Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in 1915 and it was in the latter stages of World War I.

I can remember on my mother’s side her brothers coming back from World War I. Then later on my aunt went to England shortly after the armistice was declared. In those days we lived at a place called Kenilworth, where Kenilworth Avenue is now, in Hyde Park.

in a large old home which my grandfather established in 1895, I think it was. Our family

grew up in that home with my mother and father and my grandmother on my father’s side and my aunt also on my father’s side. I can remember we used to keep cows, milk cows, for years even up to World War II. And the boys and my father all milked the cows. We had a large

area of land and the cows used to run about. I can remember my father going to work on a pony and sulky. And then in 1919 coming home he bought his first car, a Model T Ford, with great

jubilation from the family. The horse and sulkie was no more of course. Later on I went to school at the state school and went to the Townsville Grammar School. In 1926 I went to the Townsville Grammar School and I spent four and a half years there and I passed the junior examination. Later on I did another

year there and got a qualification to enter my articles of clerkship.

The grammar school was a fair way away from home and I used to ride a bike to and from in the later years but in the early years my family drove me

in to school and I got a bus home. We played football and cricket. It was in the early days of the Depression. To begin with of course it wasn’t in 1926 but when 1929 came along we were heading for the

Depression and certainly when I went to school later at Barker College, in Sydney the Depression was in full swing. Being a grammar school, of course it was a boarding school, and there was a large section of boarding school people from the north and from the west and it was interesting to

meet with those boys. They had some girls at the school in the class but there were no day girls; they were boarders. It wasn’t a large school in those days. No schools up here at that stage were large. I remember, I’m not quite sure which year it was,

but ‘talkies’ [movies with sound] came to Townsville. At that time they had a big football match and my grandmother died and I stayed away from school for that day. I remember they were going to chastise me for staying away and going

to the talkies on that first day, but I was able to prove I was at a funeral, my grandmother’s funeral, and not at the talkies. I didn’t get the cane. The cane was used extensively in those days. If you hadn’t done your home work or something it was just a matter of course that you were caned. Everybody was quite happy. These days with non-caning I don’t think the

lot of the children has been improved to any great extent.

Yes. Everybody got the cane in those days. We got it on our backside and the girls got it on their hands. That was quite prevalent.

I played football. I wasn’t a very good footballer.

I was never what I’d call an excellent sportsman, but we played football. It was rugby league in those days. Later on after I left school I played tennis but that’s another story. But Barker, I don’t think there is very much more I can say about the grammar school.

I didn’t mind school at all.

I quite liked school, yes. I was there to learn and from the day I was born I was more or less told that I was going to be a lawyer so I had to do something to get the initial examinations to enable me to enter into articles of clerkship. When I was at Barker

having got my preliminary examinations to enter the articles of clerkship I was very young. I was the youngest person in the class. I found that almost a disadvantage. My father, for some reason or another, insisted I left the state school and went to grammar school before I had an opportunity

to sit for the scholarship examination and that meant I missed a lot of scholarship studies at the state school and I always found that I had to work hard at my lessons to keep up with the others. When I went to Barker, the pressure wasn’t on because I’d already got my articles of clerkship and so

all I had to do was do my best to pass some of the subjects in the Leaving Certificate of New South Wales. I sat for that in the last two forms. Now they call them Year 11 and 12 and I think that’s what they called them in those days too. I was a boarder at Barker. My father had been at Barker College. And when he went to Barker because

the founder of Barker College had been the priest in charge of the Anglican Cathedral here in Townsville.

My Dad went there about 1900. And when he was there his father died so he had to come home. I went to Barker and so did my brothers, Ian and Graham. We all went to Barker for two years.

I found that quite interesting. It was a new world. I went down by ship to Brisbane and then to Sydney. And then there were the school holidays of course. On one occasion I went to Adelaide to see my Aunt Susan on my father’s side, Susan Bogle. Her

husband, Freddy Bogle who was the manager of South British Service Company in Adelaide. I remember once when we had a holiday period we went up onto the snow and that was an interesting experience. It was my first experience of snow. At Barker I played football. I wasn’t too good at cricket but with football I eventually got into the

First XIII. The school was very much down. It was the middle of the depression and whole dormitories were closed. Barker was a very large boarding school for its size in those days. We played cricket of course and we played football

against other schools in what they called the Associated Schools in New South Wales like Cranbrook and St. Aloysius and Trinity and Knox and Barker. It was the same with cricket. I was never terribly good at cricket.

We used to go to the city and go down and catch the train at Waitara and go through to Milson’s Point. And we’d look up and the bridge was closing gradually. The following year, in 1931, it was the opening of the bridge [Sydney Harbour Bridge]. On that day

we went down to Sydney and we eventually got across the harbour and walked up and we paid three shillings I remember to stand up on a hoarding to watch the procession. We weren’t on the bridge and we didn’t see De Groot cut the ribbon. I don’t really remember it, but the Premier of New South Wales was supposed to cut the

ribbon, but De Groot charged with his horse and sword cut the ribbon. We didn’t see that. We heard about it later. Then we went off to the Sydney Cricket Ground where Australia was playing England. Those were the days of bodyline and Larwin and we watched the game

and they got an excellent score against bodyline. That was quite an interesting day in my life in Sydney. When I came back from Sydney I settled down and did my articles.

It was not hard to adjust to boys’ school life.

There were no heaters and there were cold showers. Hornsby is between Sydney and the Blue Mountains and I can tell you there was plenty of frost on the ground on cold days. Cold showers were something that we had daily. There was no harm about that.

The food was all right for a boarding school but there are certain things that I don’t eat these days like lemon jam and things like that. We had plenty of that. You can’t complain about the food. It was all right as far as I was concerned.

It didn’t affect them very greatly. My father had had a very hard time because his father died when he was only forty seven. He had to come back and do his articles, which he completed in 1908. And there was a man named

Jacob Lew who had come up as an articled clerk with my grandfather in 1881, as an articled clerk, and he was a senior principal. There was another man named Barnett who came into the firm in about

1898 and they were the two principals when my father commenced his articles in 1901. There was a note on our family home in Hyde Park

on Kenilworth and when I was growing up I found plenty of notices of demand from a mortgage investment company demanding the money. My grandmother had to take in boarders in the house which was a large one and we managed to exist for a number of years until my father qualified and paid the note. It was the

same thing on my mother’s side. She came from a family of thirteen and they had a place called Cornelia, which is about ten or twelve miles north of Pentland on the railway line west of Charters Towers. They went broke in the

1901 drought so they had to move into Charters Towers. They had a hard life those people too. But like everything else they worked hard and eventually they succeeded. You’ve got to realise that with lawyers they might want to call it

general practice but when people start to have financial problems they’ve still got to go to lawyers. If they are well to do they go to lawyers anyway. So really that is how the firm flourished and it kept the dogs from the door.

He was a member of Townsville City Council for about six years. He was president of Townsville Golf Club for nineteen years. He was President

for a short period of the North Queensland Club, but being president of the Golf Club was one of the main ones. My brother Graham he succeeded my father in the Golf Club. Are you going to see Graham at some time?

Well you’ll get a good story from him because he was in the air force.

He succeeded my father’s length of service as President of the Golf Club so the Roberts have had a long association with the Townsville Golf Club.

No. He was married just before World War I and I was conceived before World War I began and my brother,

Ian was born seventeen months later. He had to keep his wife and his mother. And my aunt lived with them too, my Aunt Gladys, so they had just got themselves out of

debt and he had his hands full. He couldn’t possibly have gone. My brother Ian didn’t go. He had a physical disability and he remained in the firm because I left the firm for about five years for war service. My father was there all the time during the war but

Francis Roger North, who was Brigadier North, he left the firm for that period because he was in charge of the 11th Infantry Brigade as a brigadier and then in charge of the lines of communication here during the war years. He was a World War I veteran and came up and joined the firm in 1926

at my father’s request. It might have been a bit earlier than that. It might have been 1923. Then the firm became known as Roberts, Lew & North. Jacob Lew died in 1921 and was a very public-minded individual. He lost a leg just before the turn of the century

and in 1911 he built this house that we are living in. The 11th of the 12th, 1911, it is up on the top rafters there. It was built by a builder called Edward Crowder and Crowder used to do all the work at

Kenilworth for my family. He was a good builder and this house is very strongly built. Of course it was built about seven or eight years after ‘Leonta’. ‘Leonta’ was a major cyclone here which did terrific damage to the grammar school and a lot of other buildings.

The houses up to World War II were always very firmly and strongly built because the memories of Leonta lingered on particularly in my family.

It was discussed from time to time. Right up into the 1920s I remember discussions about Leonta and the experience of the family.

No, not as a boy but I remember Jacob Lew with a cigar in his mouth waiting for a cab to drive him up the hill. This house is not quite the same as he built it.

We have added to the back and I’ll show you that later on. He lived here alone; his wife and himself, and they had a great reception when it was opened in early 1912. That is that date that I referred to in December in 1911

on the rafter up there. That is of course when they put the roof on. That is an old custom I believe.

Well, I’ll give you the reason, Leonta. I will show you around. Everything is bolted everywhere

This is a red brick home and these are plastered walls and all the foundations are red brick. It is quite well built. I did my articles of clerkship and I spent

five years there. I eventually qualified. And during that time I played tennis and I was secretary of the tennis club down there called the Suburban Tennis Club. Tennis was really the only game I played. I didn’t play

football but I might have played the occasional round of golf with mother’s clubs. Dad didn’t play golf to begin with. He used to refer to it as a foot and mouth disease because they walked and they talked. He changed his mind later on and as I told you he became very much a golfer. He was also interested in

racing. He was a member of the Townsville Turf Club and a trustee of the Townsville Race Course for very many years. I later succeeded him as a member of the Committee of the Townsville Turf Club and also as one of the trustees.

When I qualified I went down to Brisbane to be admitted. I have got a photograph of the admission in the Full Court or the Supreme Court of Queensland. Tom Kovasovich who was articled at the same

time as myself. I was articled to Francis Roger North and Tom Kovasovich was articled to my father. There was a third person from Townsville, Domingo Martinez, who was articled to Mr Gross of Wilson Lyon & Gross. The three of us were admitted on the same day.

Of course we came back and I commenced practice not as a member of the firm but as an employed solicitor on six pounds a week. I might say that whilst I was an articled clerk I got paid fifteen shillings for the first year and a pound the second year. It was two pounds in the third year and

two pounds ten in the fourth year and three pounds in the fifth year. My father supported me at home and that was my pocket money. Those were the sort of salaries that articled clerks got from firms in my day, that is in North Queensland anyway.

No, I don’t think so. You’ve got to realise that I come from a long list of lawyers. My great grandfather came from Sydney in

1858 I think and North Queensland was a state and he practised law in Brisbane. His son qualified in law and practised first in Bowen and then came to Townsville in 1881. He came to

Townsville because he heard that the Supreme Court was going to be moved from Bowen, the Supreme Court was then sitting in Bowen, but it took about nine years I think before the Supreme Court burned down tragically. It was a beautiful old building, a wooden building, and it burned down

about seven, eight or nine years ago. Then there was my father and myself and my sons are doing law. My two brothers of course practised and we were all members of the firm. Ian was a lawyer and Graham too.

It was a matter of course.

I thin kit teaches you two major tings and the army does too. It teaches you to think

very much more broadly about problems and the other one is if you are going to any sort of litigation or conflicts or things like that if you don’t look at the other fellow’s point of view when you are advising your client – because your client thinks he is always right you know, well, nearly always – and point out

what the other fellow is thinking about. I think that is terribly important. The army does the same thing. I did a number of courses in military intelligence and the accent of course was, not always, but largely looking at the enemy’s

point of view and trying to find out as much as you can about the enemy’s order of battle and his method of doing things and then setting up your operations to defeat him with as much knowledge as you can find out about what he is likely to do. As a matter of fact some of the exercises we had towards the end of the

war and that thing on captured Japanese documents was extremely interesting. I think that those sorts of things were all part of it but it makes you look at things in a very much broader perspective from the army and its intelligence operation. The army one was very

useful too with their documentation and their ways of doing things and the giving of orders and set them out factually and in

proper sequence so there were no misunderstandings except when you go to land something on a foreign shore and you don’t get them exactly where you want to get them and then there are problems that will arise and there were plenty of those.

General matters more litigation and some conveyancing. You’ve got to realise I qualified on the 31st of May, 1938 and by

1939 I only had a very limited time and once the war started we were in and out of camp. I enlisted soon after I qualified. I enlisted at the militia battalion and we used to come down here on night parades just down below me here.

It was nothing complex. I remember one day when my father was out at golf on a Thursday afternoon and I got a ring from the priest I think it was to say that a prostitute in one of the

houses of ill fame at the back of the Causeway Hotel had been shot and killed by an Australian Naval seaman. I went out there to see this fellow and

to get the circumstances and things like that and a brief statement, but from then on my father took over that one. There was a whole row of brothels on that street then. They are no longer there of course but it was behind the Causeway Hotel. The Causeway Hotel has just been pulled down too so most of the place has changed.

I can’t actually remember what happened there. This lady wouldn’t open the door of something and he opened it with a pistol. I can’t exactly remember what happened there because I didn’t follow it on.

Time has taken a toll on my memory and it has gone out of my mind.

My father went into the Civic Council for six years.

At that time the main street was the Mall and that was macadam. There was no bitumen. A lot of roads of course were macadam of course in those days. Macadam is a type of brown stone,

it was wet. And to keep the dust out of course - most cities had water restrictions but not now. They have limited ones now but they are very fortunate compared to other cities. They used to water them with sea water and of

course all the mudguards on the cars used to rust. So eventually they put down cement and the whole street was cemented over. That of course was all ripped up when the mall was introduced some years ago. It was cement in the early

1920s and it lasted through until the traffic was taken out of the mall some years ago. The other one was that Victoria Bridge is now a walkway. In my day the bridge used to open to allow small ships to come up.

There was a timber mill just on the other side of Stanley Street right on the creek bank where the bridge now crosses from Stanley Street onto South Townsville and the ships used to come up with

timber.

One of the interesting stories I had when I was at Barker College relates to cricket and in this case Sheffield Shield cricket. I was always being shiyacked because I was a Queenslander amongst all sorts of people from parts of New South Wales.

And a student named Abel and myself were always the subject of butts from New South Wales, pupils of the school. On one occasion we were

delighted when Eddie Gilbert, who was an Aboriginal fast bowler, bowled Bradman for a duck in the Sheffield Shield Match. That match gave us an opportunity to shiyak the New South Wales students

particularly as we had a newspaper report that if Eddie Gilbert could take his boots off and play without his boots, he could bowl twice as fast as the ball he bowled Bradman with. That was something that helped us and stopped the

ribbing from the New South Wales side that we had received from time to time. Incidentally for some reason or another my nickname at Barker was ‘Junior’. I don’t know why. I think it was because when I went to Barker I was asked what exam I had passed and I had passed the Queensland Junior examination.

Anyway, when my brother Ian went down there a year or two later he was called ‘George’, so where nicknames come from is difficult to say.

No, not really, but the rivalry was there. It is still going on with the football tonight with the Rugby League Match.

The wharves, the railway and the meatworks, they were the main industries.

They were the principal industries and of course Mount Isaah was coming. It had certainly been developed considerably. The copper mine at Stuart wasn’t built until long after World War II. There is no question that

those were the major industries here.

The Model T-Ford. There weren’t a great number. I can remember when I was a lad going to Mundingburra School that I walked mainly there to

Mundingburra School it wasn’t a great deal of distance. There were two bus services. One was called Morris’s and the other was called Farr’s. Farr’s buses were horse-drawn. These horse-drawn buses had back stairs on them and you could get up on the buses by the back stairs.

It was the same thing with Morris’s. There were back stairs where you went and paid the driver. It was only a few years and then the horse-drawn ones were out of existence. The roads weren’t sealed, they were macadam. There weren’t bitumen

roads in those days. They eventually came in the ‘30s. Most of the roads were sealed in the ‘30s with bitumen, but it was a gradual process. To drive

up north up to Cairns would take a while. It would take you well into a day. It was about four or four and a half hours to get to Ingham and there were no bridges. You had to go in and out of the creeks and things like that. And certain from Ingham north to Innisfail was quite a hazardous

drive. The one to Charters Towers because there were so many creeks and it was all gravel roads.

I’m sorry there was a Burdekin Bridge, it was a low wooden one which was flooded. Once again that road was better than the one to Ingham. The ones north were very poor. The ones to the south and the ones to the west were gravel roads and in fairly poor condition.

Not very much at all. We went to Charters Towers occasionally. That is before the war. We went to amateur race meetings. And they were building a road up at Browns Plains.

We went up there and that wasn’t complete. We went up there five of us on one occasion. We were young and they were bank officers about three or four of us. A lot of bank officers that came from the south and boarded in places like this. Not in this house but a number of these places were boarding houses around here.

It became very much oriented to the war. People were enlisting. We were militia [Citizens’ Military Force] and we were called into camps and the

Showgrounds became our camping areas. We had another up at Sellheim on the Burdekin River on the Charters Towers side of the Burdekin. There was the 31st Militia Battalion, which consisted of

units from Proserpine who were there on the side of Charters Towers on the West and Ingham to the north and Townsville and that was its recruiting area.

B Company was largely Charters Towers and C Company was largely Ingham and A and D came largely from the southern area. Townsville was the Headquarter Company area and the command area. And they came together these camps.

The first major camp was south of Bowen at a place called Miowera. It was about fifteen or twenty miles south of Bowen and there was a rail siding there called Miowera. It was in cattle country. It was about – if you went

east it was not more than two or three miles from the coastline. It was right on the railway line. They were on one side of the railway line, on the coast side. It was a very large camp. It was the whole brigade. 26th Battalion from the west and the 51st from Cairns and that was the first of the major camps.

All sorts of

training. Weapon training was one of the most essential things but then there were exercises. We were learning and when you put a whole lot of people together who have never done any military service. Well they had little military service but some would know a lot more than others. There were very few permanent instructors. They were what they called the Australian

Instructional Corps, the AIC. There were those people but they were very much older, most of them, and some of them were World War I veterans. Brigadier North of course was a commanding officer. We had a lot to learn, but I would say the principal one was weaponry, but then there was

tactics and all sorts of things. There wasn’t much about general tactics in those days because the Japanese weren’t in the war.

I was all right. I was young. I was not as athletic as some people were but I had no problem with that.

We were losing a lot of the people at Miowera, a lot of them were ill. There were constant calls for people to enlist. I wasn’t very well at the time. I had a lot of trouble getting into the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force], but I eventually did.

I had some sort of stomach

complaint that made me regurgitate food and gave me great acidity. As a matter of fact after I got through I spent six weeks up at Atherton Tablelands. They said I was to have a holiday and a rest, but it didn’t cure me. I eventually – I didn’t get

over it but the whole of the time I was in service I had something to combat this problem and I had to take it regularly.

I don’t think he had any problem about that. I think he would have thought

poorly of me if I didn’t. Put it that way. No there was no thought at all. My brother, Graham, he was down here at ‘the Fort’. The Fortress there had a

heavy gun unit. And he hadn’t qualified at law, he was still articled, and he was transferred up to Darwin with the whole unit. He had put his name down to enlist in the RAAF and he eventually was called up to the RAAF.

He didn’t get into the RAAF before me. I tried to enlist because they had to take intakes for training, but there was never any problem with Graham and myself enlisting.

Yes, I do.

Well Amateur Week was here.

It is coming up later in the year here. A group of us, westerners and local people, hired boats for the day and we went around the island. On the way back we called at

Arcadia and we had a light meal there. It was there that Menzies announced that Australia had declared war on Germany. Then of course I realised that the

war was going to change dramatically and so it did and all our lives changed. The accent was all on winning the war. So we went about our business a few of us until we got these call-ups to these various camps. I was coming and going camps for short periods in office for

quite some time. The camp at Miowera was quite a large one and then it was followed some months later by another one which in that case was only the 31st Battalion which went there. The 51st and 26th didn’t go. They went to camps of their own. Miowera wasn’t a stunning success. The place where the

creek was, Miowera Creek, the water turned out to be brackish and the water had to be carted from Bowen for drinking purposes. Miowera was called by us Mioerror. We had a cyclone where we were there. It was a mini

cyclone and it didn’t bother us. It poured with rain and the winds blew most of the tents down. They were easily put back again. Eventually of course when the Japanese entered the war the whole thing changed again. I think

we were permanently in the army from that day on. I don’t think we were at that time. I just can’t recall but when the Japanese entered the war we were in the showgrounds here at Townsville. We were eventually moved out of that and got ourselves trained to be

not quite a fighting unit but getting organised.

I can’t remember any parades, no. There were recruiting teams but I can’t remember parades. There could have been parades but I can’t recall. You’ve got to realise that a lot of the time I

was in camp. I wasn’t there at Denham Street. Those times got less and less on civvy street [civilian life] there.

There was nothing like that in

North Queensland prior to the Japanese coming here, everything went south. Anybody who enlisted went south for training. You were allocated to units in the south and not to our battalions. The 2/31st Battalion was sent up but they were enlistees. Some of them may have

been from here but they were from all over Australia. There were allocations of some of the 2/31st to serve in the Middle East but we didn’t see that sort of thing.

There were still plenty left. Our battalion had a

very considerable number of people here. It was only when the Japanese entered the war that things changed and there was a great exodus of people mainly women and children and aged people, but that’s another story.

When the Japanese entered the war we moved to a place out at Adenvale down near the river. It was a place with big, tall beautiful

trees. They called it the Black Forest. And that became company headquarters. The battalion was stationed there. It was then that we got round to preparing maps and the defence of Townsville. Have you seen the

maps that they prepared?

Not too many people have seen them. What happened is the command came from the brigade for this battalion, which was the only battalion here at that time because the 51st was still in Cairns and the 26th was still in the west,

to prepare plans for the defence of Townsville. So I was the battalion intelligence officer. During the course of those camps I mentioned, particularly the first one at the Showgrounds, I received a commission and I was appointed the battalion intelligence officer. I had a

section of about ten. There was a sergeant and a corporal and they changed from time to time. There were changes of membership for a few of them, but they were long and lengthy over a period of times. One of the things of course that we had to do is when the operation

ordered posts for those companies in battle positions and platoons and company headquarters and the machine gunners and their mortars and their fields of fire. These companies went in to dig places and they found that all over the hills here

from Mutton Hill and along the coastline, particularly the weapon pits being dug and fields of fire determined. It was necessary to put those positions on paper so that the company commanders and the

platoon commander and the troops could know where everything was. There were no maps or they were not available. All those parish maps they were useless. They didn’t show contour lines and so they were quite useless for the purpose. It is hard to explain how I would

get something. I would get a map, but it wouldn’t be sufficient for the purpose. I found out that the Townsville City Council had prepared maps for sewerage purposes on the northward city area, which was just the area which we were instructed by brigade

to defend. I went and got copies of this plan. The the members of the section went around the area and marked on the position of the houses and also trees over fifteen feet I think it was and any other

peculiarities or major objects that stood out. They put them on this plan. We then had to get the ‘Dylon process’, there was a process called the Dylon process and this was used for tracing.

It was the tracing, we were putting these things on and we produced these maps. Then when we’d got the maps we coloured the maps, which were being produced from the Dylon [brand of fabric dye], with positions of all of the

units and their fields of fire so the company commanders and the battalion commander and brigade had copies of the maps. Those maps, I have copies of them, photocopies, but

they come from the battalion war diary, which is in the archives in the War Memorial in Canberra. It is interesting just to show how we went about defending Townsville and producing

maps as best we could with what little we had. Incidentally, on the tracings, the maps that the Townsville City Council produced and the tracings, they didn’t have any contour lines. So we had to draw

form lines on them and that included form lines of the whole Castle Hill. You can imagine that was a fifty feet contour line and that was extremely time consuming job to do. It not only covered Castle Hill, but it called Bowen Hill and Stone Hill and Yarrawonga. Yarrawonga was one of the

major points where the troops were situated and so was Milton Hill. Of course there were all the obstacles at sea and on the beach. That was quite an exercise. It took the

section a long time to do that. It had some pretty good people on that work. We had a man named Pemberthy from Charters Towers who was very good at maps. I can show you some of those that he did later on in the war

and particularly on Bougainville. They are in the war diary.

Well, they were never used of course but if the Japanese had come they would have been used. Perhaps they might not have come directly they would have come somewhere else

but it was essential we should do something. If we were going to defend the place we should have some maps of knowing the units were or how would you know where 10 Platoon was or A Company or B Company. The commanders of the field might, but once you got into a scrap it was pretty important. All they had to do was if they had to

move they could pinpoint that place on the maps to where they were. Maps are pretty important in warfare. It is amazing that when we got to Bougainville they had planes flying over all. There were beautiful contour maps which I can show you. That was

few years later. But the first thing they did was to have aerial photographers at the places where operations would take place and having done that the map people drew the maps accordingly. They were very

detailed maps. Some of the area of course was localised and on the maps there were the places where people were living. You can see it all on the Bougainville ones and all the other maps that were made later in the war, but there were no maps here, contour maps, at all and

that is very important as I explained to you but there were later on in central Bougainville.

It involved learning about operation orders and many other schools we went to, but

main one we were doing is concerning the battle order and the units had been. In this case the Japanese was what the order of battle would be and how their units would be made up and what their fire power was

and their use of mortars and also the way that they operate, I’ll put it that way. You’d needed to know as much about them and that is the most important thing like about how to capture documents and how to handle prisoners and things of that nature. Then of course there is your own operational

side of things like keeping war diaries. This war diary here that I kept is actually kept as was the one in Bougainville. I was not the intelligence officer in Merauke, but quite frankly that war diary was terribly kept, but I never kept it.

I have kept it and it is lacking information of what the about what the army was doing. It is important to know what your troops are doing. They are training and things like that. Once you are in the army it doesn’t matter if you have a rest period. You have a rest for about three days and you are out

training again. That is what happens. Merauke was a very quiet thing for most of us. We were all walking through swamps. Swamp after swamp after swamp because that is what Merauke was and circumventing enemies and those sorts of things, imaginary enemies. So we were

going back to the battalion there what happened of course is when the 51st Battalion came to Townsville and we moved out of our positions and the 26th Battalion came. It shows the positions of those units out towards the beginning of April.

By that time the brigade was here. On the 13th of April or thereabouts the 11th Infantry Division arrived. That was the 7th Brigade and the 29th Brigade. So we then had a complete division. We had three brigades.

In the meantime of course the civilian evacuation occurred. I have got a note I can show you of why the panic started in the town.

The attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour had changed the whole aspect of the war in Australia. The Japanese had been fighting wars in China since 1931. They had a large and experience army and a large and well trained

naval force as well as a very well trained air force. They had prepared for the war well in advance. They had tactics of surprise and swift movement in their advances in South East Asia and the Pacific. The timetables

I had prepared sets forth these things and it is quite interesting particularly for the younger people who don’t understand how quick this was. On the 7th of December they attacked Pearl Harbour and then on the 10th of Decembers they attacked Malaysia. They went down the Malaysian Peninsula.

In January the first Americans arrived in Townsville and camped at Gulliver. On the 19th of January Rabaul surrendered. On the 15th of February there was the Fall of Singapore and then on the 19th of February there was heavy bombing of Darwin. Salamaua surrendered

on the 8th of March and on the 12th of March, MacArthur arrived in the Philippines and realised the Philippines had surrendered. On the 18th of March censorship of all mail in Australia came into operation. On the 21st of March Hall Island was bombed in six bombing raids and on the 27th of March, Blamey returned to

Australia from the Middle East. Then as I said to you a bit earlier the 31st Battalion arrived in April and the 26th Battalion a little bit later.

Well,

the great vast progress of the Japanese towards Australia created a great panic in Townsville and the whole of north Queensland. There were allegations that the government were defending the Brisbane Line and that was a matter of constant concern in

north Queensland. It featured considerably in the newspapers. In addition I might say that in May there was the Battle of the Coral Sea and then in June there was the Battle of Midway. All of those factors caused great concern for people who

had young families and the elderly, and there were large evacuations of people from the Townsville area and from other areas in north Queensland into the southern parts of the state, and also into western Queensland. My wife’s, mother-in-law went south although her husband refused

to go. Those things were not restored until very much later.

Well, they made such rapid progress. When you analyse the situation in retrospect

they’d extended their lines of communication so greatly that, anyway, when one looks at the Battle of the Coral Sea in which they were forced to turn back, all but not completely defeated, and they lost the first battle on the land at Milne Bay. It was quite obvious that

they had little chance of getting to Australia. It is possible, they could have come in and landed on the place, on Cape York, but where would they go from there?

Well, they were

building, everybody was supposed to have a slit trench in their homes. Flynn Street was, there were big concrete structures right in the centre and the middle of the street for people to go into in the event of a bombing, when people were in the heart of the city in the hotels and things like that.

There were a whole line of them. Took some eighteen months or two years to get rid of them after the war. They (UNCLEAR) they’d get here, and I mean quite reasonably so. As I say, look at the Kokoda Trail, I mean having lost the Battle of the Coral Sea

and having been defeated at Milne Bay, how on earth were they going to, how were they going to sustain the food chain across (UNCLEAR) section the planes traversed to get to Port Moresby. Of course they were forced back but they had little chance of

feeding those troops when they got on the flat ground in the Moresby area. Unless they commanded the air and the sea, which they didn’t.

Mainly by train, mainly by train, the roads were not sufficient. Almost exclusively by train I would say.

I just can’t remember how my wife’s mother travelled.

Well, in the defence of Queensland Brisbane would be defended and north Queensland wouldn’t be defended. That’s what.

You see, there was a period there from the beginning of December until the 28th of April when there were quite inadequate troops in this part of the area to resist any enemy. The Americans

were very quick to get things done. They came over in great numbers. They were mainly air force and anti-aircraft people. There were no American infantry people here. The American infantry people went to Rockhampton. I think there might’ve been a corps or certainly a division in the Rockhampton area.

But this place eventually became, it had a population in those days, Townsville had a population in those days I suppose of about 25,000. At the height of the thing they had a population of well over 90,000 people, mainly Americans or Australian troops. There were airfields

at Giru, there were airfields on the western line at Woodstock, there were airfields up river towards the dam on the Boree River side. Dalrymple Road was a huge airstrip. There were all sorts of fighter airstrips around the place. Of course the main

airfield was well established in those days, a terrific amount of work in building new airfields. They were built very quickly. The Americans brought in bulldozers and built these airfields particularly for fighter planes which didn’t need a great length of

airstrips. The bomber ones had to be longer. They didn’t only build them here, they built them at Mareeba, they built them at Iron Range and they built them at Jacky Jacky, which was later called Higgins Field on Cape York. It’s now called Bamaga. That’s one I’ll deal with a bit later when we took 200 vehicles up from Chillagoe

to that area, to Cape York. At the time of the Kokoda Trail.

They didn’t. They didn’t like it, they didn’t like it. It lasted only

a period of about three or four months. You realise large numbers of women and children were asked to, they were asked to evacuate.

Many returned as soon as it became evident there were ample troops in the area. As I said a bit earlier, the Japanese defeats in the Battle of the Coral Sea and at Midway and later

defeats at Milne Bay and Kokoda, that changed that aspect of it.

They didn’t know much about it. They weren’t told. These bombings of Darwin were played down. I can’t recall whether I knew about it or not, but

I was some years, a few years ago I, a soldier who was in the ack-ack [anti-aircraft] at Darwin died post war and (UNCLEAR)

the tribunal that gives compensation to widows for war service due to cancer from smoking, it was found eventually he wasn’t entitled, but I chased the history of his man from some of his colleagues and I was amazed to find out the operations

of the Japanese air force on Darwin. He was an ack-ack gunner and these people were still alive who were with him were telling me about their experience and it was traumatic. I’d never believed that Darwin had been bombed like that. It was the first inkling I’d had of the bombing. Well, I knew there was some bombing but not to the same extent.

You don’t get those things told to you always. No, no they don’t. You might get told that Darwin was bombed, but you don’t get told those sorts of things. You’ve got to realise the other one is that I didn’t see many newspapers.

My visits to home were, I was still, once we became a (UNCLEAR) I’d visit my wife at home occasionally, but even when we were at Townsville, we were camped out, we were part of the battalion on (UNCLEAR) and the –

Yes, I was here, yes.

Yeah. Well, that came a bit later. We were camped, we were stationed by that time, we were stationed at Alligator Creek and we were

alerted of course the fact there was a bombing on. We looked and you could see the planes in the searchlights. They landed a few over there on the, not far from the port, some fell on the sea and some fell on land and there was another one fell over

on Manypeaks Range. A bomb fell there. I think it must have jettisoned a bomb on the way back. Like they dropped it by mistake there. There was nothing out there at all. They caused alarms. All the lights, harbour lights, the place was a blaze of lights. It took them a long time to put the lights out. The Jap [Japanese] planes had gone by the time, but they missed the harbour.

There was another one, two, two or three, but there were not extensive raids like Darwin, not at all. They were just a bomb here and a bomb there.

None at all, a couple of palm trees over there. The Queensland Department of Agriculture, they were there I remember, and that’s all. Some on the mud flats, nothing else. I think there was one over there on Manypeaks Range.

It would

certainly be. It was June. The public morale was substantially restored by the announcement by the Commonwealth Government that every inch of Queensland would be defended. This actually resulted in the substantial return of evacuees to their homes

in Cairns, Townsville and Bowen. In comparison the situation two months previously, there was now a feeling of confidence and largely the arrival of the allied services which I’ve referred to earlier, and the bomber aircraft in northern regions. The sky was alive with bomber aircraft.

A fellow named Turner who was in grade five at the Mountain Primary School, now Woodstock, during 1942 recalled the sudden arrival of American servicemen at Woodstock, which I’ve mentioned earlier where brought in to build fighter airstrips. At

Woodstock Station there was a line up of trains unloading bulldozers. Previously I’d never seen machines and that equipment bigger than a wheelbarrow. Then there were landing strips. I believe all this activity in ten days, planes were landing on the strips. I was just

telling you how quickly they operated. That’s probably a fighter strip. It could’ve been a bomber strip, I don’t know. The Governor of Queensland, Sir Leslie Wilson, came up here and he said a public testament, the situation was made quite clear by him

then. He said the doctrine of ‘stay put‘ had returned and that people were no longer going south because of the air raids or the fact that the Japanese might

invade north Queensland. Perhaps I might say exactly what he said, “Morale is excellent. Two and a half months ago it was different. After the fall of Singapore people were naturally apprehensive. Some were, especially in Cairns where no troops were stationed.

X, N, V, D, C, A, R, P and Red Cross units were formed. The people are grateful for the civil defence equipment sent them. More is required. Grateful for the civil defence equipment sent them, but more is required.” Sorry, I repeated that. So that’s the story there. I don’t think I can take it much further. I’ve been a bit repetitive.

Well, like everything else there were fights, they were only when they had too much alcohol. Americans were very well paid compared to the Australians, but we never found ourselves fighting, at our level, I mean at army level, never.

You’ve got to realise that we were taught as army officers, and the men too, that when you were looking at the way Americans do things you’ve got to treat them as foreigners, despite the fact we have a common tongue. They do things differently and that was

very clear to us. One of the things here of course, a number of Americans were Negro units, particularly engineering ones. There were officers of European descent. The one that built the airstrip that’s now called Bamaga, all Negro

and white officers, and they were all (UNCLEAR) the equipment. They got it there, but then there were some, like all sorts of things when there are people of a different colour (UNCLEAR) at times, but not to any great extent. There were plenty of fights between Australian,

particularly some of the people who came back from the Middle East didn’t like their colleagues who stayed at home either.

We didn’t have enough contact.

That’s the only contact I ever had up there. I don’t know. You’ve got to realise what the situation was in America. It’s only in latter years that, I forget when it is, but it’s only the last thirty or forty years, certainly since the war, there’s a truce been declared there. Many of the

prominent Americans you now see on television have very definitely got, came from Africa, African descent. Pretty well every second night. There’s a woman and of course the man that

led the American army in the first instance, in the first operations against (UNCLEAR) Iraq, but in relation to the first operation is definitely of –

Well, the AIF was all soldiers together. They got into their battalions and trained together. They had a lot of training before they left this country.

Battalions take a long time to get trained. They depend largely on their commanding officer and you’ve got to realise the people that went to the Middle East were trained for a type of fighting in the Middle East which is open country, and when they came back here they had

to change their uniforms into jungle greens and it changed dramatically, and had to fight an enemy who would never surrender, never surrender, terrific casualties because of never surrendering because they had to be killed in the weapon pits. That wouldn’t happen with the Germans or it certainly didn’t happen with Italians. Wouldn’t

happen with Germans either. They’d put their hands up by that time. But it was a family insult for a Japanese soldier to be captured and taken a prisoner of war. You’re aware of that aren’t you?

That was, I

was, that was referred to very much so on a number of occasions. Yes, the answer is. There were references to it even by Blamey. He didn’t call them ‘chocos’ [chocolate soldiers], but there were remarks about that battalion defended Kokoda Trail that were completely uncalled for.

They were completely outnumbered by twenty to one or something.

You didn’t (UNCLEAR). We were, to become (UNCLEAR) some of the units serving with us weren’t.

You had to have seventy five per cent of your people who were serving in the unit at that time who had joined the AIF. I remember at Merauke there was a fellow, I forget what his surname is, but he was (UNCLEAR) in headquarter company

and he was a fairly, he wasn’t a young man by any time (UNCLEAR). See, a lot of these fellows enlisted in the, who enlisted in the AIF who were not all young. They enlisted to serve, but they refused (UNCLEAR). I’ll tell you a story about it in a minute.

I tossed him on the woodheap and I won the toss and he enlisted in the AIF and made the platoon seventy-five per cent (UNCLEAR). I won the toss. But on this subject, I had one fellow, I tried and he wouldn’t do it, but

in that campaign in Bougainville, you’ve got to remember he was married with a wife and young child, which wouldn’t be more than two years of age. He came from Babinda I think. Anyway, when he got onto operations he used to insist on being a forward scout. When I say forward scout

he was a good shot and he’d get out there and he’d have a platoon and a bit of jungle (UNCLEAR) just ahead, and he used to get out there as a sniper. Being a sniper is not the best job in the world. Not too many people in the platoon wanted to be a sniper.

First of all they’ve got to be a good shot of course, which he was. Being a sniper we always have a person behind him watching. He might be ten or fifteen, twenty-five, to see movement, things like that. This fellow just refused to (UNCLEAR). I don’t know what happen to that fellow.

I just can’t think of his name now. But there are other examples of that sort of thing. It was, you know, some of the soldiers (UNCLEAR) our battalion, it didn’t seem to matter. You can have a look at the list. I’ve got

a list of those killed in action. It’s got whether they’ve got an X number of not or a QX number or just a secure number, and some of them were good soldiers, some of them weren’t. You’ve got to realise not every soldier is a good soldier. It’s a pretty, it’s, some of the people who,

one of the officers, some of the officers were sent home, you know, because they couldn’t stand it. Some of the ones you’d never pick. One in our battalion was particularly, but I won’t mention the name.

I won’t. I won’t tell that one.

That’s right.

Yes, there was no question about that. No, that was never a problem with us, but there was, there’s no doubt (UNCLEAR) when the Middle East people came back (UNCLEAR), and Blamey going to trial, what’s the name of the battalion? 39th Infantry Battalion or something? They got really whacked there,

but they were fighting against terrific odds and it was traumatic. That didn’t help at all.

No. No, none at all.

They were trained the same way. They were trained the same, no differences. Training is an ongoing thing.

Yes. Well, I told you about the planes. We were down there

and Alligator Creek was about seventeen or eighteen miles south here. Training of course. We got word that we had to go to Cape York and so we prepared to do that. It was my, I was a battalion intelligence officer.

We went by train up to Chillagoe and then we got onto vehicles and we had about 200 vehicles, all four wheel drive vehicles and we proceeded by, it took us about ten days.

You’ve got to understand that it was a dirt road and there were no

bridges or things like that. We made our way slowly and up. There was a road to Port Stewart. We couldn’t go right up the telegraph line, we had to go into Port Stewart and Port Stewart, that’s on the coast.

There’s nothing there really, I don’t know why it’s called Port Stewart, but there was a house or something, a couple of houses, and then we went up and we met the telegraph line, and the telegraph line there was no road whatever. We had to make a diversion to Port Stewart because we couldn’t go right up. The country was far too rough, so we got into this and we went straight up a rough line

until we got to where the airfield was being built by this American engineering company. We couldn’t, the country, there was all the creeks, all who’d

been up there before us was a reconnaissance party consisting of jeeps, nothing, I don’t think there’d been any other heavier four wheel drive vehicles. So it was a very difficult operation and very

slow, and on each side was what they called turkey bush. There were stations along that line, or there were in those days, and Moreton was one that I can clearly remember where there was a Scotsman with a very Scots brogue. He’d been there

since Adam was a boy I think, and that telegraph line was built in the 1880s I believe to get telephone communications. I might have been the ‘90s but it was well before the turn of the century, to service the island. We settled in around that. I kept a full,

I’ve got a full, I’ve got a diary. I recorded our movements day by day, creek by creek and experience by experience, in the war diary it’s all recorded. We then, we had Bert Anderson had been, he’d flown up from the I section with an officer, and

to reconnoitre a sight for the battalion. As they walked down beside this airfield that hadn’t been completed, the Americans were on the other side and we were on one side. We used to go and have meals with the Americans and it was my job then to,

the commanding officer at that time was Lieutenant Colonel Cardale with whom I got on extremely well and it was my job to once again map where the units were going to defend the air field in the event of any Japanese intrusion and also any other areas, find routes that

could be easy access to the coast. We had the east coast on one side of us only about not more than two miles away more or less, and the same thing on the other side. A little bit longer on the other side, about five miles on the Gulf of Carpentaria side, and the,

so I explored. I went up to the Cape York, the cut off track from, there was a road right up the top of Cape York and from Cape York we then, there was an old road track from us over, do you mind, I want to go and get some information.

Perhaps I might start again.

We went by train from Townsville to Chillagoe and then we got on 200 vehicles and we went through to Laura and

then up to Coen. They were dirt roads, and we crossed the major rivers there like the Coleman and the Mitchell Rivers, particularly the Mitchell was a very large river, and then we went from Coen we were to go up the telegraph line, but you couldn’t go up the

telegraph line because there was a lot of rough country ahead from Coen, so we diverted to the coast to a place called Port Stewart. I don’t know how it got its name, but it must’ve been used in years gone by for people to get off ships and go inland on the Cape at that point. We then went in a

westerly direction and we met the telegraph line. From the telegraph line we went straight up the telegraph line until we got to Bamaga. Just before we got to Bamaga we crossed the Jardine River. We’d never have been able to cross the Jardine River earlier in the year because it’s a free

flowing river and it was just enough free board to enable our vehicles to get across the river without having engineers prepare a special bridge. We camped around the airport or airfield which was then being built by the American engineering company which

was officered by Americans of European descent and by people of other ranks of African descent. My task at Bamaga which was then

originally called Higgins Field and was later called Bamaga, only in more recent years after the Aboriginal settlement on the western side of Cape York not

very far from the airfield. Red Island Point was a stepping off point for small craft going to Thursday Island and other islands at the north of Cape York. There was small boiling down, or meatworks

we like to call it, at Red Island Point where cattle were slaughtered. Probably the best term is a slaughterhouse for people who want meat to be transhipped to Thursday Island and the other islands of that group. It was my task as, and

the intelligence task, to explore the country all around the top of the Cape and also report the positions of the defences of the battalion against attack against the airport or other landings on the coast. This was the time of the Kokoda Trail and we were sent to Cape York to defend this airport

in case there was a Japanese attack upon the airfield or an attempted landing on Cape York in this locality. As soon as the danger from the Japanese at Kokoda Trail operation disappeared

we were withdrawn and we returned to Australia just before New Year as the defence of that area was no longer required. During my course at infantry battalion intelligence section there I

went to the top of Cape York and I made explorations all around the locality. One of my interesting journeys was cutting a trail to the first settlement opposite Albany Island,

which hadn’t been, it was a dray track which hadn’t been used for forty years. It took us two days to cut our way through and we spent a day there looking around and exploring the place and the old house that was there which hadn’t been occupied for some years.

I recall the night that we slept there away from the house amongst the trees. There was a great consternation for a while, there was rustling and we thought first of all there was alligators because we saw a number of alligators in the sea in our explorations on the Cape, but it turned

out to be wild pigs. Our worries were not as we thought. We were certainly concerned about alligators. We saw them in the sea, we saw them of course regularly around Red Island Point where the slaughterhouse was.

On one occasion I went to Thursday Island and spent two days there, had discussions with the officer commanding and I watched the Torres Strait Islanders drill on the parade ground there. There was a company of Torres Strait Islanders and I was absolutely amazed at the standard of the drill. They were quite equal to any

regular British Army unit. It was absolutely amazing to see this drill and it greatly impressed me. Of course Torres Strait Islanders are people who generally have a very good physique. It’s amazing to see the difference in the physique of the people at Bamaga Missionary Station not very far away from where we were.

The conditions in which they were living were poor and of poor stature. It was an interesting journey.

I think the most challenging part of it was the part of the people who were driving the vehicles and maintaining them. I think they lost about ten of 200 that didn’t complete the journey.

Well, I don’t know. They probably got them going eventually and brought

them back to Chillagoe I would think. It depends on which way they were. They were not matters of my concern. I was more concerned with the operations of the maps and keeping the war diary and exploring the countryside. We did a lot of driving about in this locality.

The importance of it was to defend that airfield against Japanese attacks or attacks on the mainland or the peninsula, particularly if the Kokoda Trail operation had been successful. I mean you’ve got to realise we went up there in September. Like everything else, these sort of things have to be planned. All the vehicles have got to be assembled, so we heard about it probably at my

level probably about six weeks before. I heard about it six weeks after it was first planned. I want to say that a company of the, or units of the 51st Battalion went to Cooktown and Iron Range where there were also airfields being built.

There was a big airfield at Iron Range. As a matter of fact some of the bombing of the Japanese ships was done from Iron Range and from Mareeba. I’m not too sure about Cooktown, but Iron Range and Mareeba as I understand it. There’s always been a bit of, not disputation, but question the accuracy of

where these aircraft, land based aircraft, what bases they flew to attack Japanese shipping, from which ones in north Queensland. I don’t want it to be accepted as what I say as being completely accurate.

Ten to twelve days. If I could that war diary I’d tell you exactly. I haven’t been able to find it at the present time, but it’s got every movement in creek and thing. It’s a full detailed description. At lunch time I’ll see if I can find it for you.

Training.

Yes, and sport at times, at weekends. I mean football games, football. If you look at the war diary you’ll find out about the football results. Other battalions, 31st against 51st, 31st against 26th. That’s it, football at the weekends. One day of rest usually on Sunday. There was always training and things to do.

Ask me about it, and we’d been in Bougainville, I wasn’t with the battalion at the time, I was doing a school when they first launched their attacks up on the Ganga and the early parts of the first part of the campaign, and I got back just in time to go up on

the Numa Numa Trail at Top Peaks at George and Little George. That was that, and then the next one of course, we went up on Porton, the operations on the Bonus Peninsula. So we came back after Porton and another battalion takes over from us. You leap frog, you know. We’re

down now and we have a spell for about a week or so and the next thing we’re into training again having spent all that time on those operations, in training again. Then we hear about the atomic bomb. We just stopped training and came back to camp. We had places, you see. We were going to go down south next time

where there were a lot more Japanese than what we were fighting. A little bit different to the type of country, a little bit more open. They were using tanks down south, but we’d been operating as an independent brigade. The 55/53rd Battalion and the 26th Battalion and we’d been leap frogging one between the other. We’d have a spell. We had two fronts. One would

go up on the coast and the other one the centre area. In training you don’t have any sort of leisure time to lay down and enjoy the beach or something. They’d always find something to do in the army.

Well, after we came back from there we went on leave of course, and when they re-assembled in Cairns, I went to a school for military intelligence

at Redcliffe. Not Redcliffe, I’d previously been to one at Redcliffe. This one was at Southport. There was a big old hotel there at Southport. It accommodated the Australian School of Military Intelligence, and I went to

a school there and when I went to that school I was appointed to run a school down at Tenterfield for NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers], military intelligence for NCOs in the middle of winter. The battalion was amalgamated I think sometime in May. I’d have to get

you the exact date of that year.

It was amalgamated and it was at Merauke in New Guinea.

By ship, by ship.

We got a direction from the CO [Commanding Officer] and we got a direction from commands, from higher commands. (UNCLEAR) has come down the chain.

It originated from army headquarters, particularly a placement like that because by the time they brought us back they’d brought the 51st back from Iron Range and Cooktown. We caught a ship and we came back and we were offloaded here in Townsville for leave. I forget what our leave was, but I had to go down to the school

at military intelligence.

Where spent?

Yeah.

About a bit less than three months.

Yes, yes, I was moving about all the time. Well, I had to come back to camp of course. We were under canvas, all those things, and just beside the airstrip.

I can’t recall any, no, can’t recall any at all.

That’s not to say they weren’t there. The answer is I don’t know. I’ve got no, I would have to look at the war diary. There weren’t any Japanese aircraft recorded in the war diary, but I think they’d be more interested in Horn Island than us because there was quite a considerable air force contingent at Horn Island with planes on it. There were no planes on, I don’t recall a plane landing on this airfield

before we left.

Well I think by that stage we were fairly well prepared. It’s difficult to say. There’s nothing like experience in warfare, there’s nothing like experience in life. We would’ve made a pretty good showing.

You can never be certain about these things. You can never be certain about how people respond to the great stresses of warfare. I mean it’s a pretty traumatic affect on people, being shot at.

I’m quite certain we would’ve done very well. It’s not easy to say when you ask that question. A lot depends on the number of enemy that have landed. If it was like Kokoda we would’ve got an awful shock, but if it was equal.

At Milne Bay the forces, Australian forces, it was a very bloody battle and the Japanese got mauled but they didn’t have the forces that we had. We had two brigades there. They had an extensive landing force but they had to achieve their objective so they had a problem on their hands. They

had, they were the attackers and the defenders were fairly well prepared. Once having been prepared they repelled the attackers. That’s the first defeat of the Japanese army in World War II on land.

Well I’d have done my best. I wouldn’t have

shirked, put it that way. I’d have taken things calmly like I do to the best I could in life. However, that’s, I was one of the, well not fortunate ones, but I didn’t have as much action as a lot of other people did in the army. I’ll tell you about that a bit later on. I only had one incident where I fired a shot at anybody because I eventually got to company 2IC [Second in Command].

Well, I just took those things as a matter of course. Like most things in life you do your best. That’s the answer to that one. I mean I’ve always been pretty meticulous about how I do things and

I wouldn’t have gone at it like a bull at a gate like some of my colleagues who were perhaps (UNCLEAR). If you know one or two of my colleagues, they’re absolutely magnificent soldiers, but they had long experience. They’d been in the Middle East, and there’s nothing like experience in life, nothing like experience.

Same old story, looking at the other side’s point of view, operations, army procedures, operation orders, particularly looking at the, many of the exercises were based

on captured documents or information received from the enemy. We were asked to solve them, two or three ones in New Guinea that were put forward as exercises.

Well, NCO training, well NCOs were officers and trained a little bit different.

A sergeant (UNCLEAR), he was commanding a platoon even though he was a sergeant. He was about to receive his commission and I think the war ended too quickly. There’s not much difference in the training. There’s probably greater experience

in the use of arms, things like that, particularly if you’re a mortar sergeant or machine gun, Vickers machinery. You’ve got to be experienced in the operation of those things. If you asked me to fire a Vickers machine gun I couldn’t do it, or a mortar. That’s not a part of my thing as an intelligence officer, but the others couldn’t do that intelligence work either.

I don’t think the adjutant, he was the chief administrative officer of the platoon, and he wouldn’t be able to fire a mortar or a machine gun unless he’d come up from one of those areas.

Yeah, that’s right.

I met her well before the war of course. She was running a little frock shop down there with her sister, and I think the first time, she was carrying a parcel out to a car and I helped her with

that. Anyway, we got to know one another and went out a little bit. It was just one of those sorts of things the entry of Japan into the war. She

knew I was in the services and things like that and in the army. It happened to be one of the times, I can’t tell you what date it was, it would be well over a year before I proposed to her, once, after I’d had an injection

for smallpox, I wasn’t very well after it, but she said yes and we were married, but that’s when I was on leave, or just after, sometime after one of the camps at Miowera.

I don’t think so. We’d make decisions like that.

We never worried about those sort of things. It was part of life. We were fighting a war to win, didn’t worry about those sorts of things. Very dramatic claims, listen to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] news at night, all the traumas of what happened at Dunkirk and things like that.

Yes, there was a lot of concern.

Very quiet. That was, we were married down here at the cathedral and my wife had been in the

auxiliary services, the VAD [Voluntary Aid Detachment]. She was in the VAD, and they were lined up outside the church for her comings and goings, and there was just my sister and my brother, were bridesmaid and the groomsman.

Then we went home to her home and we had a meal there and that was it, just the family. There were no outsides guests at all. My family and her family, so that was it. We had a very quiet

honeymoon and it wasn’t any length of time I was back in the army again. I think I went back in the August for about a week or a fortnight, back into the army after that. After that it was hardly ever, that was 28th July ’41 and so it didn’t take long for things to move after that, did it?

Yeah. Well, I left from the school down there and my wife used to come while I was at school. She had a manageress in the business there. She’d come down to the school and stay around about. She stayed at Tenterfield when we were there,

and stayed there in Southport too. So if I was on leave or anything like that, I wasn’t here, she’d come to the school. She’d come and stay there, and she had this business and this lady used to run it. Because I mean you know what happened, the whole place was rationing. You understand rationing of course. Clothes

and the store here, understand they used to open for about two hours. It was very hard to get clothes. She’d probably go down south and try to buy clothes, buy fashion clothes and all those sorts of things. So the business was slow really.

No.

She was pregnant before I went to New Guinea, to Bougainville, not to Moresby. Merauke, not to Merauke.

Well, there were plenty of reports. You’ve only got to read the newspapers. I mean, New Guinea is not, Merauke

was a little bit different. I didn’t realise it was quite a great swamp, south west side of New Guinea. It was quite unbelievable, great rivers that come down from the mountains. New Guinea’s been pretty well known for what it’s like. My wife had travelled extensively, not extensively, but she’d been all around New Guinea

on ships.

Just as an infantry battalion officer. I didn’t know what I’d be posted to. When I went to Merauke, I knew that the battalion intelligence officer was filled. I was posted as a platoon commander

in spite of all my experience and skills, it didn’t matter. It was quite a reasonable battalion after amalgamation, the 31st, particularly the type of 31st officers, 31st officers and the 51st officers. (UNCLEAR), and it wasn’t until there was a change in command

that that was, although the new CO arrived that was the end of it.

But I know it as well as anything. That changed the whole operation.

I just

waited here as long as I could because I knew Merauke was no operations of any consequence at all. It was just defending an airstrip, certainly more important than the ones up at Cape York because there had been raids on the airstrip at Merauke, which didn’t

kill anybody whilst our battalion was there, but before I arrived. So I knew there was, and I just waited here in the camp here for a ship to come along and as soon as they were following the movement control I knew pretty well by the time a ship came out. I said, “Don’t worry about the ship. I don’t want to go up by

ship, put me on an aircraft.” So I went up on an aircraft straight away. That gave me a few more weeks here with my wife. I was out at the staging camp and I spent the time with my wife at her home when I could. I had to report daily or something like that. So when I heard the ship might be coming to take us to Merauke I just

rang the fellow, went and saw the fellow at movements that I knew and said, “Would you put me on an aircraft.” That night I slept at the officers’ club down here at the Seaview Hotel and got up very early in the morning and my wife, I said goodbye then, and then she drove, she had

a car, she drove home to her mother’s place and I got to the airport very early on a bus and I got on this aircraft and there were no seats. They were DC3s. No seats and those aluminium things, all your equipment and

luggage, kits, kit bags were all down the (UNCLEAR), and you just stumble backside down everybody together and we took off. I went to sleep for a while, I dozed off, and about half an hour later I looked up and the sun

is in the wrong direction. I said, “Where are we going?” That’s one thing, you spend an awful lot of time with people teaching you map reading. It’s absolutely essential if you really want to patrol and things you’ve got an excellent sense of direction. It’s my experience not too many soldiers have. Years and years ago when I was a boy

I used to go out on the cattle station and I remember my uncle, saying, “George, these few cattle here, you drive them in this direction,” and he came up about two hours later and said, “George, you’re going in the wrong direction. That’s not the right direction.” I learned a thing about never getting yourself in the wrong direction.

I looked up in this aircraft, the sun’s in the wrong position, and sure enough in about ten minutes we’re back landing at Townsville airport. What’s wrong? Forgot to refuel the plane. So okay, we started again. We landed at Cooktown and from Cooktown we flew, and we probably dropped somebody off or took somebody on at Cooktown.

Well, I arrived at Merauke and I was posted to the 10th Platoon B Company and, or was it 12th Platoon B Company, as the platoon commander, and we were on the western side

of the Merauke River. The airstrip is on the eastern side, the main settlement, a place called Urambi, and we had exercises and things after that. Once of course there was training in jungle warfare. I mean there was

plenty of jungle around, there were plenty of swamps, walking through swamps and fighting and things like that, and swamps. Then B Company was transferred back here. A Company went over and we did the same thing. There was still the same sort of training.

We had one platoon up on the Island River. Now the Island River is, it took us in a small craft, I went up there subsequently very much somewhat later, but initially

a RAAF radar station was established on the western bank of the Island River at about fifteen, not more than twenty miles from the mouth of the river. The river at that part is about 1800 to 2,000

yards wide. It’s tidal at that point to an extent that, if you were to get water from the river at low tide you’d get buckets of water. We might have to get drinking water

and we had to go down to get drinking water at low tide when the fresh water floats on the top. We were right in the middle of a native village, which we parted, in other words, we were in the centre and they

were on both wings. They were living in the Stone Age. They couldn’t drink out of a cup. They were all highly infected with malaria, very obvious swollen spleens. I reckon the life expectancy wouldn’t be more than thirty. They were cannibals. We had evidence

of that. A neighbouring tribe came down to try and fight with them and eventually they were (UNCLEAR) not only by ourselves but by the older tribes. They were protecting us there. Not protecting us, but I suppose protecting us because they were the eyes and ears of Japanese

infiltration. (UNCLEAR). All of the houses were on stilts. They used to build these things for us and we’d give them food, and

they established small traps along the banks of the river and we used catch fish, mainly catfish, which was quite edible, and small alligators. We used to give them like, all of our food was tinned food,

except on occasions we’d have a fresh meat drop. We gave them some of our food and there was no question of giving them money. Alligators on one side, they worked a lot harder when they got alligator flesh. I only spent a short period of time there, but before my arrival

the Japanese had come down and attacked the force. At that stage a man named Rudakoff, but I was in charge of the platoon there and they made the Japanese (UNCLEAR). I think by the time the air force finished them

off, none ever got back to their base. They had a base called Japero. Now Japero could be a hundred miles up the coast, might’ve been a bit more or less, and this area is a tangled mass of waterways and it’s entwining

for about, it varies, but at least two or three miles, two or three miles inland, and then whilst the island is in a great river. You’ve got to realise that rain falls on these things. On Bougainville we could pretty well set our watches on

the rain. It used to start about four o’clock in the afternoon and finish about one in the morning, and these ranges I was talking about that fed the island they were very much higher than the ones in Bougainville, and so this place had to be, had

to be defended, the radar station because it was very important from the point of view of the airport at Merauke. Whilst I was in Merauke there was an attack on Japero I think it was and other places to the west of us. To do that large quantities of

air force fuel, aircraft fuel was flown across from Port Moresby or elsewhere in DC3s and the bombers took off from Merauke airfield and bombed to the west of us.

This place was mosquito infested. You didn’t see too many mosquitoes about but there were plenty on offer when mosquitoes about, and asked people, all of us were taken one Atebrin a day and they were still going down with, so we

started to take two Atebrin a day. By the time we left the place we were very, very yellow indeed. It was before I, I was at Post 6 we called it on the Island River. There were a number of other posts. The 26th Battalion had a post at a place called Tanah Merah. That was just a defensive

to defend any Japanese infiltration. But before I arrived at Post 6, I think you’ve heard of the

(UNCLEAR) Barbouttis episode? Did I send you a copy of the Barbouttis operation?

Hey?

You’ve got to realise that at that time I was still in Merauke. I went to Merauke after that, but it’s a very stirring episode about that one.

Perhaps I should get it.

I remember it was almost New Year’s Eve and the acting commanding officer announced that Barbouttis had been killed as a result of

his meeting a Japanese craft in a waterway near Japero. He’d been buried at sea, but the story of course was that he was a member, with another member of the battalion had joined this aircraft. They were two soldiers. It was a far eastern liaison

craft called the Rosemarie and they threaded their way through these waterways towards Japero. Their task was to ascertain the number of Japanese that were manning the post at Japero. Once they got close to Japero one afternoon

as they were about to turn a corner two Japanese water craft came towards them and opened fire on them, and Barbouttis was extremely brave. He fired a machine

gun at them, and then when that jammed, the Bren gun, he fired that. When that jammed or ran out of ammunition he picked up and threw –

Hand grenades at them.

At that stage the skipper was, because of the depth of the water he was out in front checking whether he’d drifted. He was in front of the ship going very slowly and he brought his craft back and he got back on board somehow or other and they turned the craft around and as they did so a Japanese

from the bank shot Barbouttis through the head and he dropped dead. He didn’t get a Victoria Cross, but he got a mention in despatches.

If you’re killed in action you can either get a Victoria Cross or an MID [Mentioned In Despatches] or nothing. We’ve investigated and tried to get the facts from records about what was told about it. It’s probably due to the fact that command, there were a number of factors. The choco one’s not,

the battalion was still in that category, was still a mob of other battalions that became some months later. Blamey’s attitude towards chocos was well evidenced on the Kokoda Trail operation. The fact that it wasn’t part of a, FELO [Far East Liaison Office] was not part of unit, he was just attached to our

FELO for the expedition and so the battalion had little or no control over it. The reports didn’t go through us at all. I don’t think they went through brigade. (UNCLEAR). We tried to discover them but they don’t keep records or information. I’ve been able to obtain and I think I’ve been able to go

as deep as anybody can from a person who was in records was a personal friend of mine at the War Memorial. I think the records or recommendation of MIDs are not kept, so we don’t know what was said. Anyway, he was a very outgoing sort of man.

I think I told you the story how he was an offsider to his brother, one of these Greek cafes down there in Flinders Street next to the Great Northern Hotel and he was a big fellow, outgoing.

He was a fair little bookmaker at the race meetings we had. Very outgoing type of fellow, very direct and very popular. That’s the story.

Hey?

He was a part of the battalion. I knew him in the battalion.

He was one of those sort of fellows, you don’t forget those sort of people. A lot of people in the battalion recognised a man as outstanding like he was. He was a corporal, but that doesn’t matter. He was running a book at a race meeting we held. We had a race

meeting at Merauke at one stage, a battalion race meeting. Later on the Merauke Force ran one, but we had one of our own. A lot of other people came and competed. He was a bookmaker. I think he was a bookmaker (UNCLEAR) and won. (UNCLEAR), but he was well known.

So at Merauke we left. When I went to Post 6 I was posted from B Company as a platoon commander as 2IC to ‘Blue’ Shilton, who was a

company commander of C Company, and I was still a lieutenant. I spent some weeks there and then it was decided that we should go back to Australia. So two of these naval vessels,

their not frigates, what do you call them? They came up the river at about four o’clock in the afternoon when

the tide was in. (UNCLEAR). Shilton took the first lot and we all had to, all we had was our rifles and packs and we had to climb up the rope, rope nets. It’s not too easy, climbing up rope with a pack and a

rifle on your back. We took some time to get people aboard, and the skipper, when I got on board he was roaring at me for not getting the people on board quick enough. (UNCLEAR) get it out before nightfall.

His name was Vidgeon. They’re the family that had in the 80s drove their cattle right up the peninsula through all the turkey bush and formed that settlement opposite Albany Islands, the name which escapes me at the present time.

He had a brother who was there with Dalgety’s in Townsville. Dalgety’s were a merchant company, mainly (UNCLEAR) the grazing industry and wholesaling. So we eventually, I told him who I was and said I know his name was Vidgeon. (UNCLEAR) quieten things down a bit.

We got on very well. He had a brother here, and another brother here in the Union Fidelity Trustee Company and we used to have a lady who used to come into our office. She was, I suppose she had the early stages of dementia or whatever it might be, but she

used to think that Jim Vidgeon and his brother were the Prince of Wales, the Prince of Wales. We got on pretty well together and were good friends when (UNCLEAR) in Merauke, and we went back to our camp there for a while and then we were taken,

we came back by ship to Australia. I’d have to get some records. I don’t know what the name of the ship is. I’ve got no chance of recalling it at this stage.

Well, I just think that, who was left to defend

the, remember by this stage Kokoda Trail was well over. The fighting in the northern parts, and Lae had been captured. All of those areas had gone. The Japanese were in retreat, put it that way.

No affective means of doing anything at Merauke really. Probably important from an operational point of view that the airport was kept open and they didn’t bomb it. Those were the sort of things I bought pictures of. Without looking at the times and dates I just can’t tell you, but

by the time we, anyway, we went back and we were on leave. We came back to Strathpine and then from Strathpine we reassembled and went back on the

training operation. Wasn’t long at Strathpine I was sent to another school, a military school at Southport. So I went to that school. My wife came down and stayed down there at a couple of places. We rented houses.

I’m not quite certain whether there were one or two schools there but it was some considerable time, and whilst I was there the battalion went to Bougainville.

You’re asking me to remember names.

Well, there is one particular exercise, not Pearl Ridge. It was a ridge which the Australians fought. It’s frequently mentioned from time to time.

I’ll show you the map of Tsimba. I know where you’re getting that one from. No, that’s on Bougainville.

This one is on, in New Guinea. It was fought by, it’s not Pearl Ridge. It’s a very narrow ridge. What they’d done is they captured the Japanese documents on how they were going to supply their forces and how they were going

to maintain them on this ridge. It’s up in the Ramu Valley and the Japanese, the Australian forces, all they could fight was on this narrow ridge, and one of the great advantages of that eventually, they had an awful time to get them off, but they knew how

they were going to supply their forces and things like that, and we were given a sort of exercise, certain information and we had to supply how the problem could be solved, how they could be got off this ridge.

Those are the sorts of things. This is the most common sort of thing. The most important thing is knowing the Japanese order of battle. They like their weaponry. We’re talking particularly of infantry battalions and attached troops and their methods

of fire. All sorts of things in relation to the way they do things and how best to combat them.

Well, the first thing is the strength of their battalions, the number of people and how they divide their units up,

what their weapons are like. Like what’s in a platoon in the Australian Army, what’s the weaponry. They were right down to low levels but there were a lot of other things too. They way they do things, the way they think and the way they give commands. Then of course was our own side of doing things, particularly in giving orders and keeping

records. There’s sort of looking at it, there are two schools. There was the higher school that I’m talking about that people from, I suppose part of a battalion,

but it also applies to brigade and divisional officers and that’s the higher school. Then there were two schools, one for senior NCOs and officers. Mainly in relation to battalions and other forces. Well, I don’t think

people from artillery units were sent for instance, but there were also the capabilities of inter-communication, all sorts of things of that nature. It’s very difficult without getting a syllabus, it’s very difficult to be specific.

Well, I think their ability to (UNCLEAR) out of jungle operations. I mean they were much easier to get rid of in open country, but in jungle operations, as I said earlier here,

the fact that they dug a weapon pit and put a weapon in it, they were not going to get out of it until they were killed. The number of our people who lost their lives, our side who lost their lives because of that, it’s dramatic. I mean ordinary people would’ve, ordinary soldiers or non-Japanese, well,

(UNCLEAR). Non-Europeans would’ve put up their hands long ago, but not them. They fought to the last, until they were killed. It was an insult to be captured as a prisoner of war, and that was a major problem always.

It didn’t happen with me, but there was a great variety of our soldiery too. In the battalion the soldier was not nearly as good as from some of their

marine, Japanese marine battalions. Those people on Ocean Island and Nauru, they were marines. There were some marines that we met in Bougainville on one occasion. A marine was killed, but he

crawled up in the middle of the night with a sword into one of the pits. He was killed, but that’s an unusual case. A Japanese soldier wouldn’t have done that. I’m not depreciating their abilities as fighters but they weren’t equivalent to the marines, and the marines of course were (UNCLEAR)

regarded as very much a professional soldier. There is a great difference between professional soldiers and, you’ve got to realise the Australian Army were not professional soldiers except some of the senior officers at Duntroon, and they,

what happened with our battalion eventually when we were fighting in Merauke, and being in the Middle East, recently being in the Middle East, our 2IC was on, what’s the place up there

where we were sailing troops, outside north of Darwin? What’s the name of that island?

No, a small one, Timor. He’d been a commander on Timor. Kelly had been in the Middle East, a commanding officer, 2IC, and there were a couple of others that had

experience. They didn’t all have to have experience to be good. A lot of other people were just as good, but it’s great to have that experience behind you. As I said earlier, there’s nothing like experience for soldiery or law, or just playing golf or something like that.

Not at my level, but whether all the secrets are out or not I don’t know, but the British were able to get the Japanese Naval code. Now that’s intelligence at the highest level. There were a lot of other things like that that made all the difference. There were some breaking

of codes, the Germans’ codes, what they were about, by British intelligence. I think there is a story, is it whether the Americans knew or the British told the Americans that

Japan was about to bomb, I’m not too certain, but there’s some suggestion that was also known. I’m not quite certain on that.

I’ve got contempt for them having regard to some of the atrocities they committed. They were terrible, Nauru and Ocean Island, they were horrible apart from the treatment they gave some of my good friends in the Burma Railway

and the way they treated prisoners of the war. It was absolutely shocking. I just think it’s not good enough really. The things that they did at Nauru and Ocean in particular, very atrocious. They weren’t all against

Australians. They were against the Chinese, they were against the South Sea Islanders, they were against lepers. I’ll read you some of them later on. But I suppose that’s war and some (UNCLEAR). I’ve got no evidence against Australians

(UNCLEAR).

By air. I joined the battalion. The battalion had just finished its operations and the first section of its operation. It landed there as I remember I think just after Christmas. We went all, the battalion went

by ship and they landed at Torokina and then they started their operations up the western coast northwards. They reported a number of places. I think they’re well known to you, the Ganga River,

Downs Ridge.

Well I didn’t have much chance to do that because the battalion was resting and they were about to go up onto the Numa Numa Trail,

and I wouldn’t have spent more than two days at where they were resting in one of the resting areas there, and the officers’ and sergeants’ messes were all set up and the men’s messes. They were all under canvas of course, but they also had undercover messes,

and as the units moved from one to the other, one area to the other, they had an incoming battalion had just been on service moved into the outgoing battalion which had taken over from them.

I just landed there and before I could even put my kit bag down I was sent up onto the Numa Numa Trail to carry out an upper trail run in conjunction with an officer of the

No, no.

What’s the name of them? I said it earlier in the day, the number comes first.

Yeah. The battalion were then occupying the

(UNCLEAR) Pearl Ridge and George and Little George. They were the two features on this main ridge that you could look across and see the sea on a clear day, and if you looked west you could sea the sea. Anyway, I went out with a patrol

with that battalion which was then entrenched on the Numa Numa Trail in that Pearl Ridge area.

Well, we went to, we had, on all those patrols we had a native guide and we had maps, which I described earlier,

properly prepared maps which showed all the contour lines. It was very rough terrain. When you started to go downhill you really went downhill. So we went down first and we settled down at about four o’clock in the afternoon and that was the usual custom.

That’s when it usually started to rain and you’d settle down and get a few palm leaves or something and you’d put them around you. We generally used gas capes. Gas capes were much better than any other sorts of cover against the rain, so we wore gas capes and they were protection against the cold too because if you were up

on the top it was very cold in the early morning, but colder if you got wet. You very seldom could keep your feet dry if it was raining, so you had wet feet. We got down to this place and about a quarter of an hour after we were there one of the members of that patrol, which wasn’t under my control, I was just the observer, allowed

an armed gun to discharge. There was no way in the world the native guide would stay there, so we had to go right up the hill. We stumbled up the hill. There was no, well, if there was a track I’m afraid I didn’t see it, but we eventually got up about another thousand feet, almost exhausted and lay down and slept. Then next day of course we kept on with the patrol.

It was an uneventful patrol. We didn’t move, I suppose I was acclimatised to the countryside and the steepness and the problems and trying to find my whereabouts. You’ve got to realise it was because we were up and down like that, it was very hard to particularly describe to the native guide where you wanted to go. I think I should

show that map in a minute and you’ll understand what I mean. We came back from that patrol. It was (UNCLEAR) 55/53 Battalion. Now I’ve got (UNCLEAR). So that was it, and the only thing I’m not quite certain how, I’m sure I went back and reported to the commanding officer, Commander Kelly, and

he told me I was assigned as 2IC to Don Company. So I then, from then on I was (UNCLEAR) when I left Merauke I was 2IC C Company, and this time I was 2IC of Don Company, and so the next thing we did was we moved

up onto Pearl Ridge and George and Little George. I didn’t say to you that when I got Torokina I was pretty soft. I’d been living the luxury of the old Southport Hotel on those courses and it took me, I needed a lot of steam to get up the hills onto the Numa Numa Trail. This is the trail that leads across. Numa Numa is on the other side

of the island on the east coast and they call it the Numa Numa Trail. The Americans, to build this airfield, they established the airfield and then any Japanese attacks, there were none I don’t think from the north, but they were certainly some from the south and the centre and

western side of the mountains. There were no trees left there. They blew the tops off all the trees, and they just stayed, they put there and they didn’t worry about pushing the Japanese any further south or

north or east across the ranges. They used the airfield, but it wasn’t our battalion. The first battalion, Australian battalion that took over from the Americans, the Japs were on, I don’t know whether it was Little George or George, but that’s the story, they were on separate

sort of peaks or ridges and they used to get water at the same point. And I tell you, as soon as the Australians got there they ambushed the Japanese at the watering point shortly after I arrived and then from then on it was on for young and old, and we fought them

on that trail, on the Numa Trail, and we fought them down south. We were just one brigade. The 11th Brigade’s responsibility was the Numa Trail and the northern sector. There were two brigades in the south where there were many more Japanese and they were fighting them with tanks. We didn’t get very much more information about that except casual talk. Nobody sent us a sit rep [situation report]

to tell us what they were doing. If they did I certainly didn’t see them as company 2IC. If I’d have been at battalion headquarters perhaps I would, or adjutant or battalion intelligence officer, but you don’t see too much of that, particularly in the operational times when you’re in a company. So that sort of

started it all. The ascent up that Numa Trail, as I said, is very, very exhausting and I was as soft as butter and it was steep, cut off the rocks like this and you’re going up and up. It was around about 2,000 or more feet. At one point what they were able to do was to

drag a couple of jeeps up somehow or other. I don’t know, that was long before we were there, and when you got to a certain point you could get a jeep to take you almost to where your battalion was dug in, and we took over from other people who’d dug these pits and our fields of fire were all established and things like that. We were on a ridge barely wider than

the width of this room, wouldn’t be any wider from that street to this house next door. It varied, but that’s roughly. Then there’s a ravine and then there’s the Japs on the other side looking at you. I’ll get you the map.

With this company, and then it’s got the (UNCLEAR) the sergeant and the man that do most of those maps, I don’t think he probably ever, he never went out on a patrol, but these other people

did at times. Anderson did and so did some of the others, but there was a small group there that had to type reports and do all sorts of things. So it’s a sort of a, in terms of sections, it’s like an adjutant. An adjutant has got communication with the company, with people in the company by phone. Communication

is particularly important. I don’t think our communication was as good as the Americans but in all other respects I think we were better. If we went to attack somebody, the Americans always had about three times as many men in the field as we had and that can be awfully fatal at times. You get cross fires and get shot up.

We’d send a platoon, they’d send a company. When they sent a company, we’d send a platoon. They certainly had very heavy artillery fire, probably a little bit heavier than ours. Anyway.

This patrol we had a native guide and it’s very, very difficult even

with those maps to know exactly where you are, and I found that when you got out on these patrols you got information that’s been collated at the I Section of battalion headquarters. The information in this case was received not from our battalion sources, not from our patrols, but by somebody else’s patrol, and I felt in some cases the information as to where

those things actually happened were wrong. Listening to what the native guide had to say about where the Japanese were, and finding that on the map they were supposed to be somewhere else and weren’t was a bit disconcerting. Anyway, on this patrol after up hill and down dale and

going to where I was told to go and finding I didn’t think we were where we should be according to the map supplied to me, we went to this place where the guide said there’d be some Japanese, and we got up to that point. We had to go right up a hill to get there. They were on the top of a ridge. That’s the usual place for them. Then we got there at about

four o’clock in the afternoon and I had a forward scout but I went further forward to reconnoitre the position. We were on a slope like this and looking forward there was a bit of a clearing at the top, and I got very high up and decided that

they, I’m not quite sure, but I think that they, by the time I got there it was only about five. It was still light, but there was nobody there. So I decided, the guide was very definite that somebody had been there and was there, and I formed the conclusion myself looking at the base of the clearance that there was someone there. So I decided to stay on the side of the hill myself

and I discarded my rifle. I couldn’t, the Australian Army wouldn’t give me an Owen gun. I mean if you’re on these sorts of patrols there is only one weapon to carry and that’s an Owen gun of course if you want something a little heavier, but then you’ve got to have somebody else

to carry the ammunition, and that’s a Bren gun. Bren guns were not too, they were a bit heavy to carry up and manipulate on the side of a hill like that. So soon after I got there I made up my mind that the best thing to do was see if I could get a Thompson submachine gun from the Yanks. So I sent my batman out and promised him if he could get one

for me that tell them, I gave him some American money and a bottle of whisky I think and I got a Thompson machine gun and ammunition. I carried that all the time on patrols. I carried it every time I was in the field because we were in very close country and it’s very difficult to be,

I’m not a good shot, very difficult to be accurate firing a rifle up hill. Not my way of thinking, but an Owen gun or a Thompson submachine gun. Owen guns were better than Thompsons but I couldn’t get one. So I stayed there all night on the side and woke up

early in the morning and then crept up closer and sure enough they appeared and I fired at them. I think there were two or three of them and I’m sure I didn’t wait to see whether I actually killed or wounded anybody. I put it down as one killed and I think that’s probably reasonable.

One thing that was worrying me all the time was that I left my platoon and they retreated down the hill, down to the bottom where there was a running stream of course. All these places having running steams. They’re not terribly deep or anything like that. I suppose when torrential rain fell they would be, but they’d run away very quickly because they’ve got falls down so steep and waterfalls and things like that. So

I regained them and the next thing when I got down there after I said to the guide, “I want to get an observation post where we can see this site.” We had wireless, we only had those big wireless sets and that’s one of the things the Yanks [Americans] had much better wireless, big humping. I had

two fellows carrying that wireless set. A big thing like this it was on their back, plus their own gear, and what we did then of course we communicated directly with the artillery and the artillery shelled this place and we watched the artillery shelling and we came home.

It was like a burst of artillery fire anywhere.

I’ve never thought about that except that I wouldn’t like to be in it. It was explosions taking place and some hit just a bit below the horizon. I suppose the ones we certainly hear the explosions and swear that some of them are

pretty well direct hits. We don’t know how many Japanese were there. You couldn’t see that for the timber, and some of them would’ve gone over but the artillery people have a practise in relation to a site like that. First of all they’d look at their map and if they were missing anything we could turn around and by wireless tell them,

“You’re dropping short.” or “You are over your target.” or “You’re on your target.” They certainly landed on the target. They might’ve been some gone over earlier. I can’t remember that. I wasn’t operating the thing although I was next to the wireless operator. So that was the end of that battalion. There’s a report there that I’ve read since, I didn’t sign, it’s grossly exaggerated. I

won’t say any more. I didn’t write it.

Well it had things in it that didn’t happen. I couldn’t believe it. However, that’s another story. I talked to Anderson about that. I said to him, “Bert, I’ve just read that report.” I rang him up when I got hold of it. He said, “That’s Springer, he always exaggerates things.” I thought thank God I didn’t sign it. He had us firing Bren

guns at them, we never fired a Bren gun at all. That’s one thing and there were a couple of other things, other people firing into it and they were never there. They were all down the bottom of the gully, I was the only one that did the firing.

That’s right. It took me sixty years to find out. Yeah, okay.

I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know why he’d want to bolster me up. One’s got, the answer is I don’t know. It’s an accurate general report except for those certain particulars. There was never a Bren gun fired at all. The two main things

were probably the king hit one would’ve been if they were obviously still there, would’ve been the artillery on target. You can’t tell what those casualties were, you don’t claim any casualties for them. That’s noted. I suppose it was probably a decision made by battalion brigade in relation to artillery casualties. (UNCLEAR).

I think I did one other patrol later on but there was, no, I didn’t. I only did two patrols, sorry. One was I found nothing.

Officers didn’t get issued with Owen guns. Only certain, not every member of a platoon got issued with Owen guns. I can’t tell you,

I think there were two Owen guns to a section. You’ve got to remember first of all, that was the latter part of the war, but first of all they were a war time invention and well, (UNCLEAR) when they came into operation when we got them. The Americans

never had them. They had Thompsons. The Owen was better because it could stand up to all sorts of conditions, dirt and all sorts of things, very handy to use. Thompson was one of these shiny pieces of work. The Owen was a bit of old steel but it was very efficient. Not everybody had Owen guns, even in a platoon.

I think it was two to a section. That’s about six, and that’s pretty reasonable if you go on patrol you would have one of the Owen guns, probably two Owen guns to a section, you’d have two of them, one on forward and the other one a little bit behind.

You’ve got to realise that if you were going to sit down on trench warfare thing and the enemy is coming at you, there’s nothing harder hitting, more hard hitting than rifle fire, and then you’ve got to realise you have a Bren gun per section. So you’ve got different types of fire. You’ve got a Bren gun, two

submachine guns and rifles, and then of course you’ve got your grenades. We’re talking about just a plain section, three sections to a platoon, three platoons to a company. That was that. That was the sort of, later on in the war I

missed out on, fortunately I might say so, out of the, I wasn’t in A Company or part of C Company, I was in Don, and when we came back from Numa Numa Trail and the next thing is we went on the operations up to northern Bougainville and we had that operation that I just

told you about.

Yeah, righto.

All that happened there was I went up with Don Company. We were inland

from the major port of operation. Porton was on the coast and we were inland. We had the 26th Battalion on our right. We had B Company on the right of the battalion. It was B Company next to the 26th Battalion. There was Don Company.

Again with B Company on our right and there were two platoons of C Company. So there was one platoon of C Company with the commanding officer at Porton with A Company. So we have two platoons of C Company, Don Company, B Company, 26th Battalion, that’s across the peninsular.

Our base of course was a place called Ratsua and we came up and that’s where we spread ourselves there. Porton is up here and so that’s the way it was.

Is that all right?

That explains it. We dug ourselves in there. We had three platoons forward. The company headquarters was on a ridge behind these platoons about give and take 200, 300 yards. We cleared an open stretch in front of us

so we had a (UNCLEAR) field of fire if they wanted to come straight up, which would be most unusual. There was a well just down below which had been dug, down below the ridge, and I didn’t get there exactly when the rest of the company did. I was a few days later and I found the company 2IC was responsible to see all

the mess things right and the defence of that area. You’ve got the cooks there cooking food and food being taken forward in dixies and things. I found them walking along this front stretch so I stopped that pretty quickly and we put a track around the side to feed these three platoons, and I had somebody go behind and follow them

to be quite certain that they were protected as they went. The watering point, I don’t know whether he actually told you the story about how I nearly got ambushed? Did he tell you about the story I nearly got ambushed? I said, “Hucks, how the hell did you go there?” He was taking a shortcut back to his B Company which was

on our right, you see. Anyway, he escaped from that and he was only just about fifty yards down, he scuttled back and fortunately he didn’t get hit, and I said, “Look Hucks, for God’s sake take that route around there and it will be safe and go through (UNCLEAR) to your section,” which he did. Yeah, I remember that. Anyway,

we were there and that was when we had, I told you that story about that young fellow who wouldn’t enlist in the AIF who lived at Babinda or somewhere up there and his wife had just had a child and he used to go out in front and pot Japs if they bobbed their head up in the wrong place. He was a sniper, he was a good shot. He wasn’t

the only one. There was another much older man who was a member of the AIF. He did the same thing. They used to call him ‘Dadda’. Every time there was a route march, Dadda would lag behind everywhere. They reckoned he had enough washers in his backside like we had, and Dadda was an excellent soldier and he used to spend his time doing the same thing. He enlisted in the AIF.

Soldiers are different (UNCLEAR). There are not too many fellows in any of those forward, or in headquarters of the company, would want to do that, but those two did.

Which one?

I didn’t.

All I did was when he

came back.

I was never involved in an ambush.

Well that particular time on Numa Numa Trail, those patrols. We saw, remember the enemy were fairly remote and if you were company 2IC, I mean I was sent out as a company 2IC, most company 2ICs

they’re there to take over and confirm the CO of the company, he’s a company commander who is a captain or a major. Some of them are majors, some are captain. And they take over, but it’s not usual for them to be out in platoons fighting.

As I say, I was lucky I wasn’t reported on because everybody got involved no matter who they were. Tom, Dick or Harry, the whole lot of them were involved in that fight, fighting for their lives, and their company commander, Clive Downs, was killed and another officer. He was a platoon commander.

They were at Porton.

I was there. Porton’s another story. It was an action on it’s own. Has anybody told you about Porton?

I understand you’ve seen, not you, but Blue Shilton who was the commander of C Company, that platoon of C Company who was actually the company commander C, and ‘Blue’

Reiter who was a platoon commander there, have both been interviewed and they give pretty good descriptions of what happened there.

My views are that it should never have taken place. You’ve only got to look at the map and see how easy it was for the Japanese to reinforce

their numbers. There’s a road right down to the beach at Porton. They could bring them across into Bougainville from, what’s the name of the island at the top? They could bring them across without any trouble, but they brought the reinforcements down in trucks on the road.

The whole operation should never have occurred. You see, General Blamey was coming up. Has anybody told you this?

General Blamey was coming up and we believed that the whole show was put on for his, to show what his ex-choco battalions could do. So General Savage was commander

of two corps which was in command of the operations in Bougainville, and the brigadier and the CO clearly had a number of telephone discussions about this and there were a lot of reservations, there were a lot of conferences. I don’t know who else you might have spoken to. I don’t think

you would be able to speak to Samson who was then Dick Samson. He was a commanding officer of a support battalion, support company rather, and I don’t,

he’s not well enough to be interviewed these days. I talk to him on the phone sometimes but he fades out after about four or five minutes at the most. There was great discussions there. I’ve been talking to Reiter only recently about it and he and Samson wrote reports for the record on the Porton show.

They were rejected by headquarters, they were very critical, and they were, although they’d had long service in the army, they didn’t get discharged until after Christmas because they were held back in Torokina revising their reports and settling them. There was a telephone conversation which I’ve endeavoured to obtain

a copy of but never been able to do so. I don’t know whether we could get it now, but the adjutant of the battalion was a named Captain Gerry Gerard and before he enlisted he was a senior clerk in the Railway Department and he wrote shorthand. It’s alleged to have been a lengthy discussion between the brigadier and Colonel

Kelly, which he took down in shorthand the conversation for Kelly’s protection because the senior officers of the battalion, that’s particularly, the best person to talk to would of course be Downs who was killed in action, that one, but Shilton would’ve been (UNCLEAR). He’d be

the best. I don’t think Reiter was involved directly at that time because he was, well he was not in command. He was an excellent soldier but he was a fighting troops and a platoon commander. So we’ve never been able to get, I asked Kelly if we could have it but he’s never given it to me, if he’s got it.

Evacuation, I wasn’t there.

There was great dissatisfaction in the battalion about the whole operation. It was badly planned at senior levels and there was quite a lot of disputation about it. I wrote some letter to my wife,

being a lawyer they were carefully guarded so they couldn’t get at me, but the census people sent them back to the battalion. Joe Kelly called me up and talked to me about it and said, “Don’t do that again,” and that was the end of it. My wife didn’t get that letter. What we did do, we,

Blamey came up to watch the spectacle at the particular time and there was great comments about this one and one of the officers was a fellow named

Cromley or a word like that. I can’t remember. That’s not

quite right.

He was a commercial artist and an excellent one. As a matter of fact in our mess in a short time he prepared skits on all of the officers. I just remember (UNCLEAR) Reiter, he had it under his name, “How to win friends and influence people.” Reiter

was pretty direct, you know, and the Japanese knew that too. He didn’t waste any time on dealing with them. He also had one of Blamey and underneath that was written, “Nero fiddles while Porton burns,” and here’s Blamey on a small fast craft, beer bottles swinging all around and

men swimming trying to get onto the ship, and him taking no notice. That was sent south by an officer who was going to see if he could get it published in an Australian newspaper. I never knew what happened to that. But I remember giving it to him and an arrangement with Cromby,

but he had this comment the operation and it was put on particularly by his viewing whilst he was up in Bougainville. There was also a feeling of course

that not having regard to the fact that we sort of stepped in and starting fighting there on Bougainville, all we need do is sit there and do nothing like the Americans had been doing for months once they’d captured their objective. And the same thing goes for north Borneo. I think you’re aware of that, but that comment was strong. See, we lost over a period of about eight months, we

lost sixty-three fellows there. That’s a tenth of the battalion. A battalion strength is around about, a tenth of the battalion in that short time. The list of wounded, well some of the wounds were very serious and some were very small. A lot of them didn’t require much hospitalisation at all. There was one fellow who writes to me from South Australia. He was terribly

wounded in that Tsimba Ridge thing, and he was invalided home straight away and spent about two year sin hospital. He married a woman who nursed him in hospital and he’s still alive and well. It’s the most amazing recovery. He was almost disembowelled. He was carted out and got to shore just in time. There were a lot at Tsimba Ridge

that didn’t make it, and of course the same at Porton. Casualties were very high. At the Numa Trail there was only one of our men killed and he was unlucky. He’d been on a patrol. I think they decided they’d stay the night and have another go at the Japs in the morning.

I talked to one of the fellows that were with him on that day, and he just put his head up and the Jap sniper killed him instantly. He was of Greek extraction. I remember his body being (UNCLEAR), brought down the hill and up the hill throughout our positions. Those casualties

were quite unjustified because so far as the war was concerned, the war was over for those Japanese. They’d been bypassed. They could have been, I suppose you’ve got to have been somebody there like we were.

Hmm?

Cooks?

That Don Company, when we were there

at the time of Porton, the

Hey?

I think I can wait.

They brought across from New Guinea Papuan infantry battalion people and there was a patrol,

twelve or fourteen went out, and they by nature having regard to their existence for hundreds of years was hit and run. They knew how to get about the countryside and hide themselves. Anyway, they’d done their job and they were on the way back and they came into our battalion about four o’clock in the afternoon.

I said, “You can look after the perimeter of this operation,” because the perimeter had to be manned at night. There was no way in the world anyone was going to man that perimeter. They had to be inside and our fellows had to man the perimeter. We fitted them inside all right. You see, defensive operations were not,

they didn’t defend. They attacked and ran, you know. It’s an understanding. I got a great surprise at the time to find that that would happen but I can understand it now having regard to their way in which they lived and fought and existed over the centuries. That’s the way that

they operated and it was a bit surprising. I don’t know if there’s much more I’ve got to say about that operation. We came back.

Settled down in the mess, talked about the operations at Porton. It was a major topic of conversation of course.

The officers. Mainly officers and the men, a whole host of people. A whole host were talking about it, all of us.

Well, some reckoned the operations should never have taken place. It was conceived at high levels, and of course you’ve got to realise in the army you do as you’re told.

What comes from the top order, you’ve got to do it.

Oh yes.

They didn’t have much time to realise that it was futile. They found very quickly that it was. They established their beachhead all right. Unfortunately getting them

out of it was a problem because the water craft that took them there, one of them got stuck on a reef. They didn’t land quite exactly at the right place, which is understandable at four o’clock in the morning. Beach landings are always very difficult and fortunately they were English

ones and they were proof against .303 fire, the Japanese small fire. So when they got away from the shore and got into this they were able to have protection against .303 fire. They didn’t have protection against mortar fire of course.

There was I think one occasion which a Japanese soldier went out and threw a grenade into some. Some were killed in that one, but that wasn’t, only occasion got into one of the craft. But of course they only had

to be re-rescued out of the craft. A lot of these soldiers swam for miles to get to an island across the way, and down the coast they swam miles. I can’t tell you how many it was, but there would have to be at least a dozen of them. Some of them of course never had any chance of making the beach so they were shot

inland. Smith was certainly killed inland, he was a lieutenant. His body has never been found. Most of those were left inland where they were found. I think there is not much more I can add to Porton, except to say it was, we were very unhappy about it.

I think the answer is they were critical of command. They were saddened by the loss of their mates, particularly Downs, he was an excellent soldier. He was a school teacher, Downs, from Ayr, and

he hadn’t had any Middle East experience. He was a very much admired man long before he lost his life, those sorts of things. But what are you going to do about it? You’re in the army. It might be your turn next and that’s it. I don’t think I can take that sort of thing much further.

It was a very disturbing operation. The next thing of course we were going to go down to the south and we were concerned about that because the Japanese were in very great numbers there. I think we got a reputation of being a good battalion and we might be able to do something with them down there. It was a different type of warfare

from what I can gather, and not only that, we were aware that the Japanese were about to start a counter offensive and had to try and circumvent, encircle any force that attempted and to press them back. Anyway, we were out on a training exercise, as I explained, later and we heard that the atomic bomb had gone off and we returned to camp straight away.

We celebrated because we knew the end of the war had come. That was very interesting. I’ve been a long term member of Legacy of course, and there was a Legacy bulletin, extract from a Legacy bulletin from (UNCLEAR) a few years ago and (UNCLEAR) a brief statement of

about two pages what were the Americans’ plans for the attack on Japan. The atomic bomb saved the Japanese hundreds of thousands of lives. The Japanese would’ve wondered what on earth happened once the Americans started to invade Japan, planned for February 1946.

I don’t know whether you realise but the damage by American aircraft on Tokyo prior to the atomic bomb going off was horrendous too. There were a lot of Japanese cities very badly damaged, particularly those industrial cities that were supplying war materials and things, but Tokyo in particular. This one

just gives the numbers, the preparations by the Americans to land this huge force over a wide area of the eastern coast of Japan in February, and of course the naval and air force bombardments, horrific. There would’ve been a lot of American losses of life of course, but the

Japanese losses would have been very much greater. So you know, they talk about the atomic bomb but it had a great blessing really. It saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Unfortunately a number of Japanese people lost their lives, but in doing so they saved the lives of hundreds of thousands

of people. It certainly saved the lives of a lot of Australians. I might not have been here if the war had continued for another four or six months. We’d have been battling it out there in that futile war in Bougainville. Of course the operations in Borneo would’ve continued,

and they were futile.

Well, preparations for peace and a relaxed and easy attitude. One of our officers made some sort of bomb out of I don’t know what. He was a mortar officer. He’s still alive but he’s lost his mind. He

lives about midway between Sydney and the Gold Coast in New South Wales. At about midnight, that night or the night after this thing went off in the middle of the night with a huge bang and woke the whole camp up, killed the night. But those sorts of things,

we realised it was time to go home when everybody looked about getting home. Of course, the next thing of course what was going to happen, and we were told being in Don Company which had not been involved in this Porton operation, plus the CO and adjutant and intelligence officer

and quartermaster services would go to Nauru, and that the A Company and the balance of, and C Company, the battalion 2IC, a man named Tetley, would go to Rabaul, and they were not the only people at Rabaul I gather.

I’m not too certain about who else went to Rabaul. The occupation of the Nauru and the Ocean Islands didn’t take a great deal of time. We were quite certain when they left there, because I was offered discharge towards the end of September.

Well, I’ll tell you. We went over in two ships, the River Burdekin and the River Glenelg, and the purpose of our operation was take possession of

two islands from the Japanese and accept the surrender. I think I’ll have some water. Those are the embarkation rails, both of those ones.

About three days or something like that.

I was quartermaster of (UNCLEAR).

I was, look after the provisions, see that everybody was fed and things like that.

It’s some time in September, towards the end of September, yes. Well, when we, Nauru of course was a phosphate, and Ocean Island, both would have been mined for phosphate by the British Phosphate Commission.

At Nauru, I never went to Ocean Island, but at Nauru there was a cantilever sort of wharf, or facility rather than wharf. It wasn’t a wharf, a facility at which the ships could tie up to and load the

phosphate mechanically into the holds of the ship. Nauru is a, not quite a circle, but like that, what you call it, and it’s quite easy to drive around in an hour without any trouble at all, and the reef

extends out about not more than a hundred yards and after that you’re in about water 6,000 feet of water. So the ships, there’s no place for them to come into a harbour as such. There was a little boat harbour there and for ships that were coming to load and,

to unload rather, cargo, there were two buoys about 500 yards out to sea and these boys were both destroyed by the British Phosphates after the declaration of war so the ships couldn’t tie up to them. So when we got to Nauru we had a lot of men and

cargo to unload and we looked at, we were on the western side of Nauru so the sun was shining brilliantly on that western side at about four o’clock in the afternoon, and we looked and we saw buildings there.

I better have that glass of water back. They were moving all the time against the tide and we were looking at the western sun on Nauru, and one of the things that attracted us was a lot of buildings, sheds

I suppose about thirty feet high, open. There was something in them but you couldn’t discern what it was, and there weren’t one of these, there were a lot of them.

Hey?

When you went around the island there were dozens of them. I’ll tell you what they were in a minute, but don’t be too anxious. I’ll tell you the full story

about what was in the sheds. But it was the next day accepting the surrender, and once that was over we began to unload and as the quartermaster it was my job to see the landing craft that we had on the ship brought first of all our men ashore and the tents and all their gear. That was the first thing, and their

food. They went into the boat harbour and we had the job of getting those things off the landing craft and onto the shore. There were two cranes there. I just can’t remember whether they operated one to begin with or not, but certainly

the first thing we did with the engineers was have a look at the electricity supply. Of course there was a power station there and that had to be kept going and enough electricity we hoped to run two cranes, but the best we could ever do was get one crane operating. And the cranes, all the stuffs that were put

into the landing craft, there were cargo nets laid down and then you pick them up. We had trucks getting rid of them. There were a number of breakdowns from time to time of the electricity things. Now, that was a day and night job. That went twenty-four hours a day and I might’ve got an hour’s sleep here and there at night in a lull

for about four days and I got a bit sunburned from the reflection of the water in the boat harbour. One of the major problems there were flies. There were flies everywhere and the reason for that was although

it’s a phosphate island it’s not fertile, and the administrative officer was telling us that all the Japanese would be dead, that they wouldn’t have been able to sustain anything. You couldn’t grow things on the island, and that you could get fish of course. It was very difficult to

line fish because of the depth of the water but if you got on a prow and used lights at night you caught these flying fish in nets. Have you seen or heard about that? We did it once or twice. I went on one occasion and I wasn’t very steady in the boat. I stayed in the boat but the native who was guiding us fell in the drink as my tipping the boat the wrong

way. It wasn’t very much to eat on the island. It was, I think they had mainly introduced food. They grew small crops. There wasn’t a very great Nauruan population, and of course there was administration there and a labour force, Chinese labour force, and Gilbertese and other South Sea Islanders. Well,

these lavatories were everywhere because it was an offence to excrete human excrete anywhere except in these lavatories, and what we found out about it was that the night soil from these lavatories was used to grow pumpkins and these things were lousy with pumpkins. Those sheds had pumpkins and pumpkins and more pumpkins, and every time

I have pumpkin soup I think of Nauru because I’ve never seen so many pumpkins in all my life. The report that I’ve got there says it. There’s a very dry season and the Japanese got great problems about feeding people. Then the rain came and

they planted these pumpkin seeds and then they filled these sheds with pumpkins. They used those pumpkins not only to eat, but they used them for pumpkin wine. They used them for making, distilling. There were stills all over the island.

They got

a container and they were winding things, copper pipe. I don’t know where they got that from. They must’ve had it. They also had coconut palms to get strong alcohol.

My batman did once and got as full as a boot [very drunk].

When you had a look at the coconut trees they were bottles. Have you heard about this? They were bottles and the stems of the coconut flowers with sap dripping, were dripped into these bottles and from that they distilled very strong alcoholic drink.

So the first thing we had to do of course was to get rid of these ‘dunnykins’ because they were all burnt down within the first week. The flies, it was almost impossible where I was operating on the boat harbour to eat a meal with the flies. One of those lavatories of course was right next to me there.

Eventually got rid of it and within I suppose ten or twelve days we got rid of the flies, more or less anyway. Not the problem that they were. The unloading operations took about four days and I didn’t leave that place except I had a bunk down on the, I had a batman of course. He used to bring me my meals and things like that.

Then the next thing of course was to, I had nothing to do with that, was to get the Japanese back onto these ships.

They were in excellent condition. They all had little fat guts. ‘Pumpkin guts’ we said. So what the administrative officers

on the ship said about them was bound to be wrong, but the reports that I’ve got here earlier from some of the natives said the conditions both on Ocean Island and of Nauru a number of people died of starvation. I think probably more so on Ocean Island than on Nauru.

Well, only we

had no, I mean I wouldn’t have any contact with anyone who could get that before written reports that I’ve got. They’re very detailed. I’ve got them here. It lists in order of date the happenings after the Japanese declared war on America, and all the bombings and all

the rest of it, and all sorts of things about the Japanese and their doings and their cruelties and things like that. We’ve got to reload, first of all our troops didn’t have any part of that. I’m the quartermaster. People in our platoons disarmed and collected all the weapons and things like that, and

saw that the Japanese didn’t have any more weaponry. Of course I wasn’t present at the surrender, the official surrender. That morning after we arrived in the afternoon looking at Nauru from the ships, eastward onto Nauru from a westward direction.

I didn’t have any part in that. So once the unloading was completed the next thing was to get these Japanese, disarm them and back into the two river ships that were ready to take them back to Torokina.

Well, I can’t remember. Certainly there were no, in any operations I was involved in I think there was one Japanese POW taken in that op,

the first operation when I was not with the battalion. But after I arrived in Bougainville I can remember, I’m certain there were no Japanese soldiers taken prisoner. These people of course, the war was over and you’re just dealing with a massive number of Japanese

soldiers of all ranks, and all we’re doing is our people disarm them and tell them to get their gear ready and they’re going to be taken back to Torokina tomorrow morning. And I wasn’t, well, there was no, I wasn’t, I didn’t have anything to do with that operation. My thing was to have everything ready at that site so that when they

came to them they could get in the barges and the barges could turn (UNCLEAR). They landed there at all sorts of odd, they didn’t have kit bags that they could put on their backs like we did and climbed up that one in the Island River. They had no arms. They had them all wrapped in, could be towels. They weren’t, not blankets, sheets

or something like that. They were just the minimum possessions anybody could have. There’s no way in the world they were going to, that those possessions were going to get up there on the, with them, carrying up the cargo ropes on those two Burdekins because it was a bit steeper than the small craft that

I climbed up on in the Island River. The cargo nets were down and they were supposed to climb up that. You’ve got to realise that ship was not, it was moving only slightly and it was an open sea. The weather was pretty good. It wasn’t rough from what I can recall, it wasn’t rough. We didn’t have any trouble with the weather. The weather was

fine. So what I insisted on doing was that the cargo nets be laid in the barges and they’d just, they’d have to fox for their own when they got on top. They’d be mount up through all their personal belongings in these (UNCLEAR) and sit on top of them. That’s how we got them onto the ship and then they sorted them out

somehow when they got aboard.

There were some that weren’t and they stayed behind and our troops made the arrangements for their security and we disembarked at Torokina and they were put

in a camp at Torokina. That problem was over. There were a number of Chinese coolies there who had been working in the mining, the phosphates, and they treated them very badly.

A lot of Koreans, a labour company of Koreans, and they treated them, well, they had to be very subservient, I’ll put it that way. The Japanese attitude towards Koreans, they were a superior race. I’ve got no evidence of any cruelty there against

the Koreans. There could have been but I’ve never heard about it. I had to set up that sort of arrangement. The arrangement, of course our cooks and feeding the battalion and doing all sorts of things usually done by a quartermaster.

I had a very good look around the island of course. It’s not very, it’s quite easy to, it’s very easy to get around. It’s not very deep.

Well, they had very extensive defences and they just,

this article just gives you an idea. “The Japanese,” this is a report that I have, “Constructed approximately 350 concrete emplacements for heavy coastal tank attack and field guns and machine guns. They were all well

sited. The general defensive plan consisted of an outer, an inner perimeter, the beach defence and flat lands constituting the other whilst the plateau defences in depth.” This is a general statement so that, remember this is a top Japanese regiment here. They were

first class. They were almost what you’d call a naval unit and they were a marine unit and generally a superior soldier as I’ve explained to you earlier in one encounter we had people had on Bougainville. This has got, “Heavy ordinance consisted of – ” and it goes through the guns that they’ve got. It was very

well fortified against attack, and so that’s generally, this report has also got the raids that took place of Japanese aircraft before they first landings by air, and some suggested

they intended to mine the phosphates which they never did of course. This statement also says, “The relations between the Japanese forces and the phosphate people was far from cordial and has also attributed to the breakdown.”

That’s because of the American bombing. “The showdown finally came in June when the phosphate members were ordered to quite the island. They did on the 11th of June.”

The place was well fortified, they were there to defend it and they constructed the airstrip. “In early September,” this report says that, “Two Chinese were executed for a trifling offence and thereafter harsh punitive measures were instituted.

Stealing, wandering in authorised places, refusal on admission to bow to passing Japanese or signs of rebellious (UNCLEAR) heavy penalty.”

“Soon after the strip was completed the American bombers made their appearance. The first raid on the 21st of November was highly successful and eight Japanese bombers and several fighters were destroyed beside

the airfield installation. Thereafter Allied raids were common and must have caused apprehension with the garrison. With Allied superiority mounting they’d cut off feeling and must have asserted itself. After the bombing raid of the 25th and 26th of March 1943 the Japanese brutally executed several Europeans.

It has been reported the execution was ordered as a reprisal for the attitude displayed by the Europeans who clapped as the bombs fell.” Now there are about four or five Europeans, whether it’s executed or they just disappeared, their bodies have never been found. And the commander of course of the force on Nauru was

tried and executed for a lot of atrocities on Nauru. The other one I meant to tell you about, “A dastardly act was the elimination of the thirty-nine Nauruan lepers.” There were a number of lepers on Nauru.

They were put on a small boat and, “They were put on a small ill-conditioned boat and towed out to sea by an ocean going vessel. Some distance out the tow rope was severed and the drifting boat with lepers was sunk by shell fire.” So those are two there.

No, I didn’t see any of that at all. This is reading it from –

One of the thing that we were told is

that the Japanese doctors had ill treated the Chinese. This information must come from the Chinese. It’s not in any of these reports, but the Japanese doctors operated on the Chinese and carried out experiments with them by connecting one part of the body to the other, internal intestinal things.

I can’t see how those sorts of operations took place, but that’s what I’m told did happen. They treated the Chinese appallingly. Perhaps it’s an opportune time to tell you what happened to the Japanese doctors as they left. One of the Japanese doctors wasn’t able to travel,

so when the River Burdekin or River Glenelg went to Ocean Island to pick up the Japanese there and take them back to Torokina, they called at Nauru to pick up the remainder of the Japanese who were there that were able to travel,

and one was this doctor. Now he was hated by the Chinese. I didn’t say to you, which I should have, when we were loading the main body of the Japanese onto the two river boats earlier in the piece, the Chinese came

to show their displeasure and do their best, they had sticks and other things to beat the Japanese who were unarmed, and I had to tell our soldiers who were there to fix bayonets and protect the Japanese against these Chinese. It was only a small thing. There wasn’t much

to do about it but if I hadn’t there’s no doubt where some of the Japanese would have been, whacked pretty hardy with a baton or two. I didn’t remember seeing any swords or anything like that. They would’ve all been collected and I don’t think the Chinese would ever have an opportunity to get one on this occasion. And the driver’s still alive here. He’s Ned Ryan these days

but he was the driver of the vehicle which bought this Japanese doctor who is sitting in the front seat with some other people at the back, and he was being unloaded in this manner. I was not present on this occasion but what happened, I heard about it of course, what happened was that the Chinese arrived in force and they really bashed him up. They got stuck into him properly

as he got out of the four wheel drive vehicle. He was driving in the front seat. In the end our troops had to fix bayonets to prevent them from coming any nearer while their loading operations took place. He went back to Torokina very badly injured. I don’t know who looked after him, but that was the Chinese

attitude towards the medical people, I suppose the Japanese, all Japanese, having regard to the treatment they’d received.

First of all I’d see to the hardships,

they’d put up all the tents, listen to complaints. Obviously some people haven’t all they want. So we had two companies there and they had to be fed. They’d, there was

the quartermaster sergeant of course in each company who would look after and do the personal things, but had to get their food and their rations and things like that. I ran a Q store [Quartermaster’s store], like the battalion quartermaster, for a short period under conditions where everything had to be brought from elsewhere. We had to select, I suppose we put pumpkin on the meal for the first time,

a lot of pumpkin soup.

We had pumpkin soup. We tested all sorts of things.

Yes, I eat pumpkin soup. It sort of reminds me of where it came from on Nauru. It wasn’t full of (UNCLEAR) fertiliser, which was in the soil. It was from the dunnykins that they built.

There is a report here. I think that’s the two, the ones at Nauru, they’re the atrocities at Nauru that I’m aware of. The murder of the administrative, one was a clergyman by the way, and the minister in the company. They were company people, they were five of them

I think. Then there was a Chinese and there were those people who had

Very eagre. I had a wife and young baby, as eagre as I could ever be. I was flat out trying to get home. As a

matter of fact, a signal came to me on my job as quartermaster, not quartermaster, as senior staff officer intelligence with the Australian Forces to go to Japan, the occupation of Japan. I didn’t

have any hesitation in turning that down very quickly. In the meantime I got a signal from my wife who says she’s bought a home for £1900. I sent one back saying, “How can I afford that?” Or words to that effect, of course I was constantly wanting to know how Susan was.

I was in Bougainville, yes. We were resting and a signal came through. I can’t remember, it wouldn’t be a signal. It was a letter. Letters came through pretty quickly, and of course in those days there was a lot of skiting about these sorts of things in the mess, when we were resting anyway. There was no chance of doing that when you were actually on the field, and there was jubilation about that,

great jubilation. I wasn’t the only one where that occurred. I withheld it from my brother officers that Darrell was going to have a child. They were a bit surprised. I did that, but they’d been teasing me for years so I thought I’d get back, get one back on them.

I tried to get compassionate leave and they wouldn’t give it to me. That was that. I wasn’t the only one that got rejected. We were going to Nauru and we weren’t actually in that, we were going south. I was 2IC of a company and it anything happened

to the CO of that company I was to take over. You just can’t give people leave like that. It might be different if I was a platoon commander or something like that, but no, you didn’t get leave like that. It was all over shortly after that because peace was declared. I had no chance of getting leave then either because the operations of the battalion, they weren’t over.

I think I told you all about the jubilation in the office, we left. I told you earlier we left our exercise when we heard about it and that night that fellow (UNCLEAR) night, he splattered that huge bomb that woke everybody up with a great start. I don’t know what he made it from. It was one of these homemade makings. He was always doing things like that. That

was rejoicing, relaxation. No more training, no more training, no more active service, no more going, no going south to fight the Japanese in southern Bougainville which was a matter of concern to most of us having regard to early casualties. I explained that at least ten per cent of our men had been killed

in action in a short period of six months. Hundreds wounded, some very seriously, some not very seriously.

I was going to tell you something else about Ocean Island and

the atrocities there. There were two there. The first was evidence of,

the inadequacy of food on that island was very considerable. A lot of people died because they just didn’t have enough food to feed them. They died of malnutrition. That certainly applied to the Europeans. Two senior Europeans died

and a lot of natives too. But one of the worst things they did they put up a barbed wire along beaches to stop landings and they electrified it. To test it they had a number of

South Sea Islanders. I don’t know whether they were from Ocean Island, but they had a prison and they were the prisoners. So they got these prisoners, four or five of them contesting a race, which touched the electrified wire and they were all killed. Another one was a worse one, is one that occurred after

the war ended. They lined a number of them up on a cliff, and that’s not recorded here but there’s no question of its truth, and they lined them up on a cliff and shot them. Unfortunately for them one of the persons who fell down off the cliff, I don’t know how steep it was, survived, and about

three or four weeks later when he heard European voices he came out of his hiding to tell the story. These are the stories of both atrocities, both on Ocean Island and on Nauru that I’ve told you.

No. As I said earlier, I never went to Ocean Island. I was not quartermaster on Ocean Island.

There was only a small force on Ocean Island. I think probably one platoon, it might have been two platoons. If I looked at these things I could probably tell you.

It was related to me by our people. There were comings and goings between, I mean our CO was the commander of Ocean Island. It would be done

by signal. It became common knowledge amongst the battalion officers on Nauru, that story, that native story. I mean the man, I’ve never actually talked to somebody who was present on Ocean Island when he came to them. That’s members of our battalion. I never had that discussion because the Ocean Island people, you’ve got to realise that I

left after my job was completed. Not completed, but I certainly had an application in for early discharge in regard to the situation. As soon as that came through I got on a plane and went back to Torokina. I bit my fingernails in Torokina for about three weeks. The adjutant,

or he was the adjutant of the battalion, Gerard, he flew back with me and we waited for a ship which eventually came and fortunately we landed in Townsville just before Christmas. I went down to Redbank and I was discharged on the 9th of January, 1946.

What I did want to also say to you is that during the period I was, I think I told you my wife told me she’d bought a house. My house was waiting and we went to the house as quickly as we could after my return home. That’s sort of ends the war sort of stories. I still keep in close contact with my colleagues.

I’ve got fairly good records of it.

Yes, yes. I attend, not all, I don’t attend the ones in Brisbane because I find it difficult to get away now, not very well. The ones here, there’s the 11th Infantry Brigade reunion coming up once a year and I attend that, and they have, they hire buses and go down once a year to Bowen, or

next year Charters Towers and the year after that up north. I missed it this year up to Ingham and Cardwell. They’re the old recruiting areas of the battalion.

I like to see these old colleagues, some of them are very well known to me, a lot of them of course have been members of the 31st Militia

Battalion since the war. There’s a book been written on the Kennedy Regiment, which was the forerunner of the 31st Battalion. That’s the one who fought in World War I. The 2/31st Battalion, the 51st Battalion and the militia, present militia battalion,

and we have gatherings. I know a number of those people. A number of people are in the militia battalion also fought in Vietnam. Not many, but some did that. It depends on their age group. A number that were in the militia battalion they were keen soldiers and

one of them who’s died now, he died some years ago, but he, that’s his records of all the battalions. A book is being published on the three or four with regard to present militia operations, on those as I mentioned, on their histories.

Well, we talk about old

times, and you’ve got to remember when we first came back there wasn’t too much of that. We were busy making our way in life. We were busy bringing up families and doing all sorts of things. It’s only when we’ve had time to, a bad time on our hands, put it that way, we’ve retired or if we haven’t retired we’re near retirement.

Well all of us are retired now. But it’s good to meet and have a quiet talk with these people. We don’t talk much about the war. We talk about how our families are, and there are a number of, I’ve got a list of them all here from I think it’s Mackay North and most of them are not,

there are some in very good health and some whose health is appalling, you know.

I never had time to think about anything else. No problem about that. I don’t have much problem about adjusting to things. I adjusted to retirement. I look at life in a different way. I don’t worry about things. No good worrying about things.

It took me a while to get sort of back into the legal profession. I found it, away from a profession from 1939 you can say, in and out but you can’t count much of those, it was mostly out, to 1946. That’s

seven years. There are changes and people in the profession change and the world had changed. It took a long time to get oriented and to remember what you’d learned of the law. I found that difficult for three or four years. That was the main consideration, the legal side, and the local authority here had some

problems with its administration and this city was badly affected after the war. The roads were run down, all sorts of things had to be done to bring it back to normal. It had a population explosion. It had,

water supply was inadequate. They were building these Tobruk Baths here, nothing was finished. The sewerage operations had come to a standstill. A group of us got together, the Townsville Citizens’ Association, comprised of a number of returned people. The mayor was

Angus Smith and he wasn’t the mayor to begin with, but he was the leader of our team. He was ex-air force, and a fellow Sherriff was ex-air force. He was ex-air force, I was ex-army. Somebody else was ex-army too. I just can’t think of it. So a group of citizen people.

Graham Burke was a prisoner of war on the Burma Railway. There were two factions, the Labor Party had complete power of the place except for the mayor. We didn’t oppose him, but we opposed these two Labor Parties and we won the lot of the seats

and we held those for eighteen years and Smith became the mayor for that period after the first three years, and we transformed this city in many ways. We completed the works that were unfinished, like the baths.

We introduced the first town plan. We didn’t quite, it was all completed and it was accepted by the government shortly after we left office, is the best way to put it. A master plan for the roadway system was developed in the early ‘60s and some of them were only completed a couple of years ago. The sewerage system was

developed and the water system, the Mount Spec Pipeline was built and that was subsequently duplicated I planning that we had arranged, and the plans were made for the building across the Ross River Dam, which has given the city adequate water

supply, and also it has prevented extensive flooding in the lower reaches of the Ross River which was almost an annual occurrence. The plan was set. I don’t think the city was anything like it is today, but the basic plan for the future of this city was set, and we’re very pleased about that factor because,

I mean I’m not denigrating what the people that followed us have done, but they couldn’t escape the planning. The town plan has been changed in some areas from time to time, and some areas are not as well as they should have been, but that’s just my comment. But the other basic services, the university was established, the army was established.

Well, I was the chairman of the works committee for eighteen years and that involved planning operations. We appointed a town planner and I was not involved in direct representations that got the University of Queensland to agree to the establishment

of the university, the Townsville University College for the purpose of establishing a wing of the Queensland University on an area of land at Pimlico which is now used as a TAFE [Technical and Further Education] training college area. We and the council realised that

area is inadequate for a university and before that building was finished we had made arrangements with the University of Queensland for a site for the university where it is now located. One of the things I used to do on Sundays when I took my children to Sunday school at St Matthews was to go on an exploration of an

area which would be a new area which was suitable for a university. There were several sites that I had a look at. One was out here at Mount Louisa. I found that one, I thought it was inadequate, and then I had a look at this area where the university is now. At that time there was the road to Charters Towers, that’s Stuart Drive, right

through up the Ross River. When you drive along that road it would have been about where the army is, there was nothing except one house that was owned by the Verhoven family. It was on the banks of the Ross River near the house where the Good Shepherd Nursing Home is, in which I have a very extensive

interest and development. I looked at this area and found that I thought it had advantages for a university. I was acting for a company which subsequently went broke that wanted to buy land in Townsville for the purpose of developing housing within two

or three years. Well, that was not possible and I told the agent that. He used to refer these things to me for consideration. Then a few weeks later he rang me and he said, “You know, Vesteys had an option over that land,” and Vesteys owned that meatworks that’s no longer there on the banks of the Ross River. All you see

when you go up there is the chimney spire, the chimney of the meatworks. He said, he’d made that offer to me for that firm and I told him it wasn’t (UNCLEAR). What I did of course was I went to the city council and I said, “Look, we’ve been talking about this,” the committee, not at public meetings, and the

(UNCLEAR) committee, and the committee agreed to allow Poppadells (UNCLEAR) to go out and talk to the Verhovens. Well one day, I remember it clearly, I was rung by a council officer and said, “I’ve got the Verhoven family here and they want to sell this property to you for, I think it’s £35,750,

but they want you to take their plant and equipment and livestock. They had another offer for 35,000, Vesteys, and the option’s gone,” which I knew of course. I said, “You better ring the mayor.” (UNCLEAR) so get onto him and get the chairman of

the finance committee and the other members of the finance committee and we’ll have a meeting and decide whether we’re going to buy it, and keep the Verhoven family there. So we had the meeting at lunch time, we agreed to buy it and we had it signed up by three thirty that afternoon. That stretches right up from the river, right up to the base, not the main part of Mount Stuart, but…

Are you right?

There were some people doubted the ability, whether the council should buy land like that. We said to them if you don’t want to buy it, we’ll buy it, but we never had any intention of doing that, and eventually the government accepted it and

along with discussions with the university we gave the university about 400 acres and there was a stock route running right through it. Now the stock route was coming from Harvey’s Range, crossing the river far up and wandering along the right bank of the river, the last resting place or camping site for cattle before

they went to the two meatworks. There was another meatworks down on Alligator Creek and it’s been moved but it’s still operating, close to the city, and the head stockman used to come up and take charge of the cattle and put them in holding paddocks on the Ross Plain or down near Alligator Creek, and that’s exactly where the site of the university library is

today. We had to close that stock route, but there was another block of land owned by a private owner and well, Corporal (UNCLEAR) and myself, mainly Corporal (UNCLEAR), went into considerable, well it was a considerable some of money in those days, and bought it and gave it to the university, transferred to the university. So that’s how the university got

that land out there. We also got about sixty acres for CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation], the CSRA [Corporate Social Responsibilities Australia] Research Centre has been there, it was established before the university. It’s been there and is still operation there. Subsequently the government wanted to establish a teachers training college and the director of education who used to be a regional director up here wanted it to go to Rockhampton, but

we twisted the government’s arm on the persuasion of giving them more land adjacent to the university. The teachers training college was established on that piece of land adjacent to the university. It subsequently became a college of advanced education and when the colleges of advanced education were terminated throughout

Australia and became part of the university, it became part of the university. Not so long ago the university established a huge 200 place residential unit on this land. They named it after myself, some little award. So that’s the university story, and the persuasion (UNCLEAR) army, I was not involved

so much as Mayor Angus Smith, but there were a lot of involvement by the council there to get the army on that site where it is. Those two things went hand and grow. They were established. Holt, when he was Prime Minister, came up one day and opened the hall of residence, the university hall on the university site, and the army barracks on the same day.

It was an interesting period of development, but these sort of things needed terrific expenditure on the part of the Townsville City Council. Major road, major water mains, sewerage, had to be all developed in those areas in a very short time, otherwise we couldn’t establish the university on that site. The Queen came

in 1970 I think and gave the university its charter on the university campus and signed the act of parliament. It was the first time an act of parliament in Queensland has been signed outside Brisbane.

Well, they went to, they had an education. They went to the local state schools and from there once they got to scholarship standard Susan went to church schools in Brisbane and Richard and David did the same. They went to Churchie.

Helen went to a church school in Brisbane. She wasn’t terribly happy about that and she came home and finished her education there. She met an old battle-axe at the school in the religious order that didn’t seem to take to here, so she came and lived at home and went locally to the cathedral school which was then St Anne’s. She was the only one that was able to do her

education at James Cook. She’s got a Bachelor of Education degree. David and Richard came back home and they were able to do, David missed some subject I think in law and he did two years commerce. No, it’s commerce. They only did commerce, there was no law. He missed a subject in commerce and he had to

do it again. Well, he had to pick up that subject again, he didn’t have to do the whole year. And Richard did his in one year and then they went and stayed at the residence at the University of Queensland and they finished their law and commerce degrees. Those are six year courses those, they’re lengthy, but the law in my

opinion makes you think from the other fellow’s point of view. I’m not talking so much about subjects, if you don’t look at what the other fellow is thinking and if you’ve got anything contentious it doesn’t matter what it is. No, what’s his attitude going to be to this contract? It’s a pretty important thing to look at the other fellow’s point of view.

Yes, I think law, I must say I’m not terribly impressed with the law at the present time,

but I think that’s largely due to, maybe it’s due to the way politicians operate and the way families, family life has changed dramatically. I see it with my grandchildren. I go to stay with David who is a practising lawyer.

He leaves home at about six or seven o’clock in the morning. I stay with him and I (UNCLEAR) see you when I went to tell him something, and I get up at seven o’clock and he’s gone at quarter to seven and he takes one of his daughter’s with him who’s at the Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School. She’s going. She

drives with him. She comes home by bus and then her mother takes her to, she’s in the pony club to do some practise riding in the pony club, and he picks her up at six o’clock and brings her home.

Yes, we were a busy family. My wife was running a business.

We had always somebody at home to mind the children when they came home from school. That’s very important. We regarded that

No, no. We had an aged pensioner who was a friend of the family who looked after the home, and home was,

it was a nice home. It was very well built. It was very small, there was not very much bedroom space in it, the dining and lounge. It was a very nice block of land. It was a pleasant place to bring up children.

Yes, but we were busy though. I mean,

I think a bit of it spins off on the family. My daughter here, she looks after this business my wife’s got. It’s a pretty hard business these days with all the competition, but she’s the chairman of two sister cities in Japan. You talk about my attitude towards the Japanese, well she’s bosom friends with many Japanese.

She spends about six weeks a year in Japan and she’s got two sister cities, one in the north of Tokyo and the other one south of, not very far from Nagasaki. I suppose a bit north east of Nagasaki. I forget the name of it, it’s changed.

And she’s also got one in Korea and she can get about Japan as if she was catching the local bus. I mean she travels light.

Well, it’s her life. I’m not concerned about it. They never admit at all to anything about their misdeeds in World War

II. They don’t talk about you know. They don’t talk about it all. Sometimes I concern myself about that. She’s also has a relationship with a city, I suppose you could say south west, not very far, but south west of Shanghai. She goes to Shanghai occasionally, but mainly Japan and Korea,

and she brings back people all sorts of things, students at schools, universities, technical colleges, inspectors of nursing homes, that sort of thing. Some of the people coming visiting us. Japanese travel, if they come, anywhere if they travel they don’t come for a leisurely three or four weeks. They came for three or four days.

It’s just not our way of doing things. She’s had all sorts of interesting people that she brings and would come, she looks and cares for on a personal basis. She’s got interpreters here and she’s got, if it was the other way, Australians going to Japan, she’s got interpreters there.

She doesn’t speak Japanese, or she can understand it, but she uses interpreters between herself and the people she talks to in Japanese. If they can’t speak English, she’s got interpreters there. The other people, Richard said the last proposal he had in Melbourne for Thiess, with a group of Thiess people.

Some underground, no, it’s some major toll road down on, what’s the name of the place on the south eastern side of Port Phillip Bay, down that area? Not quite in the heart of Melbourne but there are some major suburbs on that side. They spent $10 million in just the documentation of the tenders, the Victorian Government, and he spent a lot of time

in Melbourne and in Sydney on various projects. They’ve got one now in Sydney, which they’ve got, some very major projects.

They’ve done very well for themselves. Richard, likewise. Helen, she’s the one with twins, she does some teaching to

people from foreign countries, particularly Russia and eastern countries who settle in Australia, and she teaches them English and also a lot about Australian customs and the way we do things. I forget which university it is now, and her husband is an electrical engineer. He was qualified

here. They both met at James Cook and they were married here. All of my children have been, travelled, have moved at young ages overseas for lengthy periods.

No, no. I never had much you know. I mean, I don’t know.

I don’t know that it concerned them very greatly. No, we’ve never talked about those things. They certainly didn’t know about that story about the, see, I had a pretty easy war compared to, take some of those people in A Company. It depends what company. Don Company seemed to, occasionally Don Company got off very light. B Company, yes, it got itself

very much involved in Tsimba Ridge, had some terrible casualties, and some other places and C, but Don Company didn’t. We were just one of the lucky ones, we weren’t chosen to go into Porton.

Well, I’m not so proud of my war experiences. I think the most important thing is what

it taught me about other people and other men and the way things do. It’s the experience of life that is the most important thing there. We haven’t got very much more on that tape I take it?

There’s one quotation I’d like to say about war. It was in the Courier Mail.

I’ve had a lot of other interests. I was

chairman of the Good Shepherd nursing home for twenty odd years and that’s one of the major nursing homes in the state.

I’ll just go and get it. It’s at the end of a speech that I made.

Well, how they reacted to certain situations, about their families. That’s a very important thing with an officer, to know about his family and things like that. Generally rubbing soldiers with men. I was in the professional field anyway before I entered

the army and there weren’t too many men in that capacity that might’ve been in the officer class, but there were in the other ranks, and I find that we have, now we have great reciprocation when we meet one another. It’s a mutual admiration thing. I like them and I’m interested in what they’re doing and their wives are doing.

I think that’s probably one of the things, and there’s a lot of sadness occurred at the time. People were wounded or killed in action. You learn a lot about life and how other people live. If you hadn’t had

that experience you wouldn’t know unless you went out to get it and roamed the country with a knapsack on your back and jumped a rattler which they used to do, but they don’t do that any longer, do you know what I mean? That sort of thing.

It’s very important. I’m afraid I’m at the stage I can’t march any longer, but I

go to the services and I mention my old colleagues on that day and watch the programs on TV. Yes, Anzac Day is a very important day. It’s a day of reflection. I was, I think, do you take photographs of things outside?

There’s a plaque down there on the Strand and I was a speaker when that plaque was unveiled, but this plaque is not here, it’s in the War Memorial in Brisbane and it’s in Cairns, but it’s got the life of sixty odd men that were killed in action

in the battalion, and it’s the best placed plaque in Anzac Park. It’s right at the entrance, have you see that thing? It’s on the left hand side and so you’ve got the names of all the members of the battalion if you’re interested in photographs, it’s there.

Gordon McHugh had a military medal and what’s his name from Charters Towers, they unveiled the plaque. They unveiled the cover on the plaque on the day it was opened. That was a wonderful

occasion for people in our unit when that was unveiled.

I don’t dream about wars. I’m sound asleep once I go to sleep.

What do I think of war? I think it’s essential. I think the most important thing that people don’t understand is the balance of power.

You see, World War I and World War II were fought because there wasn’t the balance of power. The British which then had dominated the situation in 1805 or

1815, fought a few skirmishes around the world after that in the Crimea, not terribly successfully, and it’s military forces except it’s navy, were very well rundown in World War I. The Germans thought it was a good time to attack

France in the situation. World War II is a similar one, Chamberlain going home, “Peace in my time.” It was ridiculous, and of course the Germans thought they had a golden opportunity and they jolly nearly got to England. The reason they didn’t get to England was because of the invention of radar. I don’t know if you realise that, but radar enabled the RAF

to destroy the German air force before it could affectively protect an invading force of German troops to England, and Hitler had to turn away from the invasion. They had all the invasion forces ready. You know, if it hadn’t been for the Americans, they came in towards the end. They’d

been geared for war in the meantime, particularly on the manufacturing side of things as a great nation. They had all the goods. They were inexperienced troops, but nevertheless they were sufficient to meet the German Armies in World War I. In the meantime of course the Russians had collapsed so the Germans had a bit more troops to spare on the Western Front which made it much more difficult. But it was

the balance of power, and a worse situation in World War II. Chamberlain, peace in our time. The British held out. We’d have been under the control of the Japanese if it wasn’t for the British, you know. If they hadn’t held out, if Churchill had taken the offers of peace the whole of Russia would have fallen and Europe would have fallen to the German command.

The Americans had been left our like a shag on a rock. What were they going to do? The whole of India, the whole place would have fallen into German hands. The Americans would’ve had an awful job to get a foothold, wouldn’t they? Russia didn’t come to our aid. The Germans attacked Russia. The Americans didn’t come to our aid. The

Japanese attacked the Americans. You work it out for yourself. The balance of power is essential, terribly essential now. What the Americans are doing, well what they’ve done to their prisoners of war is absolutely shocking. But you know, everybody thinks the President can control that sort of thing, but they never had the same regard for life as we have and it’s very evident in the last war

with troop losses and some where they’d send a platoon where we’d send a section, or they’d send a company where we’d send a platoon. In my way that was disregard for life. That depends on circumstances I suppose. But, yes?

Yes, well that will be finalised.

I just think that this is a speech I delivered, a final paragraph, again a final paragraph of an address I gave to Charters Towers 31st Battalion VP [Victory in the Pacific] celebration dinner held at the RSL [Returned and Services League] club on the 19th of August 1995. I’ve also included in the address that I gave down

here, which was very much sorter than this one, and it’s an extract as a matter of fact from the editorial published in the Courier Mail on the declaration of peace on the 15th of August 1945 which I find appropriate to read on this and other occasions,

and it’s headed, “The end of the long road.” It reads, and I quote, “Today we’ve come to the end. At this time the thoughts of Christian men and women return in grateful thanks to the divine providence which has guided us through these fateful years. Once it seemed that the whole civilised world would go down in a sea of tyranny

and destruction. Great countries fell, whole areas were laid waste, millions of peaceful people fell under the conqueror’s yoke. There were times when the odds seemed to be almost too great for the slender forces of freedom to bear. Through all the dark years the light of courage which was born

in the souls of free men did not go out. It shone in a great and other way, in the devotion and sacrifice of the millions of young men who went out to fight the battles of freedom. Many are gone never

to return. Others bear the mark of the sacrifice in penalty and affliction, but there is scarcely one who has not paid a price in lost opportunity and wasted years. Time and again people our country and of other free countries have pledged their word that the sacrifice of these men would not be in vain, that we should

care for the loved ones of those who fell, that we should help and succour the afflicted, that we should give to all the right to live secure and useful lives in a clean and better world. Now as the dawn of victory dawns near it’s time for those promises for a better world to be redeemed. If we fail in that

we shall mock the dead and dishonour the living. That’s why Australia remembers.”

Yes, it is.

Yeah. I’ve got a runny nose, too.