Australians at War Film Archive

I was born on Station Street, Fairfield, Victoria.

We were all born there. Then we moved to Gordon Street, Fairfield, and I grew up there until I was old enough to go to school, about five years old when I went to Fairfield State School. I went to school there until I got to the eighth grade. I was eleven years old, and you couldn’t leave school until you were fourteen in those days.

I jumped a couple of classes. That’s what you did in those days. If you were good at your work, you jumped classes. If you weren’t, they kept you back. So then I went to Collingwood Tech [Technical] College, in Collingwood for two years. In those days, there were boys’ schools and girls’ schools. It was all boys at Collingwood Tech School. That was for boys that were going to learn trades. High school was for boys that were going to enter professions.

Because at Collingwood Tech, you did a period of clay modelling, casting, Monday morning two periods of mathematics and a period of solid geometry, then in the afternoon you’d go have sports, with the sports master. The next day you’d do electrical fitting, fitting and turning, all that stuff, very interesting, and it gets you ready for your trade. I left there and Dad

had trouble with his boys where he worked at the paper mill at Fairfield. He worked there for about twenty four years. He was a returned soldier, he was an old ANZAC [Australian New Zealand Army Corps]. And the doctors told him to get out of the city, the dust was causing him to lose his voice, so he brought a property about sixty two miles out of Melbourne, on the Bendigo Road, Malmsbury. He built up a dairy herd there, Hereford cattle.

I was apprenticed to Malford Motors, Sturt Street, South Melbourne as a mechanic when I was sixteen, I left school. My Dad had to move up there then I had to leave that and go up and live with him. Then I started to work with Dad on the farm, round up the cows and bring them in every morning. Then I got a job falling timber up in the mountains then. By then, I used to go to all the big country shows,

go in the wood chop competitions. I played AFL [Australian Football League] football, Castlemaine. Then a couple of mates said, “How about going and getting a job down the Kiewa Valley Hydroelectric Scheme? Good money down there.” So we went up there and got a job with the State Electricity Commission up there. I worked up there looking after big heavy equipment, tuning them up, putting tracks back on when

they came off on the sides of the mountains and all that. The high plains were about five and a half thousand feet above sea level. It used to be covered in snow in the wintertime, and there were big valleys up there. They decided to dam the valleys so when the snow melted that would be full of water. They tunnelled right down through about four miles of solid rock, right down to West Kiewa, right down at the bottom where they had the big turbines down the bottom, and the water used to rush right down from up the mountains

and drive the turbines, and that was the hydroelectric scheme. We worked there until that was finished, until 1951. They wanted us to go to the Snowy Mountains and start that off, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, but we’d had enough working around the snow. Five of us went down to join the army because there were no other jobs about.

We walked into the recruiting office and we went to join the Special K Force for Korea. There was a big mural on the window, a bloke with a rifle and bayonet and another bloke on his back on the ground, and I said, “I’m not being in that lot.” They said, “We’ll go and see if there’s anything else on offer.” We went in to the recruiting officer and said, “Have you got anything else as part of the K Force. We don’t want to get in and go fight in a war.” He said, “You can join the regular army for six years,”

told us all the good points and that. Four of us got in, passed the medical. Another bloke didn’t, his blood pressure was up. They gave him half a dozen tablets, told him to leave the plonk alone and take the tablets and come back the next day, and he got in then. He was an Aboriginal, Len Harrison. And he went right through the Korean War with me and through the two years in Malaya. We got in there, we did our recruit training

in New South Wales for six weeks. Then we were allocated. They allocated me to the Royal Australian Engineers, mechanical engineers, but I paraded before the colonel so I could get allocated to the 2nd Battalion with the rest of the blokes. He said, “Why would you want to be allocated to an infantry battalion? Everyone tries to get out of the infantry?” I said, “I wanted to stay with my mates.”

The 2nd Battalion at Puckapunyal was starting to build up down there. When we got down there, there were only about three officers there, and about a hundred and fifty troops. We were there for about nine months, gradually building up. The third day I was there, the sergeant came up beside when

we were marching around the parade, he came up and he said, “Fall out, soldier.” So I fell out. And he said, “We’d like you to do an NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] carter course.” Because I’d been in the CMF [Citizens’ Military Force], a corporal in the CMF, so I did a carter course with about nine other blokes. They wanted NCOs to build the battalion up. I topped the course and went back to the orderly room there. The company commander said to go into the care store and draw out two

corporal stripes. I was the only one that got two stripes. He said, “We’re going out on bivouac tomorrow with the company.” He said, “You’re going out and you will be acting platoon commander. You’ll get paid like a lieutenant’s pay.” It was a good time to be in then, on the ground floor. Our battle training started then. We learnt discipline as the main thing.

They put hard discipline on you for the first three months in the army, and they explained that if it’s put on you hard for the first three months, then it becomes self-discipline. Then they ease off on the discipline then because you’re a team, and you work as a team, same as a football team. Once you see how discipline works…and that’s what I think they should have for the young fellows today, something like that. Self-discipline. Once you’ve got self-discipline, you can get through anything.

They used to tell us that you get two or three hundred men that have got no discipline, it’s a mob of useless rabble. With discipline, it’s an army and a trained team. Three times we went out and did battle training, like on the move, like the war was in Korea. They warned us for action, and told us that if anybody went AWL [Absent Without Leave] they’d be charged the same as cowardice in front of the enemy.

Three different times we went out, we went the same way up over the Tallarook Ranges in Victoria. Twenty seven miles in three days, full packs, ninety pound pack on your back, all your battle gear, all your weapons. You were only allowed to stop for ten minutes, you weren’t allowed to take your boots off or anything like that because they were simulating active service. About half of the fellows

dropped out, they couldn’t hack it. They finished up as our trucks drivers and our cooks and that. Then when we were about six hundred strong, we were warned that we would be getting on the train and going up to Sydney and going to Korea. They told us we were going overseas, and that was the only place where there was a war on at the time.

We got on the train and the train went up to Sydney. We got on the New Australia there, and we went to Korea on the New Australia. The New Australia was a big liner. It brought most of the British migrants in 1950, ’51, it cost you ten pound each to come out. They were given jobs and as long as they stayed for two years they were all right.

But the New Australia, it was an old ship called the Monarch Of Bermuda, and the Germans dive bombed it and destroyed it with Stuka dive bombers in the [English] Channel, just off England, and they rebuilt it all, all the super structure and everything. When you walked through the passageways down below, all the passageways were warped from where it had been on fire.

It took us about twelve or fourteen days to get up to Korea. All the way up there we did weapons training on the decks. We did live fire shooting off the back of the ship, at wooden planks on the end of cables that the ship’s crew put out for us. Shot up a lot of big sharks that were following. The sharks follow the boat if anyone’s sick. The crew told us that.

Then when we got to Pusan, it was freezing cold, twenty seven below zero. The first thing I noticed was the ‘Man In The Moon’ was upside down, we were in the Northern Hemisphere.

He used to tell us all kind of stories. He told us once he had a lot of shells coming over and he was sitting on a log doing something, and he got hit in the back and knocked down a hill. He thought that was it. He yelled out “stretcher bearers” and the stretcher bearers

came down and had a look at him and said, “There’s nothing wrong with you.” It was a big clod of dirt that hit him in the back. He had a bayonet fight and lost most of the fingers off his left hand. They used to step up out of the trenches, they were right for bayonets and one machine gun, like an old Lewis machine gun. .When the Germans would come in to attack them, they’d step up and make

a single file in front of their trenches. And the bloke in front would take on the first German. If he went down, the next bloke would step up with his rifle and bayonet and so on. That was how some of the fighting is in bayonet fighting if anyone attacks your position. They had parties there in France, all dressed up as clowns and the Germans used to fly over in their planes and take no notice of them. He was in leave in Scotland…

He didn’t say much about it at all. He just said he lost a lot of his mates.

Yeah, it was good, but it was pretty tough for people in those days. A lot of people lived along the railway line in tents, they had hurricane lamps hanging up. They had to carry their own water. The only people that had cars lived at South Yarra.

Nobody had cars in our street, or around the suburbs. Everybody used to walk everywhere. Mother used to walk down the street about five or six miles with a big suitcase, getting groceries and stuff. There was no dole. The dole in those days was you walked down the Town Hall and took a bag with you and once a week you got two loaves of bread, two pound of sugar, half a pound of butter,

five pound of potatoes, I think it was. That was the dole in those days, no money. Old swaggies used to come to the door to ask for some boiling water for their billies. When Mum would get halfway down the passage they’d say, “Would you mind putting some tea in it, too, lady?” That’s how it went. They used to walk from Melbourne to Adelaide looking for work, the men, carrying the swag with them and sleeping under bridges.

They’d get jobs mostly on the country properties, get a feed there. As soon as they got money they’d send it straight home to their wives, post it back to their wives. It was pretty tough.

Terrific, wonderful people. The mothers looked after their children. The only women that worked were single girls, in those days. Married women didn’t go to work, they looked after their children.

Dad’s wages were three pound a week, for seven days a week. They were paying a pound of week rent. I remember seeing his pay envelope open on the table once. And he walked to work, about eight mile. Eight mile home in the afternoon. A lot of them walked further than that. By they got to the big paper mill, there was about a hundred and fifty of them. They came from all around different suburbs and walked home. They used to mend all their own boots, and Dad used to mend his shoes, and Mum’s shoes and all our shoes,

an old iron last. Mum used to make all our clothes. She’d had a dressmakers shop when we were little. She used to make our trousers. The old thing she bought was our blazers. We used to wear them to St Kilda beach on a Sunday. Get an excursion ticket on the train, a family ticket. Dad was a good swimmer, he used to swim right out to the buoys.

Lifesavers went out and picked him up one day. They said, “Get in the boat. We’ll give you a ride back in.” He said, “No, I can swim that easy.” They said, “Get in the boat, there’s sharks swimming up and down the beach.” Dad said all the people were waving at him, he was waving back, he was thinking they were waving at him because they reckoned he was a good swimmer, but they were waving at him because of the sharks swimming up and down. But yeah, he got in. Mum said, “You’re not as smart as you thought you were.”

I used to go out with the milkman of a night-time and help him on his rounds, and get two bottles of milk and a bottle of cream. Go up the bakers, they used to give me two loaves of bread, hot bread. Used to get a dozen crumpets out of there. Used to go home and jump into bed on the veranda where I was sleeping out there. I’d get up at half past five, after a couple of hours of sleeping, then do my paper round then. Come home from that, have breakfast then go to school. When we got out of school, we used to run down the Yarra,

have a mud fight and a swim across the other side and get home before Dad got home from work. That went on until I started going to the Collingwood Tech. Then we used to skate to school from Fairfield to Collingwood on roller skates then. Hang on the back of cable trams coming up the big hill at Northcote. Then come down the big hill, squat down, flying down the big hill on roller skates. Nearly all the roller skates were made in Melbourne then.

There was a roller rink at….can’t think of the name of it. You graduated from roller-skating to ice-skating. There was a glaciarium, then, just over the Princess Bridge.

Well, Mum was never sick and Dad was never sick. Dad was always a great one for fruit and vegetables.

Which I am now. I live on fruit and vegetables most of the time.

I think family life made up for having no money. Everybody in the street knew each other. All the men were mates, and all the women were friends. If anyone got crook, they’d all come down to the woman’s house and do the woman’s housework for her, you know.

And Mum always had women friends come there through the day as visitors, for cups of tea. Bread and plum jam I think they used to make. She was always doing sewing for them. She was always knitting, even when we went to the pictures at night, you could hear her needles clicking in the dark. Dad was a terrific athlete and swimmer, and his brothers were all boxers. They all came from Bendigo

and they worked in the gold mines before they went in the army and went overseas. He had us kids into athletics. My eldest brother, he took up bike riding. He used to ride road races against Fats Lamb and Hubert Hoffman. Hoffie was a terrific bike rider. He won a five hundred mile race in France. They gave him a beret, the French.

He used to go out and ride his bike until he was about eighty something, old Hoffie. He was a terrific racer. The five hundred mile road race that Hoffie went in and won, the road race, it wasn’t like the Tour De France, you didn’t get to sleep every night. It was a straight out five hundred mile race. He’d have a bit of a half hour doze then off again.

In road races, he went in a road race on an old bike that Dad brought for him. It was a twenty five mile road race, and they gave him a five mile start, Hoffman and Fats Lamb and the other blokes. And they said, “Here they come now, that will be Hoffie in front.” And it was my brother in the front. When he got down, passing through the shops, they all started screaming to him “They’re catching up!” But he couldn’t see the other blokes. And they said to him

“Sprint! Sprint!” And he got up in his seat to sprint and his frame broke in half, up near the handlebars, and he came down. And Bruce Small, who became mayor on the Gold Coast, he was there because he used to build Malvern Star bikes, in Melbourne at the time. He ran over and grabbed the bits of the bike frame and Dad and I went over to my brother, he wasn’t hurt badly, just grazed. Bruce Small said, “Quick! Grab these, and run up across the line and you’ll win. That’s in the rules.”

So that’s what he did and he won the race. And after that, Hubert Hoffman wanted to train him then and Bruce Small gave him a brand new racing bike, all chrome plated. He raced out and he joined the army in 1939, and went up to the Rabaul Harbour with two hundred blokes, and the Japs [Japanese] killed the lot of them up there. They tied them up to trees and used them for bayonet practice. That was in January, 1941.

My other brother, he turned out to be a professional boxer. He was fighting in main round events, ten round events, at West Melbourne Stadium when he was seventeen. He was smaller than me. He still lives on the Gold Coast up there. He’s about eighty one now.

Oh, Dad was proud of the lot of us.

For athletic ability and all that, but he taught us everything.

We were devastated. Mum used to keep going up the Red Cross, she couldn’t find out what had happened for nearly twelve months. Then they found out that he had been seen, after a big attack. After the Japs came in and shelled all of Rabaul Harbour,

they used up all their ammunition and they went into the scrub to get away from the Japs when they landed, but they rounded them up. There was one chap that got out of there and came home, and he told them what happened. He told the Red Cross, then the army sent out telegrams. They were reported missing in action. I got the true story of it all when I was up in the Repat [Repatriation] Hospital,

when I was sick myself, from one of the old soldiers who had been up at Rabaul. He got out of the army up there and he had taken a job with the War Graves Commission up there, digging up the old bodies and putting them in zinc containers and burying them in Rabaul cemetery. He told me exactly what happened. There were only two blokes that got out of his mob. One fellow was a cook, Sergeant Cook his name was.

He had eleven bayonet stab wounds around his face and neck. He survived. The other fellow was a captain, and he finished up in a psych [psychiatric] ward of the Repat Hospital. There was only two that got out, out of two hundred. But the other brother, he was a long distance runner, boxer, swimmer.

Dad taught us to swim. When we were about six or seven years old, we used to climb up the gum trees down the Yarra [River] and dive off, and he’d be waiting in the water and we’d climb on his back and he’d swim into the bank with us.

My eldest brother’s name was Percival, the same as Dad, and my other brother’s name was Herbert, Herbert Nelson.

He was seventeen, but he just signed his own name, instead of asking Dad to sign it. They had the same name, and they took that. 1939, he was in garrison on the heads down Queenscliff, down Melbourne. He was in Artillery. They still wore the ostrich plumes in their hats and the bandoleer, and breaches and leggings. The big artillery guns then were still drawn by horses,

and there was always a man who used to ride the lead horse. That’s what he used to do, as well as being a gunner. They were gunner drays when they went up there, but they converted them to infantry. But they didn’t have enough guns and ammunition, that’s why they got beat. They used to drill with broomsticks. A shocking indictment on the government.

They didn’t know until he came home in uniform. Dad was upset. I remember he said to Mum, “Don’t do his washing. Let him do it himself.” Father was pretty hard on you in those days. If you didn’t do what you were told, you got a box on the ears and a foot up the backside. You weren’t game to do anything wrong.

Your backside got a bit sore after half a dozen kicks. You soon learned, though. You still had a little bit of a fear of your Dad, even though he was the best bloke in your life. Like the company sergeant major when you were in the army.

Yeah, he used to write home. He was engaged to a lovely girl.

I can’t remember her name now. A lot of diggers, they got engaged before they went overseas. She was a lovely girl. He was a terrific bloke, too. He was six foot two in his socks, Percy,

and my other brother was five foot six. He was a lightweight boxer, eight stone six he was. But he beat everyone in the army and the navy. When he came home from Bougainville, he fought an American Negro at Casino Town Hall, down at the Allied Forces Championships and beat him. He had eighty four fights, undefeated. He was a terrific bloke, Bert.

He still thinks he’s pretty good. He’s eighty one and he still reckons he can beat anyone.

It was only in the newspapers and on the radio. There was no TV [television] or anything. Your radio was like a cabinet with a radio in it, valves and that. There were no transistors in those days. Everyone got around it and listened to plays of a night-time and all that.

You’d get the news about every half an hour. When the war broke out they got the recruiting going. I remember when the 9th Battalion went to the Middle East. My uncle was in that, Dad’s brother. And you got that on the radio, what was going on over there. Now when there’s a war on, they’ve got video cameras and they’ve got

satellites and they bring it into your lounge, you can see what’s going on. In those days you couldn’t. You didn’t know anything until about six months after it happened. And there was only one or two correspondents with cameras, up there in the front lines.

Uncle Herb, yeah. He went through the Middle East and came home. He was wounded, but he came home. He finished up being a builder at Echuca in Victoria.

Dad’s younger brother got killed in the First World War, they were together. They were sent up filling shell holes, and shells came over and he said, “Look out, Perc,” and he pushed Dad in a shell hole, and it went off and blew his head off. He lost his brother there, Dad,

but Uncle Herbie came home all right. My brother’s name was Herbert. In the Second World War, he was conscripted, when he turned eighteen, like all the young blokes. They did their infantry training, and there was a march from Albury to Melbourne, along the side of the road. Then they put them on a train, took them up and put them onto a boat, and sent them up to New Guinea to fight the Japs. He was only nineteen when he had his first kill in the jungle.

You went up the Markham Valley over the Finisterre Ranges, up to Bogajim and Debank, and pushed the Japs over there. They were all only eighteen or nineteen year old kids. Then the Yanks [Americans] came in and took over the positions. They went over to [Port] Moresby then, and then they brought them home, gave them about three weeks leave, then sent them back up to Bougainville. He was there for eighteen months until the war finished. Until the Japs came out and surrendered.

Some of the Japs didn’t want to go home. Some of them wanted to go home and they sent them to Faeroe Island to a prison compound, and the other Japs that didn’t want to go home, they gave them a hand grenade and told them to go down the bush track and pull the pin out. And that’s how they sorted that out. Things get a bit tough in wars.

New Guinea and Bougainville.

No. Percy was up in Rabaul before Bert ever went overseas. Yeah, all the young blokes got conscripted for the Second World War when they turned eighteen. They just got a card in the mail to report to your local drill hall. They looked in your eyes, told you to bend over and cough and told you, ‘you were in the army’. But most of the young blokes were healthy and fit in those days, because they ate whole foods

and didn’t smoke and they were all athletes.

Yeah, Percy would have been in Rabaul, because he was killed in January, 1941, when the Japs first started to come down. They would have been in New Guinea

when Bert went up there. Yeah, when Bert went up to New Guinea in the army with his mob, he wrote a letter home asking for Dad’s permission to join the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] because they used to call them ‘Chockos,’ [chocolate soldiers] the Militia. They had to have their parents’ permission to join the AIF, to go overseas and into the war. He was already up in New Guinea. Mum said, “You better sign the paper so he can stay with all his mates.”

It’s pretty tough sending young blokes like that. We had young blokes with us, when we went to Korea. As long as they were nineteen years or older, they could go to Korea. Some of them do all right in the front line. Some of the young country blokes seemed to hack it all right.

But young city fellows around nineteen years old, half of them break down, start crying. They just refuse to go out on night patrol. Someone else has got to take their place then, perhaps a married bloke. They were too young. I was twenty four year old, and I was a section leader then a platoon commander. But

once you get to about twenty one, twenty two years old, everything seems to become a lot plainer, in life. When you’re only nineteen years old, it’s nearly all muscle, ripture and bust, emotions and that. But some of the young guys are okay. We had a young fellow, Dave Candour, he was nineteen years old and a sergeant. He won a military medal for an action out there. He was a sergeant in charge of thirty two blokes. He was a good boxer, too.

Fairfield.

Yeah. Most of the fruit shops were Italians. Most of the fish shops were Greeks. The first thing you noticed was the Greek flags going up in the fish shops, but no Italian flags anywhere

because they were fighting with the Germans. But no, it just brought all the people together. They’d be out at night-time, after the news, out talking to each other, the neighbours. Especially the women, the mothers of all the young blokes that had been sent overseas, they’d all be out talking to each other. “Where’s your boy?” “What mob is your son in?” And all that. And that was…the war was just the centre of everything,

because ordinary people have got nothing else but their family. After the family is taken away, all they had home was me, the little bloke. They probably never dreamt that I would wind up over in the war in Korea, and two years in Malaya after that. But that’s life. You take what’s served up to you and you do the best you can with it.

I used to look up to my two brothers because they used to look after me. They taught me to ride my bike. They used to piggy back me down swimming, take me fishing, do all sorts of stuff and look after me. Any other kids pushed you over, they’d chase them away. It’s just your big brother. Yep.

They were really good blokes, terrific blokes. Bert, once he got home and got out of the army, we went over South Australia falling timber and working over there. I think there were about eighty five axe men at the big place over there. You could work as many hours as you liked. You could knock up a pretty big cheque at the end of the week.

We came home for a couple of months, got a job at the jam factory just down from Dad’s property down at Marsden. He bumped into a girl down there, she jumped up onto the landing to go inside, he said, “Look at that, she’s fit.” They got married about six weeks after that. Her Dad owned a big property out at Woolsten or something, a sheep property.

They started knocking about. Her father had trotters, horses. She used to ride her horse into work every day. She was a lovely girl. We used to call her ‘Bubbles.’ She fell off her bike so she started riding her horse in then. They were terrific. They were made for each other. Seven children, they’re all grown up and married. They live on their own at Ashmore now.

Yeah, he’s a good bloke, Bert. He never smoked in his life, except when he was a kid. He came home sick one day and Mum got the doctor there. I was standing in the room. The doctor said, “He’s got all the symptoms of poisoning, but he hasn’t been vomiting or anything.” He said, “Keep in a dark room, keep him quiet, give him plenty of water to drink, and I’ll come back and see how he is tomorrow.”

When the doctor went, Mum picked his pants up off the floor and about fifty cigarettes butts fell out of the pockets. Mother had a shop, and they pinched the cigarettes out of the shop and went down the creek and smoked them all. That’s what you did as a kid in those days, you tried everything. But he never smoked from that day to this. So it would be a good way to stop children smoking…

I lived at Dad’s place at Malmsbury, at the farm there. I went into Kyneton, that’s a bigger place, Kyneton. A couple of the fellows I knew there wanted to go and see what the CMF was like, so we went and joined the CMF there.

I was only there about two weeks and they gave me two stripes. It was an infantry battalion there, I was there about nine months, I suppose?

Eighteen, I think, about eighteen.

The war was finished then. My brother Bert was home from the islands. That was about 1948.

No. It was just that I had grown up in an army fellow. Dad was in the army,

all his brothers and him were in the First World War. Percy was in the army and got killed in Rabaul, and Bert was in the army in New Guinea, and all that sort of stuff. Usually it follows that you’re full of it all from your brothers and your father and that, so it was the thing. I think it was another step towards manhood,

joining the Citizen Military Forces.

Well, he couldn’t, just that he missed everyone. There were pieces cut out of his letters, everywhere. The censors cut everything out. Anything to do with the army or where they were or what was going on, anything like that. All the letters were censored by a censor.

There were just big chunks cut out of the letters with a pair of scissors, so you didn’t know where they were or what they were doing. Until letters stopped coming, and then mother would go into the Red Cross to try and find out what was going on. That was the worst part, the waiting. So everyone listens to the radio every night, to try and find out where different battalions are, but you don’t

know where they are. They used to have signs up in the shops and everything, “A loose tongue can sink ships,” because there were spies around everywhere, listening, and they’d radio back anything they hear. It’s surprising how many spies there are around Australia, like when there’s a war on. Even now there would be spies around different cities and different places, and holiday places.

Well, when anybody gets killed or wounded or maimed in the war, you don’t feel it unless you see it. If you’re close enough to touch it, then it affects you and it changed your whole life. But if you just heard about somebody getting killed. It’s the same as on the news, if somebody gets killed in a car accident and it’s on the news

it doesn’t affect you that much. You don’t like to hear it. You just find out if they got the bloke that did it. If he was at fault, that he gets punished for it. If he gets drunk, throw the key away. When it knocks on your own door, that’s when it affects you. Yeah, it upset me. I used to see him riding his bike down the street for years after that. I used to sing out.

But when you get into the front line yourself, you’re that tough, you’ve been trained that hard and we were all ex-athletes in the 2nd Battalion that went to Korea. I was a foot runner, I’d done wood chopping, swimming, boxing, football AFL.

Most of my mates there were rugby league players from Sydney, some were boxers, fighters. You couldn’t get a job then, that’s why I joined the army. We finished the hydroelectric scheme, and they wanted us to go the Snowy Mountains and kicked that off, but it was too cold.

It was good money up there, it was like a big army camp. Mount Beauty, there was a big camp at the bottom with a great big cookhouse

and a big dining room, with long tables and chairs, like the army. And they had huts. You had your own private room, with a bed and a wardrobe everything in it. You worked for the State Electricity Commission. There were wages, but you could work as many hours as you liked. You could get up and start work at daylight in the morning and work until dark at night, if you wanted to. They had to finish it at a certain time and

the longer the hours you worked, the more you got paid. It wasn’t a hard job, most of it was technical work. I went with a team of fellows. It was a bit quiet with the big equipment when the snow was up there, you couldn’t work with it. When the snow started to work it was too slushy, too dangerous. You’d go to the side of the mountain in a bulldozer, when you’re blading roads, and the whole side of it could give way and you’d go right to the bottom, so

they let it go until the ground firmed up a bit. So I worked with some blokes falling timber down below the snowline for about six months. I knew how to fall timber so that was good. I finished up a bush foreman there. Three of us were pulling the same amount of timber as nine other blokes. We all used to go into the wood chops at the end of the week, make a bit of extra money on the wood chops.

Yeah, we went down to Melbourne to see. We wanted to stay together, see, we were all mates. So we went down to have a look at it. There were recruiting things in the paper. We went down to join the Special K Force for two years, but when I saw that mural on the window of the bloke with his rifle and bayonet, and a bloke on his back on the ground,

we didn’t want to be in that. So we joined the regular army for six years and we finished up in Korea anyhow.

Oh, the stories that Dad had told us about fighting in the First World War. I just didn’t like the look of it. What was I then? About twenty three, twenty four,

I used to get in a few fistfights sometimes up on the Kiewa Valley Hydroelectric Scheme. There were a lot of big dice games, on pay nights up there, where there would be two or three thousand pounds on the table. Blokes would get full of beer and want to fight. I could look after myself. I used to stop fights, too, if I saw a fellow get knocked down, we’d stop it straight away.

And blokes never used to put the boot in or kick blokes once they knocked them down, that was the end of the fight, and they would push them away from each other. Nowadays they just seem to keep bashing and bashing blokes, I just don’t understand it. The same as the road rages, they go out of control. In those days, when we were working and knocking about, it was always a fair go fight. And if a bloke was offered out in a fight, and he fought the other bloke and he got knocked down, that’s it that was the end of the fight.

We all used to say, “Stay down, he’s too good for you.” Use your brains, you know. They’d want to get up and keep fighting. There would be about ten referees there.

Walking around the streets until midnight, waiting for the papers. All the people were out on their verandas waiting to get papers.

Living in Fairfield, I was a kid doing my paper round.

You’d get extra papers that would come out late at night if something happened. But when the war finished, everybody was out talking to one another, visiting, just having a couple of beers. The few quid that they did have, they spent it on beer. Beer was a lot cheaper in those days.

Yeah, it was pretty sad because Percy wasn’t coming home.

But in general, it was over. Like Dad was glad that it was finished. The only letter he ever wrote to me in Korea was, “Look after yourself, son. Use your bloody brain and keep your head down.” Fathers never used to molly-coddle you in those days. Your mother used to look after you, and was really close to you. But Dad was a steadying influence

in the family. You did what he said. You did what your mother told you, too, but if you didn’t she’d say, “I’ll tell you father when he comes home.” That put you straight into line.

Just the K Force blokes. Not much. You don’t know anything about a war until you get in it, and see your mates getting killed and blown to pieces.

And feel the concussion of the shells going through your body and your teeth rattling and the trench floor coming up and hitting you in the face, concussion, getting nose bleeds for days on end. You’ve still got to go out on night patrols every second night, meet the Chinamen out in the valley, stop him digging in at the bottom of your forward slopes

so they can put their front battalion on you the next night. You’ve got to keep them back on their side of the valley. There were all minefields out there, too. You have one or two dummy minefields, and if you get wounded you can run into the dummy minefield, and the Chinaman doesn’t know they’re dummy minefields so he won’t follow you in there. So you can lay up until the stretcher bearers come down and pick you up. If the rats didn’t get to you. Once you got wounded, hundreds of rats swarm all over you.

That happened to my mate Allen Smith. He got left down there. We went down to get him three days later and the rats had done the job on him. I used to box with Allen, spar with him at Puckapunyal. We went into the front line first, to try to learn where all the mine gaps were, and where the mine fields were. The Royal Fusiliers were in that position then,

and most of them were only National Service kids. The senior NCOs were regular army. We used to go out on patrol with them, but they’d only go to the bottom of the forward slope, and wouldn’t go across the valley any further, go where they were supposed to go. They were too frightened. That’s how Allen got killed, he went out with a patrol of them, and they run into an ambush. We were taught to rapid fire and

charge straight through an ambush and get out of it. But the young Royal Fusiliers fellows all ran back up the hill, dived back into their trenches and left him out there on his own. Yeah, they were too young, and they didn’t want to be there anyhow.

Yeah, there were a lot of young blokes. The regular army for six years. They looked at it like it was a job, most of them were tradesmen. You had to pass a pretty strict psycho test then. It had all sorts of questions in it. “Do you ever feel like jumping off great heights?”

“If your mate fell off the top of a hill, would you try to save him?” And all sorts of stuff. They had at the top of the page, “Some of these questions are not right, some are and some have nothing to do with it.” So they let you sort it out, they wanted to see what you thought about things. How your thinking powers were, I suppose. You just answered common sense answers.

If you thought a question was stupid, you’d put a line through it. That’s what I did. I must have passed because I went in. Four of us got in easy, we were all pretty fit. That’s what they wanted anyhow.

Lenny Harrison was an Aborigine. The first officer we got at Puckapunyal, who came down there, he was an Aboriginal, too. Reg Saunders his name was. He was the only Aboriginal to ever get a Queen’s Commission in the Australian Army.

He won a military medal in the Middle East, a bartuit in New Guinea. He was a really good bloke, a terrific officer. He used to play AFL football. He used to umpire the first half, then throw me the whistle and I’d umpire the second half. We played football around. Lenny Harrison,

I was more mates with Len, because some of the other blokes used to pick on him because he was an Abo [Aborigine], you know. He was a gentleman, real easy going, he was a nice fellow. He reckoned his girlfriend’s legs were too skinny. He was a terrific bloke, though. It’s a bit hard to remember their names now. I met Len at the recruiting office.

He was there when the four of us went in there. He was going crook because they knocked him back, but he’d been drinking wine. He said, “They’ve given me these tablets to take and told me to come back tomorrow.” I said, “Well, do what he told you.” He said, “Will you blokes be here tomorrow?” I said, “Yeah, we’ll be here tomorrow.” He got in then, he passed.

Yeah, it just was like a real estate office, with an army officer sitting in there. Out the back was an army doc. It was pretty easy to pass the medical test for me, because there was nothing wrong with me. The other guys were all right.

Most of the young blokes in those days were pretty fit. Everybody was into athletics, most blokes. All the blokes that I knew anyhow.

It was a dustbowl. There was about a foot of white powdery dust wherever you went. Half the blokes there were down with a sore throat. They called it Pucka Throat. It was caused from the dust.

We all slept in canvas tents with wooden floorboards, we had bunks, a straw mattress on it. The showers were an old tin shed halfway up the hill with no windows in it, and cold water. The mess hut was good, the food was good. There was a good wet canteen open until ten o’ clock every night. Yeah, plenty of sports,

plenty of football, athletics. I remember we had a big sports meeting there, and Tommy Harver was a front row forward in Balmain. Both he and I had a sore throat, a bit of the Pucka Throat and a wog. They gave us a bottle of mastussy and some aspirin. “Go and lay down, you blokes.” Reg Saunders had the company down for battalion sports, and he sent a runner up to get us off our bed

and come down for sports. He wanted me to run in the hundred yard sprint, and the long jump and high jump. He wanted Harvey to run the two hundred and four hundred yards. It was all yards in those days. So I went to get some sand shoes, buy them off a bloke, and they were two sizes too big. They were like clown shoes, they were flapping when I run, but I won. This bloke sprinted down in a pair of spikes. They said, “That bloke, you won’t beat him,” and I beat him by about five yards.

Then I went in the long jump, I won the long jump and I won the high jump. And Tom Harvey won the two hundred and the four hundred, and another guy we didn’t know won the eight hundred. We got the Monday leave to go to Bendigo for that. Reg Saunders, the Aborigine lieutenant said, “Where’s your sore throat now?” I said, “That fixed it up.” It was the dust that used to get in your throat.

Well, I was only there roughly a week, then I started the carter course, the NCO course. They had an Oz MIT team there. The Australian method instruction. They had a captain, a sergeant, a couple of privates with them, they had all the weapons and stuff. It was like going to school every day. They were teaching us how to teach the soldiers, how to train them in weapons training,

and lay mine fields and registering where mines were. The whole engineering bit, the whole infantry bit. Then we did a written examination, then we went out in the bush for a week, bivouac, and we did battle training out there. Each bloke had to take over a company, as company commander. I could handle that all right. We used all live ammunition, and we had to withdraw up a big hill,

under fire. Under fire, right, there’s a lieutenant there throwing half sticks of gelignite near us to make it real, as if we were being hit with mortars. I think there were three blokes who were hit with flying stones and pebbles. One bloke lost his eye. Another bloke lost his leg from his knee down. They threw a grenade in a hole and it didn’t go off.

They threw another one in to explode it, and it didn’t go off. They left it there for about ten minutes, and they went up to see what had happened, to get the grenades out, they reckoned they must have been duds. And just as they got there it went off. A bloke stood up and it blew the bottom part of his leg off, from the knee down. They’re tricky. They’ve got a little fuse, a four second fuse inside them, and sometimes they’ll go out for a couple of seconds, then they’ll spit again and start to burn. You might get one in a thousand like that.

That’s what they got that day. That bloke, when we marched over through Melbourne, before we went to Korea, he stood on the bridge on crutches on one leg when we marched across Princess Bridge.

Yeah. We threw grenades into a hole, for practice and that. We were behind sandbags and they had a hole out in the ground. They taught you how to bowl it. You don’t throw a grenade, you bowl it. He bowled one in and it didn’t go off.

They let it go for a while, then they put another in to explode it. What happened, that one fell short and it was just outside the hole. They waited for a while and it didn’t go off. They went over to pick them up, I think they waited for about five minutes or something. They didn’t wait long enough. They shouldn’t have gone near it. They should have put a guard thing around it and kept everyone away.

But they went over there and the thing went off. The one that went off set the other one off. We had a few accidents. Some of the guys crawling under barbed wire with a machine gun on fixed line fire went over your head, sometimes a bloke would stand up and get hit with bullets. Night-time, mostly at night-time.

Yeah, one guy got hit around the kidneys

with bullets out of a Bren gun. Yeah, he stood up. I believe when the troops were training at Canungra, at the jungle school up there, a few of them got killed up there, with the live firing. It’s a long time ago now…

That was in Puckapunyal.

When you came back after the examination, you went back to your company. You reported back to your company orderly room and that’s where the company commander is and the platoon sergeant, company sergeant. Mostly the company commander would be in the office. When I walked in he said, “Ahh, come in Corporal Gray.” I said, “I must have passed, did I?” He said, “Yes,

you go and get some stripes out of the Q Store [Quartermaster’s Store] and put them on.” He said, “You’ll be going on a bivouac tomorrow, and you’ll be acting company commander and you’ll get lieutenant’s pay.” I was the acting lieutenant there right through most of our infantry training. Then we started getting a sprinkling of officers coming down from Duntroon College. I’m trying to remember the name of the

officer just before we went to Korea. Right through the infantry training I was acting platoon commander. I was acting sergeant then I was acting platoon commander. Then just before we went to Korea we got officers coming down from Duntroon Military College. When we got over to Korea, we lost that officer, and we got another officer when we got off the boat and got on the train and went up to staging camp up

a few miles behind the 38th Parallel. We got an officer that came from the 1st Battalion. Lieutenant John Sullivan. His twelve months wasn’t up, so he came from 1st Battalion to us. He was a terrific bloke. He’d been in action and he was a real level headed sensible bloke.

Some of the K Force blokes came back wounded and told us there were regular blokes up there. He said, “You won’t get out of going to Korea.” He said, “You’ll wind up over there because they’re short of K Force fellows.” But the 3rd Battalion that was in Korea all the time, they called it ‘Old Faithful.’ Once your twelve months was up you were sent home and they were getting reinforcements

from Hamamura in Japan. There was a battle school there. They were sending blokes from Australia to Hamamura Battle School there, and that was like a reinforcement place with the 3rd Battalion that was in Korea. And the 3rd Battalion was there for about three years, that’s why they called it Old Faithful, and the blokes just rotated through it. The 1st Battalion went over there for a year, like our 2nd Battalion went there for a year.

Yes, there were guys coming back from the K Force and that, and some of them signed on for six years in the regular army. They finished out there with us at the 2nd Battalion at Puckapunyal. They told us what it was like in Korea. They called it Cho Sen. They nicknamed Frozen Chosen.

It was twenty seven below zero there in the winter, and it freezes down thirty feet. But Cho Sen is Korean for ‘The land of the morning calm.’ The wind never blows before lunchtime in Korea. Every morning there is calm. That’s where it gets its name, Cho Sen. The Land of the Morning Calm.

Well, some of them had been in action and some of them hadn’t been. It was mostly the 3rd Battalion blokes who were action.

Kapyong. They won themselves a presidential citation from America for that one.

No. There was one bloke there that had been hit in the stomach, he had about five bullets through his stomach, but he just big-timing. Trying to make out he was a big-time fellow in front of the new recruits.

It didn’t make any difference. You were in with all your mates and you were trained, you were hard-fit. You get bayonet training in the army. They teach you all the basic moves and that. But then you put the scabbard on the bayonet and tie it on and then you’re taught bayonet fighting and you really get into it. Like you don’t hit your mates with the butt of the rifle, or you make sure you miss his head,

but you stick your bayonet into them, and you learn how to parry and thrust and all that sort of stuff. Once you get into bayonet fighting, the instructor just tells you. I said to him, “The enemy is going to know all your moves, your parry, your thrusts.” He said, “You don’t have to stick with it. As long as you come to them screaming and aggressive, you can use your own moves if you want.” Like in the football. That’s it, it’s a fight. You’re fighting for your life.

So if you can invent something better than the army has got, you stand a better chance of getting through it. Once you get really fit, and you’re tough and you’re good at everything, and you’ve got all your mates with you, you think your invincible. When you’ve got a loaded gun under your arm, a sub-machine and a belt full of grenades. It never bothered me going out on patrol of a night-time, even after when blokes got it.

Yeah, we were all prepared.

We were trained up to the minute. We had long route marches and forced marches and that, and breaking all the records at Puckapunyal. We thought we were pretty good.

My Dad had told me about the First World War, and other diggers over there, he asked what the Chinaman was like, was a good fighter or not. Didn’t worry about the North Koreans. Most of them were farmers,

but fanatics, you know. The biggest trouble was that they came at you in such great numbers, and there was that much artillery. They would put artillery on you for two or three days. Then the artillery would go up and over the back and it would lift like, you know. But they kept the artillery on the Yanks, on the left flank, artillery on rocket division of the Koreans, and then they put the frontal straight up onto your position.

We had tunnels dug, and we used to get in the tunnels. Up on top the hill, we had kitten wire about ten inches above the ground, in twelve inch squares, all over the top of the hill. When they got up there, their feet went in down amongst the barbed wire and they couldn’t move. They stayed there, they couldn’t get loose. We’d call the Kiwi [New Zealand] Artillery down our hill then and blow the Chinamen off it while we were in the tunnels.

It didn’t bother us. We didn’t give it a thought. At that age, you’re not worried about what politicians do. The main reason we went over there was

because all the South Koreans were getting killed. We saw the films of all the refugees coming down in front of the fighting. And Pusan, the southernmost city, there were over ten thousand kids there under twelve years old, carrying little babies around and that. An army captain over there put up great big tents and that and

opened up a protection area for them, got food from the American army to feed them all. A lot of the Americans, when they went home, they adopted those kids. A lot of them, not all of them. And those kids learnt to speak english in about a week. They all had baseball caps on and a mouthful of chewing gum, from the Yanks.

When they were coming down the main roads in the hundreds, they used to block up the roads, and our trucks and the Americans couldn’t get up to the front lines with the food. In amongst all the people, were Chinese and North Korean commandos with sub-machine guns, dressed up as women, and the guns were hidden. They’d told all the refugees

“If you run off the road, we’ll kill you.” That’s why they stayed on the road. One American officer with a loud hailer was trying to get them off the road, so the trucks could get up. He said, “If you don’t move off the road, I’ll call artillery down on you and blow you off the road.” One or two of them run off the road, and there was a stutter from the sub-machine guns, and we knew the North Koreans and the Chinese were in amongst the people,

keeping them on the road to block the road. He called down a couple of shots to straddle the road, straddle the crowd, they started to break a bit and you could hear the sub-machine go again. He said, “Well, I’m going for final effect.” He said, “We’ve got to get out of vehicles.” And he called in artillery and he blew them all off the road, killed the lot of them. He got all the North Koreans, the Chinese, the women and kids,

and all the old blokes, the lot of them. He cleared the road so the supply trucks could get through. And that’s what war is like. The army officer, he probably never forgave himself for that. He probably died cursing himself, but he had to do what he was told to do.

You’ve got to carry out orders. When you’re in a war in the front line, and you get orders come down from up top, they come down through the chain of command, you’ve got carry out your orders. If you don’t, it’s affecting more than you

and the blokes under you, it’s affecting the whole army. You’ve got to do what you’re told and you’ve got to live with it.

Oh, about three hundred. It might have been more. When we first down to Seoul, I think there was only about three buildings standing. I’ll show you a couple of photos later.

There were people all just standing around with a few belongings, hundreds and hundreds of them, and all smoke coming off the buildings. When they had the Olympics in Korea, in Seoul, we were watching the tele [television] and the boys said, “That’s Seoul, you were there weren’t you Dad, in the war?” I said, “No, that’s not Seoul. That’s Tokyo.” Because it had all been rebuilt. I didn’t believe it was Seoul City,

it had been rebuilt. And the Americans being over there, they progressed South Korea probably twenty, thirty times faster than it would have had their never been a war, because they were all farmers, and not educated. Out in the paddocks, digging up roots to eat. But once the Yanks got there and set up business and got them going, they industrialised the place,

all the people benefited from it. And the North Koreans didn’t benefit at all. And they’re the ones that started the war. Then China came into it.

The same thing that happens when you’re in action. The bloke will,

in the winter, will go down a track between mine fields. As soon as you get over the sandbags, out of the trenches, and you put your safety slides off, you’re supposed to put your finger in behind the trigger, in case you slip over or something. Some blokes, they’ll get nervous, they’ll have their finger on the trigger, they’ll slip over and their feet will go out from under them, they’ll put a zipper [stream of bullets] up a bloke’s back in front of them. That will just go down as ‘Killed In Action’. It’s put in the battalion records as an accidental wounding, but

I suppose about thirty percent of blokes who got shot in Korea would be accidental woundings, from your own bloke. If you go over your patrol boundaries in the night-time, in the dark, you’ll take one another on. You don’t know it’s your own patrol there in the dark. Someone will hear a noise and they will let fly with a Bren gun or an Owen gun, and someone will shout out “We’re Aussies.” But there will be three or four of them knocked down. But once you get used to patrol, you keep away from your patrol boundaries.

With accidental shootings back here in Australia, it’s just put down as ‘accidental’, and they get paid compensation. So much for a leg, so much for an eye, all that sort of stuff, same as if you were at work.

We reacted pretty strongly to it, because the safety precautions

weren’t strictly adhered to. If they strictly adhered to the safety precautions, nobody would get hurt. It was always they forgot to do something or they were stupid.

Mostly it was in the instructor. The instructor who was with the blokes showing them how to throw the grenades. He should have been in charge of that, and they shouldn’t have gone up to the grenades. They went up to them too soon.

They should have kept away from them. Throw one, it doesn’t go off, throw another one, it doesn’t go off. You must have a crook batch of grenades. Anyone with any brains would figure that out in two seconds. He probably just thought it was those couple of grenades. I wouldn’t touch a grenade that came out of the whole shipment, if two of them didn’t go off. If you had two dud cars, you wouldn’t go back to the same distributor. And the bloke who threw the grenades, too,

he should have had enough brains, he would have been nervous throwing the grenades, I suppose, first time. With an accident like that, they just tighten up safety precautions. That would upset the instructor as it would have upset the bloke who lost half his leg, but accidents happen.

Once you start monkeying about with playing with fire or explosives, someone’s going to get hurt. Like two people in two cars, one starts up at Cairns, one starts in Melbourne, they’ll run into each other sooner or later. It’s the law of averages.

The battalion marched through Melbourne with fixed bayonets. All the people turned out. A lot of the diggers relations and that would have been there. But mostly, there wasn’t a great deal of blokes from Melbourne.

There were blokes from Melbourne, Sydney, Perth. They were from everywhere. In those days, blokes were moving around looking for jobs, from one state to the other. It was hard to get a job. Like the guys that were in my company, the West Australian blokes.

My army number was Three Oblique Three Seven Four Nine. Well, the Three Oblique was Victoria. Sydney was Two Oblique. The same as the phone numbers are now, twos and threes. The West Australian blokes had a prefix on their number as well. Because it wasn’t the AIF then, it was the Royal Australian Regiment. The Queen had given us her colours.

We marched across there, in the slouch hat and the white gaiters and the white belts. Across Princess Bridge, down to the cenotaph, on the other side. Then they took us back to Puckapunyal. We got on a train, that’s right.

It was just a going away parade, that’s all.

A bit of a show for the relations of the troops and for the troops themselves. They were all fully trained.

Yeah, it did look really good, yeah. The guy that lost his leg in training reckoned we looked pretty good. He was crook he wasn’t going over there. I said, “You might be lucky you only lost half your leg. A lot of these blokes are going to get killed when they get over there.” He said, “Yeah, that’s one way of looking at it.”

I only remember his nickname, we nicknamed him ‘Frenchy.’ I don’t know even know what his name was. Same with a lot of blokes in the army, you never get to know what their name is, just the nickname. But the guys in your own platoon, you get to know their names. The guys in your company, most of them you don’t get to know their names, just the nickname.

I can’t remember now. We went back to Puckapunyal.

No, I don’t think there was a pre-embarkation leave. We just got on the train and went to the docks where the New Australia was. A lot of people saw the ship off there, and the band played, we had a terrific band, they used to play swing tunes and that. When the ship started pulling out, they were playing ‘Oop De Doo,’ or something like that.

No, I didn’t hear of anyone deserting, to try and get out of going over there. I think if anyone wanted to get out of going over there, they could go up the padre and he would parade them up to the colonel and if they had a good excuse for not going over, the padre could get them out of it I think. Like, if they had a letter from their wife, or if their wife had written to the local minister or something, they could get a lot of pull that way.

They tried that when we were in Korea, a lot of blokes, but it doesn’t work when you’re in the front line. Your wife can’t get you pulled out of the front line, once you’re committed. Unless your wife has been hurt at home. One of the guys, his wife got her face burned in a gas oven, and they flew him straight back to Australia from Korea, from the front line.

He said he was going home. He said he would get a lift from a Yank fighter or something like that, or a Yank plane. He was heading down the road this day when they pulled him up. The company commander got him, sent a few signals or things like that, got it verified, the letter from his local minister,

he wrote a letter. The next day he was on a plane back to Australia. They look after you pretty well in the army, if you’ve got a genuine case. If it’s a very serious illness, if somebody is not expected to live, they’ll get out of it. They’re compassionate. They call it compassionate leave. They’ll send you home on, say, two weeks compassionate leave,

but once you get home to Australia you can get it extended. But that compassionate leave is always there in the regular army. So when you’re training, or even when you’re overseas, if somebody at home gets badly hurt or something like that, you can always get compassionate leave for a start, then you can get it extended. Once you get back to Australia it’s easier to get it extended than it is to get away. Once you’re up in the front lines it’s pretty hard to get out of the front line, once you’re committed to battle.

A lot of guys will use it. Get someone at home to write letters to get them out of it if they’re frightened and that. But most of the blokes do their job. Some fellows break down or start crying, that’s when they start to be. You send them back down the line, twenty four hours R & R, rest and recuperation. They come back, if they break down again and they’re a genuine case, they’re nerves are cooked, the padre will usually get them sent back behind the line. Get them a truck driving

or something like that. But sometimes a bloke will just refuse to go out on patrol. They get thirty days back in the military gaol back at Silva. The Canadian screws bash them around a bit, they change their minds. You see, if a bloke refused to go out on a fighting patrol of a night-time, and he’s got no legitimate reason, he hasn’t broken down or anything, another bloke has got to take his place and go out. You usually find the married blokes will do it,

because they’ve usually got a bit more go in them than young, single blokes. That’s no good. We used to say that any blokes that refused to go out on a night patrol, they’d go out one night and a couple of their mates would get killed. There would be a fighter patrol on the next night, and they wouldn’t want to go out. Their nerves would be rattled, but they wouldn’t show it, they wouldn’t break down or anything. They would bottle it up, and it all comes out when they get home. I used to say to my blokes, if it happened to any of my blokes, it only happened once or twice, I’d just say,

“If you don’t go out, somebody else has to got to take your place, and if he gets killed, what are you going to do then? Are you going to go and explain it to his family?” Nine times out of ten you can kid them around, say, “Stick close by me, stay with me.”

Yeah, one fellow, John Philpot, he was up on The Hook. It was pretty hard up there. He broke down, he was up on his bunk,

sobbing. I went up and said, “What’s the matter, John? You get a letter from home, did you?” Some blokes used to get ‘Dear John letter’ [letter informing that a relationship is over]. He was shaking, he said, “No, I’m all right.” That’s a danger sign, they say they’re all right when they’re sobbing like that. Half the time they don’t know their sobbing. But I said, “Look, if you’re not feeling well, you don’t have to go out on patrol. I can get you a job back behind the lines, if you like.” This is between you and your digger,

nobody else knows about it. He said, “No, I’m all right. I’m just a bit tired.” I could see his wasn’t right. A grown man doesn’t sob and tell you he’s all right. Some blokes, it affects them different. Some blokes will do their bottle and want to fight you. They won’t go out on a patrol, but they will fight you. Their emotions will go one way or another,

and you’ve got to know. When you’re corporal or a sergeant, you carry a stub book in your shirt pocket, and you’ve got every blokes name in your section or your battalion there, whether he’s married or single, what he did for a living before he came down, so you know what his temperament is like, and you put little comments in there. So if anything out of the usual crops up with him, you can have a bit of a look at your book, or you’ve studied it, so you know what each bloke is like. And they’re all different.

So you’ve got to use a bit of man management and understanding with blokes. You’ve got to be firm and you’ve got to understand them. Which comes in handy through your life. I think I learned that from my father when I was a kid. If you’ve got a good father or a good mother, it grows with you.

Want to fight? Oh yeah, I went over to an orders group

to take a fighting patrol out one night. I came in from patrol, I got in my bunk for about a quarter of an hour and a runner came in and said, “You’ve got to take over to Bogart Company [B Company] and take another patrol out, tonight.” So I had to go over about a quarter of a mile to another hill, to get briefed for the patrol that night by that company commander. And the colonel was there with aerial maps to show me where I was going, to take the patrol. I had to go behind the Chinese lines.

They had a build of traffic, like trucks and things, and he wanted to know what was going on. I came back and it was four o’ clock in the afternoon, I got in my bunk in my dugout, had about ten minutes sleep and I had to get out then to get the blokes out and give an orders group to my patrol and show them where we going, and this bloke kept on chipping in. I thought, “His nerves must be going on him. He hasn’t done this before, he’s a pretty good bloke.” I said, “Keep quiet will you for Christ’s sake.

I’m trying to get the blokes their info [information] for their patrol tonight, so there’s no stuff ups for them.” He said, “I’ll stuff you up.” I said, “What are you doing, Danny? You’re not usually like this. What’s wrong?” He said, “There’s nothing wrong with me.” I said, “Righto, I’ll pick you blokes up. Check all your weapons, load your magazines,

fire two rounds out of each magazine so you know they’re feeding properly. Check all the split pins on your hand grenades, make sure they’re all straightened out so you can get them out easy and quick. I’ll pick you up down the bottom of the hill. Then we’ll go up over to the other company, and then we’ll go out through the lines.” I said to him, “Now, what’s the trouble?” And he wanted to fight me then. “Smart-arse, big mouth, in front of the blokes.” I said, “No.” He said, “Get up here.” And he jumped up on the sand bags, on the parapet of the trench and he wanted to fight me.

The Chinese had mortar teams on the other side, they were likely to start lobbing mortars around. I said, “Get down or they’ll knock you down.” He got down quick and the mortars stopped. I said, “You’re a pain in the arse. You never acted like this before. What’s wrong? You get a letter from home or what?” He said, “No,” he said. He said, “I’ll sort it out.” I knew then what it was about. Anyhow, he got a Dear John.

Something came out later on, when he cooled down. But he could fight, he was tough, and I thought I might get a belting off him, but you can’t. If you’re in charge of a mob of blokes and you’re in the front line, you’ve got to stay tough. If you’re frightened of a bloke, then that’s the end of it. You’re already beat. You’ve got to say to yourself ‘I can beat this bloke.’ I was like that, I’ve always been like it. Anyhow, he came good,

and then I made him buy me six beers. They tasted good, too, I’ll tell you. He said, “You mongrel. I knew you’d get even with me.” But things like that crop up. You’ve got to sort of tamper things a bit. Lots of guys will start fighting one another and things like this. But I never looked for a punch up with a bloke in my life,

unless he was pushing a girl around or his wife or something like that, I’ll flatten him. I thought I could beat anyone, and that stops you from fighting anyone. Because what’s the good of fighting a bloke if you know you can beat him? My brother taught me that, because he was a professional boxer. And Dad said to me, “Don’t try fighting.”

I took a patrol down one night, I took a listening patrol out. Three of you go out and you get out, go down the bridge of the hill down to where the minefield fences run down each side of the ridge. All the ramparts are mined with anti-personnel mines. And when the fences get down to the floor of the valley

they turn like that because that’s the end of minefield, and you’ve got the open valley then. Sinchang Valley. I took a listening patrol out one night, and got down there. We were lying down there quiet, just listening and what the Chinese used to do, they had grenade boys about sixteen or seventeen years old, and they had about a dozen grenades on a bandolier across their chest. And they used to sneak around out there, and if they thought they knew where you were….

Sometimes a bloke would light a bloody cigarette and the smoke would drift around. He would be under a poncho. You wouldn’t strike anyone out there for a couple of weeks, and you’d smell cigarette smoke. And it would be one of your blokes would light a cigarette and have a couple of puffs. They could smell it. The Chinamen could smell cigarette smoke across the valley. And then you’d hear stones start to fall around you on the ground.

The first night I heard that, I said, “What the hell is that? Is something falling out of the trees?” But there were no trees above us. There wasn’t much of a moon and I said, “Bloody Chows [Chinese] must be throwing stones at us.” Then my mate said, “Yeah. You know what Sully told us? They throw stones until you open up and let go with a burst of slugs, then next thing a grenade lands where you are.”

I said, “Righto. We’ll sneak down a bit closer to the creek.” It was a bed of a creek. And all the frogs had stopped croaking. He said, “There’s someone there. The bloody frogs have shut up.” That’s how you could tell where a Chinaman was of a night-time. The frogs would stop croaking in that part of the creek where they were sneaking around. And when they’d get up there, they would stop croaking up there, and these would start croaking again. Little creature noises. We got down closer to the creek and you could hear someone moving

on the gravel in the bed of the creek. I said, “We’ll jump up, we’ll hose that with slugs out of the Owen gun.” I said, “Tell Smithy to go around there with the Bren gun. If they tear off down that way, you can knock them over down there.” We jumped up and we hosed that, and the bloke tore off down there and this bloke let fly with the Bren gun. But he missed the two blokes. The radio kept coming on, “Sitrep, two six.” They wanted a situation report, and the radio crackled so I just turned it off,

because you could hear it across the valley. I pulled halfway up the hill, then I called up command post. They said, “What’s going on down there? You having your little private war down there, are you?” I said, “No, a couple of the enemy came in along the bed of the creek, started throwing stones at us.” He said, “I’ll debrief you when you come back in.” He said, “Get back out to where you were. You were halfway up the hill.”

He said, “Get back out to where you were.” I said, “Well, they know where we were. If they start mortaring us out there, we’ll be in it.” He said, “Well, they probably know where you are now.” I said, “Yeah, because you just told them we’re halfway up the bloody hill.” He said, “You better boomerang back in here.” They made up all sorts of different words. If you got out in a patrol clash and anyone got hurt, flowers for six, and “we’re going to boomerang.” Chinamen could understand all that, it was stupid.

The Chinese knew our officer’s names and addresses where they lived in Melbourne, or Sydney or anything. They used to come up of a night-time across the valley. “Good evening Lieutenant so and so, of so and such an address. Your next door neighbour has got your smoking jacket on and he’s entertaining your wife tonight.” That was the first brush I had with them. They were good soldiers, the Chinese.

You’ve got to be good, haven’t you? If you want to stay alive, you’ve got to be good.” They were their elite Chinese soldiers. The guys from about twenty to thirty years old. Any older than thirty, they were their labour battalions that dug all their trenches and all that. Any younger, the young fellows they had as grenade boys. They could run fast, around the valley and throw grenades. But their man patrols that came out of a night-time

that we bumped into, they were their well trained, well disciplined soldiers. And of a night-time, they went back behind, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John were the four apostles, out on the other side of Sinchang Valley, they went back behind those and back up into the mountains. And the only Chinese that were on those trench systems during the day, were the labour battalions cleaning out the trenches and straightening out the fortifications. It wasn’t worth knocking them off, because they weren’t fighters. We used to leave them there.

So that was the first scratch we had with them.

You got your orders group when you got out there. You go from your trench system, you go across the valley to a certain map reference, then you go up a rampart to a certain map reference. And when you got to those certain map references,

you had a call sign. My call sign was Two Six. If you wanted to call your command post, you’d switch on your radio and say, “Two Six for Two Six.” And if they had their radio on they’d say, “Two Six.” And start talking. Because your code sign was Two Six. But if you wanted to talk to your command post, and you were out on patrol, you gave your own code sign twice. Two Six, Four Two Six.” Which is your command post,

and you’d just give a map reference. You don’t say it’s a map reference, you just say what the map reference is, but the Chinaman can read that, too. He’s not an idiot. For different spots out in the valleys and features and hills, we adopted different slang words for those places so the Chinamen couldn’t pick them up.

Oh, Betty Gable and Tom Mix,

Pine Ridge and Rocking Horse and different stuff like that. The same with your passwords and counter signs. When you went out on patrol, when you’re coming back in, your own bloke is sitting behind a Bren gun in the trench system. When you come back in, as soon as he hears you coming back up the hill he’ll shout “Halt. Pine.” That’s the password and the counter sign is “Ridge.” “Pine,” and you’ve got to come back with “Ridge.” If you don’t come back with that “Ridge” within a few seconds,

he’ll open up on you. You could be Chinamen, you see. And they’d change it every night. It was a different password and counter sign every night. Chinamen used to lay doggo [still], and when a patrol was coming back in he’d stand up behind the last bloke and walk in with a Yank uniform or an Australian uniform, and he’d get back up into your trench system and he’d chuck a grenade in your command post and bolt down the hill again. It only happened twice. When you were coming back in from a patrol, the bloke that is on the end of it,

and the bloke next to him, they keep looking around behind them all the time. And if somebody stands up behind them, or if they find someone walking in with them, they’ll shoot them. But it could be anyone. Most times it would be a Chinaman. But they stopped doing that, once we knocked two or three of them off.

Yeah, it was cold.

We went from there to a camp, the whole battalion was there and we got all our combat [gear] given to us. It was all British issue, winter issue. Your underwear was like pyjama pants. All the clothing to wear in the real freezing cold has got to be loose, so you’ve got warm air between the skin. If you’ve got tight clothing, you will freeze to death. So the long underpants with a split down the front

and a split down the back. You had a string singlet, cotton straps and it was about an inch mesh with big knots in it. That’s to hold the shirt away from your body. And your shirt was a woollen shirt, then you had a woollen pullover with a draw string. Then you had a combat jacket with reinforced elbows and a hood. Then you had your parka,

which was lined with sheep’s wool, and it had a big hood with wire in it that you could squash up this way or that way. You’d look like a great grizzly bear with that. Then you had your combat pants with magazine pockets. You had your boots. CWW [Cold Weather Wet] boots, with a big course rubber treads on the soles so you didn’t slip. Then they gave you two pairs of the woven nylon innersoles to put inside your boot,

to hold your foot about an inch off the sole of the boot, so your feet didn’t get cold. And two pair of white socks. A pair to fit you, and a bigger pair to pull over those. They were white because you have to wear clean socks. You could wear socks for about two days, then you’ve got to put clean ones on, because as soon as your socks get a bit of perspiration from your feet in them, they stop insulating your feet. Your feet will start to get cold with the

moisture in your socks. So you usually carry spare socks down inside your shirt all the time, so you can change them over. And you can’t wash anything in water, you have to wash everything in petrol. Anything that was washed in water froze, and it was frozen for the rest of the winter.

When we first got off the ship, we went through Pusan. We went to this camp, and we got all our gear then. When we got all our gear, we broke the record for bottles of beer. We drank more bottles than the first battalion drank when they first got there. The next day, they put us on trains to take us up to the front lines.

While we were on the train in the railway siding, Korean kids would come in and try and sell us rings and things. They were all starving, they had nothing. There was about ten thousand of them in Pusan. The American Negro Military Police there, started shooting them. The rifles were out of carriages. I said, “If you shoot any more of those kids, I’ll blow you to pieces.” One of our officers said

“Get off the station and leave the kids alone.” They backed off, the American Negro Military Police, and the kids came back again. We gave them as much food as we had, and cigarettes. They could sell the cigarettes to somebody. And then the train started pulling out and the officer said, “Now pull those weapons in. You’ll do plenty of bloody shooting when you get up to the front line.” But that was one thing that opened my eyes,

and I’ve never forgotten that. Shooting a bloody kid up on the platform.

You could smell it five mile out. People didn’t have anything. You can’t compare cities today with cities then. It was over fifty years ago. All the South Koreans were all farmers.

The only ones that had motorcars in South Korea were government officials or visitors to the country. The people had nothing.

Pusan? They were just doing it hard, that’s all. As you got up country, and into the villages,

they were living in. The huts they lived in in the winter time, they were that cold, half the kids there had club feet from frost bite. The huts they slept in the villages, they made them out of mud and straw and the cardboard cartons from our beer cartons. We went up to a village one day to have a talk to the headman

of the village, and they’d just had a funeral. We went up to have a look. In this big hut, they’d dig a hole about two foot deep, and they’d put branches across it, then they’d put leaves and everything, then they’d put soil over that. At this end they’ve got a fireplace, and at that end they’ve got the chimney. And that draws the heat across under the floor of the joint, and they’d all sleep in there.

You’d get a hut about as big as this room and fourteen of them would be sleeping in there. They’ve got a gutter down the middle in the winter. If they want to go to the toilet, that’s where they do it of a night-time. If they go outside, they get frostbite. Twenty seven below zero, that’s bloody cold. And that’s how they were living when we got there. It’s a bit different now. They live in condos and they’ve got cars now. And they build motorcars and sell them to us.

We didn’t stay in Pusan. Most of the houses and buildings in Pusan were built the same way as the Japanese houses, like out of light pine wood, and thick paper and cardboard and stuff. Government buildings were built of brick. There was

in Seoul, where the Parliament House, when we were in the front line, there was an old Chinaman that used to fly an old rattletrap aeroplane over every Friday afternoon. He used to take mortar bombs with him and go and drop them on Parliament House in Seoul. Then he’d fly back over the front line again, back into North Korea. His engine used to be missing and firing and backfiring and everything. All the boys used to get out and wave to him. They used to call him “Bootcheck Charlie.” Everyone knew him in Korea.

They were all waiting for his plane to crash, but it never ever did. He must have had a crook sparkplug, I reckon. Bootcheck Charlie. He used to wave to us. He never dropped any bombs down on us. He just used to go and drop mortar bombs out of the cockpit of this old aeroplane, on Parliament House. He might have been disgruntled with the politicians, I think. Old Bootcheck Charlie, he used to get a laugh when he went over. The whole Commonwealth Division,

you could just about hear everyone cheering in the trenches.

You’d pull into a bit of a siding, and it could be Korean men, women and kids who would come over. They’d want a bit of food, they had nothing. They were starving. We used to throw them out handfuls of lollies, for the kids. But the men would grab them and start fighting over them. We didn’t realise then

that they had no food, they were starving. The officer who had been with the 1st Battalion said, “They’re starving. That’s why they’re fighting over the bloody lollies.” I said, “Can’t we get any rations? Chuck some rations out to them?” He said, “I’ll go and see what we can get.” We had a couple of cases of K rations, and they went off like magic. Like last week’s pay, as soon as you chucked them out. One big bloke would grab the lot, and a couple of his mates with him, they wouldn’t let any women with the kids have any of it.

They’d probably sell it later on somewhere. Wouldn’t have liked to be living there. Poor buggers. They’ve got to fight for food when they’re in war-torn countries like that. And there were North Koreans who had been infiltrating right down through there, too. And they fired shots at the train while we were going up. We came under fire about three or four times.

We were told to keep our heads in. Couldn’t do anything. They were probably snipers, about half a mile away. We got up to a place called Camp Casey then, and everything was frozen. What did we do there? We did a few exercises out in the hills, so the officers could get used to manoeuvring us around and all that.

The tents had what they called ‘choofers.’ They were like a stove in the middle of the tent, the chimney went up through the roof, and it had a big tin patch on the roof, so the chimney, some of them, if they were left on, would get red hot and they’d set fire to the tents. They didn’t realise that the chimney leaning against a piece of tin, the piece of tin would get hot and still cause a fire. About a third of the tents would go up in flames, and blokes would go up and throw their pay books in. If you didn’t have your pay book,

you could draw out so much money, until you got a new pay book. Some of the blokes who had been in trouble got fined, they were put on restricted draw on their pay books. So if a tent was on fire, they’d chuck in their pay books so they could draw a full pay. If they could find a way, they’d get it. But the stove had a little carburettor on it, and you could adjust a little knob on it, so many drips going in it, and it would keep burning all night.

That was good. You had to have one. If you didn’t have one, you’d freeze. Choofers. They’d made a sound like it, too, choof, choof. The rats used to come in for the warmth. There were a lot of rats up there. The rats worried me more than the Chinamen. If you ever got wounded, and the rats did a job on you. They did a job on my mate, Allan Smith.

He was our first casualty when we went on the front line. He went out on patrol with the young fuselage blokes. They ran into an ambush and they all ran back up the hill and left him there. We were trained to run into an ambush shooting, and then crash out of it. He got wounded, he ran into a dummy mine and he bled to death. When we got down there, the rats had been at him. We could have gone back down the same night, and he might have been still been alive. You don’t know.

The British blokes back at the War Dogs School up there, they had casualty finding dogs there. So the little mongrel dogs, they’d put a white coat with a Red Cross on it, they used to send them out after patrol clashes, and they’d find any wounded people. Then they’d come back and sit in front of the handler, and the dog would take them down to the wounded bloke. They were good, especially finding them of a night-time,

they were trained for that.

When we were at Puckapunyal. He was a corporal and I was a corporal. We were training there and we used to get with the other corporals down the wet canteen and have a few beers and talk about your blokes. You’d tell each other what different blokes were like, different temperaments and all that stuff. We were real soldiers, like professional soldiers. If you were in it for six years, you might as well do the job properly.

We’d been selected out to do the NCO Carter Course, so we did the job properly, and we were learning as much as we could so we could go up in ranks, as sergeants, sergeant majors. We were too old to do officers school, unless you wanted to go to Portsea and do an officers school there. But you only got one pip. What was the use of that? Once they find out what job you’re best at in the army, they’ll keep you at it. They won’t promote you any higher.

Like if you were a corporal, they will make you a ‘T’ sergeant, a temporary sergeant and they’ll pay you the sergeant’s pay but you won’t get the promotion. Because a thing called seniority exists in the army, and they’re only allowed so many sergeants, so many lieutenants. All the lieutenants come from the Duntroon Military College. They don’t like them coming up from the ranks. The only way you’ll get to be an officer, with a Queen’s commission,

is if your officers get killed in the front line. Then they’ll promote you up to an officer, and that is called Field Rank. And that’s as good as doing the school, because you’ve learned in the front line fighting. The only one who can take Field Rank away from you is a brigadier with a court martial. When we’d been in the front line for a couple of months, they allowed for ranks all confirmed in the field, corporals and sergeants.

You were still a temporary sergeant most of the time. You were doing a sergeant’s job and getting paid for it, but still in your pay book you’re a corporal. When it was all over and I came home from Malaya, they said, “The army’s changed. You’ve only got three months to go for your six years, you’ll be getting out of the army. You’re not a corporal any more, take your stripes off.” That’s what they told me when I came home from Malaya, at the transit depot in Sydney. And I’d trained the War Dogs, I’d brought the War Dogs, I did two years in Malaya,

I came home because my time was only a couple of months off, they sent me home. I had a fair bit of sickness over there, and they burnt me out. That’s what they told me at the leading transit depot in Sydney. I was just not in the battalion any more. I was off battalion strength and I was like a floater, waiting for discharge. And they told me “Take your stripes off your shirt. You’re a private from now on.”

I said, “Why? It was confirmed in the field, my rank.” And he said, “The army’s all changed now, son.” And that was it. It was the only time I ever got crooked on the army. I couldn’t have cared less then. I was buggered, I was burnt out and I had been crook. I was looking forward to getting out of the army. I was looking forward to lay down. I was burnt out. We came back from a long, deep penetration patrol once in Malaya,

which was about two weeks before and we’d had all sorts of things. Strychnine berries in our water bottles from the jungle streams and all sorts of stuff. Leeches all over you and bloody ticks all over you and just completely buggered. You can’t eat much. Most of your twenty four hour ration packs they give you is Mars Bars and sugar tablets and salt tablets. Stuff you can’t live on.

It’s just to keep your energy up, to get the job done. We came back from a deep penetration patrol, it was the last one I did, actually, with the blokes. We’d been out for about seven days. We got within about half a mile from our camp and we were all buggered. We just sat down, with our backs against rubber trees, and were there for about half a day before we could up and get back into camp. We were just burnt out. That was the end of it.

Yeah, I never felt that buggered in my life. From that day on, like even when I’ve been crook I’ve never ever felt that weak in the legs. I couldn’t get up, stand up. But it’s the food. You’re not eating the right food. You can’t live on salt tablets and Mars bars and little tins of powdered eggs.

We would have been about two miles behind the front line,

the battalion, in a counter attack position. That’s when they sent all us NCOs up the front line. The Royal Fusiliers I told you about before, they occupied the position there. They sent all us up to learn where the mine fields were, and the mine gaps down the bottom. We were to go out on a couple of night patrols with them to learn the topography. The lay of the land.

The young fellows, the young National Service kids, they didn’t go where they were supposed to go. And Smith got killed, out on patrol that night. After we’d been up there for about ten days with them, the battalion moved into line. I don’t remember much about where the battalion was then. We were on there for about a week or ten days,

while we went in first. They probably did a couple of manoeuvres out the back, so the new young officers could get used to handling the men. There were only six hundred of us. The full strength is usually about…you’ve got A Company, Baker Company, Charlie Company, Don Company, Support Company. You’ve got about a hundred and something in each company. You’ve got about…

a bit over a thousand blokes in an infantry battalion. But there were only six hundred of us when we left Australia to go. We took a few reinforcements from the 1st Battalion. The 1st Battalion was coming back home, and the guys who didn’t have enough time up their sleeve, they came to the 1st Battalion, to build the strength up. We got John Sullivan, the lieutenant, came to us then.

He was a terrific bloke John Sullivan. I knew him for years afterwards. Even when I was training the dogs at the school in Jindera, we bumped into him coming from the army camp out at Ingleburn. I was marching my blokes with the dogs along the road, in Ack Ack [?] formation, taking the dogs out for exercise and to do a few exercises with live ammunition. His staff car pulled up and he got out. “Is that you, Gray?” “Yeah, G’day Sully.” And I went up and had a yarn to him.

He had a couple of cold beers in the back of the staff car. My blokes wanted to move on and have a beer, so I said we better move on because we’d drank the beer. The battalion moved on. On the hill, two one oh, I think, one five nine was on the left flank, and to the front and to the right of us was a big hill called

355. The 3rd Battalion occupied that. It had a cable way straight up the back of it. Sampuchon Valley was out in the front, and the four apostles, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, they were the hills the Chinese occupied of a night-time. Behind those were the mountains. We moved in, we took over from…

the Royal Fusiliers. They moved out once the battalion moved in. John Sullivan, yeah, a good soldier.

Down on patrol that night when they were sneaking up the bed of the creek. That was the first time that I opened up on them. That was with a sub-machine gun. They cleared out quick.

When the colonel debriefed me, when I came in from the patrol, he said to the company commander, “It sounds like a reccie [reconnaissance] patrol. Find out where we put out listening posts. Pull that cap off the bottle of beer and give the corporal a drink.” The company commander, he was a major, he didn’t like taking the top off a bottle of beer and pulling this beer out for a corporal. I could see it in his face. When he held it out to me, he only held it half way.

Body language, you know. I said, “Thanks very much, sir. I’ll do the same for you one day.” He got the message. We got on all right after that, he was a good bloke.

His problem was with himself. We were all right. He just didn’t like pouring a beer out for another rank, below him, I think.

Some officers were like that. The majority of officers were good. They’re trained the right way. I think it comes from the family they come from, I think. Probably spoilt when they’re kids, spoilt when they grow up. Probably got everything their own way when they were a kid. Once you get into the army, you don’t get everything your own way. You follow orders. One officer was (UNCLEAR) up on The Hook. I forget his name. He was a major, a company commander.

He came out screaming “Pull back! Pull back!” To all the blokes. One of the sergeants said, “Great. Go up and grab him and push him in the command post. We haven’t got any orders to pull back off this bloody hill. We were told to hold it. Don’t pull back.” He was drunk. He had been drinking in his dug out. Anyhow they court-martialled him later on, cashiered him out of the army. He might have wanted to get out, but I don’t think so. He was probably just a bloody alcoholic.

The diggers just barrelled him into his dugout. Might have belted him in the back of the bloody head with the butt of a gun, I don’t know what they did. It’s easy to shut someone up if they’re screaming out and giving the wrong orders. You’ve got to. Some of the blokes would have probably have tried to do what he was telling them. To pull back like. Probably started running back down the reverse slope of the hill. Our blokes don’t do that. Our blokes don’t retreat. They dig a hole,

they stay in it. Our blokes used to say, “What are you going to do if Charlie comes over tonight? Stay here?” “What? I dug the bloody hole, it’s mine.” That’s the Aussies attitude. The Yanks will get out quick and pull back, then they’ll lose a battalion trying to retake a hill. All different tactics. The Australian blokes, I might be biased, but they’ve proved themselves over and over

in all different wars, the Australians. They’re the best soldiers in the world, Australian soldiers. All Australian men are terrific, and Australian women. It’s just that most of them that get into trouble lack discipline, self-discipline. That’s all. And everybody can be taught that. And that’s what is not happening to the young people now. Some of them are brought up properly, and some are not. Some are lucky, they’ve got good parents who will discipline them. They’re firm with them, but kind.

Get them educated properly, do the right thing. Good parents. There are so many poor little buggers, they grow up with broken marriages and all that stuff. And it’s getting worse, too.

Yeah, that was one of the things that knocked me. I never got over it.

He was such a genuine little bloke, little, he was half a stone lighter than me. We used to spar nearly every night back at Puckapunyal in the ring. He was a British lad, come out here. He was an immigrant, he joined the Australian Army. A lot of the blokes in my battalion were either English or Scottish,

terrific blokes. The war dog handlers that I trained, that we took to Malaya with us, half of them were Englishmen, half Aussies [Australian]. You can tell the difference when they’re all together. They get on well together. The Cockneys, I think, were the pick. If you had to pick, the Cockneys, the Londoners, are more like Australian than the rest of guys, with their different ways of speaking

and their accents like, and they grow up different. They get into trouble, a lot of the young English blokes, too. You can see it when they go to the big soccer matches overseas. Mobs of them go over there and start fights. They’re starting to do it now down here. The football, big fights broke out in the grandstand. There was a lady sitting there with two little girls. I think they stopped them

from drinking at the football matches now. It’s the same with like the mobs, the young English blokes, they go all around the world to the big soccer matches, they get drunk and start fighting. If there were a war on, they would be in uniform. They’d get all the fight that they needed there. Young blokes today, they don’t seem to have as much pride as the young fellows did in my day.

Perhaps because they haven’t got the fathers and that to teach them.

It didn’t make any difference. Once our first couple of casualties, our fellows didn’t. Most of our casualties were from mortar bombs exploding, or artillery shells exploding. In my platoon, there was only one bloke

killed with a grenade. Another bloke was blown up in a minefield, Keith Forran. He came and seen me a couple of times when I was in a field dressing station, with concussion and nose bleeds. He walked into the tent two days running, Keith Forran, haversack on his shoulder. He just looked at me, I said, “How you going, Keith?” He didn’t say anything, he just sat down on a bunk. He said, “What are you doing in here?” I said, “Oh, we called the Kiwi Artillery down on our own hill, like.

They hit them with phosphorous shells and the phosphorous came in our tunnels, and was choking us. We pulled four blokes out, and the floor of the trench came up and hit me in the face and I wound up back here.” I looked up and he was gone. He came back the next day. But he had been killed two weeks before in a minefield. Your mind plays tricks with you. He was a nice bloke, Keith.

His face was receding back and he had a slightly protruding nose. Two of his diggers walked into a minefield in the middle of the night. He said, “Where are you?” They said, “We’re in here.” One of the blokes said his mate was standing on a mine, he felt it click under his boot. And Keith said, “Stay there.” And he prodded his way in with a bayonet and got in to them and he put a safety pin into the mine, under the bloke’s boot, a safety pin out of his field dressing. You can feel down

and you can feel a hole where you can stick a pin through, it stops the detent from going down or up. He said, “Just walk straight out there. Take four long steps.” And those two walked out and he turned around to come out and he stood on a mine that he had missed. We found the tongue out of one boot, and a bit of his jacket, the cuff of his jacket.

Yeah, he came and saw me twice, two days running when I was back in the field dressing station. I had concussion pretty well, I had nose bleeds for a week. My nose was full of phosphorous fumes. I missed him. He was a lovely fellow. A terrific bloke, Keith Brown. He was a sergeant in one of the other platoons. Yeah, everybody liked him.

I was lying on the bunk in the Canadian Field Dressing Station and he walked in. I had sandbags around my head, and I put my head that way a bit so I could see the door of the tent, because the Yank fighters were buzzing the camp and the bloody tent was going like that, getting sucked. I wanted to see if there was anyone comes in. I had tubes in my nose, in my lungs, to a machine down beside me.

And he walked in, his little haversack over his shoulder. No hat on, that’s when I noticed his hair was back a little bit, and he had a bit of a conk [lump]. I didn’t expect him to come back the next day. It’s marvellous, isn’t it? My Dad told me, he said, “You’ll see ghosts when you’re fighting in a war.” He said, “Sometimes you will see ghosts for years afterwards.” I do with my older brother, I see him riding down the street on his bike.

But I think it’s just what’s in your sub-conscious, like your memory bank. It puts them back there again. There was someone on a bike, but it wasn’t him. And Keith walking in the tent, I think it’s people that you really miss, people that you’ve really known and been really friendly to, I think your brain tries to keep them with you.

Our blokes? Nuh. Anybody that gets killed or wounded, the stretcher bearers, like when you go out on night patrol, you’ve got a stand by patrol in the trench system. If you get into a fight out in the valley, you’ve got a getaway man. As soon as you get into a fight, you’ve got a big tree in the valley, say further down in the valley, one bloke on any patrol he’s the getaway man. As soon as you contact the enemy, he goes for the rendezvous point, he’s your getaway man. He runs flat out straight there, and he lies down there.

When you break up a patrol action, you’re all split up. You make your own way to that rendezvous point. He gives the pass, you give him the counter sign and you all form up down there. And the flyer patrol, the stand-by patrol that’s in the trench, they know you’ve had the contact because they can hear it. They go out and they do the area over, stretcher bearers go with them. They pick up papers out of any of the dead enemy’s pockets and that. They’ll take on the fight with any enemy that is still there. The stretcher bearers will

pick up all our wounded blokes and take them back in. From then on, the diggers don’t see those blokes again. If they’re wounded, they will go back on a jeep ambulance, back to an Indian field dressing station or a Canadian field dressing station. And any of them that are dead, our battalion surgeon will have a look at them. He checks the lot of them, of course, and any of them that are dead. On the reverse slope of the hill, he checks the lot of them, alive or dead.

If they’re dead, he will tie a tag on their toe and they will still go back behind the lines on a jeep. One bloke was taking a dead fellow back one day, and he pulled up to light a smoke, because he had the shakes from taking the dead fellow’s body back, he knew him. He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it, and the bloke said, “How about one for me?” He wasn’t dead. Doctor Death had tied a tag on his toe and the bloke,

his heart rate was probably down low, he couldn’t pick it up. They’d only feel their pulse on their cateroid artery, or on their wrist. Mostly the carotid artery. Doctor Death made a mistake with that bloke. The bloke in the jeep said he bloody near bolted up the hill. He said, “Where’s my cigarette?” The bloke on the stretcher, he said, “I relaxed after that. I had a bit of a yarn to him.” He said he was talking all right. He said, “So I just went flat out back to the Indian field dressing station.”

There were Indians and all breeds in Korea. There were seventeen different nations fought in Korea, United Nations. There were seventeen flags up at Pusan Cemetery. There’s only one Yank buried there. They took all their dead soldiers back to America in zinc containers. They’re all buried in zinc containers.

Good. The Negroes used to get a bit frightened sometimes.

Just the ordinary private soldiers, and the ordinary private white American soldiers. I don’t think their education level was on a par with ours. We used to hit it off all right with their lieutenants and their captains, much the same as us. But the ordinary, they were conscripted, all the Americans that were there. They called them the ‘daggies’. The Marines were totally different.

The Marines were on our left flank. They were about the same as our guys. But the ordinary American soldiers, the daggies, the conscripted blokes, I think they were like the dead end kids. All they knew was the [United] States, they knew nothing about any other country in the world or anything. You couldn’t talk to them. They were just mouthing off about rubbish, most of the time. But the Marines were all on a par with the Aussies,

and with the ordinary soldiers, their captains and their lieutenants, we got on all right with them. When we went on leave to Tokyo, we could go to any dances and that, the American nightclubs there. They were okay. The American girls were good to dance with. They liked dancing with the Aussies, the American girls, they reckoned we could dance rings around the American blokes.

They had nightclubs in Tokyo.

When you’ve been in Korea for four months, you got a week’s leave to Tokyo. You go back for another four months, you get another week’s leave.

The Marines didn’t bug out [leave]. They were on our right flank, they didn’t bug out, those blokes, they were bloody good soldiers. They stayed put, the Marines, because they’ve got a lot to live up to. They’re trained pretty hard, the Marines.

They can become sailors or soldiers, the Marines. They’re trained for warfare at sea or land, the Marines. That’s how they get their name. But the ordinary daggies, and some of the Negro soldiers, when the battle was on on The Hook, four of them came thundering through our trench system when I was there. Sounded like a bull stampede. I looked around and there were these Negroes coming through with their eyes flashing.

I said, “Where are you blokes going? You’re not supposed to be here.” They said, “We’re going Stateside.” They went straight past me, I don’t know where they went. They were probably bugging out, I suppose. Oh, yeah, one mob bugged out up there, a mob of Yanks. One of the blokes from the 3rd Battalion, I went drinking with him on leave in Tokyo and he told us the Yanks bugged out on them. They left all their machine guns,

with the breach blocks in them and everything. And the Chinese came up and turned the guns on them, bugging out down the hill. And then they were set up for when the Yanks tried to retake it. That’s the only thing I heard. We used to go over to the Marines, we’d take over a bag of sugar and they would give us three big frozen turkeys, for a bag of sugar. It was good. They had a lot of stuff in the front line trenches, the Yanks.

They had rubber boots, with so many different layers to keep your feet warm. Different to our boots. Our boots were better. But the officers all had electric blankets in the front line, the American army. They wouldn’t go out on night patrol in the wintertime, they’d freeze to death. They had electric blankets in their sleeping bags. We had sleeping bags and rats to keep us warm.

Well the first they noticed, our radio operators and our intelligence, they picked up nine different outstations. An outstation was like a radio station. They picked up nine different radio stations out around our area, on the other side of the valley, that weren’t there before. And they suspected straight away that the Chinaman

was starting to move his troops around to put them in an attack formation, which was the formation they were in, and it turned out pretty well. I’ve got the full story written out in there, and maps of the battle of The Hook and everything. Yeah, once they started they put in a lot of artillery. And our artillery answered their artillery.

24th of bloody July.

Well, their artillery was landing all over our hills. Then our artillery starts firing on them, you can hear the shells going over our position, like express trains going over. The Kiwi twenty five pounders, their shells are going over and landing down your forward slope. And their artillery creeps up the hill.

And their soldiers, it’s got to creep up. It’s got to lift and come up the hill. So their soldiers come up fifty yards behind it. Because when a shell lands on a hill like that, all the blast goes upwards, nothing comes back. So that’s why the attacking soldiers can get within fifty yards of where the shells are falling. It all goes up. And it’s got a lift. Once it lifts up to the top of the hill, they’re there, they’re at you, they’re right in front of your face. And that’s when the Kiwi Artillery come in handy, because they had Howitzers and they could fire up over the top and

land them on your forward slopes. By the time The Hook was finished, the body count was about three thousand three hundred, I think. Three thousand and something, on the forward slope and down the valley. But there would be about twice as many drag themselves back up the hill wounded, I suppose. They signed the truce at Panmunjeom a week later. No, they signed it, about four days later I think,

because we all got out of the tunnels and that and took our boots off for the first time for three weeks. The officers came back from the brigades with their little movie cameras and their silk scarves and their swagger sticks, and start telling the Chinese to get back. “Fire on that man, shoot that man.” We had been read the riot act when the truce had been signed. We were told that if we fired at any of the Chinese and killed them, we would be charged with murder, and if we wounded them we would be charged with wounding with intent.

The Chinese only had picks and shovels on their shoulders. They were looking for their dead to bury, you know. These officers came up from back behind brigade, and they were telling my blokes to shoot at them. “They shouldn’t be this close,” and all that. I said, “I wish they’d come a bit closer and bring a few beers up.” At Christmas time they used to leave bottles of wine and fountain pens on our barbed wire down there, on the forward slopes.

You’d hear them down there. You’d hear the wire twitching. We used to fire a flare up and they’d be down there, “Good on you, Charlie. You haven’t got any Fosters [beer] over there, have you?” They used to have a woman come up on the loud speaker of a night-time, the first time we were on the line, a different place to The Hook, and if it was raining she would play ‘Stormy Weather’. And if there was a patrol out in the valley she would play ‘It’s Foolish But It’s Fun.’ She was a bit of a character, she was.

She’d read off all the officers names and addresses back in Melbourne, telling them the neighbours were in there wearing their smoking jackets.

Well, you had dugouts dug into the reverse slope of the hill. And we used to get the star pickets, used for putting up barbed wire, and drive them in. We used to get the used bullets belts, the canvas bullet belts from the Vickers machine guns, and make like a mattress thing, criss-cross.

Everyone had a sleeping bag, you’d just put your sleeping bag on it. The rats were a problem. A lot of the blokes got Manchurian Fever, haemorrhagic fever. The mites live on the rats. A lot of the Yanks died from it, because they used to line their bunkers and dugouts with blankets, to stop any dirt falling in on them. And the rats used to get between the blanket and the wall, and walk around in there.

And they used to shoot the rats with their .45 Colt Automatics. As soon as the rats died, the mites would come off the rats and crawl down the blankets into their beds and bite them. And haemorrhagic fever, they told us the symptoms of it. They called it Manchurian Fever, like Manchuria in Korea. They changed the name of it to Haemorrhagic Fever. Once you get it, you start getting headaches behind your eyes, and any scars on your body start to bleed, and you start to pass blood in your water.

Then your skin will start to bleed. And that’s the end of you. You’re dead. The little tiny mites off the rats caused that. I think it killed about four hundred Yanks, that. They woke up to what they were doing. They were shooting the rats and the mites came off the rats. And a lot of them went blind, drinking Lucky Seven whiskey. The Koreans used to get the bottles of whiskey, and they used to

cut the bottoms off the bottles upside down, tip the whiskey out of it. And they used to make their own Lucky Seven whiskey. And it was seventy five percent human urine and twenty five percent embalming fluid. And that’s what they used to sell to the Yanks, Lucky Seven whiskey. And the Yanks used to buy it and drink it. Sent about three or four hundred of them blind. Lucky Seven whiskey.

Korean kids used to try and sell it to us when we were behind the lines. “Go and sell it to the Yanks.”

No, you don’t get bored. You sleep when you’re not doing a patrol. If you’re an NCO, you’re flat out getting two or three hours sleep during the day. Because you’ve got to go to orders groups and you’ve got to make sure all your blokes clean their weapons properly, make sure they fire a couple of rounds

out of each magazine, so it’s feeding properly. You don’t get stoppages then, when you get out on patrol. Make sure all the grenades, they bend the pins back up, to keep them safe, so before you go out on patrol they’ve got to straighten their pins out so they can get them out quick. Yeah, the diggers get enough sleep. If you’re a corporal or a sergeant, you don’t get enough sleep. If you’re a corporal you’ve got ten blokes,

and a lance corporal, there’s like eleven of you altogether. There’s you and your lance corporal and your blokes. And you’ve got a Bren group of three blokes, with a Bren gun, and the other blokes have got rifles and bayonets. You’ve got a sub-machine gun and an Owen gun. Your 2IC [Second in Charge], your lance corporal, he looks after the food for the diggers, and the ammo [ammunition]. And you’re the tactician, you’re the battle, in charge of the fighting and that. The same with a platoon.

You’ve got the platoon commander lieutenant, he’s in charge of the fighting, the tactical side of it, same as the full corporal. And the sergeant is in charge of making sure the troops get their food, their ammo and everything. But he will change with the platoon commander, the sergeant, taking fighting patrols out. You went out on a fighting patrol, you go out in two groups, two orange groups, two circles, and whoever is in charge of the forward group is in the middle with the radio,

the radio bloke. And the orange group at the back, there’ll be a corporal, and with a radio. If the front group walks into an ambush, this mob will fan out and go straight through them, while they stay down there. Then you work it out then, whatever you’re doing. But the bloke in charge of the forward group and the second group, you don’t yell out orders to your blokes, it’s all whispered. As soon as you yell out one order, every Chinaman in valley will shoot you.

He will know you’re in charge of the whole patrol. That’s why the officers don’t wear pips in the front line. If they get taken prisoner, they interrogate officers ten times harder than private soldiers. An officer pulled his jumper off to give me one night to go out on a patrol, he said, “Here, chuck this on. It’ll keep you warm.” I said, “I’m not wearing that out on a patrol.” He said, “Well, put it on inside out.” I said, “If they take me prisoner, they’ll soon the pips on the inside of it.”

No. One bloke chased me around a paddy bun one night, I ran out of ammo, and I took off and he was after me. I jumped into a paddy bun and he ran straight past me. He was a big Manchurian. I reckon he was almost seven foot. I could smell him, I could hear him grunting. I was hoping he would keep on running for the next ten mile.

I never had a slug left in my magazines. I forgot about the hand grenades on my belt. Oh yeah, I wasn’t frightened, I was just. Everything is just done. As they used to say in the front lines over there, “There’s only two kinds of blokes. The quick, and the dead.” Speed is the most important thing.

Not their faces, no. They were on the other side of the valley. The closest we ever got to the Chinese themselves, you could see them walking about sometimes, just before dark, or early in the morning. They were about four hundred yards, you could hear them talking of a night-time. The tunnels, we had little hession bags on little wires. If you walked in the door of the tunnel, you’ve got to put you back against the wall

in a bit of a hollow, and move that bag with a stick. A bullet would come straight through it from one of their snipers. We had a machine gun mounted back in, and a blanket hanging down in front of it, so they couldn’t see the muzzle flash when you fired out through this. No, we didn’t have any bayonet fights or hand to hand fighting. I used to go out and lay in the floor of the valley,

I used to get out there before first light. The colonel used to give me his sniper to take out with me. He used to say, “Don’t let him shoot anyone.” He just wanted to give him a job. He was following him around, because he was his batman and he was his bodyguard. He probably wanted to go out and sniper. I’d take him out there and I used to take the bolt out of his rifle and put it in my pocket. If he fired a shot from there, they’d drop mortars on you and blow you to pieces. We used to lay out there with a pair of binoculars,

and just watch the dirt getting chucked out of the trenches. I used to call up, what was it? Nine Nine. A big Centurion tank on the top of that hill. He’d blow a hollow in the back there, and just have the turret and the twenty pound gun sticking over. If you called him, Baker Nine Nine was his call sign. “Baker Nine Nine?” “Yep.” You’d give him a map reference and he’d shoot a tracer across there and say, “How’s that?” You’d say, “Spot on,”

and he’d put five more into it. It would be the old Chinamen digging all trenches out. Only done it once, and I felt sorry for them. One bloke came out of a tunnel once, relieved himself, I let him finish. I didn’t put the tankie on him. He went back in the tunnel again when he’d finished. You’ve got to laugh about that. I wonder if that bloke is still alive?

Even though I could see him, there was a twenty pound tank gun looking at him. You never know your luck, do you? He’d probably thank me if ever met me. My mate used to sling off at me, “What about the Chinaman you let get away?” I said, “How many Chinamen let you get away?” You never ever know.

There’s live and let live. Johnny Sullivan, our platoon commander, he said to us “It’s live and let live up here.” He said, “They haven’t attacked Australia.” He said, “You’re over here doing a job for the United Nations. Don’t start any bloody thing, for Christ sakes. You’ll get yourself and your mates killed. If they try and take us, we’ll fight them off. But just use your brain.” And he was right, too.

No, not me.

We always had two good scouts out in front of us. Don McMillan, he was a professional fisherman from South West Rocks, down the coast of New South Wales. He always used to volunteer to go forward scout. Used to knock off the issue rum out of the…You know where the officer used to hide the issue rum? In the hurricane lamp. He had a hurricane lamp hanging up in the command post, and another one hanging beside it. We went through his water bottle and everywhere they used to keep the issue rum.

But we could never find out where he had it. In the lamp beside the other one. You’d think it would be kero. McMillan found it. I said, “How did you find the rum up in that lamp?” He just tapped his nose. He could smell it. He always had a store in the front line, he’d have a couple of nips. I’d know when he’d been drinking rum. He’d come up to me and say, “I’ll go forward scout tonight, corporal.” I’d say, “Righto, Don.” You’d always know where he was because you could smell him,

out in the valley, you could smell the rum. But he was good. The enemy ambushes would let your forward scout go through, let your second scout go through, then they’d hit your main party. But if you’ve got a good forward scout out there, you could smell the Chinaman, he’d smell like onions. You could smell him fifty yards away. He could smell us, too, I suppose. Terrorists could smell us in the jungle in Malaya. Blokes would have a shower and use soap, then they’d put Johnson’s Baby Powder around their crotch

to stop chaffing. Wondering why the terrorists always walked around us when we had an ambush outside the village. I asked one of the locals. Terrorists had come in and surrendered one, he said, “They’d smell your Johnson’s Baby Powder.” So we had to have a shower with no soap, don’t put anything on you. We used to dunk ourselves up to our neck in the old slimy swamp, down the back of the camp, before we went out and put ourselves down for an ambush, and they used to walk right into us then. They couldn’t smell us.

But that’s Malaya.

They were dug by a British battalion that was in there. They caved in on them, killed a few of them. Northumberland something or other.

The Hook. There was a valley at the back, paddy fields, and you came up the back of the reverse slope of The Hook like that, and it was on a corner of the Sinchon Valley. The Chinese would be four hundred yards out there. Up the reverse slope of The Hook, and went down gradually on the other side. But you couldn’t get up on the top. At night-time you could get on the top of it, get out the top and get some fresh air. But mortars would come over.

On reverse slopes, you had a doorway going out the tunnel, about three quarters of the way up. We used to dig the floor, sloping up like that, and the blanket hanging down in the door. They used to come over and throw grenades through the door at the back. If you had the door straight on a slope, they would roll in and blow you up. But with the floor up on a slope like that, with the blanket there,

the grenades would hit the blanket and roll out and blow them up. Or they’d throw a napalm pack in and try and suck all the oxygen out. They never got onto us. But kitten wire over the top of The Hook would stop anyone from running about up there. But they could come around the side, but they didn’t have a go at us. I think one bloke came around and had a go. Once you put the kitten wire over the top, they couldn’t get through, their boots and that would get stuck in it, and that’s where they would stay. There were plenty of them after the truce had been signed.

I went up the top and had a look around and there were Chinese blokes up there with grenades in their hands, they’d been up there for bloody weeks. So it was effective, the kitten wire. It was about that high off the ground, and in squares about that big, big enough for a boot to go down and catch their legs. It was a bit hard getting untangled, poor buggers. Each time I see a Chinaman, I feel it takes me back. They’re such easy people to get on with, the Chinese.

There was a Chinese family down at Runaway Bay there. Took the boys to church a few times, with George and his mother, at the Baptist Church. They were lovely people, the Chinese. And I bumped into a lot of Chinese and made friends with a lot of Chinese in Malaya. There were a lot of the Chinese in the Chinese villages. Most of the terrorists were Chinese, their boss was Chin Pang.

…my nerves were real crook. I got crook. I was all right for quite a few years. When I had my business down here, I had a lot of pressure on, I was working long hours, and I just couldn’t get up off the floor one day, my legs were buggered. I remembered back when I was in Malaya

when I was burned out, I thought, “I can’t be getting crook like that again,” because I had a thriving business, I had four blokes working for me. I was doing auto repairs, I done outboard motor repairs, I was building galvanised boat trailers as well, flogging them. The local doc [doctor], a repat bloke, he sent me up the hospital and they said, “I think you better come up here and have a bit of a rest for a while.” We sold out business down there. Because I’d had nerve trouble

in Concord, after I came back from Malaya, they tried everything on us down there. Insulin and shock treatment and God knows what. It didn’t make your nerves any better, it just made you about one and a half stone heavier. We were pretty skinny. Anyway, I got going. I was going good in my business. I think I might have been working too many long hours. They got me up there,

they hypnotised me up there, medical hypnosis and they had me back in Korea and fighting again. Took me right through my life. When I was baby, I could actually feel I was a baby on the table, and I could feel the presence of my mother there, but when I was looking it was just like the filament of the light bulb above me, on the table, and I had this overpowering feeling that my mother was there. And I was like a baby, on the kitchen table,

in Fairfield. I was at school then, at work. They took me right up, then they bring me out of it. Put a hand on my shoulder and they’d bring me out of it, and I’d wake up and I’d feel real cool and refreshed.

Yeah, it flashes out every now and again.

A dummy minefield is a minefield with the same kind of fence on it, star pickets and one strand of barbed wire along the top, with a red triangle hanging down like that, every so many yards. That’s the minefield fence. And nobody knows what’s in there unless they walk in there. And unless they’ve got us…

…when they taught us how to lay mine fields. You’ve got to have a map of the country, where it is. You’ve got to have a datum line, where the mines are set and another datum line where you’ll set a mine there, and one there,

one there around it. Usually that will be an anti-tank mine and these will be anti- personnel mines. But if it’s up in the front lines, where the country is too steep, they will just put anti-personnel mines in there. They had jumping jack mines up there, which were loaded with shrapnel. They had three prongs on them like that. When you stood on them, it would go down and the

detent would, the spring loaded pin would fire and hit a twenty two calibre case that was on a bit of fuse, the two second fuse would burn and it would be into a bag of explosives in the mine, and there was a little projectile there, and it would explode and blow the projectile up in the air about six foot and it would explode and come down all over the top of you. That was the jumping jack mine. The other ones there, the German shooter mine was a pound of TNT [trinitrotoluene] in a wooden box

with a trigger mechanism on the top, and when you stood on that that would go off and blow your foot off, or half your legs. That brings two more diggers in to carry him out. So that puts three out of action. That’s the way they work all these things out, all these explosives experts. But the jumping jack is the one that the shrapnel comes down around you and anyone near you. The shooter mine will only take you out, plus your stretcher bearers.

Well, that’s a minefield with no mines in it. They’ve got the minefield fence with the red triangles in it, but there’s no mines in there. Usually a dummy minefield is there, if they’re going to move tanks forward in the near future. They’ve got a way of getting tanks through, they know they can go straight through mine fields and there’s no mines in them,

their own mine field. Or they’re put there for diggers to run through, if they get wounded. The Chinaman won’t follow you into there, because he doesn’t know if it’s a dummy minefield or a live one. They used to come up of a night-time, they used to crawl up and feel for the prongs of the mines with their hands, and have a straw in their teeth, and move the straw up and down to see if there’s any trip wires in there. If it put pressure on their lips, they knew there was a trip wire there. You don’t cut a tight wire, and you don’t pull a lose one.

And if you feel any prongs, you scoop the dirt away from around it, until you find the hole, pull the safety pin out of your field dressing and stick it in the hole, then it can’t go down and go off then. That’s how they do it. But a dummy minefield is a dummy minefield, there’s no mines in it. Which is good if you get wounded because you can run in there and lay quiet.

Don’t know, never walked into a Chinese or a North Korean minefield.

I don’t think I ever saw one. They might not have had any.

Well, most of the civilians become casualties when the war is finished. The mines are just left in the bloody ground, they’re not pulled out. Whenever our engineers laid down mines, they’ve got a record of where every mine is. They’ll go and pull them.

They’ll either pull them or explode them. Tanks can go through a minefield. They’ve got a gizmo fixed up to the front of the tank, and it’s got two wheels and a big flailing chain goes out in front of the tank, and it flogs the ground and drags them out. So they can drive a tank through a minefield and that explodes any mines that are in the ground.

Mostly, where they set mines around villages and places, up through Asia and the Tropics. These people are going back to their villages are getting blown up. The mines are out around the perimeters of their villages. In Vietnam, there’s a hell of a lot, and other places. They’re just put there by people who don’t keep a record of them, and don’t know where they are.

And the blokes that put them there have probably died or been killed. But the Australian Army, our engineers, put mines down, they’ve got a record of where every mine goes. In the wet season, when it rains all the water runs down and the ground turns into slush, all the mines drift down to the bottom of the minefield. There are none up there, they’re all down the bottom and they’re all against one another. And the engineers have to go out, when the rain stops,

and make all those mines safe. Bring them back up the hill and lay the mines again. So mines can be anywhere in a minefield. If they’re put in and you get very heavy, torrential rain, once that soil gets really soaked, the mines will start to drift and they can drift anywhere.

In the middle of winter, twenty seven below zero, nobody used to go out in the middle of the valley looking for a fight. You couldn’t stay out any longer than a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, because the liquid in your blood starts to turn to icicles and it expands. It’ll kill you. We used to go and put blokes down on listening posts.

You’d have your great big sheep wool lined parka on. Three blokes would go down to a listening post, down to the mouth of the minefield. We called in Mine Gap. You could only stay down there for about quarter of an hour, twenty minutes. Then another mob would come down and relieve and come back. There was a procession of blokes going down and coming up all night. But the Chinamen never used to come out, they had too much brains. He was probably back behind the lines eating fried rice or something.

Yeah, the liquid in your blood would crystallise, it’d kill you. What do they call it? Hypothermia. You just freeze to death, frostbite. You’d lose your nose. You’ve got two pair of gloves on in the winter. You’ve got an ordinary pair of gloves with a big pair of mittens on over the top of that,

with a trigger finger in it. They make it so you can shoot somebody, even if it’s the middle of winter. You’ve still got a trigger finger. But the action on your automatic weapon, sometimes the breach block would only go down halfway and then stop, it won’t fire if it’s too cold. The only thing that will lubricate and stop that is Vaseline hair tonic. The oil we were issued with was useless. The weapons wouldn’t fire.

Yeah, Danny McCollin was out on a listening post one night and there was a Chinaman creeping up the hill towards him and he pulled the trigger and the breach block stopped halfway down, and it wouldn’t fire. So he picked it up over his head and chucked the Bren gun at the Chinaman and knocked him down the hill. They came back in and after the debriefing and told them the story, they asked him, “So, did you go down and get the Bren gun and see where the Chinaman was?” He said, “No bloody fear. I was getting out of there.”

He said, “Well, you better go down and get that Bren gun.” And if you lost a weapon on the front line in Korea, they would send you out the next night to go and get it, retrieve it. They didn’t like the enemy getting our weapons because they could go out on a patrol and use our weapons on us, and we’d think we’d run into an Australian patrol, see? And we wouldn’t shoot back. So you didn’t want any of them having our weapons. Because you can tell every different kind of weapon, once a weapon barks out on a night patrol, you know what it is. It’s only one single shot.

They’ve all got their own initials, their own sound, their own noise. Grenades, mortars, shells. Once you’ve been out in the front line for a week, you can tell what it is, just by the sound of it.

We were pretty well equipped, had rifles and bayonets. I always carried an Owen sub-machine gun, being an NCO. We had two groups in our section. We had a rifle group and a Bren group. The Bren group with three blokes.

You had the gunner who done the shooting, the 2IC who takes the empty magazines off and puts the full ones on, and the number three is the bloke with the rifles and bayonets, with stacks and stacks of ammunition over his shoulder, and he always faced to the rear, in case someone sneaked up behind them. He could put them off with a rifle or bayonet. Your rifle group had rifles and bayonets. If you had to move,

your Bren gun would fire on the enemy to keep their head down while your rifle group moved up, and they’d keep the head down while the rifle group moved up. They called it ‘Fire and Movement.’ Old fashioned to what they do now. The blokes in Vietnam had rattle guns and slugs hanging all over them. Terrific firepower. They had as much firepower as one of our battalions would have in Korea, a bloke in Vietnam. They could shoot a ten story building down in two minutes, I reckon, with all the firepower they had.

The bloke working down here, who did a job on my car, he was in Vietnam. He said, “I don’t know how you blokes got on in Korea, with rifles and bayonets.” I said, “Well, that’s all the Chinamen had, and we could run faster than them.” He said, “How do you mean?” I said, “Haven’t you seen a Chinaman with his pants off? He’s bow-legged.”

There were thousands and thousands of them, yeah.

I think the Yanks had about sixty something thousand casualties in Korea. That’s a lot, a hell of a lot.

Yeah, but you know we’re only a company deep on the front line. But thousands of Chinese were over there. Like a corporal could bring down the whole of the Commonwealth Division Artillery on somebody.

If he saw a target, as long as he was a lance corporal or up, he could get on the radio and give a map reference to the Kiwis behind us. The British Artillery behind them would pick it up, and the Americans, everyone would pick it up. They were all on the same frequency. Everyone would chuck it in, depends where the map reference was.

They would know what would be at that map reference. So whoever was in charge of the artillery would decide whether they would bring their big heavy stuff in or not. And behind the British, we had the Yank navy sitting off the coast, with their great big ‘express trains’. Of a night-time when you were out on night patrol in the valley, you could hear them going right over the valley. You’d watch up north, and you’d listen,

and wait for about three or four minutes and you’d look up at the horizon and you’d see all the dull lights glowing one after another on the horizon. And you’d wait for about another five minutes and the noise would come down, boom, boom. All the big naval guns firing. They’d fire about ten or fifteen mile. The Yanks reckoned for every shell, we’d kill about thirty to fifty Chinese.

And that’s how they reckoned what the Chinese casualties should be. But they didn’t reckon on the Chinese being dug in tunnels running back eleven mile underground and they didn’t get any of them. When they put in their ground troops, that’s why the Yanks got knocked off, the Chinaman was underground.

Yeah, we used to go out and get bodies out of the minefields. Sometimes the Chinaman would be wearing an American steel helmet. And they’d think it was an American body, so they’d want the American’s body brought in. Nine times out of ten it would be a Chinaman who’d have a Yank battle bowler [American helmet] on. We went out and brought in several bodies from the minefields.

Bugger of a job, they’d stink like hell, crawling with bugs. You’d tie a rope around their ankles and get back and pull them, in case something has left a grenade under the body with the pin out. If you rolled them over, the striker lever would go and bang, and you’re gone up in the air and that’s the end of you. You tie a rope around the ankles and get back about ten yards and just slowly pull the body.

Pull it about three or four feet. If there’s a grenade under it, it will go off. You’ve got to be careful. Then you’ve got to put them in a body bag and bring the body home. They stank a bit. You’d stick your hand down there to see if they’ve got meat tags on them, and you’d get a big handful of mush, if they’ve been out there for a week or two. The smell was still in your body a fortnight later, in your perspiration.

You’d go to the toilet, the stink stays with you for a couple of weeks. It’s a sad end for a human being, isn’t it?

I don’t know. I think it was being busy all the time. Being in charge of other blokes and tactics and all that sort of thing, all the time.

I hadn’t been around any dead bodies or anything before I went over there. Only cattle on the property, but that’s different. Handling a dead body didn’t worry me at all, it was just the smell of the person. And you start to think then, ‘This is a human being.

What a sad bloody end to somebody that somebody loves, who’d been a baby once.’ All that sort of stuff. That’s when you start to get pretty crook on politicians sending you overseas to fight, when your own country hasn’t been attacked. The Second World War was different. The Japs came here, they actually landed in Australia. I knew Ken Bromley, Major Bromley, that drew the line across the middle of Australia, where we were going to let the Japs land and come down there,

and stop the Japs in the middle of the desert, where there was no water. He was in charge of the rehabilitation place on the Gold Coast here, when the wounded blokes came back from Vietnam. He used to bring his boats and outboard motors down to my factory to get them serviced, Ken.

No. Never had time to worry about that.

You were a soldier, you were in a battalion, you were with your mates, you were a fighting battalion, and you were there to do a job. You do it. You do what you’re told and you do it the best you can. The same as anything in life, any job you take on, you do the best you can. You get self-satisfaction out of that, and you can be proud of yourself.

I went to Sunday school every Sunday when I was a kid, mother made sure of that. Yeah, Mum used to make sure we went. If we played up, she’d always say, “You’ll be in trouble, the Lord will punish you.”

Dad used to say, “Don’t put those bloody silly ideas into his head.” I’d ask Dad “What religion are you, Dad?” And he’d say, “Bush Baptist.” No, he was all right, Dad. Mum was pretty strongly religious, as was her mother. My mother started work for Mack Robinsons Chocolate mob, when she was a girl. There was only two of them working for him. When he used to cart his chocolates around the street in a little

go-cart thing with two little pram wheels on it. He used to go from door to door selling hand-dipped chocolates. Mack Robinson. It’s a lot bigger now. Mum used to make us show at Sunday school every Sunday at the Baptist Church. Mister Shroud was the minister’s name. How did I remember that? The last time I went to Sunday school was when I was about, twelve, I think.

Yeah, it was good. I used to enjoy it. Most of the kids used to go to Sunday school. They had a tennis court down there, plenty of athletics.

Nuh. He never had a gun. He couldn’t help me if he never had a gun. We’re all human beings. When you’re in a war, you’re human beings.

I don’t think God has got any say in it. You get human beings running around shooting bullets at one another. When we got back behind the line, the first time we came out of the front line, the padre was there waiting for us, he was handing out hymn books to everybody. Everyone was tired and buggered and all that, and there he was. Two of my mates weren’t very religious.

They tore about half a dozen pages out of the hymn book to use when they went to the toilet. He used to give us a bit of a talking. You never saw him in the front line. None of the padres ever came up to the front line trenches. One bloke came up there, in the wintertime, he used to sneak around the trenches. I nearly shot him twice. He was a Church of England padre.

When the Second World War was on, he was a merchant seaman and his ship got torpedoed and he was floating on a big door or something for seven days, until he got rescued. He nearly died and that’s when he went into the ministry then. He reckoned God had saved him. I reckoned the door had saved him.

Yeah, he was sneaking around the trenches. I was in a stand-to, like a weapon pit, listening for Chinese sneaking up the forward slopes,

and I heard someone scrape against the wall of the trench. I pulled the Bren off like that and I was just waiting for him to come around the corner of the weapon pit. A bottle of rum came in and the padre behind it. I said, “Geez, I bloody nearly shot you, padre.” He said, “That’s all right.” He said, “You didn’t, did you?” He said, “How about a warmer upper?” I said, “I’ll be in that.” You’d hear the blokes, they used thump their boots against the wall of the trenches to knock the snow out of the treads of their boots,

you’d hear it going on all night. You’d hear the thumping going on. The Chinaman could hear where your trenches were, but he wouldn’t come out in the wintertime. He had more brains than to come out in the middle of the valley in the night. It was frozen. You could slip over and shoot your mates in front of you and that. Our bright officer sent us down the ridge, a procession of us down to a listening post and there was no one out there to listen to.

I brought it up with Sullivan, our platoon commander, once. He said, “Well, you’ve got to go out, orders are orders.” And he said, “I’m going to go and have a rum.” It was a bit hard to fight anyone with a great big park on, and a hood squashed down, and howling, freezing bloody wind blowing in on you.

It was that slippery, as if you were on ice skates. Everything was frozen. So I reckon Chinaman Charlie was back behind the lines with a big bowl of fried rice I reckon, and probably full of prawns, too.

Snatch patrols? They’d usually send four or five blokes up towards the Chinese trenches, sneak up there, even if it takes them two hours to sneak up,

kitten crawling up, just slide into a trench, grab the first bloke they can see, and gag him, drag him back over the trench and just slide away and bring him back, interrogate the prisoner. Usually they fight that bloody hard, and if they can get their mouth through they’ll start yelling out. Usually they’d thump them that hard they would be dead by the time they got them back to their own trenches, trying to shut them up. Everybody would give them a crack to try and shut them up.

Every time they’d yell out, they’d start dropping mortars all around you. It was a dangerous thing. It got that bad, that hard to get a prisoner, at one stage in the front line there was an offer of a week’s leave in Tokyo if we could get a live prisoner back. I didn’t bother about that, bugger it. We were out on a patrol one night, and this bloke was sneaking up slowly, up towards us. A mate said

“There’s a bloody Chinaman coming up towards us.” I said, “How do you know it’s a Chinaman?” He said, “Who else would be out in the bloody valley at this time of night on his own?” I said, “Well, a Chinaman wouldn’t be. He’s too bloody clever.” Anyhow, I said, “Grab him.” Got him, tackled him, brought him down, he gagged him. He wasn’t trying to sing out. We got him down to the trench system, took him down the reverse slope. It was one of our own water bearers, water carriers that used to bring the water up to us. He used to live in a bit of a hole in the ground on the reverse slope,

South Koreans. We thought they were South Koreans. This bloke had a sketch he’d made of our machine gun bunkers. He’d been across the Chinese lines, probably let them copy it. They were clever enough to say, “No, you keep it, and take it back with you.” If he came back with nothing. Well, they might have sketched the bunkers. They called up field security, and a South Korean bloke came up, an American bloke,

they took him down the back of the reverse slope for a couple of hours and thumped him around, and the South Korean bloke. I didn’t see it, but one of the diggers was down the reverse slope down at the cookhouse getting something, he said the South Korean took his revolver out and shot him in the back of the head. We had to go down to that bloke’s trial ten days later and give evidence that we caught him coming back from the Chinese line.

They’d shot him, executed him ten days beforehand. It was a South Korean, a rocker division bloke, field security, that shot him. The American bloke was pretty upset, because they don’t do that. The South Koreans, they were right on the ball, they had no mercy for the North Koreans because of what the North Koreans had done to them. They must have got other blokes who had done the same thing.

They probably got food. They could have got plenty of food off us, but they’d probably get money. They might have been North Koreans in the first place. You don’t know. They all looked the bloody same. Slit eyes and black eyes. In Malaya they reckoned they were looking for a Chinese bandit. I said, “What does he look like?” They said, “They reckon he’s got slit eyes, yellowy coloured skin and black hair.” I said, “Oh yeah? I can bring you a thousand of those.”

Good soldier. Be aware of him. Don’t do anything bloody stupid. Do what you’ve been trained to do. Don’t stir up a bloody hornet’s nest, or you’ll get yourself and your mates killed.” Too much heavy artillery. You start it easy. But if there was a fight and they came at you, come up your forward slope.

They do that. They know themselves they’re going to run into slugs and artillery. That’s just it. You were trained to do your job and you do it. Any bodies you’ve got to bring in, you bring them in, that’s it. You don’t see them again, they go back behind the lines. And you’re with your mates all the time. You’re pretty close to your mates when you’re in the front line. You’re talking all the time, and nattering all the time…

Oh, anything.

Mostly about going on leave to Japan. Big cold beers. Some blokes talked about malted milks. Some blokes talked about their wives. Some blokes talked about their mothers. We didn’t have any gays in our battalion in those days, no blokes talked about their boyfriends. It seems like they’ve only just come out of the closet

in the last twenty years it seems. It’s not their fault, they’re entitled to their life. As long as they don’t worry me.

No. They would have just discharged them straight away if there had been any there. The other blokes probably would have thumped them because, they used to call it ‘poofter bashing’ in the old days. They just didn’t like it. That’s why the gays probably kept quiet, poor buggers.

It doesn’t bother me one way or the other. I’d rather they’d dress as a girl, because they act like a girl, they’ve got a girl’s mental attitude, the bright eyes, the hand movements, everything. I’d rather they dress like a girl, myself. They’d probably feel better themselves, too, but the trouble is they’ve got a man’s body. It’s a bit of a bugger, isn’t it? Like being born with a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK ’s head.

It’s marvellous how they can cover up for all the years and years. Some of them are twenty five, thirty year old before they come out. Once they start knocking about with the other gay person, that’s when the other ones won’t let them go, isn’t it? Then they want to do their thing in front of everybody and they expect to be accepted, just out of the blue like that. And some of the fathers can’t accept it, for a while, because it’s not what the fathers were brought up to be.

And there probably wasn’t as many gay people about. But you’ve got to just accept things as they go. The whole world is changing all the time.

Yeah, blokes would talk about their girlfriends. One bloke was raving on about his girlfriend every day. The blokes didn’t want to hear about it,

they just wanted to read the letter.

Yeah, I had a couple of girlfriends, in Japan. Didn’t have any girlfriend’s home in Australia. I knew a nurse at home here in Australia, came out to the boat to see us off, but

when I got back home, she was married. She sent me a cake in Korea. When I got it, it was all crumbs. There was a letter in it, “If you can’t eat it, throw it at the enemy. It will probably kill them.” Yeah, she was married when I come home. She lives up here on the coast. She married a sailor. Her and her girlfriend were nurses at a hospital. Her girlfriend was Jimmy Burgess’ a mate of mine in Korea.

He was in the Sigs [Signal Corps], he was one of the signallers in the support company. His wife knocked around with her. They were both nurses. He met her at Tweed Heads, his wife. The other girl, two of them were working at a hospital in Tweed Heads. He was in there, he cut his leg with a cane cutting knife and that’s where he met her.

I don’t know. It never bothered me. I was always too bloody busy. Blokes that had been wounded, blokes that had been killed, writing letters to their bloody people. It was the padre’s job like,

but I knew them before I went over. I knew their people. They’d write to me. And I’d just write letters back to them, and they’d want to know how their sons or their husbands got killed. I’d tell them there was a lot of heavy artillery and they just disappeared, so they’d probably been killed instantaneously. Couldn’t find any part of them. Somebody else might have found their body. I just used to bow out of it. I didn’t like to say. Even if we had brought a bloke in that had been killed.

I would try and let them down as easily as I could, even if I had to tell them a lie. Someone else would probably tell them what they wanted to know. I think that most mothers and wives want to hear that their husbands or their sons were killed immediately that they didn’t know what hit them. Rather than be wounded and linger on in the hospital, with no guts, for a fortnight, and gradually die. I don’t think any mother or wife would want to hear that.

Or in a prison camp. They gave them a hard time in the prison camps in North Korea. A little bowl of rice in the morning. They’d give them a big handful of tobacco, but no papers to roll it in, and no pipe. It was all mental torture. They made them go to school every day with a notebook and a pencil and try to indoctrinate them in to socialism. Two of my mates got taken prisoner. They used to play noughts and crosses. They used to take them out and tie their wrists up to a pole outside,

and leave them hanging up there all night, trying to be smart, trying to be clever. But all the time they were prisoners, that’s what they did. They took the Chinamen on all the time. They just put up with it. There was no hard physical torture. Sometimes they would put a stick on the back of their knees and make them squat down on it, and tie a rope around there, and make them squat there all day, with their back up against the wall. I said, “What happens then?” He said, “Your legs just go to bloody sleep.”

He said, “They’re too stupid to know that. You’re just squatting there on numb legs.” It’s better than trying to run away and get shot. Everybody’s got a different slant on different things, but they handled it all right. They came back, they were full of worms, they weighed about six stone. Their hair was down to their shoulders and they had blue overalls on. They all had pneumonia. Too skinny to get a needle in, with no flesh on their bum. When they went around to get some clothes from the Q store,

the quarter master sergeant gave them a military uniform and boots. He said, “You better put the boots on here. You go walking around here bare feet, you’ll get yourself put on a charge.” A bloke came back up to warden and told me and I called the Canadian padre. We were at their field dressing station where the prisoners came back through. The padre went down there and tore strips off him. He came back and said, “He won’t be giving those fellows orders any more.” He said, “They’re going to Japan for three months, to put some condition on them.”

One bloke said, “I’m not going home. I don’t want my wife to see me like this.” That was it. The Canadian padre went around to the Q store, and he charged the quarter master sergeant. I don’t know how he pulled it but he said, “I’ve put him on a whizzer.” The Canadian captain.

About six months. They were taken. The 3rd Battalion, under Colonel Green, I think. They took him prisoner, he ran out of ammo and they took him prisoner. His blokes were taken with him when they came back again. I don’t know the full story, but I think that’s what happened.

They didn’t want to talk about it anyway. They just wanted to get a good feed. And once they gave them a good feed, it went straight through them. They had to de-worm them. They were full of roundworm.

I was pretty good in Korea. I picked up a few bugs in Malaya. I picked them up in Malaya because they were really holding out for tea, and the food was all sweet stuff to keep your energy up.

But in Korea the food wasn’t too bad. We got it sent up from the cookhouse down the reverse slope hill. It was mostly bully beef and biscuits, but you got a decent feed once or twice a week. The cooks would cook it. They’d stop drinking beer and cook a meal for you. I came in off a patrol one night, I was cold. I went into the cookhouse and said, “How about a cup of tea?” And they were all sitting there drinking beer, the cooks. And I brought my patrol in,

the three blokes who had been at the listening post, cold as buggery. I said, “How about a cup of tea or a cup of coffee for me and my diggers?” They said, “Nuh, you can get something in the morning at breakfast time.” They’re all drinking beer and playing cards. I put a magazine in my own Owen gun and I shot up all the sandbags over the top of their table, and all the sand came down in their beer and on top of their heads. I said, “How about a cup of coffee?” And he said, “Righto. You’ll get a cup of bloody coffee.” I said, “Right.”

My mates said, “We better get out of here, we’ll be in trouble.” I said, “No we won’t.” I said, “I hope Sullivan comes down here,” the platoon commander. I said, “He’ll put these blokes on a charge, knocking us back for coffee when we’re coming in off a patrol.” And what did he do? He sent them out on patrol with us the next time we went out. They had to sit out in the valley with us all night. We got a cup of coffee every time we came in after that. The sergeant cook said to me,

“You’re bloody mad, Gray.” I said, “I know. I meant to tell you when we first got over here.” I said, “Never knock a digger back for a cup of coffee when he comes off a patrol, hey?” “No,” I said, “Even if you’re drinking beer.” We got one bottle of beer a day in the front line. These blokes were getting beer from the Kiwis, and they were getting half full most afternoons. They didn’t like being out on the patrol all night.

We were in a counter-attack position, about seven miles behind the front line when we came out of the first position we were in. And they told us we were going in again.

And they formed us up and in the night-time gave us our first line of ammunition. You’ve got your weapon, your grenades and your belt of ammunition. When you’re magazine is loaded, that’s first line ammunition. If you use that, you’ve got other ammo [ammunition] comes up. Then they gave us a case of C rations each to put on our shoulders. They walked us six miles up to the front line up the road in the dark. It took us all night to walk up there.

There were trucks going past us. The road was only big enough to get a truck and three blokes on it, then it dropped down a big steep hill. You could hear the Artillery up the front line all the time as you were getting closer and closer. A little bloke from my section came up behind me, he said, “Hey corp [corporal]?” I said, “What? You all right?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Does anyone want to have a spell?” He said, “No, they’re all right.” “C rations not too heavy?” “No.” “About as half as heavy as a carton of beer.”

“No,” he said, “I was just worrying about that noise up there.” I said, “Yeah, you don’t want to worry about it. It won’t go away.” I said, “Everyone’s a bit nervy the first time up in the front line.” I said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll fix them up when we get up there. We’ll break all their gun barrels in half.” He said, “Yeah, you would laugh, make a joke of it.” I said, “What else are you going to do?” I said, “Go back there and tell your mates to quiet down. Everything’s right, by me.”

You can get them over it with a bit of humour. When we got up to the front line trenches, they gave us a position to go in on, a certain part of the hill. When we got up there, there was nobody there. The British battalion had pulled out. We didn’t know when they pulled out or what. It was empty. The Chinamen could have came over and taken over the hill. And all the trenches had fallen in and everything.

The British battalion hadn’t repaired the trench system or nothing, it was all blown in and full of water, it had been raining. That was our first introduction to The Hook, yeah.

No. The British battalion had moved on. I forget the name of them, the Northumberland, something or other.

(BREAK) Yeah, that was an empty feeling. We didn’t know what was going on. I went around to my blokes

and found them, wherever they were. They’d already started to pull their little shovels off their packs, they’d already started to clear out the splinter base, so you could get in if the shelling started. All the splinter bases were fallen in. The British battalion just did no maintenance to the trenches at all, they were all just National Service kids, I suppose they couldn’t be bothered. They knew they were getting out. So that was our introduction to The Hook.

Cleaning all the trenches up.

We brought sheets of iron up to rivet to the walls, to stop the walls falling in, put stakes up along it. Clean all the splinter bays out, so you could get in under there. They had timber bags across the sandbags. In heavy shelling you’ve got to get in a splinter bay, you can’t stay out in an open trench. You’d lose your head if you stayed out there. There’s shrapnel whizzing everywhere, red hot shrapnel. You can feel the heat of it if it goes past you. Bullets are the same. You feel the heat of bullets as they go past your head. They sound like bees going past.

We straightened all that up, and that night the Chinaman came on the loud speaker and said, “Welcome Australian soldiers. We hope you are settled in, and comfortable. Welcome to the meat grinder.” They used to put it on, to try and knock your confidence. Welcome to the meat grinder. It wasn’t the girl from down the line. When we were in the other position, there was a girl that used to play records,

she was all right. This was a Chinese bloke that was talking to us. Yeah, “Welcome to the Meat Grinder. Don’t come out on patrols, you might get hurt.” Righto. We sent patrols out that night. One of the blokes out of my mob went out, a corporal. He run into a Chinaman out there and he got into a hell of a bloody fight.

He won a military medal out there that night, in that fight. The sergeant went down and he took over and finished the fight off and got his men out of it. They gave him a military medal. Tom McGuire. Yeah, Corporal Tom McGuire. Blokes used to call him ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ Terrific bloke, Tom.

He had two bullets in his upper arm, they sent him back to a field dressing station, and he came back up about ten days later. He was in terrific pain all the time. They gave him a pocketful of aspirin and that was it. He said, “I thought they’d send me home, get me out of here. They sent me back here.” I said, “You’re a good soldier, Tommy. That’s why they want you back up here.”

That’s what they do with any of the blokes, any of the trained soldiers, they want them back in the front line. They don’t care if you’ve got pain in your arm or anything. They will send you back up there, a pocketful of aspirin. I said, “You can always get into the morphine syringes.” We had plenty of syringes of morphine. You usually stuck three or four in your hip pocket before you went out on night patrols. If any blokes get hit bad and they start yelling out, you can just snap the top off and poke the needle straight through the backside of their pants. It only takes about two or three seconds for it to work.

That comes in handy. Tommy used the morphine for a while. He got hooked on it after that. They fixed him up, he got off it. He was a good soldier. Tom McGuire. He always used to call me corporal. He was a corporal himself. He always used to call me corporal and stand to attention. He was real army, real army ridgy-didge.

I said to him “Why are you always so ridgy-didge?” He said, “I’m on the ball, I’m real soldier. I’m a professional soldier, career soldier. And on the ball.” I said, “Yeah, but you still get shot in the arm.” He said, “Lucky shot.” I said, “You make sure you carry your arm, don’t put your head down there.” “Don’t get me worried, George.”

He was a terrific bloke, Tom.

He said, “They were waiting for us. They had a weapon pit dug in out there.” He said, “We sneaked down there.” He said, “I could smell them, and I told my blokes to get down.” They hit the ground and they opened up on them. They could probably smell him, too. They said they were going to welcome us out there.

He got his blokes out of there. He was the only one that got hit, they were lucky. The Chinese had Russian burp guns, they fired seven hundred rounds a minute. They were pretty deadly bloody things. They were seven point two millimetre, I think, the slugs are. They had drums underneath them with seventy five rounds in it. You could hear them at night-time out on patrols. If someone used a burp gun, you would just “bllurp, bllurp,” it was that fast. The Owen and Brens were slower.

But you could hit more with the slower guns. With the burp gun, wherever the first bullet hit, the whole pattern would hit there in the one place. They fired fast, but they weren’t accurate. Owen guns fired about four hundred and fifty rounds a minute, they were all right, they were good. They packed a pretty good punch. Most of the casualties that our blokes got were with the rifles. Rifles and three oh three bullets across the valley.

And Bren guns.

Well, it held out there all the time, with a few battalions on it. And the Chinese hit it and couldn’t get through there. He brought down a division of troops, and threw them in against our blokes. We were only a battalion. There are three battalions in a brigade, and three brigades in a division.

So it was nine to one at the battle on The Hook. There were a thousand blokes in our battalion, but there was only one company on left of the Hook, and one on the right of it. We had all the artillery behind us, too. The Marines and all that, and the 3rd Battalion on the right of. And we could bring in an air strike

any time we liked. Jet fighters would be up from Iwakuni in two or three minutes, with napalm and all sorts of stuff. A lot of firepower. Artillery was the main thing. They reckon that the troops he put into big fight on The Hook, the Chinese, they reckon he brought them up from about fifteen kilometres behind the line, overnight. They reckoned they doubled them up or fifteen miles, in those days.

They just had a cotton bag around their neck on a bit of string that was their rice issue for the week. And they were all full of marijuana. Marijuana grew wild all over Korea, where we were. There were marijuana bushes anywhere, everywhere. We used to get the berries off it. They smoke leaves in Australia, it’s useless. It will just give you bronchitis, but they sell it and get money for it. But the buds with the tar in, that’s the real McCoy.

The Yanks told us how to use it. They said just get a bud like that, scrape it into your tobacco like that and roll a cigarette, before you go out on a night patrol. And it sharpens your night vision. You can see three times further in the dark. But you don’t have any more than three draws out of the cigarette, then you pass it around to the other blokes. It’s all right, it relaxes the blokes a bit. No more than three puffs of it.

And the blokes knew how to use it. In those days it was known as a sex drug. It was supposed to kick your libido up, but none of my blokes needed that. Couple of beers and a good sort was you needed. The Chinese, they threw in a division there that was three battalions in a brigade, three brigades in a division, was

the casualties were about three thousand and something. I’ve got the figures inside there. Yeah, that was the body count. They would have had troops up in the front line anyway. These division blokes were the blokes they doubled up from back behind the lines. It was a terrible slaughter. They signed the truce while we were on The Hook. That was their last attack, their last attempt to get through.

At Pyongyang, there was a big searchlight straight up in the air, and they told us if it turned red they would be attacking us, if it turned green it meant they had signed the truce. And everybody used to keep an eye on that searchlight. Everybody forgot to look at it when they attacked us on The Hook. They forgot the searchlight. Yeah, nine to one.

It’s pretty big odds. We had bigger guns than they did. Our casualties were fairly light, about a hundred and fifty, I think. Not light for the blokes that got hit, or their relatives. But that’s a pretty big price for the Chinese to pay. That’s probably why they signed the truce. They probably thought if an Australian battalion could beat a division of our blokes, what’s the good of fighting? But it wasn’t our battalion,

it was all the artillery we had. They said the artillery was heavier, than the artillery in France in the First World War, at the Battle of the Somme and all that, that went on for weeks. I forget how many thousands of rounds were fired in that one.

Three days and two nights.

Oh yeah, they probably had a tea break, it would ease off, then it would come on again. It all depended when their troops moved. Usually they throw in artillery and rake the valleys with machine gun fire before they move troops through those areas. They reckoned they were cleaning the area out. They used to fire Vickers machine guns right down the whole length of the Sinchon Valley. It was a bowling alley before we went on night patrol. There would still be Chinamen out there, you would still meet them out on there on patrol. They would just get in holes or under rocks.

It was all right for a bit of psychology, I suppose. Some smart officer probably worked it out, who doesn’t go on patrol.

When artillery is landing all around you, you just keep your head down. Everyone just gets down, you get your head down, because there’s bloody shrapnel flying everywhere. You could hear it going around everywhere. Each section leader has got his own blokes. You’ve got a platoon sergeant and a platoon commander. Once artillery starts landing all around you, your stupid if you put your head up. You get in a splinter bay because, if it’s coming up your forward slope

and it’s all over the hill, they’re not going to come up through it. Once it starts to lift and creep up your hill, they’re fifty yards behind it. And once it goes over the top of your hill, they’re in your face. So that’s what you’ve got to watch for, when it starts to lift. Usually an officer is out in the trench with a field telephone, calling the forward shot to the colonel or the battalion commander in the command bunker. He’ll say, “It’s starting to lift.

It’s coming up the hill now.” You say, “Yep, we’re ready.” Then you get all the blokes out in the trench then, crouching down. As soon as it goes up to the top of the hill, you’re all out. All your machine guns, all your Brens and stuff is out there, it’s just all your blokes in the splinter bay. All your guns are there, lined up and ready to go. If anyone looms up, you just point it and pull the bloody trigger. Most of the time, your machine guns, you’ve got them on a fixed line of fire

and they’re firing across each other. And you’ve got a killing ground out in front of your trench systems, and you clear any scrub out of the road. There’s a cross fire, right through the whole ground. They call that a killing ground. You get out and line your guns up of night-time while your patrols are out. And those guns are locked there in position. You can easily unlock them, just by swivelling the lever around.

Danet barbed wire, like concertina wire, right down the bottom of the hill, just inside that you’ve got drums of napalm, down in the dirt. And you’ve got a ring of grenades around it, with wires coming up to your weapon pits, up to the top of the hill. And about three or four feet up from the drums of napalm, you’ve got trip flares, about that high the wire is, and you’ve got flare pots with magnesium in them.

They come pass the drums of napalm, they don’t know they’re there, they chuck rice mats on the wire, they come over their rice mats on the wire, past the napalm drums, they hit the trip flares and the flare pots all go up. You pull the wires, all the wires on the pins on the grenades and they explode around the napalm, and it’s all lit up, like bloody Christmas. They can’t go back through it, or they’ll get burned, and you’re up there and they’re in your killing ground. Everyone starts shooting and it’s just like.

they go down.

That’s how you work it out in front of your trench systems, so your guns are locked down. Most of three thousand Chinese that were killed out in front of The Hook and down in the valley was killed from artillery, from back behind us. Any that got up the hill a bit were shot with machine gun fire.

A lot of machine gun fire. Dave Candour, and his Vickers machine gun crew, they took heavy casualties that night. I think Dave got wounded all around the back of his shoulders, with shrapnel and stuff. They went over to help the Marines. It’s mostly artillery that causes the big casualties. Bloody murder, the artillery.

There’s only one place to be when an artillery barrage starts up, and that’s in a hole in the ground. The whole hill rocks. It goes right through your whole body, the concussion. It makes your teeth rattle and your eyes water. And then when it stops it’s so bloody quiet, you can hear the quiet. Blokes start to move around a bit. “You all right?” “You there?”

They all start singing out one another’s names, to see if they’re mates have been hit. Usually you’re pretty right, as long as your dug in properly.

Yeah, I’d call the roll. Smithy, Blokey, whatever their names are. Or I’d just yell out “Number off.” You know their voices.

“Everybody right?” “Yep, yep.” You know everyones voice, you play enough football together. They’d say, “You reckon it will be quiet now, corp.” “Yeah.” Somebody else would say, “How the bloody hell would he know?” All the Aussie humour comes out then, then they get dirty on the Chinamen for blowing their trenches in. “Go and give that bloody slant eye bastard a shovel, he can come and fix my dugout.”

Yeah, they’re characters all right.

No, it probably turned green while we were on The Hook. We forgot all about the bloody thing. The hill was rocking from the artillery fire. I was worried about them over-running the position, but what I was worried about mainly

was the Yanks, the Marine division on the left flank, going under. If they got onto them. I reckon we could hold our hill, but I doubted the Marines. I knew the Marines were good, but I didn’t know them, I never trained with them or anything like that. I knew my blokes, every bloke in the battalion was trained in a minute, all good. I think most of the blokes got a positive on the rifle range when we trained. They were all good shots.

They were all ex-football players, foot runners, athletes. They were all pretty tough when it came to hand to hand stuff, hand to hand fighting. But you don’t know what the Marines were like. They were tough, they trained pretty hard, but when the pressure comes on, some of the boys reckon they would crack. You don’t know. You just hope they didn’t, that’s all. And they didn’t. They held up good.

A few of them came over and seen us. They came back with Dave Candour, the sergeant, with his earplugs and his MMG, medium machine gun, his Vickers. They reckoned “You’ve to look after this guy. He’s real soldier this guy.” They couldn’t speak too highly of him. But Dave was a boxer, too, he was a terrific bloke. He belted the probo sergeant on the ship going over to Korea. Everybody liked him then.

We were up there for a few weeks. The company swapped over, they relieved one another before the fight came on.

On The Hook? Having a shower down the paddy field down the back of The Hook, and they started throwing mortars over at us, and I was standing there in my birthday suit and my towel was over there. We had a bit of wood running

across the paddy field. All mud and water and rice. We had a canvas shower bag out there. I don’t know why they put it there. I hope no one had a camera when I sprinted back across that board and into the dugout on the hill. When I got back up to the trenches, the lance corporal said, “Where have you been?” I said, “Having a shower, I told you I was going for a shower.”

He said, “I hope you enjoyed it.” “Yeah, they shot at me.” That’s the worst I ever felt, wondering if I could make it, whether to go, whether to lay down flat in the mud or what to do. I thought, “No, I’ve got to get back to my blokes.” So I just sprinted across there. I wouldn’t mind a movie of it.

Yeah, I left my towel there. I was moving, I can tell you.

Bloody mortars landing everywhere. Yeah, I was moving. I got up the hill pretty quick. Then somebody yelled out “Here he comes.” Yeah, I never lived that down. They put a sign on my dugout then, ‘Fastest Sprinter In The World, With Nothing On.’ That’s the only time I was worried, getting caught out in the open.

Didn’t have weapons, nothing. Didn’t even have my shoes, boots on. Nothing. You feel a bit vulnerable when you haven’t got any footwear or nothing at all on. I was clean though. I’d had a shower. That was funny, that was.

The truce? They were sitting for two years up at a place called Pyongyang, that’s where the searchlight was, up there.

The American and the Chinese were meeting there. We reckoned they must have had an unlimited supply of champagne and cigars, they’d been there for two years. And when they signed the truce everyone come out of their tunnels on The Hook and they said, “They’ve drank all the bloody champagne and smoked all the cigars, that’s why they’ve signed it.” That’s why we reckon they signed it.

Well, they just pulled back out of there, and they read us the riot act,

where if we shot any of the enemy we would be charged with murder, and if we wounded anyone we would charged with bodily harm with intent to kill or something like that. Officers came back from behind the brigades with their movie cameras and swagger sticks and silk scarves. One of them told my Bren gunner to fire on the Chinese. I said, “Nuh. He doesn’t fire on the Chinese.” He didn’t have any ammo in his magazines anyhow. He said I’m not going to fire on them.”

“Do I have to fire on them, corp?” I said, “No, of course you don’t. They read the riot act to you this morning. You don’t take any notice of this prick. He’s been sitting back there fifty miles behind the line, doing nothing. Taking the Korean sheilas [girls] out dancing.” Our platoon commander came down, John Sullivan, he said, “Go on you, beat it.” I think he was a major. Sully was a lieutenant, “All right you, beat it.” He didn’t stay long, he went. He probably felt he wasn’t working.

He thought he was going to take command. He thought his rank was going to get him everywhere. Sullivan sighted him and came sprinting across. He said, “Get out of here, don’t take any notice of this idiot. Get back where you come from.” And I said to the officer when he told my Bren gunner to fire on the Chinese, I said, “No, he can’t fire on them.

They’re only burial parties. They’ve only got picks and shovels on their shoulders. They’re only looking for bodies to bury.” I said, “They’re all right. Leave them alone. The fighting’s stopped.” He said, “Oh, they’re getting a bit close.” I said, “Well, don’t stay here.” I wasn’t game to say too much to him, because you can’t get smart with a superior officer. They find out who you are, they put a charge on you and you wind up in gaol. I didn’t say too much.

But Sullivan came down and rescued us. He didn’t buggarise about with him.

We took all our boots off, and washed our feet. They were all spongey and white. We hadn’t had our boots off for nearly three weeks. Got some condies crystals up in water in a dish, and soaked our feet, toughened them up. Out come the cigarettes. Blokes started moving around, walking all over the hill. Went up the top of the hill,

and they’re were Chinamen up on the top of the hill caught in the kitten wire. And that was about it. Then the next day we were told that we would be going back near the Kansas line. There was a row of mountains about four or five miles back, it was the second line of defence. And that was all loaded up with ammunition and stuff, if we ever had to fall back onto it. And there was a big valley there

in front of that. And we marched back there. We had to destroy all fortifications, this was the terms of the truce, destroy all fortifications, and then go back. The demarcation line was two mile on either side of the front line. The Chinese line and our side. We went back to this big valley and they called it the Peace Camp, and we put up all canvas tents, and the regimental sergeant major came out and told us to paint all the stones white.

All the (UNCLEAR) started again, then. His job in the front line was to keep all the ammo up to us. When you get out of the front line back into an ordinary army camp, he’s the guy that walks around like he’s got a ram rod up his back, and he’s got a swagger stick. If he thinks you’re taking too short a step or too long a step, he gets it out and opens it up, that’s the measurement of the space you’re supposed to take, and he walks along beside you with this stick measuring your paces.

And he’d tell you, “That’s old gold, that’s not polished brass on your belt buckle.” “So what do you want us to do then, sir?” “If it moves salute, if it’s standing still paint it.” Yeah, he got that in the Pommy [English] army, I think.

That’s when I went over to the dog school. Over in another valley was the Sixty Four Squadron of the Royal Engineers.

They had the war dogs that they used to send up to the front line with a handler, to their battalions and that.

No, there were no brothels. They were flat out getting something to eat. Nobody worried about that.

Our blokes didn’t go near the Korean women. It wasn’t because of the VD [venereal diseases], it was because of TB, tuberculosis. Seventy five percent of them had tuberculosis. Now some of our blokes contracted tuberculosis over there. There were villages around the place, you could go there if you wanted to. The Yanks used to go there, but our blokes kept away from there. Our battalion surgeon gave us a lecture.

He said, “Don’t go near them.” He said, “They’ve got VD. They don’t get examined. But worst of all,” he said, “they’re rotten with tuberculosis. Seventy five percent of them have got tuberculosis.” He said, “If you go near them, you will get tuberculosis. It affects you for the rest of your life.” They didn’t have a cure for it in those days. They can get rid of it now.

It’s coming back on strong, they reckon, tuberculosis germs now.

The Korean women are very quiet, very easy to talk to. We knew some of the Korean women that were school teachers in the small schools, in the villages. We’d go in the village and talk to them. And we’d take food in,

we’d give them supplies out of our cookhouse. But as far as getting too friendly with them, you had to be careful, because you didn’t know if they were giving information to the enemy, to the North Koreans or what. You didn’t know if they were North Koreans living in South Korea. They all looked the bloody same. They’ve all got slit eyes and black hair and yellowy looking skin. And they could speak South Korean and North Korean, there isn’t much bloody difference.

We were an Aussie battalion over there doing our job, and we did it. We just kept away from them, that’s all. The Yanks used to get in and get themselves into trouble.

That was good. Mostly we would get in buses and go to all different places, sight-seeing and that, see as much as we could, because we were only there for seven days.

We used to book into the Dai Ichi Hotel, in Obasi. Where we went on leave, to Tokyo to Obasi, there was a big barracks there that they, all the Japanese naval raiders were trained in there. Down the back of it, they had all these big tanks below ground, concrete, where they trained all the Jap [Japanese] sailors to man the midget submarines that they let go off the mother submarine and came into Sydney Harbour,

and sunk one of the ferries in there. But that’s where they trained them in there, in the midget submarines, at Obasi. There were big barracks there. When we went on leave there we got a bunk in there, for nothing, it cost you nothing. Come outside the gate and all the Jap taxi drivers wanted to take you to hotels and all over the place. It was a beautiful place, Tokyo. It was very friendly there, except there was a lot of returned Japanese soldiers there.

If you were in a restaurant or a café or a bar, they would come and stand at the door and stare at you. They still had their old uniforms on. They were probably bomb happy. We just used to take no notice of them. We were told to ignore them. But you could see the look of hatred in their face. The women were very well mannered. They were that well mannered, that you think they’re having a shot at you,

trying to be smart, but they’re not. It’s the way they were brought up. They had very strong family ties and respect for their families. The Chinese were the same. The Japanese were very clean. The Japanese house, some of the hotels and houses, you’ve got to put slippers on, you can’t wear your shoes in. And the floors in the bedrooms are all titami matting. It’s not wooden floors. It’s wood all around the outside but the floor inside is all titami matting about that thick.

They just roll out an eiderdown thing, to sleep on it. They’ve got a pillow about six inches through, and it’s full of all the husks off the rice. You move your head on it, and you can hear it, it’s noisy. They just put it under the back of their neck, and that’s how they sleep. In the morning they get up and roll it all up and slide the door along, there were cabinets right around the room, you can sit on there, nothing in the room, no furniture, and they just heave the bedding in there and they close that up and the room is empty again.

It’s quick house keeping. In the wintertime, they put these things with red hot coals in them at the foot of the bed. That got me. I was waiting for the thing to go up, but it doesn’t. It’s got a wooden thing over the top of it. Where did we go? We were waiting at,

it was a leading transit depot. When they told me I was going home, to start the war dogs in the Australian Army, we went down there and stayed at hotel there, that’s when they put that foot warmer thing in the bed, with red hot coals in it, and this thing over the top to hold the blankets up out of the way. I said, “It’s a bit dicey, isn’t it?” It worked all right.

In Tokyo and the big cities, they’ve got girls who work in there, but they live in a big hostel, and they’ve got doctors in there. It’s a big business. I don’t know about street girls. There are girls on the street who want you to come to their house, but the hotels get girls from the big business place,

like where the doctors are, and they work for that place. The girls don’t take any money off the blokes. You pay the hotel manager and he’ll ring up and get six girls down. They line up along the passage and you can go along and pick which one you like. They’re not allowed to smoke, and they’re not allowed to drink. And they’re very well mannered. Yeah, they’re very gentle.

They’re very easy to get on with. There’s never any trouble in a hotel. If there’s any trouble, they’re out of a job.

Oh, yeah. I don’t know, I think I was pretty full of beer most of the time. Don’t remember much about it.

No, Aussie diggers never talk about any girl or woman they slept with. That’s their business

and it’s got nothing to do with anybody else. They respect anybody they sleep with. I found that out. That was one of the strongest things I noticed about the blokes in my company. They went on leave and that, and they wouldn’t ask one another about the girls, either. They’d just say, “Did you meet a nice girl? Was she a good sort?” You’d say, “Yeah,” and that was it.

They were pretty gracious, our blokes. They don’t blab their heads off about girls. They’re pretty fussy, though.

Oh, best looking, good sized bust, speak english, honest. A lot of them left their wallets and money and cameras in Tokyo, got on a plane and went back to Korea three parts full. Back there about four days, and all their stuff would turn up in the post.

The girls would take the postage out of their wallet and send it over to them with a note, “You can’t hold your liquor, love so and so.”

Yeah. They used to cut the hands off the thieves in Japan when the war was on. Any criminals they tattoo in Japan. They used to tattoo them. Our blokes used to walk down the street on leave in Japan, and the people would walk around them if they had tattoos or anything on their arms. They’ve got a police box on the corner of every block, in Tokyo.

And they’ve got little waddies. If anyone plays up, they get out and hit them on the head and chuck them on the truck. And the men used to walk in front of their wives, and their wives would walk at the back. If the sun was out, the bloke would give a grunt and the wife would run up and hold a sunshade over his head. The Jap blokes never walked down the street with their wife beside him, she had to walk behind him.

My mates didn’t like that. They were sort of really stood over but I think it was just their ways. And the women did it, they didn’t know anything else. Either that or they couldn’t get a feed anywhere else. Yeah, we’re pretty free and easy in Australia.

Oh yeah. The American captain came out when we were taking some photos of the shooting stage jets on the strip. We didn’t go straight to Tokyo, we went up to the north of Japan. We went across on a Chinese boat.

A few blokes pushed a couple of the Canadian screws off the back of that boat, that bashed then up in the military gaol in Seoul, got rid of them.

Yeah, they targeted them. As soon as they got on the boat, these Canadian sergeants got on, and they knew them.

They’d done thirty days in the Seoul gaol, and they used to belt them around, anyone that went down there. Any parcels that came for you, they’d say, “You can donate them to the staff or we can burn them in front of you.” And if you said, “Well, you can’t have them. I want them burnt in front of you.” They’d set you then and they’d make you dig a hole in the ground a foot deep and fill it up with water and make you mark time in it all day. If you stopped, they’d belt your around the head with the buckles of a wood belt.

One bloke got out of there and came back up to the line, got a Bren gun and half a dozen magazines and went down and shot the place up. Another bloke came back up and blew his brains out. He wasn’t going to go back there again. They knocked the soldiers around something terrible in the military gaols over there, those Canadian military police. Anyhow, they knew who they were and they said if they ever catch them away from the gaol,

they’d do them. And they got them. They were on the boat. And all the diggers on the boat just gradually herded them down the back of the boat and tipped them over the back of the boat. And that was it.

There were Aussies there and British soldiers and that. I’ve got a pretty good idea who it was, but I forget their names now. I wouldn’t say who it was anyhow. But I know it was going on, from the time I got on the boat, they said,

“So and so, the screws from Seoul [UNCLEAR] are on here.” One bloke said to me, “Keep away from the back of the boat, mate.” So I just kept away from the back of the boat, but I saw them go over.

Yeah, and there were three other blokes on there, and they put them up on the deck higher, and went up there and locked the doors. Had a go at them.

They shot two of them over the back of the boat. I think there were another three on the boat, probably going on leave to Japan.

No, they lifted them up and pushed them over the back of the boat. Let them swim. Someone might have picked them up, but I didn’t see any other boats behind us.

I don’t know.

I don’t know. I don’t care. Blokes that knocked people around like those mongrels don’t deserve any better. I don’t condone it, but if it happens, it doesn’t ruffle my fur one way or the other. You put yourself in a bloke’s shoes who is three month in a gaol and

they’re bashing him every day. Two of our blokes went in. One bloke blew his brains out and the other bloke went down and shot the joint up, and they got him and gave him another three months in there. I don’t know what happened to him.

They might have refused to go out on patrol, and an officer’s charged them. Once they go back for a court martial, it’s out of your battalion’s hands then. It’s in the hands of the brigade headquarters, and that’s it. Cowardice in the face of the enemy, and they’re put in gaol.

If they could talk to them up in the front line, like I used to talk to my blokes, you can get them out of it. You can give them a job down the reverse slope of the hill in the cookhouse, doing something, until they get hold of themselves, or something like that. Sometimes you will get a bloke who will just jack up. If he’s had his own way all his life, or he’s a tough guy, he’s not going to knuckle down to anyone. They’re the sort of people that usually run into trouble anywhere in life.

You can always strike a…There’s always a middle ground to everything.

Their nerves would go on them, and they wouldn’t admit it. You could ask them, “Are you getting a bit shakey?” You don’t ask them if they’re frightened, because most blokes are a bit nervy and frightened before they go out on a patrol. But some of them, if their nerves go

and they’re frightened of going out, they will become aggressive. A lot of blokes think that attack is the best defence. But it doesn’t go down with NCOs that know them. We get to know what our blokes are like. We try to figure it out and fathom them out. So yes, I used to send my blokes down the reverse slope to the cookhouse. “Go and see the sergeant cook and tell him I sent you down there. You work down there with him for a couple of days. That will get you out of going out on patrol,

and someone else can take your place.” If they weren’t going out on a dangerous job, you know.

No. I thought I could beat the whole of the Chinese army. I did. I thought I was invincible. A bloody Owen sub-machine gun and a belt full of grenades, I thought I could beat the whole Chinese army. Idiot. I suppose I was just lucky. But it was the same as playing football, if you in and play hard

you don’t get hurt. If you go in and ease up, you go in soft and easy, you will get flattened. I believe that if you’re going to do something, get into it and do it, or get out. We trained that way. It was all training. The blokes that trained our battalion at Puckapunyal, they did a bloody good job. They were all professional officers.

I didn’t eyewitness any of it, but I had one little bloke that came back. I couldn’t get him out of going down there, he wouldn’t listen to me. He went down there and he came back and he told me what it was like, and he said, “I’m not going back, corp.” He told me exactly what they did. Another bloke used to be my forward scout, Donny McMillan. They sent him, and he come from the 1st Battalion. They gave him thirty days down there, for striking an officer.

The officer wanted to send him out somewhere, and he reckoned he would get killed, so he flattened the officer. You don’t punch officers in the front line. They court-martialled him, gave him thirty days down there. He came back up and he told me exactly the same as this other young bloke told me. They make you dig a hole, fill it up with water, they make you mark time in it. And when you’ve done that and you can’t stand up, they make you run around the assault course, six times, then they will come out and tip buckets of muddy water over your head.

And if you give any cheek, they will put another ten days or twenty days onto your sentence, and keep you there longer. So they can keep you there as long as they want to.

Well, once the blokes up in the line heard about it, they all went out on patrol. They didn’t want to go back and get thirty days in Sirra Bu. But when a soldier’s nerves go,

his nerves go. Like Johnny Philpot, he just broke down and was sobbing, he reckoned he wasn’t sobbing. I gave him a hand to get out of his bunk and he weighed a bloody ton. He never had any strength in his legs or anything. His nerves had just packed up on him. I got him sent back behind the lines. I got him sent back

as a casualty to the Canadian field dressing station. I said, “You put down that you got aches and pains in all your joints, and they’ll think you’ve got hammeragic fever or something. You will get a couple of weeks out of the line then. You’ll probably feel all right.” I said, “Can you blow a trumpet?” He said, “Yeah, I can, as a matter of fact.” I said, “Well put in for a bloody transfer to the band or something.” Once he got back to the Canadian field dressing station, he was there for ten days then he came back up the line and he was all right.

Yep. I used to get a lot of guys that would just come up and talk to me quietly, of a night-time, about how they were feeling. Just explain emotions and things like that, as my father used to explain to me, when I was a kid, and I used to get upset

or get into fights out in the street. Yeah, I can thank my father for a lot of things. He used to take the time to sit down and talk to you, or he’d piggyback you over to Collingwood on his shoulders, and watch the footy. A bloke told him to get me off his shoulders one day, and he put me down and got a bloke to hang onto me and he went up and dropped the bloke, flattened him, came back, put me back on his shoulders and sat down. “How many goals are we in front now, son?”

I’ve never forgot that. The bloke beside him was laughing. It was just bang and he thumped like a bag of spuds hitting the ground. My old man comes back and the bloke said, “That was quick.” He said, “Yeah, you strike them everywhere you go.” He was real kind hearted, my Dad. Anybody that was .like crippled kids, or they used to get polio when I was a kid, a lot of the kids were getting polio.

They called it infantile paralysis. And all the doctors could do was put steel things on their legs, because your muscles used to waste away and your legs would twist up. Sister Kenny used to massage them underwater, but they called her a quack, so she went to America and the Yanks welcomed her with open arms. She cured thousands of kids there, then the Australians wanted her back.

Self inflicted wounds, yeah.

I know one bloke took his boot and his sock off and put his foot out of the trench in the middle of the winter. He said, “How long do you reckon it will take to get frostbite.” I said, “You’ve got it now. You’ve only got two minutes.” You could make a cup of tea inside the tent on the choofer, put it out on the floor of the trench and it would freeze solid in four minutes, a boiling hot cup of tea.

Ordinary water stayed solid for the whole winter. All your clothes had to be washed in petrol. Couldn’t wash your clothes in water. If you did, halfway through wringing them out, it was solid, frozen solid. And your hands were stuck to it. Twenty seven degrees below zero was bloody cold. It’s degrees of frost.

Yeah, he got sent home.

I don’t know what happened to him. He said he was going to get home. He said, “What’s the best way to get home?” I said, “In a body bag.” I said, “But you will be a bit stiff.” He said, “What’s an easy way to get home without getting hurt?” I said, “Some blokes get frostbite when they’re out on patrols and that.” Not thinking that the silly bugger would take his boot off. That’s what he did. Your foot goes black. The circulation stops.

I’d seen hundreds of Korean kids with clubfeet and that from frostbite. Self inflicted, I didn’t know him, but I heard of one bloke in the company, another company in the battalion. He shot himself through the foot. The stupid bugger took his boot off first before he shot himself through the foot and put his boot back on. I reckon he must have been drunk.

He didn’t want to bugger his boots up. That’s what his mate told me. He said, “He was fond of those boots.”

We used to call them ‘screws.’

The two blokes who jumped off the boat? No. They all wondered why they committed suicide. They must have been a bit disturbed.

Halfway across the Sea of Japan. Halfway between Korea and Japan.

A Chinese boat. Esang. There was the Esang and the Wosang, two Chinese boats.

They used to charter them to take troops backwards and forwards. I reckon it was funny, a Chinese boat taking us across when we were fighting the Chinese. You were waiting for the boat to blow up.

No, it was quiet. I don’t know what happened about the inquiry or nothing. As soon as the boat docked, we just all got off and got going. We were on leave. We had a week’s leave and that was it. Bugger the screws. If they want to jump off the back of the boat,

they can jump off it. That’s it. I don’t know what happened with them. Anyhow, that was up the north of Japan. We were going to go from there down on the train, which travelled down along the edge of the inland sea to Tokyo. We were going to Tokyo. But we wanted to go up north and have a look, and travel down on the train through all the big cities. The trains were beautiful. All the upholstery was like purple velvet,

and there was a boy to each carriage if you wanted anything. And in the buffet car, there were drinks on. And there wasn’t a ripple on the drinks, the train was that smooth, and fast. We met some Yanks on there, some Yank officers, and they gave us a little bottle of bourbon each. They said, “Go on, have a taste.” So I chucked it back like that. My eyes came out like they were on two springs. Talk about strong. I’d never tasted bourbon before. He said, “Did you like that, did you guy?”

I was still trying to get my breath back. I said, “That’s why blokes are nuts, drinking this stuff. You’ve rotted your brains.” A little bottle that big. He said, “I can get high on that.” I said, “Get high all right. You’ll kill yourself.” Bourbon.

We went out there and we were just taking photos of the jets. Because they used to come over us when we were in the front line.

They used to strafe the Chinese trenches. They had a knob on the end of their straight wings. They used to come over. We’d call them over and give them a target, we’d call them over, they’d circle around and they’d go right up into the sun. And you’d watch the sun and you could see the silver plane dropping like that. You could see all the fifty calibre machine guns casings pouring out under their wings.

They’d be shooting up the trenches. And when they got a bit further, you could hear the noise come across the valley then. Then you’d see rockets go, and no noise. Then you’d hear the rockets hit and they would be pulling up and you’d see a couple of little bombs would come out. And they’d be just about back to Japan by then. All the noise would come across just when they were practically pulled out and gone. They were that quick.

If a jet comes down and strafes you, you’re just hit with everything and you don’t know where it’s coming from, until they go past you, then you would hear the scream of the jets, I guess. But we never got strafed, thank Christ. But we went to have a look, see if we could find any of the jet jockeys [pilots]. I got in one of the Shooting Stars, and they’re fragile. You touch the wings and they rock. They’re small and light.

They don’t look as dangerous as they do in the air. I got up and I sat in the front seat. “Get in George, I’ll take your photo.” “Righto.” So I’m sitting in there like this, taking my photo, and a Yank captain came out with his crash helmet. He said, “Don’t touch any God damn thing in there, guy. That’s all loaded for patrol.” I said, “Righto.” I was just going to press the button on the stick, and the fifty calibre cannon in the nose would have blown all my mates off the strip.

I said, “Are you going on patrol now?” I said, “I wouldn’t mind going with you.” He said there was a helmet in the front seat. He said, “Whats his name had left his helmet in there, there was a lieutenant’s name on it.” He said, “Put that on if you want to go for a fun. I’ll take you for a run.” I said, “Righto, I’ll be in that.” All the other blokes were screaming out “Bullshit artist.”

They didn’t think I would go with him. Anyhow, he pulled the canopy down, he was in the back seat and I was in the front. He said, “Just sit back and relax.” He said, “I’ll talk to you as we’re going along and tell you what’s going on.” He said, “We’re taking off now, you can feel it going back in the seat.”

I’ve had Ford V8 cars, you put your foot down and you can feel you go back in the seat. In this thing, I thought I was going to spread all over the back of the seat, and my face felt funny. I looked down to look at the airstrip and we were halfway out over the Sea of Japan. The bloody thing, accelerating. The airstrip was gone. We were up and away. The next thing, the wing’s like that, and he said, “You’ll feel a few Gs [G-force] here, Aussie.”

I could feel my stomach going down, then we pulled out. He said, “There’s nobody there, there’s nobody home. We’ll go back.” And we went back. I think we were away eleven minutes. When we landed there, all the blokes came up around the plane. He said, “Just push it back in the parking area, you guys.” They pushed it back in the parking area and we got out, and he said, “How did you like that?” I said, “Terrific.” And they were all saying “Look at him, he’s agreeing.” It happened that quick,

it was a hell of a thrill, hell of an experience. It was over too quick. I would have rather gone back for a second go around. It was terrific. I used to like flying. I had a private pilot’s license on Cesnas down at the Illawarra Flying School in Sydney, when I was living down there. The jets were fast, the jet fighters. And they weren’t really fast in those days. I think about six hundred mile an hour was their top speed.

But when they turn them, they turn like that, they were that quick. That was good, it was a good experience. Then we went down on the train to Tokyo. Every time we went somewhere the blokes would get funny and say, “He’s a jet pilot, this bloke.” They’ll send you up. You’ve got to be careful what you do. You can’t make out you’re big-time.

Yeah good. Get away from the stink of the joint. Get in there, and the girls would give you a bath there, in the hotel. The bath’s got a wooden top on it, they dip water out of the bath and they put it over you, and then they soap you all over, then they wash you down, then you can get in the bath when you’re clean, and you can have a soak. And then you can get out, you can dry yourself with a towel, or they will dry whatever you like.

If you’re in there too long, the blokes come along pushing the door open, and grab your arm and pulling you out, buggerising around like. Then out for a bit of fun, into the lounge and get stuck into rice wine, the saki. That’s deadly if you drink it cold. You don’t get drunk for about an hour, and then all of a sudden it hits you and you get rotten. That’s why they heat it up. They drink it hot, then you can get drunk while you drink it. It doesn’t leave you with a big hangover. The blokes used to dance with the girls in the lounge, didn’t go out anywhere.

They just wanted to relax, dance with the girls, have a few beers, go to bed and have a bloody good sleep in a clean bed, away from rats and everything.

Yeah, and the girls would look after you all right. If you wanted something to eat, they would go down and get something. They’d cook you whatever you wanted.

I forget now. I think I was three parts full of beer. Don’t remember much. I had a good sleep.

Yeah, I had a couple of girlfriends there. I’d dance with them in the lounge, like the other blokes. They’d finish dancing and they would sit down and go on with their knitting or whatever they were doing. Totally different to a girl that you would meet in a hotel here. They were like little old women. They were quiet and gentle and well-mannered.

None of them smoke or drank or anything. They looked after you. A lot of our fellows got married to Jap girls and brought them home. One of our blokes, he won a military medal in Korea, he used to sneak out in the dark and come back with, he used to cut the left ear off many of the enemy. He used to take a strangling wire with him, and strangle them.

Just slip into the trenches and strangle them. He was a Thursday Islander, a darkie.(BREAK) This bloke could have got himself shot, coming back across the valley then. All the blokes reckoned it wasn’t Chinamen’s ears.

That he had been down and killed a couple of the Yanks. Kept it pretty quiet, didn’t want it getting in the newspapers.

I don’t know if he used to bite it off or cut it off, but he used to bring back one or two ears. He might have got them off dead bodies for all I know. He was a mystery man, and he spoke very quietly. “How are you, George?”

Thursday Islanders are all quietly spoken like that. Bloody deadly, though.

Yeah, he probably wanted to go and get even for some of his mates that were killed. It might have been something coming from his family’s natives or something. They might have been whats-it-names for all I know. What do you call them? About the kid that was cannibal kid.

You know, he was eight before he was seven. Charlie Meanie, that guy’s name was.

Yeah, he married his little Japanese girl and brought her out. The last time I saw him was up at Queensland Repat Hospital, years ago. He was an orderly up there. I was lying on the bed, he came up.

I could feel somebody near me. “Hello, George. How you going?” I looked up at him, and I grabbed my ears. He said, “Oh. You’re trying to be funny.” He was a character Charlie. Softly spoken. His wife had a deformed arm, and I never ever knew. I’d been to his place half a dozen times. He said, “You never noticed her left arm? Her deformed arm?” I said, “No.”

He said, “Usually, she’ll hold it round towards her back a little bit. Or she’ll have something over it or something.” He said, “They’re master at disguising any deformities they’ve got.” And I never ever knew. And I knew her for about ten years, I suppose. They had two little girls. He gave one of his little girls, she was in the marching girls, and he gave her his military medal to put around her neck. He said, “That’s hers. She wears that when she marches.”

It was in a fight out on a patrol, a few of the blokes got killed. The sergeant and the corporal got knocked down, and he took charge of the patrol and he got the other blokes back in. They went behind the Chinese lines looking for trucks and stuff. I used to go behind the lines occasionally. They used to call them reccie patrols, reconnaissance patrols, to find out what the, you could hear trucks and vehicles over behind the Chinese lines.

They’d send somebody over to see what was going on. Perhaps trucks bringing troops up, a build up of troops. You’d just go back up there and keep quiet and don’t do anything, find out what’s going on and come back in. But they got out there and they got sprung and got into a fight, but he got them out of it and got them back. He was pretty good of a night-time, you couldn’t see him. He was black. Charlie Meanie. He had the softest voice I’d ever heard. But he was powerfully built.

A strong fellow. And his Japanese wife looked like his daughter, she was so tiny. But she used to make him do what he was told. She said, “Australia different, George. Different Japan.”

Yeah. My Dad told me about Ghurkhas in the ’14–18 war, when Dad was there.

He’d tell us about them, he said they were that quick. The Ghurkhas used to go out of a night-time and they would take an empty sandbag with them and when they’d come back they might have a dozen ears they’d tip out on the table, in front of the officer. The Ghurkhas were dead set. Like the eldest son of every Ghurkha family goes into the British Ghurkha Regiment. Tradition. And they take the big family cookery with them, these curved knives.

That’s what they used. He said they were that quick. He said this Ghurkha was sneaking around the German trenches one night, and the German jumped at him with a rifle and bayonet, and the Ghurkha whipped out his cookery and went swish like that. And the German said, “Ha! You missed.” And the Ghurkha said, “Yeah? You shake your bloody head and see.” That was an old joke that went around.

No, never heard of it.

I only heard it through the grapevine, too. I went and asked Charlie about it, he said, “Not me.” With a bit of a grin. I think he had two personalities. I think he was deadly on one side, and easy going and quiet on the other side. Some people are like that. Some people can kill and it doesn’t mean a bloody thing to them.

There’s different types of killing. There is killing to save your own life and other peoples’ lives. They call it justifiable homicide. And there are other blokes who get a kick out of killing someone, watching somebody die. Like a sadist, lunatics. I can’t understand it. I was brought up different, thank God. You wouldn’t want to spend half your life in gaol. I can’t understand blokes who get into trouble all the time. They spend three quarters of their lives in gaols, some blokes.

And the fights that go on in gaol, and the things that go on in there, I can’t understand them going back in there.

Well, if you’re using a Bren gun or a sub-machine gun, and you’re out on a night patrol in the dark, and somebody opens up at you with a sub-machine gun,

or a rifle or throws grenades, and you can see the flashes that come from it. It’s easy to shoot back at muzzle flashes. You’re not looking at a bloke’s face or a body or anything, you just know that there is someone there shooting at you and you’ve got to knock it down or they will get you. It’s just as simple as that. There are other tactics, too. You’ve got to know how to move around, You’ve got to be quick, and make sure your gun is working properly. There are a lot of things you’ve got to take into consideration.

You’ve got to know that the blokes that are with you will back you up. Yeah, it’s a team effort. One bloke is no better than the other.

Yeah, they used to send the dogs up with a dog handler if somebody wanted a patrol dog to go out on the night patrol, just towards the end of the war in Korea.

They used the casualty finding dogs extensively to find the wounded blokes, and they used mine detection dogs to find mines that weren’t ours. The patrol dogs, they used those with success. Instead of having a forward scout out in front of you, they’d have the dog handler with the dog in front of a patrol. And the dog handler could pick up an ambush, they could smell them three or four hundred yards away. They’d stop,

then they’d go out, they had them on a long rope. The dogs were trained to run in and get a bit of meat from the ambush. The only thing was you had to hang onto the rope, because if they run away you lost them. There were a few loose dogs running around the valley over there. Came in through other battalions. Might have been over with the Chinamen all night. But you pull them back, you sit down them down, and you feel where they’re looking,

their heads in the dark, and they can get an idea of how excited the dog is. Once the dog’s been out on patrol and he’s smelt an ambush and they’re pulled back, they bring a mortar, a DF, defensive fire down on it, blow it out of the way. And then they go down after that is quietened down, they let the dog smell the Chinese bodies. The dogs back away from it. They don’t like going near anyone that’s dead. The next time that dog goes out, he will pick up an ambush another two hundred yards further away,

because he knows what he’s out there for, he knows what the smell is. The more experience they get, the better they get at it, and their natural instincts develop. It’s the same with tracking dogs in Malaya.

The casualty finding dogs? They put a little coat on them, a white coat with a Red Cross on it, so they can be seen by the enemy or anyone. They’re trained to find a wounded person,

they get rewarded. From the wounded person they give them a little bit of meat, and they come back to the handler and he gets them a little bit of meat. If they want any more off the wounded bloke, they don’t get any more when they’re training them. Just one little tiny bit. And he will say, “Go.” He’s trained to do that, they teach him what “Go” means. His handler might be five yards away, and the handler will say, “Come” and he will come and he will get a bigger bit of meat. And gradually they opened the distance up

until the dog knows what he’s doing. He gets a little bit of meat off the casualty, when he finds them, and when he gets back to his master, he clips a lead onto him, onto his breast harness and he takes him down the wounded bloke, but he gets his bit of meat when he goes back to his master. Then he takes him down on the off chance the wounded bloke might have a bit more meat. But once they learn how to do it, you don’t have to give them a bit of meat at all. The dog knows what’s going on. They’re intelligent enough to sort out what’s going on

when they smell the blood on a bloke. But they saved dozens of wounded blokes. Yeah, they used them with their own battalions, the British. And it makes the blokes feel better when they’re in the front line, if they know there’s casualty finding dogs that will come down and find them. They’re little mongrels at the best, they live closer to the ground.

The big purebred dogs, they’ve got a better scent. If you want a big dog out on patrols of a night-time, and you can train a German Shepherd to attack someone. They develop a guard instinct towards you. If anyone comes at you with their hand raised or something, they will fly at them. Like any dog will protect its owner once they establish their links. But ‘Killer’ got knocked out on a patrol one night.

The first time this officer had had a dog and handler out with him. And the handler said, “The dog’s alerting.” And the officer said, “The Chinese couldn’t be this close.” He went on a bit further, about another ten or twenty yards, and walked straight into an ambush. The handler got slugs across his ribs and the dog was killed. They took the dog’s body back in the jeep and they buried him back at the dog school that we did.

They had a photo in the paper. I seen where they buried him. They made a dog in stone and painted it white. They had a real military burial for him. Killer his name was. And he’d been out on dozens of patrols, they reckoned. Very successful patrols. This young infantry officer, he didn’t believe the dog and it cost the dog’s life and the handler got wounded. But they were sort of a bit sceptical when I first took

‘Prince’ the patrol dog from the School of Military Engineering up to Camp Barrett, the officer cadet school up there, they were a bit sceptical. But when I went out with them one night there, I got onto the bloke who was down in front of the hills, there was a listening post out there, and Prince alerted to him, and I said to the bloke in charge of the patrol, “Send two blokes up there, tell them to take their time and go quietly. But as soon as they get near the bloke that is up there in a hole somewhere,

just lay quiet until he moves, or coughs, you know exactly where he is then. Jumped straight on him. I said, “Give him the sandbag to put over his head,” so they can put it over his head and put his hand over his mouth, because if he yells out, if there’s anyone up in the hills. I thought there would probably be other blokes up in the hills, because they had organised a night patrol and all that. I didn’t reckon they’d just have one bloke out there, and I was right, because this bloke got his mouth open and screamed. Instead of singing out

“Stand to” he sang out what they sang out in the parade ground, he sang out “Stand fast.” Officers say that, too, if you’re walked along and your hat’s on crooked, they say, “Stand fast that man.” And they come over and say you’re on a charge and that. This bloke yelled out “Stand fast” because they only get about six months infantry training. They do about three and a half years in officer cadet school, like courtroom procedure and all this stuff, that’s why you’ve got to train them when they come to the battalion. Anyway, all the flares went up, parachute flares

fairy lights and about fifty blokes come charging down the bloody hill with fixed bayonets and rifles. Poor old Prince, he flew under the log that was next to us, and I flew under with him, and just laid there with him to see what they’d do. Because I was frightened that Prince would have a bit of one of them if they came near us. I said to him “Leave” and he went “rorrrwwrr”. He used to talk like. I said, “Leave” and just patted him and laid there with him, and he was all right. He was quiet.

They run up into the other blokes, the patrol, then they run down to get them and the other blokes chased them into the bush. It was a bloody shamozzle. I said to the bloke, I said, “If that bloke gets a warning, and there’s someone on that hill, you’re going to be in trouble. If you were in action, you would get killed.” Just send one bloke up or go yourself, but don’t let that bloke make a noise.” But they went up there and one bloke barrelled him with the butt of a bloody Owen gun and he screamed out.

Yeah, that was a training exercise up at officer cadet school. And the truck came out and took them all back, and I’m standing there and the staff car came out and they said, “Where’s the dog handler?” I said, “He’s bloody well waiting over here.” They said, “Righto. Come here and get in the car.” And it was one of the officers from the cadet school. He said, “Are you and the dog all right, corporal?”

I said, “Yeah.” He said, “How did things go?” I said, “It was the biggest bloody shamozzle I’ve ever seen in my life. What do you teach these blokes up here?” He said, “It’s a bit different to an infantry battalion, is it corporal?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Ahh, we’ll straighten everything out tomorrow.” The bloke who was in charge of the patrol, he got into strife. And the blokes who went up to have a go at the lookout bloke, they got into strife, and everyone wanted to come and pat Prince, the dog. I said, “What about me?” They said, “You knew what you were doing.”

They believed in the dogs, then. Susan Barry came down to school, from the Women’s Weekly and got photos and done stories on them. Other officers came in there and watched the mine detection dogs. They said, “They can smell the mines, you put them there.” I said, “Well, we’ll go a bit further, out of the mine field.” I put Tiger a bit further out, and he sat, and (UNCLEAR) I said to two of my blokes, “Dig down and keep digging.”

They dug another foot down in the sand and there was an old broken plat down there. It had probably been there for twenty years. Another time, we took up the Military Cadet Officers Training School. They breached a…they put two white tapes across like you do when you are going to breach a mine field, go through, and we went through, they had mines in there, and when we got to the edge, they said, “Go a bit further and see if he can find anything else.” I thought these cunning buggers have something else.

When we got back from destroying all the fortifications in front line in Korea, we went back to the Peace Camp, back near the Kansas Line, and they asked me if I wanted to go and do War Dogs School, because they were sending a bloke from each of the three battalions. They said the Australian Army was

going to start training the dogs to use them. I went over to the school, there was another fellow there, from the 3rd Battalion, Lance and another guy from the 1st Battalion, Bluey Mosh. A redheaded bloke and he was a funny bugger.

He used to get into a lot of fights. Yeah, we went over to the War Dogs School there. Sergeant Ken Bailey was in charge of it, the War Dogs there. They had the big kennels there. He trained all the London police dogs. He was a sergeant. There was another sergeant there, he was a Welshman, and of course his name was Taffy.

He was on the veterinary side of it, he was the vet. So we did the school with him, the veterinary side of it and training the dogs out in the exercise yards, and out in the scrub, out in the hills, learning how to use the patrol dogs. It was quite easy to learn. I’d had dogs at home on the property, sheep dogs and cattle dogs. Then I went back to the battalion.

I used to take the dog Eros over to the battalion in the Peace Camp. I took him back again and they said, “You’ve got your marching orders, the school’s finished.” I went back to the battalion and they said, “You’re going home?” I said, “What for?” They said, “Well, you’re getting transferred to the School of Military Engineering, back in Liverpool, in Sydney. They’re going to build war dog kennels there, you will probably have to go and get dogs. When the battalion comes home,

they will probably send blokes down to train with them.” And that’s what happened. I reported to the School of Military Engineering at Casula, just out of Liverpool. They said, “Well, we’ve got a chap who will be in charge of it, a warrant officer. He doesn’t know anything about war dogs, but he’s had his cocker spaniels in the show.” I said, “Well, war dogs are different to cocker spaniels in shows. A war dog is not a show dog,

it’s a working dog.” Before I left Korea, Ken Bailey gave me the British Army Training Pamphlet on war dogs and they had a big map showing how to build the dog kennels and everything. “Don’t give that to anyone,” he said. “While you’ve got that, you will be in charge of the dogs.” He said, “And you will be the best one for it, too, because you did the school with flying colours.” This warrant officer, I forget his name, he was a good bloke, a nice bloke, he was an engineer.

And he was keen on dogs. He said, “I don’t know anything, corporal.” He said, “I know about dogs. I don’t know anything about war dogs.” He said, “I’ll just ride along with you and pick up what I can from you.” I said, “Fair enough. Good.” I said, “As long as you don’t chip in when I’m giving lectures on veterinary stuff, or when we’re training the dogs.” I said, “Don’t come in on me, because I’m doing it the British Army way.” He said, “That’s all right.” He said, “I’ve got to learn all about it anyway.”

He was good to work with. And anything I wanted he got for us. He got us a big hut down there, it had a blackboard in it where I could sketch different things, all the sorts of worms that dogs get and different things. I gave him the pamphlet to take a photocopy of the plan for the war dog kennels, how to build them. I said, “I want it back straight away.”

He said, “Don’t you trust me with it?” I said, “I don’t trust anyone with that war dog training pamphlet. I was told not to let it out of my hands.” He said, “That’s okay.” He went and Photostatted a copy, he came back and said, “Are you happy now?” I said, “Yeah, I’m happy now.” I put it back in my pocket. He said, “I wouldn’t mind reading that.” I said, “No, you don’t get it.” I said, “I will teach you as we go along.” I said, “There will be stuff in there that you won’t agree with, and you will want to argue with me, and then we won’t get on.”

He said, “Righto. It looks like I’m going to have trouble with you.” I said, “No, I’m going to have trouble with you. I know what I’m doing, you don’t. You know the cocker spaniels you put in the show,” I said, “leave it at that.” I said, “Just keep quiet and listen, and I will teach you everything that I’ve been taught. And then we’ll go a long way.” He said, “That’s fair enough.” And that’s what he did. He was a pretty good bloke. He said, “Where are you going to get the dogs from?” I said, “I’ll go down to Melbourne. I know Melbourne because

I come from there.” I said, “The best place to get these dogs. We want pedigree dogs. So the best place to get them cheap is to go to the show societies and get the addresses of people that have got dogs that have bitten judges or bitten someone and they’ve been banned from being put in shows, you see? You’ll get it cheaper if the owner doesn’t want it. They’ve probably got other dogs that don’t bite. And we want a dog with a bit of a kick in it.” It didn’t take me long to round them up. I got about eight dogs,

down there, and we got them all for about twenty quid each. Most of them were a bit of the angry side. Once they’d bitten someone and got away with it. But they were all well bred. So we got them and crated them up to Sydney. The kennels were finished by then. I stayed at my brother’s place in Melbourne for about two weeks, and the engineers built the kennels in two weeks. Terrific kennels.

Got up there and put the dogs in there. The dogs have a good sniff around and a pee on everything, and settled in. I sent a sig [signal] up. The battalion had come back to Enoggera by then, from Korea, so I sent a Sig up there. The sergeant major up there, he told me to send him a Sig once I got back to Australia and got settled and knew what I was doing. So I sent a Sig to him and he sent a message back saying,

“You want soldiers to be trained for dog handlers. Any preferences?” So I just put down the names of the blokes I had in my platoon in Korea, because I knew them. And they said to me, “Put us in when you get down and start training the dogs. It’ll be a bit of a bludge.” I said, “Righto.” And they all liked dogs anyway. I haven’t met an Australian yet that didn’t like a dog. They arrived down there, and the dogs, we started taking them out for exercise every morning.

You’ve got to get a dog out for exercise first thing, every morning, so they can use their bowels and their bladder, then they won’t foul up their kennels. And they will hold it until you take them out, the poor buggers. Because they get regular doing it around about six o’ clock every morning, or as soon as it gets light a lot of them. Sometimes a bloke would go out and get a skinful of beer and get home and sleep in in the morning, and his dog would be there, walking up and down. I used to take them out for exercise,

so they could use their bowels and that, and have a pee. Then I’d get on the bloke. There was only one bloke I sacked off the course. He was a smart arse, so I got rid of him. I got one of the engineers who wanted to get in on the dogs, a local bloke. So I went and saw the colonel there and said, “Your sapper [bomb disposal engineer] wants to come in and be a dog handler.” I said, “I’ve sacked the other bloke. Sent him back to the battalion.”

He said, “Yeah, all right. If you think he will be all right.” John, he was a terrific young bloke, he got in there and the dog took to him straight away. A dog knows people. Dogs can read you straightaway. Because animals use body language, especially dogs. So we trained his dog for a guard dog. He used to put the baiting suit on one of the other engineers, the padded suit,

and he used to walk out on the football ground, and this bloke used to sneak out from behind the tree, and walk real sneaky like, and John would say, “Watch him,” and the dog would be like that, and he’d say, “Watch him,” to get him stirred up. Then the bloke would run and he’d say, “Look out.” He’d let the dog go and the dog would bring him down. You trained them to hit them in the back of the legs and bring them down on the ground, where they can handle them. As soon as barracks got the dogs all trained there.

We didn’t need guard dogs, so we converted him back to a patrol dog. And tracker dogs. We trained them to be patrol dogs, loose out in front of you and come back when they smelled something. And we put a harness on them and trained them to track people, trained them to get a piece of meat from the person when they tracked them, they’d be hiding somewhere up in the scrub.

You’ve got to train a tracker and keep him on tracking because a patrol works on air scent, a tracker dog will work on a track picture. It’s not the smell of the person as much as broken sticks, squashed ants and beetles and skin flakes floating off the person’s skin onto bushes. A track picture is about six to eight feet wide, and it’s got everything in it. It only gets fainter and fainter as all those things that are

squashed and broken, they dry up. Skin flakes always stay there, but they evaporate and go dry and the smell goes out of them. That’s a track picture. A patrol dog is taught to find someone who is hiding in an ambush up in front, and he’s taught to air scent. You don’t put a harness on him, you just have him loose and you take him up with a long rope

until he points to where someone is up in the scrub, they might be two or three hundred yards away. And you say, “Good boy,” and you pat him and let him run in and they feed him and they make a fuss of him. Then gradually you get him back to working loose, and not getting any meat off the blokes in the ambush. Then they tell him to go away, and scold him. Then you take him out after about ten days, as soon as he smells them

he’ll go up, but then he’ll change his mind and come back and come around. And you say, “Heel, sit” and you get behind him and say, “Where are they, boy?” He knows what he is supposed to do. He knows he’s not wanted up there, and dogs know. If you scold a dog and tell it to go away, you hurt its feelings. And you get an idea of how excited he is, you look between his ears and you’re looking down a dead line where they are. You just give him a bit of meat or whatever you’ve got in your pocket.

You make a fuss of them and give them a good rub up, it’s better than a bit of meat, they like it. Then you get the ambush to come out, and they come down and they give him a bit of meat there. That breaks him out of running into an ambush to get rewarded. You use a bit of psychology and you change the training, once a dog starts using its brains and all its different senses. So you train the patrol dog to work loose in front of you, to hand signals, because it’s got to be quiet in the jungle.

The tracker dog, you put a breast harness on it, and you give him something to smell or you take him out where there’s been a fight and that, and you cast him around and he’ll pick up a scent, and you let him go along slow and he’ll have a sniff around and finally he will go off away from the area where everyone’s been, and he will follow a track away from it. Or he might get confused. He mightn’t be able to find the track going away somewhere. So you cast him around in a lot of different places, because some of the terrorists, if they’d been in a fight, they would go about ten yards

then they would go right around the circle and right around behind you, then go in a straight line and that’s why we could never find out where they went. But we started casting the dogs and the dogs would start going out wide, and I said, “Let’s follow him.” And we followed him around and then they went in a beeline straight, and we got onto a terrorist camp one day, where they’d been. They weren’t there, but they had been there, where they’d had a feed. So we got onto their tactics in Malaya. That’s what they used to do in Malaya. They’d come into a village,

get medical supplies and food supplies, they came from Australia, Weetbix and they’d have a lot of tobacco and all that stuff, and they’d come in one side of the village. Sura Templar [?] had the barbed wire fences, he electrified them, so they dug tunnels underneath them and got in the village and they didn’t come out that way, they came out the other side of the village. The locals dug tunnels for them, because they were Chinese villagers.

They’d come out the other side. And if we had an ambush there, they could smell you and they’d go to one side of you and go through there, and you’d get after them, fire at them, go after them with the dog, and the dog would get confused. That’s why we were losing them. We didn’t know they were going right around the other end of the village, they go in a straight line and go right back where they came from in the first place. And this was in the night-time, in the dark. But we got onto their tactics, then we started getting hold of them, then.

They were smart. They’d been in the jungle fourteen years, some of those blokes, fighting the Japs.

No, dogs have been used in the army for years. Dogs were used right back in the old days, they used hounds and that. They used to use them to attack, send them in before the troops and the warriors and that. They were teased up until they were mad, and they would send them to jump into the other people’s trenches.

Yeah. The air force always had dogs. They used to guard the airstrips up in the islands in the Second World War. They were guard dogs. And the Japs used to get a silent whistle, that high pitched you could blow it and humans being couldn’t hear it, but the dogs could hear it. And they used to lure the dogs off the airstrip with that, and they’d give the dogs bits of meat. They used to wonder why the dogs used to leave their posts, when they’d put them on guard.

In the morning the dog wouldn’t be there, it would be up in the scrub eating meat, and the Japs would have been in and buggered around with some of the planes. Low key, but they’re coming. A silent whistle. Have you ever heard of a silent whistle? Yeah, they worked. If you’re going anywhere where there is dogs and you don’t want to get attacked, you put one in your pocket and when a dog comes towards you, you blow it real hard and it hurts their ears. A human being can’t hear it, it’s too high.

They’ve got a new gun out now, the Yanks. It’s like a baby screaming, but the decibels are that high it will knock a person down up to three hundred metres away and it can cause complete deafness, and a pain in the head, because it’s tuned up, the decibels are that high. They reckon it’s like a baby screaming. I cut it out of the paper the other Sunday.

I knew it was a good job, and the dogs were good companions. Somebody to look after. It was interesting working with the dogs, to see how they could use their instincts. And how the dogs could outwit other human beings. The dogs are terrific to work with, they never argue.

If you get a headache, they will come and lean against your leg. A dog can read you. You’ve got unconditional love from a dog. I’ve seen blokes kick a dog, and it will still come back and lick the bloke’s hand. I’ve never seen a bloke’s wife do that he’d get a saucepan over his head probably.

The dogs were very faithful, we had them in the bush. I worked with a guy in the bush, and he had a dog. If he ever lost his pipe along the track, “Where’s my pipe?” When he couldn’t find his pipe, his dog would go and find his pipe and bring it back and drop it in front of him. And bird dogs, too, retrieving birds. I used to go down to the gun dog trails and watch them. There would be a bloke in the bushes on the other side of the river. The dogs were there with their retrievers, they’d have a shotgun with blanks in it, and they said to the dog “Watch.”

And the dog would watch, like that, and he’d have one foot up, ready to go. They’d say, “Stay.” And the bloke in the bushes would have a bag of dead pigeons, and he would throw one that way, one in the middle and one down that way, and with the dog still under control they would fire three shots like that, and they’d say, “Go, one.” And he’d go straight in the water like a rocket, get that pigeon and come back, drop it at his feet. And they’d bring the three of them back and drop them there. I went and took one of the war dogs down there, a black Labrador. He’d been retriever, a bird dog.

I found out why the woman sold him to me. The bloke threw the three pigeons out, he went out and he grabbed the three of them all in one go, brought them back, dropped them in the mud, cocked his leg on the tree and went over and started to have a go at the bloke in the bushes with the bag of pigeons. That’s how clever he was, that’s why she sold him. She told me, she said, “Don’t try him out retrieving birds. He’s too smart.” He went right through the whole thing and he came back, he had the bag of pigeons.

Three in the mud, had a pee on the tree and went over and grabbed the bag of pigeons from the bloke in the bushes and came back. The bloke said, “Hey, he’s got all my bloody pigeons!” I said, “I know he has. That’s why they sold him to me.” But he was good for tracking in the villages. The German Shepherd has got a good nose and plenty of stamina. The Labrador has got a better nose, you can use him a village where there is thousands of tracks. The terrorists used get on a bus, go into a village and go in and hide in the coffee shop, behind the counter.

If you put a German Shepherd in there, he couldn’t find the tracks amongst all the others. But the Labrador could, from the bus stop. He would track him into the coffee shop. You’d go to the coffee shop, look in the door and if the coffee shop owner wasn’t there, you would know there would be a terrorist in there. If the dog was pointing at the counter, you used to put a burst of slugs along the counter, and nine times out of ten the terrorist would rear up from behind the counter. I got three terrorists like that.

Blokes we tracked all day through the jungle, through the rubber, down to the road, got on a bus and went into the village. They would put their weapons in the bushes. They dressed up as rubber tappers and anything. You couldn’t look at them and say they’re a terrorist, because they could be a rubber tapper. The hardcore terrorists had khaki uniforms and red stars on their caps and they were deep in the jungle. They used to come into contact with what they called ‘The Town Branch.’

They never carried weapons because it was a hanging offence if you carried a gun in Malaya, when the Emergency was on. They used to collect money out of the rubber cups. The locals were scared into putting it in. They used to give that to the terrorists to take it back by their couriers, and then they would send it back up to their headquarters, up near the border of Thailand. They used to go through limestone caves underground. They didn’t have to travel on top. You can go the full length of Malaya through limestone caves. That’s why they couldn’t catch Chin Peng.

Well, we trained the dogs and gave them battle training and everything, got them going. Only one dog failed, and we gave him to one of the officer’s who said he would take him. He was gun shy. We trained all the others with live ammo and TNT down the dust bowl, shooting over their heads in the scrub. Then they sent a sig down that the battalion was going to Malaya

and they wanted a dog section sent up there. So we went up, and we got to Onogra, and I walked in the orderly room and the sergeant there said, “Where did that bloody dog come from?” I said, “He’s mine, he’s a war dog.” He said, “Get the bloody thing out of here. Dog’s are not allowed in the orderly room.” He said, “Who are you anyhow?” I said, “I’m Corporal Gray. I’ve got a War Dog Section here to meet up with a battalion and we’re going to Malaya with them.” He said, “Well, you want to get a bloody move on, they’re getting on the ship now.” I said, “Righto.”

He said, “I’ll get a truck for you.” He got a truck and got us down to the wharf. And there was one of the blokes there. We had a mascot dog that used to come in with us when we were out training the dog. A little cocker spaniel. We were going up the gangplank, one of the dog handlers had a kit bag on his back and his dog. I said, “That bloody kit bag is moving on your back.” He said, “Yeah, shut up.” He had a wild dog in the kit bag, taking him on the boat there.

I wondered why he asked me to tattoo a number on his ear when we were down there. I said, “He’s not a war dog, I can’t tattoo a number on his ear.” He said, “Just put any bloody number on his ear, will you?” This bloke had this all worked out before he went, so he could take him to Malaya. He was his pet dog. Found him in the bush, he followed us in. They called him ‘Wild Dog.’ Little cocker spaniel. He was a good little dog. We got on the boat, and they had big kennels on the boat and we put the dogs in there.

When we went up around the coast of New Guinea, it was oppressively hot. It was a hundred and fifteen degrees down in the cabins. It was a ship that brought people out, like a passenger liner. All the dogs were down with heat fatigue, so I went in the ship’s barber and got his electrical clippers and gave them all a haircut.

All the German Shepherds looked like greyhounds, with their long skinny tails. You could see their ribs. I gave Wild Dog a hair cut and I left the woolly stuff on his ears, I made him look as stupid as I could. A big tuft on the end of his tail. He said, “He don’t look like a war dog.” I said, “But you’ve got his number tattooed in his ear. Just tell them he had to have

a haircut because it was too hot. He said, “Ahh, trust you to bugger things up.” I said, “He’s right,” and I put his name on the War Dog list. When we got to Penang, the thing I noticed was all the black and yellow sea snakes floating on the water, as we were getting in towards there. You don’t want to go swimming up there. Anyway, when we pulled in there, the vet [veterinarian] came on board to inspect the dogs, check them all out, this Chinese vet.

He said, “You are Corporal Gray?” I said, “Yeah, I’m Corporal Gray. I’m in charge of the War Dogs.” I said, “Do you have to give them the once over and take blood tests and that?” “Yeah.” A bit of blood out of the vein on their back leg, see if they’ve got heartworm or anything like that. I said, “We don’t have heart worm in Australia.” And he said, “Yes, you do.” And that’s when we found out that the drovers’ dogs used to be galloping around, working, and they’d pull up coughing.

and they thought it was the kangaroo meat that they were feeding them. But they had heart worm. The micro phelaria was going around their blood. And it comes from the mosquitoes that live in the roots of the water lilies, bites them and it goes around. And another mosquito bites them and it fertilises them, and they grow to about eight inches long and they block up the valves in the heart and the dogs drop dead. They have convulsions and they drop dead. Heartworm, they got onto it back in Australia after that. We used to give them penicide tablets, it kills the worms.

Anyhow, he checked the Alsatians out, took a blood test out of each one’s leg. And the Wild Dog went up to him, wagging his tail. They crawl up to you, the cocker spaniels, docile. And he said, “What is this?” I said, “That’s another War Dog, you missed him.” He said, “This is not a bloody War Dog.” I said, “Yes, he is. He’s our champion sniffer dog for drugs and explosives and all that stuff.” He said, “Oh, we better fix him up,

hadn’t we War Dog?” And he patted Wild Dog and he licked his hand. He gave him a check, he took some blood out of his leg. The guy who owned him came up and he said, “What’s he buggering around with Wild Dog for?” I said, “Shut up, go away.” He said, “I will send the results of the tests to you. All the dogs look perfectly healthy to me, they can come into Penang.” I said, “Okay.”

We got to Windom Barracks then, and we stayed there for two weeks, to acclimatise. A Ghurkha regiment came in and taught us how the terrorists move through the scrub and that, how they patrol and walk through the scrub.

No, only what we were taught, going over on the boat.

What happened, you see, the Communist Party was trying to get into power in Malaya.

Once the war finished in Malaya and the Japs disappeared, there was a mob of locals that called themselves AJO, Anti-Japanese Organisation. They were mostly Chinese, and Chin Peng was their leader. And they used to ambush all the Japs. Most of them were tin mine and shop owners and all that. They were working for the British. And the British used to drop them arms and ammunition and grenades and weapons.

They would use them, but half of it they were putting into limestone caves and block it in there. And they had it planned to take over Malaya, the Communist Party. That’s why they hid all these arms and stuff in the caves. We wondered where they were getting the weapons from. When we got there, they had Thompson sub-machine guns and everything. We thought, “Well, they wouldn’t have that stuff from the Brits [British].” But it was American stuff that they had picked up.

Then we did a couple of schools on the terrorists, lectures in the battalion. They said, “What happened is, Tunku Abdul Rahman, the president, has banned the Communist Party in Malaya. The Malays are in charge. But he’s banned the Communist Party because most of them are Chinese and some are Indians.” And he said, “They’re frightened the Chinese Communists are going to take over the place, and that will make them closer to Australia and America.” Because the Communist Party was real big, then, trying to take over everything.”

He said ‘Some of them have gone underground already, and are starting to terrorise villagers, and throwing grenades into school buses and blowing the kids up.” And that put the diggers backs up. “So that’s why you’ve got the tracker dogs over here.” That’s all we knew about them. They were throwing grenades into school buses and coming into the villages and cutting peoples’ throats and taking their teenagers up into the mountains and training them to be terrorists. We had to track them down.

(UNCLEAR) Templer, he came over and took over the British Regiment that was there, and he was the guy that electrified all the barbed wire fences around all the Chinese villages then. We went down to the big British War Dogs School, down at Kota Tinggi, in Johore, and they had about two hundred dogs there. If any of our dogs got sick, we just had to go down there and leave it with them, and their vets would look after them, and they would give us another fully trained dog to take back with us. I was in charge of the War Dogs section.

We were based where there was an old palace, battalion headquarters was in it. Another mob was in the harem room. There were a lot of tin huts that we were in, they had the dogs, the wet canteen and a big dining hall. We were in the centre of Malaya then. We were about forty mile inland from Kuala Lumpur. We had one mob up at Kroh,

near the border of Thailand. Another mob out at Jin Tang. We had a company in each different state. And when they wanted a dog, they used to get onto us at headquarters and they’d get a helicopter to pick the dog handler and the dog up and take them in the helicopter. It was too far to go. We used to patrol locally, to pick up any terrorists. But if it was a fair way in, in another state, we used to get the helicopter in to pick them up and take them to the mob,

to whichever company of Aussies that wanted them. There’s that photo of Jacky Piggot, waiting for the helicopter to pick him up. That’s how we found out what the terrorists were doing. They were trying to terrorise people to take power of the place. But once you start terrorising the population, the people, they don’t want you. That’s when all the Malays that lived in kampongs, they were loyal to their maharajahs and sultans. They were all Muslims.

They were the ones that came and gave us information, to the security forces and to the battalion, where they’d seen terrorists, and who was harbouring terrorists and all that. And we could go out and track them and put ambushes down. We never got any of the terrorists in our ambushes, because the blokes, they could smell our blokes, they had Johnson’s Baby Powder around their crotch. They used to walk around us and we wondered why. I asked one of the surrendered terrorists that came in. I worked with Ian Hyde, a British police lieutenant down in Penang,

they sent me down with a dog to work with the commissioner of police down there. Ian had tea in his big house on the big lawns in Penang, and he said, “A local boy and a bad terrorist wanted some medical supplies, so we sprayed a bit or aniseed in the bottom of the bag, make it easier for the dog to track them. He said, “We put medical supplies in. That bloke is going to.” It was out the end of Penang Island, he said, “He will put the bag at a certain tree and when the terrorists pick it up, he will give us a bell.

We’re going to take you out to Minden Barracks and put you in a gaol cell there, with the dog, tonight. When it’s dark. So no-one knows you’re there with a dog.” If anyone seen you going in there with a dog, they’d know there was a dog on the island. And the spies with the terrorists would know. You could hear them cooing up in the hills. And I stayed out there for a day and a night. The next morning they came, about four o’ clock in the morning. Ian Hyde had his patrol outside in a truck, and it was still dark.

I got the shock of my bloody life. The patrols outside in the truck. He said, “You’ve got to get up the end of the island, before it gets light. Because we want to move in there under the cover of dark. We don’t want the locals to see that we’ve got you and the dog. They’ll send a message up the terrorists.” Anyway, I got in the back of truck with these blokes. They smelled different. They smelt like bloody terrorists, and they were bloody terrorists. They were terrorists that had come in and surrendered

in other states, and they’d made a fighting patrol out of them, and they were working with the British Police Field Force, under Ian Hyde, the British lieutenant. And I was in the middle of them. The hair on the back of my neck was going up. Nobody told me anything about it. Anyhow, Ian Hyde got in the truck then and he said, “What’s the matter, George? You worried, are you?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “No, these blokes are all right. They got sick of being in the scrub and they came out.” He said, “They take us out to the camp they come from.

We ambush the blokes that they’d been with. They all come from a different state. We moved them interstate and give them a place to live and a uniform. Usually they’ve got their wives and kids with them, and they haven’t seen them for years.” He said, “They work pretty good with us.” He said, “We’ve had one or two of them go back into the scrub, but that’s a few out of two or three hundred.” He said, “But they know the scrub.” I said, “Righto.” So we went out there, and we up and cast the dog around and he picked up the track, and we tracked him right up the island.

The dog stopped, pointing down into this bit of creek. I said to him, “There’s someone in there. The dog’s propped.” He said, “Okay, what do you want me to do?” I said, “Just stay here. I don’t want my bloody dog getting blasted.” It was just starting to get daylight and there was a bit of a creek off the track. He said, “He’s probably sleeping down there.” And he pushed this Chinese sergeant (UNCLEAR) and they all crept around,

and they put a cordon right around it. And Ian Hyde said to me, “Just get back there and get down on the ground. I’ll go and see what these blokes are doing.” Soon as I got back, he jumped straight down into where the dog was looking, and a bloke run out and I let the dog go. I said, “Get him!” And Prince brought him down, he knocked him down flat and stood over him, growling. Because we had trained him to do this. Ian Hyde came out and he said, “There’s only him and his missus.” He said, “He threw his gun away in the bushes.”

See, it was a hanging offence. Any civilian carrying a gun in Malaya at that particular time, when the Emergency was on, it was a hanging offence if they were caught with a gun. The only ones that could have a gun were the Aborigines that lived deep in the jungle. They were allowed to have a single barrel shotgun to shoot tigers, or to shoot meat, look after their tribes. He brought the woman out and she had a little kid with her, about twelve months old.

And quiet as a mouse. They must have had him trained to keep quiet. They might have had a gag on him. Anyhow, he came out. It was starting to get light, and the other blokes were closing the cordon like that. He gave a couple of whistles, and a whistle came back. It must have been his sergeant. He had been in the jungle fourteen years, fighting the Japs. He could read the scrub, he’d know if anyone were a mile away in the scrub. Animal instincts. We got him back in

and he went through, when they got back into Penang, they went up to the commissioner’s house. He told him on the phone that he was bringing this bloke and his missus and the kid in. They had the bag of medical supplies with them. They questioned him and he said he didn’t know any terrorists. And he wasn’t a terrorist. He said he was a rubber tapper, and Ian Hyde said, “Well, you haven’t got a rubber tapper’s apron on, you haven’t got a rubber tapper’s knife and you don’t even

smell like a rubber tapper.” He said, “You smell like a terrorist.” And they got him up the police station. They got the books out with all the blokes that they knew were known terrorists. People that lived in the villages and towns, they all had ID [identification] cards. And if you suspected anyone was a terrorist, you pointed a gun at them and said, “Show me your ID card.” And they knew what an ID card meant, don’t matter whether it was in Malayan or what. If they couldn’t produce an ID card,

you stuck the gun right in their bloody throat and you held it there until you got someone else there to take them away. The police would find out. They’d either be a terrorist, or they might have lost their ID card. They might be fair dinkum. But you didn’t take any risks with them. Anyhow, this guy, they identified him with witnesses that he belonged to the terrorist Town Branch, that collected money out of the rubber cups and give it to the terrorists, who give it to their couriers to take it up to Jin Tang. And their town branch, if they had a gun

they would throw it away in the bushes, so you couldn’t catch them with a gun on them. So if you found a weapon you’d say, “This is your gun. You threw it away.” “No, not my gun.” You couldn’t prove it. By the time you got it in, the fingerprints would be blurred over and all that sort of thing. By the time you got halfway in, they’d turn around and confess to what they’d done. The poor buggers would be that frightened, thinking they were going to get shot. This Arh Chi used to be breathing down their necks. This sergeant who had been in the scrub for fourteen years.

He used to sit right over the top of them and stare at them all the time. You could see all the nerves going in their necks. The poor buggers were that frightened they’d own up to what they were doing. If they were in the town branch, I think they’d get six months in gaol and then let out. If they were caught with a gun in their hands, it was a hanging offence. No options.

No, I wouldn’t go and watch anyone getting bloody hung, anyhow. I don’t believe in capital punishment. Not when there’s fighting going on and all that stuff.

Like any terrorist that went in to murder people in the villages, they could do what they liked with them. They could hang them and put them through a bloody meat mincer for all I cared, they were just bloody rubbish. But a bloke with his wife and his little kid. He was probably bluffed into doing it by the terrorist. He probably threatened to kill his wife and kid if he didn’t do it. That used to happen a lot.

Hot, sweating twenty four hours a day.

Except when you’ve got about six bottles of beer into you, then you used to cool down. It used to get cool of a night. It was cool in the jungle. It was red hot in the rubber estates, because the sun could get in there. Around the camps, the sun could get in. We had a cyclone or tornado go right through one camp, and it rip away half the huts. It picked them up and took them bloody miles away. Big trees crashed in, and about half a big hornets crashed in,

and there was bloody hornets all over the joint. I was more frightened of the hornets than the bloody terrorists. They sting hundreds of people to death in Malaya every year. They’re about that big, and they live in a big nest like a football thing, in the scrub. If you ever walk into them in the scrub, you can hear like a big electric dynamo. You fall flat on your face, because they will go for anything shiny. They will go straight for your eyes if you run,

anything that moves. They swarm. A lot of women run and they get stung to death. They teach you how to flop on your face. I said, “You don’t have to teach me how to flop on my face if there is bloody hornets around me, mate.” I said, “I can hit the decks quicker than anyone.”

All right. As long as they were with you. They trust you to look after them. They get fed at four o’ clock every afternoon. If you go out on patrols,

each soldier in the patrol carries a tin of dog food with them. And they don’t mind, as long as they can feed the dog. And the dogs get to know all the different soldiers. They will sleep with a different bloke each night when you bunk up. The blokes will call them over and cuddle them. I’d go “Traitor, ay?” And they’d get up and come over and sit in front of you and look at you. They know what’s going on. You go, “It’s all right. You can go back with him.” They go back over. Like kids. Yeah, very intelligent German Shepherds.

It hurt me a bit when I had to give Prince up. I gave him to another dog handler, because they wanted me to take a dog up to work looking after this committee member up on Penang Island, when I was working with the police commissioner. They said, “You want a dog, a pretty aggressive dog that can bring someone down.” I said, “Well, Prince can bring someone down, if I tell him, too.” They said, “You can take him up.” The next time I went down, the commissioner reckoned Prince was a bit too tame.

That was working with the police commissioner on Penang Island. We got to the end of that. They were from a Town Branch, that bloke, his wife and the kid.

That was a patrol deep in the jungle. The locals had come in and told us they had seen terrorists moving around the area, and going up onto this great big hill. Almost as big as Ulladulla, out in the middle of the Australia. Uluru.

About half as big as that, covered in scrub. Everything is covered in scrub in the jungles. Teak trees a hundred feet or so high, and the canopy, vines all grow between them and the sun never gets in there. That’s why it’s always cool in the jungle, and it rains for about an hour every afternoon. So all the leeches can travel through the jungle and get into your boots and everywhere. Flies can come and blow the lace holes and the maggots get down into your boots.

You wake up in the morning and you’ve got to pull your boots off, because they’re all fighting over the blood in your boots. You get the ticks out of you. You just a cigarette near their bum and they back out on their own. You don’t touch them. You try to pull them out and the head stays in, they will get infected. You delouse yourself like that every morning in the jungle. You put up with tigers and all sorts of stuff, in the jungle. A mate of mine, a tiger grabbed him by the hand one night and started dragging him in the jungle.

I said, “What are you doing?” “Something’s got me by the hand.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “Bugger if I know, it feels like a bloody dog.” I said, “It’s not a dog, he’s over here with me.” So I took a chance and put a torch on him. A half grown tiger had him by the hand and it was backing back, and he was going with it because it was hurting his hand. I fired one shot over its head. It dropped him and bounded clear back into the scrub. I said, “It was a half grown tiger.” He said, “His bloody old lady is probably waiting back in the bush for it to bring me out.”

I said, “You’re lucky. You rub some stuff on you.” You rub some mosquito repellent on you and they won’t come near you.

There were a lot of tigers in the bush. Most of them were mangey. They’re not that big, the Malay tigers. Not like the big Sumatra tigers that can break a boar’s neck with one hit. About that big. The black leopards are the worse. They scream in the middle of the night. They scream and you’d reckon someone’s murdering a woman.

It was like a woman screaming her lungs out. Those black leopards, they’d call them. You’d go down in the morning to get water, and there’s a King Cobra down near the water. It would rise up about that high, as thick as your arm and about six foot long. They will just stay there. They own that part of the track. You shouldn’t fire a shot, when you get near terrorists. They will pinpoint you, and they will go right around in a complete circle, in the opposite direction. They used their tactics.

We buggered them up. We’d get into a fight with them. We used to wear a coloured piece of ribbon around our jungle hats. It changed every day. And they started to put the coloured ribbons around their hats, trying to make as if they looked like us. We’d change the colour every day, and then at lunchtime we would change it again. And we were getting them in the afternoon, because they were seeing us in the morning and putting that colour on their hat.

But we changed it. In the afternoon, we put the day before’s on, at lunchtime. Then we’d pick, you could see the terrorists out in the bush.

Taken to identify you as Hundred. It was only the bloke Hundred who knew when it was supposed to be worn. The terrorists were trying to outfox them, we got them. We changed it every lunchtime. We had more colours than they did anyway.

Yeah, I was explaining that to you before. When they were having elections over there, and the Communist Party were trying to take over Malaya. They were backed up by China. America was frightened of China, it was real communist, and Russia was real communist. Everybody was frightened of communists. They were looking under everyone’s bed in Australia, and the Yanks were looking under their pillows.

Anyway, Chin Peng, he was head of the AJO, the Anti-Japanese Organisation. When the Japs went out of Malaya when the war finished, the communists took him over to Russia and indoctrinated him into socialism, told him he would be in charge of Malaya when he got back. He knew he could get one thousand or more blokes, a couple of thousand of the AJO blokes to act as terrorists. Tunku Abdul Rahman had banned the Communist Party,

so they went underground and started terrorising the people into leaving money out for them, for subscriptions into the Communist Party. They used to take some of their teenage sons up into the mountains and train them to be terrorists, with a uniform, a whistle and a lanyard. You do that with someone who is illiterate, they think they can beat the world.

I was tired.

But I was with the dogs. If I hadn’t have had the dogs, I would have tried to get out of going to Malaya, because I was pretty tired and knocked up and my nerves were a bit crook. I got on top of that, it was interesting. What I really liked was the veterinary side of it. I did a bit of veterinary stuff with Taffy in Korea. He said, “You might be going to Malaya. Don’t tell anyone I told you, but you might be going to Malaya.”

He said, “Try to get into as much veterinary stuff as you can. When you get out of the army, it would be a good job for you. And you’d pick it up quick, being a motor mechanic.” And I liked it, too. I always wanted to be a surgeon when I was a kid. I always loved surgery. I watched all the surgery on Discovery Channel a lot. And I got a heart book. When I had to have the surgery done on my heart, I knew what they were going to do. I had a heart book from the Mayo Clinic in America,

and I’d studied the whole lot of it. I liked studying everything, I like to see how everything works. I just went with the dogs to Malaya, and I was wrapped up with the dogs and the way the dogs worked. I was interested in the work, the job, getting these terrorists that were killing people and killing kids. I was sitting in a restaurant there one night, the Sungi Sepot Café one night, with a local police officer, the police field force, an English guy,

and he had a couple of the Malay police force with him, and we were having a couple of scotches in there. The camp was about three miles down the road. I ran in, met him in there, had a couple of drinks, and I used to run back out again, a bit of exercise. Another bloke used to be a boxer, he’d run in and out with me. We were sitting in there and he looked up like that and he said, “Down!” I’d just came from Korea.

I just went down. I nearly knocked my brains out on the bloody table, but I got down, and a grenade went off. The terrorists had rode up on a push bike and chucked a grenade into the café. They’d seen the police officer in there, they were after him. But they were a rotten shot. The thing rolled down and went off near the counter. It wounded the bar man behind the counter. Not badly. The counter took most of the blast. It frightened buggery out of me, I didn’t go in there for a drink again. Bugger it.

And our mob, the army said, “Don’t go on leave in your uniform. You’re a target for terrorists.” CTs, Communist Terrorists. “Righto, what do we wear?” They said, “Go and get a pair of sports pants made, and wear a shirt. And make sure you wear the sleeves rolled down, for malaria precautions. If you haven’t got them rolled down, they will put you on a charge if you’re out after five o’ clock in the afternoon.” But you can get bitten all day and it doesn’t matter. If you’re in the jungle on operations, you have to have your sleeves up,

but if you go on leave you’ve got to roll them down. Bit stupid, isn’t it? But anyhow, they said, “Trousers should be grey, and the trousers should be either white or blue.” I said, “What’s that if it’s not a bloody uniform?” “They’re Australians. They wear grey pants and either a white shirt or a blue shirt, blow him up.” Don’t wear your uniform? You’d be better off in your uniform. At least you could dive on the ground. You couldn’t do that when you’ve got your own clothes on, you would get dirty.

The soldiers. The Chinese soldiers in Korea were trained solders to fight, and they were given orders what to do. The terrorists in Malaya wouldn’t stand and fight. They would fire a few bursts and they would clear off. Hit and run. They were cowards. Like these terrorists who blow people up. Like President Bush,

the American president said, “They’re faceless cowards,” when they blew the towers up. But that’s what they were like. ‘Run today, you can fight again another day.’ That was just like they’d say. We’re not cowards because we run away from a fight with the security forces. We’re doing it our way, so we can fight them the next time. But they run away the next time, too. But they kill women and kids. They’re rubbish.

I’d usually tell the dog to leave, take him back out of the fight. You don’t have him if a firefight starts.

Very important. The terrorists would come into town, they might shoot a plantation manager.

They used to make his home, call him out to the front door. As soon as he came to the front door, they’d shoot him, and they would clear off back into the scrub. They’d tell the Home Guard, “Fire your shotguns up into the air or we’ll come back and kill you.” They were locals, but that’s what they’d do. And they’d say they put up a hell of a fight. The lying buggers. The British Army knew, and the British officers who were in the Malay Police Field Force, working with the Malay, they knew, too. Most of the rubber state managers were British,

because Dunlop owned most of the rubber estates there. They all had armoured cars and that. The only way they could get the rubber state managers was to get their home guard, like to call them out, trick them out, and they would blast them. Or they would get them going on a track going into town. They’d have big Ford V8s with steel plates all around them.

Chin Peng always boasted, “You will never catch me. I can travel underground through limestone caves.” He said, “I can travel the full length of the mainland through limestone caves underground, and only come out once or twice.” He said, “You will never get me above ground. So you might as well give up trying.” We didn’t believe him, but they could never ever catch him. His father had a bike shop on Penang Island.

We used to get leave, come down from up country. We used to go around the bike shop after we’d had a couple of beers at the Britannia Club, and have a yarn to his father. Talk about his son. “He’s bad.” He said, “My other sons are different to him.” He said, “He will get into trouble.” We said, “If we see him he will be in bloody trouble. We’ll shoot the bastard.” “Oh, don’t shoot him, don’t kill him.” “Nuh.”

He said, “He hasn’t hurt anybody.” We said, “Yeah, but he orders other people to. You better tell him to come in and give himself up and the whole thing would be over.” I said, “You can do that.” He said, “What happens to me, then? They put me in gaol because I’m his father.” “No,” I said, “they’ll give you a reward. There’s a big reward on his head. Millions of dollars.” “I couldn’t do that to my son.” We used to get over there and get him going and twist him around a bit.

He was real good friends with us when we were leaving. He was worried. He couldn’t do anything. He used to come out and boast, Chin Peng. He was on Discovery Channel, boasting about what he did in Malaya, Chin Peng, the bugger is still alive. They couldn’t catch him.

Chinese, the same as Chin Peng. Easy to talk to, most Chinese are quiet and easy to talk to.

Very deep. Yeah, we got Chinese terrorists, got them in and interrogated them. You could see all their nerves going in their neck and the sweat is pouring off them, and they’re as deep as the ocean. It’s hard to get anything out of them. But this Ah Chi , this ex-terrorist, the sergeant used to get bamboo slices and you push them under their fingernails, and once they stop shaking their heads and biting their lips, he’d say, “It’s not hurting any more.”

Put it up another fingernail then, a new one. He would get them talking.

Yep. I was in one day, I said, “That bloke won’t be able to pick his nose tomorrow, will he?” He said, “No bloody fear he won’t.” But they’d killed people. He wanted to know about the camps that they had come from. They would put them in the police field force and send them to another state, give them somewhere to live and pay them.

That’s how they got a lot of them to come in. The terrorists used to tell one another. Some of them went back into the jungle and they would bring other terrorists out with them. They got sick of living in there and the security forces were getting tighter and tighter on them. Especially our blokes. Some of the terrorists came in and surrendered, they said they’d give it away because the Australian patrols were that close and tight together, they couldn’t get medical supplies, they couldn’t get food. The Aussies were putting too much pressure on them.

The first patrol we sent out when we got to Malaya, this is a joke. They sent a patrol out to do an exercise, to teach them what to do. They went up on this rubber estate, they got up there and they were sitting down having a bit of a rest, you see. And two rubber tappers come up to them, latex all over them, they said, “Good day. You Australian?” “Yeah, we’re Australian.” “You got any cigarettes?” “Yeah.” And all the blokes would give them a cigarette, because the Aussies were always generous.

“Have you got anything to eat? Left our lunch at home.” They spoke English. The blokes gave them a couple of tins of food, they opened them up, had a feed. And I noticed they scooped the stuff out of the tins, got every bit out of it. I thought, “That’s strange for rubber tappers.” Our blokes don’t do that. They eat what’s in them and shot the tins away. But we were taught

that once you eat any tinned food, to burn the tins and bash them flat, then bury them. Because the terrorists used to use the tins to make grenades out of them, pack bloody ball bearings and explosives into them. They used to make grenades out of them. So we had to burn, bash and bury the tins so they were useless, so they couldn’t use them. They said, “We better go back to work.” And away they went and when we got back to the road, I just went out to watch what they did. I never had the dog with me. I got down the road, the truck was waiting,

it blew its siren. There was a car down there, a big Jaguar. I went over to it and said, “How you going?” He said, “You been up on one of my estates?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I was talking to a couple of your rubber tappers up there.” He said, “No rubber tappers up there.” They were two bloody terrorists come down and got some bloody cigarettes and something to eat off us. That’s what he reckoned. He said that’s how they get around. They’ll put rubber tapper aprons on, carry a knife around with them when they come up to talk to you. “My rubber tappers are not working that section there.

No one tapping the trees up there. If you go up and look at the trees, you will wake up straight away.” He said, “You’re new here, aren’t you? You Aussie battalion” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, you’ve learnt the first lesson.” When I got back I went up to the colonel and told him. The orders up on the board. ‘Don’t speak to rubber tappers. Don’t give them cigarettes. Don’t give them food.’ That’s the first thing we learned.

Yeah, that was out. The locals had given us information, come into the orderly room from the Malay police field force, that they were going to do the shill over. Like information from local Malays that had seen terrorists go up.

They wanted a handler with a dog to go out. They said they were going to work the hill over first, then they wanted a dog and a dog handler to go up, in case there was anyone left hiding there. The dog could smell anyone, or any food or ammo that was left. If they bugged out, I told them if anything has to be done

with handling a dog, come and see me, because it was getting a big quiet sometimes. So I took Prince with me this time. I took Pedro with me with the police commissioner up Penang Island because he was pretty aggressive, Pedro, he didn’t like the military police either. He used to bite them. So I took Prince with me this time. He was playing up. He didn’t like Pedro, jealous. But he needed working, Prince.

I said I would go out and take Prince. The boss said, “Righto, away you go.” He said, “A helicopter will pick you up and take you to about a mile from where they’re going to do this hill over.” The helicopter took me out there, two other blokes with me, not with dogs, they just wanted to come with me. We got out there. There was this police lieutenant,

he saw the chopper. They’d made a DZ, dropping zone, they cleared the scrub out so the chopper could land. I don’t know how far it was from the hill, but they reckoned, didn’t want the chopper to come too close to the hill, because the terrorists would be on us, they’d clear off if they saw the chopper land there. They might think something’s going on. I said, “It’s your show.” So he dropped us off,

a couple of miles away from it. He took an assault section. He put a mob of his blokes with pump action shotguns right around the bottom of the hill, he cordoned it all off. About thirty blokes out there with him. Then he took half a dozen blokes straight up the ridge, an assault section, straight up the ridge.

The terrorists went down both sides. We found out after they chucked their packs down one side and they went down the other side. He split his firepower. He blew the whistle, “I want you and the dog up.” Anyhow, it lasted about three quarters of an hour, I suppose, a lot of shooting, buggerising around, a few grenades. He blew his whistle, so I went up with my two mates. He said, “Take your dog and sniff around.” He said, “There’s bunks here for about seventy blokes,

with big bamboo tubes with water in them.” He said, “This is one of their headquarters.” Took him around the bunks and everywhere, and old Prince, he kept trying to get outside, he was looking over towards the edge of the hill. I said, “Leave.” He’s still trying to look out again. I said, “He’s onto something over here.” I said, “It might be a bloody monkey or something. He usually doesn’t go for monkeys.” I said, “Righto, go on. Seek.” He went straight over and put his paw down like that,

scratching leaves like that, and there was a bloody baby in a hole in the ground, covered in leaves, a baby about six months old. I nearly dropped dead. And he just sat back and looked up at me like. ‘Aren’t I a good boy?’ I gave him a pat, I said, “You’re a good boy, all right.” I said, “Come over here.” I said, “Look, we’ve just captured a terrorist.” He started crying then, the little baby. A very quiet. Oriental babies, Japanese or Chinese are very quiet.

You never hear them playing up with their mothers, because they’re quiet, too. Anyhow, he was just in the nude, he had no nappy, nothing on. Our babies are pampered. Their little kids, they carry them around. If they baby gets the runs, they will just hold him out like that and he will clear his bowels. I said, “What will we do with the baby now?” He said, “I’ll call our chopper back in.” He said, “I’ve got two wounded blokes,

and there’s a few terrorists dead. And there’s two wounded terrorists.” He said, “Take my blokes and the wounded terrorists back in.” He said, “With the dead ones, just take a photo straight on, and a profile.” You take all their clothes off them and burn their clothes and bury them, just put about three inches of dirt over them, so the wild pigs dig them up and eat them. That’s to throw the fear of Christ into the other terrorists. They don’t deserve any better, he reckoned. So, righto.

And he said, “Take the baby in.” They took the baby down to the fondling home down Singapore, gave it to the nun’s down there, took it in. I rang up to find out what was going on and she said that a young British couple had adopted it. Probably still alive, be an old man now. The terrorist mother, when the fight started, she probably covered it over and left it there. Frightened it would get killed. Never ever saw it again.

Human interest story, that, isn’t it? He said, “I’ll be buggered. It’s the youngest terrorist I’ve ever captured.” I said, “Don’t try and pull my leg.” He said, “No, it’s the youngest one I’ve ever captured.” I said, “I’ll tell everyone in the battalion about that. And we’ll drink your health tonight.” I said, “Why didn’t you shoot it? It’s a terrorist.” He said, “Oh, I can’t.” He thought I was fair dinkum.

The shock of my bloody life. I thought it was some sort of animal.

Then I saw his eyes and his little bloody fists and that. I thought, “Jesus bloody Christ.”

Prince wanted to go over towards, he looked like he wanted to lick him. I said, “You can’t lick him.” I had to pull him away, “Sit, leave.” He was looking up at me. “Orrrwwrr,”

he started talking to me a bit. He was probably saying, “I found him.” Yeah, we took him in the chopper to give him to the nun’s down the fondling home. I rang them up to find out what happened. It was in the Singapore Times, too. That we’d found a baby, a terrorist’s baby. They didn’t say where he was or anything. The terrorists might have gone down and tried to get him back.

A good memory, yeah. I’m just glad they got me out with the dog and Prince pointed got onto him. It was the strongest he had pointed to anything. He used to point to terrorists, but he used to balk a bit because he knew they carried bloody guns, and there was going to be a fight. With the baby, he would have worked it out straightaway it was a young thing.

I often think about that. I wonder where he is, if he’s still alive. He might have a big family. He might be in China, he might be in Malaya. He might have died, for all I know. Long time ago, wasn’t it? 1956, that was. Forty eight years.

Oh yeah. But things had slowed down a bit, then. All our blokes were doing tight patrol and a lot of the terrorists were coming in and surrendering. It was getting a bit quiet. I was just glad to get out and do something. Get out of the camp. I was drinking too much beer, I think.

I got sick over there. You get strychnine berries out of the streams. They drop off the bushes and you get traces of strychnine in your water bottle and you get crook.

If you get water out of the streams. We didn’t know. The streams and the water, there were spirochetes in the water. You drink them and you contract lepto spirosis. The spirochetes get into your liver and cause big cysts to grow in your liver. In about two weeks you drop about a stone in weight. And all your muscles get smaller.

It’s like a golf ball in there. And the only thing they can do to get rid of it is give you a packet of Epsom Salts every day. It clears the cyst out of you liver and that. They didn’t know much about medicine in those days. They had nine different bloody whats-it-names on my papers, on the end of my bed. They reckoned I had been bitten by a spider, or something. They asked me how beer I’d been drinking and I said, “Not enough.”

When they stripped me off nude out in a room, an Australian Army sister there said, “I’ve got to go all over you looking for bites.” I said, “You’re going to rape me.” She said, “No, your luck’s not in today, digger.” She shot me down, I was being smart. Shot me down. She was attached to the British Hospital there.

I had lepto spirosis, and I got over that. And then I had some other bloody fever and they were giving me penicillin three times a day, and through the night. And my backside, both cheeks, were black from bruises where they were shoving the needles in. Bloody Malay orderlies.

The needles used to bump up against the insides of the stainless steel kidney bowls, and you’d get hooks on them. I said, “I can’t stand any bloody more of them.” It was that painful. It was bruised black. This bloke came down, he said, “You finished. No more penicillin.” I said, “Thank God for that.” He said, “There’s no more you.” I said, “It’s a pity there’s no more you.” I used to dread

that bugger coming down and shoving that bloody penicillin in my back. It was a big thick one. He used to squirt that penicillin into you. It’s like crystallised. I didn’t get malaria because I took the tablet every morning. I used to give them one each on roll call of a morning and dismiss them, and they’d walk away and there would be two lines of bloody tablets on the ground. And they were getting malaria.

Two blokes got cerebral malaria, and they finished up vegetables. I said to the blokes, “Go down the hospital and see them at Tai Ping Military Hospital.” They go down to have a yarn, and when they got there, they were sitting on a deck chair like that, completely buggered. They were on another planet.

I was burnt out. I started getting joint pains, all my joints were aching, headaches and I couldn’t open my eyes to the light properly. They sent me down and they did blood tests. A major came around and he said, “Aidy? Oh, shove off.” I will never forget it, like Pommy talk.

The famous saying in America now is “Get out of town.” I knew that was wrong. (Ver-UNCLEAR), that’s all the solids dropping out of your blood over a certain time. So they put me on something for rheumatoid arthritis. He said, “You’ve got acute rheumatism.” I said, “Oh, is that what it is.”

The Australian Army nurse used to come down every night and you used to get one small bottle of Guinness. That was the Pommy issue. She used to bring me down a large bottle of Victoria Bitter [beer] that she had in the fridge. She’d say, “Get this into you, digger. This’ll fix you up. That bloody Pommy stuff will kill you.” She said, “Don’t open it until we put the light out.” I reckon that’s what fixed me up.

Yeah, and I got out of there, and I wasn’t fixed up properly. Aches and pains all over. I had that all the time until…I had a few months to go, and they said, “You’re going home. Your six years will be up soon.” I came through the leading transit depot, and they told me to take my stripes off, that the army had changed and all that. I couldn’t care less. I was burned out, I was buggered. I told you about when I was in that rubber estate. I sat there for bloody near four hours, I couldn’t get up. We were all burnt out. The padre said to me

“Perhaps you should have given it away when you got home from Korea. Two years in this bloody hole.” He said, “You’ve done a marvellous job, anyhow, the reports from the police commissioner down at Penang have been good.” I didn’t know they were going to take my stripes off me when I came home. But the army had changed. And I couldn’t have cared less. If I’d signed up for another three years, they said they would have sent me to a warrant officers school.

They guaranteed that, and they probably would have, for training infantry. I just wanted to get out and go home and see my mother and father. I had ideas, you see, I did a school. When we took our dogs down, half a dozen dogs and half a dozen diggers, I took them down from Sungi Sepot too, it was pretty quiet. My boss, Major Earlwell, he said, “I’m going to send you and your diggers down to the big War Dogs School.

You can go and learn something about the veterinary side of it, with the colonel and the captain, down there in the infirmary. And the other blokes can patrol around the War Dogs School and they’ll work in with the Ghurkha battalions that are protecting it.” I got down there and I worked with them down there. They said, “We can keep you down here for six months, if you like.” I said, “Well, that’s good, but (UNCLEAR) for six months.” The other blokes went back up with the dogs, and they had big war dogs trials.

There was less and less action because the terrorists were coming in and giving it away, which was good. I had three blokes lined up with the best dogs to go and win the war dog trial. Jimmy McPherson got drunk and filled his dog up with meat pies. Tommy Feedman’s dog tore off after a monkey and it bit it and it got rabies.

I think the dog owner just got drunk. When I moved away from them, they give it away. There was nothing to do, and they didn’t want to go in the War Dogs trials. I said, “You’ve got the best dogs. One of you will win it. You’ll get the big trophy, the big write up, everything, in the papers.” They didn’t care. They’d rather all just get on the slops. They’d all turned into bloody alcoholics, I think. I think they’d had a gut full of the army, too. And bloody Jimmy McPherson’s dog, Carl, he had a gut full of meat pies.

They were buggers some blokes. He was a Scotsman, he wasn’t an Australian. So I worked with them for six months there. I got into surgery with them. I really loved that. They said, “You’ve got the knack.” Right, and they taught me how to cut properly. I did anaesthetics, learned all the sulphur drugs, antibiotics, and

I learned how to look after dogs, after operations. You’ve got to turn them over every ten minutes, otherwise they pneumonia. Fluid builds up in their lungs. They showed me all about the life cycle of the heartworm. They said, “You want to take this back to Australia with you, because they know nothing about it in Australia.” You know the big doberman pincher? He had heart worm. He went after a monkey one day and came back

and just keeled over on his side and started running and he was dead in about five minutes. We took him into the vet, he took his heart out, he had seven worms in there, eight inches long. His heart wouldn’t have been in a very good condition, because there wouldn’t be much blood pumping out of it because the chambers wouldn’t be able to fill up, with a great bunch of worms in there. They travel around the blood,

then they start to fertilise the thing, and they start growing, and they stop once they get to the heart. They’re too big to get through the heart. The Poms [English] used to give them penicide tablets. That used to kill the wound.

Yeah, I went home and saw Mum and Dad. They just carried on. Mum gave me a big cuddle and the old man shook hands with me. They were busy on the phone.

Mum said, “You will have to excuse your father. He’s got a lot to do.” I said, “I will go and help him.” She said, “He’ll be glad of that.” So I went and helped him and then I spent my leave there. I used to take him down the local pub every afternoon, for half a dozen beers, stop him from wanting to fight the publican. He thought he was back in the gold mining days. We’d get a bottle of sherry to take home. After the second night, Mum said, “Don’t give your father any more of that wine of a night time. I can’t shut him. He was talking until five o’ clock this morning.”

I said, “Righto, he’s on the blackfellas. He don’t get any more.”

It wasn’t so bad when I first got out of the army. But I still had trouble with my eyes and the light, and aches and pains all over me. Before I got discharged, I was complaining about it and they put me up the Concord Hospital.

They sent me from the battalion at Enoggera. I was supposed to get discharged there. I was planting pine trees around the joint, and I got sick of that. I said, “Where are the War Dogs now in Australia?” They said, “Down Ingleburn. Why? Do you want to go down?” I said, “Yeah.” So they sent me down there, and they had it all under control there. They had the dogs there and other blokes there. They asked me all sorts of questions.

I thought I would keep out. My mate was in married quarters there, Jimmy Burgess, he lost his eye in Korea, one night out on patrol. He was there at Ingleburn. He said, “Keep away from it, mate.” He said, “You’ve done six years with the blokes that took your rank off you. Give it away. You can come and live with us if you like.” Colleen said, “Yeah, come and stay with us.” They put me in the camp hospital there and I didn’t get any better, so they sent me to Concord Repat Hospital. They said, “The headaches are cause from a septum bone in your nose.”

So they took the bone out, but that didn’t get rid of the headaches. Then they took my tonsils out because I was getting sore throats all the time. That didn’t make much difference. One of the old diggers said, “You’re nerves are buggered, mate. I was like that when I came home from bloody New Guinea.” Then they said, “We’re going to get you to go down and have a talk to the psychiatrist.” So I went down…He said, “Get up on the bunk.”

He said, “I’m going to put you to sleep and have a talk to you while you’re asleep.” I could smell the ether he was putting onto this thing over my nose. And I knew then, from doing the veterinary course, that when they give you ether and you go to sleep, what the ether does is rob your brain of bloody oxygen, and that’s why you go unconscious. I said, “I don’t want to take bloody ether.” He said, “I’m only going to give you a little bit. So you will be half sort of out, so I can get you talking.” He said, “Don’t make me wring everything out of you.”

He said, “Tell me everything. I’m not taking you prisoner, like you’re trained to jack up around enemy soldiers.” I said, “Righto.” So he’d give me this stuff, I’d go to sleep and I’d wake up and I’d feel terrific. Nice and cool, nice and quiet. He’d say, “Righto. We’ll have you come back in the morning.” I said, “What happened?” He said, “It’s all right, we’ll see how we go tomorrow.”

I went back in the next morning, and he said, again, “Now don’t make me have to wring everything out of you.” He couldn’t get anything out of me. When my nerves got crook and I went up here, the lady psychiatrist up there said, “They had him in Concord and they couldn’t get anything out of him.” That’s why they used medical hypnosis on me up there. Took me straight back into fighting in bloody Korea. And that’s where it went back to, there. It wasn’t Malaya. That was only psychical stuff. It was the mental stuff and the blokes getting killed.

One bloke had a leg through his chest. Half a leg, things like that. And you can’t do anything about it, and you come home with a guilt complex because you can’t stop a bloke from dying. All you can do is help him to die.

Yeah, it got that way that they couldn’t get me out of it. They used to get an orderly to wheel me back, chuck me on the bed and let me wake up in my own time. It helped a bit. I went back to work in my business down there. I lasted about two weeks, then I wouldn’t be able to get back up off the floor again.

That got me back up there again. They said, “You’ll have to stay up here for about two or three months.” I said, “What do I do about my business?” They said, “Put one of your mechanics in charge of it.” I said, “Righto.” I was up there for about two months. They doped me up to my eyebrows on bloody Valium.

They were still giving me medical hypnosis. Sleeping tablets of a night-time. I was that doped up that I was sleeping all day and all night. And I complained about it. The psychiatrist said to me “That’s what you bloody well need. That’s why we’re giving you medication.” And they put me out in a cell where they put violent blokes, and they gave me a needle and they put me to sleep for three days. They said, “We might come in from time to time and talk to you.”

They outlawed that after a while, putting people down and giving them long sleeps. I don’t know why. Anyhow, whatever they did, it got me fairly right, but not real good. They said to me, “We’ve done all we can for you. We’re going to discharge you. Do you like fishing?” I said, “Yeah.” They said, “Get yourself a couple of good fishing rods and a mate and go fishing, because we think you’ll be back in here all the time, and we’ve done as much as we can for you.”

I said, “I come up here to get cured, to get right. I’ve got a business.” They said, “Well, we think you’ve done enough work.” I said, “Righto.” I came down, got rid of the business, sold all the stuff. I got a letter about five days after that from the repatriation commission. I was always getting fifty percent pension from when I got discharged out of the army. The RSL [Returned and Services League] got that for me.

Then when it stopped me from working, the doctor said, “Go up there,” he wrote a letter for me and sent me up there. When I come back, I had to go and report to my local repat doctor, Dr Thompson down here. I went and seen him and he said, “How did they use medical hypnosis on you, George?” I said, “They rehashed it all, fighting in Korea and everything, and when I was crook in Malaya.”

He said, “I don’t believe in regression. I’ll teach you how to relax, that’s what you’ve got to do.” He made me a tape recording of him talking to me. He used to hypnotise me and get me relaxed and I just used to sink down into bed, and he’d say, “I’ll leave there you there now.” And I couldn’t move. And he would leave me there for twenty minutes. He’d come back in and touch a trigger spot on my wrist, where he had touched me and put me out. He’d touch me on the wrist and say, “Nice and easy, nice and relaxed now. Breathing nice and steady

and waking up now, waking up.” And I’d wake up and I felt terrific. And he’d say, “You’re right now.” And he’d say, “Take it easy when you get up, you might be a bit whoozy.” I said, “No, I feel great.” I could spring up out of the chair. He said, “Are you feeling better?” I’d say, “Yeah, I’m feeling good.” And he’d say, “Well, it won’t last. You’ve got to come down and keep getting these sessions. And play your tape of a night-time, or if you wake up through the night

getting flashbacks to Korea or anything like that and you’re having sweats, go out and make yourself a cup of tea and don’t go back to bed. Stay up for the rest of the night.” He said, “Just lie on the couch and play with the tape.” And I used to go straight back to bloody sleep again and wake up about three or four hours later. And he got me back on my feet. He got me going. I got back into competing, bike riding and everything. But injuries that I had in the army, broken bones and crook joints

and both knees fractured and all different stuff, you can’t do anything about that. But as you get older, you have to admit it. But I poke along. I’ve studied food and I’ve studied athletics, I’ve studied sports medicine for forty years. I reckon I’m going pretty good for seventy six. The way my heart is and everything. I can monitor my heart and all that stuff myself, and how much to train,

aerobic training, how much fat burning training. I’ve got myself a treadmill.

Not now. I haven’t dreamed about Korea for about ten years.

Oh, carrying out stinking bodies and crashing through blokes’ ribs where they’d been napalmed by the Yanks, and getting grabbed on the ankles by blokes in the dirt. Stupid bloody things. And wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, you haven’t dreamt anything, you just wake up and you don’t know where you are.

You don’t know where the door is or the light switch and you find yourself fumbling around near the bloody wardrobe. I’d never been like that. I thought, “Don’t tell me I’m going nuts.” I rang up my local repat bloke and told him. “Don’t worry about it.” Go out to the lounge and stay up, don’t go back to bed. He said, “What time does this happen?” I told him, and he said, “Yeah, that was the time you were out on night patrol.” He said, “Your bloody subconscious is trying to kick you back into bloody Korea all the time.

It’s like being on a cracked record, you can’t stay off it.” He said, “Stay up. Wake up, stay up. Start your day from there.” He said, “You can go back to sleep at two o’ clock in the afternoon.” He got me right again. Knew what he was doing. Didn’t believe in regression, taking you back. He said, “Forget all that.” He said, “Only live with people you get on real well with. Do the things you like doing.” He said, “And you’re sensible enough to use moderation. You don’t get drunk and go out gambling and doing stupid things.”

He said, “You know how to conduct yourself?” I said, “I ought to know by now.” This was thirteen years ago. It gradually gets better. I brought myself a new bike and joined the bike club and started to go for rides on Sundays, but I couldn’t stay very long, because I had always been a sprinter. So I got a track bike

and started going out the velodrome and riding on the velodrome. I wound up getting third in the Australian titles, vet seven, I think I was sixty seven years old then.

That was the World Masters Game up Chandler. Well, I rode in the Australian Titles out there the year before that. I’ve always been a sprinter, foot running, swimming, everything. I’ve never been a stayer. I’ve got white fast twitch muscle fibres, that run on ATP, anus tentri phosphate. The stayers have got red slow twitch muscle fibres, they can run long distances.

Like the American Negroes, they’ve got the white fast twitch muscle fibres. That’s why they can jump so bloody high. The coach said to me out the velodrome one day, I asked him about it. He said, “Put your feet together and put one hand on the wall and crouch down and see how high you can jump with your feet together.” I jumped about a foot off the floor. He said, “You’re a sprinter.” The muscle fibres contract that quick.

But you can only go a certain distance, you burn up all the ATP in your muscle fibres and your legs go from under you. About five hundred metres I can sprint full bore. About forty three seconds.

Yeah, I used to go down here to the RSL at Tweed Heads. They have a battalion reunion down there every year. It’s a dry till. I think it costs you about thirty bucks to get in. I used to take my son George with me, my eldest son. He used to like to go down.

We used to have a few beers and see a few of the blokes, but they were all old. They were all dragging themselves around, big fat potbellies, been drinking a lot. You’d have a talk to them, they’d ask what I was doing, “Do you have a dog?” “No, I haven’t got a dog.”

I think there’s only Sleepy Daniels left now. The other five of them, they’ve died from lung cancer, from smoking, all sorts of things. There’s only Sleepy, and the secretary of the 2nd Battalion Association in Brisbane. He was on Hill One Five Nine the night the Chinese fighter patrol chased all our blokes back. He was calling all the shots, and I was there with the stand-by patrol.

Lieutenant Bob Downey, Robert Downey. He was at a field telephone calling up all the shot to the command post. He said, “Get down that splinter bay with your blokes.” “There’s not enough room for bloody ten of us.” He said, “Well, stay where you are and keep quiet.” He was a bit flying. The slugs were flying around the trenches. He was calling all the artillery.

He said, “It’s lifting. It’s getting pretty bloody close to us now.” He said to me “You better get your blokes ready to get down there.” He said, “The other patrol is just about back up here.” He said, “You go out and engage the Chinese.” By the time we got down there, the Chinese had cleared off. Thank Christ. I wasn’t too keen on confronting them. They were pretty angry, the way they come over. I thought anything could develop. And the bloke said, “What’s going on?” I said

“Either it’s a probe to test our strength, or it’s preliminary to a full-scale attack.” I said, “I haven’t heard anything about full scale attacks, and they told us they didn’t want to fight us Australians.” Their war, their fight, was with the Americans. I think they were just testing our strength, and that’s how it turned out. The colonel called all the NCOs up and said, “There was a probe to test our strength and see if we’re alert.” We were alert all right. They chased our fighter patrol back up the hill.

Those slugs make an angry noise when they go past your head, like a bumblebee flying past, you can feel the heat of them. Yeah, nothing came of it. We just went back to patrolling the valley of a night-time then. It gets dark out there. You could always tell the Chinese, the frogs got croaking in the creek, when the Chinese got near us, the frogs shut up.

His nerves just went on him. None of the blokes could tell me anything. They just said he shot himself. Quite a few blokes shoot themselves. They can’t settle back into civilian life, and things they see overseas and that keep haunting them. If you can get a good doctor and you can get someone that you can talk to, and will sit down and listen to you, you can get it out of your head,

then you’re right for a few weeks. And the time gets longer and longer that you’re feeling better. And as time goes on, you get that way that you learn to handle things. It doesn’t affect you as much. You’ve got create a lot of good things on top of it, and bury it. .So it can’t get up and bite you on the arse. Athletics is the best.

Get into competitive sports. Go to the races, have a bet on the horses. You worry about losing your money then, instead of the mates that you lost.

While you’re busy there, you’re in charge of your men and you haven’t got any time to worry about yourself or let anything affect you. You’re worrying about them, keeping them going, listening to their problems. And sorting all that out.

That’s the first thing the psychiatrist will tell you when you crack up fifteen years after you get home. They’ll say, “Write down everything you did from the time you got into Korea.” You get halfway down the page, tears are running down your face on the paper, and you just get up and walk out of there. And they say, “Well, that’s when your trouble started. You were that bloody busy, you couldn’t do anything for yourself. You had no one to talk to, you couldn’t whinge about anything. You’ve bottled everything up and you’ve brought back here with you. And it’s trying to manifest itself while you sleep and rest.”

They used to hit the blokes with electric shock treatment and all that. They killed half the blokes they hit with it. They hit us with the sub-carmer insulin treatment and half the blokes were walking into the Parramatta River. They didn’t know where they were. One bloke went to work one morning. He was sitting on the steps of the Bunnerong Power House, where he worked before he went in the army, in his pyjamas. A police came up and asked him what he was doing. He said, “I’m waiting to go to work. The doors are not open yet.”

The policeman took him down the station. He said, “Have you been in hospital?” He said, “Yeah. I’ve been over in repat hospital.” He rung the hospital up and they sent a couple of orderlies over in a car to get him and bring him back. But they weren’t doing any good with that insulin treatment. That’s when they started using psychiatry and hypnosis. I suppose it works on some blokes,

but they rehash it all and bring it all up fresh in your mind again. And my doctor down here doesn’t believe in that. You see doctors have always got different ideas, that’s why you should always get second opinions. He said, “You need to learn to relax. You’re highly strung. You’ve always been highly strung being an athlete and wanting to go all the time.” He was pretty good, he was an English doctor that came out here. Bill Thompson, down Central Street. He’s a terrific bloke. He’s only got to look at you

and he will tell you what’s wrong with you. You don’t even have to tell him any symptoms. But he’s no fool. If he thinks you’re worrying about something too much, he’ll just say, “Wishful thinking” or something like that. “You know better than that.” He will bring you back on the straight. But you’ve got to learn positive thinking is the main thing if you’re crook and you’re trying to get over anything. Positive thinking. Just don’t think ‘What if?’ Or ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?”

You just think about the right thing to do, and do it. And do it straightaway, don’t put things off. People never get around to doing things, like seeing their families. Someone will die and they will kick themselves for the rest of their lives for not going and seeing them when they were alive. Even if you just ring them up on the phone, two minutes, three minutes.

My wife cleared off. She got sick of it. Tried to take the two boys out of school, but the teacher wouldn’t let them go. They didn’t want to go anyway. She took Linda and went up north. I don’t blame her I suppose. I wasn’t easy to live with, and she just got sick of me being crook, I think. She rang repat and talked to them up there, and next thing she’s up Northern Queensland somewhere.

I wrote to her for about six months, and she had all different excuses why she didn’t want to come back, so I said, “Right, I’ll divorce you.” So I got to a solicitor and he sent the papers up. He knew a solicitor up there and he had a fair idea that she was working for him, because she used to work for solicitors.

And the solicitor said, “Yeah, that’s right. Her husband wants a divorce. I’ll send the papers up, sign them and send them back.” And it went through. That was it. And two weeks after it went through, she came back down and was living in a caravan park down here. She’d come down and see the kids. That was all right. I wasn’t worried about it.

When they wanted me up the hospital there for two or three months, give me a good rest and that, she told someone “It was just like he died.” She only came to see me once. Like your husband’s died and you can’t do anything with him. I thought, “Well, if that’s the way she thinks, she can go to buggery.” I know plenty of my mates whose wives looked after them and stuck with them. She just couldn’t hack it, she couldn’t put it up with it. I don’t blame her.

She hasn’t married again. She’s had plenty of boyfriends. She likes to go out, be sociable and that, I can’t blame her. You’ve got to live, you’ve always got to have a bit of fun. She was a good wife to me, but when I got crook, she just got sick of it. I brought the two boys up. She brought Linda up. I used to send the boys up for a weekend on the bus, to stay with her. She was a chain smoker. She used to have them in the caravan, breathing cigarette smoke all Saturday and Sunday.

I was glad when she came back to live on the coast. They could go and see her and do what they liked. She knocks about with her mother, and looks after her mother. She was married to a real good bloke, old Ron. He died of a heart attack. She over fed him. He was like a big fat pig. She’s fat, too.

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If I win at the races on Saturday.

I go out and see the girls and they wash my car, and don’t charge me any more than ten bucks. The grandkids. They wanted to charge me twenty bucks one day, and I argued with them for a while. One of them said to the other one. “We’ll give him a ten dollar wash.” I said, “I don’t like the sound of that. I’ll pay you twenty.” They done a real good job on it, and I gave them twenty bucks. I haven’t asked them to wash it since.

They’ve been wanting to wash it lately. I said, “How much?” They said, “Ten bucks.” I used to get it washed down the servo [service station] while I was shopping down at Coles [supermarket]. They used to wash it for ten bucks, but they’ve gone up to twenty bucks now.

I learned a lot about life.

I learned a lot about discipline. I learned a lot about myself. I know that I’m not a bad bloke. If I can help anyone I will. I always speak to crippled or deformed people when I’m shopping down there. I always go up to them and shake their hand and stroke their brow and talk to them, ask them what they’re doing. Usually their father or their mother will be with them, and you see a bit of a tear in their eye and they’ll come over and shake hands with you and say thanks very much.

Most people shy off people like that. They don’t want to get near them, I don’t know why.

I think I’ve seen the dirty side of life and I’ve seen the good side of life, and the people that are millionaires and have got everything, they still carry on like idiots and they waste their money, flash cars, bloody aeroplanes and they’re people starving all over the world.

A lot of the rich people make big donations to charities, and I understand all that, too, yeah, but there’s still a lot of things that can be done.

Being the same as my father, what he did in the army, and my oldest brother being killed in the war by the Japs. My other brother fighting in the army in New Guinea and Bougainville.

I just think that I’m one of the family and that I held my end up the same as they did. I think it makes a man out of you. You can understand other peoples’ problems. I’m not backwards in asking help or solving problems. I can solve most problems myself, but the guy that I look up to is my local repat bloke, if I get crook. I will ring him up and say, “Is it worth coming down to see you?”

He’ll say, “Come down and I’ll have a look at you.” He always says that. I say, “Why do you always want me to come down.” He said, “I’ve got to make a quid somehow, George.” I don’t go down there if it’s something I know myself. A good sleep will get rid of a lot of aches and pains sometimes. I’m buggered if I got without sleep. I get on this Discovery Channel and this History Channel, I’ll sit up all night watching surgery and trauma cases

I am damn interested in it, and I don’t think it hurts to watch it. You can enjoy something like that. A lot of people can’t look at it. I like to see people being helped, people being saved from dying. He’s a hard bugger to beat, that bloody Grim Reaper.

If he gets you in his sights, you’ve got to be good to get away from the bugger.

I reckon about half a dozen times. I believe in God, I’ve always believed in God. I reckon he was watching over me both times I got sucked into big breakers out in the spear fishing boat. I looked up at the sky and I said, “Where are you? I need you?” Good way of saying a prayer, isn’t it?

No, I’ve never been real religious, but I am religious. If anyone wanted me to go to church with them to keep them company, I’d go. I wouldn’t give a bugger if they were Catholic or a Bush Baptist or what they were. I agree with other peoples’ beliefs, be they Muslims whatever. If they want me to go with them, I’ll go with them. People get their solace from their beliefs and that. It keeps them on the straight and narrow. If it does that, well okay.

It doesn’t matter what religion it is. The only thing I’m crooked on is using kids for suicide bombers and that’s not the Muslim religion, that’s the bloody fanatics who are using the Muslim religion for it. A lot of faceless cowards use religion to gain their own beliefs and they’re just mongrels. They’re just rubbish. The only way to get rid of them is to blow them up, shoot them.

Don’t lock them up. Don’ t make taxpayers pay sixty thousand dollars a year to keep them in gaol. That’s the only time I believe in shooting or hanging them.

No war is just. They should get the leaders out in a big arena and give them a sword each, and make those buggers fight it out, and leave all the poor bloody people, the workers and that, out of it.

I don’t think the government has got the right to take a woman’s kids away when they grow up and send them away and get them killed. They don’t give the parents anything. They might give their wives a war pension, a mere pittance. The mothers don’t get anything. They loose their son in a war, all they get is a bloody telegram. They should compensate the mother. That’s one thing I’m crooked on,

but I don’t let it worry me. One thing I don’t like politicians for, I don’t like the way they think. George Bush called John Howard “A man of steel.” He can’t even play football. How is he a Man of Steel? It might be because he is getting old and rusty.

Nuh. Yeah, I’ve got a lot of my father in me, I think. You’ve got to be firm but fair. And you’ve got to believe in something and believe in it properly, but don’t get too carried away with it. And you can always leave room to change your mind, if you want to. And leave other people room to change their mind and opinion, too. We’re not put on this world to fight with people and argue with people, we’re put here to look after all the animals

and the flowers and plants and stuff. All the people disappear off the Earth, the animals get wiped out. A lot of human beings are wiping them out. I think that’s why we were put on this Earth, to look after the animals. That’s why we were given superior intelligence.

Yeah, well, blokes like [Adolf] Hitler have got to be stopped. He warps all the minds of all his people, and he forces all his people into it. A dictator. That’s what a dictator is. They get into politics for a start, then they get control of the police force so they can control the people. It’s all a matter of control. Every war is a matter of control. Some of them use religion to do it, some of them use police, use force.

All politicians have got to have a police force to make the people do what they want done, and it’s the politicians who make all the rules and regulations, and they use the police to enforce it.

I don’t think he would. He’s forty years old now, and Larry is about thirty six. I said to them, they’re both married,

I said, “Why go away to a war if you’re married, and you’re happy and you’ve got children? Why go to a war and go kill some poor bugger you don’t even know? You might get killed yourself. Where’s the common sense in it? Bugger the politicians. Work, pay your taxes, you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. If anyone attacks the country, that’s different. You’ve got to fight to defend your own country.” I can’t see the sense in sending young blokes overseas

to fight in a foreign country for foreigners we don’t even know. And they don’t want us in Iraq now. Now they’ve got rid of Saddam Hussein, they want all the Yanks and everyone to get out of the place. They want to take the country back. And there are many different tribes in Iraq, that the strongest ones are going to stand up and take control. And they might be worse than Saddam Hussein. That’s why the Yanks want to stay there. They want to try and get their way of government established there.

But there’s about seven or eight different tribes there, all vying for power and they want to run the place. I can envisage the Yanks staying there for about ten or fifteen years, before they can get someone to take over the place. And they’re going to have to knock off the blokes who try and spoil it all the time. I think they’ve got a never ending battle myself. I think they ought to just let them go. They had to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

He was killing all his own people and gassing all the Kurds. They had to get rid of him. His two sons were going around shooting people. They were just criminals.

Any terrorism that is carried out by stealth and kills women and children, it’s got to be stamped out. They’re just rubbish. Faceless cowards, and they have to be eliminated.

Don’t put them in gaol, just shoot them. They’re not either, they’re off on another planet. Not worth putting them in gaol. Sixty thousand bucks a year to keep them, feed them. They haven’t earned a feed, I reckon. They’re criminals. They will only teach their offspring

the same way of living. It doesn’t matter what religion they are. All religions have got their ethics. And it’s only these maniacs that come in and use the religion to their own good. And they use fear and terror to make religion work for them. Even the people who are high up in the Muslim religion, they’re too bloody frightened to go against the terrorists. Fear of being killed puts a lot of people off.

You’re not a trained soldier, you’re just a civilian. And civilians are terribly frightened of even dying. I couldn’t care less whether I die tonight or tomorrow. I’ve seen death. It’s never worried me. So what? I’d come back and haunt John Howard if I die tonight.

Yep, I do. Those blokes were all volunteers. My Dad, all his brothers. They had recruiting tables outside the pubs. They would wait until they got drunk and then talk them into signing up. A bit of Dutch courage. They thought they would go over and fight for their country. But it was all, they were fighting for the King, then. King George. That’s where my name came from. He said to my mother.

“What are we going to call him?” She said, “Call him George. If it’s good enough for the King, it’s good enough for my son.” If I had been there, I would have different ideas. Call me Bill, Bob, Jack or anything. What’s the Johnny Cash song? He called his son a girl’s name and his son tracked him down and fought him in the dirt in the bar. Sue. He named his son Sue.

Yeah, Johnny Cash. I used to like his songs. Most people live the right way. It’s just a few people who don’t. I think it starts out when they’re kids. They’re not lucky enough to have good parents.

It’s just the luck of the draw. It depends who you draw for a mother and father, I think. A lot of kids grow up in the slums, their mothers and fathers are alcoholics and no hopers and the kids grow up and they flourish. Because they knock about with other kids who have got good parents. It rubs off on them. And they’ve got enough common sense to do the right thing. It depends on who young people mix with and who they run with. They get out with rat bags of a night-time,

and start drinking grog and taking drugs, and it’s hard to get them back off it. Because they start to develop authority out of that. If they get away with it, they think ‘Well, I can do whatever I like.’ A bloke that’s got nothing, it’s like giving him a million dollars. They don’t know what to do with it. They go mad, they’ll lose most of it. A lot of people who win the Gold Lotto, they’ve lost it all in the first five or six years.

The only way I can answer that is to say that I’ve played fair, right through my life. I’ve done the right thing, what I was supposed to do.

I’ve helped anyone that I could. I’ve listened to people with problems. Helped them to solve problems, or just make suggestions. A lot of mates, if they’ve got any problems, I’ll just say, “Have you ever tried this? Ever tried that? It might work, it might not.” Plant the seed of thought and if they want to run with it,

they can. George still tells me his problems. Something must be working that I’ve been telling him. Now he’s totally different, he’s headstrong, he knows everything. Another few years he might settle down a bit. George has always been level-headed. You would think that you were talking to my father when you talk to George, and he looks a bit like him, too. But he’s got the same values, and he’s steadfast, you won’t swerve him from what he’s doing to do.

And he’s got a lovely wife, Christine. She played hockey for Australia, and she coaches the Gold Coast team. Even now, she goes for five, ten kilometre runs, two or three mornings a week. Gets him off his backside. He used to play rugby league, down here for the Tigers, George, but he likes his beer a bit too much, I think. It doesn’t affect him and he can handle it, so it’s all right. They’ve got a nice house down here at Helensvale.

They’re renting it out to an American army captain at present, for four hundred bucks [dollars] a week. He brought a house up at Canungra and he brought an ex-race horse for one of his daughters. Old Squizzy. I used to back him when he raced down here at South Port. Cool Cat his name was. He bucked her off one morning and she give it away then. George took him down to the polo club and left him out there. They rent him out for people who want a ride.

He bled twice and they barred him from racing. He’s a good nice big chestnut horse. They were trying to get me to get on it, and I said, “I’ve forgotten how to ride now.”

I’ve helped a lot of people who have been down on their luck. No dough, no jobs. I’ve lined up jobs for a lot of blokes. And I’ve fixed a lot of bloke’s cars for nothing. I see blokes who can’t figure out what’s wrong with their cars, I just like to help people. I like to see things running smoothly. Everyone getting on.

I think I’ve done a pretty good job. When I was crook, when my nerves were shot, I might have got on someone’s nerves then. I probably got on my wife’s nerves. She couldn’t put up with it. A lot of other wives look after their husband and put up with it. She probably just wasn’t cut out for it, I suppose. But she was always good to me. Some people get frightened when a returned soldier gets nervy.

They read other stories about soldiers going off, and probably watch films. She used to go quiet for two or three days, and I used to say, “Have you got a headache or something? Are you feeling crook?” And she’d say, “No, I’m all right.” And I started to think it wasn’t me, it was her. Just not talking. Then she started going out.

Then when I went into hospital, and they wanted to keep me up there for a couple of months, she said to her girlfriends, “It’s just like he’s died and he won’t be home.” A silly bloody way to talk. Most of the women used to come up and see their husbands twice a bloody week up there, getting treated. Bring them up some fruit. She only came to see me once in two months.

I thought, “She’s given me away. You’ll just have to get on by yourself.” Then she cleared off when I come home. I was only home a few weeks and she cleared off, she tried to take the boys up there, and I thought to myself, “She’s not thinking properly. Taking the boys away from their school.” They were all into athletics and doing good in their tests at school.