Australians at War Film Archive

Well, I was born in England in 1935. My father was English; my mother was Australian. We lived in England until the end of the Second World War. I went to school in England and have little memory of it because I played truant on as many occasions

as I could and educated myself at the museums in London. I remember very clearly the commencement of the Second World War as much as anything else because that was when my father went off to war and I was not to see him again for another forty years – he separated from my mother during the war. The blitz had a great impact on me and I have very vivid memories of

the blitz and it may have given me the notion of joining the army later on. At the end of the war, my mother returned to her home state of Western Australia, which is where I remember, with great fondness, my education. I went to Aquinas College in Mount Henry on the Canning River and, as I came towards the end of my schooling, I had to think about what I would do after school and

chose, at 17, to join the army. So, with only the experience of school cadets, I joined the army at 17 years, did my basic training in Perth, developed huge ambitions to become a corporal, succeeded in becoming a corporal where, with no concern at all I was drilling and training men who had actually fought in the Second World War. When I look back, I’m horrified of that now. I escaped without being

lynched from that and applied for the Officer Cadet School at Portsea at the suggestion of my CO [Commanding Officer] and, at 18, I went to OCS [Officer Cadet School] at Point Nepean in Victoria. That was the third course and we celebrated our fifty years of graduation just last year, here, in Canberra – a military career spanning 30 years. I was commissioned to the Australian Staff Corps and assigned

to the Royal Australian Armoured Corps because the massiveness of the tanks appealed enormously to me. I was sent, very early in my career, to Malaya, which was then called the Malayan Emergency and there was great legal distinction as to whether that was a war or not – it wasn’t, it was an emergency – and I spent nearly 12 months attached to a British unit – we had Australian armoured units there. That was certainly a growing up

period and, not entirely surprising, I got married not long after that and our 50th anniversary is coming up shortly – we’re about 47 years now, I think. I did a number of regimental appointments with armour. I did all my training in Centurion tanks and then I went back to Perth as adjutant of the 10th Light Horse, a very famous regiment in the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] history and the overall

history of Australian armour. I returned to Puckapunyal, a name known to all armoured corps people, where I did more training before going to staff college at Queenscliff, which I thoroughly enjoyed – a very academic course and one which really set me on my way for the rest of my years in the army where I specialised in logistics – an unusual thing for an armoured officer to go into logistics – and, as a logistician, I went to Vietnam

as the logistics operations officer for the first ALSG, that’s the Australian Logistics Support Group. At the end of that, my next posting of significance was to America where I did a very intensive logistic management course with the US [United States of America] Army and then was taken on at the faculty as a teacher and I served nearly three

years, two-and-a-half years in America. I returned then to Russell Hill, that great monolith that swallows us all up where I had some responsibility for Australian logistic policy and then had to make the decision we all do at about that time of our life, do we go on with postings and shifting the children around and, for better or worse, I decided now was the time – I wanted a post-military job – to leave – and I chose teaching. I joined the staff

at St Edmonds College in Canberra where I taught history and I had a series of managerial appointments there, culminating in my last three years of 20 years as the assistant to the headmaster. I then retired at 65 and took up leading tours to Greece and Turkey, two areas I have a great interest in historically. I don’t do that now because current events

rather reduce the number of applicants for such tours but I write about that now and try and relax and paint and that brings me to this moment as I sit in front of you to talk about my life.

Vung Tau was the appointment. That was where headquarters were, where ALSG was but I was also the accredited logistic liaison

officer with the Americans so I was as frequently, if not more frequently, in Long Binh and about a third of my time in Nui Dat, which is where my service clients were. If you’re going to do the job properly, you’ve got to see what the client wants so it’s about a third in Long Binh, Nui Dat and Vung Tau. On the odd occasion, I went around the country on various jobs

and going as far as the DMZ [Demilitarised Zone].

My father was born in England and he had a career, potentially at any rate, of being a sailor and he went to the Dartmouth

Royal Naval College. I never met my grandparents but, apparently, they were quite odd people and, when he was within one term of graduating – and that would have put him, probably, at about 16 – I think they graduated as midshipmen at 16 – and they plucked him out of college and took him to Australia, which infuriated him. He was a 16-year-old and I think he resented that all his life. So he went to Australia somewhat

unwillingly and then went to an agricultural college – Hawkesbury, I think it was – and his father put him on a farm in some wasteland out in the backwoods of Western Australia that I think he loathed. It was on one of his trips to Perth that he met my mother who was a ballet dancer. She was a very precocious young woman who graduated from a ballet school under the

patronage of some Russian dancers and she’d set up her own studio – she was about 20, 21 – quite extraordinary in those days – that would’ve been 1929, 1930 – and they got married and went off to England. It was to attend to family business according to the family archives but I think it was father’s escape from the

problems of the farm. It also took my mother out of a profession that she was very good at so they became a less than happy married couple, unfortunately. I was born in 1935, which was a very interesting period in European history. Hitler had already come to the leadership of the Nazi party and, in 1933, was making big

moves. In 1935, he really was there. My father, I think, somewhat altruistically, decided he’d go back to his service roots and he would join the services. I don’t know why he didn’t join the navy, which was his great love. He joined the army and he was given a wartime commission – I think it was called an emergency commission, then. I remember reading once that they were known as ‘emergency gentlemen’ or ‘temporary gentlemen’

because only a full-time soldier was a true gentleman. He went into the service corps and saw service in North Africa, Sicily and Italy and was then reassigned to Palestine immediately after the war – he was in the occupation force – and went through the whole war without being wounded though I think he had some difficult moments. He was having a cup of coffee – I think it was in

Tel Aviv – and the Stern Gang [right wing Israeli group] lobbed a grenade in there and he was quite badly wounded in the legs; it’s an irony of war. I saw him once: he came home on leave. I can’t remember what part of the war it was but he certainly, even as a youngster, gave me a feeling that there was something noble rather than romantic about being a soldier in that, he really was doing something very special for his country and

I could understand that. Although I told him about my experiences in the blitz and I wanted him to say, “Oh, aren’t you a marvellous little boy that you survived the blitz,” and, “Aren’t you brave,” he seemed to find it not very interesting at all, which I can really understand now. I can remember the two occasions when he went off to war. I remember saying goodbye to him, I think it was at Victoria Station, very much out of the films that you see nowadays, the steam and the smoke and the

people milling around and soldiers with their gas masks and tin hats. He was an officer and I remember he had a cane because he tapped me on the shoulder and said something, the way fathers in the forties would say, “You’re the man of the house,” and then off he went. The occasion he came home from leave, the most graphic memory was of him leaving again, not that I thought that he was going to get

killed, I think we all had this sense of vulnerability. Hitler, who was targeting me and my mother, personally, with his bombs didn’t bother me at all; I found the bombing quite stimulating. I could never understand why my mother got quite twitchy, particularly when I was late home from school. Those are the two big memories: my father going off to war and my father returning to the war and I didn’t feel fearful for him but I did feel inspired

about this word, ‘service’; I was coming to grips with that. School was quite unremarkable. I thought the teachers were loathsome. I won’t name the school. It’s been pulled down now, which I think is probably quite a good thing and, of course, the poor teachers that were there were those who probably couldn’t enlist or had been turned down because of health. For all I know, I wouldn’t have understood that

at the time. They may have felt guilty that they weren’t ‘doing their bit’, that phrase that was so important. So my mother and I enjoyed the war and then there was the big move – where would we go? My father wanted to settle in South Africa where we had quite a lot of family. Of course, one of the sad things about my family was that that was not my mother’s view of the place to go and she was drawn back to Australia. We

ultimately got on board the SS Orontes, an Orient Line ship, which was most exciting and it really does have a place in my history as a professional soldier because there was a whole flock of Australian soldiers returning home. It was the end of the war; they’d come from France, Germany and such places and they were relaxing on board. Well you

can imagine Australian soldiers getting together and relaxing! Beer flowed – I knew nothing about beer; we didn’t drink beer in my family and I didn’t understand why the odd soldier was found sleeping on the stairs or lying in the corridor and my mother would say, “Don’t talk to him!” which was very typical of my mother. I should perhaps add that I never actually went into an air-raid shelter during the blitz for the very clear reason that my mother would say, “You don’t know who you would meet down there.”

So, I hid under the stairs – that was my place when the bombs were dropping. At any rate, I met Australian soldiers and I thought they were fascinating fellows, even if they were a bit sleepy at times with a beer can in their hand. There was also a General who was going to New Zealand to be the governor and I actually met him on the deck and he was such a

typical British General with a white, fluffed-up moustache and called me “my dear boy” and that sort of thing. He told me some romantic nonsense about the war, which was obviously a blanket for what he was really doing. He just thought he’d tell a boy, “This is what it’s like to be a soldier, son, and, if you’re a real man, you’ll be a soldier.” I don’t know that that affected me at all but certainly this sense that the Australian soldiers were something

special – I didn’t know quite what it was. They were so down to earth; they were so manly. They weren’t telling me wild stories and it was impressive and, the more I think about them now, the more I think this was the very best of the Australian tradition. So it wasn’t surprising, I suppose, when my mother put me into Aquinas College, which was a simply beautiful school and, in those days –

that was the forties – school cadets were a very important part of making a man of you and my teachers, Christian Brothers, were very devoted to making you a good and a useful man. It says something about the culture from which I came I suppose, that a boy was expected to be a good man, that was the first thing, and useful to his country. And so a lot of Aquinas boys went into the public

service, into professions like the law and medicine and the military, and as an aside, the sister school, Santa Maria, over the other side of the river, which is for girls only, they were expected to be good women, and the manifestation of being a good woman was to marry a good man. So there was an interesting approach to being young. So I joined the cadet corps at Aquinas.

There was a formidable man, a Brother Egan, who just loved uniforms and noises and drilling his troops, and we must’ve looked quite extraordinary together. Brother Egan was 6’4” – it may not have escaped you I’m nowhere near that – and I remember particularly because I had a photo taken of this. I was standing to attention with my rifle which was the then famous .303 rifle with a fixed bayonet, and so the total

height of the rifle and the fixed bayonet was about an inch greater than me and I wore an enormous slouch hat – it was enormous on my little frame – and there was the first impression I had of me in a uniform being a soldier. And I rose to the dizzy ranks of sergeant and somehow this whole thing of being in the army, or being in a uniform, having responsibility – big thing for

Christian Brothers, to take responsibility – and my little platoon, I think there were about ten boys in the platoon and they were mine. And Brother Egan, one of the great things he would tell us and certainly one of the things I remember, was his phrase, and I’m not sure this is his actual words: “The call to service is one of the most significant calls to which we can respond.

It is service that ennobles you.” I’m not sure that I wanted to be ennobled, I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but here was this notion service was important. And it was about this time that my father and mother finally put to rest legally their marriage. My father hadn’t joined us in Australia and so my mother was faced with could she continue keeping me at school.

And she made the decision rightly or wrongly that no, she couldn’t and so at sub-leaving I had to leave school. And that was devastating, that was probably the first crisis of my life – because life really hadn’t been that bad at all – and I had to do something, and I remember sitting on my bed at home in Subiaco and my mother saying, “Well you’ve got to do something” and I said

“Yes of course, I’m going to join the army.” I daren’t say that my mother fainted. She still had a wonderful gift of drama and she did wave her hands and she clutched her bosom and she gasped at the thought that I should join the army. My intention was to go along to a recruiting depot and just sign up, and mother said, “your father was an officer and your grandfather was an officer” – which in fact he

wasn’t. I later found out that grandfather was a driver in the service corps of horses and I saw a uniform with his putties and his whip and so on, but I didn’t know that so I didn’t have an immediate response – and she said, “I can’t afford to keep you at school so that you can go to Duntroon.” “Quite all right, I’m going to join as a soldier.” And off went mother to have a fit of the dramatics and I went to the recruiting depot and…

Yes I did but it was on that occasion he came home on leave and one of the great regrets children have when they

come from a broken family – “Why didn’t I speak to father about this or that?” So it really, when he came home from leave, was more, “Where were you?” because I had a map in my bedroom from the National Geographic, and I would have a British flag and I would pop that where I thought father was, and so that was about as close as we got. He would look at my map and he would say, “I was here,” and, “I was there.” One of the

places he was, was Tobruk, and of course Tobruk came and went under the authority and control of the Allies, and I remember he resented deeply this man Rommel chasing him out. I knew all about Rommel – 8 or 9 year old boys knew about that – but that’s about as close as I got to him. It’s a good and interesting question because after

when I got married and I wrote to my father and I said, “Hello, remember me? I’m your son. I’m going to get married,” and I got back a letter that I’ve lost and I regret now, saying how proud he was that I’d made this decision and he was sure that the young lady who was engaged to me would bring great happiness, and I can now see where that was leading in his own heart particularly

as his own marriage hadn’t been all that happy. And so we started correspondence and he was in South Africa at the time there was great disputes and awful things were happening, and he was a farmer which is strange because he didn’t like farming originally, and he built boats, but he had to protect his little outfit and so he became the commander of the local

farmer’s militia. Our correspondence then often turned upon him sending me diagram and saying, “Would you comment on the disposition of my Bren gun, where I have my scouts and where I send out my patrols?” and so this became a very interesting one as we tended to swap our experiences. I would say, “When I was training we would do this”

and after I came back from Malaya, which was my first operational experience, I would tell him about that, and he would tell me about some of his experiences. He wasn’t a fighting soldier, he was a service corps soldier and I’d rather gather he was responsible for supply of the food stuff, and so his little column of trucks would drive up and deliver. Well I now realise what that was about and it

was a thoroughly dangerous occupation and these are the unsung heroes. I believe so often in the military – the dogged lads, and lasses now I suppose, who drive through the night or through danger to make sure the soldier always has what he needs. So I think I was soaking up a bit of that – this is the service thing again that I think has a thread through much of my career. So that was the extent of my discussions with him, and he told me

outrageous soldier stories, like how he captured Florence, and there was a grain of truth to this because he certainly was in Florence. My father was a very cultured man. He was very interested in antiquities, particularly the Renaissance, and in Florence he had an absolutely wonderful time, and I don’t think my father always did as he was told. He was a very independent sort of fellow. On one occasion he clearly went off with his camera to take photographs

of cathedrals and the like and so he tells me and I’m not suggesting this is absolutely the truth. While he was doing this he looked up and there was a German officer doing the same thing and I said, “Dad, did you shoot him?” and he said, “No, no, we took our photos and went our separate ways.” It’s a nice story but I’m not really sure it was a fact. It was my father showing a more human side.

I think he did but in an almost incidental way. He never spoke of his wounding in Palestine because at that stage he was away from the family. No, he didn’t. He may

have indicated that he’d lost some friends. I have a memory of that and it probably didn’t mean all that much, and I know that sounds awful, but I had too. On the odd occasion you’d go to school in the morning and there’d be an empty seat. “Oh, where’s Fred?” and the teacher would look very grave and say, “I’m

very sad to tell you boys that last night Fred’s home was bombed and he won’t be with us any more.” “Oh, that’s a pity. Good bloke, Fred.” And that was generally the reaction. I don’t think we were insensitive. It was just part of life, and I think father probably responded rather the same way and that gelled with me. I know about that. It’s sad

but it’s not awful. Later in my career the sense of awful, about war and about the consequences of the war came home to me very, very deeply, but not then.

Yes, only quite recently I suppose my children are of the age and experience that they’re asking that very question. They have a sense of the fabric of history and one of them was in the air force for some years and could’ve gone away to war, and he’s asked me that so just recently I’ve tried to think about that. I’m not sure that I

understand why I reacted as I did, but it was I think a fair description to say I saw it as a game. It think Mr Churchill who was an extremely clever politician and spoke with enormous persuasion, I think he really had the English public in the palm of his hand telling them all sorts of things which might ring a bit hollow now which is, “We can

never be defeated.” No grubby little Nazi could defeat us, and this island will never be taken, and that’s fine. How could he? And so when all these planes came over, and there were hundreds and hundreds of them, dropping all these bombs, you can’t beat us. I’m not even sure I understood what being beaten was. I did know that people were killed but it was a game and

we were winning because Churchill always told us that we were. Since I took up the study of history I realised we were awfully close to not winning, not surviving, and furthermore I’ve leant that Churchill knew that. There were those wonderful speeches: “We will fight them on the beaches…” He was saying, and said in his memoirs, “…but God only knows how we will.” So it was a game and you would tend to

rather like the computer games now. I lived near an aerodrome, Northholt aerodrome, and we would try and count the number of planes going out and coming back. The fuel that they had then it wasn’t a long turnaround. You went to Germany you dropped your bombs and you came back. Sometimes you would know that there were less coming back than had gone over, and you’d think well that’s one for

Hitler, but he can’t win. I didn’t have a sense that those were young fellows not all that much older than I was. So it was there in me and I now realise just how horrible it was. I also realise that why my mother was not just having dramatic tizzies but probably knew some of the air crew. Certainly we knew a number of Polish pilots and navigators –

these were the free Poles, they’d fled from Poland and they wore an RAF [Royal Air Force] uniform with Poland on the flash and they’d go off and fly in the British squadrons – I don’t think there was a Polish squadron. My mother would’ve known some of these.

Yes. I lived in Ealing Broadway

which at the time I thought was a long way from London ‘though each night I could see London burning. I now realise why – Ealing Broadway is about ten minutes I think or less on the underground train. And yes, every night that the raids were, and they were basically night-time raids for obvious reasons – our fighters had radar which was a great advantage. I’m

not sure if it was less effective at night but at any rate the Germans chose strategically to bomb at night, and the fires were massive. Again it was that strange sense of being a nine year old boy. I would climb up on the roof of our house with my cousin who was living with us – he was a boy a couple of years older – and we’d sit up on the roof and watch, and I think of it now as most insensitive and

just stupid because things would fall from the air and yes I watched the burning. There was no television in those days of course but I did like to go to news reels, one hour programs, and for some strange reason children were allowed then – I wouldn’t allow my children to see them – and you would always get the losses at sea and shots of the planes and of course the burning.

And I remember it particularly because it was such a popular thing to see and you felt so proud – the King and Queen would make a point most mornings after a blitz when buildings were still smouldering and firemen were out with their hoses and the homeless were standing in the street, and to see the King in his military uniform – that was really good. It’s taken the reality away and I think that was a very important part of the whole process.

The King and Queen are there and people feel, perhaps not as I did that it was a game but, that it’ll be all right, and they did that job very very well. I probably have different views of the monarchy now, but then that was terrific to do that. I felt very much with them, but your question was did I see the burning and yes I did and it didn’t create that impression of horror, probably relief that it wasn’t ours because

we did have houses destroyed in our street. It’s awful, I’m reflecting on a macabre humour really here. I remember going out into the street, Gordon Road, and about four houses down, maybe five – they’re all attached to each other in a great long row – and there was a space where there was a house the previous day and it was no longer there but on the second storey there was a bath

sticking out into the air still attached to its pipes. Everything else seems to have collapsed and burnt, but there was the bath and I remember thinking what an extraordinary sight, and then went off to collect shrapnel or whatever I was doing that day, because that was a great thing picking up mementos of the night’s activities.

Yes, and that’s a very

enduring memory and I’ve mentioned that to my children because they’re social creatures and they understand that, and I think I probably did too. Yes the community were all, regardless of station, were all as one, beating this swine from over there, and none better than when the underground train was stopped in the tunnel

because there was a raid and when the siren went all trains had to stop, and the underground train would try and pull into a station, and the doors would slide open and we’d either stay on the train or go and sit on the station. And there everybody would talk to one another – I would talk to other school children and mothers would talk to me, and if I was running around being a pest they’d say, “Now sit down” which was

very kind of them. Meantime my mother is at home of course not knowing, and I can understand now why she was so pleased to see me, though the way she would manifest her pleasure was usually, “Where the hell have you been?” which I didn’t quite understand. But yes, there was this great sense of being together and I think that was also a ploy of Churchill and other public speakers to say, “Together we can’t be beaten.”

We thought it was absolutely marvellous. I realise now that the fire services were quite extraordinary. No wonder they gave medals to some of them. I think they were all men, because the women tended to be working in the munitions factories – I don’t think they were in the fire services although I may be wrong.

They wore these great big helmets. They would be deployed remarkably quickly and then everybody else would hop in. I carried my bucket of sand – we all had 3 or 4 buckets of sand in the hallway, and a bucket of water and a stirrup pump. I’ve never seen anything so ridiculously ineffective to do anything, but it was great to squirt at my sister, and the stirrup pump was a tube you stuck in the bucket of water and it had a

handle or a strut down there with two bits and you put your foot on that and you’d pump it up and down and out of the end of a little rubber tube you’d get a little dribble of water. The notion was if your house caught fire with incendiary bombs you’d do this. A couple of houses did catch fire in our street and I grabbed my bucket of sand because my sister commandeered the

water. I remember that because I was very miffed. I was older than she was and therefore I had the seniority, I believed, to have the bucket but she got it first, and so I had to take the bucket of sand. We all did that, and I don’t think I ever put anything out except a fire in our own house which was our fault. The chimney caught fire, and had nothing to do with Mr Hitler, and my grandmother and I put it out as I

dumped sand in the fireplace and we squirted in a somewhat futile way our stirrup pump up the chimney and finally it went out. But it attracted the ire of the warden. He had a tin hat and a gas mask and they were meant to go around and if the light shone out of the windows

he’d make you put your black out up. And he banged on the door and shrieked when we opened it and said, “Put out that bloody fire. It’s drawing the whole German air force into London.” And I took that very much to heart, how awful, and we were desperate – how do we put the fire out in the chimney? It finally burnt itself out and I hope we weren’t a target for the planes, but I thought I’d let down the war effort on that occasion. But yes,

community was strong and I would say fearless. I think it was quite extraordinary the way women would rush out and do their things. A great memory I have, and it includes my mother, is of the war effort of women in England. I didn’t have the privilege of seeing what people were doing in Australia at that stage, but it was quite remarkable and they seemed quite fearless. I’m sure they were terrified.

I think probably most boys did because Dad did, and even at 8 or 9 there were youngsters joining up at I suppose 18. The senior boys from school

were sometimes leaving school before they finished their final exams so I don’t know what age that would’ve been, probably 17 or 18. I don’t know whether they lied about their age, but they did, so yes I think the answer would’ve been had I had the chance I would’ve, and I’d have to say, had a German paratrooper landed near me all my instincts would’ve been go and do a bit

because the only good German is a dead one. That’s a terrible thing to reflect on as a 9 year old boy, but I think we all probably thought that way – they have no place here, they’re not real people, and we must do our bit. Because I saw stakes out in the field which had been put there to impale a poor unfortunate paratrooper or even just a pilot bailing out. We were

very conditioned – everyone will fight, and if it was with my bucket of sand – imagine me encountering a German paratrooper – I felt I’d done my thing.

No I didn’t. My father did.

No, I didn’t know about this estrangement and so I didn’t know then that the prospect of going to South Africa was there. I had

no idea.

Yes.

It sounds a cliché, but another world, a new and wonderful world. I’d have to say my destiny was always, I think, to be an Australian. It was only when I came to Australia and became assimilated and became an Australian student

and an Australian soldier that I realised I’m definitely an Australian and I’ve always carried an Australian passport though I’ve had the opportunity to have a British one. It’s just a thing about me. I embraced being an Australian and I am an Australian. So different, yes, completely different. Light was different, school was different, the countryside was different. The people I recognised

as different. I even recall that the lack of accent, I deemed it as a lack of accent whereas I met people in England with such a range of accents which I thought was the natural way, all people had a different way of speaking. I have to say now Western Australians do speak somewhat differently from those that we used to refer to as over in the East.

We even had our own language about things, but yes a very different and wonderful world. It was new, bright, secure – a fabulous place, and I’ve never lost that feeling.

Oh yes, yes! School was immensely satisfying. The teachers were wonderful men. I haven’t maintained friendships with

all those that I went to school with in Western Australia, but the godfather of one of my children and my very close friend is someone I was at school with so we’ve known each other for 60 odd years and he’s still part of our family. But I went to a school reunion last year, year before, and I was meeting people for the first time for 50 years

and oh yes I remember him. He sat over there in that corner, and we were remembering things about each other – it was just natural. I don’t think I would experience that if I met any of my school mates from the UK, in fact I’d be sure of it. I can’t recall a single name whereas I can probably name all my class, and it was a class of about 38, 40 in Perth.

No, not a bit. In fact I was an object of some curiosity and I guess I had some of my mother’s dramatic instincts and, sadly, exploited that. I had had a wartime experience that none of my West Australian friends had, though their fathers had gone to war – they’d had that one

but they were fascinated at being told about bombing raids and fires and stirrup pumps and things like that. And so I enjoyed sharing that and that sharing experience was a very good part of my young life as a student. No, I was accepted and I thought they were beaut. No difficulties at all.

Oh yes. We didn’t

play rugby in those days in Western Australia – it was very insular – but we did play Australian Rules which was totally different from soccer which was the only football game that I was familiar with, and I loved Australian Rules. I wouldn’t say I was a star but I played at every opportunity, went up for the teams. Great game and I still think it’s a great game, though rugby I think is still the greatest.

Yes well there’s a question I’ve been asked a number of times, and I’ll say that I have always said I had no problem with the discipline. I thought it was perfectly suited for me, and that is I got into trouble on the odd occasion.

On one occasion I even got the infamous whack on the hand, but it all seemed perfectly reasonable to my life at that time at that school, and it was a very deep shock that I read and listened to claims of events which were all taking place at the time that I was at school, not at our school but

down the river at Clontarf and Bindoon, both of which I visited, and I knew nothing about that. It was quite devastating for me because it threatened my memories, didn’t destroy them, because what I realise now is that these things do happen sadly and they’re not to be condoned and clearly there were some men

who couldn’t or wouldn’t live up to the ideal of the school, but I have nothing but praise to say of the teachers and they influenced my life and still do to an extraordinary degree. I remained in touch with one Brother until he died of cancer about 6 years ago and I actually spoke at his requiem which was most unusual

and I am enormously privileged to have done that. Normally the Brothers do all their own thing, we just sit there and listen, but I was invited because of my close friendship with Brother Egan – that’s the cadet man. I count that as one of the privileged associations I’ve had and I think I would regard him as one of the more influential men in my early life.

He was a man among men, a great model and I think now as you probe me with these questions that I probably saw in him the father image, the father that sadly wasn’t with me. I hadn’t thought about that much before but those are the qualities he had.

Yes. Self-discipline

was something that the Brothers were very big on and though perhaps we didn’t all take advantage of that I did respond to that and I’ve always found that whatever you’re going to do whether it’s as a husband or a father or as a military officer or a school teacher, you’ve got to exercise some discipline over yourself. Otherwise you can’t expect to draw it from others, so this sense of

‘to thine own self be true’ I got very clearly from the Brothers. To be a gentleman – it’s a somewhat old fashioned word now and some would actually deride it. My notion of what it was to be a gentleman was taught to me by the Brothers, and they actually had a little book. It was called Christian Politeness and we were meant to carry it around. The definition of a gentleman was there.

The most important thing was that you do not knowingly or willingly cause ill or harm to another, and I once said that to someone and they said, “And you became a soldier?” It is not incompatible at all. In fact there is still room for a gentleman in the professional ranks of the military and you should never be ashamed of that. I’ve actually discussed this with my soldiers

and Australian soldiers are very very perceptive young men, and they see that. And in fact often they will say, “My officer is a gentleman,” and you suddenly find your heart really touched by that. They might say, “He’s a real good bloke,” and they’re really saying the same thing, not that he goes and drinks with them or uses the same language that they do. They recognise that that’s something they expect

from the boss and you let yourself down and them down if you don’t perform that way, and I have no doubt whatsoever that notion of that’s what a gentleman is, not soft, came from my time at school. No hesitation to say that at all. The good healthy life – they loved sport, they’d go out and play sport because that’s what

people do, keep the body healthy, and so my sense of love of sport which I’ve always had was developed there. I played tennis for most of my active life. Now I’m a gym junkie because I still take that seriously and tennis is a bit beyond me. But all that came from Aquinas.

Well I don’t know whether it was out of the ordinary because so many of the mothers around their husbands were away, and that was the great bond with so many and my mother was so like all the others. She worked in the Kodak factory. I knew Kodak was about films and I thought, “My dotty mother, what’s she taking films for?” In fact what she was doing was developing the reconnaissance photos that were such an integral part

of successful bombing. Now I think of those awful events of bombing Cologne and the fire storms there, and there was my tiny little red-haired mother making her contribution. And that was what she was doing as they all were so that wasn’t so uncommon. But when we came to Australia, though there had been tragedies in families and men were killed, there were

far more conventional families around than was mine. I think of the children in my class. I’m not aware that there were others, just Mum at home. And so you’re right, when I came to the New World, if I could use that term, yes we were a little different, and now that you ask that question I didn’t have quite the same family

structure that my colleagues had.

Yes I think she did, but I didn’t appreciate it at the time – what youngster does? And I was probably rather critical of her whimsical and erratic ways which I regret now. I also regret not telling her that because she’s now dead. I didn’t appreciate that

her life had been very very difficult and in her own light she did pretty well looking after me and my sister. But life is full of regrets. Why didn’t I say to Dad this, and why didn’t I tell mother that, so I’m another one that falls into that category.

I had this notion that men go away and fight without knowing what that meant during the war, and I think everybody of my age, particularly males, did. And probably the girls thought oh yes, and we’ll go to factories and keep the country going while the men are away. When I joined the school cadets I must have been getting inklings that this was

a profession that attracted me, though I’d be hard put to say why that was so. It’s a cultural thing rather than an informed choice; because the military wasn’t running around the bush at Aquinas firing blanks out of .303 rifles, and to an extent it might’ve been just one of those

unthought responses when mother said, “What are you going to do?” Just in my mind came father in his uniform, Brother Egan in his uniform, me in my cadet uniform, and I probably knew a few soldiers around in Perth. That’s probably what it was but that doesn’t alter the fact that the moment I actually marched into the depot and I started doing my training, I

loved it, absolutely loved it, and I’ve never had a moment’s regret of the time, and the most difficult thing was decide when I would leave. You tend to think stay, promotion, but then jobs were becoming scarcer and I had a family of four children. “Should I leave now?’ And I chose to leave early and now I don’t regret that either because I was very happy with my

school career.

Yes. My mother must’ve enjoyed it because the sense of drama I think would’ve appealed to her. I went along on my own. I was – my birthday is on the 16th of January, and it was on the 18th of January I went to the Perth Recruiting Office, and

I presented myself to an NCO Non Commissioned Officer] and said like a polite young Aquinarian, “Good morning sir. I’d like to join the army,” and he laughed. I felt quite taken aback by that. I thought they’d all fall over and say, “We’ve been waiting for you for years,” and then he said, “Sit down son. How old are you?” I was small and I was blonde and I wasn’t

shaving and I clearly looked about 14. And I said, “Seventeen,” and he said, “Well you’ll need your father’s permission.” And I bristled and said, “But my father lives in South Africa,” and he probably said, “Look son, just go home and get your mother to sign.” And so he gave me the forms and I took them home and of course mother rose to the occasion the way she always would and said, “I will come with you.” Can you imagine a 17 year old boy’s

mother coming with him to join the army, and much as though I said, “I don’t want you, they’ll laugh at you, they’ll laugh at me,” mother marched me back to the depot and she was only a little bit taller than me and she fixed the NCO with a bright eye and said, “Now my son is going to join the army, and I want you to tell me where we’re going to sign and he will get plenty of socks and warm clothes.” It was just so embarrassing.

But at the end of that she signed on the dotted line and an officer appeared along with a number of others and we clutched the bible in our hand and we took our oath, and I think we were whizzed straight off to Guildford. We all got on a bus in our civilian clothes, straight off to Guildford which was just out of Perth. There we met the traditional squad that had been there for six weeks, and

they jeered at us, “You’ll be sorry.” We were running around for some days still in our civilian clothes because the organisation couldn’t get us to the Q store, but we still had to go into one of the huts, the dormitories and an NCO would tell us how to stand to attention and always call him Sir or God or something like that. Then we got on a bus and went to Karrakatta where there was the traditional Q [quartermaster] store,

a long counter with a fellow standing behind, and they would call our your size – there were no tape measures. They clearly thought they were all experts. A storeman would then grab a coat of the appropriate size, or what was deemed as the appropriate size and throw it on the counter and by the time you got to the end of the counter you had this enormous pile of clothing on top of which was a tin hat. You’d stagger out,

I think you’d put it all in a kit bag, that’s right, and I remember I got everything except a pair of boots because they didn’t have boots my size. Everybody else had boots and I didn’t have boots, and we got into the bus and taken back to Guildford, and the sergeant who was going to rule our lives for how many weeks we were there told us to get dressed in the uniform – he was going to check us. Of course I got dressed in my uniform and I had my

civilian shoes on and he had an absolute fit. “What’s your name?” and I said, “I’m Richard, sir!” I then got my first lecture that I wasn’t Richard anyone at all. I was Private Hall. He said, “Why are you undressed?” And I said, “I’m certainly not undressed.” I really must have been the most awful child – and he said, “You’re naked, you’re naked! You haven’t got any boots on!” And I said, “No, because you didn’t give me any boots.”

He then gave me a terrible rollicking for being cheeky, but he couldn’t do anything about it because I didn’t have any boots. So he said, “All right, you can wear the shoes until we get you boots.” And I couldn’t leave it alone and I said, “Excuse me sergeant, I can’t put putties on either – they were the things you put round your legs – because the putties have to be wound around seven and a half times on the top of the boot.” And he got apoplectic, and he called me out and

told me to go to the orderly room and I did that and the others were dismissed. He stormed in and he said…well I won’t tell you what he said because it was quite colourful, but he wanted to know why I…

Well it was something like, “You’re up yourself son, you really are,” and I didn’t know that phrase, but it didn’t strike me as being terribly complimentary.

He was very angry, but there is a point to this story really because we became quite good friends and he became a mentor of mine when I became a corporal. Later in his cups he said, “Son, I knew you were going to go places. No-one stood up to me before.” His nickname was ‘Swoop’ because he would swoop on people. But at any rate I did ultimately get my boots, but I made

my mark with Swoop obviously because, at 17 years and a few days with some men almost twice my age were signing up – Korea was looming – and I became their representative, still not shaving, and when things went wrong which they did all the time I would march off to the orderly room and bang on the door. “Sergeant, sir, the men are most unhappy with this or that,” and he’d get quite purple and stamp around.

Anyway usually we got these things done, and I guess I became the mascot of the platoon, because they treated me with extraordinary tolerance, with my bumptiousness, and I guess out of that, after I’d finished my training, two of us out of the platoon were asked if we would like to become local Lance Corporals. “What would you think about that?”

and I said, “Oh absolutely,” and my colleague said something equally vulgar as to where they could put their stripe – he didn’t want to do anything like that, and he said, “And you, Dicky,” – he called me Dicky – “you stay with your mates. They’ll look after you.” And I made my first military decision. No, I’ll be a lance corporal. So I was promoted to lance corporal and then I had to do exams and the like, and

I became a corporal instructor. We had still going then a group called the Australian Instructional Corps, AIC, and I’m certain that that had emerged from the Second World War and it generally consisted of NCOs who’d had war-time experience, terrific soldiers, very very smart, their uniforms were always great, and I was very

privileged to join this group though I confess I don’t think I realised that at the time. But I became a relatively smart soldier because of the modelling I had from these people and I started to instruct. I instructed in drill, small arms, minor tactics and field craft, and I loved field craft because I was small and I could camouflage myself and we’d play these wonderful games. You’d drape a gas cape over you

and stick bits of grass in your hair, and the trainee soldiers would have to try and pick you out and invariably they wouldn’t find me and that gave me a great sense of ‘this is my calling’, though whether I thought I would have a career in sitting under a camouflage net I don’t know. But this was a new and wonderful world. I had some position, I was complying

with professional standards and people worked with me. I really liked that.

Not at all. It should have been, but no sense no pain I think. It wasn’t daunting at all. Everything was a challenge but I loved a challenge and

I could meet the challenge. I didn’t have enough sense to realise I should hold my tongue or perhaps not be so forward but it was all wonderful. I liked jumping over things, I liked running fast. The only thing that perhaps bothered me on reflection, and Sergeant Swoop would do this, there was a technique developed during

the First World War of crossing barbed wire. When you deploy barb wire it’s normally in a circle thing and you pull it out like a concertina and stake it to the ground, so you’ve got winding wire. To get through that one soldier would rush forward with his rifle and you had basic pouches on, and you’d throw yourself on the wire and that would collapse the wire, and then the rest of the section would rush through the gap

putting their foot on your back and springing through. Because I was cheeky and small Swoop would say, “Hall, on the wire,” and away I’d go. Now the first time that happened as you can imagine unless you have various vital parts protected you can do yourself a very nasty mischief, and I learnt very quickly that I would stuff socks and things down my underpants and I’d put things in my basic pouches and that would stop the wire.

Providing my colleagues actually put their foot at the top of my shoulder and not the middle of my back, they could all leap through and I could emerge fairly unscathed. After a while I realised that I was the only one getting told to fling themselves on the wire so I think this was Swoop sorting me out, and I think that was a very good thing for him to do. I was probably a little more modest and a little more receptive to the

various ways the wind blew as a recruit. I remember that.

Well the thing is when you knew that Swoop would pull a trick like this, before you left your barracks, because everybody knew they’d pick me and so they didn’t do anything, so I started stuffing socks in my underpants and I must have looked a bit odd on parade because I bulged in unlikely places, but you know

you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.

Of course it was that, yes, I was a silly young boy, but it was a priceless experience and if I got a few

cuts and bruises from the wire or Swoop putting me down or shrieking at me. All this was a terribly important part of turning me from a silly young boy into a man, and it certainly paid off when I graduated as an officer because this was a much much greater challenge. I was a second lieutenant – there is nothing lower in the hierarchy than a second lieutenant. You barely exist in the minds of others.

You got paid significantly less than a corporal who was meant to be beneath you in the ranks system, and when I went to armoured regiment there were actually men in my troop who had fought in tanks in the Second World War and I was the boss. The lessons of my experience with Swoop had finally given me the sense of restraint to know how to deal with these men,

and the only way to deal with these men was to respect their incredible knowledge and not be a blithering twit. And so I wasn’t, though I must have made some mistakes and I would say Swoop and the way he dealt with me was just the thing I needed. A couple of my colleagues, particularly the younger ones, probably hadn’t learnt that lesson because we were talking about this at our anniversary

dinner, and the stories that we made terrible asses of ourselves: “Did you?” and I said, “Well I probably did.” But in fact I was very fortunate in having those lessons 12 months earlier when I was a private recruit minor. That was my exulted first rank, private recruit minor. You got paid less until you were – it might have been 21. 21 was a key for all

sorts of things in those days. You couldn’t drink in most places in Australia, or not legally, until you were 21. I’m not sure if you could get married. At any rate when I did I was 21.

Definitely. Yes it definitely did, certainly

during – I don’t know whether it was actually at the joining up – I probably didn’t think all that much of war, and if I did it was just one of those things. I didn’t join up to go to war, but I clearly understood that we would. But you’ve asked me this question before and I think it’s about time I got down to how I feel about this. Korea was certainly a turning point in my understanding of war

because people in my section when I joined up were going off to war after they became basically trained soldiers. They went off to their regiments or their battalions and I got left behind because I’d got into this instructor stream, and I began to have doubts because I wanted to go to Korea, and particularly as a couple of my colleagues had gone

and I was very envious. I don’t think it was in terms of I saw them when they came back and they had two ribbons from Korea – I don’t think there was ever that sense and it’s rare in the Australian army that you get this obsession with the ribbons. I can think of some other armies where that is more of a motive, but I was keen to go to Korea and I was very disappointed, and when my CO said, “I think you should

apply to Portsea.” I really had to decide because if I decided to go to Portsea and got accepted of course, the chance of going to Korea would at least be reduced on a time scale – and nobody had any idea how long Korea would last – whereas if I said no and went on to…because I was in infantry at that stage – went on to a battalion there was every chance I’d go on to Korea and it was a real difficult

choice to make and I really did think about it for quite a few days – it might’ve been weeks. I really did want to go to Korea. Now, you will ask me, “Why did you want to go to Korea?” And I think I can really answer that now as my memories start flooding back. Yes I wanted to be a fighting soldier because I had had my basic training, I was a reasonable shot,

I was very fit, I had some sense of command, I liked working in a team – that was very important, the camaraderie that had developed amongst the troops – because it was us against Swoop – was very very strong and that really appealed to me – this was better than a football team –

and there was a very strong sense of ‘with my mates we’ll be right’, and I realised later on that that’s very much an Australian military instinct, though I hadn’t realised it at the time. With my mates I’ll be right. If I am wounded they will help me. If one of my mates gets hurt of course I will help him. They can’t get us. I thought that was great – this is the life I want. Not to go and kill people, not to go and wreak havoc, but

us together. And I probably had this silly notion that all my best mates and I would all go to the same battalion, which was most unlikely, but that’s probably what I thought: me and my mates, we’ll go to Korea. And I do remember one fellow – he was in my section – actually came back to Perth. He was only in Korea a very short time and he was very badly wounded, and that was very sobering. I saw him on crutches,

much older than me, with a lined and haggard face, and that’s what it’s like. And then a second one, a fellow who was at school not with me but at Perth Modern, and he was a few years older, but I knew him, Charles Yacopetti, MC [Military Cross] – he was captured in Korea, and his experience of a

POW [prisoner of war] camp were quite terrible but also very very gallant and Charles I don’t think was ever quite the same after he came out of that time as a prisoner of war and I think it haunted him. He remained in the army for some time – I think he retired as a lieutenant colonel, but that also sobered me.

May I tell you a story about Charles? Something that I’ve always remembered and I’ve told other people because this is someone I’ve known. Charles got an MC in the best of circumstances. His patrol was fired on and his sergeant was wounded and Charles got his own soldiers away and came last helping the wounded sergeant

and he was captured and he was put in the cage there, and he was separated from the other ranks which was the practise in the prisoner of war camps. He became very clearly a leader of the guys there and he obviously had a sense of humour and I never appreciated either before then or since, but he persuaded the guards to give the Australian colleagues

some rice wine, and he explained to the guard, “In Australia we drink a toast to important people on their birthday, and I believe it’s your President’s birthday.” And the guard said, “Yes Comrade Yacopetti, you are learning well. That’s very good.” And so he poured out this

dreadful rice wine into their pannikins and Charlie lined them all up and turned around at the head of them and fixed the guard a steely look and said, “The Queen,” and they all drank a toast to the Queen. Of course Charlie got beaten up most dreadfully but I thought, “My, that’s Australian and that’s beaut and what leadership.” And though that was a little later than my time in Perth he was a Western Australian and so

I’m beginning now to realise that war is not – I don’t think I ever thought it was romantic, but I was seeing some of the reality, so there was my own colleague who came back wounded, and there was Charlie who came back later on after being a POW.

No. I made the choice to go to OCS and when I found myself in Armour, which was my choice, we weren’t deploying our tanks there at all. The Brits were

and there were two OCS graduates both from earlier courses, I was the third course. Course 1 and 2 went and were attached to the British tanks, to the inner skillions. I desperately wanted to go, but I didn’t get that.

Awfully. Awfully, and a very good choice of words, and I just shrivel up thinking about it now, but perhaps my confidence got me through. I wouldn’t have the nerve today faced with similar circumstances, and I think it says more for the tolerance of the older men that were there – that they didn’t take me out the back and belt the tripe out of me.

They were tolerant of my mistakes and I actually learnt from that in due course so I was very very lucky. It’s almost ludicrous isn’t it, the picture that comes into your mind. Yes it was a challenge but I didn’t see it as such, it was just part of the thing.

No, but

as I’m talking to you I realise it and I don’t know whether the camera is picking up I’m blushing but I should be, I really should.

Yes. This was a great adventure in its own right because I have to admit that Western Australians were then at any rate a little insular and we referred to everyone on the other side of the rabbit proof fence as Easterners, and this was the first time I’d been East.

Having been accepted for Portsea I got a crew cut because I thought that was the sort of thing that one did – I was a great admirer of Kramer the great American tennis player so – there is a point to me telling you this which I’ll come to in a moment – got on a train at Perth, wound it’s way up to Kalgoorlie, changed trains and then the big crossing, the desert occurred,

and because we were common soldiery we didn’t have bunks at all, and I have the advantage of being able to sleep in the overhead luggage rack – I was small enough to get there. Everybody else sprawled around the rest of the train, and we chuffed our way over to Port Pirie, changed trains, went to Adelaide, changed trains, went to Melbourne. At Spencer Street

station we were met by a big shiny bus and a big shiny warrant officer, and off we drove to Point Nepean which was where the academy was, and then started six months of the most intensive work of my whole life. Even then, doing things cheaply was

very much the practise and so the army squeezed into 6 months something like an 18 month course, so you really didn’t have time to scratch yourself. You were up at the crack of dawn and you flogged through work until about 10 o’clock at night when they turned the generator off, because we weren’t on the main grid, and then if you still had homework to do you read it under the blankets with a torch. That was

six months of officer training. Quite extraordinary. I’m not sure that anyone would put up with that now but we did then. And at the end of that we all put in our choices of the arm of the service we wished to be assigned to. I had at this stage been an infantry soldier, but I chose armour because armour had

big tanks and they fired big guns, and really do think that was part of the attraction. I was very familiar with what tanks did, not from my personal experience of the Second World War but all boys knew about what was happening in there, and tanks were a very significant part of the operations in North Africa where my father had served in Notting tanks, so I had no question.

I selected tanks first and infantry second and artillery third, and I got armour. So that started a 20 year career of wearing a black beret and the armoured corps flashes and about half of that time I suppose I spent with armoured units.

Well

I don’t know whether it was a natural affinity. I certainly didn’t regret – in those days it was part of the training scheme that a young officer learnt all the trades that your soldiers learnt. It was not the practice in the British army. The British officers I regret to say in the regiment I was attached to, almost gloried in their ignorance of which was the front, which was the back

of the vehicle. The practice in a blue-blood British cavalry regiment was to be frightfully jolly and lead but not really know much about the vehicle. But we had to – we did a driving course, it was quite a long course, I think about 6 to 12 weeks, and then a gunnery course of the same duration, and then a wireless course and then I think a tactics course and throughout one’s career

you did more of those. We spent virtually another six months just learning our trade, and I must tell you, driving a Centurion tank is the most fabulous experience. You might lust after the opportunity to drive a Jaguar or a Mercedes or something like that. Mine was to drive a Centurion tank and I loved it. Rolls Royce engine, ah! quite wonderful.

So that was my introduction to armour, and it was simply good fun and I think we were all quite good drivers though we all had our events that we were ashamed of. Getting bogged was the most dreadful sin, and it’s really not all that hard to bog a 50 ton tank. Usually you bogged it through

lack of appreciation of the ground. For example, if you saw a nice flat green bit of ground only an idiot would drive across it because the fact that it was flat and it was green probably meant that there was water running under that, and you put 50 tons on top of that and down it goes. And of course with all the enthusiasm that I still had, I drove my tank into that on more than one occasion. There was one

rule that you never broke – if you bogged the tank you dug it out, and I can tell you digging out a 50 ton tank is not much fun particularly if your colleagues who didn’t bog it in the first instance have got to help. We did that a couple of times and so I learnt to drive on more secure ground. But that was the first time I was doing real intensive training to fit me for war,

all of which I enjoyed and there was a lot of money around then so we fired off in training probably 100 maybe 200 rounds from a tank. I can’t imagine how much that cost but by way of comparison, a trainee troop leader to say nothing of an actual tradesman tank gunner might have difficulty in firing that number in their career. You’ve just got to

watch the money.

Ah, yes, well Puckapunyal was the place. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Puckapunyal but every armoured corps officer and soldier knows it. It was a great bit of middle Victorian bush,

with things like Mount Puckapunyal that in fact my training group tried to drive a tank up. We failed I might add, and at great expense a platform had to be dug beside the tank to drag the tank onto it and then be recovered down the hill, and you can imagine the CO was less than pleased. I wasn’t responsible for that one I must point out. There were hills,

quite big hills. There were dry gullies, wet gullies, boggy areas, even a small river there, but really what we were training in, and I think this may be where your question was leading me, we were training in European tactics to fight a European war in Australia. That was part of training in the 50s. We were still thinking European. We were still influenced by British experience which

is very extensive, very good, and we hadn’t acquired – how shall I put this delicately – the fascination of doing things with American equipment and in an American way which might’ve been equally inappropriate, but we were very British in both our approach and our training. It was a British tank too, a very very good one – my humble belief it was the best there was at the time and we were very fortunate to have them – fabulous piece of

equipment, the Centurion tank. We went through two or three marks. The Centurion tank in fact had been designed and came off the design board. It actually ran out in the last years of the Second World War. I don’t recall any action that it fought. They may have deployed some to France but it was then all over. So we bought the best on

the shelf at the time. I think it was 50,000 pounds I remember because the same number of pounds as there was the tonnage, and it was a pretty good buy, but gone now. Like me it’s a museum piece.

I was in command of 4 tanks.

Immediately, yes. I had my own tank – the troop leader obviously rides in the tank and he is the commander of that tank, but then there are three other tanks in the troop that make up this sub-unit which is the armoured smallest sub-unit there is for four tanks. Yes, and that was daunting because I was

eighteen and a half years old and a number of my troopers and a couple of my NCOs had actually fought in tanks in the Second World War and their level of experience exceeded mine by an unbelievable amount, and I was the boss. Because of the experience I’d had with Sergeant Swoop and my training, I was better prepared to handle that challenge and not

fall into the trap saying I’m the officer and you’re not and what I say goes. And because of that, that was good luck, but then it became really good fortune not just good luck that I had these fellows to help me learn my trade. Another excellent sergeant who never in front of the troops and quietly would point out if I was being an idiot: “Sir, I suggest that you deal with trooper

So and So this way” and I had acquired then enough wisdom to say, “Right, that’s how we’ll do it.” We even rehearsed little interviews – some of these soldiers were really tough and it was good to do a little playlet in my office and then we’d go and put the thing into practice and the sergeant would march the wretched trooper in with lots of shunning and unshunning and bright and polished salutes,

and I did the job that I was required to do in a more professional way because the sergeant had really set it up, and it worked. It was wonderful for a young officer to have had that opportunity.

Yes it is, and that’s a tremendous challenge for them, and I think I was particularly fortunate and it may have been a quality of our armoured corps NCOs, because I can now only speak about that world, that they could rise to that occasion. I have the fondest memories of them and of course more and more these days I tend to be going to their funerals because they’re older than I am and they’re dying off now. This’ll be good for the Archive –

one such NCO was General Peter Cosgrove’s father.

Peter Cosgrove’s father was, yes, and he was an absolutely wonderful character. He was quite paternal of looking after the young officers, and there would be phrases around like: “I’ve got the young sirs coming this afternoon.

I’m going to show them how to open a can of beans,” or something. Yet you’re quite right, it was a real challenge for them and it’s a quality of the NCOs that they coped with that because that’s not easy, not easy at all. But by and large I think they did it wonderfully and we were the beneficiaries, we young officers. If any of us ever forgot it, and I doubt it, it would be a mark of great disrespect to those sergeants. I certainly have never forgotten

it, and I have no hesitation in saying however good an officer I became I owe it to those people in the early part of my career. They gave me the structure and the performance criteria that mattered.

Oh invaluable. They had fought at

Salamaua in New Guinea and just the deployment of tanks even though at the time in the Second World War they were drivers or gunners, they had been there and done it and they had seen how their officers had directed them. Yes, you would certainly listen if at the end of a day’s exercises you might be sitting around the camp fire having an ale – good romantic stuff.

They usually would not offer that sort of advice unless you asked them. I’d say, “Look, how do you think we went with our fire and movement?” And he might say, “Well, I would’ve done so and so, sir,” and if you had any sense at all you would tuck that in your mind and next time you would do it. But they were very good. They didn’t say, “Hey boss,

you really stuffed that up.” They’d wait for you to say, “How was that?” or, “Would you have done that any differently?” You normally had to get them before they even wore on too much and their tongues became loosened and the divide between the officer and the NCO was drawn out a bit, because the officer has a very important role to play – not to allow too great

an intimacy because that undermines both of you and that’s another judgement call that a young officer sometimes finds difficult.

Yes. He always is the NCO and you’re always the officer even though you may be the idiot and he’s the experienced soldier. You’ve got to preserve that divide. I’ve seen some very tragic relationships develop – they simply weren’t going to work – when you close that gap.

I was always taught as a young officer, respect your NCOs. You don’t go drinking with them, you don’t go visiting the men there at their mess – that’s their place. There are certain occasions where on invitation you may go which is usually around Christmas or the annual cricket match, but you watch the time very closely and you don’t stay there all afternoon. Normally an experienced adjutant or 2IC [Second in Command] will give the signal and you will get out if you’ve been visiting the sergeants’

mess. Cricket matches are another story altogether, but they’ve got to be.

Yes, it would’ve been probably 4 or 5 years really because I’d graduated as a 2nd lieutenant and you served 3 years before you went to lieutenant so you’re still of the troop

leader rank, and that meant that compared with the RMC [Royal Military College Duntroon] graduates you probably had longer in the role of troop leader which was a great advantage really. It wasn’t until I had spent quite a lot of time as troop leader that I got promoted to captain and that takes you out of the – really the greatest job in the regiment is troop leader – into other roles. I was an acting

captain, temporary captain, for a while. I was the signals officer at the armoured regiment and then I got my first posting out of the regiment which was to my surprise because West Australians rarely seemed to get posted back to their home state, it’s just one of those things in the army. I went back to Perth as the adjutant of 10th Light Horse which was delightful as far as I was concerned. Not only was I seeing my family but

I wasn’t – no, I was married then. There was a Malayan episode. I went from armoured regiment on my first operational experience to Malaya, so I missed out on Korea which was a source of great disappointment to me but I was suddenly given this opportunity as a lieutenant to be attached to the British in

Malaya.

Oh yes, the 15/19th King’s Royal Hussars. They don’t exist any more. They’re been amalgamated in the First Light Dragoons. They were a, dare I say, very blue-blood regiment. The British regiments are very hierarchical, and the cavalry of course are the top of the pile.

Well they’re neither actually, though they had been an armoured regiment in Germany but when they went to Malaya they were called a reconnaissance regiment, which was merely a name invented for that time to allow them to operate in Malaya – and it was Malaya then not Malaysia – in armoured cars.

Cavalry sort of thing, yes. They were Daimler armoured cars.

When I used to write to my family I’d say, “Yes, I command four Daimlers,” which sounded impressive but nobody took me very seriously.

Well! They were Second World War vehicles but they were reliable and we did our thing on the roads.

Absolutely! They played polo, would you believe? I didn’t of course. Not only did they play polo but young officers, of whom I was one, were expected when they were at regimental headquarters to do riding school at 6 o’clock in the morning. I’ve never liked getting up early in the morning and the thought of getting up and riding a horse was a source of very great concern, but they let me off by risking

goodness knows what when I said, “Oh, we Australians only ride bareback.” I’d never ridden a horse, but I said we only ride bareback, and that so offended the riding master, he excused me from riding. Had he accepted I don’t know what would’ve happened to me. At any rate, the youngsters had to do riding school at a place called Ipoh, in Malaya, and I slept in. That was very nice.

This was 1956. Malaya was one of the post World War II events of the dismantling of the Empire. The Communists exploited that as they were right throughout the whole of Asia very successfully, and a liberation group was established under Comrade Chin Peng

who had been leading the anti-Japanese revolutionary movement, something like that, and the British had in fact been supplying him, as they had all the others, with weapons and equipment and so on. Came the end of the war and the capitulation of the Japanese, Chin Peng and his boys didn’t hand any of their kit in, and they maintained their army and it was called the Malayan Peoples Liberation Army and they lived in the jungle.

Britain was trying to sort of hand over authority – I think with a little bit of reluctance and nevertheless, hand over authority to the Malays, and the Malays were saying, or at least the British government were saying the Malays were saying, that we need to stamp out this insurgency because the Malayan Peoples Liberation Army were saying, “We’re going to liberate Malaya from the evil toils of the Empire,”

and presumably they would set up government. Well the vast majority of Malays were opposed to that so Britain deployed forces throughout Malaya to stamp out the insurgency, and I use the world insurgency because legally that’s what it was, and there were a whole lot of rules that we had to apply because it was not a war governed by the rules of war. Our particular role

was to support the infantry and do whatever we could do – it was a very fluid sort of thing – and that meant we went and protected villages, or we fired into the jungle on pre-determined targets or in some cases – I went on these – we deployed people on foot. So they weren’t in their cavalry role. We got together and pretended we were infantry and we dived off into the jungle. So that’s what I was caught

up in, patrolling roads, guarding villages and escorting food convoys all of which the Communist terrorists were seeking to attack, and they did, sometimes successfully and other times unsuccessfully.

That’s a very fair description of it. We didn’t have that term in those days. The

phrase used was probably counter – insurgency, but yes, you’re quite correct, and that’s the term that we’d use today which meant you could go days and days buzzing around and achieving nothing, and then a spectacular sort of contact in which we were generally significantly the victor, success. But the most testing one was to look after the villagers and

the British strategy was to create protected villages – they’d put a fence around the village and brought them all in together. Everyone had to be home from the paddy fields by a particular time, by the curfew time, and we the security forces undertook to protect them from reprisals from the terrorists. So though low in intensity it was demand of man power.

You’d spend lots of time guarding and not making contact with the enemy, whereas in Vietnam the strategy went from the strategic hamlet strategy to go out and find the enemy. Search and destroy was the dreadful phrase that was used but that was very graphically accurate – find them, destroy them – whereas we tended to protect our villagers and if the Communist terrorists

came to us then we would destroy them.

To put it politely.

That’s a good historical question. Yes it could well have been. It’s remarkable isn’t it. We have these

neutral terms or even these pejorative terms to make sure that no-one is in any question who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. We were always security forces – there’s a nice phrase that isn’t it? They were CTs, Communist terrorists. I don’t think we used the term insurgent which later became more popular, but just CT, Communist terrorist. We would have reports on the CTs.

The awful, “Well how many did you kill today?” which emerged from Vietnam body counts fortunately hadn’t emerged in my time, which was probably a good thing because my own regiment’s success during my time there if you can call success a body and I’m not saying that is, was only about three I think. Then when we got to Vietnam everything seemed to revolve around, “How many bodies today?” which is

awful, and I must say I have great philosophical opposition to that. If that’s the way you measure success no wonder we’ve courted failure so spectacularly. I think we were right in Malaya – we were there to protect the people.

Oh you’ve done your research – that’s quite right. He was

killed on the road going up to the mountains, to the Cameron Highlands. I should remember because I’ve actually patrolled that road, but that’s quite right. And that was probably the most spectacular kill that the terrorists had. We all tried terribly hard to bring that group to account,

and certainly our regiment didn’t achieve anything. The Australians chased some of those and did reasonably well and the Ghurkhas [Nepalese Regiment of British Army] spent their whole time chasing that particular group. Speaking technically, it was a well designed ambush and we learnt a lot of lessons from that. That was classical ambush technique and became the impetus as to how we should counter that for many years,

almost until we went to Vietnam.

In relative terms, yes it was because though we talked about CT [communist terrorist] platoons – 38 Platoon was the one that I was involved in chasing – the platoon may not have had more than 12 people. I think this particular ambush might’ve had two platoons and I can’t recall now what that

number would be but they would have impressed some other labour, possibly unwilling, to dig pits or whatever. But it was the technique that was good. My memory is that they stopped the lead vehicle because the man was in a car I think and not an armoured vehicle, and they dropped a tree behind so they isolated the target and this was the

technique, and then used their resources to fire on that. Looking at it technically, well designed given they had limited resources, and nothing like the extent of the ambushes that could be conducted in Vietnam where they could have been so regimental strength, which means the VC [Viet Cong] or the North Vietnamese army could have deployed 600, 800 people in

an ambush. The French experienced the same thing.

Yes, but it was the same technique.

No. You will wonder when people look at this later. I flew Qantas

and that’s in fact how I went to Vietnam. I went by train from Victoria to Sydney – I think it was my first visit to Sydney – and then I flew out from Sydney, quite a torturous trip. It was the Super Constellation, the plane in those days, and we got to Darwin and we all got out there and had a shower and breakfast, and then

to, it might have been Jakarta though I can’t recall ,and then to Singapore. At Singapore I was received at the reception base at Nee Soon, not far from Changi and then the first-class train in what was called ‘The Cooler’ because the European carriage had air-conditioning, the others didn’t. I wound my way up

to Central Malaya, to Ipoh, where I was received by the adjutant in dress blues. It’s an an interesting war isn’t it, and I was taken to the regimental headquarters, so that’s how I got to the 15/19th, by Qantas. We did fly first class, that’s right. The officers flew first class – there were 3 officers and 3 NCOs, and the NCOs were down the back of the plane.

Wonderful distinction. That first class junket stopped later on in my career.

Enormously. You couldn’t possibly get a commission in the 15/19th unless you went to Winchester or – there was another school. They were sort of feeder schools to the regiment,

and apart from the National Service officers who were temporary gentlemen rather than real gentlemen, the officers all came from the very swish schools. It was just like the prefects room – the officers were like the prefects at their former schools, actually very nice people but this was the first time in my short

military career I had met officers of another country, and I knew immediately we were very different and that difference has been emphasised throughout my 30 years.

Oh absolutely. I mean it’s ridiculous in Australia, but this is very much the era of the Empire, 1956. It’s not many years after the end of the war,

1945, and these regiments had been going for some hundreds of years and this is how it’s always been done. This is the justification, but it didn’t necessarily make them a poor regiment.

Ah.. well you see I was an attachment, and so this criteria doesn’t apply to me. I was an Australian attachment, and I’d have to say that often I was introduced to other people with the

phrase, “I say, have you met our Orstralian?” and they’d come and look at me wondering if I had four arms and six legs. I was different and I was clearly strange and I was an object of considerable curiosity, less so with the soldiers, but certainly amongst the officers.

In fact I was at a dinner in England with the regiment not too many years ago, and someone actually addressed me as a

colonial, and I confess that I said…I won’t tell you what I said, but I thought he was a pompous ass and I told him so. I was delighted that the lady who was a titled lady who was my escort said, “Oh good on you, Dickie. That’s telling him.” It somewhat got up my

nose, as they say, but I enjoyed my time with them, and professionally it was very rewarding and I had great respect for my squadron commander. He is quite ill in England at the moment and in a few weeks time I’m going to see him, going over to the UK. His name happens to be Fraser which is my mother’s name, and Fraser is a Scottish clan so it gives us a cultural affinity, even if

I didn’t go to the same school as he did.

Ipoh was the regimental headquarters which is about the middle of Malaya, and our area of responsibility extended slightly south of

Ipoh to a place called Sungai Seaport which is a little village, all the way north to the Thai border, so that was very extensive. I was appointed as a troop leader and therefore all my soldiers were British soldiers. They were mainly Geordies which is an English name for soldiers recruited in the north of England and into the southern part of

Scotland – very very tough soldiers. My role as a troop leader was to patrol roads, to visit villages and they were looking after you to camp out around a village at night, and every now and again to fire on targets in the jungle from roads, and because I volunteered for it to lead foot patrols into the jungle hoping to find

CT supply lines or dumps. I have to say we failed in both but I did shoot a rubber tree stone dead but no-one thanked me for that.

Oh absolutely and indeed I had the privilege of the brigadier of our brigade – because I had to report this and I was still in the field and he visited me next day and he gave me a lecture, that I had been

invited from Australia to come and help protect the Malays, and here I was single- handedly trying to destroy their economy, which I thought was a bit harsh. But I had become more accepting of criticism at this stage of my career and said, “Yes sir, I’m frightfully sorry,” but the soldiers thought it was hysterical and for the rest of my time in Malaya they would speak of their Orstralian troop leader who shot dead a rubber tree.

I had to live with that and hope that my superiors in Australia never head about it.

Yes, relatively speaking there was quite a bit of activity but it was – how shall I put it – it was of

nuisance value to the CT's because after all they deployed an enormous amount of Malay and British and Australian soldiers all running around after them, so as far as they were concerned it was particularly cost-effective, but again it’s this ‘how do you measure success’ and it’s so facile in my view to measure success in the number of people you’ve killed. There are far more important things than that, and therefore I think the intensity of our

operations you could measure by the time we were out on the road – the time we were doing things and not sitting at home – and the fact that nothing bad had happened during that time. I think we could claim moderate success, but this is the boring element of war, you’re going around all the time.

Oh most

certainly and particularly my squadron commander considered that absolutely essential and he would attend what was called morning prayers which was a meeting with all the civil authorities at 9 o’clock each day, just to see how we were going together – what the villagers were saying about us, how we could assist in any way that the local authorities asked us. Yes, that was a very responsible way for them to perform and I was very pleased to learn about that because we’d had none of that experience in Australia, and that was of course the reason I’d been sent there, to get that experience.

The daily routine was very regimented and very regimental for the short time that I was there and this was quite deliberate – it was to permit me to get to know the regiment and its whole scene of operation. I stayed at Ipoh. Ipoh is quite a large

city by Malay standards and it’s the capital of Perak. There would be all sorts of formalities that you would have to observe – calling on the commanding officer and being told a bit about the regiment, being introduced to mess customs which would you believe would involve if you were in Ipoh, afternoon tea of cucumber sandwiches and

tea in the afternoon. Obviously this wasn’t during operations but at the regimental headquarters you’d do that. The evenings – all dinners you dressed for dinner, and the appropriate dress for us there in Malaya was our blue’s trousers, shiny boots, soft dress shirt and a white jacket with badges

and the like. Once a month if you happened to be in Ipoh you would attend a regimental dining-in night which follows very strict protocol, the order of courses and the things you eat and the sort of conversation you can conduct, after which you would go to the games room and for an Australian officer it was

fascinating to see how English officers played games. We play some fairly rough ones in Australia, like ‘Carry the Mail’ which means it’s just an opportunity to beat half to death someone who is carrying a newspaper. But the English had their own form of madness and you would have rowing contests where you all sit in a row but instead of rowing in water you had to consume a large glass of beer

which I found very painful because I didn’t drink at all there, so I was allowed to drink ginger ale which has disastrous effects on your insides after you’ve consumed a number of those. But that was then, that was the fun evening, that’s what young gentlemen did, and that didn’t last very long. I was introduced to rugby – they were absolutely delighted I played rugby. That established me in the regiment more than my skills as a soldier, and I very

quickly became half-back for the regiment which I took great pride in. We played in the Salanga Cup which I think was open to all regiments throughout the whole of Malaya, though I was only in the northern sector. We got defeated in the semi- final, our regiment, but I did score a try and I was engaged at the time and I rushed around Ipoh buying up every English language

newspaper I could find to send home to my adoring fiancée. As none of the Carrick family played rugby it was all totally incomprehensible to them but she deduced that she should be proud of her fiancé and obligingly told me in a letter ‘very good’. I remember that as the most spectacular thing of my stay at Ipoh. But then things got serious – that only lasted I think about ten days. After being measured for my tailored greens,

I mean gentlemen wouldn’t go into the jungle with untailored greens would you believe so I had all my greens handmade for me – and went to a place called Coolum which was just a tiny little village, and there things did get serious. We got briefed on where the terrorists were, or where we hoped they were, and drilled in our procedures, our radio procedures, our deployment procedures and most particularly

in anti-ambush roles, because that’s what we expected most. The daily procedure, unless there was some special operation on, would be up about 6 o’clock in the morning perhaps sometimes a little earlier, first parade with your troops and vehicles and saw how they all were, whether any of them were sick, vehicles all maintained.

Then you’d go for a briefing to see what the day’s affairs would be, and normally it would be my troop as for the others that we would go out of our little camp some in the morning and meet a convoy of food vehicles from the village. So I suppose any time between 8 o’clock and 11 o’clock we’d go to an assembly area. It reminded me very much of the stories my godfather used to tell me when

he was escorting convoys in the north Atlantic, just getting everybody organised so you’d mill around because we didn’t speak Malay, to have the merchants get their trucks in line and see that they were properly tied up, and then we’d find the head man and introduce ourselves and ask them if they would be so kind as to do the following things if shots

were fired. Really you didn’t have much chance for that succeeding. They weren’t soldiers and if shots were fired they’d go anywhere to be out of the shots which is not quite what one would like. And then off we’d go, and we were in contact with the vehicles by radio which were one of the great advantages of being in Armour, and when we came to likely ambush areas where the ground came down close to

the side of a hill, we’d often deploy a vehicle forward, perhaps even dismount troops to see that things were okay. The thing was don’t stop the convoy so you’d have to put these forward so the convoy could keep moving. And if a truck broke down that was the thing that really worried you because you really had to leave someone with them rather than just let them go. On two or three occasions that I was escorting I had up to four trucks break down – I only had six

vehicles in my column, which was difficult to see how many you would take a risk with. I can’t remember what I actually did but I know I was terribly worried about vehicles dropping out, and then you’d get to the other end and they’d go off to the four corners of the earth to sell their products. We’d usually have another column to bring back. If not we might be deployed to do some speculative firing into an area of the jungle.

You could never fire just as the spirit moved you. You were bound by quite extraordinary rules. For example, if a fellow dressed as the peasants would be because rarely did the Cuts wear uniform – they did sometimes but rarely – if they emerged and had a rifle in their hand you couldn’t just shoot them. You were obliged to say, “Stop or I shoot,” three times,

and if they foolishly had done nothing to surrender at that stage you could fire to kill. The soldiers had their own way of overcoming that because you could be summoned before a magisterial court and there was always an enquiry when a CT was killed.

Yes, and the magistrate knowing full well what it all meant would say, “Trooper Brown, did you

say, “Stop or I shoot three times?” and Trooper Brown would say, “Yes sir, I said stop or I shoot three times.” What Trooper Brown said with his weapon levelled at the supposed CT was literally, “Stop or I shoot three times,” bang! So that overcame the difficulty of the legal constraints. I don’t recall us ever shooting someone in error that wasn’t a CT.

You would also have to have targets designated for the big guns, so that before you went out you knew that a particular piece of jungle accessible by fire from the road you could fire at. Once you got there if you were a prudent troop leader, you would do a scan of as much of the ground as you could to see that there were no rubber tappers in there, because obviously that’s not in the interest of anyone to frighten

or worse, to kill them, and once you were reasonably certain and had all the clearances from high up you would fire your fire mission and usually have no knowledge of whether you’d done any damage, and you had to rely on someone else to tell you some days later, yes you did get something. I can’t recall my troops ever having got anything but we made a lot of noise.

Indeed. We would work on reports and they usually were hopelessly out of date obviously. We would hear from the village that the Cuts had been using a particular track and the information might be they use this track three times a day, and so on the basis of that we might decide to fire a speculative fire mission at 4 minutes past 12, and the odd chance that that would

coincide with one of the three passages – well obviously the possibility of getting anyone like that was fairly remote. So that would be done and then you would go home and you’d go through a debriefing. You’d have to explain everything you did which was very painful for me because on one occasion, in addition to my rubber tree that I shot, I had an accidental discharge – it sounds rather vulgar but it’s a terribly

serious thing and that is you fire a shot by mistake, and that can happen a number of times. You can have a round in the breach and you can fiddle with the trigger which is just awful – it goes off. Or you can have what’s called a cook-off and the round’s in the machine gun and it is so hot, perhaps you’ve been firing, and the round will actually explode. The cartridge will explode in the breach and off it goes. Well I did discharge my shot. No-one was hurt thank goodness but of course

when I got home I had to acknowledge that there was an accidental discharge, and then all the paper that would have to be filled out, my regimental headquarters would have to be informed, the local policeman would have to be informed because he was a sector commander, and so on and so on. In due course I might be reprimanded if it had been very serious, and I wasn’t on this occasion so I escaped both with an accidental discharge

and a mortally wounded rubber tree on my conscience. But my soldiers were very protective of me. I’ve been very fortunate with that – they loved having an Australian – and our radio procedure was such that they would always have code words that they thought were Australian. I once told my troop sergeant, as Australians do, about kangaroosters. No such thing exists but it’s a sort of known Australian thing,

and he loved that, so kangarooster became code for all sorts of things, and it certainly confused other British listening in to our radio procedures, all these very strange words that we used. But I digress. That was a common day’s work, escorting. If a truck broke down you had to look after it. I was never ambushed so I didn’t have to deal with what happened to a couple of troops in our regiment. They actually had an engagement,

and then they would have to respond and they have to respond very quickly, and they have to minimise casualties to their own people.

Well basically the equipment was that which was provided to them when they were fighting the Japanese, so they had Bren guns, they had a Stirling

sub machine gun, they had pistols, they had quite a few grenades. The terrible Claymore mine hadn’t been invented then so we didn’t see that in an ambush, and I don’t recall them having rocket launchers. I don’t think that had come into the infantry. They did have explosives which they stole generally speaking. That’s how they got hold of those, and they might be used in an

ambush, but it was relatively close range automatic and semi-automatic fire and rifle shots. That’s why it had to be all over very quickly because we had clearly superior fire power and once we had located the enemy we had every means of destroying them.

Well, mainly by isolating

them. This was their practice and they could do that a number of ways. They might try and isolate an armoured vehicle by firing at a softer vehicle, one of the trucks, and immobilising that and setting it on fire and as the roads were narrow the armoured vehicle possibly couldn’t get passed it and take part in the rest of the ambush, so that was one way. Or they could isolate it by dropping a tree both in front and behind the armoured

vehicle. In my view and experience that was never terribly successful because the bigger armoured vehicles could run over the tree – they just ran at it. But that was isolating the armoured vehicle because there was no way they could take it on. The best they could do there was an armoured personnel carrier called a Saracen, and this was a standard practice. The Saracen had double doors at the back, and they’d open up and the troops, the support

troopers would come out of that. They would try and halt or cause the Saracen to halt to de-bus the troops and they would sight a machine gun in such a way to fire into the open APC [Armoured Personnel Carrier], so we had to devise procedures to try and guard the troops as they were coming out. That’s when they are at their most vulnerable, and in our regiment what we tended to do if the word was we were going to deploy the

troops, the Saracen would very quickly turn sideways because normally you’d fire down the road so that you’d disgorge the troops straight into the edge of the jungle and that was the procedure that my troops and my squadron practised. Otherwise they could fire at the Saracen itself or the Daimler or the Ferret and it would do no damage, none to speak of.

Yes. In fact on that same road that we spoke of earlier going up to the Cameron Highlands, yes there were a couple of very successful ambushes there as far as the Cuts were concerned, very successful ambushes, and it also set on fire a jerry can on the outside of the vehicle and that caught fire and that added to the problem – it burnt out the vehicle and there were a number of solders

killed. We didn’t have any, during my time, casualties in the regiment from CT fire but we lost a vehicle over the side of a mountain road in a landslide. That occurred just after I arrived so the first funeral that I attended in operations was of our troopers who were killed in the landslide. But that’s no less

heavy on the heart of everyone when these could be young lads, probably national servicemen because the British had a lot of national servicemen in their regiments.

No, not territorial. That’s another group. The territorial are the equivalent of our reserve forces or the CMF [Citizens’ Militia Force] to use the old term. The national servicemen like our national service scheme in Vietnam, they were drafted for

two years and they would normally do one year in the United Kingdom and then they would be deployed for their final year, somewhere like Malaya. I had a couple of national servicemen in my troop.

No, it would have been almost the same as our National Service Act and provisions of the Act for Vietnam, not the earlier National Service Act –

the earlier National Service Act didn’t allow national servicemen to serve in operational areas, but they did something like three months. I think it might have been full time training, and then they transferred to the CMF, to the reserve and they saw out that two years as reservists, though that wasn’t the term that was used in those days. Now the Act was changed for Vietnam, and they were called up for two years

full time service and subject to various conditions in their second year. They went to Vietnam where they were shown to be extremely good soldiers.

No, I didn’t, and that was one of the

big differences between the two campaigns. One was an emergency where you could really separate emergency operations from others and the contrast was very very obvious in my regiment. Back in regimental headquarters in Ipoh there were never going to be any terrorists. You played polo, you played cards, you went to parties, you dressed up in your pretty uniforms and did all those things. Then you went off and did operations dressed in green in designated areas.

In Vietnam the area of operation was everywhere and so when you were wearing your white jacket and playing cards there was no such thing as the emergency. Then you put on your greens, you went into Area A and there you did your daily thing combating the emergency. Where I was in Vung Tau or Long Binh or Nui Dat which was the Australian military base, operations could be occurring at any time, the VC

could fire into your camp. So there was no area that you regarded as absolutely secure, although it’s really some areas that are more secure than others. But Malaya was almost a game. Again you’re in a neutral area and you go off and do your thing and then you come back to the secure area.

Well that’s a very good question. That’s very interesting because we’ve

discussed this regiment that I was attached to – very much the Empire, blue blood, long traditions. I must step with care here, but my British colleagues had clearly been brought up in the culture of the Empire and therefore they were the superior beings, and though they were here to help the Malays, they weren’t British and that attitude was very

very obvious. They were decent fellows but they clearly weren’t one of them, and I remember being quite shocked when an officer said to me when I asked to do a Malay language course. “You don’t want to learn that language. That’s most uncivilised.” So there was that remoteness, but I had started painting when I was in

Malaya, and so I liked to go out to the villages and paint the houses, and I had a natural sense that I don’t want to intrude in these people’s lives so I’d knock at the door and say, “Would you mind if I sat there and painted?” Some didn’t speak English and so I would have to indicate what I was after. Others did, and they were always very very gracious and some families invited me into their house. So this was the first time I was meeting people of a very distinctly different culture, and I

loved it and I’ve always had the softest spot for the Malays, because they were warm and they were friendly and they were simply lovely people and I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity. But I was looked upon with a little bit of suspicion by the regiment. That’s the Australian, he’s a bit odd. But I really liked doing it and I’d go as often as possible. There was one family that said, “If you’re passing my house come in and you’ll have some tea,” and I did. It was one

of the more rewarding experience of my time there.

Ah yes. The Indians lived in a separate community from the Malays because between the Malays and the Tamils there was also a tension, and I’d have to say between the Chinese, and the Malays and the Tamils there was tension which got quite out of hand and in New Year in 1956 there were terrible riots.

I didn’t see the Tamils – the only time I saw the Tamils was on operation because being the lower end of the social scale they did the unpleasant work. Rubber tapping is a very very unpleasant business, very smelly, and they didn’t talk to you. You might say hello but they generally wouldn’t acknowledge you. We were intimidating, we were in big vehicles, and soldiers. So I found I had nothing to do with them, not by choice

but that’s how it happened. And the Chinese, they’re in the big cities, they’re not out in the villages. The villages are all the Malays, the indigenous Malays, and I really didn’t see much of the Chinese other than my tailor shop was owned by a Chinese, though it was Tamils who were doing the making of the clothes, and of course I couldn’t speak to the workers but I could speak to number one man who was Chinese.

The business, yes. Well there were two sorts of areas where the Malay society was. There were the people working in the cities and I simply didn’t spend time there other than going through them on the way to somewhere else. The villagers, the strategic hamlets, they were all indigenous Malay. They worked in the food production line so that’s where they were, and the Tamils were employed by

the Malays in many cases to work the rubber plantations of which there were an enormous amount. Each had their sort of niche in the society.

I didn’t personally but they did exist of course. The Tamils were sometimes impressed into service

not from any philosophical interest but I’m either going to get shot if I don’t carry it, and if I do carry it all will be well. I don’t recall from reports and certainly not from experience in my regiment of ever capturing any terrorists wearing their uniform and their badge who were Indians and certainly not Malays. The Malays loathed them. There was no question there – they were quite unequivocal

about that. They were no help to the country, they weren’t in their views real Malays at all. This is how societies have their tensions, and they resented their success and their economical advantages that they exercised in commerce and business. There were clubs that the Chinese owned exclusively and didn’t admit Malays

and they’re all citizens of Malaya so there was that tension too. Always sad when you see that sort of thing, but we do it ourselves don’t we in our society to an extent.

Yes they had.

There were a sprinkling amongst the senior ranks who had actually served in the Second World War. My squadron commander had been a young troop leader in the Second World War. Yes some would have been in the Mau Mau activities, yes. Some would have been in Palestine. I’m trying to think of the ribbons but that’s a bit confusing because

with typical British understatement the general service ribbon tended to cover just about everything, and that’s why it’s called a general service so you could have India’s North-West frontier, you have Palestine and Malaya with all the general service ribbons, so you couldn’t necessarily tell. But yes, in the regiment there would have been a solid sprinkling of experience in other areas of conflict in the

Empire.

I would have to say I was not conscious of that at all. We tend rarely to speak about experience

and I got the impression but that might have been because of my very narrow experience, that we weren’t bringing lessons from anywhere at all. We were creating a mode of operation which by and large was very successful there in Malaya and I don’t recall ever talking even with the officers with this experience, what they did in Europe or what they did in India. I don’t remember them even talking about

staff college because a lot of British officers went to Quetta in India, the staff college. I don’t remember them talking about that, so we talked about polo, we talked about parties and we talked about what we did in Malay and that appeared to be our world. I hadn’t thought of that before you raised that question.

Oh definitely. They were possibly the most experienced soldiers in the campaign, but they didn’t have the resources. Yes, they had been fighting the toughest form of war which is the unconventional war since ’43 and they had wide experience. No wonder they were good at ambushes

and the things that they were able to mount. Having become very interested in the study of history, I would love to have been able to speak to a captured CT, but I never in fact ever met one. I saw a dead one, but I was never able to speak to them, and they probably couldn’t speak English anyway.

That’s testing my memory a bit, but I would think probably no more than…less than a dozen. On the scale of Vietnam, very small isn’t it? I don’t know whether they suffered any after I left. I suspect not so in their whole period in Malaya, twelve. The infantry battalions

would have suffered more but I don’t know what the British figures were. The Australian figures are readily available and they were quite small. We are remarkably good in minimising casualties – we’re very careful about calculating risk which is I think one of the admirable qualities of how we go about prosecuting our wars. We really do become extremely concerned, some say over-cautious,

about personnel casualties. Miserly. It’s a good thing.

I think very properly – and I thoroughly support this notion – very properly on the basis of to what extent we had minimised the

achievement of the CTs, and we would count villagers that had not been intimidated, individuals that had not been shot, Tamils who had not been kidnapped and impressed into service, the success of villagers to be able to go out at dawn each day to work in the fields and come back and to be able to do that each day – that was success. This notion of the body count didn’t exist at all then,

and I think that was a way, and my view as a former professional soldier is that by and large the British security operations in the emergency were overwhelmingly successful because they passed without bloodshed, power to Malaya as it was then, and they can’t claim that in too many other areas. It was nice to be

part of a successful operation.

Yes there is.

Yes there is, and it was the first time I was discovering the difficulty, because my training thus far had been very much on the European model, deploying tanks.

Well there was none of that in Malaya, and as you imply, who is the terrorist? You can see three friendly people in the paddy fields, wearing the garb of the local peasantry and you have no guarantee that those are people who are just as they looked, and that of course applied in a spectacular fashion in Vietnam. But you could never be quite sure and under the terms

of the emergency you couldn’t just arrest on suspicion. In fact for females there was a particular, and rightly so, protection for them that we had to find a female policewoman if we wanted to conduct a search, and searching of suspects of course was a very significant part of our operation. We used to try and get a female constable to accompany us on operations but

not surprisingly she said she didn’t want that and so we’d have to call her.

Well nice of you to imply that. One would think that was so, but I would have to say in all honesty that when I went to Malaya I had had no

training in jungle warfare at all, but it was one of the benefits of me being sent to be attached to the British, that I came back still as a very young officer with the first post-World War II experience of jungle fighting albeit in a rather stylised fashion that I was with a cavalry regiment, and that gave me, I won’t say material

advantages, but it gave me the opportunity to be part of a growing sense of this is the area of our operations, and though I think we still had the Canungra jungle training centre there, it became a much more potent part of training schemes and continues to be, and so more and more people went to JTC, jungle training centre. Training was more and more in the hands of those who

had had jungle experiences, whereas previously we’d relied on experienced Second World War soldiers who had fought in New Guinea for our jungle experience, and things were changing, techniques were changing. The scope of operations of course in Malaya was totally different from conventional warfare in New Guinea. It was the beginning of a whole change of culture in the Australian army, and we’ve gone ahead I think in

quite spectacular fashion and we’re rightly regarded as being one of the world’s foremost exponents of jungle training now. Even the Americans admitted that. The first training teams that went to Vietnam were brought there because they had experience the Americans didn’t have.

Ah yes.

Oh it’s a horrible place, the jungle. I don’t think I had any romantic ideas about the jungle, but after my first foot patrol as distinct from just looking at it from a vehicle, I had formed the abiding conclusion which has never changed that it’s not an environment that’s very welcoming, and I have very vivid memories of things I didn’t like about the jungle. The light was eerie – the trees were

very tall and they cut out the light so you’ve got this pale greenish glow all around you. There were creep-crawlies in the jungle that don’t like you being there. I tried to imitate Tarzan at one stage getting across a small ditch and I held on to a vine which seemed reasonable under the circumstances. I’ve never done it since because there were millions of little ants

on the vine, and when I put my hand around the vine they considered my arm was the rest of the vine, and I had all these ants over me and they bit and I was feeling a very sorry young fellow. And leeches – I must tell you about leeches because this will make someone ill when they’re watching this. Leeches are quite the most revolting things. I know of no soldier who endures a leech and says, “Oh it’s a mere nothing.” To start with they’re a

…they appear in large numbers so you can rarely say in the Malayan jungle or in the Vietnam jungle, “Oh, one leech.” You open your shirt and there’s dozens of them hanging off you. Now they start off little itty bitty things like that but after they have supped upon you for a while, they’re as thick as your thumb and as long, and though you’re not conscious of

any pain or anything like that, the mere look of them is just quite quite awful. The traditional soldier’s way of dislodging a leech is you take a cigarette and you puff it up and you stick it on the tail of the leech, which I presume is uncomfortable, and the leech detaches itself. Otherwise as you move around and you squash them, you find your shirt soaked with blood and after a while you can be quite wearied by

the loss of blood, and I just really don’t respond well to the invasion of leeches.

Yes, yes indeed. I hope you’re not speaking from experience. It was another part of a young isolated man learning about other facts of life, and

I’m sure I can say this in this interview. I found a use for the condom which was most effective, and I didn’t embarrass anyone because everybody knew that that was what you do, so when I told my wife years later, “Oh yes, I used to carry a packet of condoms in my pocket,” it was in fact in the jungle, and yes you would put certain bits and pieces in there, and that at least

gave you the confidence that there were some spots that you could be pretty certain that the leech won’t be, and for me that was awfully important I’d have to say, it really was.

Yes. The thought is probably worse than the fact, yes, really really terrible.

Well you see you’re picking my age. In my youth most significantly. Soldiers of my generation would all have read Liddell Hart. They would have been schooled in his technique of analysis, and of course nowadays a new batch of historians are sometimes quite critical of Liddle Hart’s approach. Now I can’t change my spots all that much. I find his

analysis very good, and yes he influenced our way of thinking very much in my youth. I think we probably were still talking about him at staff college but not quite as much, but he was an historian of and an analyst of a war that we haven’t fought for some time, and so there needs to be other forms and other people now. But there’s no doubt he had a

sharp eye and he influenced the professional approach of many young officers and I would certainly count myself amongst those. I guess I tried to write papers at staff college the way Liddell Hart might have written them, but if I was at staff college now I almost certainly wouldn’t, because there are different things to contend with and different weightings on different consequences and we hopefully will never fight again the sort of war

with the sort of industrial complex available to all other members of the coalition other than America, though their resources are finite – no one in America I think realises that yet – but they are. I guess at the time of the Empire they thought their resources were inexhaustible. Churchill certainly didn’t. He thought it would be a close-run thing, but it’s

part of the American character that they cannot see any limit to their economic power, and their policies of colonialism though they would object to me calling them colonialists, but they are in the same way.

Yes

Because their culture is built on, “We revolted from colonial impositions.

We are the antithesis of colonial power,” and yet goodness me they colonised both culturally and militarily the Philippines and one could go all around the world.

Of course. I was going to say, “But that’s their problem, not ours,” but in a way because of the contracting nature of the world, it’s the old thing, America sneezes, we catch pneumonia.

It’s up to the politicians not the soldier and the ex-soldier to formulate how we will cope with that but it should worry any thinking person.

Yes, it was the…I can’t remember the name of the man who proposed this scheme. At any rate it was this, that the villages would be contracted from their general sprawl into controllable areas, and it has a little bit of bearing on how the French tried to conduct things in Vietnam

in the early days. A fence was actually put around the village, the head man’s authority was recognised by the security forces so you didn’t enter the village without his permission, but the wire was to keep the people in and safe and keep the bad guys out, and the role of the security forces was to support that. So you always acknowledge the head man, and

you always consulted him when you were deploying your forces outside the village around the fence, and the description I gave of our activities was very much part of that, the passage of food from one village to another or to the marketplace was escorted and protected by us. Even my regiment would do night patrols around a village, because the theory, in fact the fact I suppose, was

anybody moving around after curfew outside the village was a bad guy. You still had conditions, obviously, as to whether you could fire or not and it was a real test of your map- reading. I was caught up on this on one occasion. Even if you got clearance to fire, you can’t fire if you know the range of the weapon that you’re firing is going to put in danger a village somewhere else, and I actually saw some CTs

one evening. Everybody else was back in their village, and I was by luck in a wonderful position on the top of a ridge and looking across a paddy field. There were four CTs in their uniform, red stars on their hat, and I couldn’t fire because there was a rubber plantation worker’s camp in the direct line of fire about a thousand metres away, and there was a danger that if I’d fired

the big guns of my heavy support vehicles, that they would have been in danger so you can imagine the young man wanting to do his job. I couldn’t fire. I informed my superior headquarters of the problem, and as it happened the Australians were deployed some miles away to come and chase them and when they finally got out of camp they had disappeared. In fact they’d got on a boat in the local river

and had gone off in that, and there was a spotter aircraft swanning around looking for them, and saw them in the boat, and I don’t know the full story but I know what he did. Obviously a spotter aircraft doesn’t have machine guns or anything clever like that on, and so he came down low and fired his Very pistol which is the pistol that fires a flare, at the boat and he missed on two passes and then the boat pulled under the trees and the CTs got away.

But we had something close on 10,000 troops deployed on that operation for these four CTs, and my troop found a boot. We’re not quite sure why, but he had taken a boot off and sniffer dogs came and sniffed at it and told us what we all knew – someone with smelly feet had been in it and so on, and nothing happened. But that’s part of the constriction that

you had on implementing this plan which is still a good one, and you look at the number of villagers that were abducted or beaten up or an operation mounted against their village – that was really very small. The only areas of success for the CT apart from having deployed all these soldiers, was on ambushes. That was where they were good, and that’s what they put their efforts into as often as they could

without any really spectacular success, though knocking off the local governor was a feather in their cap. High Commissioner he was.

Yes, that’s very true and do I know of any connection between the two Chinese elements? No I know of none at all, and I think probably Chin Peng’s army in the field knew that they were going to make no headway with the urban Chinese, and so they didn’t attempt it, it would seem,

to penetrate the Chinese community in the built up areas simply because they weren’t interested. They were getting more support sometimes enforced, mostly enforced, from the countryside. They were going to make no headway in the city.

No, no. I think the Chinese in the city were, and I don’t want to be unfair to them, they were businessmen,

they recognised Malaya was going to be a real sovereign state, and in the terms of a democratic sovereign post-Empire state they were going to do well. The liberation movement meant absolutely nothing to them, nothing to them at all.

I’d have to say I don’t know.

I couldn’t comment and I haven’t really tried to study that because I’d never thought in terms of that. I think it’s a good question – since, because the two-China issue has become much more important to us politically and strategically, but at the time I didn’t think of that and I hadn’t till you raised it, thought about it.

No, no. In my regiment of the picture I’ve painted you would realise that we would not be interested in that at all. The only indigenous guides, and I had one when I did a foot patrol, was an Ebahm, the old headhunter, because they loved going off with the British soldiers.

They were extremely good navigators in the jungle, they were very very tough, and for some reason we recognised the value of them in the jungle. I would have literally been lost without my Ebahm guide, because you tend to go around in circles in thick jungle – well I did.

Of course, yes, this was all on foot. I was very good navigating on the road. I had a Shell map, no problem at all. Just count the milestones.

Yes I did. The regiment –

I doubt whether they’d have let one of the British officers go, but because I was odd, I was Australian. I think they thought they would indulge me, and I spent I think it might have been six weeks in Singapore – then part of Malaya – which was a lovely rest from the field of operations and I enjoyed learning Malay. It was a British army run course, they were all bilingual, they were all national servicemen that had studied

Malay in a former occupation, and it was just nice having a bath every night and having pleasant meals in congenial surroundings, and we worked fairly hard. I very quickly lost my Malay speaking skills unfortunately because it wasn’t a fashionable thing as it later became to study Indonesian in Australian school, but at the time I didn’t have anybody I could speak to and I didn’t

take the trouble to get a Malay newspaper to read, so within a year of coming back I had lost any competence in the language. But I was able to speak to some of the villagers and particularly to the local policeman with whom we had to cooperate, and they very quickly would recognise me and come to speak to me rather than try and talk to some of my British colleagues who would probably shout at him

which he objected to naturally enough. That was a broadening experience and one which was very good for a young man meeting another culture so early in his life.

Yes, and that is always, even in Vietnam, the most delicate one and it’s the one most open to abuse, and even when you’re trying to do the right thing you can have some mischievous words exchanged or you can have a complaint when you had no intent to

embarrass them, and that’s why we had to be so careful of having the female constable with us. In fact in the latter part of my tour there we actually had to carry hessian screens in the Saracen, and if we were going to do a stop and search usually as they were coming back into the village because it was thought they might bring weapons to hide, or when they were going out in the morning, we thought they

might be taking food out to give to the CTs, so you do a stop and search. And we’d have to erect these hessian screens providing we could get a female constable, and the women would go behind the screens and they would get a pat down search. Quite properly we weren’t allowed to touch the women, so yes there is that degree of sensitivity, and it’s a bit like poor unfortunate school teachers these days – they don’t touch a child

even in the most supportive and affectionate way, lest that child says, “Oh, a teacher treated me inappropriately,” because you’re immediately on the defensive. I’d have to say my British soldiers were schooled very very carefully, and we attended briefings frequently on this. We are here to look after these people, treat them with respect and don’t cross these boundaries. It didn’t stop it happening at times

but it was good to see that being imposed, and that’s a lesson that was very much part of our training back in Australia, and I can recall many occasions when I had to come and give talks on this – respect for the indigenous people. We’re there to help. This is quite foreign to our previous training, changing the mindset. Some of the more gung-ho would be saying, “Oh, why do we have to be careful?”

But it became a matter of both practice and requirement to treat people respectfully. Again I say it doesn’t stop abuses from occurring, but at least we were changing from that notion of war in Europe to the new war, if I could use that term, in Asia.

Yes, in my experience they were. The prizes were less frequent than in Vietnam. A successful cordon and search in Vietnam might reveal a cache of dozens of weapons and even a VC soldier. Rarely would you get that sort of thing, but on the odd occasion you would find

suspicious papers because they all had to carry an ID [identity] card which of course is very new to us in a democracy like Australia. So you could always ask for the card because you don’t have to search, and sometimes they would have a card that didn’t appear right or they’d have two cards. Now we didn’t deal with that. We had to arrest, we had to call the police and the police would take them away and

I don’t really know what happened after that. But if those papers were genuinely false for devious reasons, then yes we were quite successful because my troop picked up a number of these dodgy documents. We picked up quantities of rice being carried which was beyond that which was permissible to carry, and that would be an indication it was being carried for ill purpose to give to a

CT, again perhaps not willingly but the threat, “Your child will be shot,” or, “You will be shot,” and so they would be arrested, though I don’t think food did get out from the strategic hamlets to the terrorists, which put pressure on the terrorists to get their food, which means we were really succeeding.

The terrorist was the CT, the

Communist terrorist. Strictly speaking he was a member of the Malay Peoples’ Liberation Army, but we certainly used the term CT. The terrorist was someone who put himself outside the ordered society. He was in revolt against the government and he was targeting the infrastructure. I suppose in more formal days we would have spoken simply of the enemy, but CT was the accepted term.

Yes it is. Well it is and it isn’t. It probably springs from the same root principles. You’re in revolt against authorised and legal authority and it’s simply the means that are changing, so probably the principle is the same. They have put themselves outside the structure of the system

for good reason or bad – I’m not making a judgement on that – and having done that, then they’re therefore someone that’s got to be exterminated or converted. The easy one is to exterminate, the more difficult one is again that awful phrase that emerged from Vietnam, winning the hearts and minds, WHAM. The Americans were always talking about WHAM, winning the hearts and minds. It’s an extremely

difficult thing to do, and we talk about why don’t we learn from history. Well we have current examples – winning the hearts and minds is important and we haven’t learnt that yet, though I think the Australians by and large have learnt that, to their advantage and the peoples’ advantage, better than some of our partners. Absolutely fundamental. You cannot beat philosophical revolution without winning the hearts and minds.

It doesn’t matter how many bombs you’ve got.

Of course. Absolutely. They never had a chance, because they never had the hearts and minds of the people they claimed they were serving. Even Mao [Zedong] himself would say you can’t win – it was his

revolution, structured along his lines, and they couldn’t achieve what Mao said should be achieved so they had Buckley’s chance [no chance]. The best they could do would be a significant economic and strategic nuisance, and they were. Look at all those troops, and the confining of the population and those impositions, restriction of rights. All that they could say, “That’s a success.” Paradoxically the revolutionary feels that if you kill

the other person you will impose some sort of change, even if that person is allegedly one of your own. One of the most awful things any soldier will come back from Vietnam remembering, are the civilians in a bus that were blown up by the VC. These are Vietnamese. We didn’t do that, but in some perverted way the VC are saying, “We’re winning because we’re showing everybody what we can do.”

That’s a hideous way of going – terror is in the revolutionary view a legitimate weapon of war. It doesn’t matter to whom you demonstrate the terror. The terror is the thing. That’s why all soldiers who’ve had any practice in the art of profession of arms, find war abhorrent, because however you apply whatever force you’re called upon to do, people die,

and a soldier doesn’t accept that any more readily than a civilian does, whatever we may say at the time.

Of course.

Well in Malaya they simply didn’t have enough chance, but there were the odd merchants driving their trucks caught in an ambush, and if we use the awful language of today

they would regard those as collateral damage, so you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. But it was really, on the scale of things nowadays, miniscule, and yet we were working very hard to make that small number even smaller. That was what we did as security forces in the emergency, at great economic cost and strategic cost but not

the cost of lives.

I would have to admit I did by mistake. I went down a particular road in the north, my map reading was not as good as it might have been and there was not a border post actually on the border – it was about two miles further in, and I don’t know who was more startled when I came round the corner in my lead

vehicle and there was a Thai policeman. Even I recognised that he wasn’t Malay – the Thais look a little different – and I think we were both saying, “Who the hell are you?” And I very quickly realised that I was where I should not have been. It’s marvellous how your mind works. Immediately I thought, “Oh, this is not a career move that’s going to do me any good,” so I was frightfully apologetic and while the soldiers were rolling around with laughter we got

our vehicles turned around and I retreated to Malaya. The Thai police waved, but that was Richard Hall’s unwitting invasion of Thailand.

Just short of 12

months.

No not operationally. I’ve got to wear two hats, the human hat and the clinical soldier. No it was worth every moment of it operationally because, I realised I was learning things yet to be learnt back in Australia particularly from an armoured perspective. We had not had

any armoured people deployed overseas apart from the two in Korea since the Second World War, so that was very rewarding and I would have happily stayed with the regiment longer from that point of view. But I was engaged – I got engaged just before I left to go to Malaya, and I was obviously anxious to go home and get married,

so there was a slight conflict there. In any event my Australian authorities were quite unequivocal as to when I would come home, because interestingly had it been 12 months or longer I would have qualified for different sorts of entitlements and the like, and I couldn’t exceed 12 months from that point of view so I came home perfectly happy with my experience and

about to embrace marriage. That was very suitable. A soldier must also consider they do have a private and domestic life so sometimes you have to subordinate it to the requirements. It was very nice to get home, but I don’t regret the time – I thought it was wonderful, and I think I was probably a better – informed soldier, at least for a while, after I came back from there.

Ah yes. Because this was classed as war service you get more than the peace time leave entitlement, so my memory was that having been processed back in Sydney – I came back through Sydney – I probably went off on leave

for about six weeks I would think, and that wouldn’t have been my whole leave entitlement because I would have got home in April I think, and I got married in July, so I went off on leave again in July, and I would have been a residue of leave. The same sort of thing happened when I came back from Vietnam. I had quite a lot of leave accrued which you

tend to need after experiences like that, not that I’m saying mine was very taxing but it is nice to reacquaint yourself with what home is like.

Yes. After Malaya I can’t think what my first appointment would have been,

but yes they gather and become more of your life and you do a little less regimental training. I was still doing some regimental work, because I established the squadron, a new cavalry squadron. Of course that was the thing I’d been practising in Malaya so I was an obvious person to be associated with the formation

of the new cavalry squadron, and that kept me in Puckapunyal. That was 4th/19 Prince of Wales Light Horse which was a reserve unit, but under the organisation of the army at the time…many reserve units had a regular squadron attached to them, and we formed this regular squadron, and that squadron later became 1st Cavalry Regiment that went to Vietnam – not with me – I’d gone on to do other things.

We prepared that squadron to go to Vietnam, and that’s moving me up slowing towards going to Staff College which is the next critical phase in my professional preparation.

Well I would have gone to captain and then temporary major. In fact I went to Staff College as a temporary major which meant I think I was probably two years ahead of rank and that was

about the normal thing. Staff College is normally full of young majors or recently temporarily appointed majors, because Staff College is for training for Grade 2 staff officers, which is major, so you’d expect to come out of Staff College as a qualified staff officer – that’s what it is for, and for future command appointments. I happened to do

reasonably well at Staff College and I was offered a couple of appointments and I chose the teaching one which I always liked, and that was at the Royal Military College, so I went straight from Staff College to the Royal Military College here in Canberra. That really sort of brought to a close my regimental training and from then on I was a staff officer

until I retired.

Endlessly!

Yes, yes. Interesting – well I don’t know if it’s interesting or not – but my thesis was on the military in society, how it is affected by society around it.

That the army

culture has been up to then too isolationist, and it needed to integrate better with society and, modestly, I think I was probably right because now instead of living in these enclosures, now you find the military people are distributed in society and I think that’s much healthier.

Yes, and Duntroon was really a socially closed camp. It was surrounded by Canberra but it was not of Canberra, but now it’s very much part of Canberra and I think that’s a step in the right direction though I don’t think our influence did. I think the comments I was making in my thesis were valid, that for some quite good reasons but often with less than good consequences, we had been inward- looking. We had established our

own rules and ethics and codes of behaviour, and were less concerned as to the extent they really represented to society, and yet it was from the society that we had come to be a soldier and it was important to remember that.

Yes. Well it sounds grander than in fact it was. The appointment I had then was the last of this title – it was called brigade major. Brigade major is the senior staff officer for the commander of the brigade, and the brigade was in fact that organisation or that

headquarters in Puckapunyal that sent off a series of battalions to Vietnam, and we had, amongst others, 7th Battalion – I had most to do with that – so I really didn’t have any responsibility for training them in their professional infantry work – that was the responsibility of infantry – but my role was to get their paperwork straight, get their medicals done,

that their various tests had been completed, their movement orders ready, and arranged the transport from Puckapunyal to some place which was normally Sydney from whence they would go, so I didn’t train them and in fact Colonel Smith would have been most annoyed to think that I might have been given credit for training them, but I got them organised and I got them set up to go overseas. That was my role, and it had nothing to do with

the fact that I was an armoured corps officer. I was in fact then a staff officer and this is a whole new world regardless of your corps affiliations.

I don’t have a very good memory of that, that is I don’t have a social memory of that. I have a very clear military one. Here

was a commitment. Here was a call upon all the things we had learnt as an army, and it was the opportunity for people who’d been training in this post-European conflict to do their thing and be tested professionally, so I think by and large most military people whether they were the other ranks, the NCOs, senior and junior or the officers, looked forward to the opportunity to do

what they’d been trained to do. I think that was probably the prevailing attitude, with no possible sense that there was going to be a terrible social division not just in Australia but throughout the world, no notion of that at all, with another thing, and we were going to grasp this opportunity, so we probably went off quite cheerfully to do what we’d been trained to do.

The Dien Bien Phu operation itself was studied with great interest in Australia. It was even a subject of questions in the military history exams which was a formal exam we did in those days for promotion. We would do cloth model

exercises of Dien Bien Phu. The cadets at Duntroon would be taken through the operation – a fascinating operation. It was in fact a conventional war. It’s often spoken of as guerrilla war but it was a conventional operation, even with some tanks, very few but some tanks. So that had great interest, and in Australia I suppose it was only the military that knew where Dien Bien Phu was let alone where Vietnam

or Indochina was, so there was a greater military awareness than community awareness about these things, and we certainly didn’t go ill-prepared. I think the quality of our instructors in the first group and then the deployment of the battle group were highly skilled mentally and physically and tactically.

Oh very much. In fact we were already looking at mistakes of the French, and the French will admit they made mistakes. There was a little bit of uncertainty I think when we

arrived. Would we try and build a model based on the successful Malayan one, and I think it was the French that invented the term the Ink Spot method, which is you drop a spot of ink on the map and it would spread and that was how the influence of pacification would occur, until finally all the ink would join together and that area was pacified. We defined pacification rather

in the same way as we did in Malaya, that we will have separated the enemy and their influence from the people of Vietnam, and the game would be won. I think though the Ink Spot method tended to hang on for quite a while and we had to modify within that and so we had one blot which was Nui Dat, the centre of Phuoc Tuy Province, and

from that we radiated our circles of influence and the theory was one day all of Phuoc Tuy Province would be pacified, that is the enemy’s influence in there would have been nullified. We didn’t entirely succeed but we went damn close, and closer perhaps than many other areas of Vietnam, but it couldn’t be sustained on our own, so when America withdrew we had to withdraw.

Yes. Once again another one of the many strange things about the war in Vietnam, we went by plane. We were established in Vietnam when I went so were doing what was

called reinforcements. Units themselves went by ship but individuals went by plane, so the Sydney was taking the battalions and the tank squadrons and the like, but I was going to a staff appointment so I went by plane. I went from Duntroon – that’s where I was on the staff there – and a staff car would you believe picked me up at my house at Vals Road

in Duntroon. It was quite early in the morning and though we hadn’t wished it, the kids all got up and they stood there and said goodbye to Dad and it was a bit tough, and I went off with my bag with a driver all dressed up. He drove me to Canberra Airport and I got a plane to a personnel depot in Sydney where I had my last medical check and that evening we went by bus out to

the international airport and filed aboard a Qantas aeroplane. The Qantas plane flew us direct to Tan Son Nhut. I don’t remember it but I read that many people remember this. The Qantas pilots had to cultivate a unique approach to Tan Son Nhut, which was to do a much steeper descent into Ton San Nhut than they would normally do into Mascot to avoid the

bad guys firing rockets and things. I don’t remember that particularly, but we arrived in polyester uniform because that’s the neat attire for people travelling, and got picked up by various agencies to take us to our spot. As one of the officers there I was exposed to the standard practice of arrival. I don’t know whether it was mid-morning or midday but at any rate

it was very hot. Saigon is stinking hot, and they drove me round and round through Saigon which is terribly polluted, and through the fish markets. The characteristic of Vietnamese cuisine, they make a thing called nookmarm which is a sauce. Nookmarm is made by placing a fish in a muslin bag and hanging it up in the sun until it disintegrates

and drips into a cup, and that which drips into the cup is nookmarm and you pour that over your rice, and the Vietnamese clearly think that’s very nice. I have never tasted it and never would, but the smell is a fascinating introduction to the country. So somewhat shaken by that experience I got on board the Wallaby Airlines, that famous airline – that was our Caribou squadron – and that flew me down to Vung Tau, and I think that was

a trip of an hour I would think, and that avoided driving down Route 1 I think it was, which was basically owned by the Viet Cong, so Wallaby Airlines was the way to go. As an aside – I’m very proud of this – my son was a flight commander in that same squadron many years later when he was in the airforce. At any rate, Wallaby Airlines delivered me to Vung Tau,

and because a Caribou doesn’t fly very low, I had my first chance to look out the back out the window at this country I’d come to for 12 months. It was the first time that I had seen what bombs do, and it’s interesting because I’d watched London burning and heard the crash and all those things. This was another aspect of bombing that I hadn’t been exposed to, and that was just the holes

as far as I could see anywhere out the aeroplane, these enormous craters. And two things struck me – one how big they were, and the other how indiscriminate it appeared to be. Where ever I looked there was a great hole in the ground and just in that short passage down to Vietnam that said volumes to me about what I was becoming involved in. Someone was making these holes and people live there,

and I guess that was quickly out of my mind because we landed at Vung Tau, and I was taken out to the Australian base which was in the sandhills. The Australian Logistics Support Group had just set up shop on the beach virtually and then moved in a bit. The high point of Vung Tau was where my bunker was, it wasn’t very high, and my bunker was where you were meant

to go if the bad guys shot at you which they rarely did. Otherwise I had a tin hut with a number of officers and I was in the middle and this was my staff. I had movement control people, I had supply people,

I think I had a radio and a radio operator, and my office with maps on the walls – this was to be the centre of things, and it was part of the way things were done. My successor, the logistic operations officer – I cant remember his name now – he was within 24 hours of going home and you couldn’t wait for your ‘reo’ – your reinforcement – to come because the moment

he was there you were gone. And I said, “Oh, we got a couple of days for briefing,” and he said something that you might translate as, “Well not really. I’m getting the hell out of here.” So my handover was basically, “There’s the cupboard, that’s where you make the tea, that’s Fred over there, and that’s the telephone, and I’m away,” and out he shot. And there I was with a little note

on my door saying ‘Logistic Operations Office.’ I hadn’t met my boss at that stage.

What does he actually do? Okay. It’s a fascinating word logistics. It’s the art, though some would claim it’s a science – I’ll stick with art – it’s the art of ensuring that everything the soldier needs to sustain him,

to move him, to protect him and to allow him to do his job effectively and safely, everything connected with those functions is logistics, which meant as I discovered more by just how it happened rather than a briefing, I had to see that he got all the ammunition he needed at the time that he needed at the place he needed it, his clothing, his food, his water,

his aeroplanes, the modes of delivery, and there was simply no excuse for those things not happening. You couldn’t be a bureaucrat and say, “No, you’ve exceeded your ration,” though that was said to me by an American once – “No, you can’t get any more flares. You’ve exceeded your monthly ration.” You couldn’t say, “Oh I’m too busy.” You couldn’t say, “This is a bloody

inconvenient time to ask for this item.” You couldn’t say as the Americans said to me sometimes, “Oh we don’t have that in stock. We’ll have to send to Australia.” You can say nothing other than, “Right. Onto it,” and that was the abiding challenge and the burden. No demand was unreasonable by definition and no excuse was acceptable

so think of trucks, think of food packs, think of parachuted things, think of water, think of aeroplanes, and my office was responsible for establishing it, where it was, tasking it, filling it up and delivering it and bringing it home, and often those things were in conflict. Someone wanted a helicopter at a fire support base to deliver food or water, but

someone else had wanted the helicopter as a gun ship. We didn’t have enough helicopters to have dedicated gun ships. They did whatever was necessary to be done, and again you couldn’t say, “Frightfully sorry chaps, he’s out rounding up cows,” or something, and that was my fear. Other soldiers you’ve spoken to had that fear that they were going to be killed, and a very real fear it was. They had the fear of the consequences of their actions if they shot the wrong person –

that’s a very very real fear as you would know, that lives with them forever and often impacted on the health and well-being of their lives long after they left Vietnam. My fear wasn’t that at all. I was only in danger probably twice. My fear was that some soldier would get hurt or be hungry or not get something and it was my fault, and I’ve been driven as a father to feel that way for my kids. They will,

perhaps incorrectly I’ll say, they will measure whether I was a good father. Did I father for them properly, and the whole time I was in Vietnam it really got to me at times. Is there going to be a soldier who will say, “You failed me,” and I couldn’t think of a worse thing to bear. As far as I know no-one said that, or if they did there wasn’t any substance. I mean you can always sling off at the logistics people and

that’s understandable, but that was the fear and it was constant, and there was never any relief for that, day or night. Things happened and if you’re going to aspire to that position the buck stops with you, and I couldn’t blame my captains or my lieutenants or the clerk or the radio. There were times during my 12 months there where I thought I’m not up to this. It’s a bit like the

athletes – it’s no good saying you’re not up to it, bloody well get on with it. This is not a boy’s game. This is the big time. I’m not saying it took the same toll on me as it did on an infantry commander or a battalion commander, but it was in my mind every moment and it presented a difficulty and I did have to take a break.

We all did, we all had that R&R, which is rest and recreation. I think it was five days, and I had agreed with my wife before we left I would not come home to Australia. Some of the soldiers did. We thought it would be too difficult for the kids and for us, and so in the calmness of the days before we went we said we’d go and I ended up going to Thailand for five days, where I worked on an archaeological dig for two

days up in Chang Mai, north of Thailand. But it was a great break from this and I left a very competent captain – he was so pleased to see me come back – to run things while I was away.

Yes.

It’s almost an obsession, not an obsession for perfection because that means you’re claiming you’ve got abilities that you know perfectly well that you haven’t got, but I was really worried in my heart that someone or some group would get into a mess and it was my fault and if it was my fault then all the training and the experience I had gathered

right from those times when I was a silly young boy, had been a waste of time and perhaps I should have gone to do something else. And then my rational mind would say well stop whingeing because you are there and you don’t have that choice any more, and you’ve just got to keep working at this. I’m not being a hero or making a heroic decision, but it was the first time in my military life that I

really realised what being responsible for things were. When I was a troop commander I didn’t think of myself as responsible. It was just wonderful, it was fun, everybody tried to help me and it didn’t matter if I bogged the tank, I just had to dig it out. But now if I made a mistake this was serious – a guy is going to get killed or hurt or not get medical treatment,

and I had to say to myself and my boss did too, you can only do your best but you’ve got to set your standard high because that’s the business you’re in. You went to Staff College, you know what to do and get out there and do it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, and by and large I had those rare moments very rarely. I had a wonderful team and I tried to

remember the things I had learnt, but there was an exhaustion at the end of all that which was probably mental and not physical. I was really in very good shape when I came back from Vietnam physically. We exercised – I used to run around ALSG with my boss. I mean how foolish can you be, the weather was shocking, really really hot. But it did tax you mentally. I don’t think I made a mistake or if I did it didn’t have the consequences that I feared.

But it was a burden and I’m reluctant to say that in the context of those soldiers who put their lives on the line. I mean I never had that as a likely consequence, well perhaps twice I did and nothing did happen, but for me it was a very big issue.

Ah yes, and they were

a mere nothing and I must say my thought process was trivial in the extreme. I can’t remember which order they came, but I went on an operation over to the Cambodian border with the Americans because I wanted to see the American front line logistic system at work, because one of the things you do professionally is you soak up as much experience

as possible. Now I had a pretty good handle on how it was working between Long Binh and Mi, and Mi and Nui Dat and I was making it work to my benefit, but I wasn’t quite sure how they were handling other things – I had my suspicions – so I asked if I could go on a convoy. And I did. I went on the convoy. I had no responsibility. I was an observer under the terms of the agreement,

and I travelled with the convoy commander who was an American captain. It was a convoy of about a hundred vehicles so it was a very inviting target, and it’s not surprising that it was attacked. It was on our way back – going there I felt apprehensive and the convoy discipline was

unbelievably bad, but we did get there and I spent a night in the fire support base where I shared a bed with 2 or 3 rats which wasn’t very pleasant. The Americans had imported sections of concrete pipe, and they put sand bags around the outside and that’s where you slept when you weren’t doing operations. So I crawled up inside that, and in the middle of the night I felt

something nudging my foot and looked up – a couple of bright eyes and an enormous rat, and my first reaction was, “I’m going to draw my pistol and shoot the bloody thing,” and then fortunately I thought, “Oh my goodness no, if I fired down this pipe there’s likely to be people outside.” On that way back from the convoy it was ambushed. It was ambushed up the line. It was a hundred vehicles from me. I was travelling in a jeep

and I didn’t actually see the vehicles stopped though one vehicle had been damaged. I think there was probably a bomb in the road and they detonated it and it blew up the vehicle. But I was travelling back not in a jeep but in an armoured personnel carrier, and I was sitting on the outside because it was fiendishly hot and a number of things which are now amusing occurred. When there was this great big bang

up the front we saw smoke and flames and then the radio went mad saying, “They’re everywhere.” All the American soldiers closed the hatches of the armoured vehicles they were inside and I was left outside, and there was no way they were going to open. So if you can have a picture of a small somewhat frightened major sitting outside on a flak jacket. You remember we were talking about the condoms. The thought was still in my mind and I thought if I sat on two flak jackets I would protect

two more valuable bits of me. So here I was perched on these two flak jackets. The Americans had all disappeared inside and closed the hatches, and there was firing. I had no idea where the firing was coming from but very quickly you assume that it’s all directed at you despite the fact that there were dozens of other people. And then the hatch just in front of me opened up, and I remember thinking, oh they’ve changed their minds thank goodness, and

a hand came out with a sack of grenades and dropped it in my lap which in view of my comment on flak jackets was the last place I wanted it, and then the hatch closed. And here I was holding the sack of grenades, looking out there, and as I looked to my right I saw what I knew perfectly well was a rocket coming towards me, well towards us – the column – and you know it’s a rocket because the dot is getting larger

and it’s sort of wavering like that, and my mind with great clarity said it’s targeting my vehicle – because it’s an armoured vehicle – and I’m the only one sitting outside and of all things in my lap is a sack of grenades. I’d have to say I went into very powerful prayer mode and did all sorts of deals with God, you know, just make this thing miss and I’ll be a different man. And as it happened it missed by an enormous amount and

I was really in no danger at all I suppose, and then the top flap opened and the American convoy commander popped his head out and said those deathless words to me, “Oh cool, Aussie,” and I thought, “Gee, I’d like to tell you a thing or two,” but I wasn’t quite in full command of my speech faculties, and I got down from the vehicle leaving the grenades there and walked around and then went up the column to see what was happening,

try and be professional and take notes but it was such bedlam. No one was prepared to do anything that I could see, and in due course the armoured car pulled up alongside me, the APC, and I got on and somewhat frostily continued the journey home to Long Binh, where the captain duly reported that the column had been under attack and I was somewhat bemused to see that someone had

determined that it was a company-sized ambush. I have no idea how they deduced that, but I could have told them there was definitely one rocket launcher and at least one shot was fired at the column, and I might have added that it was certainly aimed at me which wouldn’t have been all that accurate, but that was the one that missed. And I’m not sure that I kept my bargain with God either.

No, that didn’t happen, no there was no flashing of life, but there was a picture of what I would have like to have done to my American brethren when I saw myself sitting outside and them inside. Yes that did, and so often these things run through your head afterwards. What I really should have said to the captain was…but it was too late and I never saw him again. And the other one had …

almost as a trivial consequence I was going to Xuyen Moc. Xuyen Moc was a Vietnamese village to the East of Nui Dat, and I think it was either outside the tactical area of responsibility or it was outside Line Alpha. It certainly was outside Line Alpha. Line Alpha is a line you draw around the base, and you can fire at any target with whatever you’ve got in Nui Dat at that, so it was beyond that, and

Xuyen Moc was a very interesting little community. They were all North Vietnamese and they’d fled the South during the French operations there, and they’d been led down there by the parish priest. They were mainly Catholic and they’d set themselves up in this place called Xuyen Moc, and he’d taken charge. He had organised the defences, he’d posted guards and they did their own patrolling and so on. Everything was fine except no one paid any concern to

Xuyen Moc and they often didn’t have food. I don’t know about munitions. I think he probably got those by either stealing them from the local South Vietnamese army, but we didn’t support them. But I happened to have met the priest in Vung Tau some days before this, and he was saying

he really needed some medical supplies and I said, “Doesn’t someone give you these?” and he said, “No.” So I thought poor man, so I spoke to our hospital and they said, “Oh of course you can,” and they gave me some kit, some material. We didn’t have convoys going out there and I thought nothing’s been happening in that neck of the woods for a while. I’ll

go in a jeep with a machine gun on it and I went off. If you’re not terribly brave like me you have this sort of feeling in the stomach, I hope no one’s watching. I can feel eyes upon me and I cocked the gun a couple of times which was pretty stupid because I was probably going to shoot the head off my driver. I was a little bit apprehensive, and then I started thinking if I get killed out here I’ll get into trouble, because I probably shouldn’t be

out here, and it’ll reflect badly on the Australians and all those stupid thoughts were going through my mind, and as they were I heard a shot. I’ve no idea whether the round went within a kilometre of me or a few centimetres, but I certainly instructed the driver in the vernacular, to get a bloody move on and get us into Xuyen Moc – I think we were only a couple of kilometres away –

and his personal best was I reckon an Olympic record. We zoomed into Xuyen Moc and I gave the priest the stuff and he gave me a drink, and the ladies came in their lovely outfits and said, “uc da loi,” “thank you,” and I thought, “Now I’ve got to go home,” and neither the driver nor I – the driver was blaming me: “I told you we shouldn’t have come out here.” And I’m thinking, “Well I’ve got to be cool. I’m the

logistic operations officer and I probably shouldn’t be out here,” and we just didn’t know when to leave, and it was really quite silly. We stood on either side of the jeep and the driver was looking at his watch and then looking out there and looking at me out of the corner of his eye, would I make a decision, and I don’t remember who made the decision, but we went home without exchanging any further words about anything, and I think we both tacitly agreed and I got back to Vung Tau and said,

“We won’t mention this to anyone every again.” So that was the second one, and I hope it amused the Vietcong soldier who may or may not have been shooting at me. Those are my only two occasions I felt in mortal danger but I really don’t know whether I was. My burdens are of the mind, not of the body.

I sometimes felt I was dealing with the world. My clients of course if I could use that term, and I didn’t, were Australians. It was the task force. My whole life was ‘keep the task force going,’ but my sources of supply were varied. A significant amount of material had to come from Australia and that was a constant problem –

to get the right advice as to what stock levels were because we didn’t have the sophistication of computers then that we do now, and so I had to rely on the commanders of the various service units, that they have enough of the commodities that they’re responsible for. But some we purchased from the Americans and I should for the benefit of this Archive say that we paid for every

service and every piece of goods we got from the Americans. Nothing came free and nothing angered me more than ill-informed visitors, usually politicians and sometimes press, who would say, “Ah but you get that from the Americans?” and I’d say, “Yes but we pay for it.” We paid two ways – we had a direct payment and we had a capitation rate, that is on the number of Australian consumers, we paid so much per day and I forget what that amount

was, and that covered travelling in helicopters, taking a ride on an American boat, borrowing a jeep – you paid for absolutely everything, and because I knew we paid for that – I was a very grouchy young man I suppose – if the Americans didn’t deliver or didn’t deliver what I wanted in the time that I wanted it, I got very angry and probably unreasonably so at times. So the Americans were another source and

I’d have to say I had to fight to get the sort of service that I believe we should expect for the amount we were paying. The odd thing we got from Saigon and sometimes for the Koreans but that was most unusual. Mainly it was Australian and Long Binh was the headquarters for the logistics support

for I think the whole of Vietnam. That’s why I spent a lot of my time at Long Binh, but it was a struggle. They had this famous saying: NIC, not in country, and you can imagine, you wanted flares or grenades or particularly petroleum – we got our petroleum from the Americans – oh you can’t have that until next week, it’s a war. I actually deployed my New Zealand captain

permanently at Long Binh. That was the guy who was in my office. It’s better to have him there and when we got an NIC or other code for ‘can’t be bothered’ I could get hold of my captain and say, “Go and see the highest rank you can find and say by one o’clock this afternoon or else,” and the ‘or else’ was, he was to call me back and I would try and get hold of a general, or I would brief my commander

to tell him to get stuck into it. We only had to do that once but it was a battle, it really was. Australia was pretty good. There was the odd clerk who would say, “It’s a public holiday on Monday,” or, “We’re out of that stock,” but normally a terse message would fix that.

The short answer is yes. Not only did I hear of it, people who were responsible to me were engaged in it, and you might get the impression I was easily angered. I guess I was. That angered me enormously and I think one of the first telephone calls I got

after I took over was a guy on the American air base which was our next door neighbour saying, “Are you the Log Ops [Logistics Operations] officer?” And I said, “Yes I am.” “Well I want three dozen koala bears.” And I thought that must be code for something, and I said, “I beg your pardon?” “I want three dozen koala bears.” And I said, “This is Australian Logistic Operations.” “That’s right – the boys let me have

koala bears.” And I said, “I don’t know anything about that.” “We used to get them up in the Hercules every couple of days.” And I said, “What did he give them to you for?” And he said, “Oh he didn’t give them to me, I would give him or swap him for whisky or a jeep or something.” And I said, “It ceases.”

He didn’t believe it, so that customer went. And yes it continued. Australian boots were marvellous, and the Americans would give you hundreds of dollars for a pair of boots, and because I was Log Ops, the number of Americans that would turn up and take out a roll of – they didn’t have American dollars because we had MPC [military payment currency], the money tokens that

we used so it didn’t put black market problems into the economy, and they would offer one hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars for a pair of boots.

There it is, that’s the one. They’d have to change colour every now and again to avoid nefarious deals. So yes, the answer is yes, and I didn’t stamp it out, but I certainly didn’t become a source though my

staff told me we could all make a great deal of money. Think of the rubber tree I shot in Malaya, I thought no this is not what we’re here for. But of course it was around and there are some extraordinary stories of people who brought home jeeps, dear oh dear. And I wasn’t there for the final withdrawal from Vung Tau but I believe some very interesting not – inventoried items came home.

Absolutely. The Americans, you can imagine the description, you probably heard it, the Australians had for the American beer, but yes, they were very fond of it and I’d have to say because this was in my field, the Jeparit which was the ship that rotated I think every six weeks…we had just about a whole hold

full of beer, and it would all be gone by the time the Jeparit came around the next time. Boy it was hot down there in the holds. I remember standing on the deck many times with pallet after pallet of beer coming out, not that it was a bad thing. We handled it better than most I suppose. It was probably a necessary evil, not being a wowser at all, but the American beer was

pretty shallow stuff. Cords and something else – the American beers, and we got a lot of XXXX and VB [Victoria Bitter], there’s a free plug.

They had a different philosophy on equipment maintenance.

I can speak on maintenance because that I guess is my field. The Americans have tended by and large to work on a maintenance program – if it’s broken you take the components out throw it away and replace it with a new component. Now if you have a cash background to that sort of thing I suppose you can do it. We’ve never had those resources and so we’ve developed a whole culture – if it’s broken, take a hairpin or a

safety pin or a bent bit of something and fix it and keep it going as long as possible, and I think we’re extraordinarily creative, and our mechanics are nothing short of brilliant. Their training is excellent and under pressure in operations their performance is just unbelievable. Did the Americans have anything like that? No they did not. I spent some time in maintenance depots

having a look at the Americans, and I found something which made a comment on society which I found very saddening. If you go into an Australian, particularly a field maintenance unit, they’ll have all their manuals. Incomprehensible to me, the soldier can read them, understand them, he can implement it and what’s more, if that doesn’t work for some reason he knows of a way he can get around it. The equivalent in the American maintenance was a comic,

and I know I’m exaggerating a bit but it’ll say, “See Bill. This is a spanner. Bill picks up a spanner and places it on A.” That’s a bit exaggerated but that’s what it was, and it had a big beefy builder and a great spanner and I actually picked up one and said could I have it, and I’ve lost it. I really would have liked to have kept it because I’ve told people that

and they’ve said, “Oh that’s not so.” But it is. So when we were running down and I was there during the rundown period, there were thousands of tons in weight of American equipment all over the countryside, used car dumps which were just unbelievable, and then of course we’ve all seen the helicopters pushed off decks because

they couldn’t go back to Saigon. But yes, they were all over the country.

Yes, that’s quite correct. Now you never saw that in Australian areas. In fact some of the extraordinary fabrications that people did are quite remarkable. The tanks, because they were quite old tanks,

our Centurions, at that stage. How the lads kept that going is nothing short of a miracle. Brilliant work, absolutely brilliant, and my only dealing was that I was bringing the tanks home. Before I left we had actually thinned out most, not all of the tanks, and we had to hire Japanese ships to take them home which as a historian I found faintly ironic. In the 1970s we were bringing them

home in Japanese ships, and they just fitted.

Well, I couldn’t name the names because I probably wouldn’t know the names, but yes of course, there was a real

commerce taking place and whether you call it the black market or just steal and sell, yes that went on with the American system. It went on between the Koreans and the local economy. It went on with Philippine servants who were being employed probably at quite miserable rates in senior headquarters.

Yes, it bred a corrupt sub-culture and it was another one of the tragedies of Vietnam. You’d be foolish to hide your eyes from that. Of course it existed. Every time I visited Saigon you saw it everywhere. Saigon was a place that we regarded as very inferior because we thought we were real soldiers, and the Nui Dat soldiers regarded us as inferior because they thought they were real soldiers. But all knew that together we were, but there was still that attitude.

I don’t recall

much detail about that. My impression when I left to go there was certainly not that I’ll be the last rotation, but that’s not to say there wasn’t some effort – I think there probably was. Halfway though my time there, very clearly the Americans were signalling with no subtlety at all, that they were going to

withdraw, and equally obvious was that the Australian government knew of this or realised this and I was told to prepare plans for closing up, and so one of the jobs I had in the last six months I was there was to do what’s called an appreciation which is an analysis of the pros and cons of various

options and about coming home. I had to work out how many additional ships would be required because the Jeparit would take 12 months of turnaround, and we finished up hiring these Japanese ships. So I was doing that and I left obviously before we did withdraw. I was asked to stay on I’d have to say which I thought was

less than fair, and I had a frank and honest exchange with the chief of staff in Saigon when he told me that professionally he thought it would be a very good idea if I stayed to see the force out because I’d done the work. I thought very persuasively I told him where he could stick his good idea and that I had four children at home and a wife who’d not seen me for 12 months and was being very brave,

and I didn’t mean that lightly, she was, and I was going to go home. It was offered that I could have an extra five days at home and then come back but the choice was mine. I’d have to say I didn’t consider it. No I’m going. It would be nicer if I could say I thought deeply but I didn’t. So someone else – I can’t remember who it was now,

but I do remember welcoming him and giving him a briefing remembering my arrival, and then the last two nights I was there, in fact I was up all night because we were loading ships right through the night and I was accompanying him and the new boss. The new colonel had arrived so that I could give last minute wealth of experience if that was the term to the poor fellow who would close it up and he did.

No, I’ve enjoyed MASH over the years and its

endless re-runs, but I saw nothing in Vietnam faintly resembling that though there are some similarities. Now some of the American forward bases did look like that if you’re thinking of say ‘The Swamp’ where Hawkeye and company live, an absolute disaster of a place which was a wooden frame if you remember with a tent fly draped over it.

Yes, there were some of those around, but the Australian ones were really quite different. Certainly the Australian soldier in Nui Dat – well Australian soldiers anywhere – is very inventive, and he will make himself as comfortable as possible in any set of circumstances. After Nui Dat had been set up for quite a while, there were more and more semi-permanent buildings, prefabricated ones brought out

from Australia or which we purchased from the Americans, which gave a degree of comfort but there was never the disorder that you would have seen in ‘The Swamp’. Messes went up, that is the officers’ mess and the sergeants’ mess which were semi-permanent buildings and they’d brought in some decent furniture so that whenever the opportunity arose they could have some sort of social life or an area where they could

relax a bit. The soldiers built a soldiers’ bar instead of just serving cans through a window. The officers’ mess did the same thing. The sleeping quarters were very well ordered and they would put floorboards down. Sometimes they were discarded pallet bases because there were always an enormous number of those, but later they actually constructed floorboards

to get them off the dampness and the grit of the floor, and beds were there of a more permanent structure than a stretcher – not entirely but they were there – and you would suspend mosquito nets within the tent instead of having to have individual nets, and you’d make a little bedside table out of boxes and all those things soldiers do to make it more homely. Around the

outside there would be sandbag placement to stop shell fragments. But the impression you got when you saw it was all very neat and of a standard to give a degree of comfort. Now in Vung Tau much to the derision of the Nui Dat soldiers there were much more permanent buildings. There were warehouses and workshops, and if you could beg borrow or steal an air-conditioner you whacked an air-conditioner in.

We got local contracts to tizzy up offices and operation centres. Operation centre are manned 24 hours a day, so if you can get an air-conditioner to make the conditions good you’d do it. If you put wooden linings within the thing to give a wall you can hang maps on, you’d do that. And so there was a lot more of that at ALSG and it was quite a neat

little city, but there was still the odd frame over which a tent fly was spread. Now my own quarters were most commodious. It was about the size of this room that we’re in. I think it was a wooden building. I think our engineers had built it, sandbagged on the outside, windows instead of just

a hole in the wall, and I had a parachute liner, no actually a whole parachute suspended inside my room up there, and that gave a sort of curtain effect for the whole room, because this would be about the size of a parachute. My bed was a bedstead not a stretcher, and I had a dressing table and for the

second six months I acquired a fridge, not terribly corruptly, and it meant that if I did have visitors, professional visitors, I could offer them a beer or something from the fridge. It was also a great mark of your importance. If you had a fridge you were a person of importance. And I had a wardrobe, and

I had electricity because we had our own generators and therefore I had overhead lights and a lamp on my table alongside the telephone – you always had to be connected by telephone – and I just thought it was a wonderfully homely place. I had pictures of my family hung on my net, and I had my tape recorder playing classical music. Comfortable, no doubt about it. On the odd occasion

that you had to stand to, and that only happened two or three times in the whole twelve months, we’d have to go to this revolting bunker which was evil-smelling and had absolutely none of those things at all. It was just wet and yucky sand, but I lived comfortably. The soldiers up at Nui Dat probably lived less comfortably but they were still remarkably inventive in creating comfort and we do that very well, Australian soldiers, I think.

It’s a relative word, secure, but I would say because of the way we conducted ourselves, each in a different way, because Vung Tau was always going to be a different kettle of fish from Nui Dat. Take Nui Dat first. It was an operational base, it was guns and guards and patrols continued around the clock

for the whole time they were there. Access to Nui Dat was strictly limited to our soldiers. An American General could turn up and not be just let in. We were very security conscious. We did clearing patrols all the time, we fired fire missions from within Nui Dat to clean out anything that might be approaching. We had tanks, very very good tanks, both within the perimeter and fire support bases outside

the perimeter of Nui Dat, and apart from the odd mortar attack that occurred I don’t recall any significant attacks with the exception of the famous or infamous Long Tan Battle, which was a truly remarkable passage of arms, and Nui Dat was very very clearly the object of the VC and the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] and they were both involved in this, and it was in significant strength, and

the company that was deployed and the APCs and the reinforcements that were deployed, performed magnificently in very difficult conditions. A number of books have been written about it. Some I think have been a little fanciful and some of the criticism has been ill-informed, but I think all reasonable critics and analysts of the show all say it was well done in the circumstances.

And that was the only one that I recall, a serious attempt to knock off Nui Dat. Now you’re not going to ask me because you’re too experienced a person I’m sure to say, “Had we failed at Long Tan would they have overrun Nui Dat?” because I’d have to say that’s idle speculation and it won’t really go anywhere.

Now ALSG are different because we were in a peninsula and the peninsula in itself

was a degree of defensiveness. We were in range of VC Hill and the VC – that’s why it was called VC Hill – could and did go up there, and with the wind in the right direction and luck favouring them they could squirt an RPG [rocket propelled grenade] from VC Hill and could have got it into the Australian base. The American air base was closer and was more vulnerable. I don’t think we took a rocket in there. We took odd

small arms fire and I’m really not sure whether that was a VC unit or some intoxicated member of Vung Tau who didn’t even know where they were firing, and of course there were the odd celebratory squirtings of 50 calibre machine guns from the American Air Base which would fall in our area. It’s a remarkable ignorance of physics that some people, particularly soldiers think that if you fire the shot

up there that’s the end of it. The end of it is when it comes down again and we were the recipients of the odd one of those. But we did out patrols. I had nothing to do with that side of it. Mine was Log Ops and I had an opposite number – I think he was a major – he was local protection and it was wonderful to have nothing to do with that. He looked all haggard and bothered about whether his guards would get shot and the like,

but he had a constant program of patrols.

No, but a friend of mine, Adrian Roberts, he was the commander of the APCs and a young man, because Adrian is a little bit younger than me. He performed magnificently and got not a great deal of recognition which is one of the things that happens in this strange profession of ours. There was a

quota – you’ve probably been told this before and it’s a thing you could be amused or ashamed of – there was a limit to the number of awards that could be made in each category, so there were limits on MCs, a limit on MBEs [Member of the British Empire], and when that quota was reached you went on a list which could or could not be redeemed in what was called the end of war

awards which was years after the end of Vietnam. Adrian I think got an MID [Mentioned in Despatches] and he brought reinforcements in and his APC troop performed magnificently – he got an MID which was mentioned in dispatches which I think is code for he was recommended for another award – I would speculate without knowing the details it would be an MC –

and the quota had been reached at that stage. That’s what happened and soldiers tend to be a little bit cynical about the formal awards.

Isn’t that interesting? I think all soldiers

knew of them but that’s not the question you asked. No I was not conscious of talk of what we had done, only guarded talk of what we were going to do and very clinical reporting of what we’ve done, not that it’s a question of reminiscing but a question of recording, could we have done it better, what were the lessons learnt, move on to the next program. So my memory is we thought

about the last engagement big or small and the next two, and that’s how it worked whether you were in Nui Dat or in Saigon or at Vung Tau. That was the way of looking at it, probably because you didn’t have the time to talk about the others. Now what the lads did when they got into a let down drinking binge I’m not sure. They may have because it would have been a way of, particularly if they’d been involved in an early operation,

purging it from them. And you had to make provision for that because there was a lot of bottling up of what happened and I think that’s a whole new area of investigation. We need to find a better way to try and purge these memories and questions from the soldier of any rank, and if it is letting them go and drink more beers than you think is good for them well it may be something that you accept,

because there was a lot of criticism from the public that the Australians were drinking too much. It used to infuriate me. I’m not a big drinker but how dare someone say, “That soldier’s drinking too much.” For goodness sake, the things that were within him, and that might have been the only way that he could have softened the hurt or the fear or the conscience question, “Should I have done that?” What we did tend to do was try and see that the soldiers

were safe when they were doing that and there was a compound – I know it sounds pretty awful – but there was a compound down at Vung Tau, and they could go in there for their three days in-the-country rest and they could do their drinking and they wouldn’t hurt themselves or if they did, there was someone outside the compound who would go in and put them to bed. And I thought that was a good way, yet I know there were some who would say, “Should we do that?”

Of course,

and the one thing science agrees with is there has to be a coping mechanism, and if you don’t like that one well don’t think of you, think of them. Did it help them? If so, then there is some grounds for saying it has merit. Don’t measure it in what you would do. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d said, “Well I’m not going to provide beer in the Jeparit because I think the soldiers drink too much.” That’d be awful, and I would have been sacked and rightly so. It wasn’t my job to

make that judgement, but it was my job to see they got what they needed, and I think they did need that so that’s what you do unless you can find a better way, and I think we should. And perhaps we are, I really don’t know, perhaps we are looking at how to alleviate those burdens because that’s a very critical part of the science of caring for your soldier, and we should never forget that. You either care for the soldier or you give the whole game away.

Not very much and I regret that. I did it as often as I could insofar I would nick up to Nui Dat and I would go up in one of the columns on the ground. If I was sending the columns out, there was no way I could avoid going with it sometimes, so when I could I would go up, and I would certainly see the headquarters people, saying,

“Are the supplies arriving at the right time in the right condition ? Is there anything that you’re not getting that you do need?” That would be standard procedure. If I had time to go and see the diggers I would tend to go to see my armoured corps mates. The time I was there we had a tank squadron and an APC squadron, so I suppose nine tenth of that time was spent with them, and we would sometimes talk about the operations, but I guess it

was always I wanted to know if they had a lack of petrol or ammunition or whatever. But I guess there was always they would tell me what they did on the last op, and I would put that away in my mind. I didn’t really see much of the Infantry, though I did spend a couple of days with the SAS [Special Air Service] and their very secret little camp on the top of the hill. They had a hill with their own name – ‘SAS Hill’ – and I went

to talk to them but they didn’t tell me much.

No. They play it very close to their chest.

The whole range I guess of apparent

unmoved by anything to deeply depressed and shaken, and that would apply across the board of all ranks and both national service and regular. I never knew unless they told me any young soldier I met whether he was national service or regular. You could tell a regular. He might be 40 years old so he clearly

wasn’t a National Serviceman. Some appeared quite unmoved, some very withdrawn, some physically exhausted. I tended to see them more because they came to Vung Tau for a rest, and though I didn’t intrude in those compounds because the last thing they wanted was a nosey officer down there, particularly a what they called a ‘pogo’ – that was the ALSG dwellers were called pogos – and it was a worry

as a professional soldier to see the effects on them. The closest I came, and it wasn’t a fighting soldier, so much it was one of my movement control people at ALSG. I came to work one morning and he was quite clearly in bad shape, and I am ashamed to say I thought he had probably been drinking and put it down to that. But no, he had received a letter from home. His wife was

carrying on with someone else and she’d written. It’s the ‘Dear John’ letter [letter informing that a relationship is over], and of course he was absolutely shattered and he didn’t want to tell me because there’s a great humility associated with that, and then when he did tell me we had to work out was applying for leave and going home an option or not. He was a professional man and said, “I can’t. I’m movement control person,”

but I seem to remember we did, after I talked to my commander, we did send him home. It didn’t do any good but there were too many – and I don’t mean to say dozens or thousands – one is too many. There were a number of those that I was aware of and they were casualties of that war just as much as the guy who was shot or who lost his mate and couldn’t cope. But I didn’t see as

much as perhaps the company commanders would have seen in the battalions. They would have been close to the events. I would visit the hospitals, something that I found very difficult to do. It wasn’t really in my job – I think the first time I went down was after one of the APCs was hit by a rocket and these were guys I knew. That’s when I wrote that little poem that’s in that book.

I knew them, a number of them were killed, some were very badly injured and I went down to the hospital which was quite near my bunker. That was the first time, I think the only time where I saw seriously wounded people. I’d seen a couple of dead before. It’s the first time I’d seen wounded, and I was very shaken by that and I thought of their wives or their parents or their sisters, something

like that, and how would they cope, and I thought would they live, and I thought is living going to be a bad thing or is dying going to be the best for all – all these thoughts go through your mind, and I wished I could have sat beside them and said, “I’m armour too, and you’re one of the family and good on you mate, you’ll be right,” but I never found the right words. The best I could ever do was stand at the bed

and it’s just not one of my gifts. I wish it was. It was a very sobering experience that day. I think there were about six of them in the hospital. Five or six had been killed I think

Of course it is. And if you’re

into prayer and that sort of thing you start saying, “Now fair go God, this wasn’t my understanding.” Of course. And all the emotions like anger. We, if I could speak about us from Vietnam, we did get very angry at times, and yes you ask those questions. You don’t always get answers. I’ve always found God doesn’t always respond, if ever, but I still have a go at him at times, or

her. Yes of course you ask the questions, I think particularly when you see youngsters injured. There’s a shade of gallantry when you see an older soldier – they’re a good digger and this is what happens, the worriers, but you see a youngster and the young look so young when they’re hurt.

At that stage I would have been in the army 22 years. Yeah, it shakes your choices, though in the wash-off I’d say I never regretted it. I made a good choice to join the Army. I think I contributed to our nation and I think the army cared for me. I don’t deny those things at all, but it does shake your

convictions for a while.

Oh! Oh! Well this is hearsay isn’t it? What did fellows say to me about it wouldn’t be admissible in court. There were some

significant criticism of course. Some of them were well-founded, some of them were on the basis, “Well we wouldn’t have done it that way,” which is true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were totally wrong. But they have an overwhelming belief in the rightness of force. It’s a very old feeling, the Greeks and their ‘right is might’ and the more might you’ve got the righter you are.

Pernicious sort of thing, and they were then and are now I suppose criticised for that, but there were also examples of incredible dedication amongst some of the leaders, which any professional soldier would recognise and say, “My God, that’s good.” And they had their quite exceptional

ratbags and I suppose we did too, but I don’t think we had the same number. We had things like Mêlée which were the blot on the American profession of arms, but it also reflected on the paucity of training of young leaders, and I think I can say that in all my experience in the Australian Army one of our strengths has been the care that we devote to training young leaders. The

quality of our young NCOs and the quality of our young officers I think is magnificent, quite magnificent. The quality of some American officers, because no one’s gone to the trouble or had the strength of mind to train them properly, is terrifying, absolutely terrifying. We’ve had our other problems but we’ve not had that one, and so junior leadership I would identify as the one that

probably bothered my colleagues most. I would have seen that personally and certainly it was the currency when people had the time to do it. I mean we really didn’t have the time to sit down and say, “Oh wasn’t that awful,” and we didn’t actually collaborate with the Americans in operations all that much. There were some, but we were never under their command and therefore criticism was

probably more at the upper level application of their tactics, and I would be a critic of their logistics simply because it is based on the premise we have unlimited dollars and that will solve everything. We tend to have a completely different principle – we don’t have unlimited dollars and therefore ingenuity and procedure must be there. I favour ours for effectiveness.

Well because the discussions were so limited there – now it’s quite different afterwards when you’re back in Australia. My feeling would be

it was fairly in balance. It just wasn’t a big issue because we were not so operationally dependent on them. I probably got more angry because I was logistically dependent on them, and I tended to get into a bit of a tizzy if a driver told me he went there to pick up some stuff and it wasn’t there, and then I’d be very critical. Because I had such a good and supportive

commander I felt I could go and say, “My boss reckons you’re a lot of ratbags. I want my stuff on my truck now.” That often but not always worked. So yes I was critical of their system more so than perhaps – I heard our field commanders criticising them.

Oh I can tell you a story. We would be foolish to pretend that it wasn’t there and didn’t have an impact. Camp followers have been a feature of armies for thousands of years and

they did exist in Vung Tau. I can only speak with any knowledge of Vung Tau. There’s a sad element of that. Here were a people whose economy was very fragile, and it was a source of income for families. Anybody with half a mind would recognise that most of the girls were involved in this industry

because the cash was needed not necessarily for them and their child or children but for mum and dad and grandparents and the like. So yes they existed there as they had in Vung Tau as they had probably since the French times because it was a French garrison town, and yes of course Australian soldiers found the need of it. Our medical authorities were perfectly aware of that before we left, and I think they took quite

prudent precautions and as I understood them these precautions were and always have been there. Commanding officers are to make sure they draw the attention of troops to the inherent physical dangers which are significant. There were some virulent strains of gonorrhoea and syphilis there which I guess are still blighting some families and it’s just awful. The second is

that if you’re going to involve yourself in these sorts of relationships then you’ve got to take proper precautions, because after all if you don’t do that you’re putting at risk you as a soldier and you’re here primarily as a soldier. So COs had to do that, and I’m pretty certain we had to do what we did in the Second World War which every month you put in your VD [venereal disease] statistics.

I don’t recall any CO being rebuked if their statistics went above whatever the figure was, but I know it was taken seriously. It was certainly taken seriously by my commander, and he would personally go around to the various support units and give his little homily. Unfortunately I think that did not the slightest bit of good because he was seen as a silly puritanical man, whereas

he wasn’t making a moral judgement, though it was pretty clear what his moral feelings were, I think he really was trying to care for the soldiers, and of course there was a relationship between alcohol and the brothels so once you enter into the field of over-consumption of alcohol, you’re much more vulnerable to the enticement. And so if you were in Vung Tau and if you were on leave from Nui Dat, there was no lack of custom from the Australian soldiers,

but the MPs [military police] were instructed to tour the brothels – I’m not quite sure what they were meant to be checking, but they had a presence there, and I don’t mean to imply that their presence there was as customers. I simply don’t know at any rate. I think that probably did some good but I can speak with a degree of authority based on the fact my commander, God bless him, decided

one night he would go and show himself in Vung Tau, to emphasise the fact he took all this seriously which was fine as far as I was concerned, except he asked me to accompany him, and I put to him that I was logistics, I wasn’t brothels. That wasn’t my thing at all, and he said, “I don’t care, you’re coming with me.” So red-faced and trying to disappear, I trailed along after him and we visited

about ten of them I seem to remember, because about the fourth I just wanted to die and disappear, and all the Madams greeted the colonel with great respect. This is not to imply that they knew him because he visited, but he was the number one man in Vung Tau, and I think some of the ladies were absolutely delighted that he’d chosen to visit their establishment. We went into

a couple of whatever the areas are called, along with the MP sergeant who like all MP sergeants were enormous, and the only amusing thing of this awful night I remember was as we went into this room the sergeant said, “Ah, Private Jones, how are you?” “Very good thank you, sergeant,” and then we left. So yes, they were there, and yes we were aware and

we did as much I think as was reasonably possible. Chaplains had the difficult task of giving the moral side of it. As in all departments we have the very good and the ordinary and perhaps the odd one who’s not so good. In Vung Tau we had a couple of excellent chaplains. I actually believe you’re interviewing one of them, Father Bernie Maxwell. He was a

chaplain when I was there, a man I have the highest regard for. I’ve often said to him since, because we’re still friends, why the commander picked me when he could have taken you, and he thinks that’s hysterical.

I believe that was so. Now I know the Vietnamese authorities which probably would have been the authority of Ba Ria which was the province capital, but Vung Tau was a special zone so there may have been an organisation there, a Vietnamese one, and they would issue certificates of operation or something like that, but I’m pretty certain our medical people also did their own, because

I certain knew from briefings that certain establishments were regarded as particularly unsafe and COs were told to make sure their soldiers don’t go to this one. We did the same thing for restaurants and bars – there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and indeed certainly some of the bars and some of the restaurants and I suspect some of the brothels were actually

put out of bounds under that basis, and once it’s been put out of bounds as a military directive, an MP is authorised to arrest a soldier who goes there because he is out of bounds. So he can’t say, “I’m on leave. I do what I like.” “No, you can’t go.” I have a feeling they actually might have posted a notice on the door which Madam wasn’t allowed to take down. Otherwise they’d heavy her and close the establishment completely. Yes, I’m sure those processes

applied, and they’re quite old fashioned. You’re right, they existed in the Second World War.

Well obviously they were keen because it was their only source of income in many cases. They were pathetically young some of them, and I never saw one who looked genuinely enthusiastic at all, and I think the

odd soldier would have said that to me too, and he was probably quite pragmatic and said, “Well for your $20 you can’t have everything.” My impression would certainly be it was an economic element to it and they weren’t driven because they were madly in love with Australians. Though there was, as there always is in these countries, a group who saw the Australian as a liberation from their condition, and there were efforts to marry Australians.

Yes, I came home before our commitment to Vietnam was over though I had logistically done the work of setting up our extraction. I came back the same way as I went up there. I came back in a Qantas aircraft from

Tan Son Nhut. I actually came back with my commander – he spent just less than the 12 months – and we arrived in Sydney having sat in the comfort of the Qantas plane and had a really nice meal, probably two meals and some orange juice. We arrived in Sydney late in the evening I think it was, and I learnt later that this was a planned

time of arrival. It would minimise demonstrations of returning soldiers, and we went through Customs in the normal way. The customs officers were I thought at some pains to make the reception easy. There were a couple of rather foolish people on the plane bringing back bits of rifles and large knives and other prohibited

imports which they reluctantly had to give up, and then when I got through the Customs lane there was my wife who’d come up from Canberra to meet me so that was obviously a big moment, and were taken away very quickly in a staff car to where ever we were staying the night. Then my wife travelled

on down to Canberra to collect the family again the next morning and I arrived in a mid-morning plane and there they all were at the airport to meet me. That’s probably one of the most vivid memories of all my 30 years. I’d left behind one little daughter who was now 12 months older so she was about five I guess then and that was a big thing to see her rush across the tarmac and

meet me. And then we were back again in Duntroon. It was, it seemed to me, to be the practice that when the returning veterans came home they went for a walk around Duntroon, around the married quarters and everybody was coming down their paths and saying, “Welcome back,” and the kids were walking with me and it was a lovely moment, and for some years it was the only nice moment about the return because then I learnt what was really happening in Australia

that generally we’d been isolated from. My wife certainly didn’t tell me about the Moratorium marches. I can’t remember reading too many Australian papers. I suspect that we got sort of sanitised news that someone else pasted together. I just don’t remember reading papers, so it was a bit of a shock to find the intensity of feeling because all of a sudden it was now personal. I was a returned person from

Vietnam, and there were all sorts of consequences of this. I was assigned to Russell Hill and for the first time in my professional life I was told not to wear a uniform, to go to work in civilian clothes, and Russell Hill was full of these apparent civilians because the authorities were concerned that we might become the object of harassment. Whether that was over-reacting

or not I don’t know but I did learn over the years that some fairly unpleasant things had occurred at home while I was away. My wife and the children were very nicely protected because they lived at Duntroon while I was away, whereas others might have been out in the community, and certainly my father and mother-in-law were very aware because they lived in Melbourne and there were big moratorium marches in Melbourne, and they found the chant of the Moratorium

people very disturbing because the chant was, “One side right, one side wrong, victory to the Viet Cong.” My in-laws didn’t have to be very smart to realise that that meant what these people were saying was, may the Viet Cong kill their son-in-law. They were worried about the effect that might have on my family. And then things continued at that level in society. Veterans

didn’t admit that they’d been to Vietnam. When they were wearing uniform they tended not to move around in society but stay in military clumps. All this was quite contrary to my original academic theory that the military should be much more closely integrated with the community. And there were a lot of bright young academics writing scathing criticisms of all sorts of things which the military generally felt

shouldn’t have been directed at them, it should be directed at the government, and it was a time of social lack of stability and even in some veterans clearly a feeling of guilt. I was meeting soldiers of all ranks who were very disturbed by what had taken place. I don’t mean clinically disturbed, but they were very worried about it all.

It did affect their lifestyle – there was a higher incidence of drinking, I think a growing incidence of drug taking which certainly in my career has always been anathema – soldiers didn’t do that. Unfortunately now you’re hearing some who do but that again is a reflection of society and it is hopefully less in any event than it is in society today. But they were very strange times, and we were all rather pleased when

I got the opportunity to go to America, and so with my experience with the Americans I was posted to do a very intense academic course at the US Army Logistic Management Centre, which was their top logistic college, do a course there and then stay on as a member of the faculty. So I did a 6 month course which in true American style was really about a 12 to 18 months course squeezed into 6 months.

Quite a valuable one, gave me great insight into the mechanisms of logistics to which I brought my practical experience of dealing with the Americans in Vietnam. And so I took up my position in the faculty with great enthusiasm, and was able to offer a slightly different point of view on some things. Probably the most memorable thing was trying to speak American in public speaking. That was one of my roles and

I found that we really do have quite a different vocabulary from the Americans. But it was a great two year period. The Americans were also going through this social upheaval of people regarding the veterans as pariahs, and it was interesting to see how the American military were coping, which was basically wall themselves off from the rest of society. We lived just outside a very big base in Virginia, a very

conservative part of America. But during that time I started to think about what my future was in the military, what the most effective time for my family and for myself would be and to give some sort of priority to what I expected. I’d want to stay and be promoted knowing that the moment I indicated I wanted to resign that would be the end of that.

I chose after another 2 years I think, 3 years back to Russell Street to tender my resignation with no rancour, but it was the time to end it. I didn’t want to move the family around any more. They were committed – a critical time in their schooling, and so here in Canberra we severed from the army. I stayed on, as I was

obliged to be in the Reserve for a little while and that presented its own difficulties, and entered what some people felt was a surprising change of pace into the teaching business. But in fact from my military history it isn’t surprising at all. I’ve always been very interested in teaching. I enjoyed my two and a half years at Duntroon on the faculty there. I loved my time on the faculty in Virginia, so it was a natural step in

technique but not in audience, and it was a fascinating experience for someone coming from a very disciplined society into the society of teenagers. But fortunately I know my hair was beginning to grey there and it was clear that I was older than some of the other teachers, and I found I quickly established a very interesting relationship to the students and I taught history for 18

years at St Edmund’s College, and the last 3 years as assistant to the headmaster and 5 years ago I retired from that, and I spend my time, subject to demands of clients, leading tours to Greece and Turkey to areas I have an interest in…particularly their ancient history, and so I’ve been to Greece and Turkey 7 or 8 times I think, and Gallipoli

the same number of times. That brings to the end 50 years of work, of which half has been military.

No I haven’t. Some of my colleagues have and have found it interesting. Just in the last couple of years I have

thought about it but I’ve taken it no further.

My children asked me the same thing, and I’m not sure that I gave them a satisfactory answer. I felt there was a degree of failure on the part of Australia and

others involved in Vietnam. Parts of my Vietnam service became quite personal in that I formed a relationship with an orphanage near Vung Tau, and I still don’t know what happened to the children and the orphanage or the people looking after it. I think the people that were looking after it almost certainly would have suffered some sanction from the new Communist regime. The children

of course I have no idea. I believed we in the military went for the best of reasons, the least being the Government committed us to that and we are as much servants of the Government as any citizen, and probably greater in that we must perform functions we don’t ask other citizens to perform. I had no crisis of conscience in going there. I think we performed

very well in Vietnam. I think we were respected by the Vietnamese in Phuoc Tuy Province. I think we were seen as reliable, trustworthy and honourable people and therefore it reflected on a country they knew little about, that it was an honourable and a reliable one, and then for reasons over which we had really no control we withdrew, and

returned Phuoc Tuy Province to – and then of course we come to what? To the Vietnamese? Yes, to the Vietnamese. Were they the Vietnamese that we were trying to protect? A little less sure, and so by some measures you could say all that effort, all that goodwill, and result – because you were talking to me about how do you measure success – I feel

that there was no success other than…and I don’t belittle this, we went honourably and we tried hard, and that’s something, but it was very unsatisfactory to me and I’ve never quite come to terms with the lack of satisfaction, and I just feel, perhaps not necessarily correctly that to return there would awaken those feelings

of inadequacy and we didn’t finish the job and in the meantime I’ve acquired a number of Vietnamese friends here. My family sponsored two Vietnamese families. We’ve remained quite close to one of them. They haven’t gone back and they don’t intend to and they probably would be unwise to though I’m not really sure about that. So all that says to me, be cautious, this

may not be a clever move to go back. That’s not an entirely persuasive answer to your question, but it’s the best I can come up with at the moment. Now I’m not saying that I won’t change my mind, but I better get a wriggle on. I’m 70 now, and if I wait until I’m 75 – Yes I think that might be quite a good idea – I mightn’t be in the…have the disposition and condition to go,

though I think I probably won’t go back, and it’s a matter of fear rather than indifference.

I’m almost surprised by my answer, but I’m quite confident my answer is what I’ve felt for a long time, but no one’s pushed me to say that and I’m grateful you have in a way and I’ll think about

what I’ve said. I’m quite sure that it’s a correct judgement, well the best judgement I can make at the moment.

Oh yes.

You had to ask that. Hindsight of course – you have a degree of brilliance you never seek to claim otherwise. Given that it is in hindsight, we probably didn’t have sufficient cause to go but it was a line decision and I could

still defend the decision to go given that I know so much more now. I think there was a degree of inter-country wheeling and dealing. I think that’s undeniable now despite the fact that it was denied for so long, and I think you could justify it morally and you could certainly justify the effort that we devoted ourselves to and we have no reason to be ashamed of that.

Australia’s involvement. Ah no, I will only speak with any degree of authority about Australia’s involvement. The American involvement is another matter, but no, just for ours. I still would be, even with the additional knowledge, but particularly with additional knowledge, feel that we didn’t succeed. I think I’d go further. I am confident that the government and most certainly the defence force’s motives

for doing what they did in Vietnam were honourable throughout. I think there was a real devotion to care for the people of Phuoc Tuy Province and to bring them stability, to bring them a degree of autonomy. They don’t have the autonomy – I’m not sure about the stability now – but I think we acted honourably. About other wars more recently I’m in much more doubt as to the honourability

involved.

Yes I do. I see the same wheeling and dealing being done. I see the same political pressures and almost by definition political pressures raise the question of morality.

They existed for the Vietnam one too, but I think they were greater. The magnitude was greater this time and the consequences infinitely greater, and we’re going to reap the same sort of post-event consequences, and we’re going to have less control over them. Vietnam has emerged and survived if you can use the word survival in the broad sense, and is gone out

of the memory of Australia…Britain wasn’t involved… out of American, but it will take a long time for the consequence of the present crop of conflicts to go out of the mind and I think the questioning and the statement of conscience in all the countries involved there is going to exercise people’s

minds for a long long time, and there’ll be a shift as values increase or decrease on certain aspects of it, but I honestly believe that if there is to be a final analysis on the most objective lines rather than subjective, the participants will be found wanting. I don’t think they’ll be able to find something to justify many of

the actions. Now I’m not being disloyal to the Australian troops, though I think within the terms of what they were obliged to do they have acted in a disciplined and honourable way. If there are exceptions and I accept that there will be and there always will be but I think we have acted honourably. I think the military hierarchy has probably given the best advice they could in the circumstances.

They know and you and I know, they won’t and can’t make the decision – go or not go – they can only put the consequences and the views of the military, and such as Peter Cosgrove, good servants of the nation cannot and will not say what his private reservations if any were until long after he’s retired, but I hope I live long enough for him to have had the opportunity to say what he really thought or what he gave, but I suspect

that that won’t be out for quite a time, and that’s right. That’s what an honourable man in his position would do. But my view is we will be found wanting, and furthermore my children’s generation and perhaps even their grandchildren are going to have to live with the consequences of it. Now I’ve been out of the military long enough that long before we went to Iraq I and many of my contemporaries said,

“This is a bad move,” and we cited the reasons why we thought it was a bad move, so we haven’t come to this conclusion only when things have gone wrong. We were opposed to it, whether on the basis of our Vietnam experience or not I don’t know. I would like to say I and my close friends have been opposed to it because there was not the justification, and I think that’s the bottom line. There was not the justification,

and every day it seemed that the arguments that we raised and dismissed, the silly old buggers are being proved to be correct. I gain no satisfaction out of that, quite the contrary. I feel all the more miserable.

Yes, I think it is too, and I think we are culturally disinclined to

come out and make public statements. Soldiers, and even ex-soldiers, don’t as a rule do that, and the fact that that number of senior people did the other day was quite a departure from practice, and that means to say they clearly felt very very strongly about it, and it was hurtful and I felt the hurt, and some political opportunist, a number of them, said, “Oh typical retired, grey-haired, out-of-date people.”

That’s a very poor riposte, that really is. They deserve more respect.

You do indeed and I agree with that entirely.

It does, but that’s for the academic to say, “Well that’s the exciting thing about tensions in society.” I guess that’s so.

Well chalk and cheese almost, and it’s interesting because they’re really my only two operational experiences. I didn’t go to Korea and I wasn’t involved in the other. The level of intensity which was the phrase you used was completely different from Vietnam. The

control of what we did and what we tried to do to achieve relatively limited but achievable aims in Malaya, made the whole thing go in a fairly satisfactory way. I feel in Vietnam that neither militarily nor politically were there sufficient chances of success. There was always going to

be a higher level of lack of success and that feeling is exacerbated when we look at the third one in which I’ve not had contact. Success out of that is diminished even more. So we were in control of the situation and I was also younger, enthusiastic, still learning my trade, and in the thinking of a professional soldier it was a wonderful training ground,

from which I derived enormous professional benefits. Vietnam had an element of we were learning things, but I was then older. I was a shade more cynical which comes with age rather than my occupation, and I think I was thinking even then this is not winnable. Now I know you can’t base everything just on that, a win

or a lose. Often there’s got to be a compromise, but even during my time there I thought heavens, the French had ambitions to put this right, and I know in my mind that their chances were limited. Ours haven’t increased, so we’re going to be faced with a similar thing to the French. The French’s humiliation was probably greater because they made it great for them. They thought this was the power and the prestige

of France that’s been mismatched. In America it was seen as that and this national shame a failure as it affected them rather than the Vietnamese people, and I suspect that in Australia we felt it both as failure for the Vietnamese people and our own failure. So we added a slight element which I think is to our credit, but it added to the burden and the Americans are still reeling from, “Oh, look how we lost,”

whereas Australians or certainly veterans are saying, “Look what we failed to do for the Vietnamese, and look at the egg that was left on our face.”

We’re all capable of infinite denial, and

the Americans have perhaps raised that to a higher art form than anyone else, but I think that’s so. It’s a protective measure. We all create our defences, and something that will coalesce American society which is so disparate is the common belief that they’re had a go at us, and it really does regardless of gender or of ethnic background or of economic status,

that’s something they can all share. That’s very powerful. It was enormously powerful and very evident when I was there in the ‘70s, ’76, ’77 – enormously powerful, and within the military community I had unwarranted status for two things: I was a soldier – and a soldier is the last bastion of the defence of God’s nation sort of thing – and I was a Vietnam veteran. That was in the military community,

or less so outside, so we kept inside. I hadn’t thought about my Staff College thesis for many years and now that you’ve raised that I’m almost saying, my goodness I was almost a prophet.

As a former professional officer I’m shamed by both, that they’ve allowed the military to become a weapon to hit each other with and a very crude weapon at that. Yes, I squirm about that. I think it’s very sad, and I think it’s very sad for the veterans themselves who have got caught up in this, and some of them will be caught up in something

that they have no control over, and that’s emasculating them. I’m really getting my genders in a problem there because I suppose you shouldn’t talk about emasculating the military forces any more because of the position of women in the military forces. But I mean it’s taking their character away and the military do so much for their non-military citizens. A little bit in return I think is not asking too much.

It’s gone out the window to reduce that relationship to political cut and thrust. I hope we don’t fall for that but we do so many things don’t we that mirror American society, but I hope that we can avoid that one.

The quick answer is yes, and if you said when, only a few years ago.

I’m told by my children, and they’re always the most perceptive, that I never said anything about it. My letters from Vietnam were about the lizards and the sand dunes and the weather and the fact that I went boating sometimes, never about what I did or what anybody else did. I came back in ’69, ’70,

so up until about 2000 I didn’t speak to any of them. I didn’t want to think about it I suppose, and I didn’t think that the family would be any better off hearing comments about it, but things did change and if you want to know when they changed, they changed most significantly after the Canberra welcome home parade, the National Veterans’ Day Parade, being preceded by one the previous

year in Sydney. My son was in the air force then. He was a Flight commander with 38th Squadron, the Caribou Squadron, and he said, “You and Uncle Duncan,” that’s my school friend, “come to Sydney and march, because I’m going to be flying the leading aircraft, the Caribou over the Veterans’ Parade,” and I was very attracted by the thought, and then I thought about it and foolishly…unfortunately, I can’t say that I

shed all foolishness – foolishly I said, “No, I’m not going to.” There was an opportunity to say, “I’m glad you’re back.” The Australian public chose not to. That’s their choice. I chose not to go to this late one, and my son accepted that and didn’t argue, but after it was over – it’s always after it’s over – I don’t think I made a good judgement. I think it was mean-spirited of me,

and there was my son flying his aeroplane over his father’s colleagues, and I wasn’t there. I’ve missed that opportunity, and then out of that came the next one here in Canberra and I went on that one and it was an incredible feeling, absolutely incredible. The Vietnam Memorial was opened and I think it’s a most evocative

thing, absolutely extraordinary. We all marched down Anzac Parade, and young policemen – because at my age policemen are getting younger all the time – were carefully guiding us into areas, and I saw a little boy on the side of the road who wouldn’t have been around, possibly not even his parents, when we first came home, and he was holding a banner saying, “My Dad’s a hero.” This is the Australian public that I served.

The other was an aberration, and for me and particularly for my friends who were much more traumatised – I’m not claiming that I was traumatised by Vietnam at all, but for them it was an experience like a resurrection, it really was. For some it was too late. They couldn’t shed their alcoholism or their depression or their drug dependence, but by and large it was fantastic. And there were strong men crying in the march,

and that was lovely because the poison was getting out, and from that day on I marched in the Anzac Day March every year except when I’ve been overseas and that was at Gallipoli itself. Every year, and I talk to the children and they’ve been very pleased that I’ve done so both for their own sake and for mine. It was a quite incredible moment in my life,

that march.

To pick a memory? Well I suppose the whole of Malaya, that it was the first time that I’d been on operation. This was the testing of

a young incompletely prepared officer practising his arts and learning from them. It was a professional thing. I didn’t feel particularly threatened. I saw it as a learning experience. Vietnam didn’t have that feeling at all but of course I was older, I was more experienced, I was infinitely more competent, but

I felt the burden of my job very heavily and I’ve talked about that, and I was disturbed about our separation from the society that I served. So that was very different, there was nothing like that in Malaya, and I think on both occasions the coming home was the memory that is very graphic in my mind, but the

troublesome thing about Vietnam was that brief flash – there was my wife and my children and I am home and I’m safe, and they’re all right – is reduced by the impact of the coldness of the public face of the public. Perhaps it wasn’t coldness, it was still anger and that was very disturbing and I guess I would remember that though I’m much more

relaxed about it now seeing it as just something in the span of Australian history.

Of course.

Yes. I find it less significant in that that doesn’t surprise me at all and it is very much in our culture and Gallipoli is a wonderful example of the first time that happened, when the dust settled, when the deed is done, when you have done what you are obliged by your connections to your

country and that you represent, when that is done and the battle is over, the thing that we have in common is we served our nation and each can respect that. And I think it’s one of the very strong and enduring memories that Australia has of the Turk. We are so welcome when we go to Gallipoli. Young soldiers salute me when I’m at Gallipoli because I’m wearing my medals on Anzac Day. They all

salute me. An old man came up and put his hands on my medal and gave a deep bow with his hands like that. I was so touched by that. This is a Turk and my previous generation of Australian may have shot and killed his father, and yet there was no rancour at all. Now, I know of no other battlefield or interaction between countries where that is so strong.

Well I’ve got to be honest and say no, I don’t feel exactly the same way, but I can forget as we have forgotten atrocities that occurred in our conflict with Japan. You can’t take away the fact there were atrocities but it’s an event we recognise. The people who are Japanese are not the ones who perpetuated those atrocities, and the sins of their

forebears do not necessarily descend on them, so I’m comfortable with that and I guess that’s closer to how I feel about the Vietnamese. But I’ll add to that. The Vietnamese that were killed both by other Vietnamese, I mourn their passing and think that was part of an awful price that you paid for very little return, very much. Yes,

they’re strong feelings and I think that was Mike Smith who made those comments, and I would agree entirely. Of course, that is a typical Australian soldier making those comments.

Well, I’ve welcomed this opportunity because I’ve said things today that I haven’t said altogether before. I won’t say I feel better for it but I’m quite confident that what I’ve said represents not just my personal view, that it is also indicative of others, in which case I hope I’m contributing to yet again part of our history without claiming that it was either significant or better than any one else. Quite the contrary, but it is a contribution.