Australians at War Film Archive

Well, after we left Paddington, we moved to Tempe.

Yes. In the women’s hospital, as was Mavis, three years later.

We left there and went to Tempe and from there on that’s where we lived permanently.

About four years old.

It was a good place for kids because it had a lot of parks around the river. It was a quiet place. There was always lots of fun and activities going on.

The railway was near by and the trains used to come in bringing coal and stuff like that. There was always people carting it away. First of all with horses and then they used steam trucks. They used to just run up and down past where we lived. We used to race them up the hill.

The steamies especially, and by the time we got to the hill of course, we were puffing and the truck was gone.

I went to Tempe School in 1924 and I remained at Tempe until Year 8. And after that, I went to Hurstville Technical.

Yes. We used to have to travel

by train regularly.

Yes. Then I went east for a couple of years and got my intermediate certificate and then left school. After that I got a job at Angus and Cootes which lasted about nine months. I apparently got upset because

another bloke got the job I was after and they finished up saying, well you’re not the one we want.

I’m lost.

No, no. Where I started was what they called bench stamping. Up the top they had the pattern making…not

pattern making…gosh. I’m getting lost.

Pardon?

He was a tram driver. He drove trams and during the war they changed to buses and he drove buses and retired in about 1955. But the job I was talking about

was tool design. Cutting implements and making dyes and stuff like that. So after that I started working with a footwear agency, Goldworks, that was at Dating House[?[. I was there for about two or three years. I had an altercation with the boss.

Wasn’t terribly serious. We didn’t agree sort of thing and he said, you’d better leave.

Well it was depression time and it didn’t matter if you wanted to do something, it was more if the opportunity was available. I did sit an examination for the railway.

I got chosen for a job in the …what they called the Workshop Bay…in Eveleigh Workshops. I wasn’t keen on that idea. I wanted to be a draftsman actually. Later on I did apply for one which was in the Public Service but you needed a leaving certificate to be chosen. So I was a bit disappointed there. Otherwise I had jobs like messengers,

riding bikes like the present mob. I worked in the wool mills…that was all night work. We started by picking up the bobbins from the spinning machines. Then they put us on the spinning machines and we were spinning wool…wool material.

Still living at Tempe.

I had been working in a foundry at St Peters as a metal grinder. When I turned 21 they kept me on but a month later I got the sack so after that I didn’t do much, or nothing really.

I was listening to the radio on the night Menzies [Prime Minister Robert Menzies] made his statement

that Britain was at war and we’d have to join them.

I was wondering why they didn’t challenge the Germans in the first place after so many years. I was quite happy that they took it on, in a sense.

I used to like reading the papers so I got onto it. We used to see the newsreels of things

going on. We were pretty well informed about that. We used to know the names of all the characters, even the lesser people. We weren’t living in the dark, in a sense.

I agreed with what he said. They got beaten off in about six weeks didn’t they, when they went to France. And if they had started a year earlier that would have been in trouble as far as I was concerned.

No, I didn’t change my mind.

I went down to Victoria Barracks on day one.

Yes. They took our names and they said, we’ll call you if we want you

but nothing happened. Then they said, to be in the OS [Overseas Service], you had to have had service in the Militia. So I thought, oh well, I’ll go and join the Militia. That didn’t make much difference I guess. So I did that. I went into a camp the Monday…say I joined on the Friday, and Monday we were in camp. I hadn’t even held a rifle.

All the training was done in Botany. A place they used to call Happy Valley, where all the people who had no homes had built shanties. It was in a nice sort of sheltered hollow, on the water, so it was good.

Two weeks I think we had there. They called for enlistments while we were there, but I waited until later.

After I got home, I went to Arncliffe to arrange my enlistment and got told to come back again. So I enlisted on the 30th October 1939.

No, because it was a routine thing really.

Oh, I didn’t

have a good opinion of my standard of health at the time and I thought I mightn’t be fit. But they accepted me. I weighed about ten stone seven then. When we joined, they issued us with uniforms and they were all a bit large. People complained and they said, you’ll grow into them. Which I did.

Well, just take it as it comes was the idea I think. When we started training it was just standard training, not for any particularly aspect of war. Infantry training. That was all you could do really.

That’s very hard. I can’t remember that really.

I don’t think it made any difference except that on the 2nd of January Mavis and I got married, so that was our first hurdle. I was home for two days. On the 4th of January we marched through Sydney and on the 9th of January we got on the ship. The 10th of January we sailed. Mavis caught a little launch out to the…

to see the ships. I’d gone down below. I’d seen a lot of Sydney Harbour, but when I was down there one of my mates, Laurie Walsh came racing down and said, “I’ve seen Mavis on the launch.” We just caught a glimpse of her and had a wave and away we went. That was it. I was at sea.

I gave them two shocks, didn’t I. Actually I said to my mother, I’ve transferred from the Militia to the AIF [Australian Imperial Force]. I didn’t want to say I’d joined up straight away. That was my little white lie. I didn’t want to upset them. She and dad had lived through the First War and knew all about it.

No. He was unfit apparently. Actually when he died he had a spot

on the lung and I think he acquired it when he was young.

The chap next door…the neighbour. I had a cousin who was in the infantry in 1918. I think it was 1918 he was in. That’s the only two I knew anyway.

Being what?

It didn’t worry me, I didn’t get sea sick at any time we were travelling. It was quite interesting watching the convoy and all the manoeuvres they carried on with. Anti-submarine stuff.

Initially I started off as a mess orderly. The old chap next door said,

“If you’d like an easy time be a mess orderly.” So I took that on with one of my mates called Bluey Keily. After about three weeks I got sick of it so I gave it away to someone else and went back to training on the ship. We did a certain amount of small-scale training.

That’s a good question too.

There wasn’t much you could do. It was mainly talking.

I just really can’t remember.

Where we were going? No, they didn’t tell us where we were going. When we left Australia, we went from Perth to Colombo, and we were there for a day or so. We took off again and on the way to Aden…I think perhaps they told us after we left Aden that we were going to Palestine.

We thought we might be going to England. When you’re in that situation you go where you’re taken.

Oh not strictly. I had no real connections with England. One place was much the same as far as I was concerned.

No. There was nothing to talk about really.

Well these are things that have gone…I just don’t remember about day-to-day things.

When we were going ashore permanently? We landed at a place called El Kantara in the [Suez] Canal. We landed at midnight.

We walked up off the boat up a concrete ramp. There was a shadowy figure standing there and you couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Just a heap of clothes. The Arab dress you know. That was all. After we got ashore we were given a meal and a couple of blankets and we slept until the following morning.

It was sort of a collection point really. Not a camp. Oh there, no. We got on a train and travelled to the Sinai, which was all desert. I was a bit upset about that. I thought this is no good for me.

Oh I wanted something sensible, where you could see some colour. The desert wasn’t very attractive. We saw an oasis on the way. You couldn’t see anything, any habitation.

The first place we got to was a place where the AIF had fought…the Light Horse in World War One…El Arrish, that’s right.

Oh yes. It was right on the edge of the desert. There wasn’t anything attractive about it but it was our first contact with the Arabs. They were doing a bit of trading with us for oranges and stuff like that.

It wasn’t a very good sort of place. They were living out in the bush sort of effect. I suppose they were a bit indifferent I suppose. Looking at personalities…we weren’t there that long to make up our minds. We went from there to El Majdal, got off the train there and sat by the side of the road, and there was a little story…

We were watching the sparrows in a bit of green stuff there. Not many trees. We caught trucks up to our camp, Julis El 3 as it was called. This was the information we’d been given while we had been on the ship in the Aden area.

Oh we stopped in Julis for a while. From February 14th until September and then we went to Egypt from there.

Went to Helwan just outside of Cairo. We were there for about a month or so and then we moved up to Alexandria at a place called Amiriya about 15 miles out of Alexandria.

Well, they weren’t doing anything then…oh wait on. I’m getting out of sequence.

They didn’t enter the war until the 11th June I think.

By the time we were going there the Italians were in the war, but they didn’t say anything about how we’d be operating. Just more training. More training in Helwan. Amiriya.

On the 12th December we were on an exercise, a divisional exercise and we were called back to camp, and we made our preparations to go up to the front then.

Pardon?

Just directly.

We did have a battalion parade and the CO [Commanding Officer] gave us a bit of a talk about things that were going on,

and what he expected from us. It was just a general order I guess. Each company had been told what was happening and that’s how it got around.

Oh yes. It was expected what we were going to do.

We were interested in what was coming up. It was a fair trip up from where we were. We left mid morning and we didn’t get to the place where we were to stay temporarily until quite dark. It was the middle of the night or there abouts.

That’s about as much as I can say about that.

While I was in Palestine, I was in infantry, a rifle company and they called for people to be trained as runners. So a mate of mine and I decided we’d try it out because it gave us a bit of extra training,

finding our way in the dark and that sort of thing. Star navigation, but that didn’t work out.

A runner’s duty is to maintain communications. If the telephonic communications had broken down, if the wires had been cut by some means or another, we had to go and take the messages.

In World War One it was very dangerous. It wasn’t so much in World War Two because it wasn’t a concentrated thing like World War One. There was open warfare, and there were wide-open spaces and people were scattered far and wide in their formation and that didn’t arise that much.

I remained a runner for about 18 months I suppose.

After we got to Sidi Haneish, that was the name of the place, where the camp was. What had happened was, the British had been down there previously with the 4th Indian Division…they were the ones who were to do the initial attack at Sidi Barrani. They’d moved out and we took over their place. They didn’t know they were going into battle.

All they knew was they were moving on and they finished up taking Sid Barrani where the Italians had established a base. The British had better equipment and better soldiers and they knocked them off in 24 hours. They took many thousands of prisoners. Then they moved on up into Cyrenaica.

When they got on, they sent a group of officers up there to a place called Salum where they were told what was going to happen. They were given instructions. They came back to camp and we started moving up. I couldn’t tell you the date. Soon after anyway. We left Sidi Haneish on trucks and drove through to Salum.

I think in one day. We were camped there. We dug a pretty insignificant shelter into the hill. At one end it was about three foot deep and the other end it was about 18 inches. There were eight of us. While we were there someone spotted some planes, about six or nine and drew our attention to it.

So we were watching this and speculating that they were ours coming back from a raid on the Italians. We were watching and someone said, “Something just fell out of that plane.” And we all tried to see it. The next things the bombs were exploding down on Salum. That was four miles from where we were, and we were diving into the hole of course. I remember one bloke on the bottom saying, “I haven’t got my tin hat.” And another bloke said, “Bad luck for us Curly,

if you need your tin hat,” because we were all on top of him, about eight deep. Anyway they continued on their way not doing anything to us, but over the top of the hill they reckoned there was bombing, but I don’t know the truth of that.

We were in the battle zone if you want to call it that. We moved

from that position I mentioned up the hill, about a thousand feet up, on a road called Halfaya. To the troops it was Hell Fire Pass. We settled in for the night there. It was pretty cold…a thousand feet up in the air. I was sharing a blanket of course, with my mate named Ross Pritzler.

We heard a plane approaching, so that sort of made the tension a bit more and a bit more shaky I suppose. I was watching the sky and I saw the exhaust flare. It was coming in and I watched as it flew across and it banked away at about 90 degrees and that was the last we heard. The next day we got off again. I can’t remember how far we went.

We went to the outskirts of Bardia and we probably stopped over night at one place. It’s hard for me to tell distances. But we just got there, the runners were all together. We dug in and we were just standing around talking and one fella said, “Look at that plane!” And there was one coming straight across where we were.

Another bloke said, “Something fell out of one of those planes.” We were right in the middle of the flight path, so we dived into our holes and twenty two aircraft carrying two thousand kilograms of bombs dropped forty two thousand kilograms of bombs along the spot we were on. It was quite hair raising that bit.

Not in our group. But three of our fellas were killed and a couple of others. It wasn’t much of a result for forty tonnes of bombs. My other little experience with that place was, walking out and the brigadier drove up having a look at what was going on, and he called me over to the car and said, “What did you think of that?”

I was a bit …sort of…said, “Oh you soon get used to it.” I didn’t know what I was talking about of course. I had to take a message then across to our company. They were actually counting the shells that were exploding in our area, and they used to get these counts back as information about the Italian artillery. As I was going along, there was British

anti aircraft…heavy anti aircraft had moved into the area. They dispersed the equipment. They were in a big solid mess and we thought that they probably caused the problem. Anyway, as I walked by…I walked by an anti aircraft gun which I don’t think had been used, there was a bomb hole right along side it. I looked at it across the way to my right

and there was a heap of clothes lying there, or rags it looked like. I looked at it for a while. I could see it was a greatcoat and there was some scalding around the bottom of it where it had been burnt by the flash of a bomb. So I kept going and got to my company and the report was they’d had 160 shells fired into that area.

Then I had to get back to my unit. Had a bit of a chat to the fellas there before I left.

Pardon?

Oh, I didn’t look. It wasn’t close enough for me. It was about fifty yards away.

Oh, it was part of it. We were just outside. We moved again the next day probably because of the attack on the area. We were a bit conspicuous.

So we moved up, I don’t know how far, but there was another raid on the brigade headquarters and one of the planes was shot down. I saw the plane falling but I didn’t see the action of it. It was on fire. It must have been… not metal…

I’ve forgotten the terms now.

Three blokes jumped out of it. Fabric covered! As it was coming down you could see the skin being consumed and the skeleton of the aircraft itself. Three fellas jumped out. One fella’s parachute was on fire and the other two landed safely.

Yes, they landed near brigade headquarters. But they did a lot of bombing. You could see it around. You could see a great cloud of dust come up, all in one area. Bombs…you pressed a button and they all fell out at once. That was the pattern.

It was quite an interesting situation. We didn’t anticipate there would be so many people there and that the opposition would collapse so quickly. It went on for three days into the area we went into. I think…put it this way,

getting into the position…on the 2nd of January which was the anniversary of our wedding, we got the order to prepare for tomorrow for the attack on Bardia. They usually advised us that all blankets in the company should be rolled and delivered to the company store.

That was the instruction. We knew the battle was coming. That night after we done that, we packed up and moved to a position where they formed up. We were given something to eat and a tot of rum and slept until about two o’clock.

In the morning, two o’clock I think it was we got up, had another meal and we moved out to where the start line was. We were the third battalion into the area, into Bardia itself, and we were drawing near to where we were to form up, the barrage had started.

I felt I jumped about two feet into the air, and everyone said, “Jeez,” or words to that effect. But we got accustomed to it pretty quickly and just moved onto our position on the start line. When we got to the start line area, they had to look to find it, the officer’s group

banded together talking. They were head to head, yelling as hard as they could. They could just hear each other.

The shelling. Our shelling, yeah. Anyway they got themselves lined up and we laid down at five yards spacing. By that time…or shortly after the barrage, the First

Battalion [2/1st] was the first to get into the place, followed by the Second [2/2nd]. At half past seven we were due to go, but once our bombardment ceased for a period, the Italians began shelling towards us. You could hear them coming closer and closer. Probably about three rounds.

The shelling was right over where we were. Of course we were lying on top of the ground. It was pretty frightening, but someone started making funny remarks, like, “That was close,” or words to that effect. While we were lying there, for some funny reason, it was dark, I was down at ground level, I looked across

and saw a shell land on the ground about 10 yards away, and about 3 yards from a fella in the next group. But it was a dud and it caused no damage. One of the company commanders was sent a message from another company about one of the young officers who had been hit directly by a shell on the leg.

He was seriously injured of course and was taken back to where we were. We were doing this bit of laughing and he got very annoyed. He said, “If you’d seen what I had seen you wouldn’t be laughing.” Reggie Burns who was the sort of ringleader said, “What do you want us to do, cry?” That was the end of that bit.

I think a bit of nerves. It was a new experience. But that’s what he said, what are you going to do, laugh or cry? So we were laughing. Somewhat nervously, but we weren’t crying that’s a certainty.

Bardia was the best part.

We went from Bardia

on about the 8th of January to Tobruk which was much the same situation.

We were there for about 13 days before they made the attack. This time I was with battalion headquarters because we alternated between actions. I’ve lost my track.

No, no, no. The Sixth Division was in the attack phase. The people who were in Tobruk had been pushed back by the Germans and that’s when they collected.

Yes. Anyway,

on the particular day of the attack on Tobruk, the Third Battalion [2/3rd] was the leading battalion. We had the experience of forming up and marching up. I don’t know how close we were to the Italian line. We laid down there and waited for the barrage to start. While we waited there, on one occasion we heard a bugle blow

and I think a dog barked. We were getting a bit anxious about whether we had been discovered. But the barrage came down pretty soon after that and we were just lying there watching the fragments flying around. You could see them bursting and the fragments flying around. That went on for a period after which they had to move up the

Bangalore torpedos to break the wire. The Bangalore torpedo is about twenty feet or so of galvanised piping stuffed with explosives with a detonator to set it off. While we were lying there we saw the pioneer people, the battalion pioneers going up towards the wire. You could see them putting

it under and waiting for the explosion. I think they put three under the wire. Two went off and the third one didn’t explode immediately. When the first went off they were calling for people to get up and move. Some one said, “This one hasn’t gone off yet,” so we hung around for a while. I think the third one went off or it failed altogether.

On the way into the action, as I said, I was with battalion headquarters, and when we got through the wire the tanks were all lined up and we were laying along side the tanks. You could see the leading company engaging the Italians in the fence system.

They had sort of posts which were concrete dug into the ground at about 15 feet. They were attacking. We saw them withdraw then go back in. It went on from there. Smoothly in a sense. As far as I can remember. That particular part, I was a bit worried then that they might have been having trouble.

We left sometime in March and we returned to Alexandria, which we thought was going to be a rest period.

We travelled by train back to…first of all we travelled by trucks to Mersa Matruh. We stayed there for a couple of days. Then we got on the train and travelled to the Alexandria area….Amiriya was where we were. They had a train station near by. We stopped there. We were given a day’s leave and then the second lot went off on leave. Then

they were all called back to camp because we were moving.

We were going to Greece. We got transported into Alexandria and got on the HMAS Gloucester to transport us to Greece.

It was like a racing boat. It was doing about 30 knots. It took us twenty two hours to do about six hundred miles.

It was terrific. During that trip there was an air raid warning. I was down below. The ship was closed down. You couldn’t get up on deck. Then the fella on the bridge was describing the action as the plane approached and when it dropped the bomb. That compensated

for not being able to see what was happening. Anyway, the bomb fell short. I think there had been two chained together. Probably if it hit the ship they would have dragged the other one onto it.

No. It was a few hundred yards behind us in the wake of the boat. They had the general direction all right but that was OK. From then on it was just plain sailing. We sailed into Piraeus just towards

the end of the day. Then we docked. Three or four of us decided we wanted to be the first off. General Blamey was on the boat you see, so we were a bit cagey about taking the chance. But eventually we decided we’d go, and we hopped down onto the wharf, went along to where the fence was running around the boundary and had a bit of a cross conversation with the Greek Police.

And things like that. You’d say to the blokes…they knew what we meant. We couldn’t make any comment. So it was our first introduction to a Greek.

Well they were very friendly I suppose. The probably realised we were going to try and help them. Everywhere we went they’d be waving to us.

They’d beckon to us…like come back sort of thing. So we went by truck…a captured Italian truck by the way, to a place called Daphni where we camped for perhaps a week before going further up into Greece.

When we moved off, initially we went by train and the trains are quite narrow gauge. Much different to Sydney trains,

probably more like Queensland trains, and rather tiny carriages. We went to a place called Larisa. It is probably in the middle of Greece and we camped there for probably a week again. Then the action started to develop. When we got into Larisa, the buildings were all over the place and we thought they must have had some bombing, but they’d had an earthquake before,

and bombing as well, so they had been pretty knocked about. Then we went out to Tempe where we had our camp there. The first thing we did was go down to river and have a swim. It was the melting time for the snow so it was freezing. You’d take a full breath, dive in and come up gasping for air. I don’t know if it condensed or what. So after that we went back to the camp. There wasn’t much done there.

Mainly by truck after that incident. Mainly truck travel up to the various places we went too. When we left Tempe we went up to a place called the Veria Pass which was our position for the approaching battle. When we got out of the trucks

we were a couple of hundred feet below the level of where we were suppose to be, and having been walking on level ground all the time previous, virtually level anyway and at a much higher elevation, we were about four thousand feet up I think, we were gasping for air. A couple of Greek soldiers

walked up the hill passed us as though we were standing still. Naturally, they were accustomed to the atmosphere. We got up to the top, settled in there and then the next day it snowed. About four inches of snow on the ground. We only had the clothing that we had in the desert, uniforms and that was it. So it was pretty frigid. In that day a small German reconnaissance plane flew along at the same level as we were on the hill.

We couldn’t hide so we waved to him.

No they didn’t take any action there. So we were there for a couple of days.

I’ll just give you this bit here. We were withdrawing from that position and there were

companies much farther out. We withdrew to the bottom of the hill, dug in and we were a sort of rear guard for a few hours. While we were there the First Battalion moved through and it was snowing again. This was midnight. I was on duty with half a blanket. You couldn’t sleep so it was a waste of time.

The following day we started to withdraw following the First Battalion. We walked cross-country over the range of hills for quite a long time. I can’t remember exactly. It led us down to the approaches to Aliakmon River, which was the main stream in that area. When we got there, the Engineers had

built a pontoon means of getting across the river. They stretched a wire across, a cable and they had a fairly big pump and they were using the force of the water to drag the boat across the other side. Just as we were either on the boat or getting on, six German bombers flew up the river, but they didn’t do anything.

They were apparently on another bombing mission. They didn’t even fire their guns. They were only up about five hundred feet. We got across the river and we moved a couple of miles to a nearby village where we stopped over night.

Out of Greece? Well there had been a battle near Larisa

…Pinios Gorge, and we began withdrawing from there. I was with a group who got out early. We were on a truck, but a lot of people couldn’t get on trucks and they were just walking. We had three or four attacks on the road until we got to a point where they had

a road block, questioning the people as they were coming through. It was pretty rough.

Well we were on trucks so we were dozing I guess. You had to keep an air raid alert. There were a couple of blokes standing by the back of the cabin with the cover pulled back so we could see what was coming. When the planes

approached we used to bang on the lid and they’d pull up. Everyone would dive out and get as far away as they could in the time they had. Two blokes got wounded during one attack. We picked up a New Zealander when we started off. He’d driven over a bomb, which had exploded under him. It had killed his driver.

He had a webbing belt on and that was shredded in a number of places. He undid his trousers and showed us the bruises he had around his body. If it wasn’t for the webbing belt he would have been dead too. When the raids came on we had to get him out as well and the people who were later wounded. I don’t know how long before we got to a CCS [Casualty Clearing Station] and dropped them off into the care of the doctors.

I was desperate too. Of course. There was no hope of holding our situation. When that road block questioned the people, we were lying under cover for a few days before we started withdrawing properly and then it was just to keep going day after day. We’d move in the night

and hide in the day.

We got to Kalamata in Greece, then we were ferried out to a destroyer called the Illawarra, and from there we went on in a direction that took us past Crete. We did learn that they had intended us to go to Crete but the Captain of the convoy decided to keep going

for some reason we don’t know about. We got back to Alexandria and returned to our old camping area in Palestine.

Well it was a bit of a relief to be away from all the bombing and stuff. It was only the bombing which was the difficult bit.

Five weeks or thereabouts. In the meantime the First Battalion [2/1st] had

largely been captured in Crete and they took a hundred men from both battalions, the [2/]3rd and [2/]2nd to build them up. To give them a few experienced fellas. Some of the NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers]. I don’t think any officers went, but there was 100 taken. So after that the Syrian thing started. Some

of our officers had gone up to the border to be shown the situation as it was developing. When they got back we were ordered to move. The main battalion went by train to a place called La-rah. I had an injured leg, or slightly injured and I wasn’t able to march. So I got a ride on the truck to La-rah.

Well, we got back to Julis and there were a lot of fellas in the camp who’d been back with wounds and sickness. I got a decoration and because we hadn’t seen each other, they kept buying me beers. I couldn’t really drink so I got in a limp condition and one of my mates was taking me home.

We went across a wadi. A wadi is a little creek. It was about six foot deep. I got out of it but I must have stubbled on some loose stones and bundled my leg up like that. In the morning I couldn’t walk.

They didn’t know. They just knew I had hurt myself. I had to go to the doctor. They didn’t do anything. Just bandaged my knee.

Well, I felt it wasn’t going any good at all really. We got rid of the Italians in that sense but…we knew about what was going on in Europe. The British were on their own by this time.

We had just no idea. It was just one of those things. It looked like it was going on forever. When we got to Damascus, the Russians had entered the war on the 22nd June, the day our battalion…well the action around there, our unit and the Indians had captured Damascus.

and cut it off from Beirut. Beirut was 150 miles away I suppose. That was it. We started out to go to Beirut to continue our advance and we met a group much too strong for us to get through. We had about perhaps 400 men in the battalion, as against

about 800 which it normally is. They decided to withdraw and there was a mountain called Mount Jebel Mazar. They sent two companies out there which amounted to about fifty or sixty men instead of 200 and they got involved with the French on a hill. But the rest of us were just spread around all over.

They put in a couple of nights up there before they withdrew, from memory. They took us then in a round about way to the coast to join in with the 7th Division at a place called Damour. We were travelling without lights and the roads were so dangerous.

They had fellas walking in front of the trucks so they didn’t go over the edge and so on. But we got to Sidon and we moved up from there to just outside Damour and joined in on the attack in that general area. I couldn’t tell you the particular targets.

They were pretty good soldiers as far as I was concerned. They had good artillery.

They resisted pretty much our attempts to knock them off. We were at the end of that of course. 7th Division had been in the area for about a month by that time. I think they did pretty well, the Frenchmen.

We were up in Syria at a place called Qatana as I recall. The 7th of December…that would be about the area.

Just outside Damascus. We had gone back to where we’d come from.

They had radio news. Someone had a radio. Probably on the telephone. Someone would get a message from headquarters. There were no newspapers or anything like that around.

Well I suppose it was because I don’t think anyone had ever thought about Japan getting involved. Although

from what I’ve read, the general’s staff in Australia had a suspicion it might happen. There was no general talk though. Long before the war, in 1934 they said there was a danger that if Japan entered the war, Britain would be deeply involved.

I remember writing home and saying to Mavis,

‘there should be enough people home to carry on there.’ We only had four divisions operating, and in World War Two they had six divisions and they had only about half the population. I just thought that they hadn’t done much about preparing for some eventuality. That they might get in a panic and bring us home.

I wanted to come home but I didn’t anticipate coming home.

That was the general attitude. I don’t think anyone thought that we’d be needed in a sense because they could have had four divisions again, speaking about relative population. The casualties hadn’t been that great in our lot.

They did.

We didn’t know of course, the 7th Division had gone home so we thought we might have gone, that it was a possibility. When we started out, we got to Ceylon and the kept us in Ceylon for three months.

No, well in a sense. No, I was in the 6th Battalion [means 6th Division] all the time.

I was just saying we were pulled in there because they were worried that the Japanese might try and take Ceylon. They had a big naval base there and Air Force. But there was…Trincomalee is a big naval base. So we were there to defend that in the event of a landing. They attacked the place…their naval force attacked the place a week after we got there. There were aerial attacks around the place.

They bombed Ceylon, not Colombo.

We travelled on passenger ships, except one, which was the Westernland, which was coming from Ceylon to Sydney. When we got on the

Len Lew ships…what did they call them? They were pretty primitive. No toilet facilities. We were sleeping up on deck. I don’t know how many men they had on them. Three or four hundred at least. They were supposed to be loaded with petrol and ammunition. I remember

I don’t know how many days out from Brisbane we were, but we had a destroyer escort and we were leaning on the rail watching it. All of a sudden a great fountain of water went up behind us. They had dropped a depth charge. We thought this is going to be good. But it turned out to be just whales. They might have been practicing or something. It certainly wasn’t a submarine anyway. The story amongst the group of fellas was that by the time

we got there…we were getting information about the progress of the Japanese, 32 miles from Port Moresby, and we were thinking we would have to land with fixed bayonets. But it didn’t turn out like that. It turned out all right.

I’ll tell you what the CO said about them. He said they all wear glasses or words to that effect.

But it turned out…I remember at the time…this was said in Ceylon and it didn’t impress me because when you fire a rifle it’s two pounds pressure on the first one and four pounds on the second one. You don’t have to be too big to do that do you. We had heard stories of things they were doing and it was a bit disturbing.

Well it’s not much good…you can’t…you can’t have any feelings towards people like that because it doesn’t matter what you think. You’re either going to cop it or you don’t.

Well the Germans were a bit different because they had four or five divisions. We had two divisions plus some …

an Australian and New Zealand division plus some British troops. I don’t know how many they had. Maybe they had twice as much. That would make four divisions. They had tanks and they had a fleet of aircraft. Dive bombers and high-level bombers. We had nothing. No defences against the aircraft. So that’s the way it was.

As I said, I was a signalman by that time. They had lost men in Crete and they were short of signallers, so I had been working with the signallers so I was able to join them. We had it different. We used to go out with the troops but we weren’t called upon get up and walk into the machine guns et cetera.

This one particular day, after we got to Eora Creek where our principal fighting was involved, we had to go and lay a line out with a particular company as they moved into the area. They came under attack there and we were able to conceal ourselves behind trees.

And this particular time I had my back against a tree and I could feel these bullets hitting the tree and I think its gonna knock the tree over. I realised after a while that they were at a higher level and were firing into the top of the tree and the vibrations were coming down onto my spine. It was a bit uncomfortable until I realised what was going on.

I thought they were hitting lower down, where I was. As I said, I sort of wriggled my back and I was thinking about it and thought jeez, they’re hitting higher up because nothing was happening.

There’s no wood flying. So I realised it was only hitting part of the tree and the vibrations were coming down the trunk. But they were pretty strong though.

I was evacuated on the 30th November. We got into the battle area. We were camped at Myola Lakes

which was about at the top of the area, and then we got onto the track on the 20th October, maybe a day, a day and a half before we got into direct contact with the Japanese. But we were involved from about the 20th October until 23rd of December when they got withdrawn. But I got out in November.

I was crook. First of all I had a minor operation on my groin. I had a cyst on my groin. It was infected.

Oh, it just grew there I think. It turned red white and blue sort of thing. I went to see the doctor to see if anything was wrong and he had me standing there while he cut it out. Then he sent me back to B Echelon to recover.

But I apparently developed a very bad cough. I was coughing all night. The bloke in charge couldn’t get any sleep, so he said, “Send him out.” And that’s how I got out actually.

I was sent back to Port Moresby. I reckon I wouldn’t have been much use up there where I left because you can’t have someone coughing all the time.

I finished up in hospital.

……… malaria wasn’t diagnosed but I had clinical malaria that was the story, which means you have the symptoms but they can’t trace the bugs.

No, by that time the others had come

back. I got there on the 30th and my three weeks were up so it was getting close to the 23rd of December.

Oh yes. We left there and went on a ship called the U-Chow. It was the smallest boat I’d been on. We went to Cairns and caught the train up to Ravenshoe.

We camped there and went on camp from there. That was the end of New Guinea.

After two years in Queensland we were sent to Wewak. I think they called it British New Guinea at the time, and we were there for eight months – January to August. When the war ended? That’s right, the 15th August.

We were up Mount Shiburangu about three thousand feet up. We’d been sort of garrisoning that area. We relieved the 8th Battalion I think. We were doing a bit of patrol activity. By an odd chance though, my discharge came up on the 16th and I don’t know if it was to get revenge or whatever, but I got put on duty.

The night of the 15th until midnight.

On the signals, the telephone.

I’ll just tell you what happened there on that particular day. What happened was, we started to get a message from brigade headquarters. The fellow I was with had about the same speed of Morse code which was about ten words, when we didn’t miss any.

The fellow sending the message insisted on doing it in Morse, so while we told him what the problem was and after he got through we realised that what they were sending was the message saying no more patrolling. So we knew that that meant no more war. We rang him up again and said we know what it means, so why don’t you just read it to us. But he made us go right through.

It took us about 15 minutes. That was a bit of excitement, to be on duty at the time to receive the first information about the end of the war actually.

I went outside. There were fellas in two man tents. I realised they weren’t asleep and I said, she’s over. And they went back to sleep again.

We’re not Arabs. That was a funny thing.

One of the signallers, a fella by the name of Don Wilson and I were due to come out that night. So we got a lift down on the 16th. We were in camp in an area around Wewak. I can’t remember where it was actually. For about a week.

While we were there, there was an older man, probably up around the forties came to the tent with a bottle of what he called Backrubber which was flavoured with pineapple juice and he wanted us to have a drink with him. I didn’t, as I say, I didn’t drink a lot. I wasn’t much interested in drinking Backrubber. It was raw spirits I suppose.

And so we put our thumbs over it and tipped it up like this and we just got a little drain. It was so volatile it just flew out of your nose…the gas. That was quite a…he was a good bloke the old fella.

Oh a certain amount. We got on a ship called the Gorgon

which was suppose to be a sister ship to the Centaur. The one that was sunk. It was quite a good trip down. As we got nearer Sydney, I got up about four o’clock in the morning. I think we were in Broken Bay watching the lights, this area. And when we got to Sydney Harbour, it was a brilliant day like today was and sunny. They dropped us off at

the wharf. We went out to the showground and got an amount of discharge things and walked home, more or less. Went home that was it. A few people talk about welcome homes, but we had no welcome home after six years. Oh, you were talking about settling down. I was very unhappy with the conditions in Australia then.

There were gas strikes and coal strikes and lots of people expressing their anger. It seemed as though there was going to be a revolution, and there would have been if they had had someone to get them going. I was savage about the conditions at that time. Mavis and I decided to go to New Zealand. I got out in October

and in February we went to New Zealand for eleven months. But accommodation was just as bad over there as it was in Australia.

We tried to buy a house but they wanted a thousand pounds key money and we didn’t have anything like that.

We had an uncle and we stopped with them for a couple of months. He had a pub.

We did get accommodation with a farmer whose wife had left him. After a while he decided he wanted to get her back so…I’d worked on the railway for most of that time so I was entitled to a quarter fare pass so we took a tour from Taranaki, and because we thought the boat would be leaving from Wellington, we went down to the South Island,

and each place we went to, like Dunedin and so on, we checked on where the ships were leaving, and nothing was happening. We got as far as Invercargill, the most southerly point and we were told the ship was leaving from Auckland at a certain date. So we had to streak back up to Auckland. We had a bit of sight seeing as we went, but we had two children by that time. The first one was born while I was away at the war and the second one was born while

we were in New Zealand.

The kids? No, not really. It’s no good talking to people who don’t understand it. Some people just shrug their shoulders. They seem to object to it if you want to have a conversation about some aspect. I once went to dinner with some draughtsmen I used to work with.

I raised some question this day and this bloke just outright told me, we know all about the war stuff. I just shut up, that was it.

Oh we talk about it when we get together. But they don’t talk seriously about the war. They talk about funny things that may have happened, like the time I fell and hurt my leg. Not many know about that though.

It was in the night.

I used to just get into trouble when I wasn’t doing anything. That was probably the trouble, I wasn’t doing anything.

Yes, I used to play cricket.

Well, it must have helped us because as I said about the uniforms. We grew into the uniforms.

I finished up about twelve stone six or thereabouts. Starting from ten stone six. It wasn’t from any excess of food or anything. It must have been normal growth under those kinds of circumstances.

As you got on it became a standard that you don’t drop out of. If you

start dropping out everyone would be on your back. I’m talking about route marches and things like that now. Otherwise there wasn’t a great deal of effort, only the route marches, so there wasn’t anything that dragged on you physically.

I’m probably a bit nervous

Yeah, go on.

I didn’t tell Mavis even. I keep those things to myself. Otherwise people try and change your mind.

No. No one I knew got involved.

That would be true. I met fellows when I got there of course, but no one I was associated with.

I didn’t think so much about the Empire; I just thought it was a danger to everybody apart from the Empire. I would have thought that they

…I tell you what I did think…that Britain, I thought, was overcrowded and that they should send about twenty million over here with their industries and things and make a difference to Australia and give them space. Even now it’s not overcrowded. There’s plenty of open space.

Fighting to survive.

There was an element of that but you didn’t think much about that in my opinion.

Oh well. You’re always suppose to look after your mates as well as you can. If you got into trouble you’d have to help one another. I don’t think there was any…you were just doing the job. I never thought about it that way.

Just from my experience I can say that if I was threatened by a bull I would probably want to run, but in the service situation you were educated, or you had more discipline anyway. I would rather have avoided all of that but…

I’ve gone blank haven’t I?

No, we’ll talk about it while I think about it. The three grades of fear? Well, you can be distressed by what might be happening. The third one is terror really, and the

one in between is sort of very anxious I would say. But I didn’t use those words before.

The fear of it? Not really. It was the same end wasn’t it?

No, I think as you go on you lose it. I was thinking about that the other day. I remember when we were up in New Guinea, one of the officers I had known a long time, I was a lance corporal…no I was just a private in those days, he just said, “how long do you think we can keep tossing heads?” There was no way of knowing. That’s about it.

It was in the beginning because I was bought up…my mother is fairly religious. My father wasn’t. I used to go to church and Sunday School and all that. When I reached 14 I didn’t go any more.

I remember being at Church one night and there was an old fella making a speech. He was a returned soldier from the first war. And he made all these comments and I thought, can I really believe that? I feel a bit that way all the time now. That’s been the way I’ve thought anyway. But I can tell you in the first action we had, we were praying a lot. One mate, I’m not too sure of the exact words he used,

he was lying there communing with God sort of thing, and he said, I know I haven’t been as good as I aught to have been, but can you look after me? A fella by the name of Bruce Emmet. That was his attitude.

I was thinking about me at the time.

You just tried and cancel the fear bit out. Sometimes I could do it and sometimes I found it hard. You’ve got a level of fear and you can contain it. That’s the way it is. I remember the day we went out for the first battle. I’d been with battalion headquarters which had been fairly quiet. I was going out with a company which was then experiencing shelling.

We could hear all the shelling. You had to learn about where they were going to land and stuff like that. But we didn’t have the intensity. When I went out to the company, A company, they were standing around. This was the night before you see and everyone was having bladder trouble and there was one fella there who was fairly up in rank, and

he was gasping like a fish out of water. I thought I don’t feel that bad so I felt better already. Poor character. He got through the day but I think he was sent out. It was recognised by the company commander and he was sent out and someone took his place. But that’s the way it was.

We didn’t even have that. We had artillery fire. They were firing blanks at one stage. It was the first time I ever saw an artillery piece in action.

The bombing was overwhelming. As I said, at the time it was the loudest noise I’d ever heard. It wasn’t so much the noise in the air, you

could feel the vibrations on the ground. You could feel the bombs coming closer and closer. Then you’d go over the top. I can remember sitting up. I couldn’t see…this cloud of smoke and dust was hanging over everything. You couldn’t see the sky or anything. I couldn’t see anybody so I ducked…I thought, ‘Jeez I must be the only one alive,’ so I ducked back in my hole. When I got up next time it was a bit clearer and I could see other fellas popping up too.

That was pretty horrifying because they came in three flights, one behind the other, all dropping the bombs on the start line for them so we got a triple dose.

In my opinion, our equipment was better than the Italians at least.

I was talking about the equipment situation in Greece. We went off to Greece with the same stuff we had in the desert. We had the problem of a possibility of tanks. We had continuing activity with aircraft. High level and dive-bombers.

That was the kind of thing I was saying. There was no defence against the air attacks, and I think most people felt uncomfortable, put it that way. We were on top of the ground. If you had a hole it would be different. But when you’re on top of the ground, everything’s coming your way.

I remember everyone having a big interest in…when we were camped at Julis, there were areas…I didn’t go to them actually but a lot of fellas went in. They had photos of old canons. Around about Gaza…Gaza was involved with the Light Horse. We didn’t get to Beersheba, which was a battle they talked about.

It wasn’t really until after the war that I discovered that the Light Horse had been through Barada Gorge which we had been involved in with the French. That’s about it. I didn’t see much else. You always went past somewhere where they’d been.

Like out to Jerusalem. I never thought of it at the time about the Light Horse being in that area, but they were.

I can say we felt that way, yes. We were following and we wanted to be…probably not as good but sort of backing them up.

Well,

World War One, what I’ve read of it, I don’t think I could have survived in that. I’ve talked to other blokes who have the same opinion. There was tremendous shelling and stuff like that, and they were always stuck in one position. We were moving and you might be there for a couple of days and move on to somewhere else in the way we advanced.

So we very rarely spent a long time in one position. They were there for weeks. If they were going to launch an attack they had anywhere from a month’s preparation. In Bardia we had 96 guns. I mean the concentration was pretty good because it was on a narrow front. They had hundreds of guns. They could only fire at one area of course,

but it must have been ghastly

Our fellas?

The captured 40,000 in Bardia and 25,000 in Tobruk. There were great long lines. A mate of mine, Jimmy Russell was detailed to escort a hundred or so, maybe more and as they moved off an Italian shell landed.

No Italians got hit but he got hit on the leg and that put him out of the war for good. He wanted to be a warrior. I only wanted to go home. That’s the way we talked anyway.

Oh of course. That’s the funny part about it. With all the build up and once the event’s over, it’s just like,

they’re just people aren’t they? Another one of my mates, a fella by the name of Bembrick…they had what they called the cages. They were on guard in there and they apparently had a good supply of chianti and cognac as well, so they got the prisoners and they filled them up with one or the other,

chianti I think it was. They were pretending to drink and the Italians were gulping it down. One bloke got so full he almost bit his tongue off. There was no what I’d call anger against them because once it was finished it was finished.

I didn’t get close enough to get into trouble with the Japanese.

We …because they were getting pushed back. That was the worst part, getting pushed back. Advancing seems to be…you’ve got more control of the situation. It’s when they get pushed back that they get into trouble. Our fellas did when they were retreating from the Kokoda area. They were pretty badly beaten up.

The early division, the 7th Division and the militia group. But when we were advancing, the people in the second line…that they say I was in, were reasonably peaceful. In the 7th Division, a young fella named Kingsbury [Pte Bruce Kingsbury, 2/14 Bn] I think it was got a VC [Victoria Cross] because the Japanese were attacking battalion headquarters. He put up a

good performance with a Bren gun. You wouldn’t get that situation while you were advancing because you were in control of the situation.

Practically nothing. Not really. I remember we went to Sidi Haneish.

I had gone to the canteen and before I could get back to where I was camped, this dust storm blew up and you could feel the grains. They felt quite big. You just couldn’t move in it. We had one or two while we were in the advance. But I haven’t clear memories of it. It was just one of those things…once it’s gone it’s gone.

It’s hard to be specific but uncomfortable particularly from the airmen’s point of view

because they were trying to beat up as many people as they could. I remember the first raid we got involved in at Pinios Gorge when we were at the end of the first part of the retreat, we’d been watching flights of Stukas going over to another area where the New Zealanders were, 30 at a time with not much between them.

I was watching them and at about eleven o’clock I saw another lot come over and I just looked up and thought, ‘Jeez these are ours’ and they certainly were. I don’t know how I got that idea because there had been several before that, but this lot had a look about them I think, and they started doing their…they get into a circle. They pick a target and the boss starts driving and they all follow after. But funny enough as far as I was concerned, they seemed to be bombing along the edges,

right in the middle of a sort of valley. A shallow valley. And the bombs didn’t seem to be near us and I thought at the time you could tell the difference between German and Italian bombs. I felt the Italians they just wouldn’t burn sort of thing. But with the Germans, once they were dropping from the Stukas, there was a tearing sound. The metal ripping you know, with a great explosion.

That’s about as much as I can remember.

As I said, there was only one rule in our area because you were responding to manoeuvres you see. I know the [2/] 8th Battalion and the 19th Brigade got into some very heavy fighting when they were in contact and

being directly shelled. I was just reading about it just recently actually. They were having to withdraw under fire and that would have been pretty stressful. But most of ours, they were just coming from one direction and we just had to keep falling back without any threats except from the air. When we got to Larisa it was a bit different there because

they were put in position. I didn’t see this. I had to go out to the company from the battalion to take a message, and I was talking to the boys. But I didn’t see the river in front. I must not have gone far enough to be able to see it. They were forming over there and they reckoned there had been thousands of them. They began an attack

and those forward companies suffered a bit. But rather back there was nothing that was affecting us. Except the air blokes. The message I had to take was that they were to move in accordance with a plan previously discussed. When in effect they were going to withdraw from that position at

about three o’clock. But there was some misunderstanding. Some people either didn’t get the message or something happened because in the books I was reading, one of the officer’s went to our officer and told him that there was to be a withdrawal and he said, “Well you had better keep that bit of paper.” We didn’t take bits of paper, he might have written it down, because when you get back, if anything happens

when you get back you could have easily have been in trouble. But anyway, when I got back to battalion headquarters, they were loading trucks and moving out. The truck I got on, they were all aboard actually and they said, get on. And I said, I don’t think so, we’d better stop here, there’s two of us. I don’t know if we were the last back or what.

Anyway everyone was yelling, “We’re going, we’re going.” And we didn’t know any different so we got on the truck. As I said we picked up a New Zealander who’d been bombed and we were on the road. There was a tank attack late that night. Our blokes were overawed. They only had rifles. There was a New Zealand gun operating there.

And they were doing some good work but they ran out of ammunition. So our fellas were just firing rifles and Bren guns. They killed one tank commander but I don’t know if they had much effect. I think they made one short withdrawal and finally decided they couldn’t hold their position and would have to make their way the best they could.

At that time one truck was moving out. It had a doctor and a young signaller on board, and a fella named Hoddinott was on board and as they were going down the road they were stopped by a machine gun post, I think that’s the way it goes, and he and another bloke got out and cleared the hold up. The doctor and the young signaller…the doctor was killed and the signaller was

apparently seriously wounded and we thought he had been killed. But there was a report in one of the local papers, say Bulgaria or something like that that he actually died of wounds sometime after that particular incident.

We wouldn’t have known about that because we didn’t have access to that sort of information.

It wouldn’t have been in the newspapers anyway. No we didn’t know about that. We just went where we were asked to go.

Oh yes. Crete was a bit the same. Some people were deeply involved and some were in areas where they didn’t get so caught up.

We had about…I don’t want to say anything I’m not dead sure about. I know some of them were upset by the situation. The fella I was doing the running with, my mate, he got captured in Crete. He spent four years in Germany. I think he got released

because he got ill. He was one of the unlucky ones. He was in the salt mines in Poland I think. Another flyer…I ran into another bloke later after the war who was a signaller. He was on a farm. The people had lost their son in Russia and they treated him like a son. After the war, I don’t know how long after but he actually went back to visit them. The same situation. It was a good

story.

Oh not a lot really. They used to come around selling fruit and stuff like that. When the Japanese threat evolved, the signallers and a section of riflemen were posted on lookout points.

Quite a number of them. Usually the people doing the rubber tapping…(phone ringing) shall I answer that?

Got some sound effects.

Two weeks. There wasn’t much you could do actually. First of all I sent a telegram to Mavis and she booked a room in what they called the Cranbrook Hotel, Rose Bay on the waterfront.

When I met her a lot of people were jumping down and screaming, but we were very quiet about it all. We got a cab. We sat in the cab and didn’t want to talk because we didn’t want to

share a few words with the taxi driver. And then we got out to Cranbrook. I came from Tempe and that was Rose Bay. We stopped the night and the next day we went to the local agents and asked if we could find something else. We got into Double Bay and a house, which used to belong to Lowes, Lowes clothier. They’re still going.

When we got there it was a room about 20 by 20 with stacks of room and you could look out the window. It was a nice outlook. We stayed there for the two weeks. We used to go down to the local restaurants for meals. Oh we went swimming and the occasional pictures. It was only two weeks you know.

No. I didn’t feel any awkwardness. It was just like being home wasn’t it?

They took us to Greta and after a few days I found out that the married blokes were booking accommodation and their wives were coming up and they were stopping there. So I thought, ‘Oh blow it.’

So I did get a contact and told Mavis, and I think the next day they closed the camp. I wanted to ring her up or send her a telegram and they wouldn’t let me. So I wasn’t going to leave her standing on Maitland Station all night, so I just walked out. When we got to Maitland the trains were all gone, so we stopped in the pub.

The next morning I went home with her. I think I only stopped for one night. Then I went into Victoria Barracks and asked if they could get me a travel warrant so I could get back to my unit. But instead of that they put me in goal.

No, at Victoria Barracks. They’ve got one of the 1840 prisons there. It’s sort of that shape. Not a square thing. What do you call it? A hole in the wall and there were I think eight blokes in there. And that’s how I spent…the next day I looked out the window and they were all going to the football. If I’d known that I wouldn’t have come back. I was stuck there.

I hadn’t got punished yet. No, I didn’t like the atmosphere though. There were some lousy characters there. I kept pretty much to myself. And one day…you get to know these things, lunch was coming up so I got up and went and stood by the entry to the mess, and the next thing the door opened and two or three

provosts [military police] jumped down and pulled me in inside. I was quick enough to get out of their grasp and get in the corner. They said, “Get in the cell.” And I said, “Well you put me in.” The whole weekend I was very sour. They put me out again, so I got out of that lot. In the finish we had to face the local colonel

and they put us on the train. But before they moved us they put handcuffs on us. There was three of us there out of the 16th Brigade and we said we don’t want them, so after a bit of a discussion they said we’ll put them on you and you’ll keep them on until you get to Brisbane. So they put us in a bus and we get into Central and …

I don’t think Mavis knew I was going, and we were walking across the main hall in there. We had our hands in our pockets to hide the handcuffs. I suppose I might have had my hand in his pocket or he might have had his in mine. He was met by his mother and I thought this is crook. This might be the last time she sees this bloke. I think his name was Cole. The other bloke was the welterweight champion of the Division.

He accepted the situation but he would have been a bit of a nuisance if they hadn’t told us they were going to keep the handcuffs on us. So we got on the train and Mavis turned up. I had a newspaper so I put the newspaper over my hands. She couldn’t see the handcuffs. Then we went off on the train.

They did take them off us. There were people there whose intention it was to shoot through as soon as they were undone, but we wanted to go back and that was it.

Nothing happened in Brisbane because the ship was in and waiting for us to go. Actually I was on an earlier ship, the [SS] Anhui A.N.H.U.I. but I missed that and was put on the Paine Wingate which

was one of those Liberty ships which was the word I was looking for before. One of the officers apparently was saying a few words about us coming back with provosts. Some bloke was going to chuck him in the water if he didn’t shut up. I think he shut up. We got on board and we did the trip up to New Guinea in relative discomfort.

That’s right. They had got to Ioribaiwa. What had happened, I think it was a bit each way. They had dragged two twenty five pounders up within range and they had shelled the Japanese.

Apparently the people could hear the Japs squealing when the shelling was going on. That’s all I know but apparently they were much relieved when the artillery started operating. I think they withdrew and that’s when the chase started.

We had been there for a couple of weeks before they started moving out. In round terms.

They really…we might have started at about the same time they started to withdraw. I don’t know how far away it was.

I think there was but I couldn’t be positive about it. Once they start running you’re on an advantage

irrespective of how you feel about it. That’s all.

I don’t know if we knew much about MacArthur.

I don’t think we knew much about that because

we were well on the way. I know the day we started down the mountain at a place called Owens Corner into the valley, it was a very steep hill. He was…MacArthur, Forde and Blamey were sitting in a jeep as we went passed. There’s a photo around of three of our fellas talking to

MacArthur. I don’t know if I’ve got a copy of it. Later on we got to know about him saying that the speed of the advance and that they weren’t putting enough effort into the situation. Tubby Allen, our commanding general sent a message back in effect that the

nature of the country has to be considered to be able to understand the reasons. That went around the town very quickly and everybody agreed with that lot. That was about all there was to it. Nobody really thought much of that situation. The fact that he said those kind of things. He had to take it back didn’t he.

Yes I can. A mate of mine used to be friendly with a group…he was a Tech student. They were doing electrical engineering. They met a couple of girls in Rose Bay.

One day they were having a picnic down in the park. I didn’t have any attachments at the time and my mate asked me if I’d like to go. I was waiting there to see who was turning up and Mavis arrived. We had quite a good day and we sort of got together then. This was about late 1937. That was it.

Oh yes. Regularly.

Well we had final leave. We didn’t think about it before that. We just turned up to see her dad…I wasn’t a great talker even then. Mavis had to say,

“Neville’s got something to say.” And it went on from there. When I was pushed into it I knew what to say. He accepted the idea. I don’t know why, and that was it. So we arranged…that was towards the end of December. We arranged to have a wedding at St Michael’s Church in Flinders Street

where her parents got married. I had to go back to camp on that particular day. I got out and walked out into town. My mother and two sisters were there and …the wedding was fixed up and after that…our wedding breakfast was milkshakes and coffee at a milk bar.

Quite a performance.

We were signed up both ways, Army and marriage and there was no way of avoiding getting on the ship. No trouble really. We had an interesting experience on the day the ship sailed. I think I told

you something about that. We were getting well down the harbour and I’d been looking down for a while and I went down to the cabin to read a book. My mate Laurie Walsh came rushing down and said he had seen her on a launch. On a ship it takes a while to get used to where you’re going, so I ran straight up the companionways, down to the stern and looking over I saw this launch. It was just turning away.

If I had been half a minute later I would have missed her. So that was our farewell.

I didn’t link the two. There were two things. One we wanted to do and one I had to do. No I didn’t feel any virtue in that.

Oh it was yes. I had my little mantra. When I hoped into bed I used to say, “I love you, I love you.” That went on everyday. She didn’t know that. And of course most of the time, I suppose in the early days, we’d be out there having these lectures and I’d be…

my mind would be in Australia. It worked all right.

In what way?

As I said, on the day of the attack, we were lined up and we were third into action. We were supposed to start at about half past seven I think. It was still virtually dark. It was mid winter really. So after the initial

bombardments against us, we got moving and I don’t know how they found their way myself. You could virtually march from the silhouette of the fella in front of you. As we were going along, what we called…bouncing blue balls were flying around and it looked as though you could touch them…catch them. While I was going along I looked out further

and one of them went flying across the sky. I think they were anti tank shells. We were getting the over flow. Some were fired and these were just bouncing away from where the target was. We got along and daylight came and they began to shell us as we were moving. We apparently got ahead of our schedule and an officer came up in his carrier and asked us

to go to ground and wait until he could tell us how the situation was.

Oh yes. Open formation. I suppose we were in single file but spread 30, 40, 50 yards between sections.

Oh it was reasonably flat. The surface was

stony and desert like. It wasn’t a sandy desert. It was a hard surface. I’ve got a picture there I can show you. Scattered with small stones around. There was not much growth. There may have been the occasional saltbush thing. There wasn’t much growth in that area.

We hadn’t reached it at that stage. We were something like a thousand yards away from it. But when we went to ground after the adjutant spoke to us, a shell…it must have been one of these anti tank things flew past my head and the fella along side me, past his feet, and we said, “Jeez what was that?” It made a fierce sound. But nothing

more happened in that time. So then we had to start off again. I don’t remember much shelling. There must have been a bit. We got within about three hundreds yards of the wire and the company commander said to me, “Go off and mark the opening.” And I said, “Who me?” And he said, “Yes.” So off I went.

That they had blown the wire to get through. You could

actually see where it was, but he wanted me to go up and mark it. So off I went and as I was approaching it there was a Lysander aircraft, a reconnaissance aircraft flying down quite low…maybe three or four hundred feet. The anti-aircraft were onto it, so I thought that’s not going to be much fun up there because the shrapnel will be flying…or should I say fragmentation.

When I got there I thought I had better keep moving around, not to be a standing target. But they didn’t have that kind of consideration and they went everywhere. As I was walking around I was just looking at the ground and one of these fragments landed a few feet away from me. It was sort of like a spear in the ground. Finally the company caught up and we

took off under the command of the company commander on the bearing they’d nominated and as we were moving along inside the wire, the colonel came up in his carrier. He had a pipe in his mouth and was standing up. I think he had his standard cap on, not a steel helmet. He asked us how we were going. We had a small conversation

with him. Anyway he called the company commander over and as they were talking he said, “Where are you going now?” The company commander said, “There’s a water tower in here that we’ve got to take a bearing on and get ourselves lined up.” He stood by the carrier, took the bearing and the colonel roared out, “Get the hell out of here!”

Because the carrier would have diverted the compass you see. And so we had a bit of a laugh, the fellas.

No, no. The wire was blown and two battalions had been through before us.

Yes. It was only a single

wire but it was just blown open.

We weren’t, no.

Not really. I suppose they wouldn’t have had mines amongst their own defences though. As we went along there was still, not continuous

artillery fire…

I’d have to say we were apprehensive as I was saying before. I remember one incident a shell was coming and I reckon it was in my line. My knees sort of automatically buckled and I was on the ground.

The company commander roared and yelled, “Get up and keep moving.” I was going to get up but maybe he thought I was going to stop down. I think it was a bit stupid though. Standing while the shells were exploding. You’d cop the fragments. They wanted to keep moving so I suppose it made it a more difficult target.

Well no. I don’t remember anything like that. The sound that caused an extra bit of interest is when the bullets started to fly. It must have been a couple of thousand yards…a machine gun I guess. The blokes would say, “What’s that?” I remember saying, “Bullets!” There’s nothing you can do.

I don’t think…you’d be feeling concerned that you might cop one, but there’s nothing more as far as I can remember now. A long time ago.

We were approaching the area where the objective was. We came across a low stonewall they had built across

a particular area. It was right angled to our movement. We went to ground behind that and stayed there for a while, five minutes or something while the officers looked around the situation. While we were there one of the fellas had apparently gone into a shelter the Italians had had, one of their defences. And a shell landed in it. He was the first fella

we had killed. A fella named Ray Coates. Then they said, “We’ve got to go.” So I walked up…they had us spread out a bit and climbed up on the wall…it was only a few feet high. As I jumped over it three bullets landed right where my foot landed. There was about that much difference between my foot and …

I didn’t hear any sounds of danger from then on because our artillery was still firing pretty heavily. Someone once described it as a ‘very colourful situation’. The dust and the sun rising right in our eyes. But by the time we had got close to the objective it had risen far enough

for us to see what was going on.

Oh we didn’t even think about that. You were sort of on your own. I don’t know if there was any order given. The fellas went to ground and fired on the target, which must have been three or four hundred yards or something like that. No, I remember exactly.

It was about two hundred and fifty yards because I had my sights on two hundred. I hadn’t changed them as we should. I had been firing at the target…or what I presumed was the target. It wasn’t until I fired the full magazine that I saw one of the bullets hit the rock wall. Perhaps they might have been going into the gaps at the time. So I reckon it was about two hundred and fifty yards from the defences.

Oh no. You wouldn’t be able to hear that because it was pretty noisy. Then as far as I could see, they all got up together and started advancing on the objective.

The ground was so hard they had what they called ‘sangers’, which was like a stonewall. It was the height of a person depending on how the ground was. When we approached it, it was about chest high. I was telling the newspaper bloke how we got onto that situation. He said we stormed it.

You can’t storm a brick wall. You can storm a trench but not a rock wall. But anyway, between the time we started to advance again, we were getting quite close and a mate came up to me and said, “can you help me fix my rifle?” He had apparently taken the magazine out so he could fill it. And when he went to put it back it jammed. We were standing there about a

hundred yards from the Italians trying to fix this…trying to knock the magazine into the rifle. I thought we’d better lie down while we’re doing this. I thought we might be a target. So we did that and got it going and of course we were about fifty yards behind the mob. Virtually they had gone up a rise and out of our sight. So we got to the …a little wadi

in a depression and then it went up hill again on top of which the fences were. The fire was so heavy we thought we’d better go down a bit and there might be a break. So we went down about twenty yards. It was still going so we went down another twenty. Still going, so we thought we have to go over now. When we got up to the rise…

I’ve forgotten much of the effects, but there was a group on our left, which turned out to be a platoon from the [2/] 2nd and [2/] 1st battalion. They’d been…they had joined in with us. I don’t know for what reason whether they had made up their own minds or whether it had been arranged. As we got closer to the sanger, the Italians were throwing their grenades, which were mainly percussion with shot. They weren’t like a Mills bomb.

The difference? Well the Italian one was like a light aluminium structure. It was filled with shot and when you threw it, it exploded on contact. The Mills bomb was cast iron, cast metal. It exploded from a detonator. It was much more effective

A four second delay.

You couldn’t see, only heads. You were concentrating on the line you were on. But as I was going up the hill I saw one of these fellas get hit

with one of these Italians grenades and he was hopping across our front. Then he sat on a rock which was about thirty yards from the sanger. I worked my way across to him and said, “Are you all right?” He said, “Yes.” He said, “Go up there and kill the bastards.” You don’t want to be too rough on them. By this time, I hadn’t noticed, I had caught up with my group and

it turned out they had been given an order: “Front row kneeling, back row standing to open fire.” But I had got past without knowing this was going on. I got up on the wall and I was maybe twenty yards ahead of them and not knowing it by the way. As I was getting on to it, I had to put my rifle

on the top and I felt a bit vulnerable then. I had nothing to help me. Eventually I stood up and walked along the top of it to a machine gun post. I made a few threatening gestures with my bayonet. About three times just to see if they were interested sort of thing and so I jumped down and went into a circle.

The Italians were in…shock, I think that’s all you can say. They were running from somewhere I couldn’t see, to the other end of the Sanger. They were in the middle of this Sanger, a foreign legion fort if you know what I mean. It was built on the same method as the wall. Loose stones

sort of thing. Twelve to fifteen feet high. It would have been a lookout as well officer’s quarters. This fella appeared behind there and he still had his Breda with him, a light machine gun, so I stopped him and told him to put it down. He put it down, dropped down beside it and went through the unloading procedure, then he picked it up to take it away with him. So I knocked it down with my bayonet this time and let him know I meant for him to leave it.

So he dropped it and went off on his own.

Oh yes. The other group, the 1st Battalion. I don’t know how it came about but they were just slightly ahead of the other lot. I met one of the blokes in there. I didn’t recognise him and I wondered who he was. He turned out to be a 2nd or 1st Battalion. At that stage

a machine gun started firing, a lot of machine guns started firing from the base of the little fortress, and I was about 15 to 20 yards from that and I was wondering what I was going to do about it. I just happened to look around and the company commander and a sergeant were turning the machine gun around that I had captured and they opened fire at the guns in the fortress.

That’s it as far as that part of it was concerned. [Neville Blundell was awarded the Military Medal for ‘conspicuous bravery and devotion at Bardia on 3 January 1941.’]

They were surrendering without any attempt to get away. It was pretty difficult because the defences they had were like islands. I don’t know how far the next lot were away from where we were. They were sort of isolated and they didn’t have anything in a sense to withdraw too. In the time they would

have had to.

It could have been the artillery barrage that might have upset them pretty much. And the fact that we were moving steadily. There was no going to ground at that stage. Some of the fellas said

that when they got into the area that some of the Italians …we had leather jerkins and they thought they were bullet proof. I did hear that the machine guns…they had to change their range as we were moving. Although we had to walk through early, apparently it was going over our head and we didn’t realise. While

we were moving around they arranged to send a group outside to the sanger to see…to have an eye on what was going on below. So because I was on my own in a sense I went with them and when we got out there there was a sanger…

it could have been a toilet for all I was concerned. It was sort of isolated by about one hundred, two hundred yards from the main sanger, and about eight fellas got in there, and there was no where for us so we just went and laid on the ground. A fella, his name was Bembrick, I didn’t realise that he was behind where I was and after a few moments I heard bullets going over head, and I thought

…I couldn’t see anyone firing. But apparently from that sanger they must have seen the firing because a sergeant of ours got up and fired on him and discouraged him probably. So there was no more rifle fire. In the meantime I had pulled a small rock, a sandstone rock about the width of my shoulders, I had to lie flat to see what was going on….

about that deep and about that thick and put that in front of me. Then a mate of mine, Johnny Armstrong came and joined me…I’m getting out of sequence. While I was there lying on the ground a couple of Italians appeared on the edge of the rise. Of course it was quite a steep hill, two or three hundred feet down to the bottom area. I went over.

They didn’t offer any resistance. I just took them prisoner. One was a WO [Warrant Officer] and he had a Sam Browne [belt with shoulder strap] on and I had just acquired an automatic pistol. Will we wait?

No, no. When I went over to them. I think…they didn’t have any arms. Actually they had driven up on a motorbike and sidecar and they had their hands up. So I just said, “Go that way,” sort of thing. I think they had been stopped at that sanger I was speaking about, and as I said

Johnny Armstrong joined me. I was kneeling up cutting the holster off the Italian bloke, and he complained. I shunted him off and I was still sawing away at the Sam Browne, and my mate said, “Tanks?” And I looked up and there was a tank about thirty yards away. They had a blue pennant on.

Our signal for our tanks was a blue pennant. It didn’t say what colour blue. This was a dark blue and I thought, “It must be one of ours.” I stood up, had taken half a step, had lifted my foot up and the bloke in the tank moved and his head came above the turret, and he had an Italian hat on. And I thought,

“What are we going to do?” And I saw my mate…oh no, when it happened I said, “Dagos!” And my mate had a couple of second start on me and he went for his life. So I reckon they would have had me well and truly in their sights if I hadn’t laid on the ground and put my little bit of rock up. By that time it was about that high instead of seven or eight inches. As I

laid there I thought, ‘Oh well. This is it.’ When I was standing the rock up it leant on my rifle. So I knocked it over and got the rifle out and I thought, “Will I have a shot at this bloke?” So I’m lying there trying to find the slit, the gunner slit, and I’m thinking, ‘I wonder who’s going to fire first?’ So I fired and got back behind my rock. They fired the cannon and it went over

my head, it was 40 millimetre or thereabouts, to see what I’d do. So I didn’t move of course and I’m thinking, ‘I’ll only have to worry about the machine gun.’ Not thinking the tank would move and shoot me from any side. Anyway they decided that rather than fire the machine gun they’d fire the canon.

It hit the rock and all I can remember is the rock being driven on to my helmet. I could feel myself lose my senses and I’m thinking, “Jeez I’m dying. What will the family think,” and things like that. Anyway, I don’t know how long it was, I opened my eyes and it was nice and bright, so I knew I was all right. I had to lay doggo because they were still there. You have all sorts of funny thoughts, artillery being fired and you are

put in some danger. But they eventually went away. I heard voices and looked up and they’d gone all right.

What?

Oh yes. As soon as I opened my eyes I realised I would have to keep still. I had my hands tucked in like that see, and I was thinking, ‘They’ll see the whites of my knuckles.’

That's it. They went away. In the meantime one fella had gone out to attack them with a grenade and I think the grenade got caught…we were wearing gas gear at that time. It got caught in there and killed him.

They fired on the company commander who thought they were British tanks and he was going over to talk to them. They knocked the rifle out of his hands and his batman was killed. That’s Peter Tambakis who had been to the company on the start line and was savage because we were laughing. He was killed. Then I just went back into the fortress then and sat there thinking,

“How did I get out of that?”

Would you like to know the whole story? The signallers with whom I used to move. We were …

at the back of the sangers. They had individual sort of shelters. They had the rock walls in there as well, and of course the officers were in there discussing the action of the day. I wasn’t there at the time. I talked to one of my mates. And they heard them say, they were discussing the action and they said, “Well we think everyone deserved a medal,”

but I was outstanding. That was their opinion and they were going to recommend me for a decoration. So I came back to their area, and the first thing they said was, “You’ve been recommended.” I said, “Bullshit.”

And then I couldn’t believe it because I didn’t think there was anything of any consequence that I had done. It wasn’t like someone rushing out and doing something extraordinary. It was just a straightforward procedure. And I didn’t think it was warranted, the decoration. So I spent the time…people were congratulating me and I kept saying, “It’s wrong, it’s wrong.” Another mate, Max Russel came up and he was

carrying a ten gallon tin of cognac and I was arguing with him about it, and I got frustrated and I said, “Give me the can,” and glugged it down. And not being a drinker that was my real taste of alcohol that I had drunk, apart from medicinal rum. And it made me very talkative. I talked to other chaps around the place and one bloke finally said,

“Go to bed Blundell.” So I went off to my mate. During the night we could hear track vehicles moving and we were concerned that there might be tanks again. We weren’t sure if we should raise any alarm or just disregard it. We eventually decided not to bother. He could have been someone a fair distance away because it was very quiet

and the noise carries, especially that sort of sound. That was the end of the day.

Yes, I look at it as proof I was there. I don’t have any great excitement about it. It’s a bit of an embarrassment in a sense to me.

Well as I said, it was the opinion of the officers. I was told that as I was approaching the wall they were throwing these grenades. But I didn’t see any of that. Whether it was true or not I don’t know.

In effect I was surrounded by smoke and flames. I don’t have a recollection of it, so I don’t think about that. It’s just one of those things.

I don’t know, we never discussed those things.

When they left the area where we were, they went up behind the sanger towards where the battalion headquarters had been established. Someone had sent a runner to the colonel. He’d been moving around apparently and let him know that

there were tanks in the area. He had taken some action because apparently they were virtually tracking him. And while they were in that area, two chaps, Sergeant Wyeth and Lieutenant Coleman had engaged

on their way out and he had an anti tank rifle which would have been relatively ineffective because they were only for very light stuff and Coleman had been hit and seriously wounded. One of the stretcher-bearers went out and pulled him in behind cover, Tom Watson his name was and treated him. While he was treating him this chap Coleman sort of mumbled,

“Stupid bastard,” talking about himself and I think he died soon after. In the meantime the 16th Brigade Anti-Tank Company was coming towards our position. There were three guns. They deployed and started to open fire.

One gun apparently got caught in a position which he had to back out of so he could engage the tank, and by the time they had done that it must have been within 30 yards of them, and they engaged it and destroyed it. Apparently though the engine kept going and creeping towards them. So they fired a couple more shots at it and the sergeant’s gun

was more in the open. This was all happening within a hundred yards and it was said that his gun destroyed four tanks, but the tanks scored two hits on his. The first one blew them off the gun and they got back up and knocked it out obviously. The third gun only fired one shot

and its bridge bolt got hit by shrapnel so it was useless and they were out of it straight away. The first gunner I mentioned fired 75 rounds. So there were tanks full of shells. Apparently the shells could penetrate but they couldn’t go right through the turret and they were spinning around inside them and they were mincing the fellas up inside.

Before that they had…there was an Italian hospital and two of our men had gone to the hospital, I think one was having trouble with his feet, for some treatment if they could get it, and while they were in there the tanks approached their area and they charged. There was a wall around it, and they

charged that and tried to get over it. They backed off and got out and captured these two chaps. They thought they were going to get shot at the time. The tank people took their arms and equipment and put them in their own tanks. They took the fellas’ great coats and they went off. That’s when they got engaged with the

anti tank guns. One of the …our chaps came over the top of the area with a Bren gun and opened fire on the blokes who were guarding the two who had been taken prisoner. They recovered without any difficulty. That was the end of the day as far as that was concerned. Six of them.

I could only see one. They might have been over the rim of the hill and I was looking in one direction and there was no chance of me seeing anything else. That’s about it.

We’d moved up to….

I think I mentioned being at Daraya. We had been driven in buses and various other things up to another point. They were private drivers, they weren’t Army people.

We changed then to Indian trucks and were taken up to about five to ten miles from Damascus. We went to ground there. Some people were dug in but we didn’t have any tools to dig where we were. There was a company in front of us. The group I was with …

battalion headquarters…Headquarter Company and we were in position there and the French started to shell that area, and we considered that the trucks were drawing the fire, so we told them to shoot through, and they were quite happy to do so. One man had been hit by the artillery fire. He was carried out. He wasn’t seriously injured.

It was towards dusk or four o’clock and we were put in trucks and then driven up to…we were then a couple of hundred yards from the area in which we were to operate. While we were lying on the ground there a couple of bombers appeared and caused a bit of panic. Everyone sort of scattered because we still had thoughts of Greece

in our minds in my opinion. Anyway we reformed again and we were waiting for the time to arrive so we could take off. Just opposite there was a big explosion, I didn’t hear any sound but it was a great white cloud went up and it turned out to be, I think, a small arms cache.

Probably it ignited like a fire rather than exploding. But there was no sound, we couldn’t believe it. Anyway the movement started and the groups had their various objectives which were forts on top of the hill. We were supposed to have an objective which was another smallish fort and so we approached it. There was

no fighting there, as far as I can remember.

As far as I was aware. They were all on top of this one hill. There were about three of them actually. The one we had to go to, Fort Sarrail [?]…I think it was more of a barracks building rather than a fortress. But as we approached that the signals officer told me to go and get the truck and

bring it back. I wandered off. I think I was on top of a hill and when I got to the transport people they had been shelled quite consistently all afternoon, and the truck I had to take back…it was just a utility and it had been peppered

with fragments. Funny, its number 4320 which was my regimental number. We were joking with the driver that my number was on that shell. Anyway we got on the truck and drove back and when we got back…I didn’t like closed areas see, because they were obvious targets. So I said, “I’ll stop with you. I don’t want to go up there.” And I said, “Go over and tell the

sergeant major.” And he said in a few words, “Go up and tell him yourself.” I asked him to tell the signal officer that we had the truck there and I was going to stop with the truck. So he said, “You go up and tell him yourself.” So I go up there and there’s beds and everything in this room where they were, and I thought this is better than sleeping on the dirt. We didn’t explore the place to see what the other situations were,

but the fort was a square building and in the centre they had another accommodation and there was a ten foot wide passage all around it. The gate was in the alley that we were in, and so about four o’clock in the morning they told us to stand-to

and we winged and carried on to be up at this time in the morning. Then the machine guns started firing and the French had killed the two sentries and we were stuck at the gate. There was a machine gun on either side of the gate. They were throwing bombs in. The people nearest the gate were throwing grenades at them.

Two of the fellas got shrapnel wounds. It was pretty hopeless. We couldn’t get out of the building. It was certain death. We arranged in our room, there must have been 10 or 12 blokes in there to shoot the beds up and put the matrasses around it, so if they threw grenades in then we would have a little bit of protection.

And we might be able to use our rifles if anyone tried to get into it. While we were doing this…I could hear someone in the next room – it’s funny how you hear things. It was a fella speaking in French and it was one of the officer’s offering to surrender. We didn’t.

No. I knew it was French but I didn’t know what he was saying.

It was an obvious conversation between the French blokes. The troops were mainly Senegalese and the officers ,and the NCOs I think could have been French. I think they were two WO’s.

I think they offered no opposition. They just had to open the gate and walk in. While they were throwing these bombs, a couple of us went

up to the wall and looked out. We could see these jumping jacks…bang, bang, bang, hopping around. They looked like herring tins. They were throwing other grenades as well. So we had to front up for surrender which was a bit of an unpleasant thought. Here were these Italians, and we didn’t have much of an opinion of them with their hands up.

And now we were getting the treatment. So we went out into the alley way and they collected us. I’d taken out of my sack a tin of Red Feather Camp Pie, something to eat. One of these Senegalese fellas saw it and made me dump it on the ground. When he wasn’t looking I picked it up again. He put his rifle

about that far from my head. I don’t know whether he would have fired or not, but the French NCO, warrant officer told him not to bother, to let me keep it. So when they marched us off, two of our fellas were wounded, so four of us were carrying them. We had a fair distance to move. By this time it was getting light and we could see

what was going on. We went down a gully; I think there were about 30 of us, POWs. Maybe a few more. As we were going we came across an outpost. Our troops and the Italians, not the Italians, the

French were intermingled so the CO who was with us instructed this outpost to surrender rather than get engaged in a fight. They would have killed as many of ours as they would the other fellows. They came down…two of them were in a position. One bloke, his name was Douzans, we reckoned he was a French man, he had this nickname – he had it written on his steel helmet.

The other chap, a bloke by the name of McGurren, he said that as they were coming up the hill old Douzans was trying to rub this French name off his helmet. The next thing they realised there were two fellas with three cornered bayonets, so they became prisoners.

At that stage yes, there was nothing dangerous, except that fella who wanted to shoot me because I kept picking up the tin of camp pie.

Oh I think so. I remember one little conversation. The French WO said, “C’est la guerre. [That’s war]” I knew that one.

He said, “Germans – will slice your head off.” They just treated us like another people.

You wouldn’t have a clue. What happened was, as we were carrying these fellas down the hill, what happened was we came across a Citroen car so

I suggested we put the fellas in and just drive them down. When we got them into the car one of the WOs said, “No key!” So I said, “We’ll push it.” It was all down hill so we had to push it a little way and just keep the brakes on. So we went down the hill and they had quite a biggish square area,

an open area. So we got… in that area there was a big two-storey building and there was a guard post at the entrance. That’s where we finished up. Suddenly an Indian carrier appeared and drove out in the middle. He sat there with the machine guns aimed at the group. Two of the Frenchmen had hopped

out with their light machine guns and one bloke looked down. He pointed to our fellas, no magazine. He was wasting his time. The colonel offered to go down and tell them to go away. He did that and returned. He should have hopped in the carrier and went off. He honoured his promise. The carrier turned around and

started to go back to where it had come from. It went twenty or thirty yards and spun around and opened fire. The two blokes in the car hopped out and went over the wall… they previously couldn’t walk. They dashed across the little space between them and jumped over the wall. I went with them. The fire was mainly directed at the main group. We were under cover then.

In that incident, the colonel was wounded in the arm and two of our fellas were killed. Also a couple of the Senegalese fellas.

Yes.

No, they made up their mind about that. They were driving away apparently and must have decided

it wasn’t right and so they opened fire. Anyway, we weren’t taken. That was where we stayed, in the hole. The other people were taken over to Fort Weygand. Some of them were left outside under guard at Weygand.

This was part of their defences.

We just stopped in the hole where we were. Anyway…

The two wounded men. I finished up with them.

Yes. They probably didn’t see us. They were watching the carrier. We were just lucky we took the right decision in a sense. It wasn’t much of a decision, just run for your life.

Then we were stuck there for the rest of the day. It was a pretty hot day. It was the middle of summer. It was different to the desert. A very hot area in Damascus. The fellas were getting a bit upset by the heat. Probably because of their wounds. When the British started shelling the area, they were shelling on top of the hill.

Probably a hundred yards from where we were. They were getting a bit worried. I just kept telling them, “they’re not anywhere near us, so don’t worry.”

No. It was one of those things we probably should have. We knew roughly how to bandage a small wound, but nothing of any size. We wouldn’t have been much use to them.

They had already been bandaged before we came down the hill. One was the sergeant and one the sergeant major. I was in distinguished company. After a while I decided…this big building, there might be someone up there, so I would go up there and see if I could get help for them. I’d

gone about…I was waving my hat to indicate I wasn’t going to cause any trouble…I happened to look around and saw this group of Senegalese creeping around this wall on the other side of the road, so I quickly ducked back to where I was. But I think they just went off without troubling anyone. There was no shooting. Then we had lunch on the campfire,

so that was a big relief.

They were French Army people.

No, they were just French soldiers and they had French WOs. I don’t think there were any French officers with them.

We learnt that somehow. They were tall, gangly fellows except the fella who was pointing his rifle at me. He was only a little fella. But they were quite tall men. So, after we had lunch we were just lying in the hole and I heard a fella moaning. So I thought

I’ll have a look. It was one of the black fellows. He’d been shot in his shin. It had hit the bone and his leg was just hanging on by flesh. I gave him a drink of my water and that was all I could do with him. The wound had stopped bleeding for some reason. There didn’t appear to be much around. That was that. Later on one of our sergeants

came up and said, “what are you doing down there?” We told him the story and put a group together and they rescued the others in the fortress. And they had a bit of trouble because while the shelling had been on, that was part of the target, that particular fort. One of the fellas said that the first thing they saw was one of the flagpoles had been shot off. Unfortunately a shell exploded

and smashed the glass in the window and one of our fellas was in the room and the glass had hit him in the throat and cut his jugular vein. He bled to death. He had only just joined us a few days before. So that was his unfortunate end. They relieved them then and that was the end of that day’s operation.

Let’s see.

No. The other group had been in at Barada Gorge and they had been attacked by tanks who had been trying to get through to Damascus I think. Our fellas had put telephone posts across the road to block

it. We didn’t have any anti tank armaments and … Sergeant Copeland was in charge of a section there, and they had attacked the tanks…they threw two inch mortar bombs at them. I don’t know…they’d be useless really because they have to be armed before they explode, so if you throw them

you don’t have any chance of arming them. The force of the power to fire the thing from the mortar that charges it see…there was no point in doing what he did. But anyway it was effective I think. They either surrendered or went away. I’m not too sure what happened. Later on, another

chap and I went into one of the buildings. There were buildings nearby, tearooms and things like that. It had a big archway…not so much an archway but a terrace extending. The fella said, you can go there with a Bren gun. It was looking straight down the road, and I thought that would be stupid because if anyone was going to be suspicious of something happening, they’d be looking straight at it I guess. So I rearranged

myself a bit so I could see but not to be quite so obvious. While we were there an Indian came in. They’d been in action on top of that hill across the other side of the gorge, and he’d been shot in the arm – much like the Senegalese fellow. It had gone in like that apparently, but it had torn all the flesh out and the bone was smashed inside it.

He would have to lose the arm in my opinion so we had the job of bandaging him up. It wasn’t bleeding either. That was a funny thing. He didn’t have any field dressing so we had to give him half each which was the procedure. If you have to fix someone up you use half and half. Half his and half yours. Obviously he had to have a splint.

So we looked around and found a French Hotchkiss machine gun. The bullets are in trays about that long and so we stuck that under his arm, wrapped it up and sent him on his way. We had some different experiences. From there we moved around up the road and into a point where we were supposed to just watch for tanks. That was pretty boring

because nothing came up. They gave me a Bren gun so I was sitting up on the hill, and thought, to fill the time I’ll pull it to pieces.

First of all it’s on a bipod. Gas-operated machine gun. There’s the barrel, then there’s the gas area underneath.

The butt and the trigger mechanism. The ammunition goes in at the top in a curved magazine to allow for the shape of the bullets. When you put two together they make a curve. To pull it apart, the butt comes off and a tracking business that holds it together.

And then you can take the block out and the firing mechanism. You just clean it up and put it back together. It’s pretty hard to really describe it. That was the main components, the barrel, the gas area and the bi-pod, that was all one, and then the butt, which had the trigger mechanism.

It was a Czechoslovakian made gun. It was made in a place called Brno, BRN, so that’s where the name came from. [The Bren gun was the product of a joint effort between a Czechoslovakian small-arms firm in Brno and a British firm in Enfield, hence the name BREN]

Yes, that was part of our training. One of the chaps was a bit more interested than all the others. He could disassemble and assemble a Bren gun in nine seconds in the dark!

Or blindfolded, whichever he chose. He had the art. Not a lot got that enthusiastic, or not many people.

We did…it was jungle training basically. We used to go out to a place named Mount Fisher, a jungle training area and spent maybe a week on some occasions.

It was really just exercises for the officers to get used to movement, movement at night and stuff like that. The troops just went along. The pawns.

Not really.

It was mainly the usual jungle combat. Patrolling and stuff like that. One night we were out there and apparently a wallaby was hopping through the joint. It disturbed someone and they made a noise and it came crashing through the bush and it landed on my chest. It could have been on my face. I could have been clawed. It kept going.

Actually in Ceylon we had done quite a lot of jungle training. We were quite lucky. We had a bit of an advantage on the average lot. They got used to the jungle conditions.

You’d better ask me that again, I’ve just lost the track.

What I was going to say was, we had quite a lot of casualties on the Kokoda Track and we were by that time

fifty-fifty reinforcements and experienced people. I suppose that was the best way to get the reinforcement people up to the standard they wanted.

We had two experiences working with the Americans. One was

seaborne invasion training and the other was a big exercise up in the back blocks of North Queensland in more or less open country. We were in a very deep valley and what happened was they had paratroopers and they were using live ammunition for the artillery. Planes

were dropping bombs. I wasn’t very excited about that because there was a possibility with artillery of drop shorts and …on one occasion a shell exploded. I have no idea how far away it was but one bloke was flown back from the explosion so it couldn’t have been too far away. I didn’t like the sound of that.

We watched the Americans doing their paratroop drops and one fella was caught up in a dead gum tree about thirty feet above the ground. Another fellow…

One fella went through a tree and broke his leg. It was a pretty dangerous business. But it wasn’t what you would call good paratroop country.

But that was all I was saying. We only saw them drop, we didn’t engage or anything.

Well as I say we didn’t really have any contact with them.

I don’t think anyone particularly liked the Americans. It’s one of those things with distance. You don’t get to meet them. But they were a bit brash I think is the best word.

Oh we didn’t get involved in the actually landing at all. We just did training. That was …what happened, we would go out in the barges and

practice getting off them and things like that, and they would race out to sea. It was quite windy and the water was choppy. A few of the fellas got seasick. We were watching a boat beside us and one bloke was up the front seasick…the Yank in his immaculate uniform was down the back steering, and when he vomited it just went off parallel

to the sea and the Yank copped the lot.

The LCP’s? LCPs they were called [Landing Craft Personnel]. There were just a barge with a drop down front so when they ran onto the beach you could run out onto the shore. After we did the training they did an exercise in which the barges were involved.

So we would take off from a point and move down the coast a few miles I guess, then make a landing. We had a Major Anderson who was the 2IC [second in command] in the battalion at that time, and he was a very enthusiastic fellow. As we were approaching the beach he moved down to the front and soon as the barge hit the beach the thing went down and he dashed out and

disappeared in the water. There was about five feet of water. The soldiers came behind him tip toeing across looking for dry areas, but he fell into a big hole. We went up a hill and occupied a position and that was the nature of the exercise.

The Americans had attacked it and occupied

it, but they just occupied and defended the area they had occupied. They sent us up there to relieve them so they could be released to go to the Philippines. They put the fleet together in the period we were in Aitape itself. They were putting the fleet to go there. There were quite a number of ships. I can’t remember

how many. But they were using our fellas who were about to go up to the front, they put them on a duty and they were carrying the coffins of the dead Americans – lead lined coffins. What happened, the bodies had been there for some time. They were full of body fluid and they were leaking,

and our blokes, instead of the Americans had to carry them to where ever they wanted them. That was a bit ridiculous I thought when you’re in a situation where you might be killed to have a bit of a foretaste.

We began to move up to where they had stopped. They had had a big battle at a place called Rin-da-mere River [probably referring to Driniumor River]

and I think they said that 10,000 Japanese were killed in that particular battle. We were due to carry on from that area. The 19th Brigade had been operating there before we got there and our immediate job was to relieve the 19th Brigade. There were near a place called Idakaibul

which was their supply base at that time. We started to move down the coast from Aitape to the Danmap River. We were transported on trucks most of the way I think. There was a bit of walking. Then we went off…when we got there at the Danmap, they were building quite a big bridge. It was maybe

a third to a half finished. Then we turned off and followed the river up, passed Idakaibul to near the position we were to occupy. There was a wire stretched across the river to help people

get over. We had to wade it anyway. I heard that one of the smaller men almost disappeared. We got over and

No it was just a wire stretched across the river and we just walked in the water. It was so we wouldn’t get washed away I guess. But we got across and moved up to the 8th Battalion position and stayed overnight.

It had been raining a fair amount later in the day. After dark it continued raining quite heavily and at about eleven o’clock we were woken by people walking by and talking. We said what’s going on and they said, a flood. So I got up and my foot was straight away in water. We didn’t know what the situation was so we just followed the mob. We didn’t move too far from that location.

We crossed a little …wasn’t so much a river but a sunken area where the water eventually began running quite heavily. We got there before it got too strong and just got behind trees to keep out of the wash of the water. One fellow was a bit slow getting there and they were doing all sorts of things

to get him across. He was a bit concerned. He might not have been able to swim or something like that. We stood there for quite a long time it seemed and the water gradually got up to there. We didn’t know what was going on up the river though. We were just standing there. I remember thinking, “well this is it.” But instead of getting greatly worried

I just calmed myself down somehow or other. But automatically I just said, “well this is it.”

Well we hadn’t been there long enough to know what was going on. We had just arrived at twelve o’clock. We had set up our meals area and accommodation. Actually someone had left a double bunk and we occupied that.

It was typical jungle area. It wasn’t terribly dense as I remember but it was typical jungle. Anyway the next thing we heard was that the machine-gun group and been put on an island which was fifty feet tall and that island had been totally washed away. The trees and everything were gone.

It was just a pile of stones hardly above water level. Those fellas, there were about twenty of them probably, seven at least were drowned and a lot of the others had been washed down the creek. One fellow had been washed ashore…he had been hanging onto a log I think, but he had been washed ashore and spent the night – as he told me, spent the night after covering himself with mud to keep the mosquitos off.

One young bloke who apparently was a good swimmer, he got ashore quite quickly in the area that we were in, but he didn’t know where he was so he stayed out all night. He had nothing on. In the morning there were about six or seven fellows on the other side of the creek in various stages of undress. The officer, a fellow by the name of Fernside was fully dressed…he had his pistol,

actually he had all his equipment. He was the only one. They say that there must have been a landslide up at the head of the river, which built up and broke through. It was quite an extraordinary flood. I mentioned the bridge because that got washed away down at the mouth, and I even heard it said it had been washed into the sea. Where we were was a joining of a creek and the river

and I suppose the joining of the force from both areas was what caused the problem with the island. It was a bit of a disaster. It was one of the most dramatic occasions of my experience. In the morning of course we had to try and get those blokes on the other side across. The river was still running strongly. They tried all kinds of things. They put a grenade in a grenade discharger

and tied a signal wire to it but the weight of the wire wouldn’t allow the bomb to travel the distance. Finally, I think one of the officers who was a strong swimmer went up the river a bit and swam across to these fellows. One body was discovered just nearby where we were. He had been washed down one of those little creeks I mentioned and his body was found

jammed under the trees. I didn’t recognise him although I had known him most of the time in the Army. It wasn’t so much…his body was all swollen and he had an obvious broken spine. The only way they identified him was that he had his wife’s name tattooed on his arm. That was a bit sad. He’d been with me all the time. He started

as an original in the unit. A bad way to die.

No. You just pick them up and take them away and that’s the end of it. You probably wouldn’t have buried anyone there. You were talking about funerals? Oh no.

Oh no. If you got shot that was it. They take you out on a stretcher and that’s the last you see of people.

The division had four hundred and fifty casualties in about 8 months and it was fairly strong,

although they were said to be undersupplied with food. It was much the same as Gona and Sanananda when they were virtually half dead and still fighting. That was their principal I guess. The casualties they suffered were about ten to one compared to ours. I didn’t believe it when I first saw it, but that was a fact.

Oh yes I finished up in the signals. We were with them but we wouldn’t be, generally part of it, although if we got under attack we would have to be riflemen. But with any of the advances though,

we didn’t have any great part in it.

I was quite enjoying it yes. As a duty.

Ours was only internal. They used to send two men with each company. In the battalion group,

they’d have an exchange…a ten-line exchange there and they would communicate with the brigades, but the people in the companies were just back to battalion headquarters. We had a wireless, but they weren’t much good. Once you had a bit of distance or in trees you couldn’t get contact. I remember going out with a group on a patrol and carrying one of those and

what we would use it for in the night was to listen to music from the West coast of America because we couldn’t contact the base.

We started off in January, February. We finished in August when the war ended. The 5th of August. Nearly 8 months actually.

We had rest periods along the way. Down the beach occasionally. When you were in reserve and other people were out in front. It was not all continuous action.

It was mainly, in a sense, company patrols were about the biggest that got involved. Maybe two companies in some situations. Probably one of our biggest actions was at a placed called Wonginara Mission when they sent two companies out to attack a Japanese general headquarters. They almost caught the general

but he got away. They used in that particular instance, native guides to get them there and then there was a bit of heavy action for a while but then they drove them out of the place.

Wewak wasn’t much of a place, a biggish headland and that was engaged by the 4th Battalion, the 2nd and 4th Battalions. They had that action and we were more or less supporting it at the time. But I didn’t see any township or anything like that. There must have been a little town there because later, after the war they took a group of people back as a sort of celebration.

But I don’t know much about that though.

I think they remained in the general area, a sort of a collection area until December or possibly a bit later than December. I’ve got documents about that.

Oh Japanese? I’m sorry, I’m talking about Australians.

No I think they…I don’t think there was any fighting. There might have been the odd character. There was talk about patrol activity. But as I said, it’s a long time ago now. We left…a mate and I left on the day after the war officially ended so we were right out of it by then.

I was reasonable. I don’t think I had any problems. We were fed well up there. They used to bring up frozen meat in boxes. If it happened in the company, say there was a platoon out on an action, then the stuff had to be

eaten so sometimes you had more than you’d expect to get. Good generous steak instead of bully beef and biscuits.

Absolutely. It was certainly taking a load of your shoulders. Actually I was near to the end of what I could have taken in a sense. Before Mount Shiburangu at a place called…I shouldn’t have started that should I. Anyway

there was an aerodrome and A company was on that position. At first we relieved 8th Battalion A company and the night we got there the Japs crept up and threw two grenades in. Nobody was injured but for the rest of the week the artillery was firing nearly every night. You never knew, just bang and that was it. You were awake and alert. On the last day of their occupation there

I was on duty and another Nip crept up and threw a grenade in just across the valley from where I was. And I remember as soon as the explosion had occurred the Bren gun was firing. Instantaneous, and that was a mate of mine called Stan Benbrick who had been an original member of the battalion. I thought

it was a pretty good effort. It affected me…I got the shakes. I wasn’t actually scared but I couldn’t control it so I reckon I had reached the end of my …I didn’t tell anybody. I just sat there until I calmed down. They’re the things you should report when you’re a soldier.

I felt embarrassed yes. But as I said when the explosion occurred, everybody turned out

We were relieved by someone else. After than I think we went back towards Shiburangu. Of course, that was the way it was because we finished up there when the war ended. No it was just one of those things.

No, it was really the end of the war as far as I was concerned. There were no actions after that. I remember, when we back to the battalion they used to say, we’ll go out and do this,

but I just didn’t feel comfortable. There were no obvious symptoms but I just didn’t feel comfortable.

No, well I just didn’t think of it that way. As I say I didn’t talk about it.

I was able to absorb the situation but it was a bad point.

I supposed I was. I suppose everybody was, but I had read a fair amount

in magazines about the war, so I had a fair understanding of what was on, but there was a big difference between reading and facing the music.

From the first day of action I guess, and I wouldn’t have been the only one actually.

I had a pretty heavy day the first day, so it might have accelerated things. Actually the bombing the week before, I mean we were bombed quite heavily and that was our actual first experience of explosions. It has to be a big introduction.

Five years, that would be right, yes.

Only that in my thinking…during the war I used to think I will have to do something better for myself after the war, so I made up my mind to try and improve my status.

Although I think we were a bit robbed with the COS [?], the Rehabilitation Training. I did the course at the Sydney Tech, Diploma of Excellence which is equal to a Leaving Certificate but only limited to four subjects though – the subjects they used in the courses.

What had happened after discharge there was a rule that if you were under 21, you could get any level of training you wanted or were capable of carrying out. At the same time they had the Universal Trainees and they did about 90 days, and their conditions were if they were under twenty two they could get any training they wanted.

When I approached them about this I said when I was twenty-two I was already overseas, so I couldn’t have qualified through that business, but they wouldn’t accept us. A lot of people were quite put out about that. From what I understand, in New Zealand,

the longer your service the bigger your benefits. I just had to make my own way after that. I was getting monetary support but I had to do it at night. You couldn’t get full time training. I think at the time the house was being built and I was working on the weekends trying to get the backyard into some sort of condition.

It was a pretty tough time. It did cause me a lot of personal anxiety and after about…I did the first two years all right, but after about 18 months I had to give it up because I was going around the bend, in a sense. I had to give it away for about five years then do the remainder, just to be sure of things. That was my…the main

complaint after the war.

Yes, of course I did. Particularly…it was a Labor Government. They had introduced this. You could hardly understand it if you had people who were doing 90 days training and were entitled to full benefits,

and you were in the same age group and you could get only part time training. It seemed quite unfair to me. I did dispute it for a long time but I had to give it up in the finish.

I didn’t think about that. That wasn’t part of my way of thinking

There were a lot of people…too many I suppose used to say, what Sydney needs is a good bombing, to understand what we had been doing. But I had an interest so I didn’t. I didn’t subscribe to that idea. There wouldn’t have been much point actually.

Actually we didn’t get into too much discussion. I don’t think people wanted to talk. The fellas mainly didn’t want to talk, or most of them. They didn’t want to get involved in any discussion. Our discussion was limited to the people we knew.

No, I didn’t want to upset her. I wrote very little about the war.

About the only thing I did include in a letter was the fact we had been captured and that in a sense was a bit of a joke. Not that it wasn’t serious at the time. But after it was all over it was just one of those funny things that happened.

Not really. We had it all out in our letters.

She kept all my letters. I was keeping hers, but when they went to Greece they tipped our kit bags down the well and that was it and I lost them. Bad luck. It would have been nice…actually there’s a film on at the moment about a fella whose letters home had been kept and he had kept his wife’s letters. He was fighting in Tobruk so that will be interesting.

My experiences? I did write about it. I used to just write about every day things, which used to make letter writing very hard for me. I hadn’t done much writing until I began writing letters. I was just determined that I wouldn’t say anything about it because it would cause people stress at home.

Actually I wrote home just before the Battle of Bardia, and I just said, “We’ve got some business to do,” or words to that effect and that was it. It was hardly a page. I couldn’t think of it. There was nothing to say. We weren’t allowed to discuss military matters; if you did the stuff was cut out.

No I didn’t no. I guess I was a bit solitary in a sense. My only concern about the state of the world was the strikes and stuff

that were then going on. During the war, wharfies were pretty regularly on strike and the soldiers were doing their work for them. The only thing I was crook about was that I didn’t have the chance of a nice job for a couple of months. I didn’t take much notice of the social aspects. Mavis was there and my family was there and that was it.

She was five months old.

It was unusual I would say. I met a fella whose baby was borne after he left in the first fleet and he didn’t see her for two and a half year. It was a bit of an advantage

I suppose to come home to a five months old. You wouldn’t have any difficulties with their attitudes.

As I recollect, it was reasonable.

I understand. It was reasonable.

I think it might have to do with the tank episode. What I did was worth being proud of.

I accept the fact that I could be killed. I didn’t do much about the attack but I wasn’t desperately anxious about the situation. If I could have been like that all the way, I could have been all right. I don’t think anyone understood that each experience takes a bit out of you…I suppose confidence and the ability to resist difficult situations.

Oh yes. I wasn’t very keen to go up there at all. Once, I can remember, as we were walking up the river, my mate Johnny Armstrong we were walking together. He was uncomfortable. I think he had haemorrhoids. He hadn’t told me he had this.

I was bitching pretty seriously and Johnny got angry and ripped around and ripped a left into my belly. So naturally my anger flared and then I thought, he’s my mate. You can’t go fighting in the jungle. I’ll never forget that, but I’ve never even mentioned it to him. But I’ll always remember that.

We supported each other. Not overtly but you stuck with your mate and that was it. We didn’t get into any really desperate situations and it didn’t require any extra stress in doing anything for each other…we were sharing it. One of the occasions when we were in Syria, when the Armistice

was arranged and we were with signals there. We had been under machine gun fire for a short time. Actually if it hadn’t been for a fellow who had just joined the unit spotting movement on the other side of the gully, up on the mountain we could easily have been massacred because he spotted the movement. No one

even bothered to see. I mean, I was looking up there but I couldn’t see anything. He said, “There’s movement up there,” and we were all on the west wall and completely open to the machine guns. So we all dashed over to the other wall. But if they had spotted us we would have been seriously inconvenienced.

Anyway, as it was getting dark the company commander said go and contact the battalion. So we were making our way across this enclosure and they fired a burst at us. John was a bit in front of me and he yelped and jumped through a hole…a sort of lower level of the wall and I went less quickly, and when we

got over the other side, I said, “How did you miss that rock there?” There was a big rock there, and he said, “Tthat’s the trouble, I didn’t!” When we contacted the battalion we had a signalling lamp and it was flashing like a searchlight. It was illuminating this rock and we were a bit concerned that they might take some action against us, but nothing happened. That was to let battalion know we were here.

And later on we got a message that there was to be an Armistice at twelve o’clock that night. At double oh five, the French artillery began firing and as far as I can remember it went on for about two hours. I was talking to a mate of mine who was in the 5th Field Regiment

and they wanted to return fire but the officers wouldn’t let them because of the Armistice. That was a bit stupid. Eventually they stopped firing. That was one of the worst moments because there was supposed to be no war and they were still shooting.

No, I don’t think so. I hadn’t been injured, so that was all you had to be concerned with.

During the war? Everyone has those. You have to do it at the time, there’s no good thinking about it later.

I don’t think I ever thought of things that way. I probably didn’t think, that’s it! I think just a general idea that that was the life we had

and that was it. You lived with it. I can’t think of anything I thought about. I just thought of getting out of it that was the main thing.

Our war, or war itself?

Oh no. I don’t think so. I wasn’t much of a thinker was I?

I think it has. I remember I used to work for Civil Aviation and there were a number of ex-service fellows there. We used to talk about different things but…this was 1947, I found

myself being upset, so I thought I’d better give it away. It was pretty fresh then. The more you think about those things they worse the effect. So, I say no I didn’t. Do what? I’ve lost the question now. No, I didn’t have any regrets.

I made up my mind I should give up the idea…I had all my histories. I had bought them especially to be able to read about what other people had experienced. I had to give that away as well. I’ve only used them since to check on things if I got into an argument or something of that nature.

Well a lot of the fellas used to indulge in high spirits.

Drinking and stuff like that. As I said, I didn’t drink. The first drink I had was in Bardia. Cognac. And later there was a chap whose birthday was the 1st of March and mine was the 2nd and I use to have a drink with him on my birthday. This was in Tobruk.

That led to a bit of misunderstanding. It was a bottle of whiskey I think. It affected me. I talked a bit too much. We were having a discussion. We were talking about a fella who had been appointed a sergeant in the platoon. The signals platoon. I was a runner and had no real direct connection with them. And I just said,

“I think it was unfair that he was promoted because he did nothing as far as signalling was concerned.” He was a messenger and had a motorbike and I used to walk. And he must have heard me. He came charging into the tent and threatened to punch me. I wasn’t very receptive to that idea but kept my mouth shut. Anyway, a mate of mine, a chap by the name of Laurie Kenworth.

who I had gone to school with. I met him when I enlisted on the day, he said, “you have to have me first,” and the chap went back to his tent. I suppose he realised he had been a bit stupid. That was one little incident. Generally speaking there were people who played a lot of cards.

I might have done a bit of reading. Probably letter writing was one of the ways I filled in time. I was pretty slow. I didn’t like to write about what was happening so you have to make things up.

I suppose I shouldn’t… This happened in

Lebanon. We had gone out on some publicity business and we were being entertained by a village family. They had a little girl about four or five and I was trying to win her…to come and talk to me. But she was shy and wasn’t interested. So

I wrote home this big letter about how I had been seduced by this particular girl. I had a description of her eyes and smile and all that kind of thing. And I wrote this home to Mavis and I got this letter back, which wasn’t entirely in agreement with my story.

Oh, I can only remember

that I had invented a story that wasn’t true and it had upset her in a sense, when she had first started to read it. I think I did say to her that she was all of four or five years old.

In the letters? Well we weren’t allowed to talk about Army matters and I

felt it was a waste of time trying to include it.

Oh no. It didn’t worry me. I had the attitude that we shouldn’t cause the people stress. My parents or Mavis. There’s no point in describing what’s going on and how you’re feeling about it. It only upset all the people. I had two things; I wasn’t going to bring home any souvenirs

and I wasn’t going to write any descriptive stuff about what was happening.

No I don’t think so. I just wasn’t interested in recording it. That’s why I wrote that little story of my own about the first three years.

Because in my letters I seemed to be going to the pictures and playing cricket and sundry things like that. Anyone would have thought that that was all that happened.

Well I just started out with that idea and I was going to put the thing out of my mind.

Yes. No souvenirs and

I remember we had a bit of a discussion in the tent about returned soldiers and RSL [Returned Services League] badges. I said, “If I wear one, the official one, not the club one, I might wear it behind my lapel, but I wouldn’t put it on the front.”

That was what I felt. I wasn’t interested in displaying but I didn’t know the war was going to last six years,

so I changed my mind, if I finished. But as far as souvenirs and stuff was concerned, but that was how I started out.

Well it was getting towards…or even at the stage when we were in Aitape in Wewak, it appeared it could easily go on for years. I felt certain about that. Then they dropped the bomb. If the bomb hadn’t been dropped it could have. No one appears to know.

Well I’ll tell you I felt it was good for us but I felt there was potential danger – without knowing anything about it. A potential danger for everyone else. I can remember that quite clearly. When they said they had killed 125,000 people with one bomb.

Well, as I said it looked like the end of the war,

but it wasn’t a good prospect.

If there were more wars and they could kill 125,000 people every time they dropped a bomb. There was something I was going to say about that…fleeting thoughts.

We didn’t have any concept of that idea. It was six years

and that was the only one dropped. We didn’t even know if the Germans were involved in it. There was no way, that was out of our scope.

As I said, I wasn’t keen about having to go there. But it didn’t make any difference.

You go whether you think you’re interested or not. It happened that there were rumours going around that those people with long service, with dependents, were getting early discharge, and some people were going home quite early. When I say early, in July instead of August. So we knew that as far

as we were concerned that…fellas with my experience, that we were going home in the short term anyway. I had an expression, I would say I don’t care if the war goes on for 10 years now. I won’t be there anymore.

Oh yes. That’s if you survived.

Oh, it did, yes. That might have been part of what I said before about when I…

Got the shakes yes. That wasn’t an uncommon business. But I don’t think anyone would speak about it.

Of course. That was when we had the flood. That was the first thing that was said. There’s seven fellas there…or part of that seven, were all fellas who had had five years

service and by accident their lives had been taken.

Only in the sense that I’ve spoken about it before. There’s no more about it really. It caused a lot of damage. People who didn’t get deeply involved with it

lost equipment and clothes and it forced the unit to be closed up further up the hill so we could get away from the water. Nothing other than that. It was quite a dramatic night actually.

Well it wasn’t quite as rough as New Guinea ‘Mark One’ – Kokoda.

Well, we didn’t know what was coming. It was funny, in Greece we were climbing mountains. We were up at the snow line in our withdrawal. In Lebanon

the country wasn’t as steep as that that we were operating in but it was very difficult going and we didn’t have experience of those kind of conditions really. But New Guinea, Kokoda, we were operating at near 7000 feet. It was hard in effect

that apart from the hard labour, as I said you were subject to rarefied air and that makes every action a little bit harder – physically, than if you were down on the sea levels as you were on the Western Desert.

Well, when we first started,

I remember a place called Uberi, the hill was very steep. The track was kind of winding like that. I’ve only remembered that because I’ve seen a photo of it. When we got down to the bottom of that it was very muddy. A lot of the muddy bits I’ve forgotten for some reason. I don’t remember the mud. I can remember all the difficulties. I remember when we got passed

Oivi, I was a bit off-colour. I had a headache of some kind and as I said, we walked from Oivi to Soputa and I occupied two files as we walked along. I don’t know how far it was, 15 or 20 miles I suppose. So I was a bit unfit at the time.

In that area it was dead flat virtually.

It was only creeks and things that were the only deviation from the flat country.

That used to happen everywhere. Yes.

I suppose, where they could help they’d help.

I don’t think…I’ll get to the point. When we were approaching… before we got involved in the action, there were quite a lot of fellows that couldn’t keep up. We just had to wait and they just had to keep going. When we got there we stopped and let them catch up. There was one particular area when the doctor,

the RMO [Regimental Medical Officer] of our unit and his troops came across an area which was called Mission Hill I think, and there had been a lot killed there. They hadn’t been buried because of the withdrawal. I suppose when they were going back they didn’t have time to do it because they were engaged. This

doctor, he saw this and stopped and buried them. Skeletons actually. And at that place there was one thing I’ll never forget. There was a tree stump, a tree about that big, about that high. And on it was a stretcher and on a stretcher there was a dressed skeleton. That was a bit of a shock.

He was right down to the bones. I suppose he had been left because of the fighting and there was no use carrying him. But it was a shocking sight in a sense.

Oh yes. We knew the uniform.

Oh yes. It was a shock to the system to see that situation and it persisted.

It was left until we got there and our doctor saw the situation and he stopped and buried them.

You just look at them and just keep going. It’s just one of those things. That’s the situation.

You don’t get time to think about that. You’ve got to keep moving.

Think back about what had happened?

I don’t think particularly. I think you just accept the day for the day.

No. Nobody ever talked about the possibility of being killed.

I don’t know.

I suppose because if you had that in your mind it would be pretty disturbing wouldn’t it? As somebody said, I don’t know who. You always think it will be the other fella – even hope it.

Oh yes I can remember one incident at Eora Creek,

the 1st Battalion had been mortared as far as I’m aware. It could have been a mountain gun. They had a number of casualties. They took a number of people, stretcher-bearers out of our unit and I happened to be one of them. So we got down to the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] where they were treating the fellows and

I had been there about half a minute and a mortar fired three bombs. We knew that had been a target and everyone went to ground. I looked around and there wasn’t even a little hollow I could get into, so I decided I’d just sit on the side of the track. I just sat there and I’m thinking, ‘If I hear it I’ll have to duck.’ Then

the bombs exploded on the lower area, in the valley where they other fellas had been first. I was very relieved of course but thought someone’s going to be suffering for this. After that we had to go in and pick up our patients. We picked this chap up and we used to carry a stick, about five foot long

to sort of help you keep on your feet. We were manoeuvring around in this small place so we could get out and the stick went onto something and it moved. I looked down and it was a bloke’s leg. That made me feel a bit queasy. I just walked over and up the hill. It was very steep. It was very

hard carrying the man because he was a big bloke. We were walking on either side of the track. We weren’t on the track, we were on the rough stuff.

Because the track was only a footpath sort of thing. A single line, and of course when you get two sides of a stretcher you’ve got to be off the track.

As I said, funny enough, the mud and stuff has disappeared as far as I’m concerned.

You see pictures of places where we were and you’ve got blokes ankle deep in mud. I must have walked in a similar place but I’ve just forgotten it.

We only walked across that actually. It was only little, only a small creek at the time. There was a little wooden bridge. There’s a picture over there. It was insignificant really in the terrain but the fighting

there was pretty heavy.

No, because we weren’t involved. We had just arrived. We could hear it as we approached and that gave us some discomfort. As we got nearer we found it was nearly over.

I can’t remember seeing anything. It might have been a bit off the track where they were fighting. We didn’t see any bodies.

But there had been some heavy fighting there.

We weren’t thinking of that. We were thinking they ought to have been in it earlier. We had no way of knowing.

Well if they had been fully trained, they would have been able to cope with the situation I would have thought. As I said yesterday I would have thought they would have had sufficient people here to have enough…the same four divisions again in Australia. That was the problem of why it wasn’t on.

And even the troops they had, according to MacArthur were only D grade.

I didn’t know. As I said I didn’t know the people. All you can go by is there was certain talk and some of the battalions weren’t up to the job. Particular

groups in a sense had been badly treated because in Port Moresby they had been used for digging defences and unloading ships. They were apparently given very little actual training.

I would imagine, to a degree yes. I only know by talk, I don’t know by facts.

Mates? Well I suppose all the Signal Platoon. A fair number of the A Company group with whom I was with for the first 12 months of my service, and after.

There was the odd character who was difficult. But that was just one of those things. The same everywhere isn’t it? You’ve got someone who’s a bit difficult to deal with.

I’m not thinking of high pressure, I’m just thinking about camp life. I think by the time they get under high pressure they’re thinking of themselves rather than wanting to fight with other people. That’s the way I looked at it anyway.

A fellow in my tent was inclined to be that way. Challenging people, abusing them and carrying on. He had…a decent bloke but he had this peculiarity. He was thumped a couple of times but it didn’t make any difference, he still had the same attitude. When we were in the desert, before Bardia

he got diarrhoea and they wanted to take him out then but he refused, kept going and he got killed. A bit disturbing especially if he’s a close friend. They had to go back and look for him. The corporal, our corporal and the chap’s mate. They found him. He was sitting there with his trousers down

and something had hit right at the base of his skull. They could still see it protruding from his body. It must have been one of those dead unlucky things.

Oh, I suppose so. Fate is what happens isn’t it. It’s not what you plan.

There was a lot of that in it. There was one particular signaller, he was a corporal and he had an offsider. They were probably a little bit behind us in the line up and this fella had been hit. It must have been an anti tank…it just chopped his legs straight off and the chap that was with him said, he was lying on the ground, blood

pulsing out of his arteries and he kept saying, “Don’t take that equipment, don’t take that,” and he just lie there and went to sleep in a sense. Just bled to death on the spot. Nothing could have been done I guess.

Oh yes. All the funny stories we used to hear about. We had some bushy

types who would have a great sense of humour. I can’t recount much of it.

I think we indulged in a bit, as much as we could. We also did a certain amount of heavy arguing about what was going on in the world and stuff like that.

I remember some occasions.

Political, communism, British actions in different places. What happened when the Russians came in the war. It was said that Britain

exported to Russia stuff that could have gone to Singapore. I don’t know the truth of that, but that’s what was said.

Well we argued about it. In that situation I suppose Europe was the most important part. That was the way I thought anyway and the way I think was generally thought. So they had to support the Russians to defeat the Germans.

And when they wanted to bring the Australians home from the Middle East, that was part of the story I think. They wanted to concentrate on getting rid of Germany, and Japan afterwards.

We wanted to come home didn’t we. I wasn’t upset by the prospect that we weren’t

coming home, even though we wanted to come home. As I said in one of my letters, there was enough people at home to look after the situation. That was in December January 1941.

But we didn’t know that. I don’t know how that could have developed really.

Because they…it was known, from what I’ve read that in the event of England being involved…or Japan coming into the war, that England wouldn’t be able to give the support to the Pacific that they could have done if it had been just Japan. They couldn’t

sacrifice fighting in the Middle East and India. What else could they do?

Oh, I think I thought the same thing. I don’t see why I should have changed that point of view.

I was going to say, people used to say they joined for adventure and that kind of stuff, but I had been thinking about it and I thought it was the duty of anybody…any male capable of doing the job to get involved. You don’t know how you’re going to react when the situation evolves, but I thought that Germany was a threat to the rest of the world.

Never mind Britain. If Britain had collapsed then I don’t think the Germans would have let Australia continue to be British as we were supposed to be…or even Australian. They would have done something about occupying the place.

I don’t think I thought about that. I think, I wrote in my little story, we watched Australia disappear behind us and there were some of us who would never see it again.

I don’t know about that.

Even with the preparation there were probably limits to the number of forces you could move around. The preparation should have been made at home to cope with the situation.

Rather than having to run to the Yanks the way they did, they would have been more independent, although they would have needed the Americans to be involved because we didn’t have the numbers to cope, or the equipment. They claimed that the people who were already in New Guinea were inadequately equipped anyway.

And supplies were low and they had no plans for supplying people across there and we found that was so. At one stage around the Eora Creek area our ration was a tin of bully beef a day plus army biscuits.

Oh yes. We were virtually on a starvation diet. A third of a tin of bully beef, about that thick and about that deep, that’s a meal.

Well, in the mountains it tasted like manna from heaven, and I can remember if you got the tin you put your finger in and pulled…grabbed the fat out and got that into you.

The bloke was lucky who got the tin. We used to improvise meals with the bully…not so much the beef but the biscuits. There were some other things, I can’t remember, but it certainly wasn’t bully beef. It was made up like a sort of a porridge. There would be six of us with a dixie and they’d say, “You go first,” because they thought each individual would probably feel it was being greedy and take

less and the last bloke would get the best share in a sense. That was the sort of thing we’d do.

I don’t think it was jest. It was pretty serious because we were pretty hungry. Anyone who said they weren’t…well I lost a couple of stone from the time I started to the time I finished. And of course when you got down on the flat

on the other side, it was heavily tropical and the bully beef would be liquid. Repulsive. What we should have done… I didn’t do it. I knocked off eating the stuff, because I found I just couldn’t front it and ate biscuits and stuff. But what I should have done I suppose was just tip the juice out and eat it. But it was such a horrible

mess I just couldn’t look at it.

I wasn’t for 18 months. But the first time I really had a drink for the purposes of having a drink…

I used to get a bit dizzy occasionally but it was getting too much. I was only on two to three shillings a day and you can’t throw it away. There were times when I wouldn’t have a drink for six months. I was a bit afraid of alcoholism. I had an uncle who was a pretty heavy drinker and he wasted a lot of his money

on alcohol. I didn’t want to get into that situation so I would put myself off it for six months.

There were some very heavy drinkers yes. We used to have a beer night once a week. That was entertaining.

Well I didn’t drink much so…I know I got full a few times. I suppose it was one of those things that got people together, talking and being a bit stupid together. I remember the signallers; they were noted for their drinking activities. This was in Egypt before we even got into the action side of things. There were

30 fellas and they would each …on every pay night, they would buy a case. They could buy a case of grog. In the cases there were four dozen. They were all packed in straw, formed straw around the bottles. So they clean up four dozen overnight I think.

On parade? You just showed up and suffered. No, I don’t think so. You were talking about humorous things. We were on early morning parade, this was in North Queensland. We had been there about five or ten minutes and suddenly a string of fellas about seven or eight of them who had been down on the football field, drinking all night.

And by the time we were on parade, they came parading across in front of us like the seven dwarfs – each of them had a lantern. That caused a lot of amusement to see these blokes crossing the parade ground with lights at six o’clock, which was daylight of course. That was one of the specials of the

camp. There were other little things that went on, which if someone talked about I might remember, but I can’t all on my own. We had a couple of fellas there who were annoying…not so much, nuisance blokes particularly when they were drunk. One bloke was about five foot six and they dug a new latrine, which was about seven foot deep.

They dropped him down into the latrine and left him there. The other bloke, they tied him to a tree. I wasn’t there at the time, but heard the story.

Oh I suppose so. If there was the opportunity to do something that wasn’t dangerous, they would take it.

I suppose it was but if someone came out with an appropriate remark it would have an effect. There was one rather quoted incident in Bardia during the early part of the battle. This particular group got tied down and under pretty heavy fire apparently.

There was a bloke called Abdul. I think he was Lebanese extraction and he had the colouring so we christened him Abdul. I asked him did he have a match and he said, “If I had thousands and thousands of matches you wouldn’t be getting one now.” He wasn’t game to move but that was quite humorous in the situation. I felt my own comment was a bit on the amusing side when I said to the bloke, “You don’t want to be too rough with them.”

Things like that.

Well probably while the shooting was going on. One particular incident in Tobruk. At the end of the day the battalion headquarters had caught up with the company and there was a wounded Italian and he was calling for aqua. And we knew what aqua was. Someone was going to give him a drink

and I said, “Well look, if he’s got a stomach wound he’s not supposed to have a drink.” And the bloke said, “If the bastard wants it, let him have it.” That was sort of black humour I suppose.

I didn’t take any notice after that. I was told. They may have given it to him.

They were still throwing grenades and firing some rifles while we were approaching them, so in a sense they probably did the best they could. But on the particular day…they had a reputation of giving in too easily but I read somewhere that

even when they combined with the Germans, sometimes they were the best soldiers. I don’t know where I read it though.

Well our experience was that they kept throwing grenades.

I saw one bloke get hit. They were dangerous

for close contact. Some of the fellas saw them lying on the ground. One bloke kicked up, it exploded and injured his foot. I don’t know if it was deliberate or not. And another chap picked one up to examine it and just dropped it. He dropped it virtually at his feet and it just blew up and he had to be carried out and treated for the result.

Well I didn’t do anything because we were on our approach. It was only about thirty yards from the fence. I went over and spoke to him and asked him how he was, but it was just pain from the explosion. He was able to hop and run. He started hopping and then he finished up running. Then he sat down.

It must have hurt. Another…it was in Tobruk, a fella by the name of Hoddinott, a sergeant, he got one in his steel helmet just above his eye. He had a black eye.

No, I was quite calm apparently. I had to move across about five yards from my path. I just eased my way over and spoke to him. He stopped moaning and then went on.

Nerve wracking. Bardia was the best example.

We just kept moving that was it. Being able to keep moving probably made the difference. The Italians’ impression of the situation. They say they tricked them with the leather jackets because they thought it was bullet proof. They apparently thought they were firing on us all right but we weren’t being hit.

You would if you had the chance, but we were attacking and didn’t want any delays so you had to keep moving.

Well you kept moving or the captain would probably give you a blast like he did me when I said, “who me?!”

It was open. There was no cover. It was just plain desert. I can show you a picture. There’s absolutely no cover. It was as flat as a pancake. Except for the area …at the sort of head of the wadis, there were little dips and that was all there was in that particular area. There might have been a little pimple of land. That was all.

It was virtually dead open to anyone who was trying to shoot you.

Not on that day. I told you about the fella who was quite anxious, more anxious than I was.

He got through to the end, but as I say they took him out because they recognised he was in difficulty.

Well, I could see he wasn’t comfortable. I suppose anyone else, like the officers. He could only have been put out by an officer. So they probably knew he was over stressed. I think he had a couple of kids or something like that. I think he was probably

more concerned…or it would have given him more concern than the average fellow. Although he wasn’t the only one who had children.

Some people suffered stress, but they recovered apparently because they kept going. Fellas I knew, funny enough

they did gain nervous effects from the day. I don’t know what they did with them but they finished up going the distance.

That’s personal pride I think.

You don’t like to let anybody know…I didn’t anyway, you were having problems. It may have been a problem all the way, but without being noticeable. That was the end point in a sense. Lucky for me it was the end.

What?

I don’t know. Some people were able to withstand the situation. They didn’t complain. The only bloke who spoke to me about it …this was just about Eora Creek, he said, “I don’t know how you can remain so calm.” Didn’t want to give my secrets away.

I was feeling the same as he was but I had learnt to look as though I wasn’t.

I think it’s just a calming influence. If you let yourself go, you go quicker I think.

Well I told you about Syria, when the planes flew over.

That was a momentary panic. They all…and I think I went with them. I didn’t stop where I was. I went off with them. And that’s the thing that can happen. If someone lets go then someone else might follow, and it builds up I guess. But they came back and got into line again. It was just the planes. The point was

we didn’t have any defence against the aircraft and we were just doing what we were used to, taking cover. I still put it down to the fact we had just got back from Greece and we had had experience with bombing.

I think with aircraft it stopped with you all the time.

Occasionally I think about the big bombing. The others, I don’t think too much about. I know that on our ship, the last raid of the day our ship was involved, and Laurie Walsh told me…he was manning a machine gun on one of the bridges, that the plane

was on a good line to hit the ship. But they couldn’t resist the small arms fire. There was 45 Bren guns and probably most of them were firing. When he dropped the bomb it only missed by feet. The pressure, you could feel the ship move sideways and the lights went out. A mate of mine who’d been down below on his bunk came up

and said sparks flew off the inside of the hull. He wasn’t going to stop there any longer. It was pretty close. If it had been unopposed I wouldn’t have been here because it was near the … I was at the stern end, and it was near our end where the bomb exploded. It would have wiped us out. There was one ship called the [HMS] Slamat, and I didn’t know this

until I read the story. It was hit by dive-bombers and everyone was lost. That was five hundred people. And we had on our boat about 2000.

I think so. As I said, I did consider it as our duty

and I had read a fair amount about…not serious stuff, about conditions of war. I knew about hand grenades and mortar bombs and stokes mortars from World War One. But I didn’t understand how it would affect you, I just knew the stories.

We had a few in our unit. Some were taken away because they were too old and they probably thought they couldn’t put up with the physical requirements. They were put in what they called The Old and Bold which was a division defence group. We had a chap who had won a DCM [Distinguished Conduct Medal]

in World War One. He stopped with us right through. He was only a small man. I’m not sure if he was a Dane or Norwegian but he had jumped ship in Australia and served in World War One. Served most of World War Two and he wanted to go back to where he came from. They said if you leave the country you can’t come back. They had

introduced that new system of being…Australian citizenship, and because he wasn’t recognised as being an Australian citizen, that’s what they put on him. But he had done a little miracle at…I forget the battle, but he had gone out about five times…to rescue…he was a stretcher bearer. He had gone out about five times to bring people in. He was carrying the last fella and he got hit himself

and I think someone had to go and bring him in. He was one of the best I saw.

No, I’ve got a fairly good memory of my life generally. Pre-war, post-war.

I used to have nightmares occasionally. The best one, I was in Greece before being involved with Germans. I dreamt that German paratroopers had flung open the fly of our tent and fired submachine guns, and I could feel…in my dream,

the bullets hitting me. I was grateful when I woke up. And I’ve never forgotten that. It’s my most vivid dream.

Oh yes, off and on. Over the last twenty years I suppose I’ve had a couple. One in particular was New Guinea and I had been sent out to go on leave and I handed my gear in and they said you’ve

got to go back up. I had no rifle and I was just about passing out with fright. But luckily I woke up again. I used to have occasionally…they say in sleep you have a sense of paralysis when you’re asleep. I must have had a few of those kinds of dreams

because I can remember trying to release myself, and I was making noises. Mavis woke me up one night. It was just one of those things, but whatever I was trying to do, I just couldn’t do. It was like I was being held down. I don’t know if it was war caused.

I suppose like any other serious experience. I don’t feel I was greatly changed but other people might say I have changed.

I have a TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated Pension] and

it’s based on the post traumatic stress thing. A few physical situations. When I got hit by the shell, indirectly of course, within a couple of days I had a stiff neck. My neck was affected anyway, and I wrote home to Mavis and said, I must have had my head on the wrong piece of equipment.

That’s stuck with me. I’ve had a lot of physiotherapy for my lower back and cervical area. I took up…I started the continuous exercises they gave me in the physiotherapy and

my neck’s now almost normal.

I’m reasonably settled if I’m not disturbed.

I react rather quickly especially with my poor wife. If something’s not done to upset me I feel reasonable, but I know I have periods when I feel uncomfortable. That’s as far as I’m concerned.

Oh, just on edge. Sort of jittery. I suppose it’s almost normal in a sense.

I’ve had a bit of it here. Some bloke planted all those trees there,

and I was a bit upset because you see how they’ve grown and we didn’t want big trees around here because it’s on a rock shelf. And that upset me for about a month. I didn’t say anything but I felt very uncomfortable for about a month. It depends what it is. What upsets you. Like normal situations,

Mavis wants to do something which I don’t feel like doing. I say, I don’t want to do it. That leads to a bit of a brittle relationship, but I know what the story is. It doesn’t affect me, but how it affects her!

I enjoy it but I wouldn’t go looking for it.

But I enjoy the company.

I’m content with the way I am. I’ve got enough interests. I’d rather…I’m a bit of a loner. I think it’s the way I am.

I wasn’t in with the mob at any time of my life. That’s it.

Oh yes. I always go in. I didn’t go in for a couple of years because after the war I had been away in New Zealand. For a while I didn’t go. I didn’t have much interest because I was going to Tech and things like that.

I enjoy Anzac Day.

Probably light hearted stuff. We don’t talk in detail. Actually one of the fellas who was in the 3rd Militia Battalion and they were disbanded and we got a number in our unit. He’s a pretty smart character and he wrote a comment in our newsletter.

About how people talk about us being war minded. And he said, I’m listening in and they’re talking about native plants and the particular bloke who was doing the talking was living in one of the inland south towns, somewhere around

about Bargo…no not Bargo, it’s a place down around the Snowies…the apple joint…I can’t think of its name. [probably thinking of Batlow]

No, not Adaminaby, no.

This fella, after the war had become a parson and he was living in this town

and he liked native plants, native animals and things. Any cat on his property he would shoot it and bury it and plant a tree there. So this was the conversation he was commenting on, and people say we are war minded. That’s the way it is. They talk about almost anything else. A special incident like when we were shelled in Syria

after the Armistice, a piece of shell fell on my face but I had pulled a blanket over my head, and it fell on my face about here and Johnny Armstrong started complaining that I was taking more of my share of the blanket.

I made some comment about it of course which I can’t remember.

Nobody introduces the subject. So that would be for everybody to decide. We just don’t…you just say incidents like that which are just a bit funny in a sense. That’s all we talk about.

There’s no way of explaining that. I don’t mind

talking about with the fellas about anything that happened. But that’s not the way the conversations go. They just seem to be about ordinary things, just the same as if we had never been to the war.

No body’s interested. You can’t talk to yourself.

Oh no. If we want to talk we’ll talk. If we don’t we won’t talk.

Most of the time there might be a small comment about some particular incident but otherwise it’s just run of the mill talk.

Well, I made my little book up so they would know what I did instead of going to the pictures and playing cricket. I think people have got to know

what you’ve done in a sense. Your own families. I don’t give it to other people. But if people want to look at it, they can. Actually I wrote it strictly for the family. But they haven’t read it yet. I wasn’t going to hand it around. That will be one of their heirlooms.

What do you mean? Industrially? Scientifically?

Well I think there has been a level of changes that are acceptable …trying to rewrite history is one thing I get upset about. And mainly World War One history.

Well they’re not doing it so much now.

In recent years people are discovering that something different happened. The Landing of Anzac and things like that. They’re only making up their minds from stories they’ve been told and these fellas…Doctor Bean was there [Dr C E W Bean]. He went through World War One. He was often in the front line

or close enough to be in trouble, and I believe practically anything he’d say because he didn’t go on with…he never dealt in exaggerations as lots of people seemed to. He just told the story as it was, to me.

I haven’t read a lot about World War Two. I’ve got the histories

but I haven’t got down to reading them. I think it has been reasonably described – the official history. But sometimes public comment by people who weren’t there can be a bit annoying.

Well I’ve got a Japanese car.

It’s just like dealing with the Germans and the Italians. You still have it in your mind that they were enemy and the cause for disrupting your life. I had a game of golf with a Japanese bloke one day. A public course. I had my ten year old son with me. We got on all right. He was looking at young John. He said,

“You wouldn’t be able to do this in Japan,” like young boys playing golf. He was an affable character and I suppose the real difficulty was that they were educated in a certain way, death was honourable and that kind of stuff, and that’s what they were bought up to be and you can’t throw that off.

Not that way. No, survival is the most important thing in life. If you’re dead that’s the end of the whole thing.

Only based on the memories that we were put through because of their activities. I don’t thing much

else. I had a mate. I don’t know what his experiences were but he refused to work…he left his job which he had occupied previous to the war. I think he was working in a business that made crockery and stuff like that, decorative stuff. He just threw the job in and he was pretty well up

in the management. He felt that, but I didn’t. I thought he was stupid actually. I can’t see any point in it. You don’t gain anything. So that’s the way I felt about it. There were times when I didn’t want to associate with them. That was the way I felt about that. I didn’t

have the feeling that we shouldn’t buy Japanese motor cars or radios or watches or TVs or whatever.

I had a couple of small things but I think they have slipped the cog. I don’t think there’s anything else.