Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in East Melbourne. I went to Lithgow Street State School. I left school as one of the very few after I'd finished sixth grade. I left school when, with the permission of the Education

Department I was only eleven and a half to go to work because it was right in the heart of the Depression years. So I started work in a little small foundry when I was eleven and a half . Then I got out of that by the time I was fifteen and became an apprentice to the shoe trade. Which was the top women's shoe makers in Melbourne, Harrigans Shoes. From there,

well I joined up when I was eighteen. I was on me way overseas a month after I went into camp and spent five and a half years away from Australia before I came back. Whereas those who came back and went to New Guinea had a couple of spaces of time back in Australia. They would have preferred

not to be there, just the same. Five and a half years, was a long time. When I come back I couldn't settle down inside the factory cause it had bars up at the windows. I couldn't be locked in, so I spent two or three years down on the wharf. Then I in ‘51 I became a postman. I liked that, I was there for eight years.

Then when me knees started to give out on me I transferred over to Telecom, which was part of the PMG [Post Master General] in those days. I spent eight years with those and I retired in 1981. I've been doing nothing but welfare work and battalion work and those things ever since.

Well, it was about the only job that they'd give me at that age. They didn't realise I was that. They thought I was fourteen of course. I was only there for two months and then I went on to other little jobs. Only part time

little jobs to earn a few shillings.

No, it wasn't what I'd call dangerous. It never seemed to worry me. It never seemed to worry me going to work even. The only thing that concerned me that I had to look a little older than I was. I can remember my mother took me up to a second-hand shop; they weren't like the op [opportunity] shops today, to get my first pair of long pants. But,

they were stove pipe types. They would have been ideal in the bodgie [a teenage fad in the 1950s] times, years ago. I used to walk around with a pair of bike clips on so nobody'd think I was wearing these old second-hand pants. During that period of time there were a lot of organisations that did picnics for kids like they do today. And there was a race meeting in the national park

and I got right through the heats and the semi final. I won the final, the 100 yards. The prize was six shillings or an order on a men's wear store, and I got a beautiful pair of, in those days, grey pants for six shillings. Well the next year I entered

the race and I won it and I was disqualified because I was classed as a professional. That was only when I was about not quite fourteen. That was the end of my professional foot running days.

I was the youngest of seven. I was adopted, by the time I was able to get around and understand what was going on in

life, even at ten -year-old my, the next one, my youngest sister was getting married, so you can see the vast difference of that at that age.

Well, I never found this out. I never knew I was adopted 'til I was 27. When I asked me father, me mother had died of course, when I asked me

father he said it was just that, didn't even say it was somebody they knew but how he come across me I don't know, he never got a chance to tell me, but my adopted mother was very, very good, she was wonderful when we were kiddies. Life was great, I had no complaints. We were poor, we had nothing, but they gave me everything they could possibly give me.

Many a day that you'd go to school without any lunch to take with you. You might get a penny to buy a bowl of hot soup, something like that. But I never knew I was adopted til I was twenty-seven, when I applied for a passport, went on a working holiday in ‘49, to go to England. That's how I come to find out. That didn't worry me

a great deal. I did try to find my mother, just to find out why. But I was three years too late, they'd moved on somewhere else. It was only a young couple living in that house when I went there, so I just gave it all up then and just got on with me life.

I got that, I never, see in those days to get

an apprenticeship you had to have oh, what do they call it now, I forget the name they used to call the degree, you get a be 15 to get, some school order, below intermediate, yeah. So they took me on at Harrigans, because of the fact that they were a bit short on getting apprentices.

So I never had the in those days when you pass the, got into the, above the sixth grade, when then you done an exam, a merit. It was a merit exam; you had to have that to become an apprentice. But I got in without it. So I spent three years there 'til I joined up

I had a run in with the manager there. He wasn't the easiest man to get on with. But he done something I have never ever forgotten and I never let him forget about it when I got back. I went into town.

Well this

was what happened. I went in and I enlisted. It was only like buying a ticket on the railway station on Flinders Street station. It was one of those little windows that were open and there was an army official behind that that took your thing and signed your paper. So I went off on, that was about the 17th December 1939. I only turned eighteen in November. I didn't get called up until the 13th

March and went to Williamstown Racecourse and then Puckapunyal and we sailed on the 14th April as reinforcements to the battalion. And I went in and got my notification. I didn't tell '‘em anything at work. I put it down that I was a labourer and not an apprentice. So when I came this day, when I got the letter. I went into work the next day and I said to the foreman, “I'll be leaving

on Friday because next Wednesday I go into camp.” He was pleased all right about it but when he told the manager he came belting down and said, “You cannot do this, you're an apprentice.” So he run off and he rang the authorities in Melbourne and he come back to me and he said, “Now you're in a lot of trouble. You lied about being an apprentice and signing the papers. You've got to go into town and see a Captain Dibble.”

so I go into Melbourne and I see a Captain Dibble. He said to me, “Why in the hell didn't you tell me you were apprenticed in the first place, now I've got to fill all these bloody papers again!” he said, “Report back here on Wednesday.” So I go back and feel a bit cocky, and the manager came down and he said, “You're in trouble aren't you?” I said, “No, I'm still leaving on Wednesday.” You know what he said to me, “Well I hope you bloody well get shot.” now that's the thing that stuck with me.

That stuck with me the whole five and a half years I was away, and that's the first thing I'd do when I went back, I went to see him and said, “Look I'm here all in force.” and a few other words as well, but that's just life I suppose.

No, I think it was 'cause I beat him, whatever, I was a bit cocky about it because I'd beaten him.

and I think that's all it was, but I didn't stay there after that I left. I couldn't put up with being in a place with bars on the windows. I just went on from there with jobs and whatever until I finished up my work on Telecom.

I did think that they'd forgotten me after it became Christmas time, but at the end of January I went back into town and I spoke to someone about it at the grille and they said, “Oh no, it will come, no worries.” So I just hung on til I got that. We went out to the Melbourne Showgrounds where we did a bit of getting uniforms and whatever

Then we were transferred out to the old Williamstown Racecourse to do a bit of drill and that sort of thing and it was out at Williamstown Racecourse that they really came into contact with some of the toughest blokes they could find you know. Thugs what have you. Why they joined up I never know. The first week we were there, the Friday night,

we were in this sort of big tin shed cover with just the little bare boards about that high. I was just sitting down getting ready for bed and this little bloke opposite me, very small he was, and this big thug come down and starts to abuse him and went to pick him up, going to belt him one. Had nothing against him, just that he was drunk. The little bloke lashed out with his big heavy army boot under his chin and

floored him. So when we went up on parade in the morning the colonel calls out and wants evidence or witnesses to this brutal bashing of this fellow. Nobody stepped forward, so he said, “Nobody wants to own up, there'll be no leave for the weekend.” so this little fellow steps forward and it’s in my book, and he said he appreciated him for his honesty and all that but no little man

could do the damage he done. He'd busted his jaw in about three places. Anyhow, they come to accept him after that. Well, we done some time there and the Tuesday before we, the Tuesday night we went to Puckapunyal and then, my mother was ill when I left home and I asked for twelve hours to go back and see her.

But this lieutenant that I went to wouldn't let us go. If I'da known what I knew later on I could've gone past him to the commanding officer and he was a pretty good sort of fella. So I thought, “I'm not going to take it, I'm going to head back in to Seymour.” Well Seymour was about eleven kilometres from Puckapunyal. I walked through the bush, took me hours to get to Seymour Station but this

officer must have read my thoughts cause he was there with a couple of camp police and they arrested me. They put me in the cell tent for two days til the four o'clock Sunday morning they let me out to pack my things and at nine o'clock I was on me way down to the boat at Port Melbourne.

It didn't seem to worry me. I'd

usually get around, wasn't what you call a loner but I did, I got around and enjoyed myself.

Yeah, I did. The Depression gives you that, 'cept for the fact that you didn't have anything, but you have to survive. I think that had a heck of a lot to do with it.

I'd would thought so. Because of the fact that

I, I remember a chap who was in the same street as meself. They were very particular when they first, or they were, supposed to be, you couldn't enlist under twenty and you couldn't go above thirty five, but there were fellas in there forty eight fifty lining up. One fella that I was with going for the exam, that was his fifth time he'd turned up and each time he'd got knocked back, but this fellow in the street he was quite a nice

fellow. I knew he belonged to the Communist Party but he never influenced anyone with anything. He had about four kids within a fortnight, they discharged him because he was a communist. They were a little bit particular. But how some of these other no hopers and thugs got in I don't know, but they did.

I was underage too. The thing that later on I went overseas and I done my

training in Palestine. The day that the ship left the port on a Sunday and it was raining. And after we pulled away from the wharf and I went down below and the iron shod heels slipped on the steel plates on the steps going down. I finished up I went from the top step right down to the bottom step and they had me locked up in splints right across until we got to Palestine because

there was no way they could x-ray anything. They asked, they wanted to put me off at Fremantle. But I said, “I've come this far I want to go on with it.” which they did. They found it was only muscle damage over the period of time.

About five weeks.

Well, I think the whole thing, it was a similar thing

as I tell you later about the POW [prisoner of war] thing, you have to accept it. You did. There was only a couple of other fellows in the medical ward with me and they weren't, they were through, upset tummies and all that business, first time at sea. And they never seemed to talk about it, worry about being on their way. There were quite a few, quite a lot in our battalion

married men who had left two or three kiddies behind. And they were all around the 28, 30 year bracket. They were always mainly very quiet about things. They had probably done a lot more thinking than I had done. It was great excitement I suppose for me. I can remember they brought me up on deck on a stretcher one day

when we were half way between Australia and Sri Lanka as it is now, and to see the big convoy with the war ships and troop ships and all that, a marvellous sight to be part of it. So it gave you the excitement of things it never seemed to worry me.

Oh gosh now. They made a film years ago of the first lot of Jewish

immigrants that come out to Australia and that was the ship that they had. It was a regular troop ship between England and India. It wasn't a converted passenger ship or anything like that. Off hand I can't remember. It will probably come to me later. [probably the Dunera]

Yes, because they couldn't do an x-ray. Until they got to Palestine.

Well, no, I didn't.

There was no such thing thought of in those days like they do now, occupational therapy and all that. No, after they'd done that I was in the hospital, maybe four or five days in Palestine. First up there was a nurse used to take you for a little walk up and down the tent, but that was the only exercise that I got.

No, none at all.

I didn't, it wasn't that me legs were completely splinted. I was splinted from up here, above the waist. I couldn't use the legs properly, but I could move them in bed. But it was just all that til I got to Palestine. When I got to Palestine they x-rayed and found there was no bones damage, only

muscular.

Well, on board the ship you were in hospital and at that stage you didn't know too many men in the unit. There were only ten days before I arrived in the unit and then we were shot overseas.

Eh, not really, because I'll tell you what, I slipped up on that before. When I went to Puckapunyal I was in the 8 battalion, 2/8th Battalion. I travelled overseas with the 2/8th Battalion and I didn't know too many of them. But in the meantime, as I said, I probably didn't say it, but when I joined up and come home and told me

mother and that that I'd signed up I had to take back a form for their signature permission. My mother didn't want to do it but my father said, “He either goes now or they'll take him later on.” But after, she died on my way to overseas. Before I got to Fremantle I got the telegram. And he had a little bit of remorse after that. Anyway, he got in touch with the

authorities and told them that I was only eighteen and what have you. I don't know anything of this is going on it was just one day in Palestine and an officer come along and said, “You can pack your things, you're being transferred.” So they transferred me to a unit that they had put together over there called the guards battalion. It was supposed to be. It was called the olds and the bolds, those that were too old and those they couldn't

do anything with. I was there about five or six days. On the Sunday we were lined up to inspection by General Blamey at that time. When he come to me he asked me why I was there. I told him that I'd found out before that my father had complained to him and this officer told me before that that I was

being sent to this battalion which wouldn't be in the front line services. So General Blamey said to me, “If you want to put in for a transfer it will be granted immediately.” Well, a mate of mine was in the 2/7th, he was the battalion boot maker, he said A company wanted a bootmaker, why don't you apply for it, I did. In about 48 hours I was in the 2/7th, so I didn't know them too much before we

got into action, more so after being a POW. But they were wrong about the guards’ battalion, because in Greece they just got cut to pieces. They sent '‘em up there doing work and they got caught in al the bombardment. I was lucky I wasn’t in that.

I was quite happy when I joined because I had a mate in the battalion. He was a regimental man, he was a corporal. I used to do the repair work with same of about four other companies, but once we went into action that was forgone. You just took your tools with you and if something needed doing you just got it out of the truck and done the repairs, but I didn't have to do anything much at all when we went into action.

That was when I arrived in Palestine. We done most of our training in Palestine because we hadn't done much in Australia.

Oh, very green.

No, no, because something new was happening every day. We used to go on twenty and thirty mile route marches.

And they'd have a band at the end of the last mile. It's marvellous what a band does for you, lifts you, and you couldn't, you used to have to go on those 20 mile marches without using any water out of your water bottle. That had to be full when you come back. You can imagine doing 20 mile in the desert. But some of them were a little bit shrewd. They used to have a drink and then they used to urinate on the cover on the outside of the bottle, say it was leaky,

but they didn't get away with it. It done us in good stead in later years once we got up into Libya and those places.

Oh yes, I had a gun to take away with me and you were responsible for that, the whole thing. When you was in Palestine there were quite a lot of thieves about as far as the Arabs were concerned. We had about six to a tent, which was

dug into the ground to about that height. So if there was an air raid you got some protection. You used to have to put your rifles against the centre pole at night and put a chain through ‘em and chain ‘em to the post, until you got up to use ‘em next morning.

You’ve got no idea. It was a ridiculous situation.

At one stage, not so much in Palestine. We never had that much, we had our rifles it was in the vicinity, it was mainly all just drill. We done a few things up just this side of Tel Aviv where we used to do the desert training and the soft sands and crawl around and all that business. And when we moved from there we moved into Egypt,

just outside of Cairo. They used to have wooden anti-aircraft guns scattered around the area which pointed. In those days the Italians were the only ones we had a concern with and when they came on a raid they would fly very high. You could hardly see them and they'd drop their bombs from there so they could go anywhere. But this was done with these wooden anti aircraft guns to make it look like they were well

fortified when the observation planes used to fly over. So that's all they really had. When we went into action we had Bren guns, but we only had one Bren gun to a platoon. Now that platoon was 100 men. We had that all the way, right up through Libya, right up the other side of Benghazi, we got

well beyond Benghazi Then of course they decided we were going. We didn't know at the time we were heading off there. They brought in the 9th Division, had arrived up there in that time and they took over from us at about three o'clock in the morning. We left to come back and we got down as far as Mersa Matruh, which is on the border of Libya and Egypt. And that was the first time that we ever handled

what do they call it. What the gangsters used to have, the tommy gun with the round thing. And we got the chance to fire a few bullets out into the sea. And then you only got one to a section, one to ten men. So we didn't have that much at all.

Yes, I had a Lee Enfield then, at that time. Then. Cause we lost

that, the ship got sunk of course.

No I never, oh I tell a lie, there was a military group used to meet in a hall in Collingwood. They were the fellas that were in the, the army, not permanent ones.

The militia type

of thing. And they used to have a firing range there and they had 303 rifles with a point 22 barrel. We used to go down there and they'd allow us to have a couple of shots into that. We never had any firing til we got there. It didn't seem to worry me. My Mum used to say, get a good job, but I never ever got a job for ‘em.

Yes,

I did. I done pretty well at Williamstown rifle range when I was in the army. I did pretty well with that. They were looking for, there were three or four of them who got extra badge and extra money because they were expert rifle people, they wanted them possibly snipers later on I suppose. I never got to that of course.

I was.

I never got to, only at targets, only at practice at that stage. So that was that Enfield rifle. I had that right up until we got sunk at Greece, that was left on board the ship.

Oh, now that'd be pretty hard.

I would say that would've been possibly round about just after Christmas towards New Year’s Day when we went into Bardia. That would've been about the first time. You didn't see any enemy there you're just sort of firing, just the numbers just to try to keep their head down sort of thing.

No, the 9th Division were

the ones, because of the fact that. As I say, we moved out and came down to Alexandria in Egypt and we were only there three days I think it was and we were on a ship to go to Greece.

It was the 9th Division that took the brunt of it. We did get, when the Germans came in to Africa we got a heck of a lot

bombing and strafing that was different to the Italians, we had to keep our heads down and make sure everything was right.

That was when we took up positions to go into positions for the battle of Bardia. We turned up and it was about midnight, and

we took over from an English unit and they had their intelligence men used to take you into positions because you gotta be in certain positions, different sections, different whatsinames. So in our group, our company been taken off into some other position and he was taking us in to show us exactly where it was. Then all of a sudden shelling started and of course we went to ground. That was over and he said, “It's all right now

get up.” and we went on a bit further, it started again and we went down and the third time it started, we went down, we didn't want to get up, because we thought well, this is a little bit more dangerous than training, but this pommy [English] soldier said, “Don't worry about it, get up, that happens here every night, it's a goodnight thing and it's probably a welcome thing to you to the area.” So that was the first time when I realised

that it was such a serious situation.

No, I can't say that did. The first thing in fact was the day of the attack on Bardia they had all the artillery guns just behind our unit and they fired for something like about five hours and it was really deafening.

You realise then that you are in a war zone because of the artillery guns were banging off whatever. You didn't even think or hear the explosions off in the other end; it was just what was in that corner.

No, well I think that once you started there was so much going on around you, and you had the other fellows in line with you,

you didn’t give a thought to it. I would say the first time that the actual killing affected me I had a mate, once I joined the unit, by the name of Jack Anderson, he was one of them selected to go out and cut the barbed wire when we went through. As we passed through the barbed wire that was him, on his knees,

with wire cutters on the wire and a bullet right through his head, that's when I realised. Losing him I suppose, that combined, this is real. But then you get on with it because there is nowhere for you to go and there is nothing you can do. You can't not go ahead and do things because the other fellows are doing it as well so you don't give any thought to it. I've spoken to quite a few other fellows and they

don't, they had the same feeling that you don't think about anything, just hope that you get through it all right.

Well, not running, but moving fast into it. But the wire, part of it, most of it was down except the area where he was cutting. They went sort of round that.

You've got to keep going because everybody else is keeping going. And when that Bardia was over, they gave some of us. I had four Italian prisoners to take around and pick up their dead and line them up so they could be collected. And everything went on. They were very, very badly dressed and everything.

Some of them with the soles hanging off their boots. They'd been in the desert for a long time.

Yeah, it did, I looked at it. Anyhow, at one stage we picked up quite a few bodies and put them in groups of half a dozen. We came to an Italian store tent dug into the ground. It was full of Italian clothing and boots and that. I let them

refurbish themselves, boots and that, they were quite happy. So we come to the next place and we come across two fellows and we put them down and the other fellow was laying on his back with his arms up in the air and his legs, he was just stiff. I couldn't talk Italian but I explained to them what they gotta do. They had to push his legs down and they did and they stayed down, but his arms they couldn't get they weren't putting enough pressure, so I made signs that they've really got to do it,

so they pushed it down and of course he must have had a lot of air stuck here and all of a sudden he let out this grunt and they took off. They left me for dead. They went over the hill and I never saw them. I had to go back to headquarters and get another crew. So those things, there's always, well it's serious, but there's some comedy, if you'd like to put it that way.

A groan, a very heavy one it was and they thought he was alive and they shot through. And I was left without any POWs.

No. No, that had nothing to do with it. All I had was the rifle on the shoulder to look good. They were no problem, the Italians. They put up a good

fight until you got close and when you got close they just put their hands up. You didn't do any of those sort of things. Well I never saw any of it. I know that in Bardia they had something like 45,000 prisoners there and they were in a wire enclosure and you'd hear them calling out, the very thing of calling out for their mothers, ‘mamma’ and all this business

but they seemed to be no trouble. They never done anything wrong there.

There were a lot of conscripts and they were very poorly treated and that. All these officers apparently had their women. We captured about twelve women who were there for the officers, like a prostitute type.

We didn't have to do much. I didn’t in that respect. The machine gunners were doing most of the work. We had an

English fusilier crowd who were the machine gun company. They were the ones that done the most and were in the line going in, the Italians never put up that much, well some of them got killed so they had to do something. I don't think that I fired one shot when we advanced into Bardia.

Well in the first place when

the Battle of Bardia started, the first day, because I was one of the last to join the battalion I was made as a stretcher bearer. That is one of the worst jobs you can ever have, it is a very hard situation. You're trying to rescue fellows out and what have you and there's shrapnel flying in the air. You realise then what the situation is. But that was only the first day, the next day I joined

the others, just one of the infantry. As I say, your mind is taken up. You don't get time to get frightened. It's not man to man type of thing. Later time, in some instances, they get to become man to man. That's the time, you think, “Is it you or is it me?” But the average one didn't even bother to think about their own situation. They were just,

they had a job to do and I think a lot of it was done through the rigorous training we got before that and all the talks they gave us on different things. That had a lot to do with, there would be the odd one, but I didn't see one of them.

Yes, well, in that part of Libya, there

where the colonialism came into it, there were a lot of farms. There were a lot of Italians doing farming. And this was one house that was virtually would have been on a farm. We didn't realise at the time. It would have been right in the heart of the advance, so everybody had gone, there was nobody there. So after they captured this one, they put up this big wire perimeter and put all the male prisoners in there

and they put the ten or twelve women in this house. And they were so I think they were so scared that they wouldn’t move out of this lounge area here. They used to do all their bowel movements around the wall, because they wouldn't go into the next room to the toilet. As they had a line they would move out. They were only there about seven days I s'pose.

but they were taken out, truckloads of prisoners every day, down back into Alexander and that. They shipped a heck of a lot out here to Australia and when the time came I didn't get to see any of that of course.

Well, it's a strange incident. I came across a fellow who was in our battalion. He was an Italian. He used to be a

despatch rider in Mussolini’s army and when he done his service he migrated to Australia. He was one who captured in a group his own brother. So many strange things happened. I remember, oh I talked to half a dozen of them, they were all right to talk to, but they must have been cunning because they must have been told that if they had a red cross on their arm, they count you as a non-combatant

overnight there was dozens and dozens of those red cross arm bands.

It was, because they threw everything at us when we first started, but when you got in a distance where it was going to get serious for them they just walked out and put their hands up.

No, I don't think so, I think they were paid prostitutes. And the strange thing amongst the Italians. In Bardia they had been there so long that they had their fortifications below ground, all concreted. You could walk a couple of kilometres this end and not come out until the other end. All through that we found photos

of one blonde naked woman that was handed to them. They had all those sort of things. The officers walked around with plumes in their hats and the other poor devils never had hardly anything. Wines and stuff were there for officers but there was only normal rations for them.

Oh, no, well, it didn't happen in this instance. They were only there for seven days. They went down under security in a truck heading down to Egypt. No, they were quite safe. They were, I suppose from memory now, 25 to 27 year olds.

mostly all blondes. I don't know why they had a preference for blondes. But no, we had a four man guard around the house, one on each corner. Nothing would have happened and the average one, I don't think there weren't too many of our fellows from our unit were there, they were in other positions. It would only be day duty of the guard that we'd be there.

No, I don't think they were in any. What happened to ‘em after they got down to Alexandria and Cairo I wouldn't have a clue. They might have been repatriated back to Italy for all I know. I never seen or heard any more about them.

Well, Greece, we went across.

The ship we went across in had no problems. There was an air raid but we weren't in any trouble. When we got to Greece we were moved out to a little place called Daphne which was just outside of town. We were camped there for about two three days, then we went up, higher up into the mountains then. We got

very close to the Yugoslav border. The New Zealanders were also up there. From daylight to dark the bombing and strafing was on, it never stopped. We had no air force there. It was like the Americans. They had no opposition so they could do what they liked.

There was a whatsitsname bomber they called the flying pencil. I forget the name of it but it was a two engine bomber they had, with a rear gunner in it. I've seen those planes so low you could see the fellow in the tail. You couldn't see faces, but you could see in where the machine gunner was as they flew over you. So we were harassed the whole time. We had to then eat,

the evacuation had to be done at night. The trucks had their headlights shielded with only a narrow slit in them. If you could see the photos, one of those books will show you photos of the terrain that we came down. Those transport drivers were the ones that I admired. They had to bring those trucks down loaded with troops and they twisted and turned and you could see down, looking down three or four or five parts of the road

which you already passed. The orders were that if one truck broke down you didn't try to start it, you just pushed it over the side, but I thought to myself, what about the ones below it? Anyhow, they done a wonderful job, they were the main ones. So we got down into the flat lands, part of it not far from Bralos pass, and they decided then that we'd go by rail, but the Greek engineers on it wouldn't

drive the trains because it still went on, you got bombed from daylight to dark. But in this rail yard there were two trains all loaded up, freight wagons. One was out of action. The undercarriage knocked out of it but it was still workable, as far as the engine was concerned. We had a fellow, an engine driver, in our unit, and they decided to this night when we were going to take off

was to set a sort of a decoy for the Germans. The one that had the undercarriage knocked off, they fired up the engine and allowed it to burn and throw out a lot of smoke and everything. And the other one they kept it to a low level. Of course they came over this evening and they bombed and they bombed and they blew this rail engine and that to pieces. They didn't seem to take notice of this one because it wasn't doing anything. The moment they took off we took off

and of course night time come down we were all right, we come down to a place called Kalamata in Greece. It was a town right on the coast. We stayed in the olive groves until dark until we were taken out to the troop ships and evacuated. In my book as I tell it I, it was the first time I come across civilian casualties, I never seen them.

I'm telling a lie on that one. One of the things in Greece when we were on the flat lands there. They caught us this day and they were bombing us there and there was a school not far by. And they come down and they bombed and bombed. They killed about sixty kiddies in that bomb. They shot down one of the planes who'd done it. It was the only time I seen any retaliation like that. He

wasn't hurt, knocked around a bit when he crash landed. They threw him back into the plane cause of what he'd done, deliberately bombed and knowing it was a school.

Oh yes, I did.

No, it, well it wasn't in our group. I don't know if it was English fellows or Australians there.

No, it was just half a dozen and they were inflamed about these kiddies. They just dragged him out and the plane was on fire and they just threw him back in. Whether they shot him before then I don't know. That was the only thing like that I saw.

No, I didn't get to see them. We were moved on by the trucks by that time when there was a lull in the bombing. But when we got to Kalamata we were to march from there down onto the beach. Went through the

town, little narrow alley way or street. There was a young lass there lying against the wall on that side. And a piece of shrapnel must have sliced her breast 'cause it was just hanging by a thread, so I carried her across and put her in a door way and closed up her breast wound and put a field dressing on it. I often wonder whether she survived or not, but she was

safe from the machining because it was a deep sort of commercial doorway and it went back about that far, so I put her in there and then I had to join my crowd and go on with them. I often wonder what happened to her.

So then we went on to the down onto the, it was like a mini Dunkirk thing with all these troops waiting their turn to go on. If we were taken out to the destroyer out to the troop ship, the Costa Rica, and we had to leave by three am to be out of

bombing range. We weren't heading for Crete, we were heading for Egypt. They caught up with us in daylight. There was about six to eight in the convoy. You'd see their bombs landing about the other ships and you couldn't see the ship because of the spray going up and you'd say, they're gone, but as soon as the spray had disappeared they were on their way. Saw one

that got hit and then ours. The last two bombers apparently come down out of the sun with their engines off. They never hit the ship but they landed about ten feet off it, but they lifted the engine of the ship about three feet out of its mountings. And of course that opened gaps in the

outside of the ship and they couldn't start up and they knew it was going to sink, so the destroyers came back and took the troops off, there was maybe a couple of thousand of us on that ship.

Well the first destroyer that came in, you've got to see the navy at

its best just to see how efficient they are. They run up along side the ship, 'cause we weren't going to sink at that moment. They reckoned it would take about an hour and a half. And they just came as close as they could to the side. They were smashing the life boats that were on the ship itself with their overhead gear. And they come off and you had to jump, they rose up or the other ship rose up and they went down

and when it got about six feet you jumped. So we were on that and I had a, my sister had given me a brush and comb set. In those days they were great, silver backing with inscriptions on them. And where I was on the ship was right down at the bottom of the steps, at the bottom. That's where my pack was. And we'd just come up on our turn to

get our lunch we thought we were out of bombing range, but these two that came out. The old stew went left right and I went the other way. It was just because of the explosion of course. I decided I'd go down and rescue my pack. When I got down to the last step, I looked down and there was a porthole there and it looked to me as though we were going below the

water level, cause it was getting darker and darker, and I said, “It can stay there, I'm off.” but it wasn't that, it was the water had got into the turbines of the ship and the power was just draining away. But I got out of that as quick as I could. I was on the last destroyer that got away, because eight of us were grabbed by an officer, I didn't know him, to collect the weapons and throw ‘‘em on to the deck of the destroyer, which was along side, and the sailors

were throwing ‘‘em back into the sea, they said we haven't got time for that, so we were the last eight or ten to jump off it and it took off and we stood off. They didn't want the Germans to find out that they had sunk too many ships. Only two had been sunk of course. So we stood off and they fired about another four shells into it. And I suppose that was the most impressive thing I've ever seen, to see a huge boat or a liner

disappearing in the last minute. It's a part of a world, it's your own world that you're on and it's disappearing from sight. It's a terrible sight. I don't think I've seen anything like that. So we went off there.

and they dropped us off on Crete because they had to get back and try to rescue some more from the coast of Greece.

It did, a big one, because it went down bow first and the tail end was sticking up in the air.

No, I think they stood off about fifty yards I suppose when they fired into it. They put the shells into below the water line to make it go down quicker and it did, it disappeared in no time. But it was a horrible feeling to see this thing, so big and it was a home to two thousand people for a short period of time. It disappeared.

Not that I know of. They probably, because there was still some fellas were left behind on Greece, but I don't know about the Greeks. They had already evacuated a lot to Crete before hand, if you read the history states, because there was nothing more they could do and they had

had an agreement with it which it tells you in the history books, an agreement with the government there that they were evacuating. They took I don't know how many, because some of those, because there were still some on Crete when we got there.

Well actually, when you look at it in hindsight, we were crooked on the thing. We were lobbed into this situation.

We didn't, we weren't happy about going to Greece, because we were an experienced fighting unit. We would've thought that the 9th Division who had no experience, we had three months of continuous fighting experience in the Libyan desert. So we were pretty good. All of them were pretty experienced. Of course the 9th Division had just

arrived. Because of the thing that they were sending people to Greece as a sort of an appeasement thing to help them. It wouldn't have mattered. They knew from the start there was no way you could win in Greece because you were striking virtually the whole of the German Army and we were only one Australian division. And some New Zealanders and what have you.

But when I look at it after the war, you look at it in hindsight, it saved a heck of a lot of trouble, because, by putting these troops into Greece, to help the Greeks and to fight the Italians up in Albania, and the Germans, the Germans had to postpone

their move on Russia, to come down through the Balkans, otherwise they were in trouble. And by the time they done that which was virtually the beginning, that was April, that would have been the beginning near enough to spring, ours was autumn. And if they hadn't've brought those troops down it took ‘em another three or four months to clear them things.

As you know quite well, they got trapped at the doors of Moscow. If they hadn't've come through there they had the summer, they'd have gone right through Russia. Gosh knows what would've happened to the world if that...

Won the war sort of business yeah.

Yes. It was a foregone conclusion there was nothing much

we could do. I'd say the ones who done the most damage as far as the Germans concerned in Greece would've been the New Zealand machine gunners because there was positions up there where you couldn't fight. It was just so rocky and whatever. But we did draw their army down, lot of people lost their lives for it but I think it paid dividends.

I was just looking last

night, I don't believe their figures. They had it down in our battalion that about 79 were POWs, but there weren't that many. There were only a few POWs of ours. But there were some from other units that had been taken when they got trapped at the Krins [?] canal and they couldn't get across there. The biggest majority were never missed, we never lost many. I can't remember any of them that were there anyhow.

Well, we didn't know what was going on, as I say, there was an English unit, a lot of them about, fifteen twenty five thousand of ‘em were taken there five moths before, which was to build up fortifications. But there were no fortifications there at all, nothing.

I don't know what they'd been doing and of course we arrived there, sixty percent with no arms whatsoever. I'd say that was about by that time about April, near enough to the 30th April, what it is now. Anyhow they put in orders and they flew in or what

ever they done. They brought a lot of things with them but they were only rifles. I was issued with a 1912 Enfield rifle. I was issued with a bayonet with no scabbard. I just carried it in me belt like a pirate. Only a certain amount of ammunition to it. We only had about, from memory, five

captured artillery guns. We didn't have the other unit, but the force that was there and they were set up in different strategic positions but they never had any firing sights on ‘em and fellas had to cut twigs out of the trees and tie ‘em on the front and every time they fired them they'd fall down and someone had to crawl out and stick ‘em back on. We had about, our unit had about

five mortars and three of ‘em they had no bases to ‘em so they had to go and cut big pieces of timber and attach ‘em to that. So that they could stand ‘em up to fire. So it split up into about four sections on Crete. As far as our section was concerned that was about the main thing because there

was an aerodrome there, so that had to be guarded. But, they couldn't put any reinforcements there when they start to land, because according to the history, our people had captured their code. I think it was called Astra code or something. Ultra, the ultra code. And course, they'd know all about. They

flew over day after day with observation planes, taking photographs. So they would know all the troops around the airport. So if we were to reinforce it, they say they would have known that the code had been broken. So we had to wait until they landed. That in itself was, I don't know, that was a thing in itself. They captured the airport.

they were landing their planes, and of course they were crash landing them. Most of their planes that they had for that parachute landing were made out of galvanised iron, just like a roof, and only one in five had any instruments. They used to have to follow the leader sort of thing. And they crash landed

with their alpine troops and that. And of course when the runway got bogged they also landed a plane and they put a semi-light crane together and they used to lift ‘em up and stack ‘em on top of each other on the side of the runway, just like you'd see ‘em in a wrecker’s yard, cars stacked on top of one another. That's how they worked they just landed and stacked them up.

In Crete. Oh, yes, yes

it was an amazing thing. They bombed and bombed all that morning. Then all of a sudden there was a lull, no noise, then all the drone of these planes. Anyhow, when they jumped, I'm only talking about the area we were in, there were several areas. When they came down first up we were in a place called Georgeopolous. A few of us were down swimming.

We looked up and seen all these paratroops. Parachutes coming down. Of course, we were there naked, what could we do, we were in the water? We had to get by and they looked as though they were dropping just by, but they weren't, they were dropping further back. We had to make a run to get our clothes and of course we got in the rest of the unit and they moved us up the Melami Aerodrome, and to see them all coming down

they complained that we fought unfairly cause we didn’t wait until they were down, we were firing at them as they were coming down, but they were firing at us all the way as they were coming down. They had machine guns of all descriptions

Yes, and they used to drop parachutes with big tube caskets, huge things which were full of other ammunition.

Some cases we come across, we didn't but other units come across one or two of these. It helped them to use their weapons and that against them.

Well, we didn't have any machine gunners at that stage, mounted guns because we didn't have any. We only had hand guns, Bren guns, or what have you.

Yeah. And they were doing this

Bren guns and rifles and you could see every time they dropped, they'd stiffen as they got shot. Then we saw planes come over, they'd been hit by, there were some light ack ack [anti aircraft] guns there, they'd been hit and everybody on board was dead. They'd fly out over the sea and just tip it up and they'd fall down into the sea. It was just like tipping rubbish. It was something that was

something that nobody had ever seen before. It was the first time it had been dropped on organised positions.

Yeah. They were going to kill you, but you knew you were in action so you had no time to do anything but do what you do, firing as much as you could

we never captured any of them there because most of them that came down in our area were dead. But then of course the history book tells you that this New Zealand general, the Maori general, thought up about there was a group of 400 hundred Germans

that were moving in on them so he decided he was going to make a run for it, make a charge at ‘em.

No, no, no, I forget what his name was, you'll see it I'll show you it on Monday I'll pull the part out for you. Disber or something like that his name was. Then of course, the general that was in charge of the allied forces there and our units decided we'd join him.

which there was one company out of our battalion, which was C company, joined him and they done the bayonet charge which of course was the charge of 42nd Street they called it. And they drove them right back but only temporary; they got reinforcements, we only….

I don't know, I suppose somebody, I've always tried to find this out, but I think it's just somebody who put a name to it. It was a

big opening it was just like a huge space between two farms of olive trees, just a big open space and they charged down there between the olive trees and they drove them all back and captured a lot of equipment on the way back, but by evening they had pushed us back again, because we had nothing.

Yes, it all started

on the 20th May, and by the first of June it was all finished.

Well, no, they weren't. They had some of the Greek or Cretan soldiers that they'd move; with the Greek royalty they'd moved them to Crete. For safety, then they flew ‘em out at a later date.

but no, they were helpful. I've got another thing going at the moment. The Greeks have got this. I gave them a memorial service early this month, at the shrine where they built a nice memorial about the battle of Crete, the Greeks have. They also want a photo and a little bit of a letter to put in their museum.

They've started on Crete about the battle of the area we were in and I had to get a photo taken brought to passport size and a little letter attached with it, which I will show you on Monday. I made remarks they were great to fight along side. They had no fear, no nothing. You didn't get to mix up with ‘em that much but they were on your flanks and whatever. They were great.

They were really.

I would say after the Melami airport, aerodrome thing. I knew that once they could get down and bring in as many troops as they liked there was no stopping them then. Which they didn't, they brought in a lot of the mountain troops, and we

fought a rear guard action from all the way from there to Spartia, which was right down the other end of the island.

Yes, it's a sort of hit and miss thing. You take your situation. You might have a situation here. You are holding up the enemy, but you can't hold ‘em up for long, while the others go back further, maybe a kilometre, maybe two kilometres, and dig in again

and you leave that and you go back beyond them. We done that all the way back to Spartia, which was up the top of the mountain. It's not like Crete today, they've got roads, these were just rough goat tracks. We spent oh, I think five days, six nights five days. No food, no water, and we held ‘em up while the others were evacuating.

No, very little

you nap off, and stay awake because they were sending out patrols all the time.

Well, we didn't. We had nothing. I went on a work group with an officer and four other fellows. And we had one of these little furphy [water] wagons, you know what they're like. They're just like little water tanks out of a truck, but they were ones that you could pull along on a little trolley type

then we took it up and get the closest area that we could to the river that ran through there and course we had to go down the side of the mountain to get to that in huge biscuit tins. They stood about two foot high and were about 14 inches square. And then poured ‘em in to the furphy and then would pull them back

to our fellows to have a drink. But the time I was taken on that we'd probably filled about a third, when we got the order to leave it as it was, because we were going to evacuate, so I didn't get it back to them. One of the books there was a mate of mine walk, talks about that thing. Two of them had to crawl down to where water be got and fill up a few

water bottles and crawl back up to the group. Well, we held that up for about five days and then we were told that nine o'clock that we were going to move out down the mountain about eleven o'clock. It was about that time I suppose. We took off and left this mate who wrote the book, left him up the top on his own and set him up about four machine guns and he went from one to the other

firing them just to make them think that we were still up there. And he came down to join us but on the way down the leaders up the front took the wrong fork in the road. By the time they woke up to the fact and come back we went down the rest of it onto the beaches; the last transports were going out to the ships. They couldn't stay any more it was three o'clock in the morning. The navy couldn't. They took a helluva lot of belting, the navy.

so they couldn't stay, where do we go, we're on an island and they're not coming back any more.

It is, yes, yes. To the point of. The frustration of. All you could do was sit down and wait for them to come along and pick you up you know.

This mate of mine, as I say, he was the first one down the mountain after us, and he came to a fork, in the track, it's only a track, a goat track

and there was a group of Aussies there. They had been drinking wine, they were drunk. He said, “You'd better be on your way.” he said, “Or you'll be in trouble.” “Oh, we don't have to worry about that, the 2/7th battalion's still up there, they're holding it.” He said, “I've got new for you, I'm the last one.” He said they sobered up and raced down the track in front of him.

All those things happened.

Well, that was one of the bravest things I've ever seen from an individual, because they didn't realise they were getting of from Spartia until the daylight come. When we were captured

they lined us all up in a group and this German officer stood up on a rock and spoke to us, in perfect English. He said they didn't know we were going off there, thought we were still up in the mountain, but when they'd did realise it they put the order in for them to bring the aircraft in and bomb and strafe. And they did, they just raked the beach with machine gun fire and up the side of the mountain and we were a group

of about forty that was up, like up a track up the mountain, then this young German mountain soldier, he was only a young fellow. He raced down the mountain waving this huge Nazi flag at the planes, and all of a sudden, and first up they didn't get the message. You could see, like in a cowboy movie or war movie, bullets flashing in the dust.

but he wouldn't stop, he kept going down and waving it. All of a sudden they saw it and they stopped.

Yes, as well as his own mates of course, he had a group that was with him. They came out of the mountain all over the place in groups, to capture small bodies of people. Then they put us all together in a group and marched us back, officers and all. The colonel in our unit

Walker, he was already on the barge that started to pull off from the shore to go out to the troop ship, when he got the message that the battalion weren't able to come he decided he would turn back and spend the time, which he did. Him and another officer that came back and they became POWs with us. He had the opportunity of getting away.

No, I used to know his name but I don't think. He was only a private but he worked for the intelligence section of the battalion. And they'd already scanned the ground in the daylight hours. But he took the wrong….

I say he may have, I don't think anybody done anything about it I don't think anybody

I never saw him at any reunion or Anzac Day parade, so whether that affected him and he didn't want to turn up I don't know. I know we had one officer there, a captain. He was in charge of supplies. His orders, as we found out later. He'd sent back off one of the destroyers that come there a supply of tins of food and

and stuff that his group were supposed to stack them on the beaches and stand guard until we come down because they knew we had nothing to eat or drink. But he just stacked them there and he took off. Nobody talked to him when we come back. He attended one Anzac Day and nobody talked to him. He hasn't come back since, he'd dead I suppose, Fletcher, but he never turned up again.

but he just left it and course there were that many other troops there that by the time we got there, there was nothing left, everybody'd taken it. Oh they're just one of the mishaps that you have in life, you don't worry about it, you just get on with it. So when they marched us all back and they took us back across the island, there was a barbed wire sort of entanglement there that we had used and the

Greeks had used to cage up Italian prisoners that they took from Albania. So we were lodged in that and outside of it there was this big concrete waterway. It stood about that high like a square box but it came down the mountain and that's where the water used to come off the river. It used to run through the village. So we were allowed to go out there to wash, but it had to be at certain times.

because the people down the other end, the Greeks, well they take their water for cooking and drinking out of it, so we could only do it at a certain hour. So that they would be, the water from all these POWs washing wouldn't end up in their stews or whatever they have. But, that was bad; it was a heck of a lot of dysentery. I had never had dysentery, I had bad diarrhoea. The toilets had been built

there for the Italian prisoners beforehand was just a big trench with a couple of logs laying across it. And of course, some of those fellows that were in a bad way used to sleep by it, because they couldn't get away from the thing because of the dysentery. There was one incident there that a Cretan fellow come along with his donkey collecting wood and went into the forest

a little bit. And while he was away his donkey disappeared. It finished up in little jam tins cooking on little fires all over the ground. The only thing that was left was the skin. So that was that incident on Crete. They used us then to build a beautiful cemetery. Not only for the Germans, they even dug up some of our fellows that died. They went

on a working party digging up the cobble stones and that in the little villages to build this thing and they did a wonderful job with all steps and everything, but they had slave labour. We were slave labour so they could do it.

Aaaah, I would say about. I didn't get to see the finish of the thing. I would say three, four weeks. They took us down

we went on this coastal steamer, called the Arcadia.

Well, we didn't. Maybe some of them occasionally did. They never bothered us. We had these young paratroopers they were, they didn't bother with us but they were arrogant in themselves. But I never come across any incidents.

with them.

Yes, there were only officers in charge. Our colonel and two of his officers were with us for four days, four or five days. Then he got a message from the German officer in charge there that he would like him to appear before him, which he did. They had to supply him with clothes. His clothes were in rags. The book tells you that.

then they said that he'd have to leave because they couldn't stay with them. They were moved into other camps on into Germany. For officers only.

Oh, yes, they wanted to do that in the first place and he said no, he was going to walk with his troops, and they gave him that

permission to walk with us and march right across the island. We were two or three days getting right to the other side. But then once he got there, it was about three days I think it was when the officers in charge of that area realised that he was there, so he sent that and asked if he would appear before him and he did. He didn't want to leave there but the told him he'd have to. So off he went, I didn't see him again.

well after the war anyhow.

Yes, the Arcadia, small coastal vessel, we were jammed down below the holds right down in the ship, it was in three sections. This time, still these fellas with dysentery and that and stuff was dropping down on the ones below. We were allowed up on deck

in groups to use, what they'd done, the toilet and they had a log hung out over the side of the ship with a rope, and you had to get out and sit on that. It was a bit risky. The embarrassing thing was. I don't know if they were German or whether they were Italian. Four women up on the bridge laughing their heads off at the antics of the fellas trying to use the toilet off a log off out over the side of the ship,

and stop themselves falling in. And all we got on that. We had no water to drink, and they gave us raw fish. In their idea that was a delicacy. Salted raw fish, you can imagine what that done to us. Without any water to drink, and these people, small pieces of fish. That's all we got. It took about nine hours or something to get to Greece. Salonika. Now Salonika

itself is a story in itself. It was eh, there were two camps in Salonika. 1 and 2. They were camps that were built during the Greek/Turkish war. Brick buildings with parade grounds and what have you. They had nothing there to give us much to eat but a bit of water, cabbage soup in the morning. And you used to get a small round flat loaf

of bread had to go to 8 prisoners, so you got a little wedge. That in itself if it wasn't serious it was comical, because, you'd select one to cut it and all the eyes'd be on it so that they didn't get any more than the next one, and then you'd draw cards to have your pick, and I can tell you I doubt if there wouldn't have been a sliver of stuff more on one cut than another. And that's all you got all day.

Yes, it did, because of the fact that we had. There was Australians, New Zealanders and Cypriots. Then all of a sudden they found that the sewerage pipe had an opening in the middle of the parade ground. So they got the idea of escaping through that. I think there was something like about 39 did escape before they

found out, and that's going through the sewerage pipe, see, something like that.

Yeah. And to pull themselves forward, and to keep that going, they run an imaginary two up game around it, so that the Germans would see you congregating and wouldn't take any notice, and a couple would go down into this sort of trap area, about that deep, square, there was apparently, there was a story

there was a Cypriot went through it and got half way through it and panicked and he died in there. Course then they knew the others, they fired up the pipe from one end and then they came to the other end, he died a few years ago, the same unit as us. He was head down and his back side up and a bullet went right up his backside. Every time we told him he was shot in the backside he would never

agree to it, but he was.

With his bum up. So then of course you weren't allowed out at night time. The toilets themselves were in an area in the open, in the parade ground, so at night time you weren't allowed, they used to patrol round there with the dogs and the guards. They shot a few, because these fellows with dysentery had to go somewhere. They went out there, a few were shot,

I don't know who they belonged to, but this particular night there were five New Zealanders in there and they threw three hand grenades in there and blew them up. If we'd have stayed there, in that camp, for twelve months, none of us would've walked away.

No, you slept on the concrete floor in what they called the barracks. With nothing.

No. Just like a, I suppose in one respect

a big hall. There was nothing in there, not a thing.

Well, they used to just sit around doing nothing all day because there was nothing to do.

I would say, in the day light hours and luckily at Salonika the weather, it was around June, that's their summer, start of their summer period. They just sit around in groups and they used to be just lousing themselves because of the lice was just. You couldn’t understand how much there was.

Because the fact is the things that happen there, they used by this time when we got to Salonika they used an occupation army and they were made out of, I think, Romanians, I forget, one of those countries, and they were the greatest mongrels you ever come across in your life. There was one instance there that I saw. Outside the wire enclosure there was a

Greek girl, about 12 I suppose. Threw half a loaf of bread over the fence. One of these guards seen her, and knocked her down and bull whipped her on the ground. We're in the odd way, can't do a thing about it. Then when we were marching to the trains to go to Germany. It was like semi Anzac Day. People came out on the streets, were saying goodbye and all this. This woman, I would say,

when I say woman, mid twenties I would say my estimate at that time was that she'd be about eight months pregnant. She stepped out and gave one of the prisoners; I didn't know him, a piece of bread. And these guards seen her, hit her with a rifle butt, kicked her, she lost everything. There, she was starting to lose everything as we marched off. They were mongrels in themselves.

when we went to the train. We used to have forty men in a big freight wagon. Nowhere to sit, crouched, sat on the floor. The only toilet we had was a big tin, like a tin of peaches. Everybody used to use that in turn and every time there was an act, the corner of the carriage was an opening was about that big, with barbed wire across it. That was the only light or air that came in.

Every time that somebody used these tins, you'd hear them say "feet" and all the feet draw up their feet to let him get up there to empty it out. So this particular night one of these Romanian guards, the trains that we had those freight wagons used to have a little platform on the end. And the guard stood there. They threw the tin out one night and he copped the whole darn lot. The next stop that we had was just a stop, I don't know for what. What they used to do was run the train off

into a parking area to allow troop trains to go through.

Oh we had a big train load. Four or five hundred I suppose.

About forty in each wagon.

No, you just sit. You couldn’t lay down. We were about six nights getting to Germany, to Munich. And they

all gave us when we went on that was a pound supposed to be a pound in weight of bread, and equivalent of about maybe a can of soft drink, it was water, that had to last the six nights. We pulled up over a river just outside of Belgrade in Yugoslavia, and they tied everything that they could find on themselves to this

tin to drop down, because the train had stopped on this bridge over the river. To try and get down to the river water, but we were just a little bit short. But it wasn't long before we pulled into a siding and the Yugoslav Red Cross gave us some mint tea or something. That wasn't the greatest either because that started up the diarrhoea and all that business. From there we

arrived in, just outside of Munich at a place called Mausberg, 7A Stalag. There's photos of that there as well. They all lined us up I remember, this German sergeant major spoke good English and come along in front of us and called us the biggest names in the world, never seen such a dilapidated lot of people in all my life but he said, we're good, he said, “We'll give you a feed this evening,

but I can assure you, it won't be steak and eggs either.” And it wasn't, it was just cabbage soup and it went through us. Now, it was shocking, and I tell you, this is when I felt this feeling of depression.

Well, you didn't know, because the incident I'll tell you about we all had to be de-loused of course, which I'll tell you about

you leave all your clothes in a certain area and you'd hang ‘em up and they'd de-louse them. And you walked into this barrack, naked about 12 or 14 at a time. Seats down the middle they had German soldiers in overalls, one sitting facing this way and one sitting that way. And you'd line up in front of ‘em and they'd shave every hair off your body,

that's bad I know, and then the next….

Yeah, then next moment, you had to stand there raw naked, not a hair on your body. Then they brought in the first lot of Polish what's it's name, conscript workers, all women, all in their twenties or thirties, stark naked, make ‘em stand in front of ya, while they coat every hair of their

body [with delousing solution]. That then was done to try and break your will power down. That's what I put it down to. That's when I had this feeling. I thought, if they could do that, what's in line for us now? And then when they done that we had to go throughout into another room. There was a huge barrel, oh, probably about as big as this room. The women would come up one side, we came up the other

and there'd be about 25 or 30, body to body, because you couldn't move. And when they said duck, you'd duck, cause it would kill all the eggs and lice and that was just to demoralise you, but it failed. Because of the fact that you get starving people, a naked body didn't mean a thing to you.

It was, to make you feel down on the thing, but it didn't work because just seeing anybody's naked body when you're starving, that doesn't interest you. So from there we went out onto working parties.

Just the odd one. The odd one would sometimes give you a cigarette, you know.

But the average one, as I say, until we got to Germany they weren't of German nationality. They were bad. And the rest of the time in Germany, there were some bad times, but most of the time wasn't. There was a lot of hard work. Lot of long hours, you worked. When we went to Poland to the coal mines we worked anything up to fourteen hours a day. Two of us had to

shovel 30 ton of coal in that period and you couldn't come up before you were finished. But we couldn't do any more than 14 hours, probably to do with the Geneva Convention. But I seen some of those Poles go down on a Monday morning and not come up til Thursday night. Machinery breaks down they'd have to do today's shift, tomorrows, so they never let out.

Oh, they went into factories, they brought them all out of

Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia.

Later on. We got nothing for the first ten months. We weren't even registered back here.

Families, if you look at my record, it showed that

I was missing in action on the first of June, then later on missing in action believed to be POW, recovered, it was a strange way of putting it. Recovered in Russia in such and such a date, I've got it all there. That's how we were registered then with the Red

Cross, we started to get Red Cross parcels, then you could do some trading. The story goes on, later was I'd never seen snow in my life. I went out on a building work in Munich. I'd never seen snow in my life, I'd never struck it. That was in 1941 it was the coldest winter on

record, minus 45 degrees.

They do, but they were always rugged up well, but we had nothing. Our uniforms were worn out. We had a dislike for the French, we never got on with the French at any time and when we first got this stalag in Germany and they were all starving, they

had been there since the fall of France, the Dunkirk area. They got parcels from home. They had a sort of a dry type of biscuit that they were swapping with out fellas for our uniforms which were better than theirs and they would give us their threadbare type of jackets and riding britches type of pants.

Mine wasn't worth exchanging because it was just all ragged, the boots, this is another story. You heard the story about the people with two left feet. I had two left shoes, or boots. I could get the right one, but the left one I had to split down the front to get that inch, walk like Charlie Chaplin.

I had, my clothes, of course, when I arrived in Germany, because the clothes were in such a bad order, they gave me some French clothes and they were very threadbare. You had no singlet, no underwear, no socks. Two left shoes, or left boots. Just a jacket and these jodhpur types of things. And I had the job, they'd only

got to the level, there was a big line of apartment buildings. They were an L shape, and it was about hundred yards one way and about 300 yards the other way, but they were only at the cellar level. My job was to, right on the corner, there were stacks of bricks around. I was

pulling nails out of the boards for future use, and I tell you what, I would have been dead in a week, I was frozen. On about the third day I was there I was doing this and all of a sudden there was a plunk on the side and I looked around and there was a brown paper parcel about that long, that wide. I didn't know what it was. When I looked up

there was a woman standing on the corner and when the guard wasn't there she pointed to me and pointed to the parcel. When the guard wasn’t there I kicked it around behind a stack of bricks. When I opened it up it had a bit of woollen long johns, a woollen singlet, pair of ear muffs, and a pair of socks. I never had much to strip off there but I

stripped off in the snow and all that coldness and I put them on and when I wanted to wash ‘em in the barracks I washed them and stand them in front of the pot belly stove and I'd stay there for about three hours to stop anybody pinching them.

Well, yes, a long history goes into this, is this the time for it or what?

Quite possibly. Well, the start off was that she walked off and I saw her then, occasionally. She used to walk out in the street and go to the shops. Occasionally she'd drop a little parcel off with some food, half a chicken or something. I used to share that with two or three of my mates. Then when the summertime come, by this time you've got a little bit

more confidence in yourself, you get a bit, a little bit that way that you can sum up the guards and when they're out of action you do certain things. We used to go over to a hut which was behind the big building, to have their lunch; they used to bring your lunch out in a big can. It was only a

very thick soup kind of thing. They be in there, you'd have about an hour. I used to leave that and go back to the building, because occasionally she'd walk past and I then got to talk to her and there was no guards because they are with the rest of them. She told me her father was a member of the opposition party when Italy came into power and he went to a concentration

camp. He died there. She had no love for the Nazi party whatsoever. She was a woman 35 and she had a son who was eleven and she lived with her mother. So we got a lot of occasions, got to talk there.

No, it wasn't, I'd learnt German, so by this time I could speak fairly good.

Then when next winter came along we couldn't work on the building job, we couldn't mix concrete or anything. So we were put into, there were streets of ‘em. We were put into cellars, convert the cellars into air raid shelters, reinforce them. We'd met in there and have a talk when the guard wasn't around. Then I got out

on four occasions at night time and joined her. I don't know whether that should go into the history or not, but it is, it's good really. Now what happened was, with the camp we were in. There was only 150 of us, a working party. It was a big long barrack. Then there'd be a wire fence and the guards’ barrack was on the other side of that. And the showers were on the other side of it. And when they used to lock you up at night they used to

close the shutters, but on the other side, because the German barracks were there they never locked the shutters on the shower room. So right down the end of the barrack was our toilet the kitchen was up the other end. Then one night we were down there talking and the fella looked at the door, it was a wooden door that's got two panels.

and he said, “That panel'd come out of there.” and he got down and he lifted the beading off, and the panel just falls out, so he made the holes where the nails were bigger and shoved the nails back into it and he got a bit of soap and he got some dirt off the floor and rubbed it around the nail hole and nobody noticed it. And as I say, on four occasions me and another fella used to get out, now we were

half a kilometre from the building job. You couldn't get out of there until ten o'clock at night because the guard'd come, stand up the top near the kitchen, and he'd say "lights out", so you'd rush to get into bed. But because we were going to go out a couple of us'd be down near the toilets, and when the lights went out, the guard would then go and go round the other side of the run, so that's what they done, only two guards

to patrol the outside, so with that the fella that found the panel in the first place would take the panel out. And I'd go out and the other fella'd go out, stay in the shadows and he'd put the panel back. Once the guard had come around your area, over the fence and you are into the paddock.

Yeah. Barbed wired and all. The barbed wire used to be high and it would cave in at the top, but we managed to get that and I used to go back to the

building and meet her. And we had work clothes to work in. They were just like a black material type thing. I'd get there and take off my uniform, hide it amongst the bricks put this other on and then she'd turn up. The first two times she took me to her sister which was about

I don't know, half a kilometre up the road and around. And she was on the third storey and we'd spend five hours up there. We had to be back at the camp and inside the wire before half past five. That's when we had to come out and have a shower, so we'd spend that time, having a cup of tea, talking, and all sorts of things. Then I went back with her. She only lived up the street from where the building was

and this particular night was the second one, she used to leave me on the corner of one street and go straight up to her place and I used to walk around the corner, across the road into the building, change back into my uniform and head back to camp. On this particular night, she left me, this is at about quarter to five in the morning it was still dark. I walked down the road and as I turned the corner

to go into the street to cross over to the building, I run into two policemen and they were walking down just talking. And for what reason I don't know, but I was that close to them that they parted and I walked between the two of them. My heart was pounding, but they must have thought I was a worker going to work, so they didn't even challenge me, so that was all right. So after that we made two trips to her brother's place

and that was on the other side of town. And all she said to me that night was whatever you do, whatever I say, my German wasn't so great by then, don't say anything, just laugh. So we came to one of the squares we had to cross, and on the other corner there was two police. They didn't bother us, we went to her brother's spent the night.

Local police, just local police.

Probably a worker going to work.

Yes, probably, oh look, there were a lot of conscript workers. The French had a pretty good even run around of different ones of them. After that they moved us to.

Oh, it was a passionate one in the finish. She was thirty five, I'll show you the photos on Monday or whenever you're

ready. But she done everything for me. Without her I wouldn't have survived.

Yeah.

I suppose to a certain way, but not as much as she was. I was only nineteen by this time, just right about to turn to twenty. So what happened was, this particular day, when

the lunch hour when I went across to the building to see her, we got caught by a civilian worker, a little fellow he was.

Yeah. And, he grabbed us. He went to grab her and I hooked him [punched him] and knocked him down and she went up the steps and took off. He got up and dusted himself off, he wasn't worried about that. But we used to get

the Red Cross parcels and you had in the parcels at that time or other, you used to get 2oz packets of tea, and he wanted 6 packets of tea, otherwise he'd report us. So I did have one back there and he wanted one the next day and he wanted six in the week. But you couldn't because you only got a parcel once every month. So when I went back I spoke to the Australian sergeant who was in charge

at the camp, inside of it, fellow from Sydney, and I told him. He said, “We'll fix him.” He was allowed to wander, go around to the working jobs with an interpreter, to see if everything was right. So he said, “We'll be out and it will be right on nine o'clock.” By this time we had got the walls of the building up and we were down in the cellar, so

he arrived and I gave him his one packet of tea and he said, “I want five more.” I said, “No, that's the last one you'll get.” “Oh.” he said, “I'll get the guard.” but by this time the sergeant had arrived with the guard up the alley way. I said, “If that's a fact we'll call him now, there's one there.” with that he panicked. I called the guard, he pushed the packet of tea back, he didn't want it, I never seen him any more.

Cause he was in trouble if he was accepting food from POWs, so the sergeant and the guard come down and said, “What do you want?” I said, “Oh, it wasn't important. It was something to do with the work.” So that was that, so after that we never met down in the cellar 'cause it was too dangerous. She wouldn't even go out and shop for weeks. Her sister used to do her shopping.

End of tape

Well, as I say, we were lucky to get away wit that incident, so we stopped meeting at lunch time. But it was not long after that we were moved. When the first lot of Russian prisoners were brought in, they moved us across town to a place called Wolframsdorf. It was right opposite the cemetery.

and then she couldn't contact me over there but. Then I spent about five months over at the other camp when they moved us up into Poland. She went really about three years without finding out what had happened to me or where we'd gone. So to get away

before we get into the Polish thing, with her, when I got back I'd given her my….. there's a thing I have to tell you about - how we kept contact with one another. When I went over to this other place. She found out where I was working. I was working on the council then. And she came over one day and said, “You'll have to be very careful.” So what we done, I got her to

write about six envelopes with her address and her handwriting, not mine. And if I ever wanted to meet her or wanted anything, I'd pop it in the post. Use the German post. But I'd used about three I think. I must have had about four left. And I stuck them in the back of a little mirror and we got the word this day that we were going to be

inspected by the Gestapo [secret police]. I took it in my mind, I took it out of the photo and tore them up, got rid of ‘em. When I came back from work that day there was the mirror in about five pieces, so I'd done the right thing. But she had no contact with me after that. We had that up til then using the German post. Then they moved us from there up to Poland. We went to a place

called Eight B first where there were a lot of other prisoners as well, another stalag. In fact when the war was over they found in the forest just at the back of the camp, forty five thousand Russians were buried there. Died. You've got no idea what they done to those fellows. It was shocking.

Oh,

mass graves, they just bulldoze big mass graves and they bury them. But there were forty five thousand built up in the forest in that area. That's what they found when the war was over. In their investigations. Before we went to Poland we were back in the stalag outside of Munich for about ten days, and they had

a compound there with some Russian prisoners in it and they used to put the dogs in there at night to go round, and the first night that the dogs went in, there were two dogs, and the next morning they were hung out on the fence, and they put other dogs in the next night and the skins were on the fence again. They'd eaten the dogs of course.

Oh, they were cruel to the Russians.

They always consider ‘em. If you read anything of Germans that done in those times, you'll find that they considered them lower than low. They weren't human people. That was something to do with it I suppose. Political things that went on over the years. They did. I remember when I went into hospital over at the barrack hospital it was in

Munich when I was bed down with the flu. They brought in a Russian fellow there. In normal times they would be about John's [interviewer’s] height and weighed about 11 stone, and he was 34lb in weight.

They gave him some food which he couldn't hold, and he died, but they just done everything, they just starved ‘em and even when we went up in Poland and went

in the stalag there before we went up into working parties, they had Russians there in a compound. The compound was attached next to where the Australians were. I wasn't there, I wasn't involved, but I had a mate of mine there, he was telling me the thing that separated the compounds was the brick wall of the compound. They used to come in and remove a few bricks out

of the brick wall and the Aussies used to pass them some food. And there's times that they would pass ‘em the food and one of their own kind'd hit 'im over the head and take the food and run off with it. That's how they were, they were desperate.

No, they hadn't. They had nothing. The Russians were so very ill treated, they were really bad. But not like us they didn't have it.

No, not, only when they used to search us, go through things, and they had a one track mind. If they were looking for civilian clothing, you could have a bloody radio in your crib [bed] and they'd push it to one side.

Yeah, that's right. Because naturally, cut throat razors were banned, but I've seen German soldiers come in and search and see cut throat razors, and push ‘em to one side. That's not what they wanted.

Well, as I

said, when we went to Poland we went from there and went out in a working party. It was a coal mine; it was eleven hundred metres below. Metres! Below ground level. Used to travel out in little trains, three mile out underground, under the town.

Yes, yes, yeah. The last escape was when I come in the clothing. When I got

to the camp, there was. Working parties only had about 150. There were 159 when I got there. It was mainly made up by English troops that had been captured at Dunkirk, and a few South Africans and a few New Zealanders. So we went, there were 34 of us Australians that went to the camp. So when we got there, the English fella that was in charge,

he just gave us a run down on what to expect and what not to expect. And he told us, he had this young fella there then. He was only 19. He was captured at Dunkirk and he was a specialist in radio. And he built a radio. They got all the bits and pieces that they could get from the Polish people, by exchange of some of the things out of the Red Cross parcel

but the only thing that they couldn't get was, what do they call it now. It's a thing, like you're doing now, to bring in everything perfect. It was a coil and they couldn't get one and it took him eighteen months, but he sat down with a pair of scissors and a jam tin type of thing, and he cut this thing to make the coil.

And it took him eighteen months and some days he only cut a quarter of an inch because it was said to be so intricate. He used to wind, he wound that on but he would never listen to the radio. He was always frightened of being caught with it. And when they used to change the wave length, which the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] used to do it and so did the Germans. He would go and unwind it and wind it on to another wavelength.

we had that radio there for what, two years. First up we started to put it in….We had a box, a coal box, where the coal used to go in for the heater. They raided a few places and they found things that had been hidden in the coal boxes, because they'd get dust on ‘em when the Gestapo blokes'd come in. But ours, we took about that much of the level off it each day and got new stuff off the heap outside, so

there was never any dust. Anyhow, we did it. I used to listen with them, take down notes, two or three in turn when you've taken down the notes you write a little bit of it, then you go from barrack to barrack and read it to them and destroy it. When the time came that they were going to move all POWs back from

Poland, Czechoslovakia back into Germany, they didn't want them to fall into the hand of the Russians because that would give ‘em more fire power you see. So they decided that, we knew we were going out on Saturday. They moved them back into Germany. Some of them were on the road for months and walked a thousand mile. They fell by the…

they died and this mate of mine he was one of ‘em, they used to sleep out in the snow in the middle of winter, in barns and anything. They got ‘em back as far as Bavaria again. But the radio they decided, they had a big recreation hall or hut and that was built on top of a brick foundation that

you cant get underneath it and have a look if anything was hidden under there. The brickwork was about that high. Similar to what you see when you build a brick veneer home or something. They'd apparently they told me when they saw me in England. They got down to there, and they took out some of the bricks and put the radio in there and sealed it up again. Now, when I escaped how that come about was that

I had been working down the mines a lot and you done three different shifts in the day and when I was on afternoon shift on about four occasions, we used to go down with a guard. There used to be two of us and we'd go down with a guard. He used to go down to the post office and pick up their mail. Also they'd go round to this

family brewery. There was only this woman and her son that would run it. They would go in there and get bottles of beer for the guards and they'd sit in there for half an hour and have a beer themselves. The fella that was with me at the time, we'd sit out on the step in the sun. This day I saw a young lass sitting on a seat.

She was there sitting in the sun, I got talking to her. And after about the third time that I'd done this she did come out with her mother and said that if any time I wanted to escape they would help me. That's what you needed, outside help to be successful. Well I suppose for twelve months the opportunity didn't arise.

But when they decided they were going to move ‘em back into Germany I decided I was going to make my attempt. Well, what happened was when there was an air raid they never bombed where we were but they used to fly over the Russians to other places. Of course the air raid sirens would go off and they'd move us out of the camp and into the yards at the mine, there used to be a tunnel that run into there,

where the trains used to go in, and they used to close both ends off with steel doors. So they took us in there, the rest of the shift were down below so I suppose there'd be about fifty of us in this tunnel. When the all clear siren went off they take you out. And like they always done whether they took you on a tram or whatever they done, they always counted you on and off so they had to have their numbers.

So when they all went out I decided that this was when I was going to make my break. I curled up in a cavity there and pretended to be asleep. Well, they didn't have their numbers and two guards came back with their torches. They thought they were waking me up and said it was all over so I had to go back to camp. So I went back and by the time we got back there because we were moving out the next day, so to stop any escapes they put extra big search lights on their and the place was lit up like the

MCG [Melbourne Cricket Ground]. And I walked around and around that fence 'til three o'clock in the morning I think and I couldn’t find any way of getting out, so I laid down and had some sleep and a fella come to me and said, “Are you still intending to go?” I said, “Yeah.” and he said, “Come and have a look at this.” so he took me round the back right up the back of the camp and there was no guard there. And that led out into a big paddock, a big field. And he said, “This is the reason.” went round the front and of course

we weren't allowed to take anything what you stood up in, to go on the march, so any extra clothing they were throwing over the front fence to the Poles, and what got caught they were climbing up the wire to get it off and they brought the two guards from round the back to get them away. There was nobody there. So I got this little gunny sack with some food in it and I got over the top, and dropped into the paddock. And of course it was snowing. Now we get to this clothing that

they supplied us with. They were both suits with no lining in ‘em. It was like a suit, with a light material. But on the back they had a big E, which meant English. They didn't talk about Australians or New Zealand, E. But about that big. So I took off across. There was a track further up where people used to walk across so I headed towards there and I heard these fellas yelling

to me in the background but I couldn't hear what they were saying exactly. And as I got, I thought to meself, I dragged a bag behind me to cover me footprints until I got to the track. When I got to the track I threw the bag over my shoulder and I heard ‘em say, “Its right.” I'd covered up the E. So I wandered out onto the roadway and there were two buildings. One was completed and one was just up to the cellar

and I wanted to change and turn this inside out so the E would be in. And I went around the corner and there was a young lass there and she was bathing practically a new born baby. She panicked, she got very excited, I said, “Don't worry about it.” So I went next door to where there was just a concrete floor on top pulled out the snow inside and crawled inside there. And every

movement you swear that everybody can hear you because you're in an enclosed spot. So after I'd stayed there for an hour or so I was frozen, I had to get outa there. And I'd been told by what I said, this lass, I was to head that way. Over the back further there was these big…. There was a big long street and it had these coal miners, workers used to live there, two storey buildings

oh, a couple of dozen of them. So I headed for there. I got on the road and damn me round the bend come a squad of German soldiers. They used to march single file along each side of the road. There was nowhere I could go, the fields were on both sides, so I still got the back over my back, I walked right down the centre of ‘em. They never took a bit of notice of me.

Well that was that, and as I say, they never took any notice of me. When I arrived at the street and turned the corner oh, there'd be dozens of people out in the sun talking. And I started to wonder, cause I gotta get to the other side of town. I started to walk and all of a sudden a voice came and said, “You're not Polis.” It's not much use me

denying the fact, I couldn't speak much of it at all. She said, “Are you from the camp?” and I said yes. She said, “Follow me. But stay a few paces behind.” which I did, went down hundred yards and she took me up onto the second floor and she said, “You can't stay here but I want you to stay until I get my sister who lives on the other side of town.” And she said, “Don't go anywhere near the windows.”

She said, “I'll be back in a minute.” and she came back with this young lass who was about seventeen who was going to keep me company. She had a whatsitsname, a mug on the stove, a big mug and they had what they call ersatz [substitute] coffee and it was made out of acorns. It wasn't too bad hot but cold it is terribly bitter. And she said, “Oh, there is a mug of coffee there.” and I was frozen. And I picked it up in me hands

and it stuck to me hands, couldn't get it off. It burnt them. Eventually I got it off. The young lass washed me hands and bandaged it up a bit. Anyhow, she came back just on dark and they gave me…. they used to have years ago, car coats, that's half a coat, came down above the hips. She gave me this to put on and a hat, and I went arm in arm with her

sister and by this time the Germans were ready to evacuate. The Russians were getting closer but it still took about ten days before they got through that area. And she done the same thing, take her arm she says, “Just have a giggle.” We got onto the main road and it was just lined with German trucks and artillery pieces and tanks. They were all ready to evacuate if the Russians came through.

we passed a vacant block and this girl or woman screamed and run out on the road. We could see what was happening; she was being attacked by a German soldier at that stage. She said, “Don't interfere with that just keep going.” We got to the next corner and there's two police standing on the corner talking, but as we got there this girl had got up there about ten paces in front of us. As soon as she got level with them I heard her say to them those people saw it.

And they said, they yelled out we want…. She said, “Run!” and run we did. Up the road, down a couple of lanes up a couple of alley ways, they come to the first alley way they gave it up then, we just continued on. Then we went back over to her place. Her mother wasn’t there, they had a two storey place, but it only consisted of two rooms. There was the kitchen and everything downstairs and upstairs you had like

a dining room with two bunks along the wall. And her mother had gone to work apparently and couldn't get back because the curfew had stopped her. So we were on our own for about two days I suppose. And the toilet was like the Aussie country toilet out the back. It was downstairs and outside and I had to wait until dark. Anyhow, she went off to work on the third

day and she'd been going to work and coming back. Now she was a lass who had worked before at a butcher shop. When the rations were on she took pity on someone and gave them extra meat and it was found out. She spent a couple of years in a concentration camp. She told me her life story and that and she told me how she'd been

taken advantage of by three officers, by offering her food. Three occasions the food was offered to her after the act, but then they tip it into the dirt and rub it into the dirt so that she couldn't eat it. I said to her, “Why did you go to it three times?” She said each time she thought that somebody might be different and give her food. Anyhow, there's [tattooed] numbers up her wrist

so she didn't get back and I used to look out the window upstairs and on this day on three occasions. Once I seen a German patrol go up the street. It was when Hitler formed his army of elderly citizens. They used to have a band on their arm. And I saw a Russian patrol and that disappeared and nothing happened,

then all of a sudden I could hear that the fighting had gone past. I was upstairs and couldn't get down, and when she'd gone to work and not to move she'd left me a bucket to use. I decided I had to get back to this other place; this is where they were going to help me. So after I'd spent the two or three days I decided to go. The only way I could do it was I

hung by me finger tips to the window sill and dropped to where all the snow had built up against the house and I went through it then to crawl out but I made a boo boo, there must have been a very thorny bush there and I come out and I was scratched on me hands and blood was pouring out of me. I couldn't get me bearings I just headed in the right direction. After a while I got my bearings where this place was and I went there and I knocked on the door

and they thought I….. they knew the march had gone on by now and they thought I'd broken away from the march. They doctored me up and the lass's mother was a whatsitsname, a midwife. I stayed there for weeks; she'd get called out for different jobs.

No,

it was just civilian people, girls that are in the family way, going to have a baby and what have you. They went out three times while I was there. Then of course, I know it's funny, but I developed a bad ulcer right on top of me eye.

Well I'll tell you. And

her mother sort of operated on it. Just opened it up to open it up, put a dressing on it. She said, “You can't sleep on that, you'll knock it.” Then she comes out and she's got a thing, you know you see these cricketers, have these boxes to protect them, well something like that. It was shaped in a way that I thought it was something to do with her business of being a midwife.

but for a woman, it was placed between her legs. It was that shape. And I said, “You're not going to put that over me!” But anyhow she convinced me and that fixed me up. Well, I was with them for a fair while and I got on well with her, with Lucy and I said to her out of the blue one day that I wouldn't mind marrying her. Parents were in agreement with her, she was twenty at the time.

No, I don't think so. They don't think, because of the fact that her father was the manager of a big mine in a place called Kanabits [?]. When the Germans came in they took all the executive staff out of all these jobs and put their own people into it. He went back to being just an ordinary coal miner. But

by the time I'd got there he was retired and no more use to them. She had a brother who was eighteen and the police force was looking for him because he wouldn't work for them. They used to raid the place. Anyhow, yes, they decided we'd get married. Of course they had nothing to do as far as…. we went across to, of course. She was Catholic.

but not a strict Catholic, so we went over to the Catholic church to see if we could get married there. He said he couldn't marry us without the bishop's permission.

Yeah. If he had the bishop’s permission. The bishop lived about three mile away.

Oh they were, in that period of time, but

I'm talking about when the Russians had moved through. We were getting pulled up from time to time at night time, because being, their freedom after five years of the Germans. They never had that great a freedom with the Russians, but better than they had. Everybody was giving little celebrations of friends and we used to go around to four or five of their friends at different times. You'd forget things and

you'd be past the curfew time. Well I suppose on about four accounts we got pulled up by Russian patrols and had a tommy gun stuck in your ribs. She had papers and I had nothing and the last time, whoever he was, said if you don't get a passport it'll happen to you all the time. So her mother took me up to the coal mine where I worked. I've got the whatsitsnames there

to show them. They were like a little not a passport but the right things. And the coal mine filled it in, that I was a POW and I work there and they took me along to the Polish and Russian Red Cross and they made out another one with all the things but your name was changed, instead of Drew it was Drev, because w was pronounced as a v, so they done that. And I didn't get any

more problems after that. So we had to go to the bishop's, but we had to take the risk this night. So we went through all the paddocks, potholes and the snow was blowing down and oh God it was miserable. Fall into potholes and we got over to the bishop and he saw us and he wasn’t in agreement of course.

Yes, before I was recovered.

Oh, well, I think it was. When they say it was your duty to escape it was just a saying, but you didn't take that into your mind. Anyhow we went over to the bishop and he was against it. And then oh I suppose we sat

there an hour. Then he decided. He tried to talk us out of it all the time. He couldn't talk her out of it. So he sat down and he typed his permission. Twenty five words it was and it took him one hour, about an hour and a quarter. And he'd just tap one key and sit back, just to get us to say something then he could kick us out, but then he didn't, he gave us the ticket and after,

he was a villain. He died about a fortnight after, but that's getting away from it. So we took that back. The priest of the local church said, “Look you've only got four days then Lent is on and I can't do nothing about it.” So we had to do something about it. How could you have a wedding without some form of reception? There was no such thing as a reception. But there was another Australian

in the town that once he heard there was an Australian who had escaped he got in touch with me. How he found out I think it was because of the people he was living with. The two boys in the family were black marketeers, I suppose they told him. Anyhow, he come down to see me. So we went back, two of us went back to the camp. This time there were only two policemen on the gate.

it was to keep other people out. They didn't want to let us in. We only wanted to find some personal stuff so they let us in. We scrounged around the camp and we tried to find that radio but we couldn't find it. We found a pair of brand new army boots but they were too small. I think they were only a seven. He took nine and I took nine and a half. We took them with us. He said, “I think I can get something from the two boys in the house on those.”

So we took them away. He said, “We'll get that.” What he got was two bottles of vodka and a bottles of slivovitz. Well slivovitz is about 95% pure alcohol and when they drink that in a little glass they throw it down and they throw a little bit of sandwich in their mouth at the same time. Then her mother said she didn't have anything to put to it, but she had a big bolt of

material, like to make a suit or something. And they had a cousin who had a little farm just outside of Cracow. So we decided we, Lucy and I would go out, that was the daughter's name, and we would take this bolt and try to exchange it. So off we go and we were to get a train. There was no whatsiname trains going, passenger trains, they were freight wagons.

We were there at ten o'clock in the morning and bought a ticket and asked what time they were running, don't know when they were running, there was no regular thing. They didn't turn up til about half past two, and it was only these open trucks, the big steel open trucks. And you were standing up and we were standing in about that much snow and the most comical thing that you could ever see in your life, but it was a serious situation. Eventually it took off, and

when it got dark they pulled into this little station like these country stations with nothing there, not even a box. But it had the standards of the lights and just a shade and a globe, and there was stacks of sleepers here and there. And course there'd be possibly 400 people on this train. When we pulled up there and there is no toilet.

and they said, “Women first.” So the women get out and they go behind the stacks of sleepers. Snow everywhere. And all of a sudden, as though you blew a whistle, a big cloud of steam rises where they had been urinating. Well it was comical to look at but serious. Probably happened the same when we had our turn, but I didn't see that.

Yes, she was a lovely, beautiful looking girl, and cause we spent about I suppose, it was January, I didn't leave there til the middle of April, we had a fair amount of time together. There was nothing went on apart from that. So anyhow, we changed this bolt of material for some flour

that they had there and some eggs and we packed the eggs in the flour and made a rucksack of it. And we travelled back. Her mother made some types of biscuits and stuff. So she had a girl friend as a witness and we did get married. Then I was still there about oh….

Yeah. We just had that and what my mate come up with, this alcohol

and some horse meat. So we had that. It was only about six or eight of us there.

Photos, no, they never like cameras, at that stage, I never asked if they had one. I wasn't interested. I know quite well that one night I went with her to visit some people and I'd had too much to drink. There was a tram run back

and it was packed. One of these European trams with the trailer behind it. And I travelled sixteen kilometres standing on the bar between the two carriages and don't remember getting home. I was that full with this slivovitz. So that was what we had for our wedding breakfast, our wedding breakfast cost a pair of boots and a bolt of cloth.

Yeah, we had that worked out; probably when the new tape goes in I can tell you about it.

Yeah.

Well, the Russians took everything out of the country that they could. Engineering stuff, the lot, left them with nothing. We got the word that the officer that we had to go and approach

up in Katavich about sixteen kilometres away. Oh yes, you'll be allowed to go, so we headed off with her mother and these two other chaps, we stuck together then, the Aussies. We went by the train again up to Cracow. It was night time and we reported to the headquarters there which was a big brick building with a big brick fence around it. But they wouldn't let the two women in.

So they chased them off and they locked us up for the night, upstairs on the second floor. And in that room there were two iron bedsteads with the wire mattress, but no blankets, no mattress and the windows had been blown out and it was snowing. So I said, “We're not going to stop here but how do we get out of the second floor window?” so we pulled the iron bedsteads to pieces and the wire,

we wired ‘em together and we hung ‘em out the window as a ladder, but a bit rickety going down but we got that, and carried ‘em over to the wall and hung ‘em up again and over the wall. So with that we headed to the railway station thought well that is where the women are going to go, but unbeknown to us they went and visited the cousin of theirs in Cracow, which we'd done when we got the train up there to go and get this food. But they weren't

there. There were a group of Russians about eight of them around a table and they had some young lass there dancing on top of the table, naked, wackin her backside with bayonets and whatever. And after a while they got a bit sick of that and wandered off and let her go. We went back and my wife and my mother arrived back the next day, so she couldn't go, and we knew that by then. I told her, I promised I would

do the best I could, so I did. I got to England, I went to see….

Well, we went by boat. When we first got…

No, I got to England the day after VE Day. After their celebrations. In the first place when

we went to Cracow, when the Russians were through and we went to a place where there were a lot of French conscript workers who'd been captured and they'd been released. They were there and there was some five English fellows that turned up at that place. And they would feed the English fellas but

they wouldn't feed the two Australians, because every time that the French and the Australians got together there was a brawl. I saw a rugby match in Stalag 7A, it never ever finished, it always finished in a brawl. So they refused to feed us and we were both attached then to the Russian kitchen and the captain that was in that, he had his young daughter with him. Young lass and she was his batman. Travelled

with him, been on the road. And she used to prepare the meals and we used to eat with them cause we were the two that couldn't get fed. But then when Laurie, the other fellow and I reported back to Cracow after we got out of the window. Seems to cross a bit but that's how the memory goes. When we got back, we had to front up to

the officer, a woman. She was an interpreter. She gave us a run down. She was right, they were fighting a war, they were trying to get us out and we were doing this escaping. She said, “We'll lock you up tonight and tomorrow we'll decide whether we shoot you or send you home.” So we spent a horrible night that night but then they'd….

Well, we didn't know, she was convincing in herself.

Prior to that, when we had to report to the Russians in Cracow and we had to walk. We had to cross over this big bridge over the railway yards, I saw the biggest woman I ever saw in my life. I guarantee she would be seven foot three. And with this winter padding on she was huge.

she was on guard, a Russian.

I wouldn't say she was ugly, but she wasn't pretty, I wouldn't be interested. We had also; when we'd gone back to that camp in Poland we'd got new uniforms so we were nice and bright and sprite. And as she passed she was in the middle of the road directing traffic she saluted us; she must have thought we were officers. We didn't know what she was doin' so we

ignored her. We got on about ten paces and she fired a shot over our head. Come back here. We went back here and she made us salute her, big broad grin on her face, she was huge. Glad to get away with that, but when we got back there again and they turned us loose and they took us down and they put us on this English boat

and they had about three hundred French people, conscript workers on it, men and women. They had the women up one end of the boat, and the other and there was barricades between ‘em. There was fourteen of us all up. There was five English fellas, Laurie and I and about seven Yanks, pilots and that that were being repatriated from Russia. The Scottish fellow, he wasn't going to allow any French person

guarding his ship so we had to do the guard on the ship. So we had a revenge on it, they offered us all sorts of things to get together with their women but no, we wouldn't let ‘em. I know it was nasty, but.

Yeah.

No, we just told them, “We were told we can't let you go up there.” Oh we were offered all sorts of things, but anyhow.

We went to Italy first, to Naples. Spent about ten days in Naples. The Red Cross was there to receive us. Then we got another boat to England. We arrived there the day after VE Day, so the first leave I could get, I went up to London to Australia House to make arrangements to get my wife out.

Oh, they had

they knew that there was POWs that come out of Europe. There were Australians and all sorts coming out of there. We were about the last of them coming out of Russia. We were put into which had been a big private school in England. We were given leave of course and the first leave I got I went to London, to Australia house.

and I saw this military attaché, a major there and I told him the whole story. I went back two or three times and over a period of three months I kept putting off my return to Australia. That was all right. I talked to the officer and told him why and he agreed to it. So eventually, the attaché said to me, “Look, you'd have more success in Australia than I would, because I've only got to send a correspondence

back and it's got to come back to me.” So we took the next boat back and I arrived back in Australia the day after Show Day in 1945. The second day I was back I went into town to the Immigration Department and who was stuck behind the counter, which we'd lost him a long time ago, was a sergeant that I didn't like very much at all, but he was great. He took all the information and he said, “I'll look into this

and I'll push it along for you.” Now you've gotta remember this is the 27th September.

Well, it wasn't in those days. About three weeks later I get a, I'd arranged when I was in England with a couple of people who took troops in, and I told them the story and they said, “Well,

when she arrives we'll put her name down that she's to come to us, and we'll look after her until she gets on the boat.” Well I didn't know whether it was going to happen or not. Now this is the thing that I must tell you, and you know there's nothing in it, but it's the power of the Catholic Church. Now, when the uprising was in Warsaw and that went on for fifty five days, when the Jews rose up in Warsaw,

the British wanted to send in planes to drop them supplies and the Russians wouldn’t allow it because they had to have one stopover on Russian land because they couldn't go the whole way and back again. And they wouldn't allow it, so that's why they had to go their own way. When this was put through and it had to go through the Catholic Church. They sent a plane with a full crew and it had permission to land in Warsaw

to pick up five war brides. All Catholics. So you see the power that can be done through the church and good luck to them. I came back and I suppose about three weeks after I went in to see this fella, oh I don't know, towards the end of September, and I get this letter to say that she was in England

and they got her on the first boat out here and she arrived out here on the 28th December. All that work and others were taking donkeys’ ages. But the marriage didn't last. I made a mistake. To take a young one out of that and you couldn't get accommodation.

You couldn't get houses to rent or anything at that time. But my brother and sister in law had a big

two storey place and they gave us the top area. But then of course I had to go to work and she was left alone. Then she wanted to work so I got a job where I was working.

She picked up English very good, very quickly. But at first we said everything in German; because she spent so long under it she could talk it. After about four years she was bedlam to live with, she was too

ambitious and she disappeared and I didn't see a thing of her for three years. I tried to find her but no.

No, what happened she made things that bad for me, after we left she wouldn't go back. She left the first time, only after about six or eight weeks. She went to work for

a couple who had a sock factory out in Brunswick as a house keeper and I went to the police about it. She disappeared, I couldn't find her, went on for about eight days.

Yeah. So whether this was planned I don’t know. I don't think so. I don't like to believe it was. I'd put it in the hands of the police and they put a piece in the paper with her photo that she'd disappeared

and these people saw it and they contacted the police and the police contacted me and she was brought in to Russell Street [police station] to meet up with me. They asked her why did she leave, she couldn’t tell ‘em why. They said, “Was he cruel to you?” No. “Was he a drunkard?” No. “Did he gamble?” No. Couldn't see reason why. So they talked her in to going back but she wouldn't go back to me brother's place. A friend of mine they had the hotel up in eh

what's the street, Nicholson Street, Fitzroy, Commercial Club. I got the big room up there. We went to live there, got on our feet and that. That went on and it was….

It was because of the fact that she was, proves the story when I finish it, proves that she was ambitious to get on,

I didn't know anything of it until one day I was told she was running a canteen out at the migrant camp, at Broadmeadows, a military camp. I went out to see her but she wasn't wanting to come back. So for three years after that I didn't bother and one day she turns up. I was living here in Croydon on the farm which is the trotting track at the moment.

She come up there and wanted a divorce. She wanted to go back to Poland. I knew that was baloney. But to cut a long story short I got a word that she married. I did go through with the divorce because I had to sue her. It got that bad I said to her one night when I got home from the hotel, “If you're still here when I come home tonight I'll have to put you out.”

She'd go, if I was upstairs in the room, she'd go down in the lounge. If I was down in the lounge she'd go upstairs. And she admitted years after she had no cause to do that. She didn't know what to do about it. But there’s a lot more in that story.

Anyhow, I hadn't seen her for years. 28 years I had not seen her. I used to go home for lunch when I worked for

Telecom and take another fella and we'd have a cup of tea and go back to work. And we were just walking out the door and the phone rang, and it was her. I didn't know, I recognised the voice had a foreign note. And she wanted to see us. So to cut a long story short the wife and I met her in town. She'd only go back to the hotel because she knew where that was, lived there, so we visited there.

She went back to Italy, Sicily, she didn't marry an Italian doctor, it was a business fellow, and they lived in Sicily. For years she asked if she could write to me. She asked if I would write to her and I said no, but if she wrote to me I'd answer it, courtesy. And we corresponded about twice a year. And I said to my wife I said, “Either her husband's mixed up in Mafia business or they pay ‘em

protection money.” Out of the blue one day we get a letter from her to say, “I suppose you'd realise it we've been paying protection money for years.” They had a beautiful big, it was like a castle. And he owned to finish up, five television stations, fifteen butcher shops and other numerous businesses all put out for other people were running them, so she had everything.

That was all right, she told us that this had happened and that they'd been paying protection money and that about three weeks ago her husband’s car had been stolen with personal papers and that. And they found it burnt out in a little village with a body in the front seat who'd been shot. Well she didn't know what it was. Apparently it went to Mafia or something. It had nothing to do with them.

It turned out to be that her housekeeper, her son, was the one who stole the car, and we never knew what happened, who shot the bloke. But anyhow, that's that. She paid a visit to Australia, then I hadn't heard from her for oh, gosh, another eight or ten years I suppose. And Eileen and I had only just got married.

six o'clock in the morning we got a phone call. Before I married Eileen I was living in a unit over here in the same place. I gave up that to come up here. She only had that as an address and she went there and the woman didn't know. She arrived in Australia at five o'clock and grabbed a taxi and come all the way out here and she was bedraggled, honest, she was terrible, smoke and smoke and smoke.

Then she apologised to Eileen and said she should never have got rid of me, I was a good husband, but she was a naughty girl that was her attitude of it.

Because she wanted to get on. I was prepared to work hard but I was not a business man.

Well probably to go into it and help her. She had a bit of an affair with a fella

that I found out about, when we were living in the hotel.

No, no. It was after she came back. We were together then 'til 1949, 1952 when we were divorced. But she'd gone out with some people from the hotel one night. I'd stayed home. Her raincoat

was on the bed, I picked it up to put it in the wardrobe and a letter fell out of it. And it was from this fellow who had a business in Collingwood. He more or less, I'm not frightened to write me name. They'd had a wonderful time along the beach towards Mornington and he wrote his name and the telephone number. I'd been down to see me sister this day and I got on the

double decker bus in Smith Street Collingwood and I looked up and I seen this telephone number on a brick entrance to a garage. So I jumped off and I went in and I asked for this fella's name and the young bloke said, “Nobody by this name here.” so I said, “Well that's the number he gave.” Oh he worked it out it was somebody that used to come there and get his car serviced and he'd make a few phone calls, but he didn't know where, Up the road, was then, in those days, there used to be

the Labour Bureau where you could go and get a job. A friend of mine worked in there, it was a woman about fifty. I went up and seen her, I thought well. She looked at it, she said, “Yes, I know the name, he's just around the corner.” So I went round there to tackle him and he wasn't there. So I said to his secretary or whoever she was, I said, “You tell him to call me because I'm coming back this afternoon.”

I got back to the hotel when he rang. He said, “If I'm going to see you I've got to get my solicitor to see him first.” I said, “Well, if your solicitor’s there, it won't stop me from punching your bloody head in!” this sort of business. Anyhow, when I got there, he wasn’t, only himself. The thing that dirtied [angered] me, I didn't mind about that, it was over as far as my marriage was concerned. He blamed her for everything and it takes two to tango.

He had a foolscap thing of different things, she asked to do this, she asked to do this, she done this. With that I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him across the desk. His receptionist come in she said, “Oh don't do this you'll only get yourself in trouble.” I said to him, then I said, “Look, I'm not going to do you in but I'm going to tell your father in law.” He said, “You don't know my father in law.” I said, “Yes I do.” I didn't,

but he had a menswear shop in Melbourne. I said, “I'll tell him.” cause I'd found out then that while he was doing a line with my wife, his wife was five months pregnant. And because the other bloke, I forget his name now, if he was told that he was playing around while his daughter he would have been a wipe off, he was a Jew.

But that was the finish of that I didn't see her after she left, for three years. Then years after that, when she come out here, only twelve months ago I suppose.

It certainly is.

Well, we used to; you did because you couldn't keep the rent up. You used to go and hire a hand cart

and do about five or six or more trips with all your furniture. But you left it til nearly midnight when there weren't anybody around to notice much. You had to have in those days a red book that had regular payments of rent 'cause estate agents wouldn't look at you without a rent book. I can remember my father writing his own rent book.

and it's a trick I learnt from papers before, as long as you don't have any oil in your hair, used to rub the paper on your hair and it gives an aged look. You know, a note book. All these things were done. If you don't know the tricks of the trade, you didn't survive.

Well, I think a lot of people were, the only tricks I knew that they were doing, they were trying to lie, to get something out of it. There were no,

at that stage that I'm talking about there was no pensions of any description. They did come into it later. Single persons got seven and six a week and seventeen and six for a married couple. So you know, you had to live on that most of the

times. At one stage, one house, we were paying thirty shillings a week, double, virtually double the pension we got. The last place that we lived in before I went off to war was very nice, fifteen shillings a week.

Oh no, we had a whole house and there were many houses for rent, you just had to have your red book that

showed you had been a good tenant in the past, otherwise you never got them.

Yeah, it was. Well there's no other way they could check it. If the rent was due on the nineteenth of this month well you wrote in the nineteenth of the month is paid and you put somebody's initials along side it. They didn't worry about that they just looked down to make sure that weekly or monthly, whatever it was

it was paid.

Well, the whole thing is that in the main what we used to do, in Evans Street Collingwood there was a butcher’s shop there, at twelve o'clock when they closed down they sold off everything they got so that they started fresh on Monday morning. So you could get a side of lamb

for one and sixpence. One and sixpence side of lamb would carry you for a whole week for a family of four, well there was only three of us at home. So mainly the likes of steak and those things was out. Breakfast was mainly a thing made of bread and milk, just ordinary bread and milk. You'd save a bit of hot water to soften it up then you'd have that.

Quite often I'd just been to school with nothing but a bit of bread and dripping [cooking fat]. Dripping was a wonderful thing they used to have from the roast, spread on toast or spread on bread. Today you'd probably turn your nose up at it but then it had a flavour about it. That was about all you could take to school then. We never had any

such thing as supper at night time, we were lucky to get a dinner. We nearly always used to have a good dinner, because vegetables, potatoes you used to be able to get twelve and fourteen pounds for a shilling, so you could live on vegetables alone and just have that meat and go up and buy that side of lamb for one and sixpence. So that was the main…. the whole thing is that the woman

of the household needed to be a good cook because there were so many things that they used to make that unofficial type of bread puddings that had sultanas in it, raisins and that, things that would last for nearly a whole week. Today you'd be going crook because you had the same thing over and over again, but you had to have that to exist.

Well we just took it that that is a way of life because people that you mixed with and the kids you mixed with were in the same condition as you, so you took that to be the natural way of living. There was a big home down the street from us and big bay windows. And there used to be a kiddie in there used to ride on this beautiful rocking horse and I used to stand there watching him and when I later on

not then but later on when I came back, I was married and I thought ‘Well, the first thing I'm going to look around for if I had a kiddie is buy a rocking horse like that.” which I did, I bought one. But my son would never take to it so I had to resell it again. All those sort of things. You envied anybody who had better than what you did, but you didn't complain. Because everybody around you is the same, it's not much good talking about it.

Oh,

lots of things. Many things. We were never idle for fun. We used to make a football by rolling newspaper up or filling up one cigarette pack with the others, make them as tight as you could, wet them and let them go hard. We used to play that for football. Played a heck of a lot of hand ball up against a wall. We played for hours and hours, hand ball. And then they had what they used to call

I dunno, some stick. You'd get a little piece of broom handle and make two points on it and you'd put it on the ground with a stick and you'd hit one end and you'd hit it as hard as you could, then you had to judge how many steps it's goin' to take you to get to that. There were many, many things. My brother in law at that stage made me what they call a toodlebuck. Now a toodlebuck is a

round piece of timber, with a hole in the middle with a pin going up the handle and with a cotton reel underneath. Roll a bit of string around you could pull it and it spins, like a spinning wheel and they used to have those and play cherry bobs. That's the nuts out of cherries in the season. You'd run a book like a bookmaker’s book. Three to one this, two to one the other. Kids used to come along and bet and you'd finish up with a jar full of these

little bods, with nowhere to go with them. But there were all those sort of things you could do.

Yeah, football teams once you got up in the fifth grade, sixth grade. In our case we had a champion Richmond ruck man who was a teacher. Used to coach the team, used to take ‘em down the local park and

teach them the football. And we had the state school competition between ‘em. When I grew up a bit at around about fourteen and fifteen I used to play in the Melbourne Boys League, fifteen and under. And I played with them for about three years. There were all those sort of things you could do.

Well, I dunno whether I said that in the book or not, but Victoria in general in those days was classed as little Britain,

because we lived more their way than NSW or those other places. I don't think there was a great thing of mentioning being all Australian. They were more or less I think for the British. Although there were a lot of problems in the Depression years when lots of English migrants came out. A lot, of them not all of them, were buying

their jobs. You'd go to where a job was vacant and you'd probably find twenty or thirty people 'd be there for the one job. And when they were doing the interview they'd slip the floor man, whoever was doing the interview, a ten shilling note. With a guarantee on that thing that they'd be getting it every pay day. That caused a heck of a lot of trouble in those days. I never got involved in it. I never seen

it our place them getting involved, but I knew they'd done it.

School? You never got away with anything in school. Teachers quite often used to bring lunches in for a lot of kids who never had any lunch. Lots of teachers used to do that. It was a different thing today, each of the classes

are say, if you were in grade three, you'd have grade A and B, so half way through the year you'd go up, if you were good enough you'd go up into the next grade. It was quite easy to go ahead and advance yourself.

Oh yes, I tried to learn everything I could. I was a pretty slow learner, but once I got something I never forgot it.

At eleven and a half when I left school, it was quite a good age to be going to high school or technical school for the next year, so I done pretty well at that.

I don't think it entered my head about that. My parents thought it was the thing they wanted to do. It was the only way we were going to exist. So I never

gave any thought to it, whether I wanted to go to technical school, which I was going, I was going to the Richmond Technical School. I never got there but it never ever worried me.

No, not a thing. I never had any I used to just let things go as they were. As I say, at fifteen I went to

work in the shoe factory, but I was always happier working outside, certainly.

Well, we never had many newspapers at home, we couldn't afford them. They were only a penny but every penny counted. I can't

remember reading anything much about that until I suppose not much more than about six months before war was declared. At that time I went to this dance in the city, on a Sunday night and they stopped the music. We were all standing on the dance floor and they came out and said war had been

declared and we were involved. The lass I was dancing with I didn't know, all she said was, “Oh my brother!” and she fainted at me feet and that was the first woman ever fell for me.

Yes. A brother who was probably in the army or she thought he would probably get called up. And that's when we started to take notice of it. See there's a big thing in the Depression years about a lot of people that disliked

the Communist party. Now a lot of people were called Communists in those days who weren't belonging to the party, but assembled with them because in those times they were the only ones who done anything for the poor or the weak. They would go and chase up food and anything like that. They used to collect a lot of stuff. One day a week behind the Collingwood Town Hall they would issue it out to the people as they come along.

They were the only ones that done it, but I think it was more or less similar to what it is today. You get a group of youths that go along and break it up, start a fight and break it up. Chase these fellas that were preaching Communism and they'd run for their lives. I think that about sums up what went on in those days.

No, not to my knowledge. Some people might have, they might have delved into it more. I thought of nothing much but meself in those days. The only radio I think we had in our place was one of the very oldest ones and that was only used for night time, news or something. I was never home at night time so I

never heard much about it. No I didn't really find out anything about it.

Most nights. I was hardly ever home.

There was only picture [movie] shows, the occasional dance at a town hall somewhere. And that was about all. I know that on a Friday night a mate of

mine, if we'd gone to the local pictures, they'd come out at quarter to eleven, eleven o'clock and to fill in the time we'd walk into town, call in at the Herald office to buy the Sun [newspaper] on a Saturday morning, then we'd come down to Hoddle Street, or Punt Road as it's called now. And there used to be a factory there called Daisy Bells, that used to make all cream cakes and that and you'd knock

on the door there and the foreman'd come out and give him two shillings if you had it and he give you a dirty big bag of cream cakes. That's about all we thought of in life. Just enjoying ourselves, not about anybody else's problems.

Because I thought it was the right thing to do. Prior to that this mate and I had volunteered to fight

the ‘39 bushfires. It came right up this way, Taggerty and those places. We used to have to go in behind the parliament house and that's where the farmers and those people used to come down with an open flat top lorry and pick up a group of 12 or 20 fighting fires. Well, we done that. The war had already started of course. That was in the

days, round about November. So I had the feeling of wanting to do something and that's why I enlisted.

We never had that much. You only had beaters. Hessian bag tied to a branch or a stick, and you'd dip them in water if you were close to it and try to beat the grass fires out. They had

different places like up at Narbethong and that where they had a lot of timber country. They had what they called dugouts, they'd dig these dugouts in the ground in case of fire so that people could get in, but they had to get out because it was just like putting a chicken in the oven or something. Lot different to those things today. That was the only things we were doing.

No, not until the

‘62 fires when I was living in Croydon, we went up here through the Dandenongs to Ferntree Gully, we got cut off for about 12 hours but we weren't in any danger. It was only a matter of waiting, cause we couldn't get out on the roads to get out because the heavy fire was there.

Yeah well. No, its, the thing when the war broke out, according to the government laws you had to be twenty or over and under thirty-five. But I come across fellas who were forty-five, forty-eight, one fella was in, and he got a bit of remorse when me mother

died, of course he was left on his own then. He got in touch with the authorities and told them that I wasn't 20, I was eighteen. Apparently as I found out later they told him that I wouldn't go into a front line situation. That's why they took me out of the 8th Battalion and put me in the guards battalion with all the olds and bolds. That's how I got out to go to the 7th. If I'd stayed with the guards I would have been in a lot of trouble. They

really got cut about up in the mountains, up in Greece.

Well the officer took me up to another officer and they said that this is probably what had happened, but he complained to them and they'd decided I'd go in the guards battalion and I wouldn't be in the front line. No, I wanted to be back because I'd made up quite a few friends

in the 8th Battalion. And then I come out of that and I was waiting to transfer to the 7th Battalion.

Oh well, there would have been maybe thirty or forty at that time. The battalion strength was built up to about four or five hundred. And he just came down the ranks looking at different ones. He passed some of those that were there where they were too old, shouldn't have

been there, those that are been AWOL [Absent without Leave] he spoke to two other fellows and he came to me and he said, ‘Why are you here?” and I told him something about me father had complained. “Oh.” he said, “If you want to put in for a transfer it'll be granted straightaway.” which it was, in about two days, I was straight on to the 7th Battalion.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. He was the first. There was a bit of a conflict in those days in Palestine, because of the fact that he had his wife with him. And they had a house there, big, oh, there was no other house around in Palestine then. But he had this house and a lot of the officers were uptight about it because they couldn't import their wife, but his wife was working for some

charitable organisation which was part of the services I think for troops. That's why he had his wife with him. Whether it was just rank I don't know.

Well I never had a great amount of faith in him in the early days because of the fact that he had all this run in with the head of the police. The fact is they found

his badge or something was left in a brothel in Melbourne, and there was a lot of rumours about what he was and what he wasn’t. But I did think he was a great leader. He organised the whole evacuation of Greece. I suppose it was just because of us that we got away quite good that we were singing his praises, but apparently he was a pretty good tactician.

That's when I thought a lot of it because he was there with us all the time.

No, very officious he was. In fact it seemed to me he only spent a couple of minutes talking to me. As though he just wasn't interested, he was only looking for numbers. That was all he was after.

The only time I ever saw him, yeah. I never saw him in Greece or that.

Oh, yes. Headlines in the Truth newspaper in those days. Used to print all the things that go on, you know, controversial things.

Oh, it was because you never got to you know virtually, even the colonel never came down to say words to you, only when they thought it was necessary.

That you were important enough that they picked on you and selected you to be pulled out of that. I didn't want to go to the guards battalion because I'd settled in where I was.

No, I put in for a transfer. I was in the 2/8th Battalion then. I put in for a transfer to the 2/7th and I stayed with them right up til the last.

Well, at the time we didn't know what was going on. And when we were going overseas we thought we were going to England. And nobody give a thought to Palestine.

Nobody'd told us we weren't going to England, but nobody didn't tell us either. It was only that when we turned into or grouped just outside the Suez Canal that they told us we were going to Palestine. And we then thought it was possibly only the fact of training, probably we would go to Europe then.

but as time went on and then when Italy came into the war, well, they knew quite well then that we were staying there because they had all their army in Libya. They had their colonial farms. They had been there for many, many years. They were so dug in there that they had dug in and buried all their shells there ten years before.

one or two out of three of their shells the cordite got affected by being in the ground. They would fire all right, but they wouldn't explode. They just lob ‘em in amongst you.

I think so in the early stage, because I remember a couple of them making a remark. At that stage in Palestine they were telling us it only rained once a year, but when it rained it rained. And it turned a lot of the land into a slushy compote. There were words about oh,

“Just imagine what the fellas in the First World War went through!” and all those sort of things. We arrived there about roughly, give or take a few days, about the 20th May. We never saw action till just after Christmas. I think they were all getting a bit edgy. We had been so long in training and hadn't been used for anything.

I think that we were quite happy to go into action but they didn't realise what it was.

Yeah. They organised, the authorities organised a race meeting at a place called Barbera.

And with the help of some Palestinians made a circular race track, it was pretty good, and built a small portable type of stand. They had about six races and they gave horses names of horses that raced in Australia. There were some of the fellows who were jockeys.

but a lot of them were the Arab jockeys and they supplied the horses and while the race meeting was on they had a big canteen. It was more like a storage place with a counter to serve beer. There was a bit of disturbance. I don't know what started the disturbance, but somebody started a fire. Course when they raced to the fire they helped themselves to the beer

at the back. That caused a heck of a lot of a lot of trouble. There was a heck of a lot of ‘em, but they were all the same. Most of them were the same types who should never have been there. There were quite a lot of fellows who, not just because they were out of work, but they were just literally, no-hopers. Same as what we got today. They were of no use to anybody. Those sort of ones finished up in what they used to call the citadel

Jerusalem, which was the military prison. Most of the fellows were even glad that they went. They were always AWOL or they were drunk or they couldn't, and also the fact that when they were AWOL and you don’t get a replacement it means that the others have got extra duties to perform for no reason at all.

Yeah.

I wouldn't have trusted, this fella wouldn’t have liked to have been along side of one. The time I got into action with these fellows you could virtually go anywhere with ‘em. They was as worried as probably I was but they got on with the job.

Well, there was one fellow I knew. I never knew of others. I knew of some up to forty-eight. Some of ‘em had virtually grown

20 -year-old children. Anyhow, one was a fellow by the name of Bill Wood. When we were taken prisoner we were sitting there on the beach waiting to be picked up, and he said huh, so they were all talking about what the future held for them. “Well.” he said, “I hope it's better than the First World War.” He was a POW in the First World War. He said, “I hope the food's better.” because all they used to get was potato peelings, which used to be

cooked up and made into soups and those sort of things. He was the only one I knew had been a prisoner of war. He was, that was in France he was captured.

No, he never spoke about the war. He never. In fact I never heard those fellas around there talk about anything. There were quite a few in our unit including the fellow

who wrote that book. They were joined the whatsitsname, the horse unit after they come back after the war. To be honest I never heard any of them talk about the problems they could come up with or frightened about anything that was going on. We had half a dozen fellows in there, thirty-fours

to thirty-eight and they were a great help. They had a lot more calm about them in everything that was done than us young fellas.

I think so.

No not as far as the work was concerned, but if they saw anybody,

these fellows in our section alone. This fellow was a corporal up there. Comes from NSW. He come along and saw anyone who was a bit worried, and have a talk with them. It made a difference. You could talk amongst your mates with what you were doing, but not with somebody with a little bit of authority. He was only a corporal but he done his job well. And now today everybody who was associated with him are still associated with him whenever they can.

There was, I can remember once on the last Sunday before we left Puckapunyal. I was sitting out on the steps and there was one chap there he had three kiddies

in the 7, 8, 9 bracket and he was leaving all those behind, but never said a word, he broke up a bit on the port when it pulled away, because he knew he was going for a long while, but on the whole there was not much of that, not in our group anyhow.

I think to a certain degree yes, because there was a small British Army that was there before us who pushed them back over the edge of the border, but they had made, the Italians then when they had reinforced, in numbers, they'd pushed ‘em back, that's why

we had to go in because they brought ‘em back to Mersa Matruh, which is on the border of Egypt and the Libyan desert.

Yeah. It's about the third of January.

The Christmas, apparently, we thought we were wrong, that we were going to attack before Christmas, because they put on a Christmas dinner for us

five days before Christmas and the word was that we were going to attack before Christmas but they didn't. What reasons for not I don't know, so we just took up protective positions til the third of January.

Well, not with my, I didn't have thoughts like that, no, I didn't to be honest.

I think I was

involved in it and also the fact is I had the feeling that you didn't want to show any weakness to your mates next to you. You relied on him. You relied on one another. You didn't want them to worry by you showing you was worried. Oh, there used to be, Christmas Day they were just joking. They issued us all with a bottle of beer. It was about the only thing we had on that day.

Yeah. Because they didn't know what was

coming. I think they woke up to themselves on the day because it was a strange situation fighting there with the Italians. As I say, we were there for what, seven or eight days before we went in to Bardia and to see these coloured balls floating in the air, it was just like Luna Park or somewhere. And these, they were all

in groups, these coloured balls, but they were attached to very fine wires. We found the containers that were fired out before. They were about that big and about that, and they were only fired up there and they used to float, and that was to stop low flying aircraft from getting over their positions.

Could have been, cause they stayed up, oh,

they stayed up there for an hour, then they fired some more. It was just like having at Luna Park sort of thing. Everyone used to be amazed to see these things. The artillery barrages weren't of any, well, you were concerned about it, but as the old saying goes, while you can hear it, it's not going to drop on you. The one that drops on you is the one you never hear. They were the only things, then there would

go all quiet, and you would lie around all day waiting for something to happen. Then, on the day of Bardia of course, the closer you got to the Italian lines, the air was full of smoke and shrapnel, and you could see the shrapnel shells exploding overhead. That became then a very serious situation.

Yes, we went. We done several of these patrols. The Italians, they had fortifications built underground. I don't know how far they were gone but I would say pretty well

two or three kilometres in block off an area, and you could walk from one end to another without coming above the ground. But in front of that they had tank traps. Now they were dug down to a thing of about twelve or sixteen feet deep. They were roughly thinking back on them now, only about ten or twelve feet at

the bottom, but they'd sort of come that way, get wider at the top. So that meant if a tank went into that it couldn't get up the other side. Well we used to crawl up as far as the tank traps, and the Italians worked out that they used to fire the whole time of machine gun fire at one point or another up and down the tank trap, but they had it this way that they used to fire

for one, two or three minutes but they never mixed them up, so we knew that if we get three minutes, we get three or four fellas across in that time. But if it was two minutes it was probably only two and they'd wait on the other side and then we used to look down and watch them playing cards, reading, all down there and just assess how many in that particular way. Somebody else'd be doin' a patrol,

further along. They used to take a good five or six hours by the time you got there and got back. You'd have you’re, the rifle, the buckles and everything on the rifle were all taped with a black tape so they didn't rattle or anything like that. A little bit hairy, because you're only, a patrol like that's only about ten men.

And out of that you've got an officer, a sergeant and the rest are all privates.

It was scary, yeah, well it was scary in a sense that they didn't know we were there. They done protections to see that we didn't get there, but it was scary in a way I suppose looking down and seeing your enemy enjoying themselves and you're up there in that thing. Ah, there was the last patrol that I went on, where

the officer that was with us, he'd stood up instead of creeping. Of course that was seen, they fired a burst, but I think they thought they saw something that wasn't there because none of us got hit, none of us got caught.

In some of the patrols you pulled a sort of cloth bag over your boots so that you wouldn’t make any noise. There wasn't much to make noise, it was all sand, but you came across heavy gravel at times. You would put if anybody was fair headed,

make him put on a little cap on underneath his helmet and just a little bit of black underneath the eyes to stop any reflection of anything. Because the desert's a funny thing in Libya you know. I've sat down there at midnight and read a letter in the pitch black. But the stars were out or the moon was out, but if it was no stars or moon, we had to, if you moved around. If I had to go,

if anybody had to go from one platoon to the other, you had to take the signal wire in your hand 'cause you'd never find it. We took a fella back at Christmas Eve that had taken appendicitis. And we had to take him to headquarters which was three quarters of a mile away. The fellas of the left hand side of him in front of the stretcher

four of us carrying it, he let the signal wire run through his hand. Anyhow, we got called on to halt. It was the Black Watch. They said to come forward and be recognised, ask who you were. He said, “Come forward and be recognised.” and the fella said, “If I drop this wire I'll never find it again.” And a voice came over, “And if you don't bloody come over you still won't find it will you?”

so we had to put the stretcher down, and you couldn't see them til you were right on them. It was amazing. I went from one platoon to another with a message, and finished up in front of where I started. You got not idea, it was so black.

Hmm, yeah. But when it was the moon, I'd sat down and read a letter at midnight.

I can't, I would say, from memory a few floating clouds around, but not a great deal. We virtually didn't attack till dawn. We had the artillery barrage rush behind us and they fired continuously for about an hour,

and it would have been dawn and daylight when we went along in the line.

I never seen them used. I believe they did use them, but I never ever saw them used. They were done by the engineers.

They were all the world to what I found out about. I saw one that wasn't loaded at one stage

and all it was to my imagination today is similar to a plastic drain pipe only they were metal. I suppose they were about that big. All the dynamite and stuff was inside ‘em. But they done the job, they really did scattered things.

Well it was to scatter it and break it up. The barbed wire is all this

about that wide and it's all interlaced an it's a sort of a pyramid type of thing and there's posts in it just driven into the ground, like the steel posts we have here. But it would blow it, but of course once you blow it the posts out of the ground and it goes flat, you have to step through it.

Oh, a fair way,

No, that was dawn, and see the Italians had a lot of very small tanks, one man tanks and they had them in the line with a build up around them of rocks, oh about that high, and they were the ones, they were firing that at us as we came on. They didn't do any damage at that stage.

Well, the whole thing is that you I think it’s a funny thing, but it is a thing you believe, you don't want to show any fear because of the fella next door to you. They rely on you as much as you rely on them. And I think you felt a little bit that you didn’t want to put yourself down that you were frightened or anything. But it was an eerie thing because it’s something you never come across before.

Air raids, they're a different matter, they're bad, but if you could get your head under a bush you felt safe you know.

Oh, mateship it is, it’s a great important thing to be able to rely on mates, it’s a wonderful thing, even in civvy [civilian] life. You feel confident that if you had a strife and asked a mate

and to help you out you're sure he's going to do it. There was a heck of a lot of that business amongst the units, the different platoons and that because that's the only time you got together, it was in a group of a thing like that. You're in a section. There's a hundred men in a platoon, ten in a section, and you're worked as a platoon, you didn’t work as a company.

although you did work together as a company. But the only ones that you mixed with your training and all is the hundred men in that platoon. Some of the other companies, you never get to know the fellas. I got to know more of these fellas as POWs than I did in the days of serving with them

Yes, they had, I forget what they were, they were

huge. The tanks. Each unit only had about one or two. They'd rumble off in front of you. I've seen one of those tanks get hit with a six inch shell which was, and it just shuddered back on its tracks and then continued to run on. That tank got hit by a six inch shell head on,

and it just rolled back on its tracks and continued. The steel on ‘em must have been terrifically thick. That's about the only time I ever saw them. We never had any around out area. It’s a different matter when you go into a battle like that. You'd be fighting one minute and the next hour you might be in relief in the back and let somebody else go up in front in certain areas.

You were not relieved, but you might be taken out, when you advance in open country like that it's just one big line or two big lines, or whatever it is. But then again, you might get to your area, virtually clear it out, so that way that you'd be.

You'd come back a little bit and you'd be in reserve to help out one either side if you required your help.

I found in Bardia the thing was they threw everything that they possibly could at you. Til you got to striking distance they put their hands up, they didn't want to fight. They put up a heck of a battle while everything was in their favour.

but if it looked as though it was going to be bad they came out in their hundreds.

No, no, not the Italian one, there was none that I knew of, no hand to hand fighting.

We had forty five thousand prisoners taken at Bardia alone.

Oh, a huge area. Oh, of prisoners.

they used to bring ‘em all in and put them into this enclosure. It was only a rough barbed wire enclosure they used to put ‘em in. They would put guards right round it. They had no shelter no nothing. They just sit there. But they kept taking them out. Even after the first day they were taking them out in truck loads, heading down into Egypt.

No, I didn't. I didn't think it was a great place when I saw the smoke from the explosion of shrapnel shells. They burst up in the air and they just rained down on different ones, small pieces big points. I never got

hit. I got a couple of pieces I got whacked with. It would more or less burn more than anything, terribly hot once they hit. Just even little pieces, burnt right through me uniform, those sort of things.

No, that wasn't Bardia, that was in

Greece. I got, must have got hit by three pieces I suppose. They weren't very quick apparently. One either side of me, burnt right through my clothes. The other one, don't know whether I should tell you or not, cut a piece off the tip of penis.

No, it wasn't. Well, it was more a burn than anything, but then of course in that situation you can't get treatment straight away. Probably not til the next day.

No, it was yeah, that's right.

That was the only things from shrapnel. There was one on the island of Crete as I mentioned. I was issued with a bayonet without any scabbard.

You stuck it in your belt like a pirate. We came to this well and I jumped up on the well and got some water for them, and then I jumped down, it was about this high off the ground the wall. And the bayonet stuck in this leg and just scooped a piece right out of it. Well, that leg swelled up about three or four times its size as we were days in the camp at Crete, never got any treatment. All I could do that day was just

keep bathing it with hot water all the time. Drew most of the infection out. Never bothered afterward. I was pretty lucky in that respect.

It is.

You couldn't just have a look straightaway because of the situation.

You have to wait til things calm down.

It wasn't.

We went straight up to Tobruk, yes. We had no rest.

No no, we were in trucks. We went to Bardia. The only time was that after Bardia, before we got to Derna. We were marching chasing the Italians and we were going back in trucks and the record still stands today for the 2/7th Battalion, seventy six mile in seventy hours full equipment. We

just marched and marched. We got to Derna but they'd moved on from Derna.

Not much. Wasn’t like today. You just had a back pack.

They just had a change of clothes or something and some food. I can't remember oh, you had your munition pouches in the front.

You used to have one anti tank rifle between, each section had one, you take it in turns to carry it. It was a reasonably heavy thing. Long and heavy, we had to carry that as well, but not like these blokes today. They'd never do that because they couldn’t do it.

Ah, we all had, each had two. They were also in your ammunition

pouches.

No, no, no. You'd have a break, no matter what you do in the army you march for fifty minutes and have ten minutes break.

Oh, well, tired. We got to Derna and we were billeted in what had been an Italian camp there.

about three days before they moved on again.

Yes, they had farms. Yes.

They seemed to be all right. They didn't bother us. You can imagine you're in a desert but they'd have a house, they'd been there for years. It was way out, nothing around it, no bushland or anything.

wide open, but they never seemed to worry us. At one stage there at one farmhouse we bought some vegetables off us. They were quite happy about that. They didn't seem to be bothered. The Italians had gone and we had taken over. I never had any problem with them.

That was on the day of the attack. It was a terrific. It was hard to see, it was cutting onto your face. Put a handkerchief over your mouth was about all you could do. We had not had an issue of water that morning, so when we settled down in the night at Tobruk and dug our slit

trenches, we all had to dig in we had to have somewhere for protection, we saw this heap of forty four gallon drums out about hundred yards. That was like a dump they had out there. Well, the Italians used to mark their drums according to what was in it. It might say for arguments sake if there's any red paint on it

might be oil. Blue might be petrol and green water. So when it got dark two of us crawled out to that and we went thought the drums and looking with just little very fine torch. And we come across one that was green. We rolled it and you could hear it lapping inside

we pushed it back and if you've ever tried to push a 44 gallon drum in a sandy desert it's pretty hard. Anyway we got it dumped in the slit trench, when we opened it up it was oil. They'd changed their markings over a period of time. So we didn't get anything to drink after being in that dust storm til the next morning.

Before the attack, yes.

Oh, they I remember seeing it after it was sorted out, something like 150 tanks of all sizes and little ones right up to the big ones. That was before we got there, there had been a tank battle between the British and the Italians. The Italians had sort of been wiped off but all these little

tanks. Some of the blokes used to get the little ones and scoot around in them, because, the Italians had gone by that time. There was a lot of artillery pieces. They sent a lot of them over to Crete at one stage.

Ah, well I suppose in the firing things, but they done

a heap of things that our blokes would have probably done if they had to leave their equipment behind. Make it as useless as you could. The ones they'd sent over to Crete they'd smashed the viewing, the sights on them, ones that I saw as Crete the fellows had to cut two sights for each gun, off a tree.

and they used to tie it on and every time they fired it one'd have to crawl out and straighten it up again.

Oh, about 55 millimetres they were, the guns. They left everything behind, when they went. They only took what they could with them because they were travelling by truck.

That was only one day, Tobruk.

Well they used to talk about ‘em. Hit and run type of thing. They were as I said before they'd throw everything at you until you got distance to them that they couldn't get away or you were close onto ‘em and they would put their hands up. There were that many white flags that you thought they'd been issued with them, but they weren't.

No that was at Tobajudobia[?], it was a little town and an office was there. We went through it searching for weapons and stuff. We came across this huge safe. It must have been as big as, as high as the door. We got it out into the bush and decided that the officer in charge wanted to see what was inside it in case there was

legal documents inside it. And a fella said, “Yeah, I knew that somebody else in another part of the battle had opened one of those and they got a few thousand Italian lira.” and that was exchangeable in Egypt for that. And we thought we'll have some and when we're finished we'll have leave. We had to open it and all we got was three empty envelopes. Nothing else, nothing in it.

Supposedly, but these fellas that found this four or five thousand didn't. I think you used to get about two pound five, English money sterling for a thousand lira, those that took it back when they went back to Alexandria or Cairo. Got some exchange on it, but we never got any.

Yes, we would've. The officer wouldn't have been told. They wouldn’t have known what was in there.

No, Adjadabia was before Benghazi. Benghazi we never had. After Ajadabia we had no contact with the Italians at all. Because as I say they were moving

so fast ahead of us. There was another unit that went into Benghazi and captured that in itself and we were on the reserves. Then from Ajadabia, we went up to Benghazi and then we dug in at a place called El Idebia or something like that. That's where we were relieved by the 9th Division.

No, we didn't, their planes had been active well before that the air force had, but we had not contact with them at all. We went out on one patrol on a utility [small truck]. I think there were five of us with the sergeant in charge. It wasn’t

a utility, it was a lorry with a flat top, and on the back of the flat top they had a one pound anti-tank gun. Which was captured, Italian stuff, with twelve rounds of ammunition. We went up behind a big sand dune just near a marsh land. It was the only spot in Libya where there was a marsh land. They couldn't use that part they had to come up the road, so

we went behind the dunes, so we set the truck into it with the gun pointing up the road and we looked over and we saw, I don’t know how many it was now, probably 40 or 50 tanks and they were doing manoeuvres about half a mile away. The sergeant said, “What the hell are we doing here, we've got 12 rounds of ammunition, all those tanks? But we've gotta stay here

and see what happens.” and so we stayed that night. Next morning, we seen them still doing some manoeuvres. The sergeant said, “While we're here we better put a shell up the breech.” and when we went to do it, they were two pound shells and wouldn't fit. He said, “It's no use us being here.” so we took off. That was how, that was the only contact I saw of the Germans.

Went back to Egypt. Yeah.

It was. We didn't hear a thing about this until they got to Greece that they had possibly been attacked two or three days after we left them there. They did, they got cut about. They were cut about a lot over the period of time, and they were the ones who

retreated back right back to Tobruk. They were the ones, the Tobruk Rats.

Well, we didn't know anything about how bad it was. It was a long time after that we heard what went on at,

with the Tobruk Rats. Because there was no way we were going to get any information when we went there to Crete, we had no contact with anyone except official records and they're not going to tell you anything. We knew that they'd been attacked but we didn't know anything about Tobruk as the Desert Rats had it, yeah.

Very unprepared, they were to my way of thinking the way I used to see the groups they were terribly out of plan with everything. Just seemed to be at that time just anxious to get right away, but you couldn't. Once you got in

a convoy coming around those mountains you just had to stay there. I had a seat at the back of the truck that I was in, they yelled out, the truck came up that close and they had an enormous big ladder attached to it and it must have stuck out about ten or twelve feet in front of it and it got between my legs and it was lifting me up. They backed off; there was no problem after that. They wanted to move on quicker

but they couldn't because once you got into the line of a convoy you just stayed with it. There was no way you could get past it otherwise. You could get onto the flats of course.

Well that was fairly hard, because we weren’t; we had just mainly desert clothes. We didn't get up too much into the

snow, the New Zealanders and that got most of those places. They got up into the much higher parts. Overlooking Yugoslavia and places like that, but we never taken and it took a fair while. I went up; I think I told you before when you get down into the flats. You weren't bothered by the bombers when you were in the mountain areas because they couldn't do much damage to you, but once you get out onto

the flats they, so this particular day each truck of ours you'd have one spotter on the running board. He would tell the driver where they were going, where the planes were heading and what have you and then you'd scatter. This particular night, we were I wasn't spotting, wasn’t' spotting at night time,

but we bedded down on the say the north side, I forget whether it was north or south, of the railway line, the whole battalion. Now this is the thing about fifth column [spies]. And we settled down for the night. The trucks were further down to take us down in daylight. We got there about 11 o'clock at night

and about half past twelve. It was a night when there was a lot of fluffy clouds about and a full moon, but you didn't see much of it because it was in between the clouds. And within an hour and a half they were in bombing and machine gunning right up and down, they were to do it, but we got word, whatever happened. But they came and roused us all up and took us

on the other side of the railway line, about 100 feet the other side of the line, and we no sooner settled down there and those planes came down and they machine gunned all up along where we were. Now that was fifth column information on that, but it didn't come off.

Oh I don't know where the intelligence got their information. We never knew a thing about it. We were settled

in for the night and we were no sooner settled down and the officers, everyone's grizzling because they had to get up. They told us no reason, but they moved us on the other side of the line and all these planes come out machining. You could see them coming out from behind the clouds and the moon was shining. And that's how fifth column worked so quickly.

Oh it would a had to be, the Greeks woulda had to tell ‘em. Like lots of those countries had their fifth column workers.

Well, in the battalion history, you would find that that would take

there were too many changes of top ranking officers, I'm talking about generals. In Crete we started off with one and we went through five before we got through to the New Zealand fella. It was just one after the other, we were just handing over. You can't fight that way, each one's got a different idea of how to fight in battles and what have you and I don't know if the Greek component

of the campaign was anything like that. It could have been for all we knew. It was on the run backwards all the time, doing a bit of fighting and then back down, and set up a position, so whoever was doing the fighting at that time could pass through you. Crete we knew was bad. We were badly served as far as top ranking officers were concerned.

Had to scatter all the time. The trucks'd scatter to both sides of the road and you'd pour out, you'd just scatter, because of the fact is that if you're all in one body you're a big target, but if you're single you've got a chance, not everybody's

gonna get hit. But at one stage there they came down and I shot off and got my head and shoulders under a bush. And I lit a cigarette, and I thought to meself, “God, they could see that.” but they couldn't see that from that distance, that height. But that was the feeling you got. You got your head under it and you felt secure, your whole body.

Well, they were Stukas mainly, those things, for the low flying stuff.

They had, I forget the name of their bombers, they used to call them the flying pencil, they were so sleek. And they would come machine gunning mainly. They didn't waste many bombs because it was a waste of time in the open. They come down there machining mostly. Some of them were that low that you could see the rear gunner, you could see him but you couldn’t see his face, recognise his face, but you could see him sitting there, firing his gun.

They do, that is a bit of a scary thing. You get half a dozen Stukas diving on you and this siren screeching as they're coming down. It's an unnerving thing. Nothing much you can do about it, just go on and hope for the best.

Well, as the history book tells you, they bombed us for

three or four hours I suppose and it was more intense than the normal daily bombing we got, and then everything went quiet. Not a noise and all of a sudden this drone comes along and it gets heavier and heavier. And you look up and there were dozens of these big, slumbery planes flying. They were

made of corrugated iron, roofing iron. And only one plane in each flight of about nine had instruments so if the leader was knocked out they wouldn’t know where to go. And they just got over the area and these paratroopers would flop out and the foolish things that they had of course, the officers had different coloured parachutes to their troops,

so of course they were the first ones you looked to fire on. Then they dropped these enormous big canisters with all their equipment in it. They'd be coming down firing automatic firing. It was hard to believe, these dozens and dozens of people dropping down in parachutes. Of course once they hit the ground you forgot all about that and you had to go to

protect yourself. Then before you could do much another lot of them would come over. Then we were moved out of the area that we were in at a place called Georgioupoulos and we were taken opposite the Melamene Aerodrome. That’s where we watched them. They eventually captured the aerodrome and then they flew,

they crash landed planes with mountain troops in them. They deliberately crashed them to get them down quick enough and they'd pour out of the thing. When that got just as they unloaded this plane they put together this crane and the crane picked it up with a grip and deposited it on the side and the next one'd be put on top of it. Was just

like a car yard, a wreckers, stacked on top of one another, just to keep the runways free.

Well it was to lead up to the Melamene airport.

Oh, they were good.

They were good and solid. We had them on our flank for quite some time and that's where the Battle of 42nd Street come out. The officer decided they were going to take a run at the Germans because if they didn't they were going to take a run themselves. So when they heard about this the colonel decided that we'd run with them. They only needed one company out of us which was C Company

and I was A Company, but C Company went with them. And they done a bayonet charge and they all scattered. There was a heck of a lot of the Germans. They just threw down their weapons and scattered. By this time they landed a lot more troops with planes in the airport and they took up positions and we couldn't go any further. Those fellas went, I don't know, must have been

half a mile, captured a lot of machine guns and stuff which they were able to use afterwards, but that was the Maoris that was about the only bayonet charge there was.

No, I wasn’t there, I was on the other flank.

Yes, we had

one there, there's a photo in that book I got there. He became a captain in the army when he came back here. He got away from Crete. He was a full blooded aborigine. Reg Saunders he was called. Had a little bit to do with him in Palestine when he was only a

private, but then he came in to be a sergeant. He was at that time about the only Aborigine to become an officer.

As they were treated with us, was quite good. There was nothing. He was just taken as one of us. But when he came back after the

war it was shocking. He was ignored, never invited anywhere and if he did go into officers’ celebrations anywhere, he was just ignored.

Reg was, yeah. There was nothin wrong with Reg. Very determined sorta fella.

The only one that I encountered there. I run into another one when I worked on the building job in Munich, but he come from the 2/11th Battalion from Western Australia.

Well, I know at this stage at that time I could talk

a certain amount of German and this fellows name was Tommy Taylor and there was this young apprentice that was on the job there and he used to call him nigger, and that used to get under his skin. And he said to me, “You can talk German, you tell the boss that if he calls me nigger again I'll hit 'im.” So they sent him to another job, save any trouble. That's the only incident that I saw

but as far as the rest of the troops were when we were in Palestine with us in the canteen he used to drink with us in groups. He was just another soldier.

Just individual things they used to try and, you know, if they thought that

anyone couldn't speak English they'd have some slaps at ‘em, in English. But I never saw that much of it, because as I say when we got into Germany. In the first instance, when you were in Salonika and that you were too dammed scared to do anything. But once you got a little bit of time and a bit of experience under you there were certain things they used to say to them but I never saw much of a problem.

That's right. We didn't think we'd ever come out of there.

Well, it was the fact that it was the first camp that we'd gone into. The one in Crete was only a wire enclosure just while they grouped, but that would be the first camp that you would call a camp that we went into and

the treatment was so bad there was no food, very little food of anything. But because of the fact that we were still pretty fit men, to a certain degree then, it took a fair to work on you. There was so many things that these Romanian guards. They were the greatest mongrels you ever come across in your lives. You never knew when you had it or what would happen

you know. The Red Cross, the Greek Red Cross did get to it the finish and they brought in some tomatoes but that was only a one off. They wouldn't allow it any more. Someone must have had a lenient feel and allowed ‘em in. But they weren't allowed in any more and the conditions were so shocking, the lice was unreal. And the conditions that you had to be in

was just some form of big disease going through it and these fellas going through the sewerage pipes didn't help. When they discovered the pipe, there was one fella that come out on this end of this sort of business and dived through the window where we were all just sleeping on the floor, all covered in crap and all that, it's all those sort of things. If we'd a there under those sort of conditions for some time we'd've never walked out.

No, they just eating on you all the time, getting into your groin, and your clothing and you spend hours doing what they call nit biting, you crush ‘em.

Oh I don't know, I suppose would be hard to say. Some of ‘em would be as big as what we would call a blow fly,

without the wings. And a greyey colour.

Oh yes, biting.

You feel it. You can feel some of them, but the other one, it's an itch. We never had anything like that till we got to Salonika. The next problem after we got out of Salonika was the bugs in Poland. I've never seen bugs

like that in my life.

The bugs were, they tell me that what they used to do was they had this enormous big septic tank, covered the camp. Every so often, you'd have a Polish farmer would come with a tanker and they'd pump it all out into their tanker and then they'd spread it out all over their [garden] beds. Before they dug it in. And they said where there's

septic, that's a breeder for them. And you could see them coming across the ground in their hundreds, like if you've seen a lot of beetles coming across. And we were in barracks there of, in separate rooms of about sixteen to a room, double tier bunks all around the wall. The ones that were up in the top bunks were the worst because they're laying on

their back they used to drop out of the ceiling into your mouth and that. Twice a year they move us out, we'd have to sleep outside and they'd fumigate it. And when you come back in the room that you were in, I suppose the others were the same, you would sweep ‘em all up and dust ‘em all off the bed, the bed bunks and one of those little dust shovels that you use is heaped with bugs.

They bite, because I saw fellas there with infected bites on their body. But it was good for a few months after they used to fumigate the place.

No, they weren't any bigger than what the, oh, maybe a bit bigger than the lice.

there used to be, the walls were lining boards, you wouldn't see them. You'd put the lights out and wait ten minutes and there'd be hundreds of ‘em coming out of the walls. That was shocking that was.

Yes, but lice was a different thing. You'd try to keep yourself as clean as possible, but there was no way to stop ‘em.

I don't know how it comes that lice gets so into people that lives in those conditions, but that's how they were.

Oh, Poland, I would say it became a nuisance value. More as than other one. Conditions were so bad at Salonika that it became

a real worry. What they were frightened of was germs, that's one thing the Germans were always frightened of, fever. If any sort of fever came they'd put you into camp hospital and treat you.

I don't know. But anything of a fever type. Everyone that went

down in the mine in Poland. I was the first one to go down with it. I went down with a terrible fever. Not a fever, a temperature. At that stage we had a doctor there, an English doctor. He was no use. He'd send ‘em to work, he sorta wouldn't give ‘em time off or anything. But he had to be responsible to the Germans. So he sent me to work but when we got down to the mine

the guard saw me and took me to see the doctor down the mine and he sent me back up with the guard, said I wasn't fit for work, this English doctor sent me down again. And the German doctor sent me back up again and he sent me up a third time. Finish up, the doctor down there gave the guard a note to take up to the doctor saying being the enemy he should have been ashamed of himself that

he would send this man, so within about three days they closed the camp. I was the first one to go down with what they call the black coal fever. I went completely blind for one hour and they closed the mine for a fortnight to save it spreading. Now that's a big thing for them because they wanted every ounce of power they could get. But they closed it down for a full fortnight. Anyhow, they got rid of

that doctor, we got an English fella who came from South Africa. He was quite good. He looked after us quite well. The other fella wasn't ever interested in us anyway.

No. Not one of ‘em in the camp.

No, well they never told us. There was no reports in my record. They weren't going to put those things. I've got my record at home. And some of

‘em the Germans which I got from the army here. In German, the things you were. They had the one down that I was in hospital for the flu, but there was no other things down on it. They weren't going to commit themselves to it. They weren't going to tell the world what they were doing. They only done that so that they appeased the Red Cross.

I didn't know what it felt like. I was just laying in bed.

I couldn't do a darn thing. They come rushin' around havin' a look. This doctor then came in and I don't think he, whether he had any drops to put in me eyes I don't know, then me sight come back. It was just the height of the fever that was causing it.

Oh yes, yes.

No, I think it was just

transferred from one person to another what they knew from it was their duty to escape.

Well, the ones that I saw from I mean we saw those ones we already spoke about in Salonika. I wasn’t involved in that. I saw the groups of them would come, that they got

but at the working parties, there was always somebody who always wanted to escape. Sometimes it was only a matter of two, three or four hours. Some of them overnight. We had one fellow there was on the job with the building. You know where all the storm water

ran, these places go into one big culvert type of thing. It was covered with broken pieces of bricks or whatever. He wanted to escape so he decided that that was where he would hide. So we took the broken bricks all off it and he got in there about ten o'clock in the morning. Remember we don't knock off til five o'clock and we had to throw all the bricks and rubble

on top of it of course. He can get out later. But all the workmen on the job used to urinate in that so he was all day there with all this urinating going on. He only lasted about three days outside. Most of ‘em that's all they did. There was a night when one fella escaped through the night, same as I got out but that was for an escape. The fella who was a captain, a commandant of

the camp. He wasn't bad sort of a fella. Because he had an escapee on his hand he got transferred and down to the camp where there was the French conscript workers and that's where the doctors used to be. If you needed medical attention that's where you'd go. You'd be marched down there. So each time the fellas used to go down for sick leave. There'd be half a dozen of ‘em. What happened was that there was no escapes, and he used to say he

couldn’t understand the Australians he said he got sent there because of one and they weren't escaping. This particular night they cut a big panel in the barbed wired fence and it swing back like a gate. There was seven of ‘em got out and the last one didn't push the panel back, so the guard wouldn't see it, but the guard got caught up in it, ripped his uniform. That following morning there was about

five of ‘em went down to the French camp to see the doctor and he come out and he said, “I suppose no more escapes.” They said, “No, there was seven last night.” He laughed like hell he did. He said, “I got sent here.” he said, “For I'd hang that bastard,” he said, that was his words. So that was that one. The ones on the others, wandering out. We had the other camp we went to Walfreidoff [?] was opposite the cemetery.

and the night before, before we went to the camp, we were supposed to go there we left this camp. They used to take us across in a special tram. They'd count you on and off the tram and then before you got on it they'd count you again going home. During the night apparently there'd been an air raid and there'd been a bomb had landed in the cemetery and. They're ones as you know

that have these big statues and they had this big statue of this angel with the wings. You might have read that in the book too. This fella wanted to escape so we decided to give him a bit of time. So one went up the tree with the rope and lowered the statue down to the ground, hit it in a bush, and when it was time for him to disappear before we went home,

gets on to dusk. So they got that and they smashed the other wing off the angel. And put a big overcoat on him and the bloke had got throughout and we brought 'im out and we marched in three so we put 'im in the middle. Each bloke with an arm underneath 'im. And we got down and they counted us. They had the amount they wanted. They counted us on to the tram and when we got off

they counted us and before we're comin' through the gate they were looking at us with a torch, it was dark by this time. “What's wrong with him?” “Oh, he's not well, we'd better take him to the medical centre.” So they went into the camp. Next morning there's this angel standing on the parade ground. They couldn't work out where the heck he'd come from. This bloke got away, but he got caught in three or four days.

For the best. No plans at all. Getting away was the hardest part. It was a strange thing when you were in Munich. You could walk around all day with a spade or a broom on your shoulder, nobody'd take any notice of you. And it wasn't ones on the park where it was,

they wouldn't bother you, but once you but once you got near to the autobahn, then they'd check on ya. I had one occasion there walked around with a broom on my shoulders looking in the shops, instead of sweeping the gutters.

On work parties no, but some of the big camps, like the stalags they were there all day, they never came out. They might

have a working bee inside the camp or they might have a working party outside the camp to cut some wood, but they never. But they were all made up of sergeants and corporals in those camps. The officers’ camps, they had their own one. The different camps that they had.

We had early

days in Munich, we were at this camp what they call west end. It was a sort of a distributing area to send you out to working parties. We were there for about eight days and they had ideas that one of the prisoners there in the English part of the camp was a German and they couldn’t find out. But somebody did a search one day and found an automatic

pistol. We wouldn’t have had that in there, so they recognised that he was the one. Next day he disappeared, he didn’t come back. So the Germans must have woke up that he was found out. And then they also had, never found out about these things we got of Poland. They were dependent on the Germans of greeting groups to help them.

now, in as much as they had the Ukrainians. They got them to join a group and join the German Army and got them German uniforms. Well they were going to make them useful later on in the attacks. They was supposed to be called a holiday camp for British POWs. I never knew one person who went there, but the

talk was there was about eight from some of the working parties around had gone there. Now that was a holiday camp, better food and entertainments, all that. They were trying to form a British group of these Bs but I never knew of one Australian that ever went in there.

They tried to break up loyalties between different groups like Australian/British, Australian/South African. They tried all those sort of things. They used to come around for a while and they used to have these special lectures on your day off. You had to go; you couldn’t just stay in your room. But it never got them anywhere.

Just to try to

tell ya how right they were, how wrong the rest were and that if you wished you could go to this holiday camp, but they never got any of our group.

No they wouldn't talk to you about what they done to the Jews, but they used to just tell you that the Jews was the cause of

their troubles, well back before they started to attack them. But it was more or less just trying to build up and convince you that what they were doin was right. But it didn't go off. You just have to listen. But it was just about two or three of them that I had come across.

Ooh yeah.

plenty of those, about every three months they do that. When we first got up into, before we went to the mines in Poland, there were about a hundred and thirty of us went into 8B camp, they searched us out there. That friend of mine she had made me two pair of civilian shorts. Not just for running around in, for dress wise in case if I wanted to escape again, and they dived on those quick smart.

took them away from me straight away. No, they make raids every so often. Looking for something or other. Didn't bother about anything else they find if they didn't find what they wanted. If they found what they wanted, well, it'd be taken away.

No, they're not. The

Great Escape, but I mean it's been Americanised. To my way of knowledge we got word of that all along the line, even though we were out on the working party. There were 75 escaped out of that one, and fifty of them were killed. They shot fifty, or done away with fifty of them. There was hell to pay. We got the news of that, that was really the thing that you got

down in the dumps over, when that first happened because that's about the first time we'd heard about them doing anything in general about the escapings. But that was to try and stop them from further escapes. I know these escapes. You see all those things I don't know if you ever saw the film which was, ah, what do they call it now, when they put a German in amongst the Germans.

when the fellow was hiding in the big water tank, well that was a true thing, just exaggerated a bit, because the way they went about it you could have picked this fella out at any time. All those types of escapes, I've read two or three books about some of them, one I forget the name of it now, it was only a soft back thing. If ever he should have been charged with murder

when he escaped well he should have been because he, this old woman came out of somewhere and she fronted him and was going to yell out and he shot her. So I mean he could have been charged with murder on that. But in most cases the fellas that went out never done anything wrong. As I say, when I done my second one was when I had all that

summer gear to work with and I went into the village to get a loaf of bread cause I had ration tickets that I got but then they pulled me up because I didn’t even give it a thought. Here's this fine looking fella, well dressed, why isn't he on the front? This policeman, that's what he said, “What's a fine looking bloke like you doing here?” If I'da talked enough good German I probably

would have told him I was on leave, but then you gotta have papers. I knew the game was up; there was nothing I could do.

That was just off the building job when the guard was not looking. Disappeared at the last minute, hide out somewhere; I forget where I hid out, til they'd all marched off

the job and then during the night I found this more secure spot. I knew the direction I was heading. But I was in strange areas, you don't know what's around the next corner. And I didn't realise til I went back in ‘84 and they took me around, that is, his son took me round places and I realised that there is a number of

forests and you just come out of one forest and there's a village. It's hard to miss them, spaced out all over the place. Not for any purpose, that's how they do it. I realised that I had Buckley's hope [no hope]. You can travel by night. You think you're doing well, the thing that was good about it you were never bothered by dogs. Never saw a dog when I was in Germany, apart from the military ones of course.

never bothered about those so you could wander around in the night time, but you never got that far.

No, no, no, no, you take what you could out of Red Cross parcels with you, and you could make sure you didn't eat too much. You work it out that it’s going to last you seven or eight days til you got to the border. You didn't know what to expect when you got there. The most you could carry was enough

to last you four or five days, mainly take chocolate, things like that, which is not a heavy weight to carry. Then you'd, about, if you come across a good hiding spot about three o’clock in the morning well you'd take it, you didn't push on any further. Then you'd just stay there and hide or sleep for the rest of the day and go again at night time.

No, they didn’t, they took me back to their station. They didn't ask me the first time because I was in uniform, but the second one when I was in German clothes; they asked me how I got them. I told them I bought them off a Frenchman. They said what was the Frenchman? I said I don't know, all Frenchmen look alike. So on both accounts

they just rang up the camp and give you a feed, lock you up for the night, the guard'd come the next day, take you back to camp. The commandant'd give you ten days bread and water and send you back to work again.

No, no, not for that reason, no. I suppose they could of try and thrash a bit more out of you to find out where I got the clothing from, but they never did. They didn't even bother to try and

catch you. They left it to natural things to do it. You're in a strange country and you don’t know where you're going. And they let these things. Now they had one thing up on the border of Switzerland was the big lake as you know, and the other area they had guards’ posts, big buildings stuck up in the air. They were spaced a fair distance apart. But between that they

had cardboard or wooden features of a guard with a rifle, and every now and then they'd pop up out of the grass. From the distance, when you see that with a gun pointing at you, you don't know whether it's real or not.

No I didn't, just told by other fellas that come back. No, I just got 40 mile I suppose from the Swiss border.

Roughly about 80/90 mile.

The first attempt was only about fifty. The second one was I suppose was about 80.

Well, I didn’t know what to expect at the other end, because at that stage none of ‘em were coming back to tell us. You'd get the odd one that was sent out from a stalag, from a strange place you didn't

know, they'd tell ya. But I didn't know what to expect when I got there and the ones that told me about the cut-outs of the soldier with the gun, so come back and the I never had another try then til I done that one in Poland and I got away.

The only mistreatment I saw in Poland apart from ones that were working on building jobs that we passed when we went to the mines was the one when we got off the

train. When we first arrived in Poland. I don't know if I told you about that or not, it's in the book. We got off and we were just grouped up waiting for instructions on which way to go. We had guards, they brought a group. I don't know, could have been sixty or eighty of them. They were marching down where they, I had a feeling at that time that they were

marching ‘em down to take them to Auschwitz [concentration camp]. Now Auschwitz had a separate line where nobody went. They put in a track where they had a special line. I presume that they were moving them down to the station or the railway yards to transfer them there. But just before they got to us, thirty feet or so away, there was a big hall with the doors open

Somebody made a run for it and then the whole lot followed and someone went in there and locked the doors. The guards they had with them were SS [Schutzstaffel]. They didn't go looking for them. We got the story from our guards at the camp later on that they just cut off water supply and everything and just left ‘em there. And as they made a run outside from it they just mowed ‘em down. I would say for maybe two three days we weren't

that far away from the camp they went to and we'd hear the machine gun fire and we heard from one of the guards that they just waited until they came outside and mowed them down. Whether that was true or not I don't know. I suppose it would be. I could blame the SS for anything. They were a terrible lot.

No, not,

close up with them at sometimes you know, see a few of them coming down and they'd make some snide remark about something. But I never had any run in with them whatsoever.

Only after those guards told us about it. I never heard about it before that.

No, they didn’t know. But they knew it was a concentration camp for the Jews. I mean all this

didn't come out until after the release of Poland and VE Day is when Auschwitz is brought to the fore. But that's where we knew Auschwitz was there. I was about thirty five kilometres from we were camped. But we never saw anything of what they done there. We had a fella wrote a, he was in our unit. He wrote a book and got a lot of publicity out of it. The first one he wrote I was

that ‘I Was There’. The second one he wrote was ‘The Stoker’. I dunno if you heard anything about it. He got a lot of publicity on the telly [television] and sold books about it, that he helped put ‘em into furnaces. It went on for a fair while. Even the holocaust group backed him on this. But then they turned their back on him and they wrote this article on a

Gippsland paper and they didn't believe that it was possible that it could be done and we don't either. We didn't have much to do with him because it was only his way of making money we believe. I didn't know of any. Well, I know that he got ten thousand dollars from the government because of being in a concentration camp and another fella from another battalion who I knew got ten thousand because he was in

a concentration camp. How could he be in a concentration camp when the day that I escaped he went on the march with the fellas that moved out of the camp? So he had the gist of telling, they made a few dollars for themselves, but there was no way they could check ‘em out. I never saw anything in that way with the Jews. Only the bad way they were treated when they had them out working. Pushing them and forcing them to work faster and harder. They had such a look on them, those

pictures on that was made was true. They had a look on them of defeat. They wouldn't even raise their head to look at you as you passed them. Possibly frightened that they could get a whack or something. That was their life. That's about all that I knew about the Jews, the things that I saw.

Aaah, just over two years.

The first time was before I escaped, about twelve months I suppose. When the first time I met her it took about nine months before I ever made the escape to

join her, to join her mother. Her mother was in that book. She was a wonderful woman. She didn't have to take me in and look after me, put her thing on the line. Don't think it had anything to do with her when Lucy cleared off and left me, because she used to always write when Lucy came back to Australia in 1980, she said her mother was always on her back to see what had happened to me.

They wrote three letters addressed to the hotel we were staying when she left, but then they'd changed owners about three times so nobody knew. So they never got any answer. She just came looking for me through the phone book to see whether I survived, to see whether I lived.

You go down

as I say, it was eleven hundred metres. You can imagine going down in the lift and they tell me a lot of the other mines are just like it. They just let it drop and pull you up at the last minute. You had the clothes to work in. You get down to the bottom. To get you to work they had these little trains that used to run underground. They used to

pull up to about two fifteen two ton skips, so we used to climb into that and it used to take you up to the coal face. Different ones used to go in different directions. When you knocked off at night, no you had to walk out. They used to have different ones laying on the top of the coal they used to whack ‘em with a piece of wood. But you used to march out. It was a big eye opener,

the first one I thought nothing of it as far as spectacular because I was in this section where you had to shovel on your knees, just all day behind you. But that was only for a short period of time. Then we got this other place and what they would do they would come to a coal face and they drive into

the coal face and they had what they used to call a roochy pan and it was like a half barrel attached to a machine and it used to shake. And you used to shovel it into that and that'd run out on a conveyer belt and go up top to the trucks. Once they got that they drive that right in. They had several of those, but in

the other section they had it with an enormous coal face and as I say, it just felt like to me that you just walked into a big ballroom all the lights that they had. And the Poles used to clear. Once they cleared the two days of coal, that leaves them a gap behind them and they'd bring in the timber to shore it all up and they'd

shore it all up and they'd pump from the top, they'd tip the sand in at the top and the water and that used to flush in and when the water dried away it filled up that area. But then when the Germans took over they would go a month without doing anything and they had numerous fall ins. They had one Pole a day killed in that mine. Because they didn't do the maintenance work on it properly. Only one prisoner was killed.

I worked with a fella from Western Australia, Alec Shaw. His brother worked there as well. Alec used to work for me for nearly two years. And this particular night I don't know why, but we got these orders to split up. I think it was just a matter of splitting a whole lot of us up. So I had to work with two Poles, doing the same job that he was doing.

what happened was that during that time this huge block of coal, it would be bigger than this room, had fallen down. We used to be a bit edgy with every creak you heard. The Pole said to us, “Don't worry about the creaks, but if you see a bit of fine dust coming out from the roof then get out. It means there is a crack and it's going to get worse.” So this big block fell out,

when I worked with Alex I could shovel both ways, and he could only shovel one way. It meant that I had to be in this part of the line and he had to be here. When this block fell it knocked a post out of the ground and that fell against that wall but he was trapped under it from the waist down, made a hell of a mess of his legs, but if it had've been I would've been under it on the other side, which I wasn't.

That was the only time I was in danger anywhere down there I was very wary early in the, at the slightest squeak and I would look, until the Pole told me don't worry about that, it's when you see the dust drifting down, get out.

His heel would touch the back of his thigh. And they went back; I don't know what happened to him

after that. They took him back to the main camp and he would've gone into the hospital there. I never saw him after that.

When you come out yes, cold water whether it's winter or summer. They had showers there for you.

Oh, it was a terrible time, honestly it was. But you didn't know what was going on. You thought the rest of your life was going to be there. Because at that stage it was early

we used to have the news over the radio that the young English bloke had made but in the later months we got no word about anything to listen in, you just go by what other people tell you.

No, that never occurred. But I was wary, how long is this going to go for you. When we got the word, the Poles used to come down each day. When they told us

about the Russian advance, that gave us a good lift. Because that meant that sooner or later they were going to go through because the Germans had had it by that time. They were only putting up a bravado front. There's amazing the amount of troops that they had.

Yeah, well they were the occupation army.

When I was at Lucy's place, before we were married, it was when the Russians came through. She said, “Oh, come up to the corner up near the post office and have a look.” because they told her that the Polish troops were coming down, which there was, you see the Poles were split up, there was a lot of them that the Russians had claim and they used to call them the Free Russian Polish. And you had the Free Poles that fought out of England.

so they had a group that came down. We went up to the corner and you looked up a road up to the top of a hill, and over the top of the hill, I said, “This looks like a damn circus comin to town.” There were dozens of these wagons some of them had troops on it, some of it had feed for the animals and they were all in line coming down over the hill. The fighting force had gone on.

This was what the occupation army was coming in. It looked to me in the distance that that's what it was, a circus with all these wagons coming in and of course they took over all the spots. They done all the patrolling and that. But they never did any patrolling without a Russian sergeant or somebody in charge of ‘em. They were so unreliable, but they didn't have any control over them. They just looted, they raped, they done everything on

the way up to Odessa, a later date with us. We asked a Russian soldier who could speak a bit of German, why these people. He said the only way they could control them was to let them do what they wanted to do. They were good fighters according to them. But to rape and loot that's all they were interested in.

The

two incidents one was they had a lass up against a wall. Two of them were holding her while the other bloke was going for his life. But this time when we had to go to Katavitz and we couldn’t get a tram, Lucy's mother went with me, Lucy had gone to work apparently, and we were going up to Katavitz for information before we even tried to get ‘em out of the country

we came to this shopping centre, it was just like a little arcade, a lot of people about, and just inside the arcade they had this lass on the ground. Two holding her down while the other fella was raping her, and people were just walking past, they didn't care a damn about what went on around them.

No I think it's just their way of living. They were in a strange country and they were there for the taking.

It's what that Russian officer said later on, that's why they had to let them do that to keep control on ‘em. You’ve got no idea what they were like. Honestly. They were the crudest people I ever seen in my life. But, I was a bit unsure of myself when they were around, you didn't take any risks with them. Unluckily, they got away with it.

Oh I'd say that loyalties becomes, because it’s a matter of, you need

support and it doesn't matter who it is, you need that support to make your life a bit easier. You feel get yourself attached in lots of ways, but as I say I had so much to thank Lucy for I wouldn't have lived. That's why I went back for just that ten days a couple of months before she died. I owed her that at least. I discussed it with me wife and she said, “You best go because you wouldn't be here without her.”

As I said, we went to this camp over at Freidorf and I saw her a couple of times, when I was out on the job, only to talk to. But we weren't there that long before they put us on a train and we went to Poland. She didn't know where. I had given her before, a long time before,

see when my mother died my father went to live with my sister, so that was my home address. I gave my sister's address to her and said, you know, you can always write to me at a later thing. She didn't know what had been done. She went to that last camp just looking around and asking a few questions but they were getting a bit obvious so she just gave that up and she didn't know.

I was only home about the 27th roughly of September and the first week of October I'd been in to make arrangements about getting Lucy out of the country, and a letter arrived from Fanny at my sister's place addressed to me hoping I'd survived the war, She didn't know what had happened to me. In it she said if I wished to correspond with her cause it was that

when the occupation army went in the arrangement were to go to the post office here. They had vouchers that those people could write postage wise. So I sent a half a dozen of these, a brown paper sort of a roll thing. She continued to write to me here. She wrote to me about four times a year and I would answer it and around

about 1962 she wrote and told me she married a fellow with seven kiddies. They ranged from 13 to 21, but then in 1971 he died and she was there on her own, but that's then. When she married the

fellow she said would you mind if her son continued to write because her time was taken up with these seven kids. And that was, she only give me a write at about Christmas time. Then her son took over and he wrote, until he decided to come out and pay a visit in 1982, was the first time he came out. And then he convinced us we should go back out for a holiday in 1984.

She said, when they took me to their place where we stayed. She had a unit up the road somewhere. Waited, she come in. She looked lovely. She came up in her national dress and everything you know. We had a great old chin wag [chat] about things but then she developed the cancer and got much sicker all the time. I said I'm going to make the choice

so I went, I only stayed ten days and but she had more interest in me than I had in her in that respect. I appreciated her I thought the world of her for the things she done. But she did tell me when we went there in 84 she said, you know, “I loved you in 1941 and I still love you.” Made me feel a bit bad. These things happen. I didn't know what happed to her because

when we got all the reports, Munich was getting hell bashed out of it and bombed. But apparently her area didn't get touched. It was only about 200 yards and there was places down everywhere. We didn't know. But we remained the best of friends right up until that time. The time she died.

No, I'd say, war time things didn't come back, but she still looked a very attractive woman even though she was getting on in those days, so was I. No, I don’t' think the war time thing didn't come about. I was so pleased to see her looking so well. After all the things she done but I must say that the kids, the fella she married

was wonderful to her and everything they went to they took her with them. So she lived a good life after that.

No, I never done much talking to different ones about things. They asked different questions, especially when I came back and brought out a foreign bride.

I got all the questions about that. When I first come home there wasn't a great deal of interest in us as far as people around your neighbourhood because one of the first lots of the Japanese prisoners had come in. There was five in that part of the street. They'd just come home so everybody was interested in building up them and nothing was said, no one was bothered about what I

had done. I wasn't there that long. Once Lucy came out I moved to me brother's place.

The only thing I've encountered and it's still going on not as much, they've formed an organisation in Australia now, called Saviour of Australia. They're the ones who came back and fought in New Guinea and it all centred around the time of the big battle of the fleet which would've had've

if the Japanese won they'd had a free run to Australia, through the Coral canal or something, I forget what they call it, Sea. These ones class themselves as the saviour of Australia. The thing is that we thing, we didn't say or do anything about it, you can't when you talk about those things. But we hadn't've gone, there'd be no saviour of Australia. If we hadn't've

fought with the rest of the world to try to hold up Hitler he woulda controlled most of all of the world and given over things to Japan and Australia would've been under Japan. So, ideas of later when the fellas say to me it doesn't matter if you're up in the front line for five years, the fella who is supplying you with the supplies is just as important

as you are. And that's true, he is. You can't do a thing without him. So it doesn't matter whether you fought in this or that battle, you had to rely on other people. That's the way it was.

Yes, it does. You feel as though you’ve done a great job, and it does drag you down a bit. If that's the opinion you've got of us we weren't much good were we. I consider that what we done, you see when you

come to look at it I wouldn't've liked to have fought in the islands or New Guinea, myself. Now I look back and say please, not a POW. But, when you come to look at it we were prisoners. We were away for five and a half years and we didn't come home. The fellas that came back and went to New Guinea, but they came back to Australia twice and they had leave to go home to their families and what have you. Their battle

in New Guinea and that were only a matter of only a couple of months and then they were in relief and back in Australia and reinforcements and go back again. So I suppose we done it pretty hard, but I wouldn't have liked to be in New Guinea, conditions and those sort of things. I wouldn't wanted to be into that.

Yes, yeah, I've heard them say it must have been pretty hard, pretty tough for you, not as much as the Japanese but as I say if we'd stayed at Salonika for even six or seven months I don't think any of us woulda come outa there. Wouldn’t 've.

No, no, you just looked on them as the enemy

as that fact. You didn't have anything to do with the other people, but there were one or two good people and there were some good guards believe you me. Some of the older ones that had been in the First World War. You get some of the younger ones who were back as guards they were there after they'd been wounded and were just recuperating before they went back up the front, they try to give you a hard time and all that business, speak about things,

you'll never get home, all this business. That never felt too good. The average one didn't bother us. The guards in the main didn't bother you unless you done anything to them, that’d be up to you. I never had that sort of feel for them. I never had a love for them. I kept them at length and I never tried to do anything, that's how it was, it was just the good ones. I can remember a fella

he was Frank King. He was been in Australia in the First World War and was interned, perfect English, he was a wonderful fellow, he tried to do everything he could to make our lives a bit better in the camp we were at. You’ve got people out here that would do the same thing for different people in different situations. That’s how it is, I didn't have any hatred for them.

I hated what they done to people in general but I remember what Fanny's son said to me back in 84, they didn't, and I believe him. They didn't know anything about the concentration camps. They knew there were concentration camps. But they didn't know anything of the like of Auschwitz and those places. If they did, what could they do about it? They couldn't protest about it or something.

If they did know anything they just had to close their eyes to it, and I think that was true. They were quite good people and the ones I went back in 84 and I met some of ‘em. I remember I went to a big place there in Munich, a big tower with a restaurant on top. And we had lunch there and we were just leaving and the waiter, he came up to me and he said,

“You're German?” I said no. He said, “I heard you talking in German and in English.” Because I speak to my wife in English. And he said, “Well where did you learn your German?” I said I was a POW. He said, “After all we done to you, you're good enough to come back and see us.” he said. “Thank you very much.” There's good people and bad people. I don't take notice of it.

Yes, I feel that if we hadn't've we wouldn't be sitting there as slaves, as all those occupied countries in Europe would've been. And maybe it wouldn't've been them; maybe it would have been the Japanese that controlled things. The Germans had no intentions of giving up the countries that they'd captured, they'd have to be taken from them. And it would've been the

same for the Japanese. A bit different to Iraq of course. He [Saddam Hussein] done the one, the things of the country he went into and put them all into life as captivity more or less. So it had to be done. It wouldn't have been worthwhile living if it hadn't've been.

Well, my honest feeling is

I don't think America should've gone in. It should've been done by the United Nations and I consider them terribly weak. How can you have members in that, like Russia and France, who veto everything that doesn’t suit their business deals with people, they shouldn’t be in it, but I feel the head of it, he's a very nice man [Kofi Annan - Secretary General of the UN] but I think he's a little bit weak on making decisions.

They should have been the ones that should've put the United Nations army in there with the backing of all these countries like America and Germany and all those. But no, and America wanted to go in there definitely. Nothing was going to stop them from going in; they were going to do it. But, I think that they thought that at the last moment the United Nations would've agreed for them all to go in and do the thing. There wouldn't've been any outcry about it then.

Well, quite possibly, if it doesn't suit their. I don't think they could go to a big war. Any war's a big war, because people get killed. But the likes of Iraq, and these places, they are small wars. I don't think there'd ever

be a situation of a world war again. Because there's too much involved. I think the writing was on the wall some years back, going back to round about the 48s, when there was the cold war with Russia. Russia was sanctioning up there with China. The big nations. It looked like it at that stage that it was going to be a war between the Allies and Russia and probably

China in behind ‘em, but I think Russia woke up to the fact that this is a thing. This could develop into a war and if we defeated the allies, the European and all this business, then we they've got no allies to fight the coloured races in the world which eventually it’s come to this in Iraq, with the Moslems and that. So they broke off a close pact with China cause they were going to be the only white

nation in the world who would be able to stand up to anything. And I think they woke up to the fact and they lessened their hatred business of the rest of the world, which they did have that hatred when Khrushchev [Premier USSSR] and those were there, and I think they woke up to that and I think that was another thing that was a bit of a saviour for us because I thought we could've developed into another world war again. With the business of Russia and China we might have been in a lot of trouble.

I don't think there'll ever be another world war. Hopefully not anyhow.