Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Footscray the 31st of December, 1911.

My dad was William Henry Arnold and my mother was Mary Anne Greenham.

He worked in the menswear department of JH Hibbert and Company for practically fifty years.

I had an older sister, Eva and a younger sister Jessie and two brothers Roy and Max.

Only as a girl. In those years

she worked in service. That is she worked for a, lived in with one of the Bourke Street business families. They had a home in Sandringham and she lived in there. That was all her working life until she married.

I went to school at, for a short time, a couple of years, at the Tottenham State School. Known in those days as the ‘Tottenham Jungles’ because of the surrounding area for some distance around was overgrown with scotch thistles

which were six or seven feet high and great things to play in at times. After a couple of years, at that time we were living in Ballarat Road, Maidstone but in 1920, we moved down to Footscray to my mother’s old

home in Greenham Place. Greenham Place was the part of the old estate of my mother’s grandfather. He was in the meat industry in the very early years with meat processing and his own livestock and abattoirs and they were situated at Braybrook,

a few miles up the Ballarat Road.

I did very much.

Well I think being with other children. I had a good number of cousins all around my own age

and to be at school with other boys and girls was a pleasure.

Mostly junior teachers at that level but I came in contact with the senior teacher in the Eighth Grade. Known to the boys as “Boof.”

But

No idea. He was Boof Williams but he was a gentleman too.

We moved to Footscray where 253 School [No.253 Public School] had been the school where

all my forebears’ children attended and my mother went to the school there when it was a private school before it was taken over by the State. So we’re very proud of the school and still are. There was a reunion there last year. I forget which year it was

but it was probably the Centenary or something like that. Not that I got there. We had a poem to learn to learn there at one time. I went to the second year of what they called the Higher Elementary because we had no high school in those years. And

one of the poems that we had for English was ‘The School at War’ and the knowledge of the words of that, some of them still linger with me.

“This is just a place your father learned the words of war the touch of life is born to truth.

Here in a day that is not far you too may learn the meaning of these words.”

And there was another line.

\n[Verse follows]\n “All night before the blink of war in\n

fitful sleep the Army lay.\n For there through the air that’s still the night to gauntly gleam the coming day.”\n

Yes. Cousins. They were all older than me and I didn’t know them

as other than uncles because my father was one of the young members of a family of thirteen and I was too young to know them very well. At least I think two of them were killed in action and

two others served in Field Ambulances. One in the 7th and one in the 10th. And both of them returned to Australia.

Not at all. No, but I grew up with

returned men practically all my life and I found them all helpful and encouraging and no one ever put me off joining the Army and I always had every intention of joining the Army at some time.

I recall my mother taking me to Port Melbourne to see the boys when they were coming home in 1919. And one day, I remember it very clearly because it was the men from the Thirty-second Battalion

and as many as them were from Footscray although the unit itself had been formed in Adelaide but they didn’t have the numbers and they built the unit up from men in the Western Districts - Southern and Western Districts of Victoria and the others from Footscray numbers. And

there was no opportunity to say hello to the many boys who my mother knew. Although we did try and we did wave to one or two as they came away from the ship but they were driven to the stadium in West Melbourne before

training for Adelaide. But we were not to see any of them until they had been to the 32nd Battalion headquarters in Adelaide and were officially disbanded. But the after the First World War, the units that had been in action were

apportioned places, preferably in the city that they went away from. But in the case of the 32nd Battalion there was not sufficient people in South Australia to warrant as many units and so the 32nd was allotted to Footscray area and as a result I was called up in

in the 32nd and soon my basic training. That was in 1929. I said I did my basic training rifle and machine gun and rifle firing with the 32nd Battalion. But from there on I was at -

volunteered it was called. The Sergeant Major said, “The following men on the end of the front rank - Right Turn. Quick March. You are Army Medical Corps.” And previously we’d all tried to get into the Artillery or the Army Service Corps but that wasn’t to be. As it happened the five of us we were all school mates really.

There was Archie Signal, Signy. What was his name? Sigley. Archie Sigley and Buck Noble, Cyril Ashman and Young…. Youngie. He was a small lad from Altona. His name was Young but he was always called Youngie

and myself.

Because they used horses. They were units with horses whereas the Infantry that we were with, you marched. Well in the future we did plenty of marching also. But it

was probably the best thing that ever happened to me going into the Medical Corp and we joined the 2nd Field Ambulance. We were allotted to it. That was the system. Certain districts provided the annual intake to the units. They were called quotas. We were….

and you get known as quotas. My record books got that on it which was 1911 quota. That was the year you turned eighteen in. And I was fortunate in the fact that I didn’t turn eighteen until the 31st of December so I was always ahead of things. I had been at school and I still was one of the young ones.

Oh yes. Once a week. Religious Education. Not that I didn’t get religious education as well because both my parents were Sunday School teachers and my Dad was

a local preacher in the Methodist Church. He was so for over fifty years and but we did get religious instruction once a week at school. And that that was in all classes.

Sunday? We got

up reasonably early and went to church at eleven o’clock when we were small. When we got old enough we went to Christian Endeavour at ten and then church, and in the afternoon we went to Sunday School at quarter to three. But

occasionally we had church again in the evening. It depended on what we were, only young children, we didn’t go out at night.

I chose not to go to High School. I could’ve gone on to either Williamstown High or Essendon High. But I was good at arithmetic and my mother arranged for me to sit for an examination for a scholarship at Stotts Business College and I was fortunate enough to

get a half a scholarship which made it possible for my parents to find the fees at half fees. And so for 12 months I went to business college and at the end of that time I was a qualified shorthand typist and a qualified

ledger keeper.

I guess my great grandfather had been a businessman. I always thought I’d go into business myself,

but I never did. Do you want me…?

And my first job it was rather strange. In January that would’ve been in

1926 was it? 1927? I went into Stott’s to see if there were any vacant jobs on their list because we’d been told to do that and the young lady said, “Oh you’re too early.” she said, “Business doesn’t start up until about the end of January

in the city. But.” she said, “Come in later.” I said, “There’s nothing at all? You haven’t got anything at all?” “Oh.” she said, “There is one job. But you wouldn’t want that.” she said. I said, “Why not?” She said, “It’s in the butcher’s shop.” “Oh.” I said. “Where at?” And she said, “Bennett and Woolcocks, Swanston Street.

Just past the Town Hall.” So I went down and was interviewed. Very short interview. “When can you start?” they said. I said, “Very quickly. Very soon.” And I did. I spent nine years with that company. Very happy

years too because I was in the meat industry which pleased me no end. On my mother’s side of the family, they were butchers for one hundred years or more back. I was quite happy and I found the workmen in the shop and in the factory were all,

almost all of them, were returned servicemen and the result was I went to work in uniform some days when I had a parade at night and I used to work late and then go straight down to South Melbourne to the parade and those men were tremendously good to me and encouraging

me and I also got practice as I took over the accountant’s job there, and I was also a number of other things: a storeman, first aid man, as happens in a smaller unit. Small - well it was a unit. But smaller business you get more opportunity to do things in the smaller business.

And I did things there on the clerical side that I never got called on to do in my future jobs but the advantage was that I knew how they should be done. And ultimately when I left the company, I went to a larger company where I was in charge of the accounts department and

that also was a thrill because it was in part of the William Inglis empire. The Imperial Freezing Works, Footscray. There were thirty-seven departments there and although I didn’t come into contact with the thirty-seven departments, I did come into contact with the results of those

departments through the accounts. And after the war I decided to go back. I could’ve remained in the service but I chose to go back to work. Wasn’t particularly welcome of course.

The Victorian manager said to me “There’s no place here for you.” He said, “You’ve been driving around the country enjoying yourself while we’ve

been here working our hearts out.” And I said, “Excuse me, Sir.”

Well it did but then I’ve got to learn. Where we are back to ?

Yeah. It

was through the whole of the Depression. One year business was booming everywhere in Melbourne. It was the first time that we’d come out of the Depression from the war and the return of the servicemen with mass unemployment

and business was really booming. I think it was 1931. And our firm had retail trade and wholesale trade and the wholesale trade was around the suburbs and that was serviced by ten drivers.

Nine of them had T-Model Fords and the other had a horse-drawn wagon. And with the wagon he did the Albert Park/Port Melbourne area and the other drivers did the areas, what they called rounds. One out to Footscray. One to Cheltenham. Another one round Fitzroy and Collingwood and

round the various suburbs. One day, one Monday, the drivers usually came back and accounted for the day’s sales and balanced their books and supplies. What they’d taken out and returned and

at four o’clock this Monday afternoon all ten drivers were back to the office and some of them had sold nothing. It was my job to balance their books and check them in at night and I remember saying to them “What happened?”

And they said shop keepers wouldn’t buy. They simply wouldn’t buy. And I learned of course but it was the news from America and they’d got the news probably in the morning paper which I didn’t read and they’d learned about the

real breakdown in business in America which meant bad news for Australia. And it was.

Yes.

It was. It was a shock. It was a shock to all the people as a matter of fact because this meant unemployment and it was a sad and

sorry period that the next six or seven years it was ‘til1936, that the situation began to improve.

I was engaged at 30 shillings per week to start.

That was a pound a week and ten shillings for meals and overtime and it was added to the pound a week and. Yeah that was good money. At that time I was only fifteen. I’d gone through Business College far too young according to the system.

But I had only turned fourteen when I sat for the examination and when my mother went and took me in to enrol me on in January the young lady doing the registering said,

“Date of Birth? And I said, “31st December, 1911.” “Oh,” she said, “I can’t enrol you. You’re too young. You’ve got to be sixteen.” She said, “I’ll have to go and talk to Mr Holmes. He’s the Principal.” So she went away. Came back a few minutes later and she said, “He said, I’m afraid Miss Jones you’ll have to

enrol him.” So I had actually I had a very successful year at Stott’s Business College. I was not winning any speed tests or spelling competitions that were held every week but I was in there.

The evidence was in the streets where there were unemployed. Masses of unemployed. Very, very quickly that came about. My brother was out of work

instantly. And from then on for years he was riding his bicycle and chasing a couple of hours work here or there wherever they could get it and the men and boys used to move from company to company to see if there was any employment. There were big companies,

oil terminals and maize products in Footscray; Barnett Glass Rubber and if they could get two hours work it was something.

They didn’t. But I was the unemployment officer and

it was my job to see that the men and boys who applied for jobs, that they didn’t get to the Manager. So I took their name and address down and age, and assured them if the opportunity came we’d get in touch with them.

and mostly that was the way of it. But now and again and on over the years , although I was only a Junior at the time, if an applicant appeared to me to be useful, I would risk the ire

of the Manager to talk to him and no one I ever recommended didn’t get a job. There weren’t a great number of them but if I recommended them he’d find a job for them. One particular chap I distinctly remember, he was a tall Englishman.

Fresh from England man and a loner in Australia. He told me his story and so I found out that he was a carpenter and I recorded it in the book. And at the time for all our

trade we used what we called, for want of a better name, sausage boxes. They were tray boxes perhaps two feet wide and four feet long. They were standard because they fitted the horse wagon and they fitted the T-Model Fords. And they

at the time, they were in a dilapidated condition and there was no thought of replacing them. During the Depression you didn’t replace things, you repaired it. And I went to the Manager and fronted up to him, was the words he used, and told him the story of this chappie. I said, “He’s big,

he’s capable and he’s a carpenter.” “We don’t want any staff. We’re not putting any staff on.” I said, “I think, Sir, that he could repair our sausage boxes. If he kept those in a state of repair and became a cleaner or something like that?” “Good idea.” he said. And he put him on. And Bert Livers,

his name was, and he was made a worker in the company for years. There were others too of course. Many years later when my Meals on Wheels

man brought my meal one day he came in and he said, “Snorkers today.” “Oh.” I said, “Where did you get that from?” He said my father-in-law worked for Bennett and Woolcock, the Butchers. He said, “They’re always calling them snorkers.” “George Capuano?” I said. “Was it?” He said, “That’s right. How did you know?” I said, “ I worked with George,”

and I was responsible for getting him the job.” He told me that he had just lost his job. He had seven young children and he would do anything. So I went to the manager and told him and “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing doing,” he said. “We’re not putting anyone on.”

I said, “Excuse me, excuse me.” He said, “No. Out of the way.” He’d just come from breakfast at the Royal Mail and he wanted to get back to the shop. I persisted and I said, “But Sir. He’s a brother of Senior Constable Capuano of the Wireless Patrol. “Oh,” he said. “Why didn’t you say that?” And so George got a job. Only the week before his brother

had jumped out of the patrol car in Swanston Street, leapt out and grabbed the bolting horses of our one and only horse drawn wagon as it careened out of Little Collins Street into busy Swanston Street and stopped it from any catastrophe. So George got the job and he was still working there after I left. Now this many years later,

I meet the man who married one of those seven children. And strange to say they live here in Box Hill.

And yes and he this Tom…. Tom Moran his name was and he’d done twenty years of delivering Meals on Wheels in this area. But….

Well it was strange, I suppose. I left there because I did a piece of work for the company and discovered that there was theft

and how it was going on and it meant going in early in the morning and working til late at night until all the staff and gone, and I discovered what was happening and took it to the manager and some of the men were sacked as a result. And the Managing Director sent for

me. I’d always been on very good terms with the Managing Director. I was the office boy and I was in and out of his office. “Get this. Get that. Bring me some money up to the Athenian Club.” and one thing and another but this day he shot a question at me which shocked me. He said, “Tommy how long have you known this was going on for?” I said,

“Sir, if I’d known it was going on I wouldn’t have reported it to you. That’s the last thing I’d a done.” So he said, “I was just testing you. I said after nine years, Sir, you put me to the test?” He said, “That’ll be all.” So I went out and had a look at the paper and Inglis and Company wanted a ledger keeper.

As a group we went down together, the five of us. We’d arranged that and we got out of the train at South Melbourne with quite a crowd.

We were amazed at the crowd. As it happened it was a muster parade and we were just the new bods. But we went along to the Drill Hall in Howe Crescent in South Melbourne and we were surprised that we were accepted amongst the crowd as though we’d had always been members. This surprised

us, the spirit of the crowd . We learned on parade that every Thursday night there was a riding class at the Sturt Street. At the ASC [Army Service Corps] Sturt Street Hall and we were all welcome to attend. That claimed our hearts because the horses

had been probably the main attraction for city boys and from then on we were at home. As rookies we had a lot to learn in the Field Ambulance. Was quite different, of course.

The sense of lectures on medical matters and hygiene which was a highlight of our training right from the start, because we were a Divisional Army Medical Corp which accounted for our numbers. There were representatives there of two Field Ambulances. There’s our sister Field Ambulance the 6th, the 2nd

and 6th. And the 4th Field Hygiene Section and 5th Casualty Clearing Station and a Clerk from the ADMS [Assistant Director Medical Services] office and one or two odd bods which built up the numbers. When we went to a normal parade,

it was not quite as big as that first night. But from then on with the Depression, we were very happy to go to parade because it meant another four shillings probably in the pay packet

and you could not earn that money anywhere else in those years. And that went on for six or seven years. So not only affected us but it also affected the doctors. And there was one young medico,

he hadn’t been able to, he couldn’t afford to buy into a practice and he hadn’t been able to get into association with another doctor and he was talking to one of the Army medical boys and they said to him well he said, “Why don’t you join the Army? You go into camp.

You get paid for your fourteen days camp and you get paid for each parade. At least that’s something.” And he did. Years later he moved from the unit that he was in and came across

from the 2nd Cavalry Div. to the 2nd Field Ambulance as a CO [Commanding Officer]. And a fine CO he was also. But he told us his story how in 1914

he joined the Light Horse and served overseas until they took the horses from them and moved them into France into the mud. And it was while he was serving in

France that he made the mistake, the remark that “If I ever get out of the bloody mess, I’ll do medicine.” And it’s strange to say that the quartermaster of the unit on Gallipoli,

he said the same thing. Whether he had been a medical student before he went away, we don’t know. But his name was Warley, Captain Warley, Honorary Captain for the Quartermaster. But he said the same and he did. And in 1941, 1940,

from the reserve of officers, he was brought in to work in our camp hospital because we had no officers of our own at that point in time. All officers and most of our troops had enlisted in the Second AIF [Australian Imperial Force].

And we were just getting a couple of reserve medical officers off the reserve and sometimes a medical officer from Footscray would come in and do three months. And then the next three months one of the other medicos from Footscray would come in and other reserve of officer man. At this Captain Warley,

I didn’t understand why he was particularly kind to me while he was with the unit, until many years after. I got married on the 9th of March 1940 and the unit had been fighting bushfires down the

Mornington Peninsula during the day and we all returned to camp late in the afternoon and my brother and I were going on leave because

No we didn’t get into the Second AIF until later.

This is not running isn’t it?

Oh.

Oh yes, no. We were senior NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers]and because it was that the enlistments were so great, all our officers had gone and most of our NCOs and those that remained, the Army issued an order that no Senior NCOs were to be

permitted to join the AIF henceforth because at that time we knew that we were going to be required in our own land.

Thirty six.

Yes I was I was working at the Footscray works and some of my staff were also

in the 2nd Field Ambulance for which I was criticised for influencing young men to join the Army.

Oh friends and workmates and

ultimately the company. Being a processor of food they wished to have me released but I refused. And the accountant said, “Well if you’re not going to

be released you’d better arrange for your Corporal Maurie Quick, you’d better arrange for him to be released to do your job while you’re away.” And that was done. That was no problem. The unit applied for him to be Manpowered out and he was

and he did my job for the five years that I was away.

We knew what was happening in Europe while the Nazis were building up their mighty force. And

they made no effort to prevent us from learning. Our doctors, which was customary, our doctors went home to London on short courses and longer courses and naturally enough they visited Europe and the Germans,

particularly one because he was the nephew of one of our Generals who’d been the CO of the unit and General, his name eludes me for the moment, his nephew came back and in one of his lectures he told us what was coming in Europe. Because he’d been shown the miles of

underground concrete factories where the Germans were manufacturing planes at such a rate that they were producing them and running them out and flying them off as he said, like sausages. And he said that it’s inevitable that you fellows are going

to be in this before very long. But at the time the Germans were still attempting to make and keep friendly relations with Britain. But at the same time within the Army I knew more than

other members knew because the AIC man, and the AIC they were Australian Instructional Corps men, and they were the men from the First World War who maintained the Army during peacetime, they were the knowledgeable permanent

force men. You only had one in each unit, may have been more in some larger formations, I don’t know. But we had one in the 6th Field Ambulance and one in the 2nd Field Ambulance and they were wizards. The Warrant Officer who was responsible for the 6th Field Ambulance was

WO1[Warrant Officer 1] Morel and he had been sergeant major as it happened to the Thirty-second Battalion and in for the 2nd Field Ambulance we had WO2 [Warrant Officer 2] Tom Rosengrave. Now he had not been away with the AIF

but he was with the force led by Commander Veal and who took Rabaul from the Germans in 1914. He was a member of the right half of the Victorian Rifles who went along with the Naval force to take over from the Germans. They did.

That was a very successful takeover too. There were only several casualties. One was a private… soldier, and the other was the doctor, the Medical Officer who was killed by a sniper. But

WO Rosengrave was also a resident of Footscray and ultimately when the militia was formed in 1930, compulsory military training had been in vogue, but in 1930 the Government ceased the compulsory service

and volunteers were called on.

I did stay in and at that time I was a corporal.

The training was marching

and it was good and solid training because it developed discipline and you’d get a command like ‘Right turn’ or ‘Left wheel’ and that’s really what makes a soldier. Much as all as some people object to it, it’s the thing that smartens the man and

I enjoyed the training. I’d done a fair bit in my years, cadet training at Footscray, but it was done under different circumstances here. Most of our parades were at night and so we were we were working in the back streets of Albert Park and South Melbourne. Marching here, marching there.

But one night particularly I still have the remembrance of that because the examining officers were strangers. They were not our officers and it was our officers that were being examined for their marks for their rank and on this one occasion, Captain Zacharin

Captain Zacharin was doing his examination and this was marching the body of troops I was in charge of that night. I was the sergeant in charge of the troops that evening and Captain Zacharin was instructed to do something and move the troops from here to there and one thing and another

and at one point, left wheel. And we would’ve marched straight through a brick wall. But like good soldiers we all turned right. And the examining officer said to me afterwards, he said, “I see you are all good soldiers.”

He was a senior, a colonel, no I don’t think he was a general, a colone,l and he said “On that command, you all turned right correctly.” But many years later 1941 or 1940, that Captain Zacharin came back to us

as our Commanding Officer. I knew him but he didn’t know me.

No. No he probably wasn’t even aware of it because the process went on. The senior officers never disclosed that. They probably took ten marks off.

Very quickly they, after our first camp. We had our first camp in 1930. (UNCLEAR), of course we had horses. Not for riding

but we had horses with our wagons and they needed to be tended and harnessed and unharnessed and the harness returned to the mobilisation stores after the camp. And I had the job of taking the limber full of the stores back to the mobilisation stores which were closer to the town of Seymour. They were at the rail head. Huge stores.

They contained all the uniforms and equipment from World War One the surplus, where our uniforms of that day came from. We were wearing 1914-18 uniforms. The camp finished and I drove the limber and all the stores back into the mob siding and the officer there received them all in and I

got aquittance. I only lost one small item during the camp. A tug short. The little piece of harness about six inches long and metal wrap, and that’s all we lost during the camp. One tug short. The horses were standing waiting.

They knew they were going back to the paddock and when I got the aquittance, he took me out and gave me a leg up onto the horse because they’re bare backed. They were mighty animals. So he said, “Grab his mane and hang on.” smacked the horse on the rump and away the horse

went and its two companions with it and headed for camp. Three mile I think it was back. That was the ride of my life.

No. Bare backed and just hangin’ on the mane. They’re things that make you learn.

I hung on and when we got to the Q Store [Quartermasters Store], back at camp he

and his mate pulled up at the store and I slid off. But I didn’t fall off and I wasn’t thrown. So all together getting into the 2nd Field Ambulance was wonderful. I preferred to be a field sergeant and I was and remained that all the time I was a sergeant. I

still lectured and trained the boys as we went along. At one time we had more troops and the ASC men were busier and a little older. But they were terrific men those, and Mr. Rosengrave,

is the way you addressed a warrant officer, ‘Mister’. And about 1937 we knew that we were going to face the Japanese. Not publicly known of course but within the service we had no doubt and I think it was in 1937.

Mr. Rosengrave had the responsibility of working on the revision of manning and war equipment tables for the Medical Services for the 4th Division Commando. And being a senior sergeant I worked with him

and for a couple of years we revised the war equipment tables because this was transition from horse to MT [Motor Transport] which affected a number of personnel on. For instance we had perhaps ten or twelve drivers of horse drawn wagons but in the under the revision

we had forty drivers. Forty MT drivers. And the result was that when all our officers enlisted in the AIF, that included our quartermaster and I was promoted to quartermaster, lieutenant quartermaster

and that happened throughout the Army, it was inevitable. And slowly in the twelve months or so after the second AIF left, we lost more personnel going to units and to the Air Force

and many more back to Manpower to the various companies that were tooling up for increased production as a result of the war.

It didn’t come from the Government.

The Government did not. They even at one stage, just prior to the war, they reduced the number of, there’s probably good reason, the number of militia men. But that’s

one of those things. It was probably wisdom at the time. It wasn’t apparent to simple people like us.

Yes oh yes. I remember Mr Menzies announcing that on the radio

and. It meant something to us to because we knew, those of us in the service, knew that when the AIF sailed we were going to have more responsibility. We knew this because in 1938 the

Japanese force sailed some fifty-seven ships from Japan and at the time, America, who had more information apparently than what we did, they switched their Atlantic fleet into the Pacific and the Japanese fleet

weren’t prepared to face the combined Atlantic and Pacific fleet. So they turned sail and landed all their troops in South China and around Burma area and the British had long thought that the Japanese were going to attack India. And they even had a

separate force prepared and it was working and attacking these Japanese in and around Burma. That was ’38 and there was an Indian division also

in that area and when the Japanese, a year later - that was September ’38, in September ’39, when the Japanese moved again, the Indian division was moved into the Singapore area. And that’s where they were taken prisoner at the same time as our Eighth Division was

and the Indian force was taken as a slave force to the Rabaul area. But a lot’s happened in between time.

With the declaration? Well for one thing I became an officer. Something I had never envisaged or thought of. I became quartermaster and

that was a big change. Can we interrupt.

This

took effect at the end of 1939 and in 1940 of course there was a great deal happening in all this time. There were special parades. There had been a trial mobilisation order issued to see whether we could put troops into

the camp hospital at Queenscliff and Point Nepean. We had the defended port force that were available for that and we found that we could have had them ready on motor bikes and we could’ve put them into that camp that night. But that was in

’38. That wasn’t necessary at that time. And ultimately when the Japanese came in to the picture we were all pretty well versed and trained. We’d had training in going into camp, coming out of camp and different duties and responsibilities. But for me

I went into camp on the 2nd of January 1940 and on the 3rd of January the ADMS 4th Division called on me and he said,

“You are appointed training officer and in charge of the unit. Train them for battle. Don’t leave a stone unturned. And don’t let me down.” With that he marched off and

I actually, I didn’t ever meet up with Colonel Robinson again. So training did commence and I left no stone unturned and

That’s

the question. I knew from the war equipment tables what was going to happen in the future and so I trained our three companies in the need for swift action and

with no officers I used my two senior sergeants. One became Company Commander A-Company and the other Company Commander B-Company and they had charge of it. Until we got a CO and some officers, they were company commanders and they did a first class job. I would give em an order at nine o’clock

at night to move and they could and did pack up hot Fowler stoves, load them, load their full equipment and they got conversant with this. And when we were in Western Australia, that was the constant movement and they ultimately became lieutenant bearer officers and

those two sergeants worked right through til the completion of later on. Which we’re not talking about now. But Rabaul. Ultimately we got our new CO and that was Lieutenant Colonel Zacharin, David Zacharin

And he made something of the unit.

At that time, not at all. We knew the problem, the whole unit knew the problem and

we had a camp hospital. Camp Hospital 5 with twenty-five to fifty patients mostly and everything had to go on and it was many years before I thought of the responsibility that I’d carried. But

that’s one thing about an army in the field I guess. You know what you’re doing has got to be done and it’s got to be done well. And you get on with it. And I was very grateful to all my NCOs at that time because I’d never, while we were waiting for a CO, I didn’t strike any bothers at all within

the administration and the orderly room sergeant functioned like an angel. That’s a very responsible job. And the rest of the unit functioned just the same as though the CO was up there in his tent or in his office.

No, we were we were doubly fortunate we’d had excellent officers for so many years. Always we’d had excellent officers. Two, three, four of them became generals and all those that I had ever spoke to man to man as an NCO they made no difference. They were

gentlemen and they were good officers too. And the unit many years back, it was in the 1930’s, we had a visit from three members of the original 2nd Field Ambulance Past

Members Association and I don’t’ remember the names of the two of them but I definitely remember the name of the one who was Charlie Stevens minus two legs. He had lost, he and his mate both lost their legs in France and

when they came back they formed the Limbless Soldiers Association of Victoria. This I knew of always because they had a distinctive triangular badge different to any other badge of any other force or service. And that was

in the 1930s and then in the 1990s I was to meet Charlie again. One Anzac Day, his son David was pushing his

wheelchair which had been a donation to him. When he formed the Association, it had been donated to him by the Red Cross and in 1990 he was still moving around in that same wheelchair. And after the march, his son David spoke to our boys and

they invited them to come to the reunion which they did. And I welcomed Charlie and his son and told them that I recalled the time in 1930 when Charlie had visited us and encouraged us as members of the force to build up our

camaraderie and friendship with one another because it was so important in wartime that you are all friends. And the following week, at the time I was working on the family tree, and the following week, I lost a cousin. He

died down at Seaford. And I rang to get some information from his widow and she was kind enough to tell me what I wanted to know about the date of death of my cousin and I asked her for her details also

and I then said, “Oh and what was your maiden name?” “Oh,” she said, “Stevens. You might have seen my father’s photo in The Sun the other day.” I said, “I did. I not only saw it, I cut it out.” And I said, “He was your Dad so that was

an interesting thing.” Because in being the father of my cousin’s wife, we were also related and as a result I got Charlie’s story.

He was,

yes.

Oh that and the meeting with other returned men. It was all inspiring. That takes me back to my first camp in 1930.

All the boys in that camp were pretty well 1911 quota from what I remember. We didn’t seem to have a lot of the older members. They had probably dropped out because the compulsory training had finished and so we were all eighteen year, nineteen years old. And we were allowed

one night over at the Red Cross hut. Each unit had a night and our unit and some other smaller units their troops were there that night, and it was a padre who

was in charge and he gave us a talk and a chat and pointed out to us now that we’re in the Army, that it was very important as we were learning, as regards to our health and our living, he said it’s doubly important that you

think of the spiritual side. Because, he said, it’s very important in wartime because it’s a dangerous occupation. Not only in the field, in battle but it’s a dangerous occupation at all times. And I lived to see that

for the number of my mates that were killed during World War Two accidentally, is staggering.

Well in the Air Force. Several of my Sunday School bible class were killed in

accidents in Britain with planes. Because they had to learn to fly planes. Different types and one thing and another. And they had to train and many pilots were killed in their training. Some of the finest and most successful pilots even had what they call write-offs in their training.

But in our own area, we lost some infantry men who were killed when their car went off the roads at the back of Arthur’s Seat. And in

our own unit when I was sergeant major, I gave five corporals longer leave over midnight, past midnight because it was a 21st birthday party. And they were all from Footscray/Yarraville area and on the way back to camp in the early hours of Sunday morning, they hit the Stoney

Point Express and all five suffered broken bones but they all survived, strange to say. The boys in the infantry wagon down the Peninsula were not so successful and they lost some of those. But the result of this accident of course, meant that a little later on or a long time later on, the five of

them came out of hospital. They’d all been syphoned off and around various Melbourne hospitals according to their injuries. But ultimately they were all back on their feet again and they were court martialled for being Absent Without Leave. A court martial was organised at Mount Martha and a whole hut was

set up as a court room and there were thirty, forty officers there. All the legal team from 4th Division and a number of observers which was the custom with court martial. And I was the witness for the prosecution

and when I was called to give evidence I marched in and saluted and the legal officer, I forget the right term, but he said, “Oh you are so and so, rank, number, name etc.

On the night of such and such did you give these, names of all the corporals, extra leave on the night of such and such?” I said, “Yes Sir, I did.” Much fluster and flutter around the court room. And he said, “That’ll be all Sergeant Major. Thank you.” So

I saluted and marched out. And I said to Mr. Rosengrave, I said, “How come my evidence had them acquitted?”He said, “As Sergeant Major, you’re responsible for your men seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day,

and only you could give those NCOs longer leave and you did. So they were not Absent Without Leave.” Only being a militia NCO, I didn’t know all the rules and regulations of AMR&O [Australian Military Regulations and Orders] Which I had to learn pronto.

And also as quartermaster, I had to study the standing orders for the Army Medical Service because that is another set of rules and regulations which are not written into AMR&O.

Yes

Because we anticipated attack. In fact, we knew it would come. We didn’t know just how and it was only a

strange set of circumstances that the Japanese did not land their force at Darwin after their bombing raids readied it for a landing.

Well, training was

a continuing thing. For all the members whether they were drivers or not they all had to be proficient in first aid and. Not necessarily in 1940, but earlier when I was doing my training, we all became proficient in St Johns first aid.

It’s the general, can’t remember now. There was one time that an officer in the 4th Division in the AMC [Army Medical Corps] who was the chief man behind the St John Ambulance Service. And we had to train our troops

in the use of stretcher bearing, of course, which is an art in it in itself, and the use of splints. At that time, different splints. They were the Thomas splint type for arm and leg. Very effective in the field. Not used in public hospitals, of course

and all our personnel had to be proficient in the use of those. How to put them on, how to take them off, how to treat a patient.

No. First aid only in the field. Only medical

officers did that in the Army.

He doesn’t. That’s life and as Jesus himself said, ‘It must be that there will be wars and rumours of wars

til the very end.’ That is part of life. Although I was an Army Medical Corps officer, I carried a rifle and a pistol all the way through New Britain, never had to use either fortunately. But that night in camp was a turning

point, not only for me. I had been baptised and no doubt all the boys in that camp that night had been baptised. But there comes a time in your adult life when you should make a decision. And

the padre that night gave us the opportunity. There were over a hundred trainees in the hut that night and he suggested that anyone who wished to go a step further in the discussion stepped into the little office and

twenty of us did. And there that night we made our decision to adopt the decision to accept Jesus Christ as our saviour. And he said, “Give me your names and your number and your congregation you belong to and I’ll get in touch with your congregation.” And after the camp, my Minister

called me in one day and said, “I believe you’ve made your decision. Now well that’s your Confirmation. We’ll have a Confirmation service.” And he said, “Having reached that decision, are you prepared to think of doing something realistic within the congregation?” He said, “We are in need of Sunday School teachers.

All our Sunday School teachers have been teachers for the last forty or sixty years and there is a lot of opportunity.”

Confidence, for

one thing. Faith. I didn’t ever look back in my life from then on. I place my trust in my Lord to guide me and I know he did because everything that I decided to do

thereafter was right. Both in leaving the first company I was with. In my manner, in the 2nd company. Give you an example of what that did. I’d only been….

Well we’ll skip what I was on about the company and go forward to this. In 1942, I was expecting to fill an appointment in the 8th Division but because of the turmoil

in the Middle East and at home, the 8th Division was not formed on time. Also we didn’t have the numbers which was more important and we had to get troops back from the Middle East to build up the formation to form the 8th Division.

And that’s how many of the boys that were taken prisoner of war in Singapore, had already served in the Middle East and some of them in New Guinea. They had even been home and into Timor and taken prisoner there.

Then we got a sudden order. Three days notice to get our war equipment and the warning order for movement at the same time. Three days notice. It was a tall order but I would never have achieved it had my CO not

been behind me all the way because we struck trouble at every store we went to. It wasn’t as though you went to one ordnance depot and got a thousand items. You had to go to one of twenty or thirty small warehouses scattered around South Melbourne mostly

and the large ordnance depot out at South Kensington, to get your equipment together.

Well those three items you’ve mentioned were

a camp commodity. We had no problems with those. It was the other scores of items. The war equipment table is made up of alphabetical sections and for each alphabetical section there was a store. A little warehouse in a back street of South

Melbourne or a bigger one just over the bridge from Flinders Street and you had to go to each one of these. And without the CO to back me up a young lieutenant had no chance with these long service men, many of them were First World War diggers

but I strongly suspect most of them hadn’t done any service much but because they would not cooperate and they would not at first issue me with what I was requisitioning for. They said, and this was generally every store we went to, that everything was reserved for the AIF. Everything was reserved. And they couldn’t issue to a

militia unit. Well fortunately I had a CO who was a….

We were ropeable. But we had to get it and we did and we got our full war equipment within the time.

Well Section K; that was knives, forks, spoons, cutlery, pannikins and such like. Other sections were -to think I wrote those tables until I was almost blind at one time!

No I can’t, thankfully, I can no longer remember. But the war equipment table is half an inch thick and page after page after page.

No. No.

We Australians unfortunately had two armies at the same time. The 6th, 7th ,8th, 9th Divisions were AIF and they were all Australian Imperial Force. They were all with one purpose, to go to the British Empire

force. Now in Australia, our home force was left with One, Two, Three, Four. Five didn’t exist at that time. Four divisions and they were made up with troops in every state. Put together along the lines of the first AIF although not identical because

when the home force was set up it was done on the basis of numbers in the state and you got enough numbers allotted to say Southern Command in Victoria, Northern Command in Queensland, Central Command in New South Wales and smaller forces

in South Australia and Western Australia. Western Australia had a Third Corps, they called it over there. Third Corps, it was a basis of a Corps. It wasn’t a full Army Corps and ultimately when we moved from Victoria, which we did, we sailed to Fremantle and during the time we were in Western Australia we were under

the command of 3 Aust. Corps.

Because they were reserved. They had reserved tickets on it for the AIF. Whether that was official or whether that was un… They didn’t want to part with the stores they had because they couldn’t see where they could get any more from.

It is the truth.

Yes. We were known as Choccos. Even to the AIF we were Choccos.

We had blue uniforms, Army Medical Corp, with double cherry red piping down our blue trousers and our peaked caps.

A cross section of the AIF were all officers of the militia and a cross section of all the troops. Our 2nd Field Ambulance members for instance, they enlisted in the AIF, many

of them into the 2/1st and the 2/2nd Field Ambulance and to the First AGH, Australian General Hospital. But maybe scores or certainly more than twenty who I know personally, they went to the various other units. They went to the artillery, Army Service Corps

and the battalions. One of our horse drawn drivers, he’d also done all the first aid study and he enlisted in the AIF into a fighting battalion as quite a lot of them did.

Oh it was common amongst people, it just wasn’t amongst any particular group of people or anything. It was animosity to military training. A lot of people objected to the compulsory part of military training

but that was that was absolutely essential. After all, there were only four and a half million people on this continent when the First World War finished and at that very time we were fearful of the coming of the Russians who were bent on

empire building at the time and navy building and already the Germans were already ahead of us in battleships. So compulsory training was essential. We’d had naval and military service in Victoria from the very first landing. The very first time. The Victorian the

5th Victorian Battalion from the outset of Victoria and we had a naval force.

Yes I went AWL [Absent Without Leave].

Our camps were always at 4th Division camps, were always at Easter, and I had been to camp at Easter time. We did other longer period camps but always at Easter ,over Easter. And in 1937, we were to go into camp at what was to be our battle station. It hadn’t been named as such

at the time but we had trained at Mount Martha and not only the Div., not only the medical but the whole of the Division trained at Mount Martha and that became our battle station when the Japanese came into the picture. But in 1937, I was a Sunday School teacher at St Andrew’s Presbyterian

Church in Footscray and the session clerk, he’s the senior lay man in the Presbyterian congregation, the session clerk was also superintendent of the Sunday School at the time and he and the secretary didn’t altogether favour me being in the Army and

being a Sunday School teacher. But they said to me about the Sunday a couple a Sunday’s before Easter they said, “Tom.” very nicely, “You’ve been a Sunday School teacher all these years and you’ve never attended a teacher training conference or class

in all that time. We believe you should go to the conference at Mornington near enough to the camp on this Easter.” And I said, “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve never been to a teacher training class because I’ve been well and truly trained

by a father and a mother who are past masters at Sunday School teaching and I’ve never felt the need.” “Well,” he said. “We still think that you should.” He had in mind that there must have been some, perhaps from the Minister

about it, because he subsequently, both my mate and myself were elected to the eldership and he probably had this in mind but he insisted that I must go to camp. And on the Sunday before Easter he said, “We’ve taken the responsibility of paying your

fees and registering for this conference in Mornington. You go down to Mornington on the Thursday night and you can stay until Monday or Tuesday depending on when you have to go to work and we assure that you’ll never regret it.” So

I still intended to go into camp. But I changed me mind at the last minute and came home and packed me bag and went alone down to Mornington on the night train. And it was a packed train because Mornington

was always was a popular holiday spot. And I admit to feeling lonely and wondering what was ahead for me and as was the way in that day, there was one porter at the gate on Mornington with one little gas light

overhead and he was dutifully collecting.

Oh met my wife? Well I saw this lass walking out off the platform ahead of me. About your size with coils of black hair at the back. I didn’t see her face but I said to meself, “That’s my girl. Surely she couldn’t be going to this conference.”

Walked off the platform and around to where we were quartered. The menfolk were quartered in a home in the backstreets while the ladies were quartered in the Federal House. It was a very popular place for such affairs. And about five or six chappies in the bedroom where I was staying. Didn’t know any of them and they didn’t know me.

And in the morning I got up and shaved and ready to go across and the other lads had all gone being accustomed to such dos. And then I walked across to Federal House and I saw there this mass of womenfolk waiting for the dining rooms doors to open

and no sign of any of the lads that I was to meet up with, and just then the secretary of the Sunday School and the session clerk came up and said, “Come, Tom. We’ve been waiting for you. We want you to meet someone.” So they led me out onto the verandah of Federal House

and I nearly fell over. I was struck dumb. The girl they were going to introduce me to was the girl I’d seen come off the train. So they introduced me. She wasn’t a bit interested. And I had nothing to say. But

we were involved in the activities. There were, for the rest of Good Friday, there were services and in the afternoon there was a portrayal of the Reverend John Williams and his wife

arriving at Fiji on their way to New Guinea. This was a long way back but the Minister who was organising this weekend, Reverend J.C. Jamieson, he’d allotted tasks to various members

to take part in this, there’s another word for it, portrayal of the arrival or the

Pageant. And it turned out that he had a long frock coat and put it on me and a thick black beard to stick on me face and I was to be

the Reverend John Williams and the girl that I’d met she was to be my wife, Mrs Williams. Well the affair went off very well as far as everybody was concerned. And these students had no doubt that that the Reverend John

had arrived and he and his wife went to New Guinea as it happened, and after some years there, he was killed and cannabilised by the natives. Not unusual in that part of New Guinea in those days. They were head hunters which tells the story. So

I spoke to her on the Saturday but she wasn’t a bit interested in me. I had short back and sides. I was a sergeant major in the Army. I didn’t know how to speak to girls anyway. And she came from Balwyn

which was one of what you would say, very well to do suburbs. New suburb, then it was. It was growing. North Balwyn didn’t exist at that time. But I asked her, Saturday afternoon was a rest period, and I asked her would she come and sit

with me on the cliff top and talk. I’d like to talk to her. And surprisingly she said she would. So taking my rug we set out and received a cheer from the group on the porch as we headed for the beach. It was a lovely afternoon and

we didn’t agree to see each other at all at that point. But by Tuesday morning she had agreed to meet me at a further Christian lesson and lecture

on the Monday night in Scot’s Church, Collins Street. And after eighteen months, she accepted an engagement ring from me. And after eighteen months, even though by then I was still waiting to sail, but she understood

and we married on the 9th of March 1940 and I didn’t sail. I didn’t go with the 8th Division. I stayed with the 4th and we didn’t move out then until we got our movement order in April 1942. By which time we’d married on the 9th of March and

a year later our first baby daughter was born in February 1941. So I had an added reason to be in the Army. I’d always told my friends who objected to me being in the Army that I had more reason for being in the Army than most people. That I had a grandmother, many aunts,

mother, mother-in-law, a daughter and it was my responsibility or duty. Which they didn’t altogether see.

Oh a lot of people had an aversion to Army

service. Well you know how many ‘No War’ marches they’ve been in the last month or two? And someone has to fight the wars. That goes on until the end of time as our Master said. Because as long as there is evil and good in the world there’s room for

all soldiers. Christian soldiers non-Christian soldiers and….

Oh definitely not.

Definitely not. One night I was going to drill as we called it in those days and on the corner of Barkly Street and Nicholson Street [Footscray], there were big pool room over the top of Schofield and Spurlings menswear shop and there was frequently twenty or thirty or forty of the boys from the pool room down

smoking in the street. And this night, most times I had my two brothers with me because under the militia regime, brothers were encouraged to join and they did and both my brothers were sergeants, but this night I was alone. Probably going

to the drill hall to check through these equipment tables and one thing or another and I got a hoy from this crowd on the corner and you never ever knew whether you would be set upon and I didn’t know if I was going to be that night. So I stopped. And invited them all

to come down and join up. I said, “Because you’re going to be in it whether you want to or not. Very soon.” They pooh-poohed that of course and a number of them said if there’s any trouble like that we’re off to Oodnadatta. And that was as far away as they could think of. I don’t know that they knew where it was.

Oh no, we didn’t have protestors. We didn’t have paid protestors in those days. No they were just ordinary people like you and me who thought differently. One of my own cousins, he wouldn’t have a bar of the Army.

He got a job in the munitions works. Unfortunately my mate who had been a sergeant with me for seven, eight years, he dropped out and got a job in the munition works. That was your choice. That’s fair, you don’t want to go.

Well she’d known from the time we met what my intention was and we talked once we were engaged. We talked this over many times. And she said, she was a very fine girl. She said

“We fixed on a date and I don’t want to be left on my own after you go. And if I’ve got a baby we’ll wait til you come home.” And it worked out very well. She was

a wonderful girl. Kept our home going. Until after several years, her eldest brother was a pilot in the Air Force, her younger brother was in the Navy and then her Dad who worked for one of the BHP

Broken Hill Proprietary companies, was given a party to take down to Tasmania, to Hobart and set up a new rivet plant for the Air Force. So my mother-in-law was home on her own so and

she and my eldest daughter Barbara, they went to live in Canterbury Road, Mont Albert. That became my home address. But ultimately the city of Camberwell sent me a certificate, I got nothing from Footscray. My brothers and myself got no recognition from the City of Footscray because we didn’t enlist there,

we were already in. But because I was in the City of Camberwell and probably because I was an officer, I got a certificate and her two brothers didn’t.

It’s amazing.

Oh we’d trained at Mount Martha for years in scrub and it was not the bush. That angle of it was no problem to us. Matter of fact, I don’t think we had any problems in Western Australia. No problems with movement. No problems in regard to functioning. The

Lack of news. We got very little news. We had our own unit paper. That’s what the boys over there did. The units had their own papers. We didn’t have a paper like they had up in New Guinea where they had news

and photos and things in it.

No. No maps. No wireless.

Train.

Train. Be on our toes and after the first, we did three months up there when we were simply receiving patients and sending them on to a hospital. If they were serious or keeping them for a few days then sending them back to the lines. The second time we went up

we did a second tour of three months. Did three months up and three months at the somewhere else, break. And the second time we went up there, the CO, he knew that our unit had been running a camp hospital since the camp was set up at Mount Martha, and he also was anxious because that’s the best form of training,

to be dealing with patients. It was contrary to the understanding of the Field Ambulance which is, it works at its best when it has no patients. When it’s empty. And you’re ready for action but in our own country Australia, this was different. This was unlike war in Europe

or anywhere else. As again it was unlike war in service, unlike service in Australia, in New Guinea. Here we had rations of vehicles and vast areas of country to cover. Whereas in New Guinea you were restricted to

except when the action was on to coastal strips. And limited transport. I did read only recently that they had taken some horses even to Moresby at one stage.

Well

there was a scare because it was known that a submarine was off the west coast. And so our intelligence boys went along the coast and they ultimately found where the Japanese had landed at Jurien Bay. Now Jurien Bay is about twenty mile through thick, impenetrable

scrub to the coast from Moora. And Moora is one hundred miles north of Perth. So you’re a hundred miles north of Perth and twenty miles through thick scrub to the coast. Well you got there by water craft and the Japanese had landed there and they’d left their trademarks of rubbish on the beach

and at the time that the submarine was there, our brigade did what was called the Jurien Bay Exercise. Our engineers cut a swathe through the scrub as best they could. It wasn’t straight, it wriggled and missed trees and it was terrible

hard working cutting through, but ultimately they got through to the beach. And I didn’t take part in that exercise. That was not my place, but we did have a either a light section or a company. In our training, to go back to the training, we trained not only in movement of the unit as

a whole, we trained in companies. A, one way, B, the other, a light section, probably a quick section out of a company to go in another direction. We had a company on the Leongatha Showgrounds, another company out at Highton, out from Geelong

and a light section at the Causeway to Cowes.

Their rubbish. Empty food containers and packets and papers and just rubbish. The exercise to get through there was well worth it of course.

It showed us that what the Japanese had found out. That this was not like Manchuria or China or Burma. There was no easy access on the west coast. There was no river. There was no free, forced labour available. There was nothing there to encourage them to make a landing on the west coast. And our

troops were fully aware of this and our job in the west was, had they landed, we were just to be a worrying force to them until further forces were available. And they were available very quickly. Very quickly the Americans came to Perth as they came to Melbourne. I was

in Perth one night with my driver. The CO had ordered me to take his staff car, strap on me pistol and don’t come home without these things. And Saturday night my driver and I, we went into a Perth place to get a meal and there wasn’t another Australian in there. It was hundreds of American

sailors and soldiers.

Mostly very well. They, the Australians, put up with them. Except on certain cases like in Brisbane, it became an all-in fight there on one occasion.

Well we weren’t fighting men. Not that my boys didn’t fight, they did. But I didn’t come into contact with the Americans, except in the general way in Queensland when we were there waiting for a ship, I didn’t have much contact with them. We got along alright with them the night in

Perth with them. They made room for us and found a chair for me and my driver. And they said, “What’s he doin’ with you?” I said, “Where I go, he goes.” That’s different in our Army.

Oh absolutely. Yeah the

group at the table chatted freely about this because they were, what they called themselves, enlisted men. See they weren’t officers, they were all troops. But I was an enlisted man too. As a matter of fact, we get to that stage now, when did I join the AIF? Well we were at one

of the first camp spots that we were in the Geraldton area. A place called Kojarena K-O-J-A-R-E-N-A, I think. Kojarena. It was at a turn off from the main road that went to the next nearest town which I forget the name of.

The turn off, which was just a dust track with a couple of posts on either side to signify that it was a turn off and that led into real bush and large, what do they call em over there, cattle stations. I forget the name of the

place now, but I when I came back years later I talked to a lady in Box Hill here whose aunt owned one of those cattle stations and that was the turn off to the station where we were camped.

No no. Our troops accepted the fact that we were a defence force. We were a defence force and we truly were. I think we probably would’ve done better than they did in Wewak. But certainly we would’ve never have, there would be no,

be no, what do you call it?

No surrender. But back to Kojarena. It was there that the Army gave permission for any and all troops in Australia

to join the AIF and our unit did to a man. So we became, a new name, the 2nd Australian Field Ambulance and it truly became an Australian Field Ambulance from then on. We already had Victorians

and Western Australians and when we moved to the Northern Territory, we got a draught of, to complete our strength, from New South Wales and several from South Australia, a medical officer from Tasmania. And in Queensland we also got some officers from Western Australia, a transport officer and a surgeon. And in Queensland we got

a captain but he was promptly promoted to major.

Well AIF units didn’t accept reinforcements, didn’t welcome them. I know that

from my own brother from his treatment in the Middle East and from others. Reos [reinforcements] were not welcome. But as a unit, when we sailed from Queensland, we were entirely VX and SX, TX numbers. So

Our numbers in the militia were some 592,642, that’s about what I was. In the AIF, we got new numbers. And my number became VX. When you got the VX that was the Second AIF brand. VX. NX, QX, SX, TX.

And my number became VX111107. That designated you were AIF. Shortly after, the Government moved and made it legal to

send Australian troops overseas to the islands. They did that so that units who had AIX BX and ASX numbers and other troops they had, just with the militia numbers.

I’ve got Queensland cousins. Two, four, five. Five Queensland cousins but they retained their Q numbers and they went overseas.

Colour patches changed

when you changed your formation. The 4th Division colour patch was round chocolate. The 3rd Division was an oblong, I think, an oblong two coloured patch. And

the various patches for the other divisions.

Not

Not at that point. We still, as far as I remember, we still weren’t wearing (UNCLEAR) coloured patches at sea. It didn’t matter. But from after eighteen months in Western Australia,

we did our amphibious training and our jungle training on the Swan River. Stories in themselves.

Night landings, night sailings, boarding, night boarding.

Sailings, landing in the dark.

No We didn’t have to. We worked out of Point Walter which was properly equipped for small boats. We didn’t have landing craft. We only had small boats for training.

The hardest part was it’s a, I don’t think they’re mountains, but it’s a very hilly area down where the Collie Coal Mine is, south of Perth. And

we used donkeys there as pack horses and you had to push them and move them up through the trees and over the hilltops. It was hard work, hard yakka. We never struck anything like that in New Guinea or New Britain fortunately. But the

fighting was almost over when we went to the islands. From our stint in Western Australia, we went up the centre on the Ghan to Alice Springs and at Alice Springs I got a hoy from the same boys that I’d been talking to on the

street in Footscray. They’d had their wish. They’d, all of them, been formed into a Transport Unit under my old Company Commander at the 32nd Battalion, Harold Schultz. Captain Schultz and he was there, and his boys to welcome us when we arrived at Alice Springs.

Being all Footscray boys of course it was wonderful. And we only stayed one night and the following day we were taken by the new desert motor trucks. Incredible.

Incredibly big to us compared to our unit, the vehicles we’d been using in Western Australia. Incidentally, we did not take those to the Northern Territory.

No. They remained at the training camp.

Oh yes.

Nobody refused but some of us, myself included, found some of it dangerous. Yep.

Heights for one thing, where we had to work. Then

we had to walk up to our carrying stretchers and move through a waterway which was mined with depth charges. And as an instructor I didn’t

go along with it. We never struck anything like that in the islands. In fact, just the week before our unit went through this course, the Engineer in charge of laying the demolition charges, he was killed himself. Which

bore out my thinking as an instructor that it was overdone.

Yep.

Yeah yes. We got short leave from Western Australia and went home and then came back via Adelaide of course

and got a pleasant surprise at Quorn where I dunno whether we’d picked the Ghan up there or we’d picked it up earlier but that doesn’t matter. But that was the old Ghan, not even the second last one. It was a pretty poor example of a train and when we got to Quorn we found that the Country

Women’s Association, CWA had put on a hot lunch for us in a big vacant building there that was like a hall and handy to the railway station and that was a very pleasant surprise.

A hot meal. It would be better than what we’d been getting in camp. It certainly was. The ladies were lovely.

I don’t’ remember where we de-trained, whether it was miles away from Alice Springs or what, I don’t remember, or whether we went straight into Alice Springs. I’ve got no recollection of that. But only I had the recollections of meeting the boys from Footscray and

their officer who is in charge of them and we stayed overnight there only. The following morning, we went north on these new mighty motor coaches. Motors, not coaches, open motor trailers. They travelled up the new road that had just been finished.

Yes. Made by the Allied Works Council and they’d done a magnificent job. And our first stop was Mataranka where they had to refuel and the one thing that we enjoyed there were the hot showers only the water was so hot that it was too hot to get under. But when you weren’t

under it was just as hot outside anyway. And the next day, we must have, can’t remember that. Some things don’t remain with you. But the next day we went on to somewhere and picked up the North Australian railway train. Oh a real beauty. ‘Spirit of Protest’, the boys named it.

There were no panes of glass in windows in the coaches and when we de-trained at Adelaide River, we all looked like the black boys. Could’ve scraped the grease and the dirt off. I enjoyed travelling in the coach. The boys were in the cattle trucks. But that’s

part of the Army game. It’s a good time of laughter and pleasantness, but we got to Adelaide River and there was an officer waiting there to direct us to the camp and we were camped at the sixty-one mile post. That was sixty-one miles from Darwin

and as we came down from the train, the officer said, “That bridge up there’s over ninety feet in the air and when the rains come, whole trees come floating down under that, just missing the structure.” And we saw that when the wet came.

We didn’t cross it of course.

No but it was in the….

It was in the dry and we were there nine months.

And we had the Wet not long before we moved out.

and we moved out in September, I think it was, September ’43 so we must have gone up there in early in the year.

No. Don’t recollect seeing any.

None in any of our units. But there were some in the AIF units of course. And there were some in the in the other units but I think they were in the NSW and Queensland units.

Ran a camp hospital which was our best we did, I hadn’t got around to that quite before. We did that just out of Kojarena. There was a magnificent mansion there and it was called New Marra Karra M-A-R-R-A K-A-R-R-A and

it was built on the site of a very early homestead and it was lavishly furnished and set up with a well and gardens and everything. And we ran a, forget whether it was a twenty-five or a fifty bed hospital there, camp hospital. The benefit of which is your troops don’t get sent out of the area and you don’t lose them. They go back to their units.

Mostly we were doing that the full time during the war. Was what we were best at and back to Adelaide River. Well we did the same there and periodically we had the matron-in-chief come and visit our unit. We didn’t

have any nurses. Not at any time did we have any nurses. They were all our own nursing orderlies did everything and did it well. It was interesting when we arrived there had been one, two, three Field Ambulances there before

us but they were just duty Field Ambulances. They’d only just put huts in before we got there so we had a hutted hospital which was excellent and but they didn’t have any water laid on. That restricted your activities of course so my CO who had

been CO to the Engineers Dept in Melbourne for eight or nine years and knew as much about engineering I think as he did about medicine. He requested the Engineers Department to come and put a bore down on top of a hill and a young lieutenant came out with his right hand man

sergeant and they surveyed the site and they came back to the CO and told him that it wasn’t practical. He said, “We don’t believe you’ll get water if you put a bore down up there.” And the CO said to him, “Young fellow, put the bore down up there. We’ll get water.” “Oh,” he said. “I’ll have to go back and talk to my CO before I do that.”

The CO said, “Well, do so.” And he did. And the CO came out and visited our CO and they put the bore down and got oodles of water. Which the CO had directed a pipeline to the officer’s area for showers, pipeline to the hospital, pipeline to the back of the hill to the transport area,

and everybody was happy. Apart from that, we were very restricted. We were not travelling anywhere. It wasn’t the done thing. There were fixed installations and fixed units and air strips, air strips right down the highway.

I forget the names of them but the one next to our camp, where we flew out from in the end, was Bachelor and that was the strip, drome [aerodrome] where the Mitchell Bombers left for. There weren’t a lot of them and they were noisy planes but they were very effective, apparently. But we’d hear the five of them, only five of them went out every night, and we used to wait and listen for them to come home.

And one’d come in. Later, another one’d come in. We’d say two three four and only four and we’d begin to wonder. Because they used to fly over Timor and those places. And sometimes, an hour later, one’d come trundling in on one motor and we’d roll over and go to sleep then. But

Oh we’d been very aware of it actually right from the start. The militia boys had no doubts about it, not at any point. They were as good a force as you’d get anywhere.

Only twice. That was tapering off, tapering off. Only twice and the area that they were bombing then was our area because they were bombing the Bachelor Drome. They knew where the planes came into but they couldn’t find them and they missed them. The two nights that they bombed, they didn’t get anywhere near the planes.

Oh,

not our actual camp. But they dropped a bomb before it and after it and the one they dropped before it, landed in the workshop area and those boys got a bit skittery and a couple of them jumped into a deep trench from bit far away and skinned their knees and

we dealt with the gravel rash on their knees but they weren’t otherwise injured and that was as close as the bombs got to us.

Anything of a serious nature that we couldn’t put right in a week or ten days, was immediately sent on to

Adelaide River proper where there was an AGH. But if they went there we didn’t see them again. They went away to recreation and then back into the transit camp and they’d be sent to some unit that needed them. Not necessarily their own. Several of our own boys did

need evacuation through the hospital and they finished up down in Victoria at Camp Pell, Royal Park [Melbourne] and when they realised that they were going to be sent to NSW or Western Australia or somewhere they just went AWL and found their way back to the unit and they got there. They

knew that the CO would welcome them back. He never liked losing a member of the unit. Nobody else did either and they, some of the units, they find em. One lad was with us at the time. He’d been with the Fifth Field Ambulance and he went AWL like that and his CO

ordered that he be fined two pound which was done in our pay section. Our pay section attended to that. But he didn’t mind. He’d got to a good unit. It wasn’t his own. He was a NSW chap.

Well,

it’s just too hot to explain. Most times we only wore a pair of trousers and boots and socks. You couldn’t wear a shirt in the heat especially if you were doing anything, any sort of activity.

No. No. Just normal, which you’re busy all the time. I never got any respite myself. I was up at two o’clock in the morning to receive the meat in and check it. And in the day time, there was always things to do. The hospital area was my responsibility. As a quarter-

master, I never talked to you about that but a quartermaster’s responsible for outfitting clothing packs or anything else in the way of equipment, boots and socks. And not that we had much for replacement with. We never ever did get in the field much replacement. I had educated our unit very thoroughly from the beginning because I’d learned

from men who knew and understood and I’ve got a tent peg there that the boys bought back for me. They called me Tent Peg because I used a tent peg as an example. I’d been in half a dozen wet camps where we had tents go down and when the tent goes down you get wet too and so does all your

gear. And I tried to drum into them that that we got one issue of tent pegs and you’d never get another. And we never ever did. And they learned. We had very very few losses of equipment except accidental. One time at

Gin Gin. We were in a rest camp at Gin Gin. We’d been pulled out of Geraldton and we were in a rest camp at Gin Gin and I was duty officer. I had half a dozen boys on guard at the camp area and late in the afternoon one Saturday, all hell started to pop. Bullets were zipping around and

I looked out with the guard and a tent right in the middle of the count camp was burning fiercely and the drivers, ambulance drivers and truck drivers, their ammunition was exploding and bullets were zipping around. There was six or eight, I forget whether there were six or eight men in a camp, so there were six lots of ammunition to

explode and we could do nothing. Even had we had any water supply oh I would never have allowed the guard to go closer. I didn’t go any closer meself. And we just had to wait until it burned itself out. That was one loss. And when we were at Adelaide River ,we had a serious loss there which

called for a board of enquiry and a court martial. One of the lesser lights, he was a reinforcement chap. He hadn’t been with the unit long and he was on picket, we called it, and he walked the camp all night to see that everything was in order and his hurricane lamp went dry and he went to A-

Company’s store and got out a four gallon can of kerosene and put it in his hurricane lamp and lit it and everything went whoosh because it was petrol and the complete store was burnt down and out. Full medical equipment and all other gear from the company. A company has a lot of equipment. That was a serious

loss but one of those things.. And similarly we had another fire there that

Well it was never able to be explained. It was the CO’s hut. He had a hut and it went up in flames one night.

Nobody ever knew or learned anything of it. Of course he lost all of his personal equipment and

Not to that extent. Could never imagine it, by that time. When he first came to the unit, it would’ve been understandable, because we had

a wonderful crowd of two hundred and twenty blokes at the time. But there were some wild ones among them. They had been chosen from Collingwood, Fitzroy and as far down as Warrnambool, Queenscliff and when he first come to the unit he was not popular. I don’t suppose a new CO is ever popular. One thing,

they don’t know anyone but it was different. By the time we got there later, they were his boys and he was recognised as the father of the unit. And that stayed with us the time we went to New Guinea and long after in the Association. But oh, there’s no knowing the reason.

When the weather broke and the Wet set in which was a horrific time and anything could’ve happened that night. I was in the Officers mess and stayed there for hours because the lightning and the thunder was fantastic and so was the deluge that came and then it didn’t stop raining for three weeks. Washed the road away. Beautiful road,

too.

We didn’t sit. We didn’t sit very comfortably that night because those of us that were in the Officers mess, they had a box of hand grenades on the table there and the lightning, it struck this corner of the hut then it struck that corner of the hut then it struck the

other corner of the hut but it was all wired against lightning of course. But it was a frightening time really. For a little while.

We got a warning order

for movement. It was like when we left Victoria. It was a warning order and a movement in one.

No we’d gone on leave from Victoria and now we got the warning order and we had understood that we were going

from Darwin by ship and when we got this warning order and movement order at the same time it was for all personnel to move by rail immediately to Victoria. Taking no

Yeah. Taking no on route for New Guinea.

And because there was no shipping available, we couldn’t go from Darwin. All the shipping movements were tending back into the distance towards Morotai where all vessels were needed and so we finished up with another leave in Victoria. That was

Being home. Yeah.

My second daughter arrived. The first daughter was born on the 23rd of February ‘41 and the second was born on the 22nd

of February, 1944 exactly three years later. And we were home until I think for September, October. We had to go to the

Dynon Rail Centre while on leave, the CO and I, to inspect our stores. All of which been packed by a work party in our absence and then they’d come down by rail all the way from Adelaide River by rail to Dynon in Footscray and West Melbourne. And they had to be shipped from there to Cairns

by rail again. No shipping available of course. And they were up at Cairns and our troops were camped in Brisbane and the officers were quartered out on a pineapple plantation at Strathpine. There were no pineapples fresh at the time. And we were stuck up there again waiting until there was a vessel to

take us.

No. There always is when you get delayed. You’re going somewhere and you can’t get there. It’s the same if you were on holidays. It’s just the same in the Army, in the services if you get hung up. But one good thing came

out of it. I contacted some of my Queensland cousins and was taken out to lunch one day. My aunt and uncle lived at Southport and she provided the funds to one of her granddaughters to take me out to lunch and I met some of my second and third

cousins which I’d never met. I hadn’t never consciously met my aunt either because they married in 1904 in Victoria and went to live in Ipswich, Queensland. After some years, they had four children. After some years, they moved to the coast and they had a boarding house just

the edge of an inlet and they lived there for many years. During the war, they were a separate boarding house for American soldiers and sailors. And

just recently I got a cutting sent to me by my brother he lives up on the Gold Coast and he cut it out of the paper and sent it down to me. It’s a photo of three generations. Grandmother, a daughter and a baby. Three generations of the Spencers. I’d

never heard of the name but they are my cousin’s descendants and I’ve got the cutting there. I’ll follow that up when we get past this and….

But before we did my aunt and uncle offered us a pre-Christmas dinner

and to “Come and have it now because when you get the order to move will be too late.” So that was in November ’44.

Everything. She was a fantastic cook. She’d run a guesthouse for many years and she invited the CO and all his officers. Well I think there were only seven of us there actually

at the time but the CO arranged to get loan of a utility and he didn’t refuse. We’d never had anything like a farewell ever. Any of us. Because the unit moved in such haste, there was no time. And when you moved from Western Australia, well they were all strangers over there.

When we first went to Geraldton, they had a community night. But we didn’t get to that because we were too busy. But the night, the day, at my aunt’s was fantastic really. We hadn’t been home for Christmas or Easter for, up to that point, about four or five years

and it was the best part of two after that before we did get home but.

November ’44.

Oh it was. It was extra special. And almost immediately we got a movement order and we was on

trains to Cairns.

Oh we were glad to be on the move. The only good thing about that period was that we didn’t have any stores or any equipment and we couldn’t do anything. We were just, what’s the word, there’s a word for it I suppose, marking time.

No it was a lovely trip up by train. A lovely train and meals provided here there and wherever we stopped which is a great relief to the cooks of course.

Yes.

Well now the troops had good comfort. They had good compartments.

We were at Cairns three weeks just long enough to get more injections and wait for a ship. Which finally came.

Yes, tents. That was a lovely three weeks actually too. It was a good water hole there for swimming and we didn’t go near the ocean.

Well a lot of the boys were due for renewals and I had to cop some because they hadn’t entered it in my pay book at one point. A mistake on an officer’s part but he’d get the books and sign em and passin’ em back and mine hadn’t been entered so I had to go through several of them again.

No great worry. You still don’t like getting’ them.

I suppose we had time but there was nothing much to look at in Cairns at that stage. It’s since the war that Cairns has blossomed.

But all my recollections of Cairns is I looked from where the camp was, one, two or three or four big houses. Nothing else. There obviously was something more to Cairns than that but we didn’t go walk about at all.

I forget the date but that doesn’t really matter.

The Van Heut. A Dutch ship, V-A-N H-E-U-T. Van Heut.

No. Oh no.

No, you never know. We didn’t know when we went to West Australia we were five hundred miles down into the Southern Ocean to avoid the Jap subs. Oh, fun and games in the Army.

I don’t remember much except that I was ship’s quartermaster. I was the quartermaster for the ship not ships quartermaster. I was quartermaster and my dealings were with the ships quartermaster and he told me that they had just been carrying Americans and he said they throw away more than you fellas

get to eat.

When we got to Lae and we let a left a company there. A-Company landed at Lae. See the rest of the forces were moving out at this stage and we were the

occupying force.

Americans. And the AIF troops they were concentrating back in Queensland. There’s other things but that doesn’t matter. They were after Lae. When we got to Lae, it

was after the fighting was over and it was a stinking mess of a place. Bodies were still floating in the water. It was really a mess.

Oh, nobody knew at that stage of the game and everybody was so busy. Evacuating an

island is a big thing and it was a terrific job for the force that was heading out of there at the time. Cause they were wanted still for action further afield, the other side of the Philippines.

And our ship sailed from Lae and we did know then where we were going to. We were going to Jacquinot Bay on New Britain and we also

knew that we were going to be attached to the West Australian Brigade because we were the only unit from our brigade that was moving. And so we were attached to the West Australian Brigade which consisted of three battalions. I won’t try and name them without a reference. But it was much the same system as what happened

in the AIF. The First World War, the 5th Division, was a mixed division. It was units and troops from here there and anywhere to make up the 5th Division. And so was this the 5th. It was the 5th and the 10th Division that now was in occupation in

New Guinea and we were going now into New Britain, round the corner. And ultimately we landed at Wide Bay but after spending some time at Jacquinot.

It

Must have been a few months. We’ve got no records and there’s no movement orders in our Div. of this period in our record.

Well A-Company formed an Advanced Dressing Station and

so did B-Company up inland. And we had the main dressing station on the bay. Our personnel ran a rest camp and for me, I was just busy getting stores and

packing, ready to move because we knew that we were going to move to Wide Bay any minute, any time. That wasn’t in our hands, that was in somebody else’s hands of course because we would not move until our sister brigade, the 6th which was at Wide Bay, until they were ready to move out and

that wouldn’t be until all the battalions at Jacquinot were ready to move up too. The Field Ambulance was just a little drop in the ocean.

None. What the battalions were doing, we never ever got any news unless there were wounded.

And so far as I didn’t work in that department, I never had any knowledge of patients or anything like that. My concern was with our own troops and the patients.

No.

Well, they may have known. They

knew that we were heading north for New Guinea, that was all. That was enough too.

Yep. It had been well blasted and it was a job to get our stores from the beach head up to a certain spot that was. Well there was no spot for a

camp at all until we cleared it. Soon we had Bourke Street there and Collins Street. And there wasn’t any good making any installations there because we were not stopping. So we were just camped.

No, none at all.

None at all. We didn’t see any people until well up until after the war finished. Then we didn’t see many of them either.

It’s a nights sailing from dusk til dawn which is not terribly far but it’s far enough. That’s an interesting point though when

we come to move because we were due to sail at dusk one day and not before. Not before dusk and three American landing craft arrived early in the day and they were drawn up on the beach

clear of the mouth of the Wunung River which is where we were camped on. It was a wild, raging fast flowing mass of water rushing into the bay. You could see the fresh water right out into the bay. And they told us that you could get fresh water miles out, it was so plentiful. But we didn’t go out and try that.

And in the afternoon we loaded the three landing craft and at dusk the troops moved down. Just before dusk while there was still enough light to see, the troops went down and went aboard and I had my party on the number 3.

About a dozen of my staff.

Oh chiefly a warrant officer, he was regimental quartermaster Sergeant and four or five corporals and a few odd-bods couldn’t get on the other craft I presume. We weren’t worried about personnel. There weren’t records,

and there’s nothing featured in our record of service either. It was just normal action movement as required. So we were just due to sail. It was dusk and beginning not to see your hand in front of you. It gets very dark quickly

and suddenly there was the sound of a plane and a Jap plane comes over and it dropped three bombs on the beach head. One, two, three where our craft had been in the early part of the day. So soon as it had gone we cast off and sailed.

Oh glad they dropped em then not after. Not after we’d headed out into the bay. Because they couldn’t have missed us if we’d left the overhang of the jungle and the river, we were invisible, but the moment we’d hit the water in the bay, we would’ve been visible, we couldn’t have missed. They couldn’t have missed either. So the first two craft made good time out into the bay and the third. Mine had forty tons

of engineers’ stores on because we were going to build an operating theatre when we got up the coast and the two leading craft got away a bit on us and you have to keep directly behind each craft to see the light of the leading craft at the end of a pipe so that

it’s not visible anywhere else but to the craft immediately behind. But the two leading craft just as we got to a point we were going to go round the point and head up the coast, a terrific hurricane hit us and mountainous waves and then our craft got

nowhere near the point. As a matter of fact, the waves were so turbulent that the craft stood up on it’s end and then slid back into the waves with the weight. The engineer shouted out to me, “No way of getting around the point tonight. We’ll have to heave-to in the lee here and

wait til daylight.” Which we did. Dawn anyway.

Of course. Yeah it was a frightening experience. I’ve never forgotten it. But it was frightening itself but we weren’t fearful. We never had any doubts. Well that’s just one of those things that you pass through.

And in the morning it was still pretty rough but it was much calmer and we made it up the coast and we were very welcome when we got there because the boys of the Fourteen-Thirty Second were again my Footscray boys. One of my bible class lads was the lieutenant in charge of the company. They’d been waiting in the rain for us all night.

So they wouldn’t leave the beach head because we could’ve arrived at any minute.

Oh we got cheered. Yeah. The lieutenant’s name what was his name? Abby. Forget his Christian name for the moment. One of the Abby family, they were one of our solid families at the church.

I’d taught about five of them through the Sunday School.

Yeah

The story is of course that most of the 32nd battalion troops that were pulling out had already left and gone. We didn’t see any sight of them.

They they’d gone down overnight probably to Jacquinot and they were pulled out for good. They were going home. So was the 6th Field Ambulance. They’d probably gone at that point because we’d arrived. We didn’t know anything about that. What was your other?

Well we didn’t have any field work to do there. I don’t know what B-Company did in that time. I didn’t see them again. They would be out in some forward area with an Advanced Dressing

Station whereas our job was to build an operating theatre and we had our own team of carpenters and Bomber Brown. There’s always a Brown somewhere. The Bomber was the carpenter and he was in charge of the building and with some of his team., he went

out into the scrub looking for trees suitable trees to make the structure.

Well we had a massive engineers’ stores. What it was I don’t know. I wasn’t interested in it. It wasn’t my concern and I wasn’t interested I really wasn’t.

I wasn’t interested in the building, it was not my concern. And the boys knew what they were about. They were builders.

Nothing. Nothing for the time being. You see we lost our CO at Jacquinot. He

went home on leave the right word for it. His young son had passed away unexpectedly. He just had one son. And he died for some reason or other and so the colonel was granted leave and he didn’t come back.

After some leave he was promoted to an AGH on Bougainville and it was some months before we got a replacement.

Major Crouch who was a surgeon. He took charge and ultimately we received a replacement CO. But he was a sick man. He was suffering shell shock. And it’s recorded in the stand routine orders

I got a copy of this somewhere that he was in hospital this week and this day and this next week and the major, our major in charge, he called a board of MO’s and boarded him out.

And the Army headquarters had no option but to replace him and ship him out. He’d had his time.

We were we were inactive at that time. We didn’t have the operating theatre up and

we were only interested in the casual sickies. We had a tented area for patients and that worked well.

Only our own battalion sick and artillery.

We got some of the… there was an Artillery unit there which was firing pretty well constantly across our camp. As a matter of fact on two occasions, there were fall shorts and in both cases they landed on our nursing orderlies tent both the times.

Oh yes

Both occasions.

Well they scattered. Because they were fall shorts they didn’t explode right away and the second one that happened, did and three or four of the nursing orderlies, as they scampered out of the tent, copped the blast across their backs.

Yeah none of them were

seriously burnt, just upset.

No because I wasn’t there but I’ll guarantee that the language was very hot. I heard some of it later on when I got the tale of it from them. But no one was

no bad harm was done.

No we were a particularly healthy and careful and well trained unit. I was laid up for a bit in that time. Because I had a fall…

you want that story?

When our stores were packed by the working party in Adelaide River, they’d used a car crate to pack them in a mass of stuff. Whereas we at headquarters had fifty-three panniers of medical and other equipment, they’d pack the bulk of this stuff into one

car crate. And that was alright for shipping it by train by rail to Victoria and back to Cairns and then shipping it with a ships sling from Cairns but no way could we move up the coast with that thing and my team and I, we were working flat out. We had to make something and get as many

crates as we could to pack this in so that we could manhandle them on the landing craft. And I had the misfortune to slip and fall into this thing. It’s about 10-feet deep and we weren’t provided with any ladders. Not in our war equipment table. The result is that

I injured my left leg from the ankle. The ankle up to the knee here, it stripped the flesh off the bone up to about there and it was instantly infected. Fortunately we had penicillin at that time

and I had a doctor which looked after me for most of the time he shared my tent or I shared his tent and they saved me leg. But apart from that we’re a pretty healthy crowd and we all took Atebrin to prevent malaria. It didn’t stop you from getting it but it stopped it from getting on

top of you.

Oh this happened at Wide

No not at Wide, no. At Jacquinot.

As we moved. Well there was no thought on my part or the major’s part in evacuating me.

At the time I was the only non-medical officer in headquarters which was reasonable enough. In any case I chose to stay with my unit. And I bare witness to the fact that they did a good job.

But I didn’t do any walking around for some months.

But I had good team in the Q Store. They were well trained and I never had a team that counted time or hours. They slept and guarded the Q Store when the other boys were perhaps in the rec. hut [recreation hut], writing letters and that. And they could certainly write letters in the Q Store.

They ran the Q Store. I had no worries in that time.

Oh we were concerned. For one thing, our actual hospital was outside the perimeter of the armed troops. And

around the bay a little bit there was an artillery unit and a short distance from them was the camp of the New Guinea boys. The New Guinea troops and our boys were more frightened of them than they were of the Japs.

Oh they were fierce and quick on the draw.

One night we got a call about midnight that the MO thought that one of their troops had appendicitis and he was in great pain and he phoned in for a another doctor to come and confirm or otherwise.

David Waterworth, he was our Tasmanian representative, Captain David and he generally got these extra calls. He’d done a flying doctor trip one night from Darwin to the Kimberly coast. I volunteered to go with him but there were

too many ahead of me that night. But this night I went with him as company on the jeep. There were black out conditions of course over an uncertain area. There was no track there. We knew where to go, that’s all. And we knew that before we got to within a hundred yards of their camp we would be

commanded to halt. And we were and it took a bit of talking by Dave to convince them that we were Australians. Ultimately they allowed him to come in on his own

which he did and the driver and I, we waited in the jeep. It was a bit lonely to wait out there in the black. Ultimately Dave came and he had decided that he didn’t have appendicitis. That he had a bad gastric complaint and that that was the trouble. So back to camp we went.

They were found by the 6th Field Ambulance when they went in there after that area had been bombed

and I don’t know anything about that. Except that it was common knowledge at the time that there amongst the wreckage on the site where we were building, had been found bodies of women. Later on it was confirmed that they were Korean.

Well we knew all about it from the papers. We knew all about it from the papers. But we were now on the actual Tol plantation where that had happened.

This knowledge that you have.

No. No. But Bomber Brown, I’ll give him his full title, and his team discovered several trees with webbing still hanging on it and heaps of bones on the ground and there were some bodies that the

earlier party that had gone there and inspected the area at one time and not gone that far back into the inland, to come across these. So they weren’t our concern of course but the unit had to advise the brigade headquarters and they got onto the right people

to deal with that.

Well we received odd casualties.

One was an explosion on a motor launch and the mechanic or engineer, you like to call him, was badly burned. And we had to, I s’pose brigade headquarters would’ve done the call for a Catalina to come.

That was our means of evacuation the only means. We had of evacuation by Catalina.

No. Not in our area. They were all moved further forward towards Morotai. No we were small, a small force.

No. There were some but once again I had nothing to do with them. It was more I didn’t have anything to do with the records.

Eats and accommodation, equipment, reports.

We periodically had to fill in forms of course. To state what special items of equipment we had and whether it was intact.

Not that I

knew of. We did have one committed suicide but that was an odd case.

Those things do affect you, you never forget them as a matter of fact. You’re a big family in a unit, even if it’s two hundred and forty strong.

Everybody knows everybody else and they all know you, they know your love affairs and your affairs. Whether you’re married or whether you’re single or not. It’s a wonderful experience to serve in the unit.

Oh occasionally. I didn’t get all my wife’s letters. She didn’t get all mine.

Not much. We got, no. We didn’t have a weekly newsletter in our unit or our area ever.

Nothing.

Those of us that’d played cards in the first years had got tired of playing cards, I think. We tried to write. That was our only entertainment. The only thing that we did was to write home. Always hoping that it wouldn’t be long.

And it wasn’t really.

the bombs were dropped?

We were at Wide Bay and after building a nice operating theatre there. I don’t think we saved anybody’s lives, we had a number die in the operating theatre.

The only two that I came in contact was I was there myself to see the doctor, and while I was there, these two boys were brought in. They were part of a troop from one of the battalions and I don’t know which battalion. I never knew what battalion it was.

But these two were Queensland boys but that didn’t mean a thing because we were with Western Australian Units but we were a mixed lot now. And I said to my friend Captain Johnny Wales who’d been nursin’ me along for months and he was the son of the Lord Mayor of Melbourne. Councillor Wales was a noted

Melbourne City councillor at one time. And I said to John, “What do you think?” He said, “I’ve done all I can for them. I’ve filled em up with morphine but I’m afraid that they’re so badly shot up that there is no hope for them.” I said, “Are they gone?” He said, “No. They’re not.

They’re still with us. But,” he said, “I doubt whether either of them will recover.” I never heard from that but that was the closest I personally got to anyone in that condition. Our orders were not to contact the Japanese in any way. We didn’t.

Our Army didn’t want to lose any more troops unnecessarily and the battalions were not to seek out Japanese only deal with them if they moved up the peninsula. And obviously some had.

Yes

No we didn’t do any celebrating as far as I know. I didn’t. There were thanks given for the fact. But within five days we were ordered

to board a ship which would pull in, ease up and take us on to Rabaul. Which we did. No equipment, no stores or anything. Just personnel.

Ah yes. Thank you

In the Army especially the Army Medical Corp, such things, you see a lot of sick people. A lot of them. Not a lot that died that passed through our hands I must say that. But you did see sick people and

there’s no time you’re doing anything. I was never an active nursing orderly. I had done the course of home nursing under the skill of nurses from World War

One and was a qualified first aid man under the St Johns Ambulance system and on and off for a couple of years I was duty officer in Camp 5 Hospital.

Sympathy for the boys that had gone before us. We’re there at the end of the fighting and that is all I could think of. I’ve got three

at least three ambulance books there and some of those really tell of the torrid times that both medical personnel suffered and the patients that they rescued. But our unit didn’t go through such a time.

No. Like a lot of our units, we tended to feel guilty. I felt guilty that I didn’t go to Singapore. I felt guilty that our unit didn’t go into New Guinea earlier because we were trained. But in the

Army, you do what’s required of you and we were needed that extra time in Victoria. I dealt with an intake of five-hundred eighteen year olds plus a small number of older men who were unmarried. Five-hundred in one afternoon.

Outfitted them, showered them, fed them. And gave them enough NCOs to make a new complete Ambulance and that Ambulance was in New Guinea three weeks later. And the sum total of instruction that I could give them in that time was about looking after their equipment because there’d be no more, could be no more, might not be any more. And

here was I properly trained but these lads were going in ahead of me but you don’t get any choice in these matters. It’s unit that counts and my unit did everything that was asked of it from the year dot to the time we cleaned up in Rabaul.

I didn’t. I didn’t really because of the fact that I had had so much to do in the unit. I was the quartermaster. I was in charge of the unit for a time til we got a CO.

I was in charge of the transport until we got another transport officer. I was in charge of the pharmaceutical section until we got a pharmaceutical officer. There was never a dull moment. When my wife had told different members of the family that I was busy and they couldn’t understand it. And when I came home many people said to me we don’t know how you come to be busy. All our

friends were sick of having nothing to do and standing by all the time. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Yep.

Well for one thing I’d looked forward

for some months to an appointment and then good fortune you could say, the unit I was with was shot off to Western Australia.

I didn’t let it get me down at all and my overall interest in the personnel that went and came back and I knew scores of people and that kept me on me feet and my interest never

waned in the service.

Perfect control. I had a staff of corporals that guarded that store as their own. In fact it was and that never changed.

No. There’s really no opportunity for it. You only get one ration

per man and one ration per patient per day. There’s nothing spare and our cooks ensured that every atom of ration went to the men and as a result they were a satisfied unit.

Well you could say that.

No.

No there was an Activities Committee that looked to those things.

No. I never was firm mates with any of the other officers. The closest I got to being mates was with Captain Johnny Wales

who nursed me through a bad period. Gave me injections of drug every day. Night and morning and afternoon and that was a deep and abiding friendship.

Oh partly my position in the unit and being

so close to the CO.

He was my friend. A man I admired. And any feeling that was amongst the troops when he was appointed

was quickly dissipated because once he got to know his men he found out he had the makings of a first class unit and nothing after that was too much trouble for him as far as the troops were concerned. That was important to me too because they were my concern from the time I was a

a sergeant major. It’s the good thing to become quartermaster after you’ve been a sergeant major because your concern is for your men. It never wanes.

Oh,

you wouldn’t call it mates as such but we were friends. We’re from Footscray and that is a big thing. Footscray is a place, it was, where it meant something and you had,

well just as you had esprit de corps in the unit there was esprit de corps throughout Footscray amongst the population there that I hope existed in other suburbs but from what I saw and heard didn’t.

Day

one.

No we didn’t have a, we had a padre in the Northern Territory and we had the padre in

Victoria but we didn’t in Western Australia. And there I attended, when I could, the Maylands Church of Christ and from Geraldton the St Johns Presbyterian Church in Geraldton. I made friends there with the locals. Still

correspond with the wife of one chappie. But we had no and I speak for the troops now. No for myself, not the troops. I don’t know whether at Wide Bay the Roman Catholic boys attended Mass with

a unit who had a Roman Catholic padre. In the Northern Territory, he was happy to come and spend the day with us at our unit. And he’d stay for lunch and that was the most contact we had with

the Church.

Not to my knowledge as I said. The Catholic boys may have gone to some other unit but as far as I know there was not a…. Actually if you had a padre in the in the brigade, he could be one of any one and he

acted as the go between all the people, it made no difference. It didn’t make any difference and it never ever should.

I

prayed whenever I got the chance. I did meet with some of the other lads in the Northern Territory, the NT, at odd occasions when they organised a get together but not as a regular thing. I was never free

enough.

Well our first prayers, they were the same I would say for all the boys. We were praying for the folk at home.

We knew we were alright but they didn’t.

Yep. And we knew there were scarce commodities at home. I knew that from my wife’s letters about the rationing and ration tickets and one thing or another. Whereas

we, the troops we got three meals a day and the ASC never missed. In all my time in the Army, the ASC never failed. They’re an incredible force the ASC.

Don’t know that I did much praying then. We were looking forward to the job ahead of us. We were to go into Rabaul and if I did any praying about that

it was for guidance and strength for what we had to do in Rabaul. We had to take over as many of the wounded. Pick them up from the Japanese camps. Establish them in our hospital and pass as many more on as we could to other units. And you want to mention Rabaul, I must say that the Japanese considered the red cross was a sign of weakness.

But when it came to the finish in Rabaul, those that could speak English and talked acknowledged that it meant something because it was the medical units that was dealing with them. The boys of the armoured division

or one of the other units handled the take over of tanks from them but it was the medical units that went in and brought the sick prisoners of war out. No rifles, bayonets or anything. Not that they had any arms left either but we went into their

camps amongst the Japanese without fear. And they were still a force to be reckoned with. They still marched like veterans. As they were.

No.

No we did nothing.

Our unit anyway. Other units did, I know from the books that they’ve written that they did have Japanese patients and they dealt with them on the same basis as they dealt with our own.

Well I still had

a unit to look after as far as rations and clothing and equipment was concerned. And a hospital with patients which had to be rationed for and fed. And in the case of rations you have to order your rations and you get what you’ve ordered and it’s on the QMs [quartermaster’s] head if you don’t get sufficient because there’s

no corner store. And the numbers do go up and down and as when you send twenty patients off to a hospital ship. You’ve got twenty patients’ rations there you don’t send them with them.

Indians. Indians

from an Indian force that had been in Burma in 1938. And in 1941 they were under the British command they were moved into Singapore alongside our Eighth Division boys and so were taken prisoner and they were carted off as a labour force to New Guinea.

It was heartbreaking. I’ve seen the driver of my jeep carrying out virtually the skeleton on his two hands and loading him in the jeep

and then another one and they didn’t take up any space. And I only saw a limited number because we could only take so many. But we had another five Field Ambulances there doing the same thing, the Casualty Clearing Station and a General Hospital. And this is what the Japanese saw - the care

and they marvelled at it. The care which we gave to those skeletons. And at least one of them , and I got this from one of my boys who was in charge of a Jap work party and this Jap was a an NCO in charge of the Japanese work party, and my lad

told me that the Japanese asked him one day, “Would you please take me and let me see this god man that lives in that tent on the corner down there. Would you please take me in and let me see that god man?” Which he did. He was probably a

major in the Red Cross or the Australian Comforts Fund and he was impressed enough to want to go and see that man who handed out gifts and cups of tea. But we did get through to some of those chaps

at that time. And it was too late to do them any good, much.

Well we do know that there was a tremendous change came over the Japanese people as a whole after the BCOF [British Commonwealth Occupation Force] went and lived amongst them. I’ve read some of the Japanese letters. I’ve read some of the letters from

one chappie, he’s…

Yeah. I’m with you.

With all the care that we ever treated our own with and they appreciated it. We had two Indian doctors stationed with us in this

period. One of those, he was over seventy years of age and the other was a young fellow who was still a lieutenant. Never got his captaincy and he didn’t get that until he went home on a hospital ship. He got home for Christmas ’45.

Yes.

They were saddened at the cruelty of the Japanese. It was unthinkable what they did.

Not at first, not at first.

We fed them the only thing that they could take and that was something that we had adequate supply of; water, sugar, and powdered milk and some powdered egg.

And inside a week those emaciated frames were on their feet. And one of the nursing orderlies came to me one day and he said “Cappy,” he said, “these jokers are givin’ cheek. To think what they were like a week ago!”

Oh it showed that we were doin’ the right thing

and gettin’ the right result and they were different specimens when they lined up to go aboard the next hospital ship. Then they were on their feet, not being loaded on jeeps. I guess they did get picked up by transport but when I saw them, they were on their feet and ready to go.

It was a tremendous and a great relief because that was our best effort for the war. All the other years we had been looking after our own who were pretty fit even when they were sick. But these poor coves,

they’d had bashings and they’d starved, been overworked. They dug tunnel after tunnel from one side of the Rabaul Peninsula to the other. From bay to coast and that’s how they were able to store such supplies of petrol and they

cleared all the equipment out of the sunken ships. There were innumerable ships sunk in, actually in Rabaul Harbour and around the coast and in those three and a half years that they were there, they recovered all the equipment from inside those ships and stored it in these tunnels. Miles and miles of stores.

In one tunnel there, I looked at the maps and I souvenired one. It was the map to the admiralty map of the entrance to Port Philip Bay and I took it home as a souvenir and before long somebody pinched it on me.

Well many of them had been killed. Many had died because it was originally it was probably a full division and now it’s down to the size of a couple of battalions. I don’t know the numbers. You don’t learn those things during wartime. You do what’s got to be done so

that’s what we did.

Yes our West Australian Major Kevin Hayes, we picked him up in the west when we still didn’t have a full team and the NCO,

by now we had a replacement CO, he was a Captain MacKenzie. He was swiftly promoted to Major and no doubt he’d be promoted to Lieutenant General in due course from Captain to CO as quick as that. And he chose Gavin out of his team of officers

to be responsible for the missionary people and the local people that had been attached to the mission. He had previously been at Kokopo, the

bombing by the New Zealanders and the Americans had wrecked their village. Although the people escaped pretty well intact with the missionaries. They were Roman Catholic missionaries under a Monsignor and another priest or two and a number of lay

people preachers with them and the Japanese cooped them up in a cleft in a hillside and they were there for three and a half years. They also had to tunnel because the bombings by the Canadians, the New Zealanders and the Americans was pretty consistent and for their own safety they had to tunnel and live in these tunnels for three and a half years. Without lights or warmth.

Not at this stage did we see or hear of any.

But there were women in the missionary camp. They were a lot of them from Poland and their leader was from Poland.

Yes

the leader of that society was a very strong man and he stood up to the Japanese Commander of Rabaul who ordered him to be executed

once and then at the last minute when he had executed everybody else he stopped them. And let the Monsignor and the Monsignor still tackled him about his brutality and his wickedness and later on again

he gave the order for him to be executed. And again he stopped him. Stopped the execution. He never let up. Every chance that he got and on their representatives. And the third and last time which he knew

was his third time when he went out to be executed and that was the day that the General received word that Japan had capitulated. And again he was saved and he acknowledged that only by the grace of God had he lived through that period.

He became the Archbishop of Rabaul and many years later I got a note that it was reported that he had become the Bishop of New Guinea which was a big lift for him. But he

Just one thing. That the two sergeants that I promoted to company commanders. They were new sergeants, they were lately corporals, they were the two lieutenants that had the responsibility of going into the

Japanese camps and ordering them to clean em up before the force left and telling them what to do.

They did it.

September to January 1946. I think it was the 13th of January. The CO sent for me. He said, “There’ll be a ship in the harbour in the morning. You go down and inspect

it and you’ve got the opportunity to take a party of twenty-seven men to the Solomon Islands to take over the 8th Field Ambulance there. They’re overdue for home.” “So,” he said, “would you care to go to the AGH?

Would you rather go to the AGH? Or would you prefer to take the party and go to Fauro Island in the Solomons?” I said, “I’ll take the party to the Solomons.” So the next morning there was a giant of ship there. I’ve never seen a bigger one. Forget the name of it.

Annatina, I think. It had just finished transferring two hundred thousand Americans and landing them on, not all in the one shipment I hope, at Morotai ready for the handing over there of the Japanese swords to Macarthur and now it’s

been retransferring them to somewhere else, I believe into Japan, proper. They didn’t tell me that though. They don’t tell you too much in the Navy. But I believe they were taken into Japan all the two hundred thousand of them. So in the morning it was a really fierce day and that ship was as hot as an oven. And it had twelve decks and I had to inspect all

twelve of them and then sign that I received the ship in good order and condition, which I did. It was fully hammocked and I didn’t notice any hammocks missing. And then in the afternoon I picked up my kit and with my twenty-seven bods. we were put aboard

and she sailed for Torokina.

No. No that was that was done by the champion Fisken. The ordinary orderly room sergeant who fixed me with enough nursing orderlies, couple of the Q staff, a pay sergeant

and a postal corporal who became a sergeant. So we could function as the headquarters of an Ambulance with that number.

Well I happened to know that land headquarters said that I

was to go to Fauro Island. So I satisfied the CO with his option. I had no wish to go to the AGH. Probably got promoted if I’d a gone round there. It was one unit I hadn’t done anything for. But the trip to Torokina

was fairly short. They did it in a day I think but the weather was incredible and it was so rough at Torokina on Bougainville, that the landing craft that came out to pick us up couldn’t get anywhere near the ship. It

seemed to me that it was a hundred yards away from the ship. It wasn’t quite that much but they loaded us in several nets into cargo nets and then swung us up and out over the bay and then drops us down into the landing craft. Quickly we got off the

net, a bit younger then. The net went back for the remainder of me men.

Oh we only had light kits, yeah. We didn’t have much to carry.

Well this is as we like to think it, this was our peace time service. It goes down on our records, our own records. I dunno what it is in the Army records, but this was our peace time service. And it was so rough there and wild for a fortnight

we couldn’t proceed any further because we had to do the rest of the trip in landing craft. And the engineers just simply wouldn’t take their landing craft to sea in these ranging storms. So while I was there I had the advantage of messing in the American

Medical Corps mess room which was a mighty building. Beautiful building. And I had for company one colonel and one lieutenant colonel. They were both the top officers of one formation. The full Colonel was an ADMS or a DDMS [Divisional Director Medical Service]

and his brother, they were two Sydney doctors, his brother was the CO of the AGH there. So the three of us had our meals in this magnificent mess room. But only for a fortnight.

In the company of these gentlemen. I knew their names. I suppose picked em up, I suppose as you do in the Army. They were the Haiatt Brothers. H-A-I-A-T-T. Matt Haiatt and his brother.

And they were Macquarie Street specialists but I didn’t expect to see either of them again. But after a fortnight, the engineers said we’ll risk it and it was still raging seas. Well the first day out we made it to

an island off the coast of Bougainville. Buka I think it was, Buka Island. And to land there we had to leap across a strip of water onto a muddy bank and scramble our way up which was a pleasure and we spent the night there. The following day it was a bit calmer and

we set sail for Fauro Island, our destination. According to my Army record by now, I’d been nearly a fortnight on Fauro Island so we were running a bit late. But we had another day’s sailing and late in the afternoon we landed on Fauro Island and what a beautiful

gem of an island it was. A beautiful silver shining strip of beach. A magnificent back drop to the coastal strip rising high, not quite a mountain but very high, and beautiful sunshine. I wrote an article about that.

It was ‘Life on Fauro Island’. It was a lovely experience and that’s one of the gems of the Pacific Ocean that you read in the tourist books. It really was. But there were still twenty-two and a half thousand Japs there. We had to wait our time. Our job was to look after the health of any

sick of the battalion and the associated troops that were still winding up and had to attend to all that goes on in getting clear from an island.

It was the, I can’t name the brigade. These

things go from you in time. It was probably the 28th Brigade and the battalion, strange to say, was the 7th Battalion which in World War One had been known as the Footscray Regiment and that was a 3rd Division Unit. Had been 4th Division before the redistribution of seats. So I was very happy to come home

again with Footscray troops.

It sure did. But just as well too because I didn’t know a soul in the Officers Mess on the ship. I’d not met more than one or two of the officers while on the island because again our hospital

was at the beach head. And there was no ready access to the fighting men. They were around a headland which you had to go through water to get to and I never bothered to do that.

Simple things.

I was a medical officer there. There were two medical officers there. But the senior one, again there was a Casualty on a one of these petrol driven small craft.

It blew up, had a habit of doing that, and he was badly burned and the CO had to wire for some other transport. I never saw it. I didn’t see it and I don’t know what form it took. It may have took a Catalina for that matter. It could’ve been a Catalina. He left me a note, “Sorry to leave you the

unit to yourself,” he said. “I’m taking this opportunity of escorting this sick lad. We may save him. I’ll give him injections from here til the time we can get to a General Hospital, wherever that may be.” So I was left with a young captain as a medical officer and

No, nothing.

No, nothing. No

No. No, you don’t get troppo cases when you’re going home.

Oh it was hard in this respect that Mr Ford, Minister for the Army, assured our people at home that we would be home for Christmas. And they’re not silly enough to imagine that all troops would be home for Christmas because all troops never are anywhere at the same time. Now my wife was sensible enough for that but

she still longed for me to be home for Christmas if it was possible. And it wasn’t to be. But we then looked forward to being home for Easter and we had the job again of cleaning up our own area there before we left it. We were handing over to ANGAU. A-N-G-A-U. [Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit]

That was the Australian New Guinea Administrative body that was taking over the islands as an interim force until their own councils and governments could be set up again. Because the indigenous people had been crammed into one island by the Japanese where they were forced to grow

vegetables and fruit for the Japs and they got it pretty rough and sickness was very rife amongst them. Some tropical diseases and TB [Tuberculosis]. TB had broken out from the lack of food.

The it came to an end ultimately with once again I got acquittance’s from the engineers for the engineers stores. Refrigerators and things like that and we weren’t getting receipts for ordnance and rations or anything like that. There were small hand tools which were to be used

by ANGAU in cooperation with the natives themselves and leave them with the natives. But that was another big task that was outside the scope of the Army.

Well we didn’t take anything. I didn’t take them but they were

on my account. Three jeeps that the 8th Field Ambulance had. But they were not in the camp area where I was. I didn’t sight them and they were around the corner in the fighting troops area. So I didn’t have any knowledge of those and I didn’t even know they’d been loaded. But I found out in Sydney.

But I being around the corner and cut off from the rest of the force had its drawbacks. Actually the young captain with me, he was terribly interested in climbing to the peak which went straight up from where the hospital

was and the canteen was there also. And he came to me one day and he said, “Would you come with me?” He said, “I’d love to go up there before I go home and I’m due to sail soon.” He said, “One of the chaps that’s been up there, told me all about it,” he said, “He told me what do to. So if you’ll come with me,” he said, “I’d appreciate it.”

“Right,” I said. So we didn’t have any commanding officer at all. So we took time off to climb this. The road up went up almost vertical. It was vertical in places. The Japs had cut the undergrowth away in places

so that they were to drag equipment up in a zigzag fashion and drag it up until they reached high up in this thing where there was a similar cleft in the hillside to what there was in Rabaul. It’s all volcanic eruption stuff of course. And

in this cut in the hillside they had built an observation post. All nicely glassed in too and with a perfect view out into the ocean. You could see for as far as you could see, perfect, clear vision.

Yes there were two Japanese officers in there and this captain said, “What you do is you walk into where they are sitting and you don’t look at them. No you walk through and out the other side and continue on up to the hillside top.” Which we did. When we got to the top it was

an amazing thing. We looked down hundreds of feet down a straight edge with a few trees growing out here and there to the ocean below where it was slapping up against the base. Frightening situation but I said to him I’ve seen enough. So we retraced our footsteps. We came down, came through the same

way. Didn’t look at them, we just marched through. After all, we were the victors. Not that we’d done much victory, but. And he sailed the next day.

This is it. I finally had,

we had, a movement order. Didn’t give any times or anything you see and then one day we were advised that the Her Majesty’s Ship the Kanimbla [HMAS Kanimbla], you’ve heard the name of the new Kanimbla recently? This is the old Kanimbla, one of the old ones. There were more than one. But she was a good ship too. It will arrive and depart

at five p.m. And so the next afternoon it did. But unfortunately I was out on this slip of land and where the landing was still getting a clearance from ANGAU from whatever things that I had to leave with them.

And the battalion and the troops moved out and went aboard and while I’m still waiting for my piece of paper, she gave a hoot and she was off. I grabbed my paper. I said, “Let me get in your launch and take me out to the ship. She’s off and this is the last ship out of the Solomon Islands for the duration.” Thought

if I missed it that I could be there for a long time. Bustled down, jumped into the motor boat and it roared out and across the bay and the Kanimbla’s going. I knew it was gonna be a battle. I ripped me shirt open and stuffed files with all me receipts ‘

in under me shirt and they raced up along side the Kanimbla and she was moving pretty fast by then and one of the chaps on the barge sang out, “Throw him a line!” and someone up on deck, seemed to be a mile high at the time to me, threw out a rope and it come dangling down

and as soon as I could I grabbed it and I didn’t wait for them to pull me up I went up hand over hand as fast and far as I could. You’d a thought I was in the Navy. But ultimately they did think to pull the line in and I was aboard.

I sure was. I wasn’t

keen to stay there another three or six months until some passing ship took me home.

Well we had a beautiful, a really calm trip home. They were in such a hurry to get away because there was a storm warning for the area and they never had a second to lose. Not that I talked to the

captain of the ship at all about it. But the other officers on the ship told me that they’d had the storm warning and that was the urgency. We had a lovely trip home. Nothing to do. No unit. I didn’t even have to see to my troops because they were in the men’s quarters. Not in the officers’ quarters like we travelled down on the other

one. I kept a note of where we were at for when I got home. I did make a note of that.

Surprise. Most of my boys went but I was left with

five. Three of the jeep drivers and two of the company. Spare parts. So there was me and five bods and we got in on a Saturday morning. It was as cold as ice and raging storm and rain. That’s normal Sydney weather and we

got shuttled off to Liverpool. Well I didn’t go to Liverpool. I sent my five bods out to Liverpool where they’d get quarters and I hunted up a Sydney cousin and as I had nothing but a shirt and trousers on and it’s as cold as ice. The kit store wouldn’t open til Monday cause the war’s over now. War’s over a long way

back and the kit store wouldn’t open til Monday. So I borrowed a cardigan from my cousin Jack and he said well we’re going to the pictures, you’d better come along with us. So I went to the pictures that night with Jack and his wife Phyllis and their baby. They had a twelve months old baby daughter and on the

Sunday, Jack took me round to a mass of Sydney old aunts and his grandfather, who was over eighty, and he was my grandmother’s brother. One of her brothers, John. Had been born in Victoria but they’d drifted to New South Wales. Become

Sydneysiders. So after a battle to get a receipt for the jeeps, I finally ordered the warrant officer in charge of the vehicle section, ordered him to give me a receipt. Three jeeps, no tools. He looked at me and gave it to me. I’d already told my boys to be at Central Station

no later than five o’clock. No drinking and keep yourself fit and clean and be there no later than five pm. Then I headed for Sydney and the records office which was in the Methodist school there at the time.

Not long but we couldn’t afford to wait another second. Only

Monday and he refused but Tuesday, I went back and tried to talk turkey to him and no luck. He wanted those tools. There never were any tools on a jeep. There’s nothing to use them on but he’s a civilian in uniform in Sydney. So I went back Wednesday and ordered him give me a receipt and he knew I meant it. Then off to Sydney to the records office

to show all my receipts, evidence that I was clear and they said. “Oh well. We can’t do anything for you because all personnel here have gone on leave and most of them are on the train to Melbourne. They’re all Melburnians.” Lovely. So a major said, “I’ll get you a

sandwich anyhow and we’ll think about this.” So he got me the sandwich and I said. “There must be somebody who can help me. Have you got a Rail Transport Officer?” “No.” he said. “He’s on leave but WO is down in the basement. I’ll take ya down to him.” So down to the basement we go and I said to the Rail Transport Officer, I said, “ I’ve got five bods I’ve promised

to get home for Easter and I’ve promised my wife I’ll be home for Easter. All I want is a railway warrant for one officer and five other ranks.” “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry. Both trains are fully booked out.” I said, “I know. I’ve been told that but I want a rail warrant. A rail warrant, please. Thank you”, I said and was off. Anyway I got there waiting and spick and span and no

grog, nothing, they were ready and as I got there the first Division pulled out at five pm and the next one left at seven. So then I had to get past the Rail Transport Officer on the gate who assured me that there was no chance of getting on that Division. It’s fully booked and overloaded now.

“Right.” I said. “I just want you to pass us through the gate and we’ll do the rest.” He said, “But I can’t get a seat. I can’t possibly get a seat for you, Sir.” “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve sat on more than a railway train full.” “Alright,” he said. So he passed us through. And we got on the train. It was certainly packed tight.

We hadn’t had another meal. And we weren’t gonna get one so we sat there and I remember the train pulling in at a station on the other side of the mountains. Can’t think of the name of it just at this moment. And

I was awake when they announced where we were and I didn’t know anything then until I was told that I was at the signal depot out somewhere in one of our outside Melbourne suburbs. I

It was just another challenge. But I did I say I lost consciousness on the train and when I asked, years later I asked all these boys just how did we get from

that town in New South Wales. How did you get home? “Oh,” they said. “We didn’t get home through Sydney and New South Wales, we got home through Port Melbourne.” They didn’t. That’s how numb we were. We’d been going like mad ants since September non-stop. And

well, I’ve got no memory. Goulburn. From the time we reached Goulburn and they said ‘Goulburn’, I felt we were gettin’ there.

And then it was for home. I had the leave pass from Camp Pell Melbourne and a utility to take me to 85 Ballarat Road where my wife, I believed, and my two daughters aged five and two would be waiting for me to be home for Easter.

In a few minutes I arrived to find two small girls waiting at the front gate with a sign up on the veranda ‘Welcome Home Daddy’ and no wife. But I was greeted with the cries, “Mummy couldn’t wait any longer. She’s had to go to the dairy for milk. She’s been waiting for you all day.”

At that time milk sales had to be made before five in the afternoon. I knew mother wouldn’t be long anyway and she quickly arrived back and after a few years away, we were back together again. The wonder of

it, being home.

Well they’d been waiting long enough for a bloke in uniform. I think if it’d been somebody else’s Daddy they would have welcomed him just the same. But after a few days the little one, she could just

prattle and after a couple of days she said, “Daddy go back to the islands.” “Oh,” I said, “Why love?” She said, “You smell.” And in the islands, you get an odour. It comes from the food you’re eating, the water you’re drinking, the Atebrin you’d been taking for years and it’s a definite

native smell. Not conscious of it meself, of course. You never are. And I didn’t go back to the islands.

No no. I knew full well the odour because we never liked it. Whenever we were in the company of other troops that had been there longer than us and the Indian soldiers for

instance, all had that powerful odour.

Wonderful. Wonderful. She’d done a magnificent job. She paid off the house while I was away. While she went to live with her mother those years while Dad was

away in…well all the men folk were away. And she let the house and that paid off what was owing on it. From which I’ve been eternally grateful to her because she was a wizard.

For years.

Never ceased. Never ceased to settle down. After all these years, I’m still conscientious, a loner. That’s something I never understood but although I was only in command for a short time I never

lost that sense of what a CO has, the responsibility of men’s lives in your hands. A false order, a mistake, a failure to do something, the possibilities are numerous and it didn’t hit me fully until a few years ago. I never thought about any of those things at the

time because everything was moving so fast.

Yeah. I had a visit from the president and the treasurer of our past member association a

couple of months back. Picked up my record and found out that I was not on the officers list of the 2nd Field Ambulance. I was a captain in the Australian Army Medical Corp and they realised that I had been in charge before we had a CO and they came out

to see me. And the president said to me with surprise and wonder in his voice, “When we joined the unit, you were running the unit from the Q Store.” I said, “Yes”, although I never thought of it in that light. And I certainly

wasn’t going to take over the CO’s tent. Didn’t have one for him anyway.

It was

There’s no similarity with civilian life and service life. No similarity at all. You can

think it and say I talk about I camp here, I camp in the back room here and I literally camp. My clothes are hanging on the peg behind the door. I get up in the morning I put em on. Me boots are there. I put em on. Same as if I lived in a tent. I drag the blankets back and the beds made. It had to be made better than that when the CO was doing a kit inspection.

Oh that wasn’t at home. That’s now. No I settled down to family life very well. That’s why I didn’t take the job out at the Repat. Hospital and get promotion at Heidelberg which I could’ve. I was anxious to get back to civil life. After all we

we only had two for our family so far and we always hoped to have at least four. And the first that we were having after the war we lost. Flora lost it. And one reason probably was that I wasn’t fit. The

attack of flu that I got in Sydney didn’t leave me for months and months after. And when I went back to work, although the Victorian manager wasn’t anxious to have me back when he realised I was back to stay, he said, “Well,

take it easy for six months. Just walk around the works. It’s a quarter square mile. Plenty to walk in. And look at every department notice, anything here, anything there and after six months we’ll see how well you are.”

So in that six months I didn’t just walk, I did every job that came along relieving. I relieved this one and that one and satisfactorily I say because I knew what was satisfactory.

I was treated alright by the Government and the community.

It wasn’t acknowledged at all by people. They weren’t anxious to talk about it or mention it. It just wasn’t done. And I must say we had no wish to talk about it.

Very little. I didn’t tell her about the many of the things that I would’ve liked to talked to her about but it wasn’t for a mother with young children. They weren’t things that you could talk to mother about. Listening to her was probably a good thing because

slowly it took a lot of things out of my mind and there were plenty of occasions that weren’t happy moments.

There certainly is.

No. No you don’t. It’s not right.

It’s not right and that’s why my son, when he was fifteen, he had no inkling of my service at all. He was born in ’52. I’d been home six years by then and you don’t talk to little fellows about these. I

never would’ve talked to him about war and as life has had it he has not had to face it. He’s been too young for Vietnam and Korea. I was still eligible for those places only fortunately they were not large numbers that were being sent. And there was

sufficient younger men both free and many of them anxious to serve.

Oh absolutely. Well whatever we were given to do, we did well and that’s

a good record.

Not as much as some of the younger fellows were. For one thing I was a decade older than them and my mind and knowledge of the First World War was pretty good.

It had been a source of interest to me from the time I could virtually walk and I was so proud of the diggers of ’14-’18 and I was constantly reminded of this over the years. I presume they got their information from the unit office because innumerable times I had calls

from dependants of World War Two Field Ambulance men. I didn’t keep a record of them but they rang, they phoned, they got information about the present unit. They were interested in the present unit and its progress and anything I could tell them about the First World War and I was not

able to tell them anything much.

I did for many years until the tram lines wouldn’t go straight.

Oh,

I don’t’ think so. I had an interest in the service before the war. From the time I was a small boy. I still have. I’ve been to all the muftis and report. Learned a lot a stuff out of these from reports about things like this that have never been published.

No. No. What I dream about is strange places. Still do. Strange places. Old places.

Oh plenty.

No.

Well some of them concern my previous CO who became General Norris, who was a grand man.

And some of them concern my final Commanding Officer who also was a grand man.

I would just like to say that in my case I have felt that the call to duty and the opportunity to serve has been the

greatest thing in a person’s life. And any time spent as service in the armed forces, although you may have regrets as many of our past serving member have, in my case I have no regrets, no complaints.

I’m grateful to the Veterans’ Affairs [Department of Veterans’ Affairs] for looking after me as well as they have for the last fifty odd years. And I advise any young man to consider joining the reserves because it’s inevitable that in the very near future more and more of you young fellows will be required

to serve for your nation. To preserve our safety, our way of life. And I’m very grateful for having the opportunity to speak to you young fellows because I was a young fellow once myself. Now cheerio and God bless you all.