. I suppose we took our shaving gear |
21:30 | with us and so forth but that sort of thing normally would be in that except on the perimeters we certainly had no kitbags. I think that sort of stuff we must have just carried in our pack. The blanket for example, etc., that mattered. You know, something to just get by on, both on the perimeters and on patrol. The kitbags were marvellous things in what they contained. |
22:00 | It seemed a never-ending capacity stuffing stuff in those. How long were you in Darwin before you learned that you were going to New Britain? I was there I think about nine, oh by the leave time for about nine months but the unit was there 21 months in Darwin so I must have been there for oh, |
22:30 | at that rate, a total time, discounting away on leave which occupied about 3 months, I must have been there for about 15 months. So how long were you there upon your return before you went to Darwin? About three months from memory. How were those months spent? Those months in the latter part of them, let’s say in the last months was the |
23:00 | preparation of disbanding the camp and they were very fussy about that. Everything left dead clean etc. And making quite sure everyone was decked out, equipped and prepared in every way that was necessary to see them safely on the ship and go in to New Britain. Did you spend those three months knowing that it was definite that you’d be going overseas? Oh, yes. That’s right. |
23:30 | Oh, yes. Yeah. What was your reaction learning that you would be going to New Britain? Oh, you know it was, again I suppose the boredom factor in Darwin was a thing all troops of all services suffered because of the sameness and nothing was happening at that stage in the last month and all this carry-on. So, we looked upon it I suppose as an adventure and it was getting into the tropics. You know there were different things about it |
24:00 | altogether, and blue emperor butterflies and boongs [indigenous people] and all sorts of differences like that made it interesting. But we realised too that you know you were, as they said, the real thing was occurring at last. And we were very, very lucky in our role there. Our role… Sorry before we get in to your role, Robert, what were you briefed about your overseas duties? |
24:30 | We would have had information from the intelligence of the unit to tell us of the latest information about any Jap movement, success or failure. Particularly the known stuff coming back from the 6th Brigade that was ahead of us that did the real work, their progress, etc., and where they were heading |
25:00 | for and what they achieved and where we would be taking over. And the rumours were flying. Before that there was talk about going to Merauke which is an island off New Guinea and Merauke’s an absolute well-known spot for malaria, etc., but these rumours flew about, all sorts of things like that. Typical service practice, get rumours going. Going back to Melville days, Roy Millen, who was |
25:30 | killed, sadly, a couple of years, three years ago here, I went through the army with him and he and I were corporals at the time and we got a rumour going. We had a break from Melville Camp for a fortnight to go the Ambassador’s theatre in Hay Street and we didn’t tell anybody what it was all about we just, we were specially picked to, well to get out of the camp you know and have a fortnight at the |
26:00 | Ambassador’s. Oh, gee this was something. So, the mob were clamouring to know exactly what this would be and eventually we let it leak out that we were going to shovel up the manure after the 40,000 horsemen had been through it. That picture was showing at the time. But that’s the sort of thing the rumours went on. Were you well informed of what to expect in the islands north of Australia? Yes, as far as |
26:30 | the conditions went, on perimeters and patrol work and all that. We made it clear as to what we were in for. How were you informed? The intelligence section on a unit is the one through all this information comes. The intelligence officer would then go to each company in turn and give you a talk on the latest forthcoming information so that was how it was delivered. Word of |
27:00 | mouth by the intelligence officer. And how would that information be shared amongst the battalion then? Well, as each company was told, as a company group you were, you were addressing 110 men at a time and just worked through all the companies, one after the other. Like that. Just a verbal address. Yes. Yeah. Where were those addresses held? Outdoors like in a hall or a facility like that? Oh, no. No, |
27:30 | no. Oh, yes. Except for huts, our sleeping huts and the cookhouses and the officers’ mess and battalion headquarters; apart from that, nothing. There was a canteen and that was the last canteen building that we ever saw. We went to New Britain and there was no further canteens, nothing like that. During that three month stay were you at the 49th post or another position? Yes. |
28:00 | Yes and going up in to Darwin on working parties at times and that sort of thing. What were those working parties for? I think one of the antics was road building which we did quite a bit of in even Dandaragan/Moora area. They wanted rows for army vehicles, you know to get through to say the coast or whatever and we didn’t build a |
28:30 | road to the coast it was sand tracks after a time but that’s the sort of work we used to do and in Darwin, I think in Parap too, we used that as an area in ex-workmen’s huts. They were like a little cubicle type of hut so it must have been workmen working in there on some job or another and we were using those to camp in as it were and then doing a beach |
29:00 | landing exercise on Mindil Beach. The baddies were in shore and of course we were to use these engineers’ folding boats and come in and, you know, brave the shoreline and attack and all this rubbish. And of course when it came to the island they were landing barges with ramps you ran out on. Not these blooming road things. What date did you sail from Darwin on and in what ship did you sail on? Easily remembered. Christmas |
29:30 | Eve 1944. We went to New Britain and we were there until late January 1946. I think you mentioned earlier but what was the name of the ship you sailed to New Britain on? Swartenhondt. S-W-A-R-T-E-N-H-O-N-D-T. It’s a Dutch name and it means hound dog. Did you board the hound dog? Oh, |
30:00 | yes. In Darwin Harbour? Yes. What was the condition of the harbour? What did the harbour look like at that point? Well, the jetty is still there to a degree that we saw. It has been extended and it is still there. A ship called the Neptuna, it was an ammunition ship and she was moored at the jetty. The jetty was an L shape. It |
30:30 | goes out and then turns a corner and that would be the coat with the falling ties, to get out into deeper water. Now she was tied up at the jetty. A Jap air raid, one of the early ones, it was on the first, the big raid that sank all the ships and they had 13 ships in the harbour and a bomb hit the Neptuna. She blew up. She was full of ammunition and bits of shrapnel and stuff landed on Larrakeyah Barracks, which was some distance away, for example. The |
31:00 | Neptuna then rolled on her side and sank and she was then about, from memory I think about ten or twenty metres off the wharf. What they did then, they used her as a wharf anchor and extended the jetty and used her as a foundation for an extended wharf. You know, they used to bring the ships in alongside where she was sunk on her side. So, that was that bit of it |
31:30 | and the Swartenhondt was only six thousand tons. She was a steamer, a coal burning steamer, and the Lascar crew, there’s a bit of a laugh about this written in the notes by, I think myself and some of the others, but the Lascar crew at prayers time would put their mats down and face east to Allah or whatever and to carry |
32:00 | on with their mat praying, you see. The trouble was that the ship every 15 minutes would change course with anti-submarine procedure so they kept on shifting the mats you see to face east. This is a bit of a laugh the mob used to have on the strength of them. And incidentally on the Swartenhondt the Lascar crew had live poultry which ran round free on deck defecating on men’s gear and all sorts of things all day. |
32:30 | That was just another bit of an aside. Sounds like a floating menagerie. Oh, yes, yeah. Yeah. Did you sail in a convoy to New Britain? The first part of the journey we had aircraft cover but then that conked out and we were on our own, but by that stage |
33:00 | definitely the Nipponese air force, a lot of their air force was defunct. In other words they’d been attended to no end and to get to us from there they would have to come off New Guinea somewhere or New Britain, but even on those islands much of their air force had been shot up. And their aerodromes and strips and all the rest of it. So, |
33:30 | except for submarine attack, you know we were fairly safe I felt. On the matter of submarine attack, on the Duntroon coming around we all had jobs to do in the case of being sunk. I know I was put in charge of the forward deck where a lot of Carley floats, they’re sort of floating, flat, cork-filled, I suppose, floats. My job in the case of being torpedoed |
34:00 | was to get the mob to chuck these floats overboard and duly dive after them and hang on. Anyway, one morning we were coming down the coast and all the alarms went off. Everyone flew to their action stations on the ack-ack [anti-aircraft] crew and so forth and there was always submarine watch. We were rostered to take it in turn. Anyway, someone up on the crow’s nest reported a submarine out on the port side |
34:30 | about half a mile away you see. Well, this caused all action stations stuff. But after a while it was seen on further looking that it was the back of a whale which was showing above the waves and not a submarine hull. Easy mistake. What armaments did the hound dog have? On the which? |
35:00 | The, what is it the Swartenhondt? The Swartenhondt, yeah. We’ll just call it hound dog, shall we? That’s right. Well, on the Swartenhondt we just had our normal fighting gear, rifles, Bren guns, grenades. That sort of thing. Were there any fixed, anti aircraft…? Yes. There was a high angle, low angle anti-aircraft gun and Bofors on the |
35:30 | Duntroon. Slipping over that for a minute, there was the same sort of gear, the high angle, low angle three-inch gun on the stern. We had an anti-aircraft thing if necessary or surface firing and on top of that the Duntroon had a 16 rocket launcher for anti-aircraft attacking and as anti-aircraft attacked. Now the silly bit about it was this launcher was about a couple of metres wide and I suppose a |
36:00 | couple of metres high and what you said of the enemy coming in to strafe or bomb you, “Hold it sport. Hold it for a moment.” while we loaded this thing and all the rockets were put in from the front you see. Then you said, “Righto,” hop in to the turret behind and then take them on. Well, one of the most startling moments I had ever was one morning when we weren’t aware of this rocket launcher. I had |
36:30 | a practice of the high angle, low angle gun and Bofors and on the top of that they let fly four at a time with these rockets. Well, the noise when we were used to so many belts and bangs and that sort of thing, didn’t mean anything you know. But the whoosh of these confounded rockets. I remember sort of starting down through the deck. You know my feet trying to get through the teak planking. But on this Swartenhondt it was pretty meagre really. |
37:00 | But the Yank crew, we mixed with them and had a great time with them. A Yank captain used to amuse himself every day with a 45 pump automatic pistol. He’d sit up on the bow of the boat with his head, legs dangling over each side of the stern and he’d pick off the flying fish. You know there were plenty of flying fish, some even landed on deck and he’d put so many rounds through that thing he was pretty |
37:30 | accurate too, even with a Colt 45. Mm. Is that a way of killing the boredom? Yeah, that’s right. Just to amuse himself. I had a Colt 45 which is, I’ll say I won in a raffle and I didn’t use it on New Britain. I left it in my trunk in Adelaide as all our gear went back to a place there for gear. And after the |
38:00 | war this stuff was sent to your home and when I got the 45 home I said, “Now this confounded thing…” We got married in the meantime, I thought, “That blooming thing. The place is burgled. Someone gets it. Someone gets shot. They’ll be back, no it’s just not on.” A Colt 45 was much more of a potential mischief than anything. So, we bought a small motor |
38:30 | boat and I got out in to Claremont Bay. I stripped it and pitched it in all directions over Claremont Bay and poured the two hundred rounds of Tommy [Thompson] gun ammunition out of a Salvital tin into Claremont Bay. Got rid of it. Nice disposal. How did you spend Christmas on that voyage? Oh, there was always a |
39:00 | move to make Christmas and summer count. The cooks would try and do something extra or special and the officers by ritual would serve the men. You always, you were an officer you would be the lackey for the day and look after the men, even serving their food and all this business. Yeah. I’ve heard that’s a popular tradition in the navy. That’s right. |
39:30 | Yeah. It was sort of a traditional ritual thing. It was quite a pleasant occupation. Were you comfortable in knowing that there wasn’t a great threat of submarine or air attack? I think at the time in some ways in the service you sort of got |
40:00 | into a frame of mind where you just got on with it and you didn’t worry too much about your skin, except when you were frightened. Then you were worried about it as it were but you couldn’t do anything about it anyway. So, you do, on the notes I’ve written to Daryl Clohessy recently to give you an idea, when our unit was called to send up observers to Wide Bay on the line. |
40:30 | Sorry I was just meaning in regards to Christmas Day. Well, of course that sort of thing would last for about a day. That is all as far as any special difference went and then back to routine and on the ship, on the likes of the Swartenhondt we really had nothing to do, not even a CO could spring his silly physical jerks or |
41:00 | anything like that. There wasn’t the room. I remember the, don’t laugh but the army supplied every man with an oilstone to sharpen his bayonet and so some of them are busy sharpening their bayonets with their… How ridiculous! But anyway they never used them of course except for weapons to open tins or something like that. Yeah. |
00:36 | Was there anything culturally unusual about the Swartenhondt? About the what? The ship that I can’t remember the name of, the ship that you were on the way to… I know what you mean. The Swartenhondt. Yeah. And funnily enough one of our |
01:00 | friends, close friends was a Dutchman in the Dutch mercantile marine war and he worked the Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij [Royal Packet Navigation Company] – that’s the company, Dutch company – and they had on their list of ships, the old Swartenhondt. So he knew the ship. He hadn’t served on it but he knew it quite well and from him I’ve got pictures of the Swartenhondt from a |
01:30 | Dutch gent that was on it and I gave those pictures to Darrel Clohessy. He was able to print them in his book so it’s been a roundabout link up there. Kind of handy. Were there any Muslims on board? The Lascars would be Muslims, surely. They used to pray to Allah and on the mats and things like that. You heard me saying about the mob being amused, they had to change the mat position as the ship changed course with |
02:00 | anti-submarine tactics. So when you arrived on New Britain, what was your impression of Jacquinot Bay? It was just jungle to me, you know. We sort of, we got ashore and we cut out a place for a campsite with the various companies and things and |
02:30 | cleared around the tents. We had tents and you always cleared a couple of metres around the tent to keep the livestock from being encouraged to come into it. The creepy crawlies and things. What sort of creepy crawlies were they? Well, on New Britain we were pretty lucky. I did see snakes but not to worry us. I remember on one patrol I saw a whole brace of snakes either going to or coming to the river. But away from that I didn’t see any other snake. |
03:00 | There were no dogs or any other four footed creature except wild pigs and we were warned, under no circumstances, shoot a pig because in Kanaka language it’s called a gia and that was a sacred animal, so you never touched a pig in New Britain and they were the only four footed creatures, the pigs. |
03:30 | Otherwise the insects were in vast numbers, typical jungle and the cacophony of noise of insects by day, if they weren’t disturbed, was quite something. People have said to me, “How did you know if anything was coming?” I said, “The first thing that happened would be the insects would stop. They’d know.” So, when they stopped there was something afoot which was usually only a wild pig, something like that kicking off booby traps |
04:00 | at night and all other scary things but blue emperor butterflies and all sorts of butterflies. All sorts of interesting general insects. Any blokes started collecting the butterflies? Yes, they collected them and there were things called butterfly belts. Any serviceman up there will tell you what they are. They are a belt made with the wings of the butterfly up in squares and things |
04:30 | and they’re put into the cellophane wrappings of some stuff from the canteen and then they plaited it, must have made a, like a string of these things and then plaited it and so it made a belt which was just a gimmick, novelty thing and they would post these things home, you know to Australia, but some of the insects I saw were amazingly unique things. One of my |
05:00 | platoon was Victorian but he was a nut on entomology and he showed me an insect he’d picked up one day and it was absolutely like a gum leaf, quite a sizeable thing, and the stalk part was the body. It was an insect. It had legs, six legs and it was absolutely amazing, sort of thing like that. Were the mosquitoes a bit of a problem? Yes. The malaria pills, which we |
05:30 | took religiously until we looked like Chinese by the time we’d finished, all yellow. And when I got home for months all your underwear gets stained yellow around the belly area, just oozed out of us. But the malaria was kept at bay for the whole battalion for the whole time by Atebrin. When we were discharged from Claremont they gave us six months’ supply to be taken daily and wean it off towards the end. |
06:00 | Some of them of course didn’t obey that. They knocked off after a month or something and they got bouts of malaria every six weeks. The wog comes out of your spleen and invades the body and they went down to Hollywood [Repatriation Hospital] every six weeks. They were on the old original malaria medicine, gosh. Anyway, that |
06:30 | did not kill it. It would still break out. It would suppress it sometimes. Some of them might have been cured for good but most didn’t so then we got a new drug called Paludrine and Paludrine on one treatment or no more than two would kill the wog for all time. That was the end of it. I had one malarial attack even after religiously chewing this stuff up for six months. I felt pretty ill |
07:00 | but I had to knock off work only for a day or two. I didn’t go to hospital and I got over it and I never had a repeat. So it must have been a very minor sort of infection in me. How was it viewed when you came down with malaria by the authorities? Well, like I said, none of the battalion to my memory got malaria but if you had come down with it they’d be very annoyed |
07:30 | to think you hadn’t obeyed the rule of chewing up the Atebrin because luckily it was 100% sure which rather surprised me but it was. Were you issued with things like mosquito nets? Oh, yes very much so, even in the Darwin days, but on the island you definitely |
08:00 | slept with the mosquito net over your hole, and the hole to sleep in wasn’t your normal weapon pit, it was away from your weapon pit a bit. It was just a bit of a scooped out shallow trench, only shallow. Just enough to get below ground level, occasional bursts and your net went over that. But on patrol you wouldn’t dare use a net. The mob in New Guinea learnt the lesson. They’d take the nets on patrol, erect the net, |
08:30 | they’d get jumped and the next thing is, if you can imagine, trying to fight your way out of a net which would do everything but get out of the way, would let you get tangled up in the thing you see. So, on patrol we never had nets. So apart from the Atebrin we had a thing called an aerosol bomb. It was about that big. It had compressed insecticide in it. Something like a Milton spray can idea and when you got into your hole for the night. On patrol you just |
09:00 | got into your weapon pit and stayed there until the morning, sprayed out the hole as a starter and then we had an ointment. Liniment sort of stuff. It was like the modern liniment you use to keep mozzies [mosquitoes] and things at bay but it was almost like the old, what do they call the stuff? The fly, insect |
09:30 | repellent. Aerosol is it or something? Anyway you simply rub all of the exposed parts, your hands and your face and incidentally, by the time we hit New Britain there was no such thing as wearing shorts, everything was long trousers, long sleeved shirts. They’d learned the lesson, all the gang on New Guinea early on, running around as you see them in the pictures you know, in shorts, |
10:00 | short sleeves, ha, ha. You were a sitting duck for mosquito bites. But by so doing, by rubbing the liniment on and the aerosol bomb spraying out a whole and the Atebrin no one got an attack of malaria. If we hadn’t had that we’d all be down, shot. There’s no doubt about it. What did you have to do when you first set up camp? In the likes of |
10:30 | New Britain do you mean? Yes. Well, the first thing you always did was dig a pit. Something to dive into. That was the first thing and then in the case of Jacquinot Bay where we first landed we had tents so you simply cleared the ground with the tent and cleared beyond as I said for a couple of metres and that part was fixed. There was a tent erected for the cooks to work under or at least a tent fly, |
11:00 | and there wasn’t much more to it than that. The likes of the orderly room was simply a tent, you know it was all canvas sort of stuff but once you hit the island, there was no such animal on Wide Bay. And when we got off to Rabaul, temporarily we had to live under a, just your tent fly and a bit of shelter. But then |
11:30 | eventually there were tents erected after a few days and there was a decent mess hut built for the boys because… and ourselves, that’s right we had the mess and that I suppose. But we had oodles of Japanese as working parties. There were scores of them available, so much so that every man in the unit had a batman – someone to polish his shoes, |
12:00 | wash his clothes, do all sorts of things. It was an absolute luxury. There were so many Nips there. We found we were outnumbered at twenty-five to one, we were, down in Wide Bay. There were a hundred and ten thousand in the Gazelle Peninsula, which was the top square in New Britain. We were the line here and while we were in Rabaul they brought another 15 thousand across from New Island, which was the next island over, so there were a hundred and twenty- |
12:30 | five thousand of them. So, our brigade numbering a total, with supporting arms of about five thousand had plenty of Japanese working parties. So they were directed to make the huts, the mess huts. The Salvation Army hut was made by them. The CO ordered through my company commander that I be education officer, taken off my platoon, and I said to him, “If it’s all the same to you, Sir, |
13:00 | I’d sooner stay with my platoon.” He said, “You are the education officer.” That was an order. And he said, “That’s an order.” He wasn’t joking. So, I became the education officer and as such I used Japanese working parties to make huts or lectures in motor and aero-mechanics. For lessons in English and arithmetic and I simply went through the battalion to find ex teachers and put them into the role and then they carried on that |
13:30 | work and it was a diversion for me and the platoon didn’t need me anyway at that stage. They had just temporary working on parties. How far along your stay in New Britain did this happen? I’m just also wondering if the war is over by this stage. We went to New Britain; we were on New Britain a total of 13 months. Is that what you’re getting |
14:00 | at? Yes. And of that time we were three months in Rabaul. And when did you start having the POWs [prisoners of war] as working parties? Immediately. Immediately and luckily and importantly. Was this on Jacquinot Bay, because you might have sort of jumped ahead is, that what’s happened? No, we went from Jacquinot Bay to Wide Bay. That’s up the |
14:30 | coast and that was about half way to Rabaul, but at Jacquinot Bay that was the front line and the brigade ahead of us that did the dirty work, they had pushed the Japs up the eastern coast up to Wide bay. The Japs then pulled back to Jammer Bay and our gang took over the battle features where the Nips had been. Matter of fact we |
15:00 | had to fill a lot of their holes in with the dead and so forth and dig our own, you know, alongside where they were. When you landed at Jacquinot Bay and you’ve set up camp, do you go out and start doing patrols at this stage? There is no patrol work. It was virtually jungle training. In the jungle visiting Jap villages and that sort of thing. There was a set of rules |
15:30 | put down on your behaviour, the boongs, and that term is not used disparagingly in the normal slang term, oh boongs you know. We were, they were commonly called boongs and even in official language. If you really want to get pernickety, they were native carriers for us, but we were warned that they were quite as morally correct as a white |
16:00 | man up to that point. I throw that in immediately because white man then was master. You were this master and that master and we were warned never to have contact with boongs without a shirt on, for example. This was making you number 10, number 1 is top and number 10 is definitely bottom. So you never got around in any, even semi-naked state, let alone beyond it. The |
16:30 | boongs themselves behaved accordingly. If a boong went for a swim he would take his lap-lap off when he got out to waist deep water and throw it in to shallow water, and when he came out he’d crawl to fox it back, to put it back on before he got out. If he went up a coconut palm he’d gather up his lap-lap all around his crotch and tuck it in here so he was you know, covered up. |
17:00 | The other thing was when we went in to a Jap village which we would do on sort of semi patrol but not do dinkum in that sense, but it was a semi patrol thing but also an exercise. You just didn’t barge into a village like that, oh no. The village entrance on the track, there’d be a log as a rule. You’d stop at that and call for the Lilye or either Tul Tul – that’s the king or his 2IC [Second in Command] – |
17:30 | and a boy would invariably come, a kid about 10,12, come to you, you see. A Japanese kid? No, this was would be a boong. And the Japs have been kicked out of there you see and you’d tell him who you were and what you’re about and just want to come and look at the village, see the Lilye. And he’d go away and of course obviously he’d come back and say, “Get on with it by all means.” in pidgin. And we’d go to the village. Now the rule was |
18:00 | that you never saw a Mary [indigenous woman], none of the Mary. If you ran in to one you just looked through her as though she was a pane of glass, didn’t see her really. Nevertheless, while we were behaving ourselves this way we used to see the women pulling some of the fronds apart in the huts and getting a good look at us you know as we wandered around, and we’d have a talk to them you see. And also the pidgin English was used quite a deal. It’s quite a |
18:30 | novel language. Do you know anything about it at all? Not really. Well, I don’t profess to remember too much about it but we knew quite a bit about it and we were warned if you haven’t got a reasonable command don’t make a fool of yourself with mongrel sort of pidgin, talk in plain English and hope you’re understood. Mongrel pidgin? Yeah, and you had to, we tried to learn bits of it properly |
19:00 | and learn such terms as well, supposing you confronted a boong and said, “Are you seeing your Japan man today?” And he’d say, “Yes, master.” You’d say, “How many is your Japan man, twenty?” “Yes, master.” “Hundred?” “Yes, master.” “Thousand?” “Yes, master.” In other words, never put a suggestion in to a boong because he, not to be deceitful, but he would reply in that manner thinking |
19:30 | you as the white master would know better than he would and he was trying to please you. Agree to anything you said because that’s what your thinking was and you were, you know, big time stuff. So we had to be very careful, never do that. Always say in some other way about it snipping it out, and saying, “Have you seen you Japan man today?” and all this business knowing full well at that time that it was unlikely they would have seen your Japan man. Some of their language I think is |
20:00 | quite novel. The hair on your head is ‘grass belong on coconut’. That’s good. It’s surprising, you know. You’d almost think they were joking. That’s it, grass belong on coconut. Well, grass belong on coconut in my case being ginger was number 1, and that is why some of the boongs you see in pictures and things have ginger hair. They’re not ginger headed, they’re black headed of course but all the |
20:30 | traders would take peroxide to the island to trade for goods and peroxide was a first-class trading item because they’d peroxide their hair and get it back to ginger and ginger was number… I’d go and visit the kids, they’d say, “Number 1, grass long,” you know big time stuff, yeah. Babies were called piccaninnies or monkeys, either one. A canoe was a kunoo, pronounced a soshe or a lackatoi, and |
21:00 | you may realise some pictures. The lackatois had an outrigger and a float out there you see. Well, they were the most odd things to be in. Supposing you were in an outrigger canoe and you thought you were going to tip over. Well, the worst thing you could do was lean towards the outrigger float side. You think that would be the thing to do, not so. You leant the other way because the stuff |
21:30 | which would float on the water would stop it tipping that way, but once you leaned towards the float, the float would submerge a bit. It then had no flotation. The next thing was you tipped the whole thing up. The other thing was with boongs if |
22:00 | you were speaking to a boong and you thought he was lying, you know you’d say, “Back in talk.” Take it all back and shut up and start telling the truth. He’d know that, you know. The Japanese were not so clued up as us on the boong culture and they would steal from their gardens, and the |
22:30 | gardens to a boong are an absolute sacred site. They relied on that for their food. They had fences they built around them so that wild pigs couldn’t rob the gardens at night. But the Japs were silly enough to steal food from their gardens. And I might add the Japs were running short of food and medical supplies on New Britain because by that stage their ships were on the bottom in the main. |
23:00 | The air force had attended to anything who had tried to get on or off New Britain and so forth. So some of them would be hungry. The gardens of course they had bananas, pawpaw, pineapples you name it but it was a bad thing under any circumstances. I suppose if you asked the boong and you were desperate that would be different, but to go and steal it from the boong was not on |
23:30 | and boongs were such good jungle people I think if they wanted to, they didn’t do so, but if they want to cut your throat, before you knew they were within a hundred metres of you. They were such good jungle types. I had two of them attached to me on a perimeter right at the end from New Guinea and their meat tickets we’d call them, identity disks, by that stage it had been fibre, they were stainless steel |
24:00 | and they just had lap-laps, green lap-laps, and they were armed and you know to stop the stainless glinting or anything like that they’d wrap them in jungle leaves around the bow, and as far as time went they could wake up without watches on, dead on time any time in the night. They’d wake up to go on sentry or whatever. They were quite remarkable people. We had a lot of respect for them and they |
24:30 | were paid by the army when they were carriers for us, carrying food and ammunition. I remember having about fifty of them one morning plus an escort party which came up with us by the platoon strength as well to an outpost. It was six thousand yards up a river and the escort party then would escort them and protection back to the base sort of thing but they were paid for |
25:00 | that, and of course as far as stretcher bearers go you’ve heard all about the good stories that came out of that lot. What did you actually pay them in? They were to be paid in New Guinea money and… Was that a valuable commodity for them? Oh, yes and you ask me Neville what do they do with the money in the circumstances because the traders couldn’t come in to the areas. It was a war zone but nevertheless |
25:30 | that’s how they were paid. They weren’t paid in kind, which probably looks like a more logical thing. I must admit they were absolutely honest. If there was a, from the previous action when we got there, a case of bully beef broken in the jungle. They’d no more think of touching that than fly to the moon but one tin of bully beef, they thought the world of but they would not touch it until a white master said, |
26:00 | “You can have it.” That was different. They’d fly to it but up until then they wouldn’t touch it. So, dead honest. One pair came to me one morning, I had a platoon going to an ammunition dump on Wide Bay and off the perimeters and these two came to me and wanted to know could they have some of the, what was the remnants of the mosquito nets. The mosquito nets had like a linen, a cotton top and then the mosquito nets sides with the |
26:30 | usual netting. But when these nets got torn or worn out we used to salvage the cotton tops, they must have had some use for the damn things. We were supposed to collect them and there was a stack of them that thick, just these tops you know in a heap and they asked me, you know could they have a couple, one each for a lap-lap. Well they could have the whole blooming lot, it wouldn’t matter much. So, but they would ask. They wouldn’t just thieve them. We did appreciate that, their |
27:00 | aid in every respect and trustworthiness. Thank goodness, because the Japs alienated them with their behaviour and I wouldn’t like to be the enemy of a boong. As I say, he’d have you before you knew he was there. When you were originally doing some training at, was it Jacquinot Bay that you did the training? Yes. Who was training you to do what? That was just simply within the battalion itself. It was |
27:30 | working on known knowledge and any modification would be through information coming back to our intelligence section and the intelligence officer then, I can remember still giving us talks on the latest information coming back from the line. What sort of information were you getting back? Well, you know patrol procedures, Japanese behaviour, some of their tricks and antics and so forth. |
28:00 | I’ve told you about the Mr White and Mr Brown, whatever, from outside perimeters. That was one thing but also general procedures and also importantly the terrain and the battle features and so forth. All that was good stuff to be loaded up with. But as I’m going from there, incidentally talking about you know risks and things, we took no notice of but when we lost a couple of |
28:30 | officers in a matter of four days apart and I was taking a group of 12, another officer and the rest NCOs, up there as observers. Now the observers … Sorry, why did you lose the officers? What happened to the officers? They went up as observers so-called about a fortnight before I went up with a group and two were killed. You were attached to a company in this battalion or one of the battalions. There was a brigade up there |
29:00 | and in a company in attack they were both killed. No fault of their own. And so that was a bad start and when our turn came the CO got us in his tent the night before. We were about to board the night that we were to board the barge to go up to Wide Bay and they asked how we felt about it all and who were the recent casualties you see. Oh, nothing, can’t happen to us sort of thing. Raring to go for this |
29:30 | rot. So we went down to the jetty where the barge was in, an Australian barge, a 25 ton barge, and they were powered by a couple of Ford VI to marine converted Thornycroft type marine conversions, and I said to the skipper, “Where do we go?” because it looked awfully filled up. It was loaded to the gunnels and came up to a slope in the middle and he was with his coxswain |
30:00 | down aft in a bit of an area there you see. “Oh,” he said, “On top of the cargo.” So, you’re on top of a sloping cargo, hanging on to go to sea up to Wide Bay. And I said to the mob, I said, “You better tie some of your equipment to the cargo in case you go to sleep and just slide overboard during the night.” And of course we never used our epaulettes over the shoulder straps in a case like that. So that undoing your button you let the lot go and get out of it |
30:30 | rather than sink with the lot which you should do. But that’s the sort of thing you’re asking about. No, well that was it, get on and get on with it. Was it just training that you managed to do at Jacquinot Bay before you went on to Wide Bay? We didn’t have much to learn. We’d been training in open warfare stuff initially a lot |
31:00 | and then training in jungle warfare tactics for quite a long time and so there wasn’t much to learn really. It was more getting I suppose used to the environment: the weather, the contact with the boongs, used to jungle pads, that sort of thing, you know. Jungle pads. What’s that? Um, jungle pads, you know |
31:30 | tracks in other words. Well, tracks they call them as well but pads or tracks. And later on, trails. But oh, no it was Kokoda. But that was a time of just really I suppose getting geared to the environment as much as anything. What did you find most difficult about getting geared to the environment? Well, I don’t think there was much thought about it just no option really. Well, what bugged you the most? Was it the |
32:00 | mosquitoes or the wetness or…? Well, everything was wet and thereby was something. Unofficially every tenth man in the platoon had a water bottle full of kerosene. The reason being if you wanted to light a fire you had no hope by normal means in wet jungle. But the kerosene helped and every tenth man at that stage, don’t laugh, had a butterfly net made. And you know these blue emperors were the |
32:30 | prize catch of course. But that was a bit of a laugh. We got up to Wide Bay there was none of that nonsense of course. It sounds like everybody was quite into collecting the butterflies. Well, they certainly were interested, those that wanted to be. I didn’t amuse myself that way but more to do but it was done. Oh, yes. And the other thing was, in jungle, the vines which don’t grow as spindly vines only. We |
33:00 | used to use those for stringing out our groundsheets over the holes and things but the heavy ones would grow to that diameter, about seventy-five millimetres, and the way a vine grows, it grows from the ground. It uses the trunk of a tree to climb up to the tree. It then works its way and weaves its way around a branch and then it separates itself off the trunk of the tree so it’s hanging freely you see. |
33:30 | Well, what we used to do was get a machete and just cut it off at the ground level, take it back up to the slope and do a Tarzan act you know. Get on the thing and swing through the jungle on the vines. And you risked of course and hoped that the blooming thing up top didn’t let go but it never did. They were always wrapped around a branch. Quite lucky. So, with the training at Jacquinot Bay, how long did you |
34:00 | actually do the training? About three months there. So that’s quite a long time to just acclimatise yourself? That’s right. Oh, yes. What would you do in your time off? Gee whiz. I’ll have to think of that. I can assure you there was no diversions. I think we, I don’t think there was any picture |
34:30 | shows there. In Darwin days there were but we were, as infantry it was pretty hard work and you were pretty glad to get on your back. And the rule generally was, any moment you could get on your back you did because you never knew when you’d be up on your feet for a long time. I remember in New Britain days when I was an observer there was 36 hours at one stage when |
35:00 | I didn’t go to sleep at all. And like when I had my boots on for a fortnight that was because an observer, you know on night and day and no chance of getting your boots off even. And incidentally we always wore boots if you had any likely contact with the ground because of hookworm. Now hookworm was in the ground and it would get in under your toe nails and you would be, they could be fatal, |
35:30 | those diseases. Was there a bit of that going around? Well, we never took the risk of letting your feet touch the ground so I don’t remember anyone getting hookworm. We were well and truly advised on that score. When you were sent to Wide Bay were you sent as an observer for the unit? Yes. An observer had a very important job. That period |
36:00 | was for a fortnight and I’ve written about this to Daryl Clohessy and there were incidents there that brought the whole thing under roost. Your job as an observer was to know all the battle features. You had contact with a company which told you anything they knew about the score on the line and all the rest of it, Jap behaviour. |
36:30 | Apart from that, which was very important, a taste of the real thing as it were, to relay that information to your company commander. When the battalion came up from Jacquinot Bay each company commander would contact his observer as my company commander did. You would then put him wise to all you knew and lead him to the battle feature which he was to |
37:00 | occupy. And we occupied one called Cape Hill because it was like this, more or less shape of a cake. But it was on high ground, obviously. The Nips had picked all the good spots, the high ground to stand over Jacquinot Bay initially. But other features there are called the likes of Bacon, Lamb Shed, Mixed Mount and those names were used because they were the names of the |
37:30 | company commanders who took them initially and Moose was another one. Now Moose was given the name because the company commander had a big head and his name was Moose. So that’s why Moose was called Moose. Yeah. Is that the Australian sense of humour shining through? Oh, yes. And other things you know. Apparently when this gang were in action |
38:00 | they had great faith in the artillery. I can tell you a lot of stories about artillery but as the 2/14th army artillery regiment and one cheeky soldier up a tree, he was a spotter for the artillery, the normal thing was to send over sighters purposefully too far over the target, too little and decide where they landed and then decide |
38:30 | where you were going to fire for effect. So this spotter was up the tree you see and this cheeky mug said to the battery commander who would be a major probably or at least a captain, he said, “Bet you a quid you can’t get it in one.” Yeah. But there was all sorts of funny things happened. You know even in the lousy sort of life to make you laugh. In our battalion even on |
39:00 | New Britain there were two men in the transport platoon which became virtually defunct. The terrain was mostly razorbacks and as such transport and in the normal sense of trucks, you know, didn’t happen. They had jeeps and the jeeps did a bit of work along the shoreline on the corduroy road we made. But these two men had time on their hands and they used to write a paper which was circulated through the battalion for a |
39:30 | laugh and it was all full of absolute tommy rot [rubbish] you know, absolute piffle, but laughable, and these two would have time on their hands to the degree that one was a co-editor of the other, would knock on his mosquito net and say, “Are you there?” And of course you could see him there couldn’t you? Anyway, and all that, absolute rubbish but it was good humour. It circulated round the whole battalion but that was the only written stuff allowed to be on the loose otherwise you |
40:00 | burnt it quick and lively. It’s interesting that you were so paranoid about burning mail. Is this something that you were actually instructed to do? Oh, yes. Oh, there was no question. That was an order. And so this is just in case you were taken captive by the Japanese? Mm. And of course they could concoct all sorts of tantalising yarns and tricks and bait you and |
40:30 | you know it was a form of psychological torture but that, oh no it was an order. There was no option about it. Oh, no and ditto no cameras. No cameras on Wide Bay. Strictly off. Did anybody break those rules with the camera? No. And then certain other things about Wide Bay. We had a Hawaiian bred Jap interpreter and he |
41:00 | of course looked like a Jap, and everywhere he went from get up time to go to bed, wherever he wandered, to the toilet, to wherever he went and going through the perimeters had to have a burly Australian each side of him to protect him otherwise he’d have copped it. Someone might have shot him first and asked the questions afterwards. |
00:32 | Can you describe the terrain that you were doing the patrols in at Wide Bay? Yes. The countryside generally speaking was full of, what we call razorbacks. In other words steep ridges. The coral island is covered in mud and virtually it’s a cesspit |
01:00 | of, imagine all the foliage and stuff falling for donkey’s years [a very long time]. So you had a compost heap about half a metre thick at least over the lot of it with the mud below that and the mud particularly, when you were trying to climb the razorbacks on patrol and that sort of thing, you were really trying very hard and on your person all up you had about sixty pounds weight. The boots, alone the jungle |
01:30 | boots weighed three pounds therefore you were really up against it. The jungle was canopy jungle so-called. In other words the trees would grow across and cut out the moon and the sun to a large degree. So much so that on patrol the signallers who relied on pigeons for the first two days out, don’t laugh, this is World War II. We thought we were pretty advanced. |
02:00 | We had pigeons to take messages back with surety. And the signallers would ask me to stop when there was a bit of a break in the canopy. It was as canopied as that and they’d get the pigeon with the coded message on his leg I’d give them and throw the pigeon up through the opening. So, that gives you a rough idea and as I said before you were living in a sort of fairly gloomy sort of a situation. |
02:30 | And of course in that gloom, in the thickness of the jungle you had to be on guard all the time because you never knew, and lucky for me I never bumped into one of them. But I was just lucky not to get ambushed, particularly. But as far as the signals went, we had what was called Tropic 108 wireless sets and they were supposed to be quite good for the range involved but because of |
03:00 | the thickness of the jungle, somehow the waves did not get through and also the razorbacks. They’d bought the sets and the sets were useless. They weighed 30 pounds. They were on a signaller’s back and as such he only carried a pistol, a revolver in his belt. But they were quite inadequate and they even improved with what they called tropic proofing because they used to suffer from the humidity and the heat, but that |
03:30 | didn’t fix it either. So then we had pigeons and the pigeons were able to be held out for two days but after that you had to let them go anyway. So the first two days on patrol you had some contact with brigade headquarters and the way the pigeons were carried was in a basket which had a partition in the middle to stop them pecking each other. They were fed by the sigs [signallers] |
04:00 | on special food. The food was about pea-sized, concentrated food, which gave them nourishment but of course didn’t fill the bellies very much. They were so small. But at least kept them alive. Mean to say the pigeon, while being kept alive on the one hand, he was always hungry. So when he was released he was breaking his neck to get back to the loft at headquarters to get a feed. And the moment he arrived back at the loft they’d take the |
04:30 | capsule off his leg and decode the message. That’s how that worked. But people can hardly believe it you know. Pigeons in World War II. How reliable were the pigeons? Absolutely. Over what distance? In jungle of course your distances aren’t great. It would probably be about three or four miles or five. This is about the limit though. And, funnily enough going through the rivers |
05:00 | which we had to do plenty of, you’d be going across a river hoping nothing would get you in the middle of the river, meaning from the enemy on the other side. And you’d be up to your chest at times in water but sometimes you’d go into a hole in the bottom of the river you see or a depression and go right under. Well, the signallers used to hold the pigeon by their heads like this. Hold them and when they’d go under pigeons and all, they’d |
05:30 | come up again you see like in the comics. You’d see the water spewing out of the basket and the old pigeons they’d be kicking up a noise in desperation. Was the noise that the pigeons made a concern when you were in the jungle? No, I think they just went to sleep at night which was the main concern. The insects kept a cacophony up by day but the pigeons never, I can’t remember ever |
06:00 | being a nuisance during daylight hours. They just went to sleep at night. But as far as their behaviour went I’d watch them when the sigs threw them up through the canopy, in the hole, I’d get my oil compass out and watch them and they’d always do one circuit and then go off at the exact tangent. I’d see it on the compass, the directions where brigade was you know and they’d go off on a tangent straight at that point, never missed and they never |
06:30 | failed to get home. But as far as being shot down or anything like that goes the canopy was too thick for them to be seen. So that was a pretty safe and a sure way of doing it. What kind of signals or messages would you pass back to headquarters? Where you were, what progress you were making, anything of that nature. I remember sticking my eye on the end of a stick one night. That’s another story. Well, the signaller would have reported that back because the accompanying commander said later, “How’s that |
07:00 | eye going?” You know, yeah. What happened with your eye? Well, it could have been pretty serious but the stretcher bearer just bandaged it and it came good after a couple of days on patrol. Were men prone to injury on those patrols?? Well, if you got caught you certainly were and in jungle it took four men with a |
07:30 | field stretcher to carry one casualty, and the going was so tough in New Britain that every twenty minutes you’d have to change your stretcher party. So it meant to say even with one casualty you had a serious depletion of men messing around doing that. Not desirable at all. You had no back up. You couldn’t call for assistance because there was no radio contact. |
08:00 | You know, you’re really on a patrol. You were out on your own with a platoon strength plus two stretcher bearers plus two sigs. That gave you a total of 37 bodies. I know that you mentioned earlier that you didn’t have any contact with the Japs in your platoon, but what about injuries as a consequence of accidents during a patrol? You mentioned you were poked with a stick in the eye. Were those kinds of incidents common? |
08:30 | No. I wasn’t hurt, I was very lucky with it but it wasn’t enough to stop me just getting on with the job. You might well have said, “Well, what would you have done?” Oh, I don’t know. You’d have to bring the whole patrol home. You could leave it in the hands of the sergeant but you’d need a section as a bodyguard to take you back with you and deplete the patrol |
09:00 | so you know it was a case of just getting on with it. Were any of the men’s knees, ankles or other…? No, we didn’t have any sprained ankles or the footballer’s whatnot, strains or anything like that. We were all in pretty good nick [health] and careful. Because as you just explained just a common or simple injury could have jeopardised an entire patrol. Oh, yes. One of |
09:30 | the other company platoons, when it was just a company, battalion was out on patrol and a freak thing could happen. It was very rare to see an army weapon fail in a mechanical sense. You might get a stop, jam or something but to actually break was very, very, was unknown to me except this one occasion and the sergeant of this company, Jacky Vincent, |
10:00 | he was walking around a perimeter, they were out on patrol for three days I think it was and they had been ordered to dig in which we always did. Made it a ritual. I used to say, “Sweat’s cheaper than blood. Don’t take any risks. Dig in.” And he was just walking around supervising the digging in of the platoon and a bloke was bending down in front of him a few yards away and he was getting |
10:30 | his shovel off his back which was hitched onto the back of your pack. What we used to do is get the normal army shovel and cut off the handle so it was a short thing about like that and then almost at the end of the war they brought in jungle shovels, little peewit things. But these army original shovels were a normal army sized shovel which had far more usage in shifting a lot of dirt. And he was bending over to get his shovel off his pack |
11:00 | and all of a sudden a round went across his shoulder blade and grooved his shoulder blade, past his ear and on its way and didn’t hit anybody else. How did that happen? There’s Jacky there with his rifle at the trail and that was the thing that shot him. And the reason was, on an army bolt the striker pin goes through the bolt. It’s spring loaded of course. When you cock it that spring is compressed and the striker’s held back |
11:30 | and if you’ve got the safety catch off and you press the trigger it lets the lot go – the striker hits the round and fires it. There’s a thing called a cocking piece. It’s an L-shaped little bit of forging. It’s right at the end of the bolt and it’s attached to the striker pin and it comes down from that a little bit and then forward that much and that actually snapped. At the bend where the bit went down on there, that actually |
12:00 | snapped so it wasn’t held back and the striker pin went forward and discharged the round. It was absolutely freakish and I forget now what the patrol commander did about that. But he mostly likely had to come home. You know, a bloke with a crease through his shoulder blades. But he just couldn’t send him back alone. He’d have to send at least a section back and deplete his strength. So, I think they might have come home on that |
12:30 | occasion. On the matter of coming home, that was a thing never to be done except in an absolute emergency. One of my officer mates had a patrol out and the rivers were flowing at about 4 to 6 knots and when you got up to your knees you were starting to struggle with all your gear on and when you got to your chest you were really struggling to get across the rivers. This fellow had a |
13:00 | patrol out. It was for three days, he’d only been out about a day, struck a river that was flowing at a more than usual rate and volume, there must have been extra torrential rain up in the mountains and they had no hope of crossing it. None at all. And so in desperation and he knew the seriousness of coming home, not reaching your objective, he brought the patrol home and reported the conditions. We had a brigadier at this stage from |
13:30 | Sydney who’d taken over and he was not loved. As a matter of fact at the officers’ reunion dinner a few years ago when this fellow was listed reported dead amongst the ones who died during the year, the whole mess, gentlemen and all, rose to their feet and cheered. So that’s how much he was loved. You can gather the general feeling. So the officer brought his patrol home. The |
14:00 | brigadier would keep his eye on movement of all the battalions. He learnt of this through intelligence. He paraded that officer before him and told him in flat language that if ever he struck that position again and couldn’t cross a river, to walk around the source of the river, reach your objective. That’s the sort of a sod he was you know. Though of course the source of the river’s up in Japanese territory in the mountains somewhere. Across the border. |
14:30 | And out of sheer spite. He then said, “And you will lead the next patrol right to the Jammer Bay lines. You’re going to lead it.” you see, which was ordered and which he did. And his sergeant was Nick, the officer keeping the platoon back a couple of hundred metres, the sergeant and two others went on and the objective of that patrol was to confirm that the Japs were still in position |
15:00 | there at Jammer Bay. We all knew they were in position there didn’t we? And furthermore, three RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] Boomerangs, modified Wirraways, flew over that position every afternoon. So, it would be pretty dumb sort of intelligence if you didn’t know the Nips were there. But he was sent on a spiteful journey risking men’s lives. Anyway… That’s an abuse of authority, isn’t it? Oh, you know, Alf Innes got close enough to the other two as he told me to hear the Japs cocking their |
15:30 | guns, and he just missed a sentry who ran off from a sentry box just ahead of them but he’d alerted them and he could hear them cocking their guns. So he did confirm they were still there and he got an MID [Mentioned in Dispatches] for his trouble. Yeah. How were the patrols organised? Each company was given a turn and the order for the patrol came from brigade headquarters so brigade headquarters controlled |
16:00 | the three battalions, 11, 16, 28th. The 44th Battalion was more or less abandoned back in Australia. So the order initially came from brigade and their intelligence would plot areas to be patrolled and it came down through the battalion intelligence on orders to the company in mind, and then the company commander probably decided then which |
16:30 | platoon of the three of us would do the patrol work. You all got your turn and plenty of them. How long were the patrols? The shorts ones that we used to call the Front Garden patrol were three hours, morning and afternoon. The others were three or five days. And you were out on your own. How did you prepare for the longer patrols? Well, you simply |
17:00 | had the usual fighting gear. You had your normal armament plus four grenades which we clipped in our belts, and the clips were just stuck in your belt. I often thought since, you know, if a bullet hits a grenade it would be a sympathetic detonation of that grenade with its mates to blow you in halves. But it was better to have them there at the ready than not have them and in the haversack, in the pack rather, we didn’t use haversacks, |
17:30 | you would have food for up to five days as required. You had the emergency ration tin which might keep you going for a couple of days at the outside, you had a field dressing in there or two but away from the normal fighting order you would have the four grenades in your belt and a bit of extra food in your pack. How |
18:00 | many rations would you have for 4, 5 days? Well, theoretically three meals a day but I can assure you there wasn’t much in each meal. There’d be bully beef and biscuits in the main and as I said most recently the biscuits were army biscuits. They weren’t like World War I ones, from what I can understand these things were about that |
18:30 | round but only about that thick. They were like iron with nutriment in them and compressed so they were compressed sort of nourishment and we used to get, on the perimeters get a bayonet and use the butt and pound these things in to a sort of a porridge and mix them up with water or dried milk that was supplied and use that stuff. How did you collect water in the jungle? Well, the jungle offered you a bit. There was some |
19:00 | big leaves on some of the trees and if necessary you simply get a water bottle and get it running off the leaves and when it rained it rained. Tropic rain is quite a thing in itself. I don’t imagine you’d have to carry much water with you on a patrol? No, no. Water bottle held, I suppose, a couple of pints. And as for the rivers the water was absolutely drinkable, |
19:30 | fresh water of course coming down from the mountains. How would you move on a patrol? The patrol rate or speed was ordered, no more than one thousand yards an hour. And that was because of having to be very careful about scouting ahead and around to make sure we didn’t hit an ambush. If you started barging along the track willy-nilly [without care] you could run in to an ambush too readily. So one thousand yards an |
20:00 | hour was your limit. In what formation did you move? In single file. It was a ritual. You had a forward scout. He was about 25 yards ahead of the second scout. Behind him at another 25 yards or so was a forward section of men. Then you had platoon headquarters. When I say that, there was only the platoon commander, the sergeant and your |
20:30 | batman, three of us. But that gave you a buffer from forward scout, second scout section. Platoon headquarters and then two other sections behind you. Now in the case of trouble, this was an army ritual, in case of trouble your job as a platoon commander was to get up forward, get in to the jungle and get up forward and find out what the scout was on about |
21:00 | and there were all signals. Enemy in front sort of thing was simply the rifle held up like that or big numbers was pumping it and so on. And the second scout would relay that back. Noise was cut to a minimum. No-one started yelling out or anything like that at any time. And if necessary if you were held up by something in front, to attack the thing |
21:30 | the two sections behind you gave flexibility. If the front ones were like pinned or anything like that these two at the back gave you a chance of sending them around the flanks and coming in from the sides or behind the enemy. Now that was learned from the Japanese, that tactic. And that was just army drill. I asked one of my platoon recently, he’s still alive and I said, “Why did you and Blue Fabry,” |
22:00 | who’s his mate, and his second scout, “Volunteer to be forward scout?” He said, “Well, you know the old score.” I said, “Yes, I know.” And the old score was, if the enemy had sent you an ambush and we would do the same, they let the scouts go through and lie doggo, wait for the main body. So, that’s why he reckoned he volunteered to be forward scout and his mate second. Did you move at night? Never. |
22:30 | In jungle you just couldn’t move at night that just wasn’t on. Never. No. What did you do at night? Well, you had two hours on and four hours off sentry while the rest slept and took their turn. From your scooped out shallow depression with your mosquito net over it to get to your weapon pit |
23:00 | or the weapon pit you were to man for the sentry, you put a stake in the ground where you were sleeping, you had a jungle vine down another stake at your weapon pit and you put your hand on the trolley wire and went down via that at night. It was pitch black with the canopy, you could put your hand on your forehead and you couldn’t see it. It was just black and that was a way of getting to the pit firstly and stopping you from wandering around the perimeter and looking for it and getting a |
23:30 | bayonet through you for your trouble. This was the thing. And as for what to do at night, you just went to sleep while your luck was in. Did you sleep in any particular formation? No. I think it was a case of just scooping out your bit of a shallow trench. It was only about that deep, just enough to get below the surface and not too far from your weapon pit. It was a case of going where it was |
24:00 | logically possible. The same as all the weapon pits and funk holes were dug to be tactically useful. In other words it was no good having them in board from the perimeter edge. You wanted to be where you could see over the drop. It was on high ground. So you had those as forward as you dared and then outside those weapon pits you had your barbed wire and the barbed wire had empty food cans with a few |
24:30 | bits of coral in them, tied to them so they’d rattle if anyone started to come through it. But just inside the barbed wire you had the booby traps. Now they were trip wires with H3 30 grenades on them, hand grenades which were devilish things. We, by rule, to allow safe movement around the perimeter by day and also if anyone had to make a run for a hole by day the booby traps were |
25:00 | deloused. They were unhooked. The wire was a thin, almost invisible bit of steel wire with a hook on it and we used to hook it in to the ring of the grenades. Well, you unhook those by day but at night at dusk they had to be hooked up again and they were just inside the barbed wire. So if anybody managed to get through the wire they ran into booby traps and there were several accidents with booby traps, setting them particularly. Slipping |
25:30 | in the mud and going through a tripwire and so forth. Did those accidents occur on any of your patrols? Oh, yes, on our perimeters, yes, and I had the joy of taking out a bloke at night. While I said there was no movement at night and in this emergency the boss asked me to take this fellow to a dressing station and that is a long story. Just wait until I go and suffer from an old man’s complaint for a moment. |
26:00 | Explain that incident you mentioned before we paused. That was the casualty being taken out at night. That was the one of two occasions for any night work we’ve done in an absolute dire emergency and it was an attempt to save his life, and to cut that story short he’s died eventually, but when we got him to the Ford dressing station so-called. That was |
26:30 | simply a fourteen foot square tent, mosquito net walls up about five feet. The field stretcher, they were made as a collapsible sort of thing, the field stretcher was simply put on four forked sticks in the ground but the handles went into the four forked sticks, that was the operating table and the surgeon was operating for an hour or so. I watched him with two Tilley lamps, kerosene lantern lamps, that was all. And |
27:00 | the crudity of it is quite something. Today, they’d have a chopper in you know and get him out to some decent hospital. But in those days it was as tough as that and so forth. But he operated on two of the 38 slugs in this bloke’s belly. The third one was too deep in and he wasn’t game to do it until daylight but to cut any, the doctor told me all was well but it wasn’t and anyway the poor man, |
27:30 | he was a married man with three kids you know. It was a tragedy and he jolly well died of peritonitis. The third slug was in there for too long. But I mention that as the sheer crudity of the day compared with today’s rescue plans. Did you have any first aid material with you? Only personally we each had a field dressing. It was a great wad bandage affair or two |
28:00 | and away from that, if you were away on patrol and went on the perimeters you had a couple of stretcher bearers, were trained in that sort of thing and they had some medical supplies, painkillers and that style of thing. Any bandages? Yes, well the field dressing was a pretty massive bandage with a gauze wad built into it and we had enough of those. No regular bandages? No, |
28:30 | How far from the company headquarters was the forward dressing station? Well, I suppose in true distance it wasn’t that far but to cut the story short, to get off the perimeter, down off the hill, over all the Japanese hole trenches and bunkers and that sort of thing. And the pain of the patient to be nursed, it took us four hours to get there. We left about ten at night, |
29:00 | it was two in the morning we got to the dressing station. And then only to have that crudity to get on with. And I think the doctor would have been fairly inexperienced. I mean to say he wouldn’t have been a doctor for too long. He had to be young enough to stand the grind and the conditions. So one way or the other anybody hurt that badly was up against it. Did you assist with the crude operation? |
29:30 | I had no cause to try and assist, he would have had a couple of orderlies there, couple of soldiers on his staff but I just watched, you know, through the mosquito net wall. But pretty sad. It must have been extremely disheartening. Oh, yes. How were ambushes set up on the patrols? |
30:00 | Oh, the company I was attached to as an observer set an ambush one day and the purpose of that was to trap any the stragglers from the recent action coming back to their lines, you see. And the ambush was always arranged so that, as this one was, if possible there was a steep sort of bit of cliff face off the track one side. The ambush was set up the other |
30:30 | so anybody caught on the track couldn’t very well run away that way, it was too much of a steep wall. If they tried they’d get shot and the ambush was set in such a manner that anything that got in to it had no chance or little chance of getting out and had Bren guns set at each end of the run of the jungle to cross fire that way and of course all riflemen were and Owen gunners and whatnot were in the middle firing |
31:00 | directly at the track area. So that, you simply looked for a position that gave the ambush party a good hiding place as it were at the same time gave the enemy some little chance of escape if such a situation was possible. What signs could you look for in the jungle of Japanese presence? Well, the forwards scouted that job, not to lead you into one, but if we missed |
31:30 | the second scout in the forward section hopefully, you know. We had a little routine drill which I thought was rather clever. When you were coming home from patrol, as you neared your own perimeter you’d be coming up the track and about two hundred metres short of your perimeter, the forward section and the scouts would just melt in to the jungle, no words of command, nothing. It was |
32:00 | automatic. Whichever section was there and the scouts that did it but just melt in to the jungle and the rest of you would just go past, don’t even see them and if there was a party on your wheel finding out where you lived they’d be coming behind you and they’d run into an ambush with the rest of us. I thought that was a pretty clever trick you know. It never occurred but that was one of the technical tricks. What kind of signs of |
32:30 | Japanese would the forward scouts look for? Simply visual sighting of a body or movement of course or noise. But they’d be shrewd enough not to make too much noise anyway and they all had these Japanese jungle boots, like canvas boot with a singular toe on it and there’s a story there, |
33:00 | up around the perimeters on one occasion we found these Japanese boot footmarks in the mud and two or three reported in different places around the perimeter you see. So there was an immediate concern about it, right amongst it and patrols went all over looking, couldn’t find a thing until suddenly woke up one day, saw one of the war graves unit who used to |
33:30 | exhume the bodies that were temporarily buried and bring them down to the proper cemetery. And they saw one of these birds, thought he was very smart for comfort, had diced his army boots and he was wearing these confounded things. So it was an Australian all the way, making all the footprints. He wouldn’t have even thought of that, you know. Was it difficult to notice if the jungle had been disturbed by…? Oh, generally |
34:00 | speaking the pads were used and as such the jungle had been taken off those. So, there wouldn’t be any noticeable disturbance. One of the tricks as we learnt as observers was look out for any tree which was alongside the track and, typical of the jungle trees, you’ve seen pictures probably, great big like fillets[?] on the base, |
34:30 | base of the trunk go out like that, about that thick, you know they come out and spread out because nature has worked it out. The trees couldn’t put a tap root down because of the coral base so the trees spread out and once you do that the tree is liable to fall over unless you have a great spread and from an engineering view point nature provides a fillet to protect those roots from snapping off. So, what the Nips used to do if |
35:00 | a tree was alongside the track they’d get a bayonet and just worry a hole big enough to put a muzzle through and sight it in one of those fillets, which are pretty small holes you see, facing down the track. So they’d have a sitting shot of anybody so we were always warned to look out for that sort of thing and if there’s any doubt at all put a burst through it before you went near it. But these are just things by the way. That’s very interesting. Can you describe |
35:30 | what was at the company headquarters or base? Well, once you got onto perimeters there was no such sort of separate issue. A company commander, he had a hole like anybody else. He lived in the same conditions. We all used the same toilet which was just inside the barbed wire. There was nothing around the toilets. There was no privacy of course because |
36:00 | that could be a dangerous thing when you couldn’t see around all the time. And so the company was worked by the company commander and his 2IC just amongst the other holes, that’s all. How much time did you spend in between patrols back at the company headquarters, or the perimeter I should say? Well, you lived on the perimeters and the patrols went out from the perimeters so your home was |
36:30 | on the perimeters. How much time would you spend at the perimeter in between patrols recuperating? Well, in other words how often were we given a patrol? Either. Yeah, that’s right well you wouldn’t get a patrol thankfully more than every say couple of weeks or something like that. You wouldn’t want any more either. How did you spend your time at the perimeter? Except for making sure your weapon pit was |
37:00 | maintained, if rain started to get into it or anything like that, you had to keep it drained. Maintain the parapet. You sleep and scoop that hole, keeping your weapons clean. In the weapon pits we always had half a dozen grenades in the bit of dirt that was levelled on your side of the parapet but there was nothing |
37:30 | to do except that and sentry, day and night. Two hours on, four hours off. Where’s Wide Bay positioned in regards to the Gazelle Peninsula and the…? I can show you on the maps clearly. Can you just describe it for me in general where the Japanese were congregated? Yes. Wide Bay is a very big bay and |
38:00 | we were on one section of the bay took over from the Japs and they pulled back to Jammer Bay which was about, from memory I think about four or five miles eastwards, moving up the coast which leads on to Rabaul eventually. New Britain island, from memory is something like 60 miles long. At the widest point it’s only about 20 miles wide. There is, |
38:30 | at the top, the north-east end of the island, there’s more or less a squarish area called the Gazelle Peninsula and it narrows down to a neck. There’s Wide Bay on one side and Open Bay the other. But that neck across there was only a matter of about 14 miles. The Japanese were around the bay shore line away from our perimeters. |
39:00 | Our area on the other hand was more or less in sight of the Japanese. If you moved out off, you came off the hill down on to the flat at all in front of the perimeters you were in direct sight of where the Japanese were. Were the patrols conducted in the neck between, below the peninsula? Were the patrols going out into the neck that you |
39:30 | described was there? One patrol was sent to conduct a group of engineers over to Wide Bay but that didn’t come in to play much because all the Nip occupancy and action really was on the east side, and going up the east side again all the way to Rabaul. And coming inland from Rabaul, yes there was one or two underground aerodromes |
40:00 | then a canal and so on. But the west side was more or less devoid of Japs, no worry at all and that peninsula was of no account, you know, we didn’t sort of have any worry across there. What were you hearing about developments north in the islands in regards to the Japanese and the Americans and what they were doing? |
40:30 | We had no information about how their life and living was in Rabaul area. But it was to be the south-west Pacific hub for the whole of the south-west Pacific Jap campaign included in the occupation of Australia. And General Imamura… And very shrewdly instead of our |
41:00 | forces going in to Rabaul and trying to push them around, you know in piecemeal, a very clever setup was made by divisional headquarters. They simply said to Imamura, “Well, we will give you the orders and you percolate them down through your organisation and structure.” And this was a very shrewd move and Imamura was a good general. He got 7 years’ jail in the finish for some of the actions of his |
41:30 | underlings actually and atrocities on prisoners, but he was a good general, generally speaking, and he gave the orders and a Japanese order was such they obeyed those orders to the letter. We never suffered any sabotage at all. We never suffered any behind the scenes scallywagism [bad behaviour]. We were not to give them a thump behind the ear on the quiet, behind the bush because we’d been fighting for democracy. |
00:31 | Robert you were just talking about where you were in Wide Bay when you heard that the Japanese had surrendered. Yes, I happen to have the most forward perimeter platoon strength with a few other bods. It was on the junction of the Moondei River, which is around the bay a bit, and the CO came up, had yarn to me and he |
01:00 | advised me, he said, “Don’t take any risks because the Japs are full of tricks like hands up.” Got a grenade hung behind the hand, you see, and you fall for this and they chuck it forward. And I hoped I convinced him there’d be no doubt about it if I had any doubt all and we were on one side of this river and they would have to come, it was a fairly fast flowing, fairly narrow but fairly fast flowing so we had a bit of protection as it were. But they could come across |
01:30 | elsewhere and come in from the side or behind. Anyway, they were so concerned about Jap banzai attacks, this lunacy you know, you’d have to understand the Jap loss of face, what it meant to them. The loss of face story is not a fairy one, they’re very, very, well were very concerned about it and they thought that undoubtedly when headquarters told them to turn it up from Rabaul |
02:00 | all the mob down Wide Bay would go mad and put on a banzai you know, do or die attempt. Because of that they got bulldozed and cut swathes through the jungle, crisscrossing and mounted nests of Vickers machine guns at each end. So, a sort of a mob attack. It had cross machine gun fire and that’s how much sort of concern they had at that time. You know to make that provision; it had never been done before |
02:30 | but there it was, but as it happened I was you know, most forward. Were you personally expecting this kind of attack? Well, it was a possibility and knowing their form like the banzai pilots and all the rest of it, it was a possibility. So, we didn’t consider it as a myth altogether. At the time did you have any idea how many Japanese were on the island? No. We knew we were outnumbered |
03:00 | for want of a term. But we had no idea. They thought there were a few more of us but in the finish, even at that stage, there were 110,000 of them in the Gazelle Peninsula and they wouldn’t have all come at it at once, but you know another 15,000 New Ireland mob in Rabaul brought over. But we numbered three battalions and supporting armaments, artillery, medical stuff, that sort of thing. Maybe 5,000 total. |
03:30 | We had no idea. We’d have died of fright if we had, I think. And when we got to Rabaul, some of the mysteries that we couldn’t quite nut out in Wide Bay days, why certain things did or didn’t happen. We learned from the Japanese intelligence, our intelligence got on to their intelligence and filled us in with a lot of the information that we could want and sort out a lot of things that were on our minds and they learnt from the Japanese |
04:00 | intelligence, they capitulated on the 15th August ’45 and in about September, October they intended to put a bash on for two weeks. And bearing in mind shortage of food and medical supplies, it was said on their plan, that if they couldn’t kick us out in two weeks they’d have pulled back. I can assure you we’d have been trampled to death. There wouldn’t be a |
04:30 | doubt about that. But that was a thing we learnt to our horror when we got to Rabaul. But they behaved themselves splendidly in Rabaul as I said. And as far as any atrocity stuff went, they’d belted prisoners for 3 years digging 200 miles of tunnels in Rabaul and I’m not talking about blooming crawly crawly types. I’m talking about stuff big enough for hospitals, kitchens, trucks to drive in. All that sort of thing. And they’d butt stroke and bash their own |
05:00 | and Chinese and civilian prisoners they had. Chinese, army and civilian prisoners and Indians and they’d thump them to a degree where they were callous and I called it an atrocity. So there were court cases while we were in Rabaul and some were being hanged while we were there and others were dished out with jail sentences, often wonder whether those jail sentences were |
05:30 | served. I don’t think anybody might have kept them in Rabaul but I doubt it. But I don’t know where the devil else they would have gone to. But Imamura, the general, he was given 7 years’ jail because he wasn’t directly responsible for the atrocity but his underlings were in on the joke. What was the atrocity? Butt stroking them, belting them, starving them. That sort of thing. And you can imagine the |
06:00 | funs and games digging these tunnels. If they thought they hadn’t been done quickly enough, fast enough, they’d give them a bit of a butt stroke or something to get on with. But one of the other things was the Indian and civil army Chinese prisoners, particularly the Indian. The Indians had charge of some Japanese working parties and just south of the city of Rabaul area |
06:30 | there was a steep drop to the water’s edge. It was quite a cliff and it was said that sometimes the Indian party would be 12 at the beginning of the day but somehow, at the end of the day there would be six, and all this carry-on. They were sort of coaxed at the end of a bayonet to keep backing and backing and backing until they fell over the cliff. But that was illegal; it was against the rules, and none of our gang |
07:00 | ever did anything like that. They obeyed the rule. That we’d been fighting for this thing called democracy and behave yourself and if in trouble they had a court case coming. What were they generally like when you would interact with them? Absolutely civil. No trouble at all. As I say, no sabotage, no tricks. We used to go to the tunnels |
07:30 | where there were stores. There was a room as big as this full of brand new parachutes made of silk. I sent one home in its complete pack to Gwen to make underclothing. We had the time of our lives in the tunnels and things. What were you doing? Well, gathering up such like spoils as that. And I got a couple of Japanese carpenter’s tools. I’ll show you. And others I got I’ve given to Daryl Clohessy as memorabilia. If we can |
08:00 | swap, he’s interested in that sort of thing. But it was quite interesting and the fact that they’d dug these blooming tunnels. There’s one feature in Rabaul called Tunnel Hill Road because it was riddled with tunnels. And at first, thinking there may be a reception committee around the next tunnel corner; we used to go in armed to the teeth. But the Jap proved to be so reliable both in working party movement, in |
08:30 | barge repairs and all that sort of carry-on over the barge company, we only went in with a 38 in the belt or something finally. We weren’t, prior to that it was at least an Owen, you know, for close quarter work and really expected at any time but not so. So the tunnels were completely evacuated by the time you got there? That is right, and except for the stores and that sort of thing. There were other stores I can remember. Full of navy and |
09:00 | air force uniforms and air force flying suits because it was the south-west Pacific base to be. They were going to play Larry Dooly [wreak havoc] from it. But it didn’t happen, you know, luckily for us. Were they actually living underground? Oh, yes. Well and truly. What sorts of things did they have to make themselves comfortable? They lived underground mainly in tunnels and the like because the air |
09:30 | force made it its business to bomb Rabaul to such a degree that when they went on a mission north of Australia around Rabaul if they hadn’t used all the bombs, they come over to Rabaul before they went home and dropped the lot on there anyway, or drop the remainder of them. And to give you some idea of the cunning of the Japs, if they had a kitchen underground, instead of letting the smoke rise up a chimney out through the top, they would dig a trench, |
10:00 | of perhaps 80–100 metres in the ground, cover it with some sort of covering and put the dirt back and bring the chimney up to an emit, you know perhaps 80 metres away, 100 metres away. And they had to live underground otherwise they would have got killed. In Rabaul when we got there the only thing of any solidity standing above ground was the concrete steps up to the previous governor’s house. |
10:30 | That is all. The rest had been bombed flat and the plantations up there were owned by Burns Philp of Australia. We were warned not to wantonly destroy the palms. They’d been unattended for 3 years at least. The coconuts had fallen to their base. The Nips didn’t use them apparently and we were told that the government of Australia would have to pay Burns Philp 3 pounds each for |
11:00 | any palm destroyed, you know in the process, so we were careful not to wantonly destroy them. But because of mosquito breeding in the rotting coconuts at the base of the tree, the mosquito squad came around every week and sprayed all over with spray to knock the mosquito menace. As far as Rabaul went there were tremors every day. Matupi, the volcano, was active. It did nothing |
11:30 | more in our time than spit sulphurous fumes and a few rocks occasionally but we got so used to the tremors in the street, the tent poles would sway quite a bit. If we were talking to somebody we wouldn’t stop talking we’d just say, “Notice the tremor.” you know, and after it was all over. So we were quite used to it. Around the base of Matupi were hot sulphurous springs and the Japs had catwalks across the top of the water everywhere. They used to wash |
12:00 | their clothes in the muck. But it stunk of sulphur to high heaven and heaven knows how they got it but they might have washed them down with warm water. It was pretty impossible with hot water but then gone and dunked them in the saltwater of the harbour to get rid of the sulphur perhaps. I don’t know. But that’s what went on. Sounds like a hellish sort of a place. Well, of course as you understand since, the earthquakes of late have been so serious that Rabaul now is vacated and the |
12:30 | centre has shifted down to Kokopo, which is about 10 miles down south of Rabaul. Where were you staying when you were in Rabaul? Where was I staying? Initially I just had a shelter of a groundsheet and so forth. And somehow or other they started to get our gear from… So I had a stretcher to sleep on. It was quite something. And the boys soon |
13:00 | had tents and this mess hut was built by the Nips. Wasn’t a mess then. And in the mess hut eventually because of electrical supply coming across from the water craft workshop you had a generator. We brought the spare current they had over; they offered it to us and lit the mess hut so the boys could write home in a bit of comfort with decent light you see. What was discipline like? Did it get a |
13:30 | little bit sloppy after the war was over? No. It was still there well and truly. I suppose we had a great feeling of, “We’ve got this far, we’ll get home and behave ourselves to make sure we do.” And don’t take any undue risks. The Japanese had a camp up in the hills of the back of Rabaul |
14:00 | and I had the audacity when I come to think of it of one day getting a jeep and a driver and only the two of us and drove up to Imamura’s headquarters, and the Nip officers had decked themselves out great, in huts with great silk sweeping sheets sort of thing to beautify the place in their way of thinking. But I went up there hunting for some generator sets I heard about and |
14:30 | a Japanese lieutenant interpreter was sent out and I had a talk to him. He could speak perfect English. He had an American accent but he would have been probably a Hawaiian Jap or something, something like that initially. I told him what I wanted. He went to great trouble and although the rule was you didn’t salute any Jap, he was required to salute you regardless. Any Australian sentry could stand in the |
15:00 | easy position and the Japanese, whoever he was, whatever rank, plus also say a working party on the back of the truck would have to stand up and salute the sentry. It was all loss of face stuff. You could do that but you couldn’t thump them. But they did, you know, get concerned about loss of face and we had the joy of rubbing that as much as we could. The same as we used to say to some of the |
15:30 | Nips, “When do you think you’ll get home?” This is Rabaul you see. “Oh…” “Well, you’ll never get home. You know where all your ships are? They’re on the bottom. You’ll never get home.” You know, they eventually took them home when all Allied troops had been brought home they then thought that they’d use them to take them home. But bit of a story, when the electrical spare current was offered by the |
16:00 | watercraft workshop which had their own AC [Alternating Current] generator, they said to us, “That will be done providing you can provide the poles and the mains to come across to your unit.” which was just across the road. That meant never mind about Burns Philp, that meant cutting coconut palm trunks to act as the poles and this was done in readiness. And there were Jap working |
16:30 | parties required to dig the holes which are down about, oh a metre and a half I suppose, for the posts to go therein and for the cross arms, for the juice. I suppose they use a bit of bow and the insulators are made from beer bottle tops. You can put a hot wire around the top and get the glass nickel as an insulator and this was done. |
17:00 | Anyway one morning a corporal came to me and he said, “I don’t know what’s going on, Blue, but that Nip corporal,” he said, “I don’t know whether he’s playing games or just wasting time or what he’s doing.” So, “Oh, yes,” I said, “I’ll have a look at him.” So, I just quietly had a look at this Nip and the corporal had a stick and as these holes were dug by this party he had this stick and he was checking all the holes you see. I said to my corporal, “I |
17:30 | said, you dig those holes to that diameter and by golly they’ll be dug to that as perfect circles, accurately.” And that’s what he, he’s used the gauge. Every hole’s the same, wouldn’t have mattered two hoots to the pole if you hadn’t filled it but that’s the sort of exactitude they had. And all their work on making the huts was perfect. When the topping was put in… What’s the |
18:00 | name when you make it all fronds and roofs? Forgotten the name for it. Thatched? Thatched, thatched roof. When they’d done the thatched roofs, good on you, they’d get a block of wood and a machete and trim the whole thatch around the eaves perfectly straight as a finish, that’s their, as you can see from the motor cars they produce, you know busting in to a foreign market and how they’ve succeeded since. |
18:30 | Did it surprise you that they weren’t the monsters that you thought they were? The answer to that would be when they were, with the upper hand good as help you. Their officers and even their NCOs were cruel to their own if they weren’t carrying out orders perfectly and I would suggest that with the officers’ attitude and |
19:00 | down through their NCOs, look out, you wouldn’t be worth two bob to them. They were cruel and I’ve seen stuff dished out to their own by their officers and NCOs that you wouldn’t dare try and pull in a British force. Well, you might try and pull it but you’d have a lead breakfast for your trouble. You’d have an accident somewhere. But on the other hand when they were your servants |
19:30 | and as prisoners I think it wasn’t a case of loving us. I think it was a determination to display to you that the Japanese Imperial force was a force and it was a disciplined force. I’m sure that was behind it all. And, put it another way, perhaps they were afraid to do anything else but what they were told down through Imamura for fear of getting it from their own if they didn’t, if there’s any complaint. We used to |
20:00 | complain on principle on some working parties. They used to work like dogs, coolies. You had no complaint really but on principle you’d get the interpreter the next morning and say, “If those bludgers of yours don’t do this that and the other you’re up the bloody…” you see, some mythical thing would happen. It wouldn’t. And I’ve seen the interpreter convey that to a Japanese major who would line up the working party in two ranks facing each other, bark out an |
20:30 | order which was one to advance on his opposite, kick him in the shins and slap his face. And if the major thought anybody was holding back he’d go down and put the boots in. Now that might convey just what a sort of an iron discipline mob they were. But on the other hand, a pride in their force. I’m sure that must have been the pervading thing and/or afraid of their own discipline if they dissatisfied us too much. |
21:00 | So, how long were you actually in Rabaul in total? Three months. So not a really long time but did you enjoy that time? Well it was most interesting. And in our off times of course, hunting around you know tunnels and all the rest of it. Is that what you were doing mostly? Scavenging? Oh, no. I wasn’t there too long before I was nominated to education officer and as such I organised |
21:30 | educational programs. That was an order from Australia originally to get men prepared for return to civil life by any means, such as lessons and classes and that style of thing. And it succeeded, you know, gave men something to do I suppose and some worthwhile interests, I hope, and also you know a bit of, sort of nurturing to come |
22:00 | back to Australia. About this time were you looking forward to coming home? My word. We’d had enough. Enough of it. What was morale like by the time you got to Rabaul? It wasn’t too bad. I think at least you knew the war was over, that’s pretty important. Prior to that it went on year after year after year and never looked liked ending for whatever reason. But we knew it was over. |
22:30 | We knew our time for coming home was near and I think that would buoy you enough to offset any other boredom or anything of that nature. So how were you informed that you’d be going home? How were we informed? Oh, down through company orders, you know from battalion which came from brigade which in turn came from divisional headquarters with the 5th Division. And divisional headquarters |
23:00 | in naughty language was commonly called Wimbledon – all balls and rackets. That’s what that was all about. And Blamey came up to Rabaul and we had a big parade for him, brigade parade, and Blamey had been promised some souvenir to go back to Australia with you see and the |
23:30 | Japanese, the officers had what we called dress dirk [dagger]. So a dirk about that long, a lovely little scabbard, a nice thing just for dress purposes, and of course samurai swords were there too and also automatic pistols. Anyway, all of this contraband was put into a tunnel up in divvy [division] headquarters, and 24 hours a day for weeks an Australian sentry was on the mouth of that tunnel. So obviously nothing could be stolen could it? |
24:00 | But it was. With Australia’s acumen, of course, I dare say some of the sentries were bribed. And also they even came to putting a hole down from the top of the hill into the tunnel and with a fish hook device, fishing for stuff. Well, Blamey was promised one of these dirks, rather a nice little thing, but when they came in to the tunnel to get the dirks for the big noises up at Wimbledon there wasn’t a dirk |
24:30 | left. Funny that. I think one of the officers who had probably snaffled a dirk prior probably had to give it to Blamey to keep the face of division right. How did most of the men treat Blamey? Well, there’s a general feeling I think of a bit of disdain for him. Why’s that? The ins and outs of it. He didn’t do us any harm |
25:00 | directly but altogether I don’t think in the main overall, the units would like him. But as I said, he didn’t do us any harm. Just came and you know we paraded for him and so forth before we went from Darwin and also on New Britain and Rabaul days. How did you get back to Australia? We came back on the |
25:30 | Duntroon again. We landed at Townsville. What were the conditions like on the Duntroon? Just the same as before. Pretty overcrowded, you know food was good. But we landed at Townsville so we didn’t have the joy of, and we didn’t run in to any gale force winds as we did coming back on the leave, off the [Great] Barrier Reef. It was dreadful weather and I remember getting up |
26:00 | on the boat deck, on the bridge area. Well, I wasn’t seasick there but the ship was pitching so badly, I remember the stem going under the water. It was just pitching terribly and a lot of people were seasick of course. If I could get up on deck I was all right but down below was the creaking of the cabins and all that sort of thing, I was seasick under the conditions of 60 miles an hour gale force winds |
26:30 | but when we got in to the Bight there was no pitching, which you don’t get seasick any more. But she rolled up to 30 %, that was the official rolling angle because of the crossbeam half sea. So when did you actually arrive in Australia? We landed back in Australia about the first week in |
27:00 | February 1946 and having got put ashore at Townsville then we came by train overland all the way to Perth. What was the train journey like? Oh, it was just troop train stuff, you know. I don’t think we minded what was on really. It used to be funny in troop trains. If they had compartments and some went over in cattle |
27:30 | trucks, which you’ve heard. When things got so demanding on carriages they used cattle trucks after our day. We went on in compartments with carriages and you know the first thing you did was select where you were going to sleep. Now in a compartment there were two hat racks, there were two seats and the floor and then the toilet. Well, we used to draw matches of certain lengths, the |
28:00 | shortest ones lousy sort of thing. And the last draw would be the head in the toilet with the door pushed open you see and your legs this way. It was anything to lie down. And the dip of course, the number one was the two seats, obviously. And perhaps the number two was about the floor, and I think even hat racks we used. But it was tough as that but we, you know, at that stage of the game we couldn’t care less. We were very, very pleased indeed to be on the way home and the |
28:30 | Kalgoorlie-ites, they think a lot of Kalgoorlie. As we approached to Kalgoorlie they lean out the carriages and say, “There she is. There she is!” The blooming galvanised homes and things. They were very proud of it. It’s hard to understand really. Well, that’s right. And the others from Melbourne, Lieutenant Colonel Anketel [?], who was killed with the 2/4th Machine Guns in Singapore, he was our CO of the battalion and |
29:00 | Ankie probably some mornings on brigade, the whole battalion would say, “Those troops and country towns such as Kalgoorlie, Boulder, Northam” and there’d be growls, corrections from the ranks. “Kalgoorlie City and Boulder City,” you know it was a city, which is why we had a 30,000 population. But you’d hear under the breath, growls, corrections. And Ankie |
29:30 | with 14 other officers and NCOs from the unit went from Melville and formed the 2/4th Machine Guns, who were captured in Singapore, either captured or killed. I’ve seen some of the, I’ve seen Ankie’s grave and one or two of my mates who were in, you know, even went to school with me up there. They were surrounded of course and copped it, or else taken prisoner and wished they had copped it, in Changi and all the rest of it. |
30:00 | But having got home to Perth I think it must have been because of my parents knowing one of the [(UNCLEAR)] on Perth station, the train was stopped at Perth station, the troop train. I don’t know for what reason. We were heading for discharge or termination of duties as some of it was called at Claremont camp and the train was stopped there for about perhaps |
30:30 | 20 minutes, half an hour, and I found to my astonishment my mother, father and sisters on the train. My father got off work for an hour or two and we had a chat you know it was quite something. Then the train went on to Claremont where we were either given a straight discharge. You couldn’t get off the train at Perth? Oh, no. And down at Claremont you went through all the necessary procedures to see you off. What was |
31:00 | that procedure? Well, as an officer you weren’t discharged, you were put on the reserve list automatically for 17 years. And other troops, the NCOs and the privates, were given their straight discharge. That’s a thing that many of us would be looking for for years, and there was such things offered to you. “Have you got a job?” “Do you want to go back to that job?” |
31:30 | “Do you want Commonwealth reconstruction training and the scheme [CRTS – Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme]?” I could have gone say to university and done engineering but I said to them, “No. I just want to be left alone. I’ve got a job.” and I’d had enough. I just wanted to be left alone. So like a fool I said, “Just give me my,” you know, “break and I’ve got a job,” and |
32:00 | that’s it. But had I had more sense I would have said, “Well, yes, what have you got offering?” and gone and got a degree at uni in engineering, and heaven knows how it would have ended up anyway. But that’s part of life. Did they ask you anything about your health? You haven’t. I mean your health as in when you were coming back, did they ask you anything about…? Oh, well they did a strict medical check on everyone and anything of account at all, |
32:30 | apart from any malaria potential, that was noted and if necessary you were sent for hospital treatment or whatever. Oh, yes. What sort of shape were you in by this stage? Perfectly all right. I had some raised pimples here under the skin. It was a tropic thing and that went away eventually. They said, “Oh, you know, don’t worry about it. It’ll go.” which it did. |
33:00 | Otherwise, I was all right. I’d had a nice old back injury driving these Bren gun carriers like lunatics on orders, but otherwise malaria of course was still in the system but as I’ve told you I only had one attack. But I did religiously use Atebrin at the time away and I certainly used the six months’ supply religiously and I think that was a salvation. I’m sure the ones |
33:30 | who didn’t do that were the ones who suffered attacks, but when Paludrine arrived that was a wonder drug. That fixed them after some months of in and out of Hollywood every six weeks. Wonderful thing. How difficult was it to settle back in to civilian life? Well, I had a dry bed and the same bed every night. I was living at home, |
34:00 | became engaged to Gwen. We put our wedding off for 12 months and in those days you just couldn’t book a wedding anywhere. The place was so booked out everywhere you had to wait anyway even for a wedding breakfast. As far as housing went, that was a nightmare. There was nowhere to live and what we had to do to start off |
34:30 | was go and live in the Shaftsbury Hotel in Lord Street and we were there for 6 months. The rent charges, Mrs Nelson was running the place. She was very good. They even used to cut my lunch in the kitchen to take to work each day. I was working at Victoria Park and petrol was rationed. The |
35:00 | tariff was to be raised in desperation. Any of the old houses we were there for some months. She laid off raising the tariff as long as she could and then she told us she’d have to raise it about 25%. Well, I think we were paying something like 5 pounds a week for the two of us and my wages on a salary of three hundred and something pounds a year was the equivalent of about |
35:30 | seven pounds or guineas a week. It was a big hole, that’s for putting up you see. That was really trouble. So it’s a bit of a laugh but we thought, “Oh well, you know, have to do something about it.” So we’d heard about this King Edward Hotel on the corner of Irwin and Hay Street and we went and had a quiet look, and gee whiz the dining room looked all right, you know. There were even serviettes and the cutlery looked all right, you know. |
36:00 | And the alleged advert said something like, five pounds ten a week I think it was. We thought, “Wow, you know, we can’t afford the 23%.” It looked all right. So we marched up to the desk and said, you know this, that and the other but the catch was it was five pound ten each. That set us back. So then we started to panic and we answered a call |
36:30 | for a person in Nedlands who had a back room and a bit of a veranda she’d converted into some sort of you know living place, and we were there for 6 months and the old lady there was a bit impossible so we weren’t too happy with it. It was a case of get somewhere and we tried pretty hard and everywhere was taken. People who had keys to say flats, instead of telling the agent they were going to clear out, |
37:00 | they’d hand it on to a mate. And the law seemed to be if you had occupancy that was yours and the agent couldn’t say, “Oh, get out.” You arranged this with the previous tenant. That’s not good enough. And once you were in the law protected you and eventually the best we could do was to get a place for rent, a house up in Kalamunda. Now I had to bus it down to Victoria Park and bus it back every day. Petrol rationing was very severe. We had a |
37:30 | Morris 8 by that stage but you couldn’t run the car too often. We only come down on the weekends to home or something and we were up there for something like three years. We thought, “Oh, this will have to do for a moment.” We were there three years waiting to get a house built. If you had 20 kids you were given priority but we had none and we just had to wait that long eventually to get a permit. And then there was a catch. |
38:00 | We got the permit only if at that stage you could supply your own architect and your own builder. Otherwise the government had their own architects and builders and all that sort of caper. But we managed to, people that Gwen knew very well, they were builders and they were asked if they’d build us our house and they said, “Yes, when we’ve got the moment.” Any builder you went to |
38:30 | he said, “Couldn’t touch it for another couple of years.” They were all sort of chockablock. Material was extremely short. It was all, the place had been out of commission on making anything for years, cement, asbestos sheets, tiles you name it. The only thing we had from a local aspect really I suppose was timber. A brick house was mostly bricks. The brick places had been flat |
39:00 | out ever since the war ended and so it was a very grim time and the other thing was I used to knock off school at Victoria Park in the afternoon, go in to town in the tram. I’d be tearing all over Perth trying to get stores because the builder couldn’t afford the time. You’d go to a place like Maclean Brothers and you knew from hearsay or something there was a shipment of baths coming in. Well, when you got there they’d say, |
39:30 | “Oh, yes we’ve got green enamel steel baths but not cast iron,” and with that you’d have to take a plastic pink basin. I’m not exaggerating. There were such things. And all this went on and so you had to sort of juggle this and you prayed to goodness, well if you grabbed the bath now, maybe some green basins would come in which they eventually did. So, I eventually got that one sealed. With the hot water pipes, the Hardman’s copper pipe, a |
40:00 | shipment came in and the builder couldn’t run around looking for that. He had other buildings on the go. So I remember taking the Morris 10 we had in by that stage in to Murray Street, going to all the hot water pipes in Murray Street, rolling the Morris 10 over the top, tying them up to the bumper, sticking out each end under the Morris 10 and going back over the old causeway which was like this and taking the stuff to the house in Applecross about a kilometre over here in Tweeddale Road. |
40:30 | But that went on for many, many months. It was the most difficult time. But if you didn’t do that you didn’t get a house. It took 13 months to build the house anyway. Then I could build a garage allegedly a workshop in the backyard myself using all imported materials, no local tiles, no local cement for the floor. I could use local timber but that’s all. So the walls were |
41:00 | asbestos sheet, couldn’t use any local stuff. That was all nailed for housing and I watched for the imports. You’d run around the firms; find out when the next shipments would come in, there was Czechoslovakian cement I used for the floor. There was Czechoslovakian asbestos sheets and I had to use locally made concrete tiles. Dreadful things. Heavy as lead and build the thing myself and it could |
41:30 | only be built even then providing it was a workshop for the likes of making stuff for the house of course it became a garage and… |
00:33 | You just mentioned some further information about what happened when you arrived home. Um, you mean to say with the Claremont centre? Yeah. Well, that was about, the medical check was done, the offer was made, if you didn’t have a suitable job to go to and the CRTS was running so you had an opportunity if you weren’t |
01:00 | satisfied with the job or anything you had, and possibly some of the miners in Kalgoorlie were going down the mines as boggers or miners, machine miners. But I went back to teaching of course. And as I say, there was no fanfare when you were seen through that and that was rather remarkable. The bits of blisters on my hand being tropic stuff, you |
01:30 | then were sent over to Hollywood Hospital, which wasn’t far from Claremont Camp, and we went over by army truck. Anyway because of the numbers of us we were put in to waiting groups for the next truck order to go and I dutifully waited for a direction which you did in the army and went over to Hollywood. And a nursing sister there |
02:00 | she said to me, “You’re running late.” And I said, “Well, sister, we couldn’t do much about that.” I said. “We had to wait our turn to get on the trucks from Claremont.” She said, “You could have walked that distance.” She’s telling an old fellow who’s been walking for five years, walk 90 miles in three days on three occasions with gear on |
02:30 | and it really hurt in her ignorance you know. But I don’t think I said anything. But I said to a doctor later, I told him what I thought about her sort of thing and her stupidity. But away from that we just caught the train back to Perth and then I presume I went up to Hay Street and Barrack Street, caught the train home to my home in Bulla Street. That was all. They complain |
03:00 | now about those from Vietnam not being given a civic parade or something, and make no mistake, I have got great respect for the people sent to Vietnam. It was a very nasty, naughty business you know. It was lousy type of war. But not withstanding that, nobody talks about it. I just came back and came home and glad to be that way. Were you expecting fanfare? No. |
03:30 | And we wouldn’t have even appreciated it to be hung up, getting in our glad rags and doing a march, oh no. We’d had enough. Enough. The excitement come out and the best thing was getting home of course and that was very, very pleasing indeed. Had home changed? |
04:00 | No. The whole population you know was up against it in the variety of foods and that sort of thing but they had survived by sheer making say vegetable gardens in their backyard or something like that. Clothing |
04:30 | was absolutely restricted. You had clothing rations, booklets. The same as you got picking ration booklets and according to what you had in the clothing coupon, say you may buy clothes up to a certain value or not and that had to be of course for the nation to get back on its feet and make it democratically fair for everyone. How did you receive the coupons? They must have been got through a |
05:00 | post office. You’d have to show you were a bona fide citizen sort of thing and the post office would be the point of issue. I think some of the banks might have been too. The other thing was of course that petrol ration coupons and clothing ration coupons, there was nothing to stop one handing them on to friends. They weren’t with your name |
05:30 | on from memory I don’t think. Certainly the petrol rationing weren’t. So by shuffling all around your friends and things some people got by better than they otherwise would have but there was a limited number, there was. Was there a black market? I don’t think so because I doubt there was anything around to black market. You see it had been going for years you know in a pretty tight state. So no, |
06:00 | I’d say not. Did you join the RSL [Returned and Services League]? No. I didn’t really want to know any more about it. I was, what shall we say? Content on the surface, service having been conscripted to it. That was it. After I’d been commissioned 6 months only |
06:30 | there was a rule that the air force having killed so many air crew could go to any other service and volunteers would have to be released to them. Well, I’d only had a commission 6 months. I had worked my way through the ranks and I went to the CO, Colonel Proud, and I told him of my intention. There weren’t |
07:00 | too many words. I can remember them clearly. He just looked at me and he said, “Don’t apply. You’re not going. Get out.” And that was an order. So, I think I might have told you this before. All I did was smash a salute, reverse turn, out. And I daresay saved my pie. Because a lot of my mates were killed in the air force. So how do you relate that to your decision not to join the RSL? Well, the fact is I think I |
07:30 | wanted to sort of cut loose from army procedures and for many years or some of the first years anyway, I did not go to the officers’ reunions or the all ranks reunions and the last 15–20 years I had done so, until now the officers had become so depleted in numbers that it wasn’t economic to run it after the last year. Excuse me, Robert, I’ll ask you a little bit more about those reunions shortly. I’m just wondering |
08:00 | would you have joined the RSL had you been accepted in to the air force? Oh, of course I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Did you resent not having joined the air force? I felt I’d been diddled as it were. But really of course at this sight of it all, I was lucky not to be. |
08:30 | And if I’d joined the air force incidentally that would have meant dicing all rank. You’d go right back to the rank on LAC [Leading Aircraftsman] – start all over again. You took that risk and hopefully I was you know would be good enough for aircrew and preferably pilot, but it didn’t matter anyway. Did the fact that you didn’t engage with the Japanese contribute to your feelings of being diddled? |
09:00 | No. Put it this way, I think that if you entered in to a war zone and you got away with it, especially without losing an eye or a limb or something, then you were lucky and be thankful you did. That’s all. Was that a feeling or wisdom that’s come with age or is |
09:30 | it how you felt since your return? I think at the time of it happening again it was a case of do as you’re told. In the services you were just a number and you do as you’re told and as such you had no option but to just carry out that in a disciplined way. And as for when it was over, we were that damn thankful it was over that |
10:00 | I don’t think there was any feeling at all about that. And quite honestly on the averages of deaths in the air force and aircrews particularly and that, and like all services it depends on the luck of the draw. Even within a battalion there are certain areas or sections you’d be a darn sight safer even in a bloody war than what you are, |
10:30 | as I was in a so-called rifle platoon you know on your feet. So one way or the other you know I was thankful to get by without any limbs missing or an eye or two. That’s another dreadful sort of a thing isn’t it? Dreadful. Robert, why has your attitude to reunions changed in later years? |
11:00 | Oh, I went to both sets of reunions, officers’ and all ranks’ until about, I went to the officers’ until they folded, up that’s two years ago now, and the all ranks’ I went to until about three years ago. And the point is, on one of those, and it’s a personal feeling, |
11:30 | unlike some of them that when the numbers of the real veterans became so low that for economy’s sake in running these things they started to involve wives, aunties, uncles, grandsons, down to grandsons, all this carry-on, to bolster the numbers. Now I personally feel that the exercise is finished if you can’t do it as was originally intended. Well |
12:00 | then I lost sort of feeling and interest in that, for that reason. I couldn’t get this at all. So I gave it away in going to the all ranks reunion and the officers had to fold up anyway. Did you mention to me just a bit earlier that you’d shunned those reunions earlier, like you had shunned the RSL? No, the battalion committee that was formed |
12:30 | and has now got into a decent association that Cliff Tamblyn is president thereof, but initially the battalion officers organised the officers’ reunion themselves and it was only in later years after that, that the all ranks boys got together and formed a committee and they were in the all ranks reunion. For the first few years, I suppose in short I’d had enough you know. I didn’t want to |
13:00 | know about any connection and I hope I did some sort of a job on the job, but having had the war end I thought, “That’s enough.” I’d had five years of it and I had no great desire to join the RSL and I still haven’t. I think it’s all right for those that want it, that’s okay you know go for your life. But I’m aware of the good work they’ve done. I’m aware of |
13:30 | their effect on Veteran Affairs and so on but I must admit I never was really interested and so on. What would happen at the reunions that were held? Well, surprise, the officers’ reunion was run as a formal mess. It was done in the old formal mess styling in every respect, passing of the wine and all the rest of it. Admittedly there was always some |
14:00 | singular person or two but it was usually confined to one, not to be an all in larrikin act who were told some pretty sordid jokes at the end of each year. You’d pick out the real snitchers of the year and tell these jokes and some were absolutely you know, hair raising and laughable and they used to have to wait for the waitresses out of the way, back in the kitchen before they’d |
14:30 | drop one of these things. Or if a waitress came in during the bloke would sort of go off the boil and wait until she disappeared again. But they were quite very enjoyable times too; you know all your mates and all that even every 12 months. Then they got sick and dying and nursing homes and couldn’t get there except in, with the aid of their son or grandson driving a car for them or coming on their sticks. And one of |
15:00 | my close mates, he told me, I met in Hay Street about, I suppose it would be perhaps 8 or 10 years after the war, at least 8 years. Met me in Hay street, he said, “Why don’t you come to the officers’ reunion?” I said, “Oh mate, I’m still a bit disinterested as it were.” Not because I disrespected it or anything else but just didn’t want to. “Look,” he said, “If you only come to see all the old sweats having to put on their |
15:30 | glasses to read the menu, you’ll enjoy it.” you know. I said, “Okay.” Well, I went then and I went up to the bitter end. You just mentioned that the reunions were organised like a traditional officers’ mess. What was custom in or at a officers’ mess? I’m not sure. Well, you have a president of the mess and he is in normal |
16:00 | battalion life when such as in Darwin that was in or Melville. The president of the mess was usually rotated, each company commander usually would take it each night or something like that. The CO would sit next to him and then the senior officers would be either side of them up on the top table. Typical, |
16:30 | you know U-shaped top table and your other two down this side something like a wedding set up. The passing of the wine, which was a bit of a ritual, was done. They had a grace was said by someone called upon to do so and the meal was usually brought down to a level in cost that they could all afford. Some weren’t as well off as others. And there was |
17:00 | a time come as in any normal mess the strict mess procedures, after the passing of the wine, etc., were finished with, and the president of the mess as it was after the war, the president during the war with the permission of the CO next to him would say, “You may smoke, gentlemen.” Now that meant you’d get up from the table, relieve yourself and actually smoke or whatever. But that ritual was carried out right through to the bitter end. There was no sort of just a group gathering |
17:30 | and laissez faire meeting. Sounds interesting. What was passing of the wine? The passing of the wine, you have an officer at one end of the U down here, top table up here, and he’s given a decanter of wine and every other person in the place is given a small wine glass, |
18:00 | and the wine of course there’s a second cap, bottle of wine on the end of this U too and on permission from the top table the gents at this end are required to pass the wine, which means to say he got hold of the flagon and you’d never let it, once you’d picked it up off the table never let it touch the |
18:30 | table. This was part of the act and you served yourself and you’d hand it to the next man, making sure it didn’t touch the table and he took it and made sure it didn’t touch. And that would go along until it was returned to head table. I don’t know whether it was a case of guaranteeing that if you’re going to poison the CO that you’d all had a dip first, you see, before it got there. And that would go up the either side the same way and when that had been passed then they |
19:00 | capped off the flagon or something and that part was done. And it was usually followed by you know a toast and they’d have two or three toasts. The first one of course was the queen, obviously, and the king in the early part of the war. Then perhaps some other toasts for absent friends and that style of thing. All the apology cards and that sort of thing would be read out and various ones to them. Some would make a donation to the |
19:30 | cause and that was put in a fund which helped out on paying for some of the increasing costs of the meals as the years went on. What was the appropriate etiquette when you were passing the wine? Complete silence, if that’s what you mean. Absolute, oh yes. And was there a penalty if you touched the table? Oh, I don’t think it would ever be applied but it just |
20:00 | wasn’t done. You didn’t touch the table. If you were so shaky and decrepit you happened to touch it and brush it on the way I suppose that was ignored, but that was the intention anyway, never to touch it. That sounds like a great tradition. And some of the humour of the game, when we were in Darwin days there was an officers’ mess hut there and sometimes the president of the mess would be talking to the CO and they’d be so |
20:30 | rapt in conversation they wouldn’t notice the meal had finished, it was time for ‘you may smoke, gentlemen’ period, to get them loose from the table you see, and they’d be forgetting. Now Reg Kroenert, our Salvo [Salvation Army] officer, is quite a wag. About six of the lieutenants, we were more or less the larrikins of the… We’d been lieutenants, you know, you were excused for being a bit of a larrikin. When you got to a captaincy you behaved yourself a little more. |
21:00 | But on a signal from Reg Kroenert, he thought this one up, we’d all get our feet and with a signal from him we’d drag them back across the dirt and that psychologically in the mind, if anybody’s not paying attention, dragging back to get up, automatic you think, “Gee, I’ve missed the bus,” you know, “it’s time for getting up,” and you’d automatically stand up. Well, we larrikins would drag our feet back and all the other captains and officers would be chatting away and they’d hear this |
21:30 | you see and they’d all jump up and there’s the top table still sitting down. We’ll good boys we’re still sitting down because the top table’s sitting down. Oh! Oh! And the president said, “Oh, I’m sorry gentlemen,” you know but that was one of Kroenert’s tricks. There’s one in every crowd. Oh, yeah. What does Anzac Day mean to you, Robert? I think that well I went on the marches until I was |
22:00 | 80 after a few years of not doing so and to me not altogether to answer the question, but physically I felt I’d better stop at 80 but I am amazed at the later interest in it. It was worthwhile in the sense of the patronage of the public. They were there in thousands, you know, |
22:30 | rows upon rows of them in patches and kids were involved. They were enjoying the spectacle but I was amazed at the interest. It’s sort of getting regenerated. People go to the dawn service and that sort of thing. I went to the dawn service a couple of times as a kid out of oddity, devilment you know, go and be permitted to go in the dawn somewhere but you know it’s, I sort of |
23:00 | carried on regardless and I think if anything, gaining a bit of momentum. Even though it must end up, all the true veterans except Vietnam, they’re younger and they’re still coming along but all the old World War II types and back and many are dead or sick or whatever and as for riding a vehicle, I wouldn’t do that. If I couldn’t march I wouldn’t go. That was my attitude. What do you think of the growing |
23:30 | popularity of Anzac Day? Well, you know for those interested, good on them. I think it’s a spectacle looked forward to by a lot of the population. They must have some sort of, a respect and an interest I suppose and it’s quite remarkable. And the same as the gang going to Turkey on the Anzac Day ceremonies there. It’s |
24:00 | quite, quite something. And ANZACs [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps] of course, Gallipoli, was one of the greatest tactical and strategic blunders there ever has been. It was absolutely ridiculous, strategically ridiculous, and the mistakes made, and they were just throwing men away by the thousands, an absolute hopeless cause. And as for the tactics for sending ships into the Dardanelles, narrow |
24:30 | passage and you’ve got fort guns on each side all in placement for years, you’re not half looking for it. There’s no escape. That alone is stupid and as for starting off from Gallipoli through Turkey to get to the Germans, what a lot of indirect rubbish. It just could never be. But those people, and of course a lot of Australians think, Australians were Gallipoli. They were about, might have been 20% I think. |
25:00 | I could be corrected there. But they were only a fairly minor force as well as they did in a very quite large force that simply got butchered. I’ve no brief for the powers that be in UK [United Kingdom] for thinking that one up. I think [Winston] Churchill was about the mainstay to think that general plan up. Why do you think so much mythology surrounds |
25:30 | Anzac Day and Gallipoli? Oh, that I think is easily answered by the facts as you’ve had it drummed in to you. This was Australia’s baptism of fire and this was the time when the nation was recognised as a nation and so on and so forth. I think that it was such a first off because the Boer War was sort of forgotten, Australians going to the Boer War, but this one, |
26:00 | you know, this really is in the minds of people as being the real first burst. And we allegedly did pretty well in the circumstances, but it was an absolute criminal act, really. How do you think the war changed you as a person? Probably more philosophical. Things that you might have thought mattered, |
26:30 | didn’t matter any more. People get excited about this and that and so forth, probably accident and so on but you’ve got to be, well sort of hardened to that idea and you wouldn’t be quite as stirred as you may have been if you’d only lived a civilian life. That’s about all I think I could say about it. What do you have to say to the young |
27:00 | people of Australia and future Australians about war? Well, any war as we know it, you know is negative. Minus negative. And therefore for want of a saying: it’s a dead loss. With all the ones that are sacrificed and maimed and all the rest of it for life, it’s a terrible thing and at the end of it and there |
27:30 | is an end to each one of them, some of them don’t ever look like ending. But there is an end to it, at the end of it the backwash is left to the poor relatives and the ones who are maimed or you know wounded for life with injuries and so forth. But having said all that, you say all right someone lands on your doorstep and they won’t go away and he’s told to do so. What are you going to do? And I suppose you come back to the old school. |
28:00 | Tackle him, fight him, and hopefully you’re going to be a winner. Then we start on the arguments, who ever won a war with a backwash afterwards? America goes in and pulls Japan out of the mire, puts them on their feet again. The Allies in World War II put Germany back on its feet again. After all the lousy, nasty things they did. Both of those |
28:30 | nations at first had the whip hand and were absolutely merciless and would have cleaned up further if they hadn’t been stalled and so with that in your plate, what do you do? So I can’t answer the question with a clever yes or no. I don’t think it’s that cut and dried, is it? No. No. And sadly there always have been wars and there still are wars, all over the auction if not worse than ever. |
29:00 | And some very, very awful ones. The Iraq business that is a thing I’m sure the Americans never bargained for, as well as Vietnam into that culture and their beliefs and behaviour, because the likes of Iraq currently, the war’s officially ended but oh no, no |
29:30 | we’ve killed 57 Americans since. If you were a mother of one of those fellows, or a father, wouldn’t you be upset? And for what with these Arabs, you know? It’s pretty disheartening. What do you think of the political debate at the moment with regards to withdrawing Australian troops from Iraq? Well, as [President George W.] Bush says and doesn’t say, he’s |
30:00 | in a cleft stick. Now he’s bought in to it. He’s going to clean out the previous hierarchy. He’s got rid of [Saddam] Hussein. Surely he thought he was going to get rid of him and turn it in to a democracy with restructuring quickly, his gang going in to guide them, etc., and they’re all going to say “Yes, the war is ended. We’ll be in this and |
30:30 | restructure our country. Organisation.” They haven’t done that. You’ve got all these you know warlords around the place, even to stoush each other if they want to stoush anybody and they’re determined they’re going to upset it to put a spoke in Bush’s wheel and to me he is in a great knot. He can’t walk out because if he walked out now they’d say, bone point and say, “You came in. You messed up the whole |
31:00 | business and now you walk out and leave these thugs to be worse than ever.” So he’s in a knot and of course people who carry-on about John Howard [Australian Prime Minister] say, “Oh, well you know he’s a lapdog to Bush and all that rubbish.” Nobody mentioned the fact that if anybody walks in to Australia there’s only place you can call for help and it’s not Mother England any more – it’s America. So if you don’t pander to them a bit and join a |
31:30 | treaty with them, who are you going to call on? And you can’t very well say, “Well, listen Joe, we didn’t want to help you out in Iraq and all those other places but we’re calling on you now to come and help us.” You can’t do that either. So from a political aspect Bush has got to go along with it because they are our saviours to save this huge island because we can’t save ourselves. That’s a cert [a certainty]. That’s the dilemma. |
32:00 | Do you think there may be an instance in the future where we do need to save ourselves, save our freedom or fight for our freedom again in the future? It’s very difficult to predict that because who would have thought after World War I, which was fought with such terrible losses to end all wars. Well, we know since we’ve learnt a lot. There’s no such animal, and if it’s not one place it’s another. The Irish will continue to fight |
32:30 | themselves, I think. The Palestinians and the Israelis, they love it. They’re stoushing on still. You’ve always, the antics in South Africa are devilish with the native kings there taking over a lot of areas. And between the lot of it I don’t think you can predict when it’ll ever stop. |
33:00 | No, if they have enough atomic bombs they’ll blow each other off the face of the deck, but until then, and then of course we don’t want to do that. That’s very naughty, atomic stuff. And that brings to me another comment, all the do-gooders who talk about those naughty American aircrew and so forth that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they reckon you know the do-gooders think that’s pretty bad but the |
33:30 | Japanese were given the option, “Turn it up or we’ll come,” and they said, “No, get lost.” The samurai weren’t going to stand for that and loss of face so they dropped the one on Hiroshima, they flattened it, and you’d think that would be enough lesson but they said to the Japs, “All right, you’re going to turn it up?” They said, “No, you can get lost again.” They said, “All right,” and dropped one on Nagasaki. And then they decided perhaps they were lost and they cut it out. But |
34:00 | that’s the sort of pride they had and determination, and if it wasn’t for those atomic bombs dropped there would have been thousands of Allied lives, particularly Americans, killed in the final process of getting into Japan because I’m quite sure that as they got closer to Japan the fighting would become more and more fierce. It was bad enough on the likes of New Guinea, Bougainville particularly, |
34:30 | some on New Britain and up through the islands as you got closer and closer, they would have got sillier and sillier and as absolute banzai maniacs, and so I’m confident that those atomic bombs saved thousands of lives. The do-gooders don’t think about that but I’m quite sure of it. I think there’s a lot of people who would agree with you when you weigh up the |
35:00 | situation. It’s a pity it all happened. I sometimes wonder how the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese gent really thought it through as to, well what are you going to do if you annex these countries? How are you going to control them and what is the game? They didn’t, the Japanese might have thought Australia wasn’t a bad bet for some land but |
35:30 | even then Australia was only fit for habitation on the fringes, the coast more or less. So, I have no idea what the thinking of those people would be. But there’s always someone who’s a trier isn’t there? It’s quite ridiculous, the whole thing. You mentioned nationalism earlier. I just raise the question about young generations of Australians and the future generations of Australians. How |
36:00 | well do you think nationalism is in Australia? It’s not imbued as much as it is with some other countries. I don’t know whether it’s a showmanship with some countries like the Americans. They had their flag everywhere they, you know, doffed the hat to the flag. They are proud of their anthem, etc. I think that in |
36:30 | Australia there’s a certain laid-backism in all respects and nobody thinks it’s going to happen anyway. There’s not enough concern to believe it could happen. If it did happen we are sitting ducks to a very large degree. But I think that is the general feeling. It’s a great country. It’s easy living. The attitude is, well you know laid back, let it go. |
37:00 | People have sickies [sick days – days off work due to illness] and do all sorts of things they wouldn’t dare try it in other countries. They have pretty good holidays. From what I can understand the Yanks don’t have the holidays we have in trade practice, etc. Robert, having served your country and having fought for freedom, do you think that there is a complacency towards that freedom today amongst younger generations of Australians? I’m quite sure that, well you can gather from the media that many |
37:30 | have forgotten about the war, forgotten about it. They certainly in the main have forgotten about the first war, well except for the few alive who have relatives still living. But to a large degree they’ve forgotten the first one. They don’t really want to know about these other wars going on around the world and I think many of them don’t even know much about World War II. |
38:00 | One of the things to mind, my third Christian name is Pax, P-A-X, which stands for peace in Latin and I was born on Armistice Day 1918. Anyway, people don’t know about World War I armistice or if they do, it’s a vague thing all happened you know somewhere back there |
38:30 | doesn’t interest me sort of thing. World War II, don’t know much about it. As for New Britain, haven’t heard of it. They know about New Guinea but of course New Britain is part of New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, but it’s only in these latter years you see anything about New Britain in the media at all and many people don’t know what you’re talking about. Just a forgotten army. But people, particularly in the brigade ahead of us, |
39:00 | were killed and maimed and all the rest of it. We lost I think all told, only about 10 men killed. Some were knocked about and some sick and so forth so we were very lucky. And is this still the lucky country? That’s right. It is. It’s been ruined by too many criminals and especially the foreign blow-ins that have brought in the scallywags, you know, and of course this |
39:30 | laissez faire attitude it permeates the whole nation. Some parents, discipline in schools, discipline on the streets. The judiciary handing out some of these inane sentences. The prisons, in many respects, are not prisons as we’d imagine them to be and if you were very naughty you won’t have your TV in your cell. That’ll be the next, if that goes on you know. Yeah. |
40:00 | And the whole thing is a softening and I wouldn’t care if everyone was happy on the street, there was more understanding but they’re not. They say, “Well, this is a soft cop.” In my day if a policeman caught up with a kid with a shanghai or a catapult or something and kicked him in the backside, literally, and say, “I’ll take that.” You know, “You get home.” And he’d smash the catapult. But today if a policeman laid a finger on a kid, |
40:30 | physical assault. If a teacher tells a kid off for his own health, that’s verbal assault. You’ve got to be most careful as a teacher these days. And as for using a cane or a waddy like we used to, you wouldn’t be caught dead, you’d be a goner unless you’re very stupid. And I say it’s a pity since World War II this softening has occurred, but I’m sure it has over the whole nation and in all respects. |
41:00 | Then of course we get to the stage since World War II the money situation is totally different from pre-war – wages and salaries have gone up. Once upon a time before between the two World Wars, I and II, they more or less trickled along and rose about 10%, 20% over all the years. And so with the advent of money we now have drug availability. We have teenagers and others |
41:30 | able to buy the drugs. Now the part that really gets me is the complete disregard for the police authority. We not only steal motor cars, which is someone’s hard earnings, but having stolen them as a crime we then use them to carry on further crime, pinching ATM [automatic teller machines] machines or something, crashing places, |
42:00 | or we get ... INTERVIEW ENDS NOTE: Mr. Grantham has provided the Archive with additional printed material regarding his duties carried out in Rabaul, New Britain during World War 2. |