Australians at War Film Archive

Well actually it’s funny, I sort of passed the street the other day, Beach Road in Rushcutters Bay, right opposite the yacht club. I can just barely remember being there. I must have been about 4 when we left there, 4 or

5. My father who was a general practitioner bought a share in a practice at Bondi Junction so I really was brought up at Bondi Junction for most of my life as a youth, young person. Of course there’s a very different picture there now. In those days there were paddocks. I remember we used to walk to school and there were paddocks between there, and Christian Brothers at Waverley but now all you’ll see is great buildings

around the place. There were six of us in the family, six children and I was the eldest. There were five boys and a girl. Four did medicine and one brother started medicine, did a year, did quite well and then on the day he was to start his second year he went to my father and said he had decided not to go on with medicine, and he’d do law, which he’s done and he still practices. My sister eventually did physio and she ended up

marrying another ophthalmologist like myself and actually we were together in England, in hospital together after we left St Vincent’s. She is still alive and well. But then the present generation I don’t think that – there is no Cahill actually doing medicine although one of my nephews married a female doctor and that’s the nearest we can get to it now.

To Waverley. It was quite extraordinary. I left Waverley, let me see, in sixth class in those days and I went, of course my father had been at Aloysius which is at Milsons Point. He decided he would send us there. So my brother and I used to get the tram at Bondi Junction and go down to, get down to the Quay and get on a ferry there and cross the harbour to Milsons Point and then walk from there up to the school which is right

opposite Circular Quay. I could do it. We were doing it then just rapidly as you could do it now, with the tram and all. We used to enjoy it, had a lot of fun on those tram trips and on the boat, on the ferries. There’s other schools congregated there, Shore [Sydney Church of England Grammar School] and some girls’ of course, girls’ schools in there. So the ferry trip was always an adventure of some kind.

Yes they always have been. At Aloysius, the cadet unit is still a very big thing and I mean some of the schools have dropped it now. I’ve got grandsons at, I’ve got one at Riverview, one at Knox and one at Shore so I’ve got them all over the place now. But Knox, Knox particularly they’re

really keen. To get in the cadet corps anywhere at all is like getting in the first 15 and of course they love to get in the tam-o-shanter which he’s just done, get into the band.

My training? Well then I left, I stayed on at Aloysius and then I went and did medicine.

In those days, no. I just escaped it all because it was compulsory training and then suddenly it all dropped, well then the cadet corps of the school dropped so that I had no interest in the army at all, never had. I was always keen on aviation and I had really wanted to get into the air force. It’s hard now for people, young people I should think, to realise that in those days for a young doctor to get into some section of the services was like getting

into the first 15 or first 11, you’ve got your guernsey to get and so on. So eventually I after about 12 months waiting on the air force when things had happened, particularly when Paris fell I thought, “Oh well, I’m sick of this waiting. Why don’t I go and put my name down for the army?” and hardly before I could get back to the hospital I was in. So I then went out to, I was told to report to the showground where they were just opening the showground as the

reception depot for the new 8th Division which was being formed following the fall of Paris.

I hardly remember very much. I don’t know very much about the First World War because I was, I don’t know about 5 or 6 at the end of the war. I can remember the troops arriving back and marching around. Then I remember very little else but there used to be lots, for a few years there

used to be fairs held in Martin Place for the support, financial support in some way I presume of the troops that came back. That’s the only place I’ve ever won a prize in any lottery at all. I remember much to my father’s annoyance I prevailed upon him to buy a bat, they used to call them, in a chocolate wheel and which I won and it happened to be a pair of live fowls

and here we were in the middle of Martin Place with a pair of live WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s. That was anything but popular and haven’t won anything since then.

Oh yes I have, there was a neighbour next door, poor fellow. He had been gassed in the ’14–18 war and he also had a wound in his leg, he was limping and he was a rather sad character. He had one day out in the

year and that was Anzac Day. That was the only connection I ever had with it. I wasn’t interested in the army because I was keen on aviation. In fact I wanted to learn to fly but my father prevailed upon me in those days, he said, “I don’t want to discourage you but I think you can do better,” because it was a very risky game then. I remember the first flight I ever went to. He took us out to the aerodrome, out to Mascot which was

then a paddock and they had an old Bristol fighter there, barnstorming with it, you could pay a pound or something, a pound a head and you could get a flight around the aerodrome. It was an old water cooled motor and just canvas sides and I went up and then my brother went up and then my father went up and so that was in about 1926/27, and then Kingsford Smith arrived on the scene and he was always my boyhood hero.

So we used to go, my brother and I used to go and spend every penny we could save on aviation books and go out there and have further flights on these old machines. So I was always fascinated and still am.

No, there was really no air force or hardly any air force those days. There was a small thing but there was no question of that at all. It was

just you either learnt to fly with the idea of using it as a rather expensive hobby or I suppose going on and being a pilot trying to get a job flying little things like this around the countryside to local bazaars and odds and ends. That’s the way Mascot grew. Then Kingsford Smith, when he came back after his Pacific flight and his other flights then started what was

subsequently became Australian National Airways and it was the start of commercial flying in Australia. I can remember at school at Aloysius the plane was a copy of the Southern Cross, it was actually a Fokker 3 engine motor and the one coming from Brisbane always was supposed to fly over

at about 12 o’clock, and you know we’d all be waiting to see this thing come over and then eventually the great disaster when the Southern Cloud disappeared and that really finished Kingsford Smith, that’s when the business went.

Well my father was a general practitioner and he was a very kindly man. He had a big practice, worked very hard and he had a lot of sons and he had to work very hard. It didn’t affect us as much as you know, lots of people but I can remember as we got on the tram trip from Bondi Junction

over to and down to the Quay you would see these dole queues or even the queues every morning waiting outside certain little soup shops or soup canteens, waiting for breakfast. I don’t know how they existed. Of course I can remember them living in these little shanties down on Bondi and Ben Buckler [?] and down at the coast. And some of them went on living there for years and as the Depression lifted they would improve these little tin houses

they had built on the cliffs but they were quite comfortable. They had a lovely view. So that went on. So, but I was just, it never had entered my head that I’d ever be in the army or ever want to be in the army and I really didn’t. I went in almost on protest but I had to go once I put my name down. I don’t regret it. In fact I’ve been interested and fascinated with it ever since. I regret that I didn’t do some beforehand because I

would have been a little wiser perhaps, I would have known a little more when I was called up. It was rather extraordinary to arrive and I hadn’t even been in uniform.

No. Never thought of the army at all. Just wiped it from my mind. It’s rather strange isn’t it, the way it turned out?

Yes, he was very keen. I think he was. He didn’t force it on us but he was obviously very keen and I must admit that I really never thought of doing anything else but medicine and my brothers were the same I’m sure. It was just automatic. I have an uncle who was a doctor in addition, that

was my father’s elder brother but I didn’t really know him well until later years but he practised in the country. My mother had been a nurse. That’s where she met my father. She was English actually. She came out here, must have been one of the early nurses to come out here and she nursed at the Coast Hospital which is the Prince of Wales now and that’s where they met. And that’s how long ago the story started and as I’ve

said, as I mentioned before nobody in this generation has been interested. My son I couldn’t get near a hospital, within five miles of a hospital at any stage of his life. Not interested.

Because Paris had fallen and it looked as though

Germany was going to overrun everything then and there was only Australia and England really and the Australians were scattered throughout the Middle East and my friends, most of my friends were there. So that then there was a great urge to join. It was funny. When I went out to the showground I found the senior medical officer was John Loewenthal who subsequently became Sir John, a professor of surgery here in

Sydney and the next one was Peter Hendry who, he was a very experienced old soldier from the Sydney University Regiment and then I arrived and knew them both well but knew nothing about the army. They were pretty good to me but I learnt more in three weeks at the showground than I would have learnt in three years in most places I think. It was a tough old camp, a funny camp. You know, there was an air of

excitement everywhere. People, fellows would go out to lunch and at the end they’d have the bands coming down Martin Place blowing away and they’d have a few more beers and before they knew what happened they’d said, “Oh we’ll go down and sign up.” And they’d say, “Right in the bus,” and they’d come out to the showground and they’d be in. I used to stand there and watch these fellows come in and as they came in every afternoon, they sang, “You’ll be sorry, you’ll be sorry,” and the next day of course

they would be doing the same. But the thing became absolutely crowded, the showground was crowded in no time. When I first went out there from the hospital somebody said, “Oh you go out there and if you see anybody you know, a sergeant or anything like that ask him where your billet is.” So I went out and I saw a sergeant and I went up and told him who I was and he wasn’t very interested and I said, “Well look I’m out here and I’ve been posted here as medical officer can you show me my billet.” And he looked up and said, “Come round here.” And he showed me a horse box. I said, “Well

that's not for me.” So I used to go home every night. Nobody knew, but that was that. So that was the way I started in the army. There were things that went on there that were just nobody’s business.

One of them, I nearly got into great trouble through my enthusiasm after I had been at the showground for a few weeks and I noticed that around the big ring there were huge stacks of bread, ordinary sandwich bread

wrapped and they had been all round the ring, I don’t know, an enormous amount of bread. And then they would come along and I had to go out and do these inspections with the senior officers whoever they were, and I used to say, “What’s this bread?” And they’d say, “Oh that’s condemned.” And I would say, “Well that’s a funny business, why? Let’s have a look at it.” And he would say, “Oh no, look it’s condemned you know. Don’t go poking your nose in where you shouldn’t,” and so forth. Eventually I started and I got a bit

annoyed about this because I heard next that the bread used to disappear all right but nobody knew where it went to. And it was going all round the place, around the shops, around the district and I got rapped over, well I didn’t get rapped over the knuckles of course, they eventually came up and said, “Pull your head in your fool, you’ll be in trouble if you do anything about this.” But they got into all sorts of rackets there. The girls got in and they got a little, a stand, a little cottage of some kind and they used to ply

their trade up there at night. Everybody was satisfied and happy. All sorts of things were going on like that. Some of them were not too good.

Well I stayed there and actually the officers took over the wine pavilion as their mess which was a good idea because a lot of the old ‘14-‘18 soldiers were there, they were waiting, hoping to get an overseas posting somewhere. They were having trouble with their wife or the cops were

onto them or something or they had escaped from the Bay [Long Bay Jail]. But eventually you know I had been there only about six weeks when I was called. John Loewenthal said, “I’ve got your postings you’d better see me after lunch.” So I went down and met John Loewenthal with the others and they hand out these envelopes and we all looked to see what unit we were going to and

they said, “Right well who got the 2/19th? And I said, “I’ve got the 2/19th John.” He said, “You poor bastard, you’ve got a commanding officer in an infantry battalion who’s a doctor, a general practitioner.” Of course that didn’t dawn on me what that really meant. This is the most extraordinary position to be in as a junior doctor with a man who had got an MC [Military Cross] at Gallipoli, and this was Duncan Maxwell who subsequently became the first

commanding officer of the 2/19th. He was a big man. He had come back from the war, the ‘14-‘18 war and had done agriculture and he didn’t like that so then he decided to do medicine. He did medicine. He went up to Cootamundra where he built up a good practice. He was widely known and he was a very outgoing character. When I went and saw him he was about 17 stone, 17½ stone, big fellow. He had two brothers. He was the

smallest of them. They were Tasmanian. And one of his brothers I subsequently met up in Malaya. He was a planter in Malaya and he came out just before the fighting. However he turned out to be a marvellous man as far as I was concerned. No matter what turned up in any medical thing at all in the unit, he would just say, “I know nothing about that go and see the

medical officer.” So he [UNCLEAR] treat me. I think the fact that he was a doctor, in those days they were a bit more popular than they are now, all sorts of fellows were wanting to get into that unit. There were solicitors and barristers and architects, you name it they were all there. All very experienced men one way or the other. Some in the army some not. So

it was a very happy mess and he controlled it very well, but about once every month he would say, “All right gentlemen, 10 o’clock you’ll all now turn lights out, you can all retire with the exception of the medical officer.” And I’d stand there and I knew what that meant and when they’d gone he’d say to the sergeant of the mess, “You may go now sergeant.” And with that he’d go around and he’d take down a bottle of Johnny Walker and that had to be consumed before we got to bed. He did most of it but he loved his whisky. That was the one time he could do it, so we got on very well.

Medicine – the two of us are together now, medicine. He really still hankered back for it you know. It was extraordinary, very interesting.

I had very little. I had to learn as I went along. As I say when I first went out there I didn’t even know how to salute. I wasn’t in a uniform and that was interesting. When I got a uniform, they said to me now you with some unit, I don’t know what they were, we were groups of people, a thousand

guys who were in control, they were a unit, whatever it was they did. ”You have to report to Colonel So and So at the wood chopping ring, tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock, 1000 hours.” And I said, “Oh yes, righto.” So I get around there and I was not very punctual in those days. I thought I’d better get there early for this fellow, he’s a bit of a firebrand they say. So anyway I was out there standing there and I got there about ten minutes to ten and I waited and waited and waited and then eventually this little podgy fellow came around

in uniform [UNCLEAR] and as he came up to me, I saluted and I said, “Cahill sir, your medical officer.” He looked at his watch and he said, “Captain Cahill, when I say 1000 hours I mean 1000 hours, not 2 minutes to or 2 minutes after. In future, you shall be on time.” What a bastard of a show this is and he was, he was a terrible man, a shocking man. He had been up in New Guinea in between the wars

and he’d come down and he still thought I think, that he was up in New Guinea as far as we were concerned. He used to get these poor unfortunate characters who were keen to get away, these were the company of officers and he was unmarried himself, and here he was down in the Princes or Romanos or whatever it was in those days and he used to get them and take them out. He said, “Now we’ll go out, we’ll go down to dinner tonight,” or something like that and he’d get them down there and he’d make them drink till about 2 in the

morning and then drag them back to camp and at 6 in the morning he would have meeting. My God he was a terrible bloke. Eventually he did get command of a unit. He got command of a mobile laundry and he finished up in the centre of Australia and then he was there for, I don’t even know his name so I can tell you this, he was only there for a few weeks and he was sent back to here, ‘services no longer required’. He was a dreadful man. So you ran up against these coves [men]. Now the other

interesting thing there, talking about the showground, going back a bit, this mess they took over, the sergeants had the ground floor and the officers had the one above them, and the ground floor, the sergeants would open their mess at 7 in the morning and all these hardened old boys from the ’14–18 war would be in there drinking their rum and having a great old time. It was quite lively out there.

Oh they were all right, they were all right. As a doctor you were in a strange position although you know you were a captain but you weren’t part of them, you were only attached. So I wasn’t, I was strictly speaking, I was Medical Corps, Royal Australian Medical Corps attached to the 2/19th Infantry Battalion. So that you become, they accept you as a doctor

and they still do. It’s theoretical. It’s the army rules. But the army, actually the doctor, the RMO [Regimental Medical Officer] who is a captain, he’s a very powerful guy because he can say to, for example, if the CO [Commanding Officer] is playing up, and it’s happened, and he was being a nuisance. He’d just say, “Look sir, I think you’re a bit off colour, you had better go back and do this – ” And in the meantime write to the hospital, say, ‘this cove’s a shocker’, you know, ‘have a look at him’, but before he knew what happened he'd be relieved of his command and he’d

be whisked away to think things over. So that you had the final knock. I don’t think it was very often done but it was. Maxwell was interesting as far as I was concerned because Maxwell was a bit of an extrovert but he loved, he loved a social life and he loved people of importance and he would never come to me when he was sick, that he wouldn’t do. I didn’t take any notice because he was quite happy and he was going off to see

some colonels or specialists, and one day, we’re up in Malaya, and he arranged to call for me. He said, “Look I’m not feeling well, I want you to come.” I thought, hell, this is funny. I said, “Why don’t you go down to the [UNCLEAR] General Hospital and do it there. It turned out that he had some renal trouble so he shouldn’t have been in there at all, because he was ill. But then when I got into it I found he was hypertensive. He’d lost his trigger finger in the ’14–18 war and he couldn’t

see very well out of one eye and here he was commanding an infantry battalion. It didn’t worry him. Then he became a brigadier when things changed up there and Anderson took over.

No, I used to go down to the – it wasn’t compulsory. No I used to go down

and play around a bit with them but I never became very proficient with a rifle or anything like that. It’s interesting. I was talking you know, when I was at the hospital I was going away and there was one of the surgeons at St Vincent’s had been in the ’14–18 war and had won a Military Cross, he said, “You know when you go, Lloyd, it’s a good idea not to get yourself too mixed up with this soldiering part of it, because you remember you’re primarily a doctor,” he said, “Do that.” So he told me that and I thought, “Well

that’s pretty wise.” I think I perhaps could have, well you haven’t got much time if you’re with your infantry battalion, you’re pretty busy all day long strangely enough, it seems. But you get them off to whatever they’re going to do in the morning, by that time you’ve started before, and you can then go and have breakfast and everybody has been but then you have to start doing inspections of the kitchens and dah dah dah, and loos and then other things crop up. But then I’d go down if they were down there

and look at Brens or something. I’d go down and learn a bit about them. You weren’t supposed to carry one, anything at all. I always had a revolver stuck away quietly but your red cross on your arm, that was the thing that was supposed to save you on every possible occasion, which of course it didn’t. So that I didn’t, no I had no specific training at all on the military side but you did pick up a

lot as you went along. I used to go out marching with them, yes the marches in the camps and bivouacs and so on. You always did that. So by the time, you see we had 12 twelve months here, pretty well 12 months, 8 to 9 months in Australia and then we had 12 months in Malaya before things started so it was pretty well train and work pretty hard at the

end there in Malaya they were going out for five nights at a time in the jungle, just left there with very little or no food being taken out and they had to go and live off it and so forth. But I didn’t have to do that. I didn’t do that. That would be too hard.

When I got into the unit, the only one they sent me to was to a hygiene

course and I went out, and the main thing was to go out to the abattoirs which were then where the Olympic village is now and watch them slaughter various cattle and so on. Then you had to go and learn about drains and all this kind of odds and ends but nothing – that was the only school I went to, the school of hygiene.

Yes, yes you had to learn how to, yes, sure. We had latrines and so on. That was of course a big thing. You had to do get into that. That was the first thing when you got into any area at all you had to get into that. And then you had the, you’d then be having a row with the pioneer, the pioneers that was their

work in the battalion so they had their officer in charge. Finish up by having an argument with him about this, that and the other.

Oh I suppose you would yeah, but usually they were pretty reasonable. I got on pretty well with them. I had no trouble from the military point of view, thank God. Some did. One of my confreres in one of the other battalions he did. He had to leave. He came and joined me so at one stage we had

two medical officers in the unit and his CO he finished up, they quietly got rid of him. So that they can, you can do it either directly or indirectly. I don’t know how many do or have to do it but not too many.

I don’t know. He became, I think that they just, I don’t know what they did there because it was another battalion. I don’t know but they did. And

that poor fellow he subsequently was one of the last to be killed on the disaster in Burma, at least in Borneo. He got right up to the end and he just disappeared. That’s about the worst story in the whole war.

We started, no from showground I went to Wallgrove. Wallgrove was a little canvas camp in the middle of winter. It was cold as charity and fortunately I didn’t stay there terribly long. From there they marched to Ingleburn. Then we had a stretch at Ingleburn, quite a time there, about three months

or more. Then they marched to Bathurst.

The troops did. No, I didn’t have to do too much marching there because still going back between them and the camp, you’re moving one to the other. I used to do some with them but you have to go back to the camp because there would be still some left in the camp so you would go around on your truck.

Ah they’re getting sore feet and blisters and so forth and so on everything that happens when you go marching and these things or they get sick, they get crook. At Ingleburn they used to go out on forced marches. There was one they went out on, and one fellow died as a result of it. They didn’t just have to do it at the double, they might have to do seven or eight miles at the double. So you never know. You had to be about all time.

Not at that stage, no. We had no, we thought we were going to the Middle East. I was intrigued with this life and you know, that didn’t worry me. I was perfectly happy at Ingleburn and then at Bathurst. It was a great life, I thought. I thought, “This is wonderful! Nothing much happens to doctors.

Occasionally they get killed or something goes wrong but this is a great life. I don’t know why I haven’t been doing it years ago.” So I thoroughly enjoyed it. I enjoyed most of it in a way. I wasn’t too keen on building railways but if you survived it was a wonderful experience.

Well this was after we left Sydney. We had no idea. When we got onto the [HMS] Queen Mary, I’ll tell you one interesting thing about the Queen Mary later. When we got on the Queen Mary we had no idea where we were going and I think everybody considered it was certain we were going to the Middle East and we had warm clothing. Really what clothing we had was warm clothing.

Yes, oh sure. Not until we left, until we got to Fremantle then it looked pretty likely that we weren’t going there at all, we were going somewhere else. It would have to be Singapore because by that time the Japs were getting a bit nasty.

I wouldn’t know, no idea.

You just took whatever army gear you had to take including, I went off with a heavy uniform and so forth, a great coat, the lot but that was pretty useless, completely useless so we had to get more clothing when we got there. Then once you get to the tropics of course it was all very light stuff and there was no problem about that but it soon got us into getting rid of

the stuff. Actually I suppose they didn’t. The uniforms and so on, God only knows what happened to them whether they were put in a store when we went up to Thailand. Never saw it again so the Japs were probably wearing it or something. I don’t know.

Oh you could take whatever you could carry yes, and you had a certain space. There were definite measurements but you could take what you wanted but limitations as to size and so on.

Ah well they were wooden boxes about this size and about that deep. You couldn’t carry a great deal. That was your box. That was your everything. You’d have your name on that. It was a box about that long,

that wide and about that deep. You lived out of that. You could get a lot in that.

You did, yes. Well you had to be, yes you were responsible for the medical, and then you had to go to the, go through the usual thing, the quartermaster and so forth, and get these things. One little story which always amuses me is getting back to the Queen Mary. You see when we

embarked, when we, we left from Bathurst. So we had a train from Bathurst down to the railway yards which are now where, well it’s Cockle Bay down there, the railway line used to finish down there and just before, after final leave, I had to go through the whole battalion and some you knocked out who weren’t going to go abroad. So that was all done and then when we got back from the final leave a young fellow came up and said, “Oh

look sir, I wonder could you help us?” And I said, “Why, what’s it all about?” He said, “I bought a little joey back from Broken Hill and I want to take him.” And I said, “Oh God,” you know. “What do you want me to do?” He said, “Oh can’t you think of somewhere sir, you know, couldn’t you put him in your medical supplies?” And I said, “Oh yes, I’ll think about that.” So I said, “Are there any

carpenters in the battalion?” “Oh yes, we’ve got a few carpenters.” So we got a few of these fellows up and I said, “Now look there is the only way I can think of getting him in is if you fellows can knock up a box and we’ll paint it white with great big red crosses over the holes and we can stick him in that and see how it goes.” So they said, “Okay.” So we had to do this very surreptitiously, and they built this box. It was about this. It was white and

bright red crosses on every surface you could see and urgent medical supplies they had written on it. So then we got on the train and they had to leave this behind because we got on a passenger train, and all the gear went on another train and we thought, oh hell you know, what’s going to happen to Joey, because Joey had been put on there. Anyway fortunately one of the, the transport officers down here in Sydney in charge of the whole thing of

getting them on board, was a fellow, a captain in the 19th. So we told him, I had to tell him and I said, “Look this is what’s going on. We’ve got this kangaroo and nobody knows, so shut up about it but get him on, get him on the Queen Mary somehow.” And he turned up and then when we got there we were told he had turned up in Sydney and we were waiting on the Queen Mary and there was no sign of Joey, and we were off out the Bight. And then I was standing there one afternoon, about five in the afternoon looking, we were waiting for a few days before we left and there I saw a lighter coming

across the harbour, Shell lighter coming across the harbour, Shell Oil, and I looked at this and there was a white box and I thought, oh God, sure enough my friend the captain in the army had hidden him and put him on this special Shell lighter, and they had a tug pushed in to the Queen Mary and it was lifted up onto the Queen Mary and we got him overboard as medical supplies. They put him down the – and of course then we had to hide

him. They took him down to – I don’t know where they hid him. I didn’t ask questions but they said, “You’ll have to keep an eye on him.” And I said, “Okay,” and then we’d go down. The Queen Mary in those days hadn’t been altered pretty well from when it was on the Atlantic and we used to go down to this magnificent dining room, this huge dining room at night, and every time I’d go down there and sit there, in would come a sick parade with ‘Urgent wanted Private Joey’. The troops knew this and they used to send them into me every time and that meant I had to get up and go

down and here they had him, and this is the time when all the officers were having dinner, they’d take Joey out and put him up on the promenade deck and run him round. Four times around is about a mile and I’d have to go and see Joey and see that he was standing up to it all. Anyway we got into Singapore and still they didn’t know much about it because the commodore of the Cunard Line was in charge. They couldn’t do much. They hid him, I don’t know how, but then when we came to get off the ship I thought now what are they going to do. Here is this guy and he had no

clothes in his sausage bag but it was moving. Joey was in the sausage –

This fellow successfully got him off the Queen Mary in the sausage bag and we finished up then at Seremban the next day. When we got there the news was out. Everybody knew about it and David McNichol heard about it here and it was in the paper here how they had smuggled this Joey up to wherever we were, secret place. We went to the local council whatever they are who run the place, Seremban is a beautiful, was a beautiful place then and they told them this wallaby was there and we were living, the

officers were living in what had been the medical officer’s home, big home, big house something like this. So they sent a truck up next morning with about six guys on it with palings and fencing and God knows what, and they built a great place, a magnificent cage and Joey was known all over the place. He got out once and he fell down a big alluvial drain. He fractured his neck or something like that and they sent him to the vet and they got him better somehow. He was then hopping round and eventually

the sultan of Johor had a zoo, I think he still has and he obviously wanted this little fellow and said if anything happened he would take him over. So what happened to Joey eventually I’m not sure. I thought the sultan, I thought we gave him to the sultan. But there are a few other stories about so I’m not quite sure. But he was very well known and very popular even known down here, in the papers.

Land in Singapore. The next thing we travelled by train up to Seremban. Now Seremban was –

Yes, yes. You see this was part of the thing. If you got into the troops the great thing was oh, I can get out of Australia, because travelling was

darned hard. Nobody got out those days. You didn’t travel. If you were going to England you’d be going for twelve or six months or more and it was extremely expensive and most people were not in the position to do it. So apart from anything else of getting into the army or whatever the services were, is they were all doing it to get away. To get into, like some of them here who got into the armoured regiments, armoured thing with the tanks they thought that was marvellous. That was the one to get into,

but the trouble is, they never left Australia. But it was a great thing to get away and a great opportunity for young guys like myself and thousands of others to get out and see the rest of the world, which we did.

I loved, I loved Malaya and I still think it’s a great country. A fascinating life up there. I quite liked it. But I liked everything in those days it seems to me. But I did and they were, they were terribly good to us in every way.

It was interesting, one thing I must tell you. The first morning we arrived there the cooks and bottle washers had come out a few days before and there was nothing really prepared for us so that we were having our first day’s feeding out on the big square, the big oval in the centre of the town and they arrived, I’ll never forget this, here were the cooks, I went down to

see how they were getting on, how the cooks were getting on with the food that day, they had been issued with several carcasses, frozen carcasses from the Singapore cold storage, and this was the meat ration and it wasn’t chopped up, it was frozen, and they had axes and they were chopping up these beasts. Tried to cut them up with axes. God only knows. They finished up with great hunks of meat and put this in the thing and boiled it. I don’t know what they did with it. But when we arrived

there was nothing there for us. It was fascinating.

Yeah, like a big cricket ground. Yes beautiful, beautiful big oval. They called it the paddock. It was the centre of the whole thing. And this is where they, they had to put the troops somewhere like on an oval and here they were getting ready to cook and feed them with frozen, two huge, I don’t know how many sides of beasts there were there but it was legs,

arms, everything there. Solid. The axes couldn’t get into it. That was the first thing I saw. However they soon got over that. Then the next thing was to learn how to cook rice. Eventually of course the rice cooks became terribly important. They were number one, two or three, according to how good or bad they were and they were terribly important to get a good number one rice cook. And they could, they learnt to cook rice. They were very good with it. Then subsequently of course, after we lived

on rice and I’d still eat rice three times a day if I have to. I love it.

No. No rice was a thing you know, rice pudding occasionally you would get but it was the last thing you would think of. A lot of the troops couldn’t stand rice when they first got up there but within a matter of days they all began to learn to love it. Then the trouble was they could never get

enough. Rice became a staple article of diet.

Yes. They got on very well together. The locals were astounded at the affability, just the easygoing way of the Australians and they couldn’t understand it because the Brits you know, they were different altogether.

They’d have to get off the sidewalk if the Brits were walking along. And to go and have a meal with the Chinese that was absolutely, they couldn’t understand it, the Brits couldn’t understand it. The troops just loved it and the Chinese loved it. Some of them were very delightful people. They had lovely homes and they used to entertain them. They had a great old time. The troops had a great time there for a while. They enjoyed this

new way of life. All of us found it difficult. It was hot. One interesting thing was that you know when we got up there of course all the clothing was wrong. Once we got rid of the heavy stuff we were supposed to be, or we had been given, and everything improved very much but the next thing was that gave them rashes, heat rashes and these things nearly drove

them crazy. If they wanted a day off of course they would give it a rub and you know got up to all sorts of tricks like that. But then eventually, I always remember going up to the next camp at one stage where a great friend of mine from the hospital, from St Vincent’s, came. He was with another battalion and I went in at midday to see him, see what was going on and I said, “Where’s Captain So and So?” They said, “Oh he’s up there.” And I looked around and there was a great big

thing like a fowl run and in there were these white men absolutely naked with rocks, cracking them like this. I said, “What in the hell is going on there?” They said, “That’s Captain Barrett’s skin parade.” We soon realised if you took everything off and you got round you know, all your rashes, all this heat rash used to disappear. It was only when you had things on and you were sweating, so the quickest way he got to them and treat them was to make them stand there because they used to give it a rub, and if he saw

them rubbing it, they do a day or so in the compound. It was quite unethical but a very effective way of treating Davey’s itch.

Seremban, we were there in Seremban for about six weeks. Then we moved down to the coast at Port Dickson and then the Port Dickson was where Captain Barrett and that crowd

came up and took our place. We used to alternate. We stayed down at Port Dickson for a couple of months then back so like exchanging until it became obvious that war was approaching. Then we were moved. Perhaps I should have showed you one of these maps. We were moved from there down to a place called Jemaluang and that was to be our position when war developed, broke out. So we then had a very extensive

preparation for it, getting rid of rubber trees and getting lines of fire and so forth and building a wonderful place for me underground like a cave which actually wouldn’t have been a good thing to have at all. But we stayed there until war was started.

Yes, yes. I had a thing, underground thing the size of this room.

Well they chopped down a few trees. It was all prepared. The battalion, the 19th came from Cootamundra and all that area. They were the Riverina Battalion and they were great big guys. It was interesting. One of the battalions, there were three battalions in this brigade, 26th Brigade. There was the 18th, 19th and the 20th. Now the 18th came from the north

coast and the 19th from the Riverina and the 20th from the city. One stage when things were quiet, this is when we were in Bathurst, I think the three of us, the three medical officers said, “Oh for something to do let’s measure them up, the three battalions, and we’ll see what the difference is between them, if any.” The 20th Battalion was the first. They measured them up and over a thousand men. They were about almost half an inch shorter than

the north coast boys. And then they measured them up and they were almost a half an inch shorter than the Riverina boys, and these Riverina coves of course, they were big and we said, “Well now, why? Why was this?” That’s what we were doing it for, to know why there was this difference in size between these men. We had no reasonable way of finding out. One suggestion was that you know, in the city they don’t get much exercise like they would in the country but then they said, “Well, what about the north

coast and the Riverina?” And the only thing then they could say was the north coast was hot and sweaty and so on, but the Riverina you go through two phases of heat and getting very cold and so on, and they’re out on the properties. Big guys, they were really big fellows. Powerful men.

They built this thing. They loved doing that kind of thing. “Go chop down a tree.” And they’d say, “Pull it out.” Fencing you know they used to never worry

about fencing they’d just go and pull it out. Huge guys. They were wonderful fellows.

Well they built this underground, about the size of this room, almost the same dimensions of this room. Huge trees lining it, several of them, so that there’s a thickness of about ‘that’ of timber, probably would have been blown up but still it would have been interesting. And then they had the walls, they were lined with trees

again. It’s just like an underground house. They even had little compartments, they’d build you a slot in there and you can sleep in there and they had it all set up like that. And then they had a curve. You couldn’t get straight into it. You had to go down a bit.

Yeah. I used to go and live in there, yes. At night when it was very hot you would get outside.

Oh, it was only where I could see patients. You couldn’t operate there, no. It was too, you wouldn’t have been allowed to. You wouldn’t have been allowed to because there you had to, if they got sick from there they had ambulances called up and take them to the hospital which was 15 or 20 miles away. This was just, it was a nice thing. We were having a lot of fun building it because then the rain came and it wasn’t so good. But they

dealt with that. They put things around it. You see a lot of them were drovers. They’d been out in the bush and that was their life so when you got them to do a thing like that, that was play for them. They just loved it. They were really, really magnificent men.

Well that’s when, you see, Christmas was over and it was obvious the fighting was on and we knew that it was inevitable. We were there and we’d had all this thing set up where they were doing it for three months and we thought we had a wonderful pitch, I suppose you could call it. Make it a bit hot for them if they arrived. And then we got this message to go to the other side, straight up, pack up and go over to the west side because the battalions over there were in big trouble at Muar. Having spent all this time preparing for one side of the island or the

peninsula to fight, overnight we were moved across to the other side. We travelled all through the night and got over onto the escarpment about the early hours of the morning and then went down over across this viaduct. Did you see the film the other night?

The one about Singapore? It was a great [UNCLEAR]. They were talking about the

viaduct or this thing along the road. Well that’s where we went. So we were on a hill up this side and looking down on them where they were in trouble about 15 or 20 miles out, and then we went across this thing. Had to go across with paddy fields on each side until we got right up to the crossroads where the fighting was. In the meantime of course what the Japs did was just come round behind us and block it off. So there it was. Having trained first to go to the Middle East and then to have everything over

there on the other side of the peninsula to be moved into another area altogether. And the other thing of course was that in the 22nd Brigade, the 8th Division, there were three brigades and the brigades had never met, never seen each other until the latter part when the 27th Brigade came over and we did see a little bit of them. The 3rd Brigade never, was never with us at all because they went to Ambon and New Guinea and so on.

So it was just a complete mishmash. It was almost like, it wasn’t much more than a brigade in actual fact, when you think about it. We had three, three infantry battalions 18th, 19th and 20th and the 27th Brigade had, so there were six infantry battalions. A battalion was about nine hundred to a thousand men. The rest there were some gunners, two regiments of gunners so

that’s six to eight and there were some engineers and all those others there would be about another thousand. I would say there were about 10,000 fighting troops there of Australians at the most. The rest of them were people that required your need to feed them and all the other things.

Yes, well now when, when the 27th Brigade came to join us we had been there for about five months before they came over from Australia. This was the 30th Battalion and 26th Battalion. They came over and on their way over the brigade commander of the 27th Brigade was taken away and

a new man was to be appointed when they got to Malaya or to Singapore. Gallaghan who commanded the 30th Battalion presumed that he was going to be made the new brigadier but when he arrived he found that Bennett had made Maxwell the brigadier and this annoyed Bennett, at least Gallaghan, no end. Now I knew Jack, Black Jack, very well and I knew

Anderson very well. I knew both of them but it’s extraordinary, you see, there’s this business between two magnificent soldiers, different altogether, completely different men. They did sink their differences and they got on together as far as fighting was concerned but then the others, there was this constant argument. Bennett couldn’t get on with Percival, the Englishman. They hated each other and so it went on and I just recently read Gallipoli, that book, and you can’t help thinking all the time

this is exactly another replica of Gallipoli where you had Kitchener as the big boss who was out and out hopeless and then you had Percival who was an academic. Then you had the fights between the Duntroon graduates and the civilians. They hated each other and there was this jealousy all the way through. It’s exactly the same, the whole thing is going on. Sad. I

don’t know, it’s interesting now you see there weren’t many Duntroon, there would be far more Duntroon graduates now trained than there are civilians. It was the other way around in the war.

Yes when you got into the prison camp it was a bit different there because

you were all split up. They just split them various senior officers, you see most of the senior officers were sent up to Manchuria. They went up with Des Brennan. He’s an interesting fellow you ought to get onto one day. Have you got his name down on the list? He’s another, he was at the hospital. We were all at the hospital together. I’ve never spoken to Des

about his experiences, but I’ve just read Kev Hughes’ book and he was up there. I didn’t realise that they split up all over the place too.

When I arrived in Muar we got to this crossroads. We got there as I recall somewhere in the mid afternoon or something of that kind and it was

obvious then we had been potted at, they were shooting at us on the way down. We were obviously in a pretty hot spot. And what had happened was that the Japs had infiltrated down the west coast against all predictions by the Brits and the information we had, or had originally came to the 27th Brigade, was that about four or five hundred or something like that,

Japs had landed in Muar and there was this Indian brigade there of kids who were completely untrained and a lot of them, some of them not even in uniform. They had been overwhelmed. They sent the 27th in, 27th Brigade in and they got surrounded not by four or five hundred but by about fifteen thousand of the Imperial, the guards, the Imperial Guards.

More, who had tanks and planes, so they then got into trouble and they sent the 19th down to help them and of course we got into trouble so that the whole thing was a disaster in that way. But in the meantime of course it was terribly important to hold that causeway, that’s the east-west causeway because the troops that were coming down from the north would have, had they got this causeway they would have cut the exit of the other troops from the north. So that was one reason apart from the

fighting, to get out. It was terribly important for Anderson to get there. Had Maxwell not been promoted I don’t think I would have been here because Anderson was, he was a much better tactician and he was a magnificent soldier. You know it’s interesting just being with a guy who wins a VC [Victoria Cross] but that was the only one that was won up there of course. And he did

everything. The troops just loved him so much. He never asked them to do anything he didn’t do. So he led that raid into the thing where there’s the barricade across the road with a couple of others, went up there and blew them up. But he did that a lot. And I can remember saying to Charles after we were, before he went away I was talking to him one day and I said, “Look Charles, I just can never get over you on the last days at

Muar down there at the crossroads, down at Parit Sulong, the bridge when there were just a few of us left, how you would walk up and down that road in the middle of the day with the planes, a couple of Zeros strafing us as you were going off to have lunch somewhere around Sydney.” And he looked at me and he said, “Lloyd I was just as scared as you were.” And that’s the kind of guy he was. You wouldn’t know what was going with him. Just the most amazing man. He looked like a

Sunday School teacher. He was short sighted. Had great big thick glasses. How he ever got into the army, the two of them, the CO and the 2IC [Second in Command] of the unit both pretty poor as far as eyesight was concerned. And there they were, but he was absolutely marvellous. He had some very fine officers.

Then we were, I think we were out for about three nights, three or four nights, three or four days maybe more and by that time I was pretty exhausted, and I don’t know, when we got in I was running a temperature and God knows what and I was put into hospital, they put me on an

ambulance and went down. I was admitted down to the 13th. So I stayed there but moved across to the island so I didn’t get back, well there was nothing left of the battalion. They reformed it when they got onto the island, and whoever the doctor was that went up in my place, was killed straightaway. Skarl or Skale I think his name was. So there were all

these reinforcement fellows so we weren’t much better off because some of them had never fired a rifle. They were in sandshoes. They were given five miles around the thing to defend you know, with some coming in and out. It was an impossible thing. So they were overwhelmed. So I was in hospital there. I wasn’t, I was in hospital but then I had been taken on the staff there because they were short. It was a 600 bed hospital which had been down on the island at this stage when I was there. They were

bringing in –

13th AGH. They were bringing the trucks, the odd ambulance would come through bringing the wounded from the fighting straight into the hospital so there were 1200 battle casualties there and they just were operating all day and all night so that when they had somebody who could come along, they put me on as an anaesthetist. So that I just then started giving

anaesthetics and that’s how I finished up doing that in the hospital.

For that kind of thing yes, they had the proper operating tables and they had a great big hall, a school. It was a beautiful old, beautiful building. It was a new building right on the coast. It got bombed while we were there. But there were, there was water and it had everything going and a good

staff and nurses. The nurses were still there. So it was, actually we finished up in no man’s land. You see the fighting had gone, retracted right around the city but we were outside between the city and the coast and it still went on there, they were still operating there while it went on.

Well then yes, that was funny. I had to being a junior captain there, the

most recent one they had to wait in this no man’s land, we were waiting for the Japs to arrive so they said, “Right well now we’ll have to, the junior officers can go and wait to receive them at the gate of this hospital, this school.” So being the first, my duty, my thing was from 12 to 4 in the morning and I had a few stretcher bearers and a few odds and sods to

come up there with me for the reception party, and we had old kerosene lamp on a bit of a thing, a flagpole, hung that up there with a red cross to wait for the Japs to arrive, and they were very lonely nights I can tell you. And these Erks [aircrew groundstaff], they were funny fellows but even then there was a bit of a hollow at the front gate where they were just talking or lying. They’re not supposed to do anything, they were supposed to keep quiet and weren’t supposed to smoke but of course they all smoked. You could say, “Put

those cigarettes out,” and they’d say, “Oh (gestures).” However fortunately they didn’t arrive in the hours I was there but they came about 10 o’clock, oh I suppose four or five days after the fighting stopped. So we had quite a while there just working as though it was an ordinary hospital not an army hospital and then they gave us a few ambulances and a few trucks and said, “Get out. Everybody has to go.” And the army were saying, “Well they’re too sick.” That didn’t

matter they all had to go. However they got out and they pinched some trucks. I don’t know, nobody knows where they came from. They eventually got enough trucks to take operating tables and all sorts of things out. So that within a matter of, well a very short time from getting there they had set up an emergency place in what became the hospital area where they had enough to deal with immediate urgencies. Then they let, they allowed the Japs, the Japs allowed them to bring out x-rays and

various pathology things enough to work and in a limited way they could. But they did a lot of surgery in that hospital subsequently because as time went by they got – when they first went into Roberts Barracks after their march out there was no water, no electricity nothing at all, but fortunately when you get a lot of guys like that you’ll find the most amazing people

among them. You could always find everybody there, so they had expert electricians and plumbers and so forth, and within a matter of weeks the whole thing was settling down. You see the hospital area as you probably know was in a completely different area to the troops and there was this valley in between the two so the hospital, and then I was over in the hospital area where I stayed for quite a long time.

Well I was there until I was sent out to this island, Pulau Betong. Bob Puflett was the medical officer who had gone out with them and, Bob died a few weeks ago, and he just lived down the road here and he was in hospital, he was another Vincent man. It’s nearly all Vincent’s men, it’s

extraordinary about 12 of us and I think we all finished up in the can. But poor old Bob we never got on together very well. He was a funny cove. He was a pugnacious character, very good athlete. He went to Shore. And I can remember him, at one stage he was in the light heavyweight championship of the university boxing and he won that and had his nose broken and they took him over to Prince Alfred and put it back into position. He went back and he fought in the heavyweight and he won that, so at one stage when I was having a very severe argument with him out

on that island I remembered this and I retired. I let him have his way with funny results.

Pulau Betong. The Japs took us out there. Puflett had gone out there with about two hundred of them. This was early in the piece. It must have been within two or three months and he went out there on his own, and of course this was a bit of a [UNCLEAR] there before they started bringing the Korean guards in and these were the fighting soldiers that were there and they were more interested in getting on to fight with Australia than they

were looking after us. So Pulau Betong, that was interesting. That was partly air force, the Japanese air force and they wanted, when the Brits blew up the big tanks on the island they, some were left about 50% were left and it was full of high octane spirit which the Japs wanted. You may have heard this. Have they told you this story? Well the way they got this out, they got 200 prisoners and took them out there and they got bamboo

and split it longitudinally so you’d have a hollow piece there and there, put some supports up and they ran this high octane spirit in the open air down from these tanks into these little luggers they used to bring alongside there. So you know if you lit a match or anything you’d blow the whole darn thing up. However one cove died there and the Japs got terribly worried about that in the early stages and they brought him back to Changi. And I was, I had no particular job at that stage so they said, “All right

Cahill, out you go, you can go and join Puflett out there.” And I went out to meet my old mate who were in residence together at Vincent’s. I got out there and I found Bob leading an insurrection against the chief officer, the major in charge there. However I got mixed up in the argument, again to keep it going I sided with the boss and he had his way and we went on

then until we were separated. He then went to the other little island where he remained with the air force the whole war.

Yes about three months and then I went over when they split, they split the camp and as I was saying Puflett then said, “Look I’m going with the sick men. I’m the more senior of the two of us here.” And I said, “No you’re not, I am.” He said, “No you’re not, I was on the island first.” It was a stupid

argument. I mean we were all a bit silly at that stage. Anyway, he said he was going to be, he was going to look after the sick, and as he was going to take the sick I said, “Righto you can take the sick.” He said, “Well I’m having 60% of the drugs.” The Shell Company island was there, there was still plenty of drugs, everything, morphia the lot. He said, “I’ll take 60% of the drugs and you can have 40% for the fit men.” So that was where we split after this argument and the fight. We were standing up and the Japs were

waiting for us to go in these two parties standing on the rise and just as we were about to go the Japs called out “Cahill Tai, Puflett Tai, changey changey.” So, ‘Captain Cahill and Captain Puflett, change.’ So I’m put in charge of the sick men and Puflett’s got the fit men. I said, “I’m taking 60% of the drugs.” He said, “I’ve got them!” Anyway I then went on to another place, Pasir Panjang. I was only there a short time and I finished up getting dysentery myself and I was brought back as a patient. That was the only

time I got sick all the time I was in there really. Well out in the jungle I did a bit. But that was the last I saw of Puflett then until we got back here.

I went back to Changi and I stayed, I really stayed there back in Changi

again working in the hospital and general rouseabout until we went up onto the railway line. So I think about 13 train loads went, I’m not sure but I was about midway, I think. And you’ve already been told, no doubt, about how we were going to this land of milk and honey and everything was going to be there for us, light and everything, take your piano, take anything you can carry. It was 55 or 60%

sick men, a big percentage in any case. So we got on these trucks. That was a pretty miserable trip being locked up in these rice trucks. Then we started this march. We didn’t know where we were going and having taken a lot of stuff, our gear up with us because we were going to this wonderful place, as we marched we had to start getting rid of it so there

was this track behind. Anybody could have followed the discarded clothing and mouth organs and whatever else they were carrying. As you got all along all you finished up with was something to drink out of and some boots and almost nothing. They used to march us at night. Maybe you’ve been told about this. Well they used to, we’d start at about 6 o’clock at night and they’d march us till midnight and then we’d have an

hour off and then you’d go again after you had finished. The only trouble was that the monsoon season was on so that you might start off in the fine weather and then down would come the rain and it really used to rain, it was just pelting down, you had to belt on through there and we got out and I went through Weary Dunlop’s camp at one stage and had a yarn with him for a while. He didn’t know where we were going but he said, “You’re going a long way, you’re going up further.” So on we went.

We started to climb up then.

Well there were some in front of me. You see if I went about five, supposing there were ten train loads I was, I think, about in the middle because you see the 19th Battalion had disintegrated. There was no longer any of the 19th so that I was a swinger. So I went, I can’t remember who was in the truck with me.

Oh just in those days, because a swinger didn’t have a job. You know, no official thing because I was RMO of a battalion that had gone and I was never really part, I was part of the hospital while I was working there but at this stage they could give me a job wherever they needed one. You see the whole lot of us, the doctors that were on they would just say you’re going, you’re going, you’re going. And I went through I found out that one,

for instance, they would give you every couple of nights, you might get every three nights or something, you might get a night off. However the doctors, there were a few in front of me, got sick so that I kind of found myself edging up to the front until eventually I finished up in the leading lot. It took us about ten days I think, twelve days to get there. So that I finished up then at a place called Shimo Sonkurai, which was the top of

the – virtually at that stage, the top of the thing, the trip, just south of the Changaraya Pass at Burma. That’s where I finished. Then that’s where the cholera broke out. So that I had only been there a few days. I’d never seen cholera but I had heard that there must be something around there because of the weather and the water. And sure enough a fellow died and it was very obvious what he had. In the meantime the other troops behind me in the next camp down heard that

the doctor from the first party had died of cholera. That’s when Bruce Hunt came to hear that I had died. So he got John Taylor who is a very great friend of mine, the two of them set off and they arrived up about 11 o’clock at night, 10 o’clock at night and I had tucked myself down somewhere or other and I was sound asleep and they came racing up to

wake me up to tell me that these doctors had arrived up and I didn’t know, and I was completely taken aback with this and here they were they found that their victim was well truly alive and sleeping happily. So that’s when I first started with Bruce Hunt. The first time I ever met him.

I went down, this is when the 13th had only just arrived and I was at Jemaluang. I went down to see them for something down there, I wanted

some gear or something like that and they said, “Oh have lunch.” So I said, “Okay.” So I was having lunch with John Frew who is a Melbourne physician and he said, “Come and sit down here, I’ll introduce you to this fellow Bruce Hunt.” And I met this fellow Hunt, and, “I think you are the most arrogant man I have ever met in all my life. God save me from ever being near you.” That was that. And the next thing I find is when he comes up in the middle of the night because that’s where we started this

fantastic, one of the greatest friends I’ve ever had. Amazing man. An incredible man. Weary Dunlop gets a lot of publicity but Hunt was the greatest for sure. And I think anybody on that railway line will tell you that they won’t buy Weary Dunlop. They say, “He was a great man but Hunt was the greatest.” You see he was much older than we were and although I knew him, he would tell you how good he was, but he was not

skiting because when I read his obituary although I knew him terribly well, he was far greater than I thought he was, ever knew he was. I really loved that guy. You know he’d fly over here, I’m getting right ahead now, but he’d fly over here and he’d ring here or if he’d ring me, well I’d come home and find he’d got off the plane at Mascot and he’d be in the house here when I got home. He’d just go out to the fridge, he would just take over control. He was the most

ruthless man in many ways, ruthless. If he had been in business he would have made all these characters at the moment fade into insignificance but yet he was the most wonderful man, extraordinary man. A complete antithesis to Anderson or Black Jack. And Black Jack was another amazing man, great man. I knew Black Jack before I even got in the army, and when I finished up in the camp the 13th Battalion were astounded

when they said, “Come over and meet Fred Gallaghan.”

When the railway was completed I finished up going down on the track that we built down to Kanburi [Kanchanaburi] and I was only there for a few days, not

very long at all. They suddenly came and called for a thousand men and they were going off somewhere or other. This is where Kappe came up and said you know, “You’re my medical officer, you’re coming with me.” We went down to the wharves at Bangkok and we lived there for a while

maybe a month or six weeks, I wouldn’t know. The extraordinary thing was that not only had we been laying the railway lines, they were BHP railway lines, Broken Hill Proprietary, and this wharf we were living on in Bangkok was a comparatively new wharf and all the roof and so on was all BHP metals again. Here we were locked up underneath it and it was rather strange. We had been there for about a month, no it was a few weeks

perhaps, and suddenly they brought a barge in and put us on this old barge and dragged us out into the China Sea. There was this old tramp steamer, an old shocker with a great long funnel and we were to get on board on this, the thousand. The main cove in charge of us at that stage was Toyana, Toyana-san who was a shocker. He was a Korean, but he

reckoned he was an educated Japanese gentleman. He had to be the first in everything and he got up the ladder or whatever they had there on the side, and he got up onto the greasy, old metal deck and he went straight over on his neck and he bashed his head on the bollard, and he was calling out, “Medical orderly-san, medical orderly-san.” So I crawled up and there he was screaming about his ear and he had given it a whack.

He had a fractured, a ruptured eardrum. In the meantime while that happened Kappe had been sitting on this famous box of his where he wouldn’t, it was an absolute secret, nobody could get near it, and of course Kappe then, when he took it along with him on the ship or the barge, and when this was going on Toyana calling out and I’m up there and Kappe was going to be up there too, so he hopped up to see what’s happened and that’s when the famous box disappeared and nobody knows, I haven’t

got any idea what they did to that box between now and the time he got up there, or what was in it. There were all sorts of stories about what was in it, money and God knows what. I think he had something in there but I don’t know, but it was very amusing. Now there’s going on a little bit further about that. The Japs were on this ship, the Jap soldiers who had been fighting in Manchuria and they were the best Japs that I saw that we ran into anywhere. They were very good. The first thing they said when

we got in there and talking, one of the old sergeants, Gunsa said to me, “These Koreans, bad men.” I said, “Yeah bad men.” And he’d say, “Which one bad men?” And go and tell old George and he’d always wait for them and if they didn’t salute him, he’d give them a good old bash. The troops christened him George Robey [Prime Minister of Mirth], who was a famous comedian in British films in those days, old George and he

recognised the similarity he had to his films and he thought George Robey was a marvellous name, so the troops would go and salute old George any time and have a yarn with him. We had an extraordinary trip down on that thing. They had, getting back to the meat, they only had frozen Australian beef on this little old ship from Singapore, cold storage. They used to turn

this on for the troops and they got some decent food and not only that he then made these Koreans wash whatever we were eating out of and they had to do the washing up. Another extraordinary thing was there was a little Japanese lieutenant who could speak very good English and we used to talk to him a bit, I don’t know how long, it might have been ten days or

fortnight or something getting down, and he became very interesting and he told me he had been a professional baseball player and he had been in Manchuria fighting and so forth and so on, and he had no doubt that they were going to lose the war. This was in ‘42, ‘43. And one night he said, “I speak with you tomorrow night under the captain’s bridge.” The bridge was

a rickety old thing. You wouldn’t give tuppence for it. It was like a hen coop. And I used to go and I used to talk to him there at night and one night he said to me, he said, “When this war is over what will happen to you?” I said, “I don’t know but if I survive I’ll go back to my country.” He said, “Back to your country?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “Oh I cannot understand that.” I said,

“Why?” He said, “Oh we cannot do that.” I said, “What will happen to you when the war is over, won’t you go back to your own country?” He said, “Oh no, I don’t think I can go back. Maybe, maybe.” And I said, “That’s interesting. I don’t understand that either.” He stopped then for a while and he said, “You see that star up there?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “That’s your God and that’s my God.” That’s about

as near as I ever got to the Japanese. Very interesting little bloke. Well eventually we got down, they gave us all lifebelts too, on that ship. Extraordinary, quite extraordinary. Rotten old ship with Yankee subs all around us but it got down there. It only had one cylinder and the diameter of the flywheel is about the height of this room. I think we were doing

about 4 knots flat out. We eventually got into Keppel Harbour back in Singapore. We got in there about midday and as we went along going up to a berth there were two long distance German subs there, big German – big subs and then they saw us on board and they gave us a clap and said, “Little yellow bastards, little yellow bastards.” They didn’t like the Japs at all.

We got off there and then we went back and I was one of the first, we were one of the first back because we had been taken away from the main body, and Black Jack was there who received us. He had tears in his eyes you know, he could hardly talk. He just couldn’t believe, they knew that we had had a bad time but they just didn’t realise how bad it was. He said people who had come back will never go out on a working party but they

did. They had to go out of course. So after that I then, in the meantime we had a fellow who became a very great friend of mine, Tom Wilson, who subsequently became professor of tropical studies at Liverpool University of England, he was a Northern Irishman, wonderful guy who had carried a microscope all the way, 200 miles up into the jungle so he could do this

bug thing.

For malaria, for malaria and there’s another fantastic story about that too. But he reckoned that if he had a microscope he had a chance of diagnosing malaria. So here was this amazing cove, now what was I

telling about him. Oh yes – he said come and work in this little laboratory they had back in Singapore when we had moved to the jail. He said, “I want an offsider to help me with these films.” So he showed me how to do this and I did almost nine months I think, working in this little laboratory of, doing

malarial work mainly. I grew very interested in malarial work.

The little slides yes, the little glass slides. So I used to do that with Tom. We used to sit there all day long and just look down. He had another microscope there. He had a much better one then. I used his old one. I

had a good break. And I did that until I was sent to the little camp right at the end of the war, X3, that’s a little camp, Bukit Timah Road, and just about two hundred of us went out there and we were digging holes into the hills. So that’s where I finished up until the war was over.

Well the Japs were doing it, now the Russians did it. They used to put two drives down like that and then join up at the back so you could go in there and round about and so they’d go to fight in this. They did this in New Guinea. It was their way of fighting. They did it all over the place. The only way you could get them out in New Guinea was to throw smoke bombs down and smoke them out but they were doing

this in the hills. So that had the bomb not been dropped at that stage, and had gone on with Mountbatten come and landed in Singapore, the slaughter would have been incredible. There were about ninety thousand Japs around the place then and they would have slaughtered everything that moved. So that I must admit that it doesn’t worry me in the least that these things are being built out here because I think they’re absolutely essential.

This new thing for producing the atomics, atomic weapons. Not for weapons, they’re doing it for medicine. But the atom bomb, the atom bomb was the only thing that saved us, saved the slaughter. God, Japan itself, nobody could ever know. It would have been the greatest slaughter of all time.

Oh well of everybody, of everybody because the Japs would have fought to the last man had it not been for the bomb. It was very interesting the day, you see, nothing happened. We always were in touch by radio, somewhere. I say you might be a bit behind in some things you always had the winner of the Melbourne Cup within about two minutes. At this stage, we were a small camp and we didn’t have a radio. These used to be made by fellows who would go and work on the aerodrome and pinch

parts from a wrecked Japanese plane. They came in one day and said the men can have a half holiday. Well now that was just great so everybody said oh God, things must be good, and then the next day, “Oh you need not go to work today, have a day off,” and so it went on. Obviously by then they would have to go and do a bit, this was going on for a few days and then eventually it looked as though it was a 100 to 1 on, and everybody was wonderful. They were going back to Changi and so on.

You see, Changi Jail then to us was like a five star hotel. If we could get back there we’d be right, but then one day a Jap Liberator dropped out of the sky at about 500 feet and the doors opened at the back and the fellows were heaving bits of stuff out and they said, “Oh the Japs, it’s on again, there’s no doubt about it.” For the first time I really saw the coves, they were sort of relatively fit men by this time, they really went down the

hill. They just didn’t believe it any more. And suddenly it was all over. The Japs came in one day and said, “Ooh big boom, boom, boom, boom.” They didn’t know what it was even if you talked to them, just, “Oooh big boom, all over. Tomadashis.” We’re all friends. So we all became tomadashis like that. They came up to me, one guy, a really evil cove he came up and he wanted me to write a letter to the Emperor to say what a good boy he

had been. And there was another one there another Korean, he was a funny guy this cove, and he was not bad, this is in this little camp, and he came on and he produced a key about this size, an enormous key and we didn’t know what it was and he kept talking about it. Eventually we found because we didn’t have an official interpreter, we had one cove who was an interpreter, this was a key he had pinched of a great arsenal somewhere in Singapore, and the idea was that when Mountbatten arrived he had the key and we’d go with him and off we’d go. It just shows you

how silly we got. Oh dear, oh dear. There were several funny ones like that.

I think the behaviour of both the Japs and the troops were very good. Amazing when you think about it because one day the Japs were in charge and sitting in the guardhouse and we were all saluting them and

the next day we made a point of having our blokes there and the Japs would have to come past and salute us. But there was very little trouble, hardly any. And likewise when they were victors, it was nothing like the Rape of Nanking. I’ve just a read a book on the Rape of Nanking. Once the war was over then the slaughter from Singapore was ghastly but that was taken, you see we were locked up at that stage, and these were

Chinese they used to take out to the beaches around Singapore and you’d hear the machineguns going all day long. So I wouldn’t know how many were slaughtered there once it was over. But on the other hand there was none of this wild rape and all the rest of it that went on, that I know of or I heard of. They were ill disciplined in many ways and they were disciplined in others. Again it depended, the behaviour of the troops in prisoner of

war days, in any case, the behaviour of the troops, the further you were away from Singapore the worse it became once you got away from main command. In wartime you wouldn’t know what was happening because they sometimes – they got into the Royal Alexandra Hospital you know, and they shot one of the surgeons there when he was in the middle of an

operation. But then the trouble is we had apparently some of our tanks had been moved somewhere near the hospital so that they got mad when they saw this. It’s happening here, it’s happening every day now isn’t it, the same thing. It will always happen in wartime.

When the surrender was over what happened to me then. The first thing

that happened to me after – first of all I went to this little camp at Bukit Timah Road and then they took us out to a funny little camp, a hospital, a British hospital. There was an army hut, the usual thing and poor Brits there they had such a bad time. I don’t know what they had been there it was a convalescent hospital or something, and once they got there they did nothing, and somebody planted some cucumbers and these cucumbers had just gone mad and when we got to this place the whole

thing was buried in cucumbers. There were cucumbers with some openings here and there, and this is where they lived and their morale was just nonexistent. I’ve never eaten a cucumber since then. It was unbelievable to see this green thing, and oh that’s where you live. That’s the hospital we’ve come to but fortunately we were only there for a few days and then went back to Changi and I immediately got herpes around here and so then I was put into hospital myself for a few days.

Yeah, shingles. I don’t know how it happened then. Then I stayed there for a while and eventually the big hospital ship arrived, the first one the Arangi, the Oronga. This Hunt again, who was not very popular with some of his superiors particularly the Melbourne people, came running up to me and he said, “I’m off. I’m on this ship. I’ve got onto this hospital ship.”

And I said, “How did you get on? Did you see Bruce White or what?” “No,” he said, “my old mate Brigadier Lloyd is the senior officer on it and he said I fixed it, he’s fixed it for me.” He said, “You’re on it aren’t you?” I said, “Look I’m a junior, not very popular with the Melbourne people.” He said, “I’ll fix that, I’ll fix that,” which he did. He went to Lloyd and said a great friend of his was there. So I found myself on this magnificent hospital ship coming back

and then obviously I got back then, one of the first to get back to Sydney.

Oh yes. You see in particular circumstances like that where it is amazing. You could see an absolute collection of people from all over the world in

this little island, some prisoners of war others just being locked up as a prisoner of war, and how it went on in an orderly fashion is really remarkable when you think about it. It was the ships, this one came in and they all seemed to come in and they gradually, some of them stayed there for a long time and a lot of them didn’t get home until after Christmas

or for months after and some stayed in altogether. So that I don’t know how they did it, but I know that was because he knew the brigadier. You see the brigadier had nothing to do with Singapore. He could just say, “Look I want this man to come with me,” and dah dah dah dah it was like as far as they were concerned, like the Emperor arriving, this big man. But I’m sure

yes it did, if you had a relative high up in the army you would get in there somewhere if you wanted to. It’s like anything else.

Oh, I would have been responsible to the medical people from Melbourne but they had enough on their plates apart from worrying about Cahill, so long as he kept quiet and didn’t do anything that’s okay. As long as you didn’t, well staff, the thing is never to put your arse where it can be kicked.

That’s the first commandment in the army. So once you realise that you can get around and get all sorts of things if you do it quietly.

Oh yes, they realised that we had been through a reasonably tough time.

A lot of them had gone you know, a lot of them on that railway line some of them not quite so far, not so far up in the jungle. You see Dunlop was only about, he was about half way up and so that where that F Force went there had been no whites there since a British survey team had gone through there long before the war many, many years before the war, to say it was uneconomical. Occasionally on the way up they apparently used

the survey and the fellows reckoned they could find evidence of the marks. We did all that, all the walking was done at night in the pitch black so that they used to fall over. If anyone had a white pannikin you would tie that on the back of the guy in front of you, something white, so you could see where he was and what was happening to him. It was so dark. But then if you were like I was, I was medical and I didn’t have a unit. I was there so

they could move me anywhere they liked but I would have to be done with the chief medical officer, with their permission but they had enough problems at the hospital and all the other things without me.

They had no idea for instance coming back from the railway. There would be records kept before we went. They’d all be kept in Singapore.

When we were on the railway it just depended on the people that you had with you. We had a good team and they kept records on anything they could lay their hands on, some paper from the Japs’ orderly room or something. They always had an office somewhere or people would find something. They got to write, learn to write on tiny little things. The thing

was to the write the Lord’s Prayer on a 20 cent piece and that kind of thing you know. Some of them kept records like that in this tiny writing. I don’t know how they did it. But I think it depended there, where, what camp you were in and what you were doing. Apparently the officers at Manchuria, well Des will tell you about that, their problem was the same as the prisoners of war according to this book I just read. It was the same as

applied to the officers in Europe that they had boredom, sheer boredom and nothing to do, whereas F Force in any case when I knew, everybody was so tired that when they came home they had no, they weren’t interested, they had forgotten all about home. They’d just fall down where they were and go to sleep, sleep it out. They were just so tired.

Yes, on the ship. When I came back, well just to show you when I came back at one stage during, when we were training, the wives got letters of what a wonderful time all the troops were having up in Singapore you know, and oh, there was a great stink about that and they sent up a team, Tilly Adele Shelton-Smith who was the main one, and her photographer

was Bill Brindle who was the chief photographer for Packer, and they came up, and this is the time when I had two RMOs. This other fellow had left here so I went up to Maxwell and said you know, “These people have asked me to go around and show them a bit about Malaya, could I have a week’s leave?” And they said, “Yes.” So I had just met them and I got on very well with them. I went off and I had a great week with Tilly and Bill Brindle.

Now when we came back to, we called into Darwin and then when we got back to Brisbane and the ship pulled in at Brisbane and I thought gee, I’ll go and wait and see if there’s anybody coming up that I know. So I got out near the gangway and was waiting there and much to my delight after about 20 minutes or so here’s Bill Brindle coming up the thing. He got to the top and he saw me there and he said, “Look I’m looking for a fellow called Lloyd Cahill.” And I said, “Good day Bill, how are you?” Now when I left

Singapore I was about 7½ stone and I had put on a stone pretty well by the time we got to Brisbane but he didn’t recognise me. I remember poor old Bill’s face. Somewhere I’ve got a photo, I don’t know where it, I’ll look for it. A reprint of a photo, I did have it, of Kevin Fagan and myself. Kevin

was on the ship too and he was there on this ship sitting down in a cabin and they took a photo of us, both very thin.

I went back to Sydney and yes, and on the night, you see it was a dry ship and when we got to Brisbane, there was this, oh dear what was his name, Blue – not Russell, a war correspondent, a wild man and he got on board. Bill Brindle I think probably got him on to come and see us.

And he got there and he said, oh you know, “What about a drink?” And this is in the afternoon when we were waiting in Brisbane and we said, “No this is a dry ship.” “Oh nonsense. I will go and see the captain.” So off he goes. He comes back about an hour later with a great sack across his shoulders full of grog and he said, “We’ll go down to your cabin and we’ll have a party there.” One glass of beer would have been enough after about three and a half years without, but a bottle, well you were well away. However he drank

more than the lot of us put together I think, and finished up he got as drunk as could be and he was a damn pest. He said, “I’m going off to see the captain.” And he went to get out of the cabin and he opened the door of the cupboard so we put him in there and closed the door on him and left him. So that was that. However the result of that was we let him off before the ship came to Sydney. Then we got up and I woke up on the morning, it was early morning about 6 o’clock, and it was flopping around outside the

Heads, we were a bit early. Anyway we got in and eventually got up the harbour and of course it was quite amazing, extraordinary experience.

Oh going up, yes well. I’m sure it was on that ship that Kappe made his speech to what a great man he was and so forth and so on. No Bennett, Bennett. Bennett got on the ship not Kappe, it was Bennett. He got on the

ship to welcome us back and we were told to go up to the front to see the great man and they just went up and they turned their back on him. They gave him the raspberry. It was pretty grim. So he was talking more or less to nothing. Yes, it wasn’t Kappe it was Gordon Bennett now that I think about it. So that was that. Then we got in and we had to come off and you were

told those who want to go and be examined or think that there is anything wrong with them or want to claim anything go to the right. Those who don’t want anything go to the left. So I elected to go to the left and I went to the left and my people were there waiting for me. So I went back to the old home at Bondi Junction where Dad was still practising. I wasn’t feeling very well from the night before with the party. The following morning, I

think it was a Saturday morning if I remember, I came down to breakfast and I was talking away and my dear mother, I heard her say afterwards, “You know it’s amazing what a difference 24 hours makes to Lloyd since he’s come back, he’s so much better.” I was going to tell her why. Oh dear. So there I was back in Sydney. The next thing that happened to me was that, it must have been a Friday, anyway on the Saturday morning, in

those days you used to get telegrams in the morning, a telegram arrived to me, urgent telegram. ‘Captain Cahill you are to report to Concord Hospital immediately. You have an enlarged beri beri heart. Signed Colonel Bruce Hall.’ Now Bruce Hall used to be my tutor when I was at St Vincent’s. He was a senior physician there when I was a resident. And I thought, “God, isn’t this extraordinary?” So that at any rate I thought well I had better go. So then I rang another of my great old friends who I worked with all the time,

Adrian Johnson who was a dermatologist, well at that stage he was only just starting, and I told him about it how I would have to go out to hospital and he said, “Don’t worry, I just managed to buy a car, I’ll take you out.” So he arrived out to Bondi Junction with this old Chev Roadster with a dicky seat at the back and he put me in this and we shot up, and somehow or other we must have gone out, we were coming over the bridge, the Concord Bridge there and the car bonnet went straight up in the air and

then it fell down and stopped, and the differential fell out. I was left with my suitcase and my dicky heart and I had to walk to the hospital. When I went up to the admission office to confess, and it was Adrian Johnson’s, we were driving his sister, she was working as a VAD [Voluntary Aid Detachment] and she happened to be on duty that afternoon. Just by chance, he didn’t know she was there. So she said, “Well Lloyd, you will have to go in.” “Well I suppose so.

Colonel Hall says I’ve got an urgent bad heart.” So I went up to whatever the 7th, 8th floor whatever it was, and it was about 5 o’clock, it was Saturday, I went up to the sister and said you know, “When is Colonel Hall coming to see me?” Pretty important guy, and they said, “Oh doctor I don’t know. I don’t know whether you’ll see him now. He might possibly come in but I don’t think you will see him until Monday morning.” However he didn’t come so I went up again and I said, “Where’s the nearest mess?” And

she looked at me and said, “That one down there.” And I went down to this hut, it was the officers’ mess.

I walked down and there was one fellow there, very senior, an air force man. Another a great friend of mine Cyril Cummins, who had been, he was the senior house surgeon at Vincent’s when I was there, and I think he was then a wing commodore or something in the air force. And of course he welcomed me with open arms. It was all very exciting in those days, and I don’t know, I think that they gradually all started coming in from the races and so forth and a hell of a party started out there.

I discharged myself the next morning. I signed myself out because this party got going. In the early hours of the morning I thought I had better get back to the ward, and I went back, and at that stage one of the padres was dancing on the bar. Again, then I went home and then I kept away from all those bad boys. Then eventually they said, “All right, you can have

holidays.” And dah dah dah dah. So I just pottered around and eventually St Vincent’s said, “Would you like to come back and refresh and stay?” So I went back there for about 12 months.

When I was going out there, when I turned left I signed off there. That’s all they did. They didn’t examine me at all.

No, I didn’t get to the hospital. I just got on a bus. My family were waiting for me on the wharf with a car and I got into the car and went home.

That was the finish. I’d signed myself off. I thought, “I’ve had enough of the army.” And I didn’t do anything about, it and so later on, for some reason, and yes, they did eventually and I went to see them again, I had to go and see them about something. I didn’t claim anything. I said I was perfectly okay and that was all right. Well some years later, they did, they called everybody in and they had a look and I was okay then so I had done pretty

well. That’s how I finished. The sequel to all that was then some years later after, quite a number of years later because I had been to England, and when I had come back I had started in Macquarie Street, and one day I was walking along Macquarie Street, came out of the building and I was in, Bland House, and Hal Selly who had been, he was very senior in the medical services in the army passed by. He said, “You’re the very guy I’m

looking for.” And I said, “What’s the trouble?” He said, “You know things are not too good up there with Indonesia at the moment and anything might break.” He said, “I want you to come back. Are you still in the thing?” And I said, “No.” And then told him the story. He said, “Go home and think about it.” He said, “I’ll give you 24 hours.” And he said, “You know if there’s another war maybe it’s on, it’s better for you to tell the other guys to go places than to be told

yourself.” So when I went home I thought well there’s a lot of truth in that. So I came back and I said, “Well okay, I’ll come back.”

It must have been in the early ‘50’s. ‘55 somewhere about then. ’55, ’60, somewhere when there was big trouble in Indonesia. They were playing up in a big way.

No this was – that was prior to Korea. The Indonesians at one stage

were being very unpleasant and the whole thing was getting nasty up there so I couldn’t tell you exactly when it was. I’d have to look it up. However then I became a lieutenant colonel very suddenly and I remained in that as the consultant in eyes for a long time including when Vietnam was on, where I used to see the bad ones, eye cases and so forth.

I was again, yes Army Medical Corps still lieutenant colonel in the Medical Corps and really I was on headquarters of Eastern Command.

Eastern Command has now been, they’ve done that away. That was at the barracks at Paddo [Paddington] so I used to go up there. I had to go up there every now and again and I did go up there and go to lectures and keep in touch with what was happening. So then I was there and that’s when Vietnam was there. That’s when I used to, particularly they had quite a lot of

lectures and things going on then, so I would go up there on weekends and things of that kind. Which I always found was very interesting. It was good to keep in touch with them.

No, I just went to see and tell them what to do, you know, which hospital to go to or do they need hospitalisation. So the bad ones, I think they went to Prince Alfred. I think we used to send them to Prince Alfred in those days.

Yeah, they had been to Sydney. There was a small hospital there in the barracks in those days and they were going to, they were going to build another military hospital. It was as big as that. You see the navy had theirs at Balmoral so things were so fragile in those days that the plans were out to build a big new military hospital which would have got rid of Concord, you see, taken over from Concord. Of course then the eye cases of course, that’s when they went to Concord, the bad ones went to

Concord. But Concord was going to be, Veterans’ Affairs were going to be pulled right out from there into this new big hospital, which never eventuated like all these other things. So that’s that. And I’ve been working up until a few years ago.

No, I was still lieutenant colonel and I was there for, I think I must have

been there till 1970, ‘75, a long time. I must have been one of the longest serving.

Never.

Don’t know.

I was always interested but I didn’t join the RSL, no. Don’t know why. I

think mainly because I was trying to build up a practice and pretty busy and I didn’t have time. I used to often work through, I found even lunch time I just used to have a sandwich in the room and go on working. I used to think every now and again, coming home past Roseville, because they’ve got a good club there but I never joined. In some ways I regret that I didn’t.

Oh yes, I marched last year. I’m just wondering what to do this year. The 2/19th there are so few of us left out of that thousand that they haven’t

got the – it’s doubtful if anybody is strong enough, the banner, so that actually they’ve been absorbed by the 1/19th. These are not the regulars, these are the civilians, the ones down here, so the 1/19th Battalion has absorbed us. So this year in the march would be the first year we haven’t marched as a unit. We will be marching I presume as part of the 1/19th.

So whether to go and risk my knees on that, I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. I was going to ring to find out. A sergeant who was with me, Des Mulcahy, he’s a remarkable, wonderful guy. He’ll be an interesting man one day to get, he’s a real – he rang me about a month ago and I said, “Where have you been, Des?” He said, “I was going to ring you yesterday.” He said, “I got back yesterday.” I said, “Where have you been?” He said, “To the

Antarctic.” “What are you up to now?” He said, “I went down for the day. It cost me a bit of money.” I said, “I bet it did.” He said, “I went first class. If I was going to do it I went first class.” And I thought, well that’s good. He said, “A funny thing happened. When you get on they give you little badge, Qantas give you a little badge to say ‘Antarctic’ or something on it, and if you are in first class you get two.” And so he said, “I had these and that was all right but when we got back last night, they were all filing off and I just took my time, and I was about the last and the girl, senior stewardess she had a box there of these things,

badges.”

Oh, I’d need notice of that. I didn’t have, no I didn’t have any special girlfriend. I’d had a few that I thought were rather good. But I think as time got on, I’ll always remember you know, things were getting on and I

thought oh if I do go away I’d better remain single. And I remember a teacher, Douglas Miller, Sir Douglas who was a famous surgeon teacher here, I always remember him lecturing to us as students, and he said, “If you want to specialise there’s one thing you must remember, you can’t have a wife and a boat at the same time.” And I think that was pretty wise. So apart

from anything else I’ll remain single at this stage. Yes, I had a couple that I used to think were rather good but when I came back I found one had met and married an American. I don’t know what had happened to the others. There were one or two others but they had married friends of mine or something. So I was completely free. Thank God for that because – I don’t know whether you want me to go on. Up on the railway line when you had no drugs and things were very grim. The fellows did get down in

the mouth there’s no doubt about that, and worried, particularly the married men. And just at this time when we were in bamboo huts, this was up at Shimo Sonkurai, so that it just turned out that all the married men were on one side of this little bit of dirt and the single men were on the other, and I had a lot of my good people who have been friends of mine right throughout my life, these were the 30th Battalion which I hooked up with up there. They kind of adopted me and they still regard me as part of their unit and I’ve never

been part of their unit. However, these fellows were there and I was talking to a great friend of mine, Ward Booth, the late Ward Booth, who was quite a character and I said to him, “You know, we’ll have to do something.” And, “No, you can’t do anything about it because – ” We started then pulling their legs, the married men’s legs saying, “Oh well, you know, you fellows are all right, we’re all innocent over this side. I hope we’ve got a big future in front of us.” And they’d come back and this silly argument went for a long time.

Eventually they got down in the mouth and I thought, now how in the hell are we gonna keep this, got to stir up an argument. I used to stir up all sorts of silly arguments, like who would – have an argument about all these experts, which is heavier the Queen Mary or the Sydney Harbour Bridge? Well nobody would have any clue about that and they argued for that for God knows, they would forget that they were married I think sometimes. This went on and eventually it was getting a bit bad and I said to Wardy, “Look we’d better give a cup, when we come back, to the first one who knocks out a child

when they get back.” And he said, “Oh that’s a good idea.” So we got this going and we said, “We’ll give this cup to the first one who gets married and produces a child.” And Paddy Walsh who was the padre there, a marvellous cove, he was the 30th Battalion padre and everybody loved Paddy. Paddy said, being a Catholic priest, he said, “Well I can’t,” he said, “I’ll give a case of beer.” He said, “I can’t be in it otherwise, so I’ll give a case of beer.” So Paddy said he would give a case of beer. And this went round and then

the troops got to hear about it and then a wonderful thing happened because then they started betting on it. So and so had been over the course six times before so he would be a short price, and others a long price. And this went on and it was just something for them to argue about, a silly game. However when we got back we gave the prize. We got a big cup, about this size, the Shimo Sonkurai cup, and David McNichol, he heard about it and I knew David

quite well, and of course he plastered this cup on everybody. We invited him to the dinner when it was presented and a great old friend of mine, who is still alive down at Mosman, Blake Prince, he won it and the stipulation was that it had to be produced at the girl or the boy’s 21st birthday party, which she had, she didn’t like that very much. So then when that was done I said, “Well there’s nothing else left. What about giving one

for the grandchild?” So we said, “Oh a little one.” So we gave another little cup. McNichol, not McNichol the other cove, the truth man. He was a funny fella, big glasses, he got onto this one, and I’ve got a picture somewhere upstairs, but this was won by a fellow called Hendy, Chook Hendy and he got so pleased about it he got so drunk that he retired to the gentleman’s retiring room and he disappeared.

Not only did he disappear but a hand came under the door and took the cup and nobody knows where the cup went to. So there you are. So those were the silly things you could do just to cheer them up a bit.

I did see one lot. They came up by train for the Japanese. This was the Japanese brothel. It arrived up into the jungle over the railway line when it

had been built about, oh it must have come about 160 miles, and all these little girls jumped out of these rice trucks and they were dressed like nurses. All the lads had tickets like you get at Luna Park. Take a couple of these and away they’d go. A well known judge or subsequent judge was at this stage, this was at Nikke – And after we had finished the railway line we were there, and we had to get down there in a great hurry to get away but after

three weeks it was raining like mad, and very, very muddy. And I found that by crawling up on the railway lines you could get your hip under between the two and lie down and get a reasonably good rest. My friend Adrian Curlewis was next to me and I woke him up and Yuen Gunsa, the Jap sergeant came up with this noise going on and I said, “What is it?” And he made all sorts of naughty signs at me and I realised when I saw these girls that something was on. So I shook Adrian

and I said, “Adrian wake up.” He said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “The travelling brothel has arrived.” He said, “Where’s my hat, where’s my hat?” Poor old Adrian, I always tell this story about this famous judge later on but that’s the only time I saw them.

No. If they did though, they didn’t tell me. Sometimes they might have, not as prisoners of war no, I don’t think so, as prisoners of war they got a

chance.

Well that’s right. They’d come to you for everything and even the Japanese used to come to us rather than their own doctor, and if you got a good Japanese patient you would try and cure him but never let him be

totally cured, particularly if he had a cigarette, paid you with a cigarette. Skin rashes, they were marvellous because you could always stir them up when they were getting better. It’s funny, you had nothing, there were very few – actually I was lucky when I got out of that island Pulau Betong, my friend [UNCLEAR] told me because the Shell Company island as I told you, that was still in action, so that we had these drugs that Bob

Puflett and I had the argument about, and I remember having a Johnson & Johnson tin, it must have had Elastoplast [adhesive bandage], and things in it. A thing about that long about that wide, it was black and I filled that with everything I could that I thought would be important when we were leaving this island, and I got morphia and emetine and all sorts of things that you wanted

for treating dysentery and so on. Atebrin was one. I had a lot of Atebrin. I had quite a lot. I took it back and I gave some to the hospital, a big one and kept some for myself and I thought, well if I ever go away or get caught, I’d like to have some. So I had that little supply which was very valuable but eventually I, more or less, I still had a little bit even left, on the railway and I fortunately had some ampoules of a strange

thing. The Scottish medicos for some reason had ampoules, 100ml ampoules of a mixture of ether and chloroform. It was the most dreadful mixture. It was to go in anaesthetic. It’s a shocking mixture but they apparently do this. They used to use it over there and give it to patients. So I took quite a lot of them. I thought well if I get into trouble anywhere I’d have some anaesthetic with me, and I did up in the railway line. So when I had to do some operating up there on the line I had this and I had a

dentist and he had never given anaesthetics. Everybody used to be scared you know. You know we were scared to use chloroform at any time because the patients go white. They go under very quickly and then you say you’ve got to stop the chloroform now before anything happens, and then they get the ether which is a slow acting thing and the ether is irritating and it’s a shocking mixture. But however it worked enough for me to have to do a few appendixes and things right up there in the jungle.

Oh we’d done a tropical course a little on our way through, in fifth year we did about three months of tropical medicine, but it was all in those days a bit of a joke. We didn’t take that much notice but it was interesting. There was always certain diseases they had a specific treatment for. That’s what made it interesting but that’s all, so it was all new when we got there.

Then we did go and hear a few lectures from the local men up there and they were good.

No. You know if you’ve read a book about cholera there’s just no doubt when they’ve got it. You just look and you can see that they’ve got cholera.

Everybody was afraid. Yes, the Japanese were. They were scared of it

and that’s why we isolated that Shimo Sonkurai camp, to separate them. When they got cholera we had to separate them from, that was the only way we could hold it, was to put them on this hill, this Cholera Hill as we called it. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a picture of Cholera Hill. I’ll get one after and show it to you. I went up to this Cholera Hill and the others came up every now and again, but my job was to kind of keep up there and keep

away. I had a batman who really I think saved my life. You get the patients in there, actually we did reasonably well, we saved nearly 50% of them, 50% got through. I would then come down perhaps late at night and old Tom would be waiting for me and he’d have a little vial of ashes there and he’d get my boots and put them straight in there. It was the only

way you could sterilise them and boiling water, so you could wash up. I give him all the credit for saving me there. So then the Japs wouldn’t go up there. They wouldn’t go near the hill and I don’t blame them because it wasn’t the most pleasant place.

Perhaps it would be better if I just slipped upstairs and got this picture and showed it to you.

Well it was just up on the top of a hill. We had one or two old Indian Army patent tents that we had pinched from the Japs. It was raining, heavy rain. So that was the only cover and a few bamboo slats for them to lie on and a bit of a bench, a bamboo bench that they had made to operate on, but that’s all. Nothing. Just mud and slush and stuff all around the place.

I had in that little black tin, I had some forceps, a few forceps and we had a few instruments that we took up there enough to do an appendix. I had to do a few appendixes up there and the Japs would run for miles when they knew you were going to do this. They’d get out and clear out. But then we’d have to do it and we used to do it under a mosquito net. The Japs

gave us big green mosquito nets, about 6, 8, 12 used to sleep under a mosquito net, and we put that over one of these ambulance stretchers and they’d carry it up and I would just get my friend the dentist to give the anaesthetic. We used to put the instruments in the kuala, the cooking pot that you cooked the rice in for breakfast when they finished breakfast. That was the sterile, the sterility. Charles Anderson used to say,

“It takes a lot of lead to kill a man.” And I used to say, “Well it takes a lot of wogs to kill a man too,” because the ones I had to operate on one nearly died. You see there was no penicillin. The only thing was M & B 693, [tablets], which was sulphanilamide. That was the first thing that was discovered.

It killed the wog. It would kill the germs but it wouldn’t viruses, and M & B 693 was a white tablet which was very famous. Have you heard of M & B 693? In those days it was like penicillin. We just got it as we went into action this, M & B 693. Can I now divert you now, and tell you a story about M & B 693, a clever one? M & B 693, one of the troops was a pretty clever

guy and he built a little press and he’d pinch chalk from the Jap orderly room and he’d get this and he’d put it in the little press and come out beautifully, M & B 693. This was great because every now and again these guys found girls, the Japs, and they’d come along to us for treatment. The great thing was M & B 693. So we used to sell it to them at a dollar a tablet and they were swallowing chalk and thinking this was wonderful. So

that guy was a wise clever man but we had no penicillin. I didn’t hear about penicillin until I came back here and it was completely new to me. Even now every now and again, something will happen and turn up and I think that’s funny I’ve never heard of that and you’re still in that period where it was a complete – wash off.

Oh tags. Oh yes, I used bamboo for everything. They used to just get a little bit of bamboo and cut it down to about that size and they could just put their name and their number and their religion on it. We had a couple of padres up there at Shimo Sonkurai, Paddy Walsh and – they were great friends. The Anglican cove used to swear like a trooper when he

was asleep. Good bloke. One of the Jews in the camp died, there were only a few of them there poor fellows, and they were all being cremated. We had this great fire going up on the hill and one of the Jews came up to me one day and he said someone had died, “We have no rabbi in the

camp. We were wondering whether Father Walsh would say a few prayers.” I said, “I’m sure he would.” They said, “Would you ask him?” I said, “Yes. Why do you want him, why don’t you get what’s his name Payne to do it?” And he said, “Oh we know that Father Walsh, Padre Walsh can read and he speaks that language, that’s one of his specialties,” and so on. So I went up to Paddy and I said, “Oh Paddy you know they’ve asked if you

could read this and say the prayers?” And he said, “Oh yes.” He said, “Have they got a book there?” I said, “Yes here it is, they gave it to me and it’s all written in a different way.” He looked at it and said, “Oh yes that’s okay.” So the few Jews that were in the camp came up to the hill when they were going to cremate him and I went up with a couple of others and Paddy was there and he started reading the prayers like this, and one of the Jews popped across and touched him on the shoulder he said,

“Father would you mind putting my hat on when you say the prayers?” So he put the old hat on and away he went and said the prayers, and he was dispatched.

We had to. Not only that, then of course you see at Shimo Sonkurai we got the, when Hunt took a lot of the sick up to tamda sian, the little hut, the hut

was then cut in two and then they started bringing the natives in and these people were coming in and they were dying all over the place. So apart from having to cremate our own we then had to cremate theirs too. That was grim. They wouldn’t let us in too, and a lot of them were women there and babies, newly born babies. Terrible thing. These poor kids were crawling around

over their dead mother to try and get a feed. It was a disaster. They wouldn’t let us in there for long. They let me in after a week or two and then, you’ve got to be careful, you tried to get some idea into the Japs there about hygiene and they said just put bamboo across, bamboo strips and that will be beautiful, but fortunately I got moved on then

up to Sonkurai, up to the other camp.

Yeah, but we didn’t have anything to treat with them the poor devils. They had it in a great big way. Nobody knows how many died on that thing. They say that there was one death per sleeper over the whole thing, 500 miles.

I don’t know. You just do it. The old fellow, the old sergeant, he was an old

Englishman, he was an English sergeant and he was in Australia but he was there, I can’t think of his name and he became obsessed with it you know, in the end. To get them up there you had no way of getting them up except put them on a bamboo pole and carry them up legs and feet tied. So that he became obsessed with this thing. When he came back eventually he came back to Sydney, and he had the job controlling the traffic coming out of David Jones in Elizabeth Street. He was there for

many years. But it just became his thing in life.

Well you did but on the other hand you were saving some too. To get back to my friend Tom Wilson who carried the microscope, to get this thing, this dye to stain them you had to have not only the right, you had to have

the pH, the right pH, of the water to stain, and when we got it up there Tom was running around and he said, “Oh dear, I don’t know.” But this funny little camp, it’s not a camp this bit of a clearing at Shimo Sonkurai was on the side of a little hill and there was a stream coming out of this thing and they tested the water and it was exactly the right pH to stain the things. That was terrific. So that Tom immediately got to work up there diagnosing the

ones that were really bad and the ones that were not so bad. So it was just luck that you picked these things up. He must have saved a lot of lives there. So they’d go and pinch some salt sometimes, depending on what they wanted it for. We always managed to get a bit from the Jap kitchen somehow or other. They kept that going all the time. Then for

infusions for intravenous, get some salt from the Jap kitchen and they, you could, he could work it out. We also had a pharmacist and they could work out the right pH and all the other funny things. So although we were just running water in from the stream, from the rivulet, it was the right. That’s all you could do for them. That’s all they could do from there but now you could have antibiotics, they’ve got antibiotics now that will clear it up straightaway. But in those days the mortality was very, very high.

Which ones?

Ah well, that’s interesting. Oh yes, I see what you mean. Yes Marmite, well they found that out. They knew Marmite had a high content of vitamin B so that was pretty obvious but there was another. One thing that was

found out up there was by a Victorian he worked out, he was a doctor in the Victorian mental services and somehow or other, and I don’t know how I knew him, but I never talked to him, he was a quiet cove, he worked out that the treatment of schizophrenia was lithium. How he worked it out I don’t know, but he did it up there. Somehow or other he just said this is the treatment, came back and tried it out and sure enough and it is accepted treatment still. How he did that I don’t know.

I wasn’t doing anything very much. I was doing all those things that we have to do, like running fluid from the stethoscope tubing and so forth. You just have to do all this preliminary stuff. But you had to do all sorts of things. I had to do, the operations the abdominal operations were a bit of a worry. Fortunately they turned out to be all right.

Yeah, so you’d go out and have your rice for breakfast and then go out, and as I say, used to sterilise the thing, the instruments you were going to use and I just had enough to do that. I don’t know what we did. We managed to tear up bits of cloth and things for bandages. Tropical ulcers were ghastly things, terrible things. The best thing they did at one of the camps

they found you know, the fish in the river, and if you put your ulcerated leg in the river the little fish would come up and eat up all the rotten stuff there. It’s funny how they do that. So that was that. The main ones up there where I was, was the cholera that was really the killer, big killer, that was just a matter of staying there and nursing them, running fluid into them

all the time. Even though we had M & B, they couldn’t swallow the M & B tablets that I was telling you about because they can’t swallow. They just vomit it straight up. Just vomit, and severe diarrhoea. They just became completely dehydrated so you really need lots of fluids. Fluid was really, and probably still the basis of it, of treating it. So that was my main effort up there.

It was a little stream. There was a little rock coming out and this little stream was coming out from the rock and fortunately because of Tom Wilson with his knowledge of pathology, he drank the water the first thing he did. “Oh,” he said, “I’ll go and try this water.” And he found out, Field yeah, John Field was the man who made this great find about the blood, John Field. John Field was the senior man in the Kuala Lumpur Institute and

Wilson was his 2IC. So that that was one of the great finds that we didn’t know about. That was pre-war. Now there were some other things I suppose in the war that they did find out but I think that one and the lithium, those two were really big time.

Yes and that was dreadful. That was really dreadful. The reason that F Force was ever sent up there was because the Emperor, they decided that instead of sending troops around when they were going to take India it would be much quicker to get them across the railway line instead of going around by ship. So they started north from the first party that went up and then the second party, I don’t know whether B went up there or went to Borneo, the next party went to Burma. And they were coming down

but the progress was too slow and it was obvious they weren’t going to make the time that the Emperor wanted so then they sold this story of the F Force how marvellous it was going to be, and we went into it and took everything and finished up with this disaster to try and get these, the two to meet and then the monsoon came. Not only does it stuck up but the rain was

coming down like pelting like mad. You had no chance. So that when we went out we were going up naturally we didn’t take very much. We couldn’t have carried it in any case so we had nothing really but just the few things you could carry to do anything urgent up there. So that as I was saying, for legs you’d have to get off the best you can, and just at one stage I had sutures, bits of strings every now again get some linen stuff

from the Japs. Then mostly when things got on you got to gradually get the really bad legs and things like that and amputations in a big way down south, but I don’t know how they, they did that and I think they did pretty well. They probably had some disasters too. It must have been very tough. Kevin Fagan did quite a bit for that. He was down south. He was in H Force. They came up even after me. So that they kept, there was

just a sheer panic on the Nips [Japanese] to meet the Emperor’s date.

Oh they got worse and worse. You see towards the end, I’ll show you a book after, they got to be quite impossible. Life meant nothing to them there. They just insisted they want a certain number of men per day, well

then the great fight would start. They would come, I used to start seeing them in the mornings at about 4 o’clock or something like that and go through them to see who was fit enough because they didn’t come in until about 11 o’clock at night. Have a few hours of rest and then off you want them to go again. So I don’t know how long it would go to then, and they used to take them on till about 6 or 7 or something like that and then they had to go 5 miles on without any boots through this mud and slush and

then they were supposed to work like mad all day long until about whatever time, if they had a job to do that day they had to wait till they finished it. So they might work till 8, 9, 10 at night poor devils. Some of them died out there. So you’d have a fight every morning, a great fight would come on over who can go and who can't go. You had to be

reasonably strong with them because once you gave in you were in trouble. If you gave in once they had you over a barrel then so you had to just fight and fight and fight. The main trouble was to fight with these coves who became more irascible and tougher all the time. You know it was to see them, the Indians of course, the impressed ones they just treated them, well, we were below the Indians on the sign. You would see

these little trees, F Force rest camp for, or camp for coolies, and prisoners of war. We were one below the coolies, we couldn’t get any lower. But those coolies they’d pick up these great bolts, when I saw them building a bridge, and they just whacked them across the skull with a bolt that long

and kill them. These were the engineers. The engineers weren’t even, they were a different crowd altogether to the guards in Changi, from yeah, Changi. You see stupidly the whole thing was run from Changi. The Jap headquarters medical was in Changi and here we were a thousand miles away or seven hundred so that they had no idea what was going on up there. The engineers who were the ones who were doing the trouble and

making most of it just said it was nothing to do with us. “We are in charge here, we’ve got to get this job through.”

Yes there was, what was his name? Bano I think, but he was a poor, he represented Changi but he was completely hopeless. Poor old boy, I was a bit older than he was but we regarded him, he was he was almost in

his dotage and he just didn’t marry, he got nowhere with the Japs with the engineers. It’s a strange business. You know you see a Jap private, yes a Jap private if he knows that there’s a kempetai [military police], that’s like the brown shirts or black shirts, if he had to go from here to say a camp five miles up the road and he heard there was a kempei tai corporal, lance corporal somewhere there between the two, he’d go in a great circle right round.

He wouldn’t want to get anywhere near a kempetai himself. The kempetai were just so, they were really bad. So there were all these funny grades with them so you never knew where you stood with them at all. The crowd on the ship with me I realised that they were good ones. We had about three weeks of reasonable, really good blokes and they were quite happy when they knew that we had been fighting, apart from building the line, that

as far as they were concerned that was good. They eventually, when they heard when old Gunsa, the old sergeant, for some reason or other, he said the captain wanted to see me, and I went to see the poor old captain and he was going on like this, like this and I couldn’t make out what he was going on and then suddenly it dawned to me and he was saying that he had, I had

been to Sydney three times and this was the bridge, the Harbour Bridge, and that’s how I fell for it, and that was wonderful it opened the door to everything with the old captain. But he also lost three ships doing it so not real happy that way. But he then insisted that I went and slept with the Japanese crew otherwise you slept up on deck, a thousand of you on deck, and so I had to go down and the Japanese crew was sleeping in the coal bunker. You kind of crawled into it like a coffin and you had to get in there and that was

where poor old Gus Kappe, that’s where I picked up with him. He woke me up one night and shook me and he said, “Cahill, Cahill,” he said, “I can’t understand you. I don’t know why a fellow like you is not married.” This is in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean and I thought good, heavens. If all he’s worrying about is that I don’t know what’s going to happen. However, that was extraordinary. It was dreadful. They had about a 41 lamp somewhere down in the bilge or down below waterline, and the rats were

running all over you and they’d eat anything, you’d have to hide everything, your shirt or whatever you had to sleep on because the rats would do it over. It was a funny old ship.

Oh the Koreans were the worst. They were worse than the Japs. Of course the Japs hated the Koreans. They didn’t like

them at all. I don’t know. You used to get them every now and again. I learnt to say ‘wakari mashi’ which is terribly important. That means ‘I don’t understand’. Now eight out of ten times I could get away with that but then the other times you would get a clout somewhere or other and a bit of trouble. But they were pretty good with the doctors. I think they were pretty good with doctors. They were extraordinary that way. They were funny. Because as I say, they would come themselves to see you rather than go to the Jap. They were strange people.

That was on there for years. It must have been up for 15 or 20 years. I don’t know whether it’s still on or not. I must go up to Canberra again and

have a look at this thing but isn’t it priceless that thing.

Oh it’s quite a long time ago now, they moved the thing down into the basement or somewhere at one stage when I was looking for it when going up there to Canberra with my wife. Anyway I found out with great difficulty where all these things were and it had been changed a bit and

down there, there was this half a, a portion of one of those things we used to build as a hut where we used to live, and it was built out of luang grass and things like that, and this roof. However I was looking at this thing and thinking dear oh dear, you know, it reminds me to think and my mind was miles away thinking of this and it brought back all sorts of memories to me. After about, I suppose, I wouldn’t know how long I must have been there for,

some time and went out and said, “You'd better come and keep going.” I went outside and I got outside and I thought gee that’s funny, there was a voice. I didn’t hear what they were saying. I’ll go back and hear what it’s all about and I went back and I was still looking at this thing and again not paying much attention to it, and then I said that’s funny, I know that voice. And I listened to it, and here am I up there on the wall telling the story of how cunning these prisoners of war were and how I had often – whether they

would get back to the straight and narrow. And this chap was telling the story or the story of him was they’d come in from work every day and they went past the guardhouse and they also had to, kaf seri hi miri, something or other, to the Japs and away they’d go. But this particular guy when things were getting thin in the way of food, and he beat all records as far as I was concerned, by coming in saluted the Japs and went straight through and

when he got in there he had crutched a live fowl which he had down in his fondosi, between his legs. History doesn’t relate what happened either to the fowl or to anything else but it was a superb piece of organisation. How he could do it I don’t know. But another cove he got, not Brashs, but near Brashs in Oxford Street there was another crowd there, another shop

there and they were tailors and he had worked at the tailors this fellow, and he made a superb fondosi and he had pockets put into it. He put pockets in these things so that when they went out they had pockets of various sizes and they would say that’s all right and take that back to camp and they’d put it in the fondosi. So they got back bits of aeroplane parts and all sorts of things, probably the parts that made the radios.

A fondosi was a loincloth. It was just a piece of cloth that you tore up

about oh, what is it, a metre long, a bit over a metre by about six inches wide, and that was your whole that was your clothing, your underclothing, you’re everything else. So you wore it between your leg and tied it with a bit of string around your waist flopped over the side. So to put that inside, a live fowl, the Jap can’t have been thinking, either he was myopic, very short sighted or he didn’t have his mind on the game that day. And that went back. And whenever the family go, I say, “Don’t tell me the thing is still going?” “Yes Dad, it’s still going. You’re still up there talking.”

Ah they used to do that. They used to go down. One day my, Tom Martin, this was the amazing batman fellow I had he came in and he had a whole compass from a plane. They were working down on the aerodrome which is now Changi aerodrome, and this was out of a crashed plane but it was not an ordinary compass it was a fighter but it was about that high, about

that round, and it was heavy and why they would have that in a fighter I don’t know. He reckoned it was a fighter. I think it was probably a bomber. Anyway he brought this back to Changi and at this stage I was living, this is after we had been moved out of Roberts to the jail and the place was, some people were inside and they built these huts outside and I was in one of the huts outside and they made me, I was in charge of this hut. It was always called the Vatican City because they had all the padres

at one end of the hut and the doctors on the other end, and I was in the middle to keep order. So Tom comes back with this enormous compass thing which if the Japs had caught you, you would have had your head cut off. I said, “For God’s sake Tom, don’t give me that, get rid of it.” He said, “Oh no Skip, I had a lot of trouble getting this.” He brought this, I don’t know whether, he couldn’t possibly have fondosi’d it, but he got it in. I said, “Get rid of it. I’m not interested, get rid of the thing.” At that time things were getting

hot and the Japs made us build slit trenches underneath the huts so that they’d put you down there occasionally and say, “Well this is where you go.” And these Super Forts [Flying Fortresses] were flying and occasionally you’d get a few things falling from them.

So that we were supposed to, when they came over, these things, you were supposed to hop into the little slit trench underneath your hut. I don’t know why but that was the idea. The Japs did.

In Changi after we came back from building the railway. This was in the time I was there about 12 months almost, working up in the path [pathology] department so that things at that stage, a lot had come back from the railway and the Japs weren’t pushing them too hard after the surveys came back so things were a bit eased off I suppose. But anyway that was all right. Eventually I said to Tom, “Did you get rid of that darned thing?” And he said, “Yes it’s gone, don’t worry about it Skip, everything is all right.” We

go to get on the ship, we were going somewhere, oh we were going out to this little camp, and blow me down, he comes in and he’s got my sausage bag and I go to pick it up and it weighs a ton and I look and here’s this ruddy compass still there and he wouldn’t get rid of it. And he got it back, he brought it back to Sydney. I don’t know whatever happened to it. He gave it to me up here. I had it up here for a while and I said oh get rid of it

Tom. But they would pinch anything. They were the greatest thieves. There is another story which I don’t know, it’s one of the early ones. In the lift in the tower of the jail they pinched the main bearing which annoyed the big boss of the Japs very much because he couldn’t use the lift. The story is that a very cunning engineer got hold of it and he converted it into cut throat razors which he sold to the Japs. Now whether there’s any truth

in that I don’t know. I won’t vouch for that one. But they were good.

Well the ack-ack [anti-aircraft guns] would start up, the Jap ack-ack would start, no it was really ack-ack coming back. They might have blown off a few rounds up there I wouldn’t know but we did get stuff in from the probably from the ack-ack. They would shoot straight up at these things. They couldn’t get anywhere near them. This was right towards the end. They’d come over

very high in those days, and you could see them up there and nobody ever got anywhere near them.

I think they used to just say, righto all the medicos have that end of the hut and the padres have the other end of the hut, and then you went and

battled it yourself and got some mate. But the troops they’d say, well they were divided really into areas, little areas because the units had been more or less disbanded and they were scattered all over the East. So you were just with a group, this group would go here, this group would go there. So there was, no I don’t think they allocated, I don’t remember them allocating positions. You found a place yourself.

No, but there was a thing run by Falk. Keith was a doctor down here, that was his brother, what was his name?

marvellous bloke. He was an engineer. I think he was in the engineers but he ran the workshop as they called it. But he started making artificial legs down there and they were amazing. He was putting in joints for you know, above the knee amputations. He was a very good cricketer. He played for New South Wales. I remember him since school when we were schoolboys. Now he had a wonderful unit there and he did some

wonderful work with these hands and legs and all sorts of things. He of course was so valuable he never left Changi. They kept him there running the show. He was a kind of quartermaster too, and I remember when we were going up to, oh what was his Christian name, going up to the railway line and I was getting a bit thin and my wardrobe was getting a bit thin, and I had heard that an Indian ship had come in and there were some gear on it, it had, an Indian ship with some Red Cross stuff and there were a lot of hats on

it so I thought I would go down and get a hat. And I went down and saw him and he said, “You can have one but it’s a bit unusual,” and it was a pork pie hat. Now you wouldn’t remember what a pork pie hat was like but they were very smart for all the young fellows round town, so I finished up with a pork pie hat and a pair of shorts and a pair of boots that I had had all along and that was that. But to get one of those pork pie hats was a big thing. You had to be very friendly with the quartermaster bloke. And you

know during the night on the march up there, was a fellow called Ringer Edwards and you will find Ringer Edwards in Shute’s book and he was an incredible cove. He was a ringer. Do you know what a ringer is? A ringer is one of these guys who works in the shearing sheds and he collects all sorts of things, and the ringer is usually quite a character. Now this cove was a character. He was from out the centre of Queensland. An amazing

cove. In the middle of the night we had pulled up and it was pouring with rain, absolutely pouring with rain and I had my pork pie hat on and we’d go up there and then when we were resting they would bring in the coves who had fallen over and broken their arm, because they did, they had all sorts of injuries. You’d start getting a few guys who could cut up bamboo and strap them up and keep them going. But to get there to start doing that, it was so wet, you couldn’t do anything. But somebody said get the ringer down, and you’d hear it up and down, we

used to be stretched out over a mile or something because you were dragging all sorts of sick blokes. “Ringer!” You could hear, “Ringer, come down here.” And this guy here he would come, the ringer, and he’d say, “Do you want a light doctor, do you want a fire doc?” And I would say, “Yeah.” He said, “Give me your hat.” And I gave him my hat and in the middle of this monsoon he could, he would put the hat over, I don’t know what he did down there, he’d light a few little bits of stick and within 5 minutes he’d

have a fire going all with the pork pie hat, with that. I could do things but you know, he was an amazing cove and Neville Shute refers to him in one of his books, one about the centre of Australia I think, the ringer. And he was alive until comparatively recently and I was told by somebody, “The ringer said to send you his regards.” He was fantastic, a fabulous man. Now these are these country coves and this is where the Brits were at such a great disadvantage. The Brits had no idea at all. You see the staging

camps that the Japs made, so called camps where you would find the notice up for staging camp for coolies and prisoners of war. Well the first thing the Australians would do would be go in there and say, “Well we had better get on and dig a borehole and get the latrines going.” The Brits would go in and they would say, “We have to start cooking some food and this will be the kitchen.” And somebody came along and put a borehole right beside the kitchen but it stayed there and they’d just leave the kitchen

there. And the result is they got dysentery and the flies would come and it would nearly drive us mad. But they had no idea of how to live in the bush, and these coves had we not been with these country coves we would have been much the same. But they were just extraordinary characters because they knew how to do it. The ringer had been droving for years.

The Dutch were difficult. The Dutch were difficult and I’m going to tell a story now. I’m going to just modify it a bit.

The Brits. The Dutch were always the F Dutch, ‘fucking Dutch’. Now one day a Sunday morning, I remember they said, Oh God have you seen the

notice up there in the Dutch lines?” And I said, “No.” “Go and have a look at it.” They had a great big blackboard and on it was written in chalk, on it, “We are your allies, not the fucking Dutch.” They just couldn’t get on with anybody. Because there are two lots of Dutch, there’s the Germanic Dutch and the others wherever they came from, but one of the Germanic ones – and one of the great German

general’s cousin was in the camp with us. I don’t know how he got in there. He was with the Dutch but he was fighting with the Dutch against his cousin. Well I suppose that would happen quite a lot. Now there’s another interesting one. The Yanks came in to us too but then they used

to organise talks and one night, who was there? I’ll have to think about this one, yes there was an Irishman brought in and he was a merchant marine and he’d been sunk. He was a skipper of a merchant marine. O’Shaughnessy I think his name was, and he came along to one of these evening talks or afternoon or night talks and he was

listening to this business and then there was somebody else there then, I think he was probably an Englishman who had been on a ship that had been sunk where this cove the Irishman used to go round. The Irishman was on this ship that’s right, and he was sunk by the Japs and here he was in the camp. They got him in there. He finished up in there. Then a Yank came in and somehow or other he got mixed up in it, but extraordinary, I can’t remember the details of that one. That was an interesting story.

Well they were extraordinary. Once we got down to the jail, the jail proper there were some big exercise yards and because of the early divisions of the British ones that arrived late, there were all sorts of well known actors in there and there were well known Australian actors, professionals. There

was a fellow called Dennis East who subsequently became the professor of music at London University. He was there. He was a famous violinist and there were these fellows from the various jazz bands that were there so that really there was plenty of talent, any amount of talent there, so they were all locked up when we first went into Changi. Now some of those

gradually crept up and they formed a concert party, Slim de Grey was one and the others, probably nearly all of them are dead now, Brighton the pianist. He was in the 19th. He was in there. There was some cove who wrote the books, Russell Braddon, so they used to write their own plays but eventually the Japs agreed to letting them having one of these exercise yards and build a stage for the plays and they built a very, very fine stage

eventually. This is after we came back from the railway line and they could fly scenes. They had The Girls of St Trinians fellow, he used to do the backdrops for them and have all these girls, great big bosomy girls with these things in and they could fly them up in the air, and down, then another came down, they got to the stage of being really first class. Almost. Some of them of course were, a couple of them there became girls they were so good. They dressed them up that even Japs wouldn’t believe it and they wanted to

come and make sure. There was a funny old pair of Englishmen, Darto, Major Dart, and Preston, Colonel Preston, two old Indian Army types and they were just incredibly, just, they were beyond everything. They were just floating along, and Darto had a little dog and he used to give half his

food his rotten issue of food to this little dog. The little dog became very famous. At one stage there he, it was when I had dysentery and I had just woken up, it was when an Indian ship came in and it left a lot of food including eggs and so forth and so on, and they said well these eggs are good obviously we’ll have to do something ourselves and they managed somehow, these WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s appeared and one of the officers who was with the

Commonwealth Bank, can’t think of his name at the moment, he started this little farm, a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK farm and they produced eggs and gradually more eggs and more WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and he got a farm going. This was very famous this farm and the egg production started to come down, and this was a disaster because that meant that not so many eggs coming to the sick people and then a terrible accusation was made that Darto’s dog was

eating the eggs, and this nearly precipitated a war between the Brits and the Australians and it got to Black Jack Gallaghan and the English commander about this thing and they thought the only way to solve this was to see the watch and catch the culprit. So they arranged to go back before dawn about 5 o’clock one morning and they let, I don’t know what his name was, out and they had hidden themselves, Black Jack and the lot of them, behind various things to see what the dog did and they let him go.

And he got into the compound, in among the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and he walked round until he found the eggs and he sniffed on them but he just sniffed again and then he lifted his back leg and peed all over them, and Darto said, “I told you so, I told you so. That’s what he thinks of your bloody eggs.” Darto he became famous. The troops loved him. They used to do terrible things to them but they just went on as though nothing happened. And then they

decided that they were going to put Darto in this play one night on stage, and do this short thing on him. He always went round with a battered old topee hat on and a couple of them came in to me and said, “Oh look sir we’re going to do Darto and whats-a-name in this next play that’s coming on and you can help us.” I said, “What do you want?” They said, “You’ve got some methylene blue and gentian violet,” and so on, “we want to have some ribbons. We’ve got to make some ribbons for him when he goes onto the stage.”

So he finished up, I gave him whatever I had. They finished up they had a string of ribbons go from here to here across whoever was taking the part of Darto, and as I had contributed to it I was given one of the VIP seats which consisted of sitting on a log near the front. But they had a whole lot but no Brits were allowed in, and no Japs were allowed in this night. Because the Japs used to love to come to see this too. So I was sitting down there and Darto and Preston were sitting in front of me and the Australians were laughing their heads off as these old characters came in

with this toupee on and ribbons across here and a little dog coming along pulling it along and there wasn’t a sign of these two old fellows, they just sat there and to my amazement not a sign, and then when all the clapping had stopped it was a bit of a fizzer because Darto turned around to Preston and he said, “I say, Preston, I knew a couple of fellows like that in Punjab.”

It was a wonderful take, but everybody knew but old Darto. I don’t know whether he was pulling our legs or whether we were pulling his.

Not that I know of. There were stories of it but if there was there was very little because, A, it might have been where the people stayed in Changi but when you got out of Changi you were too tired to be interested in that. In any case you would have lost, all your inclination for that kind of thing

went. It used to worry the married men very much as to what was going to happen and so forth, if they would ever reproduce. Then they came back and found they were reproducing very well so we reckoned that was due to the rice diet. There were so many things like that. There were funny things and that was one of the good ones. But then they actually wrote plays, you know they wrote songs. Slim de Grey wrote a few quite catchy

tunes. I heard them being played recently on one of the shows here on the air. Lots of things came out of it.

No, they just wanted to –

Oh you couldn’t, but they just told them it was closed off or something.

Sometimes they wouldn’t care, they were only silly little Japs. They seldom worried us. You’d only see them, they used to come round and do a tenko [parade] every morning and every evening they’d count and then you’d see them, well a camp like that you never saw anybody, so if a Jap was trying to get in they might have let him in but would try to keep him out. He would never have known what was going on in any case.

They reckoned they were real girls we had in there. They were going to have a look and see but they managed to get over that problem.

That was fed out to us you know, that was fed out to us right up to the end,

right up to into action pretty well. They couldn’t fly. They couldn’t fly at night. Oh the greatest lot of nonsense you’ve ever heard.

Oh intelligence. They must have known it was not right. There was a firm belief that because they were short sighted they couldn’t fly. That’s absolute nonsense. You put a pair of glasses on you’re just as good as

anything else, anybody else, isn’t it? Crazy. There were all sorts of silly things like that. The Japs couldn’t do this and the Japs couldn’t do that but they could do that and a lot more that’s the thing because they were, you see a lot of these divisions that came down and got in among us they had been up fighting in Manchuria and all over the place. Their tactics were good. This business of strapping yourself in a tree so that you

couldn’t fall out when you’d been shot it was very disconcerting to find these shots coming from behind you and these guys were up, the snipers were up in the trees and they’d just strap themselves in so that even if you machinegun them they stayed up there. Just all this getting in behind us all the time. Anderson realised that. Anderson knew that. Anderson would go up to them when we got up there to go training in the jungle and you went out with binoculars and so forth like everybody used to like to

throw those away you can’t see in the jungle, throw those away and fill everything you’ve got there with hand grenades and he went into action with hand grenades hanging all over him. That was sensible. You see he had done it in Africa. The other, we did everything wrong, our tactics were wrong. All the trucks we used to take with us when you had them with you, oh you know, must have a truck but they were only a great nuisance in the

end because they blocked the road and then you were stuffed off. So our tactics weren’t good.

Anderson always was interested in this going around the back, getting round the back of the other the enemy, no having Maginot lines or anything like that but that was useless as it was.

Yeah, yeah, yeah sure. When you’re overpowered in numbers providing you’ve got some help, well A) first of all nobody can find that without air support, that’s impossible. At one stage on that long trip back when we were going back, fighting down, the Zeros used to come down and machinegun the trucks all the way. I had a truck full of wounded and dead, I suppose some of them, and

suddenly the windscreen just went white, well it went straight between myself and my driver so you had to get out and get the rifle, pass it out. So you couldn’t you know, when you had that going on all day long and they used be over all the time in daylight it made it pretty difficult. But again you see we were caught in the transport. As medicos we were overpowered with numbers

and no air support, none at all. I had a, when we burnt down a village not long before we went away the troops went in and found a lot of brandy in the houses and they said, “Do you want any brandy, Doc?” And I said, “Oh yeah, what have you got?” And they told me. I said, “Put a case on in the back and one of these days it might be handy.” So I went round and I had a case of brandy, a dozen bottles or more and when I ran out of morphia I was

giving them this brandy which was very helpful, but then I ran out of morphia and water, had no water. Eventually they got rid of, at first they wouldn’t send any message through on the radio for fear the Japs would pick it up you know, absolutely useless.

Yes, this is right, in action.

This was before you know, when we were getting Jemaluang ready. We

told all the people to get out and they had to get out and while we cut down the trees we paid the government a dollar or something per tree to clear the land to defend it. When they burnt it down we found this brandy, a lot of brandy in one of the houses so I got a case. So when I ran out of morphia I was giving them a dose who could take it by mouth. That gave them some relief.

I say there was an order out apparently, this was all above me I didn’t know that but apparently there was an order that we couldn’t comment or get through on the radio, or whatever they had at Parit Sulong, this was right at the end, to see what in the hell to tell them what’s going on. Until eventually Anderson said, “Oh hang that. See where some British troops were supposedly coming down to help us.” And that got through but then he also got through the fact that I was out of morphia and had wounded and deceased and we had no water. Well I didn’t know that. I didn’t know he had put that through and I was just doing my usual thing there and suddenly two old biplanes came over and

when you looked up they had what looked like the red what’s-its-name [roundel], the Japs had underneath it but actually they were two old planes, Dutch planes, they were Wildebeests or something and they had come over and I looked up and I thought, “Oh God, the bloody Japs. What in the hell, are they coming over?” And then suddenly this huge bomb was dropped from it and the bomb actually was a huge long cylinder, a thing about this long about that thick containing morphia

and water and so forth. I don’t know. I know I used the morphia in about 20 minutes and that had gone and then there was not enough water. You see we had no water. The only water was in these terrible drains.

For the really bad ones the only thing you could do was give them

morphia. I had some Thomas splints for legs and the early ones who had fractured legs, or you know, the bad ones I was able to put splints on them. Then of course some of them died but by that time we had other sick ones on the top of them and so it went on and then you’re being machine gunned.

This is on this long causeway. That long causeway was the trouble because we got up to, we’d got up to that’s the west coast over there, we

got up to where the people were in trouble. So when we got there and got them out and tried to get that Indian brigade out which they did some of them came and joined us, but then we had to get back across to this, across this river at Parit Sulong. We tried to get back there before the Japs got to it but the Japs beat us to it. But then the Brits and some Australians were supposed to come up, they heard about this and they were to come up and try and clear that but for some reason they didn’t get

there so we were left, but eventually Bennett sent an order through everybody has to get out, those who can possibly move must get out.

We had to swim the river and get across the other side and that just about finished me. Then we had to, I went out with a party led by a fellow called Dick Keegan. He was a great friend of mine. He was one of the best of

them. And we went, I can remember sleeping in this great swamp, mosquito just all night long we were bitten by the swamp, wet everywhere and the next day we went on. We had to climb over a small mountain up the top and got down the other side and then we got into another little river and I got in a bit of a canoe thing there for a while and we got down there. Then – I’m getting very sketchy, but I

remember we got out and we were going along the road and it was terribly hot and we had gone quite a long way, we had been out for about three nights and three days and then we came across a little hut and somebody, one of the Malays came out, and he said, “You must drink this.” And he had a bottle of soft drink which was creaming soda and it was a thing I never was keen on, but I had this creaming soda and I drank that and I was sitting down and I thought I can never get up. This is the finish I’ll never

get up and there were some others, I had some wounded with me and I thought oh hang it, and then I heard that we weren’t terribly far from the troops from our lot and I said ah, I’d said eventually, “Look I can’t go any further now, you’ve got to go on and I’ll stay with these guys and you go on.” Then a little Chinese boy came along and he had a bike and he insisted I got on this bike and I got on this bike and he said, “Down there.”

And I pushed off the best as I could and I looked down the thing went down like this and down at the bottom was the greenest and the most awful looking swamp you’ve ever seen with a bit of a board across it. And I pointed the old bike at that and I got onto it and went arse over turkey flat on my back and then somebody came and pulled me out, and I looked across and they had pulled me on the other side of the river and there was an ambulance. So that that saved my life because I couldn’t have gone

another step. I’d had it by that time. Then I got on, I don’t know how many were in that ambulance because I got on it and I was sitting on the left front mudguard and then we went up to this place Lolong Peng. But I had a heard by that time from being out and my colleagues didn’t know, they didn’t recognise me and I had no idea because I had nothing left. I had a shirt and a pair of shorts. Anyway I got in there and then eventually they

put in another ambulance and took me down to the 13th Hospital. They were still in Johor. Anyway I got in there and they just put me into a bed in the ward and I just went to sleep. I don’t know how long I had been asleep. I woke up next morning and there was a nurse, one of the nurses going through my pockets and saying, “You naughty boy.” And I thought what’s the matter, what’s the matter. She had my syringe and she thought, I had no badges of rank she didn’t know, and I was in the VD [venereal disease]

ward. Eventually she woke up to what it was and in actual fact I was a doctor, and then I got changed and so I got moved around. So that’s how I started then when I was put into hospital and then moved over. Things were moving so quickly. I moved over to the hospital and it moved over to Singapore itself. I went over there as I still had malaria and stuff.

Well that’s what came over the air apparently, yes.

Yeah.

Every man for himself yes. Now there was a fellow, Ray Snelley, who was a great friend of mine. He was wounded. He had a leg badly fractured and he was on, he couldn’t move and I said, “Oh well Ray, I’ll stay with

you.” He said, “Look you are junior, you are junior, you’ve heard the order. You have to go and I’ll stay here.” So that fellow stayed. Now he deserved a VC, because he was slaughtered. They got those, the Japs, the ones that were there. They put them in a little hut and they just locked them up, wouldn’t feed them and they’d come and offer them a cigarette and then take it away and all come around laughing and so on. And there

was one fellow, Ben Hackney got out, and I got to know him very well later. The troops then came through and they got them and took them and they tied their hands together took them out and just machine gunned them, and Ben Hackney for some reason somehow he got out of it. He had been hit. He pretended he was dead and he crawled into the jungle and

he stayed there and crawled into Changi some time later and he had survived a lot. But he was the only one and he saw it. Otherwise they were going to and even Yomashta [?], in his book, said, “This was one of the most dreadful things.” He was ashamed of the Japanese, the troops. So that’s what happened to them. The most dreadful story. So I eventually got out as I say, by crossing this river with some wounded, some others.

I don’t know. Well I’ve never been able to work out why there was no, they didn’t follow us because people were drowned getting over this little river, they drowned. I don’t know why they didn’t follow us. I was just reading this book on Kent Hughes, it’s an interesting book. He talks about it a bit but he thinks that maybe the Japs had had enough because

they killed, we killed their general, the Japanese general and I think that’s why they turned on this act of getting the survivors and shooting them, but it was a disgraceful thing to do. Before that you know, when we got to what happened in the river had this bridge that goes up and down like that, there are pictures of it in that book and eventually Anderson had a talk, and Victor Brand was the doctor from the other battalion. He had

come and joined me. There were the two of us and we decided that to put a lot of the wounded, the really bad ones on a truck with a white flag and send it over to see if they would let them through, but when they were met up on the top of the hill, the bridge, a Jap officer came up who could speak good English and said no he wouldn’t do that. If the whole force

surrendered then he would take them through, otherwise no. Well then Dicky Austin, Dick Austin who was a very great friend of mine. He was one of these coves and he was one of the first wounded in the battalion. He got hit here and out through his neck but he was still going. He was in the truck. He was the officer in this truck that we sent up and he got hold of

the steering wheel, and when the light of the sun went down backed it down the river and came back and joined the few of us that were left. Then Dick walked out with me subsequently with this wound here, and it took half his shoulder away, but he was one of the survivors. Quite a few got out but quite a lot of them were wounded. So that was that. So that finished that. It was a horrible story. The Massacre of Parit Sulong, they

called it. Gilbert Mann was, he wrote a little book called Grim Glory.

Well actually while we were marching we didn’t. All there was, was a bit of a clearing in the jungle with that famous sign up. ‘Staging camp for coolies and prisoners of war’. So we just had to doss down there. There was nothing prepared at all. We tried to carry something along the way for feeding I presume, and it would be usually in an area where there was some water available. The Japs would pick them I think. There must have been something there because it was raining like hell the whole time

so we weren’t short of water from that point of view. But really they were there, if you marched from 6 at night until whatever you finished the next morning, whether it 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 you’d just flop down, and then the idea was that they would, they would do I think, a couple of nights in succession. You’d do two or three nights in succession and then have a night’s rest and it was because of that rest business and the old doctor not

being able to go on I kept going through. So I finished from train five to train one. But there was nothing there at all. When you got to train one where we were at Parit Sulong, there was nothing there except this clearing with a little water thing coming down from the rocks in the hill behind us and that was it, that was the camp. So then we had to set to and do something about it. It was quite extraordinary how they got to and did that camp. The only water available was the thing coming down out of

the mountain, out of the hill. Within a matter of days they had made a little dam with bamboo and eventually it became quite a large dam, and we had that going all the way through. In the meantime they were going to be putting down a cook house in another area, and in another area latrines. So within a matter of a week there was somewhere there for somebody to doss down. Then the next thing they’d do was put down or start building

the hut to live in. But it would have taken, because I suppose at that stage there was relatively a large number of fit men although a lot of them were, almost half of them were really light duties only. They were able to gradually build this hut and a bit of a cover but there was nothing there for us. There was nothing prepared, nothing at all.

So that was the position that you had, nothing prepared at all and gradually they built the camps right through as each one that came along the first ones would start to dig it and so you’d go on.

They used to have to go away and rough it like we did because there was nothing there from them and gradually they would have a hut built for themselves. They also had a little hut built, I presume. I don’t remember much about the guards. I wasn’t worried about them. But they did, they must have had something. They always carried rice with them. Just rice in a little thing on their back and their belts. That’s the way they went into action carrying their own rations and they’d just go and get some water,

rainwater and cook that up. But I don’t know what the Japs did. I wasn’t very interested in them.

Well there it is.

That’s the Parit Sulong Hospital.

That was gradually built. Once the cholera hit us it was obvious we had to have a separated area so we started just on the hill, oh it must have been

50 yards away from the camp because there was a bit of a break and just built first. They started. The cover was an old Indian Army pattern tent which had belonged to the Japanese, and they just pinched that one and then they’d pinch another one, and so we eventually got what 1, 2, 3, about three of them covered up. They had to just be enlarged as the number of cases increased. But again, there was no drainage, no storage for water

or anything like that all. It all had to be brought up from down below.

Cholera, cholera is about one of the worst things you can possibly see because it’s so devastating and it’s in the water and the streams. That’s where you could get it from. It’s from pollution all the way, but fortunately in that little camp they had this stream running out of the mountain and

that helped us a lot. But for that reason unless there’s absolute hygiene you just get this thing and go and die. Bruce Hunt, I remember Bruce getting them together early in the piece and explained it to them in very vivid terms what it was all about and what was going to happen if they didn’t get set to and all pull together. And the first thing they did was they dug all the surface soil off and got rid of that and then he was absolutely

meticulous about where the kitchen was and were the latrines were, and so the whole thing was in areas and he was insistent, absolutely insistent. He took over complete control at that stage as far as the camp was concerned. The commandants just handed over to him. He insisted then that after you had eaten and before you ate anything you had to get in a line and go up and he’d have boiling water, and you’d have to put whatever you were going to eat out of and with, into the boiling water and then go

and get your food and go back into some more boiling water and put it away till the next meal whenever that may be. So it was this intense care of hygiene that helped very much there, apart from anything we were able to do up on the hill.

Oh I’m glad you asked that because you know the Brits, we’re always

laughing at the Brits and going on about the Brits but we were short, we had no-one to nurse them, and Bruce sent a message down to the camps down below and it got down to one of the British camps and said we were short of orderlies. Nobody was trained. They were just ordinary troops. We used to train them. And could they do anything about it, and they sent up about half a dozen Englishmen and about 50% of them got cholera and died. They just worked on the cholera hill with me. A sequel to that was

when I was over in England in 1947 the big test, the famous cricket team was there at Lords and I managed to get a ticket to go to Lords, and at lunch time I observed, well I go round the front here in this wonderful ground and I went past the royal enclosure which is in a little two storey house in between the stands, it was then, and down and underneath it was quite open and it seemed to be informal down there. And as I walked past

this enclosure I heard somebody called out, “Captain Cahill, Captain Cahill!” And I looked round and there was Joe Higgins who was one of these Englishmen who came up. He used to work. He used to make me laugh. He worked in the Bag of Nails, a famous nightclub in London before the war, and there was Joe when he got back he had gone up from the Bag of Nails to the royal enclosure, working in the royal bar. He said, “Come in here Cahill.” I said, “I can’t go in there.” He said, “Come on, come on.” So I climbed

over the fence and got in there and sat on a keg of royal beer and had some beer with old Joe. He used to come and pick me up by cab about once a month and take me out to one of the halls they had, reunions and there they were all these fellows were there, the Brits and their wives or girlfriends or so on, but it was just like in Australia, the girls were pushed down one end and the men were all up the other end. I went out there, I

must have gone out half a dozen times. It is extraordinary isn’t it. You see, being in that camp, being a prisoner of war there I always said it was the greatest club in the world. No matter where you went you will always find somebody. When I was coming back from England after that effort, a couple of years later I came back as ship’s surgeon on a ship called the [SS] Port Hobart and they ran straight from London to Cape Town, and when they got to Cape Town, they said, “Come on we’ll get off here and we’ll take you out and show you Cape Town.” We went to a nightclub, it was

something like the old Trocadero was here in Sydney and there was a balcony upstairs and they said, “Come on we’ll see what goes on down below.” And there were still fellows there, lots of people at that stage still in uniform. There were sailors and airmen, God knows, all milling around the floor downstairs a great old going on and suddenly a brawl broke out and in the middle of it. I looked down and here’s a cove going hell for leather in an Australian uniform and it was one of the privates, and oh dear, he was a

funny boy. He was leading it, in the middle of the lot of it. He spotted me come down and get into this thing. I thought, no keep going. But I saw him after. So no matter where you go around the world you’ll always find an ex prisoner of war.

50% yes. Three out of the six died. That’s roughly. I couldn’t be exact in that. They died of cholera.

There was really no tent. All it was, the covering, the top, it’s all open down below and just that was put over a flooring of bamboo, cut bamboo.

That’s all it was. So the rain was there. The roof was supposed to keep them a bit dry, but it didn’t keep them dry of course, the poor devils. They were so ill they weren’t very interested whether they were dry or wet. In fact they probably would have been happy being wet.

Oh just you know, they would be vomiting and they would be in a mess. They were filthy all day long but they were just bathing them and they

would help me when it came to giving them running in saline and so on what you had to do. That’s about all you could do was run in this saline which we used to make. Fortunately there was a pharmacist with me in the camp and apart from Tom Wilson the, he was this English fellow who subsequently became professor of tropical medicine and so on. They

were able to go up to the Jap kitchen and steal enough salt and stuff they could with what few instruments or few things they had with them could get some saline with the right pH to run into them intravenously through the stethoscope tubing that you were using. So it was terribly primitive. Some people actually had to cut down bamboo to make needles. I fortunately had a few needles and I was able to use those all the time. I had enough to carry through. I don’t know how much fluid. It would run it

at a rate of knots. You know here you wouldn’t dare do it. They were so dehydrated that running a saline into their veins at a great rate didn’t seem to worry them at all and that was the only thing we had. Of course there was no penicillin. That hadn’t been discovered. Sulphonamides we had a few but it was no good giving them tablets because they’d only vomit them so you’d just have to rely on as they do now when anybody is exceedingly dehydrated, running in saline.

Oh it was more than palliative, because it was restoring the fluid. Otherwise they just dried up so that you could – you actually dehydrated. We actually poured all the salts in and whatever salt we could. It was just the salt we stole from the kitchen but after all that was all right. Now the amazing thing was, well they were so sick I suppose that it didn’t matter. You didn’t

worry. Here you’d say well they must have had reactions every now and again but I don’t remember any reactions, but I think we were probably too worried about, you’d do one fellow and then go to the next and the next. You’d spend half the day doing that. So again these Englishmen that came up, they had to do all the dirty work and they did it and they’re marvellous fellows.

When you’d see them in the early stages they would be and then of course as I told you, their appearance would alter so much, they became so dehydrated so rapidly that the only way you could keep tag as to who they were was to make these little bamboo tabs which we would sew onto their wrists. Once they saw you get one of those tabs and put it on their wrist you could see that you know, they’d just be so upset and so worried. They would almost give up the ghost straightaway. But however we got, I

think in the best of hospitals in those days the survival rate was somewhere between 40 and 50% and we weren’t far behind that so that in spite of all that. Nowadays of course if you have these antibiotics that you could run in that would be altogether different. In addition it’s a frightfully infectious disease, because all the streams are infected, so every time you

have a drink you get it up, if you don’t then contact people, direct touch and subsequently later on, as I told you, when the Indians and the other unfortunates came in with the women and babies with them, that was a most ghastly sight.

No these were largely, I don’t know where they came from. I think they were locally brought along by the Chinese particularly lots of Chinese. Some Thais not so many. Mainly Chinese and Indians and where they got these people from,

pirate them I suppose, and bring them up to work on the railway line.

Absolutely.

When Sonkurai was divided into two, and Bruce Hunt took the sick up to Burma then they left the sick, some sick or those who were too sick to travel in Sonkurai, then the Japs said well there’s only half of you there now so you’ll have to have only half the camp, and they filled the other half up with

these poor unfortunate natives who were just almost 100% had cholera, and they died like flies. Had babies. It was an appalling sight. One of the worst sights I’ve ever or anything I’ve ever had to deal with when newly born babies looking for their mother, they knew their mother but they had no-one to feed them, and we couldn’t look after them. It was really appalling. And the Japs at that stage, they had no compunction about it

all. They wouldn’t do anything. They just didn’t want us to go near them and they wouldn’t feed them and they didn’t feed them. The further it got away from Singapore the worse it became and the further you got up on that railway line the worse it became. It was just an appalling business there. You can understand them at times they, I don’t know, they, one only, an occasional Japanese

would do his block completely and just bash and kill somebody he didn’t like, a native but then when the whole thing when there was no, nobody cared about it all. It was no good going to the sergeant who was usually in charge of the camp. He couldn’t care less. You know you could never forgive them really as a race when that kind of thing went on.

Eventually after some days but I couldn’t do anything but at least I got permission to go down and see them. Some of them were just you know, might have had other things, wounds, or you could do that but to go down there then and try and treat, deal with these dead mothers and surviving babes and so on that was beyond anything we could do. It was the most

ghastly business. That’s where you can never really forgive them for the complete neglect of them. They couldn’t have cared. It didn’t matter. There were lots more to bring up and they can come just get rid of them, go out and burn them. That’s all we could do. I don’t know, I have no idea who they were of course and didn’t know what their mentality, mortality was. Nobody would know how many really died on that railway line. They

said once, one death per sleeper, maybe that’s right.

I don’t know. There were some I think, a great thing in some of them was the great desire to fight the [UNCLEAR] they’d do anything you asked them to do, and they’d cooperate every way. They were determined to. Now others as soon as they saw that thing go on their wrist they’d give up the ghost. They’d say well it’s the finish. They were all sick men before you started. They were supposed to be fit but most of them were sick. When they loaded us with

50% sick and then the others, the fellows that were fit so called fit that we took up there by the time they got 200 miles or so of march into the jungle in about ten days on very little to eat, no food, no organised food at all. They were all pretty exhausted by the time they got there and then they had turn round and make a camp to get themselves set up all over the place before they even started, so that then as soon as cholera hit the

place within a couple of days, a day or two we had the first case and then that came on so that it wasn’t easy. Actually the Japs did, if I recall rightly they did give us a few days off to get organised when that started because there was nothing there, nothing there at all. It was at that stage, that first few weeks or first few days when they managed to do quite a lot of work and build that dam. That was a masterpiece.

I would declare who was fit and who wasn’t fit. Well to start off with, no-one was fit so then you had to really, judgement, and it became worse and worse. In the end they would just force, whether you or I or anybody

protested. They just said we want so many men and they would come and take them. They took some and some fellows died out there going to the job or working there because they were exhausted before they started. But they were just so ruthless. Now it depended a good deal on the doctor. When I went up to Shimo Sonkurai, the main camp at least at

Sonkurai there, it was the most extraordinary thing because the doctor who did all the work there or most of the work was one of these Indians who were, what are they called, they were the half castes but he was a doctor though, and he used to go and do all the dirty work and go and do the thing in the morning, and James, his name was James, and he was a

lieutenant, he wasn’t a captain, he was a lieutenant because he was half –

The doctors there they just said, “Well he does that, that’s his sick bay, so he’s got to do it.” No that fellow James he used to fight like mad to get them going, to stop them being out on work but he had no help from these bosses.

I don’t know what it was. That camp was an extraordinary camp. The senior man in charge was Harris. He was known even to the Brits as Stainless Stanley. He was a big man and nobody knew just how good he was except himself but he reckoned he was the ballroom dancing champion of Great Britain, he had played tennis for Davis Cup for Great

Britain and he’d done every sport in the world, he could box. He just, James will do the work. He will fix it up down there. So it depended a lot on the doctor, yes it did. Then I suppose the next one was the Japs themselves. The ones that I found they were pretty good, the doctors as far as I was concerned they were all right well not all right but you could have saved some of them but you’d know that somewhere that you

couldn’t under normal circumstances be allowed to go out. It did really boil down towards the end because you had to say, well God, you know, they’re screaming for 300 men and there are only 500 who are fit. You’ve got to do something about it otherwise there will be real trouble in the camp. So at times I’ve had to say, “Well yes they can go out,” knowing very

well that they weren’t. Very difficult position. And it depended a lot who was on charge. I don’t think that the, you see I was lucky that Hunt was a very tough man and the Japs used to take a bit of notice of him. As I say, even when he went away I had the decision there so it was a bit easier in some ways but in some of the camps I don’t know, things might have been different. It depended a lot on who was the boss of the camp.

I didn’t strike many of those. No, they were the Japanese orderly. I don’t know if I told you about the orderlies. Oh this was another funny one, this is nothing to do with what we’re talking about now, it’s just a funny experience I had with one of the Japs.

There was one cove, Ioki, a little Jap –

He was in the camp. He was in the camp and he came to me, of course when he came into the camp he was a new arrival and a nasty little bit of work. He had one little, about three whiskers and he was very proud of this beard. He used to talk about it all the time. However he came in for various things and one day he came in to me and he had a piece of paper, and he had drawn his trouble and he was going, “Ohhhh dah dah dah,” and I

looked at this thing and all I could see was a hole here and a hole down here, and then it dawned on me that he had a belly ache. This was his mouth and this was his backside and oh he was going on about how bad this was. So anyway I said okay, he had been paying me cigarettes every time he came to see me so I said, “I’ll do something for you.” And I told you I had a pharmacist in the camp with me, and we got down and we told him

about it and I said, “We’ll make up the most vile stuff we can think of.” So he went up to the Jap orderly room and they pinched some red ink from the Japs and we got some of this foul water from some place round the camp and then they got some wild ginger and they had quinine, we had some quinine which that alone is bitter enough so that we put in there and then some stuff called acidphetedine, now that’s one of the worst smelling stuff. It used to be in the British Pharmacopeia, some kind of a thing. I don’t know what they used it for. But it’s the vilest thing I’ve ever tasted or

smelled. So we mixed up this terrible mixture with the red ink in it. It looked absolutely fantastic. So I got Ioki-san and said, “Well now, here you go.” I don’t know how much it was. “You’ve got to take it three times a day, 8 o’clock in the morning, 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock at night,” because we knew he was on duty in these hours. I said, “You’ve got to come up here to the sick bay where I am and we’ll give it to you, it’s too precious.”

He came up and I gave him a cup full of this stuff and he would drink it down and he would go, “Ohhh!” And he would go on with this and eventually the troops heard about this and they would come to see Ioki’s performance. It went on for days, it went on for a couple of weeks and Ioki said, “Oh!” “No, you’re getting better,” and get another cigarette, and he’d go up and have another drink of this foul mixture. But then one terrible day

came when he sacked me and I wanted to know, I said, “What happened?” I was in really trouble then and then I found out that a Japanese lance corporal, a medical had come into the camp and he went up with the same picture and he showed it to the Jap corporal and the Jap corporal said, “No good, no good at all.” That’s when I got into trouble. So I then found out what the corporal had ordered and he had told him that he had to give that, give the white and red stuff away, and he used to take this other stuff and that consisted of chopped up raw, chopped yak’s gall bladder. A yak

is one of those awful animals that pulls things around the country up there and he used to go and eat this stuff then. Oh God. And the sequel to all that was when the railway was built, going down on the train Stainless Stanley the British commander, we had been down at Nikke waiting for this train to arrive, it took three weeks this urgent train to arrive, and I got on and here’s Stainless Stanley and he said, “Come on Cahill you’re with

me.” I got onto this old flat top and away we went. We got down to, after all night freezing, we got down to a camp and Stainless Stanley said, “A great friend of mine runs this camp, we’ll go and have breakfast there if we have any luck.” And we got out there and there must have been the Bridge on the River Kwai guy, I think, because he had a wonderful camp as a prisoner of war camp, and he was going round as if he was still at Sandhurst or somewhere. So we sat down for breakfast. In the meantime Ioki was the

boss on this train and Ioki had gone off to see the Japs and have a meal and we had a good breakfast, we had some eggs and God knows what in this big camp, and about 10 o’clock I said to Stainless Stanley, “Sir I think we’d better go and see about that train. I don’t know what’s happened to them.” He said, “Don’t worry, Cahill, nobody would go without me.” I said, “Okay.” After about another half hour I would have another go. Eventually

at about 11 o’clock I said, “Look sir, I think I had better go and see what’s going on, it’s quiet out there.” And I went out and there wasn’t a truck to be seen or train anywhere at all and I had landed up there in the middle of Thailand with Stainless Stanley and we were AWL [Absent Without Leave] because they had gone. It took us about three weeks before we had to hitch ride down on the train and eventually got back to Singapore. I don’t know whatever happened to old Stainless in the long run. Ioki finished up on the train

going down too. He was our guard.

Well I think about 100 miles, quite a long way away and that was down on the flat. You see once you went up into the hills it was very different there. You see no whites, or very few whites had ever been through that country

before. It was rugged really tough hills.

Well originally the Brits through, apparently many years before and they were looking to put this railway through so they actually, apparently they used to come upon the pegs every now and again when we were going up there but they said no its uneconomic, you could never put a railway through there and make it pay, so it was forgotten and given back to the

Thais, the Thais had got the Brits in to give them advice so they didn’t do anything about it, so this was native country. There was no bird life there. Only small little birds used to run around on the ground, no wings or couldn’t fly.

The worse it got, sure, sure. That was partly the trouble because there was no way apart from the river and where we were in Shimo Sonkurai, we were away from the river. If you were on the river they used to bring stuff

up on the river. That was down the flat and up there, there was no way at all. No road. You see the picture. The road, we actually had no road. We were just going on a track through. That’s where that night I told you, you had to have the guy in front of you, have something white on his back so that you could see where he was. It was just pitch black. The only light

we had was the Nip used to have a candle inside a bit of bamboo that was hollowed out. That was a lamp and this is what he used to go through the jungle leading us. It’s a wonder we ever got there. There would be a Jap at the top and a Jap somewhere in the middle and probably a Jap down the back somewhere and we’d be stretched out over half a mile. Then quite a number fell over and broke their arms. They’d fall off the side of

the track and it was muddy and it was mountainous, so that in the middle of the night you might have to, I don’t know that I ever had any fractured legs, but we certainly had arms. And then we used to march from 6 at night till midnight, have an hour on a ledge, an hour off, and then go on. But

the rain was pouring down the whole time and we got drenched.

No. The interesting thing was to see the way when you started off you carried everything you could, but it didn’t take long to finish up with virtually nothing but what you could walk in.

A silent march and when we got up there we had nothing to even make a camp with really. However, amazing what you can do if you’ve got to. But

that was tough going, very tough going and the fellows stuck to it. They were wonderful the way they used to sing that Colonel Bogey thing all the time. That was a great march and they would sing that to get them going.

Oh no, they had parangs and these great big native knives and the Japs

might have given them some of that to go through but they carried on. Oh they had guns up there you know. When we got to Bangkok they then suddenly said, the Brits came down they had been there for 12 months and said, “For God’s sake get rid of all your guns and whatever you’ve got there.” And there was a well there and I went out to this well and here they were tossing stuff down this well. Before you knew what happened, you could see bits of guns sticking out of it. This is before we started out.

Oh the fellows had them in there in Changi, had revolvers and things. There was a revolver in my bag, in my case that they sent up there.

No I didn’t. Actually I had it out you know on that retreat up to Powa – what’s-its name, I had it out then because doctors weren’t supposed to carry revolvers but they’re just beyond the red cross. Red Cross brassard was no good at Parit Sulong.

That was hard, very hard. The Japs would give way eventually you know if you stuck to it but you had to stick to it and stick to it very hard, but then

you would, I would in any case, I don’t say other doctors, I wouldn’t know, but I would feel that eventually I was really acting as God you know, saying, “You’re fit enough to go out today old boy, but this cove’s worse than you are.” But they were all so sick but you just had to pick the better ones. It was no good just going on strike or to go in and say, “Well of course if you’re sick you can’t be fed, there’s no food for you.” That was the way they did it and they issued your rations according to the number you had on the road,

so if you dropped out and there were 50 less than they wanted that would be 50 less rations you got all through.

Well the cholera ones weren’t interested in eating of course, that was that. The other ones I can remember how you feed them. I can remember when that was all over, and one stage down in the main camp I was down in the main camp and I don’t know what I was doing, and suddenly there

was a commotion and this was among the sick and they were asleep on this bamboo thing up about this high off the floor, and suddenly they went rushing around like mad and before I knew what happened they had a great python that was asleep underneath them. They spotted this, these sick men and they got out with a knife and they were into it. Put it in the pot and ate it up in no time.

Oh yes. Yes, you did, that was the other thing. You see that was very hard. Mind you, you soon learned who the malingerers were regarded the fellows themselves would put it away, and they’d very often look after that. They wouldn’t have –

They wouldn’t have, I don’t know what they did to them but they wouldn’t tolerate a malingerer. You dealt honestly up there. When you get to that

stage I don’t know it all seems to come down to everybody is pretty square, pretty level there and they won’t tolerate a malingerer. I think they might have knocked him over myself, themselves, or anything at all.

I wouldn’t know about that but I know that they wouldn’t tolerate it. Everybody had to pull their weight, and that’s again where the doctor was so important because you had to be fair to the sick and fair to the guys

who were supposed to be well. It’s not an easy question. It was one of the hardest things I think I had to do. When things were really hot towards the end there, when they were pushing that railway very hard, I think I used to start sick parade at about 4 in the morning. You’d been up until about 10 the night before and then you had to go and see the guys in the dark and try and pick out who was fit to go and work, and they were all crook.

I don’t know, I don’t know. I hate to think. Then if you weren’t reasonably fair you know they’d soon let you know. I think the doctors were on the 1 to 10 numbers too. There were a couple there they weren’t so keen on but I don’t know. You just had to do the best you could, depending if you’re getting on with your CO well that makes it a bit easier but if you’re

not it makes it harder. Fortunately the CO of the camp really had handed over to Bruce Hunt the doctor, so that he ran the camp. That’s like Weary Dunlop. He was officially medical but he ran the camp and that’s what happened so that very often the doctors did run the camps. That made the, and then probably it would be easier then because they were the ones, the

ultimate. Whatever ones they said then went. I don’t know. I was fortunate to be in the camp with strong medical people. Some I think had trouble. It varied. Every camp differed from one to the other. You see if you go from Shimo Sonkurai to Sonkurai, when I got up there it was completely different,

those two camps.

That’s a hard one. I don’t know. I don’t think you could answer that one. Of course it would depend entirely on conditions and what the position of anything is. You know, you knew that people, some people didn’t get on with each other and some you heard stories that, oh that crowd are a bit

suspicious or something like that, but that didn’t make any difference in the long run I think, providing you were in a place that was reasonably well controlled. Now those conditions I’ve just mentioned there like that were at Changi more. You heard more of those kind of stories at Changi than you did when you were out on working parties.

Oh yes, Changi, you see there were a certain number a percentage of them, some never left Changi, they were there all the time. The majority were out on working parties. They would be in and out or they’ve gone altogether so that was a constant movement. Where I think, where you got people together I think that’s more when these kind of things, when they

started suspecting other guys and so forth and I think this applied to, I saw figures ten years after the war they asked me to have a look at the mental disturbances of POWJ [Prisoners of War – Japanese] against POW Europe officers. Far more mental troubles in Europe than in POWJ and they wanted to know reasons why and I said, “Well first of all I think they were all so tired that when they came home they weren’t worried about things. They’d forgotten everything. They’d just flop down and go to bed.” And the other thing is, was sheer

boredom. You see in Europe, Germany and so on, the officers weren’t allowed to work and sheer boredom came in. Now I was reading that thing in Manchuria, the senior officers that went up with Des Brennan apparently they had that trouble. The officers up there had nothing to do, and according to a book I read recently that was one of their troubles. Now I’ve never spoken to Des about that but boredom came in, but I don’t remember anybody being bored.

Oh yes Bruce Hunt, yes. Well he’s an extraordinary man. I’ll go back to when I first met him. He’d come over to Malaya with the 13th AGH and soon after that arrived and they were in Johor Bharu. I had some occasion to go down to the hospital and there I met John Frew who I knew roughly, well I knew him quite well really. He was one of the physicians of the 13th

AGH and he said, “Come and have lunch with us now.” And I went in and we sat down and John was on one side of the table and I was on the other and he said, “Oh good, here’s a friend I would like you to meet, Bruce Hunt. He’s related to me by marriage or I am to him,” and sat down. This man sat down. And I just couldn’t, I could hardly eat my lunch. This was the most arrogant man I’ve ever met in all my life. I just can’t conceive how John can be even friendly with the guy. However that was that and went away,

and of course later on, I didn’t see Bruce Hunt again until, well I might have met him once or so I kept out of his way and I didn’t see much of the hospital in any case. The next time that I saw him that I can recall was when he arrived in Shimo Sonkurai at 10 o’clock at night. He had been told that I had died with cholera and he and John Taylor, he had got John Taylor out and the two of them marched five miles up through the mud to

come and see, to take over from this guy who had passed on. And then I realised what an incredible man he was and he is one of the most extraordinary men I’ve ever known. He was still, it was just natural for him to be arrogant but he didn’t mean to be arrogant. He was I thought, well you know, I know you pretty well and I know you’re a very able cove. It wasn’t until I read his obituary that I realised that he had hidden a lot of his achievements or I didn’t know about them. I didn’t talk about them at all.

He was a most able man and a ruthless fellow.

Well perhaps the best way, when he came up there to that camp and he came in and took over immediately. He took over from the medical people, the covenants, and they were very happy to let him to do it. So then he called the fellows up and just said, “Now this is what you’re presented with.” And laid out to them and he said, “Now you’ve just got to pull together and get together if

you want to live. Your only chance of getting back to Australia is if you do what I tell you.” Bang. “The first thing that you’ll do is get all this earth off this ground here and we’ll get this camp going.” So then he said, “Who can do this?” Who can do that and do the other and then he had the whole thing organised and that’s the way he goes on the whole time. Then he’d be fighting the Japs. Even the Japs respected him. They’d call for, “Hunt Tai, Hunt Tai,” Major Hunt.

He’d argue with them and he did going up on the railway line when he was

marching up, he got into an argument with some Japs, little Nips, and he wouldn’t give way to them so one of them had a No 5 iron here, golf iron and he just bashed him with that and fractured his hands. Bruce had his metatarsals broken, metacarpals I should say. And that’s the kind, he was just fearless of them. He didn’t care. He just talked down at them. Now

Weary Dunlop was the same I’m sure. I saw Weary when we passed through him and when he was talking to me a little Jap came up and started screaming at him and he didn’t take any notice because Weary was a very tall fellow, Hunt was sort of tall too so the little Jap ran off and came back with the bamboo and screamed at him again and he still talked as though he didn’t notice him. And as I say he started belting Weary around the legs and Weary just kept on talking as though he wasn’t there. This chap gave up eventually. Now Hunt was the same as that. You see

he got beaten up with the No 5 iron and took no notice and just went on. The troops just admired him. He was a tough man but whatever Hunt said they’d do. If he said go and disappear over the lake there I don’t want you any longer they’d go. An amazing fellow. And he went on and he was tireless, he’d just go on, and even when he

was asleep he seemed to be thinking and planning what he was going to do next day. Sometimes he was right, sometimes he was wrong. If he made a mistake well that’s just bad luck. It didn’t worry him in the least.

Well actually, I think he made a mistake in taking the troops up to Burma. It was his idea and I think that was a mistake, and I think he did himself.

He was amazing. He had a book. You know Perth people. He was a graduate of Melbourne and then he went to Perth when he was quite young and he started as a physician in Perth, and they say within a matter of months almost, Perth was divided into two parts. The pro Hunts and the anti Hunts and he was that kind of man. He had become a very successful physician in a short time and of course then he enlisted and went away. He had been in the army. You know he just missed out on

the ’14 -‘18 war. He was one of those fellows he was worried about the fact that he just didn’t get away and he was into this one and he’d better get into properly, which he did of course, and with a great deal of distinction. Actually I think he didn’t get as much as he deserved. He should have got far more than he did. But then he fought with his superiors. He thought no trouble at all. He would fight with superiors whom he knew within Melbourne.

Oh, he would fight whatever he was against that day, but he didn’t like one of the well known senior officers who, at one stage the troops didn’t like this man either because Bruce didn’t and he had put himself to bed in Changi. He didn’t want to leave Changi obviously so he got sick. He was a very, I think he was quite an able cove and he probably was sick but he

realised, I don’t know whether he realised or not that it wasn’t a bad thing to be in hospital. But Hunt I tell you when Bruce Hunt came back from the railway line he took a dislike to this very senior officer, and he said to me, “I’ll get that bastard out of bed within three weeks.” And I said, “Oh yeah.” I didn’t take much notice. I didn’t think he would, by gosh he did. I don’t know what he did to that fellow but he had him up and about and he’d been on light duties for about three years, two years or something like that, but

Bruce had him up and that’s right, he just would be ruthless. He would have turned him out of bed himself if he’d got up. And actually in the last days when some of these Australians were shooting through a bit, things were a bit bad there towards the end. I didn’t see a great deal of it but he, apparently when some of these coves came in and said they had shellshock or something like that to him, he said, “Come outside and I’ll fix

you.” He wanted to go out, and he threatened to fight. He would have fought them too. But actually when he came back there was a movement here as I understand it, to put him up for, I don’t know what they were going to charge him with but back in his threatening things. I don’t know how he would get on these days. I just don’t know how Bruce Hunt could exist. Authority was nothing to him, he hated it. He was the only authority. Wonderful man.

Well that’s what, he was of course, that’s the extraordinary thing about it. I always said you know, you can see physicians or at least doctors in their specialties often depend on their mental make-up. Now physicians are usually the learned ones and they are. Well he was learned sure but they are the ones that time meant nothing to them. You’d find them going around the wards at night in the hospital and they’d meet each other and they would talk and talk and talk about these cases and so on. Whereas the

surgeons, tough surgeons would get in there and he would kick wherever there’s a scarping and say, “Right we’ll get in and fix this,” quicker than dah dah dah. I used to laugh. Then when I came back from England the next thing was that the eye men, and they were different ones again when I first came to Sydney. Norman Gregg, Sir Norman Gregg was the great man there. He was the king there. He was another one, he was a bit like Bruce in many ways. But his other contemporaries just whatever Norman Gregg said was right,

was right. Bang. He could say black was white and white was black and they’d say, “Yes Norman, that’s right.”

Oh Bruce was far more, far more egotistical than Norman Gregg. But the eye men had an annual general meeting to discuss something quickly. They would then sit down first and they would have dinner and discuss

dinner and then they’d go up, and then they’d have a general meeting and the darn thing would be so boring it would go on till midnight. The skin men they would come along and say, “Well let’s get the dinner over and get up to the poker tables.” So they were all different make-ups and I’m sure you’ve got them like that. Now you see Bruce Hunt probably excelled himself in many ways under those conditions up on the railway line. Had we not been, if we had just been there in the ordinary, I suppose continued in the hospital I think he would have fought with all his seniors and he

probably wouldn’t have become nearly so well known or nearly so successful. So that time, isn’t it, timing is everything.

Yes, yes exactly. So some people will shine in prison life while they’re in those conditions, prisoner of war life, whereas they wouldn’t outside and vice versa.

I think that they are people who often are very keen. They are leaders and they can be very competent leaders but you see some very competent leaders can be fools too but the wise ones were shrewd enough to know what they want and convince other people that they are right and they’re the real leader. Gallaghan was much the same. Gallaghan was a very tough man and old Fred you know, he had a saying that, “When a

man’s got a dirty job, he uses dirty tools.” Now he was fair, absolutely fair. I knew Fred Gallaghan very well. I knew him before I had ever been in the army so he was another cove. He loved the army. Had no children. Loved the army and that was his life. Extraordinary. I wouldn't say I think

he had a tough upbringing but he surmounted it all and was knighted. You know a great man, different altogether. Completely different to Anderson. Anderson as I told you he would, he didn’t, he led by, just example. He wasn’t a forceful character. He was fearless, clever no matter what he did.

He was a very successful grazier and he was loved by his troops. Gallaghan was loved by his troops but they feared him. Anderson didn’t have to use the big stick at all he just did it by personality. There was one case I can recall. There was one bad boy in the battalion and he had been in trouble under Maxwell and when Anderson took over this chap was up again

straightaway before Anderson the new chief, because he had gone and done something silly, and Anderson looked at his pay book and said, “Private So and So, you know you’ve got a lot of red ink in this pay book, what’s been your trouble?” and this cove said, “I’ve had too many bosses sir.” He said, “All right, well from now on, you’ve only got one boss and that’s me.” He said, “You’re going to be my bodyguard for the rest of the army.” Now that cove followed Anderson around and had no more red ink in his pay

book and he was killed in Muar alongside Anderson. There are just the two different types. So it’s the man and it’s just the occasion.

No, Bruce wasn’t a surgeon. No Bruce was not, he was a physician. That’s the other extraordinary thing about him. He behaved like the surgeon would you know, action, do something, get in, but he was a

physician and a brilliant physician. He had a book called, Houston, The Art of Treatment by Houston, this was his bible. It was an American, written by an American and he gave me one. I don’t know what has happened to it when we came back but there might be five pages are written in print, reasonable print about diabetes and you know this would be about their life their ordinary routine and life, and there down to the last few lines would be the actual treatment

you’d give. This book, but that was his thing. That was his bible in medicine. He followed this thing, the treatment of the patient handling of them what time they got up in the morning, what time they went to bed dah dah dah, what they could eat and then the last bit that much or something actual treatment.

Almost but you wouldn’t dare say that to him. He was the most

extraordinary man. He boasted he was. He did, he had a radical way of treating diabetes with the use of insulin and that’s now, they do what Bruce used to do. It was before they kind of, they regulated your activity by the amount of insulin. You know they cut down the insulin to the minor thing but Bruce said that’s nonsense give them the insulin they want so they lead a normal life, and they’ve got to have diets, certain amount and a lot of exercise because then in the end, you know when he would come to visit

me here when he came to Sydney and he used to come over quite a bit, the first thing he would do would be to ring me up and say, “I’ll be out there. I’m there.” At times he wouldn’t even do that. I’d come home and I would find he was ensconced here and he would be out into the refrigerator eating and he just broke all his own rules, and I think that’s what he succumbed to eventually his diabetes. But he was an amazing man.

No, Bruce wouldn’t do surgery, no major surgery. He did, he used to do

this business with the tropical ulcers, yes. He used to clean them out with a spoon I think it was, or some ghastly thing. I couldn’t agree with him there. He did that, you’re quite right but I wouldn’t regard that as surgery. I think that would be a physician’s way to consider he was a surgeon. But you had to do something. Those tropical ulcers were the most ghastly things. I can remember going from Shimo Sonkurai, I could smell this camp about a

mile away. The stench of it. They are the most terrible things. I’ve got a few scars here. Everybody had them. To treat them it was really hard to know what to do up there because you had nothing. I used to tie them up in banana leaves and I reckon that did them as much good as any. Just tied them up, something like putting them into plaster, the old plaster cast. You could tie some banana leaves around. You could get plenty of banana leaves mostly. But Bruce Hunt had this spoon treatment which I

thought was awful. If you were lucky enough to be near one of the rivers there you could go down and put your legs in the river and the little fish used to come up and eat all the gangrenous stuff. That was one of the best things of the lot apparently. Then if you got down to, if you could get down to the hospital later on, you could get rid of these cases and send them down there I think then they had a better chance, if necessary amputate.

Well one of my most successful ones was about Mr Ioki, and the ink and ginger and stuff for treating some sort of bowel disorder. I don’t know. You couldn’t do much, you see, for dysentery, and so that’s the ordinary dysentery up there in the jungle, the best you could do is get charcoal. We used to get bits of wood and burn that and then crunch it up and they used

to take that. Down, and early in the day, early in the piece, I can remember Cotter Harvey had us all eating hibiscus leaves going around the Changi camp eating these wretched leaves off the vines, I don’t know what you’d call it, growing along the hedges.

To try and get vitamin B. I don’t think there was much vitamin B in it at all but everybody thought it was good. And then they used to get this grass, luang grass, this long grass that grows up there and they’d bring that in

and they used to, they had some old chassis of cars and trucks and they go and pull these things out down into, among this grass and chop it down with the Japs’ permission and bring it back into camp and brew that up and that was a ghastly concoction too. That was called something or other, soup.

No, that was down in the camp. Up on the line there was nothing much

you could do except this charcoal. You had plenty of stuff to do there.

And the banana leaves, yes. Anything at all you could use. The main thing, the other thing at least that kept the flies off too, the banana leaves. I had to do a few abdominal operations up there in the jungle right up at the top near Burma. You used to, I had a few instruments and the drugs I

had pinched from the Shell Company island off Butterworth, Pulau Betong, early in the war. They were helpful. I had some, a mixture the Scots used, Scottish doctors of ether and chloroform for anaesthesia which is I think I mentioned before that dreadful stuff but quite effective.

I had a scalpel, yes. I had that in the tin box and a few blades so that was all right.

Oh I didn’t get any more, appendixes were about my limit there.

Oh well actually, you know, we’d tell the Nips we were going to operate and they would clear out. They wouldn’t have anything to do with that. We used to have, they gave us big green mosquito nets and I forget how many

under a mosquito net but we used to get one of those, take one of those down and we had an old ambulance stretcher and put him onto that and get the kuala, that’s the thing that they cook the rice in for breakfast and then we’d use that to sterilise whatever we had. I had found a few handkerchiefs for dressings aside when you were operating and I think I must have had a, I had a few retractors.

Yes, to hold the wound open and so forth. So that I just had enough to get by doing that. Now the dentist was the anaesthetist and to assist me, if one of the other doctors was there it was good. John Taylor he assisted a couple of times and if you were on your own, well you just had to get somebody who you thought was a sensible guy and tell him to go and get

scrubbed up and do what I tell you. But it was pretty dicey and exciting. But the Godsend was that the Nips cleared out if they knew you were going to do anything. They didn’t want to have anything to do with you. We used to give blood transfusions and we’d go up and steal the bike from the Nip orderly room and spin it on that, spin the blood on that so that you’d get a rough idea whether it was compatible or not. It was very crude but I gave quite a bit of that and got away with it.

Again the old stethoscope tubing and just the needles. It was a slow old business and then I ran this in. It was quite satisfactory. At times you know, coves had lost a lot of blood from an injury or something like that and there were plenty of injuries up there.

They used to get fractures and they’d get wounds from chopping because they were using shovels and picks, and shovels, and then they were

falling over and breaking legs, breaking arms, all these injuries.

No, the only one that I got mixed up in was when I was in Pulau Betong. This was early in the piece when I had gone out to this island, I had been

sent out to this island, the Shell Company island where the Brits had shelled most of the big tanks but still must be almost 30 or 40% of them still there, full of high octane spirit which the Japs wanted. So they sent about 200 Australians out there which I was eventually sent out there to this island, and it was quite incredible when you think about it. Anyway they were, when I got there, they were all claustrophobic. They’d been working

inside these huge drums all day long bashing them inside to get rid of the rust and the noise and the heat must have been terrific and they were all a bit troppo [crazy] I thought. There was one fellow I knew, a friend of mine, he was there, he was a sergeant and the Nips used to come in, in these little tugs to pick up this gasoline which they were running off through open

bamboo. They’d just run it down the hill in this longitudinally split bamboo in there, so if you had a spark or anything you’d have blown the whole shooting box up. Any rate this went on for a while. I was out there for some months and one day this friend of mine the sergeant came up and he had a great idea and he said, “Look we’ve got everything right, we’ve got a big map and we’re going to make a break for it.” And I said, “Where to?” And they said, “Australia.” I said, “Wait a minute, let’s get this straight, what do you

plan doing?” They said, “Well all we want you to do, we know you’ve got some morphia, and when the Japs come in here and work here we have to cook their rice for them. So if you give us the morphia we’ll put it in the rice and when they go to sleep we’ll knock them on the head and you can come with us and we’ll go to Australia.” And I thought oh God. But they were as silly as that at that stage. This rotten old Morris, bull-nosed Morris

motor, in this old thing which was probably worn out and everything else but they were quite serious and they would have had a go at it. That was one. Now the other one –

No, no, no. I wasn’t going to be silly. Fortunately I wasn’t silly enough to do that one. When I was up in Sonkurai, Shimo Sonkurai, they brought, one very distressing thing was when they brought a few fellows out who had escaped and were picked up in the mountains and they brought them in with a ball and chain around their legs and beards right down. They

hadn’t been shaved, and long hair, and you could just see their faces and they had them in a cage and they left them in a cage on the other side from the camp and they put them in isolation there waiting to go to Singapore. Eventually I got permission to, the Nips said I could go over and just see them and see that they were all right. But they were just, apart from the fact they were just starved and they weren’t getting any

food, I managed to, they used to put one of these kualas that we used for everything, put some tins of something whatever we had there underneath the rice and take them over just a slither of rice they could manage that but they could eat in the cage. They kept them there for about a week and then they took them down to Singapore and they were beheaded. Actually then it was just pretty useless trying to get out. You know, I knew certain characters used to go out regularly out through the wire at night and do a

bit of trading but I didn’t. I never got mixed up in it. There were some coves, McAlister was one, who produced that book. He took that photo.

No. Oh I saw people killed on the line yes, with them bashing with these great bolts, bolts about this size from these big wooden bridges. They’d

just go up and whack them on the head these fellows, the poor Indians. They were working down the river and he annoyed this cove and he’d just get up and whack them on the head. Terrible. Smash their head open. That’s bad. That’s horrible. I was only thinking about it this morning that kind of thing, any cove, anybody. I suppose if you’re starving and hungry

yourself you know you’ve got a rotten job or, I don’t know, you’d get so wild that you’d go and bash him on the head. But when you think the whole lot of them, when they’re doing thousands you know, they just took no notice at all from the old colonel, old Colonel Bano down. They had no, they didn’t care how many died. They just said you know, you’re lucky to be alive here so that if all the prisoners of war died it doesn’t matter. You’re only animals. That’s when you think about, that’s the really dreadful

thing. You wonder have they changed that much? Don’t know. Hard to think you know, the spartan way that they’ve been brought up for thousands of years it’s going to take a long time to get rid of some of it. I

don’t know how you do that. That’s very hard and it’s very hard now when you see them there you know, and they are industrious and smart, both guys and dolls, both can go up to Tokyo. It’s a wonderful and amazing country but you don’t know what happens when the bell tolls. But the same applies to Australia. God, look what’s going on here at the moment. A shooting every night, and you can’t, the funeral the other day. The poor unfortunate

policemen, they jeer.

Yes, but still they’re in clover compared with what we were in. If they’re up there but see they’re air conditioned huts, air force people were living there beforehand. I am square and I go along with it entirely. What I

would like to know is anybody who says, “Oh no, you’ve got to let them in you’ve got to let them because they’re refugees.” If you let one in then you let ten in, then you let a hundred in, then you let a thousand, where are you going to stop and how many can we take just opening up the countryside. Now if somebody doesn’t take a stand like Howard did and say, well I’m sure that maybe Howard just thinks, “Yeah, it is inhumane,” but the number of people coming in now is negligible but had it been going on now they

would be coming in thousands and Australia can’t take thousands. It can’t take, well it certainly can’t take tens of thousands.

Well having been a prisoner of war I’m biased I suppose, but I think most prisoners of war think the same way as I do. You’ve got to put a limit. There’s a limit to everything just the same as there should have been a

limit to what the Japs did to us. The other way round. War’s a dirty thing, a horrible thing. And of course there’s a question of, we had better not get onto it, but the question of terrorism. It’s awful. It’s awful. What’s going on now in Palestine. It’s shocking when they can come and fight on the

churches. So it makes, I must admit I think being a prisoner of war must have affected me in many ways. I don’t know whether I told you. When I first came back the first party I went to was down to my surf club at Palm Beach and there I ran into an old friend of mine, John Deakin. He was at school with me and subsequently [UNCLEAR] and John said, “Oh heavens above,” he was in the air force, he said, “come out here and tell me, come, we’ll get a beer and come outside and tell me.” And I was still in army greens, “Tell me

what it was all about.” So we went outside and after about 20 minutes I’m talking away and he’s just listening and he just suddenly stopped and he said, “You know Lloyd, I think it probably did you the world of good to be a prisoner of war. You were a terrible bastard before you went away.” So there you are. So I always think of John Deakin. Maybe it did me good. He thought so.

Oh yes. I don’t mind talking about it. It doesn’t worry me that much. It really doesn’t worry me but I think that nature is very kind for most people in any case. I think you kind of forget some of the bitter parts and the really nasty parts and remember the funny parts and the amusing parts, and I think of all the wonderful fellows that I met and still have been my

friends all my life. Unfortunately there’s not many left now. But they were wonderful guys, wonderful fellows and I think I did learn a lot. I think I learned a lot from some of the things you’ve been asking or talking about this morning for instance, who goes out to work and who doesn’t. You really get down to the bottom of humanity in those conditions and I am quite convinced that, and I always have been, that there’s a small percentage, a small percentage of most race or any race I suppose. But in

my experience, Australians, there are a small percentage that no matter what you do for them no matter how well you treat them the better you treat them the more they let you down. There’s that small percentage. They’re shockers. We mentioned it earlier. I don’t know what you do with those people. I don’t think you can. The kinder you are to them the worse they are to you in the long run.

No, I don’t think so. I was never, I was always convinced that somehow or other I was going to get out. I just didn’t believe that I’d be there forever. There were times when I thought it was getting pretty tough but even up on the railway line I, those coves, well I had the greatest friends. People, they’ve said that – The 30th Battalion fellows who’d just adopted me and they’ve been my lifelong friends and wonderful guys that I would never have met otherwise, and I met them under pretty dreadful

conditions but they were fantastic men and a lot of them have done very well, extremely well after. I used to wonder how any of them could come back and settle down to a normal life particularly the ones that went in for some magnificent thieving when it was necessary, and there was a lot of that, but they’ve all come back and they’ve been great characters and a lot of them very successful. There weren’t many that weren’t. I don’t know of anyone who was counselled.

I don’t think it was necessary. When they got out, when they were out, when at last they were released and this all came so suddenly it was quite an amazing business, you almost thought oh thank God that’s over. And then I say, when it came to get back and all the things they were going to do, all they wanted to do was eat bread and butter. So they’re all pretty

basic people when it’s all said and done, when they come down. I think they all, I suppose it’s a big family eventually. It was almost like a big family. Even with the Brits it’s the same. You still have friends from England and some, Archie Dillon, the most wonderful Englishman. He used to come out. He went back. I often wondered what happened to him and then he lobbed in here a long time ago now, he and his wife have been out two or

three times and as soon as they came they would get in touch with me. Now he was one of the greatest Englishmen there but after the war he, I said, “What are you doing now Archie?” He said, “I’m over, drilling.” He had been in the Indian Army. He said, “I’m really over there now you know, putting down drill, boreholes, bores and things for the Indians, you know.” He said, “They’re very short of water.” So he’s out of one frying pan into the fire.

So that’s what he gave his life to. He was going around to it, just because the Indians that he had been with, he felt that he should go and help them. That was his life, he and his wife.

I was probably a fairly terrible fellow beforehand you know, according to Deakin. I don’t know. I can’t answer that one. A few things like I was telling you about now I’m probably biased but I am a pretty reasonable

sort of a character I think, most times but if I do my block I do it properly.

Oh Christmas, Christmas was always observed yes, no matter where you were. Birthdays I don’t think they appeared very much at all no. I can’t recall anybody being very excited about my birthday. But Christmas they always tried to do something at Christmas, yeah. It was quite extraordinary. Even the Japs would try to ease off a little bit with Singapore itself, but I don’t know that it made much difference to us up on the railway line. I don’t think it did there. I don’t remember Christmas at

all on the railway line. We certainly didn’t do anything up there, not where we were.

No, I didn’t keep a calendar, no. It was hard enough to get anything to write on but as some of them, I don’t know where they got the paper but some did get paper and some did keep a record. There were records, very accurate records of F Force kept in the camp that I was on, by Rod Eaton,

and handed over officially. They managed to get paper, pinch a bit from the orderly room or something like that. They kept very good records. Actually there were pretty good records right through. That tome of the 19th, they’ve got details of everything in that book. And they were scattered all over the Far East but they knew where pretty well everybody finished up. Quite extraordinary.

No, nothing like that. I didn’t see anything like that at all. Well actually I was in the hospital, I was in the hospital one year and they tried to do something there but it was nothing very much. There was nothing much you could do. Nothing much you could do there. And outside working on

the parties I don’t remember anything at all about Christmas. No doubt it cropped up but they didn’t do anything. I think probably some, the most you could do is probably if you can sketch something make a little note or a card or something of that kind.

Yes. I don’t know. They were too good for me. I fortunately had enough

needles that I brought from the Shell Company island so I didn’t worry about that. They told me the stories and they’ve got drawings of them but it must have been terribly difficult to make them, a needle out of bamboo. I don’t know that. It would have been a pretty wide bore one. I was lucky to have those needles. I’ve still got the syringe upstairs.

I’ll see if I can find it for you. I’ve got that. It’s amazing, and a stethoscope. It was funny when I first joined the army, when I first went up to Wallgrove when I had been told that I had a doctor as my commanding officer, Rex Money, was head of the hospital, he was subsequently a neurosurgeon here, he had one hospital and somebody else had another hospital and I didn’t know anything about it all. After about the second day there I thought this is, I’m sick of this Wallgrove place I want to get back to

Sydney. So I went up to Maxwell, my CO, and I saluted and I said, “Oh Sir.” He said, “All well, Cahill?” “Actually Sir, I was wondering if I could have the day off tomorrow. I have some things I want to do down in Sydney.” He said, “For instance Cahill, what do you want to do.” I said, “Oh well I’ve got to get a haircut.” He said, “Oh yes, and what else is there?” He said, “Well actually do you see that hut over there?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “That’s the barber’s hut,”

he said, “you’ll be able to get a haircut there.” And I said, “Thanks very much Sir.” He said, “Anything else?” I said, “Oh yes,” I said, “I’ve forgotten my driver’s licence.” He said, “Oh look,” he said, “that’s all right,” he said, “you know the way things are now all you have to say is you’re in the army, and so if there is any trouble let me know.” And he said, “Anything else?” I said, “Yes as a matter of fact I haven’t, I didn’t bring my stethoscope.” He said, “Don’t worry about that.” And he put his hand in his pocket and he said, “Here’s mine, you can

have it.” So I gave up then. So I had his stethoscope all through the business. He gave up medicine and he finished being a doctor then and he gave it to me.

Well Kappe, no. I didn’t really know Kappe. I’d heard of him of course because he had been there. He was a big, six foot man and sigs [signals] didn’t

interest me very much. He was then appointed to command F Force but he didn’t come across my path at all until we were coming back, we were back and we down at Bangkok at a party in Bangkok and we were put onto this ship to come back to wherever we were going, back to Singapore ultimately. And that’s where Kappe turned up and that’s where I met him there because I was the medical officer with his bunch of a thousand guys. There was one other I think, Col Jupner from Adelaide. Just the two

doctors there and a thousand men, and they came and took us out and put us on this old ship. So that’s when I first met Gus and he was always there but he was, oh actually he had been there, we were there for a month or six weeks so I was pretty close to him for some time, just in weeks together all the time. But he was obviously, I felt he was, he just didn’t seem to realise, he wasn’t a fighting, he’d never had experience in the

rough and tumble. He was an academic. He was a nice fellow but it was just beyond him. He just didn’t seem to realise and the troops knew it, and they all knew that he hadn’t been up on the railway line. He would have been inadequate or apparently inadequate. But he was quite sure in his own mind I’m sure, that he in fact had done a great job. But then, anyway we finished up on this old ship together, and I think I mentioned before

somewhere that for some reason or other I had being a doctor I was to go and sleep with the Japanese in their quarters and Gus Kappe was down there sleeping in the bunkers too, the coal bunker and that’s the time when he woke me up in the middle of the night and wondered why on earth, why a young fellow like me hadn’t been married. For a man that’s commanding a force like this out there, he’s really not with it and he was a nice guy, but he was just hopeless, he just didn’t know. I’m sure he thought he was good. I’m sure, I’m quite positive he just thought he was the ants

pants but he was just quite inadequate.

Oh no, no, no. He was separated. The main part of F Force was about, that was down at, down towards Nikke which would be about 20 miles

down. That was his headquarters there. So we were up there. There was no communication at all. Well there were five miles between camps or something like that but there was quite a big distance between Kappe but I never saw him. If he did come well I didn’t even know he was there if he had come up to the camp but I don’t think he ever got up to Shimo Sonkurai. I don’t think he got anywhere near it. But he, you know even then they knew that he was one, but there were others up there who were inadequate but he was the senior one who was inadequate.

Well he should have been out fighting the Japs and come along and try and cheer the guys up, the ORs up, the people, but I didn’t see him. Well I knew he was in charge but I didn’t know anything about him at all. I wasn’t very interested really. But you know, when you got back later on and on the ship and then he had this box because he sat on it all day long

like an old broody hen, and everybody then reckoned he had gold and silver and diamonds and all those things in it, and food, but I think he had some records and things like that in it. Oh God, he became famous for that, Kappe’s box. Everybody knew about it and how it had disappeared when he was getting on board the ship from the barge. I have no idea what happened to it. I was there and I didn’t see it go.

Oh yes.

We used to talk about you know, how great, what a great soldier he was and the terrible conditions and he wasn’t trained for this kind of thing, dah dah dah dah. He’s like one of the IT [Information Technology] blokes now. Being a sigs man he was far advanced in his knowledge of things rather than these poor ORs.

That was all just natural to him. It went over his head.

No, he wasn’t. He didn’t. No, he thought he was doing a good job. No, he thought – but he was just, it was no good going to him. I didn’t have to deal with him but he was famous up and down the line. He just kind of sat there and was useless like I don’t know, pulling me in to fight one of these

champion boxers, world champion boxer. He thought he was sparring. He thought he did a great job. I think he did really think he did a great job. He just didn’t do anything. He just went along for the ride but thought he had done a great job. When you think of the other funny thing about it, the old Jap gentleman, Bano I think it was Bano who was in charge of the camp. He was the senior Jap and he was useless too. The

two of them. They were a useless pair. So that there was no one on either side. Bano was hopeless. I always called him, “Look at this old fool,” or something, coming up, and he was I think, resurrected you know, been in the army somewhere and they pulled him back to go up there to be in charge of prisoners of war. As far as a Jap is concerned that’s almost as bad as

being a Korean. Not very high in their estimate of importance. But even if he went and he started to argue with the Japs and I’m pretty sure that he didn’t make first base, they’d just take no notice of him. You had to have somebody like Bruce Hunt who was willing to go in and fight and argue and take a beating.

I don’t know. I don’t know what would have happened to poor old Kappe if he’d had a five iron on him. I think he reckoned he was a pretty good athlete when he was at Duntroon. I don’t know. That was the other sad thing I suppose, you know the fight between the Duntroon and the civilians which was on all the time

with Bennett. That was the bad thing. The hierarchy in Singapore was another really, you’d have to look to that I suppose nowadays to see what was the cause. That and the fallacy, and the story, the rotten the story that had been told this was the great bastion. I can remember being told about – “Oh you’re safe as can be up here in Singapore. Nobody has ever dared to come down here.” I believed that. What we all thought we

were going up to Singapore for. This is ridiculous you know, what are we going up there for? Even on the Queen Mary when we turned round I thought we’re going there to have a good time and see what it’s all about. But it was a different story. Those guns that were pointing south. They were famous. Everybody used to talk about them. Oh you know those guns would blow anything out but when they turned one round and turned it onto the tower, the sultan’s tower it just went straight through the tower

and along the road, bump, bump, bump, and didn’t even explode. They were armour piercing, they were no good. They just made a noise, great noise like a train. And you were waiting for it to explode and nothing would happen and just go bang, bang, bang. One day at the hospital there, a fellow came in with a truck and he said he had been hit in the back by a shell. They said, “What do you mean, he’s been hit in the back by a shell?

Don’t believe it, don’t believe it.” He said, “Well come and have a look.” This thing had bounced along the road he was going so fast, he was in an army truck, bounced along the road, this thing bounced into the back of the truck, hit him in the back and it didn’t go off, just as he finished, and he had it in the back and he brought it to the hospital. Another fellow came in who had been hit by, the bullets were quite small too, and he had been hit and this thing had hit him in the neck here and he thought he had something in his throat and they had a look down and there was this little bullet and it only got half way through his

neck and lodged in there. Put a thing down and pulled it out.

Yeah. But their bullets didn’t have the piercing capacity that ours did. The .303s, they were devastating. Get hit with a .303 you really had had it but these were much smaller and not the penetrating power at all. And as I

say, the big guns were armour piercing, because they were armour piercing they were no good either.

Oh it was quite extraordinary, quite extraordinary to see you know, these fellows when they were brought in from, just picked up where they were and put in the back of a 15 hundredweight truck and brought in and they

were in an awful mess. A lot of them of course didn’t live. I don’t know what they did. They must have records of it but it was quite [UNCLEAR]. Mind you I’d get into the operating theatre and start doing anaesthetics and I’d probably be there for 12 or 14 hours or something like that. You’d just go till you fell pretty well asleep, so you’d go and have a sleep and back. So you didn’t see much what went on outside at all. As soon as you woke up you had a

meal and get back into the theatre so that just went on all day. It’s funny, once I started on the anaesthetic part I just kind of got locked in there and didn’t see much more, and what went on I don’t know.

Oh no, no, no it’s something quite extraordinary. I mean we used to see them at Vincent’s. We used to get quite a few. The Gap was the going

thing then. We used to get them in from the Gap you know, smashed up and you’d get quite a lot of accidents but not like war wounds. War wounds are shocking because then during action they were dreadful wounds there.

Oh, it just depends what it is. They just explode and some of them are so –

Some of them are burns, some get terrible burns. Others, a shell explodes or something, a landmine or anything like that, and thank God we didn’t get too many of the landmines to worry. Now they must be awful. But they’d just come in minus... I can remember down on that retreat another Major Anderson and with the Indian Army fellow and he came and he said, “Oh God,” he said, “Doc, I’ve just got a bit of an injury here – ” dah dah dah dah. His

bit of an injury consisted of his arm being blown off and hanging by a few bits of skin. So I said, “Well you know, things are a bit grim here, I’ll see what I can do.” So I just cut it off and put his arm aside and tied up his, put a tourniquet on his arm. I thought, I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do with this. Can’t do anything at all. And he said, “Oh thanks very much old man, it’s very kind of you – ” and dah dah dah, and walked away and the next thing I heard was bang! and he shot himself. Got his own rifle and killed

himself. It was shocking some of the things. And we had legs blown off, and down there on that trip that was dreadful because there was nothing you could do. The coves would be brought in with legs off and arms off and heads off. The bad ones they were often dead so you couldn’t do anything, we didn’t have time to do much with them at all, nothing. Howard Green was the padre. I didn’t see him. The only time I saw Howard was

when he was running around with his revolver and he didn’t have time to bury them or do anything like that. So the badly wounded, we’d put them on the truck and they’d die on the truck. Well then the others wounded would come along and they’d be lying on top of them so you couldn’t take them off so you had dead on the truck. Dreadful business. Then the next

thing the Zeros would be down and shooting and whack you through them, the truck got hit many times. I told you that the windshield just went one between the two of us. So it was just sheer luck. They used to say, “You know, your number’s on the bullet.” I’m sure that’s what it was. Just no matter what you did you just did something and you hoped it was good enough. Didn’t have time to

think much at all really. All you were doing was, once you ran out of morphia there was not very much, but even with the morphia I just gave it to the orderlies and they used to, I’d just push it straight in through clothing and everything else. It made no difference, just give you a good big dose, I hope that knocks you over. Put them to sleep in any case. That was a rough old time.

No they were usually so knocked about they wouldn’t have, but I wouldn’t know some of the doses I gave. I didn’t have time to worry too much. You had to give a guesstimate. So then, as I say, then we we’re having run

out and then got some morphia dropped from the air and that didn’t last very long but they didn’t realise the trouble we were in. They gave a reasonable amount but there was nothing else you could do for those poor devils than make sure they went to sleep in one way or another. There was no way of getting them out. If they got out they were going to die or

they were dead. The ones there, the unfortunate ones were the ones who had fractured legs and things like that. They couldn’t walk so you either they knew that they’d have to take the risk otherwise. There were others of course, we got I s’pose some of the walking wounded and they came out and got

away. Some made it and some didn’t. But that was a grim show, very grim. So after that, having got over that then I say the next thing was F Force so that then you got it the other way just illness and so on. It’s amazing. You know little did I ever think that I would see anything like that when I graduated or did medicine and to think that you would see all these

strange things. Smallpox. I had one case at camp. Shimo Sonkurai had some smallpox at one stage. Not Shimo, Sonkurai. Pretty well every disease you can think of. Most, a lot of course you had never heard, you’d read about but didn’t know anything about. So I suppose it’s been an

interesting life in many ways. And I’ve been very lucky, very lucky.

Oh yes we had TB [tuberculosis] and things like that before we went away. Oh plenty, yes. They were good that way. I used to react. Well I was sensitive to

penicillin. I found that out at one stage and that wasn’t very good but then I used to react to TB in a big way. I refused to have any injections last year. They used to try and give me injections for the flu and I said, “No I’d rather have the flu than get one of those things.” I blow up like mad. I had one last year and I must admit it has been good, so I think I’ll have another one now. I think I’ve got over the, you know, immunity problem.

Not really, not really. I didn’t. I saw them around you know. You would see them around beforehand but I didn’t see any monks at all on F Force no. I don’t know where they went to. I think they had to clear out and disappear and take their yellows off. I didn’t see any around, no. You’d

see the monasteries, some of the little monasteries but I think for their own safety and so on, I think they’d have to get back into the jungle. Didn’t see them. It was a strange business. One of the worst things, the certain events that do stick in your mind. I can remember a few weeks after we were, the capitulation, somehow or other I was put on a truck I went into

Singapore. I don’t know why. I can’t remember why it was. It must have been to go and pick up something with a few people. I remember being on the back of this truck, an army truck, and we were going across one of the bridges in Singapore. I looked up and there were, on the lights, every one, was a head hanging down. They’d been decapitated and they were hanging from the lights, from the lamps down there. And then a bit further

on you’d find the whole body was hanging down. I thought this is ghastly. This is the finish of the white man in here. And then the next thing I saw was some Brits coming around a corner and they had their boots on and they had no shirts, and they were all white and pink out in the sun and they didn’t have hats, and they had rope girdle things around their shoulder and

they were pulling these trucks, obviously the trucks’ motors must have been out or something. Loading up, they were going round cleaning up Singapore and they didn’t give them real trucks they gave them these things. They had to take the garbage, all the mess, and then pull them along. They used to have about these rope things with about ten men on each big rope harnessed to the carts or whatever they were pulling, through Singapore, in front of all the people and I thought this is the end,

this is the end of the white man here, which it was. They just did everything to humiliate them particularly the Brits. I didn’t get into Singapore. Well I didn’t get in a great deal but that was the first time and it was a shocking thing to me. I saw far worse after but just to see those heads and then the Brits dragging the trucks through. That was terrible.

You see the working parties did go into Singapore then. They went into the great world and the happy world and they did quite well at that stage but their best supporters were the girls from the great street, the brothel street. If they went through in trucks the girls would come out and throw them money and food and stuff.

The girls that worked in the brothels. All the girls. There was a well known street there, what in the devil is the name of it? Oh God, it’s terrible

isn’t it, when you can’t think of the name of the prostitute street? They used to have to come back to the camp at night through there and the girls gave them a great welcome every time they went through and stuck them up some food. Probably paying them back for some of the money they had earned. Oh what was the name of that street? Dear oh dear. It was well

known internationally, everybody knew the name of the street but I can’t remember it.

Oh yeah, well we were paid, yes. We were paid all the time in this mythical money, this mythical paper money. I forget the name of it now. Yes it was, and then on the railway line that was whacked up. The officers used to

get paid a bit more than the troops but it was all put in a common thing and that used to be put into the camp and the quartermaster used to buy things. Up there when we got established a bit up on the rail line the traders would come along on elephants and they’d have sales on their back, on the elephant’s back. Marvellous animals, marvellous animals. I

loved them. They hate white men you know, particularly the baby elephants. They don’t like the smell of the white man. If you go along these jungle tracks they used to come up and bat you on the backside. The way they would go down, I only saw one piece of machinery on the whole business up there and it was a big Caterpillar [bulldozer], a Cat, the real Cat that they’d brought in somewhere. They’d gone and brought it into the jungle and the Nips were on this thing showing them how to drive it and they

would try and pull a great log out, a big teak log out and every time they’d go the thing would go dah dah dah, and the thing would stall and back it would go. And after about four days or something an elephant boy came along with a big elephant and he hooked the chains onto this log and the old fellow just went woo woo woof! and it came out like a match. It was incredible. And the way they used to, you know the rivers up there are

very fast running. They would line up, they would get a barge, the boys lived on this little bamboo raft with the elephant. The elephant was always around somewhere but the elephant, when they wanted to go to the other side, most of the rivers weren’t that big where they were, and you’d see the elephant go under the water and the trunk, the old periscope would be up in the air and he’d still be taking this raft across the river. He finished up in

the right spot all the time. They were fantastic. And then they would go along and they would pull these great logs out of the jungle and they’d line them up like that, one against the other you know, at right angles to each other and you would see them put their back leg out to just get it in line. Extraordinary animals. I loved them. Still do. You do too? Oh yes, they’re great. Yes, they were fascinating. I see there’s one for sale here or something in the paper if you want an elephant for your back yard.

Somebody’s got it up for sale.

Oh they’d have a bit of ‘Sikh’s beard’ which was tobacco, and it was filthy looking, this brown stuff you know. Oh God it was awful stuff to smoke. Local stuff. Fruit, local fruit and so on, they’d grow up there. There might

be some eggs from WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and so on but it was Sikh’s beard, was the thing they were after. It was something to smoke. If you had a Bible, a rice page Bible you were a very, very lucky guy because the old hands from Long Mai and places, the old boys they’d show him how, they’d get a page, a rice page of the Bible and they could get a razor blade and they could just split it. They’d just rub the edge like that and it gives way in one part and they can just peel it

like that so if you’re smoking you always had, you could get two papers out of the one page. Many bibles went up in smoke, holy smoke. They were amazing. You know we used to play cards. Eight of us used to play Bridge and there was always four of us there, we’d be back in Changi, mostly you could always get four and we played all the time I was there. I haven’t played since I left but we played for three and a half years on and

off and in the end we finished up pretty well square. But you know, one chap had, he had been, made by his batman or some clever man who got a bit of a crashed plane, aluminium in there and he had made this little tin for the Sikh’s beard and he was so proud of this tin. Bob Skeen he became the world’s best polo player. He was famous and he lived in America after the war. He’s an Australian, came from Camden. I always remember Bob.

He was very meticulous. He was Indian Army. Very meticulous. He produced this thing and put it on whatever we were playing cards on and it would be engraved and then he’d take out the Sikh’s beard and the tobacco from the Bible and we’d all have a puff of that before we started.

Yes, yes they used to come. Well this was towards the end. They used to come along with the elephant every now and again and did something.

They didn’t mind that, no.

No, they didn’t mind as long as you kept working. They didn’t care what you did really. You could go and blow yourself up but fortunately they didn’t do that. No, they didn’t, well they knew they couldn’t do much but I think they agreed to that. You see they did themselves, take you out every now and again to go and buy food. They’d know where some of these fellows were, so every now and again they’d take some of our troops out to

go and replenish if there was one of these fellows around to go and get stuff. I think they could even probably order it towards the end. You didn’t get much. What else did they used to get? They used to bring in water, waterlily root that was like potato and then when we were back, Bruce Hunt,

when we got back to Changi he said, “This is the thing to do we’ll get our own gardens going.” So he got onto a thing called amaranth and he grew, it’s a like a spinach and it grows like mad up there and he had quite big things going, and more people, and they had quite a big amaranth factory going around the jail. And then suddenly fellows were getting pain in the back and God knows what, and then it was obvious suddenly there was an

acute epidemic of renal colic, kidney and this is when I was doing the path work and suddenly they started bringing urine in, and you’d look in and you’d see millions of these crystals, the amaranth crystals they make enough to block the urinary system and they were getting renal colic. So we had to stop cooking. Everybody had to get rid of it. We nearly killed

ourselves. That was one of Bruce Hunt’s mistakes. Never thought of that before. But that was a garden. That’s going back and that’s when he went mad on gardening and got this old fellow out of bed that had been there for too long for his liking. That was in the amaranth days. Extraordinary. I can always remember, again getting back to Darto, Dart

and the other guy, they came up one day and they all had to come up and we had to do all these horrible tests you know, examine the stool tests and God knows what. I tell you it’s a very boring business sitting there all day even as a prisoner of war looking down a microscope at that kind of thing. And Darto and Preston came up one day and they had to produce a stool each and then they’d give it to you in a tin hat and you’d have to go and do this thing. And you’d look down and oh God, and you’d see stuff floating

all round the place and Darto came along and I was looking down and he and his old mate were still there, I was looking down at this thing and I thought oh God, you know, why have I got to do this and then when I had finished Darto, pressed the pick and he looked at me and he said, “Can you see anything down there when you look at it, old man?” I said, “Yes.” “Can you see anything

down there, old man?” Most uninteresting. Most uninteresting.

All shapes and sizes and consistencies. So you would give them back their hat and say, “Now you go on and deal with that.” Then the Japs then at

one stage after the cholera, they said, oh God, you know, they got a great idea and this was priceless. I don’t know if they’ve told you about this. Over in the main camp where the troops were, we got frightened about this cholera so the next thing they said well we’ve got to do, the Japs have got to do something, so they got the great idea of glass-rodding. Got to have a

glass rod test. Well they produced all these little glass things about that long and you had to get the troops up and they had to drop their trousers all over the place, all ready to take them off and stand over and you had to stick this into their rectum and come out to see if they’re getting any, growing any wogs, they’d grow. So these are the glass rod parades, but it was priceless to see the senior officers with their duds off sticking these things

up their backside. There are times I think, now am I mad or was it just a terrible dream, and a stupid dream I had? I haven’t thought of the glass rods for God know how long till now, talking about. You must ask the next doctor you find or ask the troops about glass-rodding. And that went on for quite a while. The Japs went crazy about that. We all had to have these things done every few weeks. A most uninteresting pastime for

everybody. There was no sanctity about anything there in the prisoner of war camp. At one stage, the other funny thing was quite early in the piece when they built the latrines to get a bit of privacy they got this luang, this grass that they used to pull up and they could weave it into little things so you had a bit of an enclosure if you went out to the tit bit of an enclosure

there. But then they got so hungry, the guys and the ones that were fortunate enough they were all right they could get the Sikh’s beard at a price, but then the walls started to disappear and they smoked the walls. Oh God. Dear oh dear. When I think about these awful things.

I don’t know what they did. You’d get grass or anything you could lay your

hands on, anything at all but nothing very much. There was no paper. Any paper that would be around it would be so rough that you wouldn’t want to use it in any case. And of course when the poor devils got cholera that’s when the mess, and it was very difficult nursing, very difficult. But there was no privacy in the prisoner of war. Dear oh dear, funny life. It’s

hard to believe. It’s hard to believe that you know you could, I’ve often wondered you know, then I tell a few stories and things like that and I think well, was that really true or was that something that I just imagined but then I come across it in a book and I think oh yes, that’s right, remember that story I told you? It’s true. I just saw it in a book or somewhere. So whether it’s affected me, I don’t know.

I did for a while. I haven’t for quite a long time I can’t remember having had a dream but I used to dream that the Nips were here again. I’d find myself a prisoner of war again and that was the thing that annoyed me. But there were some, there was a fellow he wrote a book about it. He was, he went away in the 6th Division and got caught or he was repatriated from

the Middle East to Australia and he came back and he joined up again and he became a prisoner of war in Japan. He lived just up the hill here in Pymble. I can’t think of his name at the moment. Yes, Twice Their Prisoner he called it. Then the other terrible things were the ones of father and son you know, the son would be killed and the father survived or vice

versa. A few of those. Quite a number of father and sons there. The kids would come in about 14 or 15 and they would be admitted, just put them in poor devils.

Well they were enlisted. They should never have been allowed to get in but once they were in it was hard to separate them. You couldn’t separate them then, the father and son, or at least I didn’t. You had to go through them all before we left Australia and several times we’d cull them out but I

was never game to say that the son can’t go.

Up in Shimo Sonkurai when the rail line came down they used to bring the trucks, they were Perkins diesel trucks built specially for the line. If the going got too hard on the road, so called roads, they’d just take the tyres off and the flanges on the wheels would fit the railway line so that they’d take

them off and bring them down that way, and these trucks kept coming down. At the same time the radios’ batteries which they had carted up 200 miles through the jungle, 12 volt batteries, were running very low. They were having trouble recharging them but they solved that problem. When the battery was, when the radio battery was getting flat and these Perkins trucks were coming through they would arrange to have a bit of a blue

straight in front of one of these trucks and they would turn on a fight. A couple of guys would get in and belt each other up and a few more would get in and the driver would come out, and by that time it was a complete melee and they were having a wonderful time. The driver would get back and he couldn’t start his truck because in the meantime they had taken the truck’s battery and had given them the dud battery back. So that’s the way we kept the news going for quite a while. They were up to all sorts of tricks like that and they really beat them, the Nips there, was always some

way you could beat them. There were a couple of other things I thought.

Yes, that’s right. That’s what they carted it up for. There was a fellow from AWA [Amalgamated Wireless Australasia] there and he was, I don’t know he probably was a sigs, a young cove. He was brilliant and he did very well when he came back with AWA.

He built this particular radio in a broom, broom head. Oh yes, another day they had the radio in the hospital area which they shouldn’t have had, and the hospital was on one side of the track and the residence was on the other side. Now the story was that when they the Japs put on a sudden raid as they were looking for this radio, that one guy had a trumpet and he was to blow the ‘Last Post’ or something or other, but he had forgotten the tune. So in the meantime the Nips had spread out and they were coming

across to the hospital area and we got the word. Somebody came and said, “For God’s sake! Quickly, they’re after a radio.” And there it was sitting down beside somewhere in the hospital. The only thing they could find to get rid of it was an old empty biscuit tin. So they put the radio in this biscuit tin and it threw it into the bushes just outside the huts, and the Nips came round and they looked at everything except the biscuit tin and away they went and so we still got the radio. So we got it going. They never

really got it. I was never sure who actually in Changi itself – I had an idea who might have been running the radio but you know they got me fairly early on, the business of disseminating the news. Here we get the news and give it to two and those two would each give it to another two and so it went on. Now I don’t know where I was on the list but I was on the list and this is when the Russians were coming through against the Germans. And it was fantastic you know, how you could concentrate. You’d get this

once a day and it just had to be a yarn you know, you couldn’t have a meeting and you got to know the names, these Russian names that I’d never heard of before and this applied to everybody doing it. And eventually you could build this picture in your mind and you can recall it almost identically as it was being told to you, and so it went on. I don’t think it was ever exaggerated at all as it spread out and went right through the thing. But I did find out eventually who had it and I was reasonably

close to him but I knew he was somehow mixed up in it but I didn’t know he actually ran it. Each area, each force seemed to have a radio somewhere.

Oh what was his name? I forget his name. He was a major there. He was not one of my friends but I got to know him. You knew everybody in

the prisoner of war camp, but I can’t remember the names.

No, I don’t think so. But I tell you I was interested, we had heard about the nurses for instances. Now what fascinated me having that read that book

that Sister whatever her name is wrote last year, when I read her book it fascinated me that when they came up across the problems over in Sumatra, and isolated completely, their solutions to a lot of the problems were basically the same as ours and that’s the way they existed. It’s quite fascinating to see

certain things when the Nips were doing certain things. Their entertainment, they turned on that woman who had the choir and they sang the music and all the rest of it. It was absolutely amazing. And those sort of things really helped when people got down in the dumps. Those girls started singing you know, you had never sung before. You’ve read that book no doubt, but it was amazing the way they did it. How they survived I don’t know. They were way isolated.

Ah, in the camp itself they used to, in Changi itself.

Oh no, the working parties, they were all too tired. A great thing was, oh, they had silly things, the troops. You know who can recite the numbers of the winners of the Melbourne Cup since the year dot. Well some coves could go right through it you know. They’d have silly little challenges like

that but that was the only entertainment they could get on your working party if they wanted any, but used to, they were really so tired when they came in most times that, tired and hungry, all they wanted was a smoke.

One of my daughters said to me one day, “Dad, have you noticed when you’re going down to the golf club, ‘Changi’ written on the fences and so on, when you go by?” I said, “Yes I have.” And I had an idea they were making a film. I heard on the air that they were going to make this film. She said, “Well you know, it’s been taken down just near the golf club I could arrange for you to see this being taken.” And I said, “Oh good.” So she did and she arranged to go and see this the next week. I went down with her one

afternoon and we drove into this area behind some scrub where they were obviously taking film just up the road a bit so we, a guard of some kind there told me that the activity was up the hill, and so I said, “I will stroll up there with my daughter.” He said, “Oh no, I’ll drive you up.” So I got into the car and he drove up this bit of a grade through some trees, low trees and

scrub and like I was dreaming, I didn’t know what it was all about, and I suddenly woke up and there I was in the middle of Changi again and it was the most extraordinary feeling when I woke up and here were Japanese soldiers marching around with fixed bayonets, and some Sikhs, and here were about 70 Australian troops, useless Australian troops who were just doing everything they shouldn’t have been doing and obviously had been in trouble, and in the middle of the square in Changi. And this

was a film, and then I remembered, and the whole thing was there and it was the most wonderful representation of the barracks where we were prisoners. They had made a great study of it and had actually built this building, just a section of it so that you felt you were really back in the building, and it was quite a fascinating thing. Somebody said you can’t talk when you’re up there so the two of us just stood there for a while and after about 20 minutes somebody came over and said there are two seats you

could have and sit over there. So I sat over there and we were watching this and there was some poor unfortunate creature who was supposed to be, he was a Dutchman who was in the camp. How he was, that didn’t matter but there were no Dutchmen there when I was there. Anyway he was obviously in big trouble, and he was going over to the dais that had been built by the Japs and there was another Australian soldier who was in big trouble, and this cove was defending him, and he always carried a bucket

around which fascinated me. I didn’t know why he had this bucket but he had to stand on the bucket while he was telling the Japs that this wasn’t a bad boy after all, but he annoyed the Japs and every time they annoyed him they’d bash him on the head, and so I saw this poor fellow bashed six times on the one afternoon. I’m quite sure he earned his salary whatever it was. Then the word got round there was a strange individual there who had actually been in Changi, and then they gradually came up quietly one after the other and

said, “We can’t talk to you here because of the filming but come round here and you can tell me and advise me.” The first one wanted to know about transport and the second one was something else. And the girls came up about make-up and so on.

Very well. The actual building, the building was the thing that fascinated me. The colour was the same as it was when I went in as, we went in as prisoners of war when we were caught. The building had been bombed,

the blinds were hanging around and it was just as I recall it in my mind. If you’d asked me to draw it, if I could draw, that’s what it would have been, and there was the grass and the little square. Everything was there and it was absolutely identical. I’ve been back to Japan quite a number of times and so on and that didn’t worry me at all, but this one really did. I thought God, I’m back again you know, prisoner of war twice.

I then watched this film and this was the first series that they took that

afternoon so I looked forward to seeing it, and I thought at the time well this could either be a great success or it could be a disaster and in my book it was a disaster. Changi when I was there, and the many years that I was there it was never like that as far as the behaviour and the way they went on. It was absolutely nothing like that at all. Changi was always, with old Black Jack Gallaghan in command, he still ran it as though he was just the

first day in the army. You had to behave yourself all the time and he was a first class commander. He was the man of the day. I always remember after we had been in about three months, some smart arse, a few of them decided they would take him on and they grew a beard, started to grow a beard and he heard about this and had them paraded to him. These three coves came and fronted to old BJ [Black Jack] and he said, “What do you fellows think

you’re doing?” And they said, “We’re growing beards sir.” And he said, “Don’t you know you’re not allowed to do that?” And they said, “Oh well, we haven’t got razors, sir. We can’t do anything about that.” He said, “How are you getting on, are you able to eat all right?” And they said, “Oh yes, we’re okay.” “What do you use for that?” They said, “We’ve got a knife and a fork.” He said, “Get that bloody knife and go and get it sharpened and you’ll have no beard when you come to see me in three days time.” Everybody shaved every day and

that’s the way he ran the camp. It was not a slapdash thing as it appeared. Anyone I have spoken to who was there with me at the time, they all agree it was an absolute disaster and a great pity because it could have, there were so many things that could have been shown. Some were quite amusing others not, but it could have been better. Of course I was told that this was to be an amusing show. I could see nothing amusing about it myself. I must admit I went to sleep in the third and the

fourth and the last one. I thought, well God you know, this is just pathetic. Once a year I go to a dinner, there’s an annual dinner for prisoners of war from all spheres everywhere, any service anywhere in the war, and this time our numbers were down we were very, very small but they were all completely disgusted with it. These were all prisoners of war.

To start as far, the 2/30th are annoyed, very annoyed because at that stage when that was portrayed it alleged to be there were no fancy Australian hats. Nobody had a hat coming in from the battlefields and if you had to have a brand new hat like they had on, you didn’t have it turned down the way they had and when you turned it up you’d have the 30th Battalion colour patches upside down. Well nothing would have annoyed

BJ more than that. That would have driven him mad and they would have been out of the army and home. The business of the way the Japs were treating the troops. We didn’t see much of the Japs once we were in there because Changi is a big area. It’s like the area of Pymble and Gordon put together, and so there was no point in putting wire around. If you got out as a white person you would have soon been taken up by the locals

because there were a hundred American dollars on your head for anybody who brought in a prisoner of war. So that there was absolutely no – Australia was a long way away. There was no point in escaping or trying to escape and a few got through but they were very lucky but others lost their heads. So that there was no way. They used to go out and trade during the night with the Indians and that went on. I think the Nips probably even knew that but as long as they did it within their own time

that was all right. There was one story, there was about ten old Etonians [Eton College UK] as prisoners of war, and after we had been there some months the old Etonians decided that they would have a reunion so they sent out an invitation to the old Etonians 10 or 12 of them, whatever they were. In the meantime BJ had prevailed upon the Japs to say, “Look, when these coves go out and do trading, instead of you beating them, we’ll build a jail inside the jail and we’ll look after them.” So the Nips said, “All right we’ll give that a

go.” And they were quite happy to do that, so that rather than hand them over to the Japs the Japs would bring them back and say, “Well there you are.” You trade them, so you’d put them into the jail. This was in a way lucky for the old Etonians except that now they were being jailed in their, within Changi itself and when they got the replies from the 10 old boys of Eton, about 5 of them were in our own jug inside, they were in the Australian jug inside

Changi jail. So they had to call the dinner off. But whether that’s true or not I don’t know. An old Etonian told me that. He reckoned he got the invitation. It was strict and it was run on lines, there was a bit of lounging around like they were, but all that business that used to go on at night. They were either too tired or you had to turn in. It was just an unfortunate

portrayal as though the whole thing was, I don’t know how people regard it but if you were there you knew that it was nonsense. What did you think of it?

I think you’ll get 99% of the Australian prisoners of war, I think the Brits too would say that’s a pack of nonsense. It’s a shame.

I thought I can remember going to see that with one of my great old friends there who was subsequently my best man, and I thought it was fascinating you know. I remember telling you about when we went down the railway line and got off for breakfast one morning, in a camp, when we built the railway line, and this camp was there, this British camp, and was running around as though it was Sandhurst, and I’m sure that must have been something to do with the River Kwai and how they did that and the

resemblance was very, very good. Some of it was done in Ceylon I think. I’m not sure where. I don’t think much was done actually up there, it was done in other parts. Of course, marvellous acting. I saw it about six times. I really thought that was great and that was very well depicted. That was going out to work and they were all pretty well dressed there compared with later on because that was reasonably early in the piece. I don’t know

where that was taken. It was probably taken further down, down round Weary’s area. Very clever.

The first time I went, most times when I went it was up to eye congresses, because after the war I decided that I’d do ophthalmology and after some

years in England I came back here and started, and then there used to be congresses arranged all over the world. There was a big one, I don’t know which one that was the first time I went to a congress up there. I remember yes, I just went straight to Singapore and then on to Tokyo.

Yes, the first time I was going in I thought, now I don’t know how I’m going

to feel about this. It was a bit disconcerting. I remember we went from Singapore, from Hong Kong and flying across from there I just felt a bit strange and wondered how it would be but when I got there it was quite all right. That didn’t worry me. But that, the other time when I saw it down here in Sydney, the replica, that set me back quite a lot. These guys walking around with rifles and so forth again, quite strange. But otherwise it didn’t worry me at all, the times that I’ve been there. But most times I

went there was because of eye congresses.

You mean the Japanese doctors. No, I didn’t make friends. We got on quite well with them yeah, quite well, and of course they started coming, they came down here very early in the piece after the war. That annoyed me a bit at St Vincent’s, Douglas Miller, the late Sir Douglas, he brought down the surgeons, Japanese surgeons in the early 50s. He would have

been about the first to bring them back and no, I disagreed with him entirely on that and I wouldn’t go there or have anything to do with them. But however, that’s melted a bit. Now I don’t, I think it’s so long ago now that I don’t mind. There are certain things you can’t forget. You can blemish it over or cover it up but there are certain things you can’t forget.

I must say that one amusing thing happened. In my practice in Macquarie Street in Bland Building, I had rooms in Bland Building and in the basement of Bland Building was the New Zealand Club, they had the basement and they had a nice little club down there where I used to go

down and have a meal occasionally, and have a drink after work, and it was very much a New Zealand show, and the carpet had kiwis woven into it and all the rest of it. And one day I came in and I found, I looked up on the wall and it was no longer there. It was the International Nipponese Club, the Japanese took it over, bought it, and the first thing they did was make me an honorary member. So I used to go down and see Hiro-san, the

manager. He’s still there, Hiro-san is still there running the show. And now of course it’s a big thing they’ve got all the pokies in the world and great big screens, and God knows what. They used to make a very good Japanese curry and I had a great friend, Bob Skeen, the polo player, the world’s number one polo player, I mentioned him before. Whenever he hit Sydney he would ring from the airport straight away and say, “Lloyd I’m down here now and I’m coming in to have lunch, and to have more of that Japanese curry.” He loved it too. He couldn’t get here quickly enough to

get it. So very good Japanese curry down there.

One day there was one of these raids on for the radio, and again suddenly the kempetai would come in and they were shocking. They came down, everything was all right until the one cove was fossicking around, and we used to sleep under these big green mosquito nets that the Japs issued,

about 10 or 12 under a net, and the Japs were fossicking around, obviously for this radio, and he pulled the mosquito net away and there was a compass hidden in it and it came down and hit him on the head. And of course then there was a great scream they were racing round like mad, and it wasn’t the radio, he’d got clobbered on the head with this thing. So then he came along to the little sick section and he found the blood

pressure machine like this one here, an exact replica, and it’s in a metal case. A grey metal case and they got this and they thought that this was the radio. So then there was another galah, and I was saying, “No it’s a blood pressure machine,” you know, blah blah blah, so forth. “Open it, open it.” And you know, I couldn’t open the damn thing. They said, “Okay, shirt off and go

and sit in the sun. You sit there till I can open up, get the lid up.” So I had to sit there. I think I was there for about 5 hours and I still couldn’t get it open, and by that time they got a bit tired of searching themselves and they let me go. But those were the crazy things they would do. Every Jap must have seen one of these machines but no, this was the radio. They were extraordinary people. So that was one of the bad, well it wasn’t bad but it was a nuisance, but every now and again they’d do these kind of

things, get a bit silly, a bit shirty. I suppose the doctors on the whole were a bit lucky they didn’t have nearly, you had to go and do some carrying of rice and odds and ends like that, you know, to make other things when you had to go and pick up rice from another camp. You’d always find somebody there you’d want to see in any case, so that was right. But on the whole they were, but you know, the troops, the fellows who had to go

out and the officers worked just as hard as the troops. Even physically they were working doing physical work, building, carrying, doing everything they had to and in addition to that taking the responsibility in taking the bashings. They were the ones that got bashed and knocked about. The junior officers, the lieutenants and the captains, they were the ones that really bore the brunt of most of it. I have great admiration for them.

Yes, yes, particularly when you know, that business, the cholera, and all those things, and even when that got over there was always something going on. There would be plenty of work you would be doing yourself, going around the place. There was no time for rest or anything like that. The other thing of course was, you can’t blame them in a way I suppose,

but ultimately they have to, is the lack of food. They had no compunction in just cutting down the rations. You know I think I was probably about 13 stone when I got there. I was between 7 and 7½ when I finished. Now I had had it pretty easy compared to some of those poor unfortunate ORs. Lack of food, and well, they said, “We can’t get it, we haven’t got it for our

own troops.” I don’t believe that altogether. They always got some. They just were very happy on some rice and if they had any meat in it and they were very happy with a few little bits of meat stuck through it. That would have been a big meal.

This is a picture of the so called hospital on cholera hill at Shimo Sonkurai camp. It was taken by the late Stan O’Neill on a little Brownie camera that he had, and using x-ray film that he purloined from some hospital. He’s got the most amazing series of pictures which have been published.

This is a reproduction of a picture or a film taken by the late Stan McAlister on a little Brownie camera with some x-ray film which was all he had left having run out of the ordinary film. It’s the so called hospital on cholera hill where the cholera patients were nursed because of the great infectivity

of this disease. We had to separate them from the rest of the camp. The tented buildings, so called, were just the old Indian Army pattern tents which we managed to steal from the Japs, and the small table alongside was the operating table or whatever else we were doing there. Now at the back you can see, right at the back of the picture you can see a track

through there which was the original, the track that we were building through the jungle and it was on that road that the line would subsequently have been laid. The flooring underneath the small tent was just some flooring that obviously we were putting down there to increase the capacity because the number of the cholera cases was increasing each day.

Yes, when you look very closely at it there are two people there. That was probably one of the nursing, so called nurses that we had on the hill. These were men who we called for volunteers to look after them. They weren’t trained. They weren’t trained nurses. They were amazing chaps.

This is a picture taken I recall, just prior to leaving Australia. It was after I had left St Vincent’s and joined the army. Little did I realise what lay ahead of me at that stage.

This picture was taken in the first six months we were in Malaya, actually at Seremban training. This was one of the officer’s rooms and these were two of my friends, all friends here. One was Keegan and the other Bradley.

Both of them were killed in action.

Yes, that’s right. The sarong became very popular with the officers there because it was much more sensible than wearing trousers and so on, just to get into these things, and I notice that it is by Women’s Weekly. They’re very much to the fore and it was taken by Bill Brindle, who was the ace photographer,

The Women’s Weekly and he became a great friend of mine. I actually went around for a week. I had some holidays and went around with Brindle and the media who were up there at the time, to have a look at some of Malaya. Where is he? There’s Bill.

This is a picture taken by the late Bill Brindle who is in the centre of the picture there. He came up with a team from The Women’s Weekly and had a look to see what the activities of the troops were. On the right of the picture was Ian Duncan. He was the quartermaster of the battalion, a very close friend of mine. He was a Scot

and he always said he was ‘fey’, which I think means that they were some sort of predilection they have or some idea of what’s going to happen in the future. He always said he would be the first officer killed and he was. In the middle is Brindle, Bill Brindle, he’s the photographer.

This picture was taken in the cabin of the Manunda hospital ship on our return to Australia, actually taken by the same Bill Brindle who accompanied us around Malaya. You will note here the sylph like figure compared with the previous pictures.

Bill Brindle met the ship when we got to Brisbane and I went to the gangplank to see if anybody was about or coming up that I knew, and there was Bill Brindle walking up the gangplank and he’s looking around, and he says, “There’s this fellow called Lloyd Cahill on board, can you tell me if he’s about?” He couldn’t believe that it was the same individual. At that stage I had actually put on a stone,

a stone in weight between Singapore and Brisbane.

“Some months ago when I was informed that I was to proceed up country as one of the medical officers to F Force I rather looked forward to the opportunity of seeing more of the East

and escaping from the many pinpricks of Changi. However, when I heard that no physician or surgeon was to accompany this body of 7,000 men I was astonished, so much so that I protested to Bruce Anderson. Bruce’s hands were obviously tied. Then out of the blue I heard you had volunteered to accompany this force. Like many others I was delighted although I fully realised what a great sacrifice you were making.

I will not say I was surprised, for such a sacrifice on your part was typical of what those who really knew you, and I have the temerity to include myself among those, felt certain that you would make when the occasion arose. This has been an ill fated force but it was fortunate in having your leadership and judgement in the early dark days. At Changi I thought I knew you rather well, your whims likes and dislikes,

but for the rest of my days my most vivid picture of you will be your arrival, mud bespattered and grimed, at the Changi camp, at the staging camp, your arrival at Lower Sonkurai, in the early hours of the morning looking for a medical officer who was dying of cholera, and the amazing energy and resource you displayed in overcoming the thousand and one obstacles you encountered after your arrival with John Taylor.

Colin Jupner. Frank and myself are the few fortunates who have the privilege of living knowing and working with you under such conditions. One of the greatest disappointments of my life was Major Stevens’ order that I was to remain in Thailand and not accompany you to Burma. And now the lads are beginning to move I feel all the more, but such things are typical of the army.

My only hope is that soon we will all be united again in Changi or even more pleasant circumstances. It is impossible for me to express on paper, as it was in words before your departure, my debt of gratitude to you for your teaching, your advice, and encouragement. It is indeed a pleasure to work for anyone who appreciates one’s own effort, no matter how humble they may be.

One of my greatest treasures will be a somewhat knocked about red covered book, Rogers and McGore, John, and I will take it back to Australia no matter what else we leave behind. My sincerest good wishes for the success of the Burma hospital and one final word, look after yourself and do not work too hard. I have already heard our old friend, the beri beri, is about.

Who it was? This was to Bruce Hunt.

I wrote this obviously when Bruce was going, taking the sick from Shimo Sonkurai up to Thanbyuzayat in Burma. He felt that things were getting too tough with all these Indians and so on coming in with cholera that he should get these other sick people

out and they’d do better up there in Burma. Unfortunately I think that things didn’t turn out quite the way he expected.

This is a book, tropical medicine by Rogers and McGore who Bruce referred to when he moved from Shimo Sonkurai up to Burma. It’s a book on tropical medicine which he was very attached to and it’s one of the few relics that I have of that extraordinary time.

This is the actual book that I referred to in the letter and know that Bruce, this is one of the things, he carried this 200 miles up into the jungle because this was the book that had, this and another book on medicine generally, were the two things that were his bibles, and to receive this from him was just like giving his heart away. It’s very precious, very precious. Now this

is a blood pressure machine similar to the one I had at Shimo Sonkurai, and one day during a certain raid by the Japs looking for a radio, they thought they had it when they saw this. They insisted that I opened it and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t open the darned thing. Eventually they said, “All right, you can take your shirt off and stand out there in the sun until you do.”

So I was duly sent out there, and no matter what I did, I dropped it, I did everything I could and I couldn’t open it, and after about four or five hours they got sick of the whole thing and said, “We’ll take it away.” And of course when I got it back it opened up quite nicely. But they were quite sure that they had the radio, that was the thing but there was no radio here. They incidentally got hit on the head by a compass that had fallen out of a mosquito net under which we used to sleep, during the process, but that didn’t interest them because they were looking for a radio.

Now this was the stethoscope that I carried. When I first joined I think I told you the story of how I was appointed to an infantry unit commanded by a doctor, which was the most extraordinary position to be in for a young doctor, and after about two days at Wallgrove camp I was fed up with all this business and I decided I wanted to go back to Sydney, so I went up to Duncan Maxwell and I

saluted as best I could and said, “Sir, I was wondering if I could go to Sydney for a day or so, there are few things – ”