Australians at War Film Archive

Well, I was born in a little place called Cowell, on the west coast of

South Australia.

On the 30th of April, in 1918.

I grew up on the west coast. My father was a railway worker, and we moved around quite a bit. I spent my primary school days, and went to school at a place called

Ungarra.

I enlisted in April 1940.

Rookie training in Wayville, in South Australia, the showground.

Well, now, quite some time. I went from Wayville to Woodside in January of 1941.

No, I was drafted into the reinforcement company of the machine gunners

at Wayville, and so we were known as E company, and stationed at Wayville, and trained at Wayville.

My battalion was South Australian formed, but it comprised of a headquarter company and an A company and E company reinforcement company, and B company

were Victorian, C company was Tasmanians, and Don company were West Australians. They all trained in their respective states, then came to Adelaide and to Woodside in January 1941, where the battalion sort of formed up then, as a battalion.

We embarked at Easter time, it was

April 1941.

No, I was still in E company, sailed with the battalion, and I was transferred when we got to the Middle East.

We landed at Port Tewfik, and went by train up to, ended up at a camp called Hill 95 in Palestine. Just outside Gaza.

That’s when I was transferred into C company.

Not very long, only a few weeks, and we went into action in Syria. Only about a month, from memory, it’s just hard to recall exactly. I don’t think we were anything more than a month

at Hill 95, then we went into action in Syria.

The Syrian campaign was six weeks, it was the first campaign that we were involved in, the first campaign that the Australians had success in. I mean, we actually won that encounter with the Vichy French.

Well, it was

June, July, August. Mid-year.

After Syria we went up into the Lebanon mountains, we were in a place called Fih, where we were just held there pending, you know. There was nothing going on at that time. We were there until,

well, it snowed at Christmas that year. We were up to our eyeballs in snow, and then came back from sea back to Hill 69 in Palestine, where we entrained then to come back to Australia, but we didn’t get back unfortunately.

Not very long.

No more than two or three weeks, from memory.

Then we left the Middle East. What happened was, we didn’t know where we were going. We were issued with sea kit bags. All our main kit bags were taken from us, and we had sea kit bags and a haversack, that’s all we had. Our guns and drivers and trucks and what have you all left about a

week prior to us. We thought at that time there was a possibility that we were going out to Tobruk, ‘cause the only entry into Tobruk in those days is by sea. We had no idea where we were going. The fact that we were issued with sea kit bags was an indication that we were probably going out to Tobruk. However, when we got down to El Kantara, which is on the canal, our trucks were still there,

and we passed them in the train as we came into the place. They all got left behind.

Well, we went down, we caught a ship and came back, and we thought we were coming of course, to Australia, and instead of that we were shunted into Java.

Yeah, we stopped at Colombo,

where the ship refuelled. It was only for a day, but we didn’t go ashore.

Well, we thought then, of course, one afternoon that we were on the ship, that we were going, one of the crewman told us that we were about 24 hours out of Fremantle, but unfortunately the next day we were heading north and we went into Sumatra

first, and then to Java.

Yes, it was in February. On the ship, I can remember the day Singapore fell, that was the 15th of February.

Oesthaven, yes.

Jakarta, well Batavia in those days it was called.

How long we stayed?

No, I’m not positively sure of that. No, I can’t remember.

Well, we went on to an airport to begin with, we were just guarding an airport. The local domestic airport. We were there for a few days, and then we were sent out into the centre of Java, and then down to the western end where we met the Japanese.

My first camp, we were put into a place called Lily’s, which is a market garden place, for a few days. I can’t remember just how long, might have been a week, perhaps, or a fortnight. And then we went to the next camp, was a place

called Garut, which is a school. And then, into Bandung, which is a big camp, a proper Dutch camp.

Yes, I was in Bandung until we were moved out of there in, sometime late December, I believe. Late December

’41, and was sent down to a place called Makasura, which is just outside Batavia. We were getting ready then to go with Weary Dunlop, at Makasura for about a fortnight or three weeks perhaps. And we were then trained to go to Thailand. Weary Dunlop was in charge of a thousand of us to take us up on the railway line.

No, I was captured in March ’42, so if it was December, it was ’41.

Bandung? We were in Bandung in 1942, yes, I was captured in ’42, I’m sorry.

Yes, Weary Dunlop had a thousand of us Australians from the Middle East. We were sent on a ship to Singapore, to go on up to Thailand to work on the railway.

I, unfortunately, developed amoebic dysentery in Singapore, and was hospitalised, and I didn’t go on up to the railway line, I ended up in Changi at the finish. I was very ill with dysentery.

Yes, it was in Selarang.

The 8th Division doctors treated me. A doctor called Major Hunt, who experimented with Sulphanilamide tablets, known as MNB tablets. They were issued with them, the army had them for the treatment of venereal disease, and anyway this Major Hunt thought that if they could fix that, it could probably fix the dysentery, which it did.

I think from memory that was in January, and it was in May, I think, when we went into the prison.

I was in Changi until the war finished.

About two years, yes, roughly two years.

Well, we flew out of Singapore, and went

to Balikpapan in Borneo.

Only overnight. We were issued with our coating, ‘cause we only had what we stood up in when we’d left Singapore. And we were issued with new clothing, which was very nice. Had our first hot shower, and what have you.

The next day we flew on to where we called in at Moratai to refuel, and I remember that very well, ‘cause Gracie Fields was at the airport and sang to us. Then we flew on, and during the afternoon the crew, there was a Dutch crew that was flying us in a DC3, just came in and said to us,

“If you’re fit enough we’ll fly right on to Brisbane tonight, and you’ll get there tomorrow morning, instead of staying overnight.” But we ran into a very heavy storm, and we had to land at a place called Biak, north of New Guinea, and stayed there. We didn’t get there until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. Stayed there till daylight the next morning, then flew off.

We flew to Merauke, I think it was, in New Guinea, and then on down to Townsville, and we arrived in Brisbane that Saturday night. Now, I think that was, it was the 20th of September that we left Singapore, so it would be about the 22nd,

I suppose, that we arrived in Brisbane.

Something like that. I know I arrived home here in Adelaide on the 27th of September.

I was discharged in November, 1945.

Well, I didn’t do very much for the first year. I was in and out of Daws Road quite a bit.

Done odd jobs around the place, you know. Didn’t do a great deal. I was in hospital with suspected TB [Tuberculosis], which took them some weeks to diagnose and find eventually that I didn’t have it at all. I worked with a little,

for a chap doing a bit of carpentry, for about the first 12 months or so, and then I went into Elders. Back into the work that I wanted to do.

From 1947 to 1978.

Well, I was based

all over the place. I was in the Adelaide office for some time over the first couple of years, but I was in and out of Daws Road quite a bit, so then I was sent over to Tumby Bay, on the west coast, because I knew that area pretty well, having come from that area. Then I was transferred back to Kapunda, and from Kapunda to Cleve on the west coast again. From Cleve I was sent to Keith in the south-east.

From there in 1967 I was transferred into Adelaide office.

I got married on the 24th of April, 1946.

Yeah, I’ve got three children. I’ve got two daughters and a son.

Ungarra.

It’s about 13 miles inland from Tumby Bay. It’s on the railway line.

My father was in charge of the permanent way there, and although he was away a lot during my growing up days, we had a good home life. It was a very small town, but it grew up quite a bit in the

years we were there, it had one little store when we went there, and about four or five houses, that’s about all. It grew up, you know, and became quite a thriving little town, and a couple of stores and garages and what have you, which weren’t there when we went there originally. That, unfortunately, has gone the other way now, like all the small little country towns, it’s practically disappeared.

Well, when I went to Ungarra, we went there in August 1924. I remember that quite well, because I’d turned the age of six in April of that year, and my father was in charge of a gang of men at a place called Tooligie, which had no school. And so I got transferred there, I was six and a half when we got transferred there. I was six and a half when I started my school year.

My mother taught me a little bit, of course, and I went to school in August, I started in August in year one, then I was promoted to year two. I had only about four months in year one. It was a nice place to grow up. When I first started school there, it was in a little tin church,

the local church, and the school was in that church, but they subsequently built a nice brick school in 1929, so I was in about year five I guess, when that was built.

Well, when I started, there was only about 15 or 16, and then when I left there was something like 30 or 40.

That’s right, one teacher.

Well, it was from grade one to grade seven, of course. I don’t how they managed, but I mean one teacher just taught the whole lot of us, and, you know, they’d give you little jobs to do. I can’t remember how they split it up, and how they did it. Today, that would be impossible, but in that day that was no trouble. And right up until I was in year seven before they had to have

any assistant teachers, a teacher taught 30 odd children.

Well, my first teacher was a fellow called Giles, Mr Giles, and the second one was Ray Verrall, then a fellow called Frith, and he was my last teacher, so that got me through seven years.

I don’t think any of them were favourites, really.

They were all very good, and I got on all right with them, I guess. I suppose Frith was probably my favourite out of the three of them.

It was only a wood and iron structure, it had been built originally

by a store keeper, and then the railways bought the house to put my father in it, because he was the ganger in charge of all the men on the permanent way. It was just a wood and iron structure, and it is still there.

Well, it had three bedrooms, a dining room, and a kitchen,

on the back veranda, built-in kitchen.

Hot. I don’t think as a child you sort of feel it so much, but I can remember my mother and father feeling it. We as kids, I don’t think you take much notice of heat.

Well, there was no electricity,

we had kerosene lamps. Many years before electricity ever got to the place, in the 20’s of course. We’d sleep outdoors, perhaps, in the night time, in the real hot weather. Sleep out in the front veranda, just take the bed out there and lay out. But didn’t notice it, really, can’t recall ever being overheated.

Well, the same. We had no trouble in the winter time, because we had a big open fire, and there was plenty of wood, plenty of mallee roots. They were abundant. The country around Ungarra’s being developed. Farmers had plenty of wood, you could go and get it for nothing.

Not a great deal.

We had some grape vine out in the front, and our father had a little bit of vegetable garden, but not a great deal. He was away a lot. When time went on, he became in charge of a special relay, and I don’t know if you really want to talk about that, but when the railway line was put down,

it went up as far as Cummins and then branched off into two directions, and then went up to Kimba Buckleboo, and then went up to Ceduna. It was very light gauge railway, and as the country developed, and there was a lot more grain and stuff being grown, they found out that the permanent way was too light, and had to be re-laid.

And my father was away a lot during my younger days, in charge of great gangs of men and relaying the railway line. Also, putting in sidings, because when it went up originally, some of the sidings were ten mile apart, because it was all scrub country, of course. As that scrub developed, and they had to put in sidings for the farmers to bring their wheat into, and to collect, ‘cause there was no road transport in those days.

So, he would be either away putting in new sidings, or re-laying their line. He was away quite a lot.

Oh, for weeks on end. Weeks, months. Very seldom get home.

Yes, she was at home with five children, all boys, too.

Five boys.

And I was the eldest.

Oh, my mother. I don’t think it was so hard to discipline children as it is today. I mean, we didn’t have TVs or any of those sort of things, entertained ourselves, you played out and played football or

whatever you could do, but there was no televisions or radio. Did not have radio., I mean they weren’t in until the late 20’s. I can remember getting a crystal set, or my father getting a crystal set.

Oh, yes. She was able to keep us under control.

My mother? Well, she was loved by everyone. She was held in very, very high regard, and that she’s my mother, but she was. And even after we were married, her daughter in laws just admired her and my late wife considered her a better mother than her own mother, and that’s saying something, isn’t it? She was only a very small woman,

and she was loved by everyone.

Well, he was a little bit different. He was of German descent, and his father was a rough old, when I say rough, he was hard to understand, he’d come out from Germany. My father was born in Australia, and spoke fluent English. I mean, he had no accent at all, but it was

very hard to understand both my grandfather and grandmother on my father’s side. I suppose, as a child, I thought he was a grumpy old fellow. My father was quiet, and pretty strict, and so he was quite a different personality to my mother, but he mellowed a bit as he got older.

He was pretty strict discipline while we were younger, when he was home, anyway.

Oh, with a stick, quick smart, you know. He didn’t sort of talk to you at all. He would give you a belt around the legs with a stick, no worries.

Oh well, you know.

We probably wouldn’t come home when meals were ready or something, our mother would be calling out for us and we’d probably be out bird nesting or something like that. And if we didn’t do what we were told immediately he was very strict, my father. My mother was more tolerant.

Well, there wasn’t much we could do, you know.

We’d go out, try to dig out rabbits and all those sort of things, and bird nesting and there was a cricket team there. There was a cricket side, my father was a very good cricketer, and when he was still playing and we were kids, he would bowl to us in the backyard and so as a result of that,

we became fairly good cricketers ourselves. But he was a good cricketer, and in the winter time, we’d play football. Get up on the local oval and kick the football around. But it wasn’t the thing, children have got the things like today like skating, we didn’t have those things. But there was football,

and tennis, and I became quite a good tennis player. My younger brother became quite a champion.

Well, we played for Ungarra, and later when I got older and moved out, and went into Tumby Bay, I played for Tumby Bay.

Well, my father, strange enough, was Church of England, and my mother was Methodist, and this little church we used to go to for school was the Church of Christ. So we had to front up for Sunday school every Sunday, which we absolutely detested going, but my father used to say, “If it doesn’t do you any good, it won’t do you any harm, so you must go.”

I think that it was good in the long term. Although we never followed it on while we got older, although I became Church of England, and confirmed in the Church of England, because my late wife was Church of England. When we married, it was a part of the deal that I became an Anglican.

The rest of the family had no following of any religion much.

Church of Christ.

Well, they occupied the church for the school, and when it came to Sundays for church, they just moved everything aside, held their church service

then put things back for school on Monday.

Yeah, that’s right, that’s another thing, too. The Depression started in 1928 and it went right through to the war. They were difficult years, very difficult years. Fortunately, my father,

I can remember him getting a pound a week cut in pay during the Depression, the government cut back their pay, but he was always employed. There was always food on the table, and we had a couple of cows that ran in the railway yard, and my father, when he was away… As a small child, when I was about eight or ten really, I had to milk the cows,

before we went to school in the morning, and milk them again at night. So we had plenty of milk and cream, and butter, make our own butter. My mother made her own bread, of course, there was no baker or anything like that in those days. So, it was tough, but then, I mean, we knew nothing different. If we were doing those sort of things today after you know, all the easy things, it would be a different story.

We delivered milk around to a few people that were in the town, because we were the only people that had a cow, or cows. And so we sold milk for three pence a pint or something. My brother next to me and I used to milk the cow in the morning, and the other one would run it around and somebody else would separate it, we had a separator, and we also used to

occasionally have a pig, and that had to be fed. That would be killed for meat when it got to a certain size.

Well, not really. I can remember sending a pig down to Port Lincoln, and the Port Lincoln bacon people used to kill it and keep half, and send the other half back to you in bacon and ham.

Or, if it was killed fresh, we’d salt a lot of it down and pickle it, but then my father was fairly generous, so he’d give the odd ones around the town a piece of pork.

No, she looked after us.

She had no income, except the milk, the few pence we got from milk, I guess, helped.

We had two that I remember.

In those days, there was only about four families in the town. It increased from 1924 to 1929, I suppose, it went from four to about eight or ten.

Yeah, there was no-one else had milk, no. So we used to run milk around.

Well, unfortunately we didn’t have a lot of meat, because there was a farmer used to kill a sheep and deliver meat into the town. For years, I can remember when there were four families in the town,

he would cut the sheep down the centre and through the other way, and you’d either get a forequarter or the hindquarter. My mother looked with the hope that we could get it every week, but sometimes if the weather wasn’t right and he didn’t kill, so you’d be without meat. I can’t recall just how she used to make her own bread and her own cooking,

and make things, but I know that quite often we wouldn’t have meat. But we had plenty of eggs, we always had fowl, so there’s plenty of WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and turkeys. We would kill one or two of them, I guess, and supplement the meat nights. In those, of course, it was a bit of a luxury to have a chicken, but we had plenty of them.

Had a big yard and plenty of WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, plenty of eggs.

Well, the local store used to get vegetables in once a week. They used to come from Adelaide over on the ship at Port Lincoln, and up to Tumby Bay, rather. The local grocer would go into Tumby Bay and pick up his supplies

once a week.

Yeah, a little bit. The land was pretty hard and clay. There wasn’t a lot of vegetables grown, no.

Oh, yes. A lot of them never had shoes.

Of course, a lot of them go around without shoes today, but we always had boots, and clothes. Some of the other children were pretty ragged. The farmers, too, they weren’t getting very much. They were all children coming in off the farms were not very well dressed, a lot of them.

No shoes or socks.

Oh, yes, they took their lunch, and a lot of them came in horse and carts, and rode ponies in, and tied them up under trees. Went out at lunchtime and fed them, or took them to water.

I didn’t have very far to go, I walked. It was only, I suppose, three hundred metres, and we’d walk home for lunch.

Oh, heaps of them. Heaps of them during the Depression. Being on the railway line, they would come to Port Lincoln. I don’t know how they got to Port Lincoln, but they’d come up on the railway line trains, and

quite often you’d wake up in the morning, and there would be two or three in a little shed over in the railway yards. They’d got off the trains and stayed there. My mother, I don’t know how many swaggies she used to feed, they’d come and want to know if they could cut some wood, and she would give them breakfast, she was very kind in that regard. She’d never knock them back, she would always give them something to eat. They were genuine men, you know, they weren’t…

Today if you see a swaggie, you think he’s a bum, because he could get a job. But in those days they couldn’t. Of course, a lot of them, when my father was doing this relay work, they would employ those sort of fellows. He would have great gangs of men. They’d go for three or four months, then he would put them all off. They’d close their works down and send them on their way, ‘cause they’d had three or four months work, and get another

fresh lot, start up again, you know. So, it was pretty drastic times, very, very hard. I had some photos of those gangs that my father had, but now I don’t know where they are at the moment.

I left in 1932, I left at the age of 14, I’d done my

qualifying certificate, as it was known in those days. I’d done very well, I’d passed. But the nearest high school is at Port Lincoln, and there was no way that my father could afford to pay, ‘cause I’d have to be boarded, to go on to high school. That was out of the question in the Depression, so I left in 1932.

And just worked around, doing odd jobs. I had a regular job in the summer time, in the wheat harvest time, with the wheat agent, the farmers’ union agent, and I used to tally the wheat for them. I’d done that even before I’d left school, I’d started that. That’s probably what gave me the

inclination or wish to get into stock agency work, ‘cause he was an agent, but he couldn’t keep me in full time employment. I used to tally the wheat, and then I left school, and I went, you know, just everywhere I could get a job. I always had some money, and my mother would take half of it, and bank it for me.

Probably three or four, five shillings a week or something, that’s what we would get. And it was difficult, but I was never really out of work, and eventually I got a job with a man called Sheehan, at Tumby Bay, who had properties. He was an auctioneer, and had an auctioneering business, and I got work with him.

He died, and the business was sold, and it was sold to Elder Smith, the company that I eventually started working for. It was hard, and a lot of the boys had joined the army, and when they joined the army in 1940, had never had any permanent work. They’d had casual work, but they joined the army to get five shillings a day, that’s how tough it was.

Just generally with Mr Ashman, the agent, he also had a farm, and we didn’t have wheat agency, or you’re sending wheat out and trucking out. I’d go out and work on his farm, just for the day. You’d only have a day, it was about

five or six mile out of town. Go out there and do some fencing or things like that. He used to love to get out there, dear old fella that he was. When I worked for Sheehan’s, much the same. He had farms which I used to go and do odd jobs out on the farms for him. He had managers on the farms, and in one case, he had a son.

So that’s what went on right up until I went away to the war.

I don’t know, I can’t recall. I could always remember as a kid, seeing Mick Sheehan, as he was known, auctioneering. That got in my blood a bit, and that’s what I ended up doing as I got older.

I don’t know. You are introduced to it, I suppose, because there is nothing else about to do, you know. I tried to get into the railways, and in those days I remember coming to Adelaide to sit for an examination to go in as a boiler maker or something like that, in the late 30’s or in the mid 30’s.

I’d been out of school about three or four years, and we had the examination at the exhibition building in North Terrace, and I don’t know, but yes, it would be a hundred or two hundred kids sat for that examination. A lot of them were in straw boaters out of Prince Alfred College, and all those sort of kids, and St Peters.

They gave us an examination which was just a bit above me. I didn’t fail it, but I didn’t get enough marks. I think there was only about 20 vacancies, and there was about two or three hundred people applying for it, you know. Pretty tough.

Oh yes, well I was born during World War I, of course. My uncle, who was William Schmitt, won a military medal in the First World War, and he was my father’s brother. When I joined the army, I went and spoke to him; I knew nothing about the army.

Yes, yes, and that was to earn me some money, too. I played banjo in a little dance band. It wasn’t little, it was a family band, actually. There was about four in the family, they was known as

Durdins. The youngest daughter, she was a good pianist, she was only about 15 or 16, I suppose. There was Jim and John Durdin. John played drums and Jim played trumpet and saxophone. The father played euphonium, we had a couple of others that played

other instruments, you know.

I just self taught. I’ve still got it, but I can’t play anymore because I’ve cut all my hands to pieces. I had a saxophone, too.

Oh, we played for dances all around, at Cummins and Yeelanna, and Tumby Bay and Port Neill. We used to get

five shillings a night, I think it was. A ball on Saturday night, you’d get ten shillings, and that was a lot of money. Sometimes they’d want to go on, you’d say you finish at one o’clock, and everybody’ll say they want to go a bit longer than that, so they took the hat around and put some money in, and you could go for another

half or an hour. You’d get more for that hour than you got for that whole night, you know.

Well, I had a banjo, and Durdins were farmers, lived out of Ungarra three or four mile, or not that far, probably two mile. And, of course, they knew that I used to play this.

They got me to come out to their place one night, we practised and started up in a small way, and it just developed. Jim Durdin’s still alive. His brother John’s dead, and of course, his mother and the daughter that used to play the piano, they are all dead, passed on. Jim’s still alive, the poor thing. He was, a few years ago, still involved with the Port Lincoln band, brass band, the town band.

No, they were great days, you know. We used to have a truck, a tray top truck. We used to get on that and go out in the winter time, out to these places. You’d put a bit of a hood over it so that you could sit there with your instruments. We used to wear a black suit and tie, too, that’s what we used to dress in.

Yes, the balls particularly. In the winter time, places like Tumby Bay would have about five or six balls. There’d be the tennis club ball and the football club ball and the RSL [Returned and Services League] ball and others. There was a ball on practically every week somewhere. They were big events, great big suppers they used to dish out.

Very formal, the girls used to always wear evening gowns, long gowns, and the men mostly wear bow ties, black ties, suits.

Oh, well I started off I think I was about sixteen or seventeen, something like that, young. I played right up to the time when I went away to the war.

Oh, each one of us would get a

turn to get one or two dances, you’d go down on the floor and have a dance. But you’d mostly play, you’d only get two anyway at the most, but sometimes only one.

Oh, yes I think so, yeah. They used to like us a bit, I think. It was good, I enjoyed it.

Yes, I do, very well. I was boarding at the Sea Breeze Hotel, as it is known today. It was the Tumby Bay Hotel in those days. I was boarding there and one of the girls, Laurel Brindle, Jack Brindle had about four or five daughters,

and we used to always have a sing song around the piano on Sunday nights. That was quite common in those days for entertainment, play the piano, and someone would have a sing song. Her father came in and said, “War’s declared.” About eight or nine o’clock at night. There was a fellow there

he used to do a bit of after hours trading, you know, by the name of Harrison. We went down, the piano stopped playing. Laurel went down with this Harrison fellow, his wife was English, and she was quite a bit older than us, and she still had her parents in England, and I can remember her crying. It was a pretty devastating announcement. I remember it very, very well.

Well, strangely enough, my grandfather and my grandmother didn’t have much relation with their relatives in Germany, and that’s another long story if you want to hear that, because funny as it may sound, my grandfather was a strict Lutheran,

and my grandmother was a Catholic. They had, I think, eight children, and none of them were brought up Catholics or Lutherans. I understand that their first child’s illegitimate and their marriage in Germany broke the family up, because it was unheard of, a Catholic marrying a Lutheran. He came out here on his own, and then she followed with my eldest uncle,

who was born, that’s the child that was illegitimate. Oh, they married, of course. I don’t think he was born out of wedlock, but when she got pregnant, they went and married, very much cut against their upbringing. This is as I understand it, my mother’s told me the story when she was alive.

So they came out here, and I can remember as a small boy, my grandfather getting a photo of his brother lying in a coffin in Germany, he’d died. I can remember that as well as anything. But, I don’t recall them getting any correspondence or talked about his brothers, or she talked about her brothers or sisters or anything like that. It was pretty unfortunate, really.

Well, the outbreak of the First World War, I don’t know, but like my uncle Bill, that I’m named after, he went away to the First World War, and I had another uncle Ted, Edward, and he enlisted, and I think he was on the ship about half way over there, when the war was finished.

So, they had two sons involved in the war, against Germany. Of course, I was only a child, I wasn’t born till it nearly finished. I think they were very loyal to Australia, must have been.

Well, it’s different today. Today, I’d be very, very much against it,

as I am against the war in Iraq. I don’t think we should be involved, but then we were brought up in a different era. You know, I think we all saluted the flag every day when we went to school, and we were very loyal to the British Empire, and used to look at the maps of the world and see all that was red was the British Empire, and very proud of it.

I was only too anxious, no, happy to go and fight Germany. It’s a different world today, but it’s quite different to 1939, too.

Yes, I was 21 in 1939.

Yes,

I enlisted in April in 1940, the war broke out in September ’39. Of course at that time, there wasn’t too many enlisted much before the end of that year, because they weren’t ready for us, you know. They still weren’t ready for us when we did enlist. It was pretty primitive, the camps and the things, and old equipment. There was old equipment from the First World War.

I went down to Port Lincoln, and enlisted there, that’s where the only enlisting place was, my brother and I. I had a brother the same, and we enlisted the same day.

He was only 20. We were in Tumby Bay,

and he had to go out to Cummins and get my father to sign the form because he had to get permission. I said, “Well, I wish you luck.” I didn’t know how my father would react. But he said, “Bill’s going.” And so he signed the form and said ok. So we both enlisted, then we had a medical with the local doctor, and then came over to Adelaide and they put us on the ship, on the ferry that used to run from Port Lincoln

to Adelaide. We came over and went through.

Oh, well, I think she was proud of us in one regard, but I suppose she was nervous, thinking she would end up with four of us in the army. The other two enlisted in the air force, long after I’d left to go away. I was in the Middle East, in fact I might have been a POW [prisoner of war] when the youngest one enlisted. I might have been a POW when they both enlisted.

But, I suppose she had a lot of, I don’t know.

Yeah.

Murray. He and I joined up the same day, and we had consecutive numbers.

They went into the air force.

Jack and

Philip, Phil.

No, I don’t, I was a POW. I don’t think Phil was in very long. About a year, and Jack never got out of Australia. He was a mechanic, and he was at a place called Tocumwal in Victoria. But I think two years would have been the most that he was in.

Oh yes, there was quite a lot. At that time, we’d been put off, we had our medicals at Tumby Bay, and then we had to wait, I think it was roughly a month before we came over, because they couldn’t accommodate us in Adelaide, then we got a call to come.

They were enlisting at the rate of, during that period, about a thousand a week coming into Wayville pretty quickly.

Well, king and country, you know. Both, I guess. It was a different

feeling in those days to what it is today. You’ve got loyalty here, but you’re talking about republics is unheard of, talking about republics in those days, for British Empire, king and country. Everybody was very loyal to the flags, and that’s why you’ve got the old people, people like ourselves, went and fought for the flag, not too keen to see it changed.

But it will change, and you’ve got to be realistic about it. It will change some time, no doubt about that.

They took us straight to Wayville, which was the showground, oh you know Adelaide. That was taken over by the army. The whole lot, there was no show there. They used to have the trots on Saturday night, the Wayville trots, that was going,

but in those days they never had any shows, of course. And we occupied, I was down in the fruit and veg pavilion, close to the railway line. That’s where we were housed, and then we moved. We were put into the machine gunners. As I was moved up into the motor pavilion.

Oh, we used to go out everyday out into the parklands, you know, and route march and drill out there, then they’d take us all on route marches down to Kingston Park and Seacliff, walk around the streets, march the streets, you know.

Well, very easily. I didn’t pull any punches, they let you know quick smart and nothing… we were probably… The youth of those days were much easier to discipline than they are today. I’m sure they were, I mean I don’t think some of the young ones would put up with what we had to put up with.

We accepted it, there’s always one or two rebels, but in the main, you accepted the discipline. We were drilled in the early days by old diggers from the First World War, and that’s who was training you. We weren’t trained in the machine guns at that stage, we didn’t even have rifles, we’d just go out and march.

Get lectures on all sorts of things in the army, and what to expect.

Well, I don’t recall exactly what they told us, but we would find things in wartime, and you could never tell anyone what it’s going to be like

anyway, because in those days we didn’t have films like you’ve got today. You can view war today and see it actually as it happens, but in our day you couldn’t. So they used to try and fill in for us what it’s like to come under fire and all those sort of things. I can always remember when I first came under fire, it was quite different to what you expected anyway.

Yes, see I went to him, because I had no idea. A lot of the fellows that were in the light horse were in our battalion, and I had no army training of anything. I’d never been a CMF or whatever. I didn’t know anything.

So, I went up to him, he lived at Port Broughton, and caught the train up and had a weekend up there, and talked to him about it. He was the one that influenced me to go into the machine gun. He was a machine gunner himself, he said, “You don’t get the foot slogging you do if you’re in infantry.” And you’re behind, in those days there were three lines. You had the infantry out in front, the machine gunners following in behind

them, and then the artillery following in behind them again. He said, “You know, if you get in the machine gunners, rather than do a lot of squad drilling and marching, you spend more time tending your guns and assembling your guns and all those sort of things.” A much easier life he thought. So that’s why I took it.

Yes, that’s right.

Well, they used to line us up occasionally, and call out for volunteers. I went out there drilling one day, and my brother wasn’t in the same squad as I, and I came in and he was gone. All of the sudden they wanted engineers, and he’d called, and he’d got in, and he’d gone, he’d

left Wayville. He was over in Puckapunyal in a couple of days, or the next day. They called out for volunteers for, in those days, the 48th Battalion had been formed I think, and the 43rd or 48th, they called out for volunteers for that battalion, and they called out for machine gunners. And so I stepped forward, along with a whole lot of others and we went into the machine gunners.

Then you form up once they called you out, and they just take you off and put you in a squad and you’re a machine squad, you know. We moved from the fruit and veg pavilion up to the motor pavilion.

He went away with the 23rd

Corps Fuel Company, engineers. But he came back, and when he got back to Australia he went into the bomb disposal, he ended up in charge of a bomb disposal group, up in New Guinea.

Well, I think he would have come back to Australia in 1942, toward the end of ’42 perhaps,

and they sent him to Darwin. He was in Darwin for a short time when they called for volunteers to form a bomb disposal group, and he was a sergeant, and he got in charge of this small group, I think he had about 20 or 25 fellows. They used to de-louse bombs and shells, and what have you.

Then we got guns, you know. Not so much the guns, but the locks, because you get blockages in machine guns, and learn how to unlock them, how to find out what, they had about four things that could go wrong, and you learnt all that.

We used to go down, I’ve got a photo of myself, to the firing range down in Port Adelaide, and fire down there. I found a photo this morning of myself, along with a lot of others. It was the Vickers machine guns, they are obsolete now, of course. They were a pretty old sort of a gun anyway. They were no good in the jungle, hopeless, but they were alright in open warfare,

in the Middle East.

Well, not that I recall, but I guess there were. There’d have to be.

Not a machine gun. Fired plenty of rifles, oh yeah.

Very noisy, they were terrible things, terrible. Very noisy, particularly

if you’re in the number two lane, alongside, feeding the belts in. The shells come out and they are red hot, and they hit you. They’d burn you, you know. No, you didn’t have ear muffs like you do today. Artillery and anyone, they’ve got ear muffs on to break the noise down, but we didn’t have anything like that.

Five to man a gun.

Well, the first one fired, and number two fed the belts in. The number three was ammunition, he was looking after the ammunition, and the other two were back bringing up ammunition. So it took five to man a gun.

Oh, I was mainly number three or number four.

Yeah, I wasn’t firing. Although everyone had to know how to fire them. I mean we all went through the training of firing the gun and feeding the belt.

Well, the guns that we went away with were old Vickers guns from the First World War. Twenty-two years after the war finished, we were away with the same guns, and the fact they were so short of equipment, they were water-cooled guns, and we didn’t even have, there used to be a little gallon tin of water that used to feed in and keep the barrel cool, water cooled.

We didn’t even have those until we got to the Middle East.

We moved up to Woodside in, I think it was in January

’41, I’m not too sure. It was hot weather anyway, January would be right.

Well, we’d done a lot of route marches up in Woodside, through the hills. Mostly marching and route marching, getting fit. Not firing the guns, we didn’t fire any guns at Woodside, we were just

going through the learning how to do the blockages that you can get in a machine gun, you know.

Oh, they were in the lock. The main working parts, there were about four from memory, things can go wrong that’ll stop, the gun will cease firing. Once you pull the lock out, I can’t remember it now,

you were able to know what exactly caused the blockage and put it right and put the lock back in and start firing again.

Well, I don’t think I became an expert, but the secret of it was to be able to do it in a short space of time, a bit of an art.

So where some of them could do it in seconds, it might take another fellow a minute to do it, you know. To sort of find out what the fault was and then get it going. But I can’t remember what they were now. A long time.

Oh, the Middle East, there was no doubt about that, the Middle East or England. The Middle East for the Australians at that time. There was only one battalion, the 10th Battalion and a few others that went to England, and they were brought back out to the Middle East. They never got into action in England, they just came back out to the Middle East, and to the desert in north Africa. That’s where we thought we were bound for.

When we got to the Middle East, it was just when Greece had fallen.

Oh, well, we were kept fairly well up to date. We knew there’d been a big push back in the desert from Benghazi, the Australians

who got pushed out of there. It was gloom and doom in the Middle East at that time, we weren’t doing very well at all. The Rommels had knocked us about pretty well, so it wasn’t very good news, and it wasn’t very good news in Europe either, in England. At that stage, the war news where we were concerned was going backwards.

Well, we were there from January until April, till we sailed, till we went away. We left there and went to Sydney, and embarked from Sydney.

They had big barracks up there, wood and iron, they were. Pretty cold

when it came. When we got there it was hot, but towards April, when we left there, it was very cold, a very cold winter, beginning of winter. And so these barracks were especially built for us, they would hold about 50 or 60 men or more, might be more than that. Long barracks, you just laid on the floor, you didn’t have any beds, you just had a

palliasse, as they called them, a bed full of straw. A ground sheet, which you put under you, and a couple of old grey blankets, no sheets, no pillow. Pretty crude, we used to envy the air force fellows because they had pillows and sheets and what have you.

Oh, well. I had several mates,

much the same as followed on as a POW, you’d always have a little group of three or four of you, and you’d be mates. People you picked up with, and a lot of them stuck with you right through, even right through the POW days. My mates that were with me in Changi, they were all dead, that was in the same cell as me. I haven’t got any of them, I’m the sole survivor, and then of course at Woodside we got split up.

We were in E company then. But when we got to the Middle East, we were all sent into different companies, so that split us wide apart.

Well, they were our own officers, of course. They were very good. We had a good relationship with our officers. I don’t think, there’s probably one or two not so good, but in the main they were great fellows, and unfortunately there’s hardly any of them left.

They had been, of course, through officer schools, and the schools of army training, so that they were top class. We had a very strict, very, very good CO [Commanding Officer] Blackburn, who was a VC [Victoria Cross] in the First World War, and he laid it down pretty hard I think, as well.

He set the example.

He was Lieutenant Colonel Blackburn, he won a VC in the First World War. He formed the battalion, and remained the commander of the battalion until we got to Java, when he was made a brigadier.

No, not really. The South Australians either had to be headquarter company, A company or E company, and E company was the first reinforcement sailed with the battalion. They were the reinforcement company, and they then reinforced. There was the Tasmanians and the Victorians and the West Australians.

They were the reinforcements as anyone dropped out through sickness or whatever, and left the battalion, those companies were all reinforced by South Australians. They didn’t have their own reinforcements.

Oh yes. I think we had two lots. We were sort of ready to go, went and said goodbye,

and kissed Mum and everyone, and then found out we didn’t go, and we got another lot later. I just can’t recall how long apart, but I can remember we went home on embarkation leave twice.

Yes, that’s right. It wasn’t very easy, either. It’s not very easy. As far as we were concerned, it was alright, but it was pretty hard on your mother, saying goodbye to them, and I suppose the chaps who had wives would be worse.

Oh yes, there were farewell parties. My mother and father were at Cummins at that time, they had left Ungarra. They had a farewell party for me there, and I had one at Ungarra as well, and one at Tumby Bay.

Of course there were three or four at a time, there wasn’t one just for you particularly, there’d be two or three other fellows going. There was always a presentation, they gave you something. I can’t remember exactly what we got, and much the same when we got home, welcome home parties were very good as well.

Not that I recall. She was a very realistic woman, my mother, and she understood, just look after yourself, you know. Come back, that’s about it.

Of course, we’ll talk about the POW days, and my mother later, if you like.

No, not that I recall.

No, I didn’t. They didn’t work if I did, anyway.

We were entrained from Woodside, never forgotten it. We marched out in the night time in the dark,

it was a bitumen road, and we entrained at Balhannah, so it was quite a distance from Woodside, and the camp is up a mile or so off the railway line. We made the march along the side of the road, not on the bitumen where you’d make a lot of noise, you know. There was a thousand of us, the whole battalion, and when we got down to Balhannah, there’s a band there

playing ‘Wish you luck as I wave you goodbye’. And there was heaps of people on the platform, too. Wives and mothers and what have you. So, all this walking along on the side of the road to be quiet, and no one to speak or anything like that. Make any noise, it was quite different when we got to Balhannah.

No, it wasn’t a secret, and then we went from there right to Sydney on the train.

We left that night and got into Melbourne. We got off the train at, not Flinders Street, the other railway station, and then we had an hour or so there, ‘cause I remember we all shot across to one of the pubs, had a few drinks, then we got back on, and went up. Then we had to change trains

at Albury, and eventually got to Sydney, and went aboard the ship.

I think we were in our long trousers and what have you. We had a bag, a sausage bag,

a big kit bag, they were all taken from you when you go aboard ship. You are issued with a much smaller bag, a sea kit bag, and a haversack. Your backpack’s gone, you don’t have that. That goes in the ship’s hull, I guess. We just had our ordinary clothes, our uniform.

Long, not shorts, because at that time it was getting around to winter, anyway. So we were just in the normal uniform.

Slouch hat, yes. Tin hat, you carry that all the time. And our rifles were put in the hull.

Well, those that weren’t number one or two had a 303, you know, the old army rifle that was First World War ones as well, they weren’t new either.

Yes, the 303, common old rifle in those days.

You don’t see them anymore, I don’t think.

I was on the [SS] Isle de France, which was a French liner. It had been in Singapore and sabotaged, and it was in a pretty bad state. It was a big ship, about the fifth biggest ship afloat in the day. There was the [HMS] Queen Mary and the [HMS] Queen Elizabeth and a couple of others bigger than that,

but it was about a 50 or 60 thousand ton liner. A French ship, but we run into problems with the sewerage on it because it was sabotaged and the plans, as I understand, of the ship itself were destroyed, and no one knew where the sewerage pipes were or all that sort of thing. We ran into a lot of trouble.

It was a nice liner, other than that.

Oh, up on one of the decks. It was Easter Good Friday, and there was heaps and heaps, because it was holidays, heaps of small boats on Sydney harbour, and people on the shore waving us out.

We went up on our own, but somehow or other in that convoy with us was the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, the [SS] Aquitania, the [SS] Mauritania. The Aquitania, I think, we’d picked it up somewhere out at sea, and that had all New Zealanders on it. So we formed up, I’m not quite sure where the Mary and the Queen Elizabeth were.

They sailed up to Sydney Harbour, I think they did, I can’t recall it. But we ended up very shortly after we got out of the heads, we had five ships. I know we were off Kangaroo Island very far down south, on Easter Monday, so Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. One of the crew said, “You’re out from South Australia.”

Very rough seas, big swells. A lot of the people who hadn’t been to sea before were seasick. It was a bit of a mess.

I was alright, I’d always been, I’d done a lot of fishing and been in boats, and on this ferry from Port Lincoln to Adelaide quite a lot, a number of times, you know. It didn’t bother me.

No, it wasn’t. We were down below the decks, we were in hammocks. I fortunately had a hammock, and people slept under the hammocks, on the floor, and I, fortunately, got a hammock, because some of those that slept underneath, the seasickness, and the fellas up in the hammocks

were seasick, and oh, what a mess. No, we had water up to our ankles when we were going down to have our lunch in the mess. It was a real mess. In fact when we got to Fremantle, they thought we’d be taken off, and they’d try and fix the thing up, but that didn’t happen. We were only in Fremantle,

that’s right, we picked up, our Don company had gone home, and we picked them up in Fremantle, the ship pulled in there and they came aboard. But, there’s a bit of a revolt, not a revolt, but a lot of the fellows were very dissatisfied with the ship and the conditions we were living under. I think we went to Colombo from there; we had ten days in Colombo

where they put radar, anti submarine device, like a radar type of thing.

No, don’t know about that. I don’t know where we crossed the equator. I guess somewhere before we got to Colombo we’d have crossed the equator.

The equator cuts across through Singapore, and Colombo’s a lot further up, so it would be somewhere there. I don’t recall feeling any bumps or anything like that, going over it.

Yes, down in the mess where we used to have our meals, it was terrible. They put boards down for us to walk on, terrible.

And the meals weren’t very good either. I think they had some trouble in the kitchens. The ship wasn’t ready for it to take troops, it had been, as I say, sabotaged in Singapore. Sabotaged somewhere, whether it had happened in Singapore, it went to Singapore to be repaired, I don’t know. It left a lot to be desired, I can assure you.

Oh, well, when we weren’t down in the mess, they still had discipline, not discipline, routine on ship. Used to have to do PT [Physical Training] every day, morning and afternoon, so they didn’t sort of let us

lie around. We were out doing exercise or we were doing something. They mounted the Vickers machine guns, they had some of those on board to fire against any aircraft. I don’t know how good they would have been, but we had to take our turn, I think it went on once or twice at least. We were on gun duty, out on the balcony,

out on the top deck. We weren’t attacked in any shape or form by submarines or aircraft.

Well, we were there for ten days, we used to go ashore each day till we ran out of money, then it was pointless going ashore without money. Nice place, enjoyed it.

I got very friendly with one of the, our ship was too big to tie up at the dock, and we used to go ashore in lifers each day. I got friendly with one of the Singhalese water police. So he said, “Come up to mine.” I met him when he was off duty for the day, and he gave us a nice run around Ceylon.

Colombo, rather. What’s it called, Sri Lanka now? So I get to see a fair bit of it, and learnt a bit about the place. He told me there was a murder once a day in Colombo, and that astounded me. I’ll always remember that, a murder, one every day. I think we’ve got one every day here now, haven’t we?

Yes, and we sailed from there right through the Red Sea, up until we got to the canal. Got off this end of the canal, at Port Tewfik.

Got off at four o’clock in the morning, we went ashore. I don’t think the train left till about eight o’clock, and it took us all day to go about seventy mile. I don’t know why, but we’d stop and start. It was an interesting journey, though. Desert and quite often, we were quite close to the canal. I can remember

we were given one water bottle for the day, and told that’s all we could have, and no more. The train stopped right opposite a young crew on the canal. The canal was, I suppose, a hundred yards away. These English fellows, I can remember them, they were there with their anti aircraft guns. Came across, and I said, “Are you gonna need water?” And they had a big stone

jar of water, one of those Egyptian jar things. I came over and filled my water bottle, and a couple of other fellows’ water bottles, and the officers seen us, and they got fined five pound or something for drinking their water. He said, “You could have killed yourself.” And I said, “If he’s drinking it, why would I kill myself?” You know, it was all sterilised, it had to be treated, of course.

Anyway, I was disciplined for that.

Well, I guess I did. It didn’t matter, I got nice cool water, and I drank all my water and the others. He would have filled up a lot more, but the train took off. I got mine filled.

Oh, yes, we were briefed, particularly about water.

Drinking water that hadn’t been treated, not to drink any water, that was taboo. But then when my defence was that it wouldn’t kill me, if the English fellows were drinking it, then they said, “Well, not only was it that you shouldn’t do that, but the other thing is that you have to learn to go without water, that once you get into action

you mightn’t get one water bottle a day. So, you’ve gotta learn to restrict yourself and not drink water.” Anyway.

No, I think it was five pound or something, I can’t remember, but anyway. I don’t think I can remember the officer very well, wasn’t very popular as far as I was concerned.

But anyway, that’s only part of the learning.

He was E company officer, yes. At that time we were still in E company, because I wasn’t transferred to C company till we got to Hill 95.

Well, you know, it was different, of course. Our first impressions of Colombo, different people, different languages, you know, it was interesting to see them, ‘cause I’d never been out of Australia before. Then, going up the canal, I can always remember it was mostly sand, a hundred and twenty or something in the shade.

Very, very hot. But then we came across all these Italian prisoners of war that they had. Hundreds of them, just in camps alongside the railway line. A lot of them came back here to Australia. They surrendered very easily, the Italians, they didn’t want to fight a war. They’d captured them up in Bardia and Tobruk, thousands of them.

This sort of impressed them too, to see these Italians and the uniforms they wore, it was all very interesting.

Look, I couldn’t tell you. I think they were grey, much the same as ours.

Well, you know, the fact that they only had a fence

around them, they could have got out and gone if they wanted to go, very easy for them to escape, there were only about two chaps guarding them. We came across another lot of them being marched, they weren’t in the enclosure, I suppose they were going down to an enclosure somewhere. One soldier in the front, English I think, not Australian. One in the front, one in the back guarding about two or three

hundred prisoners. They were marching along quite happily, you know. They didn’t want to be in the war, I don’t think. Anyway they were glad to be captured and get out of it. They would have been captured a long time, because that was in 1941, and it was another four years, so they had a long time behind barbed wire.

They sent them out and worked on farms here I think, up at Loveday, and all over the place.

When we got there, there was only one structure, one building that was a cookhouse, and we lived in, we had to put up our own tents.

That was the first thing, we had big bell top tents, I think about eight or ten to a tent. So you can just imagine how many tents there were, when you have a thousand men. And dig our own slit trenches, we were in an area where we would come under bombing. An interesting thing about that was, that’s where a lot of the light horse had fought in the first war, across that desert. Hill 95 is a part of the

First World War fighting. And we dug up shells and empty rifle cases, bullets, some live ones, you know. We had to dig a trench about four foot deep, five foot deep. There was a slit trench for every tent, it was easy digging ‘cause it was all sand.

I recall we got at least eight or ten shells, empty shells, digging that trench. So there must have been a lot of bullets fired across there. I’m sorry that I didn’t keep one or two of them. That would have been a good memento, but I didn’t.

Yes, I think I did too, you know.

We knew that we were getting close to the holidays, so the army was getting nearer then. Although, it didn’t bother us a lot. We weren’t greatly worried about it, we didn’t know what we were going into. I don’t think it bothered us either, we were young and silly I suppose. Once we did get in there, and ended up, the whole thing changed.

Oh, yes, I suppose I did, but didn’t give it a lot of thought.

I think it was hot.

Certainly wasn’t cold. I think we got into shorts pretty well, we were in shorts so it was hot weather. We were in shorts right through then, even when we went up into Syria we were in shorts.

No, we didn’t see any dust storms ever while I was there, I didn’t experience any dust storms. I think you get them out in the Sahara, although Gaza itself was all sand there, Hill 95, there’s nothing else but sand, big sand dunes. And Hill 69, when we came back, but I didn’t see any dust storms. Didn’t see any in Syria either, and we were in the desert part of Syria too, you know.

But it was a different desert there, stones, not sand.

We weren’t briefed at all, it was very sudden. If I remember, one minute we were

loping around the hills, and doing drills and what have you, and the next minute, bang one night we were on trucks and gone. So, it was very sudden. I don’t recall that we’d heard anything about the fighting in Syria, we’d heard about the recent retreat of course, but I don’t recall anything about Syria, and we went in there, we

weren’t briefed about it at all, we were just told that we were going, we were going into action.

Yes, I was transferred about a week after I got to Hill 95, I stepped up into C company, ‘cause there was somebody, I think four or five wanted. As they went off to hospitals, and got sick. When you’ve got a group of 200 men in a company,

roughly 200, there’s always someone going to be sick. And so their spots have got to be filled. So I went in there, that was it, full stop, and I was in C company. And I was in C company right through the Syrian campaign. But then I went to hospital, and I came back to hospital, and I was transferred, went into Don company.

Oh, well, I can’t recall whose spot I took, I would never have known anyway, whose spot I took, so I just went in and whoever went out, I took his spot. Simple as that.

Oh, well, they were all

Tasmanians, I don’t recall any of them are alive today, some of them died while we were POWs. So, you know, that campaign lasted six weeks, so it wasn’t a great length of time that you were with them. Because, I went after the Syrian campaign.

Well, we went in to a place called El Kuneitra, which was just over the border, the Palestine Syrian border, that was C company. We were the only company that went in that direction, the rest of the battalion went up to the Lebanon side, in the Lebanon mountains,

along the coast of Lebanon. C company, the company I was with, we went into the desert side, and we were the only Australians there. We were corps troops of course, that’s another thing I haven’t pointed out, our battalion was corps troops, and corps troops could be seconded to any other party, you know, so we were seconded to an

English group, giving machine gun fire to an English battalion. And we went into this place called El Kuneitra, which was quite a big town. It had been taken by the English two days before, and then the Vichy French had counter attacked and they were pushed out, had a lot of casualties. We went in to

re-attack it, and it wasn’t that far over the border, as I remember, you know, 25 or 30 mile. We went up there in the night time.

No, they took us up there in trucks, the trucks then disappeared and let us out, and we got down behind some hills, it was undulating country just there.

And we sort of got there and set up in position in the dark, and we were there all day. That night, just on dusk, we opened fire, and there was a big infantry, the Northumberland Fusiliers, it was a British battalion, came and the artillery opened up from back behind.

Of course, we didn’t really know where they were, even. They’d sort of done the same thing as us, they were probably half a mile further on our right. We opened up and gave supporting fire. We were out of the town I suppose, a mile and a half. We opened up in the afternoon, it was.

I’d always remember this as long as I live, these Northumberland Fusiliers fellas going out, and the mortars falling all around them. They were scattered out, and they just kept going, they just kept marching, and I thought oh, hell, it’s pretty tough in there. Unfortunately, and this is the first I remember of the civilian people, women and children, coming out of the place.

Of course, on foot, and you see it today on film, and they were crying, carrying gear, and carrying babies and goodness knows what. Filing out of the town, coming down past us, over to our left. There was another infantry battalion, an English one came in further over,

and I don’t know what time they surrendered, but they surrendered, the flag went up, and we went in and we were only in there a day or two when we moved on. But that was our first encounter of the war. We didn’t get any shells around us, or mortars, but the infantry got them, and they were quite close to us.

They were within, on our right the closest would have been two or three hundred yards as I remember.

Oh well, number one carried the gun, and number two carried the tripod. Number three carried the ammunition and the water tank, and we were set up, we didn’t carry them from that point. We remained

in that position, and fired in that position all the time.

Four, if I remember right at that stage.

Oh, very heavy. I think they were a heavy metal, not like they are today.

The number one fellow, the fellow that actually fired the gun, he carried it, he carried the barrel, it came apart, you know. The tripod was a separate thing, and number two, he’d run up and set the tripod up, and the number one set the gun on it. Number three connected up the water tank, and so on.

Well, the

little container held the gun on the water, which is about four litres of water. And that got quite hot, too, but it cooled the barrel down, otherwise you couldn’t fire. You could fire the thing without water, but you only fired it a very limited time, you had to wait for the barrel to cool, but the water kept the barrel cool, they were a water-cooled gun.

Yes, you carried the water, oh yes.

You had a little hose that went out of the top of the can up into the barrel, you know. There was mechanism to pump it up, you know.

Oh no, that was easily done.

Well, it didn’t have a big recoil, not like a rifle. They just jumped around a fair bit, that’s why it wasn’t accurate like the guns are today, but it fired, I can’t remember how many rounds a minute.

Around 200 odd, I think, from memory, that’s only a guess. It vibrated quite a bit, so the bullets shot around all over the place, but they were effective, particularly out a reasonable range. Once you got over a thousand yards it wasn’t very effective, but up to four or five hundred yards

it was very effective.

Afternoon it was, we were there, we went in the night time, but we didn’t open up fire till afternoon.

Well, you could see the outskirts of

Kuneitra, there was nothing in between, El Kuneitra it was called, it was quite a big place.

No, it was just undulating, on the edge of the desert, undulating country. So we were able to get ourselves in what we used to call waddies, in the little hollows and things like that.

Nothing. I think we were out of sight of the enemy, I don’t think they could see us, but then of course if you start opening fire they could see you. We weren’t shot at, at that place at all, because

I don’t think there was a lot of them in there. I don’t know, I mean they counter attacked and knocked the English out a couple of days, or three or four days before, but when we went back in again, the only thing they had was mortars, and they were firing mortar shells into the infantry battalions that went in. We didn’t cop any flack at all, nothing.

Of course, there was no planes, there was no aircraft, so we got out of it fairly lightly, you know.

How much ammo? Oh, I wouldn’t know. See there were four platoons, so there were sixteen guns.

We would have had enough. There was a big ammunition truck that could carry all our supplies, but how much, I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t remember anyway, if I did know.

Oh they were, from memory, normally would be about

80 to 100 yards. Just depends where you can get a possie that you’re out of sight. If there wasn’t anywhere where you could get down, you might go to 150 yards, but normally you’d like to have guns about 80 yards apart, something like that.

Oh, well the officers would say fire, you know. They would be in telephone contact or signal contact with the infantry battalion, once the infantry battalion started, then the

artillery started, and then the machine gunners opened up. And they’re not necessarily firing at anyone, just firing into the town, you know. Because no enemy came out at us. I couldn’t see where the shells were flying, we knew what direction they were coming from, but you couldn’t see the actual mortar guns being fired.

They were under cover as well. So you wouldn’t know where they would be coming from. But the officers order the fire.

No, it was signals. You had a signal box,

telephone.

No, the platoon commander would give the orders to fire, he’s only one, but he was connected up. He’d be connected up to the other platoons.

But I can’t remember for sure whether we had the full lot there at El Kuneitra. We did when we got up to Damascus, that was the next action, we went into Damascus.

Well, that really tore my heart to pieces, and

it still does when I see them today coming out of Iraq or Baghdad and things like that. You know, and you think, well, what the hell? Here we are, you’ve got these poor women and kids crying, and old people carrying what they can carry, getting out of the place. I guess they’d done that a few days before, but I don’t think they had any air raid shelters

or anything like that. They just sort of come out in droves, walking out and getting out of the place. So not a very pretty sight, that will always stick in my memory, those poor people coming out of El Kuneitra in the late afternoon.

I don’t know, there was nowhere

to go, but at least they came our way, they didn’t go the other way. They came out past us, and I suppose they just got out of the place, all the shooting and shells and what have you going in there. It was only natural that you’d want to get out. Crying, not a pretty sight.

Well, I think it started in the afternoon. About eight or nine hours. From memory I think it was about eight o’clock at night when we ceased fire. I didn’t see anyone surrender,

but that’s when the war stopped, and even they stopped. I suppose they came out with a white flag. I’d seen the white flag in Damascus, when they surrendered in Damascus, but I didn’t see any in El Kuneitra.

Well, we went in, and we were in the town for a couple of days. It was a mess,

because they’d been looting and the place was a mess, there was bodies all around the place, they were killed.

Yes, civilians, and soldiers, Vichy French. We were there only from memory a day or two days when we moved out. Probably went in, we might have had one day in there, got in there, then that

night, or early hours of the morning, and had the next day there, and then we were gone again, because we went on then up to Damascus.

No, I can’t remember, I think we just lay down, you’d have your own ground sheet and just lay down where you put your head down, you know.

Yes, it was. I’d seen my grandfather when he died, but that was a first, yes, I hadn’t seen any deaths. Not very pleasant, either, but you get used to it. I don’t think you get used to it but, you never get used to it, but it’s not the first time you don’t want to

look at them, you don’t want to go near a dead person. But over the years, of course, they got used to it. For a young person that’s not very pleasant at all.

That’s right.

For one minute you’re sort of happy go lucky, and you think what’s it going to be like? You can never visualise what it’s going to be like. You can now, because you see war, you see it in actual, this Iraq war, you’ve seen that on TV, actual shooting and what happens, but we had no conception at all.

We’d seen some pictures, but not actual, there was no such thing as television in those days, anyway.

No, a hell of a lot worse. The noise I think is the thing that you don’t sort of realise, to begin with. Shells going off, they make a hell of a ding, a bang. You get machine guns firing at the same

time, it’s a pretty noisy affair, I can assure you. And you’re ducking down for cover as close as you can to the ground, and won’t sort of get underneath you, you want to get down lower and lower. But, it’s a frightening experience, and I don’t think you’d ever get used to it.

You get not used to it, but it’s not so bad after the initiation, and the longer it goes I think, the more you get used to it. But it’s still frightening. You don’t know what’s gonna happen, you’re gonna get hit, you’re not gonna get hit, you can hear the bullets whizzing by quite close to you. It’s not very pleasant

I can assure you. But you’ve got your mind on your job I suppose, too, what you’re doing and your own protection. More so with the Japanese, the experiences there were worse, it was a much closer war.

Then we moved up, you see. There was a little desert where we were, and we didn’t encounter anything until we went to Damascus. I don’t know how far it is from El Kuneitra to Damascus, but we moved out of El Kuneitra, and went up to Damascus, which is at the foothills of the Lebanon mountains, and it was the capital of Syria. I think it still is. We took

up our positions there in a great big waddy, as we called them, outside Damascus. Much the same thing applied there. Blackburn himself was with us then, he came up. The 27th Battalion, the South Australian battalion, part of them was with us.

We took a bit longer, we were firing a lot longer there, until they surrendered. I can remember seeing that, seeing they came out with a white flag. Blackburn, our CO took the surrender, he went in on a truck, or car, rather, and accepted that flag. Of course, that was the end of that, but it was a much longer, drawn out.

We were there a couple of days before the actual firing , and we ended up attacking the place. I can remember we got bombed, that was the first bombs we’d had. We had a plane come over and drop bombs right alongside, from here to the middle of the road, I suppose. One landed right beside me and frightened the hell out of us. Got a few

shrapnel wounds, others got injured. We didn’t have anyone killed in that air raid, I don’t think, I’m pretty sure we didn’t. But we had a day and a half at least, before. I can always remember one of the chaps, we went up there in the night time and there’d been the same thing that happened there. There’d been fighting outside,

and the Allies were beaten and sent out, I don’t know who was in there. I can remember this cairn of rocks when we woke up in the morning, I was sleeping from about here to the corner of the wall, just laying down on the ground, and this cairn of rocks and a pair of feet came out, ‘cause they couldn’t bury this poor fellow. He was a Moroccan, I think.

A dark Free French bloke, but he was black. They hadn’t had time to bury him, so they just put all these rocks over him. One of the chaps, he’d never seen anyone, and he said, “What’s this?” I said, “There’s someone underneath there, that’s his boots, his shoes.” They didn’t cover his boots up. This fellow said, “It wouldn’t be a body.” And I said, “Well, you drop a stone to it, it’s gotta be a body.” And hell, that was the end of him, he went

all colours, I remember that very, very well.

No, he didn’t faint, but he nearly did. So, that was another issue, as I say. It was much the same situation, the massacre that it was at El Kuneitra. But then we went into the mountains and it became a different story altogether.

That went on for some time after. Damascus is a big city, but they put a lot of shells into it, and they surrendered, they didn’t have the Vichy French, didn’t have the firing power, you know. ‘Cause they were fighting, of course, the rest of

my battalion, and most of the fighting was going on up in the Lebanon side, along Beirut and up through there. So they capitulated, but its about six weeks from the time it started to finish, it was a six week campaign, and we didn’t get much rest in all of that time. I mean, we were fighting all the time.

Oh, well, I mean, I didn’t think very much of them at all. They were the Free French and the Vichy French. They’d turned against their own country, and they had the French Foreign Legion of course, with them. They had these Moroccan, no they didn’t go over with us very well at all.

But we didn’t get to see many of them, they were counted up and taken up to Tripoli, I think. They were shipped out from there, where they went I don’t know.

Well, where we had open warfare, we were then into mountainous country where we didn’t know where anything was coming from. We weren’t fighting cities, we were just fighting people. We went out, after Damascus fell, they took us up into an apple orchard, to have a rest. We’d been a few days,

a couple of weeks over that period where we didn’t get a rest at all. Blackburn was there, and it was only our company. We went into this apple orchard to have a bit of a breather, no fighting, we thought. I can remember poor old Tom Bishop and they said, “You have to dig trenches, dig yourself in.” and there was a stone wall

either side, drive in through this orchard. Big stone wall, about 18 inches, two foot thick I suppose. Dig yourself in, and dig a trench for two, you know. So Tom said, “I’ll dig a trench.” And I said, “I’m gonna get some of these apples.” They were little apples. I got in the dixie, and thought we’d have a bit of stewed apple,

just cook ‘em. I didn’t know how to cook ‘em, but I was gonna cook ‘em. Anyway, so Tom dug the trench, and he got down about a foot, 12 inches, or not quite that deep, and there was water. He had it right alongside this stone wall. So anyway, we took the apples and it got dark, and we put our ground sheets out.

It was quite damp, this hole that he dug. Anyway, the next thing we started being shelled, shells flying all around us, landing in there. They must have seen us go in there. Anyway, old Tom, I had this written down in my diary. We’d had a fellow killed a week or two before, he was in a slit trench, and he put his head up, and

he got a bit of shrapnel, cut his throat, and he just dropped down. Nobody knew, there was three or four in the slit trench. He bled to death, he got this vein here in his neck. This shell went off right alongside us, and I was worried about this wall, because if the wall fell in, if it hit the wall the big rocks would fall in on top of you. Anyway, I said, “Are you alright Tom?” And he didn’t answer me,

and “Booter” Burbury, who was the sergeant, who was from her to your car away, I suppose, he was sleeping out in the orchard there somewhere. He said, “You alright, Bill?” And I said, “Oh, there’s something wrong with Tom.” I kept shaking him, you know. He was pushing against me in this little trench he’d dug, and I’m sort of up like this. Anyway, I said,

“Are you alright?” And he didn’t answer, so “Booter” Burbury said, “What’s the matter?” I don’t know what’s wrong with Tom, and the next thing he says, “I’m alright.” And I said, “What’s the matter with you?” And he said, “I was saying my prayers.” I will always remember that, I say my prayers for old Tom. I wrote that in my diary, and I could tell you the date if I had my diary.

Yeah, I thought because the shell went off so close to us,

he’d have copped some shrapnel, you know. Of course, my ears were still ringing from the noise when it goes off, they make a hell of a noise, your ears ring, you’ve got no earmuffs or anything.

I didn’t. He was a great bloke, Tom. Anyway, so Blackburn was running around saying, “Out! Get in the trucks.” We had all our trucks and everything there.

Everybody was lying around, so we got in these trucks and moved out in the dark. I can’t recall exactly where we went, but we got away from that area, because it was only one gun firing, and someone said that they had it on a railway line. And it was a big artillery gun on a track, and they were bunging this into us.

They must have known we were there, because they were spot on. They were landing all around us, but they were only coming every half a minute. I suppose they take a while to load up and go again. So we went from there, then we moved into another position the next day, and we never moved after that,

because we just couldn’t make any headway. The infantry couldn’t. We got shelled a lot there, too, and that went on for some time. A week or two, I suppose. Might have been a couple of weeks.

Oh, I think they handled it pretty well. We had one or two that didn’t. One of our officers took off, deserted. They sent him back to Australia, I don’t know what happened to him. I know what happened to him after, when I came home from the war, he had a hotel up at Barmera somewhere, but he didn’t handle it. We stuck it out. I don’t know, there could have been people that

got nervous, but I wasn’t involved with any of them. None of the fellas I was with peaked on it, they just put up with it. Not very good, not very nice.

Oh yes, you had to be under cover. I mean, when we went and entered this other position,

which is in the mountains, we were reasonably covered without being in trenches. We were behind mounds and things like that, although we used to get shelled. The shells would either land short of us, or over the top of us, but they were quite close. I remember the first shell that went off that I ever had go off near me,

I picked the shrapnel up, a big piece of shrapnel like that, and I thought, this is pretty. And it was red hot, it burnt my hand. Never pick it up, not when it first goes off.

No, the snow didn’t come. There was snow on top of the cedars, it snowed up there all year round, but it gets a bit dirty. It didn’t snow until Christmas, that’s when it snowed, and it even snowed in Jerusalem that year. It was a very, very cold winter.

We were at a place called Fih when the snow came. That was a long time after, well, the Syrian campaign finished, I think, in August. That was in December that the snow came. We were snowed in for Christmas.

Well, we went to Fih, but then they brought us down onto the Mediterranean, a lot of us had what they call

desert sores on our legs, you know. Caused through, I suppose we didn’t get to wash yourselves as much as you should do. We had a week or two down swimming in the Mediterranean. We were allowed to go out into the sea every day to clear up these wogs, as they used to call them. Sores like this that break out on your legs. Not everybody had them, but a lot of the

people had them, and they’re contagious I believe. We had a week or two there, sleep in these little two-man tents right on the Mediterranean. I can remember Tom Blamey, we had to line up one day, he was the general, and he was coming through, going somewhere up further. We had to line up on this main road quite close to the sea,

and he was going to come through. We were there all day, and he never came. So they’d say, “Stand at ease. Stand at ease.” Then let us sit down. Anyway, about four o’clock in the afternoon, there was these motorbikes come, so we were all up, and into our tents and stand at attention, and the motorbikes shot through. Then a couple of cars, then Tom Blamey went through about 50 mile an hour and never even stopped.

We were there to greet him, they thought he was gonna stop and say hello to us, but he never even waved, I don’t think.

Not really. ‘Cause we used to, after that, go into Beirut on leave, and the NAAFI [Navy, Army, Air Force Institute] canteens, navy, army and air force,

NAAFI canteens they used to call them. There was a big canteen in Beirut, and they used to get the beer bottles, cut them off and put a wire handle on them, and that’s what you used to drink out of in the NAAFI canteens. They’d call them Lady Blameys, ‘cause she suggested that they make these. Didn’t have glasses so you drank out of these horrible bottom half of a bottle of beer.

You’ve heard about that before, have you, Lady Blameys? Not repeating stuff?

We had plenty of rest, you know. I

had a rest, I got a week in jail, in the boob. Blackburn had a tent put up to discipline the fellows. We were at Fih and we used to get our washing, a lot of the local women out at the town, they were very poor, and women would come and take your clothes and wash them for you. Charge peanuts, you know,

nothing. This woman came this day and brought my washing back. She was going down, I’d seen her going down through the lines past the cookhouse which was a tent. They had four of those big drums out, and she’s looking in there. They were apparently throwing bread in there, so I went down and said, “What do you want?”

So, I gave her a couple of loaves of this bread, they would have been thrown out. Anyway, she went on down, and one of the officers seen her, and she couldn’t speak English. They brought her back to me, and they said, “Did you give her this bread?” And I said, “Yes, I gave her the bread. She brought my washing back, and I’d seen her going down through there near the drums, they were rubbish, garbage.” So anyway, I got brought up

before the C company officer. I was charged with bartering. The bartering paid for this woman washing my clothes. I said, “I didn’t give her the bread for washing my clothes, because I’d paid her.” I gave her whatever it was, only a few mils or whatever the currency was. But they said, “There’s a routine order that

that bread that’s put in those drums goes to the village priest to hand out to the poor. So you shouldn’t have given it away.” So I ended up with a week in the boob with a bloke called Peter Williams. We were the first that were in there. You want to hear this story? Anyway, I had a pair of new boots, and the scrub was very rough,

it was very hilly country, stony mountainous country. They walked us around all day, route march. This was when it was going to go on for seven days. I got all blisters from these boots, so I said, “I can’t go marching any more today or the next day. We’ll go to the doctors.” So they marched me down to the doctors, one in front and one behind, with a rifle as though you’re a criminal. I suppose I was.

Anyway, he looked at my feet and said do this, do that, you won’t be able to march anymore. There was an old fellow called Bob Fox who was a great old mate of everyone. He was a First World War fella. He used to work in RAP, that’s the Regimental Aid Post. So I’m putting my putties back on, and putting my boots and socks back on,

and, standing up, he opened up my pants here, and he dropped a big handful of cigarettes, ‘cause they took all your cigarettes off you when you were in jail. And so, I got back into the tent, they marched me off, and there wasn’t anyone in there, ‘cause this Peter Williams is walking around the mountain. I’ve got a cigarette, and Len Croxton, who’s now the president of the POW association, and I’m the secretary, I said “You got a match, Len?” He’s out with the rifle

guarding me. He said, “What do you want a match for?” And I said, “Well, I don’t want to burn the tent down, what do you think?” And he wouldn’t give me one. He said, “No, I’m not gonna give you a match.” I said, “Alright, you can be nasty.” So when they changed the guard and they’ve got the next bloke on, I asked him for a match and he said yes. Threw his matches over the wire and said, “Go for your life,” you know. It’s a long story, this, if you want to hear the rest of it.

Len Croxton is a very quiet sort of a bloke. He and I were in Wayville in the machine gunners, and we’re both corporals. And I copped guard two Saturday nights straight for these trots. I said to the sergeant, “Don’t put me on next Saturday night, ‘cause I’m going to a 21st birthday party.” He said, “You won’t cop it three Saturday nights straight.” But I did. They let us out on Saturday afternoon,

and I had to come back at six o’clock to mount the guard, but I didn’t turn up. This Len Croxton was on, and he was to be relieved at six o’clock, when I was supposed to take over corporal, the guard from him. So he then mounted the guard, you have to stop on. You have to do another 12 hours. He wasn’t very happy, so about ten o’clock or eight o’clock he wanted to go, he had something on.

So he just said to the guard, “Change yourself, I’m off!” It only happened once in a hundred years, the officer of the guard came around and said, “Where’s the corporal?” So we were both up on the Monday morning, and we were both stripped of our stripes. He said to me in front of my late wife, this is four or five years ago, “You know why I wouldn’t give you a match that day?”

I said, “No, I’ve got no idea, Len.” “It’s because you cost me my stripes.” And I said, “I cost you your stripes, you’d done it yourself. You went AWL [Absent Without Leave] on your own free will and accord. You could have stopped there, you wouldn’t have been up.” I knew I was gonna do my stripes in, but I wasn’t worried about that. I had a 21st birthday or a party to got to, I can’t remember. So that’s the story.

Oh, yeah. I wasn’t gonna go three Saturday nights straight in any case. You didn’t get any extra money for being a corporal, anyway. So that’s it, that’s the highest rank I got in the army. I never ever got it reinstated. Len Croxton didn’t either. Of course, we became prisoners not all that long after. Well, I was a bit older, I suppose, but we never had time to

redeem ourselves.

I’m back to private, yeah. I ended up a private, all the way through the war.

Where are we now, what point are we at?

Well, it was just before that, in December, I went to Don company. I went to hospital, I had sand fly fever, as they used to call it. Malaria, but it’s a fever. I had a week or ten days, and when I came back, I was put into

Don company. Somebody had taken my spot in C company when I went to hospital, and when I came back I took whoever it was that came out of Don company, I went into Don company. You moved around a bit, you know.

Yes, I was in there for a week.

Nothing, we were just the occupation troops. On standby, really, I think.

They expected the Germans to come into Greece, as you know, and they expected them to come through Turkey, ‘cause they thought that’s what Hitler had in mind, he wanted to capture the Canal. We were the standby, the occupation troops, waiting for this to happen. Because we were not that far from the Turkish border. Of course, he changed the plans, and he went in to Russia, and that was his downfall, of course.

He went into Russia that Christmas, that year, and tried to get to Leningrad and got snowed in, and that was the end of the German army. They had to eventually come out, they suffered tremendously. Of course, the Russians didn’t fare too well, either, at least they won the battle. And so, the chances of Hitler ever taking the Canal

diminished, and that’s why we were then brought out of Syria. Not only that, I don’t suppose. The Japs had come into the war and we were brought back, but we were all on standby, we were up there, thousands of troops in the north of Lebanon, waiting for this to happen, but it didn’t.

Yes, I would think it was probably days later, I don’t know. But we knew that they’d come into the war, and that had happened. No, for varying propaganda reasons, I suppose, the news never used to come out on the day that it happened, but I can’t recall exactly when we were told that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour, no.

Well, it was a big, even though I had no idea that the 8th Division was in Malaya, that we had so many troops in Malaya, that it was contemplated this would happen. I had no idea myself, I knew that people had gone to Singapore, but it was a big shock to me that happened. Of course, that sort of then became

a worldwide war. It was all Europe under siege everywhere with the Germans, and the Italians were still in at that stage, and then Japan came into it, and America, you know, it was a catastrophe, really.

Early on, we didn’t even think about it, that it would happen. The events of the 8th Division losing Malaya and Singapore in six weeks, you know, we had no idea that the Japanese had landed. Pearl Harbour was a surprise, and then landing in Malaya, which happened the same day, simultaneously.

I had no idea, even dreamt that it would happen, but it did. As I say, I was surprised that we had an Australian army division, not only in Malaya, because they were scattered all over the place. They were in Timor and they were in New Guinea, and another lot were in Ambon. But they were all part of the 8th Division,

made up the whole entire division was in the Pacific.

We were, as I say, up to our necks in snow, and the next thing we were in the jungle. All in a month. And so it was a big change for us too, because the history book of my battalion, the name of it is, ‘From Snow to Jungle’.

In a very short time, we’d had no jungle training, and all our equipment was left behind in the Middle East. We were at the mercy of the Japanese, and then the good will of the Dutch people to give us arms and ammunition, ‘cause we didn’t have any.

Well, we were brought down to Hill 69 in Palestine, which is not that far from Hill 95, where we first were ensconced. We went to come down to Hill 69, we were there only a few days, a week, perhaps a fortnight, I don’t know. Took all our equipment from us,

issued us with sea kit bags, and took our big packs and our sausage bags, as we call them. Took all those, and loaded them onto our trucks, and our trucks took off with all of our guns and equipment. We had no idea where we were going. We thought that perhaps we were going up to Tripoli, because

Tobruk was under siege at that time, and had been for some months, a year probably. We were going up there to relieve them, ‘cause the only way you could relieve the troops in Tobruk was to go in by sea. They’d take you in at night time, off load you and bring the others out. Particularly when we were given sea kit bags. But that didn’t happen, we

went down, and when we got to the Canal, instead of going up it, we went straight down the other side and a train again, down to Tobruk. We got there in the dark, in the night time, and they said, “Leave your sea kit bags here, on the station, the trucks will pick ‘em up.” ‘Cause we had to walk, they said, three mile out in sand out to where we were gonna camp.

Anyway, we got out there, and our sea kit bags were still on the station, and when we walked on the ship the next morning, or the early hours of the next morning, they were frightened of being bombed there, air raids. Skipper said, “Up anchor and off!” There were still troops coming out on lifers, and he wouldn’t pick them up. He said, “No, we’re off!” So we left behind all our sea kit bags,

all we had was a little haversack, that’s all we had. No clothes, nothing, only what we stood up in.

Well, the sea kit bags were just our change of clothes, you know. You’ve got underclothes and things to keep us going for the length of time that they thought we’d be at sea. So it was much lighter and wouldn’t fill up your quarters on board ship, you just had a

sea kit bag, I’ve forgotten what they told us you had to have in it. They instructed us to what to put in it. And we had a haversack, which contained our eating utensils, all our shaving gear was in our sea kit bags, we walked on the [SS] Ochides, which was the ship we came back on, with nothing. Only our haversack, that’s all, which had our dixie, what we ate out of.

We had no razors, no nothing. I can remember getting into the ships canteen and buying a Schick razor, which is a Canadian brand razor, which stood me in good stead for about two years. I was still able to shave with it, ‘cause it had a replaceable blade. No, we had to rely on, when we got to Java, we were dressed by the Dutch.

Any replacement things we wanted were green, the Dutch uniform.

If I recall, I was wearing shorts. Sure it was shorts.

Short sleeve. Just shorts. Khaki shorts, long socks.

Yeah, always had your tin hat. Oh yeah, we’d have had that.

I don’t know what they were, but the entire group of machine gunners were on.

Also the 2/2nd Pioneers, they all got on. The rest of them coming out, I don’t know. There was a lighter full, I think they were engineers, because we had a few engineers, not very many, and I think they were the balance of them, they were the rest of us coming out. They were halfway out, and they said, “Up anchor,” and away you go. It was coming to daylight, and it was daylight, really.

The skipper wasn’t prepared to hang around, you’d get bombed, a sitting duck.

Yeah, once we started going down the Canal, we knew that we weren’t going to Tobruk, because you’d go up the Suez. Instead of that the train went the other way, she came back down to Tewfik or Port Said, whatever you’d like to say. We called it Port Tewfik.

Well, we thought obviously we were coming back to Australia. Or there was other thoughts that it could be Burma. You see, there was a big fight going on in Burma, and they thought there was a chance of going there, but when we got to Colombo, and started heading off south, we knew that,

one of the crewman said, “You’re on your way to home, you’ll be in Fremantle in 24 hours.” Then they changed tack, and we went back up to Sumatra first, and then to Java.

Yeah, you’d do PT every day, a couple of times a day.

No, we’d had nothing to be prepared with, anyway. That was never mentioned.

I don’t think at that stage, I think it was when we got to Jakarta that we started being told about the Japanese. How blind they were,

and they couldn’t stand the night time, and they were little fellows. They didn’t fight in the night time ‘cause they had bad eyesight, and all that rubbish. But, I don’t recall being told anything until we got there.

We pulled out, Oesthaven’s right in the bottom end

of the Sunda Straits, the straits that run between Sumatra and Java. We went ashore there in the night time. I can remember signals, those signalling lamps, and one of the signal blokes said, “We won’t be going ashore, because

the signal says no troops ashore.” And another bloke said, “No, that’s wrong, it’s got all troops ashore.” Anyway, we went ashore in this lighter that had to come out and pull up along side the ship. So, we got in there, we weren’t there very long, and a lot of

to-ing and fro-ing going on, and the Japs were all but there. We didn’t have any equipment. I had a ship’s rifle, five rounds of ammunition, and

a lot of fellows had nothing. I can clearly remember this, it is written in our book, but I can remember it being said. B company was lined up behind us, ready to go ashore, and the instructions were being

belted out by the officers, what we had gotta do. One of the B company fellas called out, “What do I do? I haven’t even got a rifle.” And Major Greiner, who was in charge of B company, said, “Now listen, chaps. Those of you that haven’t got a rifle, when you get ashore, cut yourself a stout stick, and when someone drops, grab their rifle.” That’s it.

That’s true, and that’s written in the ‘Snow to Jungle’ book. So, fortunately, the Japs are right there anyway, and we waited some time, got back on the lighter and we waited some time. The thing didn’t start to move, and eventually we took off, and someone took us out there, but it wasn’t the chap that brought us in, because all the

harbour was mined. And we got out through those mines by someone who took us out there, and didn’t know where the mines were. Luckily we got back on the ship, and I can remember it was about midnight, or one or two o’clock in the morning, ‘cause they gave us hot cocoa when we got aboard for a drink, you know.

Well, as I understand it, they thought the Japanese were nowhere near the place, that they were further up at Palembang

somewhere, but they’d already landed, they were in the outskirts of Oesthaven. It was quite a big port.

Who? The Japanese?

I think it was one of biggest messes, no one understands it. I think we got there,

there was a lot of confusion, the same as Java. A lot of confusion. I think General Wayville was in charge of the operation at that time, but there’s so much going on, and so much confusion, they didn’t know what to do. They just sent us in there hoping that we could stop them from getting into Oesthaven, for what reason, I don’t know.

No, we didn’t. We never fired a shot. We went out there, back on the ship and off.

Well it was. Different altogether, of course. We were coming from desert warfare into jungle warfare.

We had no training. Different temperatures, coming from stifling heat, and jungle warfare is quite different.

No, not really. We pulled up there, I can’t remember, I think it was daylight when we

dropped anchor. We didn’t go into a war or anything like that, we were out in the harbour. Dropped anchor, and took ashore on this big lighter. But I can’t remember seeing anything.

We left there that night.

That morning, early hours of the morning. I think it was only about 12 hours that we were in Batavia. We pulled in alongside the [HMS] Empress of Britain, that was a big ship that the nurses that escaped from Singapore, those who weren’t shot down was on this ship. Loaded with civilians,

and some war fellows, soldiers. We pulled up right alongside it, next door to it. Then there was a lot of argument as to whether we were gonna go ashore there, until finally in the end we did. They drove us around and around. We seemed

to be going around in the same area. There’s a lot of sewerage, deep drains that run through the street, there was in those days. We sort of go round and around, didn’t ever stop until finally somehow in the early hours of the morning we were taken out to the airport. Then I was told later that the reason why they’d done that was to give the local population an impression that there was hundreds or

thousands of us, you know. We were going around the same spot. But I can remember quite well, when we were in Ceylon on our way back, listening, they had amplifiers right around the ship, and the news, the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] used to give out the news every day. We used to listen to that each day. This particular day, I can remember it quite well, we used to listen to the war news, they said that another large contingent of Australians had

landed in Java, and taken up their positions alongside the Australians and Americans already there. When we got there, we were the first Australians, and the only Australians, apart from some deserters that was on this written thing, which we arrested and gave them the ultimatum whether they could fight on, or whether they could go back to Australia as deserters.

There was no Australians, we were the first and only Australians I think, that went to Java.

Well, because they said that another large contingent of Australians had landed in Java and taken up their positions alongside the Australians and Americans that were already there. We ended up with one battery of American

artillery. One battery.

Well, we didn’t know, you see. Because, we had our area, and we thought oh well, they must be in some other part of the island, we don’t know.” But we met the Japanese that landed, that came ashore in the Sunda Straits, they came on the western end of the island. They’d sunk the

Australian ship, the [HMAS] Perth. The American ship, the [USS] Houston, was sunk in that encounter, and there was a lot of POWs with it. I don’t know how many Japs, they say eight thousand or ten thousand, I’ve got no idea how many Japs we met. But that was a real shemozzle.

Well, I didn’t see them until they brought them out. They were running around, they went ashore. Apparently they had

fought their way onto the ship in Singapore, and they had sugar bags, or sand bags, we call them, of watches and stuff that they’d stolen in Singapore. Some of our fellows went into town and rounded them up, arrested them. They brought them out into this hangar where we were camped on the airport,

and there was a big wire enclosure one end of it where I suppose they kept the stores, spare parts in this hangar. Blackburn, they were screaming out, and putting on a dreadful noise. We were all sleeping in the thing. Blackburn lined them up and gave them the ultimatum. They could either stay and fight along with us, or go home on the

ship as deserters, one or the other. Now how many stayed with us, and how many went home, I’d never know, I don’t know.

About 100 odd. From memory about 100.

Well, of course, their story was that Singapore had fallen when they left, but it hadn’t fallen at all. The nurses, who I know one very well here, Betty Bradwell, she was on that ship, and that ship didn’t leave, the fighting was still going on when the ship left. Singapore hadn’t fallen, they hadn’t surrendered.

That was their story of course. Bit of a nasty part of the war, I suppose. I got to meet one of them years afterwards, I think he’s still alive. But he stayed on with us, he stayed and fought on, he didn’t come home, so he didn’t get charged with desertion. Whether any of them came home, I would never know.

For a while, yes.

We got there in the night time, we didn’t know where we were, ‘cause it was pitch black dark. There was no lights in those days - there was air raids, there was a war, and everything was blacked out. I can remember

Jack Carter, an old mate of mine who’s since passed on, we were just laying down on this nice piece of lawn, and of course when you’re young, you’d go to sleep on anything, and sleep well. The next thing, this air raid siren started blaring at us, and it was about from here to the front door from us, we were sleeping quietly alongside it, and there was an air raid siren. Nothing happened that particular time.

When we moved in and got into the hangar, we dug out slit trenches and later that morning, I’m not sure if it was that morning or the next morning, the air raid siren used to keep blasting, and every now and then it would go, and the all clear would go. Anyway, this morning, they were doing a lot of extensions, and extending the runway. They had a lot of natives doing it.

We had this air raid siren went, and we sort of got used to the thing going and nothing happening. Anyway I looked up, and they used to fly in formations of 27, and you could see these 27 planes coming towards us. They let fly, and let these bombs right among us. More so down the end where these natives were working, of course it killed an awful lot of them.

Killed some of our fellows, and wounded quite a lot. I can remember this, it’s not funny, I don’t suppose, but the natives used to have a string around their neck with a little piece of rubber, they used to put in their mouth, and then were told to keep their mouth open when the bombs were going off. I don’t know what that did, I think it stopped you blowing your ear drums to pieces or something.

This morning, anyway, they dropped all these bombs, and made a hell of a mess, and so the ambulances were there, picking up the wounded and taking them off to hospital, some of our chaps. So, it was all practically cleaned up in two or three hours. Another mate of mine and I were walking a bit further down, quite a way down, and here’s an

Indonesian bloke, curled up underneath a bush. The doctors, about 200 yards up further is the last of them. I called out to them, I said, “Here’s one.” I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, you know. So, this Dutch doctor came down, a paramedic or whatever you call them.

He kneeled down alongside him, and started to talk to him. Anyway, he eventually uncurled, so I walked back to see. He said, “Oh, he’s ok, he’s just frightened.” He’d lay there for an hour and a half, at least, with this rubber in his mouth, curled up like a caterpillar. Poor fellow, I will always remember that. He didn’t have a mark on him, but he wasn’t gonna move from underneath that bush.

Not a lot, no. Not at any time, really. Jack Carter, the bloke I just told you about, we went on leave one night. I remember we were there because they used to give afternoon leave and night leave. It was his 21st birthday, and we celebrated it in a nice big restaurant in Batavia. But, they

were very nice, the Indonesians, the Dutch were a bit aloof, but the Indonesian people were very nice.

Still in desert, it was hot, we didn’t wear long strides in Batavia.

Didn’t have any equipment, because they rustled up guns and rifles and that from the Dutch, we didn’t have anything. We were landed there with nothing. All our guns and trucks and all those things came back to Australia about three or four weeks after we landed in Java, on another ship.

Oh, I think we were there two or three days. I can’t just recall exactly, might be four or five days. Then we moved out up into the highlands, where we met the Japanese, eventually. Only a few days, anyway. The Japanese landed in two places.

They landed down Surabaya way, and they landed up where we were, Liliwang [looelawang?].

We just had to fight them. You should

put up some resistance. Everyone had either a rifle or say, had a Bren gun to every 20 men, 15 men perhaps. There wasn’t very many Bren guns, we had rifles, which we got from the Dutch. They weren’t the 303, they were a different sort of rifle. We had a few mortars, we didn’t have any artillery,

only this one platoon, one battery of American, which was about four guns. They fired a few shots and then disappeared, never seen them, I don’t know what happened. They’d become prisoners of war, but they didn’t fire anymore. Very difficult, the jungle warfare. I mean, compared to what it was in open warfare,

when you didn’t know where the Japs were, they were fearless. If they met any resistance, they just went around the back of you, and they just fire mortars until such time, they didn’t have artillery either, they’d just fire mortars until they got some reaction, then they’d sort of settle down and try and work out where you were. Very, very difficult.

I think about 60,000, or so I’m told. It was a hopeless situation, we only fought them for about three days, and we came out. My company, Don company, we were brought back to form a rear guard, to get our troops out. There was only machine gunners and the 2nd Pioneers.

So we came back a couple of mile, I suppose, out of the front line as we thought it was, but you didn’t know where the Japs were, really. It was thick jungle. We formed a line, there was only one company of us. The idea was to let our blokes all out, and then put resistance up if the Japs got up to us, and we were gonna be taken out.

Well, our fellows came out, I think, in early morning, and we formed this rear guard. We could hear the mortars going, you know, they were quite a long way away, say two or three kilometres. Then, late that afternoon, I was quite close to the road, as a matter of fact, we were stretched across the road and into the jungle. I heard this marching, and I looked back, it was a bitumen road.

These fellows in green, bright spanking new uniforms, black boots, looked the part, you know, they halted us. They got to us, I walked across, and one of them he was Dutch, said, “Yesterday I was in my office in Batavia, today I’m a soldier.” And I said, “Well, good luck, you get in there, you’ll have a lot of fun.”

They went in and I would say three hours later, and we hadn’t been picked up, they came out, and just disappeared, they went off. They wouldn’t stop in there because they had no training, they didn’t know anything about the warfare. They went and these mortars are getting closer and closer.

Our trucks never came to pick us up. I would say the mortars were within four hundred yards of us when our trucks eventually arrived to pick us up and take us out.

Oh, they were very good. They were top line soldiers, they’d been fighting up in China.

They were well equipped with good machine guns and what have you. They weren’t like we were led to believe they were, blind, and could only fight in the daytime, you know. They were little and all the rest of it. Some of those guys were 5 foot 10, and pretty active. They used to wear these rubber boots with a little spot for their big toe, and the rest was…

They’d climb trees, very active, they were good soldiers, no doubt about that.

Well, I dunno very much was going through my mind at all. I knew that we were in an absolutely hopeless situation, and that we were,

as it turned out, only there as a token force to try and just delay the proceedings so they didn’t get to Australia so quick. But, they were in Java, but they had already landed in New Guinea, New Britain, and they were bombing Darwin while we were there, so we weren’t holding them up at all. If you

couldn’t get 15,000 Australians and say 60,000 British soldiers in Malaya to hold them up, they were overrun in six weeks. What hope did we have, it was a hopeless situation. There were token forces. There was a battalion, the 40th Battalion was in Timor, a thousand men,

together with two or three hundred others, signallers and engineers and what have you. Another small group, one brigade was in Ambon and New Britain and Timor. You know, they were sacrificed the same as we were, because it would have been better if they had all been up in Singapore. They didn’t put up any resistance at all, they couldn’t.

As far as I’m concerned I don’t like it to go on tape, but I haven’t got a very high opinion at all. I could tell you a lot more, but I won’t say it.

Well, as far as I’m concerned it was a surrender. What happened was we were brought out of the line. We’d stopped fighting and we thought we were just going back to set up again at another point.

But, the Dutch capitulated, and unfortunately blew up the radio station, and our CO, or brigadier by this time, Blackburn, was in charge of all the Australian troops in Java, could not communicate with the Australian government. The disappointing thing about all that was that had we still had radio contact with Australia, I’m sure

that we could have formed a point in the south of the island somewhere and done the same as what they did in Greece and Crete, and formed a rear guard, and had ships come in, or submarines, or whatever come in and pick us up and get us out. But we had no contact with the government. We couldn’t tell them what happened or where we were assembled or whatever, and of course that was it. We had no option but to surrender, the same as the Dutch surrendered.

They were being bombed, and they knew that was a hopeless situation, but if they’d have given us a day or given us a chance to, Blackburn, a brigadier by this time, given him a chance to contact the Australian government and say that the Dutch had capitulated, here we are, meet us at such-and-such a point, we could have got out because the Dutch were weeks before they ever got to the south of the island.

So, it was rather than a capture, it was a surrender. There is nothing more I can add to that, I don’t think.

Well, we surrendered, and we went up, we were scattered around a bit of course. We weren’t all together. A group of us ended up in a tea plantation in the south of the island, in the mountains. A big tea plantation, there

was no town, I don’t recall ever seeing any town there. And we were there, we were instructed to discharge what ammunition and arms we had, to throw them away, and disarm ourselves. We just waited then, until we were instructed what to do.

Well, we were in just about jungle, we walked around, we weren’t locked up or anything at this time. We hadn’t seen the eyes of the Japanese. But we just walked out and threw them in the trees and in the jungle. Got the bolts out first, and threw them in one place, and probably went a half a mile before we got rid of the rifle and so on, whatever we had. I had a rifle, but those who had the Bren guns, I guess

they done the same. We had no arms or ammunition when the Japanese eventually came. They didn’t actually come, I guess they came, but they only talked to our officer in charge of us. We had our trucks still there, we were asked then to go to a certain point. We weren’t interrogated at all, but the officers were, some of our officers were interrogated by the Japs.

They were amazed there was only so few Australians there, really. We’d had three officers captured during the fighting, they were severely interrogated, but they weren’t executed, they were still alive. One of them is still alive.

Well, first we didn’t want the Japanese to have them, and secondly if they came to us and seen our arms and ammunition, your chances were very slight. They would have shot you straight away if they’d seen you with a rifle, or a gun of any description. So we just disposed of them, get rid of them. More so that they didn’t get into their hands, and they could use them, you know.

Absolutely, I mean the big thing about it was that when we went away to war, firstly, the thoughts never crossed our mind that it would be like it was. Once we got into action, the chances we could see then, there was a good chance you would be dead, shot, or you could lose an arm, or lose a leg, or be badly injured. But, I don’t think that it ever crossed our minds that we would ever be prisoners of war,

it’s the last thing you think about. If you were, you’d think you’d get away. As a lot of them did in Germany, but they were white. We had no hope in Java, because the colour was against us. The Indonesians didn’t like the white people, because they’d been ruled by the Dutch all those years, and they were very anti white people, and of course the Japanese put a price on our heads,

we had no chance of getting away, no whatsoever. Those few that did attempt to get away were executed anyway, and I don’t know of any that got away. I don’t know of anyone that got away or escaped successfully. It was a big disappointment, naturally, to end up that way, and the length of time I think, too. Had anyone said to me, you know, well, you’re going to be here for three and a half years. Particularly, I developed

malaria very shortly after I was captured, and it was a very frightening and sickening disease, very life threatening, of course. I was in the midst of that bout of malaria. If anyone said, “You’ve got another three and a half years to go.” I’d have said, “To hell with that, I’m not gonna put up with that another three and a half years.” You know, our will to live, particularly as time went on, and you did get weaker and thinner, and starved

that you think you get ill with dysentery or malaria or whatever, and you say, “Hell, I’ve been here for two years, and it might be in another couple of months I’ll get out.” You know, the rumours were in our favour that we were winning the war. It’s very easy to die, when you get sick, it’s very easy to die. I think that the fact that we’d been in there and went through all this, I had malaria 14 times,

that, you know, you could be out in another two or three months, and, well don’t throw it in. As I say, it’s very easy to die, but if you had someone to look after you, there was always little groups of three or four, you’d always have mates around you. Those who didn’t have mates, and I’ve said this many times, did die, because a lot of people

are loners, they can’t mix with people. And those sort of fellows didn’t have any hope.

Well, they didn’t arrive, we were taken to them. They arrived, I suppose, but we didn’t see them, privy to that. They met up with the officers and were instructed what to do with us, and we went to a place called Lily’s to begin, which is a market place,

it wasn’t a market garden. A market where they sold fruit and that. We went there, a small group of us. We moved, I don’t know how long we were there, could have been a week, ten days, might be a month, I don’t know, can’t remember. Then we were taken to a place called Garut, and we met up with more of them, you know. Then we went to Bandung, where there was a whole lot, many, many thousands there. Not only us,

Dutch and Ambonese. A great big camp, very big.

Yes we got split up. Some of our fellows ended up in bicycle camp down in Batavia. They were the two biggest camps, Batavia bicycle camp and Bandung. There might have been other small ones that I don’t know about,

but we weren’t 100 percent together. And some of the bicycle camp people stayed there right throughout the war, they didn’t move. They didn’t seem to move them, but they moved all of us, that was up in Bandung, eventually moved to Japan or up to Thailand or Singapore.

Oh yes, I had malaria. I was the first one

in Garut, it was a big school complex that they had us in. I got malaria there. We had a doctor, and we had no treatment, and one morning he came into me and he pulled the hairs on my legs as he was laying there, didn’t care whether I lived or died, and he said, “I’ve got some quinine, but I don’t know how strong it is, because we’ve got no idea of what strength they are, but I’m

gonna give you some, and hopefully it’ll help you. So I’m gonna give you ten tablets a day.” It ended up by the second day my ears were ringing and the top of my head just about blowing off, he’d overdosed me with the stuff. But anyway, I survived. As I say, I was the first one to get malaria, and we had a fella die there that was our first POW death

in that school as well. Can’t remember the fellow’s name, but I remember the Japs were very good. They brought in their habit of putting food around a corpse and all these sort of things, and food in the coffin. It was pretty well done, but of course, that was the one and only time it ever happened. I seen ‘em do that.

Japanese guards. Later on, when we got to Singapore, most of them were Korean guards. In Java, they were Japanese.

Oh, very big camp, yes.

That’s when the food rationing started to get very short. I don’t think I can truthfully say that I had more than, say five kilos, it wouldn’t be that much, of meat during my whole three and a half years as a POW. I wouldn’t have eaten that much meat, but in Bandung, all of a sudden it was cut down just to bare rice, and for some weeks the rations were very, very poor.

They improved a little bit towards the end, they were sending us in dried potatoes, and was getting a little bit of vegetable, but very little. You know, it wasn’t very much, you wouldn’t get a serve to yourself, it would be put in with the rice. That’s when the hunger pains really started in Java, because

we’d been used to feeding. As the war grew on I think our stomachs got smaller and we got used to being hungry, you know. It’s a funny thing to say, but you get used to it. You didn’t feel it as much as you did in the early days. Always hungry, I mean, I only weighed 42 kilograms when I got here to Adelaide, and 56 or something now, 55, and I’m pretty thin now.

I’d put on some weight as well, in that period. We were released on the 30th of August, and I was home on the 27th of September, so a bit over three weeks, and I was home, and I’d put on weight. You know, we were pretty skinny, and as you see in that photo in Changi, we were thin, that was the worst part about that camp. I’ll talk about that later.

Well, do you want to talk about Changi now?

Bandung. Well, as I say, the rations, we felt the shortage of food in Bandung. That was when I first really got hunger pains and would cry when I went to bed at night ‘cause I was so hungry. We didn’t have any access, we weren’t working so much, and working where we could scrounge a bit of food.

Some went out to work, moving arms and ammunition for the Japanese, but most of us were just laying around the camp. We had nothing to do, we weren’t working. They hadn’t got us at that stage.

They were atap huts, atap roofed huts, and some of them were quite substantial. It was a proper army camp. It wasn’t built for the Japs, it was a Dutch

army camp, and housed mostly Ambonese, because Ambonese were the territorial soldiers. Nice little fellas. We were housed in huts, quite comfortable.

Oh, I would say roughly a hundred or more,

but we weren’t overcrowded. The camp itself was quite good, you know, as far as a camp is concerned. Probably one of the best we had during our POW days, would have been the best.

Yeah, there was fence around the whole complex. We didn’t venture out.

A couple of Dutch officers I think got out, ‘cause their wives lived in Bandung, and they were executed, you know, for going out through the wire, but I don’t think it would be that hard to get out. But there were guards on the gate, it was a proper gate, and I don’t know. I never went out to the boundary fences to see whether they were manned. I guess they would have been. In those days,

those guards were front line Japanese soldiers, who were a little bit better than what we got later, because we got Korean guards and Sikh guards in Singapore, Sikh army which were of course, British troops. They’d turned against the British and went over to the Japanese, and goodness knows what happened to them, I don’t know. They weren’t involved in any

bashing, they just stood guards on the gates, particularly in Changi.

Well, there was the normal facilities that would be in an army camp, you know. They started taking lessons, and people learning to play instruments,

and learning, there was lectures on in all sorts of subjects. Just to occupy our minds, the officers organised like a school, you know. Not a university at all, but all sorts. There was lectures that people were giving, to keep our mind off other things. It was quite good really, except that the food was bad.

Well, nothing very much. We would get up and have our breakfast and play cards or whatever. Played a lot of bridge in Bandung for those few months that we were there. I suppose, in all we’d have been there four or five months.

No, there was not much, certainly I never went into any work party in Bandung. Some did, but they weren’t very big parties. I think those that did would be happy to go out. Now I come to think of it, I went out on one work party, because I can remember this Japanese, they used to make tea in a four gallon bucket for use. Tin, like an old petrol tin.

You could see the bottom of the tin, you know. But it was green tea, that’s what they had. This particular fellow could speak fluent English, he had a bit of an American accent because he’d been in America for three or four years at a college or university or something. We said to him, “How long is the war gonna last?”

This was in the first three or four months, and he said he didn’t know how long it would last, it could go four or five years. We were sort of taken back, four or five years, hell, I hope it doesn’t go that long. He said, “Well, you know, it’s very hard to say.” And we said, “Why do Japan want to go into the war? What was it’s reason for starting the war?” And he said, “Well, why did America want to boycott

us?” I said, “What do you mean, they boycotted you?” And he said, “Well, Japan was at war with China at the time, and we were supplied with arms and ammunition from America to fight that war, and then all of a sudden they cut out the supply, and it was providing the Chinese with guns and ammunition.” He thinks that’s what was the cause of them going into the war.

I can remember asking him who was going to win it, and he said he didn’t know who was going to win, whether Japan or Australia, the Allies. But he said he didn’t think Japan was ready for a war, and he said, “If they don’t win this one, they’ll win the next one.” That’s his exact words. So they didn’t win that one, and I don’t know, the next one hasn’t come yet. I hope I’m not here when it does come.

Oh no, it was Australians, Dutch, and Ambonese. I don’t think there was Americans, we only had one battery of Americans there, anyway. Dutch and Ambonese and Australians, yes.

Yeah, we used to go over to the huts where the Ambonese were,

they were nice little fellows, very small little men. We had a language difficulty, but we’d make ourselves understood, and we could understand what they were saying by sign language more or less. They were pleasant little fellows, and their life from home, of course Ambon was an island in Indonesia, they were a long way away. I can remember one of them telling me that he had a wife and a couple of kids living

in Ambon. He was in Java, prisoner of war.

Didn’t mix a lot with the Dutch. We weren’t over fond of them. They didn’t impress us, or didn’t impress me. I don’t think they impressed the Australians in any shape or form.

They were a bit aloof, because they were, most of them were wealthy oil and rubber men, you know. Planters, most of them were very wealthy people. We were a bit below them, that’s the way it is.

Mainly rice, and it was what they call unpolished rice, not like the rice we have. There’s husks and all on it. We used to get a lot of chillies , and the officers or the

doctors ordered that the chillies be cut up. We had to eat a teaspoon of chilli before we had our rice. There was a certain amount of vitamins in chilli, I think they’re pretty high in vitamins. Just to keep ourselves in reasonably good order, we had to eat these chillies. I can remember the first couple of times, just burn your mouth out, and burn out the other end, too.

After a day or two, or a week, you could eat chillies, and I could eat chillies at that time, I can’t again now, but then, you’d just eat them and they didn’t burn your mouth at all. So we had that and we had no meat, no meat came in. I don’t recall, I think that there used to be some vegetables, very small, but it

was harder rations, although there was more of it, than what it was in Changi, because Changi was very bad for food. Bandung wasn’t much better, I don’t recall getting anything else. I remember one time I had dried potato, I remember eating those and getting a tummy full of indigestion. They weren’t properly

cooked, I don’t think, I don’t think our cooks knew how to handle them. They weren’t very pleasant.

Oh well, I suppose there was that many, out of the thousands that were there, I suppose there was five or six thousand people there, they probably only took out a hundred or a couple of hundred, I don’t know how many went out, not very many. Certainly none in

my hut ever went out to work. There was a hundred or so of us in a hut, so you know, it was just a few. Mainly your ammunition and arms and things like that. Gathering that up and putting them onto railway trucks and sending them down to Batavia for shipment out of the country. I think that the Japanese use a lot of the firearms and things

that they captured, they used for their own use.

Well, at that stage, as I said, we played a lot of cards, among ourselves, I suppose. Lectures and talks that used to go on, you know. If you didn’t give yourself a chance to get bored. Think you can get bored if you want to get bored,

but you can always find something to do, someone to talk to and create some interest. How to make your own fun. I can remember it was there that we had to have our heads shaved, our hair cut right off, you know. They brought in about three or four pair of clippers and I remember doing it for about two or three hours until my arm got so sore I couldn’t do it any longer, and my wrist.

Sitting around with these chaps with nice curly hair, I was running the clippers right over the top of their head, and putting designs on the hair as you cut it off. That was the only camp where we had to have our hair cut, and the Japs were very insistent that we had our hair done. We would have hats on, and they’d come along when they were counting you,

on the parades and that, and lift the hat and make certain that your hair was cut. Then, when it got to say a half inch or so long, it had to be cut again, so you had to have it cut down. Not shaved like you see them today, but it had to be cut with clippers right down as close to the scalp as the clippers would cut. Never happened anywhere else. After I left Java I never had to have my hair cut, a lot of blokes did, but it was only their own free will that they’d done it.

In Java it was insisted on, that the hair had to be cut. And they had their own hair cut, you know, they never let their hair go, so it wasn’t necessary to have a comb.

Just on bare boards. We didn’t have any beds or mattresses or things like that. Just lay on the floor. Didn’t have a ground sheet either,

I recall. We might have got hold of a bag or two of something. Bedding was right throughout POW days, I didn’t have any bedding. Changi we didn’t have any bedding, but didn’t need it. It was hot, and we didn’t have sheets or blankets on you, you wouldn’t have slept with it on in any case, but you had nothing under you. Nothing to lie on.

We’ll talk about Changi later, and the conditions of sleeping there, because I can tell you about the cells and how they comprised of...

Well, we didn’t know where we were going, and we knew that we were going down to

Batavia, but there was no buzz as to where we were headed or what we were going to do. We moved down out of Bandung by train, and I think it was one of the most spectacular train rides I’ve ever had, coming down through the mountains across these great viaducts. They were most modern trains too,

for those times, I mean, more modern than any train we had here. So we came down through these mountains in most magnificent country. It was some of the most spectacular train journeys I’ve ever had, and I’d love to do it again, but it’s too late now, I’ll never ever get back there. We had no idea where we were going, or what we were going to do. We got down to Batavia, and we had to march four or five miles

out to Makasura, which was outside the town, that’s where we went. Then, of course, as far as the sleeping conditions, we were only in atap huts, bamboo huts, atap roof on them. Weary Dunlop had charge of us by this time, there was a thousand of us. We were there in trains to go to Thailand,

but we didn’t know where we were going, had no idea we were going up there. If we did, it was only the officers might have known, but we weren’t, the general rank and file didn’t know where we were going, had no idea.

Well, we got down there close around New Years. We had a New Years Eve song

there and a concert, just in the huts. We left sometime around, I think about the eighth of January, so we weren’t there very long.

At that stage I was pretty right. I hadn’t had malaria, I’d only had the one bout of malaria at that point in time. Hadn’t had dysentery, I was going fairly well.

It was from that point onwards that things started to turn bad.

A ship, yeah. Very old ship, they gave us four hard boiled eggs, everyone got that, and they cooked the rice on board, and just lowered it down the hole where we were. We were about four days

getting from Java to Singapore, in this rickety old ship. Wasn’t very big, rusted out thing. Hardly any room to lie down, you couldn’t really lie down ‘cause there were that many of us in the hull. All together, no chance of bathing or showering or anything like that, didn’t have those facilities. If you wanted to go to the toilet,

you had to go up the ladder, get up and ask permission and the Jap would let you come up, and you’d do your business over the side of the boat and go back in the hull, you know. Wasn’t very pleasant.

Well, we were put down in the hull, you know. Right down. It was a freighter, so it carried freight, and we were in the freight hulls, you know.

Both hulls were filled up with men.

Well, there was not a lot, you know. The ship was quite big, but I guess where they used to put the freight down was as big as this room, you know, the hull. Both ends of that was covered in. It was hot, very hot.

Of course, it’s humid anyway. On the way to Singapore, Singapore’s practically on the equator, so the temperature only varies about eight or ten degrees summer and winter. It was a pretty muggy sort of a trip, very muggy. These days, you wouldn’t survive it, but we were young, in our early twenties, and most of them that age, so

you can stand up to most of those conditions better than you can when you get older. Very unpleasant.

I think it was about four days. Three nights and four days to get to Singapore. At least four days.

Well, we were unloaded, and I don’t sort of recall coming off the ship. I recall they put us on trucks and took us our to Selarang, which everyone calls Changi, but it was Selarang barracks. A lot of confusion with Changi. When the 8th Division was captured and they said they went to Changi, it was probably the Changi area, but Changi to me means Changi prison.

We went out and I can vividly remember the trucks that we were in pulling up, in the afternoon, it was in daylight hours. This big building is obviously a jail, and in the ends they had iron bars, with these little hands and women waving through the bars to us. I thought to myself hell, I hope we’re not going in there. ‘Cause we pulled

up there, but we went on out to the big army base, which is, there were three barracks out there. Kitchener barracks, they’re named after old World War generals. Kitchener, the whole of the British army, not the whole of the British army, but all the occupation troops of Singapore was in there, British.

They were big substantial buildings, they were concrete. There’s only one left today when I was up in Singapore two years ago. I was out there again, but the rest of them have been demolished and more modern buildings are there. Not as many as what there were, but I think there was about 60.000 British troops at Selarang, and that’s where we were.

Which is quite close to Changi prison, and the area, the suburb was known as Changi. There’s a village there now, called Changi village. Have you been there?

Oh they looked substantial, you know. Nice buildings, but quite different to what we’d come from.

We’d been in atap huts, bamboo huts, and we’d come to these nice big, they were all about three floors. All the cottages where the officers lived, they were quite modern houses, you know, adjoining. They were well set up, they had billiard tables and one of them was set up as a hospital, and

they had, the Australians or the British had taken out when they surrendered in Singapore, and marched out to Selarang, which is about 12 or 15 mile, they had tables, taken all their hospital beds and linen. They had everything, you’d walk into those hospital section there, well nearly as good as you’d expect at any time.

They had drugs and what have you, ‘cause they’d carted it out there by the wagon load, more or less. When that ran out, they didn’t get any re-supplied. That was impressive.

What number? I couldn’t tell you, I don’t know. It wasn’t far off the

square, where the big famous Changi square parade ground. I don’t know what the number of it was. We occupied one floor, I know the Dutch had the building next door, they were already there. They got there before we did. Like, the group that I went with there are about ten days, but I developed

dysentery when I got there, and ended up in the hospital. While I’m in the hospital, they moved on, and I think there was about sixteen of us in all, that was in that original party, that got left behind, you know, with various diseases, and I was one of them.

I was fortunate because they had a ward just for dysentery people, all on one level, and Major Hunt who was a West Australian, a very good doctor, had a raucous voice and

did a very good job up on the line later, I believe, I wasn’t with him, of course, but they had M&B tablets, or sulphanilamide tablets, which they were actually given, they had them, the medicos for treatment of venereal disease. They were quite new, they were an antibiotic type of thing. One of the very early antibiotics.

I think Major Hunt worked it out that if they could cure or stop gonorrhoea or these diseases, they probably could do something with dysentery, and it worked. I was one of the lucky ones getting amoebic dysentery, it was pretty rare, but I was one of the first that had it, and one of the first that was cured. When they run out of M&B tablets, of course, most of the people that developed

amoebic dysentery after that died, because there was no treatment, and it’s virtually next door to cholera, amoebic dysentery and cholera are much the same. So, I was fortunate, and he was a good doctor. They were able at that time to diagnose it, too, the amoebic dysentery, you know, they had labs and things set up there, out at Selarang.

Well, I don’t know, I suppose it’s the way you’re built. I don’t give in to anything very easily. As I said earlier, you can die very easily, you can give up and say “Well, that’s the end of it.” And I’m sure

that if I hadn’t have had a lot of mates, not me so much, but a lot of fellows if they didn’t have mates, they would have died, because you get there with them, and sit with them all night at times, if they were a good mate of yours and they were sick, and you’d just say, “Come on, now, you’ve been here this long…” And you just talk to them along that line all night and say, “Stick it out, lad. You’re a long time dead.” And, “Mum and Dad,” or

whoever, his wife if he was married, “who is waiting to see you, hang in there, don’t give up.” I think, as I said earlier, if you knew you was going to be there, and they said you’ve got another three years to go, you know, you say, “Hell, I don’t wanna be in this, that’s too long.” But the fact that you didn’t know how much longer you were gonna be in there sort of urged you to hang in,

because it might only be a couple of months and you would be home. So, why give up?

I got to know Weary very well, he ended up a great friend of mine.

I succeeded him as patron and chief of the POW association, and I succeeded him as national president of the POW association, and we had a lot to do with one another. Weary was no better doctor than a lot of the other doctors, not a bit, but where Weary shone out was, when he came home, he still looked after the POWs. They flocked to see him, when they got something wrong, that’s the Victorians of course,

those that lived in other states would go over particularly to see him. Whereas Major Hobbs, who lived here in Adelaide, a wonderful old man, been dead a few years now, he was equally as good a doctor, but in some cases a better doctor, but he quietly came back and went back into practise, and that was it. He said he didn’t sort of follow on.

To Weary, the POWs were his mates from the day he was captured until the day he died. Whereas the other doctors just sort of went back into the normal practises.

Yes, I think so. I think that

our death rate from my unit in Thailand was about 28 or 30 percent, so 30 percent of them died. As against, well, I don’t know the exact death rate in Changi, but there was only a few of us there, so I can’t tell you what our percentage was. On the other hand, once they got through, and the line was built, those eight months that they were up there,

that’s about the time, they went up there in February / March of ’43, and their job was completed by the end of that year. Then, some of them came back to Singapore and went to Japan, others stayed up there, maintaining the line. The workload dropped off dramatically, and the food was a lot better, whereas Changi, the food got progressively worse.

We were getting about 250 grams of rice a day, and that was the killer at Changi prison, because Singapore, as you know, is an island, it’s isolated, and as the war progressed, they couldn’t get ships in there to bring rice in, ‘cause it’s not well supported. They had to get rice to bring in from Java, and those sort of places. They lost control of the seas, and they lost their shipping anyway. They didn’t have enough

ships to bring it in. So, even then the Japanese themselves were starving, and even the local population to a greater extent. Those who had kampongs [villages] and little villages could grow a bit of vegetables themselves alright, but the majority in Singapore were starving to death.

Well, see what they did, they took the women and children out of the Changi prison, and took them in and housed them in Singapore I think. Forgotten the name of the prison that was in town in Singapore itself. Then they put us into Changi prison. Those that were in Selarang, went into Changi prison, about 6,000 of us.

They later built some huts outside the jail to house those who came back from the railway line and other places. And so I went in, along with the original group, we were housed in the cells, and also all the ground floors were workshops, and they’d taken all the machinery out, and shipped that for their own use somewhere. The prisoners were lying in there,

closest they’d get to one another, when you’ve got a jail for 600 people, and you’ve got 6,000 in it, you’re grossly overloaded. I was in A block on level 2, in cell 3, and the cells were small, they had a concrete slab for a bed, with a little concrete

pillow, and about that much each side of the block, and a similar amount down the bottom, and a toilet down the bottom, not a toilet, just a hole through the concrete. So, one step on the block, one step either side, and one step down the foot. So he either had his feet in the toilet or his head in the toilet, whatever.

That’s how we were, that’s how we stayed.

Oh well, they are all dead now, but I had a chap called, got a photo in there, there was Charlie Sutherland, Jock Page,

and Athol Flint, he’s in that photo outside Changi prison. We were the three, the four that was in that cell. They all survived, they came through, but all died since. Jock Page died about 20 odd years ago, Athol Flint died about that time, too, might be 30 years ago, and Charlie Sutherland died 15, 18 years ago.

Oh, yes, I knew them all, I knew them very well. They were in different companies, but they were like me, they got left behind in Selarang because of sickness, and so we sort of met up. Athol Flint was in C company, I was in C company for a while. Charlie

Sutherland was in C company as well, but he was a reinforcement with the C company. He came over from the Middle East, he didn’t sail with the battalion, he came over as a reinforcement. Jock Page was in A company.

Well, it was just a big concrete jungle, you know. There was nothing in there, there was just cells and steel and concrete. Still is today, but it’s been demolished. They had a great big kitchen in the middle of it, which went 24 hours a day, cooking. Like all of us that was able to go to work,

we worked every day, because Changi was near the Changi airport. There were other jobs, too, some of them went in and worked on the wars in Singapore, others were out gathering wood to keep the fires going for the kitchen. And then there was parties to clean up around the place, looking after the latrines. If you had light duties, then you could work in the gardens just outside the prison gate.

There was gardens there where they used to grow mostly sweet potatoes, but they didn’t mature to potatoes, they used to cut the tops off them for vitamins. Like a stew. No meat, we never had any meat or eggs or anything like that. It was very, very poor. I would say most people that came back from there would say

they don’t want to go there ‘cause you get starved to death. If you don’t die, you’d starve to death, that was the problem, very bad.

Well, I wasn’t very impressed at all. You know, we didn’t have any bedding, you didn’t want bedding really, if you had something to lay on it’d be alright, but everything was bare concrete. The thinner you got,

you just laid on the cement, and I can remember my father saying to me when I came home one day very shortly after I was back, he must have seen me in the shower, drying myself after a shower, and he said, “What’s that big thing you’ve got on your hip?” And I say, “Why?” It was all calloused skin, I was laying on my side, alongside the bed, and, you know, you’d lay down, and your shoulder points, and your hip points where you’d hit the concrete,

you’d go to sleep, it’d go all numb. You’d wake up and give it a rub, and roll over on the other side, and an hour or so later you’d do the same and go back. I had quite hard calloused skin on the points where you laid against the concrete. Dad said, “What is it?” And I said, “Oh, I dunno, a bit of hard skin, just from sleeping on concrete.” We didn’t have any blankets, we didn’t need blankets, you didn’t need sheets or anything like that, but

if you’d have had something to put under you, but we didn’t have any bedding of any description, just laid on the floor, on the cement.

Oh, they had their own quarters outside. They weren’t in the jail at any time. They built atap huts outside for them. They didn’t go to work, except one for every hundred men. We used to march out every day to work, a hundred men at a time and one officer.

And some of those officers, if they took turns, they’d probably only have to go once a year, ‘cause there were a lot of officers there. There was one or two of them who just liked to go to work. I can remember one very well, Ben Barnett, who used to be in charge of our group. Used to be out day after day. He was an Australian test wicket keeper at one time, before he joined the army, but Ben was a hell of a nice bloke, and he just liked to go to work,

just to be with the troops. A lot of those officers never went out any day, ever, they didn’t have to.

I can remember, we used to heckle them. We used to march past their quarters in the morning going to work. We’d be going out early in the morning, and they would be still in bed, I suppose.

But we used to give ‘em a bit of a cheerio as we went past. It was a bit unpleasant. I didn’t myself get heavily involved in it, there was a lot of them got very anti-officers, and still are, for that matter. Very, very anti-officers.

Oh, yes, they kept up the discipline in camp. If you’d done something wrong, you were disciplined. And rightly so, because if you didn’t have discipline, the thing would just become unravelled. So they maintained the discipline within the camp, if you’d done something wrong, well you were brought up before them just the same as before you were a POW.

I think that was essential.

They had a cell there, a jail part, they would confine you to jail. Lock you up, I don’t know, I never got locked up there, thank goodness. I don’t think they could cut your ration back much, because you weren’t getting very much in the first place.

Otherwise you’d be starved to death. I think they would just give you a CB [confined to barracks], or confined to barracks, or in the slammer for a few days. But I didn’t see too much undisciplinary things done there. I don’t recall too many fellows going berserk. Firstly, there wasn’t no point in doing it, really, and secondly,

I think that they, particularly with the Australians, were pretty well disciplined. They’d do funny little things, but as far as really committing any crimes or things like that, that wouldn’t happen. There was a lot of thieving going on, particularly between the Dutch boys, they used to thieve stuff from one another, but I don’t recall very much

reason why the Australian needed to be disciplined.

Oh, no. We didn’t volunteer to go out, no you just had to, you know. If they couldn’t get enough, if you’re sick the doctors would say you’ve got to go on light duties, but if they couldn’t get enough to go out, well they’d come and make up the party with light duty fellows.

Japanese would say they want X amount of fellas and that was it, full stop. And out you went, whether you liked it or whether you didn’t. But I got light duties two or three times while I was there. I’d got bashed up badly there on the aerodrome one day as well, but I had a job in the toolshed there. We used to have trailers, these old trucks, they’d taken the motors out,

and put a long rope out the front with some sticks, and we used to pull that, to take all the tools out to work for the day. Shovels and hoe types of things, and axes and there’d be a certain amount loaded on each trailer. They’d come in of a night time and if there were certain handles broken and things like that, to be repaired. I was on light duties there for about six weeks at one stage.

The chap in charge of us was a fella called Tom Miller, who was an ex-policeman, but had resigned from the police force before the war. Had a hotel on the west coast at Arno Bay. And so I was sleeping in his quarters with him, and we used to have repair these, put new handles in, unload the trailer every night, then reload them. We’d do work on these

repairing the things, putting new handles in during the day while they were out working. Tom, I’ll tell you a funny little story about him, there was an Anglican minister who was giving bible lessons and confirmation classes with the idea that when the war finished, he would have all these fellas confirmed by the archbishop in Singapore, or the bishop, who was also a civilian

POW somewhere in Singapore. So, this Duckworth, his name was, this Anglican minister. He gave these fellas that volunteered to do the confirmation classes a bible. Cigarette paper was very hard to get, cigarettes were hard to get, we used to get cigars and chop them up occasionally, and make a cigarette. Might get a bit of tobacco occasionally, not very often. Then you’d have to scrounge

to get paper to make a cigarette, but I was in there with Tom and he had this bible under his pillow. I said, “Let’s get a sheet out of the bible and have a smoke.” Three or four years after the war finished, I was here in the Adelaide office, and we had a cement boat come in, and the wharfies were making a claim, they

wanted another sixpence an hour for the ship because of this dust from the cement. The manager said to me, “Go down to the wharf and have a look and see if you think it’s worth it.” I went down there, I could see this cement dust coming out of the hull of the ship before I even got to it. Anyway, you had to be careful, because being the agents for the shipping line, I couldn’t go on board, but I was sort of looking, and I heard this voice say,

“What are you doing Smitty?” And I looked around and here’s Tom, he’s a customs officer sitting down by the shed, looking at the ship. So I went over and got talking to him. He was a funny bloke, and he said, “You shouldn’t be down here, you work for Elders, don’t you?” “No, no, I left them.” I said, I could tell a lie. And he said, “Oh, yeah.” Anyway, we got talking, something came up about this bible business,

I said, “You know, we’re lucky I wasn’t in there a bit longer, you wouldn’t have had any of that bible left.” And he said, “I thought it was getting smaller and smaller.” Poor old Tom, he only lived three or four years after the war and he died too.

Yeah, I did, I got bashed up very badly. I’d had a bout of dysentery and malaria close to one another, and I’d been in hospital or on no duties, and I was pretty weak, you know. I’d survived, and anyway I had to go out to work. I went out this day, and I got terribly sunburnt, not getting out I suppose, for a while. All my face, my lips particularly,

my face was burnt. Anyway, they used to bring the dirt down, levelling the site off for the aerodrome, in skips, and they’d tip it out, and there’d be about a yard of dirt in each skip, I think. Tip it out, and then we’d have to shovel it over the side, probably a six foot or ten foot drop. Being sick, and sore

from sunburn, I was only putting about half way I suppose, and walking over and throwing it over the side. This Jap, he was a bad one, and he come up to me and he grabbed my shovel and he filled it up and just threw it from where we stood, over the side. It was about from here to the table, I suppose. I thought there was no way in the world I was strong enough to do that anyway to begin with.

So I nodded to him and I must have smiled or done something, and he put the shovel back in the ground in front of me, and I must have smiled at him and said ok, or done something that upset him. With that he hauled off and hit me, and he hit me right in the mouth with all this sunburnt lips, you know. Of course, it was fatal if you fell down, when you’re bashed or hit about, if you fell down then they would kick you.

Well, of course, down I went, and then he started to kick the boots in, he got the shovel and then he belted me with that. I didn’t know any more. I woke up under a coconut tree, or some sort of a tree, and this is early afternoon. Anyway, when they knocked off, the boys carried me home. Then I had another three weeks with, I didn’t break me ribs, but they were badly bruised or

sprained or something, I dunno. I didn’t go to work for another three weeks, so it was a bit stupid, you know. Put me out of the workforce, cut all me mouth, and made a bit of a mess of me.

Well, the hospital was outside, that was out by the officers. They were out in atap huts.

Well, it shook me up for a few days, you know. But then I got over it. Fortunately, the guards on the aerodrome were changing quite often, so when I went the next time, probably a month later, he wasn’t there anymore, or I didn’t see him. They had thousands of people out there working, not only Australians, but English and

Dutch and just as many natives, you know, Chinese and that working there. Women and God knows what, so there was a hell of a lot of people. He could have still been there, but he wasn’t down where we were. Never seen him again. It affects you for a while, and it knocks you about, but I’ve been hit like everybody gets a few bashes up. Not as bad as that, that’s the worst I’d ever had.

No, well there was an officer out there, they called him the ice cream maker, he’s one of the engineers, and he was a very, very bad fella. They used to call him the ice cream man, ‘cause they used to say an old saying, of course you don’t hear it now, you younger people, but they used to say, “I scream, you scream,

we all scream for the ice cream man.” When this fellow was coming around, they’d scream out, “Ice cream,” ‘cause you knew that he was about and be careful. When the war finished, the padang, or the oval, they called them padangs, that’s the main oval, like the Adelaide oval here, in Singapore, they cleared that for Mountbatten to come in and take the surrender. It was full of

bomb shelters. They took all these Japs in there to fill them in, made them working, and of course, we were free to go around and do what we wanted to do, we used to go into Singapore. I only went a couple of times, ‘cause we were told to standby to come home.

Anyway, the ice cream man ended up working on that, filling those things in. I don’t know the true story. They say they bashed him to death, but I know that he was there, and that several of the fellas that had worked on the aerodrome jumped over the fence and bashed him, but whether they bashed him to death, I don’t know, I don’t think, it was probably a rumour. I know that they did bash him up, because

one of my mates was in there and seen it all. He come home and said, “Oh, the ice cream man was there today, and some of them hopped in and gave him a nice black eye.” Or a few black eyes, so I don’t know. They had them coming out working, digging the latrines too, in Changi. The day before I left they had them working then.

Oh, well, we didn’t see much of them, only those that were on duty in and around the jail. Those who went out to work, the rest of them, as I say, I didn’t know who a lot of them were, there were a lot of them, you know.

You’d see all the troops that went away up the line and to Borneo and those places, there was only one officer for every hundred men, so there was an over supply of officers left in Changi. Certainly those above the rank of colonel were taken away, but all the majors and below were still in Changi, and there was a lot of them.

I don’t know much about them.

Well, I don’t think it affected a lot, there was a lot of the fellows got a hate about it all, and didn’t like them, and still don’t like them.

They’ll speak very poorly of them. But I never got to a stage where I got an intense dislike for them, I didn’t. But I knew that they were getting it very, very easy. Very easy.

If you got sick or something?

You’d be on a working party of some description if you were well, or partly well. Light duties, you’d be out in the gardens, they had these gardens, all the urine used to be collected, you know, you urinated into drums, and that was put in to the water carts and diluted, and all the gardens of sweet potatoes and that

was grown out there. It was all watered out of those water carts. I don’t know what the portion was, probably five to one, or ten to one, or something, urine and water. So there was all those people that would have to work in the light duties, would have to empty the drums and put that into the water carts. There was others digging the latrines. They had like a big post hole digger, digging these latrines, a hole about that deep.

Then, there was those of us out gathering wood for the kitchens, that was considered a light duty, and then gathering lalang grass, it was a native grass, grows about that high. Used to have to go and get that by the trailer load. That was crushed into juice, you had to drink a certain amount of juice to get vitamins, it was supposed to be high in vitamins. There was always something for you to do.

Light duties, well that wasn’t light duties, there was some of them they worked on the walls in Singapore, and there was always something on.

Well, you had your evening meal and went to bed.

You had three meals a day, usually the first, breakfast I think was about half past six, six o’clock in the morning. Made up of a porridge, they’d just boil the rice up. Half the time it was in the dark when you got it, so you’d pick all the grubs out. You wouldn’t pick all the grubs, ‘cause there’s grubs and weevils, the rice was very poor quality. Lunchtime, they would,

you’d have rice again, but it would be just like dry cooked, and probably have a bit of potato leaf or something through it. Night time they would probably give you the same, but the cooks would make what they call divas, they would make it into a little patty, the same as what we had at lunchtime, but fried, or baked or something, I don’t know. Like a patty, round thing about so thick.

You might get one of those. The best fun was you all had a number, ‘cause they were fed in lots of places over in the jail, there’s lots of mess queues, so you’d be in the same mess queue every night. You’d have a number allotted to you, and they’d go up, I dunno, might be a hundred in each mess queue.

If there was anything over, then they would say righto, you’d be in the backup queue, and say I was number six or sixty, and they might have eight or ten over, so they would get that and they’d be 54, and I’m number 60. So the next night you’d know that there was a good chance that you were going to get a back up, seconds.

That was always a good night, because you got a double issue. But you know, the cooks would have it pretty well taped down, and there’d always be a little bit over, so there’d be at least three or four get a return, or a back up. They kept the numbers, and they’d know exactly what the numbers were, so they’d say number six to ten, so those four or five would get another serve.

Oh, well, I dunno, you had your work, and you’d come in of a night time, and just sat around and talked among ourselves with your mates. We didn’t play a lot of cards in Changi, because there wasn’t the facilities for it. The lights and things like that.

But they used to put on a concert party, there was people who were pretty good at concerts, and they’d put on a concert. Sunday nights, there’d usually be a church service. Or there’d be several church services, there’d be Catholic and Anglican and others. There’d be four or five points in the jail where you’d go to a church service. Always pretty brief. But then the Japs would blow hot and cold with the concert,

sometimes if there was a concert, they’d stop it, then you’d get a change of officer. It used to change quite often, and the next new one come in, and the officers would negotiate with them and they’d say, “Oh, yes, you can have a concert.” So, it just depends on the mood of who was in charge as to what you could do.

There was no doubt that there was radios

in Changi prison, there was no doubt about that, but the people that operated them were very, very careful that, you know, they didn’t bandy away the news. The news that we got was always three or four months old before you got it. We didn’t know that the war had finished in Europe, it finished I think in April or something, and we didn’t know till about September. But there’s so many rumours going around, that you couldn’t believe,

you didn’t know whether to believe it or not, and I think rumours kept us going to, to a large extent, you know. The rumours used to filter around, and we’d even set a rumour going, just for the fun of it. Not about where the war was, some rumour about something. Then about three months later it filtered back, somebody said, “Did you hear about this?”

Oh, I can’t remember now. Furphy, as we used to call them, the furphy. Something that the Japs were gonna give us, or this was gonna happen, or that was gonna happen, they were only petty little things, but when you haven’t had anything, no privileges, it’s nice to think that you’re gonna get something.

It was most important. I think if you lost your sense of humour there’d be something wrong with you. I think that’s what kept most of us going,

gotta have a sense of humour, if you didn’t, I don’t think you’d go very far. It’s important in civil life even now to have a sense of humour.

It’s hard to say. The misfortunes, I suppose. I dunno, I can always remember if you had a cigarette,

to get a match to light a cigarette was impossible, so you’d have to go down to the cookhouse, because they had wood fires there. If you’re lucky enough to get a cigarette. Sometimes a Jap would be good enough to give you a couple of cigarettes, they weren’t all bad. And then you’d go down there, and I can always remember, it wasn’t, I can’t remember who it was, but it was quite true,

in the night time it was all dark, and these little fire flies used to get around, these little sparkly things. Then if you come across somebody coming towards you with a cigarette alight, you wanted a light, you’d say can you get a light, you know. Well, some of them would just hold the cigarette, and you’d set yours going off it, but others would say, “No, get the hell, I’m not going to give you a light off my cigarette.” ‘Cause you’d take a certain amount, it was very scarce.

Well, I got it very soon.

I can recall we went to Singapore, it was the wet season, and it rained I think, all day and all night for about nine nights that we were there. I can remember this vividly, sitting out, standing out, or squatting out over a latrine, nearly all night with this dysentery. There were several others had dysentery, it wasn’t amoebic, dysentery was quite common.

I mean the fact that you got wet didn’t mean anything, not like here, you’d say you’d get pneumonia or something, but then I got a fever, of course, with the dysentery, and I got very ill. I got to a stage where I couldn’t, the next day or the day after, I couldn’t even get out of my bed to go to the latrine. So, one of the doctors came into the hut where I was, into the room where I was,

they were big buildings as I said earlier, and said, “Oh, you’re a hospital case.” So I was taken on a stretcher to the hospital, which is quite a little way away from where I was. That’s when they diagnosed me with what I had. By that time I was really sick, you know. I think I was even worse than what I was when I had the

first bout of malaria. I was drifting in and out of consciousness, and I lost control of everything, you know. I was passing blood, it was a pretty scratchy time. But I was so ill that I didn’t sort of worry about it too much. I was too sick to worry whether I was gonna live, die or what.

I knew how I was treated, ‘cause this Doctor Huntley was a nice, big, burley fellow with a bald head. I remember it quite well, coming in and saying, “You’re not very well, are you?” And I said, “No, I’m not very well.” And he said, “Well, I’m gonna give you some tablets, and see if we can clear your problem up.” Which he did. I didn’t know at the time what they were, until a few days later when I started to survive, come to.

He said to me, he told me that, and he laughed about the fact that I’d these M&B tablets, sulphanilamide tablets, at that time I couldn’t even remember it, but I found out after they were sulphanilamide tablets. The reason they had them, and the reason he gave ‘em to me, ‘cause he thought if they’d cure this other complaint, it was a good chance they’d clear up the dysentery, which it did.

But I think I was about a month recovering from that.

Well, they’d gone, I knew that, because they were in the staging camp across. If they’d have still been there, they would have taken me there, but they told me that they were gone, and they took me to a

hut where, it was a small hut, it wasn’t one of these big huts, it was a small hut where the balance of the others that were sick, I think from memory about 15 or 16 of us, were left behind, and they’d had varying diseases, malaria and dysentery, not amoebic dysentery, but dysentery, and other things, I suppose. They kept us together,

and we were together until we went into Changi, into the jail.

Didn’t find out until the end of the war. Pardon me, that’s not quite right, a fellow called Max Alexander, who’s now 93 or 94, unfortunately is not very well,

and he’s in a home, he came back into Changi, he got up as far as, somewhere on the line, and then he got sick and was brought back to Kanchanaburi, but he knew of some of the deaths. And I can tell you about that if you’re gonna talk about coming home a little later. So he had,

he was able to tell us in Changi, of certain fellas that we knew that had died. He was a corporal, an ordinary corporal, and he’d kept a list of those that died and where they died, and what day they’d died. So we knew, but we didn’t know the total loss, because of course, some of the others never went up the line, they went direct from

Batavia to Japan, and were sunk on a ship going to Japan. So, we didn’t know about those until well after the war.

We found out some of them, yes, that some had died. Max didn’t know the full extent of how bad the line was either, but he got sent back ‘cause he got sick up there so bad that I dunno what camp he was in, but he came back

to Kanburi, as we called it, but it was Kanchanaburi.

Well, you know, I can’t recall that it made any difference to us, it was just part and parcel of what was going on. I mean,

it didn’t sort of alarm us a lot or surprise us, ‘cause you could never be surprised at what the Japanese did, you know. No, I can’t recall we got terribly upset about it at the time, that wasn’t good news but I don’t think, it’s just hard to recall what happened.

I don’t remember any great drama about it.

Well, if you got sick out in the party, or you came in at night or during the night and took ill, well, the sick parade was always in the evening when you came in, and the doctors would

assess you. They didn’t have anything to give you, that was the unfortunate thing. I can remember being in a sick parade one night, and the fella in front of me, he was an English doctor, and he had a flu or a cold or something, and this doctor looked at him and he said, “No, if I was home in England, I could treat you, and I’d have you up and about in two weeks, but

I’m here in Changi, and I’ve got nothing to treat you with, and you’ll get better in a fortnight.” But they had nothing to treat you with, and you took pot luck. Early on, as I said, there was plenty of medication taken out to Selarang, any amount, but then as the work parties went away, and the doctors that went on those work parties had to take a certain amount,

and so gradually it diminished, and they didn’t have three and a half years supply, that’s for sure. So at the finish they had absolutely nothing. I can remember having a sleeper dropped, when I was working out on the airport where this little line was moving it, and they dropped the sleeper on my big toe, and crushed my toe, and pushed the toenail in. It got infected, and

I went to a fellow called Doctor Woodroof, and he’d had a degree in engineering and one in medicine, but he elected to do medicine. And he said to me, “Well, we’ll have to get the infection out of this, but we’ll have to take the toenail off.” Anyway, they used to use mosquito net and boil it and use that as bandages, and just get some palm oil, that’s all they had, they didn’t have anything else.

Bathe it in salt water, and wrap it up and put a bit of palm oil on it. Anyhow, I went to him this morning, and I said, “Well, I think the infection’s gone.” And he said, “Take the nail off. ‘Cause it’s ingrowing, it’s pushed down into the flesh of your toe. You’re lucky, I’ve got some local anaesthetic, I got the Japs to give me,

so I can kill the pain a bit for you.” It was quite a big syringe, it was not like the little syringes you’ve got today, it was quite a big syringe, and he put this material in, it was about a quarter of an inch or so in the bottom of it, more than that, perhaps. And he started to inject it into the side of my toe and down the side of the nail. I just let out one yell,

you know, the needle was blunt, and was going in just on the bone. And then he’d done the other side, and the pain… Then he felt it, and he said, “Can you feel that?” And I said, “Yes, of course I can feel it!” So, he said, “Well, I’ll give it another go.” I was looking at it, and I could see that the material, the anaesthetic, had come up past the plunger.

He said, “Oh, the syringe is no good. I don’t think the material’s any good, either.” So he put that aside and he said, and blood’s all running out from where he stuck the needle, he said, “It’s coming off as it is.” So he just got a pair of tweezers and turned it over halfway one way, and half the other and went boom, and off it came. I just yelled blue murder, you know. I said to him a day or two later, “You were an engineer?”

And he said, “Yes.” “You should’ve stuck to it. Don’t be a doctor, just be an engineer.” Anyway, he said to me, “When you go home to Adelaide, you know Doctor Hobbs?” And I said, “No.” But Doctor Hobbs ended up a great friend of mine. He only died about ten years ago, at the age of about 90. A wonderful old man, his widow’s still alive, she’s not very well. Lovely lady.

I was introduced to him at a POW meeting. I’d been in the country, you know, and I’d never been to a POW meeting, and I was introduced to him, this Doctor Hobbs. He used to attend regularly, ‘cause I’ve been secretary of the POWs now for 25 years. Anyway, I don’t know if he had a stroke or something, but he had a very bad impediment in his speech, you could hardly understand a thing he was saying.

The then president introduced me, he said, “This is Doctor Hobbs, Will Schmitt.” And I shook hands, and I said, “I’ve been dying to meet you.” And I told him about this Doctor Woodruff taking off my toenail, and he said to me, “You get the Doctor Hobbs, and tell he’s got to take that toenail off for nothing. When you go home, you tell him that I said so, take the nail out, and take it off for nothing.” So, I told him the story and he said, “I’m sorry sir, I don’t operate any more.”

This is the first words I’d heard him say, and I thought God, thank God you don’t! Poor old fella, but anyway, that’s another story.

Well, I’d only seen those that I knew. A lot died there, of course, and they died out in the hospital. The only ones you were concerned with were the people that you knew.

I’d go out and see them. I wouldn’t be always there when they died, but you’d make a point of going and seeing them. Changi was fairly good, they had pretty good nursing staff there. A lot of people died there, of course, but you were only concerned about those that you knew, that were close to you.

Not very pleasant at all. A fellow that married a cousin of mine, a chap called Ern Heyne, he was much older than me. He retired, he was a school teacher, but he would have been 100 if he was alive today, but he died many years ago. He was a stretcher bearer, then he worked out there, old Ern used to keep me informed,

he’d say, “Come and see so-and-so, he’s pretty sick.” He was a wonderful fellow, nursing them, he was a full time orderly out in the hospital. They looked after them pretty well at Changi, but as I say, they had no medication, they couldn’t treat you very well, the doctors did their best to keep them alive as long as they could.

That’s the way it is.

There was a whole ward of those. We called them bomb happy fellows, unfortunately. They were housed in the jail itself, up one end, on the very end,

where these arms come out, there was a room there, and an area where they had them confined. They were sad cases, you know. But they really, I don’t know how many were there, but I’d say 15 or 20 of them. They were psycho people, but we weren’t that familiar with it as I am now. I see them at Daws Road, ‘cause I go to

Daws Road a lot. Quite a lot there really bad, I don’t know what happened to them.

There would always be three or four of you together, and you’d know the others, but those three or four would look after one another. If you happened to be lucky enough to get a bit of extra ration, you shared it with them, and

they did the same. I think that that’s what kept us going, and I might have said earlier that if you didn’t have a mate, you didn’t come home. It was that camaraderie among yourselves that kept you going. It was a hard life, but you owed it to your mates that you got home, and they owed it to you. I mean, you just looked after them, and that’s

why I say today that all ex-service people, there’s a great camaraderie among ex-service people, but among POWs it’s much stronger.

In Changi? Well, Jock Page, I suppose. We were in the same cell, and Jock and Charlie Sutherland. Poor old Charlie saved my life.

I had an abscess in my ear, and Athol Flint. We were all in the same cell together.

Well, I’d had this terrible throbbing earache, and I was so bad that he come home from work, I wasn’t in hospital, they didn’t put me in hospital. He come home from work, picked me up,

took me down there to two flights of stairs to get to sick parade, and a Dutch doctor said, he had a thing to look in my ear, and he said, “You’ve got a dreadful abscess. I don’t think I can do anything for you, you’d better go over to the hospital. I’ll see you over there.” So, I dunno what they did, I think he got a piece of wire about so long, and sharpened it at one end, flattened it out and sharpened it, and put it in, had no anaesthetic, and

cut it, lanced it, and holy hell did that hurt. I went out to that, too. All this stuff, pus came out of my ear, and I was there for a fortnight, I suppose. And I don’t think I’d have seen the night out if Charlie hadn’t taken me there and carried me there. That was this ear, and for the next year,

if I laid on that side, it used to tick like a clock. Tick, tick, tick, it would drive me mad, so I’d have to lay over on this side. As long as I didn’t have anything under it, you know. Charlie said to me I was in that much pain, ‘cause I’d been on sick parade the day before, and they’d said, “There’s nothing we can do for you, it’s burst in due course.”

He was a Pom, he was an Englishman. He’d been out here many years, but his father was an old soldier in the Indian army, and Charlie was born in India. He was a rough, real rough old fellow. Single, to finish the story about him, he came home, he’s a West Australian, he came home, ended up in Hollywood Hospital, just after he came home, met a widow who

was a Salvation Army woman, and he married her, and he never had a drink. He used to get as drunk as drunk, never had a drink after that. He used to come here quite often. I’ve got something here that he brought me, some tapes and things like that, a great, great fella. Every time I went to Perth, I’d always go and see him and his wife, but he’s gone, been gone many years now.

None. Oh, no, that’s not right.

Just towards the end of the war, just before the war finished, we got one food parcel, and we had to share it between eight of us. I think we got a couple of cigarettes each, I’ve forgotten what was in it. I know I had the cigarette packet itself, and think it’s probably in some of my stuff I got up there. I think I might have written the date on it, they were

Lucky Strike cigarettes or something. That’s the only one we got. I don’t know, but they tell me that there was heaps of parcels found after the war, never, ever issued. The Japs paid us, I think, ten cents a day, but we never got that money, that money went in and it was held in a trust and they had a canteen. Every now and then we used to get cigars come in, they’d buy that out of our money.

Sugar and that, the Japs didn’t issue sugar, so they’d buy sugar and that would go into the kitchen and things like that. No, never got any extra food parcels, never, only the one. Shared it amongst, I’m sure it was about eight of us.

I didn’t ever have an instrument, though.

Well I just used to go as a patron. I didn’t take part in it. Oh, yes, as I said,

if the officer in charge of the jail, they would change quite often, and some of them would be good and some of them would be bad. Some of them would let a concert to go on, and there were some quite good entertainers there. In fact, there was an 8th Division concert party, and they were captured, and they were still in Changi. Some of them got moved, I believe, but some of them

were quite good entertainers. They put on shows, and a couple of them would dress up as female impersonators and things like that. Had a lot of fun, and done it well, you know. It would go for a while, and then the Japs would all of a sudden say, “No more, stop.” for some reason or another, I don’t know. There’d be a change of government, as we’d say, and the

next one might say, “Ok, you can have it.” It was quite good though, when they were going.

We didn’t hear anything. We were out working, particular party, I wasn’t on the drain that day, I was out I think on a wood party, I can’t remember,

to be exact, but we were sent home early. We were digging those fox holes, and they said to knock off, a bit unusual. So, we came in, and the next day, no work, and then the next day we sort of got rumours through our own people that the war was practically at an end. Of course, I think it was a few days negotiation.

But we didn’t see anyone, as I recall, it was the 30th of August, when they dropped pamphlets. There’s a pamphlet in there. Did you see that? They dropped on Changi, when the war was finished, this plane flew over and dropped them. It was a big relief, I don’t think I slept for five nights. I know we were issued with

coffee beans, and we were up bashing them up and making coffee and talking and talking and talking, it was wonderful. Yeah, couldn’t get over it, couldn’t believe it. But there you are, and then Lady Mountbatten and Linger Longer Louis, as we used to call him before, Admiral Mountbatten?

Lord Louis Mountbatten. We used to hear rumours, and there was a fellow called Fraser, who was an American army or navy bloke, and we used to hear these rumours about Mountbatten, and he was up in Burma, of course, and rumours would be floating through that he was on his way down to Singapore and all this sort of thing. It never, ever happened, until

the war had actually finished, but we used to say Linger Longer Louis, for Mountbatten, and Fraser was Far Away Fraser, he was the other one. But anyway, eventually Linger Longer Louis turned up and Lady Mountbatten into Changi, and they were made very welcome. A very nice fellow, a very nice lady she was.

Oh yes, she came in.

Got to talk to her, she walked through every hut, I think. Talked to everyone she could. It was a wonderful feeling, it was all over.

Well, there was about 40 of us Middle East people there, that were fit to travel, and the authorities, whoever it was

in charge, said, “You’ve been to the Middle East,” and all that sort of thing, “you fellas can have the first available plane or ship or whatever to go out, and nominate what you want to do.” And we said, “We want to go on the first plane.” You know, couldn’t get home quick enough. There were several of them sick, and by that time, just the day or two of us leaving, they were flying them in from all over the place, they were coming in from Sumatra, ‘cause they had a pretty tough trot, the

POWs working on a railway line in Sumatra. Not much said about that, there’s a lot died over there of our fellows. They were bringing them in from Thailand and flying them down into Changi, but the forty of us that were there were put on three planes, and

it took us a week, we left on a Thursday, so it must have been the 20th of September, ‘cause we got home here to Adelaide on the Thursday the 27th, and we left over there on a Thursday, it was a week getting home.

An old pair of shorts, like I’ve got on there. That’s all. Nothing.

No, I didn’t have shoes, no boots.

I used to make a pair of clogs, I called them, with a bit of flat board, you know. Cut ‘em out and put whatever I could across to make a strap like clogs. That’s what I had, and that’s what we had when we got to Borneo. They told us to

stand by, that we’d know when the plane was coming, so we did. We got to, not to Changi airport as it is today, but the old Changi airport, which was quite close into the city of Singapore. There was a DC3 and I didn’t know, these two small planes. As it turned out, they were Mitchell bombers. They said, “Get on whatever you like.” I said, “I’m not getting in those little things.” They were all climbing up through the bottom, so I went and got in this big old DC3

freighter. It was three Dutch blokes flying it, and they could hardly speak English, anyway. So we got on board, it didn’t have seats or anything like that or a seatbelt. No seats, just an aluminium type bench along each side. We got in there, hot as hell, they gave us a packet of cigarettes each, someone did, as we got on. Ten cigarettes.

Anyway, they started the motor up, and there was something wrong with it. So we all had to get out, and this mechanic fellow got out, and go on top of the wing, and lifted the top off the motor, done something, and we got back in and that still wasn’t right. Then we got out again, and I dunno to this day, but I think it might have been the silver paper, but he wanted something off the cigarette packet. Either the cellophane paper, or the silver paper

inside it, and he put that inside, got back in and said, “Right, we’re set.” We flew in that plane all the way home till we got to Brisbane.

Wonderful. These two Mitchell bombers had taken off, we were an hour behind them, and we didn’t know quite where we were going, we had no idea. We just said fly, you know, keep it going. We ended up in Borneo, in Balikpapan, and there was a big AGH [Australian General Hospital] there,

army general hospital, and these Americans were there and they had these little jeeps. There was 25 of us in this plane I was on, and they had a jeep for each one of us, so they drove us down to this big hospital, took us in, and we had our first hot shower for three and a half years, or perhaps longer. I couldn’t remember in the Middle East, having hot showers, only when you went on leave,

and you were in a hotel. And gave us soap, we hadn’t had soap or toothpaste, or toothbrushes, it was unheard of. I’ve never forgotten this, the shower and we soaped up, lather, beautiful! Didn’t want to get out from underneath. Then when we dried ourselves we used nice white hospital towels, couldn’t stop smelling yourself, ‘cause you smelt so nice.

Either Lux, or Palmolive soap, don’t know what sort of soap it was, but it was nice. They issued us with all new clothes. Full uniform, and we were housed right against the boundary fence of this hospital, a big chain wire fence around it. There’s all the troops up along the fence, yelling out, “Do you know so-and-so? Do you know so-and-so?”

I had an old hat that had holes in it, it was moth eaten, you know, terrible. I threw that out, and one chap said, “Don’t you want that, mate?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “Can I have it?” I said, “This?” And he said, “Yes.” And I had to throw it up over the fence. Don’t know what he’s gonna do with it. Anyway, we had a fellow in our battalion called Dave Hardies, and this chap said, “Did you know Dave Hardies?” And I said, “Yeah, I know Dave, but I haven’t seen him since we were captured, and I don’t

know where he is. I can’t remember him in Bandung or where, anywhere.” But I said, “Max might know.” This Max Alexander fellow that came back to Changi and had a few names. So I said, “Max, do you know what happened to Dave Hardies?” He looked in his book and he said, “I’ve got him down that he died in Pintoch or somewhere on such and such a date.” So I tell this poor cobber,

and it was his brother, only about 19 this poor kid. Oh, he started to cry, and I said, “I’m sorry, but that’s what Max said.” Anyway, I’m still in uniform, only been home two or three weeks, and I’m going past the Adelaide Town Hall, in uniform before I was discharged, and who should come past but Dave Hardies. And I said, “Hell, are you still alive?” He said, “Yeah, you wasn’t the so-and-so that told my brother that I’d died, was you?” And I said,

“Well I did, but Max Alexander told me.” He only lived a couple of years after the war, did Dave. He’d come from Port Pirie.

Oh, well it was really wonderful. We had wonderful receptions all the way home, and then actually getting home, meeting your own people was very, very emotional. We

got down to Melbourne, we came by plane to Brisbane, and then they put us on a train from Brisbane down to Melbourne.

Yes, we done that in Townsville, ‘cause our first stop in Australia was Townsville. I can remember looking out the plane, and coming over the Cape York Peninsula, the very tip, and the pilot came out and said, “That’s Australia.”

It was wonderful. Then we got down to Brisbane in the night time, I can remember the pilot saying hang on, ‘cause we didn’t have any seatbelts and it was raining. We came on down to Melbourne and we didn’t stay,

we slept on the train, it was a troop train with bunks in it for us. When we got to Melbourne, my brother that joined the army with me, and his wife and two cousins who were both females, who were in the army, they were at the station. I’d kept sending telegrams to my mother, who in turn said I was leaving Sydney on a train.

They were at the Spencer Street station to meet me. They put us in an ambulance, and took us out to Heidelberg Hospital. Murray and his wife Nancy, and these two cousins came out there, and I said, “I’m not stopping in here.” They lived not far away, so after a lot of haggling, the doctor said, “Alright, you can go home, but you’ve gotta be back here at eight o’clock in the morning.”

So I said alright, so they organised the Red Cross car to take us home, and to pick me up the next morning. I stopped at Nancy’s mother and father, but they had a house full, and they couldn’t accommodate me, so I had to go down to the hotel, just a couple of hundred yards up the street, they’d booked accommodation there for me. Got me a big alarm clock, so I’d made certain that I’d wake up, and Murray came down with me. We slept there.

The other brother, Jack that has since died. He was in the air force, and he’d been through and said “Bill’s on the way home.” He gave them a bottle of scotch whiskey, which was very hard to get in war time. He said, “If he comes through here, give him a drink.” Well, we drank this bloody bottle of scotch whiskey, Murray and I, and Nancy’s father, sitting by the wood fire in Melbourne that night. I hadn’t had much alcohol,

but anyway, Murray took me up to the hotel, and we sat talking till about half past four, set this alarm clock going, and it went off as seven o’clock or something, frightened the hell out of me. There was nobody up in the pub, and I couldn’t get out. I’m walking around with big army boots on, trying to find the door. Anyway, I eventually got out. They put me on the Melbourne express with Red Cross nurses, to come home.

There was five of us them, left. ‘Cause we’d dropped a lot of them off in Brisbane and Melbourne, some for Tasmania, so there was five South Australians. We had this Red Cross nurse looking after us, a nurse from the hospital I suppose, I don’t know where she was from. We had a compartment. The worst part about it was that we got out to Ballarat that night, about eight or nine o’clock that we got there. Stepped out on the station,

in September, it was the 26th, and it was snowing, in Ballarat, on the station. Poor old Reggie H, whose in that photo outside Changi prison, he got malaria, because the sudden chill gave him malaria. He was laying on the seat in our carriage, shaking all night with malaria, and he went straight in to Daws Road. We got a week’s leave, they sent us out for a week, as soon as we had breakfast and met our people, and he had to stop in hospital.

They met us at Goodwood Station, took us off, put us in an ambulance, and took us out to Daws Road, and gave us breakfast, gave us a quick medical, all within a half hour or so, and took us round to the Red Cross hut, and that’s where we met our people. Mum and Dad, a couple of aunts, my sister in laws and what have you. Very, very nice.

Well, we were just, I dunno how far it is from Balikpapan to Morotai, but we

stopped there, must have been for lunch, they just brought out some sandwiches in a kerosene box. But we were flying around and the airport was right close to, it’s a coral atoll I think, Morotai, where we landed. Seemed to be just coral and right alongside the sea. We were flying around quite a bit before we landed, and then we could see that a plane

landed in front of us, and pulled up. So we came down, and sort of taxied in alongside this plane. They just got out, and it was a concert party that had been up in Burma or somewhere, or been down here, going one way or the other. It was Gracie Fields. She came across, and she found who we were, and we asked her to sing, ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye’.

She did, but she had a pretty hard face, the old girl, but she was very pleasant. Anyway, there were some other chaps and women with them, so I had the pleasure of Gracie Fields singing to us. Quite pleasant, and I can remember it was as hot as hot, just out there on the tarmac on this air strip. That was Morotai, yeah.

That was it, none. Women looked soft, they were just beautiful to you when you’d been away for so long. We’d seen women, but you know, they were Indonesians or Chinese, but when you see your own females who are nicely

dressed, you know. They’ve got their cosmetics on and things like that, it was wonderful, even my mother and aunts and things like that, they just smelt different. I hadn’t been only away three and a half years as a POW, I’d had another year

in the Middle East, so it was about four and a half years since I’d been in contact with any of your own kin. Your own females, and mothers and sisters, aunts and people like that. Quite different.

Oh, well, it was very emotional,

and I still get emotional about it, ‘cause I remember my old Dad saying to me, he was outside at the Red Cross hut here, the Red Cross rooms over at Daws Road with another uncle of mine, they were out having a cigarette, I suppose. I came around the corner and he grabbed me, and said, “Good God, what have they done to you? Look at you!” “I’m here. I’m in one piece, what’s the matter?” And he said, “God, you’re thin.”

Well, until I had this operation, my weight has always been eleven stone, I’m only at eight stone now, and I was seven stone when I come home, so I was a stone smaller than what I am now. I’d lost nearly five stone, and that’s a lot of weight, I was 42 kilos.

Pretty thin, but you get emotional, and he was pretty emotional, my old Dad, which was most unusual for him, but he was. The mother and that, it was wonderful.

Well, I didn’t have any problems. They told us to be careful what you eat,

but I didn’t have any trouble. I got myself up to nine and a half stone very quickly, but then it slowly took me another six months to get back to what I was when I joined the army. I reckon more than six months. But then I wasn’t all that well, I’d been in and out of Daws Road a bit. I had hookworm and a few things like that. TB suspect, in and out

quite a bit, relapse or two of malaria. Then I got back and right up until two years ago, when I had this stomach removed, I could bet London to a brick that I was eleven stone two, get on the scales, and that would be it, every morning.

My father, he was living at Cummins then, he’d just moved to Cummins when the war broke out, he was transferred back there. Had a job as the district foreman at the railways. They were living there.

Well, I got a photo somewhere, my mother and father came over here to Adelaide to meet me.

I think if I remember rightly, the army paid their fare, they gave them free tickets, and I had a widowed aunt and my younger brother, who was still at school, he’d just finished school. They’d remained there when I came home to the house, there were all these decorations out the front, balloons flying around. Then I was met at the station,

‘cause they knew I was on that train, the local chairman of the district council and lots of other people. I didn’t know them, ‘cause I hadn’t lived at Cummins. I lived at Cummins in my early days, when I was about four or five, I went there when I was six weeks old, and I left there when I was four or five. I didn’t know it very well then, but I got to know it a little bit when my mother and father moved

back there in 1939. I think, six months before the war, can’t remember exactly.

The usual turkey sort of thing. I used to say, “Get the turkey fat.” Well I think they had a turkey ready, a big Christmas dinner sort of thing. I had a cousin living close by, and they were there.

Then there was a welcome home party in the local town hall, although I didn’t enlist from there, but along with about three others we had a welcome home party, and they’d give us something, I’ve forgotten what it was, a fountain pen or something.

Well, it was wonderful. It didn’t embarrass me in any shape or form. Well, it did to an extent, ‘cause I didn’t expect that sort of thing. But I don’t know that I appreciated it much at the time as I did afterwards, after it all settled down.

You were a bit toey, I suppose, you don’t take all these things in at the time, and you don’t appreciate the significance of it to a certain extent. I enjoyed it, and all that sort of thing, but I think I appreciated it more so later than what I did at the time.

I settled in, I think, fairly quickly. I was engaged very shortly after I came home. I wasn’t courting my wife at that stage, but I knew the family. She came to this welcome home dance, she was a telephonist and was relieving at Cummins at the time.

That’s how it started, and from the time, that was in October, and we were married the following April the next year. So, from October, when I was with her, courting, getting ready for marriage.

Yes, quite a lot. But particularly just after we were married, in the early 12 months. I used to drive the wife crazy I think, wake her up and doing silly things. I can remember vividly one night, we had in those day candlewick bed spreads,

and I was dreaming that I was in this camp, stealing this stuff from the Japanese, this candlewick stuff, out of a 44 gallon drum, and I’m grabbing as much as I can. I got a thump in the ribs, and my wife said, “What the hell are you doing?” I’ve got all the bedspread up tight against my chest. I’d sort of picked it up all around, I’d pulled it off

and I’d got a pile of bedspread on my chest. I used to dream, and I still do, occasionally, but not as often now, that I’m back in there. I think hell, not again. Why would you want to be in this? I’d have that nightmare still, I suppose, once every three or four months. Early on, I’d have it once a week.

Back in there, and running away from them, and hiding and doing all sorts of silly things. Then you wake up and think thank God that’s over, sweating, and go back to sleep.

I didn’t talk to anyone. In those days you

didn’t want to talk about being a bit psycho, or something like that, like they do today. Because, if somebody got, we call them troppo, a bit round the bend, I mean, you’d sort of look upon it as a bit of a smear on you. So you kept it to yourself, you didn’t want to let people know

that you’re doing these sort of things. Today, it’s a different ball game, of course. The Vietnam veterans and those people that suffer from this PSTD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder], it’s a disease like any other disease, and they get treated for it.

No, I don’t think you thought you were. It happened and you’d keep it to yourself. I can remember being in Daws Road, and in those days the wards went up to about 14, and the last two or three were all war neurosis cases down the end, you know. We used to say bomb happy. They were just looked upon as,

not bludgers, but unfortunate I suppose, but you never sympathised with them. I know one of them, a fellow called Fred Ryan, he was to come up, and he was a psycho all his life. I used to always buy him a bottle of wine, he’d come to me when I was at Cleve, Keith in the south east, and he’d just

walk the road, you know. We used to play cards in the solariums, the ward where I was, he’d come up and say, “They’re all mad down there, they’re all troppo, and they’ve got me down there with them.” He’d come up with us, and he was probably one of the worst of ‘em. You were a bit inclined, and I still am, I don’t want people to think

I’ve got any nervous problems, psychiatric problems. It’s a bit of a taboo.

The Australians, 36 percent died, of the POWs, in those years, three in every ten didn’t come back. It was more than that when you take into account those that were killed in action. It was 42 percent of the 8th and 7th Division never returned. Then the death rate for the first five

years after the war was still pretty high, it was around, I think, 14 or 15 percent. Might have been a little bit more, but they were people who just didn’t, the diseases that they inherited or had got in prison camps got the better of them, and they developed all sorts of things, I don’t know exactly what.

Quite a few suicides. But not that many, I only know of three, but I guess there were more. There were other states that I don’t know about, but I can think of three here. I think it was the results of malaria, dysentery, and all the

tropical diseases that you could get. Beriberi, that was another one I haven’t mentioned. The results of those diseases was the cause of their deaths in most instances. Their deaths were due to all causes.

It’s very hard to say. Bill Haniford, who was a very good friend of mine, they lived at Rosewater down at Port Adelaide, went there three or four times to parties, they were a wonderful family. One of his sisters developed

polio just after the war. Polio was very rife here in Adelaide, just after the war. Bill, you couldn’t help but like him, and his family, and yet they had some disagreement, he and his mother and father, and he went to live with a neighbour across the road. He lived there, I don’t know for how long, not very long, whether it’s weeks or months.

The neighbour found him hanging in their shed, in the garage. He just committed suicide there. So something got at him, it certainly wouldn’t be his mother and father. I suppose something bugged him and away he went. But he was a happy go lucky fellow, the last fellow in the world…when they told me he was dead, I just couldn’t believe it. The way he died, if they’d said he’d had a heart attack,

it wouldn’t have been, but to say that he committed suicide, dreadful as far as I was concerned.

It must have been, for those sort of people, yes. Another chap, I could go on, I don’t want to go on about that.

No. I think everyone says, “My Dad never told us anything.” I think the thing about it is it’s pointless trying to tell people something, and you can’t, if you weren’t there to experience it, you can’t tell people. It’s just a waste of time. I can remember talking to my uncle, and trying to visualise World War II, what it was like,

because we didn’t have the facilities of TVs and that you’ve got today to see what war was like. I’d try and visualise what it was like, but when you get there it’s quite a different ball game altogether, you know. And so, I find out that, apart from someone telling you instances and trying to relate to you today, which I find very hard

to do, ‘cause I don’t talk about it. It’s pointless I think, talking to people, if they’d never understand it, they could never understand it. Could never understand the conditions and the way we lived as POWs. I try and describe it to you the best I can, but you’d have to be there, really to understand it. You see these films that are being made on

POWs, they’re so far from the truth, that it’s just laughable. ‘King Rat’ or whatever it was, that American film that was made, was absolutely rubbish.

Some of our fellows did, poor old George Beard, another great

mate of mine who lives up in Queensland, he felt shame ever since the war. He died here 12 months or so ago. Becoming a POW. I didn’t feel any shame about it, because if I’d have went and surrendered, and through my own fault got caught, well you’d capitulated or done something

silly, but we had no control over it. I can’t see why I should feel shame. I feel very disappointed, that our war effort was cut short. We didn’t contribute to the war after, we contributed till we got caught, once we got caught we had three and a half years of no contribution. When we couldn’t contribute to the war, except that we probably had the Japs to guard us and it took a few

of them away from the front line. But, no I didn’t feel any guilt about it.

I’m only concerned about the welfare of the POWs, and the welfare of their widows, and I’ve been

twenty-five years the state secretary of the Prisoner of War association, I’ve been the national patron and chief, I still am, of that. I’m delegate for the national body. I was national president for five years, which a term is only two, but I ended up having five for that. I’m not doing it for the POWs,

I’m doing it for POWs, but not to advocate or carry on and talk about it. I’m talking about looking after, I used to do their welfare, I’d do pensions applications for them. And I can’t do that any longer ‘cause I’m too involved in other things, but I’m chairman of the consultative council of ex-service organisations, which currently have got a big gripe on with the government over the repat hospital, I’ve been heavily involved with that.

I’m on two committees over there. I’m on about three or four committees with the Department of Veteran Affairs, so I’ve got a pretty full book, if you talk to Kath, I’ll have a couple of meetings a week, you know. I’m only concerned about their welfare, and their entitlements, particularly widows, widows whose husbands die. I’ve got a pension for a widow here that never ever thought she had a hope in hell,

and got a pension for her just recently. I didn’t do it myself but I got it done for her. Not only POWs either, I do it for other veterans.

Well, I think now it is. The government kindly came up with 25,000 dollars in the last two or three years

as a compensation for them, for the Japanese POWs, and more recently for the Korean POWs, they didn’t do it for the European POWs. While I was national president, I’ve got a lot of things through, I got the widows automatically made war widows. You see, the fact that,

to become a war widow, and I don’t know if you know that, your husband had to die with an accepted war disability, it had to be accepted by the department. If it wasn’t, then you’re not a war widow. Of course, a war widow’s got a lot more advantage than an ordinary widow. I was successful after a number of years of lobbying with the government, and getting to know the Department of Veteran Affairs, and the ministers,

who have it automatically now, if a prisoner of war dies, his wife automatically is a war widow, automatically gets it, doesn’t matter what he died of. If he got run over by a motor car, she becomes a war widow, which is a great thing. So we don’t have any of the problems we used to have years ago, when we had to turn around if his death wasn’t attributed to war, his war effort, we had to then make

a case, and fight with the department to get her made a war widow.

I have, I’ve done that many years ago. I can’t see any point in going on hating people. That doesn’t achieve anything.

The Japanese that are alive today, all the ones that were responsible for the atrocities that were committed are probably dead anyway, and I believe that the younger generation of Japanese is just as good as our generation. I’ve fallen out with quite a few POWs, although in more recent times they’ve seemed to come my way. I’d spoken about

it many, many times. What’s the point of going on hating people. As I say, the people that caused our atrocities are dead and gone, and you can’t blame the young Japanese people for what happened with their grandfathers, that’s not right. So, I bear no animosity towards them at all, not in any shape or form.

I’ve been back to Singapore.

I was national president, and in 1992, which is 50 years after the fall in Singapore, I took a party of a thousand back, widows and POWs and their wives, and we had a big ceremony up at Kranji cemetery, we had eight or ten days in Singapore. I went up three times prior to that in organising, ‘cause it was a big event.

Then I went back again in 2002, which is two years ago last February just gone, for the sixtieth anniversary.

Well, the very first time I went back, when I went for the organisation, I made an appointment through the Singapore government,

to get out to Changi, and meet the superintendent to negotiate an arrangement where, when the time come in 18 months time, they could get into the jail, let the veterans go in and the widows into a portion, not all the jail. I think probably the hardest thing was that when I went out the first time,

the superintendent of the prison, we were up in his office on the second level in the front of the building, looking out all over the complex, and I was pointing out A block and B block and all these things, and he said, “You certainly have been here.” And I said, “I’ve been here, don’t worry about that.” And I took off the cell, I was in cell three, and I brought home the little brass number, my daughter’s got it in Melbourne. I had it mounted and given to her,

‘cause she came with me when I went back in 1992. So he said, “Would you like to have a look in your cell?” And I said, “Very much.” That was pretty tough, you know, I got a bit emotional that day, and he took me over, he didn’t himself, he got one of his officers to take me, and I had June Hierdy, who was the national RSL [Returned and Services League] secretary from

Canberra who was with me. Two or three others. The cell was empty, they were out on exercise or something, and there it was. The only thing was, that they’d taken the concrete bed out, that’s gone, and they were sleeping three in the cell now. They had the straw mats all rolled up there. That was pretty tough.

It was just thinking that perhaps the fellas that were with me in there, the time, and most of them had died. They’d gone, they’d never go back to see it, I’d be the only one that would ever see it again. Then I went there three times in that year, because the first time was the hardest, and I went back when the party went up there. I took

my wife, my daughter, there was about seven of us that I asked permission to take. Terry Hierdy, with the Department of Veteran Affairs, he went up, my brother and his wife.

I think it cleared up a lot of things.

I had always said I never want to go back there. I’d never go back to Singapore. I’d been there for that time, and the memory wasn’t a good one. But, having got there, when I was forced to go back as national president to make the arrangements, to organise this big party, and to go through it, not forced to go through it, I think that was a good thing.

Although I was emotional and I broke down, I think it done me good.

Yes, she didn’t go that very first time. I went up three times prior to the event, so I had four trips to Singapore in 18 months. A lot to do to organise it.

So I went back the first time, when the superintendent said come and have a look. The next time, he gave special permission for me to take my wife and my daughter, who lived in Melbourne, and my brother and his wife, and Terry Hierdy, whose since passed on, he

was the Department of Veteran Affairs Deputy Commissioner. He went up, and they all came in with me.

Well, then you could start talking about Changi. Those people that went there would see what it was, and you could talk to them.

Two years ago, I took my two daughters and my son, and myself went up. Then I got the daughter that hadn’t been to Changi, I didn’t get her into my cell, but I got her and my son into the prison, and into a cell, which is the same sort of cell as I was in. So, they’ve all seen it, and they’ve seen Changi, they’ve seen the prison, they’ve been inside the main gate, you know. So, you can talk to people then, and

then they know exactly what it’s like. Poor old Sue, she cried when she came out, we were waiting at the Changi village for them to come back in the bus, and she said, “Oh Dad, how did you ever put up with that?” But there you are, at least she’s seen it, and that’s it.

I wouldn’t like to go through it again. As a POW certainly, but I don’t think it done me any harm. I think it certainly gave me a different aspect on life. Of course, I was young when I was captured in the army, but

I think it’s an experience that you could never buy and it’s an experience that will stand you in good stead for all time.

Oh well, I suppose the strongest thing that stood out is actually the capture, when we surrendered,

and our first encounter with the Japanese. Saying, “Well, this is it, we’re here, we can’t do anything, we’re on our own and our contribution and to the country is finished.” And the doubt as to what was gonna happen to us. As it turns out, we got out of it, but now that we know all the

facts that we were doomed in Singapore, if Mountbatten had landed there instead of coming in as he did, well we ought to be shot anyway. The same in all the POW camps, we were not to be released or handed over. So, we’d have landed in Japan, all those of us who were up in Japan were gonna be shot. That’s quite common knowledge.

The same as what they were in Borneo, there was six survivors in Borneo, they just kept marching them away from the invading troops and eventually those who couldn’t march, they shot them there and then on the spot. So they were pretty ruthless. But I think that the fact, lots of memories I’ve got, I think probably the end of it all was when

I was captured and the reality hit home that that’s it, and the last thing I expected. I thought if I got into action I could probably lose a leg or an arm, or had anything happen to me, be shot, be killed, but never to be a POW, never entered my head.

What from? Who from?

I think you’d never forget the mates who looked after you. The kindness that they showed towards you. I shouldn’t say there was any kindness from the Japanese, some of them were good and some of them were bad. But I think the fact that the little groups, as we got around,

and looked after one another, I think the kindness that they showed is the things that stick in your mind for all time. As I said earlier, that the camaraderie among POWs is something that you gotta be one of them to understand it. I used to go to my unit picnic, and Jack Carter and I were great mates, poor old Jack died a few years ago, but when

I was in the country, I didn’t used to get to go to them very often, and once every five years. If Anzac Day fell near a weekend I could come in from the country and go to the picnic at Anzac time. He would always walk up and give me a kiss, and the kids would look and say, “What’s going on?” But that was just a bit of fun, and he’d give me a hug, and I’d do the same to him. It’s those sort of things, those memories that stick

with you, and always will. Unfortunately, we’re getting so few. When I first started marching, there used to be about 300 of us on Anzac Day, we can’t make one rank, that’s ten people, today. I think we only had nine this year, and then we get a few sons and daughters, they swell up the ranks. I was in a wheelchair, because I’d just had

a flu, and I wasn’t game to try to march the full distance. My granddaughter was over from Melbourne, so she pushed me in the wheelchair, there was two of in wheelchairs, and two carrying the banner, and nine behind, there was 13 of us, all told.

Oh well, what would I say to them? Never lose sight of your country and, much as I hate war, and I don’t want to see war, but if the time comes, you’ve got to look after, you’ve got to protect the people. Men have got to

protect their wives or their families and what have you. So, you must go to war, but that is a great dislike to me. But I think the message is to remain loyal to your country and to your family, and that’s it, full stop.