Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was a baby first and that happened on the 15th of November 1917 at Casino in New South Wales. Eighteen months old my parents shifted to Byron Bay where my father was the assistant manager of the North Coast Steam Navigation Company. They used to run boats twice a week from Byron Bay to Sydney, passengers and cargo. And I was brought up in Byron Bay;

it wasn’t like it is today. It was a very quiet, mainly fishing village and export. I went to school at Byron Bay and I went to high school in Lismore, and it was in the Depression years and I got up to my fifth year in high school and I had written to banks and everything trying to get a job, couldn’t get one. And then the station master at the railway station said, “Tom, would you like a

job as a junior porter, there is one vacant?” And in those days if you were offered any sort of job you jumped, so I jumped and took a job on the railway. And I stayed with them for forty-four years. From there I went to different stations on the north coast; Lismore, Casino, Taree, and Taree was where I met my future wife. And I was there for about eighteen months.

During all of this time I was a member of the surf club, I got my bronze medallion at Byron Bay and I got my instructor’s certificate in 1940 at Taree Old Bar, in Taree. I became engaged to my wife and then I went to Maitland. I was in Maitland—after the war broke out I was in Taree—but when I was in Maitland I decided I

would like to enlist. And so I enlisted at Broadmeadows in Newcastle. And from there I went to Tamworth. Manilla Road Tamworth for a fortnight, back to the showground in Sydney and there the 2/12th Field Ambulance was formed and I was one of the original members of that. From there

we went to Cowra for our three months training. Then they put us on a train and we thought we were going to Melbourne to go to the Middle East. Instead, the train went through Melbourne, through Adelaide, and up to Terowie and there we were taken of the train and put in the showground in tents for a fortnight, and it was just red dust

everywhere. And then we had a storm on top of that so it was just mud and red dust. Then went to Alice Springs, had about a fortnight there and from there we went to Darwin. And from Darwin after nine months, the Japanese came into the war on the 7th of December and on the 14th of December we sailed, that’s the Gull Force as they called us, 21st Battalion plus attached troops,

and our Field Ambulance went on that. And we were in Ambon for six weeks and then we were prisoners. And then we had three years and seven months. Came back from the war and I was discharged on the 29th of November ‘45 and married on the 1st of December ‘45. So we didn’t waste, my wife had been a true blue Aussie, she waited for me.

And we had fifty years, all but two months, of very happy life. We had twins, a boy and a girl eleven months after we were married and they have done very well in life. A very happy life. She passed away and now I am on my own.

Well first of all I will talk about my grandfather a bit. He was in the army in England and he was twenty-two and a half years in the army, and he fought in the Crimean War. I have got his medals from the Crimean War; I have also got his diary,

well, his personal history. Now in that history it has got weddings and it has got Marie, 1856 Corfu. Corfu was an island of Greece, but at that time it was British

and that’s where Florence Nightingale was for a while. He fought in one of the battles there and came back to Corfu and was the sergeant in the hospital there, and that’s where he met and worked with Florence. Anyhow in there he has got this marriage, it is not crossed out. And then underneath it has got Jane, Cornfall, that’s in India,

1862. now that’s not crossed out. Now neither of those are my grandmother. I have always been trying to find out who they were, and it is not until this trip over there that a cousin of mine in England found out that she died in Gloucester in England in 1882. Now my grandfather was married in 1883 in Gloucester to my grandmother.

So it all works in now. My father was born in 1885. And they came out when he was eighteen months old to Sydney. He went out onto the Darling River, to Bourke where they were putting a weir across the river. He went out as storeman, only lasted about a week, he couldn’t take the heat being English. Came back to Sydney and the day he landed back in Sydney, the

bank they had the money in went broke. So he has got nothing and he has got the girl and a little boy. So grandma knew a doctor in Casino so she wrote to him to see if he had any place she could nurse and he wrote back and said would she take over the job as matron of the Casino district hospital? So she was the, I say she was the first, there was a lady there for a fortnight before her.

She was there for twenty-five years as the first matron of Casino District Hospital. My Dad grew up there and he and his sister were great musicians. My aunty was a pianist and taught the piano. Dad was a violinist. Also he could play any mouth instrument, cornet, trombone, any of those. So he became a bandmaster later in life. And they started a

cordial factory in Casino. But Dad at the time liked a few drinks so when they used to go down every month to collect all of the cheques from the hotel, “Lend us a tenner, Harry?” So Harry would lend him a tenner [ten pounds]. Anyhow they went broke. So he went to Byron Bay then and he got the job as the manifest clerk for the North Coast Steam Navigation Company and from there he rose up to

assistant manager. My mother, she came from Tenterfield. She was born in a place called Tarvin out of Tenterfield and her family are the Fergusons. Her mother married a Brown and she was born in Tarvin near Tenterfield. She came to Casino and met Dad and they got married.

The first baby was a boy and he died in childbirth. Then there was my sister, myself, two brothers, then twelve years after I was born another little girl came along, Ethel. And so there was five of us and that was our family. My mother was the sweetest person you could ever meet as far as I was concerned. She managed our family, because during

the Depression, most places you had so many weeks off most jobs and so many on work. Well Dad only lost one week in six so we were lucky that way. I had a marvellous life. My schooling, I went to Byron Bay Public School and they held their first dux of the school exam when I was in sixth

grade and I won the dux. So I was the first dux of Byron Bay Public School. I got a nice book for that and I have still got the book, and a medal, the medal got lost some way back. Had a lovely life there. I was only two hundred yards from the surf, so

I lived in the surf and then I got to Lismore High School,

Byron Bay; there was the one jetty, if you have been to Byron Bay the main street runs up to the beach, well at the end of that street the jetty used to go out and that where ships used to come in and anchor. Quiet little fishing village;

there was about three fishermen there, some deep sea, some beach fishing. And Norco Butter factory was there, that was the main industry, and a lot of people there worked in Norco and that was the main shipping that used to go there; used to take the butter. And they used to kill pork and all of the pork pieces used to go to Sydney, twice a week

the boats used to run. There was the Orara used to run on the Tuesday and the Wollongbar used to run on the Saturday. They would arrive down there on Wednesday and Sundays and they used to dock somewhere where the theatre is on the wharf there now, that was their docks there. I never used to wear shoes, only to go to Sunday school.

That’s the only time I wore shoes, it was such a free and easy life. We didn’t have cars for one thing so everything was done in the town. And my Dad used to have a bike that he used to ride to work, and that’s the only thing I ever got on was a pushbike. And people out from town used to be on a farm used to bring cream into the butter factory

and Saturday morning brother and I would fight who was going to drive the sulky from our place around to the butter factory. Things like that. There was a creek called the Belongil Creek, we used to make canoes out of a sheet of roofing iron, flattened out with a hammer turned up at each end and a stick put in and nailed to that and bitumen from the road poured into seal it.

We used to go up this creek we even used to go out in the surf in it, marvellous life.

It was a wooden house, two bedroom. Had a lounge and a kitchen and a bathroom. You talk about bathrooms today with running water and all of that…

We didn’t have running water; we only had a bath once a week. Dad used to have to get dressed in a suit on Saturday because he would have to sell tickets to the passengers so Dad had first bath. Then when he got out, up the kids one after the other would go and have a bath. And that used to be our bath once a week. Other times, you just had a wash every day. And there was three

of us boys, two of us used to sleep in a double bed in the room and out on the front veranda we had a blind and a bed out there and one slept out there. My sister, she didn’t live at home, she went to live with her aunt and grandmother in Casino and he used to come home on the weekend. Well, by the time my other sister was born, oh dear where did she have…?

I can’t remember how we worked out the arrangements after that. I think the lounge room was used to, oh no we had a veranda out the back too and a little bed out there so one of us slept out there. But the kitchen, it was the old fuel stove and Mum used to cook beautiful meals, cakes and that on it. And I can always remember one little incident. During the Depression

the boat used to come in and this day they found a little aboriginal boy, about twelve, he had stowed away on it and of course they had to take him back to Sydney. So Dad said to the police he would look after him until the boat went back so he brought him home and we looked after him. and he saw Mum trying to light a fire with a bit of paper and chips and that, so, “Mrs Pledger,” he said, “Have you got a bit of brick, some kerosene and some wire?”

So he got this bit of brick and he bound it around with wire and made a handle about that long, put kerosene in the bottle and put the brick in the bottle. He took it out, lit it shoved it in under the chip and when the chips all got going he just took it out and blew it out ready to go for the next time. That little boy, I will never forget him. Little things you think of. And I will tell you

another thing, that house, we rented it. It was offered to my father for two hundred pound and my Dad said, “Where the b***** hell do you think I am getting two hundred pound from?” so we kept on renting. I was up there about four years ago. The house is still there and there is a big sign on it, ‘For Sale’. So I went in and made myself known to the lady and she said, “Oh we only put the sign up yesterday and we have sold it already.” And I said, “Do you mind me asking how much you got for it?” She said, “A hundred and

seventy thousand.” A little old wooden place; have you ever been to Byron Bay? You know the big water tank in front of the railway station; we lived right behind that; that was our place.

A tank. We had a tank and if we wanted a bath we used to go and fill the kerosene tin up and bring it in and we used to fill the copper, for washing we had a

copper sitting on three bricks out in the yard. Mum used to put all of the washing in that, light a fire underneath it until it boiled, take the clothes out, drain them into a great big round tub of water. Rinse them into another tub with blue in it to whiten them, out on the line naturally. None of these little twirly lines, just two wires with a prop to hold them up in the middle.

Mostly swimming and we used to walk around to Cape Bryon and if you know Cape Byron, it runs around to a point. On one side it is a sheer drop and on the other side it slopes down this way. Well we used to make slides out of a butter box which is a board about that big. Put it on

two wooden runners with a piece across the top and a rope. And we put two boards across the side and by pulling those up they would act as brakes and you could steer it and we used to come all of the way down that. On one side there is about a three hundred foot drop. Didn’t think anything of it. And where Wategos Beach is now, my friends’ people had a banana plantation and we used to go down and carry the bananas for them as kids,

things like that you know. It was a great life.

Yes the lighthouse, I remember that. The lighthouse keeper was a great friend of my father and mother so we used to go up there often. Climb up the old stairs to the top and even go up there sometimes of a night and it was operating. Used to have two little

mantle lights in there and you could see it for about twenty-five miles out to sea. And they had one fixed red light which showed on the Julian Rocks, I have slept on Julian Rocks, we used to go out there in a surf boat, stay the weekend on the rocks out there ,fishing. Great life.

I used to travel backwards and forwards, 30 miles by train every day. So I would leave home at

half past seven in the morning and get home at five in the afternoon, and I did that for nearly five years. I wasn’t a very good scholar but I did all right. I got my intermediate [certificate], six Bs on my intermediate. Went onto my leaving [certificate] and I always regret that I didn’t get those other three months in and get my leaving

because when I was, I was in charge of a hospital in the prisoner of war camp and the doctor wanted me right or wrong to come back and do it, but I was twenty-eight when I came back and then I would have a year to get my leaving and then another six or seven years before I became a doctor. I would be forty before, and the years I was on the diet in the prison

camp I only found out later on, I couldn’t retain information. I would have to parrot over and over to get it to stay there. Well that’s no good if you’re a doctor so I went back to my old job on the railway. Stayed there for forty-four years.

Well, I told you about that big tank that was in front of my place; well, it is bricked right up to about fifty feet and a normal tank on top of that. I can remember the goods trains used to come into Byron Bay and as soon as they pulled up you would see up to a dozen blokes jump off the train and off and they would come in and get in under the tank and later on they would come out and come over to the house and

come to Mum and say, “Lady have you got a crust of bread you can give us?” Well Mum never let anybody go without giving them something, even if it was just bread dipped in dripping or something like that. She always gave them something. And those poor buggers, you know they had their families in Sydney and they are trying to get a bit of work to send back some money. We were damned lucky to have…my father had a job.

He was only getting about three or four pound a week which is about six dollars though.

Well they had Norco and other people worked on the wharves, wharfies [wharf labourers] and that and if you didn’t do that you went fishing and got fish to live on. Oh many a time we have gone fishing,

or gone down and dug up pipis off the beach, brought them home and Mum would boil them up and drain them off and make the soup into a white soup, things like that.

Well I thought it was marvellous. It was north Lismore, it is not there, I don’t know if it is a school now but it is not the high school now.

And they came from all over the district there and we used to pick up, the train started at Mullumbimby, then Byron Bay and Bangalow and then all of the places, Nashua and Booyong, Bexhill, all going by train to North Lismore, and there would be buses come from Coraki and those places.

It was the main high school of the district then. And we had a reunion here after the war in Sydney out at Albion Street Children’s Court. And we had even one of our old French teachers, Miss Cohen turn up there, we had about forty people turn up to that reunion, it was great.

I would say close to a thousand. That’s a rough guess.

Latin, French, Maths 1, Maths 2, Physics and Chemistry, English.

I think that’s all. Don’t ask me Latin and I can read a bit of French but not speak it.

Well to get a job. I wanted to work in a bank. I wrote to every bank in Australia and

nine out of ten I never got a reply. That’s what I wanted to do. Because in those days there was no ambition to be a…there was no computers nothing like that. There was just accountancy, or shops, something like that. And when I was offered the job in the railway, only a junior porter, but I took it. And my

first job, I was the conductor on the train from Murwillumbah to Grafton.

When the station master asked me if I would take the job I said yes, so they took me on, I did three months temporary. I was on three months and all of a sudden they decided to send six of us down to Sydney for the exam.

So three of us passed, but one of the chaps who passed, his uncle was in charge of the examination room. He got the job and I was out of work. So I come back to Byron Bay and didn’t know what to do. Bell Brothers used to run the beach fishing there, big nets and they used to put them around the shoals of fish and drag them ashore. So I got a job with them and my job in the middle of winter

was to sit in the back of the boat on top of the net and they would row across the surf and then I would hop out of the boat and bring the lead line ashore and the boat would go around the shoal and they would start the haul. And this would be just after daylight because they had to have the fish ready to put on the train to Sydney at half past seven, and all you had on was a woollen swimming costume in those days and a football sweater. And then after

you got the fish ashore you had to wash them, box them and ice them. So after you pick up a box you have got ice water running, so then we used to have to take them down to the railway station and load them in. And I did that for two months I suppose. And then I got recalled onto the railway. And from then I started relieving, all different stations all down the coast. And then

passed my clerical exam and they sent me to Taree in the clerical part of the goods shed there. And that’s where I met my wife; she was a nurse, she was in the hospital and diagonally across the road was the boarding house. I met her downtown one night, Friday night shopping. And I said to the chap, “Who is that girl?” “Oh, that’s Jess Collon and her mother; she is a nurse at the Meyer Hospital.”

So a fortnight later a whole busload of us went to Wingham to a dance and she was there and I met her and took her home and that was the end of it.

Gosh, I think we used to go to one at least twice a week. And mainly in the country.

And you would get out to these country dances, and a lot of country halls didn’t have electric lights, they had these gas lamps, put them all around. And of course you always had a few beers. Used to have a great time. None of this modern stuff, it was all waltzes and quick steps and one steps, mazurka and all of those sort of things.

And they were great.

Oh yes they all had a band. Generally about four or five piece band; when I went to Taree one of my friends had the orchestra there.

Well a lot of stations didn’t have anybody in charge, so people used to get on the trains without tickets, and I used to go through and find out where they were going and if they were going back. If I didn’t have a ticket in my rack I used to have to write one out for them and collect the money. And they used to have refreshment rooms at different places on the line. I used to have to go through and ask them if they want breakfast here or lunch here and I would have to wire that

to the station. “You have got fifty breakfasts coming in,” or so on, so they were prepared for it. All of that sort of, any little thing. Complaints and so on, I used to have to handle all of that.

Oh what shall I say? Well they weren’t like the modern, not like the modern ones…

They were mainly an isle down the centre and they had two seats facing one another on each side and each seat took two people. And then in the centre of the car they would have two toilets, one for ladies and one for men. And the seats, they were quite comfortable. And then they used to have what we call the dog boxes, they were a carriage divided into different sections.

And they had about eight seats in each section and at the end there was one seat you could pull up, and a door and that was the toilet. And I remember on our honeymoon we went from Taree to Sydney and the mob all knew I was on the railway so they put reserved all along this dog box, so Jess and I had this dog box all of the way to Sydney.

In those days too all of the engines were all steam engines and I still love the smell of that smoke that used to waft back from the train. So that was my first job and then from there they sent me to Sawtell near Coffs Harbour to open up a booking station. Marvellous time there. I went there on the 1st of December and left there in February. It was all over

the Christmas period and they have a great big camping ground there with a dance hall in the centre, and I happened to know the band that came down; they came from Casino. And so it was one party night after night. So I opened it up and from there they sent me to Gloucester, and I was only at Gloucester for a short time and from there they recalled me and

sent me back to Sawtell because the chap that took over had mucked up all of the books and I had to go back and sort it all out. I was there another six weeks but it wasn’t the same, it was in the middle of winter.

Yes it was a Friday night shopping night and I was in Taree and we were all downtown. Next minute

somebody got on top of the veranda at the hotel and started to yell at the top of their voice and everybody stopped and listened and he said, “England has just declared war. And now England has declared, Australia has declared war.” That was the 3rd of September ‘39, that was the first we knew about it. Well that was ‘39 and I enlisted in ‘40, August

‘40. I got shifted from Taree to the booking office at Maitland. We had camps all around Maitland. There was Greta and I forget the others now, Rutherford. And of course they would all get their leave passes and come in on a weekend and I would have all of these soldiers, and I thought, “Well I can’t stay here any longer.” so

my cobber [friend] and I we went down and enlisted. And they called us up. A fortnight after I enlisted the railway stopped all leave, they were essential work, so I was just lucky I got out and got in.

No. Didn’t, no notice of any change. First change I ever noticed was just before I

resigned in 1977, computers started to come in and we used to have a commissioner before and he used to run the railway and then they got a board to run it and they started bringing in young people off the street, and I was in charge of the travel and tour centre down in York Street, and you have got to know your rules and regulations;

what people can join what train and what can’t. All of this sort of thing, and they would just send them in off the street and they knew nothing, not how to book a ticket even. And I carried them for months and in the end it just got too much and then the computers started to come on the scene, so no. The day I turned sixty, two days after I walked out and that was it. So I have been retired twenty-six years now.

I was too young, we were too interested in girls and nights out and things like that to worry about that. No. Never knew anything about it until it happened. Even when it happened it was so far away I didn’t know.

No emotion at all, just thought, “Oh there is a war on.” That’s all; see it didn’t affect us much here in Australia to start with. It was all over in England. It was only when troops started to go overseas and that that you started to think about it when you saw chaps you knew in

uniform on final leave and that, then you realised it was on.

The first noticeable sign was the troops coming in, see they used to get leave. Mostly weekend leave.

And a bus or a truck would arrive from the camp and you would get a swarm of soldiers come through and they used to get a leave pass, and they would have to put a part of that leave pass in to get a ticket. We had a kerosene case next to us on the counter and as we issued a ticket we would dump all of those, we had to account for all of the tickets we sold and they would get a free pass see? And that’s the first thing I had and I used to curse them.

Otherwise, just ordinary passengers you just give them a ticket. Collect the money and that was it. These things you had to write the number on the ticket and sort all of them out at the end of the day. That was my main work event.

Well, I never saw the camps because one was at Greta which is quite a way, see there was no transport in those days, we didn’t have cars and all of that sort of thing., and so you didn’t get around much, only by train. There was a camp at Greta and there was another one at Rutherford, there was another one at Maitland showground. Broadmeadow was the big enlistment area down in Newcastle.

Otherwise I only saw soldiers going through on leave most of the time. Never saw much, didn’t see trains going through; a full train load, didn’t see that.

And to this day I can’t remember his name. All I know he was the police sergeant’s son and

he and I used to go to the dance. It’s terrible; I have got photos and I still can’t remember his name. We enlisted together and he went his way and I went my way and I lost all trace of him. I don’t know whether he came through the war or not.

Well, I went down to the town hall in Maitland

and they had enlistment days there you could go down and enlist, and I went up and said, “I want to enlist.” Right, so they put you through a medical first, then you had to sign a paper and then that was it. And then you got called up to go to Newcastle to do the full thing there. Newcastle hospital you had to go to first. And they took urine samples and,

I will tell you a funny thing about it. We had two chaps enlisted and they were out and out villains, they were crims [criminals]. And they got full [drunk] the night before and were still half full and we were all sitting out on the lawn in front of the hospital waiting to be called. And there was one orderly there and he used to come out and he had a tray and in this tray he had

all of these bottles of urine. And he used to have to take them through the park across the road to the laboratory for testing. So these two blokes, one held the chap up and got talking to him and the chap put the thing down on the ground while he was talking, and the other bloke is changing all of the bottles around. So they all passed, but whose urine was whose? They all got through. That was just some

little things you hear.

I am sure there was because I can remember two or three in the unit; they enlisted because they didn’t have jobs.

See it was just on the end of the Depression then and most people were starting to get work but from ‘29 to ‘36 it was very hard to get a job.

I don’t think every day life changed much at all from what I can recall. My family went on as usual. The only thing I can remember, my sister was married to a patrol officer in New Guinea so she went to New Guinea and was up there and when war broke out she had to come back. She was up at Mount Hagen, her and her husband

manned Mount Hagen as a station up there and she had to come back and he retired and went overseas. That’s the only thing that I can remember actually happening.

No, rationing didn’t start until after I was taken prisoner

Well I saw my cobbers going in and I thought, “Bit of an adventure, why not be in it with them.” Although I was engaged then, I had been engaged for twelve months and that held me back a bit I didn’t know what to do. Anyway in the end I talked it over with Jess and she said, “If you want to go, you go.” But I said, “I am not getting married before I go, you never know what might happen.

I would rather you be free so that if anything happens you can make your own life again.” So although we were engaged that’s how it worked out.

Oh dear, well mine was closer.

But in those days you didn’t live with someone six years before you got married, we never lived together. Kisses and cuddles but that was it, you know what I mean. It was all a different type of engagement to what it is today.

We did. We planned; see the railways in those days you never stayed in

the one place for long, and she was quite prepared to spend her married life travelling around. We talked about whether we would rent or build; it was no good building if we were going to move. We talked about that. We talked about what we would like for a family. She would have liked

four, that agreed with me. But when we did have a family we had twins to start with and I thought no, twins was enough. If we have another set it might be three, but we were happy with the two and she had a hard birth.

Well I don’t know because I was down in Maitland and they were up in Byron Bay. So I didn’t see them much. But I think any mother would be against it, although they never said anything.

I caught the train from Maitland to Newcastle and went out to the Newcastle Hospital where we had to go for enlistment. There, the first thing we had to do was a medical, if you passed the medical then you had to go on and they took you in and

you had to make the oath then, give an oath that you would serve ‘Queen and Country’. And then they put us in trucks if I remember rightly then and took us out to Broadmeadow Showground. And there we were issued with our uniform, clothing, a palliasse to sleep on and all of that sort of stuff and we

were allotted a hut to sleep in. I forget what hut we were in but we were in the pens or one of those. And we were there for about four or five days and we were allowed out on leave. Mainly just to get us all together, there were people going to each state and as people came in to camp all

of us sang out, “You’ll be sorry!” That was the main call, “You’ll be sorry!” and those two that I told you about that were changing the urine, oh they were out. And there was one chap, he was a real country chap off a farm and he had been out and got a few aboard [had a few drinks] and come home and he just stripped off stark naked, he was dead to the world on the palliasse and so they went

and got black boot polish and tan boot polish. And they painted designs on him from here to the top of his head and the poor bloke woke up the next morning covered. And he couldn’t get this boot polish off. He put long sleeved shirts on and he shaved so that he got most of it off his face, but the poor blighter, boot polish on his body for about a week after.

We were there for about seven days and then they put us on a train and took us up to Manilla Road, Tamworth and there they started to form us into little bits of units, and they asked had anybody there had any first aid. So I had done it in the railway; I had my silver medal and everything from the railway. So I said, “Yes.” “Right, you can go with

Doc Bruce in the Regimental Aid Post.” And so I was sent in there. We were only there a few days and next thing they sent us by train down to Sydney and we went into the showground and there we went into the cattle stalls. And had palliasses and that to sleep on and then they

formed the 2/12th Field Ambulance, and that’s about two hundred and fifty odd people and I went into that. I went in as a private in B Company. And we just mucked around doing training and that there for about a month, and they sent a couple of us out to Liverpool to the hospital out there to do training out there. We were only there

a couple of days and they recalled us and then on Boxing Day we all went to Cowra for our initial training and we were there until March ‘41 in our training. And then they said, “Right we’re moving.” And they issued us all with summer uniforms. We called them ‘Bombay bloomers’. They were shorts down to our knees and that and they

put us on a train and we went out through Young and down to Melbourne and we thought this is good, they are taking us to Melbourne, they are going to put us onto a ship for the Middle East. No, through Melbourne, Sunshine, onto Adelaide. Oh, they are going to put us on ships here. No. Up to Terowie on our way to Alice Springs. Once we got to Terowie, we knew we wouldn’t be going overseas from there.

So we had about a week in Terowie and there we had red dust everywhere and then we had rain so it was red mud everywhere. Terrible it was. Anyhow then they put us on the train and we went through to a place called Quorn and there they put on the best meal I have ever had in my life. Country people, took us to the showground and they had beautiful

soups, roast lambs, lovely big bread puddings, marvellous. And they put us back on the train and off to Alice Springs. And we arrived in Alice Springs and there we had to get out and make our own camp; there was cellophane grass about eight or ten foot high. Cut all of that down, put up tents,

make our own showers, our own toilets. We were there for about nine months, not only doing field ambulance work but we were out putting barbed wire along the beaches and all of that. Dug a great big CCS, that’s a casualty clearing station, where they used to bring the wounded back and then we would fix them up there and take them back to the hospitals.

And we dug this about four foot deep and riveted all of the sides, and put trunks across the top and sand and dirt on top of that to make it bomb proof. Had night marches through all of the swamps with a compass. Have you ever been to Darwin? No? They have got anthills there and they’re about

ten foot high but they’re only about that wide and I think they faced north and south, so if you are coming this way you don’t see them, if you come this way you can see the whole expanse of it. So you’re marching along in the dark and bang! Head on to one of these things. And we had to go through all of these swamps; we didn’t know there was crocodiles in them. Mangrove swamps,

night time, pitch dark. And all of those sort of marches.

They just had us out giving us lectures on what the army is all about, about VD [venereal disease] and all of those sort of things.

Just army life, and then they would form you up and march you for a bit and teach you how to right wheel and left wheel and form fours and all of that.

Just to be careful, and to use condoms and all of this sort of stuff.

They talk about gays, now I was what, six years in the army and that never once came up the whole time I was in the army. They must have been there but it never ever came out.

Never discussed.

Somebody might say, “Oh you’re a bit of a poof!” that would be it. But we would only say that as a saying, never that he was one. Most of us didn’t know what they were; in those days those things weren’t discussed.

Oh they gave us a dungaree sort of thing, khaki dungaree.

We wore that most of the time. And then they gave us a khaki shirt and trousers and later on they gave us the full khaki woollen uniform, coats and things.

I took toothbrush, toothpaste, safety razor, shaving stick in those days I had.

Photos, Jess and things like that. Writing paper and pen. That’s about all. Tobacco and cigarettes, everybody smoked in those days; well they used to issue you with tobacco.

I started at Byron Bay with the railway. They used to have ambulance classes there, bandaging and splinting. How to resuscitate, different resuscitation to today; we used to use the Schaffer method. You would lay them on their tummy with their head

on one side and their arms like that and you would get on their back, and you would put those two thumbs along their backbone and those on their ribs and you would do three down and two back. Now it has changed; you give mouth to mouth and everything now; it wasn’t that in those days.

That was in Tamworth, they wanted someone to help in the regimental aid post ,that’s where they had sick parades of a morning, “Anyone on sick parade out!” and they would come up and the doctor would see them, give them an APC [A drug combination – Aspirin and Phenacetin and Caffeine found in some over-the-counter headache remedies] or do something. We used to do all of that for them.

At Tamworth? Well nine o’clock parade I think it was, and by the time that was through then our time was our own until the afternoon sick parade. So we used to just muck about.

Stretcher bearing, because ambulance work is manly stretcher bearing.

We had to go forward to the front line, recover all of the injured people, stretcher bear them back to the ambulance, get the ambulance back then to our CCS, Casualty Clearing Station. So we had to learn all stretcher work, how to pick up an injured person and put them on the stretchers. How to bandage them .What signs

to look for. Splinting. All of that sort of stuff. And they might be in a position where you have got to get them from that way to get them on a stretcher, might have to get them up a bank and all of that sort of stuff. All first aid, not medical, just first aid to get them there and then the doctors took them over when we got there.

There is no such thing as avoiding bullets; put your head down and that was it. I must say I never had to avoid a bullet, because as you will learn as we go along we never got into a battle. We were the first casualties. We weren’t taken forward to do any of that.

No, you just picked your own time and your own route to get there. And once you got there then you did the best you could for him if you could. If enemy fire was too heavy and you couldn’t move, you

just lay there with him until it eased off. Or you decided to make a run for it, then you had to grab him somehow or other and drag him. Sometimes you couldn’t stand up because of the bullets, so you had to improvise in some way. Bandages you all had, three or four bandages, or his belt,

to make a sling so you could pull it around under his arms and around your neck and you would crawl and drag him. Different, just work on your own means of getting him to where you wanted him.

The only thing we had was a bandage pack, and pack you could split it open and it had bandages and a sling in it, that’s all. And a stretcher.

Well, when we landed on Ambon it was very hilly and we knew that we were going to have a hell of a time getting them out. If you have got flat bushy country you can drag them out. When you have got up hill and down hills

and you’re under fire, you have just got to make do the best you can. So you just do what you could.

No. We didn’t know, all we knew was they sent us to Darwin, they didn’t tell us what for. It was only when we were on the train going to the ship they didn’t tell us where we were going; they just said we were going on a ship.

Well we knew we were going from Darwin and we knew the troops were in Singapore and they were fighting there and so we knew we weren’t going to the Middle East.

Well when we arrived, they took us by truck from Central Station out there, and they just drove in there and we all lined up on the parade ground and they just went along and said, “Right this lot go to ‘cattle C’, this lot ‘cattle A’. This lot poultry section.” That’s how they sorted us out. And when we got there

they were scrupulously cleaned. They had been fumigated, cleaned and what have you and we were in a pen that took about two bulls and there was about three of us in that pen. And we just went and collected a palliasse which is a big hessian bag and we had to go around to the chaff or hay centre, fill it up with hay and bring it back and that was our palliasse. We had two blankets,

one to lay on and one to put on top of you. And we used our kit bag as a pillow, our kit bag had all of our clothes and that in it so it was pretty soft and that was it. Meals, they had one of the big sheds for meals and we used to have to take our tin plate and pannikin and go for a meal there. We had a riot there once because they

used to have sago pudding, and it was gooey, sticky stuff, done for a couple of thousand. So one day we had it and we used to plonk it on our plate and then we would twirl our plate in the air and it would come down and the pudding was still on it. They used to send an officer around for any complaints, so we gave him the complaint and it got a bit better after that.

They used to take us on marches around Centennial Park and sometimes they used to march us way out to Bronte Beach for a swim and back in. And we had lectures on bandaging and all of that sort of stuff.

Well it varied from day to day, one day they would say, “Right you have got to put up tents.” Or another lot would be detailed down there to put in showers. Because right through the front of our camp, between the road and our camp was this big water pipe, about three foot diameter water

pipe, and that was the water into Darwin and so our water was tapped into that. And seeing as it was above ground it was always hot water, so we didn’t have to have any hot water, it was there. They had to put up shower screens and all of that. Then they had to put up toilets. Toilet was just a great long pit, about three foot wide, ten foot

deep and in front of it they put ‘Y’ shaped branches into the ground and then put a log along those. And what you would do, you sat on the log and that was it. It was quite good. Each day they used to put disinfectant and sawdust in it, so it

was quite good.

About five mile I suppose. We were at a place called Winnellie and I went back there to try and find where our camp was, it is all industrial work out there now though. We found it in the end, but they shifted the road. The road used to be there, then the water pipe, then our camp.

But now they have shifted the road from there over the water pipe, the Stuart Highway, and I didn’t know that and I am trying to work out from that side and we got it worked out where our camp probably was.

Oh yes, there was the 21st Battalion. They were next to us. They were the nucleus

of the Gull Force, they were the battalion. And then on the other side we had the engineers from Queensland, they were there; some of them came with us too. There were troops everywhere. Down the road there was the air force and then there was the DIB, Darwin Infantry Battalion, they weren’t AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. That caused a lot of friction between the

Darwin Infantry and the AIF. They had leave one time—I wasn’t on leave, I was in the camp—but they went to town and got on the grog [alcohol] as usual and an argument in the Victoria Hotel started and one of them said, “Well come out here and I will prove it to you.” and a fight started.

Well they cleaned out the Vic, there wasn’t a bottle left in the Vic, not a glass, cleaned it right out. They got out in Victoria Street and started there. And Lorna Lynn’s used to be the big store opposite; they got into there and ruined all of that inside. One of the chaps in our tent, he was in town and he was full as a tick [drunk] but he stood on

back behind all of the crowd and they were throwing stuff out and they were throwing these Tally-Ho cigarette papers out, boxes of them. And he was collecting them and putting them in his shirt and our tent had enough cigarette papers to last for months. That was one of the things that happened. Another chap, he was a warrant officer of the 21st battalion, he came back into camp and got a Bren gun carrier and he was going into town

and he was going to clean the lot, but lucky the MPs [Military Police] got him before he could get on the road. The MPs got him. If he had have got into town he would have created havoc with that.

Just like a big country town. It had three hotels. The Vic in the main part,

there is the Don which is down in Chinatown. The Parap Hotel was out near the airport. Bagot Hospital was out near Parap Hotel. Most of the houses were up off the ground so that they would get the air underneath, same as Queensland. It was just a big country town. A lot of the roads weren’t even

bitumen. See there was a road from… Katherine I think it was through, that was just ordinary metal road. Railway line about six hundred miles from Birdum. See you came from Alice Springs by truck, about six hundred miles. No road when we were there, just a track. Then we got into cattle trucks there and went right

through to Darwin in cattle trucks. So it was just a big country town.

Oh there was a lot of Chinese people because of the pearl divers there. And they were mostly Chinese or Japanese. When the Chinese came in, their traders came in too. Well

the head of the RSL [returned and Services League] now is a Chinese man. He was enlisted with the Australian Army. So there was a lot of them. There was a lot of Greeks up there too, they had restaurants and that there, they had a big two up school there. They had everything there.

No trouble whatsoever up there, not then. I don’t know what has happened since the war, I think they are still very well mixed up there.

Well AIF said, “I enlisted to

go overseas.” Well the DIBs were mostly militia people who had just enlisted for Australia. And they had been sent to Darwin and there was always that little niggle between those going overseas and those at home and it would start arguments and it would all start. But I think that riot

sort of finished it. There wasn’t any after that I can remember.

Well I only had one leave in Darwin I can remember, went in and had a few beers. I went shopping, went looking for things that were unusual up there. I bought two

drop earrings and a pendant made out of pearl shell. Out of the shell not the pearl. And in our camp we had a dental unit, and they had all of these fine drills and that. So this chap used to mount them for us, so he mounted these things and then I sent these to a jeweller in Brisbane and

he chained them and polished them and all of that and I gave them to Jess, my fiancé for a present. My daughter has got them now.

Nothing. They just lived their own life, they were raw aboriginals. They weren’t

like they are today that trade and make things, well they made things but they weren’t there to trade, they just wanted to live. We didn’t come in contact much at all. Mainly if we were in town we would go to the botanical gardens; you would find little pockets and get your photo taken with them or something like that.

Oh gee you’re hard.

Well we had to erect a camp first and they were only tents then. Later on they gave us these Sidney Williams huts. They’re iron huts about sixty metres long by about ten to fifteen metres wide

with a cement wall and a space between the first wall and the cement to let the air through. And we had to build those ourselves, and they put me—I was a corporal then—so I had to take five blokes and put the roofs on these huts. I had never done a roof in my life and neither had the others. So by the time we got to the other end we were about that much out,

one end was right on the end but the other one was back about that far.

Oh well we were in tents in Alice Springs and I don’t know how I got it; one of those things, big camps with people you get it. I just got the runs, runs, runs. And I had it there for about three or four days. And then it started to clear up and I thought I could get through to Darwin and I got on the, got shaken up and everything on the road

and of course there was no road and we’re sitting in the back of thirty hundredweight trucks just on palliasses so it would be up and down bounce everywhere. And it came against me again so they took me off. And they had a tent hospital at Barrow Creek and I was the only one in hospital. I had a good time there. And they had, there was a police sergeant and

his wife there and the doctor. So if they wanted anything done, they just took, mostly Aboriginal prisoners, took them out put them on a truck, go out and get a load of wood, bring it in. All of that sort of thing. They weren’t actually prisoners; they were just put in this compound and treated like anybody else. They didn’t know what they were in there for half of the time.

They were native; they weren’t educated ones or anything.

Nothing. They all wore glasses, they didn’t take prisoners.

One Australian would take on about fifteen Japanese. That’s what we all heard but it was all a myth. A lot of them did wear glasses, but they were good fighters. They were well trained; well they had been through China for about ten years so they were all seasoned fighters. And they fought

from the land, they didn’t have to have everything put at their… they carried their food or picked it up on the way. They used a lot of bicycles and things like that.

Well they were in Malaya, they had got into Malaya then because they went in on I think it was the 8th of December.

The day after they went into Pearl Harbor, I think it was the 8th, they went in and then they came down the isthmus. Well that’s when we got word about that. But then it was only seven days after and we were on a boat going to Ambon. So we didn’t have time much to think or talk about it. We were flat out getting our

things together to go.

From what I can gather they had a newspaper in Darwin, Darwin local paper, which was also army news too. I think

that’s where we got most of our news from. They would give it out on parade what was happening, mainly through the newspaper.

In Darwin. We were only in Alice Springs passing through a staging camp.

That’s all in Darwin.

Well they picked B Company to go to Ambon. So they got us together and told us to pack everything up and that we would be going on ship. They didn’t tell us we were going to Ambon.

We would be leaving by train, the railway went past on the 13th, we would be leaving by train for the ship. And we just had to then get all of our stores together; we took two ambulances with us. Pack our stores, anything extra we wanted we had to get it

and just get ready to go, that was the main thing. And then there was another fifty selected and they had to get ready to go to Timor, but they left after us so I don’t know much about them but I think they were instructed too. So then after that was all done and we had left, then they had

only a few left in the 2/12th so they brought them all back here to just outside Wollongong and reformed the unit and after they reformed the unit most of them were put on the hospital ship the Centaur which was sunk off Brisbane. And there was only a few saved off that, so out of the original 2/12th Field Ambulance

I think it would be lucky if twenty of us…I think there is only three of us left now.

Well they were a van with canvas side and tops with a big red cross painted on

each side and one on the top. And then inside they had racks which would take two stretchers, one on each side and two above and then also you could seat so many walking people in it. And you entered from the back like an ordinary ambulance today, you entered from the back. And in those ambulances there was generally a driver and

two stretcher bearers. They went forward and generally one of the stretcher bearers; he would be a corporal so that he was in charge of what was going to happen. And that was the ambulance. In them they had four stretchers and they had little carry pouches which had morphine and bandages

and things like that in them, splints. So that you were prepared, when you got there you had stuff to get them through the initial stages of what was wrong before they got back to the Casualty Cleaning Station.

There was three Dutch ships, there was the Both, the Patris and the Valentine, I went on the Patris; they were just inter-island that the Dutch had up in the islands. And some even had their poultry and goats and everything on board. Most of us slept on deck, on the hatches and everything like that. We were nearly three days on that.

Went on, on the 13th . Sailed on the 14th arrived on the 17th.

That was December 41. Most gorgeous sight I could ever see. The Arafura Sea is the most bluest bit of ocean you could ever see in the world. And we sailed in at dawn. And

I will show you the map after, it is like a horseshoe and you sail into this horseshoe and there is all palms on all of shores around with the mountains going down the centre. And the sun rising, it was just out of this world. And I still say it was one of the most beautiful islands I have ever been on.

I couldn’t tell you, I don’t know what was happening just outside our unit. See from the time we left Cowra until we finished up prisoners, we didn’t come in contact with civilians. Very rarely. The only time I came in contact with civilians

was when they had a great big mango tree in the botanical gardens in Darwin and the CO [Commanding Officer] had sent me in charge of five chaps out in the lorry to get bamboo; they wanted to put a screen up around the shower. So as we passed we saw all of these lovely ripe mangoes on this tree. So we said, “We’re going to have some on the way back.” So we got the bamboo and we pulled

in under this tree, went in the gate and we had these sand bags, about a dozen, so we just had six and filled up full of mangoes. And a utility pulled up next to us, and it was the curator of the gardens. “What are you boys doing?” “Oh we are just getting some mangoes, they were falling on the ground there and instead of wasting them, we would take them.” and he said, “Well put those six bags on the

back of my ute. Now,” he said, “Who is in charge?” And I said, “I am.” “What's your name?” He took my name and all of the others names, and he reported us to our CO. I nearly lost my stripes over that but he was a good CO and he knew what it was about so he let us all off with a caution. That’s about the only contact I had.

Well the army, they were preparing by digging a lot of trenches along the beach front and barbed wiring. Now we were field ambulance, that’s not our job, but we were out putting barbed wire along the beachfront and all of that sort of stuff. And they had anti-aircraft guns there. Not many but they had them.

They had different troops from different places; they were prepared to a certain extent. They weren’t expecting raids, but they arrived.

Well we thought we will go to Singapore, that’s where we thought we would go.

But the Dutch Government and the Australian Government already had arrangements that they would send our troops to help them in their islands. So as soon as it happened we were already ready to go. So they just loaded us on the ships and off we went. One thousand one hundred and thirty one of us went off on those

ships, and landed on Ambon. And we landed there, we got there at dawn, but we didn’t get off the ships until just on dark and just as we got off an air raid siren went. Of course all troops were dispersed, and there was a big drain so we all hopped in the drain little knowing that in those islands it is used for everything.

In muck up to our…anyway we got past it and then they put us in trucks and they had already prepared a camp for us at Tan Tui which is about a couple of kilometres out of Ambon itself, it is a suburb. But it is on a coconut plantation, on a slope which went down into the harbour. So you look across this lovely

harbour, horseshoe shaped and on the other side was the airport, Laha, and this mountain range, it was one of these things that you read about and never see. And they put us in these huts and they didn’t have any bedding or that prepared we just slept on the floor. And during the night we got

invaded with ants, ants everywhere. Anyway next day they sprayed them all and got rid of all of the ants and we had beds then.

The Dutch, plus there was a unit of about a dozen chaps went over to get all of our food storage places ready, freezers and

all of that. They were there and had done all of that for us. And so we just walked into a full camp. These huts, they were wooden huts with atap, atap is made out of coconut leaves, they bind them all together and make them into a long thing and then lay them one on top of the other. And they’re just like a roof, they won’t let the water

through, just runs off them. The only thing against, these little, what they call a gecko lizard. They get up there but they make a noise, I can’t make the noise but it is a little squeaky voice, and they go for hours, nearly drive you off your mind sometimes. It was a lovely camp. Beautiful camp.

Yes.

I had only been across on a ferry to Manly once. I had been to Sydney before because my father got osteoporosis of the jawbone, like a cancerous thing in those days and they had to bring him down to Sydney Hospital for a few months. And Mum came down with him, so once I had a week off and I came down and had a week with them, that was the only time I had been to Sydney. I couldn’t even use a telephone, didn’t know how to use a telephone.

I had to ring from Central Station and I had to ask someone to ring the number for me; I didn’t know. A real country hick.

Well we didn’t know. We were well on the ship before they told us where we were going, and they told us we were going to an island in the Dutch East Indies called Ambon. They told is it was about six hundred miles

almost due north of Darwin, just off New Guinea. So that’s all we knew until we arrived there, didn't know nothing. We were watching for subs and everything on the way over.

Well there was no routine, sit and eat and play cards.

And they had watches, they used to put a watch on, watching out for subs and things like that or aircraft; lucky we didn’t run into any. It was quite an eye opener, beautiful place, and the natives, especially the kids, they were gorgeous, the kids.

And they used to do anything for us. And after we were taken prisoner some of them took some terrific beatings just to get us a banana to us, to eat.

They had, I am guessing now, but I

would say there would be about two to five hundred Dutch soldiers there but the rest was about two thousand native troops. And they were properly trained, but anyhow they divided the island, we had one end and the Dutch had the other .When it started the Dutch capitulated because most of the troops just threw their uniforms off

and went back to native living. They wouldn’t take it and the Dutch just threw it away then. And so we were left stuck away on one end facing the wrong way and everything.

They put in quite some trenches.

Where our chaps went there was a lot of trenches all up this mountain, and they had those ready. They had a great big gun emplacement there, a big gun; I forget the size of it now. But it faced so that it was shooting out towards the entrance to the harbour so any ships coming in they could get it then.

On the other side was Laha Airport. Well we had a lot of Hudsons [Hudson Hawk aircraft], well, not a lot; we had a squadron of Hudsons over there and they used to go out and follow the movement of the Japanese towards Ambon and a lot of them got shot down and just before the end there was only two left, one was flyable and the other wasn’t,

so they stripped one right off, and they made everybody take their boots and everything like that off, and just stand, stripped the plane off so they could get as many on, and just flew the plane out. Now, they had to fly out across the harbour up over this mountain range and down along the sea back to Darwin. Well we watched them go and they went across the harbour and they

gradually got enough nose up to go over that mountain range and down the other side. And they got to Darwin, they got out. And there was about a dozen stayed behind and they were trying to get this other plane working so they could get out on that, but they didn’t. They were all beheaded by the Japanese.

Spice. Now it was the, Ambon happened to be the main spice island from way back in 1600, I think the Spanish had it first, then the British, then the Dutch, and the Dutch had it in the end. Mainly for spices – cloves

and pepper and things. That was the main trade there. But towards the end even a lot of that was worked out. And the army and air force there. But after the war they had universities and colleges and everything there, trained a lot of people.

No. Couldn’t see, all they told us about, we never saw it .we were too busy getting our things prepared. See we had to do reconnaissance for the CO, another chap and myself, we had to get in a jeep and we had to go right around that horseshoe and right across to the other side of the other island to a place called

Hitoelama where they thought they would land to get to the airport. We had to try and work it all out and then we had to come back and go to our end of the island, work out where we were going to put our Casualty Clearing Station, prepare all of that, though we didn’t have any time to prepare anything. And then we had the Americans coming back from the Philippines

and their Catalina flying boats. They used to land just down the harbour from us. And we would often get a call to go and take the dead and wounded out of these and we would get down there and these bodies were splattered everywhere and we had to clean all of that and get that out. We were flat out. We had one leave into town and that was two hours of an afternoon. We

just had time to go in and buy a few trinkets and stuff like that.

Well they were mainly arriving to refuel to get out to Australia, to Darwin, Cairns or Thursday Island. So they

would only just land and refuel and off. And it was only those that were badly shot up, that’s the only one I saw. Most of them were just on their way through escaping from up there.

I couldn’t tell you. Mainly the gunners that were on board, the navigators.

I couldn’t tell you about the pilot, I don’t think he was because I think that plane went on. I don’t think there was any plane left, I think it went on somewhere, so there would have to be a pilot.

No. All I remember was getting a call and we went out, about half a dozen, and we got out there

and well mostly all dead, just shot to pieces. So all we could do was take the bodies off and take them to the Dutch hospital and from there on we weren’t involved.

Well we found out mainly through our Hudsons, they had to go out and find where they were and then they would come back. I remember the day before they arrived there they came back and they said, “If you saw what was bloody well coming down there you would swim for Darwin!” Because there was four ships, well there was twenty-three thousand troops just to start with and we had just

over a thousand. And there was troop ships, aircraft carriers, battle ships, everything .and we were supposed to stop that. And I am not sure, but I think our biggest gun was a Vickers machine gun and Tommy guns. What could you do?

All we could do was fight them on the land, the only thing that happened when they came into the harbour, we had it mined and they made the Dutch crowd show them where all of the mines were anyhow one destroyer was coming in and it went a bit off course and hit a mine and it went up and went down and they lost everybody on that I believe.

It was

an agreement between the Dutch Government and the Australian Government —I don’t know how many months or years it had been worked out beforehand—that if anything happened we would go to their help. And so we were just sitting there waiting for them. And then when we got there our CO, Colonel Roach, he wanted to get extra troops, extra armaments, extra food, medical supplies everything.

And see our headquarters was in Melbourne, they looked after us all, and they just ignored us. And in the end, they got sick of Colonel Roach and they recalled him and sent out Colonel Scott who was the one in charge of this place in Melbourne. Of course he

was only there a fortnight before the Japs landed. He didn’t know the troops, he didn’t know the layout, he didn’t know anything. He was hopeless.

What could you feel? Either

fight or surrender. The island was only thirty-two miles wide and it had a spine of mountains down the centre which the Dutch said that the Japs couldn’t get over because it was too thick. What happened? The Japs landed on the other side and twenty-four hours they were right across with mountain guns and everything. That’s how we were taken prisoner because we were the first ones to come in contact with them.

And any ships that was in the harbour, they just sunk them all and petrol dumps they just blew them up so the Japs wouldn’t get them. So we were just sitting there with nothing and being field ambulance we don’t carry armaments, so they went and issued us with a .303 rifle. I wouldn’t know how to load

one. One of our chaps who had been in the militia before, he showed us how to load it and how to set it to fire at an aircraft. Anyhow lucky they came and took them away from us the next day otherwise we would be shooting one another I think. But no, they weren’t prepared one little bit. But to give it to our blokes, they held them off for three days.

And with the sinking of that ship, we held them up for a fortnight. I don’t know what the official records are but us chaps will say to this day, “We stopped them from going to Darwin.” We still think they were on their way to Darwin. Because they had been to Rabaul, they had taken Rabaul and they were just on their way to Timor, just closing.

And the Yanks got through around into Cairns and we think, I hope I am right; we stopped the invasion of Australia.

No they didn’t happen until after; 29th of December I think was the first one.

We were gone by then, a lot of the planes that were in that raid went from Laha where we were, at Ambon.

We had moved, we were in Tan Tui until about a fortnight before. Then we had to go and select where we were

going to put our Casualty Clearing Station. So we selected a place called Wyneeto which was on the far side of Ambon, and there was a creek ran through it so we had fresh water. So we got in and dug this hole, thirty metres by twelve metres and by about three metres deep.

Then we filled about six thousand sand bags, we called a rivet, we placed them all around to stop bomb blasting., and on top of that we laid coconut trunks and on top of that we placed dirt and that. And we were going to operate from there. And we also put up half a dozen places for us. But they were just a platform

made of bamboo slats with a tarpaulin over them and then we dug a slip trench about four feet deep, about that wide underneath the beds, so if there was an air raid we could just fall out of bed and into the slit trench. And while we were there we decided to put a guilder—guilder was the Dutch money we worked in—a

guilder in each for extras. So we got WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and we had some baking powder and we made a cake. Things like that. Anyhow on this particular day I had just had my breakfast and a shave and a wash and I went down the little pathway to the CCS to relieve a chap down there. I had just relieved him and got in there and our sergeant

called out and I thought he said, “The first Japs we see, they’re our prisoners!” But he called out, “The first Japs we see and we’re their prisoners!” I didn’t know and I walked out, as I walked out we were only about thirty feet from the main road and here is three Japs lying on the road with a machine gun trained on us. Well what do you do? Put up the hands. So they formed us all

there on the road. They wouldn’t let us pick up any of our gear, I lost my photos and things like that—no I didn't, I had my photos in my pocket. They took my watch after which was a twenty-first birthday present. Lined us up on the road and marched us into town. And they put us in a schoolroom for about an hour and then they marched

us out again up this windy road to a sanatorium which was up in the hill looking out over Ambon. There, they sat us down in a culvert thing and we were there about half an hour and then they bought down a machine gun and sat it down in front of us and started mucking around and we thought, “This is it.” Before that

I think I am the first Australian who was ever given a real kick up the backside. One of the Japs had got a hold of a tin of food from somewhere, tin about this big, and they all seemed to carry one of their flags, so what he had done, he had sat it in his flag and pulled and tied it in a bow on top and he made me carry it and they gave us a bit of a spell on the road and so I sat on it.

Next thing I get this holiest kick up the backside because I sat on their flag, not because I was sitting on his tucker [food]. So I think I was the first one to get that. Anyhow they got us up there and they started to form up this machine gun. Well, we all thought they were just going to machine gun the lot of us. But after about ten minutes they just picked it up and walked away. Next minute our chaps were up on the mountain up behind

us and their fire could just reach the building up from us and we could hear them hitting that. But then they formed us up and marched down the hill again. And they put us in a schoolroom for the night and…fifty-two of us there were…and they put us in the schoolroom, no food or nothing all day. And then about

nine o’clock they passed this little ball of rice about that big plus a tin of green paint of all things, I don’t know what the green paint was for, I suppose they thought it was food. Anyhow about an hour later they passed us in some more rice and that was us. And we were there for the next day and then they took us out and put us in an Ambonese hotel,

which is not a hotel, it is just a room with a couple of wire beds in it. And we were there but next door was a bakery, and they had just baked a batch of bread before this all happened, and one of our blokes found out about it, so we sneaked in there. We got a lot of this bread and so we had something to eat for a while. We were in there while all of the battle was going on. And on the 3rd I

think it was, our troops started to march in and we marched through to Tan Tui and they formed us up and marched us out too. And they put us in our old camp and we were there then until we sailed, that was our camp.

Nothing. See there was no troops for them to fire on because they just came over into Ambon itself, there was no troops in Ambon they were all out there, so they just walked through. Took some bicycles. See our troops were up on the mountain behind us and the main lot of troops were across Amahusu,

across the isthmus. I will show you the map after and show you where it was. So it was a terrible surprise to us. We were the first. We were back and then the next lot to be taken were the cooks, because they were behind the front line, see all of the troops were up there ready to fight. Instead of that they had to turn around and face the other way.

I believe they got four or five hundred Japs before they were taken.

We couldn’t hear it, it was too far away.

No idea. We just had to sit there and wait.

Anyhow we got out to the camp and the main road went through the camp like that and we were up on that side. All of the officers’ huts, they were down near the road. And behind that was the troops, down that way and across that way. And then behind that was our hospital. So we had a hospital there and our hut was next to that.

So we were up there all of the time. And our toilets, you had to cross the road and go down across a bridge to another one that went along the water and they had holes in all of that, and that was our toilet, straight into the harbour—‘The Bridge of Sighs’ we called it and that was that.

And then after we left, there was a big bombing raid on it but the Japs had made one of them huts and they loaded it with all of their bombs, thousand pound bombs and all of that. And one of the bombers came over and dropped a bomb and it went right in the middle of that hut. Set fire to it all at first, and some of our chaps got up on

the roof trying to put it out. And our doctor went up with the padre to try and help the fellows who had been injured up there. Next minute the whole thing, they were all killed, blew all of the huts down in the camp. I don’t know how many killed all told there; most of the huts had to be rebuilt. Oh it was a real shemozzle [chaos] there for a while I believe.

Prior to us leaving there the Dutch men were in a camp there and their wives and children were in a camp in town. So the Ambonese used to go through to town with food and stuff to sell and they knew a lot of these Dutchmen and so the Dutchmen used to write a note to their wives and poke it through the wire. Or

put it in a coconut and give it to them through the wire to give it to the wives. Anyway the Japs got onto it and they laid a trap and they caught seventeen Dutchmen. And our camp is there and there is a hill there, and on top of that hill, it would only be from here to the corner away from our camp was the old Tan Tui house, they had had all

all of this plantation and they had taken it over as their headquarters. So they got these chaps and they brought all of these soldiers half full out from town, gave them iron fence posts, rods, axe handles and pick handles and told them to get stuck into these seventeen blokes. They killed, I don’t know how many, about five or six they

killed. And about two walked down the hill after that. It was terrible.

Japanese. All under the command from Kunito. Captain Kunito who was the head of Jap forces there.

Oh dear. You don’t notice much when you have got your hands up in the air. Oh they just had their soldier’s uniform on which was, I think theirs was grey trousers and a coat. And they always wear those canvassy sort of boot and it has only got one toe for their big toe.

It is not rounded; it comes around and goes into one toe. And a cap, that’s about all. All I can remember.

I don’t know we were just expecting Japanese to come down. We didn’t even know that they were coming to Ambon, but we

thought they would be. It was a deep sea port; you could bring any amount of navy in there, right up to the shore. And also the airport was there, and they wanted those things so that’s why we thought they would come there. But we never thought that all of the Japs are coming. That’s it, when you’re young you don’t worry about what is going to happen until it starts to happen. When they start to bomb

then you start to worry.

Oh of course that’s why our CO was so onto headquarters, we were, we were sitting ducks. A thousand of us, what chance? We couldn’t even go guerrilla fighting because it was too small an island. Timor, see they had a terrific island there

they could last for months there without anybody getting hit, us, we had nothing; it was only a small island.

Mainly by cable, by wireless, that’s it mainly.

I wasn’t up in that

area to know what he said and that. All I know was that he was trying to get more troops, more guns or larger guns, medical supplies, more food. So we could hold out at least for some time. And then he even asked for us to be taken off; he said it was hopeless, just a waste.

Now and again we would get a plane over, just a lookout plane taking photos and stuff. We would always get an air raid warning. After we arrived there we had a few raids. Mainly on the airport or on the wharf where the

ships were. One day the HMAS Swan came in and brought a re-enforcement over. And they chased up and down, zig zagging up and down; you would see a bomb fall and as soon as they saw it they’d go, they got through they never got hit.

Yes. Well from what I understand they made three landings. On our side of the island, on the Latima side as they call it, the peninsula, they landed at a place called Seri and another one at Latuhalat. And one the other side where the airport was they landed at a place called Hitul-ama.

Now the Hitu-lama people, there was only a few Dutch troops there and they didn’t last, but they were supposed to get rid of any bridges, and they didn’t. So their troops came through on the road and when they got past the mountains they went off and came along the coast to the airport, and there they fought our chaps there.

Well they overrun us there too. But nobody knew what happened to them until after the war, no one, except one of the Jap officers took one of our chaps to carry his stuff. And he was the only one that got down but he didn’t know what had happened, until after and one of the Ambonese told our blokes

that they had beheaded and bayoneted and shot our blokes, the whole lot of them.

Laha yes. So nothing was known about what happened that side. Our side of course as I said before, our chaps were across a neck of land there, they landed just there and came in this way, and just there and came over and also around and took the Dutch by

surprise on that end. Now where they came across the centre into Ambon town itself, then they had us facing the wrong way. That’s why we were the first to be taken prisoner, and then the cooks and the transport were the next ones, and then was the main line, but they were facing the wrong way because the troops were coming this way. So what they did, from what I can understand then,

they split up and some of them came down along the coast road and got in touch in there. Others turned around and came back and there was a lot up on what they call Mount Nona [?], now they were the first to come in contact with the Dutch actually firing and they kept the Dutch at bay as long as they could and then they started to work their way across to the other troops.

And then they joined up and from that one they just had skirmishes for a while but I think in the end they could see that they had no shot, so why waste lives? But on Mount Nona they sent down , we were at the bottom of Mount Nona, they sent a crowd down to Kutamatia which is a road coming in from the main road to the

mountains. They sent some down there to reconnoitre, to see if they could find out where the Japs were. And when they got down there they couldn’t see any Japs, so most of them went back. And one said, “I am not I am going to wait to see if I can see any Japs.” That was a chap by the name of Doolan, now he was a legend on Ambon, they have written songs on him and everything. I

don’t know what sort of a gun he had, he must have had a Tommy gun or a machine gun, anyhow he saw the Japs come up the road, just walking up the road and he waited behind this tree and just waited until they all got there, and they say he got about a hundred of them, these Japs, before they got him and killed him. After they had gone I believe the Ambonese got his body and buried him there. They

have written songs about him, he is a legend over there. I won’t say any more; that’s enough. Anyway the legend was tried to be made not a legend fifty years after, but it was only somebody trying to get a bit of publicity. That was that and we just capitulated then and that was the end of the battle. They had nowhere to go,

they couldn’t go anywhere.

We were taken on the morning of the 1st of February and we were taken to the camp on the 3rd or 4th and just went back into the huts we had left. All of our

fancy Red Cross blankets, up on the equator almost. All of that stuff was still there.

The huts were long huts with cement floors. They were made of timber, and they were open about a foot from the ground

and then timber, and above that there was shutters, you could push the shutters out. And then on top was these atap roof made out of coconut leaves all platted together and laid one on top of the other and made lovely roofs. Those were our huts, and we had our own mess huts and things like that. Mosquitoes were bad when we were up there,

and we didn’t have mosquito nets, we had beds but no mosquito nets. But they issued us with mosquito nets and we had to wear long sleeves so we wouldn’t be bitten at night and long pants. Malaria was prevalent.

Well I can’t remember many

Japanese at the camp at all. I think they put a few around us just to keep us in check, that’s all for a few months, and then they put a barbed wire fence around and then they had their guards from then on. No, it was pretty free and easy; we had our own food even, bully beef and all of that sort of stuff, except we had to go onto their rice.

It was unpolished first, and the meals were quite good for the first five or six months I suppose we were there. Then they started to get into… we used to play basketball and everything, put up a basketball court, have talks and things like that. We weren’t actual working prisoners and then they started to get hard,

taking us down loading and unloading ships and so on. But being field ambulance we looked after the hospital, we didn’t go out on work parties. So that was our job, just looking after the sick ones.

Well there would be what? Seven hundred men I suppose, about six hundred men I suppose and Japs, I suppose there would be a dozen to two dozen, something like that. I am not certain, we didn’t see them half of the time.

They had their own headquarters down on the road, see, so we never saw them much at all except when you passed by and you had to bow to them and this sort of thing.

When the first one or two got belted up, you knew what to do then. The guard told us, “Bow!” you bow.

That was the hardest part, having to bow to the little buggers.

Where were we going to go? We had nowhere to go. But I tell you what there was, about three

escape parties, one official one I know that. But they escaped after but they were helped by a couple of Ambonese by the name of Gapsers, Bill and Barbara Gaspers and one of their brothers. So he was a Raja, they used to have Rajas of the villages; they were sort of the leader of the village. And Bill and Barbara they helped our blokes a lot and they helped

one lot get away. Now they were caught later on and imprisoned and they were tortured and all of that but seeing Barbara and Bill were husband and wife, the other brother wasn’t married, he took all of the blame for what had happened and Barbara and them weren’t supposed to be in on it at all. He was beheaded

and they got imprisoned and after a while they were let out. But they were very good to all of our blokes. With everything, food, escapes and all of that. Now as far as escape, most of those who escaped, escaped from Laha side because when they were about to surrender they told them you can surrender or you can have a go on your own. Well a lot of them had a go,

I don’t know how many. And the air force blokes that were left trying to repair that, they tried. Now just across from Ambon is a fairly big island called Ceram. Ambon, Ceram and just off the end of Ceram was the end of New Guinea. So what they tried to do was get to Ceram, some of them sailed up the coast of Ceram, a lot of them walked and that was a

couple of hundred kilometres I suppose. But those were the ones that escaped. The ones that escaped from Ambon itself, I think they went to Ceram and Ceram to the Dobo [Aru] Islands and then to Merauke in

Dutch New Guinea and from there across to either Darwin or to the Gulf of Carpentaria, a place down there. And that’s how they got through, took them months to get through but they got there. And they were the only ones that got any word of what happened here, the ones at Laha didn’t know, see all of these massacres

only happened after they left so they didn’t know anything. But most of them got through except the airmen, they were caught getting across to Ceram and they were brought back and all beheaded.

They lived there, they were the head people of the village, he was the Raja of the village and their son is the caretaker of the War Memorial Cemetery at Tan Tui. But when all of this trouble has happened with

Indonesia he had to get out, he and his family. And they are down in Melbourne, some of our people looked them up in Melbourne and I believe they have got a visa to stop now indefinitely. But he is still in touch by phone with the people on Ambon. He has been back there too since; just to see that they have been looking after the cemetery.

Getting them a prau [canoe] to get from here to there and getting them food. All of that sort of stuff. And most of them only had a little school atlas to go on and they weren’t sailors; they worked things out themselves, marvellous.

Well that was when I talked about the Dutch garden party as they called it, that was the first one that I actually seen. And I never saw another one until we got to Hainan.

See I was up in the hospital; I wasn’t out on the work parties where they were all getting bashed and that. But we had to look after the bodies that they brought back in to try and put them together again.

Well there I didn’t have to deal with anybody that had been assaulted by the Japanese. Mainly they were people with diarrhoea and tinea; one had appendicitis, things like that.

I can tell you a funny story if you like. Tinea, now they used to get it in the crotch a lot and a lot of them weren’t circumcised so it would get under the foreskin and a lot of them had to be circumcised. Used to circumcise them and stitch all of the thing to their penis and that would be it

until it would heal. But then during the night they used to get a urine erection and of course the stitches used to go, pain. So we had one little jar of ethyl chloride which is used for spraying so as soon as we heard, we would race up and phhst, and the old boy would go plonk. That was funny.

Another chap he had it bad and they used to have their shower and then they would come up to the regimental aid post and the chap in charge, and we had a box of dusting powder and also the dentist was there and he had a box of plaster of Paris, big army wooden boxes. So they used to come up after the shower, hold it up

and dust all around you know, and off they would go. One chap, he turned out a doctor after, marvellous too, but he could get far away and be out of this world. And he was in charge of the RAP this day. And a chap by the name of Con Connellon, he was about six foot six and a big bloke. Timsy dusts him all over and off Connellon goes back;

they would usually have a lie down after that. Anyhow when Con woke up his whole testicles were in a solid mass. Timsy had put plaster of Paris on instead of the dusting powder and the plaster of Paris had set hard, it was like cement. Poor old Con is all set in this cement; we had him in hospital for about three weeks chipping little bits off.

Oh I could tell you some stories about that hospital. These little funny things that happened.

I can tell you one. I had never been helping on an operation. And one chap got appendicitis so our Doctor Davidson said, “You can help me Tom. All you have to do is

scrub up and stand with your hands like that and I will tell you what to do.” So all we had to do was boil all of the instruments. We only had a couple of forceps and a scalpel, boil them in a kerosene tin and that was that. So we put the chap on the table and had his legs apart like that. So we got a sterile sheet and put it between his legs. So we took the instruments out and put them on the sterile sheet.

And the bloke giving the anaesthetic was the dentist, Marshal. So anyhow I am still standing there, Marshal gave the anaesthetic and said, “Right Doc, he is under.” So the Doc got the scalpel and he just went to trace where he was going to cut and as soon as he traced like that this blokes nerves reacted and up came a leg and there is instruments flying everywhere I am standing there and the doctor is saying, “Catch the bloody things!”

Of course they are all on the floor by then and we had to call off the operation for a while until we could boil the instruments again. We got through the operation and he came through all right.

Well we had ether and that to start with, we had a bottle, that soon run out. When we were on Hainan we had no anaesthetics.

We had a chap with a restriction of the bowel and we couldn’t operate because the Japs wouldn’t give us anything, and so he just died. They were going to try and operate, just hold him down and operate, they got him on the table but he died before they even started.

No I don’t think they did.

They had plenty themselves then. They didn’t raid our supplies then. See we went from February right through to October and then they came to us and said, “Right, we want to take all of the sick people to a convalescent camp, so get all of the sick ones.”

So they left a few on Ambon because that was going to be the good chaps, and the rest of us went with the sick ones on the boat. And when we got to our convalescent camp, have you been out to Kurnell?

here? Well, Kurnell is just one big sand hill, well that was very similar to where they landed us on Hainan Island. Landed us there and marched us out about a mile and a half to where our camp was and we had nothing, just the bit we brought with us. We had a little bit of ether, that only lasted a couple of days.

No vitamin B, we had a couple of bandages, that’s all. And the Japs wouldn’t give us anything. They gave us a bit now and again.

On a tramp steamer, the Taiko Maru, and they had three holds and they put so many in each hold and you just had a

place to lie and that was it and the only air you had came from where they opened the hold to let you get in and out; of a night time or rough seas it was covered over. And the toilets out of the back of the boat they had a couple of planks out with box on them and that was the toilet.

But we had fair meals going across. They used bully beef and stuff that we had, biscuits. Hard biscuits, so we didn’t have bad food going there. But we ran into a typhoon just the other side of Manila, the Philippines, going across the China Sea. That was hell; I was up in the front of the boat and of course every wave that hit would go straight through

the boat, up and down and side to side and I have seen people go green. They talk about people getting seasick and going green, I have seen it. I didn’t go green but by gee I was sick. And they say if you can get up on deck and get some fresh air, if you got up on deck and sat down, there was the mast going like this at you. That was worse than being down in the hold. We got through that all right.

Eleven days I think it was. To get through ,see we had to come from Ambon up through Borneo and all of those places, through the Philippines and across the South China Sea. To Hainan, see it is just off from Vietnam. You have got China comes around, Hong Kong and then Hainan

fifteen miles off the China coast and then you have got Vietnam like that.

Well the Japs said collect all of your sick people; they’re going to a convalescent camp. So we picked all of the sickest ones out and they went to Hainan, all of those who were in fairly good,

or were in good nick before they got on the crook food and that, they stayed on Ambon. And they had the worst, they went through hell there. The old Gull Force, people don’t know, I think we had the highest casualty rate of the whole AIF, seventy-two percent lost through prisoner of war, sickness and beheadings and all of that.

I don’t remember a thing. Only time I ever saw them was when I went to the toilet. Except we had an interpreter there. He was a cow of a bloke, it turned out, he got hung at the end of

the war for atrocities. He was the only one that used to come around and look around the hospital and say, “You can go to work and you can go to work.” But the doc stood up to him at that stage and said, “No.” He was about the only one I saw except when you had to go to the toilet and you went past the guard house and you saluted.

Not there I wasn’t; I was on Hainan. Yeah.

Well he was a little insignificant bloke. He wore a Japanese uniform. He had the right of way all around

the camp. And he was in with the camp commandant, Captain Kunito. Later on, I am only going on what I have heard from the others, he turned out to be a real pig. Now when all of this happened at Laha, he denied knowing anything about it. It has come out now that he was there,

he called the roll call for them to go and be beheaded when they had to go. And he was just a, and where he learnt his English was supposed to be in Melbourne, he was supposed to have some sort of store in Melbourne at one stage. So just a brute, that’s all.

A lot of these guards too weren’t Japanese, they were Koreans, came from Korea. The Japanese, if I am a corporal and you’re a private, I can belt the daylights out of you, kill you almost and you can’t do anything against me. Well you can imagine what some of those guards would do to the Koreans who weren’t Japanese. And some of the guards to themselves too,

so if they do that to them, what do they do to our blokes? That’s that. But as for the Japanese on Ambon itself, I can’t tell you much about them.

No, they were in camp at the Victoria barracks or the Dutch barracks in town, they took over that and took over the places of where the Dutch familles were, they took their houses and things like that. We didn’t see them.

No, very seldom. They used to pass through the camp

because the main road went through our camp and I heard that they caught…some of the women used to go through carrying stuff on the head and they caught some of them giving someone a banana or something. One woman she was pregnant and everything and they just knocked her to the ground, kicked her in the stomach. Atrocious. Belted her and everything.

They had no thought for human life at all. Well you can’t blame them, they had been at war since ‘35 in China and most of them were just peasants from the land. They had no education a lot of them, only the officers had education and they would spend their life treading people down.

You do blame them but on the other hand you can see why. I still hate the buggers. Those ones, but I have lost all hate. But they are the only ones I did hate.

No. We didn’t know. All we were thinking was that our blokes would come back and take Ambon back again, we didn’t think we would be there more than four months; we thought our blokes would come across from Darwin and take us back. Little did we know.

Not at that stage no.

God, lowest place on earth. It was just one big stretch of sand hill. Nothing there at all, except at the entrance to the harbour this great big rock, it was called the rock

and you could see it for miles around and that was our focus, we could focus on that. And inland from Basuo where we were, it has changed all together now it is not Basuo, Dong-Fang, they changed all of the names inland, was the iron ore and a lot of minerals and Japan wanted them

badly. So our first job was this wharf where they had to load the ships, we were to build this ramp to take these railways lines up so they could run the tracks up and tip it into the ships. And that was the first impression of this little wharf we landed out. And then they put us off, pick up your luggage, carry those who are stretcher cases and set out. And we had

Indian troops look after us that had been in Hong Kong and that. Anyway we marched about an hour and a half out on these sand hills and swamps to our camp and it was just made out of old packing cases. Tin on top. I could lay on my bunk and I could watch the sun go right across the sky through those holes in the roof. When we got rain, well you couldn’t get away, the rain just came through.

And our windows, they had shutters which were just wooden, they just hung them up and put a prop underneath. That’s how we got fresh air. Down the centre was just an earth passageway down the centre of the hut about that wide, about two yards wide. And on each side was what we call a ‘bali bali’, it

was about a metre off the ground and it was just a flat bench everywhere. We lived on that. And they gave us a straw mat, generally they are about six inches thick so they are a bit bouncy, but these weren’t, these had been flattened out to about an inch and a half. We each had one of those, that was our bed. We had that space which was as wide as the mat, and we had that

much between the mats. Just so you could walk out. That was all of the space we had. And there was one at the front and one at the back. And above we had a shelf which we could put our stuff on. And then after we were there a while they gave us a mosquito net. And two blankets. Thin blankets.

That’s all.

No, it was built, I understand, for the troops waiting to jump off into Indochina and Malaya, and that’s what it was originally for, that’s what I was told. And the only water we had was a well in the centre of the camp and

they had a big pole with another pole hinged in the middle and on the end of the pole was a bucket in there and it was weighted and you would pull up the pole. That was the only water we had and all of that had to be boiled because you couldn’t drink it. Dysentery and stuff. And showers, well they used to fill a big

wooden tank they had there, and so much time for the officers, so much time for the hospital, so much time for the workers when they came home. Through that one of our chaps got the worst hiding I have ever seen given to anybody. Because he forgot about the regulations in having a shower when the officer walked in and the officer said, “Didn’t you know this is the officers’ shower time?”

“Oh,” he said, “I forgot.” And he said, “Well you shouldn’t have forgotten.” and the bloke started to call him names and so he called the sergeant in charge and put him in charge and he was taken before our CO and the CO handed him over to the Japs for punishment. And they strung him up so that his toes were about that high off the ground, arms stretched and they just got the

guard out and they belted and belted.

Yes, we had a water shortage in the camp; it was only out of a well so we used to have our shower periods,

officers would have a certain time, the patients in the hospital would have a certain time and then the workers would have a certain time. And this time one of the chaps, he had gone out of turn and he was in there when an officer should have had it and they caught him. Words led to words and the officer put him in, he got the sergeant and arrested him. So then he was taken

before the CO and he decided to hand him over to the Japanese for punishment. And he was strung up with his toes off the ground and he was belted until he was unconscious. And then he was brought around again and belted again. And then he was taken to hospital and we had him in hospital for weeks.

But a couple of months after, he died. We think it was mainly through all of the beating. But from then on nobody was handed over to the Japanese for punishment. So I think the CO just didn’t think it was going to go that far.

He was Lieutenant Colonel Scott, he was the replacement

one sent up in place of our previous colonel, when they tried to get extra troops and food and he couldn’t get them so they replaced him and brought Scott.

Roach! That’s it, yeah he replaced him.

Well I don’t know, it was very close to a riot. Everybody was so taken back by it. From that day on they had no faith in Scott. Well he did some good things after. Helped organise

parties to get medicines and food and that into camp from outside and things like that. But that finished him as far as the troops were concerned.

Well we had a camp only a hectare square it was, but there was one,

two, three, four huts all in a line, they were all the same size. The first one was the Australian hut, the next one was the Dutch hut and the fourth one was used for something, all of a sudden they pulled it down .And then the next one was the hospital. It was by itself. It was the same style of hut as all of the rest they were about sixty

metres long by about ten metres wide. I explained about the passageways and that didn’t I?

Down the centre of the hut was an earthen passageway, that’s where you walked, and on each side was a platform which we called ‘bali bali’. And they were just a wooden platform a metre off the ground and went right back to the wall and that’s where you lived and slept on that.

You had a mat about an inch and a half thick and made of straw and that’s what you slept and lived on. And you had about a foot between that and the one next to you and that was your living space. And you had a couple of thin blankets, and you used your kit bag for a pillow and later on they gave us a

mosquito net too.

It was equipped the same as the huts. We got in and when they pulled the other hut down we got some timber from that and we knocked up some beds so that they were off the ground and we could put a palliasse on those. Until then we had to do all of our nursing, washing people and all of that on the ground.

But as for anything else, nothing. We had a little room we put on the end of the place that was the doctors and orderlies room where we had all of that sort of stuff. It was just a room, there was nothing in it.

They would get up about six o’clock in the morning,

have one small meal of rice and set out about seven. They would mostly walk a mile and a half to their work which was in on the wharves or the roads, somewhere in there doing their work. And there they would work until six o’clock in the evening with only one break during the day and that was for a small ball of rice. And then they would have to walk home, and in the meantime a lot of them

would be bashed for nothing at all. They didn’t know what they were bashed for half of the time. Oh it was bad, and then they would get home and have to have a wash and get their tea. By that time it would be eight or nine o’clock at night and then they would have the same all over. At one period there they stopped all leave

and they did that for about six weeks, continuous work without a break. And that’s when our doctor who was very good, he used to see somebody out on parade that shouldn’t be there and he would put them into hospital, put them in for two or three days just so that they could pick up. And then he would put somebody out of hospital that was not too bad, out for a day or two. We tried to give as many

as we could a spell. My cobber [close friend], Bob Allen, I don’t think he had a day off work, from what I can remember; he went on every work party. He might be up here for Anzac Day, I hope he is. He is in Victoria. He comes up here every Anzac Day, except the last Anzac Day.

Well there was the doctor to start with,

then myself. Then there was about eight or ten orderlies, but we had them on about three shifts, one on through the day another through the later part and a couple on night shift, so that’s how we did it. They were all 2/12th Field Ambulance. All of them. So that was that.

And then we had one that they used to run the RAP, the Regimental Aid Post, so they would have to come and see a doctor of a morning before they went on parade and of an afternoon. So we had somebody looking after that. And they would have people that just wanted bandages changed and things like that. Talking about bandages, we didn’t have bandages, we used bits of rag and shirt we had torn up and they would be washed and washed and reused until they fell apart. That was that.

Well we used to get them in nearly every day; they would come in with cuts and bruises. One chap came in with his arm broken. They were just dead on their feet,

they were starved and yet they were supposed to get out there and push trucks of dirt around. Work continuously; if they stopped, they would get a belting. All of that. It was just mainly starvation they died of. Yeah we lost sixty-six all told from Hainan, but there was three hundred I think it was from Ambon.

There was one thousand one hundred and thirty-one went away and there was just three hundred came back. So most of those died in the prison camp. I think they only had about fifty odd battle casualties and the rest died in prison camp.

To eat? Well mainly it was rice. To start off we would get about a cup of rice for breakfast and we may get it for lunch. We mightn’t, and then we would get another cup for dinner at night. Plus sometimes we would get some dry fish, little

fish they would dry out, and they would cook those and get those. We would make soup and stuff out of them. We would eat marigolds, lily leaves and a thing we called kinking, which was a quick growing leaf about that big, plenty of water and so it would grow quick. And things like that. We did have some tomatoes and that,

we did have gardens for a while but they soon fell through; they couldn’t tend to them. Also they used to live on those snails you see in the garden. I saw one chap there after a bit of a shower of rain, we had a electric fence put around the camp and this Dutch man he was leaning through the fence like this and trying to drag a snail in.

And the electric fence caught him here and burnt straight through his jugular vein. And then rats, when we went into the camp it was alive with rats, well they soon disappeared because everybody ate rats. And they were all right, they were protein. They tasted a bit like chicken to me. You would cook

them up with greens and a bit of rice mixed up with them. Eat them that way. Another Dutchman I know he reared two frogs to eat. Snake, if you could catch a snake to eat that. Anything that was protein you would eat. I remember our doctor he saw a bloke picking his nose once, and he said, “Don’t you throw that away, you eat that, that’s protein.” So you know, little

things like that come back to you. Another chap, Blackie Callow, he had a restriction in his bowel so he used to have to have an enema every morning to help him. So he used to come down and we would yell out, “Blackie” and he would come out to us. We had an enamel bowl with a little spout on it, and with the rubber ring and the enema tube on the end of it, and we used to just

get on his hands and knees, give him an enema, up he would get and off he would go. This particular day he came in and we used to have these tin mugs for our tea, we also had a tin mug that we mixed the soapy water up in to put in and he come in and put his mug of tea down and this Tims that I told you about the dusting powder, Timsy was in charge and he was miles away. So anyhow after he had the enema Blackie

got up and said, “Where is my tea?” Tims looked at him; he had given him an enema with tea instead of soapy water funny things like that.

Well the officers worked out rosters and all of that for us. There was rosters for that and they used to have to pick out who went on the work parties and

things like that. And if the Japs weren’t satisfied, the Japs would come around and pick anyone in the hospital they thought could walk. Then we had our own special cooks and they stayed cooks the whole time. They were picked out when we first went into camp because they could cook.

I suppose we were picked out because we could do hospital work. It was a tough job the hospital because you had nothing to do anything with. You know if you could give somebody a vitamin B injection they would be saved, but you couldn’t. He would get beri beri, and beri beri is a terrible thing. It is not painful

but your heart and kidneys couldn’t take all of the waste material out of your extremities and bring it out and you pass it out in urine. So it used to start to accumulate in your finger tips and toes and gradually work up and come right up, if it got into your lungs you would just drown and that’s the end of you. It is hard to explain. I had it five

times, one time if I had have bent my knee like that it would have split across there and all of this water would start to run down and that would be a sore across there then and wouldn’t heal. It is not nice saying this, but my testicles, I used to have to carry them around in my two hands because they were as big as a football. Things like that. And if you could start to urinate, you would be right. I have seen them urinate a kerosene

tin full of urine in one night. Once you could do that you were right. Then there was another, there was a dry beri beri. That’s affected the nervous system and that. You got jumpy feet and hot feet, got to bed and you would have to get out of bed because your feet would start to jump everywhere and get hot. Peripheral neuritis set in. All of this just because you didn’t have a balanced diet.

And the only time I ever broke down, no one ever died on their own if you knew they were going to die and nine times out of ten you did. Other chaps you would be just talking to and they would fall over dead. But we never let anybody die in camp on their own. Somebody always sat with them and talked with them, held their hand, even if they were unconscious, but

no one ever died if we could help it on their own. Only one, one of my cobbers died and afterwards I just went and sat outside and cried my inside out. Excuse me just a little bit. But

those who got through had the spirit. Once you gave up that spirit you were gone in a couple of hours. I have seen it happen. Well I had beri beri five times, I had amoebic dysentery, I had auxiliary dysentery, paratyphoid, malaria but I was determined that I was getting home to my family,

and that’s what got me there. Anybody that came home, it was determination that got them there.

Only try and talk to them, talk about what you’re going to do when you get home. What feed are you going to have. Think of the plum pudding you’re going to have. Think of your mother and father, or your wife and try and get them

focussing on home. That’s all you could do, try and build their spirit up. Nine times out of ten it didn’t work, if they had gone that far, they had dropped their spirit.

You couldn’t do anything. We used to try and make

vitamin B. Now the husk on rice contains a small amount of vitamin B, so whenever we could get the husks we used to pound them in a stone mortar thing, pound them to a powder and we used to wrap them in a paper for sort and take them to the hospital and give them to all of those with beri beri, hoping that that might help them through, some it did but mostly it wasn’t enough.

Balanced diet, that’s the only thing, but we had no balanced diet. We had two pork chops come into camp to do two hundred and fifty odd people. How could you do that? I think if I remember right, they had a lottery for those two chops because there was no good trying to work it out amongst two hundred and fifty.

Well the cooks cooked it and they had wooden boxes and they used to put it into that. And they knew how many cups of cooked rice would go into a box. And they knew how many they had to feed. If say there was a hundred cups in the box, well they had to get a hundred cups out of that box. So if there was a

hundred certain size cups in it and they knew they had to get a hundred and ten out of it they had to reduce the size of what they put in the cup. They tried to work it out that way. And if they had leftover, then they had a back up and each person took their turn in the back up and if you got a back-up you came forward and took a little bit of extra rice. Those sort of things was how it all worked. It is marvellous what cobbers will do.

I gave a talk in Darwin, they asked me to give a talk when I done that unveiling and I said, “I am not going to talk about atrocities and all of that stuff, I am going to talk about mateship.” And that’s what I talked about, how once you took your clothes off and put your army uniform on you’re all the same, doctors, solicitors, everybody. And I said, “That mateship has lasted right through to today.” I was just a railway worker,

but I had got doctors and solicitors, all friends. Once you put the uniform on you become a friend for life and that went right through the prison camp. You had two or three that you cobbered up with and they remained your friends.

It is a bit hard to get any particular things. I can go…now when we got that lot of mail, I was lucky I got four letters, Neil Mackellar was my cobber and Tommy Betts.

Well we got one lot of mail and that was two years old when we got it. A lot didn’t get any mail at all. I got three or four letters. One from my mother, one from Jess my wife, one from my sister and one from one of my brothers. And those that didn’t, Tommy Betts didn’t get any mail,

Neil got one letter, so after we had all run away and read our letters and everything, we let one another read our letters. Tommy didn’t have any so he read our letters. And then after that they decided there was enough news in those letters to make a newsletter, so we knew that Tranquil Star won the Caulfield Cup I think it was, and Colonus won the Melbourne Cup and Collingwood beat so and so.

And I knew from my letters, my brother-in-law was over in the Middle East when I left and Marie put in, Ian was down with David the other day, well David is their baby son so it meant he was back from the Middle East, things like that we got news of. We learnt people were digging up their front lawns and planting potatoes, things like that. All of

that sort of news, we made a news bulletin out of it., I don’t know if anybody ever kept it or what, I don’t know what happened to it.

Oh somebody got some paper from somewhere, always paper would turn up. I had one book that I made and it was made out of brown paper, the Japs had brought some new guns and they had them wrapped in this paper,

and so he brought some home and I cut it up and made it into a book. And half was used for cigarette papers and half was used for a book, it is down in the museum.

Yes I kept a diary and the diary I kept was in a little notebook when we were first put into that school room

on Ambon, I opened up the school desk and there was a little note book, nothing in it, just a little note book. So I took it and kept it and that was my diary right through. And I kept it and anyhow when I got home it was used in the war trials, well, quotes from it. And then it was just lying around the house here and I was in at work one day with one of the ladies and she asked me if

she could have a look at it and I said, “Oh yes, I will bring it in.” so I took it in and showed it to her. “Oh,” she said, “I can hardly read it is that small, you want to have that typed. Can I take it away and type it for you?” I will show you after. So she took it away and typed it, so there are copies everywhere, not only that I had recipes in it. We would sit down and say what we are going to have when

we get home and how to make it. I was going to start a cordial factory because my father had had a cordial factory, drew plans and everything .The things you do. Work out your own home that you’re going to build. It was all there.

Just wondering what they were doing mostly.

And it all turned out that I was wondering wrong. I was wondering whether Mum and Dad were still alive, they were. But Dad used to work, he was the sub manger of the North Coast Steam Navigation Company, well they lost all of their ships during the war, so they closed down. So Dad had to find a job. So they went to Brisbane; Dad got a job with the Yanks in one of their store rooms up there. So I am

expecting to come home to go to Byron Bay but no Byron Bay, they’re up in Brisbane. Another chap and I, see my old B Company was mostly north coast boys, they came from Lismore, Murwillumbah, Byron Bay, all up, so we were all going to go on the same train, get our grog. So I had written, as soon as we were released, I wrote a letter

straight to them and I said, “Don’t come to Sydney, I will meet you all in Byron Bay” and I wrote to Jess in Taree, she was nursing, and I told her to go up there too. Anyhow they knew they weren’t at Byron Bay so they all landed down in Sydney so that was that.

They wouldn’t

let us write, other units in Malaya and that, they got letters, not just a couple of words but letters out. We weren’t allowed. My mother and father didn’t know until I got home that I was still alive. They didn’t get word back from the government that I had been found until after I got home. The first thing they knew I was alive

my brother-in-law, he was in the army and he was on the train going into Central and he was reading the Herald, or the Telegraph, one of them and there was a list of recovered POWs and there was my name. So he got off at the next station and he went to the nearest phone and he rang my Mum and he rang Jess to tell them. That was the first they knew of where I was and that I was alive.

And one of the chaps that recovered us, one of the reporters happened to be a friend of Ian’s; they were friends, so he got in touch with him straight away and got a bit more information.

Oh yes, all of the time, that’s all you thought about.

I knew she would be there; she was that type of girl. She told me she would nurse until I came back. She wasn’t a trained nurse but she was in a private hospital, she was there for ten years. And she always said that the day I got back she would walk out. So the day, I had a photo of her, the photo is still in there on the dressing table, a copy of it

I have still got the other one in an album. And I had that with me all of the time and I had the letter she wrote; things like that meant a lot. That would lift your ego up straight away and they were the things that kept us going. And of course when I was released I was able to write a letter straight away. So I wrote

a letter to Jess and one to Mum and Dad and I just wrote and told them what I was going to do, but when the ship landed here in Sydney, that we came back on, they took us out to Ingleburn and as soon as I got out of everything, I raced to the telephone and I rang

Jess up and the first thing she said, “Oh you have still got your tongue.” And I said, “Yes why?” She said, “There have been rumours around that the Japs have been cutting the tongues out and that was the only thing I was worried about, that you had your tongue cut out.” So anyhow she said, “Well, I am going straight in now to resign. I can’t get a train until tomorrow morning but I know your Mum and Dad are on the train from Brisbane coming down now.” So she said, “You meet them tomorrow morning and I will meet you at seven o’clock

tomorrow night.” So I was there to meet Mum and Dad, but I said, “Look I can’t stop with you.” She said, “We’re going to the Peoples Palace.” Used to be the Salvation Army place in town, it was like a guest house. And I said, “Okay you go there and I will come in when I get through the camp out there and we will go and meet Jess at seven o’clock.”

I got three off the x-ray machine, three or five and it broke down. They wouldn’t give you leave, they wouldn’t give you pay, they wouldn’t give you anything until you were x-rayed. So I heard them talking, there was a lorry going into Marrickville from Ingleburn to get some of the locals x-rayed, so I grabbed my papers and I said, “I am going on that truck no matter what you say!” so another chap and I got on the truck, we got x-rayed,

we never got back until seven o’clock to Ingleburn, in the meantime I had to get a leave pass, I had to get my pay, I had to get outfitted in uniform and everything, and it was about half past eight before I got through, I raced into Liverpool on the train and into town and at Central they used to have a cloakroom there you could put your stuff in for soldiers. So I went there and put all of my stuff in and talking to the woman when I was putting it in, and I told her I had been a POW and I was going up to

the Peoples Palace, and she said, “Oh we have a phone here, why don’t you ring them up?” So I rang them up and they said, “No one by the name of Pledger here.” So I said, “Oh they must have left a note then or a message?” “No message.” I didn’t know what to do. Jess’s train was in and gone. So the woman said, “I would go up there and put your foot down, there must be something.” So I got out, you

know the ramp from Central down to Pitt Street? And I am walking down there and who should be walking up out of Pitt Street but Mum, Dad and Jess? They had had tea and thought, “We had better go up to Central and see if he is there.” And that’s how I met my future wife in the middle of Pitt Street. And then they couldn’t get into the Peoples Palace. So they met another lady from Byron Bay

whose brother was a prisoner of war and she was down there to meet him and she had booked into the Hotel Morris in Pitt Street, a room for him and a room for her. So Mum and Dad had a room there, they didn’t know, so Jess went and slept in the room with this woman and I slept in the room with her brother in the other room. That’s how we had our first reunion. The next night we got on the train and went to Brisbane.

Oh dear, well main thing we had in the hospital was beri beri

and dysentery, they were the two main things. And some malaria. Well malaria, all we could do was wrap them up in blankets when they started to shiver, wrap them up and try and keep them warm. Get plenty of fluids into them, because they would start to sweat. That’s all we could do for them, we had no quinine or Atebrin. That’s all we could do for them, we

used to keep them clean and bathed. Keep their clothes clean and if they couldn’t wash them we would wash them and that. Most of the time we were just sitting and talking to most of them. especially the ones that were bad, try and egg them on a bit. Beri beri

there was nothing much you could do for them, try and get them to urinate, how do you do that? The only thing we did try, when it got up into their stomach we tried putting needles straight into their stomach here and draining it out that way, but it wasn’t successful, we would get a bit of fluid out but not enough to make a difference. So all we could do was talk to them and how they would get better. Dysentery

well, all you can do is keep them off anything solid try to keep them on something like soup if we had any. Vegetables made into a sort of a soup. We had no tea so we used to make our own tea so we used to get rice and put it in a pan until it was charcoal and

then we would pound that into a powder, that would be our tea. Well we used to get them to drink as much black tea as we could. No sugar, well we had no sugar. Just black tea and try to get them to keep taking fluids because every time they went to the toilet they were losing fluids, that’s all. We had nothing to do

anything with. Now…well I think the Japs gave us a few ampoules of vitamin B at one stage and a little bit of quinine, that was all. We had to…our chaps out on the work parties they did a wonderful job trading with the natives or the Chinese and that, or pinching it outside and getting it in; that’s the only medicines we had was what they could get in.

Vitamin B was our main thing. That was the main thing they got in and a bit of quinine .And sometimes we would get ampoules and we wouldn’t know what was in them and we just couldn’t use them because they had nothing on them.

The husks.

The Dutch. See the Dutch had been in the East Indies a long time. Our doctor was treating one of our chaps, didn’t know he had beri beri see? He didn’t know what it was until we got to Hainan island, he had us on Ambon and one of the Dutch doctors was in there one day and the doctor was doing his round and he happened to be at this chap’s bed, and the

doctor said, “What do you think is wrong with Charlie?” and he had a look and said, “Oh he has got beri beri.” And then he told him all about beri beri and that’s how we got onto it. And we knew it wasn’t a balanced diet and vitamin B is the main thing that caused it so that’s how we got on. They knew in husks of things you get vitamin B and that’s it.

I would say it started within the first six months we were there. Well everybody lost weight and that,

I got down to about seven stone or something, which is very light. I don’t know what that would be in kilograms, but there is fourteen pound to the stone so that’s well down. Two and a half pound to the kilo. So everybody lost a lot of weight first.

Then they started to get lethargic, and it took a lot of work to do anything. That’s why they got so bashed about out on the jobs. They got too weak, it just weakens you. I would say it started to manifest itself towards the end of six months after we got on Hainan.

We knew why, we knew the Japs weren’t going to give it to us, that’s why. See if we could have gone and got our own food we would have, there was food on the island but the Japs wouldn’t let us. We learnt later

that the storeman in the head place in Haikou which was their headquarters, he had to say how much they gave us and everything. So if he didn’t want to give us some, any meat that came, by the time we got it, it would be rotten. We would have to boil it for a couple of hours to get the smell out of it. He had the say on what you got in food. The doctor used to come out and promise, “Oh yes, we will increase the food.”

That’s the last you would ever hear of it, so we just had to take what we could get. And of course as soon as you start to lose food, that’s what you start to talk about. And so all we used to do night after night, talk about what we were going to have when we got home. All I wanted was bread and butter; I wanted a slice of bread and butter. We made up cooked dishes of what we were

going to have and how we were going to cook it. All of that.

Well they had like a big wash copper; bricked up copper, sort of oval shape and they cooked everything there. And if you did any individual cooking you had to do it by yourself, where no one saw you because you weren’t supposed

to, it was all supposed to go in the kitchen. But if you got any special stuff you wanted to cook yourself, you had to find a place to cook it. But all of our stores that came in would go straight into the store house and it was issued to the cooks and they would cook it. They would work it out how much we could have per day, how many grams, weigh it out and cook it.

Oh yes, not many. We had about three that we had to watch. You know they got off balance, but somehow or other they seemed to come back to normality again.

Oh dear, now you have got me. No I am sorry, things they would say or they way they would act, things like that. I think some of them even got belted on the road because they couldn’t understand what the Japs were saying

to them and they were slow in doing things which otherwise they wouldn’t have got belted for, but as for actually…I can’t give you anything offhand.

I can’t

say anybody particularly was victimised—just who your guard was, how he felt, if he had a night out the night before or he was just cranky, and you wouldn’t pick your shovel up quick enough, bang! You would get bashed. Friendships, there was a couple of friendships made in camp mainly with Taiwanese

guards. And one of our chaps Ron Leech, he was a sergeant in the 2/12th, he had a couple of them, but he did it mainly for trading, he used to trade with them see? He would get a watch or a shirt and he would trade for something, like rice or vitamin B or something like that. He would trade cigarettes and they

became friends through trading see, like that. I had one chap there, he was a civilian surveyor. And they came into camp and they stayed about three days and I happened to be over having a shower and he came over, and he could speak a little bit of English and we got talking and that. And he asked me, and I said, “Oh hungry.”

That was all. Anyhow that night, they weren’t supposed to contact us prisoners at all, that night it was after dark and we had the side shutters up and I am lying down with my head against the wall and I got a tap on the head and I looked up and it was this surveyor, and he had a toothbrush and toothpaste and a bit of soap which he handed to me. And that’s all he handed, “For you.”

And before I could say, “Thank you,” he had gone. I never saw him again. Now that’s a little kind deed that someone did do, not a soldier, he wasn’t a soldier.

Well there was one but he was the camp commandant,

and we had a very tough one, he made us work six days a week and no time off or anything. And then all of a sudden he was withdrawn and we got another one, he had a big chin. And we had a parliamentarian, Jack Lang, I don’t know if you ever heard of him? So we called him Jack Lang. Now he took us off work for one whole day and then the next day he put on a sports meeting for us and had prizes, a

couple of cigarettes for first, just little things, a couple of lollies and things like that. And he was real good you know, he saw the blokes were being treated properly, but he only lasted about a fortnight, he wasn’t getting enough work done. They took him away and we had another one come in; he was the best one. And there was one of the guards too, Friendly Fred we called him. And he was very

reasonable but he could do his block too, especially if there was any higher ups around, but when he was by himself he was mainly all right. See I didn’t come in contact much with the guards; it was out on the roads where they got all of the bad.

There was Gordon Coventry, Gordon Coventry was a Melbourne Australian Rules kicker,

kick anything, so he was a good kicker. Oh Buck Tai, all different ones. I forget them all now I would have to go through books to find out who they were, all to do with their personalities mainly.

No not that I can remember just talk as Australians talk; we were all Australians except for the Dutch but they were separate to us. We didn’t get on with the Dutch mostly I am sorry to say.

Well they would put you in as soon as look

at you to the Japanese. They wouldn’t tell a lie to get out of anything; they would rather put you in than tell a lie about it. They were the cause of quite a few of our chaps getting beltings. There was a couple of quite nice blokes, I got to know a couple of them. I can tell you an instance, we got back here

in Melbourne, there was one of our chaps, Rocky O’Donnell, and Rocky was on the tram line going out to St Kilda and Rocky got a few aboard this day and was going along next to the tram line and he ran into one of the Dutchmen who was in with us. Well he done his block and he punched this Dutchman and he had him down on the tramline and he has got his head across the rail and he is trying to get the tram driver to run over him.

Just because they were a little different, I don’t know. They never did things to me but I know a few things. I know that after they capitulated a couple of them led the Japs to where we were and those sorts of things.

No I can’t. I thought they would be all for us and do anything for us. I think that a lot of them, how they came to be out there, were misfits at home. Came out to the island, got a bit of, what's the word? Words slip me these days.

They can do what they like sort of thing. What's the word for it?

Yeah status and I think it went to their head a bit and I think that might have had a bit to do with it. because when we went to Ambon they were dead against us talking to the natives.

“Mustn’t talk to the natives.” Of course the first thing we did was sit down and talk to the kids, give them chocolates and this sort of thing. They didn’t like that at all. They had got them, colonised them, and they were under their power see?

No.

The Dutch got just as bad. Four Dutch, they were the first to try and escape from Hainan. They were only out about three days and come back. Well, they disappeared, we never saw them again.

That was the only one,

and there was one more escape and that was towards the end of ‘44. Things were getting pretty tough and someone thought that if anything happened they were going to do us all over. They made us dig a great big trench along the side of the hut and they said it was for air raids, but we found out later it wasn’t, they were going to do us all over. And some of them got the idea that that

was going to happen, so they decided to escape and take their chances outside. So how many was it? I think it was about eight formed a band and they decided to escape. I was one that laid on my back next to the wire fence and lifted up the fence so they could get under to escape. Anyway they got away and they travelled mostly at night. Well as soon as it got daylight,

they went into hiding. When they woke up the next morning here they were camped right next to a Japanese fort, the fort was almost looking down on top of them. So they had to lie there in the boiling sun, couldn’t move for the whole day. Then they escaped and they got up into the hills. In the hills we had the communist Chinese, the nationalist Chinese, the local Leits I think they are called. Who else?

Oh and then we had the guerrillas. So you didn’t know who you were going to run into. Well they were lucky, I think they fell in with the communists and they got right through the war with them. one died, but he died of malaria. The others got through the war and they got picked up again after the war. That was an escape. But there was

one other, not an escape but an incident. They had party went out and camped, they took them out by bus about twenty kilometres out and made a camp out there to build a road and also to collect firewood for the fires. And this particular day they used to all get on a truck. And there was that many people on the truck they used to stand, the front people to hold onto the railing

and each one to hold on to their shoulders, Japs and everything. And they were going out on this party to do work and next minute they were ambushed by these Chinese. We don’t know which lot they were, but they killed all of the Japs, nine of our chaps were killed, five got away and ten just disappeared well to this day they have

never been able to find out what happened to those ten. They think that they made them fight with this army and they got killed, that’s all they can think. But two of the injured got away and they got to this village called Louou, L-O-U-O-U, and there, they were wounded, the Chinese people took them in and cared for them and fed them and everything,

but their wounds were too great and they died and they were buried in this village. And there was an old chap looked after those graves right through until the 1980s and in the 1980s, somebody up in the embassy in Beijing heard about it and so they sent a couple of their army fellows down

and they went out and dug up these bones and they found they were Caucasians and we were the only Caucasians ever been there so they must have been ours. So they worked out it must have been two of ours. So they took the bones to Japan where our war graves are now and they were buried in unknown graves because they had no identification. We know who they were, we say they were Ratcliffe and Tenoworth, but they

couldn’t say which was which so they had to bury them in unknown graves. That’s the only other instance. The other ten, they never learnt what became of those. But they killed all of the Japs.

I didn’t actually

find out about those until after the war. How I saw how the poor Chinese was treated was after it was all finished. I will tell you first how it finished, will I? How it finished for us was somewhere about June they stopped all work and brought us into camp and then they started to decrease our food further

still until we were just getting enough to exist on. Then one day over come these fighter planes American fighter planes, well we knew they couldn’t be too far away because they couldn’t go far see? On account of the petrol. So they knew they were coming from either China or an aircraft carrier. And so we thought something was happening in the area.

And then all of a sudden out of the blue a plane come over, two planes come over and out pop these parachutes and there was nine Americans had come from China. And they dropped out but there was ten thousand Japs there and they wouldn’t let them come into our camp. So they kept them overnight with them. So the major in

charge Sig Lube[?], he finished up the general in charge of the Korean War, American. Anyhow the next day he said, “Come on boys.” took a truck and off they come into our camp. Well he could see what a bad state we were in, so he radioed back to Kunming China and they sent two plane loads down with food and everything like that, but they couldn’t land, there was no landing

strip there, so they dropped it all by parachute. And we were getting around with Camel cigarettes and food, we were eating food, take some food and it would go straight through us, like that. Anyhow after a couple of days they got us fairly stable, there was a train ran from Basuo right down the coast to Sanya where the air base was, and they could

land there. So they put all of our chaps on that and set out by train. Well they got some of the way down and guerrillas derailed the train. Anyhow they got it back on the rail but they couldn’t go ahead, they had to go back. So they came back but in the meantime the doctor, myself and another chap we stayed behind to see what we could do for the Chinese. They were in hospital in town and they were in terrible condition.

We went in and they had all of this vitamin B they had got by then and we started giving needles to them and the doc said, “You go ahead, I am going to have a look around the place.” And next minute he came back and said, “Forget that, come with me.” he took us to the dysentery ward. You have got no idea. Nowhere to go they had just done it all over the floors, and themselves, it was wicked. But sitting up in the corner was a chap rolling cigarettes,

we used to buy these cigarettes see? They were just an ordinary bit of writing paper or newspaper something like that, tobacco and they were rolled with a thread tied around to hold them together. And we had been buying these and they were all coming out of this dysentery ward. That was just one little thing. We stayed there for about three days, and meanwhile they fixed the train line and they went through

and they had flown out a complete hospital from Kunming China, the Yanks, food, cooks everything, taken over and oh gee did they look after them. But we were there for a few days and after we got things settled a bit we got on a fishing boat and they brought us down by fishing boat to Sanya a couple of days at sea. When we got there, then seeing I was in charge of the hospital up there I went back and was telling

their doctors what was wrong and that. Our doctor had gone off with the others see? Then I stopped. A lot of them went on ordinary corvettes back to Hong Kong or somewhere and then the hospital ship, the Jerusalem, British hospital ship, came in and so they loaded us all on, all of the sick ones, the stretcher

cases and all of that. It was the first time I had ever seen any nursing sisters cry. And when they took us up that gangplank tears were running down, they were emaciated you know, bones were sticking out everywhere. I was lucky I wasn’t, I still had some beri beri so I was filled out a little bit. That was that.

All depends. Some of them just died suddenly in the hut but ninety-nine percent died in the hospital. And there we laid them out and sewed them in a blanket and then…I never got to any of the funerals because I was too busy. But they had a wooden cart with wheels on it, a

cart, and they used to put them on that and take them out and we had a cemetery, Boot Hill we called it, not far outside the camp. And we made a cross with their name and number on it and we buried them there. Then after the war they were all re-dug up and put in coffins and taken to, of all places, gosh that’s one of the things I have to go against; the government

took them to Yokohama in Japan. And they just had to take them to Singapore. Or to Hong Kong. They took them all of the way up to Japan to Yokohama. Blokes that had killed them and they were taking them up to bury in their…gee that hurt. But nothing we could do about it. See war graves is not just an Australian thing, it is a world wide thing, it is governed from Britain.

So whether they had anything to do with it I don’t know.

Well we had a Roman Catholic priest, that’s all we had. One chap who was fairly religious, but we didn’t have many services. The Roman Catholics had their

services but the ordinary person didn’t have many. Well I don’t think we had any that I can remember but there was always a service given at the grave site, just a short service, mostly by the Catholic padre. And that was that. But in the camp no.

That was the time of year we always looked forward to

something. ‘43 I think it was, we always managed to get some Chinese wine or something into camp. This Christmas we didn’t have a thing. This Ron Leech, a cobber of mine, who did a bit of trading and that, he and another chap decided they were going to go out to this Chinese village about a mile out in the bush and get some. So

they took two kerosene tins, you know how big they are, on a bamboo rod and off they went, we let them out underneath the fence and they got out in the scrub and off they went. But when they got out there the Chinese had been watering their whiskey down and they used to have it in great big earthenware jars, and so our boys decided to test every bit that they put into ours, so they got blind [drunk], Ron and the other chap go blind.

They weren’t going to come in under the wire so first time they meet a lot of the guards having a party outside the camp, so they just marched straight past them with these two tins up to the guardhouse, the guards are on guard. They just put these two tins down, turned and gave the guard a real salute, turned around, pick up the two tins and straight into the camp, and never got caught.

So we had two kerosene tins of Chinese wine. But the cooks usually tried and made some little extra rice cake or something like that for Christmas. Tried to save a little bit of our meagre food to make something. Always made some little, and we had a couple of concerts.

We had, well, see most of the band from the 2/21st were there and some of them had their instruments so we could have some music. That was on too. One good show we put on, started off the first part was to introduce the different characters, we made dresses out of old curtains we found. Some of the Dutch had their wives’ clothes they had brought in

their ports [suitcases] with them, all of that. And for scenery we got these old cement bags and opened them out and pasted them all together, wet that and stone all over for brickwork and made it into a hotel. The first one was the foyer for a hotel and we were introducing each one as they came in. I was the bellboy and I used to bring them in and all of that.

My uniform was made out of an old maroon tablecloth; remember those old heavy tablecloths they used to have made of wool. They used to put them on the table when they weren’t in use you know, well my suit was made of one of those. Anyway we put this show on, it had different acts, fellows done up as girls and the band,

it was a real good show. Towards the end though we were too weak to put anything on.

Oh very. Not so much army traditions, we didn’t have any on parade and that sort of stuff because you weren’t allowed.

But as far as Christmas, Easter and birthdays. Anybody who had a birthday we tried to get them a little rice cake extra, some extra thing for your birthday. I know I had a birthday once and Tommy Betts my cobber he had grown a tomato, and he gave me a tomato for my birthday. So between that

cake and what we had for our meal, and that tomato and we also had a little pumpkin we had grown, we had a birthday party with just those things. Little things like that all meant a lot to you. And you thought of your own people at home on their birthdays and what they would be doing. We had nothing to celebrate them with.

Well

things got that bad that everybody who could had a little plot of land. And when we first went into camp we asked the Japs for some seeds, and they gave us some tomato and pumpkins, and from what we grew from those they kept the first lot of seed and each crop we would have to keep a

couple. And we didn’t have a lot of tomatoes, and then the officers were allowed to go outside and start a garden themselves, well they started one and they used to supply the hospital. But it only lasted a couple of months and new camp commandant come in and cut that out see? So the chaps started to grow their little own gardens and we had one tomato plant and one pumpkin plant,

and kankong, that’s the one that grows quickly and little things like that. Some of the chaps found out that you could grow a certain bit of grass and you could eat that, and trees. Anything that we could eat we would eat.

They caught them. They made rat traps out of old tins and

that and so that when they went in, put a bit of rice in the back or something and when they went in or touched something the lid would go down and they couldn’t get out. The best one, you know the little ground lizards, they’re about that long, and they used to have this ground hole, go down this little burrow. I have seen grown men sit for hours with a little bit of string lasso over a hole, sit there and watch that hole. As soon as the lizard put his head out,

lasso and into the pot it would go. Do anything to get a little extra food or protein.

Very occasionally.

Well I don’t know what it was, I think it was mostly water buffalo, and by the time it got to us. See this lorry

used to go around all of the Japanese battalions supplying their supplies; we would be last on the list and get anything left over. So if there was any bad meat or anything we would get it. Sometimes you could hardly get near it for the smell. But they decided, the doctor decided that we have got to have it, and they would put it in a tank of water and boil it and boil it and boil it. Nearly all of the good would be boiled out of it.

They would take it out break it up and put it with these vegetable things we had and make it into a soup so we could have it that way. I told you about the two chops. See it didn’t work out what they would give you in meat. You would never say, “I had a feed of meat” because you never did. You might get the tip of your finger

in the whole plate of soup or whatever it was, you might get a smell or the taste of it but you would never see it. And that little dried fish wasn’t bad because they had salt in them. See we had trouble with salt, couldn’t get salt. And sugar, I used to love sugar, couldn’t get it.

We got it on Ambon, they used to get in real treacle, like brown sugar rolls with treacle still running out of it, and that was good. We didn’t get any up at Hainan.

A desert. There was some swampy land.

It was mainly just sand, as though it was beach right back to the mountains. See we were about ten kilometres from the first mountain range. And it was just flat sandy soil with a few shrubs on it, nothing much at all. And in there you would get a few swampy patches and that’s all.

Where we were camped we were the only camp, there was nothing near us. Away in the distance was the harbour with the Chinese camp and that all there. But nothing near us at all.

Summers were good but the winters could be cold. We used to get the cold wind off the Gobi desert in China and oh it used to be cold.

I lasted with my army thick jacket right up until the last winter and things were that bad then I said, “No I could get two hundred vitamin B tablets for my thing” So I said, “It is better to be alive and cold than dead and hot.” So I traded that and got two hundred vitamin B tablets for that.

And so it was very cold, and then you would get the monsoonal rains, and you would get wet because the roofs were full of holes. The walls were just boards with holes all through them. And you get the wind underneath the bali bali. It was cold in the winter and wet in the summer.

I don’t know; I just gave it to

one of the chaps who went outside, he traded it for me. They used to trade with the Chinese outside you know, the guard would be away down there and they would trade with someone behind a bush here or a hut there and get something. I can tell you as funny story about a Dutchman, down on a work party and there was nothing around anywhere. Anyhow he

traded something in for two pork chops. And they were rolled up in a bit of paper but he couldn’t keep them on him while he was working because he only had a pair of shorts on. So he rolled them up in this paper and put them under a shrub. So then when they were going to come home he grabbed them and he had put his shirt on by then and put them in his shirt. Hopped on the truck and here is there and the Jap guard has got his hand on his shoulders and that. What he didn’t know was that

these pork chops were covered in these great big bull ants. And they started to bite all around his testicles and that. And he couldn’t do a thing; he had to put up with it until the drove the ten kilometres back to camp. We had him in hospital for over a fortnight. He was just, where the ants had taken to him, see sweat and all of that around his groin, they just took to him.

But he said he had his chops. Things that happen like that.

Bugs? They were just bad. And the only chance, we never actually got rid of them, every now and then. And they used to get between the board on the bali bali. So the only thing we used to do

is get hot water, that’s if we had enough hot water, boil up the water and go along and pour it down these cracks. And then we would get all of our blankets out in the sun and if we saw any bugs we would crack them and kill them, get as many as we could. They used to bite at night, but you get used to it. Live with them.

They’re still nasty things though.

Well it is a funny thing that in the nearly four years we were together, very few tensions arose. Mainly any tensions that arose were over food mostly.

That was just, “Oh you got more than me.” or “You should have had that back-up.” or something like that. But tensions do, but I tell you what, all of the time I was in the army I never saw any gays. Gay never happened in all of the time I was in the army. It is a funny thing, you see it everywhere now, but in there it was nothing, well it didn’t happen.

We only had two cases of that and instead of handing them over to the Japs, the boys got permission to have their own punishment. So they bared their backside and put them across a table and gave them a few good whacks with a bit of cane and from then on we never had any more

that we know about anyway. That stopped that.

It only happened the once and sort of everybody got together and decided to form a vigilante committee as they called it but they had to ask permission of the head officers, could they have it, and they gave them permission on condition that they tell them what they

were going to do first. So it was all passed legal and everything. And nothing got, they weren’t getting hidings like they would get off the Japs, they were just given something they would remember and it brought them into line, that’s all.

Oh no towards the middle sometime. When people were getting very hungry.

Middle to the end somewhere.

No I think you had your cobbers when you first got into camp. And I think those cobbers kept together in that little group.

Although you were all together but your particular ones that you told things to or discussed things with, you kept them right through. I had three; I had Neil Mackellar Tommy Betts and Allan Brownley. Now we were four that were together right through; we shared everything and we did everything together.

Tommy Betts might be working out on the road and he would be cold out there working, I would be in the hospital where it wouldn’t be so cold, so I would lend him a singlet of mine or something to wear so he would be warmer. Things like that. Comradeship. It all worked in. If you had anything you shared it. Tomato, he shared that with me. He grew it

I shared it with the other two too. Comradeship, mateship as they called it, I don’t know how a lot of us would have got through without it.

When I finished up, I had a pair of tattered shorts

and an old pair of boots, I had paper in them to stop my feet hitting the ground. And I had a lap lap, that’s a bit of cloth you just wrap through your legs and around your waist. And a shirt, an old shirt, cut the sleeves off the shirt, that’s all I had. And my hat.

No, see when we got back into Tan Tui, there was a lot of stuff there in store so we got stuff from there. But no I couldn’t tell you what I entered the camp with now but it was a lot more than I came out with.

No that was about what I came out with. Chinese hat.

No. The only thing I traded was a cardigan, I had a cardigan I traded that and I traded the tunic coat, that’s all. I don’t know what I got for the other,

a bottle of whiskey or something.

Just wore out. You take shirts and that, well you used three and a half nearly four years, well they wear out, especially when you’re wearing them nearly every day. I had one toothbrush and there was nothing left of it in the end I

had to throw it away, couldn’t . Shave, well I lost all of my shaving gear and I had about four or five shaves. One chap had a cut throat razor, and for a half a cigarette he would shave you. So I had a few half cigarette shaves. Gees it was blunt too. But no,

No, something similar to the ‘43 one but we didn’t have as much food. But we always made something of having something. I think I got some cigarettes from Indochina, I think I got about half a dozen cigarettes so we

had a cigarette each and had a pumpkin or something in the garden which we cooked up. Little things like that. No I can’t remember what it was. Got letters in there with all of those particulars. I would sit down; see my diary is not a diary day to day. Just when I felt I wanted to write something I would sit down and write something. And that’s in my diary, how I

spent a Christmas. And I wrote a letter to my mother and father and told them what we got and how we got it…got some sugar and all of this sort of stuff.

Well my philosophy was

that was if I could make Christmas, the next Christmas that was ‘44, I would be right. That’s why I sold my jacket then, I thought now if I can make that Christmas I will be right. So I just went from day to day looking at that goal ahead of me and I think that helped me through. A couple of mates still left, I lost one but I have got two left.

That was my philosophy, make a goal and try to get to it. The first ones I didn’t have goals; I was just determined I was going to get out, but the last one I knew it was that if we didn’t make it then, they were dying too quickly and I had had beri beri five times and I thought, “Well if I get it bad once more I am gone.” So that’s why I was determined to sell my coat and get those vitamin B tablets.

How did I find out? Well how I found out was I was in the hospital, it was about six o’clock at night I think and those vitamins we had wrapped in the paper, we used to give them out and I was giving them out to those who were on it and all of a sudden I heard the adjutant running over

from the guard house and he was yelling, “It is over, its finished, the war is finished!” They had told him officially, So I just threw the powder up and said, “You don’t need these bloody things!” and of course everybody then started to get together and talk and we had a little green pumpkin about that big on a vine and off that come into a pot and anything we had there to eat, we ate it, because we knew it was finished and

we were relying on getting something extra. And then that wasn’t until the 26th of August, and it finished what on the 16th ? So we were about ten days to a fortnight before we knew it was over. We had an idea a couple of days before; they got up on one of the houses and put PW on one of the roofs, painted it on. That’s when we thought there must be something because

the Japs wouldn’t have got up there and done it, they would have made us do it. PW was the first time they ever admitted we were prisoners see? So they put, not POW, just PW on the roof. So we thought there must be something. So when this plane came over and nine Yanks came out, we knew. They didn’t land with us, they landed further up. But we knew it must be over

then. And when they came across and told us, that was before the Yanks landed actually. That’s when we knew it was over.

No I couldn’t, just that he was told that the war was finished, that was it. I don’t think the Japs actually, they might have known. They used to get a bulletin out.

We used to get news in the camp through the war from bulletins they would throw out, or from newspapers they would have and in Japanese, I think it is called katakana, it is part of the language introduced to the language where they have names for things introduced that wasn’t in their language.

Like car, ships, different things. And army and all of that. And one of our Dutch blokes learnt katakana, and he would get all of these old newspapers and he would go through and he would say “Oh forty thousand troops.” and they would have no word for say Germany, but they would have something for Germany. So many tanks, they didn’t have a word for tanks. And he would work out that there must be a

big battle going on in that area to have so many men there, so many tanks there, and we would work it down. Battle this week and next week it shifted down there, we knew that Italy had finished see? And then the Japs came around Sydney Harbour, “Oh yes Sydney Harbour boom, boom, boom” and one of our blokes he started. “Melbourne?” “Oh yes Melbourne boom, boom, boom.” “Darwin?”

”Darwin boom, boom, boom.” “Alice Springs?” “Oh yes, Alice Springs boom, boom, boom.” So we knew it was all a load of huey see? But we knew that Sydney had been bombed.

I don’t know, he was a Dutchman and I think he was a chemist there. Don’t know

whether he learnt it at school or, but he learnt that sort of the language from somewhere and it was lucky he did.

Well a fortnight before we knew about it, all of our regular guards disappeared, all new guards came in and they were mostly

Taiwanese or Koreans. Just one or two Japs in charge. So when we were released there was none of our old guards there. Chin, I don’t know what nationality he was, nobody could find out. He was the interpreter there and he was the real cow and we wanted him right or wrong and they never got him. Never could find him, don’t know what happened

to him. He might have just gone back into a shop or something, don’t know what happened. As for the regulars, until they appeared in court and there was some of them there, but even then we didn’t recognise them because they didn’t have their cap and they didn’t have their rifle. Friendly Fred was the only one, even the doctor I didn’t recognise, but I recognised Friendly Fred.

He was the guard there.

Well we started off we were going to wear these patches when we were taken prisoner, this was at Tan Tui, it didn’t make any difference whether we had a patch or not. So they just stayed

in my kit bag.

The one you saw there, just the red cross.

I don’t know, somebody made them, whether they already had them or not I don’t know. But they just gave it to us to wear so we wore them for a while but nobody took any notice of them so we just took them off and put them in our bags. That was it.

That white piece of cloth, and my number was ‘A’, Australia, ‘50’, my number was fifty and then my name ‘Athol Pledger, corporal’ underneath in Japanese. That’s all. Then we were supposed to sew them on our, nobody ever did. Nobody ever asked for them. They were issued out, “You have got to wear these.” Never.

That’s why I brought mine home in good condition.

Oh yes twice a day. Morning and night, and that’s the only time I ever got a bash, I was in charge of the hospital that night and one of the chaps had dysentery very bad and he had got out of bed and gone to the toilet, and everybody was supposed to be on

their bed if they couldn’t stand at the foot of their bed. And when they come to this empty bed and no one in it and I am taking them around and they wanted to know where and I said, “Benju,” benju means toilet. And I had to go and get him and bring him back out of there. I brought him back and they knocked him down onto the bed and then they gave me a couple of clouts, closed fist across the side

of the face. That’s the only time I was ever assaulted. Yes they used to have roll, ‘tenko’ as they called it. Funny I hardly learnt any Japanese words in all of that time. Funny thing that diary that is on the internet, a friend of mine is a school teacher and he

went to Japan to teach English and he made friends over there. In fact he married a Japanese girl and when he came back here, this friend had seen my diary in English on the TV and he emailed him to ask if he could see me to ask if he could put it into Japanese. And put it on the Japanese, too. I said, “Okay.”

But oh gee every now and again I would get an email from this friend of mine, what did I mean by such and such an expression? Because they couldn’t understand all of the expressions. But I believe it has been on there because I have had a call, my son had a call through a young student who had been in Australia but had seen it on the television back in Japan

and he thanked me for putting it through. He said, “Everyone should have known about it.” They didn’t know anything about it.

Straightaway we had doctors at our bed, they went over us, I had to go with the doctors

to each bed and tell him what was wrong them. We had diagnosed for them, what they had had, I had all of this in my memory. Oh gee, what they had had and if I couldn’t remember they had to remember for me. And then he would go and examine them and tell the sister what treatment they were to go on and what food they were to go on. All of that sort of stuff. And that went on, I suppose I went over

that ship for at least a day with them. And then the nursing staff when they knocked off, instead of knocking off they would go down to the kitchen and make ice cream, whip up ice cream for the chaps and bring it back to our beds. They were marvellous. One particular nursing sister, she was English but she had been in New Zealand for most of her life, she was marvellous too and I never took her name.

And I always regretted it because she married a New Zealander too after the war I believe, but I didn’t know her name and so I could never write to her. And I would love to be able to write to her.

Well they expected me to see me just skin and bone when I came home but I wasn’t because I still had beri beri.

So I was about nine stone, where most of the chaps, see we had had a fortnight or three weeks with the Yanks up there looking after us. Before that we had had three or four days with them in camp feeding us. They killed pigs and everything for us. At Basuo, then we went down to Sanya and they looked after us there

for about three weeks. Then on the hospital ship we were on that for about five days I think. And then they took us off that and put us onto the navy aircraft carrier to bring us back to Australia; well they looked after us. So I suppose we had two months conditioning before we got home, so although I had a bit of beri beri left I still looked pretty good.

And I still had all of my teeth, it was only back about three years back I had to have all of my teeth out because being on the diet I was on all of the gums started to recede, I had beautiful teeth, didn’t I curse having to lose all of them. And (UNCLEAR) and all of that, I used to go to the dentist and he used to massage them every day and that went on for weeks.

No good, couldn’t save them, but otherwise I was in good nick.

Well one, I know I nursed him, he was on the hospital ship and I nursed him right through and somebody said he ate a banana and that killed him.

That’s a load of huey as far as I am concerned. He just died because he couldn’t cope with the rest of it. Jimmy Adams was his name, that’s the one; I showed you that cemetery where he was buried. And this last time I went back to Hainan and coming home we had a whole day in Hong Kong, and one of the chaps knew a

firm there and they rented a car and a chauffer and an offsider to show us anything we wanted to do. And they asked me did I want to do anything. And I said, “Look all I would like to do is find that cemetery and see that Jimmy’s grave is still there.” Nobody knew anything about it. They took me to one war cemetery, no that wasn’t it. I would know it straight away, took me to another one, “No.” and then they took me to a third one where I

looked and said, “No, this is not it.” and the chap that was with us said, “There is another one look at all of the monuments up there” and as soon as I walked in the front gate, I knew it because it was shaped down. But where we used to look down into the sea now there is all of these big high rise all around the cemetery. And there was about a thousand odd graves there, how was I going to find one? Anyway I walked down the centre

where I thought it was and he went looking somewhere else. And all of a sudden he found the Australian Rising Sun, so he thought well if there is one here they would be all together, there was Jimmy Adams’ gravestone so I was satisfied then.

Oh gosh. Well we didn’t talk about the war much at all, just about the relatives and who was still alive and what they had done. Dad and Mum shifting to Brisbane. What Jess had done in the meantime, those sort of thing. We didn’t talk about the war much at all.

And then my sister, when I went away she was twelve, well when I was back she was eighteen and she was still in Brisbane and of course we got the train back to Brisbane and when the train pulled into South Brisbane all I could see was someone raced towards the train, I thought she was going to go under the train yelling, “Tommy! Tommy!” It was my sister. She was a young lady then, all of these sorts of things, all grown up.

The worst experience I had after I come back, the whole family, my sister had a place, renting a place down in Southport and we all went down there for a weekend. And this afternoon we all went for a walk. And when we come back to the house here is a little old grey haired man sitting on the front veranda. Excuse me if I get a bit churned up at

times, it will come good. And he said, “Are you Tom Pledger?” And I said, “Yes.” and he said, “Did you know Jack Smith?” He was my particular friend and I knew he had been beheaded at Laha. We had been right through the whole show together. And I said, “Yes. You’re Mr Smith?” He said, “Yes, can you tell me what has happened to Jack?” And I said,

“Look all I can tell you Mr Smith, Jack won’t be coming home.” I couldn’t, it’s the only thing that broke me up. It still does. Because Jack and me was tent mates

right through. They selected him to go to Laha and there he was beheaded. And they found a skeleton with his name tags still on so he was buried in a known grave. I have been to Ambon three times and seen his grave. That was the worst thing I have ever done. Even all of the chaps I

have buried and sat with in the prison camp. There was only one, another cobber, he too, that broke me up. Anyhow ask the next question.

Well they wrote every week to me.

But I only got those two letters. They were in touch with the Red Cross all of the time. The only thing that Mum ever heard was, we lived at Byron Bay then and right opposite the railway station and we knew everybody in Byron Bay in those days and one of the chaps that worked in the railway came across to Mum, “Mrs

Pledger?” he said, “A soldier just went through on the train and he said did I know Mrs Pledger. And I said, “Yes I do.” And he said, ‘Well you tell Mrs Pledger Tom’s okay. He is a prisoner but he is okay.” Now to this day we have never found out who but it must have been one of those who escaped and knew I was okay. That’s the only word they ever had, except

they had word from the army that they had word that there was a lot of prisoners who had been shifted to, didn’t say any particular place, to the what do you call that area?

They had been shifted and they didn’t know whether I was amongst those shifted or not, or whether I was there. That’s the only word they ever had that I was alive even. So we still don’t know to this day who passed the message on, some soldier going through on the train.

One day. I was discharged from the army on the 29th of November ‘45 and we were married in Taree two days after on the 1st of December ‘45 and Bruce Gordon who also went right through with me,

he came up and was my best man in Taree. And then we were married there that afternoon, Jess couldn’t get any wedding clothes because of the coupons. Some friend made her a dress, and she came to DJs [David Jones – a department store], came all of the way to Sydney and bought that hat. It’s a funny looking

hat now but it looked good in those days. And we got married in the Free Presbyterian Church in Taree, we are both Free Presbyterians. And that was that. She said she never had a honeymoon with me. She had it with the Gull Force. After the wedding we

caught the train to Sydney, we got here the next morning. We went out to her uncle and aunts place at Bexley and we stayed there the day and slept most of the day. We caught the train that night to Melbourne. Neil Mackellar my friend had booked us into the Prince of Wales I think, St Kilda. And we were there. All of the time we were out every day with some of the prisoners of war. The doc

came one day and took us all around the Dandenongs; he got married the next day but didn’t tell us he was getting married. We didn’t know until after he was married. Gee I was crooked on him for that. We were engaged and everything and everything was sorted so we got married. And after we went to Brisbane up there and stayed with Mum and Dad for a fortnight.

And another distant relative of mine, he was a prisoner of war in Europe. And he had got a flat in Manly, so he scouted around Manly and got us a one bedroom, that’s all it was, a bedroom flat. No window in the bedroom, but off the bedroom was a little kitchenette with a window in

that. And that was ours. We had to go downstairs to the toilet or shower. That was our first place in Sydney. And then Jess became pregnant so we had to get out of that. So her aunty at Bexley said, “Look you can have the dining room, the kitchen and the back veranda if you would like to move over.” so we took that. Then we were only

expecting one and two arrived, we didn’t know about it. So then we had to get out from there and come over to Bexley to look and I saw the old bloke down near the garage and he was the estatier and I said, “Where can I get some land?” He said, “There is no land here.” “Any houses for sale?” He said, “A bloke up the street is building two on spec, come and I will take you to have a look.” So he took me up and they had just put the foundations down .And he said, “There is one he has built, exactly the same,

around in the next street.” He took me around and showed me the outside of it, and I said, “That’ll do.” So I came back and I said to the chap. “Will you take ten pound deposit?” and he said, “Yes.” So I had ten pound in my pocket and that’s how we got this house. One thousand seven hundred and fifty pound, that’s about three and a half thousand dollars, and now I can get over half a million.

Well not hard except night times. I used to wake up in the middle of bad dreams and things and I couldn’t stay in bed. I would just disappear. Jess didn’t know where I was, and I said, “Look when I disappear, don’t worry, I just can’t stay in bed. I have

got to walk.” I used to walk for hours. That was the only bad thing I had when I came back, just couldn’t settle that part of me down. But I had tummy trouble and things like that. Went to repat [Repatriation] and they told me I was bludging [malingering] and I picked up my papers and threw them in his face. Some old doctor there and I never went back until I had to go in the end, they thought it was

appendicitis and they took me up and took my appendix out. But, they have been very good to me since. Just that one instance.

I would say over a period of twelve months.

See my doctor wanted me to go back to school—see I left more than half way through fifth—get my leaving, go to university and do medicine, he said I would have made a perfect doctor. So when I come back I was nearly twenty-eight and I thought, “Well I have got to go back and go through those exams. It is going to be another eight to ten years before I was free, I will be forty.” And just then I found

out Jess was expecting, didn’t know it was twins then and I got a place to live and I thought, “Oh no it is too long. So I decided then to go back to my old job in the railway, clerical section. So I went back with them and I was with them until 1956 I think it was, and I thought I would love to get out on my own. But something

I didn’t know then I have only found in the latter years, I didn’t know what was causing it, the diet and things we were on in the prison camp affected our retentive memory. And I found that I couldn’t retain stuff, I had to go parrot fashion, over and over to retain it. Well that would be no good as a doctor because you had to retain a lot of information there.

Even on the railway when I went back there I was finding I was having trouble retaining, but I did all right, I got up towards the top of it. But that knocked me a bit. I would have loved to be a doctor, but well I went back to my old job. In ‘56 I thought I wanted to do something on my own. So there was a bread run to just shops advertised in the paper, so I thought I will

give that a go. So I retired from the railway. I used to have to go out to Bondi Junction, I had an old Morris Van and I used to pick up the bread from there. And I would start here at Central; remember the brewery that used to be there, right at Central there? Well underneath on Elizabeth Street there used to be a little shop on the road there, under there,

that was my first shop. I used to drop bread there, and then to Sydney University and drop bread there and then I used to come back and start at St Peters and I would do all of the Princess Highway out to Arncliffe, delivering bread. Well I got through about two weeks of that and then I used to have to lift all of this bread about sixty

pounds at a time. And the old dysentery, well sores, they were started to open up again, so I had to give it away. And I went back to the railway and I knew the chap and I said, “Look, any chance of getting my job back?” And he said, “You’re only on leave anyway. You’re back.” I said, “What about all of my super [annuation]?” and he said, “That just carries on.” So I went back and I stayed with them for

forty-four years. So that’s my life.

On Hainan? Yes there was ten thousand Japs there, not in our camp, they were stationed around. I never saw them, but in our camp I think there was only two, not of the originals, they were replacements. Japs all disappeared about a

fortnight beforehand and they just put, I think they were mostly Taiwan, we weren’t worried about them .All we were worried about was getting some food into us and having a cigarette and talking, and all of that. We weren’t worried about whether the Japs were there or not then.

I didn’t walk through, I was

taken in a car into town to where the Chinese hospital was. It was just marvellous to go out to look at the guard house and say, “That’s it, it is finished.” And see the big thing hung up where they punished people and that. Just

relief to forget all about it. And another one they did with a couple of our chaps was, you ought to try it, get a dish of water and hold it up in your arms in front of you and keep it there for a quarter of an hour, without going down. As soon as you let it down, bang! Up it would go and they would put another one in

your hand. I have seen that happen. But not with one of our chaps, I saw it happen to a Chinese chap out there. You get, even hold your hands in front of you still. Anyway that’s just a by the way.

Well if it was a Jap punished it would be over at the guardhouse, but if he caught you out there

he could belt you anywhere he caught you doing something. No designated area.

Well firstly have you ever tried to talk to a woman if you haven’t seen one or spoken to one for nearly four years? It is hellish hard, to find, “Hello,” to find something to talk about. It was them that talked more to us than we talked to them I suppose. Of course we didn’t know about the atomic bomb

we didn’t know about what had happened from the day we were taken prisoner hardly. Anything they could tell us. Even when she took your pulse, it was nice to have a woman touch you. If you have been a prisoner and amongst men for nearly four years and before that you had women friends, well I had Jess, it

was so hard, I can’t remember what we said or what we did. They were so good to us. They seen that we were well looked after and well fed and didn’t overeat, they were marvellous to us. And then when we got on the aircraft carrier to come from Hong Kong to Australia, there was a lot of

civilian prisoners of war on that, bringing them back to Australia from Hong Kong. And I got to know particularly, she used to be the matron of the hospital in Hong Kong. I forget the name. Elizabeth or some name like that, big hospital there, and she had her family with her, two daughters and her husband. And we got very friendly. And in my bedroom there, when I went

back in the war trials, I became friendly with them again. She was a lot older; she gave me this tile that she had had for years, Chinese tile with a little lady on it. They were marvellous to us, and the sailors on the ship they saw what clothing we had, we didn’t have much at all. They went and dumped all of their good new uniforms and that in a bundle and told us to pick

out what we wanted. Gave us everything. Gee they looked after us.

Do you know the first place I saw? Cape Byron, that’s my own home town. I said to one of the sailors there, “Gee why can’t you put a boat off and let me off here? That’s where I live.” And then we sailed down into Sydney and we came into

Sydney just after daybreak. But there was another POW ship come in just before us. And of course they got all of the welcome; we got hardly any. They had crowds out from shops welcoming from the city. And we got off the boat and got onto buses and all they had was ‘Ex-POW’ sign across the front of the bus. And a couple of schools had their kids out to wave to us.

Not a big return like the others. They took us out to Ingleburn; well I got straight onto Jess, straight away. Had a talk with her and then I got on the train and come back into town. And they used to have huts in town, the Q-Store hut and St Andrews hut, and I went to the Q-Store hut and I

said, “Look can you get me a place to stay the night in town?” “Oh,” she said, “Everything is full up.” I said, “I have been a prisoner of war for four years and I am back in my home town and I can’t get a bed.” “I’ll get you one.” And she got me…there is a Jockeys club out in the Cross somewhere, Potts Point. And she got me to this club, out there for the night. Anyway while I was talking to her she said, “Where were you prisoner?”

and I told her and she said, “Do you know a chap called Tommy Lockwood? He is my nephew.” And Tommy was with me, so everything was in my bag from then on. And next morning I went into town and had to get back to the camp then, had the night with Mum and Dad and then I had to get back to camp.

Mainly x-ray. Health was the main thing. They made sure that your health was okay and you were in good nick before they would give you a discharge. Mainly x-ray your chest and tummy, that’s why I got into Marrickville to get mine done. And they wouldn’t

fully discharge, well that’s wasn’t discharge, that was only to get out. When I came back they gave me another full medical and you had to go through an examination about things that had happened in the camp, you had to give a talk on anything

that you saw. Any Jap that was bad or did something. All of that sort of thing, interrogation, had to go through all of that. Then they just gave you a discharge paper and you signed it and they gave you a set of clothes, new civilian clothes and off you went. Pay.

Gee I was made, I got six hundred odd pound back pay. Because we didn’t have any pay while we were away. And we were only getting six bob a day, sixty cents a day which wasn’t much but I think I got seven hundred pound.

I was too glad to get out of the army; they would ask me a question and I would answer, forget about it. I couldn’t even remember all of the questions that they asked me.

Not at that particular time, no. I didn’t know if they had even been caught. We didn’t know what was happening.

1947 I had had appendix and I had been into Uralla and had my appendix out and Jess was home with the two babies and I came home and I had about a fortnight convalescence at home .And during that fortnight I got a telegram from the army to see if I would be prepared to go to Hong Kong to give evidence on the war trials. And I said, “No.”

Well at the time I said no because I knew Jess had had those two little kiddie nine months old trying to look after twins on her own and I thought it was too much. Anyhow we talked for about a week about it and Jess said, “Look go, if you don’t you will regret it all of your life. I will close the house up,”

we had just moved in, “And I will go up to Mum and Dad’s on the farm at Taree.” I still wasn’t decided and then she talked me around to saying, yes I would go. But it was only to be for three weeks. I was away three months at these damn trials. So anyhow, the doctor couldn’t go and that’s why he nominated me to go.

There was a Col McCutcheon, he was a lieutenant and he was a barrister too. Names just go, anyhow the other chap. And the three of us went and they flew us. First of all we went out to Richmond. Then we went on an old Hudson bomber. The old propellers, and off we set out, we went to

Melbourne first. From Melbourne we flew to Adelaide. Adelaide we flew to Alice Springs. We got to Alice Springs and went to take off and the plane started to go all over the runway. There was a bolt goes through the tail and a nut had come off it and here is the tail swinging. So they pulled up and they got a bit of fencing wire and put through this hole where the bolt was and tightened it up there and we went through to Darwin on that.

In Darwin we got another plane. So we went through then as far as Moratai, and Moratai was all right, we landed there and then we set out then to go to the Philippines. And we just got to the Philippines, no sooner did we land then they are putting sandbags on the wings and tying us down

and refuelling. And before they got us refuelled they took all of that off the wings and said, “Right there is a typhoon coming through, get back to Manila to the main airfield there which is out of the road.” Off we go back to Manila, land there and they tie us down there and everything. But the typhoon missed us. So the next day we took off then for

Okinawa near Japan and we run into this typhoon. Well we were about three hours late getting into Okinawa, and we got there and refuelled and had to go straight through to Iwakuni in Japan. Got thorough to Iwakuni, still in this typhoon thing. And it is dark, there is no night landing in Japan, we’re lost, the cloud bank is that heavy we can’t get through with the radio or anything.

So we fly around for a little while and we’re getting low and he sees a break in the cloud and he comes down through the break and here is a township all lit up below us. And here is a straight strip of tarmac and he decides to put us down; it wasn’t a tarmac, it was a channel of water and the propellers were lifting the water off the top and throwing it back on the plane, we were that close to

landing in the channel. He gave it the gun and you could feel the whole thing shudder. Anyhow he got up and went up through another break and when he got up there he got in touch by wireless somehow or other with Iwakuni. So they brought us in; there was no light, they had to go out and put kerosene lamps out all over the place to bring us in. One bloke with us he was not with

our CO, he was on the plane. In Moratai he had bought a hand of bananas. And he had hung the hand up from the ceiling of the plane. And he said, “I counted that bloody hand and there was thirteen bananas in it every time I counted. When we finally got to, there was only twelve in it.” Oh gee it was hectic. That was my first aeroplane ride. Anyhow we got there, and

then they flew us on a Sunderland flying boat across to Hong Kong and we were there and they had to arrange the court, they hadn’t arranged the court. And they had to arrange the court and get the prisoners there and everything. So we were there all Christmas. Oh marvellous Christmas we had there; Christmas morning we had it there in the quarters and they started off, the barristers, they were the cooks. We had porridge,

that Uncle Toby’s porridge, not milk but whiskey on it. We had a marvellous Christmas there you know, but then we should have been on our way home. But then the war trial started in the New Year and we went right through until towards the end of the New Year. So it was, November, December, January, three months we were there.

We didn’t talk. I mean each had their own what they were going to say so we didn’t talk about it. We were just pleased to get a trip overseas. So we didn’t talk about it at all much, not that I can

remember anyhow. Except when I got to Melbourne, the doc, I had a yarn with the doc, and he gave me all of his paraphernalia, what I should say and that. That was all.

Well we had our own solicitors looked after us. And they took us out and showed us, it was a big old shed, where the trials were at Kowloon, where the trials were going to be held. They showed us all of that. Then they went over our evidence with us. And they just said, “Tell it as you see it.” And so that’s what we did.

And when my turn came in the to give evidence I started off and got up to a certain point and got up to a point and I forget what it was now but I gave a point of view on some medical thing. And they hopped up and said no I couldn’t do it because I wasn’t a medically trained person. So then they had to adjourn the court while the court then decided. It went all day, deciding

whether I could give evidence or not. And so the next day they brought me back in and they said they had decided I would be allowed to give evidence. So I got sixty odd pages in there, I didn’t know what evidence I had given until I got back and about three years ago I was down in Canberra and I was having a look at my (UNCLEAR “UX’) and I said to the person, “Look I gave evidence on the war trials in Hong Kong, would there be any record of that?”

“Oh yes I can get you a copy of that.” So she got it for me and I have got this great big file in there with all of the evidence.

Well I had said something which was medical and not being medically trained I shouldn’t be able to say, “Look this bloke had diphtheria because of these symptoms.” I wasn’t trained to do that, I am only trained to look after

people and do what the doctor tells me. Therefore they objected to that. But then the court decided I was only giving my version of what I thought. I wasn’t saying, “He had diphtheria because I said so.” I was only saying, “I was told he had diphtheria and this is the treatment he received.” Well I was right there

so they allowed it. But it wasn’t diphtheria. Some question; I just can’t remember something similar to that sort of thing.

Well I could tell them what food they had, what drugs were received

from the Japanese. Who died. What the verdict of their death was. How many had this, like beri beri, how many had dysentery. All of that sort of thing I could tell them. So I was mainly in there to give all of that evidence. What was our weights, our average weights? What was the food we got and how many calories

we were living on, how many grams of stuff, I had all of those figures down, see, so I could tell them all of that. Didn’t have to be a medical doctor to tell them all of that sort of stuff see? And they might even ask me, “You had an operation there where the chap died, why did he die?” “Well,” I said, “in the doctor’s opinion,

which he told to me, he died because there was no anaesthetics. We didn’t have enough vitamins to treat him beforehand. We didn’t have this or that drug.” See? So it was all of that.

Well to tell the truth I could only recognise one and they just looked like

humble little old men. That’s what they looked like, as you can see by the photo; just little old men. I didn’t have any feeling for them whatsoever. Only I could picture what they looked like in the camp, like the doctors and that. How the doctor brought a visiting lot of people into the camp into the hospital.

And here is all of these blokes bloated up with beri beri, another bloke is that thin you could see through him. And they all had a good old laugh about it. Well I could tell them those things see? “That’s him there; he was the one that laughed.” But he didn’t go back and send us anything to treat those people. So that was mainly what it was all about.

Not that I can remember, see I was sitting here and they were all in rows down there, so I wasn’t making direct eye contact. I was making direct contact with the bench and the people asking me questions.

Well no, look I don’t think I was in court when they gave evidence. If I remember right I wasn’t allowed into court, I am not sure but I don’t think I went into the court when they were giving evidence. I think I only went from where we were staying to the court when I was giving evidence.

Well I looked after so many people that had been bashed for no reason at all by the Japanese, and so many of them had died from malnutrition; I felt I had to have my say about that

before a court. I felt I had to because they were my friends who had been hurt, killed even. That’s why.

Well it was just like a shed, and they had plain forms with no backs for the prisoners to sit on. The dock was just a square box, there was no seat in it; you just went upstairs and sat in that.

The court, the head judge and the others, they were just in one big long bench with the flags behind them, Australian flags. And sitting in front we had two typists, they came from Australia. They took down all of the evidence and then we just had their barristers

and our barristers. Only once we had a person wander into listen. You could have, anybody could go and listen to it but only one lady came in one to listen. She was a friend of one of the locals who had been a prisoner of war of the Japs, she came to see.

I wanted to see the death penalty. At the times yes. I had no qualms about it in those days. I have now but even now I am not sure about it. If anybody takes a life knowingly and for no reason whatsoever I think they haven’t got a right to live. Well that’s

what they did to us, they took our lives knowingly in our case. I was all for it and our doctor, he should have got it. I have stood by and seen him laugh at people that are so swollen up they can’t move with beri beri and that. He wasn’t fit to live.

Well he was a fully qualified doctor. And he could speak some English which meant he must have had some training in English. He was the Japanese doctor at the Japanese hospital in town. So he had all of the things under his

command for anything he wanted to do. I don’t suppose we saw him more than a dozen times in the whole time. He would come out and Doc Aitkin would take him around and tell him everything we had had, what drugs we didn’t have, could he get us this and that? And off he would go as large as life and nothing would turn up.

And he would come in the next time and then he brought a bunch of visitors through and showed them through and laughed like one thing about the chaps all blown up and that. He was just, I know we were at war, but even in war there is at least the decency to look after somebody. They didn’t belong to the Geneva Convention, that’s the worst part. If they had had been in the Geneva Convention

they would have had to, like we had to look after theirs. I have just read the book on the Cowra break out and those blokes were looked after like kings. But of course their idea is, if you’re taken prisoner it is against their religion and everything. It is against everything to be taken a prisoner of war, it is the lowest. You have got to die not be taken prisoner of war. So that’s why

they tried to break out of Cowra, they were prisoners and that lowered them in their friends and family; they are just nobody.

I don’t know, that’s what I don’t know. Because we found out after the war the orders had been issued that we were all to be

killed. I think the atomic bomb saved us. It was so quick that, and so devastating that they thought well if they kill us we’re going to go in, because we were all ready to go into Japan. Fight in Japan, they had almost destroyed Tokyo with fire bombs and that.

And Hiroshima, I saw Hiroshima in 1947; we walked through it. There was not a thing left, only just a part of the tower in the centre of the town, that’s all that was left for miles.

That’s when I was on my way back to the war trials and we had a few days in Japan and they took us around and took us

to have a look at it.

Didn’t mean a thing to me then except that it was the means of us getting our life. Because if that hadn’t have happened I am sure none of us would have seen Christmas out, none of us. We would have all died of starvation or been knocked off.

No. As I said being taken a prisoner of war is the lowest thing that can happen to a Japanese soldier, they would rather be killed than taken prisoner. And whether they regarded us, I think they did regard us as in the same, we

should have never surrendered, we should have fought on. What was the good of it? We were only a thousand against twenty-three thousand. And of course we belonged to the Geneva Convention where prisoners of war were treated sanely with compassion. No compassion at all there. They had been fighting for so

many years that it was just in their nature to kill.

If they had have signed it they would have had to then. Otherwise, they mightn’t have honoured it but after the war they would have lost everything.

After I had given evidence, two days after, they gave us permission to leave. We had given our evidence and the other side were satisfied with our evidence so they gave us permission. So then we flew out by flying boat again back to Iwakuni in Japan and there

we had to wait for a while. In the meantime the air force had finished their stint of doing their run to Japan every week and that was taken over by Qantas. And we were one of the first ones to fly Qantas home from there. But they gave us about three days I think before Qantas. So they took us to Kyoto,

that’s the old capital. They wouldn’t take us in, the Yanks wouldn’t let us in, to Tokyo; they wouldn’t let us in. They were set on Japan was theirs, not ours, so they wouldn’t let us in. But we went to Kyoto and we went to some place there which looked after all of the soldiers

on leave and we stayed there for two nights. We were to stay another couple but all of a sudden we got recalled to Iwakuni for the trip home so they brought us back then. I don’t know, I had no feeling for the Japanese whatsoever, they just

meant nothing to me. Just that I hated those that looked after us. Even back here I didn’t hate them but I wouldn’t put myself out to say hello to them. Because I remember once Jess, when she had emphysema and she couldn’t travel far, so I used to put her in the car and we used to go into Lady Macquarie’s Chair in town and sit there and watch all of the crowds and

ships and that. And this day, and we used to get out of the car and sit on the seats, this day all of the seats were taken. But whoever had taken the Japanese around had built this three tiered platform there to race out of the bus, get over there and get their photos taken and get back on the bus again. So I said, “There is no seats; we’ll sit here.” Just sat down and this bus pulled up and this bloke come across and said, “You will have to get off there.”

And I said, “Why?” he said, “I want to take these photos.” I said, “I am not moving.” He said, “You have to.” I said, “No I am not moving, not for any Japanese.” He said, “Why won’t you?” I said, “I was a prisoner there and they’re not going to tell me what to do.” Jess said, “Come on we will go.” And I said, “No this is one time I am putting my foot down.” And I didn’t move so they went over to the bank and got their photo taken. That’s the only time that I have ever had a

run in with them.

I don’t. Young people they are just other people to me. I don’t have to talk to them; if I do I talk to them. The older ones,

no, I just can’t take to them. But I have never had to talk to any except the wife of this school teacher went over there and married. I talk to her quite openly.

No, I have only met her three times and I very seldom see them. So no I have never talked to her about it.

I don’t know if John her husband has. She knows I was a prisoner of war. But whether she has ever listened to my diary or not I don’t know.

Love it, I could eat rice every meal. Sweet potatoes no. I can’t,

even the smell of a sweet potato turns me off. Because for about three months towards the end we couldn’t get rice and we were living on dried sweet potato, they come like chips of wood and we would have to soak them and cook them and that. And we used to put them in these boxes that I told you about that we would put the rice in. and they would put them out to serve and as soon as they take the lid off, sickly sweet smell that you would have to put up with while you were eating.

I couldn’t eat a sweet potato today. Everybody seems to like them but I can’t. That’s the only thing I can’t eat. Rice, I love rice.

Oh dear, one of our chaps, Col McCutcheon in Melbourne,

he was great friend with two of the solicitors on the war trials. So when it was all over he wrote and that’s that letter there, telling what happened on that. And that’s how, I got word from him to tell me the different sentences and that. The army never wrote and told me.

Counselling? All of these chaps land back from a war, here one day and they’re out for counselling. We never had a counsellor .Straight off the boat, discharged and that was it. Nobody worried about it. Go to a doctor, they have got no idea what was wrong. They had no idea what we went through. The first one I went to about these pains in the tummy, it

was Repatriation then, not Veterans’ Affairs. I went to him, now he was a doctor in his fifties or sixties so he should know something about doctoring. And he said, “What’s wrong?” And I was telling him about these terrific pains I was getting in the belly, and I told him I had been a prisoner of war and the diet I was on and everything, and I blamed it on that. And after he examined me he come back and said to me, “There is nothing wrong with you, you’re only bludging.” And that’s when I saw red.

I hopped up and my papers were on the table and I ripped them in two and I threw them right in his face and I said, “You can stick your bloody repatriation.” And walked out. And I didn’t go back until my own doctor said, “You have got to go and have your appendix done.” From then on, everybody looked after you and everything.

“Dear Jessie, Well love,” just the start of it is hard, “Well love, at last we have said goodbye to that land of bad reminders, a land fit only for Asiatics, not white man.

It is gradually disappearing in the wake of the ship. This morning we were awake before daylight to sit around and get a glance of the hospital ship. It is called the Jerusalem. It is a British ship and has British sisters on board. They have been wonderful to us; it was a big moment of my life to be able to once more talk to a white woman. One

sister started to cry. And believe me I couldn’t stop crying myself as the nervous strain is too great. But just think of it dearest one, that day when we will be together again after all of these years of separation. They are just broadcasting

a church service and I have just said a prayer thanking God for our delivery and hoped he has watched over you all as he has watched over me. We are bound for Manila and then transfer to the Wanganella and then straight to Sydney.” Well that was all changed because of that cyclone. “I won’t sleep tonight because we have nice mattresses

and just think, white sheets. And pillow slips. It seems a shame to get between them. I saw an Aussie paper the other say and saw photos of the streets of Sydney on peace day. Gee it must have been a great day for you all at home. Well dearest, my love hasn’t altered one bit. And my memory of you and my folks has often been the only thing

which has kept me going through these last three years. But dear, we will make up for all of it when I get back, which should be about the end of the month. Give my love to everybody, cheerio dear, I can’t settle down to write, lots of kisses and hugs, yours forever, Tom.” That was the letter I wrote to

Jess.

Yes. I wrote on the 7th of August 1943. “Yesterday was one was carried home and four supported by other chaps. How long will this last? It is hard to say.

But the sooner it is over the better, otherwise Boot Hill,” that’s what we called the cemetery, “Will be calling again. Read in the paper the other day where there were seven hundred thousand letters being sorted for POWs, and we all prayed that some will be here. But our camp was not listed in the list of POW camps. So it would be our luck not to get any. Oh Mum I would give

all of the money to get a line home to you to show I am still alive. But the Japs don’t seem to think it necessary. Well it is the end of August, and I have just celebrated three years in the army, and young Peb’s,” that’s Ethel, we used to call her Peb, “birthday the other day and I did not forget you dear. I suppose you’re quite a young lady now. Let’s hope that your birthday was happier than mine. With the news that Italy had fallen

all of the boys have great hopes of being free by Christmas. But I can’t see it. March or June ‘44 is my guess. I have traded my sweater for two hundred and fifty vitamin B which will do me for six or eight months. It is better to be cold for a few months than for good. I have a hell of a lot to make up for now. It is raining and we are trying to dodge the drops because this roof is one mass of holes.

When the sun is shining you can lie on your bed and watch it from sunrise to sunset, it is never out of your vision. So you can just imagine what it is like when it is raining. This is the time you long for a nice Mum’s meal, good bath and curl up in a chair and switch on the wireless. Oh when will it come true?” And that’s one I just sat down and wrote, and that’s what I used to

do when I felt like it; I would sit down and write. It goes right through, there is only one part, when the war was over I finished and didn’t put in anything and everybody says you haven’t finished your diary. Would you like to hear this? “Postscript the 31st of January 1996,

exactly fifty-four years today to when we were taken POWs. The reason why I am writing this is because everyone who reads my diary says I never completed it and the last entry is on the 16th of August ‘45, therefore I have not put my thoughts and experience of how the war finished, so I am trying to recall how I felt the last days. The war had finished

when I wrote my last entry but we were not informed until the 26th of August, ten days later, which could have possibly saved a few more lives. We were confined to camp for a fortnight and were told to paint the letters POW, I got that a bit wrong, on the roof of our hut. At 6pm on the 26th of August 1945 I was in the hospital giving vitamin B powders to the patients, the vitamins were made by crushing the husk of rice into a powder

then we wrapped the dose in a piece of paper, this helped with beri beri. The next thing I heard was our adjutant, Captain Clive Newman, running across the parade ground from the Japanese guard house shouting, “It’s over, the war is finished!” I threw the rest of the papers away and said; “You won’t need these!” the camp was in an uproar. Groups of friends were excitedly laughing and hugging one another. I remember Neil MacKellar, Allan Brownley and

myself had a small pumpkin growing but it was soon in the cooking pot and eaten. I don’t think anybody slept that night; we were all planning what we would eat and do when we got home. Next day an American plane flew over and dropped nine American soldiers by parachute, but we never saw them until the next day as the Japs wouldn’t allow them in. But they defied the Japs and came in and wirelessed to Kunming China and they sent planes

down and dropped food, cigarettes, etcetera. We ate like kings smoking Camel cigarettes one after the other. The Yanks arranged to transport us by train about a hundred miles to the airbase at Sanya, but the train was ambushed by the Chinese and had to be returned. It left the next day and got through okay. Doc Aitkin, Dal Griffin and myself stayed behind to try and do something for the Chinese labourers from Haikou who were in a bad way.

We were there about a week and then went by fishing boat to Sanya where the Yanks had established a hospital and did they look after us. Most of the well chaps left by destroyer for home but the medical staff stayed with the sick and were picked up by the English hospital ship Jerusalem and taken to Hong Kong and there transferred to the British aircraft carrier striker and returned via Manila, Manus Island to Sydney .

Don’t ask me what day we arrived because I can’t remember. It now seems a long while ago, but I married my sweetheart Jess the day after I was discharged and we had a very happy life, having twins Paul and Nan of whom we are both very proud. I lost my pal last year but she is forever with me.” So that’s that. So there is part of my diary.

While I was in there? Oh very important. I don’t know how I would have got on if I couldn’t every now and then sit down and write what I felt or what was happening, but some chaps just sit down and put “January 21st, two died, Joe had something.” And that’s all.

A running history but not a feeling history; do you know what I mean? What I wrote I wanted to feel so it is all there, if you want a copy I have got a spare copy and you can have one if you want it.

I don’t know. Got me there. Well I always look back on the happy times not the deaths, just the things that happen in camp, sit around and talk and we would put on a play and all of the happy times, old Blackie Callow getting the enema, things like that. I don’t go back and think about them

it is better to let that go. On Anzac Day I always think of those that didn’t come back. I often think of those. And that first time, after Jess died, Paul and Ann said, “Oh Dad we’re going to Ambon, will you come with us?” and I said, “I would love to.” And two days after I got a phone call and this lady gave me her name and she said,

“I have heard you’re going to Ambon, do you mind if I come with you? My brother is buried on Ambon and I was only a little girl. All I can remember of my brother is him pushing me on the dinky up and down the footpath and giving me those chocolate frogs. That’s all I can remember and I would love to go.” So I said, “Yes.” And she came and it made her life. She still writes to me. She lives up

at Laurieton near Taree and if I go past I stop and have a couple of hours with her. But she fitted in with the four of us and we had a lovely time. I don’t know if you would call it a lovely time, but she found her brother’s grave and it made her life.

Oh dear don’t ask, names are just gone

from me now. I would have to go and look it up. I have got the full list of all of those unknown graves and that in there and I think…no he is not in that; he is in one of the other.

The only emotion I felt was a real loss when where the chaps were buried,

they buried them in a mass grave at Laha, and that’s where my friend Jack Smith was buried. And that’s the only emotion I had there, and they have got a monument over there where the grave was. And it brought back all of the happy times that we had had together, and to know he was beheaded. If he had died I wouldn’t have minded but to be beheaded, no.

That was emotion that I will never forget.

No not where our camp was because they had levelled all of that off and that was the cemetery now and I tried to picture what the camp was like and I couldn’t.

Because there used to be a road right through it and well the road is still there in front of that cemetery and I was try to pick where our hut was and everything. The only thing, I got right up the back of the cemetery and I thought, “Well this must be where the hospital was.” so I could pick that but no, I couldn’t. I will tell you a funny incident, when four of us went back there I was trying to find out where

our CCS was and there was all buildings and I had no idea where it was. But I thought if I go up that back road there I might be able to find it. So I went up the back road, no good. There was a lady there and I tried to talk to her in English and tell her, she couldn’t understand what I wanted. She said, “Oh no, you come with me.” And she took me

down this windy valley track, down to this village. And they had had a wedding there the night before and they had a great big blue tarpaulin over everything, and they must have had a real wedding because the chap that she took me down to see, he was out cold. Dead cold and he had been like that for hours. He had had it. So they sat us down, there was only Paul and I,

and Pat too. Sat us down and they couldn’t talk because they couldn’t speak English, anyhow they brought out a great big enamel dish full of corn cobs and they had just cooked all of these on the cob. And we had to have a cob each, so we took a cob. I bit onto the cob with false teeth top and bottom, both

sets got caught in the cob and I couldn’t get them out. So I had to take the whole lot out. Well ninety percent of those people didn’t know what false teeth was and when I took them off and put them back in…I tell that story quite often because I think that’s such a good one, that’s one on me.

Well I think I have gained to listen to people and to not only listen but understand what they’re trying to tell me about.

themselves. Also to help people if I can. And that’s why I joined Probus and if people are sick I will go and see them. Mightn’t even know who they are but I will go and see them just to be able to help people, that’s my idea. Because it had taught me that people are so important. I mightn’t even know them but to sit down and have a

conversation, well I didn’t know you people until today, but I am enjoying just talking to people and telling them what I feel and, well I didn’t listen much to what you feel but just talking. I have been like that ever since I came back I think. Before I never used to worry much about people, worried about yourself and that was it. And I have brought my two up to

be the same, they worry about people. I am a great-grandfather; I have got three great-grandchildren. I am happy. I don’t know how much longer, I want to get to that hundred though. My father got to ninety-two and my grandfather to ninety-three, I want to beat them.

Well first Anzac Day, wasn’t it was more a get together? It wasn’t thinking about mates; I was younger then see and all I wanted to do was meet the people I was with, not think of people I left behind. But as the years went on you think about all of those

who were left behind. You meet the wives of people, children ,grandchildren. We have grandchildren even come to our Anzac Day do and it is great to meet them. I went down, they have on the 6th of February I think it is each year; they have a service in Melbourne because most of them come from Melbourne, at the shrine down there. About three years ago I decided to go down to it and I went

down. And after the service they go across St Kilda Road to a motel and have afternoon tea there and there was a little old lady being helped across the road by another lady. So I went down to give them a hand to help them cross, and I helped them across the street and when we got to the other side she said, “Were you a prisoner of war?” and I said, “Yes.” She said, “What’s your name?” and I said, “Tom Pledger.” And she said, “Not

Tom Pledger?” and I said, “Yes.” She said, “Do you know who I am?” and I said, “No.” She said, “I am Edna Newman.” Now here is a crippled old lady and her and her husband used to come up here and we would go to dinner together and everything. And I hadn’t seen her for that long, her husband had died. And I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me. But we sat down and

had a nice talk for hours. Things like that, to remember.

I sometimes give talks to schools about the prisoner of war, and I always finish up saying, “Never sign up to go to war unless it is to save your own country. Don’t go outside, save your

own country. Don’t go overseas for a war.” To save your own country yes, but don’t go out. I am dead against it; it is the ugliest thing that can happen to anyone. I am lucky in that I only saw them in the prison camp; I didn’t see them out on the battlefield, because I was taken prisoner too soon.

It’s not a pretty sight I can tell you. You’re all, “I am going to the war!” when you’re young and all of that. You don’t think of what is going to happen when you get there. And it is a terrible thing. You see it on TV now, bodies around and that, terrible it should never be. It is only somebody’s ego that’s starts it all, they want power,

that’s all it is, power. And armament manufacture. That’s what I say. See the last war would have never started only [Adolph] Hitler [German Chancellor] got power and [Benito] Mussolini [Italian Prime Minister] got power.

That’s a question that’s a bit hard to answer because the government of the day, they’re not looking at each individual, they’re looking over the whole map. Now at that stage the Pacific wasn’t in the war at all but the Dutch had all of those islands, but they didn’t have much to look after it. Holland over there, they were right in the middle of it.

And I think what had happened was our government promised the Dutch government that if anything happened and we were required we would go and help them. That’s how it all happened. But sending an army of a thousand people over to stop twenty-tree thousand, no. They had a better

chance in Malaya because we had more troops in Malaya than the Japanese had. And it is just that they were marvellous jungle fighters, whereas we thought their eyesight had gone and all of this sort of thing. They were soldiers. They had been through China and all of those places. Manchuria and all that, fighting. So

they knew how to fight. We didn’t have a show. We shouldn’t have been sent but we were to honour the word of our government. But they should have listened to us when we got there. That our CO either wanted more troops and more everything sent to us or else us withdrawn .Well we had the Swan and another ship in

there that they could have put us on and brought us home. They left us. Took everything with it, took the planes, took the ships everything, we just had to stay and become casualties.

No. Well we talked about it. But that was all, nothing, no talk down here.

Well, when I first come back I couldn’t see any change. And it has just changed over the years but I don’t remember seeing much

changed at all when I first came back. Everything was rationed, tobacco and all that was rationed. Couldn’t go in and buy a pound of butter unless you gave them a coupon for it, that was the only thing that I found strange. Another thing that I found strange too, the women that were working. When I went away

you worked until you got married or you were twenty-two or something like that and then you didn’t work. But when I got back nearly every married woman and everything was working. I say that’s, not against women working, but I say that’s a lot of our trouble today with our young children, now the women are working, they have got to work now to keep a family

going but the children aren’t getting that love and that at home that they used to. See my wife she gave away work the day I returned and she stayed and never went back to work and she looked after the kiddies all of the way through. And I say that the love that we gave our children when they were young means a totally different family altogether in the end. You don’t see all of the marriage break-ups that you do now and

I don’t know; kids getting onto drugs and things like that. God if we had a beer, that was a terrible thing in our days.

So much has happened in the years just after the war. See there was jet planes and motor cars come into being. They were there but not like they are now. See our first thing was a little radio when I came back here. We used to sit over in the corner there on a couple of blankets. We had nothing in the house, all of the furniture we got later on.

We had two stretcher beds in there and a cot for the kids, that’s all we had. We had a card table and two banana cases to sit on see? Everything has changed so much. I have got a grandson and when they got married they had a car each, they had a house they had a washing machine, kitchen washer, everything. I walked in and I had nothing,

not a thing. Except a couple of stretcher beds, just ordinary stretchers. And a cot for the kids and a pram. Card table to eat off and two banana cases to sit on. Now we went through that until we got enough money to buy a bedroom suite, lounge suite, kitchen suite and things like that. We had none of these things and yet we got through. Nowadays you have got to have everything right

from the start. I am not against you young people or anything; it is just how things have turned out.

No. I don’t regret it one minute. I don’t regret being a

prisoner of war. I think it has made me a better person. Before the war I only thought of Tom Pledger, I didn’t think of other people, but now I think of other people. See there is two people rang up today, now one person I have known since the end of the war. We have been friends her and her husband, and Jess and I friends all of those years. And the other lady rang up, I only know her through Probus. But they’re good

solid friends, they’re always there. And I think that’s all come through me going to war. I don’t regret it, no.

I hope that I have enlightened you a little bit and I hope that what I have told you it will be on record for somebody else to read.

And I hope and I trust, and I am sure that I am going to get a copy of this for my family.