Australians at War Film Archive

Yeah, thank you. My father and mother went to Broken Hill just after they were married. And from Broken Hill run a, two service stations, Cohen and Dittmar and the other one was Silver City Motors. And Mum couldn’t cope with the dust, so they moved down to Adelaide, and

set up in Adelaide. My brother was born in, 14 months prior to my birth; I was October the 2nd, 1929. We stayed, Dad owned the home which during the Depression was a great asset to him, to us, because we weren’t having to look for payments. So a lot of people saw it a lot harder during the Depression than we did.

The first things that I remember of, is riding my little trike around while Mum was doing the washing, I was just wasting time. But when I went to school aged 5, I found that I wasn’t a very good student, and so set, set various aims in my life had to be around doing things more mechanically than doing things

academically. At 14, 13, sorry, at a very, about 12 I suppose it was, I started in scouting, and scouting helped me tremendously with my state of mind about whether I was capable of doing things or not. And I could win badges and earn credits and move from being just a scout, to

patrol leader, that gave me a certain amount of confidence for the rest of my life. And the things I learnt in the scouts, I found were wonderful for, in the army. I left school at 14, and started an apprenticeship a year later as a motor mechanic, with Motors Limited, Nuffield products, old MGs and Wolsleys and all that sort of, quite

classy cars, it was a real pleasure to work and do an apprenticeship. The apprenticeship was very good, they did put us through all the various stages, electrical, mechanical, panel beating, all the different parts of motor repair was covered, so it’s not, we weren’t just working valve angle grinders, or something like that. The day I finished my apprenticeship, I marched out, I went to Alice Springs, worked for

Alice Springs for about four months. Moved across to, to Townsville where I worked with an Austin agents for about four months, down to Brisbane for the Greyhound coaches, I worked with them for about six, six months and then came back and decided it was time to join the army because the Korean War was on. And I wanted to be in, in the war, because none of my family, I’m of German origin, none of

our family had previously been involved in any military forces. And being in the scouts, I thought this is an automatic step up. So I joined the CMF [Citizen’s Military Force] to start with, with the corps, called the corps of transport now, which was the RAASC, [Royal Australian Army Service Corps] Royal…,

I don’t know, doesn’t matter. And then I joined the regular army and as I was a qualified motor mechanic, they put me in straight away. The fact, I was ex-CMF, meant I didn’t have to do recruit training, so I went to, to Japan, occupation forces, Japan, where I worked as

an inspector on vehicle repairs and maintenance. And during that time they told us all about the Korean War, and I decided my CMF training wasn’t quite good enough, so I asked if I could go to Haramura Battle Training School, which nobody ever asked to go to, because it was like going to Canungra, just hard yakka. But I went there and I was infantry for three or four weeks while I did the training,

there was quite a lot of stories involved in Haramura. Came back and went across to Korea and my introduction to Korea was a war-torn terrible country, people on the move all the time, trying to find somewhere to, to establish themselves. Kids eating out of cesspools, floating water, floating bread would go past, they’d pick it up out of the, out of the cesspool and eat it. That was a,

a shock for me to sort of see the conditions under which these people were suffering, and, and at that stage, I didn’t enjoy my work, I was the only one who had diesel experience. So I used to get all the big Scammell trucks, which I’ll show you a picture of later on. Big Scammell transport, sorry, Scammell

recovery vehicle, it was a British vehicle. I enjoyed my job because I’d get all the big ones, Coles cranes, the Scammells and any big vehicle that they couldn’t fit under cover, and that was all right during the warm months, but in the winter months I was out in the open. Got frostbite in the feet, from my ankles down went black, and toenails

peeled off and more pussey in the heels, so it, there’s a circulation problem even today. There was only 12 Australians in our group, we were attached to a British REME [Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers] Unit, 16th Infantry workshop. So there was always competition between the Australians and, and the Brits, so playing sport and things like that was always quite hectic. We always

played to the, to prove ourselves. On the parade ground, we always made ourselves the better soldiers than the British and there’s always the feeling of competitiveness. Conditions, I can talk about that a little later. I came out of Korea, came home and within two months got married to Judy,

and we’ve been married for 50 plus years. We have two children, a boy and a girl, and very proud of them. At, in the first year of marriage, the atomic tests were being conducted at Emu Plains, and they had a Centurion tank up there, and the Centurion tank was placed right in the middle of the explosive area,

for the atomic bomb. It was filled with petrol, I can go into detail on this later too, filled with petrol and started up. Then they let the bomb go, and the engine still continued to, to run until the petrol tank ran out. So it was amazing that it didn’t, the glass itself tore all the binning off, and made a mess of it. Well my job turned out, with two others,

to go and recover the tank. They started to drive it back to, to Woomera and it, they blew the engine up, so we had to go and recover the tank with a big transporter. That in itself is a yarn. We got it back to Woomera and they put signs all around it, “Keep away, radioactive,” but they didn’t say anything to us prior to that, so we weren’t aware we were handling radioactive equipment.

So we came home, and I got home about, about New Years day for our first year together of marriage, so we had a share of separation at that stage. In the, I got promoted to corporal around about our wedding time, then to sergeant,

did schools and courses which they can be enlarged upon at a later date. Yeah, I got promoted to, to sergeant and then warrant officer, and in fairly quick time I got promoted to warrant officer from craft, craftsman to warrant officer in nine years, which is a fairly fast moving thing.

It just happened to be a set of circumstances with the Second World War and the people not wanting to do schools and courses and things like that. But I went from there to, to Puckapunyal, and from Puckapunyal went to Papua New Guinea. Had little workshops up there with about five people, and we did a fair bit of trade repair work where instead of us doing the repairs, we’d send it out to a trade

person to do their telecoms [telecommunications] equipment and their vehicle equipment and carpentry and things like that. So it was co-ordination as much as anything. My greatest joy there was a ship, an army boat called the AM Fern, army, AVM? army vessel…? I don’t know. So the Fern was a, a three grey marine diesels mounted in the back, I had to start to learn

about small craft. And it was called a planing hull, a flat hull, with three props sticking down. And around the Fly River area and places like that, with logs floating around all the time, see, they’d clean up the props, every time they’d go out, they’d clean up the prop and I finished up running out of props from my own resources. So I went to the department of aviation, DCA [Department of Civil Aviation], DCA,

and borrowed a propeller from them. The first prop they knocked off next, was the DCA’s prop, and I was trying to get a special one made up in Brisbane, balanced and then sent up to me and straight off, so it never actually hit the water before it went back to DVA. That’s not right, Civil, I can’t think of the name of it,

they had the flying boats and thinks like that, DCA, DCA I think it was. So we, we had quite a lot of excitement working on the boat, it was complete, it was a bit like working with a tank, as a hull, a fixed hull like a hull of a boat, only it’s a tank. So it was made of wood instead of steel.

We had two years there, health was not terribly good because you get all sorts of fever problems from being out in the swamps, and stuff like that. I did a lot of travelling to Medang and Wau and Vanamo and Manus Island, all over Rabaul, inspecting their equipment to see what their condition were, so I was away from home a fair bit.

Got my foot caught up in a grass-cutting machine in Port Moresby, which left me with a gammy leg. I still ran a couple of cross-country runs with, with the leg but it didn’t run too well. When I came back from that, I took a while to get medically back to class. I think I was,

I was home only for a while, medical classification, and then gradually got bought, bought back to A1 again with the leg improving. Got promoted to lieutenant, went to Boney [Bonegilla] Training Centre where I was a coordinator officer, where I was allocating people with certain qualifications to jobs, highly educated capable people

would go into instruments and radio and that sort of thing. The blacker trades would be taken over by the people with less IQ [intelligence quotient], not that their work wasn’t important, but a person just fits better into those slots. I then went down and did a course at, on the M113 Personnel Carriers, I was, that was the first, that was the

introduction to the Australian Army, so I was the first officer to be, the first vehicle testing officer to be on the M113. Enjoyed, enjoyed those vehicles, it was beautiful to work with, spare parts readily available, and they were a very, the most inspiring thing since the motorbike. You get onto one of those things and ride them around, they’re equally as exciting as being on a Harley Davidson or something.

I got posted to Puckapunyal for 12 months running the, about 100 man strong, LAD, Light Aid Detachment. Then the Vietnam people decided they wanted tanks to go to Vietnam. Our unit never formed up as a unit, never had time to form up as a

unit before we went to Vietnam, because a lot of the people I’d never even met, were suddenly in Vietnam. A lot of the national servicemen, very credible group of young men, a lot of them had schools, like working in a factory, McCormack gearing factory, knew all about McCormack gearing tractors and Massey Ferguson, and all that sort of stuff. So you had to.

Interesting on man management, cause you had to change your attitude of being a dictator, and the army would say, “Do this and do that,” to say to the person. “What do you recommend we do with this particular problem?” And they’d say, “Well we have to break the tractor in half, and work on the clutch and do all the things.” And I think it was with a, a certain amount of awe that when another officer was me, that I would say to a private soldier, “What would you suggest we do

with this?” He said, “You’re supposed to be telling him what to do,” and I said, “Not when he’s done his apprenticeship on the Massey Ferguson,” or something like that. You had to sort of do a different approach to management, I thought. And you’d get a person who’s got a skill, and you use that skill, he, he must in turn become pleased that you’ve, you’ve acknowledged his abilities,

and you get a better return from him. But I found the national servicemen very good. We worked with the tanks for six months, and then I was medically downgraded with my foot, that I damaged before. We were working on what they call open, open like quarry, stones as big as your fist, sharp edged stones, even with

good solid boots on, you still get pressure points on the bottom of your foot. And I got blood blisters all forming up on the bottom of my foot, it was, it was damaged, so they downgraded me. They gave me the choice of going home or going down to base workshops in a quieter area, and I said, “Well, I’ve had 20 years of service, I’m not going to sort of give up now,” so I finished up the last six months in a

102 field workshop, as the workshop officer. And thoroughly enjoyed that, it was almost like going to a rest camp by comparison with being up there with the tanks in the front line. Came home, went back to Bandiana, this time I was working with trade repair, talking fairly big money,

but it was, it was one of those jobs that you can take the opportunity of abusing your position for personal gain. And if anybody, while I was there, if anybody looked like doing that, he got the flick straight away. The pension was worth far more than the small gain that you could get from, from taking advantage of your position. But I enjoyed that, and my

children were getting up to the stage where their schooling was critical, they’d been out at different schools, I don’t know how many schools they went to, but there was a lot of schools. And then I decided it was about time I gave the kids a bit of a priority, so I got out of the army and went and worked for Gerlock Clutch, Brake and Steering and ran a small, about 12, 15 men operation.

I did that and the doctor said, “Well, you’re killing yourself because you’re, you’re anxiety state from Vietnam is giving you a hard time, would recommend you get out of it and get into a softer job.” So I went into pumping and irrigation, and that was a lot better being out with the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and the pigs and the, and the sheep, getting water pumped up from the rivers, and down from bores, it was a new experience. Still applying the same mechanical principles as

being a motor mechanic, but you apply it in a different way. Am I going too long?

So I did 15 years with, with Russell Jones Chyro Plumbing Supplies, and he gave me a fairly free hand, so I could do the pumping and irrigation systems, my own way

with his support, as well. That’s where I, I worked with Legacy in my spare time, to give me. My job wasn’t holding my sense of achievement, it was sort of a pleasurable job, but this Legacy and RSL [Returned and Services League], Salvation Army group, Church as a warden and those sorts of things all combined,

to make a very busy time. So my wife was in the background looking after all the things I was not doing, because I was too busy with the other things. I didn’t realise how much I was neglecting her by, and I think being in the army, an army training, the army came first and family came second. And it was at a,

an interesting time, because I thought it didn’t do our marriage a hell of a lot of good. Judy was very much mixed up with the Church as well with the women’s, well Mother’s club I suppose you’d call it, and she ran pancake day’s and things like that. So she, we, it was very unusual to be in a country town for nine years,

and I was made Citizen of the Year, which was a great honour and I get life membership in the, in the RSL, and I did 22 years with Legacy which was a great experience. And I was in and out of people’s homes all over Corowa, sort of looking after the newly bereaved widows and that sort of thing.

Legacy is a wonderful organisation, but Judy lost her eyesight and we reached the stage we were too far out of town for her, she couldn’t drive and to walk to the shops was a bit far, so we came up to Canberra to live. And both our children are in Canberra, so we had the children and the grandchildren, so life has been very pleasant. Since I’ve been here, I’ve worked with Technical Aid for Disabled,

it’s an organisation that modifies wheelchairs or makes up trikes [tricycles] for kids, little kids, to be pushed around the kitchen, while Mum, they can’t, they’re all floppy the little kids with serious diseases, and things. Shopping baskets for the old lady, they used to order those to suit their height and things like that. Pushbikes that, exercise bikes, we used to modify those to suit people, so that they could

sit in an armchair and pedal their bikes and still do their exercises. And that was a great deal of pleasure and challenge, it kept me going, because my mechanical skills, I could sort of do these things. So I got volunteer of the year. Now I’m bragging. Volunteer of the year, one year, for

for doing the technical work. Then my health deteriorated and my eyesight’s not too good, so I had to give up welding and that sort of thing, so of late, I’ve just been attending elderly citizens’ type clubs and getting to play indoor bowls and doing things completely to suit myself, more relaxed atmosphere, it’s made it a lot

easier for Judy, the, that I wasn’t so committed. But she always supported me, so I could be very proud of that. And that’s about where we get to here.

Riding a little, Dad was, Dad was a motor mechanic and he, we had a swing, a big

double-seated swing, how can I describe it. Two people sit there and two people sit on the other side, and the swing was pivoted from a point in the, in the roof. And he had trikes and pushbikes, little pushbikes, little trike things, he always looked after us well with pushbikes and toys. But the first thing I remember, Mum used to be at the laundry

washing the clothes with a wringer and a blue, blue pot where you put them through the blueing, as well as washing the clothes and I’d ride around on my bike and say, “Good day Mum.” And off I’d go again and go round the garden and come back again, and it must have been a stage where my brother started school, because I was fairly lonely and I relied on my Mum for companionship.

But they were happy days, Dad was, Dad was supportive, he was the old fashioned German descent, you sit at the kitchen table, you’re not allowed to, you’re not allowed to speak, not allowed to, you say, “Please may I have the honey or the butter or the…” because you don’t have the talk. Dad didn’t want to know what we did, we didn’t ever hear what he did. And

it was, he, he’d eat tea and go to bed. I learnt, learnt from Judy’s father, my wife, my father-in-law, what it was like to be a family that cared, it was a, it was a joy for me to, sort of, go to their place and Mr Deakin would say, “What did you do today, Judy?” and she’d say, “Oh,

got new Triumph motorbikes in today Dad, and the new Silverstar bike come out,” and she’d talk about her job. And then she’d, they’d talk to Pauline the other sister, and then I’d be included as well, “What did you do today, Bruce?” And people cared, it’s a, an experience I’d never had, it was wonderful. Dad was good, but he, he was a very

heavy drinker and used to belt Mum up a bit, and that sort of made my scouting, my support where we learnt to care for each other, and help old women across the road, and that type of thing. So it was a, Dad was, as I, Dad was physically good in providing us with

pushbikes and our trikes and our things, scooters, and. But Dad didn’t, he just didn’t know, didn’t know any better. His father died when he was young, and his mother was a very strong disciplinarian, used a rubber garden hose on Dad, as a method of caning, which you know, it’s just a different way of life, isn’t it,

different people bought up in different ways. And Dad was a tough old, old guy, threw me out of the house a few times, and made me pretty bitter. I didn’t, haven’t mentioned my sister which is an important part of my life, too. She was a nursing sister, she trained to be a nursing sister, and then she went into the Chaplaincy, and she’s a priest at,

a, in Brisbane now.

Yeah, I just needed a little breather. Anne was my sister, was 14 years younger than us, so we didn’t have that much to do with each other when we were young, but she’s been a steadfast supporter since,

since we’ve both been adults. And I’ve been grateful for that.

Well she retaliated in as best she could do, she’d throw a teapot full of tea or something like that at him. It was fairly, fairly nasty at the time. I’m not sure that I should be telling

you this. It’s just one of those situations, where grog, when Dad wasn’t on the grog he was good, but he couldn’t go a weekend without having his bottle of port, purple port, Para port? Or something like that, down the shed. And he’d have bottles hidden everywhere. Terribly heavy smoker, he died at 63, with I think as a result of this style of living.

Yeah, I offered him outside when I got big enough, I said, “If you hit my mother again, I’ll have you.” And it’s, it’s a very hard for a kid to say that to his father, and you meant it at the time, because it was just so unnecessary, and

Dad did become a lot more mellow as his health deteriorated, and he was. He was, he was very good, he took us camping and taught us shooting, rifle shooting and care with guns and stuff like that, safety first. And ferreting with rabbits, with ferrets to get rabbits, and the, the shootin’ and fishin’

type things that, you know, that boys like to do anyhow. He used to take us camping, he used to take some of my scout friends, and he’d take us out camping. It wasn’t all bad, as I said when Dad wasn’t drinking, he was good. But made it very hard for Mum, she lived to 96. It was very sad actually, because she couldn’t remember Dad in the latter part,

but life goes on.

Well my brother left home at 14 and went working on a property, and my sister was very upset that I’d walk out on her, and left her, a young kid of five or six in the environment that I left her. And she felt that I was responsible, so she was cross with me for not staying there to support her. But I,

I’d reached a stage where I felt I had a lot to learn, to live away from the family. When I went to Alice Springs to work and places like that, you’re, you’re dealing with men and some tough ones, and that’s what I always wanted to do, I wanted to sort of, meet up with these outback blokes. And Ernie, Ernie could get a 44 gallon drum, roll it up and put his arms underneath it and put it on the back of the trailer.

He, huge man, Ernie, Ernie Walren, Waldren, there was an Irishman I can’t think of his name, and they used to compete, the bows on a jeep trailer, a jeep truck are fairly strong canopy bows. And they’d get them and sort of bend them around, and when they woke up the next morning and sober, they had terrible trouble trying to straighten them up.

I don’t, don’t know they could do anything. What one of them was drinking avocado, no crème de menthe, he was drinking crème de menthe and his eyes, the whites of his eyes had turned green, and his spittle was green, and his urine were green, you’d think he’d had enough to drink for the time. But we met up with some pretty wild boys, excuse me,

mixed, mixed up with some wild boys and, and that’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to sort of get out on the back blocks, and sort of see how the other half lives. So I’ve diverted again.

She was, was born at Beachport,

near Robe, near Robe in South Australia, it was a little village, a hundred strong I suppose, at the most, it might have been 50 strong, it was all fisherman. And her, her Father jumped ship and I think his name was Foster, then when we checked up we find it was a different name, so we’ve got no idea what his name was after he jumped ship. But she was brought up in that environment, with

the first permanent house at Beachport was their home, and then the whaling people, and the fishing people would come to the jetty. And also getting grain out to, to ship away, so it was a fairly busy port at the time. Mum loved it there, she said the only thing wrong was you had ducks, fish, crayfish

to eat and not a lot more. And I said, “What are you complaining about,” you know, crayfishes and sucks, pretty good tucker to me. She said, “Yes, but we never got any sausages or chops or steak or anything like that, that, that was their, their thing they didn’t get. But Mum stayed at the school there. I’ve got the shakes, I’ll just settle down for a minute. That’s better.

Mum loved it, she learnt from the Aboriginals what berries she could eat and all that sort of stuff. She must have, they must have got on quite well with the natives, but every now and then the Grandfather would duck off and leave the wife and the kids alone for a while. And he’d turn up, back, after being, I don’t know whether he went fishing or what he did, but he wasn’t at home.

And Grandfather, Grandma would come outside and fire the, the shotgun into the air when the natives started to worry her, and they’d all head, and they wouldn’t see them for a fortnight. And they’d give them flour and sugar and tobacco and that sort of stuff. And that sort of bringing up was insular, but it was marvellous to, to, the things that she, that just came natural to us.

And Dad would be walking with Mum through the bush, and Mum would be eating the berries, and he said, “You’ll bloody kill yourself,” and she’d say, “No, these are such and such a berry.” So that was her up till age 14, and she did quite well at school. And then her mother lost her, lost her father, first, first husband, the grandmother said the ship

was coming into Robe Harbour, so she went back to get a cup of tea. When she went back there was no sign of it, so some big swell or overloaded with fish or something, never found, never found any of them. So she lost one, one to the sea, the other one was down on the wharf and a bale fell out of the, off this, out of the crane, and landed on him. Crashed his, all his pelvis, and they had to get him by

trailer, by horse and trap to Kingston, the nearest hospital, it must have been agonising, and he died. And the next one died of TB [tuberculosis]. So Mum went through all that as well, so it was a fairly good, good cobbers.

But they went to, they went to Melbourne to live, and Grandmother couldn’t go because she was caring for one of the Len, Len was a ex-First World War stretcher bearer, and she had to go and nurse him. And sent Mum with her elder sister to, to Melbourne to live.

And she just hated, you know, from being insular and knowing everybody, to being in a place where you knew nobody, she found it difficult. But she got a job in a jewellery shop I think it was, and gradually got a bit of confidence, and then they moved across to Adelaide to live. That’s where she met Dad.

Well, I had fairly low esteem, not good at school, not getting on too well with Dad, and the scout, the

scouting movement seemed to be something substantial, something I could sort of lean on, something I could learn from. The, one of the reasons I joined up is, part of the RAP, [Regimental Aid Post], air raid wardens training with the kids on pushbikes would act as couriers, so we used to, we were trained, we never had to put it into operation, I’m pleased to say, but we were trained to take messages from

one RAP group to another. And just ask as messengers, and that started, started off as being a scouting type thing to do, to work together and for their, their control they needed, needed scouts to sort of be united in the war, war effort. So I joined, I went into the Seagulls, and

Reg, can’t think of his surname, Reg was the patrol leader and he was a caring, nice sort of a young man, he more than likely was only about 14 or 15 himself. And the patrol, the major officers in, in the scouts, were Dennis Gwynn who was a plumber apprentice, so he couldn’t, he couldn’t be,

he had protective, protective industry, so he didn’t get called up. John Hayes was his 2IC [Second n Command], George Skinner was the local larrikin, and my good friend, being the local larrikin always a good thing to have him on your side. And then some, some other good people there. But you’d arrive there, and you’d, you’d, “On my honour, I promise to do

my best, to do my duty to God and the Queen, help other people at all times and obey the scout laws.” Sorry, didn’t know I could remember that. The scouting, it became a sort of religion as well, in, in that you helped other people and you did the training together. You did your first aid training together, you did your,

your knots and your lashes, you did the camp cooking and the memory tests, and you’d go down to the shop and you’d look in the shop window, and you’d come back and then you’d write down there was Cadbury’s chocolates in the bottom, and there was spearmint chocolates up the top. And you could describe, try and get the right answers, and you’d try and get the, the right answers. And you carry messages from one to the other, you get the distortions, you get from

one person telling the next person what the last person said, sort of thing. All that was good, good. And, and Borgee Oval was not far away, and we used to have a lantern in the middle of the oval, one group would be protecting it and the other people would be sneaking up on it, all those sort of things, very good fun. I suppose my greatest joy was, was camping. We used to

hike on a tram to, two trams, two tram lines to get into the Adelaide Hills, the beginning of the Adelaide Hills and hike up into the, the hills. And they had a log cabin that they had permission to build from the local timbers, and that was for the big boys, the little boys they slept in hootchies. And as you, as you were sort of promoted, you might eventually get into the hut.

My, my efforts on cooking jelly, making some jellies. I got the jellies and got the water boiling and put it all together, and put it in the creek and left it until the morning. And when I got up in the morning, the top part was still liquid and the bottom was rubber, where I hadn’t mixed it long enough to get the consistency right. But I remember getting a bit of a hard time. Mind you, I drank the liquid. But we, you know,

when we were on those camps, you’d do compass marching and map reading and all the sorts of things that showed, helped tremendously when I joined the army. Making yourself comfortable, the Australians had the ability in general, to, to make themselves comfortable, make sure they’d get washed and cleaned, was a typical Australian army approach.

And I think we learnt that from the scouting as well. But we’d do knots and lashing and stuff like that, and make crosses and put beds. You’d have bags, you’d stitch the bags up, and you’d put logs through it, and you’d put it on a tripod at the other end, so that it’d jam down. And then you had, yourself off the ground and sleeping on a decent, comfortable bed. And we always said any mug can sleep uncomfortably, it takes a,

a trained person to, to sort of, be able to make yourself comfortable within the camp. Hygiene, personal hygiene, your personal hygiene and your hygiene of cooking your, they’d inspect your dixies and stuff like that, to make they were cleaned properly. And all those sorts of things that you, you had to learn to live out in the bush. So, so scouting gave me an aim in life, you did good for others,

where, where you could. An aim in life, where you, if you, your life story or anything like that, you sort of, work your way around that and it gave you confidence. Gave, gave me a sense of achievement, I became a troop leader in that in the end, which shocked me as well, because I didn’t

expect to ever get to be a troop leader. And that sort of made life different to me with my schooling, struggling at school. And when I started my apprenticeship, I’m leaping ahead a bit, when I started my apprenticeship, I was starting with A passes, and then to finish up with, an overall A for the, the whole of my studies. We did metallurgy

and a lot of other things that weren’t, you couldn’t see that they were applicable to being motor mechanics. But you needed to know your metals for wear and tear, and like type metals wear, where unlike metals like steel and brass together, make a better bearing. And all those sort of things that you, you put in, in,

you wouldn’t have learnt at school. I, this, my confidence came more and more when I joined the army, because I was a civilian motor mechanic and the others were trained by the army. They used to sling off at all you guys ever knew was your military vehicles and. The,

the apprentices would all get together and give me a hard time, all done, done in good, good taste.

I was about ten, I reckon when I join. ’29, that’d be 1939, might have been 1940. I stayed in scouting for about five years,

I transferred from scouting to a youth group which I haven’t mentioned. I joined a youth group, and a girl named Gloria Kelly and I were both going off to the teachers college at night time, learning muscles and bones and strains and stresses, and all of the things. And we, we were just good mates, we just went off and did the, did the studies,

but I didn’t continue with that, cause I wanted to be a motor mechanic, and I thought I didn’t want to become a sports technician or anything. How did I get to that?

No, he hated it, he did, he did go to scouts, he did make good friends, but he was a loner, he enjoyed. Well he left home at 14,

worked for Miss Noonan down at Robe in South Australia, and in her pantry, you’d see mice burrows going through the flour. He used to sift the flour to get rid of the droppings, before he’d cook the bread, that was just part of John’s growing up, he used to spin some yarns. She had about ten or 15 cats, and one cat

got in his way one day, and he quilted it and unfortunately killed it, so he had to go and hide, hide the carcass somewhere. And she, the old Miss Noonan, she said, “Have you seen Ginger the cat?” And John would say, “No.” He, he was, he was a natural bloke for the bush, he rode horses and did fencing and all the things that a farm hand would have go do, and

he enjoyed that, that’s all he ever wanted to do. He finished up going into earth moving equipment which was not what he wanted to do, but happened to be the. He had a natural aptitude for grading, he could do the finished grading and get the overall as level as it could be, he had the ability in the eye, that did that. He’s done very well, he’s still going, he’s not very well but he’s still going. But he

always brought home the pay packet, his wife was frugal, and they did very well, they were always very comfortable, always drove a nice motor car.

Not so much growing up, I think the thing that first swayed me a bit, because we were a bit, bit competitive with each other, I feel, when we were young. When I first went to school, into the primary school,

a bloke named Lee was giving me a bit of a hiding, and Lee was noted as being one of the tough boys of the school. And John came in like a flash, and into it and protected me. Made, made me feel that he cared, and I didn’t realise that before. We did things together, but mostly we did things separately, he had his friends,

I had mine. But as we got older, so we became closer and we used to enjoy going to dances together and all that sort of thing. He was the one with the money, because I did the apprenticeship, I didn’t have money when I was an apprentice, and he was, from being a farmhand, he got reasonable wages. And he, he had a Pontiac, so, a couple of other cars,

a Plymouth, a Plymouth Sports. He, he went with me when I left, he caught up with me when I went travelling around Australia, and he got a job in Townsville, where he would drive cars up to Cairns, because Cairns didn’t have a wharf. So they’d off-load the cars in Townsville, drive up and back, but it was only, he only might be employed for three days

one week, one week and two days the next, so he was losing money, so he came home and went back into, got himself a fulltime job. But we did share together, and I suppose we were closer in the, in the, as you got kids and stuff like that, you have things in common, we got to know each other pretty well.

Oh yeah, I,

we, thank you for that. We used to go from, our place was Nailsworth or Sefton Park, and the River Torrens was down through to Walkerville, it was about a mile away. And we, we’d go to various parts of that, we found where the deep holes were and were

you’d get the yabbies and that sort of thing. But skinny-dipping was something that happened every, every day, you went, you got down there, you’d be doing something and some clown would push you in, so you’d take your clothes off and hang them up somewhere. And my brother got a yellow and black leech attached to his tender spots, and it was fairly, quite exciting to take the leech off. Yes, we used to have little,

Mum would make up our luncheon for us so we didn’t go home, and that was Dad’s stamping ground when he was a boy, so he understood the, you know, the, the worries that you can get as well as the fun you can have. But we learnt to become quite good swimmers, John never liked the water terribly much, but we used to go swimming down on the river.

Usually finished up in the nude, I suppose, somewhere along the line, having a swim. But had no, we had no inhibitions, we all decided it was time we should have a swim. And I suppose the fact that it was forbidden, was more inclined to make you want to do it.

Well people said it’s rude to be seen with no clothes on, and you’re only

ten and 12, 13, 14 years of age, you’re not too concerned about that sort of thing. Dad got into trouble in the river, the same river, he was leaning out after a heavy flood, he was leaning out, oranges were going down the river. And catching the oranges to bring the oranges in, and he fell in. And his Mum having the old Aunts,

two old, three old Aunts in those days for tea, and Dad turns up there all bedraggled and late, he got himself sent from the room. But, yeah, we, we enjoyed, I enjoyed water sports all my life, I played water polo, and won a swimming race or two, never very good. But we used to

enjoy the water, and go down the beach and, Adelaide beach, if the waves were 18 inches high, it’s good for surf, that’s all the waves we could get. But we used to have, we used to go down on our, Judy and I when we were first married, used to go on our pushbikes about two or three miles down to the beach on a stinking hot day. Park the bikes and go for a swim and relax in the cool, then ride your bikes home, you’d be hot and sticky by the

time you got home again. But we, that was our, one of our major pleasures, swimming and that sort of thing, it also didn’t cost anything. When you’re saving up for a house, it’s an important.

Two handers everyday for not spelling correctly.

“Who got more than three wrong out of ten? Come out again Dittmar.” Whack on that hand, whack on that hand, that never made me learn to spell. But it was cruel, it was another thing that made me bitter, because I knew every bloody day I was going to get caned. So Dad, Dad showed me a trick, he said, “When he does it to you next time,” he said, “put your hand out.” He said, “When the cane’s coming down,” he said,

“put your hand up a bit.” And he said, “The cane will be overlapping your hand and it’ll snap his cane.” So I thought, “That sounds like a pretty clever trick to do,” so I put my hand and lifted it up like that, and it broke off half his special cane, I broke the… He didn’t say a word. Next morning, “Dittmar, come out here, bend over.” “Bend over,” I put my hand out, he said, “No, no, you bend over,” so across the backside, that

used to really pain, you’d, you’d have red welts, red welts where the cane came across your bottom. So I never again got smart again with my Dad’s clever ideas, I thought they weren’t very good. But yeah, that necessary was the word I had trouble with, I had to spell necessary, and for some reason or other, I used to get the words mixed. I’m sure these days they’d

analyse, I would have some sort of problem that I just couldn’t spell. And I wasn’t good at, and I wasn’t good at writing, usually they went together. But yeah.

Didn’t, you know, you’re sort of on your own. Mum, Mum never had the confidence, having left school at

14, she, she was, she was very well read, and she could remember, you know, she had a good brain. But she never had the chance to sort of, do anything at school to sort of present that. But she didn’t have the confidence to front to a teacher, and Dad, when he came home from work, was usually a bit piddly, so he, he, we didn’t both to tell him, it wasn’t worth it. More likely to give you a caning for

getting into trouble.

I must have said something. Yes, it’s a good question. I, I don’t really know, we must obviously have told him about it, he normally just laughed and said, “This is what you want to do.” We, he, he wasn’t helpful in a lot of cases, Dad, the, he sort of showed us, he’d go down to the doorknocker on somebody’s house and tie cotton onto it, and

you’d go out and hide behind the hedge and knock, knock at the door. And somebody would come out and there’s nobody there, and you’d knock, knock at the door again, and we thought this was a hell of a good trick, so we thought we’d try it. And this woman was very angry, cause she spoilt, she said she burnt her husband’s meal, and she spoke to the headmaster about larrikinism, and the headmaster gave us a blast, he didn’t cane us, but he gave us a blast about, you know, being thoughtful about other people, and that sort of thing.

So the next trick we learnt from Dad, was to drop a penny on a, on a brick behind the hedge, so that when people are walking past, you dropped the penny on the, they’d stop, look around, it’d be just dusk or something, just snatches, trying to find out, you know, what did they drop. And that went okay for a while, and then the next one was make a parcel with a bit of string on it. You put it on the foot, on the road, and the people go past on a pushbike and they go to pick it up, and you just jerk it in a bit.

These, these sorts of things, my father taught me. And another thing, I taught my own children to do it too, so I suppose I was bad as he was. Simple things for kids to do, when they haven’t got toys and that sort of thing. Oh, I haven’t mentioned something that was very critical to me, too, was my Saturday

pictures, we’d go down for a matinee. And the Buck Roger or, I can’t, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, the shadow knows.” And all these things, just go down there, see the films, we used to, see these days where you just get one film, we used to have a newsreel, cartoon

and a couple of other films showing what’s coming on or something like that. And then you’d have a short film, then you had your major film after that, so today it would be a bit of a marathon, but in those days, that’s how the film business worked. And it was, I was the ice cream boy, I used to sell ice creams off the tray, a penny an ice cream of whatever it was, and I got the pictures free. But that was the

good days.

Laurel and Hardy I suppose would be my favourite, they used to, they were a comedian pair, do you know Laurel and Hardy? Yes. That was, they were always in trouble, you know, leaning on a house and they’d say, “Are you holding the house up?” And they’d say, “Yes.” “Well

come on , I need you for something,” and they’d walk away and the house would fall down. You know, simple stupid things, but like the Charlie Chaplin type of comedy, slapstick, and I used to enjoy that, yeah.

Dad and Mum never went to church, they, they sent us off to, to. We were baptised, and then, then when we got a decent age we were confirmed, and the confirmation was the marching out parade. You were confirmed and so you said, “Okay, well, I’m confirmed now and my decision is I don’t want to go to church again.” And I was 40 before I went back to church.

You, it’s interesting they had a special five day mission, I think they called it, and I said to Judy, “Well if he wants me, he’s got to get me this time, because I, I’m not sure that I want to be in the church.” And I felt my Auntie Jean,

felt that my Auntie Jean was there, there was an apparition of some sort, and I just felt that she said, “I’ve got you now Bruce, you won’t get away from us now.” And I, I got very serious

with the church from then on, and loved it and could see a reason for it, and it was important, very important to me, my church. I finished up, I finished up the chief warden in the church, which, you know, it was Corowa, and we were only there nine, ten years or something. But to be appointed by the locals

as warden, you know, pretty important.

Mum, Mum’s sister, and.

Very, she was just like second Mum. When Judy and I were at Puckapunyal, Auntie Jean, she was living out at Montmorency in Melbourne, we’d go down

there and Uncle Bill, he was a very staid old gentleman but always caring, caring, he looked after. He was the sort of bloke who was in the, the blind shop in Myers in, in Melbourne, for, I think 50 years, that’s all he wanted to do. Just serve behind the counter, he knew blinds, he didn’t want to know anything more, never

owned a motor car. But Auntie Jean was a, a very dear caring person, and she died quite young, but she always carried a strong, she was a second mother to Judy and I when we were young and away from home, and wanted some motherly advice and some scones and jam and cream, and

go and see Auntie Jean, yeah. She, she prayed every day, she’d just go and lock herself into a bedroom, you wouldn’t hear from her for 20 minutes, and that was her, she didn’t go to church, but she was very. I think, I don’t think she went to church, because Bill wouldn’t go, I don’t really know. Just settle down. Yes,

so, I think it was one of those things when you were away from home, somebody who’s critical to you, just like Auntie Jean was to us, she, you know. She didn’t give us anything, she didn’t give us cakes to come home with or anything like that, but she always gave us love and she always gave us beautiful meals when we went down there. And I don’t think she had any money, because I don’t think Bill,

see, it was only a single wage, and just as a counter jumper, Bill wouldn’t have been pulling in too much, in the way of money, but there was always, enough to, sort of feed us and look after us.

Nothing about the Boer War to speak of, none of my family or anybody that I knew

went away. It became important when I joined the army to, to study it back and the, The Zulu’s was on last night or the night before, to study the films and enjoy the films and read the books about ‘Breaker’ Morant and that sort of thing. Second World War was closer, because we lost Uncle Len in the, when he, he was a stretcher-bearer

and he strained himself heavily, he was working in the Gallipoli peninsula, and carrying the people up and down the terrible steep cliffs. Must have taken a toll on all the stretcher-bearers, but he was medically evacuated out with a, with a, a strained heart, whatever that might have meant in those days, I don’t know. So bought it home there,

also at that stage of the game, with Dad, he was 18 when the war finished, the First World War. But he got a hard time because he was of German origin and people would make remarks, and Dad’s reply was, was “More German blood in Queen Victoria’s line than there was

in our line, so if you want to go crook at me, go crook at the Queen as well,” sort of thing, that used to shut them up. Dad was a fine motor mechanic, and he, he was also a good man manager at work, and you know, “Bernie Dittmar’s boy, I loved working with your Dad,” you know. I, just a sideline with Dad, when we went to,

to Japan, the first day was Darwin the second day was, was Borneo, the third day was Hong Kong, and then the fourth day we arrived in, in Japan. But on the third night we were in Hong Kong, and a chap came over and he said, “I see you’re Australians, cause you’ve got your slouch hat on, I’d like you to have tea with me.” And he said, “I’m the skipper of the ship out there, and I’m lonely for an Australian to talk to.” So four of us joined him,

and he said, “Who are you?” and I said, “My name’s Bruce Dittmar.” And he said, “Oh, you’d be Bernie’s boy.” The first day away from home, and I meet up with somebody who knew Dad, and he said, “Yes, we served our apprenticeships together.” And it just made me realise how little the world is. Now that’s diverting completely from what we were talking about. But oh, they, you know,

we got a lot, down the Dardanelles, was one of my books I’ve studied and read. I, I’ve read books on Gallipoli as well, but France, I thought France was just the pits. Oh you only have to go up to the museum to sort of see what they depict up there, which was, which must be fairly true, true to cause. And I just felt so sorry for them, because there was no,

no repatriation, no support that they got that we, that we in the regular army got, you know, well maintained pension. I’m on the pension for disabilities, and its just, you know, support, I mean I get free medical benefits and things like that. So there’s a big difference between what happened to the poor old

gassed, gassed blokes. There were people in Keswick Barracks, still in liquid bath, liquid bath, bath full of liquids. They, their skin just peeled off with the mustard gas, you see things like that in the Second, in the First World War, people are still, you know, 25 years later when the war, when the second war was going, these people are still suffering

from the effects.

They were a special solution for people who lost their skin.

They, they would have been in the trenches in France.

Oh, Keswick Barracks, so Keswick Barracks is Adelaide.

Oh, those people were still there in, when, when the war was running, so it’d be 25 years after,

after the First World War. I could stand to be corrected on, on those, those dates, too, you know, I just looked at it, looked at the situation and just thought, you know, death would be better.

I don’t really know enough about it. They, they would be shipped back to Australia by, by boat,

and how they were dressed, how their wounds were dressed, I had no idea.

Yes, during the Second World War they had a special group of soldiers, volunteers, to do a, to do a trial, and that was up in North Queensland, and that was with mustard gas. And the nurses,

they weren’t allowed to talk about it, but the books eventually came out, that said they would have skin just hanging down in blisters on their arms, sort of thing. They got no repatriation benefits whatsoever, those people, they all volunteered to be, to be guinea pigs, and that’s just so wrong.

No, I never saw, I think it was

just pointed out to me and explained to me, what, what the, what the situation was for these people in this particular hospital. So I didn’t have any first hand knowledge of it, it just frightened me to think that that could happen to a person.

Oh that became fairly personal then,

you know, you feel as though you were part of it. We were, cars headlights were sealed off with just slits, the curtains in all the rooms were such, that you couldn’t have a chink of light coming out of them. There would be tape across the windows so that if they blasted, it wouldn’t be so, so dangerous. The

street lights would go off at a certain time of night. Dad was, Dad was in the home guard, he would go off to his, once a week lectures, plus weekend training and, and also laying barbed wire on the beaches. The beaches that we used to go down to, the barbed wire to try and retard anybody that was going to attack us. We, you know,

you almost laugh about it now, but in those days that was dead serious. The guns at, at, that were on the coast, big coastal guns, 16 inch I think, they’re maintained, there’s a group of people there in Sydney and Newcastle and Melbourne, in all those places, all had these coastal batteries. So

you’d be, be, slit trenches, slit trenches in the school grounds, slit trenches in the parklands, you get air raid warnings and things like that. At school, the air raid warning would go, and because we were a certain distance from school, we went home and got under the kitchen table.

That was, and I’d take with me some blokes that lived further away, so we’d turn up home, Mum would have scones and jam and cream, used to think it was tremendously good, the kids used to enjoy coming home. So we used to have training, as I said before, the pushbike scratch riding was practised but not put into action.

The RAP wardens would have a helmet on, and they’d, gas rattle. If there was any gas, they’d sound the gas rattle. The gas rattle is a, a handle like a broom handle. Then coming out from the broom handle, I’ll try to do it without my hands. About, there would be a sprung loaded piece of wood going onto, like a gear. The gear, when you turned it

around, the gear would rotate causing a clacking noise, and that was the gas rattles. There was also sirens to say that an air raid was imminent. So it was, we used to gather up bones and bottles and rag and those sorts of thing, and bag them up and take them down to the central point, where the bones would go off for fertiliser, and the rags would go off for

cleaning.

It was Enfield, I suppose, in South Australia.

My home address of 17 Third Avenue, Sefton Park I think they call it, yes, Sefton Park.

Yeah. It’s a continuation upon the scouting once again, so my scouting was my basis, and all I thought of was applying my basic scouting knowledge into something more fruitful, and to, to sort of go from primary to high school type of thing. I

joined the RAASC, which, the Royal Australian Army Service Corps, because they, they had vehicles and I was interested in vehicles. And because they, I was a motor mechanic, and I had completed my third year of training, which meant I’d finished the theoretical part of my training as a motor mechanic, and they gave me a, a test

and I passed the test as a motor mechanic under the, in the eyes of the army.

One, one night a week and then one, one weekend a month.

Oh,

you’d go in at, I’d say about three hours of a night, and a weekend would be go in Friday night and have all day Saturday there and a full day Sunday, and in the, in the training period there. But you, you were being taught, not only were you taught basic. I’ll go back a little bit.

The, the service corps was a horse oriented unit back prior to the war. The people that were trained there, were trained that your horse, or your, in this case, the men had to be treated first, you looked after the private soldier first, sergeants second and the warrant officers third and the officers last. They’d make sure the Russians

went through that vein, because when you had horses, if you didn’t, didn’t feed them and care them properly, you couldn’t fulfil your role. So that was the, the, the very old fashioned way for, for a soldier to learn soldiering. Because we were, we came into it when there were vehicles of course, but then they treated the vehicles the same as they did the horses, in, in that they serviced.

At the completion of the day, you had a servicing system that you went through tyre pressures and oil levels, washed and cleaned and all that sort of thing. And in the morning when you get, you had a morning service which you would do. So we learnt to look after vehicles. We learnt that if they stopped, that, that your first priority would be to get the vehicle going, check the petrol, check

the switches, make sure the fuses are right and all those battery terminals were right. And we, we were taught those, those skills but we were taught on vehicles like the duck [an all terrain vehicle] and transporters, and big equipment that we normally wouldn’t be allowed to touch in private enterprise, so it was an exciting time for me to expand my technical knowledge. And there was a Billy Britcher was the captain,

and I was just one of his men. Workshops became, workshops became RAEME little later in the, in the time, Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanic Engineers. And so the ASC [Army Service Corps], the Royal Service Corps people

were still, they still had their own tradesmen in those days, and we, we didn’t wear RAEME badges, we wore service corps badges. Why did I join? I joined mainly because I was, was, being able to work with bigger, bigger and better vehicles.

It’s a GMC [General Motors Corporation] chassis, with a metal hull

built around it. Where the power train would, one prop at the back of the duck. A duck is a truck that can go in the water. A lark is a ship that can go on the land, so there’s, they, they’re slightly different roles. But in answer to your question on the, on the duck, it was a standard GMC

motor, a prop at the back, it had bilge pumps manual and, and mechanical. It was capable of carrying, I suppose, about two and a half ton of stores. And it was designed to go into nothing more than about four miles an hour current.

It was interesting that later on I was involved in flood, floods in New South Wales and they, they insisted that the ducks would do the job. We said, “No, the duck’s not suitable for the job,” and they said, “Well, we know better than you, you use the ducks.” We went out and the currant was about six knots instead of four knots, so we were going downstream whether we wanted to or not. And the duck wasn’t designed

for that sort of thing, it was designed for ship to shore on a fairly calm day. What we did to that poor farmer, we ruined his roads by trying to do what he wanted us to do with the duck, he would have been far better off with a 16 foot dinghy with an outboard motor.

No, that was regular army. So, I’ve

divert.

Well there’s always the erosion, you’re, you’re always looking for rust. So you go around and you scour the rust spot down to bare metal and prime it and paint it. I never, I was never in a duck that I wasn’t safe, we,

when I was in the army full, regular army, we were preparing ducks to go into flood area, and we took it down to the beach. A chap came up to us and he said, “I’m from the newspaper, what are you blokes going to do?” We said, “We’re contemplating going out into the sea, give this a water test, but the water’s a bit rough, so we don’t think we will.” So he said, “Oh,

you’re fair weather sailors, you people, are you?” “No, no, it’s just not common sense, you know, it’s common sense not to go out.” “Oh, you’re gutless.” I said, “Well,” Sid Phillips said then “Okay, well hop up in the back mate.” He took him up in the back and he had his gardening coat on and his camera equipment everything else. And he, he went, Sid went out, as soon as he saw a big wave, he turned sideways, so instead of the front hitting the wave,

the side, and this bloke would get drowned just about. And the, and then he’d slip to the other side of the boat, and Sid would turn the boat around. And when we got home, his name was Brian Taylor, I happened to go to school with this lad, and I don’t know why I remember his name now. And Brian, Brian got absolutely saturated, and then it came up in the paper next day with a photograph of us, and a balanced

story. Pardon. And, so ducks have sort of popped up a little bit with my career, but in, in the CMF we went, we went down to Victor Harbour, I don’t know if you know Victor Harbour in South Australia. Went down to Victor Harbour, we had a fortnight’s annual camp down there. And they

took the ducks out into the fairly, once you broke past the first waves, you were fairly right. And there had a windscreen there that sort of dissipated, and they also had sort of canopies over, so we did a lot of, lot of training there, at Port.. at Victor Harbour. Pardon. That was about the most instruction that I ever got,

the rest of the time, you had something to do with ducks, go and do this for me, sort of thing. So, they were very good for, you know, they could take men or ammunition or something, off the craft and bring it to the short, run it up, drive it to a, to a depot and drop it off. And they used those right through the islands,

I’m diverting a bit.

Oh, that was rifle ranges regularly, you know, it might be once every three months or something. But you’d get down there and you’d have a fair number of rounds to fire, and you had to pass certain tests, and you used automatic weapon as well as the old .303 [rifle].

We also did, I’ll be exaggerating, so I won’t say that. No, so, we did do a lot of that sort of training, but you also do map reading. You’d have to read a map fairly well if you’re delivering stores which was part or the job was delivering stores to different people, so obviously you had to do map reading was fairly

important. I can’t say that we did very much, oh lots of films on camouflage, I’ve not thought of that, I’ve not thought of that for years. But we, we’d get British films and they’d talk about, you’d do your compass bearing, line of sight to the Church spire. It was a bloody lot of distance between Church spires when you get up to central Australia, so,

we had to sort of adapt ourselves, we’d do the Church spire sort of deal, which is also realised that you’re, you’re looking at a particular rock shape, or something like that, or a range of hills. So yes, so we did our, we did our training, I did my recruit training at Woodside, which is up in the hills from Adelaide.

All it was, all the, all the weekend work that we’d studied, and then we did a fortnight full time in, in recruit training, you know, guards and sentries and all the things you’d expect a motorised unit to do.

Yes it was.

Well, when you do your apprenticeship, you do your five years for your apprenticeship and then you do what they refer to as a journeyman, journeyman’s train, training, I suppose, it must have been. So I wanted to do my two years, to finalise my apprenticeship responsibilities. And I wanted to do

it on, in the outback, where you had to use your initiatives. I’ll show you some pictures out there later on of road trains, we, we were the first people that made road trains, we had about five prime movers, one prime mover with five semi trailers behind it. So I wanted, I wanted to learn about big equipment, the types of, the types of

problems they had up there, and when I went, when we got there, we found out that we worked six and a half day week, and a half a day to get your washing done. So we were worked pretty hard, we made, we made 14, 14 pound a week, which was very good money in those days, and keep. So we, and work was a pleasure, so you, you

enjoyed your work whether you worked five, six days a week or not. The transport vehicles, the passenger vehicles would come in on a Friday night, you worked, you worked Friday night unloading and getting it ready. You worked all day Saturday until the valve grind was done, or the brake reline was done or the clutch was repaired or whatever, you worked until you finished, it might be one o’clock in the morning.

And then you’re up again at eight o’clock the next morning, to load the perishables to, to take it on. I found it was good blokes, one and only time I ever got into a fight, I lost, we won’t talk about that. But learnt, learnt to shut your mouth and, and, do, do what you, sort of, conform. So that was the reason I went there.

I worked on Gardiner Diesels, 6LW, 4, 5LW and 4LW Gardiner Diesel engines, which were a big help to me when I went to Vietnam, to Korea, because nobody had any knowledge on Gardiner Diesel on our workshop.

I was a pretty naïve sort of a guy,

my life had all been wrapped around vehicles, never had any time for girls. And it was. Sorry, the question again, please.

Oh life in general. Yeah, you learnt to shut, to shut your mouth and sort of, not make smart remarks. There’s, you get all sorts of people, there was one chap

came out from England, and he was working on, driving the buses to Darwin and back, so he was a heavy transport man. And he picked on Billy Jeffreys one night, and I said, “Lay off Bill,” he said, “You want to be in it?” and I said, “Yeah,” and he gave me a thrashing. So I learnt very quickly that poor little Bill’s got to look after himself. But you, you learnt to

shut your mouth, and sort of, not all together, but I mean, you learnt when to say things and when not to say things. There was a very good team spirit in the firm I worked for, so it made life good. And time, time didn’t matter you, you, you know, if the job was to be done, it was to be done and you sort of, you got in there and you did it. You wouldn’t be able to get anybody to do what we had to

do in those days, but we did it with joy, and pleasure. And if you finished your brake job, and a bloke was still doing a valve grind, you’d go over and work on putting a, helping assemble it up, so it was all teamwork, I suppose, once again scouting.

Ah, fickle.

The, there was several times when I met girls there, that I thought were interesting, but, you know, there were so few women up in Alice Springs, I thought it just wasn’t worth the. There, it didn’t fit into my plans, my plan was to travel around Australia, my plans weren’t to get caught up. My, my George Skinner, the lad I went up with, George got married to a girl up there,

her name was Warner, she was a part Aboriginal girl, beautiful, lovely person. And George and I can’t think of her first name, Ernie’s her brother, Ernie Warner, he was the best drinker I know. And, but he, I could see that George, George had lost the plan, the plan, the plan was to see Australia, and George stayed up in Darwin, up in Alice

Springs. But you meet some interesting people, Ernie Warner was one of them, I was explaining, he in fact, would get a 44 gallon drum, squat down, put his hands underneath the 44 gallon and he could lift it up, and then roll it onto the back of the semi. And that was just strength beyond my imagination. And there was Bluey Ayre, he was a big Irishman

and they used to compete about who was the strongest of the two, that’s why they did the, lifted the drum of petrol up onto the back of the vehicle.

Oh yeah, yeah. Yes you learnt to, oh the picture theatre was interesting, it was open air, it was stretch, canvas seats. We used to go along to that, the reason I diverted there, is, we’d then go up to town at

the interval, and I’d have a beer, and Ernie Warner would have a double brandy or double whiskey or something, followed by a beer chaser. And I’d go back to the pictures, pickled with my four little beers that I had, and these blokes would go back, no trouble at all, no sign of any alcohol. But they, they were a rough crew, there were fights every now and again.

Not, not so much in the downtown, but we didn’t have anything to do with the Aboriginals, excepting Henry Peckham, who was one of the drivers. Henry, Henry would drive the big, big trailer with, with about four of five, three or four behind him, semi-trailers behind him. He’d see a hill coming up,

and he’d start changing down and he wouldn’t touch the clutch, he’d just lift it, slip into neutral, get the revs right and just drop it back. And he had that feel, that gentle feel, there was never a shudder in the vehicle at all, he just got the best performance you could get out of a vehicle. And Henry was, he mightn’t have been full blood, but he was very close to full blood, and I could, always admired him. He invited us to stay with his family in Darwin,

went I went up to, a bit of driving as well as mechanicing. And we went into the, the Aboriginal area, I had no right to be there, but Henry said, “You’re my guest.” So we went in there, and they all went off to the grog, I just couldn’t cope with their beer drinking habits, so I stayed back at camp. And the big old time Aboriginal bloke

came over, and said, “You’re on your own with these women,” and I said, “Yeah.” And he didn’t like that, he was going to have me. And it looked like being a riot, he had his daughter tied up to a post and he was lashing her for going out with a white man. So he was, there was a lot of ill feeling there, but there was also another part of growing up, you know, you don’t get involved in any of their problems.

But I knew there was a rifle in the place, so I went and put the bolt somewhere and the barrel somewhere else, and the butt somewhere else. And the, nothing came to fruition except this bloke tried to haul me out and he had big sharp nails, he raked them down the back of my hand, not, I don’t think he did it intentionally, but. What am I talking about, I got sidetracked.

Oh, in

Darwin. It was in Darwin, in the township of Darwin, I couldn’t give you an address, I wouldn’t know it.

Well, I went to Darwin twice, I think it was twice. Once in this capacity of moving through, I went to Darwin and spent a bit of time there. Yeah, when, when was this.

Oh yes, yes.

Yes, in Alice Springs, yes. So it was just, from Alice Springs, I, I started to object to having to wash my clothes on my half day off, I thought there’s no reason why I couldn’t have the copper boiling, while I was doing the valve grinder, or the brake line or whatever. But the boss said I was a bad influence, so he

gave me a bit of a blast. And a bloke said, “If Bruce goes, we’re leaving too,” so he came back and apologised, and then I left. And, to, he made me pay my airfare to Alice Springs, it was part of the contract, and he was right, the contract was served on me for 12 months and would cover the airfare. So

I thought well I’ll get square with him, so when the buses were leaving to go north, and I was out, out of work at the time, I hopped on the buses and I did the trip up to Darwin, and his bosses paid all the deal, I didn’t have to pay anything, well I didn’t pay anything. And then we came back to Tennant Creek, and Tennant Creek we went across to Mount Isa. Mount Isa we caught the train from

Mount Isa to Townsville, then I got a job with the Austin Agents in Townsville, and they were so pleased to get me, they made me a leading hand straight away. Cause tradesmen at that time, just after the war, were very scarce, so they were trying to keep me there as long as they could. But I lasted about three months, then I decided I’d, I wanted to move on again, so I went down to Brisbane and worked for Greyhound coaches, which were

a privately owned organisation then, not like it is at the moment. And I drove for four days a week and a mechanic for three days a week, and did my washing and all that sort of thing, I, I just enjoyed doing the things. And I lost a busload of passengers in Albion at the Five Ways, I took the wrong, took the wrong street and finished up at the airport, instead of going to Toowoomba, and that caused a delay of

half an hour or so, until I. Somebody said, “Are you going a new way?” and I said, “No, not that I know of.” And they said, “Well you are, you know,” so he said, I said, “Well come up the front and get me out of this trouble, would you please?” and he said, “Only too pleased to do so.” So he came up the front and guided me through Archerfield Airport, until I got to, to Toowoomba. But.

Well the day, Sundays

you’d go to the races, so the passengers you were getting were going to the races. One bloke would be saying “Speed up driver, speed up driver, I want to get there for the first race,” and the other bloke would be say, “Take it easy, I want to get there.” So you’d have repartee going on between the passengers, and the, the racing fraternity were a fairly loud lot. But we’d go all over the place with that, and I took a cricket team up to Esk,

and we, we arrived up there and I drove them around to the, to the hotel where they were staying. And I waited for them, and when they came out, I took them down to the cricket pitch so they could get down there and play cricket, or, I think it was, yes it was cricket. And then I’d have nothing to do, so I’d get on the bus and go for a tour around the town and have a bit of a look about. Pick the people up, take them back.

Oh that’s where, you asked me about girls. I’ll get onto that subject. We got back, and then we’d take them out at night time to a dance or something. And this girl thought I was all right, she, then I found out her big, her big mate was getting very angry, so I sort of shuffled it. I wasn’t interested enough to sort of get involved in a fisticuffs, so I enjoyed, enjoyed the fact that she found me interesting.

And so, I did have a bit of an introduction in saying good day to girls, yeah. And coming home on that bus, there’s a lot of downhill, and instead of changing down like I should have done, and make my gearbox do the work, I was using the brakes, and they glazed. No matter how hard I pressed on the brake, I couldn’t get it to slow down.

There was a bloke on a tractor in front of me, coming towards me, just curled around in front of me, he made it. And I’m glad he did, because I had no way of stopping, and then I let the brakes cool down and I got home. But it was a, it’s one of those things, even though you’ve learnt to drive trucks and things like that, it just at that point that I hadn’t realised that you don’t rely on your brakes, on, on those types of vehicles in those days. You, you do a lot of your, a lot of your braking with the gearbox.

Three, three to, between three and six months, I couldn’t be sure. Loved the job, loved the money and I liked the country. But I was getting a bit itchy about, I wanted to get home and join the army, so I sort of, cut things a bit short there. But I, I learnt, learnt in Brisbane passenger buses,

and they were good, because they, they’d load and unload themselves, you don’t, you don’t have to carry big heavy boxes of stuff. So I, I liked passengers, I thought they were good people. The only thing you had to do was get the cases out, but that was only minor by comparison to the other things, yeah.

I think there

was an inkling, there was an inkling before I left home, and it was playing in the back of my mind being CMF trained and that sort of thing, that I should do something about this. So I’d say it was almost the beginning of the Korean War that I, I realised it was there. And then I thought I, my parents, my forebears were not every involved in the army,

so I thought I’d like to have a Dittmar that’s been in the army, so. I’ve got him as well now, I’ve got a grandson as well in the army now. But when I got, got home I said, “Well, I’ll give myself,” because Mum said, you know, how much she’d missed me and all that sort of thing, because she used to rely on my support a bit, with Dad. And I said, “Well, I’ll stay home

for two or three months,” I think it was, I worked at the power plant where Dad worked on Ferguson, Fortune tractors, and I stayed on, stayed there for say, three months. Then I joined the army and, and much to my mother’s chagrin, I, I applied for Korean and was immediately taken up on it. And Mum says it was the worst thing, the worst time in her life.

And I was so full of myself, I didn’t realise that, but I couldn’t let it anyhow, you know, you have a life to lead, and even if it hurts sometime, you’ve got to take that, that step. But yeah.

Oh Mum wasn’t too happy

Because I said goodbye to her at home, and took my fiancée, which was Judy into, into say goodbye at the railway station, and there was a certain amount of petty jealousy. So yes, my Dad didn’t come in, didn’t even, have no recollection of him even wanting to come in. But I just said to Mum, “It’d be a lot easier for me, if you,

if I said goodbye here.” Yeah, so, there was hard times. Because my sister, I don’t remember her being involved, but she’s, she’s 14 years younger than me, so she would have been what, six, seven, seven, seven or eight, so I don’t remember considering her even, when I went to Korea.

Well I was in the army before we were engaged, and I said this is what I joined the army for, and Judy said, “Well I, I understand that, and I accept that.” And I said to her father, “We’d like to get married before we go,” and he said, “No, no let’s make this a trial period, you have,” finished up 17 months’ separation, “And if you’re still waiting for each other, you know you’re doing the

right thing.” And that was, it was good, but it had a disadvantage, a married person got a higher pay than a single person, and it would have been a nice nest egg for us to start off with, if we, when we got, when we got married, or if we were married at the time, towards our house. But Father said, “When you get used to home comforts Bruce, you find it

difficult to, to, to leave your home comforts. And it might make it even more difficult for you, to go away.” And he was right, in the long run he was right. But Judy was supportive, as she was with Vietnam and New Guinea.

Aware, aware, cause there were quite a few killed, I can’t remember now the number, I’ve got it in a book in there. 200 or something were killed. But yeah, I, it was brought home to me, when I got, got to Vietnam, got to Korea, sorry start again. When I got to Japan and I saw, spoke to people about

what Korea was all about, what Korea was all about, the conditions and so forth, I then, I may have previously said this, but I went up to my CO [Commanding Officer] and told him that I’d like to do a, a course at the Battle Training School, cause I didn’t feel that I had sufficient coverage. That in itself was an experience that I’m thrilled I had, wouldn’t recommend it for

anybody, thrilled I had done it, because it gave me so much confidence. When I was, whilst I was there, I learnt to use the two-inch mortar, and marching with heavy packs and carrying mortar bombs. And when I wasn’t doing that, they give me a Bren gun, because I was one of the bigger blokes, so I always got caught with the, the heavy loads. But the, the we did forced marches, 20 mile

forced marches and things like that, as well as. We had battlefield assimilation, you’re laying on your tummy, you’ve got your rifle in front of you and you’re going across a flat patch. The bloke would be firing rounds between your head and the bloke’s feet in front of you, just flicking the dust off. The bloke in front of me started to panic, I said, “Stay down, stay down, if you stand up you’ll be gone,” because I didn’t know how quickly these blokes could react.

We got to the other side and I was, you don’t know what you’re capable of doing yourself, but I thought I handled that well, and that gave me confidence. That made me the mortar man, as I said. During a live fire attack on a hill, and I fired a smoke grenade, a smoke bomb, up, I need to adjust that a bit there, adjust it around there, get ready for another

smoke, fired the smoke, yes, that’s exactly where I want it. And the bloke spoke to me, I said, “Oh, oh, bloody hell where was I.” So I came back, and I thought well I’d better put another smoke in now, otherwise the blokes won’t know what’s going on. So I fired another smoke, and I could see the bomb going up, it was going right down the middle of the lot of them, landed, landed at their feet, and poof, the smoke came up. And they said, “We’re going to kill you, you bastard,”

it frightened the hell out of them. The next one was a HE [high explosive]. They were firing these fairly, fairly close to our own troops, and it was no game, but it gave you, that’s what it was all about, was teaching you, to make you familiar with all the weapons, and be confident with yourself.

No, no.

The bloke that was next to me didn’t last a day in Korea. We were good buddies and, sorry. We were good buddies, and he, I went to the workshops and he went straight to the front lines. And he stood up to sort of see what was going on,

and the mortar landed at his feet. And that was the first day. And that information got back to me, and made me realise how fragile life really is. And poor old Bluey, he met his Waterloo. And I had an Aboriginal bloke on the other side of me, on the cheerful side of things. He, we stripped,

we had to strip Bren guns down, almost with blindfolds on, and then re-assemble them up. And the spring from the catch flew, when he was putting, putting, or somebody was putting it together, I can’t remember. And he said, “Stop still,” and he stood there, and he scanned everything and walked over and picked it up in the grass, he picked up this little spring. And I said you know, if I was going to have a bloke with me in the field, I’d like to have him in.

He was just so keen of, of senses, his senses, his hearing, his ability, his sight, was just. He was such a good bloke, I don’t know what ever happened to John, I think we called him Jack, that’d be right wouldn’t it, Jack for an Aboriginal. Anyhow, he was a, I think he got through. But

yeah, yes, we were familiar with what to expect when we, we got there. And in, in the, when I marched into the unit.

Well that was with, my recruit training was with the CMF, and it was weekend,

weekend training, that would be map reading and oh, rifle drill of course, parade ground work, that type of thing would be done. The correct way to salute, and all of these that the young recruits have got to, to learn. Yeah, I,

it wasn’t the same as, that’s whey I went to Haramura, and that’s what you’re asking me for. We, we didn’t have, didn’t throw grenades, we didn’t, we fired, fired the Bren, Bren gun. We fired the Owen gun, we fired the rifle, so it was just a standard hand, hand tools of the infantry.

We didn’t do anything with the Vickers or anything like that, the machine guns, that was for the infantry to worry about. We did fire anti-tank weapons, but I’m not sure if it was regular or not, I think that was with regular army. So the service corps was not an overly active infantry type unit, we had to defend our,

our own perimeters. We were mostly in my experience in the army, we would perimeter, perimeter defence and perimeter clearing with patrols and stuff like that, was about as military as we’d get, until we get to Vietnam.

No, no, because they were so short of tradesmen and the fact that I had already done a recruit training in the CMF, I went straight to the shop floor. Which meant I was immediately, instead of starting off as a private soldier, I started off as a craftsman, so I was on a star rating, from say, say two star for the infantry to about four star or six star to the, so my, I was on a higher rate of

pay, that way.

I, wonderful experience. We went to a depot in Sydney, I’m not sure which depot it was, whether it was Vic [Victoria] Barracks or what it was, a depot in Sydney. And then we were taken to, to an airport,

I should imagine it was Richmond. And we flew in a, a civilian aircraft, yeah. Flew in a civilian aircraft, so it wouldn’t have been, may not necessarily have been Richmond, it may have been Sydney Airport. So we flew the first day to Darwin, had an overnight day in Darwin. And the second day was to Borneo,

the third day was Hong Kong, and the fourth day was Japan. The only, Darwin was just another Australian town. Borneo was, we were housed in grass huts, beautifully done, but they were grass huts with fairly big leaves and

plenty of air, I think there must have been mosquito nets. So we had a bit of free time there, so went for a bit of a walk and found a nice beach and we stripped off, we must have gone in the nick, because we, we stripped off and all went in for a swim, we might have done it in our underwear, I can’t remember, nobody cared very much, we were on a beach on our own. When we came back, the bloke said, I said, “Any sharks here mate?” and he said, “No, the crocodiles eat them mate.” I was pleased

to have had that experience, I don’t particularly want to have it again. And we had quite a reasonable meal, if I remember rightly, and then we went to Hong Kong. We went to the Grand Hotel, a private soldier at the Grand Hotel, a room of my own, you know, the accommodation was excellent. We came downstairs to have a drink, and I felt I’ve been telling you this story, somewhere along the line. But a,

a chap came over to the four of us and said, “Will you guys join me for dinner tonight, at my expense?” He said, “That’s my ship out there, I’m in from Australia and I haven’t had an Australian to talk to for ages.” So we said, “Yeah, that’d be good, thanks very much.” So we went over and he put on a nice spared for us, and he said, “What’s your name?” and I said, “Bruce Dittmar.” He said, “Oh, you’d be Bernie’s boy.”

It was such a tremendous

coincidence. Yes I thought I’d mentioned that. And then we went to, from there into Japan, and we, I’m not quite sure where we landed, because I don’t think there was an airport, I don’t think there was an airport at Kure, where I was posted. But anyhow, we arrived in Japan and reported for duty up there,

and I was put on vehicle inspections. And at this stage I can’t tell you, when we did a vehicle inspection for a vehicle that just came in, we were looking for faults. When we got looking, the inspection of a vehicle that was being repaired, we checked the items were being repaired and give a road test and make sure it was all right. And that was a good experience, because it snowed, and I went up in the high, fairly high, fairly hilly road,

and I had this, it might have been a QL Bedford Bus, Bedford Truck. And I put the brakes on, and the bloody car went about four turns in the snow, and I’d never experienced snow before, that was my introduction. So I drove home with one tyre, one side on the dirt, all the way home, but I didn’t, didn’t, taking it on the hard bitumen. So,

and also when you did your, your road test, you didn’t necessarily, you were supposed to do the same route, but you didn’t necessarily do so, you’d veer off and just sort of look at the little villages and stuff. And that was Kure workshops accommodation was superb. Do you want me to get onto that?

Oh everything, the people,

the chickens in little coops, pretty little kids, the kids get you where ever you go, beautiful little kids. A, a polite attitude, the Japanese weren’t holding grudges, if they were holding grudges, they weren’t openly holding grudges. Cause it was only, it was ’52, ’45 the war

ended, so it was only seven years, so that’s fairly, you know, the war was still very raw to them. And they were suffering from the loss of so many Japanese lives, and they were very short of food and cigarettes, you could black market your, you’d get issued with cigarettes and soap and razor blades, and that would be,

you know, they’d chase after you for that, for the black market. The food stalls. Oh electronically, there were colour televisions in Japan in those days, and you could look into the, look in there and you could see a colour television. That was, you know, quite awesome to me. Smells, some smells were pleasant, but other

smells were dreadful. Their effluent was pumped into open hulled junks, then taken out to an island, another island somewhere and they’d be pumped onto the, into the rice paddy fields or whatever. But that was, you learnt to hold your breath for a long way, as soon as you got the first whiff, you’d hold your breath and you’d run until you got right past it, so you could go, it was pretty putrid. We weren’t

allowed to touch their food, their fruit, even things like thick skinned oranges and grapefruit, because they, they said that there’s, you know, so many worm type problems, so we never touched that. We normally went to, to eat when we were out as guys, we’d go to a British unit, like a big NAAFI [Navy, Army, Air Force Institute] type organisation. They had

baths there, you’d walk in there and the baths would be bigger than this room, and be about chest deep, when you’re sitting down, it would be up to about there. And it’d go from cool to warm to bloody hot, you know, cause they loved their hot water. But they’d soap off first, wash off first and then get into the bath and soak, they’d keep the bath water, sort of nice and clean. But they were the

types of things that we weren’t used to. The baths weren’t, the baths that we went to, weren’t communal baths, they were just for the soldiers.

We had house, house, house girls for want of a better word, that did our dormitories, polished the floors and cleaned the place up,

cleaned the toilets and the showers. So we didn’t get to know they, but you know, it’d be Lucy or somebody you’d nickname them, and obviously she’s been in the places looking good. Down on the workshop floor, the job I had was with men and Australians, and the 16,

16th Infantry, no it wasn’t, I can’t think of the name of the unit for the moment. It was a big, big RAEME unit, and it was where they were doing base overhauls, there’d be a jeep, jeep run with the jeep would be stripped down to its chassis, and comes out the other end, reconditioned. And then there’d be another run for another, Bedford buses or something, Bedford trucks.

The QL if I remember rightly. I wish I could remember the name of the unit.

Yes.

There was Japanese people throughout the unit, stewards at the messes,

and, and general cleaning around the place. But then there was, down in the workshops where, where I didn’t work, they had clerks and people that could speak both Japanese and English to act as interpreters. And the, the tradesmen there were quite,

quite good tradesmen, they found that they could rely on them. Yes, we must have been doing inner inspections, because they were doing outer inspections, down at Hiro, Hiro was the name of the, where the big workshops itself was. The accommodation block and the inner inspections were done up at the Kure.

Oh, it was basically a vehicle park, all we were doing were actually inspecting the vehicles for repairs to be done, so they weren’t under shelter at all, but they had an office block, where all the paperwork was done. I can’t remember much about that, I think it was, must have been fairly close to the same standard as what we had.

Britcom based workshops, yeah, the British Commonwealth Base workshops, RAEME. Yes, so there was nothing much there to talk about, it was just a big car park, where we inspected equipment they were shifting from the inspectors to the inspectors waiting to go to the workshops. That’s about all. There’s one story.

Bedford QL for transports and jeeps, mostly.

There was a bloke named MacPherson, who’s name I shouldn’t mention. He backed his jeep up to the, to the armament building, where they were doing repairs to all the rifles and stuff like that. And that was all upstairs, partially for security.

And he went in there, the lift was at the top, and he lifted the lead weights off and put them in the back of the jeep, and then drove off out, cause scrap metal was worth a bloody fortune. He was driving out through the front gates and he got stopped, somebody had, somebody had got to the lift and pressed the button, and the bloody thing had chugged all the way down without its, without its counter weights there. So they had a look, saw the lead weights had gone and knew it had been done recently, so they stopped the front gate,

he was, he was charged as a staff sergeant, reduced to the rank of corporal and sent to Korea for his escapades. Another one, on scrap metal, the chap, I won’t mention his name but he’s died since, he was put in charge of the steam boiler room, and he changed over all the brass fittings to gal [galvanised iron],

and then sold all the brass off. And all the steam, the steam valve must be fairly corrosive, and all, all the bloody fittings all froze up, seized up. I thought of his surname, but anyhow, he was a larrikin.

No, from Japan I did the battle school.

Oh yeah, yeah, waiting, waiting to go in transit to, to Korea itself, which I’ll tell you about in a minute. But, I’ve lost my thread. Oh yeah, I went to battle training school

from that position and came back to that position.

Only that he was a young fresh faced, 18 – 20 year old lad. Didn’t know much about his parents or anything like that, I’ve got no idea what his name was. He was just, just another bloke,

and he happened to be in the bed next to me, so we just got to know each other a bit better, that was all. Didn’t, didn’t make a friend of him, or anything.

Oh, they were battalion, they belonged to the rein… reos [reinforcements] for the battalion, so they, they’d come up from Australia. The instructors to start off with, the instructors were people that had already been to Korea, they knew exactly what Korea

was all about. That’s why they were good with the rifle, they could fire between your head and the, the feet of the people in front of you. They were excellent instructors, the blokes you got were people that had done Australian Infantry, Infantry training. See nobody else, you don’t volunteer for that sort of thing normally, but I, I felt that I wanted to be good at whatever I was doing, and I didn’t want to say I would have done this, if only

I’d known how to, I wanted to make sure that I could do that. When, when I finished the battle training course, Ray Dart and I were both called up to the CO’s office, and he said, “One of you two, have got to take charge of the two 19 pounder anti-tank guns, that the battalion’s got up in the front line.”

And I just said, “Well Ray, Ray’s an instrument mechanic, I don’t know anything about guns, I don’t know anything about instruments, it’d be logical that Ray would be a better suited person to, than I.” We were both good mates and I wasn’t dobbing him in, it was just what I thought was logical. Ray went to, to Korea and he went to, spoke to the infantry and he was responsible for the care and maintenance of these two 19 pounders.

They were like a 25 pounder, excepting these are high velocity, low trajectory, it means the round is low, whereas the Howitzer, the round comes up high. So Ray was with those until he got pneumonia, it was right in the middle of winter. And he was sleeping in a dug out, which was just a frozen hole, which was frozen, and I don’t know how they got down,

I don’t think they had stretchers, the infantry blokes did it really hard, we had stretchers. And Ray got pneumonia, and when he got back home afterwards, he got multiple sclerosis and died. Sorry. He was about my best mate.

At least I had the pleasure of going around doing the Legacy paperwork for his wife. Ray was up in the front line, RAEME bloke, same as me. And the fellow in front of him, was killed and the fellow behind him was killed by shrapnel.

And he said how it didn’t get him, he doesn’t know. But yeah, he, he died of pneumonia, and he, we back later in Vietnam, in Korea, back to Japan, because he had pneumonia. So I could get a, a case of weakness created by the conditions in which he lived, and it was with great

pleasure that I could say, “Well Ray, I’ve done the best I can for you.” Sorry about that.

But as, as to how it worked in Japan, you did your, your job until such a time as you were called forward. And the fact that I did the Battle Training School, was just my,

my request.

Well I was called forward, I reckon about three months when I got in, in country.

About three months. I flew in, and Johnny Long and Bill Kindred and a couple of others were waiting for me at the airport.

And we got in a jeep, we had about 20, we had to go to, in China, no we didn’t, we had to go to Uijongbu and just on from there was where our camp was. And driving along there, the devastation was horrific, I wasn’t ready for it, I wasn’t expecting to see, like a railway ambulance lying on its side, a bridge demolished

and crumbled. You know they, what had happened, the North Koreans had attacked right down nearly to Pusan, they were driven back again, then the Chinese came in, and they were driven back, down to Pusan again, and then the Americans came in, in, round through Inch’on. And it cut the people off, and so they saw the conditions under

which we were going back, there was a fluid war at that, at the time, we thought. As it happened, it stabilised pretty quickly after I got there, they must have known something. So on our trip back, there was just devastation, people with racks on their heads, big A-frames. The big A-frames used to, standing up, big A-frame would be from their head to the ground, and they, they’d hook it over their

shoulders and just lift if off the ground, they’d have tremendous weight, and they were all shifting their, whatever furniture they could, or what they considered was worthwhile. And the poor kids having to keep up with their parents, some, I’ve got in the back of my mind there must have been some little horses, little oriental horses, like little ponies. And they were, they were going away

from the enemy, we were going down towards the enemy. And you could see these people had to live in these sub-zero temperatures, 43 below freezing was our coldest night, and ten degrees, ten degrees Celsius, I think, below freezing. So you know, it was bitter, the rivers were frozen,

to the, the rivers were frozen to the extent that a Centurion tank, 50 tonnes, could drive across the ice. So it wasn’t just a skin of, a skin of ice. And getting back, I’m trying to visualise going back to our unit, when we arrived in the unit, after seeing all this devastation, I was given a

space on the floor, for my equipment. And then Teddy Richards, our warrant officer came in and said, “We’ll get you, we’ll get you a stretcher sent up straight away,” so I got a stretcher which got me off the ground, I thought I might be sleeping on the ground, but they didn’t, we didn’t have to, we slept on stretchers. And there was four people in a 16 by 16 tent.

It took a little while to get used to. Oh the unit I went into was approximately 100 strong English, or British, or all over Britain. And we had 12 Australians, we were housed separately from the English. And there were certain

oh, yeah, the food was not good, you know they had a thin slice of corned beef or something, with stacks of mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, chipped potatoes, and it was not what we were used to, so we asked if we could cook our own food, so we made up our little cookhouse, which I’ll talk about in a minute. And the little cookhouse, we used to cook our own, we used to cook for ourselves, we didn’t cook for ten

people. The warrant officers and sergeants, they used to go to their mess, cause their food was quite good. Our, our rations were quite good, because we used to look after the rashey blokes, the ration clerks. We used to say any repairs they wanted done, we’d do it straight away for them, in return you’d get a turkey, or some, some chops or something.

Baked beans, most of the time.

I can show you a photograph.

It’s a Y-shaped valley, big high hill to the back, with trenches all dug in at the back, where there’d obviously been a battle. We, we were surrounded, partially surrounded

by mines, so you didn’t go off the path too much. In the Y, the officers mess was to the, looking from the road up, the officers mess was to the left, the sergeants mess was to the left as well. Then there was sort of accommodation block for the rank people. On the right spur, or Y-shape, was the Brits and right down on the

point, was the Australians. We had three tents, we had a big marquee with eight, about eight people in it, the warrants officers and senior sergeants had a tent of their own, and the other one was a breakaway group who didn’t want anything to do with us. They, they just liked their own company, so they were in a different, different set up. On the spur

that the Australians were, we had a flagpole which was about a foot, no it wasn’t, it was about six foot taller than the British one, by virtue of design. And we had the Australian flag above the British flag, which was not appreciated. And then, then in the valleys, coming from

the road again, was the, the croc park, for the vehicles coming in for repair. There was a finish park, then there was the RAP and the ordinance store section, went around to the right. And so did the fitters and turners, the small arms

fitters and turners, and general engineers, I suppose, they were up on the right hand side. It’s interesting, I’ve not tried to visualise that for a long while. The hill at the back was, was very steep as I said, with the trenches. But on either side of us, there was one area there, there was signs ‘Mines’, and outside our dunny, we had a

single dunny for the Australians people, we had a urinal separate from the, from the seat, there was a mortar bomb. You could see about that much of it with a fan, with a fan tail, right outside the toilet door. And we asked why didn’t they get rid of it, they said it saves you wasting time in the toilet. So, yeah, we,

we treated that with respect. The digging in the ground for toilet blocks and things like that, had to be done in the summer, in the winter it, it had about four foot of permafrost, so our slit trenches, our mortar pits and our toilets and their grease traps and stuff, for the kitchens and stuff like that, had to all be done in the, in the dry, in the warm weather.

Our accommodation was oil, oil heated, we designed a furnace, and put one in each tent and it used to be raw petrol because it was so cold it didn’t evaporate anyhow, very much. We put petrol dripping onto a, onto a

hot base, which would vaporise and then, then burn. And if you, if you were running it properly, you’d have a, a red hot up till about two foot, two foot six. If anybody was stupid and open it up, it’d go up through the tent, which you’d, quite a fire risk. There were sandbags, three or four high, all around the inside of the tent. One was,

hit the deck, if there was any mortars dropping or something like that. Or if there was heavy rain outside, you’d have it watertight and the water would run around, without going inside the tent. We had canvas on the floor, we found a sheet of canvas and we put it on the floor, just more homely and clean too. Lighting was electric,

running from the generator. Teddy Richards and his warrant, his senior ranks, they had just a little, about 16 square, 16 foot square, I suppose, tent, and they’d have three or four in that. And the other, the other one was the same sort of a tent, with just only two or three blokes, just wanted to be on their own.

We found it better, companion wise, to have the group, cause you spin yarns and talk, I don’t know if they played cards, I can’t remember. So that, and our toilet, where we did the cookhouse, we had a big white bath, that had been stolen out of somebody’s house, when they were going through the ups and downs of the place.

And we had the big white bath with a drainpipe going out, and a big, big hot water service outside, petrol dripping away. You’d hear the warrant officer say, “You have the first bath,” every time, second bath was by draw. And he had, first bloke had about three inches of water, the second bloke had another three inches of water, by the time you’d finished the bath, the water’s pretty scummy,

but it was beautiful and hot. You lay back in this beautiful hot bath, and if you were the last one, you don’t have to hurry to get out, for the changeover. So, so we had our, oh and the Australians, all bathed every day voluntarily. The Brits tried to make us have a ration card, we had to get the ration card clipped to say we’d had a bath, we refused to do that. So we had a little riot on our hands.

We said we in Australia, are used to bathing every day, we don’t go to bed with our greasy hands. And in the end, the CSM, the Company Sergeant Major, agreed that the Australians didn’t need, need to get in the queue and have a wash in the queue. So that, oh we did our cooking in that area as well.

Approximately nine mile, about nine mile away. It would light up, it’d be like, and rumble, you could hear the rumbles when the real battles were on, nine miles was not that far, not that far away. We, we did get permission and we went up and stayed the night

with the, the infantry battalion, for several reasons. One is it’s good liaison, second is that we understand their problem, that we’re not just working on vehicles, we’re working on saving lives, and its important to understand that these blokes up here are dying, we’re down there having relatively, or reasonable accommodation. The infantry would sleep in,

in trenches, in weapon pits. In the winter it would just be an icebox, icebox, how they didn’t get more lung damage, I don’t know. It was bitter cold. You, even where we were, you’d get into your double, your two sleeping bags, you’d curl up to sleep, and you’d make it, pull it over your head to make a tunnel, and you’d breathe through

the tunnel, and you’d brush the ice out of the tunnel, you’d just, all your breath would freeze up. If you’d overhauled a jeep engine, and you got the engine back in and you got it ready to start, you’d boil up the water, get the water boiling to start with, pour it in and turn the starter motor over at the same time, to try and catch it before it froze. And the tyres on the, on the water truck, you used to have to

rock the water truck and break the, break the ice under the tyres, before you could sort of drive off. Dieseline [fuel] would separate and go curdled it was so cold. And there was, you know, little things like personal weapons, you had to have special lubricants and things like that, so they didn’t freeze up. And we

learnt a lot of skills there, which we’ve had no cause to ever use again, those skills, because we just don’t go to places like that any more, not at this stage, anyhow, so all the skills that we learnt to survival there. That sort of talked about the living area, we got, just a bit of expansion on that. We had British

units across the road from us, I’m not sure if it was the Gloucesters or the Black Watch or what they were, but they’d be, they’d be there, and sometimes they would come across to our mess, but the Australians didn’t eat, drink in the mess, they drank, they had permission to take beer into their lines, which was most unusual, it saves fights. We had quite a few Brits who used to come down and

have a beer at our place, but we never ventured up to their area. There’s a colonial attitude, you bloody colonials, we didn’t like that.

The apprentice is not doing too good, that’s the trouble.

Some, like good tradesmen any time, the good tradesmen were good. They had an awful situation there, we got paid per day,

what the Brits were paid per week, so that, this caused a lot of the animosity and one of the reasons we needed to be separated. You’d get an Australian, you’d get a British bloke who was in the Australian army going up and saying to his British friends, “Look what I get, I get, you know, per day what you get per week,” so that obviously, didn’t go over very well. So that caused,

caused problems, and the people that were the most difficult, were the Brits that were in the Australian army, because they didn’t learn to shut their mouth, and be very grateful for what they were getting. They liked to brag, and I can understand that too. But so, there was people there, like Jumbo Rayner, he was the staff sergeant artificer, in charge of our,

our vehicle line. And you can’t help but remember people like him, because he, he was an excellent tradesmen and a gentleman. And the, he also understood us, he understood that I was the only one that could do certain tasks, and it gave me a nice little bit of a lever, I suppose. They, they’d call me up and ask my

advice, which you know. One of the things that happened, there was a Canadian work, Canadian engineers it must have been, they had a loading vehicle that would cut timber down to size, and do all sorts of timber type things, and that was all built onto the back. But the engine broke down, and the only V8 [8 cylinder] engine we could get,

was an American V8 engine, where as, this, it must have been British, must have been a British unit, because the only thing that they had was British spare parts. And the distributor on a Australian type vehicles, what they call a crab-type distributor, and the distributor on the, the British one was a Lucas, not Lucas.

Yeah, was a, was a British made distributor, and it had a difference in the join, where they joined together, and I had to make an adapter up to fit between that driving spindle to the driven spindle, I had to make a, I had to do it by hand. So I made it up and got it fitted, and then when I was

doing the firing order, which in a V8 is 1-8-5-4-6-3-7-2, that’s the order in which the cylinders fire. I had that lead going over there, and this lead going into here, I had leads going everywhere, because I didn’t get the alignment quite right. And then when we got it in and got it going, we could adjust it around. Well that

was a job that Jumbo Rayner sort of organised, and he just left me alone, he didn’t come up to see me, didn’t ask me if I wanted any help, I mean that nicely, he just left me to do it, he relied on my efforts to do it. So you get the occasional job like that, that required. I was lucky having been trained in private enterprise, and then did army courses as well, to sort of,

give me a rounded, rounded. I was bragging, but I was quite a reasonably good mechanic.

No, Brit.

And he, he was, that’s what, we were talking about liking, liking and disliking them. We, we, we were a, a pain to the Brits, because we were individuals,

whereas the Brits were, “Yes sir, no sir,” salute and all that sort of thing. The Australians were left to use their own initiative a lot. Different, different sort of approach to life. And of course, when you’re a national serviceman on poor pay and not experienced in army vehicles, things were a bit tough. And when we used to have parades, even just ordinary morning parades, we would be

spick and span, shoes shined, always trying to be the example. To the extent that the CSM [Company Sergeant Major] broke us up, put, put us two here and two there and two somewhere else, but it was, it was, trying to find our way of surviving, I suppose.

Yeah, they all knew jeeps backwards, they, when we, when we got onto the QL Bedfords, where we used to have Chevys and Fords, they had the Bedford QL. That was a, a learning curve for the, our people to learn how to handle that. And we also used to work on carriers, there was the Oxford carrier, and two other

types of carriers, Australian Bren carrier, they used to do any repairs on those, and the Australians seemed to adapt to those fairly well. The, I, I think there would have been good Brits, good Brit tradesmen, I don’t think they had, they’d had the experience we had, even with our 12. We could just about produce the same

output with 12, as they did with the rest, you know, the rest, say about 50 or 60, of the about a hundred of them, 50 or 60 of them would have been tradesmen of some sort. Our, our armourer was very much sought after, because he had abilities that the English didn’t have. And the instrument makers were the same, our instrument makers were thought very highly of.

Yeah, I, I worked on all the big stuff. The, the blokes that knew the jeeps were better off employed there anyhow, and the, and just the general engineering and that sort of thing, they handled that very well.

The only reason I was called in is, they didn’t understand diesel, they didn’t understand cranes and trying to think through their minds, they weren’t taught to be flexible. When I show you some of the photographs in there, I can explain to you what I’m trying to say. The Scammell recovery vehicle had a, a drum, a

break, a wire drum, where as, you see a winch, usually its fitted horizontally. The, these were winched yeah. Their, their, their cable circulated around that way, where as ours went round and round that way. And the, the using of the winches, winching

gear was quite different by this Scammell, although the Scammell was a British vehicle, wasn’t an Australian vehicle. Yes, I’ve lost the train again, I’ll call on your help.

Oh, fair wear and tear mostly.

The recovery vehicles were doing a lot of work, recovery vehicles were the bridgeheads, and we had a floating pontoon bridge, and the, and then coming out, they had to come up high, so quite often you’d have a recovery vehicle there fulltime, just hooking up, just winching them up over the mound. There would be no mechanics with those vehicles, those vehicles would be manned by two, two or three recovery vehicle people,

and they would do their own servicing and their own maintenance. Depending on what went wrong, they’d have to be back later asking for it to be repaired. What, we didn’t, we didn’t get any, anything that came in that was battle, battle damaged, went straight across, back to Kure, where they’d rebuild the outfield, or dismantle it for spare parts.

Yeah, the Oxford carriers and things like that. The Brits may have, I can’t remember, the Brits may have been working on those, they had a Rolls Royce engine, and a very classy carrier. We didn’t see a lot of them, the Bren carrier, I think the Australians, I’m not even sure we had Bren carriers there, I said so a little while ago, but thinking about it, I’m not sure that we had Bren carriers there.

No, no, I got a fair bit of unknown origin at one stage, and I went to a Canadian hospital, and it was awful, unhygienic, used to have to get the bed lice out of the mattresses and put white

powder, which I found out afterwards was DDT [an insecticide – dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane], you’d put DDT powder, and then you’d lie on the DDT powder, and all it did was make the little creepies bloody angry, and they used to bite you even harder. But when I was really crook, an infantry bloke with a hand wound, would escort me down to the toilet, there was no such thing as a pan or anything like that, you had, you had to go down to the toilet, if you got carried down.

And you’d go down to the toilet and it reeked, it was worse than anything I’ve struck anywhere. And the blokes, and the Canadians would say, “Right-o, penicillin time.” You’d drop your, drop your dacks, lay on your bed, and he’d stand back and he’d go, throw the dart straight into your bottom. And the trista line of penicillin, have you ever had a trista line of penicillin? It’s like little,

with a glass, it used to sting like buggery, we were not impressed. And the doctor came and said, “How are you?” I said, “100%, ready to go back to my unit.” And I went back to my unit, and I was working on a Scammell, getting back to the subject, working on the front wheel. The wheel was off, I was working on the hub, and I just collapsed, and they raced me across to the RAP, I don’t remember that.

And the RAP bloke said, “Sending you back to hospital.” And I said, “Oh please no, anything but that, let me, let me just go up to my room, my mates up there feed me or look after me,” and they did, which I was pleased to say. Whilst I’m on that, I went to the Indian field hospital, and when I walked in there, they gave me a mug of coffee, put a

rug around me, they did that for everybody, and you’d sit there waiting for your turn to go in. Then you’d go in, and they treat you, treated you beautifully, and it was when I went through a religious problem. Why can these people that are non-Christians be so Christian in their attitude, and the Brits are so bloody cold-hearted, callous people. And I, that worried me for some time, until I had quite a long talk to a,

a Archdeacon’s wife, and she said we all have this problem of working out where we’re going, what road we’re going to take. And, but that’s just, all I’m trying to do is compare one hospital against the other, the Canadians were very much down the bottom end of the list.

I had the fever of unknown origin, and

it worked out to be a stomach disorder, I can’t remember what it was. But they couldn’t tell me at the time what it was, so they just put a, a name down, I can’t think of it. With the Indians I had a, I’d played football I got, one could say, knackered, I got a kick fair up the, fair up the crotch, and actually

it caused a fracture of the urethral passage. And I didn’t know at the time you don’t go to the doctor for men’s do, men’s problems, you bear it, you know, grit your teeth. But I was passing blood for several days, and I thought well, I’d better go to the doctor. So I went to the doctor, just took a, they sent me across to the Indian hospital, and it took several lots of treatment,

to sort of get that right. That’s, that’s haunted me for the rest of my life. Can we switch off for a second. All right, start again. I’ve had several other prostate problems, and it wasn’t until a, a fellow named MacGregor, a Professor MacGregor, he said, “You’ve got nasty scar tissue up there.” Each time they went to put a tube up there to

relieve my bladder pressures, they caused tremendous pain. And he said, “You’ll need to have a major operation,” and it was 11 weeks I was off work with this bloody problem. They did a rebuild, fortunately that was fixed that up, but later on I got cancer of the prostate, through chemicals in, in Vietnam, and I had a prostectomy, so I’m not as, as

manly as I should be.

They went onto mycin.. auriomycin? Or streptomycin, it might have been streptomycin, one of those very strong things. Yeah. So that’s about all I’ve got to say on that, as far as I know.

No, it was an injection, an injection yeah. I don’t think, I think I more than likely went back two or three times to get the treatment done.

Yes, it did, yes. But when I went for a pension in DVA [Department of Veteran’s Affairs], and I said about the urethral stricture, this woman said

“Well, why didn’t you pick it up?” Well, I said, “I passed weeing up the school wall, when I was a kid.” I said, “I, I don’t go around the place now, measuring what my abilities are and my disabilities aren’t, and I can’t compare myself with another person, because I don’t stand there and watch them.” She, she took it very nicely, but the, stupid bloody question, I thought. You don’t, don’t know what another person

feels or does, and. Better if they ask you in a different way.

Yes it was, it was playing the Brits soccer, because they were beating us something terrible, so we decided we’d get a spearhead. So we got a spearhead of soccer players, we came up through the

lot, the ball was being played behind. The blokes up the front hit the deck, so it got a bit heated, warrant officer got a broken arm and I got a kick and it really was a vicious game, we didn’t win the soccer match either.

No, not at soccer, but we gave them a lacing on athletics days. I won the 440, the 220 and the,

a bloke named French won the 100 yard sprint, he was an Australian. That’s not quite right, his name wasn’t French, but it sounded like that. And we got, I think of the 10 prizes, we got about eight for the day, so we came away feeling pretty good that day. Oh tossing the caber was one of the things that we’d never had anything to do with. And

it was a big Kiwi, he picked up the, the big log in his hands, and he’d been watching these people drop the log, so he thought he’d go further than they did. And what you’re supposed to do is just throw it into the air and end for end it, and he thought these people were just dropping it, so he got up there and he went right around the oval carrying this bloody great log. Oh dear, things you learn by being in a multinational group.

Oh we had no Kiwis with us, but we, the Kiwi, the Kiwi transport, I think they had a company of troops attached to one of our battalions, so we didn’t see a lot of the Kiwis.

No, engines is a, major unit assemblies we didn’t

touch, you didn’t touch the gearbox, you’d replace the gearbox. You didn’t touch an engine, you’d replace an engine. If, see a Scammell being a big six cylinder diesel engine, had the ability to do a lot of work without getting terribly worn out, so we never sent any of those back for, in my time to my knowledge, we never sent any of those back for major brace overhaul.

The Cos Chromers were a one off, it never did any miles, so it never got any miles up, it just got sort of people using it incorrectly, and we had to re-cable it, something we’d never done before in our lives. We had to order the cable in and then feed the cable into the winch drums, and then feed them over the pulleys to

give you your five to one, or your two to one or your four, whatever it is. So that was in the workshop for a long time, waiting for parts to arrive. And it was pretty critical because it was a one off type of thing, there was nothing you could do about it, until you got the parts. But I, I think, I can’t remember too well,

exactly what my percentage would be of different vehicles that I did repair. But it always seemed to be the outside, Dittmar did the stuff on the outside, they had. I’ll show you the pictures in there where they had the big tarpaulins where they put the jeeps in, or the QL truck, in under that, and they had the big furnaces blowing hot air, and I’m out there in the chill, but that was the way the cookie crumbled. I can’t,

I couldn’t give a breakdown of the equipment.

Oh no, no, that’s a little bit of a misunderstanding. When the, when the spanner started to stick to the perspiration, you’d peel it off and put it on top of the fire, pick up the other spanner, and work until that one started to adhere to the perspiration.

So that’s what I’m saying there, you kept your tools that you were using for that particular job, on the, on a grid, and kept them warm, whilst you were working, and when that one froze in your hand, oh, didn’t froze in your hand, but when it started to get sticky in your hand, you took it off and put another one in.

I think it was, something

we found that we had to do. You see it was different for the blokes inside the tarp, cause their, their room might be down to freezing, but it’s not down to sub freezing, where as mine outside could be sub, sub zero, and I guess I found that’s what I had to do.

Yeah.

Well they happened to have an in, incoming barrage of rounds at the time, so we were sort of sheltering from them. And you had to be careful you weren’t getting in somebody else’s weapon pit, you know, just common courtesy. But incoming rounds

that, I don’t think it affected us a hell of a lot, but it did make you realise these blokes were working, working very closely. We could also see across the valley where they dropped napalm onto the enemy, airplane would fly in over and drop a big torpedo shaped thing. It would hit the ground and just burst into flame, and I said to the infantry blokes “What do you find when you get over there?” He said, “People will be still sitting in the same position as they were, when

they died, or before they died.” He said it was so instantaneous and the heat was so intensive, it must have reacted on them a hell of a lot, you don’t like that sort of thing.

It just confirmed, I suppose would be the right word, confirmed what we were,

we were taught, we were taught this is what was going on up there, the reason is you’re down here doing these things, is to get these jeeps back, or these vehicles back to the front line. And that was the reasoning behind it, I think. We went up there to, to, not to sticky beak, but to understand the problems, I think it, I think it should happen more often.

Yeah, I’ll talk about the other conflicts later on.

Many and varied, they never lasted long. We had a, a bloke named Parker, a fellow named McLeod. But Teddy Richards was our warrant officer. Teddy, Teddy was, was sort of the workshop ASM, Artithesis Sergeant Major and he had his finger on the pulse of the whole

of the repair system, and he would report back to the workshop officer. Ted was ten years my senior in age, I would have thought, a thorough gentlemen, never too busy to sit down and talk about their home problems and things like that. And he finished up getting a citation of some sort from the Americans,

he deserved every bit of it, he. The sergeants were, this Sammy Lee used to get pissed every, every Friday night, he made that part of the stipulation, I get drunk every Friday, don’t put me on duty Friday nights, it’s my night, and he had enough personality to get away with it. There was Shorty Lind, he was another sergeant, Kevin, Kevin another sergeant,

they were all good guys. Sam, Sam was on the ball six days a week, he was a gun tiffy, so I didn’t liaise with him on that. But he’d come in on Friday night, and he’d sing “I’m in the mood for love,” “oh go away Sam, leave us alone.” And good old Sam would go in and fall into a

weapon pit or so on, “I’m down, I’m down, I’m up again, I’m up again,” he was just a character, he kept the morale going along well. But you want a clown or two, don’t you.

Oh yes, we, that’s one of the reasons we backed out too. You’d be trying to have a quiet game of darts or a game of cards or something, and these people would be up there.

They weren’t supposed to be drunk, I don’t know where they were getting their grog from, but they were, if they weren’t drunk, they were pretty poor singers. And we found it far better to move out and work out of our tent. And we used to have our own, I don’t know if we sang along, but we had our own amusements. A couple of them I haven’t told you about, Johnny Long was a con man

from way back, he was a vehicle mechanic. He organised a way of getting beer to the British Embassy, and storing it into the British Embassy garage, because nobody was going to look there. Then we’d flog it off to the Yanks at an exorbitant price, so that was OK. He introduced, as soon as I arrived there, as we were good friends, he introduced me, he said, “I want ten dollars from you, you’re now part of the syndicate.” So anyhow, the provos [military police]

got, the provos got to hear of it, so they raided the British Embassy we thought we were safe, we thought nobody would raid the British Embassy, they raided the British Embassy and confiscated all our grog. We thought you know, that’s pretty rough, because you know, a lot of our savings went into that, and they actually paid us back cost price, NAAFI reimbursed us cost price. So we didn’t get fined, didn’t get charged, and didn’t get our

grog sold. So there was all sorts of funny little tricks that went on. It also helped to make your, your day go by with a little bit of something silly going on, yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

I think they left Teddy Richards alone, so they therefore didn’t tread into his territory. But they were available, they more likely were working on, I don’t know what they were working on, but they could be working on planning and different administrative problems. There was one, wasn’t one of our lads, it was one of the Brit blokes got a ‘Dear John’[letter informing that a relationship is over]

from his girlfriend, he went up the tent line, got a round out and fired it through his head. And the round went through the toilet as well, there’s a bloke sitting on the toilet at the time, and he didn’t have any laxette trouble after that. But, you know, it was a terrible scene, but somebody had to, somebody made a light remark. But when we saw this poor bloke,

hand-stitched in sailcloth, and the tailor that did it did a beautiful job of tidying him up, and he was put into, I think an unmarked grave in Pusan, because he suicided, the Brits were very strict on anything like that. But that, that sent a shudder through the camp, but the reason I

brought that up, that would have meant that an officer really should, in any position that should be, that he would go down and comfort the, the tent, the people that were his mates, that they should have been cared for. And I don’t know, I don’t know, I was a private soldier, I was a craftsman, and so I didn’t know what the, what the senior NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] and that would do, but it would be a pretty awful thing, so.

But, broken marriages right through the army, my army career, had always been dogged, you know, dogged along, tempers what I lost in Vietnam of people for, bad marriages, bad marriage breakdowns. I’m not saying the blokes were all that pure, but you, it seems to be

worse when the, when your partner lets you down.

Oh yeah, but there was a warrant officer, I won’t mention his name. No, he wasn’t a warrant officer, he was a corporal and he would go out with anything, as long as it moved. And I said to him one day, “You’re not playing it fair dinkum to your wife, are you?”

He said, “Mind your own bloody business.” I said, “Well I might only be a craftsman, but I think your attitude is bloody wrong, and I think you’re…” You know. His wife wrote to say that she went to a dance, and he went right off, and I said, that’s lack of trust, you know. If you see something wrong in it, it’s only because it’s the sort of thing that you’d do. Anyhow, we had quite a tiff.

And that was, you know, that wasn’t unusual, but that’s where warrant officers and people like that should come in, not, not a, a craftsman, but I think you have your moral standards, and I’m not perfect, but I respect the, the, what these people should do and should not do. Bad example of the man too, I felt.

Yes. Yeah, that’s you know, when you’re in the frontline and getting shot at, and things like that, or even in the workshops, there are time when the tensions are such that perhaps, it would be justifiable

relief of tensions.

I couldn’t speak for all officers, of course, but I know that several of the officers got into trouble. I know that one officer, in fact his wife, his mother was running a brothel, and his wife was one,

one of the workers, working ladies, and he got called back to Australia, and I knew him very well. He’d had about three marriages, mind you, he played up with anything he could find, so you, sauce for the goose, sort of thing. I don’t know just how

bitter he was, he obviously doesn’t come up to a warrant officer, or a major doesn’t go to a captain, to tell him his home problems.

On the back of it, I’ve got the full technical detail.

The Scammell, the Scammell recovery vehicle was designed

for heavy, to recover heavy equipment. It is a, has got a 6LW Gardiner Diesel engine, and a clash type gearbox. It’s handbrake is unusual in the fact it’s a ratchet handbrake, that you can jack it on tighter, you can pull it up fairly tight. It’s got a,

a large winch, which actually lays on its side, and it’s only driven by the four, four wheels, it’s not driven by the front wheels. The mudguards on the front actually are fitted, fitted to the knuckle, the steering knuckle so that when you turn, you actually, your mudguards

turn, so your mudguards sort of swing from side to side.

I don’t know there’s much more that I can tell.

Oh, anything from the brakes

to the winch, the, the engine if I had to do anything on the engine. I remember we had, the brakes were quite a big brake drum, very heavy to lift on and off. But so, so it was general maintenance that we had to do.

Oh just fair wear and tear. We never had any. Sorry, we never, the term used, we never had any major unit assemblies to be replaced, no gear boxes, discs or engines. So the vehicle was a very reliable vehicle.

Oh yes.

For the, the lightweight QL truck, which was the two and a half tonne cargo vehicle, that’s just like a civilian vehicle except it’s painted khaki, and it will give you the same problems as an International or a Ford or a

Chevrolet. So the jeeps were comparatively reliable, there’s, they used, they’d just wear out, the, the jeep was going to go back to the production lines in Kure and Hiro in Japan and be rebuilt, same as the QL.

I don’t know what would happen if a Scammell broke down, more than likely, I don’t know, really don’t know, cause we never had any trouble with them.

I, I can’t think of, the jeep of course, would be included in that. But I never worked on any of the

smaller, none of the odd-bod vehicles. Like the carpenter’s shop that I spoke about before, I remember had designers who were cutting timber into sleepers, and, and drilling holes and all that sort of thing into timber, that was a big carpenter. When, when we were discussing it, it must have been an English one, because of the

distributor problem we had with that. And the Cos Crane, that’s been bought up before, and the Scammell, that’s about it. And sorry, I, I didn’t personally work on them, but there were carriers, I think there was an Oxford carrier and a Bren carrier, but I didn’t work on those.

It’s not dissimilar to the crane that you see working on a bridge site or something like that, or lowering big pipes into the ground, it’s just a moveable, I can’t, wouldn’t know what to call it, the actual hoist, not the hoist. The actual structure that

takes the weight, the gib. The, the gib would be, at least do a portion of the circle, I doubt it would do a full circle. It would be used for lifting vehicles out of areas where they had been bogged right down to the, nothing else could get at them. Mainly for engineering tasks, bridge building and that sort of thing.

About all, I never actually was involved with them in the field.

Well jeeps we were using as our axe, they would be seen anywhere. I had,

there’s a photograph of me somewhere there with a Chev, a Chev Blitz was a garage loading, and that one was capable of doing cut valve seats, grind valve, compressor, even did spray painting, grinders and drills. So that, that’s what we called machinery loading.

And, or garage loading in this case. Machinery loading they had a lathe instead of the grinder, telecommunication equipment had special, special tools for testing and working on electronics. The Armament bloke would have one that would work, be designed to work on rifles and, and automatic weapons.

So there was a variety of garage type equipment that you’d expect, and workshop type equipment. And they, they were based in, they’d be dug in, in most cases and sandbagged, so that if a mortar came in, try and protect it a bit. Oh we were all allocated a vehicle to maintain,

and mine was the Chevy Garage loading.

Oh chasing spare parts was a… if, the Americans had a change of attitude. When we were in Korea,

the Americans were, at that stage, very generous, give you tyres and tubes. I went to get a, a 50 calibre browning barrel from them, finished up coming back with a 50 cow browning, complete with two spare barrels. They were just so generous that they were embarrassing. In the, in Vietnam, just for immediate relationship, I wanted

a bumper for a recovery vehicle, a bumper bar. Not only did they charge me for the bumper bar, but they charged me for taking it off. That went against the Australian budget. So a tremendous change. In Korea, the equipment was good, the American equipment was good. In Vietnam, all the stuff was clapped out, they just let them rot, you know, just worked them to the last,

because they knew they were going to go for the dive, so they didn’t want to leave anything decent behind.

Oh we, I couldn’t give you names now, but we knew where the American workshops were, and we’d go to the American workshops, and they’d give you a, a pretty well a free hand. So that

they would be, could be an hour’s drive away. Can’t help you much more than that.

Oh the, the roads, even when it was frozen, the roads were very dusty. The jeeps that we had to move around with in the wet weather, in the, in the

cold weather, were fully curtained, and they had heaters. So you know, it was comparatively comfortable. In the summer when it would be all tarpaulins off and just open to the wind, it would still be very dusty. The, the Americans, and in particular the Negroes, were very fast drivers, and driving like

bloody crazy, you know. So you had to, just kept your eye open if you knew there was anybody coming, you’d sort of just get out of their way. But we found if there was a push on, we were only involved in two major incidents where we looked like having to withdraw and move back. We had to get all our vehicles in convoy order,

all fuelled up, ready to move. We used to, we used to fuel the cars, the vehicles up regularly, just to keep them topped, ready for an emergency. That, that would, during those two pushes that we were involved in, you would, you might be called out one night, moving out at

two o’clock in the morning. The Chev that I was looking after, wouldn’t, wouldn’t start one day, that was during the winter months. And I found that the petrol line from the petrol tank to the fuel pump, was blocked by a, by moisture, water getting in the petrol and freezing. So I had to take the pipe off and heat, make a fire and heat the pipe up and sort of,

empty the water out. And it caused a bit of concern, because we were on about two hours notice to move, I, I could see myself back there on my own, I didn’t like that idea at all. But we did get them, get them going, we had no, we. At one stage we changed from one side of the road to the other, it was all, all a move was, but it was part of a training exercise, to make sure that you were capable of moving. The

second time, we came back to the same spot we left in, so we weren’t to know that at the time, so we went out and did a big loop and came back in. And you would be allowed, the unit itself would be allowed to be off, off line for maybe 15 or 16 hours or something, and then we were expected to be back online again, ready to take tanks, or ready to take vehicles in.

Oh yes, tremendously. Time passed a point, is the term used by the transport people, so that the front vehicle would go past at that point, and the rear vehicle would go past it 35 minutes later. So you would say that, that road is

occupied fully, for 35 minutes or maybe two hours to get your one unit past a point. Yeah the planning, the logistical planning of things like that is quite great, because when you get there, somewhere along the line you’ve got to get food, and petrol and oil and tyres repaired and all that sort of

stuff, so there’s a lot, not just. In some cases, it’s been known that when a vehicle broke down, they pushed it off the road, they would, that was in New Guinea in particular, where the roads were narrow. And if a vehicle broke down, all you were doing was holding a tremendous convoy up, just trying to get ammunition. So its, I make that point not, its not the same in that, but

similar where you’ve got to get past a particular area. Oh, you’ve got recovery vehicles to tow tail-end Charlie.

Oh it’d be headquarters, I wouldn’t know who to, it’d be, no, I wouldn’t hazard a guess, but it would be our headquarters. It doesn’t only affect, you know, a movement like that doesn’t only affect you, but it affects the neighbouring

armies, on either side of you. So, so that you’d, so somebody in, in planning would have to be pretty switched on. It’d be more than likely, our, our Royal Australian Army Service Corps, or the American, the English service corps, more than likely to be some lieutenant colonel or colonel or something, overall charge of the

movement procedures.

Well we, normally I would have said that we would report back to the sergeant, but we used to, I think we all, we were such a small unit that we reported back to Teddy Richards, Warrant Officer T Richards,

and Teddy would be the go-between between us and the rest of the RAEME workshops.

Under the, the division. I’m

just trying to think of the name of it, it was a, I’ll think of it in a minute, the name of the division. British Commonwealth based workshops, no I can’t tell you at the moment.

That would be up in the, in a, now, it would be, what they refer to as an echelon, it would be up, there were

a rear echelon, and a forward echelon and there’d be a sort of intermediate echelon, and I’d say most of the headquarter people, would be in the intermediate one. The arms people would be in the forward echelons.

Well recovery, recovery, what they did is they put all the recovery Scammells and, and Diamond T’s and whatever, all into one, one command. And then they’d be based at bridgehead, bridgeheads where the crossing the major streams. Some of the streams would make the River Murray look like a toy,

huge streams. And so they, they would be there to, especially when the raining was monsoonal, there would be no traction or something like that, you’d get these things and they’d be winched, winched by the Scammells or the Diamond T’s. So they, for the first time, wasn’t a standard procedure for the British army nor ourselves, to have all recovery vehicles collected

to one point to be under singular control. But it was a logical thing to do, yeah.

I think the very worst case, I didn’t see it fortunately, was a truckload of Koreans, all standing, crammed into a truck, and the truck went off the side of the road and turned over,

into a minefield. You just couldn’t, you couldn’t see anything worse than that situation, trying to get the bodies, mangled bodies out. The fact that they were Koreans didn’t make any difference to it, they were still human, and be a pretty awful mess. But they, they used to do that in their vehicles, they used to stand up, you see it in films now in India and places like that, where they stand up there, and they,

a lot more people get on if you all stand up. But pretty awful.

No, no. That was the recovery people’s responsibility. They, you know, if there’s, if there’s an incident in Vietnam as well. If there’s a situation where the recovery vehicle

was out, it could be out with an escort of two jeeps, with six infantrymen, or eight infantrymen. And they would go to the site, and try and place themselves in a position to give them full protection to the recovery mechanic, to go out there and tie, tie up his casualty, in such a way that they can tie it back to your..

Recovery mechanics were quite often on their own, a very onerous sort of a job. You know, when you’re in the workshops and you’ve got 60, 70, 80 people there, and you go into a recovery unit where you’ve only got two men to a vehicle.

Not, not in those units.

A chap decided to go off his nana [go crazy], and walk up and down the road firing indiscriminately around the place. The police, the provos came in and,

and put him under guard, and I had the job of being one of the escorts to take him from our workshop sort of area, back through down to, to Pusan, and then by boat to Japan, and put him in the hands of the provos in Japan. I found that a very interesting exercise, he was a hell of a nice guy, he just, he just couldn’t cope with it.

So when, we were his escorts, so when we were having a beer, we’d slip a beer into him, and you know, make him feel a little bit human, I don’t know what ever happened to him in the end. But you, you get crazies, and there’s one bloke going like round on a scooter, scooting, walking, just going up and down the street, purely and simply to be noted. It’s like

‘MASH’ [American television series set in the Korean War], it’s anything to be noticed to be sent home. And some of the blokes I suppose were genuine.

None at all, he seemed as, to me, there was two of us, one of us had to be with him at all times. And the main thing we had to do, was stop him from getting

his hands on rifles, or to go off the deep end. When we went on the ship, there was a, yeah, I’ve got it written down somewhere, doesn’t matter, can’t think of the name of the ship. But it had, it was a Japanese or it would have been Japanese ship, it was very strongly smell, smell

of paint. When you were in the cabins or anywhere else, this strong smell, and from the galley, I’m not a good sailor. From the galley, came the smell of, you know, cabbage cooking or something like that. It was quite nauseating. The trip across was magnificent, through the, through the Japan inland sea, all the islands and things like that, it was absolutely beautiful. And when I got to the other side, I said to the,

the bloke that I had to report to, “Can you give me two days off, so I can do my Christmas shopping,” and he said, “Yeah, no trouble at all.” So I got two days off extra to, to do that. And when I got back to my unit, didn’t I get into trouble. I said, “Well I got permission,” and he said, “You didn’t get it from us.”

Oh, that’s too long ago, we just treated him as a digger,

the same as, “How you going today mate?” We wouldn’t, wouldn’t touch on touchy subjects. We’d just let him know where we were going and what we were doing now and when we get there, what we would be doing, sort of try and instil in him a bit of support, I suppose. The other bloke with me, we were both doing the same things, we were both sort of making, making it a holiday for ourselves a bit,

but at the same time getting this bloke back in the best condition we could get him.

Crikey.

Well, there was a, a NAAFI canteen and I think there was an Australian canteen as well, that used to provide. You’d, you’d go in there and there’d be,

I can’t show you. Judy.

Plates, dinner set, and we got Judy a 12, 12-piece, 12 person set of plates, so she had 12 dinner plates, 12 bread and butter plates. And they were ordered, it was done in a light reddy colour,

nice scallops, some of them were dragons, some of them were tigers and some of them were quite horrible. But these looked a bit classy, and I got it for Judy for her 21st birthday. And it arrived in Australia and the post office rang up and said, “For God’s sake, come and help, clear this,” about one box to every two plates or something. And there were dozens and dozens of boxes, and they had nowhere to put them all. So they, Judy’s father had to do several trips

to get them all home. But that was, see you could, you’d buy anything from Mikimoto Pearls, Noritake China wear, all the, the little dogs and stuff like that. There was a tremendous amount of porcelain type things that they had,

Satsuma wear was one that I was sorry I missed out on. The Satsuma wear, when it’s, when it’s cooked, it’s got a craze right through it, and I looked at it and said, “Oh something’s gone wrong with the glazing.” But that was part of the very important things in that. But yeah, so, you can get jackets with the lion on the back, or, “Back from Devil’s Elbow,” or somewhere. The Yanks used to all walk around with these great big coats on, “Back from

Hellfire,” or somewhere. The Australians didn’t think that was very good, so we never, never did that.

Oh yes, that was the ration people.

Cigarettes, soap, razor blades,

sugar, any of the kind of like salt, pepper, any of that, we wouldn’t have access to that, but the cooks did. There was a Australian small ships group in Kure and there was a boat being unloaded, and the

workshops people look after the watercraft, just got into the line, pulled up, and got a, got it loaded up with rice or whatever. And then they came back and then ducked off and sold all their, their produce on the black market and some of the stuff was worth a fortune. And to the best of my knowledge, they never got caught. They were just another vehicle, vehicle in

the convoy. But their, I the, soap was amazingly popular, so was cigarettes. The people would get the cigarettes, cut them in halves, make a little spacer block, put the spacer block in the packet, put the half cigarettes in, and they’d get two packets of cigarettes. And they’d sell them to the girls, or trade them to the

girls, they’d get terrible upset, cause they’d been conned. But, there was some pretty shift people over there, the black market was fairly rife.

Well the only, I think I’ve told you where we, where we used to store our beer in the British Embassy, I’ve told you about that, haven’t I.

That’s about the only time that we. Sometimes you could do a special deal with the spirits, the whiskeys, or the Yanks used to like their spirits, they couldn’t get any. We noticed that, we didn’t flog off petrol or tyres or boots or shoes.

Yeah, but you wouldn’t want to flog off a 50 cow Browning and get somebody to return it to you, by muzzle first, yeah. No, our blokes were basically honest. We had a vehicle, it was an interesting vehicle that we haven’t spoken about, it was a Russian jeep. And it was designed off the Ford A design, with, the,

even with a fuel tank above the top of the engine, so it was gravity fed fuel to the, to the, it didn’t have a fuel pump. And it was, it was initialled 041-Nort-E, and that was our, we’d pull up, and the Yanks would say, “What’s your number, mate?” and you’d say 041-Nort-E. Ned Kelly or. You’re filling out forms, you know, the Australians were great at, Ned Kelly was the most,

most known person in the army, I think. So they had their fun.

Oh that would have been over-run in the, in the movement somewhere, and being a workshop we’d recover it back, then retained it, which was, was spoils of war, but it wasn’t. I don’t think there was anything terribly wrong about it, nobody ever tried to flog it off, or anything.

No we, we kept to our own weapons, we wouldn’t want their rations anyhow, their clothing you wouldn’t want to be dressed up looking like one, so basically no.

Well I was there in ’52. That’s not quite true, ’52 until about March ’53. We stopped the push, the push going backwards and forwards, but there was some hellish, hellish battles still on. The Glorious

Gloucesters lost about every man in one battle, that was just before I got there. The Black Watch lost a tremendous number of troops too. We came to the conclusion that the Chinese were a fairly fair race, if a bloke was seen going to the toilet,

they wouldn’t ping him. Whereas the Canadians, if the Canadians saw anybody move anywhere they shot them. And then, then there’d be a retaliation, as soon as they did something like that, the Chinese would retaliate on, onto the Canadians. We had Turks there too, as an interesting point. They were, the Australians were always considered if they had the Turks on their left or their right, that particular flank

was secure. They, they gave full credit to the Turks. Not the same with South Koreans, nor with the Americans, they didn’t like the Americans alongside them, Americans liked to be ten miles down the road, before they let you know they were going. So yes.

I think amongst the Australians, it was so. They were a pretty fiendish lot, and death didn’t seem to hold any, any fear for them. They wore very thick padded jackets and our stem gun or our Owen gun or whatever equivalent we had there, couldn’t possibly be

stopped by the, just the thickness of their winter uniforms. I, they, they respected the Chinese I think, and giving them that respect, see we never shot at the blokes when they went to the toilet, or if a bloke was going to the canteen, go and get his tucker or something like that, they never shot at them. When, when

the war, when they were, they were in conflict, and there, no, no, there was no holes barred. I, I’m not the man to ask too much about that really.

I would have thought the Americans, I’d say in a

hushed voice.

Well I think they weren’t well trained, a lot of the people in there were, I’m not sure whether they were conscripts or not, but it came across in the same style of thing that they were not there of their own volition. And they

were prone to panic. I don’t think they had the support, the Australians were always supportive of each other, and the Canadians were better than the Americans, South Koreans were not good, and half the time you didn’t know who’s side they were on, anyhow.

I think I’m going above what my knowledge is.

Only one, that was a general, it was on Anzac Day 1952. There was a huge big valley

had been all cleared, and there were two battalions of Australian troops in that valley. There were some British troops that were ex-Gallipoli in that, in the, on the parade and the Turks were on the parade. It was a wonderful sensation to, to see people who were deadly enemies in one war, that could pull together and be so well thought of in another. And the general, a little, short

stumpy bloke, he came up to us and said, “Good day, all,” or, “Good morning, all” whatever, and we said, “Who are you sir?” He said, “I’m from the Turkish Forces.” He had enough English to be able to talk to us, and he was interested in talking to us. He did a very good PR [public relations] job, and all I could say, that their discipline was well, world renowned, their discipline was, was excellent, and that they

fought to the last man. And this general was saying how proud he was to be associated with an Anzac Day parade, with the Australian, with his previous enemy, and I think it did a lot of, lot of good work.

Well unlike the Infantry, my frostbite was brought about by standing still. You’d be working on vehicle, you might be working on a component, an engine, or

front wheel or something, and the ground would, the temperature would, could possibly have been, I said, I said the other day Fahrenheit, 42 degrees below freezing, which is a lot colder than a refrigerator. And you, you, you footwear was rubber-soled, and then there was a nylon foam

pad, and then you wore two pair of socks, but you, you weren’t walking around to get circulation, in my, in my case. And you, you keep your hands warm by having that fire that I was talking about, that four gallon drum there with some wood in it, just burning away quietly, and a mesh over the top, and put your spanners on there, so that when you were working, you’d use a warm

spanner until it started to stick on a, on the perspiration. That’s just a sort of intro to why, how come my feet, standing still, the cold used to come up through the floor, through the ground and just come up to your ankles. And my toes and my instep and my heels went black. Then

when you took your shoes and socks off, there would be pussy, mucousy-stuff around both feet where the skin has burnt away with the cold. I don’t believe it was so painful, I think it was more dead, numb, than it was painful, because I didn’t take any time off from work with it.

And I can’t remember, I, I went to the RAP with it, so I guess the RAP bloke would treat it. But it was recorded in my DVA paperwork, that I got frostbite and it was accepted as war-caused. And this leg now, I can walk from here down to the school, when I get down there, that leg gives me grief. And that’s through bad circulation,

they said that they can’t, they could operate, but they couldn’t guarantee any result, so best left alone. So I’m still, still wearing that as an, as an ailment, not self-inflicted. It, frostbite can be considered self-inflicted too, but when, when you’re, you’d have to do something pretty bloody stupid. It’s like sunburn,

that can be self-inflicted as well. But anyhow, they’ve accepted mine as war-caused, and yeah.

No, it would be over a period of time, you know, my feet would have turned red or something, and inflamed first. Then gradually got to the stage of bad circulation.

No, not there, that’s part of another story.

I was in Korea, sorry in New Guinea. And I only had about five, six staff and the kunai grass was as high as this roof, and they were cutting it down with, with big rotary mowers.

And we had to take the safety guards to let the stuff spew out as you were cutting it, because there was just so much of it. And we were short-staffed, so I was up to date with my, with my paperwork and stuff, so I went out to the workshop floor and rebuilt one of the machines. I was just doing a final tune-up, bending over doing the final governor tune, and I was called to the phone,

and I spun around to answer the phone, and stuck my foot straight into the blade, all nice new shiny bits. It opened my foot up from there across, cutting off these two toes here, and cutting the tendons of these two others, so I’ve only got one, that toe is the only one that works, that big fellow there.

I would have thought it was the bottom of the foot.

Yeah. And I was, within three quarters an hour of the accident, I was on the operating theatre on the table, I can still remember feeling the pain as they’re scrubbing the grass and stuff out of the wound. So they must have got into me a little bit early. But the, they did a marvellous job, I’ve been cross-country running and everything with it, gammy

leg, went back into Korea with it, the same leg. But that’s where I was meant to be downgraded.

Rape would have been fairly common, but I, I never knew of any, personally. Oh yes I did.

You saw those four little kids in the, that I said were put onto mama-san, some bastard raped one, one of the younger ones of them. And he was immediately charged with, you know, indecency. There was this no cover-up at all, there was no, they just wouldn’t tolerate it, it just was not

done, it wasn’t done, it was very un-British and very un-Australian. So I don’t know whatever happened to the person concerned, but I was cut up, and I heard it could have happened after I left there. I got cut up when I heard that one of those little kids had been mutilated, not mutilated, but raped. But there, there are prostitutes, prostitutes right up to the frontline,

pretty well, I suppose that business is business. But I didn’t hear of anybody. Oh yes, one humorous one, if you can have a humorous one. A New Zealander who’s name I shall not mention, came up to us and said, “If anybody’s been looking for me, I’ve been with you all day.” “Yeah right-o John, she’ll be right.” Next thing we know he’s in jail. What’s he charged with?

Borrowing his boss’s jeep without permission, shooting up a brothel and demanding sex, and when he came out, somebody had stolen his jeep, so he had to steal another jeep, so he, he’s charged with stealing two jeeps. Anyhow he finished up being found guilty, and Johnny, he was with a Canadian, and the

Canadians were vicious MPs [military police]. And he put his arm under the window and got somebody to slam the window onto his arm, smashed the bone here. Then he got medically evacuated to Japan, which is a lot softer, lot softer cop. And the last I heard of him, he was still in Japan doing time, so it does happen.

Oh I think it

would be. The girls were looking for sex for, for financial gain of course. And the blokes, more than likely reckoned it was fair game to, if they, to rape them. So it was just a.. I think there’s nothing much worse than rape, next door to being whipped and murdered,

that’s my humble opinion of rape. And I think people, we won’t go into the football problem. But I think people who get themselves into that sort of situation, are partially wrong as well, they should never allow themselves to be placed in that position. But the way the kids are these days, where four o’clock in the morning is about time to say goodnight. And I think you just, you

leave yourself open to, to somebody spiking your drinks or, that’s my opinion.

We used to get regular films and the blokes used to say, that you go and see one of those films, it would put you off for at least quarter of an hour.

So there was, one, one bloke was talking about, “You blokes would stick your dick where it’s wrong.” And somebody said, “I, I wouldn’t stick my walking stick where some of you blokes put your dicks.” And one bloke said from the back, “No wonder you haven’t been enjoying it, sir.” But they were a pretty rough

old crew. But they’d get regular lectures. I don’t know how much good it did. There were, on the one hand they were telling you not to, and on the other hand before you go out, you go to the blue light place and pick up your, your contraceptives and special

blue light kit was produced for washing yourself afterwards, so that you’re sort of sterile. So one minute they’re telling you not to, and the next minute they’re telling you what to do, when you do it, so I don’t know.

In some cases, better than 100% of the unit would have venereal disease. That might be one bloke four times, three and four, none, but it does represent a figure, that

100 in a unit, 100 cases of venereal disease. And that was, the people came, coming to Japan and Korea who came through the Philippines, if they had sex at all, they were, they were almost guaranteed that they would be loaded with something. And not all nice stuff either, not all just little gonorrhoeas or something, some other nasties. There was one

called the black pox, that I don’t know to this day what it meant, but the people were sometimes sent to a, to a particular location and left there to die, because they couldn’t do anything with them. Whether there’s any truth in that you don’t know, but you know, with our knowledge of today with AIDS [Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome] and things like that, you quite possible say it was feasible that it happened. So, I, I think,

I don’t know, I’ve never asked my son, but good question. But I would think the people in the Australian army as it is now, would be totally au fait with AIDS and, and the various diseases. There is some talk of about 11% of people in Australia have got venereal disease, which is a fairly high sort of a figure. Well it’s not as big as

90% or 100%, but it’s a very serious risk that people take.

You’d only ever see a mama-san in a brothel, but there’d be, there’d be heavies around the place, you could bet on it. Yeah.

I, I didn’t make a special effort to be knowledgeable on this. In, in Vietnam the venereal disease rate was terribly high, and I think it was, I told you before, I felt the Viet Cong were encouraging that, because of morale. A bloke’s got to have his injections every morning before he goes to work, or our blokes give him a hard time.

Yeah.

Just got treated for, just like having a cold. There was a fellow named Wren from Western Australia, and I think he had VD about 14 times or something. And they said it was very interesting, that three or four

blokes would, would take advantage of the, the prostitute. And two of them would get nothing, and one would get venereal disease, so some people more prone to getting that disease than the others. My grand-daughters shouldn’t hear this, I hope they never do, yes.

Well, it was a terrible, terrible time for them. Food was, was scarce, starvation. There weren’t, you

wouldn’t go down the street and pass a hotdog stand or anything, I mean there would be nowhere for them to pick up food. So somewhere along the line, they’d have to get rice from somewhere, and then they’d have to gather up wood from somewhere to cook the rice. I would say there’d be many a murder amongst themselves, there’d be absolutely no unity at all. They wouldn’t do anything, they were already fighting their brothers and sisters, the South Koreans and the North Koreans,

So it’d be brother against brother, in some cases.

Yes, that was in, in Seoul. I don’t know what the kid did, but this bloke was holding him by the collar, and hitting him across the small of the kidneys, kidney area of the back with a baton.

And I, I just instinctively moved and my blokes grabbed me and pulled me back, and said, “Keep, keep out of it, it’s none of your business.” So I found out afterwards what he said was right. I saw one little kid up to his waist in monsoonal rain, and the water was rushing down the workshops, through the, the cesspit and out onto the road, and down the road. And he was

picking up bread that had, that had been treating that soil with human effluent forever, so what was being washed, washed down, would be human excrement as well as, as well as bits of bread and stuff, and he was feeding his face. And I said, “What can we do about that?” and the bloke said, “Nothing, you do anything at all and you encourage others. Next thing you’ll be over-run, the refugees will over-run you. You must keep away from it,

you must not be involved.” And I came to the conclusion that was correct. You, you, common decency makes you feel that you needed to do something, but common sense said afterwards, you can’t do anything that’s going to prolong. You’re stopping them from getting cholera and all sorts of diseases from eating the bloody bread, but you,

might stop cholera, but you don’t, don’t, if you let them eat it, they’d die of cholera instead of dying of starvation, I suppose. But it’s a, it’s a dreaded thing of war, to see what happens to the refugees, I think we all, all of us could say that in Vietnam. I only heard of one

case of rape in Vietnam, which I’m not going to talk about, it was a gang rape. And all I could say it was a shame to the unit concerned. I can understand people being hated for that sort of intolerant behaviour.

Yeah. It’s hearsay to start with, so I’m not sure that. It, it was told to me, the only thing that they ever saw wrong, was an APC [armoured personnel carrier] crew drop the back gate down of their APC,

manhandled a woman into the back of the APC, all took advantage of her, one or many times, I don’t know. And then, then they were driving at the time, they dropped her off anywhere in the bush, wherever they had finished with her, just opened the door and pushed her out. It’s, which unit that was, I wouldn’t have any idea, don’t want to know. Because it’s something

we can’t be very proud of. But that maybe a thought.

I believe so.

Oh, bragged about, actually. You know, they thought it was a bloody good thing. Yeah.

They had, well you, you were taught, we were taught strongly that the North Vietnamese were horrible people, beheaded our, the head cheese [person in command] and all the things they did wrong. And I have no doubt they did, they used terror as a weapon. But it doesn’t mean there is not innocent people amongst them. And the Mi Li massacre, I can understand it,

frustrated and built up, came to attack, don’t let anything move, shoot the kids, they don’t say shoot the kids, they say shoot anything that moves. So you can understand the hatred that people would have towards the Americans in particular. I have not heard of anything in the Australian, other than that particular one incident, never heard of anything of the Australians have, committed any

war crime. Because it is a war crime to do something like that. That’s all I want to say about that.

No, no, just people telling stories. I think round the, round the bar type stories.

I don’t think, I don’t, I don’t know what. To me it came second-hand obviously. Well I can assure you it was second-hand. But I can’t vouch for. See it may have happened, she may have been raped once, but the story said that they all enjoyed her.

Yeah, pretty awful.

I arrived home early May 1953. We were married in July of 1953, so that would be

yep, yeah, before March anyhow.

Oh yes, yes, I was with 102 Field Workshops and there would have been a group of us, I guess, that would have be going home on that same flight. So that’s where the bloke said,

“Where do you want the dart?” “Up there.” Whack, straight through the middle of the fingernail. Sergeants mess with a few grogs in, in. Yeah, I, I wasn’t a drinker, the only time I got drunk was twice in, in Vietnam. Once was when I was introduced to different LAD [Light Aid Detachment] commanders, everywhere I went, they gave me a beer.

So I finished up drinking about six beers, and six beers for me is a lot of beer. So I wasn’t very well the next day there. And the next time it happened, as the warrant officer said to me “Skipper, I’ll look after you.” Bloody bastard looked after me all right, everything was laced with vodka. And I was violently ill, but I was sufficiently au fait in the thinking, that I’ll never let this bastard know what happened. So I didn’t say a word to him,

and I came back and went to bed, and got up next morning and put on a brave face, didn’t say a word to him. So I thought, I’m not going to give him any satisfaction whatsoever. I would like to have seen him charged, because I reckon it’s a rotten thing to do to anybody. The same as spiking a drink, well it is spiking a drink, isn’t it. If you’re putting vodka in yeah.

No, I knew who it was, I just decided, that he thought it was very funny, and I decided that I wasn’t going to let him know that he upset me, but I did get cross with him. When he came back to Australia, they promoted him to captain. And I said to the bloke who, who arranged his promotion, I said, “I hope you get him to work, you deserve him, I think he’s a

bloody mongrel.” That didn’t go over too well. I was just drifting around, getting carried away.

Yes.

Oh yes, I had a bundle of beautiful letters, and Judy’s Mum tidied them up, they

all got burnt. I’ve got some letters out here that I’ve managed to retrieve, I can show them to you later.

Oh critical, vital. Judy would write to me, better than two times a week. I’d write to her. And Judy was working for the armed regiment

at the time, so she received the mail. And sometimes she’d get my letters and when she read them, she’d know more about what was going on, than the boss. And then Judy was called in by one particular difficult person, and said, “What’s this?” and Judy just said, “Well, it’s a letter from my husband, and it’s private, and it’s not telling me any, any tactical,

information or anything like that, there’s nothing wrong with what he’s saying.” And, but, oh Judy can stand up for herself, she did.

No, no letters were censored. That’s what Judy had to say, they hadn’t been censored, there was nothing happening. There was nothing that I’d said in the letter

that would give the, the Viet Cong any information at all. How you’d get the information from Judy, I don’t know. It would be pretty difficult to do.

From Japan.

Yeah.

I’ve got it all written down. But just going by memory, I came back in ’53, we were married in ’53, Kim was born in ’56. During ’53 and ’56, I did a six month advanced vehicle course, and a three months artithesis vehicles course,

so that was another nine months of separation, so Judy’s had 17 months in, in Vietnam, in China, in Japan etcetera, so there was 17 months separation there. Then there was nine months separation in me going to schools, during which time Judy was organising the building of a house, the furnishing of a house, the carpets,

and also, we had one weekend together and Jim came along a little bit later. And we were then posted to, no, yeah posted to Puckapunyal, I was with 102 Field Workshops at Puckapunyal. And Judy caught up with me about four months after that, because there was always about a four months wait in those days

for accommodation, so there was a further four months break there. We, we moved to Pucka from, from Pucka I was at 102 Field workshops, and then I got a posting order to go to New Guinea for two, for two years.

As a small workshop component,

my job is to be a technical advisor to the commander, and also run the, the workshops area, and carry out trade repair work, where necessary. Then to advise the commander of the state of repair of his equipment throughout New Guinea, I had to go to all the outstations to inspect the equipments there,

taking with me the armourer who would inspect all the rifles and small arms, automatic weapons. So we’d go round, not necessarily together, but we’d, he’d go off on a particular tour and I’d go and do a vehicle compressor, or any mechanical type generators or anything like that.

So once again, Judy would be left alone for, I’d be away for possibly two or three weeks at a time, not, not regularly, but enough to make life a bit difficult. It was during that time that I got, pardon, stones in the kidney and hospitalised for a while, pretty painful the old stones, if you’ve ever had them. And

we, we loved New Guinea, if things had been different, we would have liked to have soldiered on for a second term.

Oh they were, the officer, officer group for running the battalion, the PIR, the Pacific Island Regiment Battalion, and also the warrants officers and sergeants that did the quartermaster,

and staff sergeant. What, what would he be, I suppose clerical, chief clerk type job. I, I think they had two battalions, and one was eventually at Wewak, Vanamo, had a company of at Vanamo,

a company at Manus Island, and a CMF organisation in Medang and Rabaul, Lae. And the only part, the only time Judy accompanied me on anything like that, we went up to Rabaul for a, a week, we had a little wooden shack, a hip bath

for washing in, fresh vegetables, fresh cream, all the stuff you couldn’t get in Moresby. We never had milk in Moresby, we didn’t even get when we first got there, had frozen milk, we had powdered milk, that’s all we had. Cauliflowers would come up black, you’d cut all the black off and cook the rest. The rations were pretty dreadful, they used to smog the place out about two or three times a year with, with a

the smog all around the married quarters, all around the workshops. So you were sort of in an unhealthy, unhealthy climate, mosquitoes were dreadful, malaria was not much for, for the men, I don’t know why. It’s very interesting, the men had to have their sleeves down at, at five, sundown, women could go around in bikinis until, until nine o’clock at night.

But the fellows couldn’t complain about that. But health, health-wise there, I went out, we didn’t have the proper recovery equipment, truck, Studebaker truck was bogged down to the tray of the truck. So we got a winch, just an ordinary block and tackle, and we found a tree that looked to be pretty stable, we used that

as an anchor. And we sort of, couldn’t, we tried to move it and couldn’t move it. So we went and got five Land Rovers is all I could gather up. We tied the five Land Rovers tail to head, going out from the, from the truck and the winch, and we said, “Go,” and the bloke on the winch pulled hard, or the team on the winch pulled hard. And the five jeeps all roared into power and we gradually pulled, sucked it out of the ground.

And in, in doing so, I, the vehicle that I borrowed was the colonel’s, and on the way back, the tide had come in and I didn’t notice any difference in the height of the water. And I buried her, she went blub, blub, blub and stopped, stuffed his beautiful jeep. And we were a long way from the nearest, not that far from the nearest village. So we hiked down to the village and said, “We’re in trouble, can you

help us?” They said, “No trouble at all.” The, got the lackatoy out, put Ian McDonald and myself in the lackatoy, pushed out and the wind stopped, so they just put the oars back and went, cuddled up and went to sleep. And we were freezing, you’d be surprised how cold we really were out in the tropics. Anyhow we waited for some time, then a breeze came up.

We finished up coming into Torama Barracks, which was the PIR [Pacific Islands Regiment] headquarters and we got a lift home, back to, back to camp. And I had to go and salute the boss and say, “Sir, sorry about you jeep.” I think, I think we had, actually got it out somehow, I don’t know how, it was on the bank waiting to drain it off. So we had to go out then, and recover the jeep back, as well as the Studebaker. But,

we had very little equipment for, you know, recovery, so I got a Trewalla winch, which is about a 50 ton winch, and I, we bought that, had that sent up, and a few blocks and tackles and bits of rope and chains and a stuff. And a Bedford bus coming down from the highlands, came down, coming into Port Moresby, slipped into a monsoon

drain, the whole side of the big Bedford truck just rests on the ground, on the, on the side which is a cutaway. If you pull it forward, you tear the front out, if you pull it back, you tear the back out. So we looked at the problem and got a hydraulic jack, jacked it up a little bit, and then one, two, three push, and made the jack cut topple, and then you pick up two inches. And you back up again,

pull it back, another two inches. Eventually we got it out far enough, that we could get a driver into the driver’s seat, and just ease it out quietly, we got it back without any damage at all. One of my prides and joys to say that, you know, it actually got back with hardly any damage whatsoever. If that’s correct English. So we did recovery, and with the AM Fern, the

fast supply boat, I told you about that, 3, 3 GMC diesel engines driving three exposed props. Constant trouble with, with that hitting logs and reefs and things like that. That was also very interesting, and also not very much equipment with which to do any repairs.

Oh yeah.

Valleys of it. At Manus Island, they’d take a brand new duck out, undo the bow, the water, water was one of the deepest in the world around Manus Island. You used to undo the bow, and let it sink, and that was part of the contract with the Americans, they didn’t take any of the stuff home to, for sale. That was, Manus Island was,

disposed a lot of our equipment, and up in the big deep valleys out from Moresby, there was vehicles were driven to the top, knocked into neutral, jumped off, let it go, and crashed down into this valley. There wasn’t one engine that hadn’t been stolen. You’d go down there, clamber down there to have a look around, how they got the engines out, I’ve got no idea.

But some people had taken the engines over the chassis, and got them back up into the, into saleable.

At Bandiana, which is just south of Albury-Wodonga, had a training scheme going down there,

to teach them, they’d have, they would learn to drive up in New Guinea, they’d come down with driving ability, question mark, and then they learnt to be motor mechanics. And the difficulty was the fact that there’s no depth to their knowledge. You say this a current voltage regulator, the magnetic flux comes through here, causes that to

do that, understand? Yes. Well tell me about it, “Magic master magic.” So you’ve done all that work, and all they can get out of it is magic, they can’t, can’t retain a progressive technical thought. We used to train them up there only, only in as much as light workshop work, and they’d only be sort of

labourers, or workshop assistants. I, I don’t, there’s lots to talk about, so I’ll let it go at that, I think.

Yes.

There was Warrant Officer

Yates, Corporal Dittmar myself, and Private Snowy, I’ll think of his name in a minute, Jones, of all names, called Buck of course. We were told that the, there was a tank disabled out of Woomera,

and that we were being selected to go and recover the tank. And the equipment that we were given, was a, was a Diamond T tank transporter, with weights put into the tray, a McCormack gearing tractor, if we needed to manoeuvre the tank at all, the tractor could do that. So that was on the back of the trailer on a rod,

back of the prime mover on a Rogers trailer. A Rogers trailer was a 50 tonne trailer, the Centurion tank was, sorry, 30 tonne trailer with a 50 tonne capacity load. We didn’t take all of this in at the time, cause we, we were just told to go and do a job. When we got loaded up and got our rations and

got new tyres and tubes fitted right around the vehicles, we headed off at 20 miles an hour, driving day and night, just walking around changing seats, just, and then you’d sleep while the other person. And we could, we had a hell of a good capacity of fuel, so we didn’t have to worry about anything, we just kept on driving. I’m not sure how long it took us to get to Woomera, but it would have been about three or four days.

We got there, given another lot of rations and told to head off to the Hins? ..The, to The Twins, which is about 400 kilometres north, round about north, of Woomera. So we continued on, good, good dirt tracks, no, no brush bashing or anything. We arrived at the Twins, there was nobody home there, but the

place was left open so we could use it, so we used that as the accommodation for the, for the night. Then we went out to the tank, examined the tank and it was obviously dead, couldn’t possibly start it, there was a hole in the engine, thrown a con rod. So we backed the trailer, which was a very interesting exercise, with a goose-neck trailer to try and back it into the right position to winch the tank on. Anyhow,

Warrant Officer Yates was responsible for that part of the job, they winched it up and got it on, and from a photograph that we showed you, it overlapped the front, it overlapped the back, it overlapped the sides. We chained it down with diagonal chains so that it couldn’t move anywhere, and one of my jobs was to climb inside the tank and make sure that it was in neutral, and there was nothing that we could

hurt by, by moving it. We didn’t get very far out of the Twins, when we went through a, a fairly narrow gate and on going through, through there, we got through to the other side no trouble at all, and then we had a flat tyre. A flat tyre of course, is always the inside middle tyre, that is almost impossible to get at. So we got the jack out,

and it wouldn’t work. So we thought, “Oh, we’re in a bit of a predicament.” So it was my suggestion, I’m proud to say, that we got sleepers, and we just jammed sleepers under it until it was up to the, to the axle of the offending wheel. And then we dug a hole, so that the trailer actually fell into the hole and then we had enough room to dig it out around, undo the

wheels, change over the wheels, then put it in lay-lo and grind it off the, off the planks of wood, gather the planks of wood up and put them back on. So that was our introduction to tyre problems. Took us about four days to do about 100 kilometres, because it rained and the ground was wet. We made a hootchie up, so that we could, off the tank, down onto the ground, and we

cooked our meals and had a rest and waited for the ground to dry out for us to go on. We eventually got back to Woomera, close to ten days, and it was Christmas Eve, first year married, all these separations, and now at Woomera for Christmas. So I don’t know, I more than likely rang Judy up, I can’t, I can’t remember.

But anyhow, when we got back with the tank, they surrounded it with yellow triangles, and ropes and stuff, to say, “Keep Away Radioactive,” and we were very grateful for the fact that they cared for us so much. All they said to us was “Go and have a shower, and see you down the canteen for Christmas Eve party.” Nobody said anything about decontamination, nobody said,

ran a geiger counter over us, nobody did anything. So we had that night, Christmas Day I think we serviced the vehicle, there was nothing else to do, serviced the vehicle and got it ready, leaving, leaving the prime mover. Sorry, leaving the trailer and the, and the tank all mounted up, so that, it was silly to try and do anything with it, we thought, at the time.

And all we had to go, they must have left the tractor there too, they did. We finished up driving the tractor back from the Twins, about 400 kilometres, taking it in turns, no the warrant officer wouldn’t be in it, craftsman Jones and Corporal Dittmar had to drive that bloody tractor 400 kilometres between us, so it was a pretty rotten job.

We got back into Adelaide just before New Years Eve, that’s about the end of that story, in fact.

1953, yes.

I think I got away with it, I don’t think I’ve got any problems. Both the others have died, Snowy Yates, or CD Yates,

obviously Warrant Officer CD Yates, he, he died of cancer, and Buck Jones just died, not so, not so terribly long ago, could be ten years ago, and I’m the last of the crew, so, I can be grateful, I guess.

About two months before November, we were told the tanks were going, the unit wasn’t prepared for it, men weren’t trained for it. The warrant officers were trained, I had an excellent crew of warrant officers who really were first class. And I had a fellow that was a lieutenant, had been promoted to lieutenant in the field, he

was my 2IC, which, a person I hadn’t met before. We all had to go and do our jungle training, we all had to get our injections, we all had to do a lot of, you know, clothing and all that sort of stuff, had to get all that done. And having a month for each crew to go to Canungra to get battle trained, so I never saw my unit

as a whole until we were in Vietnam. After three months in Vietnam, before I saw the whole unit as a whole. national servicemen were, were fairly predominant amongst the private soldiers, motor mechanics in private enterprise. I think I’ve told you, but I’ll repeat, the national servicemen were very capable person, whom you could trust and rely on, I found them to be all

of good quality. And a lot of them had finished their five-year apprenticeship as motor mechanics, so they were better trained than some of our regular army blokes.

Well I was OC [officer in command], Army Squadron Workshops. And I had under me there, a section of, of

ordinance corps, Second Lieutenant Cattrell, and about ten men. And they, they too were superb. If you said, you know, at five o’clock at night, “I’ve got an urgent one,” they wouldn’t care that that was their drinking time. They’d just hop out and give you a hand, do whatever job had to be done, and work on it until it was done.

When the tanks, typical example of the, the ordinance corps people, when the tanks arrived in Coral, they had done an advanced contact of about four days, three or four days, I don’t know how many miles, hundreds of miles. When they got there, there was ten thousand odd pounds of spare parts required, road wheels, final drives, all those sort of things.

And also they had one casualty, which I’ll talk about separately. So that they, they got the, a fellow named Norm Wells, Sergeant Wells, he arranged for the air people to uplift 10,000 pounds in weight, which was a big, big double bladed, I can’t tell you the name of it now, helicopter, load carrier. And they, they

got the stores all into position pretty well the next day, and it was only the work, the tremendous workmanship of the ordinance people, that did that. I wrote to the Ordinance boss, and said how proud I was to have Cattrell with me as a young lieutenant, I thought it would never hurt his career, if I was to, sort of, give him a bit of a kick along. And I did it because he, he deserved it, I felt.

But Norm Wells, he also deserves great credit, because he, he was my parts, he’d chase up the parts that were required. We, we designed a program, you know, if the final drive was to go, the following parts would be required, and they were listed down, you’d say sheet number three, all items excepting one, or 21. And we, you’re

on the air for two minutes, and nobody could tell what the hell you were talking about, so from a security point of view, it was a good system. And Norm would work that system, and get the spare parts from the stores to the airport, from the airport into Coral, and that was a sort of a daily, daily task. We, we were there three months before the

tanks arrived, and during that three months, we did all the preparation of weapon pits, mortar pits, wire, wire fencing, coils of wire on, two on the ground, one on the top sort of thing, all around the edge to make it secure. We had that done, we had the canteen running, functioning properly. We had a open air picture theatre, which I got into trouble over,

cause they made it too big, it could be seen for miles, so, so the boss gave me a blast. So we had, we got, the photographs out there that you saw, are an indication of the various stages of the, of the camp being made. My CSM who was a warrant officer, was also a carpenter in private enterprise, and he made shaving benches,

so all the people could go out there and be, you know, two, two seats, one seat either side and a table in the middle, and the blokes could in there with a basin of hot water and shave. So we had things going, so that we had a minimum of down time for blokes, they could always get a decent hot wash each night, to go to bed clean. That brings us up to, and I have included Coral there.

The important thing about the variation to, to the methods that we used, we had tanks breaking down out in the bush, final drive or an engine maybe, and our blokes would go to that point with their recovery vehicle, pull it with a winch. Or our, a 113 with a winch and a crane, and

they could change a final drive on the spot, and change an engine out in the field, so my blokes were actually physically in, in danger of being shot at, and they did their work remarkably well, you know, a very good team. The diary that I’ve written up, has got all that detail in it.

The advance, I went, I went, went with the advance party, the advance party was, was one group, and we flew into Vung Tau, we went, I think we stayed overnight in Darwin, accommodation was organised, and up early the next morning and into Vung Tau. We got into Vung Tau, yeah we got to Vung Tau

airstrip, I can’t think of the name of it, doesn’t matter, Tan Son Nhut, Tan Son Nhut airstrip, I think. And we immediately embarked onto waiting trucks, and we were taken straight up, and we were actually in the lines the same day as we left Australia. And the blokes were on duty that night.

They,

we went into an existing camp, and one of the old-timers, who might have been there three weeks, one of, each, each pit had one trained person and one bloke, sort of under supervision. By the time we’d finished, before we could move to our other camp, all our blokes would be rotated through this training program, and were ready to take on our own perimeter

defence. It’s very different to, to Korea in that the Koreans, the, the Brits would bring troops in and give them at least four weeks training before they allow, allow them to sort of go into fighting positions. But we, we went up there and on the same day, the same, the same when they were going home, they’d be on the battle experience, battle exercise

of some sort one day, the next day they’d be on the plane going home. So they’d suddenly arrive from being killers to being civilians again with no, no buffer time, there’s no, where, and blokes would go, come from having to go from their wives and girlfriends and Mum and dads. And it was a very poor way of, of handling a situation that needed to be more carefully handled.

Well being fairly familiar after being in Vietnam, in New Guinea, it didn’t have an adjustment period for me, but for the kids that had not been anywhere, there were printer lizards, half again as long as that table, that would be sneaking around at night-time. There were, there were lizards

and snakes and all sorts of jungley things, that you know, a person who’s been bought up in Mascot or somewhere, wouldn’t you know, the dog howling next door is about the only, only jungle noise he’s ever heard. It was a, it was a difficult experience for them, they didn’t have any unauthorised discharges, which was a very important thing for everybody.

I, you know, they, they adjusted pretty well. Then next day of course, they do a day’s work, so they’re, they’re up, two hours on, four off, two hours on, four off during the night, and then expected to fulfil a day’s work. Which is not too bad if you’ve got your full complement of men, but when you’ve only got 25% of your men, it starts becoming a toll, the blokes are on every second night. And they start to,

you know, start to get, make mistakes, get grumpy and its just, you know, it’s just bad management by whoever did that.

Yes. It was a, a unit area, tanks were being placed in one perimeter there, and we had the back part, the least vulnerable part

for workshops to look after. The tanks didn’t arrive for three months, so we had plenty of time if you worked hard, to prepare the ground and, so we had their tent boards down, and their sandbagging done, fields of fire cleared, so that they could see what they were doing. We used to, as RAEME blokes, we were

putting mines out during the, the night, collecting them in the morning and bringing them in. I can’t think of, doesn’t matter.

Yes.

Claymore, thank you very much, that’s exactly what it was. And so you put those out hanging on a tree or something, so you’d have a clear range behind you, as well as in front of you.

Yeah.

Only, all I, we were there before the Tet, and before the Tet I guess there was people infiltrating to see what, what the strengths were, but we never came across any. The only time, no, we never, we never got, spotted any at that stage.

And then the, then the Tet Offensive started up, and it was like Sydney Harbour Bridge. There was lights and flashes and bangs and stars, then the one that sort of made us more in order, a DC3, with a Gatling gun. And you, all you’d hear was brrr, and you’d hear a thousand rounds would go, in

one hit, it was just estimation. And the, they reckoned one, one round to every square foot, so they’d go round there and empty out, it would only take about three or four runs to empty the DC3 out. So we were, from where we were, we could watch the firefight, oh ten kilometres away, I suppose. And the M113 from the cavalry regiment were,

were doing a marvellous job, there was several of them mentioned in dispatches and military medals and things like that, in action. And it bought reality, reality back to our plane, building a, building a nice tent area.

We would have had our first preliminary fence up, we placed that as a priority.

The Engineers had dug down nine feet for the mortar pit, we had to get down there and clean it out with the shovels, and at four feet, we put, four foot, or two foot, two foot or so of overhead cover. Nine-foot down, two foot overhead cover, it’d be three foot of overhead cover, I think they wouldn’t have allowed more than six foot.

So the, the weapon. The mortar pits were designed in such a way that you had that four foot, three or four foot of overhead cover, but it had, at each end of the pit was a firing, firing spot, so you’d, it was also a, a defensive position as well. We had positions prepared for, with sandbags

and stuff like that, prepared for all round defence, within the workshops. And the blokes once again were working about every, every second night, if not every alternate night, you know what I’m trying to say, right. They’d have one night on, one night off, or then they’d have one night on, two nights off when it could be, when we had enough staff to do it. Yeah,

the blokes never complained, they just all worked and got the thing done. And the 2IC, a colonel, can’t think of his name, he came down to look at us, and said, “What a hell, you know, you blokes, who’s been doing all this work for you?” “We did it ourselves, sir.” “Well done, well done.” So chest out, proud as punch. Then the tankies advance party arrived,

and we were helping them just finalise their weapon pits and their tentage and that sort of thing. Yes, I think it’s time to have a drink.

So.

I would have thought

about 30, I’m not sure, I don’t know what their strengths were. But about 30 in the advance party, they were there to get, to help get the camp finalised and then recover the tanks from down on a. The tanks came up by Chiparat, the boat. One tank broke lose and was rolling backwards and forwards unstabilised,

with a big muzzle hitting the side of the Chiparat wall, outer skin. So that must have been a bit exciting, but they tied it down again somehow. When they arrived they had to be offloaded at Cam Ranh Bay I think it was, and then they came by barge up the, to an area, not terribly far from where we, where we were based.

And they got, when they got the tanks there, there was certain things that supposed to have been done, that weren’t done. So there was a lot of repairs and stuff just before they get, even get into camp. But they got, got the lot, I think it took several trips. I think the dozer came up by landing craft, which would have been an exciting trip. Landing craft, big blunt front every time it hits the wave,

it shud, shudders through the, I’m glad I wasn’t on it, but they, they got up there and got established. And their first casualty was a bridge-layer bloke, who, a phosphorous grenade was put in, was just behind his head, and the, and as he moved off, the shaking made the phosphorous grenade fall out and explode, he got very severe burns to the scalp.

And being phosphorous, you can’t put it out, so he must have gone through agony. They took them all off, they did a lot of modifications to the tank straight away. What was happening, when the tank was going through bamboo area, you’d get bamboo wound up in your final drives and things, until you got everything choked, the tank couldn’t go forward or couldn’t go back. And when they had steel plates down the side for protection plates, you couldn’t get into it to get at it.

So they had to, they had to get into it to, to. So took all the tank track covers off, they put reinforcements into the mudguards to stop the, the things all buckling up. And they modified it very quickly to cope with the different, Europeans designed for Europe these tanks. So obviously weren’t, weren’t designed for jungle.

Well I suppose the best organised part, was the way the ordinance people got their spare parts, that was the good side. The bad side was getting all the troops together, I suppose, was a pretty bad sort of situation. We finished up not getting all our troops together, until after, I told you before, about three months after we arrived,

before we were, could form up as a unit. But it was very well planned, I feel, before it left. There were quite a few people involved in planning it, they did it all in about two months, which was quite amazing.

I can’t tell you, I know that the, I can’t remember. I think it took the tanks several trips out, to find out what they could do and what they couldn’t do. There’s no protection for the, in the turret for the, for the gunner, for the commander, up in the

in the pole, but it’s not what I’m trying to think about, rotating base for the, for the machine guns. But I, I can’t tell you want, I’ve read it but I can’t remember what the problems were.

Well, the, there was a,

the, the cavalry regiment was, was in a separate place from us, they were under, under a major, as were the tanks under Major Badman and tanks. I can’t think of his name. So the M-113s, they did quite different jobs. They would be able to ride

fairly quietly and surround a village and have a search and destroy and find out whether there’s any Viet Cong in that particular village. I don’t think we ever mastered the tunnels that they, they reckoned, the tunnels were underneath our own areas, people would move to and fro, not take in. You knew you weren’t going to be bombed if it was, you were underneath the tank workshop or something. So they,

they had tunnels even under our own areas, we didn’t know that of course.

Grenade.

Oh yeah, Long Tan I think it was, was the first one. Testing

my memories, it’s better than 30 years ago. Long Tan was, it’s where we were testing the RAEME people, too. They had the tanks going out doing an operation, and we had the armoured recovery vehicle, the two ARVs, armoured, two, fitter vehicles, but they had the cranes on board.

And that, that was, I think it was quite a successful operation, and I think our blokes fired rounds in anger for the first time ever. And there was a, a bloke wrote me a letter back, the lad I put, the warrant officer I put in charge, wrote me a letter back, and he said, “We saw some Viet Cong today, we let go with a lot of rounds, and we didn’t get one, curses,” or

something like that, afterwards. So they, they were looking forward to fighting, which for a RAEME, is quite interesting.

My job was to, to get, I saw myself as, you know, running two and three forward vehicle teams.

Run by warrant officers, and being an ex-warrant officer myself, I felt the warrant officers quite capable of running these sort of shows, best left alone, because in a lot of cases, they’ve got more knowledge than the young officer’s got. They performed very well under their own steam, produced an excellent result, and Peter Badman, the, the CO was always complementary about the way the forward repair teams worked.

They tried to keep the numbers down, cause every time you put in another person, it’s another lot of rations, another, somebody, somebody else you’ve got to care for. So they liked to keep our forward repairs team down to a minimum size. But they, they fulfilled a role, sometimes they’d sent a bloke out just for two days, just to do a particular job, then bring him back in by chopper.

Coordinating these, these people, and also the workshop itself would be doing repairs to other equipment. So there’s still that, there’s still that responsibility, but I had a CSM, Laurie Lilley, he died about two years ago, Laurie he, we’d have a list of all the people that, that are available for his guard

duty. And, and as warrant officer, he’d handle all that sort of thing. Laurie did that, ASM duties would make sure that the teams, forward repair teams were properly manned and maintained. I didn’t run myself out of a job by any means, I always had more than enough to do. But there was, the administration of your own unit to be done,

and all I had was a, a very capable but only very young lieutenant, a very new lieutenant, to, to sort of work with. Cattrell was handling the, the spare parts and doing it very well, so I, I could wipe my hands off, off that, and leave he and his sergeants to run that. I didn’t believe in interfering too much, when I could see that things were going well. If you’ve got too many people telling people what to

do, you cause confusion. And it wasn’t that I was dodging an issue, because we, we always had the, if they wanted 20 pieces of equipment on the line, we had 20 pieces of equipment on the line for them. They never, never went out at any time, with one not enough, they always had more, you know, every piece of equipment running. And they kept them running in the field.

Oh yes, visited every one, or pretty well every one. Go out and see how they’re going, what their problems are, did they need any help. The, going up to Coral, one tank hit a mine and blew off the final drive, and a lot of pinning. And Don Dures, my ASM and myself, flew out to Black Hawk [Horse], assessed

the damage, came back, got the parts, went out the next day with a team of young blokes, bucks, and we had the tank back on the road within, within three or four days. And the Yanks said, “Man, that would have gone back to Guam if it had been our tank,” so I was quite pleased that they, they could. Am I running over here?

So,

you know, it just proved once again that the national servicemen are a fine, fine soldier, adapted very quickly. Could beat us at cricket and football most times, because it was always the Nashos [National Service soldiers] against the regulars [regular army]. And you know, it’s all good morale stuff. We did have one recovery bloke, go out, he came back after doing, the first day in country he went out and had to recover back

some bloody mess-up tanks, that had bodies and everything in it. And he came back in and he was a bit shocked. That weekend, he went out to see, he had a, got a bit of a leave pass to go and see some of his mates over in another unit, he came back a bit full, which was, he was not supposed to of course. And he got hold of the gun, the Bren gun or whatever it was, pulled it towards him,

and the trigger got caught in the upholstery, so it automatically cocked the action. And then he gave it a shake, and it fired and hit him in the leg. Mason his name was, bloody excellent recovery man, but it went straight into his sciatic nerve, he’s been in trouble ever since, with terrible pains in the legs. But you,

you’re playing with big boys toys, and if you don’t abide by the rules, somebody gets hurt.

Black, Black Horse, I feel confident that’s what it is. Yes, I, I may have made a mistake there.

We definitely flew out, yeah, we flew in, in a Caribou and we flew out in a Caribou to Saigon and then we flew from Saigon down to Vung Tau in another Caribou. But they’d just had heavy mortaring on the airstrip, and when the bloke came down with a Caribou, he almost stopped when he touched the ground, tremendous reverse prop. And then he just motored up against the potholes

with a, where the mortars had been landing, so was very impressed with his driving ability.

They were with them already. They were always accompanied, the tanks were always accompanied by an ARV and a forward repair vehicle, so they were physically there on the

spot. That’s why it might sound a bit funny, but, I, I couldn’t make decision in base, it needed the people out on, in the field to, to make their decisions and abide by them. It worked, the principle worked well, I had Peter Petit was an electrical warrant officer, Gallagher was a quartermaster, neither of those

went out. But then you’ve got Maxwell Garcia, they were the two top armament man and, and vehicle man, and they, they would be in charge of the teams. And Gallagher and Petit would be responsible for home base, working in conjunction with the CSM and myself. So

there was a fairly strong responsibility being placed on the warrant officers. The warrant officers are, are designed for, to be good, so they’re artithesis, they’re people who’ve really been trained up, and they, they know and are better men, better men for it.

Oh yes.

The only RAEME bloke that was killed up there, was with the Cav, his name was, wild little bugger. I’ll think of his name, it’ll be a bit late, Boilace, craftsman Boilace. He was told to sit down in the back, and

the story I got back was, he didn’t sit down at the back, and he got a splinter of shrapnel through the head. The other story I got back was, that the vehicle itself had been hit and he was killed by shrapnel from that, from an internal explosion. But you, they take the risks as, as do the tankies, though the tankies are more than likely in the tanks, are a lot safer than the blokes in the APC

repair vehicles.

Oh no, no, they were, they’ve got to be close enough to support each other. You know, the tanks have got to be able to put crossfire across your, your tank as you’d be expected to spray the back of their tank if they had enemy on the back. So you need to have line of

sight, I don’t think it’d be a distance, it’d be a line of sight situation, it would depend on how thick the jungle was, whether you’re crossing a creek, all those sort of things.

One chaps’ brother put his fiancée, his fiancée in the family way, no I didn’t word that quite right, the brother put the

soldier’s fiancée in the family way. And he, he objected to that and demanded to be sent home, so that he could sort out his, his domestic problems. And they were in the throes of sort of, working out what to do with him, when he picked up a rifle and aimed it at sergeant wells’ head, and said, “Get me out of here, I’ve got to get home to my wife, my fiancée.” So that was a nasty bit of, nasty

situation, but Norm disarmed him, I don’t know, whatever he did, he did it properly, disarmed him. Next minute he comes out of the tent, nose all bloodied, so, so he, got into trouble himself because he shouldn’t have done that. But he, he didn’t want, he reckoned it was necessary to show people discipline at that stage, and I have got two minds, I think he did the right thing.

This, this bloke’s fiancée back home was put in the family way by this fellow’s brother.

In, in the pudding club.

She was pregnant, being polite about this, pregnant to the brother.

Well, he had the gun in his hand, and I suppose Wells just took the gun out of his hand and, and smacked him.

Oh, the, fellow was charged for, for obvious reasons, but when he finished being charged and sent, I think he, I’m not sure quite what the

result was. They did find that he needed support, so they more than likely did a ministry, to sort it out, but he came back again and was put into another unit, so that people weren’t aware of his predicament. Norm Wells was called up before the major and given a, “What you did was commendable in that you disarmed him and you took the gun away from him, but your method of handling that was wrong, Sergeant Wells. If you ever

come before me again, I’ll have you.” So he gave Norm, Norm the message that he didn’t like that particular way of discipline, which I couldn’t agree with more.

Oh no, no, they were all tremendously good teams, team workers,

and it was, it was a bit difficult, there was petty jealousies between. I’ve got a cramp. Petty jealousies between the tanks and the RAEME people. When the tanks came in from the field, they’d be sent down on a day’s swimming down at Vung Tau. When they arrived back, our blokes were

expected to stay back and work on the tanks, get the tanks ready for the next operation. So they never got a break, or rarely got a break. And I had a few gripes to say to the boss, cause he and I were not seeing too well together, and I think he was a wonderful tank commander, but he was not a very good personnel manager,

in my opinion, yeah. So personalities play a big part in these sort of things.

No, I think they should have insisted upon giving us a bit more time to get the tanks repaired, which means the blokes could have one day’s break,

and get down there and relax in the sun. Drink a few suds and you know, have a bit of a break, come back the same night, go down in the morning and come back the same night. But they all needed a break, they, they were all placed, a very high percentage of my troops finished up TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated Pension], and it’s the stress I put on them, I feel.

It’s a guilt complex. Yeah the, I feel they should have had more time, but the commander wanted people, you know, when they want tanks, they want them now. And I understand that, but you can’t run a person on top speed all the time, it’s necessary

for everybody to have an element of time to recoup, even if its one day. It’s some time to recoup before they go out on their next operation. Peter, Peter Badman, he finished up a brigadier, so he did very well, but Peter Badman was very pro-tank people and quite anti

service people, and it showed time and time again. We’d been in the middle of a rush job, to get a job out, and Peter would say, “I want six of your men to cut a fire lane.” And he’s got his own men, but he’d take, take, because he was a major and I was a captain, he was, he would be in a position to sort of insist that he, that I give him six men. So I’d take six men off the,

off a particular tank, and he’d come back and say, “Why, why aren’t the men working on the tank, you’ve got them down there digging up weapon pits,” or whatever you were doing. “I can’t have them everywhere at once.” “Well I want that tank tomorrow.” “Well then you should have thought of that beforehand. If you want that tomorrow, leave my men alone, let me get on with the job.” “Don’t speak like that to me.” And that sort of attitude, we’re under that sort of strain. And that’s one of things, when you say

what did I do, I was a buffer in trying to get things done in a decent vein. And I finished up coming out of Vietnam with a fairly strong anxiety state, because of the tensions created, and the fact I was 40 when I was there, was just too old to be in the frontline.

Oh yes, yes,

very much so. Personnel management, my son’s in Duntroon and, and I don’t detract from what I say, because I’ve, I’ve got a son at Duntroon. But the Duntroon people are trained to be self-centred, and they don’t seem to have a good management skill. They, they don’t know how to get the

best out of their men, and they don’t realise that some of these people need to have a break. And that’s my humble opinion.

Well Peter it to me quite a bit, he’d, he’d have an O-group [orders group], he wouldn’t let me know there was an O-group

on, so I couldn’t go and listen to find out what my men were supposed to be doing, he’d deliberately leave me off the list. It wasn’t petty, it was, what I did, one bloke drove a tank until the tank blew up, because he forced a pin or something into the. When a tank got to a certain temperature,

it would switch, would switch the motor off, if you went over that temperature, you were going to cook the motor. So the bloke was doing as he was told, he said Peter, Peter told him on the phone, “Just drive, if you blow an engine up, you blow an engine up, don’t worry about it.” And it was my responsibility to fill in the form for a, defective vehicle report. And I had to say in that report, that the,

the motor was over-ridden when it was classified as too hot. And all he had to say in return was, it was technically unsound at the time, for me to do that. But he didn’t, because they were going to the beach for a swim. And he got quite angry at me for being involved in writing directly to RAEME on a technical matter, which I had every right

to do, because RAEME, on technical matters I had to report to RAEME anyhow. And then he said to his troops afterwards, “I want you to take note, that you must not over-ride, drive a vehicle deliberately, getting it to break down,” or, he worded it better than that. So he actually supported what I did in the long run, but it was a battle at the time.

He took my firefighting equipment away, I had a fire point, and dealing with the vehicles with welders and everything else, it was fairly right to have a fire point where we had it. He took that away without my notice, and set it up in his own lines. And when I approached him about it, he said, “You’re a captain, I’m a major, those things go over my line.” I said, “Well those things are on my charge. It’s up to me

to look after these things,” because they were actually my responsibility. And he would refuse to do anything about it, so I went up and saw Tommy Thompson the, his quartermaster, and I told Tom what the problem was, so he said, “No trouble.” He wrote it off, I wrote it off my list, he wrote it onto his list, and then I re-indented for outstanding lack of things. But that sort of thing was happening all the time, and it, it really is difficult to bear. And I’m

bearing my soul now.

Well Peter and a fellow named Major Kemp, who was engineers, Major Kemp said his D8 tractor could out-pull a Ford repair, a, oh, having a mental block.

ARV. He said, said that the, the D8 would, would pull a Centurion Recovery Vehicle off its, off its feet. So in the middle of the night with a skinful of drink, they took the two vehicles out, coupled chains up between the two of them, and let them have a tug of war. Now that’s all good fun with, with a prank in Australia,

but there it meant my men, they absolutely wrecked the clutch in the Centurion and our blokes had to work through until about two in the morning, or four in the morning, to get that reassembled ready for the next days trip. My ASM went up to the officer mess, knocked on the door, said, “I want to speak to Major Badman.” He said, “Yes, what do you want ASM?” He said, “Sir, I think you’re a fucking

idiot,” and he told him what he, for doing that to the tank and then making the men work overtime. He said, “Please charge me, I want you to charge me sir, I want to be able to tell everybody what you’re doing.” And of course, it was a very bitter. I think Peter more than likely just shut the door, but a very bitter experience, I wasn’t in charge of the tanks at that time, the workshops at that time,

but the boys always fed me back the information of what was going on. And it’s just lack of thought, I mean you don’t, you don’t deliberately wreck a tank to prove a practical joke. So that made me bitter, and it didn’t help my anxiety state at all, you’d be working under these tensions all the time.

Oh the men, the RAEME men to a tee, were all self-supporting of each other, and very anti, not the tanks, but Peter Badham, they were very anti-Peter Badham. They could see what was happening without people saying anything, they, they didn’t need to be told, I didn’t tell anybody. But I, so the, the tension came

right through, oh the blokes knew bloody well that they weren’t getting a chance to go down for a swim. I mean they see their, the blokes that had just come back from an operation, going down for a, for a swim, and they’ve got to stay back and work on the tanks. I mean, they could see, they’re not blind, they could see it was pretty, and they felt strongly it was unfair. What they thought of me about that, I don’t know because I never queried them.

No, no, there’d possibly be mutiny or something, so they didn’t, never did anything. They did what they were told and they’d say, “Yes sir, no sir” and dumb incidents more than anything, they wouldn’t. They, they wouldn’t do anything to be a chargeable offence.

Yes, I guess so. Haven’t used that term, though.

I haven’t used that term.

Well, how was the term used, to you?

Well, it, the whole thing was. See our blokes were, they were down in Saigon on guard, 20 odd of my men went down on guard to Saigon, so they were in Australia House in Saigon. There was

my support team out, so there’d be another 20, I finished up with 27 men out of nearly 100, that were out on secondment, for want of a term. And a master of co-ordination, I thought it was pretty appropriate. There was a matter of coordinating your efforts to the best of your ability, and I found that our blokes were just superb.

I think the tankies were too, quite frankly, I think the tankies were wonderful what they did. But I just thought Peter, from a person who went up to brigadier’s rank, I just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t do man management better.

No I didn’t, I’ve been to Saigon on several occasions, I, I did a pay run, I had five days leave,

and it was what they called in-country leave. And instead of going around the, the beer halls and places like that, for me, it was better for me to be working, so I went and said, “Look, what I would like to do, is go and pay the people up at Da Nang,” that was all the, all the guys who ran the, I can’t think of what the term is, I’m getting tired I think. Training, the training

team, they were training team blokes, these were blokes with VCs [Victoria Crosses] and MMs [Military Medals] and all sorts of things, so I had the opportunity to go up there with the pay. Paid these guys and meet them, it’s like looking at the top footballers, you know, the, these were the tops of the tops, really knew what they were doing. And I had the privilege of paying them and meeting them, and going out and having a beer with them, that was good five days leave for me. And on the

way back, the aeroplane wasn’t ready for us, the DC, it was a Hercules aeroplane wasn’t ready for me. I said, “What’s, what’s the problem, wrong with the aeroplane?” And he said, “Oh, the undercarriage is not showing a light, so I don’t want to take off with the undercarriage, could possibly have failure.” And about an hour later, he said, “Look, if anybody wants to volunteer to come back with me, I’ll, I’m flying back to Saigon now.” And I said, “Yeah, well I’ll go with you,” and he said, “Well you sit up in that seat there.” I said, “Why do you want me up there for,” and he said, “I’ll tell you later.”

Then he gave us a lecture on, when we, we have to go out overseas, because we can’t high enough up to be out of range of the bullets, yeah. So when we go over sea, we might crash, and if we crash, the water comes up to this level here, and he puts his finger up and drew a line. And he said, “You’ll know, don’t open the side doors then, because the water will come inside.” So he said, “You mustn’t do that, you go out through the top.”

And he went on and on, he was the funniest bloody bloke I’ve ever met, he had us all on tenterhooks, and then he’d just crowd it all into a big joke. When we flew back, we did go back via the coast, we did go back with the wheels down and it was a slow trip, but we got back. And when we were landing, he said, “Now, this is what I want you to do, look at that sector, and if there’s any planes or helicopters coming up in that sector, give me a warning order.”

So I didn’t see anything, but I tell you what, I was glued to that window, and he landed beautifully. That was my five days leave, it was the best relief I could have got, to go up and see these people who really were the big boys. That was one of my joys.

Oh yes, yes, the advisor group,

would be the heroes, they were like SAS [Special Air Service] type people. Yeah.

A French, what I would envisage is a French town, big broad boulevards, high trees, people running around on motorbikes, girls sitting sidesaddle nursing a baby on,

on the motorbike, quite Oriental and French at the same time. Catching, catching a bus and just go where the bus went is what I did on my day off, just toured around the looked at the, the homes, and some of the French homes there were beautiful. Very, I was impressed with it, I, I think it would be nice to go back to.

Well, the most joyful I’ve ever spent in my life, and the five days I spent with Judy on, on R&R in, in Sydney. We did what we wanted to do, we did it when we wanted to do it, we were both caring

and loving towards each other, and it was, you know, wonderful. R&R in Tokyo, I finished up with four weeks leave in Tokyo, I went up to Lake Shizenzi and up into the mountains to, to the temple areas, another chap and myself, we decided going into beer halls, and staying in beer halls all day, really wasn’t much of an R&R. So we enjoyed the,

the temples and the craftsmen doing woodwork and all that sort of thing, up, up in the mountains. And I spent a week there, I spent time going around and seeing the palaces, there’s a lot of imitation palaces in, in Tokyo, that, that copy of Buckingham Palace and places like that. And then the museums and those sort of things, it didn’t, I didn’t stop and have a drink,

enjoy myself, but I didn’t, I thought I’ll never be in Tokyo again, let me do whatever I can. And so I did, and we, this other fellow and myself we repaid tremendous reward in preference to staying getting in a beer hall and getting smashed every day for two weeks, three weeks.

After four months, you’re entitled to five days leave in, in both situations. After eight weeks, you’re entitled to a three week, four week, Vietnam, sorry, Vietnam was only six days I think. But the

five days I took off, I, I went, went to Tokyo again, I finished up in, yeah, I went to Tokyo. And I went to the, I did basically sight seeing then too, and as far as Vietnam is concerned, I did the pay run, it was the only,

leave for five days that I had. And I felt, you know, you look into what a coracle is, a round floating boat. Well I saw a coracle for the first time, and they were still designed, still designed the same as they were back in the Valdazaire’s time. And just, just seeing their, their craftsmanship and their way of life,

all I wanted to do, what I joined the army to do was see the world, not see the beer halls.

Well 22 years old in Korea and 40 years old in Vietnam, being a private

in Korea and being a captain in Vietnam. No responsibility as a private, full responsibility when you’re a captain. So they’re completely different. I enjoyed the, the freedoms that a private soldier has, you know, if you make a mistake, the worst thing you do is get a kick in the pants. But if you’re a captain or, or an officer, you, you can’t

afford to make those mistakes. And you’ve, you’ve got to, when you’re a private, you’ve got a group of blokes around, the same type as yourself, or similar. Whereas when you’re an officer, in what my unit, I only had a lieutenant with me, oh and David Cattrell, two lieutenants, so you didn’t have the opportunity to discuss

in depth, some of the things that you would have liked to have discussed, if you had another person of equal rank, so that helped to put tension on as well. When I left the unit, they converted, they changed it back to, from a field workshops to a 16 Infantry, 6, yeah, two field,

very similar to a 106 Field, 106, I’m sorry, 106 Field Workshops with five officers took over my job, and the jobs of these other two. So they had a major and about three captains, and a lieut [lieutenant] in the Q-Store [Quartermaster store], and they would have had an ordinance officer there as well.

It’s just, it was an exercise that they wanted to see if they could cope with a situation, with a captain and a lieutenant, they just didn’t give me any. The DA, not the DA, the DADEME [Director Army [?] Electrical Mechanical Engineers] Saigon used to come and see me about once every two months, and

I, I said to him “This is the biggest captain’s command in, in Vietnam, I need more help,” and he would say, “I can’t do anything to help you Bruce, I’m sorry.” “Well don’t waste my time coming here when I’ve got so much work to do and take up my time, that I could be using to make things better for my men.” He didn’t say a word, he just left. But I felt cheeky enough

to, to do that because he was unsupportive, and he could see that I was having trouble with Peter Badcock. And, you know, I would have expected a person in his position, that if he did nothing else, he’d go down and talk to Peter man to man. But he didn’t do that, he used to get home, back to Saigon, the same day he left, he had a little girlfriend

down there that he liked to sleep with. So that was my humble opinion, and as one of the fellows said to me, “Bruce, you won’t get any sense out of him,” so that’s what happened. He, he left the army anyhow.

Oh, I got aggressive. I wrote to the

military secretary, which I should never have done. Made out, when you’ve got about a, a month to go in an area like that, your military secretary sends you a note to say, “I’ve got a choice of jobs in Melbourne or Sydney, what’s your choice?” And I wrote back, I said, “I don’t care how many people you’ve got to shift around, I’d like one of the permanent army officers from Bandiana

to be shifted, so I can go into Bandiana. And he, obviously I should never said it, never have done it, I didn’t know it was going back to the MILSEC [Military Secretary], I thought it was just going back to the personnel officer. Anyhow I got called up, “You angry little bastard, you’re causing me more trouble than enough.” “Where am I posted, Sir?” “Bandiana, now get out.” “Thank you Sir, that’s exactly where I wanted to go.” But he didn’t, he didn’t get cross with me. So,

oh coming up through the ranks, and being a warrant officer for so long, made me feel that I could wrestle with these people a bit, but I couldn’t really, I should have known better. But that’s life I guess.

If war is inevitable, because of political reasons, I couldn’t condone it. I can’t condone the situation we’ve got at the moment. We’ve got a United Nations group that

are there for the betterment of all mankind, and I feel very strongly that it should be handled through United Nations, any war should be handled through United Nations.

I’d like to be well enough to march,

I’d like to show my respects for those that died for us. I feel that Anzac Day is not to commemorate war, but to, to give praise to those men and women who gave their lives, or became critically ill because of war. We’ve got lots and lots of people that are not well, mentally and physically, because of war. I’d be one of them.

It’s very necessary that we give acknowledgement to our wives, our girlfriends. It is important that they are taken into account,

my wife’s had a very difficult life, mostly because of the army and movements. My son and my daughter had umpteen schools to go to, and it’s difficult. As much consideration as possible should be given to the women that are left behind, when the husband goes away. There should be a special group of people that visit and offer help. They tried to do that

in Vietnam, but a lot of the times, the women didn’t want it, so it’s a difficult question, it’s a difficult thing, but I, I would say we need to give greater praise, love and care to our womenfolk.

I regret that I wasn’t big enough to cope with some of the situations that occurred,

I could have handled a lot better, if I’d possibly had been better educated. I think people have got to be, learn, learn there are, when you’re under a command like I was with Peter Badham, that no matter what task came up, Peter had the last say and, and the, the tradesmen in the,

with the artillery or whether its with tanks or 113s, are only subordinates to the parent unit. And they need to be told that, and explain it to them, that they must do if they are told. If the CO concerned has got any common sense, he’d get a lot more out of his RAEME attached, by being

appreciative of their efforts.

Thank you.