Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Essendon, Victoria in 1923.

Well in the depression years we had quite a few shifts. I went to a lot of schools. I started at Flemington State, I went (UNCLEAR) a long time ago now.

Flemington state. I’m trying to remember. And North Melbourne, Errol Street North, Thornbury.

Quite a few.

No I didn’t. I didn’t like school at all.

The sport was all right. I don’t know, I think it was the teachers in those days. I had some teachers…I can still see them and I idolise them.

The fourth grade teacher, she was lovely. She probably spoiled me and the seventh grade school teacher, strangely enough I met him through the war. I was sergeant and he was a corporal in those days in the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] but I liked him. He was a nice fellow. A nice fellow. And the rest, you know, weren’t too good.

Yeah it was tough. Tough days.

Everybody (UNCLEAR) knew how tough it was. Some tougher than others. We…but always good. We had a good family. Mum was marvellous, you know. That’s why she died young I think. The old man, he was very good. He always battled, always got a dollar.

He was a warehouseman and then he was a tailor. He was a tailor throughout most of his career.

I was a warehouseman. I worked in Flinders Lane and Flinders Lane was the rag capital of Australia then. I was fourteen and delivering parcels, you know. And right up until the time I went to the war.

No. But I was after the war. I got out and the old man, my brother and I, we made

trousers. We couldn’t get cloth in those days. We used to, what they call, cut, make and trim. We made for Henry Bucks.

Yeah. That was very good. And at the time we were getting seven and sixpence to cut them, make it and trim it. So we weren’t making a fortune.

Yeah. Well, it did. I can still remember listening to the radio. There was talk of a war, you know, and I didn’t read newspapers in those days. It was mainly talking to other people and listening to the radio when Menzies declared war, you know, and said, “We’re in.” And I remember my old man shaking his head because he was a First World War digger.

Yeah.

Sometimes he would but normally no. I knew what a section was and what a platoon was from him and he was a young fellow, went to the war, and of course I think he was only eighteen when they landed in Egypt. And fortunately for him he was the 11th reinforcements for the 7th Battalion when they were on the peninsula. And the war finished then.

So he went, they formed the 59th Battalion, so he was with the 59th from wo to go. He was wounded three times.

Finished in the end but I remember his section leader was a bloke called Glen Crompiteck. I remember his name. He had the New South Wales monte de pete [?]. He had the pawn shop and it was in Elizabeth Street.

(Unclear). And I met Glen. I had the pleasure of…On my first leave I went into town, you know and he had great pleasure in introducing me. At that time I was sergeant and had a military medal, you know. And they made a hell of a fuss of me. I might even have had a few beers, I think.

Well I couldn’t repeat it. I don’t want to

No, he didn’t want it at all. He just forbid it. He said, “You blokes aren’t going, you stay around.” This is when eventually I heard about the militia, you know. I got into the militia and finished up sneaking in the back door that way.

Ah I wasn’t quite seventeen then. But I was seventeen when I

went into the militia.

Well Mum wasn’t too happy about things at all but they thought it was right because I was in the militia. You know. I’d done that.

I did. And he finished up in the war too. Keith was two years younger than me and he got into ordnance. And I know he was in Flinders Lane and the next thing I heard he was in

Milne Bay in New Guinea.

Well a couple of years it must have been. I went in 1940 it must have been and then in 1941, they called for volunteers in the 39th Battalion. And we went away in….

on Boxing Day in 1941 we sailed for New Guinea. And I joined the AIF obviously, by that time I had been in the Owen Stanleys and the old man, I sent down the papers and he signed the papers. That was in 1942.

I was nineteen.

That’s all. It wasn’t anything. You know, the 39th. But later, especially in these last few years the history is there. But General Cosgrove too, he was a…. they were always taught, at the Royal Military College, they had the history of the 39th, you know. He was a great

drummer for the 39th.

Oh yes. Yeah. We went to train at Darley and we were the first because it was an AIF training area. And of course, you know, we were all chocos. And I remember there was a corporal in our platoon and he joined the 39th

but he had already enlisted in the AIF. He was waiting for a call up. Strangely enough they’d stopped enlisting in the AIF at that stage. Now I know that they didn’t have enough money for uniforms. But he got into the AIF and away we went, of course he was still in Australia. We were back home after seeing active service

and the whole lot, and poor old Cocky Boston still hadn’t left Australia.

Oh I think so. You know. It was the big adventure in those days.

I loved it. Yeah. I always wanted to be a soldier. I don’t know why but I always wanted to be a soldier. Perhaps because of my old man.

Yeah.

Oh you know. Very traumatic like everybody else and what did happen, Mum had a baby late in life. I was on final leave and Mum had just had this…she had twins as a matter of fact and lost one. So I had this little baby sister and it was only my brother and I there had been that far, for eighteen years. So

it was fairly traumatic. It was great. I can still remember parts of it.

No, I didn’t. I didn’t have a girlfriend in those days.

Yeah.

Very good. We went on the Aquitania and they sent us by rail to Sydney,

and we got on the Aquitania. I’d never seen a ship that big. And we got on and we had to do duties. And I remember I was a picket and I had to stand on the wharf, so that no one could get off. And there was one of the battalions they’d shanghaied from Sydney and I don’t want to talk about that but they didn’t want to be in it and they were trying to get off, “Let’s get off,” you know. I was too ‘conchie’ [conscientious]. There was no

way of doing that.

Oh good. They’d say these duties and then on deck they had these superstructures. We were looking for aircraft and submarines. We were looking for aircraft straight ahead and submarines over the other side of the ship and never having seen both. And I’ll always remember

we had one scare. And away went the, incidentally before we left the whole Australian flotilla was across the mouth of Sydney Harbour. There was the Aquitania, the [HMS] Queen Elizabeth, and I think the Mauritania all in there taking troops. They were going to Malaya I think.

And then we had this scare, you know, on the way. This great whooping of sirens and smoke screens. It was rather thrilling. And they put up this box kite and we all had to fire our rifles at this aircraft, you know. And an old mate of mine pulled it in and there was one hole in it. He reckons an officer did that with his pistol.

It was a bit of a shock.

Port Moresby was pretty barren and the whole lot. And of course the Aquitania couldn’t get into the wharf and we went ashore on the New Zealand cruiser the Achilles. And we went to the wharf on that and as history tells us nothing was organized, you know. We had a supply ship with us and everything was on the supply ship.

So what we carried….And we went out to this aerodrome where we were going to be based. It was called Seven-Mile and we marched out there which was some march in the heat and the whole lot. And of course got to the Seven-Mile. It was very barren, no tents, you know. And

there were no tents or anything. And all the mosquitos. I forget how long it was before we got tents.

Yes. Just sleeping on the ground. Tents No tnd mosquito nets. You know, it was quite some time. It was pretty rugged.

No. There was nothing there then.

Of course everything was fairly stable. Singapore still hadn’t fallen at that stage. And we… then Singapore fell. Apart from that we used to be rostered to go and unload the ships. You had the stores, you know. You’d go down and load them and come back. Pinch whatever you could off them. And with the stores and

there was still a bit of beer in those days. They were bringing beer and we used to have a ration out there but there weren’t many of us drinkers in those days. And then I got nominated, my section, for going to the seven-mile drome. This was a classic and there was a little hut there where the contractors built the drome. It was just a tin shed because there was still a bit of cement in it

when we went down and that was our headquarters and the road run across one end of the drome then. And my job, I was a lance corporal then, my job was to find out where all the aircraft were going and where they’d been. Because you can imagine a silly looking lance corporal going out there and asking, “Excuse me. Where are you going?” At this stage they were going away on wrecking and bombing raids and I can’t

repeat the language they’d answer you with. So it was a fairly blank sheet I had. I used to religiously go out and ask. But then as things got worse, after Singapore fell, the traffic, there were Hudson Bombers, Wirraway fighters. We were operating from there then. I’d go out and these poor blokes in Hudsons, they’d be going out to…Oh and then Rabaul fell.

Of course they’d be going up to bomb Rabaul and I’d ask them and they’d say, “Nick off.” I had to, we had to roll forty-four gallon drums which were full of AV [aviation] gas, aviation fuel, onto the strip and when they came in they would have to circle while we went out and pushed them off. And they were in pretty good nick because there were only about eight of us, you see, and then

this day along came this bloke. He has a wheel hanging down, a bomber Hudson and of course he handed alongside the strip, and of course we run over and the pilot had been killed. The co-pilot who landed her was wounded and they were all shot. Everybody was wounded including the rear gunner. We used our field dressings to bandage them up, got them out of the aircraft, and by this time then the air force arrived, and this officer

ordered us away from the plane and the whole lot. You know, I was pretty arrogant at this stage. I was a big lance corporal and I had done all the hard work. I told them where to go. Oh and our blankets of course. We used them to lay them on, put them down where they were wounded. I can still remember this fellow had, they had hit a marker and it had exploded in the aircraft and when he opened the door it was all silver,

you know. You know, it ‘pressed me with the blood in it. You know. They were the first wounded we had ever seen.

Yes it was, you know. Of course, we expected to see something the way it was shot up. But from then on it got fairly rough. We were taking a lot of raids. I think we did about thirty or forty air raids including strafing, while we were on the strips so that

introduced us to gunfire.

And we had a couple of close goes with the bombs. There was also…There was a lavatory they had been using, the contractors, and I said, “That’s a good idea. You and you empty the pan and we’ll use this lavatory.” And of course that night there was a raid and that was the end of the lavatory.

So we had no problems from then on.

We moved from one side of the drome to the other. It all gets a bit hazy now. Why, I don’t know but we all moved to the other side. Things were building up then because the

raids were getting heavier. We got…A Kittyhawk squadron flew up and the Americans were in. The first one I struck, I heard the radial engines. You know, the old Kittyhawks and the Japs had radial motors. You knew the sound. This bloke came in and it was a dive bomber because he had the American star on the side.

So I run up and left and I’ll never forget his name. This fellow stood up and he took off his flying helmet they used to have and put on his cap. He was an officer. He said, “I’m Commander Hall of the United States aircraft carrier [USS] Lexington.” And he had Hall on his jacket. I’d never seen names on jackets. And I said, “I’m Lance Corporal McKay of the AIF,” and I must have impressed him and

his gunner in the back, he used to stand up for the dive bomber. He put on a gobs hat. Very impressive. So you know, they waited and the air force came and took them away. I often wonder what happened because I think it was a couple of days later that the Lexington went down. But that was before we moved over the other side and our fighters arrived. We had to help build the

bays for the aircraft so they could shelter, be bomb-proof. I think it was from there that the Japs landed then and the battle was on. We had dug a lot of holes and we had defensive positions all around Moresby.

No. They were heading down the river. This was the battle of

the Coral Sea. That was the first one. But then of course they landed at Gona. They decided to fly us across but probably they didn’t have enough aircraft. But they flew one company across. That was our B Company in 39th.

And they met the Japs. They went down there and they met the Japanese. And then we started to walk across. I forget the order of march now but A company was second last I think and we got off and we started to walk across.

It took us seven days. And we had our stops and I remember

a very famous bloke. He was a…Later on when I served in peace time in New Guinea he was a plantation owner up there. He had been there all his life. And it’s just slipped my mind now then. And he worked out the stops to mark across and later on where they were going to drop supplies. This stuff had never been done before, never air dropped.

This is without parachute and he got us there and we arrived this night and the natives of course, they’d press ganged them. They were all locals of course, coastal blokes. They had never been in the mountains. And they got these fellows and they got us this night and he said, “Here’s what’s going to happen. There’s going to be a section between every group of carriers. I know it sounds cruel. Here’s what happens;

if one of these blokes drops his kit and runs away, you’ve got to shoot him dead. Otherwise, they’ll all go.” Of course, it was a bit cruel. You know but I could see the logic in it then. But fortunately it didn’t. They stayed. But these were later the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels. You know. We had to escorted them over the track. It was some walk.

Oh. I’ll say it was a shock to the system. You know, I can still remember. We’d climb and we’d climb and there’d be a false crest and you’d say, “Beauty, I’ve made it.” You’d get there and there was only another two hours to the top. But it was hard work.

Well in some places you did but normally you could, normally you could walk.

And we cut sticks. Everybody had a walking stick, so as to give yourself drive. Everyone had a stick. In those photographs of the last of the 39th, you can see the sticks. Well everyone had one.

Well B Company had got them and they had a fighting withdrawal all the way back from Gona to Kokoda. And then they held them a while at Kokoda and they lost Kokoda. We had defensive positions at Deniki, which was the start of the track. It was high, it was the first climb. It was Kokoda to Deniki. And eventually the whole

battalion was there, what was left of us. I think there was about seven hundred, all told. So we got in and we started a patrol from there and our commanding officer had been killed. He was up with B Company. He had been flown across and he had been killed at Kokoda. And the second in command was in charge and he decided that attack was the greatest form of defence.

So we were patrolling out and they decided that they were going to go down. And you could see the Japs at Kokoda from Deniki. He decided we would go down. Now we had a police fellow with our company called Sergeant Senopa, a local boy. Yeah. From the local constabulary. And he knew a track down from Deniki down the back way into Kokoda. So we were going to take that.

C Company were going to go down the main track and D Company were going to go further. It was all very glamorous. So, we went down, we left in the dark. No one moved in the dark in those days, in the mountains, but we did. We moved in the dark. We went down and we finished up in one of the rivers, I don’t know which. We waded in the river for a couple of hours, you know and came into the back of Kokoda.

Kokoda was on a little plateau and it was a rubber plantation. So, you know a rubber plantation – it’s all mowed grass. It’s like walking up the MCG [Melbourne Cricket Ground] except there’s trees there. And of course we went down and all we struck was a couple of old Japs who fired a machine gun. And they got killed. They were sick. And this was good for us. So we had Kokoda and

the rule was, Old Jim Cowey, who was a First World War bloke, he was a staff sergeant. He had an MC [Military Cross]. He had been a company commander in the First World War but Jim had communist tendencies and they wouldn’t give him the commission in the Second World War. So he goes across and he fires the success signal for what it was worth, and the company went into this defensive

position and my platoon, a couple of sections of my platoon went up to Oivi, which was the other way, on a standing patrol and we just got up there and we decided… all we had was what we carried. It was a flat pack. Like a flat tin of fifty cigarettes, that was a ration pack and we were going to have a bit of this for our lunch and we heard firing.

And the sergeant, I remember him now, (UNCLEAR) Murray, said, “We’d better go back. We don’t know what’s going on there.” We had no radios in those days. So away we went and we went back and we got up the back of Kokoda. I can still remember seeing the CSM [Company Sergeant Major] waving from the top and we climbed in there. And he said, “The Japs are up in the

rubber.” So then we got the story. What happened, 9th Platoon were across the rubber and one of the fellows in 9th Platoon said, “Here’s C Company now. I can see them.” And they shot him, bang. It was the Japs coming back. And what had happened, C Company were coming down and they had struck the Japs coming up to attack us. And they had a shooting match, so they sent a company back to get us out.

So there we were. We were all round. 9th Platoon has taken this fire. And I just get back and the platoon commander called me up and said, “I want you to take your platoon and go up and reinforce 9.” “Okay.” And what happens he said, “Keep them in extended line, go out and wheel round and go into them.” At this time there’s pretty heavy machine gun

and mortar fire. So away we went and as soon as we started to move, they really threw everything at us. And there was mortars and machine gun fire. Didn’t lose a man. Got up. Went to ground and then crawled up to where 9th Platoon was. And I met the platoon sergeant of 9th, a bloke called Larry Downs, And he told me the story, how they’d got …

oh the fellow that got shot, he said he was C Company and he was just over there dead. And he said, “I want you to go forward,” and he said, “Put your machine gun over there and another Tommy gun. Put it so and so, and take the rest up and see Vern Scattergood. You’ll find him round the front.” By this time it was getting dark,

it was five o’clock when we went in. So I had to crawl across in the dark and get this fellow because he had a Tommy gun. I took his Tommy gun off him and then I had the Tommy and crawled off. I met Vern Scattergood and I was a corporal at this time, so I outranked Vern Scattergood and I said,

“Where are we?” We weren’t dug in or anything. “I said, look there’s a drain I saw when we were coming up.” I said, “We’ll crawl forward and get into that drain.” There was a drain right across the plateau. So we crawled forward and got into this drain. So things got pretty quiet during that night. There were a couple of probes and we threw grenades but nothing serious happened. Well the next morning they started to attack, you see, at dawn.

And what had really happened of course, they reinforced the company that came down. By the time they pushed us out, they had about four battalions up there. We held them there for thirty-six hours and the Japs had never been held for thirty-six hours anywhere. But of course we were running out of ammo and we didn’t have any tucker. And they decided then that they were going to withdraw but of course nobody

told us because we were up in the rubber. So that night and the next night they started to put in some heavy attacks and I heard this bloke calling “JD.” They used to call me, in my battalion, I was JD. And it was this old bloke Jim Cowey. He was in his fifties. And what had happened, they started, the company had started withdrawing at six o’clock as soon as it got dark

and there was only us left and then of course a couple of 9th Platoon had got up. And old Jim woke up and he got up and called us out. When we withdrew the bloke I went up to, Vern Scattergood, in the heat of the moment he was getting excited, you know. And he climbed up a tree and he was firing the Bren from the hip. You know. And I remember saying, “Get down you bloody

fool.” But I never saw Vern again. It must have hit him and he went down. We went back and I always reckon we advanced in about the fourth wave of the Japs. We got there and there’s old Jim kneeling down beside a tree in the rubber plantation, and if you were a Jap, he shot you and if you were a digger, he said, “Get down here behind me.”

So we got down, I think there was about eleven of us at this stage. There was the commander of the 9th Platoon.

It was the platoon was up there, then about thirty but others had got out. I don’t know. We’d had some heavy casualties. I’d had a few. There were only three of us left out of my section. And,

then there was only me because the next thing Johnny Storm, who was my section 2IC [Second in Command], he was lying there badly wounded and I said to old Jim, “I’ll carry him.” And he said, “No, you won’t. He’s dying.” And we put a dressing on and I can remember it just fell in the hole that was in his back. And

we started to get out and I said, “What will we do now?” And they said, “Well, we’ll walk across the bridge,” because there was a swing bridge across this creek. The company hadn’t used that but Jim said, “Well it’s dark. They don’t know where we are. They’ll think we’re Japs. So we get out and we just walked across the bridge and then across the airfield.” And he said, “We’ll stop here and have a spell and we’ll go in the daylight.” We stopped there and had a sleep that night. We were

pretty well exhausted. I hadn’t slept for a couple of days. No tucker. I suppose old Jim stood on guard all night. He was an old soldier. I just hit the ground and went clunk. And the next morning we started walking and we walked up the track. And as we walk up the track these trees have been scarfed, and all Japanese writing on it. And he said, “Oh well, keep going. They

haven’t seen us yet.” So we kept going up and up this track. We started to climb and the next thing there’s a burst of machine gun fire and it took a bit of wood above Jim’s head. He just leaned against a tree and casually shot the one or two on the machine gun and then continued the advance. I said, “Hey, cut it out.” Anyway, then they started to get a bit thick so he says, “Righto. I think we’ll leave now.” So we

branched off the track and we went around and we bumped one listening post which the platoon commander threw a grenade in, but while we were going round it, out of the bush walks my one and two on the Bren, and carrying the gun, which incidentally had jammed a bit, they’d been running around. No ammo. So we dismantled that and threw it away and away they went, Bill Drummond and Bill Spriggs.

We had one night and then we came across a bit of a native village and they fed us. I can still remember this. Mary cooking the potato, pumpkin. It was beautiful. We hadn’t had anything for about two days. So we had a feed there and then we decided to have a rest.

We came across this village and decided to go and have a look and I remember Larry Downs, the platoon sergeant and I think another fellow, went in to see if the village was all right, and we went into it and they waved us in and

as we came in, in the other side marched the company that had withdrawn. So we met up with them. So they said, “Good,” it was just on dusk, so he said, “You blokes will sleep and nobody will stand to except all these other blokes.” So we slept all that night. And the next day we came in, we’d hooked around and we came into Isurava, which was past Deniki and

we came in there. And I can remember the company commander. There was line then, they had a phone and he got on the phone and rang up and said, “We want to broach the cargo for tucker.” So we were back in the fold. We moved forward and then we set up the FDLs [Forward Defence Line] for Isurava, and of course another story in Isurava.

Well Isurava, we got a new commanding officer there, Ralph Honner, who I didn’t know, but of course a very famous colonel. He had come back from the Middle East. And we went down to Isurava and we had a listening post forward of us.

It was about eight hours walk forward where we had this listening post. And we used to be rostered to go forward and listen. It was fairly hairy because we were expecting the Japs. And then they’d been overrun. When our platoon came out the last one had been overrun. There was only us and we were there

but we got on all right and I don’t know. I forget how long we were there. We must have been there about a week I think. Now the old Jap must have been licking his wounds because he had stopped the advance. He was only having a probe. And we got there and that’s when of course the 2/14th came in to relieve us.

And I can remember these fellows walking in, god I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, the greens. They had jungle greens on and they were the first greens I’d ever seen. And they had all this ruddy ammo and tucker hanging off them. And that’s when they told us they went forward. And the aim was they were going to relieve us and we were going to be relieved, they were taking over, but Ralph Honner said no. He wouldn’t leave us. Things were going to be tough and we’d stay with them.

Well Isurava of course was the big battle. The 2/14th had relieved us, you know, and it was marvellous. By jeez, they were brave. They put in a couple of counter attacks and our fellows were just about done

when they arrived. That’s when the nickname came ‘the ragged bloody heroes’. And my section, which had virtually been wiped out there. I was in reserve. We dug in with bayonets and bare hands. We didn’t have any tin hats.

And I remember we dug a decent little trench too. And I wasn’t far off the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] and the battalion headquarters. And I had a fellow, I had been reinforcing and he worked for Melbourne City Council. He was a street sweeper, a darkie, I can’t remember his surname now and he used to love tea. He would drink tea,

at the drop of the hat. In those days you had to boil the billy for tea. There was no tea bags or anything. We got a resupply and I got this packet of tea. It was tea in a bag and I thought, what will I do with this? I know. I’ll give it to Darkie, he’ll look after it. So I gave this tea, right. And I said as soon as we get a chance and we can boil up we’ll brew up and

we’ll brew tea. And it was some days later and I said, “We’ll make a brew.” And he was looking fairly (UNCLEAR) and I said, “What’s the matter?” And he said, “Well I ate it.” He ate the bloody tea. And it must have been a craving. And I later learned he was an alcoholic, he must have been, and the tea used to help him. He’d eaten raw tea.

“Where’s the tea?” And he said, “I ate it.” Mind you he was hungry as well. But I’ve never forgotten

that. The look on the faces of the section, all their jaws dropped. He was very embarrassed.

Yes, that was the withdrawal then. They decided to…The Japs had a breakthrough. For five days I think we were there. It was pretty heavy fighting. Iora, Iora Creek.

And the 2/16th Battalion was there then and we had to go down and we got into position and then we had to go forward to… That’s right, they had some patrols out, to allow these patrols to get back, you know. The 2/14th was still falling down back and we had to hold it. So they got back and

we were there a couple of days I remember fighting pretty rough. From there we went up through Efogi and we were going through. It gets a bit hairy now, it is a long time ago. And I know Kagi was one of our, Kagi is the highest point in the Owen Stanley Range.

We stopped there and I can remember they were going for the water. They had to go right down the front on the enemy’s side. They had a sort of fighting patrol that came back with the water. They told us that we were going to be relieved, you know, and the 2/27th Battalion relieved us and you handed over all automatic weapons.

And we handed over our automatic weapons and away we went. By this time I’d lost me hat. I lost that at Isurava when we were getting out. One of our fellows was wounded and we were just out. And the fellow who was the acting platoon sergeant said, “Bob Nemo’s been hit.” So we ran back and grabbed an arm each. He’d been hit in the legs,

and away we went and they were right on our hammerand we were going over ditches, and I know I lost my hat and I knew I couldn’t go back for it. It was a great comfort, that hat. Because it used to rain every night, you could pull yourself into that old slouch hat, you know. So I didn’t have a hat, and then it was at Kagi I walked out of my boots, you know. They rotted and fell off.

So as we got a bit further there were dressing stations and they take the boots off the dead and the other wounded and I tried these boots on. The only pair that would fit me were a bit big and I took about three steps, stepped into the mud and stepped out of them again so I finished bare foot. So the 27th relieved. I can’t remember how many days it took us to walk out then but we walked

out and of course the 27th, they got nearly annihilated there at Brigade Hill. We came out and we went to…we came out at McDonalds Corner. You know where it was. It was great. It was flat going and there were roads. Even though it was dirt, there were roads and it was flat going. We were exhausted.

But these two signallers up a tree, they were up there doing line, they said, “Where have you been mates? Out on exercise?” Bloody exercise! And we got back and the rear guard of the battalion was there and they gave us a set of greens and a towel and some soap and probably a razor.

And we had a tub and I slept that night like a log. And we were there for a couple of days and then we started to get reinforced. And what had happened, there was an old fellow from Melbourne, wrote a letter to Victoria Barracks and said he lived there for a number of years and there was also a track that came into Port Moresby

from the Goldie River. So they thought, well the Japs will use this so they were sending out patrols and there were sheer drops on Hombrum Bluff, sheer drops and they’d send out these patrols and they’d have block and tackle and climbing ropes to find this track. And I went out. I had a, as a corporal, two sections and I was in charge.

And we went out to look for this track. You know, we’d been going all one day and we stopped by this stream. And we were having a feed and one of the blokes wanted to go to the toilet. So he came back and he said, “There’s a track there at the back of that garden.” It was a native garden and we go and have a look. So I said, “Righto, we’ll go down this.” And we went down this track and that was it.

It went right down to the Goldie River. So I went down to the Goldie. It was only two days so we had to get back, so we went back. And then in the debriefing I went to my platoon commander, I didn’t know how to draw a map, I drew this map and the platoon commander helped me and he said, “I’ll come with you,” and I had to go to New Guinea Force headquarters and brief them there on this track. And they sent our CO [Commanding Officer] that came out with us, Ralph Honner,

and he went out, and I think he took a commando company with him. He went out and they went down that track and secured it. And I was promoted to sergeant. So from there it was all patrols and by this time the campaign was still going on, they had run out of puff and the 16th Brigade had arrived and they had started to move over.

The artillery had got up. And they started to push him back. So we went from there, back down the mountain to what they used to call Seventeen-Mile and more reinforcements and we went down to Bootless Bay.

It’s at the back of Moresby. It’s one of the bays at the back of that

Seven-Mile Drome too. I don’t know. Anyway, we were there still digging in, incase of a landing by sea. It was pretty mountainous round there. And it was there that the brigadier came to see us and said, “Will you all sit down.” So we all sat down, this is the battalion, and he said, “I’m going hunting Japs and you’re coming with me.” God.

Real excited. So we had at that time…We had been reinforced with a lot of AIF officers. They were from the 7th Division and mainly 21st Brigade fellows and they were very good too. And some of the older blokes, the militia blokes had joined the AIF then, and I

applied you know and they replied back but I still didn’t have my VX [Victorian AIF registration number]. So away we went and we were going to fly over. So that was the big thing. The biscuit bomber had come into its own at that stage and that was my first flight. So you know we had…if anything happened and they called out these Zeros, you poked your

automatic weapons through the windows and fire, good heaven above. But I was highly delighted at this flight, though. So we flew off and I know in our flight they said there’s…I didn’t know then but these fighter go “woof,” down to tree-top level at one stage. So I wasn’t looking too good when we landed. In the history one of the blokes

who’d been on an earlier flight said he saw me getting off the plane and I was as white as a sheet. I was glad to get off. Then we marched to Soputa and next day we went up to Gona. Now the battle of the beaches had been going on for a while then and they were at Gona, at Buna and at Sanananda.

So of course Gona was the first place they had landed, so they were fairly well dug in. There was a heavy fortress. And they’d lost a lot of men and we figured, we relieved… I think the 3rd Militia Battalion was there, and we relieved them. We were at Gona for a couple of days and then my platoon

had the honour of going in. There was one machine gun that was particularly…It commanded the whole front that we were on and we had to go in and grab it in the dark. And my platoon commandment, who was a reinforcement and hadn’t heard a shot at this stage, said, “We’ve got the honour of being the first.” I said, “I’m thrilled to pieces.” So away we went and of course in the dark you can’t see your hand there.

So we only went about two hundred metres and we were in water up to our waists. There was a swamp there that you couldn’t see. So we wallowed around this swamp and then the mortars from another battalion opened up and they were falling right in amongst us.

Yeah. And this caused the Japs of course, when they went to start firing fixed lines

with their machine guns. The platoon runner got his eye knocked out and went blind in sympathy. The platoon commander got wounded, so he said, “We’ll abort this,” and I had to take the platoon back. I thought, “this will be good, they are all trigger-happy now. Wait till we get back in to…” But however another fellow, Hughie Delby, he was originally from the 2/27th Battalion. He was there. He was looking for

us and we got back in. I later finished up his platoon sergeant, later on in the war. But that was it and then that was no good. So they had a…It was some couple of weeks they decided they were going to attack Gona and Ralph Honner was given the honour of taking

it out. And we attacked. My platoon, because it didn’t have an officer, was in reserve. And away went A Company and they broke through straight away and got right through to the beach. I was following up, and this gun that we went in to get that night, we finished up taking about twenty-four Japanese out of it because they were tunnelled right in under it

and they’d just keep coming up, keep coming up. But oh, the stench at Gona where the dead had been lying there for months. The Japs we were standing on dead, firing and we used to….We had water purification tablets. We used to dig a hole and that would fill up with water, put the purifier in and drink it, you know.

With all the dead around and the latrines, no wonder we finished up sick. But however, that was all right. So they wrote a book about it, Gona’s Gone. That was the signal and it was a great boost.

Gona’s Gone. We were then going to go up to Sanananda.

The whole battalion was going to walk up. We were in single file going along the beach towards Sanananda and our Beaufighters, it was a wrecker wharf at Gona, which incidentally is still there too, and they were strafing this wreck because the Japanese used to land reinforcements on it and then they’d get ashore from there to reinforce their blokes. And he was strafing it and then the next thing

(UNCLEAR) he peels off and you can see his (UNCLEAR). However, (UNCLEAR) who was poking about, he was waving his slouch hat and his rifle and he stopped. But in the one burst, all he did was wounded a carrier and knocked a few trees down. That was the only casualty we took. It could have killed bloody thirty or forty blokes. And that’s all. Then the message came through that we had to go

back again. So we went back again to what we used to call west of Gona. It was AmbogiRiver. It was a river up there and they said there was the headquarters of all of this mob, and we were just going to clean it up. So we go back and we had a guide from the 2/14th leading us, unlucky. We get up there, and

the river that’s coming past, getting close to it and three silly looking Jap officers came down. Dressed up. I mean the white shirts outside their uniforms and that, to have a wash, and of course sees them. So they had to shoot them. That alerted the whole lot. And we were up there for three weeks getting rid of them. Took a hell of a pounding. There was also another listening post of

the 2/14th. Haddy was his name. He was the platoon commander and they called it Haddy’s village. They eventually got exterminated but we were up there and we eventually cleaned that out and then back down to Gona. At this stage I had a boil on each ankleso they said we were going back through

Soputa to Sanananda. So we got up there and one of our rear detail mobs, they had packs and stuff with a soldier there in charge, and they put me off until these boils healed and I got them cleaned up and bandaged and what have you. Two days later…I had two days spell and then I had to go up, and I’m going

up to Sanananda. So Sanananda was quite a fight too. There were a lot of people who had a go. I just recently went back on this sixty year anniversary and we didn’t get there because it is all gone back to the bush, but I saw Gona from the air, we were flying

and how I picked it out was by the wreck, and it is still a mission wreck, so it’s still mobile. And later on I would serve with the Pacific Islands Regiment after the war and I got up to Gona and found our forward defence lines. That was twenty-eight years later. The…

At Sanananda I took over our battalion (UNCLEAR). What with the sick and the wounded we were pretty thin on the ground, and they put them into two groups I think. And I had to go back, they said on the phone, “There’s some Comforts Fund’s [Australian Comforts Fund] stuff, so come back and get it.” So I go along the track to go back to battalion headquarters to go and get it and I saw some silly looking Japs cutting

the phone line. So I shot them and then get back there and I wasn’t feeling too good, you know, and I remember seeing the blokes. I don’t know what it was but they put out a patrol from there to have a look. I went back with the Comforts Funds….It was up there that they told us our RSM had been killed. He was a First World War bloke. And one of the mortars dropped short

and a bit of shrapnel about as big as your little finger nail hit him straight in the heart. You know, that upset us because he was a great old bloke. Are we all right to keep going? We…Names are just going out of my head here a minute….

Yeah.

Oh it doesn’t matter. We used to have to go up and relieve this place. They had taken over from the Americans. The Americans had been there and we had to go up and we used to go up by night. We’d go up with a signal line in your hand, in the dark, so you wouldn’t get lost. Anyway, we’re

just waiting there till it got dark and I laid down and, bang, I collapsed see and I finished up at….You couldn’t get evacuated from Sanananda see unless you’ve had a temperature of 103 for more than three days. I must have had it for about a week, you know, because I was in ta ta land for days. And so they came through. That was the first cases of scrub typhus. So I got evacuated

from Sanananda. I forget where the airport was now, or if you don’t mind the airstrip. I was evacuated from there and you’d wait there a week or more and they’d take you back to Port Moresby. That was the last shot I fired in anger in Papua New Guinea.

No. We got back. We got reinforced again. The battalion came out. There were only, I think, five officers and twenty-seven other ranks came out from Sanananda. And we went back to Port Moresby and we got, I think it was Seventeen-Mile we were then, we got reinforced and we started to train again. I think we were

going up to Wau and we were training there and then out of the blue one night they said, “We are going home tomorrow.” So we had to pack up and we moved tomorrow so we came back. And then we went to the [Atherton] Tablelands. We were one of the first on the Tablelands. And we were up on the Tablelands. We didn’t know we were going to be broken up at that stage. Then they are ready to go on leave

and of course then the night before they go on leave I throw another sugar turtle. And I got shot into hospital.

Just got sick again. And it was malaria and the battalion went on leave and I was left behind. I didn’t do a full treatment. I forget what happened, anyway I had to go on leave.

There was wounded coming back, you know, still. And we took off probably about a week later. Seven days’ leave they gave us. So we got out for our seven days’ leave. I had a couple of days. I went into town with the old man one day. I was telling you about it before. He introduced me to Colonel Crompiteck. And

then I was going in with Mum. Mum wanted to go into town, so we went into town. Of course to show her son off I suppose. And my brother was still in New Guinea at this stage, so we got into town and I got to Flinders Street and had another attack of malaria and they had to get an ambulance and shoot me to Heidelberg Hospital. And I made a good job at that

because there I stayed for six months. I was in hospital.

I had malaria and I had skin disease and I think I was mad too. And that’s where you got the anxiety state.

I kept saying, “I just want to go back,” and they said they’d give me another few days, you know. Another few days. Anyway, they sent us to

Ballarat to the convalescent depot. And we were in tents at the con. depot after being in Heidelberg for six months, sleeping in a nice warm bed. And we were in tents and we had this night of ‘gee I’m cold’ and we got up and put our service dress on, you know, and got back in under the blankets and dawn broke. There had been a bit of a wind

and it flapped the tents back and we are laying in about that much snow. Bang. Back into hospital. Into the camp hospital. It was a beaut little camp hospital too. It used to have a potbelly stove in the ward and I was about three beds from it. It was a beauty and it used to glow, you know. You’ve been to Ballarat.

I finished the war at an ordnance depot

at Broadmeadows. They down-graded me then. They medically down-graded me. I heard the battalion had been broken up and they went to the 2/2nd Battalion and the various battalions as they kept coming in later. Some went to the…why the 16th Brigade being a Victorian battalion but that was it. And some went to the 2/8th Battalion and some fellows who hadn’t been in the AIF went back to militia battalions.

I did. I thought, “Oh well that’s it.” And we settled down then. We were going to make trousers and make a fortune all at the same time. But I was discontented, you know, I wasn’t good and then Korea broke out.

They were advertising in the paper for … to get back with your own rank, you know, the rank you were discharged with. So Dot knew I was mad, so she said, “Do you want to go back?” And we had two kids at this stage. I said, “Yeah. I wouldn’t mind going back.” So I went to Royal Park, and blow me down, I strike this bloke who used to be our my battalion. I joined up with him. He was

in the mortar platoon. We worked together. I didn’t recognize him. He had been badly wounded and his face had altered. So I got hold of him. We hadn’t seen each other and he went, “Oh strike me, that was Don.” So he got on a tram and it must have been the next tram, and I was walking along and we ended up having a nice old guts full in the Hotel Australia.

And so eventually I was called up and I went up to Pucka [Puckapunyal] and they were going to start national service. That was the first three months’ national service. So I got snared there so I didn’t get to Korea. There you go. I went to national service. And why? I volunteered and I was still available and

they asked for volunteers still. But it was a rotation system, then in Korea. A warrant officer class 2 had his time up, a warrant officer class 2 replaced him. So you didn’t have much scope. So I didn’t get to Korea.

Yeah. I stayed with it then you see, and

after I was a WO2, a company sergeant major and I, a fellow came, this half colonel came up and said, “Look I want you down at headquarters, 3rd Cadet Brigade.” They were training cadets. Now the idea of cadets was that they, the schoolboys they were then, and you volunteered for the Royal Military College. Then

you went to the officer cadet’s school and later on the army apprentices school. And Victoria wasn’t too good. In the last year they got two applicants for the Royal Military College for the whole of the year, so it was working for nothing. So they said, “What we want is new blood.” They had all these old blokes who were instructors of cadets and that is all they’d ever done. You know. Very few of them had seen any active service or anything.

So he said, “What about being my command sergeant major?” So I was promoted to warrant officer 1, so down I go. And I took over as command sergeant major. Later on I will show you a photo. It is in the book there, of one of the cadets. We opened the Victorian parliament with them. He put them on display. When we left we

had, in about thirty or forty applicants from RMC [Royal Military College], OCS [Officer Cadet School]. Kids went to the army and others just went to the apprentice school. I’d been posted to the school of infantry as an instructor, a warrant officer class 1.

And we were training warrant officer, we were running the sergeants to become warrant officers class 2. And the warrant officers, class 2 to become RSMs. And then the 1st Battalion… We were at Sydney at this stage, we were at Ingleburn, the school of infantry, and the first battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment

was at Holsworthy and they had just come back from Malaya, and they were looking for an RSM and I got posted. So I went over as RSM. I forget when I went over. About ’63 I think. And I went over as the RSM and

I was RSM there and then it came out, we looked like going to Vietnam. I had never heard of Vietnam to be quite honest. And so, but at that stage the 1st battalion…We had lost most of our seasoned old sergeants,

we had very few Royal Military College officers and we mainly had young OCs [Officer Commanding] officers and young inexperience sergeants. And it was my job to get them into line, so we trained them up and then we were the first battalion to go to Vietnam. And we went in 1965.

I left on the advance party in May and we went there and we landed and, “Where are we going?” and they said, “You are going out to a place called Bien Hoa, it is an airport,” and we were going out to 173 Airborne Brigade. So we went out and they put us up for the night. And they were an airborne brigade and we were to become

the 3rd Infantry Battalion in that brigade. And so that haunted me. Airports and rubber plantations. So in the first night…Our area was an old rubber plantation that had been dug out and what have you. And so we took over there and dug in. We had done some

helicopter training. By that I mean you probably had one helicopter for the whole battalion and you probably got into it and out of it and that was helicopter training. And we’d never seen as many choppers as they had. They had a helicopter battalion.

Yeah. And they were great. I had a lot of time for them. They worked differently to us and on the operations

we used to…they’d talk and they’d smoke, but they didn’t know. They were very gallant. They were professionals and they didn’t shirk their business at all. I was particularly impressed. We’d never heard of the term ‘dust off’. If they had a casualty they used to come on the air and say “Dust off,” they’d come in, it didn’t matter what was happening, and they’d fly in. Most of their pilots were warrant officers.

I said, we of course got a chopper assigned to us, as you know, for the CO. (Unclear) and I said most of these blokes were New York Taxi drivers. And the word went round and we’d go out and we’d come in and this bloke would go right down to the ground and make a hand signal for a right hand turn while flying the chopper. Boy they were good.

Well we were in positions because it was jungle. It was fighting but there was no comparison because we had bags of resupply, plenty of ammo. As I just said about dust off, you got dusted off. That’s where it varied. But the fare and the fighting was

exactly the same, and our techniques were adopted by them. They used to like us because we were silent and as soon as we stopped, we dug in. So you know, old Charlie [Viet Cong] didn’t know what was happening because we were dug in, silent and they’d walk in right on top of us, and all those sorts of things. And I was…

Yeah. I was getting a bit long in the tooth then. I was a command sergeant major, southern command and then this friend of mine who’s a half colonel. He used to be at the school of infantry with me as captain. He rang up and he said, “Listen,

me RSM’s just died. I’m up in PIR [Pacific Islands Regiment]. What about coming up as my RSM?” Well I’d been medically downgraded after Vietnam. He said, “That won’t be any problem,” which it wasn’t. He said, “You won’t be sleeping out in the bush,” which I wasn’t. He updated it to CZE, Communication Zones Everywhere. So I went up and of course Dot highly delighted, having…

expecting our first grandchild.

And just in our first house.

Yes. We were just going to have our first grandchild and we had a new house and we’d only been in it twelve months, I think. I went up first and then after the baby was born I came and got Dot and she came up with me.

And it was pretty hard to…We had very nice quarters. We were out at Taurama Barracks, which was down at Bootless Bay. And strangely enough I got on to an old mate of mine and said, “Where were we?” He said, “It’s battalion headquarters, still in the same spot.” “Yes.” Well that’s where we were. That was A Company’s position – where we were. That was at the Royal, double storey,

and they had been earthquake proofed and everything. So I moved around and it was all by aircraft. The CO wanted me to walk across the track and I said, “No, twice was enough.” So I only ever we went across by aircraft, and twin engine at that. But what it did do,

I got across, they were going to do an exercise which was a bit hairy. This was mainly so I could get across and I saw Kokoda. We flew right into the village on the aircraft. Right up the…The rubber plantation was finished then. I walked right up and there was the drain that I started in. That was where I got my Military Medal, it was in Kokoda.

Up to Gona and I went into the mission and of course they have priests from England. It is a Church of England mission. And they don’t speak pidgin. You see pidgin was the official language of PIR. There was this girl. She could speak pidgin, one of the natives. And I said, “Listen, there is an old truck here, you know.”

She said, “Straight through the bush here. It is about two hundred yards through.” So I walked in. Here’s that truck, the first one I went in. Here’s that machinegun I went in for the first night. I kept going, and there found our four defence lines. Fallen in but you could see where they had been dug. All uncanny. Twenty-eight years later. Yeah, so very good.

Two years.

No. While we were up there…Because I was the last year at PIR and RSM and Dot and the CO's wife had started this scheme with the girls, the Marys, of teaching them how to shop. See these poor little kids, they get married when they are

on leave, and they get permission and they bring them in and here’s their house. It’s a little brick married quarter. It’s quite nice but they’ve never seen a flush toilet. They’ve never seen running water, you know. Their eyes used to be like that, see. And they had seen very few white women. Some of them had never seen a white woman, see. Because they had only seen a (UNCLEAR) when he was on his tour. And so

they got another married quarter and they used to run this shopping business for them. The fellow I was handing over to, his wife, Mrs Osea, she would just (Unclear)! She’d bung them all around and make them stand to attention. And they’d show them all these routines and then they’d take little parties of them into where we used to shop. There was one

called the Freezer. It was a complete freezer, the shop itself. They’d never seen anything like it. And when Dot left they had two, gee three tonners to come down and see her off when she left. You know, they are very loyal. And that was good and before that my mate said, “London’s coming up. Would you go to London?” Oh yes. And Dot said, “I want to go home.” You know, she wanted to see

the grandson. And I said, “We’ll be home for a few weeks,” and we did. So that was it, we went to London for being a good boy.

Just briefly, Oh just magnificent. A bugger of a job but you know it was good as a paid tourist. It was first class all the way. We flew over and we were in a nice quarter, you know. We used to lease the quarter and

weekends you could whip over to Europe. No trouble at all. But we enjoyed all that part of it but the job wasn’t much. But while I was over there Bill Slim died. That was a job. We had to have tri-service because there were soldiers, sailors and airmen over there, and of course sailors don’t slow march.

I had to teach them how to slow march. They cleared out Australia House, pulled up all the carpets and here I am slow marching them up and down there. And hired that, you know, and we had the garden party at Buckingham Palace, you know. All good tourist stuff.

Back home.

And I went back to command sergeant major then. I was command sergeant major then. I’m just trying to put it into focus. Yeah.

1974.

I thought it was time. One, I was into my fifties then. I think I was fifty-two and the military board, there was only six generals on the military board and I think I’d been RSM to four of them when they were half colonels. So I thought it was time I went. When the military board used to meet in (UNCLEAR) command they’d send for Macka, you know. “Hello Macka. What’s the news on the OSMs?”

And it was very good. You know and you get pretty familiar with some senior officers, so you are inclined to be a bit rude to junior officers but they can still get you into a lot of trouble. There was this, I’d better not say it on the record. That’s why I decided to retire.

No, we didn’t.

I retired. As a matter of fact Dot’s mother and father were getting on then, and she doesn’t drive and she was looking after them. And that’s the main reason why I got out because she was killing herself going up in the train and doing these jobs. I mean go up for a weekend and do stuff. I said, “If I get out, I don’t want an office job.” I hate offices, you know.

I get a job on a golf course. So I used to get a week of rehabilitation while you are settling in, , while you are still serving. So I took that and painted all the house in side and then went down to the Mornington country club. It was all right. I enjoyed it. It was good physical work, nice young jokes. But the pay, with my DFRB [Defence Forces Retirements Benefit], the pension, I was working for about thirty bucks a week with tax.

You know. I was working my heart out for nothing. So I said, “It’s better to play for nothing than work for nothing.” So I knocked off and we went down to Mallacoota for the first holidays. Have you been down to Mallacoota?

It’s good flathead fishing down at Mallacoota. So I went down to Mallacoota and then I did a few lawns on my own but I wasn’t organized like they are now and I was too cheap.

But it was a bit of money. It bought me my beer and it was something to do. And then Dot’s Mum died and left her a few bucks, so we bought a caravan and that was it. I said, “Well, we’ll struggle along in this.” So we did all the things caravaners do.

No.

Oh you know. It is fairly hard to say. He said, “War isn’t glamorous.” I can remember him saying that. “It’s bloody terrible.

The loss of life. It’s not on.” He was just anti. He was a great old digger.

Oh I did what my old man said. It’s a pretty hard one.

I don’t know. He didn’t want me to go and I suppose I took his wishes. (UNCLEAR).

Yeah. You could. I remember when I joined. I forget what happened. I think they were going to start universal training, I think they called it, and they were going to call these fellows up. I joined the Victorian Scottish Regiment and of course

they reckoned they were the best, and they wanted to be full when this UT [Universal Trainee] started, so they didn’t get universal trainees, see. So they said, “If you join the cadets,” which you could join at seventeen, “as soon as you are eighteen you can go in.” So I put my age down. At seventeen and eleven months and twenty-four days I put my age down, so of course I went straight into the militia see. That was good. We did our first camp at Mt

Martha for three months and then went back and then did our next camp down there. We went down to Rye and I think that was when we started talking about the 39th then.

Yeah. There was.

Well it upset me a bit. Yeah, I agreed with them.

Oh. I’ll tell you what was one thing, I didn’t know about it. When they first started, the militia used to get eight shillings a day and the AIF were getting five. And I didn’t know that and so there was rank structures too. I don’t know why it started because when you read the history books

all the generals were militia officers, high-ranking officers. Our CO was idolized, Ralph Honner. I don’t know whether you have read anything of his books but he was a…he finished up, he was a captain in the militia in Western Australia and he couldn’t get permission to go into the AIF, so he resigned his commission and went in as a soldier. But they forgave him fortunately.

Yes. I always wanted to be in the AIF.

Oh to be in the AIF. Of course they were in the Middle East then. I wanted to get to the Middle East.

No, I didn’t. No. I don’t know what happened there. The war took over then.

No. And now that I know about training, it was bloody pathetic.

Well machinegun, you’d strip and, as far as firing, I can only remember firing about five rounds on a rifle range when I went in. And you could grab Lewis guns,

and strip andd assemble a Lewis gun. Field craft was pretty good. I didn’t mind field craft.

You know, the bush, when you are out in the bush. Wiring, in the 39th they taught us wiring. But I can remember when we were in the 39th having a post. We had to crawl up to this and throw hand grenades, they were pinecones, and I was the only.

one who was not spotted. I crawled up and dropped them in. And I was the blue haired boy for that. Old diggers were (UNCLEAR) and the old company commander. Strangely enough when I was on that first leave we went in for a drink at the City Club Hotel, not there now with me old man. And here at the counter is my old company commander from the 39th. And he looked round and said, “You’re McKay, aren’t you?” I said, “Yeah.”

And he turned to the bloke and he said, “He was a bloody pimply faced boy when I knew him.” And here I was sergeant. I had a bloody military medal with a ribbon on it.

Shooting.

Shooting and more field craft. That’s what was lacking.

I do. They are the normal things that you do. You have to start with hygiene and living in the field and all those things. But Australian soldiers are fairly good because most of them have bush craft behind them. I’ve seen it since I was in the army at the school of infantry. The

training films from the British Army and they’ve got the first step to use the condensed milk, remove the cap, and they tell you, “Don’t forget to replace the cap,” you know. But it is normal for Australian soldiers because they have been out in the bush, 98% of them have, anyway.

Yeah.

“It was going to be formed as a garrison battalion to go to New Guinea,” that’s all they said. Port Moresby, that’s right. He read it out. The bloke who was there. He shouldn’t have done it afterwards and he got into trouble after it. But he said it was to go to Port Moresby as a garrison battalion. What it was going to do I don’t know, as a garrison battalion.

And Ralph Honner in his book said that when the Japs heard about it, they didn’t exactly panic. But…

Yeah. They were supposed to be a volunteer, and they were. They were all volunteers in the 39th. The 53rd Battalion which was the other battalion that went away with us. They weren’t. They just shanghaied the poor buggers. They sort of went to camp and the next thing they know they were sitting on the Aquitania.

And they were poor and they performed poorly and they were bad. But later on they broke them up or they amalgamated with someone else and I had 53rd Battalion soldiers with me at Gona and Sanananda, and they were all right. They were trained. It was all leadership.

No. Still militia, yeah.

No, it wasn’t.No, they couldn’t in those days.

No. I never struck it. No.

No, when we went to Puckapunyal. Some blokes there.

They were training in AIF battalions, you know. They used to give us a bit of a serve.

Oh they’d just have a shot occasionally. When you went to the canteen. We weren’t allowed in the wet canteen.

Yeah. We weren’t allowed in the wet canteen, you know. They’d say, “Chocos aren’t

allowed to come in.”

No. They came into the war…They came in December, didn’t they? Well they came into the war, you’re right. They came into the war while we were training. We went in October and they came into the war.

No, I don’t think so. I don’t think we didn’t expect to get into the fight as soon as we did.

No. Nobody thought they would come down. Singapore would never fall. They would never get that far.

I can remember we were given lectures, you know, by intelligence saying, “They are all stunted growth, they all wear glasses, their stamina is not good,” and the first one I saw at Kokoda, he was about six foot two. He was a marine. He was as broad as a dunny, you know.

Yeah. We were feeling fairly confident.

Yeah. We went on final leave. Yeah.

Oh good. The were all right. You know. Sort of just going on. I know a mate of mine, he used to knock around with a

cat, a stray cat used to come into the yard and had kittens. And he said, “Knock them on the head.” And I said, “Oh I couldn’t do that.” He knocked them off and I still remember, he buried them in the yard, and wrote “Poor Puss” in the sand on top of them, see. And he always used to tell people, “He couldn’t kill the kittens,” and then six months later he was killing bloody Japs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes. It has got to be instantaneous. It has got to be normal.

Just by normal training, yeah. Just by normal training.

Oh all right. I was fairly confident. I just thought I was going up to New Guinea, probably to march round Parliament House or something, guarding it.

That’s all I thought.

Well it was. I think mainly they woke up, the poor old 53rd being shanghaied, you know, were trying to get away. And they did. But I would stop them, you know. They were sort of pleading with us. It was a terrible thing they did to them.

And it is how they performed on the trail, they let us down badly, you know. They didn’t have the officers we had either. We had some good AIF officers and I don’t think they’d got any.

Oh yeah. Very bad. And it was all training. Because our national servicemen from

Vietnam has proved that. It didn’t matter that a young fellow, a young fellow over here, he’s not a young man now, he’s 57 but he went to Vietnam. He got wounded. Our battalion never ever had national servicemen on our tour. On the second tour they did. And the fellows, the old hard heads, they speak very highly of them but they were

trained. They were trained. They were trained and brainwashed I suppose as well.

Yeah. Yeah. An old fellow like me.

Yeah. I was eighteen.

No, they were cleared then. I remember Woolloomooloo we sailed from. That was a strictly prohibited

area. We went on a ferry. The ferry sailed into Woolloomooloo wharf and we got off the ferry and went onto the ship. But all the high rise building around. They were all there waving and carrying on.

Oh no.

We had rifles which were Lee Enfield and we had Lewis guns and we had Vickers guns.

And we had three inch mortars which were all First World War stuff.

Didn’t have any kit. We had…They gave us, they made these things, they were long pants and they were ballooned, right. You could put them down for malaria, and in the daytime you could roll them and button them up.

Terrible bloody things they were. And our dress uniform was patrol collar, real khaki drill. Real army stuff. But it wasn’t until we came out of the Owen Stanleys was the first time we saw greens. And they issued us with jungle greens and gaiters, the American gaiters.

No. Only at Vietnam I had one.

A little troll doll. My daughter sent it to me from my grandson’s little blue doll. I didn’t show it to anybody of course. Being the RSM I didn’t have it out. It is still on my bedside table, and my granddaughter said, “He’d better have a wife for him,”

and she bought a wife and the pair of them still stand…and they travel everywhere with me. Everywhere I go.

Oh good. They are. When I was in New Guinea I had that little bloke and I had a native batman and we used to stick pins in him and he thought it was him. You know. He used to walk round it. You know. I had it on my bedside table then.

Yeah. The food on the ship wasn’t bad. They had been carrying troops for a long time, of course. It was a British ship. And still had the good habits like cocoa at night. Just what you wanted in the tropical seas. So it was a drink, you know, and we wanted a drink. And they took all the booze off before we left, not that it worried me. Well they had the

usual things. There was a fight. They always had a fight, you know, and gymnastics. And I was very lucky, because being up here, we were on submarine and air watch and we didn’t even bother going below decks because it was too hot and I’m claustrophobic too. And we’d just kip underneath the thing and stay up the top.

No. We never crossed the equator going there.

Eighteen.

Yeah.

Oh strange. Yeah. I’d never seen. They’re different sounds. It was like the east but it has got a smell all of its own and it was tropical.

When we arrived the big firms were still operating in Moresby. Burns Philp, the steam ships. And we talk about going back on this tour and they are all in big buildings now up there, the same companies. And also when I was serving with PIR

they put the first elevator in whilst we were there and suddenly there was hundreds of people in the street, all around this. And they couldn’t work out what was going on. Of course all these white blokes would come over and they’d go up in the elevator and they’d all get out and it would come down empty. Oh where had they gone? And they were coming for miles and miles to see this business before someone woke up and it was explained to them. Now of course there’s elevators everywhere. They’re driving them.

Yeah.

Oh no. Not really. I think the penny dropped when we went ashore from the warships that things were dinkum then.

The ship that we were taken to shore by, she had her funnel patched up, you know. She had been in action in the Mediterranean

against a German raider, and they were very proud of their funnel all patched up. Now I thought we were playing soldiers then. It was for real.

Yeah.

Oh I was acting corporal. I can still remember it was the proudest moment of my life.

They always read out the duties. A company was duty company and the CSM would read out all the duties. And he read out Battalion Orderly sergeant, Sergeant Guest, Battalion Orderly Corporal, Private McKay. Wow. Battalion Orderly Corporal, you know. I thought, “I must be in here.”

Oh doing what the sergeant told you to.

You had to sit by this phone and then when he was away you’d have to do this. But it was battalion. I thought if it was battalion I’ll be right, you know. I don’t know if I was lance corporal or not when I left. I don’t think I was. It was when we arrived that I was promoted.

Oh pretty well average. There was a few older blokes, but I was pretty young, yeah. On the

section now I come to think of it, there were only about two blokes who were about my age. Bill Drummond, he got killed at Sanananda. He was about the same age as me.

Oh no. They knew.

As I said I always wanted to be, so I suppose I did what I wanted to. And one of them was that field craft exercise where I remember the company commander

patting me on the head. And I did, I remember I crawled about three hundred yards up this bloody hill to throw this grenade. I could see it was dinkum, I had a vivid imagination.

Yes. Especially when you heard the answer. As a matter of fact I gave it away after a while. battalion headquarters didn’t know that.

but I was sick of going out.

Oh I think they woke up then. You know there is a war on.

Yes.

It was a night raid and they bombed Port Moresby, and it was by a

seaplane. You could hear the sound in the tropical night and a big moon. I thought I could see it going past the moon. Our ack-ack, which were very good in those days, they were a militia unit but by gee they finished up a top unit. Down at a place called Ack-Ack Hill. I don’t know what the name of the hill was. It was in Moresby.

But of course they got that many around they became very proficient. They made a few kills when the war was really on. The second raid was a good one because I think it was about forty eight bombers. They were soon coming over the strip and we didn’t know what was coming. They were flying over and it was all silver, glistening. And I thought they were dropping paratroopers but they were dropping bombs. That’s what you could see. Then they arrived.

Yeah.

Well what we did, we got in the holes but after they had gone we put them down another two feet.

No. That started to build it up and toughen it up. I can remember after that raid our old company sergeant major came down and our company commander. They were still First World War blokes. They came down to see if we were all right but the useless platoon bloody commander didn’t. So they came down and said, “I’d go down a couple more feet if I were you. What you want to do is pull them in. What you’ve done, you’ve dug them too wide.

Pull it in about you.” Later on in the war I had them just so as my feet would go in. The size of your foot. Nice and snug.

Well we knew it was close, you know. And suddenly we thought it’s only us between them and Australia because the AIF was still overseas

in the Middle East and things were pretty tough. We knew it was tough then. And then they started to relieve the old First World War blokes and the blokes who were coming back from the Middle East who’d just been commissioned. They were sergeants and they had been promoted lieutenant. They came. And the lieutenants over there. They had even promoted captains and majors and they arrived. And

that started us. That’s when we went on to an AIF footing. Without thinking, any business.

Still militia.Yeah.

They’d be unloading food and there’d be canteen biscuits and we’d knock off biscuits. And extra bully beef, it’s always good stuff.

And there was grog too. They were knocking off grog too for a while. I was never lucky enough to get that.

Yes.

Well that was a shock obviously. When the door opened, he’d been a bloke,

they used to have a WAG, a wireless air gunner, and he was man that used to drop down so as he could fire. This Zero had come up and laced him up and the pilot had got killed and the co-pilot wounded and the rear gunner I think was dead too. We had to get in and get them out and bandage them up and lay them on the ground.

I remember the bloke that pulled up, I don’t know what rank he was but, “You men get out of the way!” And I said, “Christ, you know, we’ve got our blankets and field dressings.” And I remember later a truck pulling up, I was taken down to the AIF headquarters and got our blankets and replacement field dressings and all that. And somebody said, “Thanks for doing that.”

Not really. That was the job, you know but a bit of a shock though, the first time.

I’ve got no idea. No idea. I never ever saw them again. I suppose they can tell their war memories and tell them that the soldiers bandaged them up.

Yeah. There’s that about it, but if they’re your own, you usually do. You are told what happens. They are evacuated to Australia or they are returned to the unit. A lot of them were returned to the unit too of course. And then there’s some of them who didn’t make it, they died of wounds. They always told you then but

occasionally you’d have blokes from other units you’d do and you’d never know.

Oh, very vaguely, I can’t remember exactly. It was over sixty years ago of course.

It must have been three or four months.

Yes. We did.

We heard about the Coral Sea because we sere digging in for that. We had defences.

Yeah.

No, Midway I can’t remember. But the Coral Sea was important to us.

We used to get briefed on that. They would tell us where they were coming. Of course the survivors form Rabaul came through us too. There was a few of them going through.

I didn’t strike any but I tell you what I did know. I didn’t know the fellow and he’s dead now, but he was our company clerk. And while we were on the drome, a Zero came over, and clunk he dropped this thing and we thought it was a

dud bomb, and later on when we were pushing this stuff on we found this parcel. It went to battalion headquarters and it was mail from prisoners of war.

I didn’t ever know what it was. It was that they had dropped mail.

No.

I think they were the POWs that had been taken from Singapore.

Ah we didn’t know.

They just shifted us to the other side of the drome and from there we were told we were going over the mountains then. That was all.

Oh this is when they had landed. They told us that they had landed at Gona and they were probably going to come across the mountains.

Our objective was to stop them. We were going to go across, stop them, fire the success signal, as I told you old Jim Cowey (UNCLEAR). And the air craft would bring across all the reinforcement we could ever find.

But one, they got the signal all right but by the time it got back to Moresby…There was no radio that worked then. And, you know, they’d carry a line across. Two, there were no reinforcements. Three, there was too much cloud. They couldn’t have flown anyway.

You know the Kokoda track might never have been fought if that had happened. Say the 21st Brigade

was, which came and relieved. They hadn’t landed yet. They were just coming home from the desert. Say they had landed and flown across, we may just have pushed them back, but I don’t think so. There was too many of them. Far too many.

No.

They knew how many there were.

Somebody had to do it. There was nothing between them. Somebody had to try to slow them down. Which we did.

No. As a matter of fact our (UNCLEAR) did a marvellous job, you know. Holding them back and into Kokoda. Our CO incidentally got killed at Kokoda. He was in Rabaul. He got out of Rabaul.

Yeah. We had, when we went across the track we got to Iora Creek and we got issued with Bren guns. Now I’d never seen one but there was one bloke in my section, he’d seen one. He’d seen a Bren. So we learned about Bren guns then.

Yeah.

Not bad. You go down this hill. I can still remember and then you start to climb. We hadn’t climbed anything like that in our lives, you know. (UNCLEAR) arrive. You don’t know whether there’s going to be eight more days,

day in and day out daylight until dark.

Yes. It wasn’t built until we went over the first time of course, no it wasn’t built when we came back.

Yeah. The Golden Mud Slide it was then, yeah.

Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. And I can remember the, I think they were machine gunners.

This great big bloke and has mate was a little weeny bloke like Lou Richards, you know. And he used to help him all the way. And the big bloke, he’d be done and the little bloke, “Oh come on Tiny, come on Tiny. We’ve got to keep going.” But only you’d sit down to have a spell. “If only I can stay down another ten minutes I’ll be right,” but, no. “On your feet.” And away you’d go.

Oh we were carrying…We didn’t have much in those days. We’d have haversacks with a bit of personal clothing and toilet gear and that’s stuff. Ammo. You had a couple of grenades and your ammunition. It wasn’t too bad.

No. They weren’t carrying ours. They were carrying supplies, you know, to go in.

Well I suppose they were carrying ammo which were resupply.

No. Not unrelenting .We were accustomed to it by then. But what did get us was the rain. You can set your watch by it. As soon as we started getting dry, down she’d come.

That damn rain, I’ve never seen rain like it. Tropical rain.

Well with all the blokes going across, they started to churn it up, you see. It wasn’t bad early on. Later on when it is going back and carriers going and people were going up, it was up to your hocks in mud.

Well we were lucky. Going over

the first time of course we were in native huts. They used to have it arranged so we were in native huts. Keinzle his name was, Bert Keinzle, he was the bloke who did the track. He’s got his photo in plenty of books. And later on when I was serving in PIR I met him. First at the Gateway pub and he invited us across to his plantation but we didn’t ever go.

Spiders were the classic on that trip. There’d be bird eating spiders, you know, and you’d hit their net and bounce back.

Oh that big. Ugly looking bloody things. No snakes fortunately.

Yeah probably.

Oh leeches. They were friends.

Ticks, yeah.

Well we were pretty fit even though we didn’t think we were or we never would have got there. But we were fit going over. When you start, lack of sleep, lack of tucker and stress, that’s when you start getting tired. Real tired.

Yeah. When are we going to get there?

Just a leader, you know. They know that. Just the ten of them. You look after them. But you never have ten in your section. There is usually somebody missing. Usually the average is about eight. A corporal of eight.

Yeah. You just have a few gruff words. You have to gee them along all the time.

Going over, I think we were there in eight.

I think we had all lost a fair bit of weight. We had pretty muscly in the legs. I can vouch for that.

Oh no. We were infantrymen. We were fairly accustomed to it.

At Deniki. It was the last one before Kokoda, and you could see the Japs. It had fallen in before we got there, Kokoda. That’s where our CO got killed.

No. You stopped and of course, it’s routine then. We stopped and then we were put in. There was A Company and we were put in, and so on all the way down, and you dug in.

We did patrols from Deniki. Fighting patrols all of them. One fighting patrol was lucky. They

cleaned up sixty Japs but ours, we didn’t strike anybody the one I was on.

No. Yes that was, yeah.

Oh it was a cakewalk, all right. A couple of shots rung out and we went to ground and keep moving, keep moving and then by the time we got there

somebody had shot them, and that was it.

When I went up to relieve 9th Platoon that was the first time. And that was my first one. They put in an attack just after us they put it in and I fired then. And then they started the next morning. Pre-dawn and through the day

and a couple of probes through the night.

You don’t think about it, you know. That’s when your training comes out.

Oh yeah. There were a few of them. The last attack particularly I can

remember because they run down. They must have been a machinegun team because they were a bit bulky, and they ran down this track and had to cross this little bridge and the sky lighted, you know. Shooting ducks. That was a good one then. Then it was on for young and old, then. It was them or us.

I think it is, Yeah. I think it is. Your training starts to take over then. The…I’ll tell you something. I learned this at the school of infantry when we used to get all this data and the American Marines did it. And by that date they started to go through all the allied forced. But it is a fact that

in war, in combat there is only a certain percentage of people who fire at the enemy and there is only a certain percentage of people ever see them. It was done for a scheme called ‘train fire’. It was a good scheme too. They still use it now, they use pop up targets and stuff. But mostly

people are shooting out. They can’t see it and they just shoot out. But there are those two or three people who are seeing the target and firing at it and hitting it. The rest are just firing at it. Other people are numbers two on an automatic weapon. He is too busy refilling mags, or changing mags or fixing the belt up. Whatever. He doesn’t see the enemy, his number one’s doing that.

And there are some who go, even combat soldiers in a squad, go through a war without firing a shot. Not because they are frightened but because they don’t see them. They don’t know what to do. These are trained soldiers. And I understood this bloke, poor fellow, he was with us all the time. And the Japanese, before they’d attack,

they probably gee up their attack of course and we used to say, “He’s calling the roll.” And he was bellowing out and we’d say, “I’d like to see that bastard and fix him up.” And when he started the first time this bloke said, “I can see him.” “Where is he?” and the bloke gave me a reference. And I said, “Well bloody shoot him.” “No, no.” And I said, “Give us your rifle.” I had a Tommy gun. “Give us your rifle.” “Oh he’s gone.” But he could see him and he didn’t shoot him.

And then he was with us through all those attacks and through the night. And I’d say, “Now throw a grenade.” Now that’s all he ever did. The next campaign and throughout all the track. At Sanananda, wrong, up west of Gona he’s in his weapon pit and he had to go to the toilet and so he just got out and dug a hole right in front of the pit and the sniper went ping and got him. He never fired a shot. Never saw anybody. Never saw what hit him.

No, but there’ll be the odd one or two. Odd one or two. Oh I know even right up in Vietnam there were blokes like that. They did what they had to do, carried their share of gear and so on, did their pickets and so on but probably never fired a shot.

Oh no. I think they all looked but they just fire in a general manner, about.

They probably do. They probably do.

I think the longer the better. You can take some of those veterans on this last tour we were last on. You know, this fellow, he’s a doctor of medicine now and he’s wearing a DSM [Distinguished Service Medal], you know, I said, “Where did you get…?” So he was a sergeant and he got his DSM at Tobruk, “There I was. Then I did Greece, Crete,” and then he was in the bloody war at Milne Bay.

You know. It must be bloody hard. Imagine those First World War blokes.

That’s right. That is quite correct. That is quite correct. I had a fellow with me,

he got a medal the same day as me. He was commissioned in the field with the 2nd Battalion at Wewak and he said, “I was bloody windy all the time.” And I understand that too. And in Vietnam I had to start pulling myself into gear, I said, “You are getting too confident here.” I was trained and I had been doing nothing but training all my life and I knew what it was like, you know.

And the first time we got jumped I found myself standing up bellowing at them instead of bloody going to ground.

Yeah.

Yeah. Some go psycho too. I’ll tell you one of the psychos. He had a VC [Victoria Cross]. I’d better not say his name but he was a VC and he used to start wandering out at night on

his own. All those capers. After he had his VC.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh that was when we were out on a standing patrol and they

heard the firing and they came back. And I went on the flank with them. The platoon leader came to me and he said, “I want you to go up and reinforce 9th Platoon.” “Jesus,” I said. They were hammering away there with heavy machine gunning and mortar fire. But we did it all right. I was fairly confident. This is what we do.

And while we were running up, it was like running up the MCG. Nothing to hide behind.

Yeah. They were machine gunning and mortars. It was cracking and whipping about us. We didn’t take it casually. And then down and then crawled forward. I don’t know how we survived it up there. I don’t know how we survived the final attack. It was fairly lucky. Thirty-six hours running out of ammo.

When I got out, we used to have drum magazines and box magazines on the Tommy gun, and the box magazines held twenty rounds. And all I had was a box magazine and it must have had about ten rounds in it. It’s all the ammunition I had. Our Bren was finished. We didn’t have any .303 ammo. We didn’t have a Bren. It was jammed. So we were very lucky to survive.

Right. That’s a bad habit. Especially nowadays with the weapons they’ve got. It fires, even rifles, they fire. The training we used to be count the number of rounds and I was always very aware of that. I was good. I knew to

the minute. Because if you fire and all that, and you are suddenly going to run out, you’ve gotta know when you are close too. Even if you leave a few rounds in a magazine.

That’s right. The Americans have a concept ‘reconnaissance by fire’ and I just saw a video the other day. That was a true story.

And very good. “We were soldiers.” It’s very good. And that was the first of the airborne assaults. Well that was a bit later than us because we were doing assaults with their independent brigade. And they’d jump out of the choppers and they are all firing about and that’s reconnaissance by fire, you know. They are wasting ammo. That’s all they are doing.

Of course they get used to being resupplied all the time. You know but when you haven’t got any. But later on in Vietnam they would say, “I want a resupply of ammo,” and I said, “Guys, you haven’t fired any yet, you have only fired a couple of shots each,” but they wanted a resupply. That was one of the things I used to hammer into them.

I’ll say, I’ll say. What happened there was, they went around to the other two platoons and company headquarters and took half their ammo off them. Half their .303 and kept bringing it up to us.

Oh. I’ll tell you what it reads. The front line…. I’ve got a copy of it there. Do you want to see it?

You right? That’s the way it was there. “The unit…39th Battalion, 20th Australian Infantry Brigade, New Guinea. Number. Corporal John Donald McKay. Action in which recommended: Date and place of action must be stated.”

It says, “9th August ’42, Kokoda. At seventeen hundred hours on the 9th of August, ’42 at Kokoda, this NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] led his section from the flank to thicken up the front line which at the time he was under heavy machine gun and mortar fire. He was ordered to dispose his section to three posts and when the section was reduced to three men, he moved from post to post while under fire to bolster up the strength of his section.

Recommended by Cameron, major, temporary CO; seconded by Porter, brigadier, commander of the brigade; OC A Company. To the honorary, award immediate, signed by Blamey.”

No, you don’t realize that. You are just doing your job. I can remember it was one day at Isurava one day, the platoon commander came around and said, “You’ve been recommended for a Military Medal.” I said, “Have I? Good.” When it came through a few months later we were up at a pretty rough site west of Gona,

and the platoon commander came round and said, “You’ve just been awarded a Military Medal.” I said, “Christ. They’ll expect me to be brave.” And he did.

I think that’s where most combat soldiers have

the problems. It’s after. Not perhaps then but later on. With me it was when we were back, right back, after we came out of the mountains. You start having restless sleeps and you are forever on guard. And I don’t suppose I’ve slept more than two hours all my life, from then. Straight, you know. It keeps coming back. That’s when the fear comes back.

Yeah.

You know when they are going to attack. They call them and then down they come. They are shouting and screaming. And you are firing in the direction of

(UNCLEAR). I said I had them sky lined. I was pretty lucky. That group I was with. He jumped out of the bloody pit. He was standing up. I said, “Get down, you so and so and so and so.” And he was right so that’s how it gets to you. You are wound up, see and we certainly, I’d say, turned our area around. That’s when we, he called me out now. Oh gee.

He called us out.

He’ll be my hero for the rest of my life. He was a big fellow. A typical bloody digger. He used to have his hat on and it was turned down. And a captain in the First World War, a company commander. That shows you the

brilliant people. He had leftist tendencies. You know. He could have gone overseas as probably a brigade commander. But no, he’d had it tough in the depression and he was an old cocky but they got him as a staff sergeant. And he was tough.

And so was our company sergeant major, who incidentally was in my old man’s battalion in the First World War. He won a Military Medal in the First World War. And I think Jim would have rather been the company sergeant major than the CQMS [Company Quartermaster Sergeant]. But that was it. He physically, he’d had it because he was platoon sergeant for this other friend of mine, a sergeant, and he was in the bottom of the

pit. He said, “I’m buggered Bill. I’m absolutely buggered.” And he would be too. Imagine a man in his fifties after what we’d been through. And the orders came through that we were to withdraw at such and such a time and such and such a position. Well Bill passed that on to Jim Cowey and he said, he’d be busy getting his battalion and he never seen him again. That’s because old Jim and

his old soldier caper said, “These blokes up the front won’t know.” You know, he’s too experienced and he’s starts to crawl up and when he sees it all going on and he starts to call me. He obviously saw the platoon commander because he was there when I got back. And that’s (UNCLEAR) and got us back and then he was in charge.

Never mind about the lieutenant and that’s that. He was in charge. There was no doubting that. He was an old bushman (UNCLEAR). They’re in and they are running around firing into weapon pits and throwing grenades. He said, “We’ll just walk out over the bridge. They’ll think we’re Japs.” We just walked out over the bridge. The other blokes lost a couple. A couple drowned crossing the river. He just walked across the bridge.

Yeah. It was!

And then walking up the track. And not only that, I reckon he said, “I’ll keep going here and if we bump them and we start firing they’re gong to have to pull back troops out of the front to see what’s going on.” Which they would.

But I’ll never forget the bit of wood going above his head. It was a copybook one. He leant against the tree, restrained (UNCLEAR), breathing slightly and bang, shot number one, number two. Bang. Shot number two. And then he continued the advance. Oh god.

I said, “We’d better take off.” Jim said Oh bugger it,” he said. It all came good

.

No, just went across.

Oh we just waltzed down off the track and turned right and got down into the bushes. And we circled around and we bumped a listening post.

We say it was there. We were just going to skirt, you know. We heard them talking Japanese, so the platoon commander pulled out a grenade and threw the grenade, and it went off and stopped the chatter so we went on.

Yeah. That night we struck the native village…

In the fire. You know, in the coals.

Over two days. Yeah.

Yeah. I’ll say.

No, the next time I saw him

was when we got to Isurava and they broached the cargo that they were taking up. For us to get that, and there was a sig. mob there and they cooked it up and it was dehydrated mutton. We hadn’t seen that before but they cooked up this dehydrated mutton. And we were eating it and Jim was just eating and I said, “How are you going Jim?” He said, “I’m buggered. Absolutely

buggered.” Anyway, the CO sent him back then and he went back and I didn’t see him again and he finished the trail.

Oh yeah.

I learned that business about field craft. And making a decision and abiding by it. And I’ve always wanted to tell his tale

because I admired him greatly. He’s dead now of course.

Yes I did. He came to a couple of reunions. He used to march with his old battalion. I forget which battalion it is now. The same as I do now. He used to march with his old battalion and come to our reunions. That’s what I do now.

He went back to cockying.

He was an old farmer. He used to plod along quietly.

Too frightened to. I’d be frightened to.

Well the brain washing is all the way you take it, I think. It’s part of training. It’s loosely learned brainwashing. It’s part of the way you hammer something into them.

It is training, you know. I suppose that is brain washing but you don’t use it.

Yeah.

I think he can. Perhaps if I had been a commanding officer. If you are lieutenant colonel you can. But I don’t think in my position you can. RSMs are supposed to be tough and hard.

Oh. I don’t know. It goes with the position and it goes with, without blowing my own trumpet, how good you are. I mean you hear blokes say, “I’d like to get him alone. I’d fix him up.” And when they see you they say, “Macka! Great to see you. I haven’t seen you for ten years.” You know. And that’s right.

They do. They do think a lot of me. Especially 1 RAR. Our RSM.. I think it’s just your personality, you know.

Yes.

Oh pickets. It’s a term from the French. It derived during the Napoleonic wars. It virtually means a century. That’s what we mean, a picket. When you stand to, everybody stands to in the infantry.

An hour before and an hour after first and last light. Well they do in the (UNCLEAR) army. And the picket, after that you’ve got to have centuries on. We still say ‘centuries on picket’ to use the term loosely. Yeah. A century.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was promoted corporal just before we went over.

They do now. But we didn’t have any maps.

No, we had no maps at all of Papua New Guinea and the places we were then. They started to use aerial photographs later on, the aerial photograph came out. Pardon me, but no maps of where we were. But these days private soldier were great map-readers in Vietnam, you know. A private soldier could call in an artillery barrage. That’s how well trained he is now.

No, they didn’t have any.

Yeah that’s right. There was I suppose the big map. The map of the world, the map of Papua. That’s what it was.

But it was local, all local knowledge that’s all.

Yeah, local police and guides and patrol officers as it was in New Guinea.

I don’t know come to think of it. We just followed the leader.

Yeah.

He appeared after we came out. Yeah.

No. We weren’t there on that parade where he said that. What did he say? He said, “It’s the man with the gun that doesn’t get shot, but it’s the rabbit that runs away.” He said it to the 2/14th Battalion when they were

on parade. But we weren’t on parade fortunately.

Yeah I’d say! Very quickly.

Yes. They had trouble with them on parade. They were mumbling away. So they should. It was a terrible thing to say. Why he said, it I don’t know. It was a terrible thing to say. He had no idea of the terrain of the Owen Stanley’s. Later on I struck

Blamey and it was up at Sanananda. When I said we went back for those canteen supplies, there were some canteen supplies and I went back to headquarters and he was up there. That was only fifty metres off the Japanese trenches. He had his red cap on and the whole lot, there.

We didn’t. That was in that understanding that there was no resupply. You wouldn’t get a resupply of clothing in the Owen Stanley’s. I suppose by the time we were at Gona if you’d have said, “You wanted another hat,” they’d have got one over. The quartermaster would have dug one up for you but I was just without a hat.

Oh yeah. Shirts had gone. Trousers were in tatters. They just rotted away. We did have some we carried but when you go into action you usually leave your haversack that’s got all your goodies in, and you never

get back to it and it never catches up with you again. That’s the trouble. Like shaving gear and toothbrushes. They’re gone.

Yeah. I suppose a lot of fellows

had those. There were married blokes there. They’d be in their haversacks and they’d be gone. But, like the Japs when you went through them after they were dead. The men used to see letters from home. That’s what brought it home. It was the same trouble with photographs.

Yeah. Not for what we needed. No but I did.

At Gona I got some tinned crab. It was too good to let go, leave it laying there.

Yeah. I remember I shot three

blokes at west of Gona. When we went through them to see what they were, there was a photograph of his family. It sort of grabs you. Those poor buggers are just like us, you know.

Well you just dismiss it.

It did me. You know, I just saw them as an enemy like me. Blokes said, “They wouldn’t eat that.” They couldn’t face Japanese, but it didn’t worry me, you know. It was their job, you know. They had families, and especially after the war when our fellows were in occupation. A lot of them married Japanese and I got to know them pretty well, the wives that is. So did Dot, you know. No, you imagine

the poor little kids.

It wasn’t too bad. They’d been married for a while by then. They had been living in Japan with them for a couple of years. They came home and I suppose they picked up the language pretty good, yeah.

No, I didn’t. I shied around it. When he was feeling cruel, a mate of mine would talk about it. He said, “He used to send a lot of your mob to the happy hunting ground,” and it was very embarrassing, yeah.

Yeah. I think so. Only reading...they didn’t know,

they didn’t know about the atrocities our prisoners of war had. They didn’t know they committed those sorts of things. But still they are Asian. They think differently to us. They probably thought it was all right.

Oh. It was pretty late in the war. We lost a couple but we never ever saw them again.

That were captured

while we were coming over. Just when we were coming over. There was our company commander, Sam Templeton. He said, “Wait here, I’m just going to do so and so.” And never again. Templeton’s Crossing was named after him on the Track. And Sam was a First World War bloke, submariner. He was a submarine bloke. Others, you know,

they were caught and then a couple of our fellows went to coast watches, as they called them. They were captured and we never heard of them again.

No.

Yeah probably. Like Sam is still missing as far as we’re concerned. Years after, we’re still trying to find out. There are a lot of stories about it, you know. Nothing confirmed.

I did. When I say it was up west of Gona. I was standing

up with an Owen gun. And there was this great tree. I was one side and I stepped round it and stepped into this bloke, and I had the Tommy gun in his belly, and he put his hands up, so that was very good, a sergeant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes they were young too. Of course the ones who came over the mountain first, they were professional soldiers. They had even fought in China. They had been at the game a long time. They were the like the marines, you know, and on their shirt pockets they had a big chrysanthemum. They were real emperor stuff.

No.

Not really. It was all over in a flash. Not like you see in the movies. There was no wrestling.

No.

Yeah.

It was a bit of a shock originally because naturally you know you are going to die if it happens, and it happens in the bat of an eyelid. You turn round and there he is. One such case, they were professionals

and once again it was at west of Gona that it happened. Our platoon commander, who was a very good soldier said, “Go and have a look at this section up here,” and we went up and we were standing there talking to them and suddenly, from the hip, he fired. And about, just past John [interviewer], was this fellow squatted down. All he had was a bit of camouflage just over his face but he was still. He wasn’t moving. And because they’d been here

you get used to it. But he just caught it out the corner of his eye. He might have blinked or just moved his head or something, and he shot him. And I could have fainted. He couldn’t have been ten feet away.

I think you get a rush. Otherwise, you would never stand it. Because the old heart must be going. When it’s on, it’s on and you get this rush of adrenalin and you have to attack and you eventually psych yourself into it and…That’s why they shout,

that’s why they shout to give themselves confidence. But of course when it’s all over, it’s such a shock.

I don’t know. Just training I suppose.

Oh I think the body just looks after itself, you know. I don’t think the body could stand it. You would probably just faint in the finish, like, can’t stand it any longer.

Yeah I did – one. It is a terrible thing. When you sit down and think of it, you think you can’t blame him. It’s just there but for the grace of God…We had to go in our…This bloke was a loudmouth. That was the unfortunate part about it, but we had to

go in, one of the platoons was overrun. This was at Isurava. We got, we got ready to go. We were all tense and we were ready to go and he had a Bren gun and he took off his equipment and he said, “I can’t go. I can’t go.” Somebody had to grab his equipment because we were on our way. When we got back he had gone. But it has to happen because I had a CO once who was a very brave fella,

and he came from the Middle East. He was with the 3rd Battalion. He started as a soldier and he finished up commanding it, and he didn’t leave the battalion the whole war. He was very good. DSO [Distinguished Service Order], OBE [Order of the British Empire], MC [Military Cross], ED [Efficiency Decoration]. And little Ian, he said, “Men are like a packet of cigarettes. Some have got ten acts in them and others have got eight, and some of them, you lose the packet then

they haven’t got any.” That was pretty right too.

Oh training. I think. I think it’s just training. You know, they, some blokes, like myself. I was a professional soldier in the finish.

It just comes standard to you, and you just carry on, and that’s the rule and it’s by the book. That’s good soldiers. They do that all the time. Yeah.

Yes.

Well we knew what was going on at that time. That was the battle of the beaches and we knew it was going on. It’s the same with every action that we go into. When they mention it everything goes dead quiet, sort of thing. Blokes have a smoke and a chew and a look around. A lot of stuff goes on in the head. Personal problems have got to be thought about.

It’s like what we were talking about this morning. How long can I keep going on before I buy it?

When is this? When we went back over the mountains?

They’d kept going. When the 14th,

the 21st Brigade of which they are a member, they got decimated on the track. They formed what was left into a form called Char Force. And unfortunately they went back over the mountain in the advance when they were advancing again. And Char Force went right though to Gona and they were there with the 16th Brigade. And they were still there when we got there, there were still blokes from Char Force.

So we sort of relieved them as well.

In this time?

No. I went over by helicopter and landed at Isurava and I didn’t know where I was.

I said to one of the fellows that helped build that monument, “Where’s the track from here?” He said, “Just up there about two hundred and fifty metres.” I said, “Good, I can start there.” But it was steep like that and I couldn’t walk up that. And after being in Vietnam, and in all our operations we were in choppers, you jump out with full kit, and your weapon and the whole lot and

we arrived in the chopper at Isurava and they had to help me out. I couldn’t get out.

Age. God.

Yeah.

Well there was a lot there. It would have to be in hundreds with the Japanese. I don’t know whether you have ever smelt anything dead, but you can multiply that and there’s nothing worse than the human dead. The stench, it is a terrible smell.

Yeah. It did. Yes, you felt like being sick all the time and unfortunately my platoon got the

task of being a burial party when it was all over. I had a couple of chunders. You’d pick up a fellow, you’d pick up his head and he’d come in half, you know.

No. Most of them were past recognizing at that stage.

Yeah. What you’d do is take one and leave one

on the body, so that that confirms that. He would be posted as ‘missing’, ‘missing presumed dead’ and when you had to get the identity disk and it would be posted ‘killed in action’.

One stays with the body and one’s back for records.

Yeah. Some people used to take the gold out of the Japanese teeth. There was, I know there was blokes that did it. They were shockers, yeah.

No.

Yeah.

The first thing is we were going along the track and it was a fairly wide part of it. And there was a tree scarfed with Japanese writing, and a hitching rail because they had mules and there was horse manure.

That’s what struck me first, and that was the mules they had.

No. I didn’t. Might have been mens and ladies.I couldn’t read it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it was this fellow who went to the toilet. It was only a fluke.

Yeah. Evidently it was in the back of a native garden and it

it had just been cleared. It wasn’t grown over or nothing. It was a track but it had been used of course, not by the Japanese but by natives. But you could see it was a track and it was quite a good track too.

You know you can get a good stout tree

and you held that there, and there was the tackle, so you could get down and pull yourself up, you know. That was the tackle, it had a block on it. You’ve probably seen them in garages where you pull the cars up off the block.

No, the engineers. The patrol, that’s what we were looking for, and the engineers supplied these blocks and the cordage for it.

Yes.

You know, it’s like you said, you might be frightened of mice but when you face….

When you are facing death it’s a different type of fear.

Oh. You know it really grips you, right in the guts, you know.

Yeah.

Well they got a bit of a fright too. You know you can imagine that, because they knew the Japs were there. Not that it mattered because as much as people say it, Europeans did nothing for them

so might as well be Japanese. But we were armed soldiers. They were white. They would get a bit of a fright I would imagine.

Yeah. The men were there.

Well we were in, that’s all, we were just in, that’s it.

Oh you made it known that you were hungry and you looked at the food. We weren’t looking too good then of course.

Oh yeah, pleased, pleased to feed it to us, yeah.

That’s right. We never ever did. The women had gone. It’s just that we…It was pretty close. It was pretty early in the war then. We did. That was the first

time.

No.

Yeah. The basic food.

No. We were talking in English and they couldn’t talk it. And being Papuans they’d speak Motu and we’d speak English. These days the official language of

PNG of course is pidgin so they can all speak pidgin. They do it at school, except they do English at school as well now.

I can’t remember. I can just remember the food. We might have taken over a hut, just moved in and went sound asleep, we were exhausted.

Oh yeah. I think there was probably. We probably had a picket on but I wasn’t it.

Oh no. Some of them were collaborators of course later on in the war they found out they were collaborating with the Japanese.

Oh I don’t know. I think they’d be shot.

Yeah. No justice.

Oh I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Which one was that?

Oh. That was when we were taking Gona. It was in the attack. I was the reserve section…as you come through, or the reserve platoon rather then. The attack goes through, you know, there with their gunners, somebody shoots both gunners, probably another one with a rifle, and they continue the advance.

Now what happens, down in the big hole the others used to come up, see. But being a reserve section we were there on top of them again, see. And then there’s a bowl there, so you give them a couple of grenades to have a think about.

They did in Vietnam but not then. You’d just throw grenades for a

while.

Yes, and the engineers it was who formed this group called the ‘tunnel rats’ that used to go down, very brave.

I couldn’t because I’m claustrophobic. I couldn’t stand it. Because they were only little holes, made for little men. You’d just squeeze your shoulders in with a torch and a couple of grenades and a pistol. And only one, we lost in our tour. He got jammed there and asphyxiated before they could get him out.

Ever since I was a kid. We were playing and somebody would pull the blanket over my head and I would go bananas.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The same as on the tours. They say, “Good, now we’ll go down the mine now.” Well not me, “You can go down, I’ll stay on top.” I can’t hack that mine. I can but the sweat runs down. So does Port Arthur, you know, where they lock you in the cell.

In what way?

Yeah.

No. I don’t know, I suppose, I don’t know what that is. I think it was ego mainly, that’s it, I reckon it was ego. I liked being a soldier. I remember talking about

it with my friend. He was company sergeant major, we would share a hole and stand to. And we’d be standing there and I’d talk about the war and he’d say this and that, and that was what I diagnosed myself with. I think it was my ego.

Yeah. There’s a story in one of the books, you know. A fellow is talking to his mate and he said, “Geez, these are tough fighters these blokes.” And he said, “Who? The Japs or the Chocos?” He said, “Both.” But we now have a very close, that association is very close and a lot of them come

to our reunions, and we go to their’s and the 14th has a picnic here and we go to that picnic. And we have one at Geelong and all the old timers go there. There is a very close feeling.

Yeah.

Oh I don’t know. We…see the 2/14th, although there was a few originals there, there was a lot of reinforcements and we were ahead of the reinforcements, you know.

We’d been fighting for six or seven weeks before they got there.

Yeah. You’d sit down and boil the billy and some bludger would see the smoke and start mortaring it.

Oh yeah. They used to have to have their spells too. You don’t fight all the time. They’d be probing away somewhere else and our blokes would be out having a patrol. And you used to get a sleep during the day too because you could be on all night. You would take it in turns to have a nap through the day, forty winks. Most infantrymen would go to sleep standing up, you know.

Yeah.

The Japs did too. They…you patrolled at night. Because that is virtually what we did when we went down to attack. We had to virtually just grab our way down because we left at three in the morning, I think.

No, you’ve got to learn. Now they’ve got night vision goggles.

Yeah. Well that’s right too. At Sanananda we used to relieve them in the dark and we used to follow a sig wire. Put a sig. wire through (UNCLEAR). It was fairly terrifying if you dropped it.

Yes. We used to have to worry about booby traps too.

Yeah, but it was only a fluke. If there was something like a nice pistol laying around you wouldn’t dare pick it up. It could be booby trapped. It was worse in Vietnam. They were masters in that.

Oh they used to booby trap

bodies too. They’d booby trap it and you’d turn it over and off it’d go.

No, I didn’t.

No.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah it did. You know it’s like when you’ve got a bad cold or the flu. You know you’ve got a bit of a temperature but you just keep working on. But after a few days it starts to get to you a bit. Because I know when they took me in I was 106 when I went out and I stayed that for a long time. They couldn’t get it down.

It’s got to be up around that. 106, 107.

Not that I could remember.

Just longing for bed, a safe bed, that’s all you wanted, somewhere where you could have a good sleep. I’ll be right tomorrow.

In those days, cigarettes.

Yes. I was.

Mainly because I didn’t have any. That was the only reason.

I suppose we just knew that there weren’t any, they just couldn’t do anything about it, that’s all. But as soon as they appeared you shouldn’t have taken it but you do. Being a smoker, you can understand that.

Yeah.

Oh you know, it was all right. We were going home for a few days, you know. It used to take almost three weeks to get home from the Tablelands in those days.

Yeah. I think we did.

No.

I think they did, yeah. It’s a funny thing. The commanding officer we had, Ralph Honner, he’d been with a very famous AIF battalion. But after Isurava where he

joined us, and the battle of the beaches, he had a special love for the 39th. He wrote books about it. He was a Sydney bloke then and he would come down, he come down for a couple of reunions. He was a great speaker, he was an Ambassador to Ireland. He was a member of the Liberal Party and he was one of their presidents, well after the war, and he was Ambassador to Ireland when I was in

London. And I thought I’ll go over and see the old bloke. It was only a matter of ringing him up. But we couldn’t get together…Because the troubles were on then and being in the army we weren’t allowed to go. But one of the fellows used to be a CO of mine. He finished up commander of the 2/14th, Ralph, and he got over to see him. But that was Gerry Cadmore. The poor bugger

got Alzheimer’s now. But he got on to pull the strings, you know. Apart from the fact that he was a full colonel.

As a private.

Yeah, when

I was a private I wanted to be a corporal. When I was a corporal I thought I’ll make sergeant and I did. And then (UNCLEAR) crept up. That’s how you get rank, you know. I was warrant officer, class 1, before I left they were handing out commissions, and you could take this commission and you didn’t lose any pay because a warrant officer, class 1 pay was equal to a captain, on top increments. And I didn’t want to be

an officer. I wanted to be RSM.

RSM. It’s a famous rank. Everybody looks up to you.

Oh, yeah. Technically but you are the king of the heap. When you are a subaltern you are nothing. You get to eat in the officers’ mess. But you get to meet generals, ‘Hello Macka, how are ya?’.

They are always pleased to see you.

Oh with great respect, with great respect, especially junior officers. Because you used to, say if the old man he had a plonker on he would say, “All subalterns to drill 06:00 and the RSM will take them.” And you have all the diggers lookin’ out and you look at them.

Yeah. I suppose it is.

Yeah it is. Sergeant is a great rank in the infantry because you’ve usually got a platoon commander and the platoon commander is usually just promoted, if you know what I mean. He’s a bit tender and he always looks to the sergeant to lead him. “How am I doing? What are we doing here?” And then if anything happens to him, the sergeant takes command,

Oof our assault by air platoon. It’s a great platoon, it’s handy to do pioneer work. It is always a handy infantry platoon to throw in as an extra platoon. Ours was always commanded by a sergeant. I don’t know why, couldn’t get an officer who could handle himself, pioneers, big hairy arsed pioneers. You had to be a sergeant.

Ours was always a commander of us pioneers.

No, I can’t no. No, I can’t record that.

Yeah. That’s happened on occasionally. He’d discuss it with me and say, “What do you think we should do?”

Oh it’s the same as all men, you know. I’ve had some good officers and some bad officers but as a sergeant I’ve had some beauties. But they were all,

they were all good. Some were better than others. I just had one old friend of ours, Hughie Delby, he got a military cross at the battle of Gona, at the finish. It should have been a VC. He was from here to that far behind the artillery barrage. That’s how we got in first. As soon as the barrage lifted he was in the trench with them. Very brave. He

was the bloke I said, we went round to look at this section and there was this Jap listening. He shot him from the hip. He always used to say to me after, “Terrible thing this war. Terrible thing this war.” Well anyway after the war he was a bank man. And I’ll bet he was a good banker. But the poor bugger, I got a letter from his daughter. He lost his bladder,

oh you know. I think he had a bit of Alzheimer’s. She said it was a tragedy to see such a great man…It would be too. I’m glad I didn’t ever see it. He was such a strong bloke. He was a bloke, I think he liked fighting. He finished the war a company commander, you know. (UNCLEAR).

No, ship. We were shipped to Cairns and by rail up to the Tablelands.

When I got back and they all went back on leave and I had this attack and started to get sick with malaria, you know.

Yeah. Well I’d had a couple of courses, you know, for malaria, in

the 2/9th AGH [Australian General Hospital] in New Guinea, twice and in the hospital in Stony Creek in the Tablelands.

It used to start with the shiver, that was the first, you’d shiver bad. You’d shake

like that. Although we were taking Atebrin at the time, it didn’t matter, it must have been fairly bad, it didn’t suppress it. And that’s what happened with poor old Mum when we went on leave, you know. I started in the train and I thought I’m only a bit cold. We got out and I said, “I think you’d better ring up for an ambulance.”

Yeah.

Oh. They used to trek all the way our from Mordialloc to Heidelberg to see me every week.

It would be a divisional thing I think it was then. It was going to look after the…I think it was the 6th Division Hospital. I don’t know whether it was. I don’t even know what hospital it was then.

No.

No, after I came out of hospital. I had been in for a while. It was over six months.

Yeah. I met her then. I had an old friend, we used to knock around before the war and Dot and her sister were in the army and his mother invited them

to my welcome home, because I hadn’t been home. And I came and they were there.

Very good. Very good. They were all very good, those girls.

Yeah. They were all officers.

Oh. No, I think you can talk person to person. I was in for a long time and they get to know you well. But talk about the first time I was in hospital when they evacuated

me from Sanananda, god, and I was like raw beef from the toes right up to the shoulders. I had tinea and what have you, and sick, and you get out and you meet one of the old hard nuts. And you go in their big marquee, and at the end of the marquee, and she’d say, “Strip off everything you’ve got and throw it in the bin.” There’s a forty-four gallon drum and they burn it all. There you’d be, stark

naked and you’d have this shower, There were showers there and she came along with this tin of purple dye, you know, and painted you with a paint brush. Genitals and all. Oh boy you’d be crawling up the ceiling, then into bed. God.

Yeah.

That was the stuff. I forget what they called it now, but that cured it anyway. They painted you with a paintbrush.

Yeah. There was no pampering. “Come here.” Whop it on. Geez.

Oh there were various units. I forget now who

it was. I know there was about ten of us who went into the AGH and they thought we had scrub typhus and there was about eighteen in our ward, and eight of them were dead the next morning, so I said, “I haven’t got scrub typhus. I’m all right.” Eight died overnight.

Yeah.

No. They were all just as sick as one another. There was a high temperature, couldn’t get it down, that was the first thing. And then they started to peel them and they couldn’t find out what it was. That’s when they found out it was a bug.

Well they used to take layer after layer of skin off looking for it and that’s when they found the typhus.

No. They do that in the mortuary.

Yeah. It kicked me on. I said, “Not me. I haven’t got anything wrong with me.” We didn’t know what it was in those days, and then they told us that they had found this bug.

Yeah. It was living under the skin, yeah. And that’s when they found it on the planes.

Yeah.

I think it was about eleven days or something.

Yeah.

About nineteen months I think.

No. No leave in all that time. Yeah.

Oh lovely. I

came home and I can still remember, because we had to go on leave with our rifle and all that in those days. And I opened the front gate and I think Mum was washing the front veranda and she turned round and saw me. And she was forty-four I think, she was only in her early forties. And good. So

they had no phones, you couldn’t ring up the old man on the phone. And then he came home and I opened the door and he fell over.

No.

Yeah. I had written letters, I should be due for leave shortly. They just lived in hope.

Oh yeah. There was lots to eat. They had a meal. I don’t remember what it was. But I know we had a drink.

Oh yes. I had a drink. I had a cousin living with us then because he’d been in the air force and he’d been discharged and

he came home, of course I was in bed. He was working shift work, you see. He comes in and he shakes me, he wakes me up and I said, “Good old Myre,” and went back to sleep again. He was thoroughly disgusted, told me about it years later.

That was about it. We only had two days, Dad the first day and then Mum the next.

And that was it.

Yeah. They were proud all right.

What?

Oh, yeah, you’re a sergeant now. There’s a photo of me there with my Mum when I come home from hospital.

No, I didn’t say anything at all It wasn’t necessary. The old man would know, he being an old digger.

No. It was still going. That was 1943.

No.

I tried to get upgraded and go back but I didn’t do any good.

You go to the doctor, get to know him. You say, “Listen, I want to get upgraded.” “Yeah, all right. We’ll send you for a board (UNCLEAR).” “When am I going for that board (Unclear)?” “Oh shortly.” He kept pushing you off.

Yeah. Fobbing me off.

Yeah. I was pretty thin in those days and what have you.

Oh I don’t know. It was all right, because I was wearing a decoration then. There was no ribbons worn. And then I think in 1944 they did,

they did brought out a 39th , three star it was when it first came out. So they know you’ve done your bit. That was all right.

Yeah. You are in uniform.

Oh no. Not the medals, just the medal ribbons.

Oh, what the general public? They

just know you’ve got something. That’s all.

Oh yeah. Some of them did. Some of them did.

Oh no. It didn’t play in any beers. I can remember when I took Dot out one night, we had just started to go out and we went to the Australia Hotel. And

I had two beers. She didn’t drink, so I just stopped with two beers and being very naïve and the waiter came past and said, “What’s that?” It was a crème de menthe. And the next thing a beer and a crème de menthe had arrived on a tray with the compliments of the major. And there was an old major sitting down there with his wife. He was a First World War bloke. And he said, the drink he gave it to us. We had a toast.

All right. They were all right. I got on well with them Americans. They were different to us but I remember when the war ended, it was a good day. They certainly came out of their holes then. It was excellent.

Everybody was in town, you know. They declared the joint shut where I worked and we went into town. There was…Dot was in hospital. She had just had our first baby. It was good. Everybody was happy.

That’s right.

No, I got out of it in 1946. I stayed in for an extra while. One because it was work. That was good. As a sergeant, I was getting ten and sixpence a day.

Ten and sixpence a day. They had gone to six bob a day then, the privates. And the sergeant was getting

ten bob and I think we got sixpence rise, and I was getting ten and six a day. Dot had been a sergeant. I forget what she got. I think it was about seven bob.

Yeah, we were both sergeants.

She was at the Royal Mechanical Engineers. She was the orderly room sergeant. She used to look after all that, down at Albert Park Barracks.

No. She had never been a Field sergeant. She was a clerk only and solely. She used to live in fear of having to go to an NCOs course. I don’t know why, she could do anything. But then we got the, Rod was born in ‘45 and

then I got out and Amy was born in ‘47. As I say, I always wanted to get back in the army.

Very good.

Yeah. That’s what she said. And we

got married. Her family were just battlers. We got married in the Presbyterian Church at Mordialloc and she borrowed a wedding dress from one of these girls and when we came out of the church, all the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Services] women, they were lined up, we had a guard of honour of AWAS, and I know her old man said we had to have one of the local restaurants receptions,

and he said, “Come down,” and he got another table put in for them, and they had tea there. It was good.

I still love her, she’s a lovel woman. She’s a lovely girl. She’s been a good mother. She is very caring. She has looked after all the family. All the family, mine as well.

My Mum was sick. She had a coronary attack and they were in the next street. Dot used to go over and look after her, bathe her when she was in bed. She didn’t go to hospital.

Oh I think it does, you know. You’ve got to have the right

woman but it didn’t affect me at all. It helps you sometimes.

Buggered if I know what makes you fall in love with a lady. She was a cute little thing.

No. That’ll do me.

Yeah. That was a blow, and once again it was a blow to the ego.

Yeah. I suppose it is in a way. You can’t do anything, and I was pretty right. This fellow I know, this bloke at army headquarters, he was a captain and he was at Albert Park and he said, “I want you to come down and see me.” So I go down to see him and he said, “Come here!” And he takes me down the passage, in I go and the next thing

I’m standing in front of the master general of ordnance, who’d been an old infantry soldier in the First World War. He said, “I’ve got a job for you.” He said, “Looking after spare parts.” He said, “I’ve got blokes here, they’re ordering spare parts for Bren guns but they’ve never seen a bloody Bren gun.” Because they were ‘base wallahs’.

They’re blokes who go to base. They never get out of bases. And they are quite happy to be there.

Cut lunch commandos. And then I panicked. All I could see was the 9th Division landing in Torokina and saying “Where’s the spare barrels?” “We haven’t got any. Macka forgot to order them.” “No.” I said, “I’d rather work in stores.” “Okay,” he said. Wish I’d have taken it. I would have finished up a major. Anyway I was there and I went out to the stores. I was a sort of rouseabout, and I was a sergeant major to them. I used to fall them in,

and march them to work and dismiss them and muck around, a dog’s body a lot. But we had a few, most of them, most were B class blokes there. You know. Sit down and (UNCLEAR) the war, then go down to the sergeant’s mess and we’d be right.

We had two war widows with us, and she came up and grabbed me and she’s crying and she said, “Don, how did you ever do it (Unclear)?” So that was good. That’s when I said to the bloke, “Where’s the track?” “Just up there,” he said. “About two hundred and fifty metres.” I said, “Good, that’s it. I like that.”

Oh look, I couldn’t believe it, you know,

that they had dug out the side of the mountain, to get the chopper in. When we went back it was a Pacific Islander pilot. He was good. I said, “I fought on the track. Can you point it out?” And he said. “No worries sir,” he said. And he got out and it was beautiful. It was like looking at a map. He’d say, “There’s Iora Creek, there’s so and so,” and oh

how we ever fought on it I’ll never know. Marvellous.

Yeah.

That was what it was like in Vietnam at places but we had shovels then. After Isurava we had shovels.

Not the hands. And Bayonets. We, in Vietnam, the first operation we went onto, I got a big shovel, my mate got a pick

and we were ready to go. And they say, “What do you want them for sir?” “You’ll find out.” A few mortars come in. “Can we borrow your pick and shovel?” Yeah.

No.

I think I was a guinea pig because I had diseases that no one had ever had. I can remember this, now Australian, he was. He was a civilian and he came up and I was sitting there and he pulled my pyjamas back and said, “I haven’t seen this since…” and I thought, “Oh Jesus. I’ve got leprosy.”

Only this rash I had. I thought, “Jesus it must be leprosy.”

Anyway, it was this strange bloody disease I had.

A fair bit. And now me old section commander of mine, a bloke called Charlie Tanner. They were all publicans. Charlie was married. He was an old bloke, and anyway in the attack

on Gona, Charlie Tanner’s been hit. I said, “Where’s he been hit?” He said, “You wouldn’t want to know.” “Oh God, Charlie.” When he was carried out he is saying, “Is it all there? Is it all there?” He lost a nut [testicle]. That was all. Very happy. All the inside of his leg went. Yeah.

No.

I know.

No. Doesn’t effect it.

Ego.

It doesn’t affect it.

They did a lot of research. Blood. Oh god. I was forever up. I was on speaking names with the pathologist. And as it turned out I had anxiety state, which I didn’t know until after I got out. That’s where they declared me. But I think the psychiatrist

said, “He can stay here for a while. He’s half mad, this bloke.”

Yeah. I think I was. Well we definitely….you know. On a string.

Probably that. I’d shout out, have nightmares and the sisters would report it of course.

They’d want to be quick. Yeah.

No. I think that would have been all right. It was mainly the others. It was mainly blood I think and

they did a few…They had me as a guinea pig there for a while. They were doing tests.

Yeah.

I’ll never forget when we came out the first time, I was evacuated, and this sister said, “There you are, you fellows won’t take your Atebrin.” I said, “What’s Atebrin? We haven’t had any Atebrin..” We were still on

Quinine. We were still taking quinine tablets.

Yeah. Oh malaria’s that been invented? It’s been out for six months. We all went yellow. Of course we were all yellow when we came back but we were jaundiced.

Pardon?

Yeah. I made a couple of good friends. Yeah.

A young fellow from the 2/10th Battalion. Another bloke from the 2/12th. And strangely enough I had a couple of 39th blokes with me all the time, both sergeants.

No. I thinkg it just dropped. That was the end of it. Yeah.

No. Because we were AIF then.

But the days went quick. By the time they woke you up and got you out of bed and the hospital routine you went through. But some of the sisters were good. You got to have, one

day a week was hard tucker. You’re on hard rations. And I’d say, “Oh gee nurse, I’d rather have a poached egg.” And back she’s come with this poached egg for me. Yeah.

Bully beef.

Yeah. Even in hospital they did it, yeah. For saving rations because it was good.

No, it wasn’t World War I stuff. That was an old tale, World War I. I remember bringing home this tin of stuff, on leave, and I said, “Christ, this is what we’ve got to eat.” And we opened it a, “Christ,” he said, “Maconachies,” and he and another bloke opened it up and got a fork each and

they were into it. It wasn’t Maconachies but it was meat and veg, the same thing. Christ, Maconachies. Yeah.

Reading mostly. And then when we were well enough we used to go over and there was a pool…We played pool.

No. Everyone’s too frightened.

Yeah.

We didn’t have any VADs at Heidelberg. Most of them had been overseas. I remember this sister, she was sort of head nurse and she came in and she said,

“I’ll introduce you to my boyfriend, he’s on leave.” And he was a sergeant. He wasn’t much older than me.

Yeah. They said that they were breaking up the 39th. “Oh Christ, what happened? Where did they go?” “They all went to the 2/2nd.” It is only recently that I got to an old mate and he told

me, he was there when they broke it up. It was pretty nostalgic. But I read about it. It is in the history of the 2/2nd Battalion. The men had to full march in order onto the parade ground and he told them. They had been told they were breaking up and he got up and made his speech and they were farewelling them.

And led them down to the 2/2nd and handed them over. The 2nd Battalion sent their band to meet them half way and marched them in. And he handed them over with this speech. They were lucky they formed a company out of them, so they didn’t lose any ranks. They were all there. The officers all remained and they remained together as a group, as a

company of the 2/2nd Battalion. So it was very good.

Well I was sorry I hadn’t gone back. Because they got back then and gave them a good leave. They gave them twenty-eight days’ leave, nearly, and once they had sent them all back home again. They went back and then of course they went to Wewak then, which was a terrible waste of life, it was worth nothing. But

we lost a couple of good blokes. We lost one of my blokes. He was a digger called Slim Journeaux. He had feet like that. He was a character of a bloke. He got, he went to ground when this gun opened up and it took the heel off his boots but it also wounded, down at the heel. So I said, “You’d better go back to the RAP.” So he’s

limping back to the RAP and he said, “What the bloody hell’s that, Peter?” And he sticks his head over and there’s two Japs with a machine gun creeping up on battalion headquarters. So Slim shoots them both, you see and he goes back and casually mentions to the CO, “He shot the…” “Christ,” he said. He was the hero of the battalion.

It should have. He didn’t.

No.

No. Oh sometimes you can recommend it to the officer that he should be recommended for a so and so. If he thinks it’s worthy he will put him in. Then it’s up to the company commander and then to the CO.

Yeah.

Oh I don’t think so. No.

Yeah.

War’s all about, yeah.

Yeah. Including the commanding officer. The RMO [Regimental Medical Officer] and all the wounded. There would have been hell to pay.

No, I didn’t get a letter from the 39th at all.

Yeah.

I don’t think so. Who’d write to the bloody old sergeant. He’s lucky he’s not here.

No, I didn’t.

Yeah. Serves me right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh,

I don’t think I appreciated that for the rest of my life. Being, having a nice bed. Having a nice meal.

You know. They said to me, “We are going to send you to convalescence,” and the first one was out to the Governor’s residence. And that was a beauty.

Stonington. And at four o’clock you were allowed to walk up to the pub and have a couple of beers and come home. If you had more

than a couple you were RTU, Returned To Unit, see.

No. They just said, “Right, you shouldn’t have messed up.” It was run by the Red Cross, oh and they were glorious soft beds and dressing gowns. We never had dressing gowns. You used to wear your great coats. And all lovely.

These ladies would come and see if you wanted anything. I think about two weeks you were out there. And you get back and they said, “You are going to be medically downgraded,” you know. Went before the board. And they’d made up their minds, they have all your medical docs. And then they sent me to Ballarat convalescent depot. That brought you back to earth. Living in a tent.

Doing guard duty. You’d have to do duty and as a sergeant, you’d have to be sergeant of the guard, and they had a boom there.

Oh yeah. I did later but you had to be on the pill.

Mount the guard. And of course, the infantry, we knew how to do it but of course they had all types.

On the pill?

No, you’re not A1.

No. Oh no. A lot of blokes were praying that they would be made B class. Get out of it.

No, I don’t think. You’d get a bit of leave, we could go into Ballarat. We used to have the odd beer, meet the odd young lady. WAAAFs [Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force] up there, the air force girls. And then back on the tram. As a matter of fact one week

going to…when we were going to Adelaide, we always pull up at Ballarat and I always stop at the old con [convalescent] depot because the toilets are there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I should have stayed at this office job he gave me. But that’s now. Now I am in my sixties. Then I was only twenty.

What should I have been doing? I should have been back in the unit. Back at the unit.

Oh it’s what

I was talking about, you know a lot about getting a medical upgrade. And you’d say, “Ok, where’s that medical upgrade?” and they would fob you off. Because you were doing the job and they didn’t want to lose you. Then you get there and they’d say, “No, you stay where you are.”

We were living at

home. We had a room. It was lovely, our first. It was a room at Mordialloc. And use of a kitchen. She’d have something cooking and somebody would turn it off. It was a bugger of a joint. However, we finished up going back to her place. The old man built two rooms on the back of the house. And they are still there. It was a little cottage right on the coast.

Still there. It was sold the other day for $310,000. And of course they’re doing it up now. They are going to make it double storey and it will be $710,000. One house off the beach.

Yeah. The old bloke bought it for four hundred quid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh no. There was plenty to do. The war was finishing then and there was units folding up and then it finished and I stayed on for another six months. Mainly on account of it was a job. It was pretty busy then with units folding up and getting all the stuff back.

No.

No I didn’t. I didn’t strike anybody for years afterwards, not until I went to a reunion I met them, because they all got scattered far and wide when they got broken up. But I didn’t see anybody.

And the first reunion I went to, I met them then.

About Anzac time, yeah. Oh no, ’47, I think it was.

It was all right. They’d get us somewhere to hold a reunion and then we couldn’t have it next year. They’d all get full. Fighting, belting.

Geez, they went through places quick.

I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so.

Mainly football I think. Important stuff.

No, I didn’t. Yeah, only by reading the paper. I didn’t know there was going to be a police action and you know.

And I’d do that, used to see the soldiers. I can remember the colour patch faded out then. They formed the Australian regiment. But it was written, the Australian regiment, and I’d see these young soldiers with it on. I didn’t ever see any old soldiers with it on. No. I’d see. No that was (UNCLEAR) was 1950. You know the term Royal

was granted. And you’d see them around – RAR it was called then.

Nothing. About as much as I knew about Vietnam. But I knew there had been Korean guards in the POW camps.

Yeah. Because they’d been treated

bad by the Japs. They had to show off.

Oh I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Talking to the blokes that went to Korea with our blokes. It was the same as those who went to Vietnam. You are in the Royal Australian Regiment. They were in the occupation and suddenly they were in Korea. And the old soldiers, that were Second World War blokes, they went too.

And the next stop they sent three battalions to Korea. So when I went back in, it was on a rotation service. If the RSM had done his twelve months, you’d had to have an RSM to replace him. So there was only one bloke to get picked out of the rest of the army.

Yeah. She knew I was restless

and wanted to get back in the army. She said, “You want to go back in the army. They are advertising with your rank.” I said, “I’ll go and see about it,” so I was working shiftwork then, so on the dayshift I decided to call into Royal Park and that’s when I met this bloke I knew.

No.

Yeah. But Korea was at the back of my mind. I thought I could finish in Korea. It had been…I went back in ‘50. They had just started then. And then when we got back in, we went to this recruit training company. The adjutant came in and said, “We’re looking for volunteers for Korea,” so I put my hand up and

that was it.

Yeah. That was years after when I was a warrant officer, class 1.

No.

No. They got a few recruits. Blokes who had been towards the end of the war and wished they had of been in it. So they joined up for Korea, they did get a few enlistees.

But mainly it was blokes who had been in the army, who had been in the occupation. They were the main ones.

No I didn’t but the regiment did, the fellows that were in Malaya. I didn’t get to Malaya.

It was only three RAR that got to the Indonesian Crisis. It wasn’t very much but we lost a couple of lives though just the same. And they were Second World War blokes.

Yeah.

I see in the paper today that 5/7 RAR have come home from

East Timor and they have got a reserve unit as one of their companies. So they are…because they are not getting any soldiers now they have got to have the reservists.

Mmmm.

Yeah.

That’s right.

That was when I was a…I came from the school of infantry. I was the RSM of 1 RAR who were at Holsworthy and I’d been with them a couple of years and the whisper was on that we were going to go to Vietnam. And I said, “Where’s Vietnam?”

Nobody knew. Nobody knew why we were going. And so it was. It was a waste of human lives sending fellows over there. And ten years it went on.

Yeah.

When we were warned for Vietnam it was pretty cruel because there were some young fellows there with wives who were expecting babies.

And they put their hands up and said, “My wife’s expecting her first baby,” and they bloody discharged them. I went stone mad, you know. However, they stopped that. My voice was eventually heard because if they had hung on they probably could have gone with somebody else twelve months later. His wife would have been happy. He would have been happy. But it was pretty cruel you know. They were mongrels. It was like when they

discovered homosexuality in the army, they just bang, straight out. Oh bloody cruel.

Should have been in the pommy army.

Yes I did. You know because we were fighting guerrillas. Except when we got tangled up with the North Vietnamese but I didn’t know what it was like. It was very corrupt, Vietnam, it was all political, ‘diggers for dollars’ and it was.

The president, who was it? The Vietnamese president asked Harold Holt for help. Pig’s arse, he didn’t even know where Australia was. He knew where the Catholic Church was. That’s about all he did. It was political and it was religious. And it used to annoy me, but they did that. The Americans, because we had a team of advisors there then, and

they used to have to go out with the Vietnamese army say as a company commander. They were having a few casualties. They got shot because the poor little buggers, they would leave, and leave these fellows on their own. They were all mainly Korean veterans, and so then we went with the Americans. We had to learn a new way of life. There was helicopters,

when we went in and we became operational, the OC support company was what we called the Battle 2IC, but he was in charge of the battles. And he became S1, and S2 he was the adjutant and S3 was the intelligence officer and all this crap to fall in with the Yanks. And a bloke said, “He’s

RSM.” “Don’t tell me what that means,” he said, “but bloody look out.” Yeah. ‘Radio Rentals’. God they were characters. This mate of mine, he gave them all nicknames, Radio Rentals, and there was Lummox, this big bloke. He had this big thing, and it didn’t matter what happened, he just plodded along through the jungle twisting dials. He was happy. Anyway,

I found them one day in a clearing and I said, “What are you blokes doing here?” They didn’t know. They were listening away. “Listen, you better dig in.” “We haven’t got any shovels.” “What about that?” “No tucker.” So we took them in hand, Called for (UNCLEAR). They sent tucker for them and a few extra shovels. And I brought them inside the fold, into battalion headquarters and put them into the (UNCLEAR). God, they reckon I was their

father. And we looked after them all the time. But the poor little bloke who was in charge of them, a lieutenant, he went to the CO in two brigade and said, “There are North Vietnamese infiltrators in the South Vietnamese army and they’re opposing us.” And they bloody sacked him and he was right.

And, oh God strike me, red hot, no, not you. You have got to have the stars and stripes in both eyes. But yeah, he picked it up on the net. As soon as the…there was one unit from war zone D it was called. That was from the days of the French. War zone D we were there. And come night time this

South Vietnamese unit, they became the guerrillas, same unit. They wouldn’t wear that. We heard them. They were the same ones on that day. We could recognize them by their voice. That’s where we… he said, “Can you hear voices?” They were underneath us. That’s when the tunnels were found. God.

That’s right.

Yeah.

You can only advise. I was very lucky. Lou Rumfield was our CO and I could talk to Lou and he knew what was going on. But politics played a big part over there. A big part. It was all

the way with LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnston] at that stage.

We did. Yeah.

Six months.

Oh no. I was medically downgraded then. I got

home and they x-rayed me and it was a bloody Vietnamese doctor found all the ulcers. And then when I got home I had to go and see the specialist in Sydney. I had eight duodenal ulcers and Christ know how many stomach ulcers.

It was for nought.

It was a waste of life. We were lucky. We didn’t lose many in the Australian Army for the time we were there. They performed well. And I didn’t mind soldiering with them. Good but looking at the big picture those Americans lost hundreds, they lost a million lives they lost, and for what? (UNCLEAR). They’re out. I’ve got a card, I think I’ve got it in my wallet.

One of the conmen, they sent me. I belong to this mob, it’s the airborne mob reunion. That’s the card and that’s another one. I must have it somewhere. It’s this you see. But he’s got a photo of himself with a rifle and his

steel helmet on. “We were winning when I left.” Jesus. We went to their reunion last year, it was a company reunion. By golly it was a good turn. But a born conman, loves anything like that. He organised it, at Woolgoolga. We just went down from Yamba, here. “We were winning when I left.”