Australians at War Film Archive

Myself well I left school at the age of 15. And when I was 16 I got appointed to the Public Service in the Premier’s Department.

I had finished my schooling at Intermediate standard I didn’t go through right through to Leaving Certificate. And my mother had sent me to a commercial high school. And amongst other things was shorthand. Which of course in those days was a sissy subject only girls did shorthand but I got a B pass in shorthand in the Intermediate. And when I went to

Public Service they said to me “Would you be willing to smarten up your shorthand?” I said “Yes.” Of course at the age of 16 if they would if the interviewing officer says to you will you go out that window and jump out you’d say yes and you possibly would. So I smartened up my shorthand and learnt to type. So that within a couple of years I was able to comfortably

go along at 120 words a minute in shorthand and 80 words a minute on typing. And later on during the war I taught two officers to write shorthand. And of course the best way to learn anything is to teach it. And so that when I came back from the war I was able to scurry along at 140 words a minute in shorthand no trouble at all. And

while I was in Premier’s Department I was seconded as a Private Secretary to a Minister of the Cabinet and I was with him for four years. And then I went back to my department. And well a few a couple of weeks later he called me up the Minister that I’d been with and he said “Roy I don’t know what’s going on but something’s going on

but I’ll tell you. Last night I had dinner at Government House and the Chairman of the Public Service Board was there.” Well of course the Chairman of the Public Board is the hire and fire of the Public Service. And I said “My name came up?” And he said “Yes they wanted to know all about you.” And he said then the conversation shifted round so he said “That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know what something’s in the wind but I don’t know what it is.” So I went back to my desk

and 20 minutes later I knew what was going on because I was called into the Head of the Department and told that I would be part of a two-man economic mission to go round the world to entice industrialists to come out here on their or in cooperation with somebody that’s already here and to talk to merchant banks about the advantages of investing money in New South Wales.

And so we were away for six months. All through America and England and the Continent. And that had a lot of funny things in it because my friend my colleague he said “We’ll get a car” and I said “we’ll get a car and driver.” I said “I see the way they drive in Paris” and we were in Germany at this time and I said “I won’t be in it.” “Oh” he said

“well I’ll drive.” “I said have you got a licence?” He said “No but I can get one.” I said “I doubt that.” So he went down to what was the equivalent to the NRMA [National Roads and Motorists' Association] and he said to the girl down there he wanted a temporary licence. “Oh” she said “no trouble at all sir. Let me have your Australian licence.” He said “I haven’t got it I’ve left it at home.” “Oh” she said “I’m sorry I can’t do it.” And

he went mad. And he said “I’ll go and see the Ambassador.” Which we promptly got a taxi down to the Ambassador. And they had all been warned that we were coming round the world all round the world. And so after the usual preliminaries the Ambassador said “Now is there anything I can do for you?” And Smithy said “Yes I want a temporary licence to drive a car.” “Oh” he said “that’s no trouble at all just give me your Australian licence.” And Smithy

said “I haven’t got it I left it at home.” “Oh” he said “it’s not possible.” And oh Mr Smith went mad and accused the Ambassador of not helping oh he got very so I finally intervened and said “Look we must get a car. I’ll drive the damn thing.” And so we did. And drove all over Germany almost up to Berlin.

And then we came home we flew home. And that was quite an experience. And then two or three oh a month a month later the Government decided to set up a permanent New South Wales Government office overseas and the place to set it up would be New York. And I was promptly told that I would go and supervise it administer it.

So I spent well my family came with me then or my then family and I was there for three years. And travelled a lot around particularly up and down the eastern coast of America up into Boston and down to Williamsburg and as far in as Chicago. And I did a lot of TV interviews and because I appointed a

public relations man and he organised visits to TV stations and radio stations and we got a tremendous input there. The Americans virtually knew nothing about Australia. And I had developed a little spiel when I went to interview the head of a big business that where

Australia was how big it was what it’s population was and other things like that. And the work load got so much that I asked for and the Cabinet sent me over an assistant. And when he came over Bill Larkin and I said to him “Bill when you go out” I said “these people know nothing about Australia. So you tell them what I’ve just told you.” And he said

“Oh that’s silly.” I said “Look just do what you’re told.” So the first interview I sent him out to talk to somebody he came back a very chastened soul because he had said to this managing director he started off by saying where Australia was and how big it was and he was stopped and this very big businessman said “I know all that I’m a college graduate I know all that.

There’s just one thing” he said “I get confused. I know Australia’s an island but is it off the north of England or off the south of England?” And so that was proof positive that you had to tell them where Australia was what we were and all about it. So then I came back after three years I came back to Premier’s Department. Didn’t like what went on there. And one of my staff

told me that there was an ad for a position at the University of Sydney and that I was qualified for it. And because after the war going back a bit now after the war I went to the university. See we had been for four or five years on a strictly physical plane. There was no mental activity really at all. And I thought well I must brush the cobwebs out of my brain and not being matriculated

I could get into a diploma course. And there were two diploma courses at the University of Sydney in those days. Diploma of Public Administration which I enrolled in. And then I had a friend in the Premier’s Department who wrote letters and did a lot. And finally the University granted me a full matriculation status.

And I felt then that I must I was obliged really to take a degree course rather than the diploma course. And when I looked at the curriculum I had no one to help me and that was the problem. And I noted well I thought Arts is the easiest one. And when I looked at the curriculum it was first year was psychology and I think history and a language.

And I thought well I’ve never done a language at all and that would be quite beyond me to do that so I then looked up the curriculum for Economics and that didn’t have any language in it so I enrolled in Economics. And it wasn’t ‘til more than two years later that I found out that the Arts first year language course was English. But however I battled and I

finally graduated as a Bachelor of Economics.

Well I was I was born in Sydney. We lived in the family lived in Stanmore which was then a pleasant suburb. But

the problems grew out from the city. Redfern became a it was a nice suburb and it went downhill. And my family considered that Stanmore would go the same way. And so we moved out to Hurstville. And we lived at Hurstville for some time. We had two houses at Hurstville. And then we moved to Epping and lived in Epping

until I left from Epping and joined the army. Although well before the I joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] I was in a militia unit a Cavalry Field Ambulance which was quite good. I could ride a horse without any trouble so the horses were no trouble. And we also did a lot of medical training which came in very very handy later on.

But that’s that was before the war. Now after the war I stayed at the University as Assistant Registrar at times Acting Registrar when the Registrar was away or something. And that was hard work but I had my I was my own boss in New York. But when I came back to Premier’s Department everything you did a Senior Officer

would have to alter it just apparently to make certain that everyone understands that he was the boss. And this annoyed me because they never came back to me and said Roy this Cabinet Minute do you think this and that and the other and I wouldn’t do that they’d just simply alter it. And sometimes they’d make a mess of it because I was in touch with the ministers and knew what they wanted. And this used to annoy me until

one day one of staff said to me that there was an ad in the paper for a position at the University and I was qualified for it. And so I did I promptly wrote a really insulting letter. I simply said that I noted the advertisement in this morning’s paper and I wished to apply for same yours faithfully. And but somebody did a very good rundown on me and found out all about me. And

I had several interviews with the then Registrar which was Isbeg Telfour and ultimately got the job at the University. Where I administered Agriculture Veterinary Science and Medicine. And that was very very interesting. And I was there for 15 years until 1978. And then I retired because my health was going to pieces.

And so I retired from that. And as a retired gentleman I’ve been busier than I ever was before when I was being paid. And that brings you up to I lost my first wife. And then had a problem I married again but there was a problem there. And I divorced her. And then I had met

a veterinary surgeon who was had been appointed to the University as a graduate assistant to me. And I got to know her very well. And we ultimately married. And that gave me 11 years f the best time of my life until she was found to have developed cancer in the lung and we I lost her in 1988. So

and then I moved I moved out here we were very fortunate. She lived at Mosman and I lived here. And the problem was that all my books and records and whatnot would not fit into the house at Mosman. She was an avid stamp collector amongst other things. And all her stamp albums and and books and things wouldn’t fit in here so the problem was that we would see and we I had friends here in Bellevue Hill

and Vaucluse and she had friends well we both had friends in St Leonards and Cremorne and those places so where would we buy a house? And I think it was her idea she said look why don’t we hold hang on to both houses? We can afford it. So that and it worked out beautifully. She had a complete set of cosmetics and clothing here.

I had a complete set of gear at Mosman. So that if we went to dinner at Vaucluse we came back here and and lived here for two or three days until… She was at one time she was the President of the Australian Veterinary Association and so she had commitments there. And so she might go back to Mosman and I’d stay here for a few days and then there’d be something up there and I’d

go and live in Mosman. So it was a two house family. And that was very very successful until I lost her which was one of the great pities of my life. But and I’ve lived here in Double Bay ever since. That brings you up to date I think.

Well yes it was different. We lived in Lincoln Street Stanmore. And there were a lot of other children about, and we had a wonderful time flying kites which was a very difficult thing because of the multitude of overhead electricity and telephone cables and everything. And to get a kite up through them was quite a

work of art. And to get it back down again was, and so that in that area there was a number of tangled kites and their cords up amongst the wires overhead. And in those days most gardens had a fruit tree or two. And I shouldn’t tell you this, but a few of us got together and I was the youngest one

so I was the lookout while they went in and stole some peaches, or when they were ripe, some apples from another place. And we all scampered out. And it was very diplomatic or very democratic or something. We all, with what we had, we all gathered at the top of a laneway in Stanmore. And everything was pooled and then everything was equally shared

out. And of course I was the youngest one there, and I can remember one night we had stolen some Packham pears. And if you know anything about pears they’re very hard. So that I had gnawed a hole in one, well everybody got two pears and I gnawed a hole in one, by the time everybody else had finished theirs. So I made myself very popular by handing out my

pear with a little gnawed hole in it and the other one which I hadn’t touched. So that was, it was a very happy time. Everybody was friendly. It was a very happy suburb in the 1920s. But amongst other things I kicked a football one time, was playing with a friend Doug Yates in the next street. And the football

went over his fence. And I rushed in, ‘cause I used to rush everywhere in those days and instead of coming out the gate I climbed over the fence. But unfortunately the loop of my shoelace caught on the top of the spear top of the fence. And so when I jumped off my feet stayed on the fence and I made a one point landing on my head. Which came against me later on because I had

upset the nerves in my forehead and that, I had to wear glasses for a long time even as a youngster. But, and I still had them when the war broke out and I wore them. But I got too close to a bomb one time and my glasses and all other things went up. But I found that apparently wearing those glasses for several years it had corrected

my vision so it wasn’t until I got, my right eye was badly damaged during the war in Japan, that I came back to wearing glasses. And of course I’ve had to wear glasses ever since.

Well my father had an illness at one time.

And he was told very accurately by an amazing medico that he had to stay near or on the ocean. If he moved away from it would not do his health any good. So my father got a job on a passenger ship that went from Sydney to Fremantle and back again. And he was all right while he was doing that. When he

retired he moved up to Baulkham Hills. See I had an elder sister and an elder brother, I’m the youngest of the family and he moved up to Baulkham Hills. And his health went down. Down and down. Until he was just a complete sort of failure. You might call it multiple sclerosis type of thing. And then he,

for some reason that I don’t understand, he moved out to Caringbah near the water. And his health came good. And he lived to a ripe old age of 89. And when he was about eight, and my brother and I used to go out and visit him there. When he was about 87 he was very annoyed one time we went out to see him and he said oh he said, “I walk up to Caringbah

to the shops,” and that’s a couple of miles from where he… but he said, “The other day,” he said, “I had to sit down on the way home.” And Ken said to him, “Well Dad you know you’re getting old a bit.” “Oh,” he said “don’t be silly,” but he said it won’t happen again. And Ken said, “Well Dad you’ve got a walking stick.” Why oh, that was a shocking thing to say. But the next time we went out and visited him the walking stick was in full view

and he lasted another couple of years before… He had breakfast one morning so we heard, and said, “I’m going to lie down,” and when they called him for lunch he’d just simply, quietly died in his sleep. But my brother was a great help to me. He was older than me. And when I was a junior Public Servant my salary was minute

but his salary was quite good. Mine went up and up his was good and stayed good. So that when we went to, he’d say to me we’re going to a dance on Saturday night. And I’d say well I haven’t got any money. “No,” he’d say, “I’ve got the tickets, I’ve got the tickets.” So I appreciated that and I’ve been able to help him lately. But everywhere we went

he paid for what I couldn’t pay for. And then we, as I said, we joined the militia about 1935, 36. And that was a cavalry unit so we were, oh we thought it was wonderful, boots and spurs and a hat with emu feathers in it. And

while I was in camp at Wallgrove we actually, the unit that I was in together with the 7th 14th and 21st Light horse Regiment, we really opened up Wallgrove. It became a big army camp later on. And while I was out there I got a message from the Chief Clerk at Premier’s Department who said, “Roy have you ever thought of joining the Forces?”

And I said, “Don’t be silly,” I said, “I’m already on the Reserve for the air force,” I said “I’ve joined the air force,” but apparently they had a difficulty with the number of ground staff, the number of air crew, and so I was and my brother was the same, we were put on the Reserve to be called up at any tick of the clock. And so I said to him, “I’m on the Reserve for the air force.” And he said, “Well would you like to join the army?” I said, “Oh yes,”

straight away and I said yes. Before the war finishes I want to get into it before the war finishes. And so he said “Well there’s a position at Headquarters 8th Division for which you have the qualifications that they want.” And so he said, “Come down, they’re at Rosebery Racecourse. You’ll have to interview Colonel or he will interview you, Colonel Roark.” And so I came down and was interviewed and told to go and

enlist in the ordinary way. And which I did. And then I was seconded and that’s a long story. I was seconded out to Rosebery because what they needed was in Headquarters, a Division consists of several sections. G [General] Operations Section, Q [Quartermaster], Intelligence which also looked after the cipher clerks and

things like that. And I was appointed to the G Operations Section. And the reason for that was that I wrote shorthand and typed and it was thought, and it did actually happen, that in the campaign I would have to take the movement order from either the general or colonel and then type it up

in the dark. Pitch dark. And you had to be very accurate with that because if you got a map reference wrong you could send a battalion out here and all their ammunition out there. So it had to be, that was the qualifications I had that they wanted in Div Headquarters. So that covers that angle.

Oh they’re good fun. We both had learned to ride. Living at Epping, no Turramurra, at North Turramurra there was a riding school you could hire horses out for the day. And my brother and I both learned to ride, and all his friends also

learned to ride. So a group of five or six of us would sometimes go out for a day out somewhere or other, riding horses. And then, so that I don’t why we joined a medical unit. It was just one of those things that you did in those days. But that was very handy because we both enjoyed horses and being a small unit we did not have to

supply our own horses. The Light Horse Regiment had to supply their own horse and when they came into camp a lot of them would bring two horses in. But we do our horses from the Glenfield Remount Dept. Those horses knew more about cavalry training and cavalry orders than we did, and so we’d be clipping along the road with everything jangling and we wouldn’t hear it

but the horse would hear it. The sergeant-major way up ahead would give an order and you’d find your horse was easing back and you’d look around. And the next thing you’d be in sections before you’d been two, that’s a half section and you’d be in a section. And you hadn’t heard a thing but the horse had. And then the next thing you’d find your horse would either be hurrying up or standing back, and the next thing you’d be in squadron, the whole thing. And that was good fun.

We had a lot of it, was a pleasant thing. And running at Wallgrove, we ran the hospital there. And that meant that you learned a lot of medical work. And we also learnt medicine, we had to, one month, one night a month I think it was, we

went out to Royal South Sydney Hospital to the Emergency Department out there, and I can remember very clearly the first time I went out there I walked into the place and there was an old chap, well seemed to be old, sitting down there and he had his arm in a kidney dish and it was open from the wrist to his elbow. And they had forceps hanging on it

while they tied … And I went God this was something that I wasn’t used to, living in Epping in those days, which was a very nice, pleasant suburb. And this chap it was quite funny, this chap, somebody said, “How did this happen?” He said, “Oh,” and on went his story. He had fallen over a pitchfork. Because in those days ice carts and bread carts and milk carts were all horse-drawn.

And so he worked at a stable. And he had fallen over a pitchfork. And we heard who owned the pitchfork, who used the pitchfork, who left it where it was, who, and then all over again. And he finally, just as they were finishing he went into shock and he was put on a stretcher and carted into the hospital. And in those days, I don’t know about these days,

everybody who came in to a Emergency Ward, a book, was name and address and injury and cause of injury. And so one of the doctors said to me enter him up on the book. And I came to cause of injury and I said to the, see I was a whole 17 or 18 years old, and I said to the doctor,

“He said he fell over a pitchfork and I said that’s ridiculous.” I said, “That would be a puncture wound,” but not that. And he said, “Oh put it down as fell over pitchfork.” Oh da da da, put it down very quickly. And later on I said to him, “I don’t understand this.” And he said, “Son don’t you understand what that was?” And I said, “No.” He said, “The Razor Gang had got at him. And he’d put his hand up

to save his face and the razor had cut him open.” They were the days of the Razor Gangs. And we had a lot of razor cases in the South Sydney. And one night I was, it was also my job to clean up the instruments and put them in a, oh what do you call it? The thing to sterilise them, the steriliser. And I was hurrying and one of the doctors said to me,

“You seem to be in a great rush.” And I said, “Well the last tram for half an hour, finishes out, goes from outside the hospital,” and I said, “then I’ve got to wait half an hour for the next one.” That’s at 10 o’clock at night. And he said, “Oh no,” he said, “you walk down Dacey Avenue and pick up a tram from La Peruse into the city.” I said, “Walk through this district with the Razor gangs?”

And he said, “No trouble. Unless you interfere.” He said, “Nobody will touch you unless you interfere.” He said, “You walk down that street and if somebody is being beaten up over here you don’t see them, you march straight down the centre of the road and nobody’ll ever touch you.” And that was so. Of course nowadays I think if you did that they’d knock you on the head for practice. But in those days it was a different matter. You could, and so that the work at

Royal South Sydney Hospital was good medical training and we also, I think again once a month, went out to University, the School of Anatomy, where they had prepared for us to go out there. And a cadaver was brought out from the stuff they preserve them in. And he had been dissected, half his lung, half his ribs were taken

off and all his internal parts were there. And we were trained that the lung went in here and the spleen went in here and the liver was down here, so that if we ever, if a war ever happened and we got a wounded man if he had a puncture here we knew that under there was his lung, or whatnot, and we could treat him accordingly in the field before he got into a

hospital for treatment. So it was all good training both medically and cavalry-wise.

Not in not in 1935 36. But it obviously by 1938, it was obvious something

was coming near. And the militia was reinforced. And I knew from working in Premier’s Department, one of my jobs was to decode the cable that came in every night. Our Agent-General’s office in London would send a cable at five o’clock at night in London time, in code, Bentley’s code. And it would be waiting for.. It my became my

job, it was waiting for me in the Department when I got in at nine o’clock. And so my first duty was to decode the cable and send it into the Premier as to the latest diplomatic and whatever was going on in London and in Europe at that time. So I knew that the war was imminent because of this.

Oh very hard to remember now. But what … the diplomatic discussions and things went and what was happening. It was more a resume of the latest thing with the War Office, the Foreign Office and the English Cabinet. And that was passed to our Agent-General and that became the cable that came out to us

to tell us what was going on. But it was quite interesting. But it was, you could say, yes, you reading these you could see that the war was coming closer because of the tenor of the cables that we got.

No. None of my family or connections were involved

with World War I. So it was only what one learned in history at school and all that sort of thing. Gallipoli and the Somme and whatnot, but personally I had no connection with World War I.

Oh just the basic thing that we landed at Gallipoli and in the wrong place. And lost a

lot of men and retired from it eight months later. And the Battle of the Somme and Ypres and those places was absolute slaughter. But that was all we knew about it. The details of who did what wrong wasn’t part of your history course

that you had at school. So you just picked up bits and pieces of World War I but not very much. Because I wasn’t involved in it in and you know I didn’t have an uncle or grandfather or something in World War I. So I really wasn’t terribly interested.

No we were quite busy with looking after the horses when we did go into a bivouac or weekend or training with horses. We had, all our time was spent either with the horses or medical lectures. And I can remember one time we went we thought it was going to be a

a summer camp for a month at Robinson because the Division that the 4th Cavalry was in, their area of defence, was down the coast from Nowra up to Berri. And so we went into camp at Robinson. And everybody was oh, this is going to be great. A summer camp, oh dear. And we went by train

down to where it breaks off and the train goes up to Robinson. And everybody was as happy as a lark. Most of them had been had a quite a quantity of liquid refreshment. I fortunately was a teetotaller and so was my brother. So, but I noticed somebody said gee it’s getting cold on that train trip up. And so somebody shut the window. And when we got out of the train at Robinson it was

freezing. And oh, this was a shock to everybody. So urgent messages were sent off to Victoria Barracks and supplies of blankets were sent, more supplies of blankets were sent up. And we had an outdoor ablutions and the showers and what have you, we were in the showgrounds at Robinson which were up on a hill which made it worse but the colonel had arranged with the Ranular

Hotel that for sixpence we could go down there at night and get a towel and use of the bathroom. And then we could stay there up to 10 o’clock or so, play billiards or whatever. And that was very good. It was about a mile and a half from the Robinson showground. And that was the time see…

Yes it was at Epping. There was a riding school at Epping. We nearly lost one horse, oh dear that was a time.

Charlie Polton was riding that. And we went down we rode …

Riding in the militia. Well when we took horses into a weekend bivouac we always finished up with what they called the Mad Mile. And most of the places we went to were rifle ranges. Because that was space you see. And beside the mounds there was always a wide space down towards the targets.

And so we would, the last thing before we packed up and went home was the Mad Mile. Which meant that we all ride up to the 900 yard spot. And the orders came through, trot, canter, gallop, charge! And so everybody in line across charged down. I had at one of those,

I had a huge horse, great black animal. He must have been 17 and a half hands high. And he must have put his foot into a rabbit hole. Because he suddenly went down. Not right down but down and then he recovered himself ,but I was able to stay on his back but I lost my right stirrup with coming out of , practically out of the saddle,

and at a full gallop there was no way I could pick up this flying stirrup. And I thought and I was out of balance. So the only thing I could do was to kick my foot out of the other one and ride him without the benefit of stirrups. And I might say that the terrible infamous point was to overtake the sergeant major. He was

in front. And you didn’t overtake the sergeant major. And this great beast of a horse that I had, and without the stirrups I didn’t have the power to hold him back as much as I could. And we got down to the end of it and the sergeant major beat me by half a horse length. And so that was the sort of thing that went on in those days, that was. Then the they were all collected by the

personnel from the Glenfield Remount Depot and they went off and we came home. And of course, 1938. Might have been very early 1939, we were mechanised. And so we got, and the army didn’t have trucks for us. So we were told on parade one night that we were going into camp

and anybody who had a truck could bring it in. And the truck got paid more than the driver. And so several chaps said oh I’ve got a truck or I can get a truck, yes right-oh. And we had one chap, Butterwall, Butterworth his name was, and when he we went down the Macquarie Pass, I mean, he changed

gears, you’d think they could hear it in Nowra. It was a frightful crashing of gears. And somebody said to him you know why, what is the trouble? And they said, “How long you been driving?” “ Oh,” he said, “this is the first time.” And what he had done, he was the offsider of wherever he lived out in the outer suburbs, he was the offsider to the garbage truck.

And he had seen the driver shift gears and so he thought he could do the same thing. So he borrowed the truck and brought it into camp. And that was how we managed to survive that camp, travelling… If you ever had to travel on his truck with his rather limited driving skills or ability, was another

matter. But the trucks came in. And when we went into, as I said before, we went into Wallgrove we had horses there for a while. We were, it was just the changeover time. We also had trucks. And I was given the job and it was very early, the only building in Wallgrove at that time was the hospital. And the

quartermaster’s store was a mile up the road. And where we had to go up every morning and collect the required rations for the day. And I was given, I had a driving licence, so I was given the job with another chap of driving one of these trucks up to the store and getting everything. And it was a brand new truck

that I got. And of course, once you had a brand new truck, and in those days as you see there was no such thing as an automatic, you put your foot down on the clutch and you change gear and you let the clutch up. Well a brand new car you’ve got a brand new engine, you’ve got to be terribly careful if you let the clutch up too quickly then the whole thing took a great shudder forward.

And so several times the chap that I took up to get there would have a great can of milk filled to the top and he would finish up with milk all over his feet, when the truck was madly dancing around under my guidance I’d never driven a truck before, I’d driven a car. But not a big heavy truck that was brand new.

That was part of the early militia’s stories.

Yes, we heard that, I remember that time. My father was away. But the radio said that Chamberlain had declared war and we were following suit. And my mother, I can hear her now,

she said, “Oh my God.” And nothing changed for a little while you see. Hitler ran round and round and then it was they called the “Phoney War”. And it was only after that, when things got really desperate that they expanded and they formed the 8th Division and that’s when my brother and I formed, went to the air force and finished up, he finished up in the air force. And I finished up as I’ve told you, in the army.

He finished up in Balikpapan. And he was a sergeant. He could have come home by plane. But he knew as soon as the war ended, the work on the planes went downhill, nobody worried too much about it. And so he thought well one of those planes is going to crash and so he waited awhile

and came home by sea. So I was actually home about a week or so before he was. So because I came down through, to Nagasaki. And we came out on an American aircraft carrier. Down to, we were supposed to go to Okinawa and that’s a long story. And we transferred to a trooper and finished up in Manila on our way home.

And then there was a mistake made in the orderly room where we were, in the 187th Reception Depot, just outside of Manila. And they made up a movement order for men to go home on an aircraft carrier. I think it was the Indomitable. And when the word came out,

I knew that some chaps that had come into the camp from Japan, after my little group had come in, and they were on the on the draft to go home. So I had become very friendly with a major, I don’t know why, so I went to the major. And I said “This is not good enough.” I said, “We’re on our way home, so first in first out.” And I said, “These chaps have come in after my group

and we’re not on the thing.” So what had happened, in the orderly room all our names were on pages in the book and they had turned two pages over on one occasion and of course all our names were on the… so he found that out. And he came back to me and he said, “Look they’ve made a mess of it. Bu,” he said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said, “I’ll fly you home. So,” he said, “you’ll leave

a couple of days after the draft on the aircraft carrier but you’ll go down by PBY [Patrol-Bomber designation], the Catalina.” So that’s what happened. We went aboard the Catalina. And it was wonderful. Around Manila, hundreds and hundreds of little islands and seeing them from the air was absolutely wonderful. And this major had said to me,

he said, “Oh things are a bit rough at home.” I said, “All right.” He said, “Well there’s coupons for everything,” he said, “Everything is short. There’s coupons for butter and whatnot and there’s coupons for clothing. So,” he said, “any clothing you can get from the army,” he said, “would be very handy.” And I thought hmm. So we got down to Morotai on the first night, on this PBY

and we were going to spend the night on Morotai. And I made sure from the crew that we would go on next morning, on the same aircraft. So I left my gear and we had been fitted out you see, in Nagasaki by the American forces. And we had a kit bag full of gear which I left on the plane. And remember, everybody, when you were an ex-POW [Prisoner of War], everybody thought you were half-witted or you know, you didn’t have any senses left.

And so we got ashore. And somebody said, “Everybody got all their gear for the night?” And I said, “Oh no.” And he said, “Well what do you want?” And I said, “Oh what should I have?” He said, “Well what have you got?” I said, “Oh a shirt and shorts.” “Oh,” he said, “you want the lot.” He said, “Look go and go out to Q [Quartermaster] store.” “Right-oh.” So off we went.

“Right-oh what do you want?” “Oh,” I said, “oh what should I have?” And, “Oh well you want the lot.” Right, boots, socks, shoes, the whole lot. And he said, “Where’s your AB84?” That was a book that all this was entered up in. Well luckily in Nagasaki we were kitted out there and the chap ahead of me was told that the quartermaster had run out of these books.

But he said, “Don’t worry, you can pick up one of on your way home next time.” And so he gave me everything without a book you see. So Morotai, the quartermaster sergeant said, “Where’s your AB84?” I said, “I haven’t got one, they ran out of them up there.” And, “Oh well,” he said. Out came a paper and it was all entered in. And back on the plane. And down to Darwin.

The same thing again. “Oh no.” “What have you got?” “Oh short and trousers and …” I got off the plane in Sydney and we flew by Liberator from Darwin to Sydney, 12 hours it took. The last time I did that it took six. But in those days, 12 hours. We left at six am in the morning and we landed at Mascot at 6 pm. Me with two great big things. Oh I had

clothing for gardening and getting under the car and working on the car for years after that. And the best thing I had was, oh I finished up saying no, I don’t want any boots I’ve got a pair of boots, they were too heavy to carry. But I had a pair of American boots. And they were very good they were. They came half way up your calf and you could walk through six or eight inches of water and they were quite waterproof. And even when

I kept them for, oh for years and years and years. And when I went to New York I took them with me. And they were absolutely wonderful in the winter. Because you would step off, go to step off a gutter and you’d think oh yes that’s solid ice. And you’d step into it and it would be just, looked solid on the top but you’d crash through that into six or eight inches of very dirty, snowy water. So

those boots came in very handy. But that was my villainous thing of cheating the army thing, stealing from the army. Shouldn’t tell you that should I? May go back and I’ll be court-martialled or something.

Well I don’t know, everything else, shirts and underwear. Oh no, it was… But the major in

in Manila had, as I said, in Manila, had said things are tough. Any clothing you get it’s a good idea to get it. So I did.

No well,

1932 I was 12 years old. And I simply did not know that there was such a thing as a Depression. My mother was a very good organiser. And how she did it I don’t know. But there was always fruit on the sideboard. There was always nutritious food and I think that, nothing

exotic or glamorous or anything else, but good solid nutritious food. And I think that is one reason why I survived the war. Because I had built up a solid nutritional body. Whereas some of the other chaps, in talking to them during the war up in Burma, or so it would come out, that their mother was a,

played bridge five times a week and would pick up a pound of pork sausages and an apple pie from the shop and that was it, because she … And they didn’t last. They went down. But I kept going and I’m sure it was the food that my mother supplied somehow or other. But as for a Depression, I only learned about the Depression years after it.

Because in my home as a youngster going to primary school 10, 11, 12 years of age, nothing was said about it or there was always food there. There was always an apple in your bag and for lunch, and with your sandwiches at school and all that. So I was fortunate that I just wasn’t aware of the Depression.

Whereas if I had been older of course, it would have been a different matter. But that was the Depression. I didn’t know it went out.

Oh I think at my age everybody wanted to enlist. It was one, it was sort of necessary.

We were fighting and England was, by the time the 8th Division was formed, and the time that Ken and I went to join up the air force, and then the army and whatnot, England were pretty unsafe. It looked it was standing alone. It was just before America came into the war. And so it was a matter of, oh King and country. But more than that it was

exciting. You know you would go to places that you would never go to again, and all that. And so that you were only too happy to join it was an excitement. I think that’s the only reason that I can give you. There was no great idea of patriotism or anything like that it was just a good exciting situation to get into you know.

And then, I mean King and country came into it a bit but not a great deal. The excitement of going somewhere you know, you go somewhere, you know. Which you would never do again. So that was the way we joined up. And I think 90% of chaps did. The 6th Division of course they joined, they were formed early. And they were mostly

the chaps that had were coming through the Depression had left school couldn’t get a job, and so there was the army going to pay them. So 6th Div was made up of those, mainly those younger people. Whereas 7 Div, 8 Div there were a lot, it was a lot, the average age was much higher than the 6th Div. And a lot of them were chaps that

either had a little business or were well employed but thought it was necessary to join up at that time because the Phoney War was over and England stood alone so you joined up. But and our age limit was higher than 6th and possibly even 7th Division.

Oh only what we read in the papers. But if, and looking at it later on, this possibly is jumping a bit. But it took Germany 10 weeks to overcome most of Europe. Took them another 10 weeks for Greece and Crete. In Malaya

it took the Japanese 10 weeks to take the whole of Malaya and Java. So that the fighting was vicious and fast moving. But we can come to that later I take it.

Well you didn’t know. But it was somewhere outside Australia. And I had a

a mate in the Premier’s Department and he joined the air force, and apparently somebody said to him in the enlistment, where do you want to go? And he very cunningly said I’ll go wherever I’m sent. And he finished up in Canada. Doing his training in Canada. A lot did that. Another neighbour of mine, Johnny Moth at Turramurra

he joined the air force and he did his training, I think in Canada too. And then went out to the desert where he unfortunately crashed his fighter plane and he was invalided out. And seriously injured. But he came good after a while. But you could go, you know, you knew that you were

going to go somewhere out of Australia. In the normal course of events you wouldn’t be able to do that. So it was the excitement and going places was part mainly I think, the main why reason why most chaps joined the army or the forces anyway.

Mm?

Mm …

Oh the air force was the glamorous arm of the forces. And I went down to the Recruiting Depot near Woolloomooloo, and I was quite happy, they put us through a…

I would have become a wireless operator. Wireless gunner, I think they called them. Because it was quite interesting. They said, “We’re going to put a, you’ll hear two separate Morse Code things. And on the paper in front of you will put down..

You don’t know anything about Morse Code we know that, but you will put down whether they were the same or different.” So you know, it was a dot dot dot dot dot dot and you’d put same. Dot dot blank dot dot dot and you’d put different. And so I went through that. And that was going to be my rating, when they said they were very sorry but they couldn’t take me in straight away but I’d be on the Reserve. So

that was how I was went into the air force. It was the glamorous arm of the forces. Better than footslogging in the army.

No I would have waited to be called up for the air force. But

this chap was Chief Clerk from Premier’s Department when he rang me. He said they want you in a hurry. And I joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] on the 3rd of March 1941. And I was on a boat to Singapore at about the 27th of April. So that created some problems. Because a medical unit in the cavalry didn’t help.

I had never handled a rifle. I’d never done any training, I’d never done a day’s training in the army. But they gave me a rifle and every morning we paraded and I always had to get into the rear rank. So that when the order came to shoulder arms and everything I was always a second or two over, I was following the blokes in front of me and

didn’t know a thing. And then we had, in those brief few weeks that I was in the army before I went over to Singapore, we had a shoot at the Anzac rifle range. And oh that was a frightening experience because I listened carefully to the chaps talking around me and I heard things such as, “Oh remember Joe Blow?”

“Oh yes, he was the chap that had his cheekbone shattered.” “Yeah that’s right.” “He didn’t have the butt properly into his shoulder.” Yeah oh what about so and so? Oh you mean the chap that got a broken collarbone? Yeah well, he got the rifle butt in the wrong place, and all this was going on. And for the first time somebody said oh so and so just simply dragged his trigger and forgot all about the first pressure. Now that was the first time

I’d ever heard the fact that with these Lee Enfield .303s, you have two pressures. You pull the trigger a certain distance and then you when you want to fire it you just, ooh the tiniest pressure, and away went the bullet. Well I didn’t know that until I was on my way out to thing on the rifle range. And

so I was doing all right, I was a good shot. My brother and I did a lot of shooting of rabbits out over the mountains and out to Hartley and places like that. And I was, and it sounds boasting or something, but I was a very good shot. And so I was doing all right on this Anzac Day, out Anzac rifle range. And then we had to go up to about the six or seven hundred yard

mound and standing, set off three shots. And then run to the next mound and down on one knee and three more shots. And I was getting a bit behind, they were running in a line you see and I was getting a bit behind. And so the next one, I was in a hurry. I jammed the bolt up and back again and down to the next thing and

and lined up and pulled the trigger and nothing happened. I thought God. And then I tried to get the bolt up. And I couldn’t shift it. So my score of course, well, after that I didn’t fire a shot. So after that my score was you know, very low. We came back to camp and I went to the Armourer and said rifle’s jammed.

About an hour and a half later he brought me back my rifle. And the language. Oh! It had taken him an hour and a half to clear it. What I had done in my hurry, I had jammed the bolt back which ejected the cartridge but I jammed it back and forward when the cartridge was three parts of the way out, and I had jammed it back into the bridge.

Which meant that it went in as an oval instead of round and was properly jammed. So then, and when we got to Kuala Lumpur we had a day at the rifle range in Kuala Lumpur. And we had, and this is diverting a little bit but 8th Div headquarters was made up as I’ve said, of G Operations and Q and Intelligence and they were, we were all pen

pushers, we were behind desks or operating a typewriter or Gestetner printer or something or other. Whereas we had, the unit had what they called the D and E Platoon, the Defence and Employment Platoon. And they did all the, I was in the army for six years and I never peeled a potato and never stood a guard because we had this D and E Platoon. And they did all that. And they were selected

from all over, on the basis that they were good shots they could take the eye out of a running kangaroo at a hundred yards. And so they prided themselves on that they were the soldiers we were just the you know, pen pushers in the office. And then we had this day at the Kuala Lumpur rifle range. And I got the top score. And

that created a problem for one of my mates, Uncle Mac Morris Macdonald. Uncle Mac to me. They all gathered in the canteen that night to celebrate me winning the top score. Me with drinking my lemon squash. But Mac he got into it, and I think it was two or three days later I was coming up from

our hut to go on parade early in the morning, and there was Mac. And he said, “Oh there’s another one.” And I said, “Mac what are you doing?” “Oh,” he said, “that one’s, that one’s, that’s pink.” He had the DTs [delirium tremens]. He’d been drinking in the canteen for oh, about two solid days. I thought God if one of the officers sees him he’ll finish

up in the Military Police Headquarters at Port Swettenham. So I said, “Mac come with me.” So I turned him round and took him back to our hut. And I said, “Now there’s your bed, get into it.” And there was another chap who was off duty and I said to him, “You make sure that Mac does not leave that bed.” I said, “If he does somebody’ll see him and he’ll, at the end of the , he should’ve dried out and

be all right.” But that was Uncle Mac. And he drew, and I’ve got it up there if you’d like to see it, he drew, he was a wonderful artist. And he drew a picture of me which I found it years and years later, and it’s sitting up in the bookshelf there. And this is somebody side-on, the targets are up here and I’ve got a

a rifle with a bend in it, and underneath he’s got ‘this boy’s good’. And he gave me that on the back of a piece of Red Cross paper. So that was, they were the happy times at Kuala Lumpur.

No. No I it was very good.

We used to go into leave for example in Kuala Lumpur and in Johore Bahru, we came down to Johore Bahru and we would go on leave into Singapore, and I was a bit of a camera buff, I loved taking photos, I’ve got a lot of photos. And while they went into the Anzac Club and started drinking madly I wandered off

on my own down parts of Singapore, where I’m sure some of the Chinese residents down there had never seen a white man before. I got way down and I realised that this was dangerous after one episode. There was a bit of a market and they had sheets of cloth on the ground

and what they were selling was there. And this chap had a great big bowl, great big glass bowl. And in it was the most extraordinary coils of snakes and I thought that’s crazy ridiculous. Because there was a scorpion in it that was the size of a two-pound lobster. And

this great scorpion and coils of snakes and what not. And I was quite interested in that. And a Chinese gentleman came up to me and in perfect English said to me, “You are interested in that?” And I said, “Yes what?” And people were coming up, other people were coming up and for about ten cents they got a little dipper, so big dip of

water or liquid out of this great thing with all these frightful animals in it and they drank it. And I thought that that great scorpion, it must be celluloid or something, ridiculous, the size of it. But this gentleman said to me, “You are interested in it?” And I said, “Yes.” “Well,” he said, “that is in local brandy.” He said, “They are animals that are all

immediately so venomous that they would kill if they bit you.” This huge scorpion. There was a crate and there was a cobra and a couple of other things. And he said, “It is very wonderful medicine. It cures anything. Cures everything, it’s wonderful. I will buy you, I will buy you some med…” I thought oh my God. How do I get out of this?

Because I thought if I say not on your life you know, I’m miles away, I’m the only non local for miles around and if I upset this chap I’m likely to get a knife between my ribs. So, “Oh,” he said, “I will buy you,” and I said, “Well wait a minute,” I said, “what are these little boxes down here?” “Oh,” he said, “that is the same thing,” he said, “but it is ground up, all those very venomous animals are ground up

and you put it in your tea and drink it.” I said, “Well say you buy me one of those and I’ll have it with my mess in the morning, in camp.” “ Oh yes, certainly.” So he, oh thank goodness I didn’t have to handle the drinking of this thing. Later on up near the Siam-Burmese border I saw scorpions that were that size.

Incredible things. When you cornered them with a shovel or a chunkle they hissed at you like a snake. They were incredible animals. I saw later on, oh years later there was a TV program on which purported to show the largest scorpions in the South America. And they were only half the size of what you see in the wilds of

of Burma and Thailand, up in those incredible places. Incredible animals. But a lot of chaps, I was very lucky I was never stung by a scorpion. But a number of chaps were because they used to, the small ones used to fall out of the roof in the hut at Tavoy. And later on and shortly after we moved into Burma, into Tavoy where we rebuilt an airfield

that the British had begun, I was, we went to bed and I was lying there and I heard a plop. And I thought that’s right beside me. Right beside my head. And at that stage it was quite early in the piece, I still had a torch that worked. And so I carefully got the torch and looked over and there was a scorpion sitting about four inches from my ear with his tail

spur just up. Oh. But other chaps got bitten by centipedes. Well centipedes are you know. People who hear this won’t believe me. But we had centipedes that were 12 or 14 inches long. And about that wide. And then their legs out from that. And one chap got bitten one night. And that’s a long story but he was having a

dream. And it finally bit him on the lip. And he was a sick boy for two or three days. It was a huge centipede. There were, you know, things that we saw, things like spiders that were incredible in their size. They’d fit onto a saucer with their legs hanging over the edge. And we had one of them, we found one of them

one time and one of the chaps said oh don’t worry about them they’ve got no, they don’t worry you, they’re big. And somebody put a shovel down right in front of it and it brought two little feelers up and out of it came two fangs. And everybody around heard the crunch as it crunched onto the shovel that had been put in front of it.

So somebody said insects, to hell with that. And we had to kill it. But it was, you know, things up there are unbelievable.

I think it’s elevenses.

And that woke me up and I put my hand up and I had in my hand a scorpion. And that was the length of his body, his claw was out here and his tail was out here. And I automatically flung him

one way and I … People wondered why Malaya …

Well a lot of people wonder how or why Malaya fell so quickly. And one of the reasons

certainly the reason that I hold is the complete inefficiency of the British High Command. The British had been in Singapore for 10 years before the war started. They had never spent a day or a foot in the jungle. There was fortress troops

let’s call them, and the only thing they did was to leave their barracks and go into their club and go back to their barracks. Although at that time, on Singapore Island, there were big patches at Jurong and up near the reservoir, of good jungle. But they never went into the jungle. Because it was the British absolutely definite idea that the jungle was absolutely

impenetrable. Absolutely. Like a high stone wall as they say. This was ridiculous because they overlooked two things. They overlooked the fact that the Sakais which are the indigenous people of Malaya, now up in the north of Malaya, the Sakais moved through the jungle like you and I would move through Pitt Street on a busy day without bumping into anybody.

And also when they got onto the ground the orang-utans could walk through the jungle without any trouble. They normally, orang-utans normally are up in the treetops. But I’ve seen them actually on the ground walking through the jungle. But the British, it was absolutely impenetrable. So. The only way if Malaya was ever attacked the only way it could be attacked was from the sea.

So back in 1930 when things got, were beginning to get a bit funny they built the great naval base and the naval guns all pointing out to sea. Because the only way that anybody could come, in their thinking, could come into Malaya was by sea. So these enormous guns were all pointed to out to sea. Secondly

there was absolutely no coordination or anything between the army, navy and air force and the civilian population under the Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas. They just didn’t they didn’t talk to each other. The Commanding Officer was Sir Robert Brooke-Popham

Air Vice-Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham. Now he may have been a very good airman. But he had no idea of ground troops. No idea of ploy of ground troops. And there being no coordination between them, Brooke-Popham decided that if Malaya

was attacked it might be by air. So he had constructed here, there, pretty well everywhere down Malaya airstrips. And having constructed the airstrips he then said to the army there are the airstrips you’ve got to defend them. So the best example of that stupidity was when Malaya was invaded, there

was a an airstrip a few miles, a couple of miles inland from Kota Bharu. Now the Japanese landed 30,000 troops at Kota Bharu. And immediately went inland. And you can’t expect a few men to hold up 30,000. And the first that the poor soldiers from the 3rd Indian Corps knew it was, the Japanese were at the end

of the runway. And so they simply scampered, naturally scampered for their lives leaving untouched all the ammunition food supplies of every description, they didn’t have time to destroy them. And this happened time and time again. In fact the Japanese in their propaganda said that they were travelling down Malaya on Churchill’s stores. Because

all these airstrips, they just took them over intact with all the ammunition, food supplies of every description, untouched. And they, as I said, they made a big thing of it was Churchill’s stores. The other thing under the very noses of the British, Japan had been busy

in Malaya for years before the war. And they had told the Malays that when they took over the Malay rate of 50 cents an hour, they would make it a dollar an hour, when they ran the country. If you want to, when you wanted a haircut when we were there,

we went to this one and that, they were no good. The one to go to was the Japanese hairdresser. And they were very good hairdressers. They were very friendly and they would laugh and joke and say, where are you from? And what are you doing? All the thing. So in every town practically in every village there would be a Japanese hairdresser.

And the other thing, the dance halls were very popular in Malaya. And to take a quick example, the dance hall at Malacca was run by a very cheerful chap who was very good to Australians and sometimes he would slip them tickets you see, you bought tickets for about five cents

each. And these girls were lined up, absolute beautiful girls and wonderful dancers. And so you bought your tickets, I think they were five cents each, and when the music started you went across and you gave the girl your ticket and you danced. Now the Malay, the manager of that particular dance hall that had been so friendly to the Australians and learnt all sorts of things naturally, where

they came from what they were doing. When we were in Changi a couple of weeks, as prisoners of war that manager walked into Changi in the uniform of an Imperial Japanese Army captain. And they practically, well you might say, every Malay was a fifth column. And we wondered at the time when

22nd Brigade headquarters for example was very accurately bombed, although it was perfectly camouflaged under the rubber trees. The rubber trees were about oh 10, 12 feet apart. Their canopy of leaves made a perfect camouflage. And coming off the road they would go back and they would repair the road so that from the air it would not appear that any trucks had gone into that area.

But through that incredible camouflage headquarters was accurately bombed. And nobody could understand that until Div Headquarters was in the same, camouflaged in another rubber estate, perfectly camouflaged. And we wanted a message to be sent to

a brigade headquarters and so we had runners, they sometimes called them orderlies, but runners who took messages like that. And this particular chap pedalled his very heavy army pushbike down the road and along the road and back up and it was a very hot slog. And he got back and oh, five minutes later was given another message. And he recognised that he could cut diagonally

through the rubber estate and that was easy because they kept the undergrowth down, it was like walking through a park with trees. And he worked out that he could cut diagonally across to the headquarters. And interrupting that, you must realise that in the 1940s and before that, the great commodity that Malaya produced was rubber and tin. Rubber was so important

that if we damaged a rubber tree we had to pay for it. And if we somehow or other cut a rubber tree down the army had to pay the owner of that plantation 30 dollars for that tree, they were they were absolute gold. And so this chap, getting back to our runner running through diagonally across, came across a spectacular

area. About a dozen rubber trees had been cut down. Their foliage had been stripped. Their trunks were laid in a perfect line, exactly in line with our Div Headquarters. The foliage was spread out making a perfect arrow. So that an aircraft would pick up that arrow line himself, up with it, count 1, 2, 3,

4, bombs away, and through the camouflage, let’s call it through the canopy of trees, he would have dropped a bomb into the middle of divisional headquarters. The runner galloped back to headquarters with this story. We immediately sent a platoon out. They ran all the way and they camouflaged the ground to air signal. And five minutes

later there was an aircraft overhead going round and round so slowly, somebody said that bastard will fall out of the sky. He was going so slowly round and round and round above our heads looking, obviously looking for the signal that he’d been told was there. And that happened time and time again. The Malays would, another good trick of the Malays was to use banana leaves. And they’d layer the

banana leaves in an arrow pointing to where headquarters or whatnot was. And the point was that the Malays were giving the information to the Japanese as to where these things were. And down near Johore Bahru an English captain literally staggered into headquarters and he was distraught. He was

the Commanding Officer of an English ack ack [anti aircraft] regiment. And he had been ordered to withdraw. And he had his entire regiment, had gone into a rubber plantation and again, completely camouflaged. Five minutes later a flight of 27 planes came over, and they had a very good system, at a certain signal every plane would drop their bombs.

We used to call it pattern bombing. And it would wipe out an area of a practically a square mile. And this officer had not been killed but he came up and he was distraught. He said that he had lost his regiment and he thought that by cannibalising his guns, and getting a gun crew together, he might get one gun out of his regiment. Because you see the Malays had

seen him go in there got on the phone to somebody and the closest airfield occupied by the Japanese, which sent out a plane or a flight of planes knowing exactly where they were. They couldn’t see them but they would know exactly where they were. The best example and the luckiest thing I think, that happened,

was a we had withdrawn to Singapore Island into Hollands Road. Hollands Road was one of the upper class districts. Beautiful bungalows spread out with much lawn all about them. And I don’t know who started, who called it, but there was a conference with our general officer commanding, General Gordon Bennett

and the British Commanding Officer Percival and Wavell. Now Wavell was a fool. He had been in India and made a mess he’d been in the desert and made a mess of that. They’d transferred him to India. He couldn’t do the right thing there. So where do they send him? To Singapore. He hopped in and out of Singapore two or three times, never went near the fighting or anything like that but to this

conference held at our battle headquarters in Hollands Road, in the house. Bennett was there of course, Percival came out in a small staff car all camouflaged of which there were dozens running round everywhere and nobody took any notice of them. But Wavell came out to that conference and he must have commandeered the largest, most luxurious

car in Singapore. It was an enormous vehicle. And it was black. It was painted polished black. He had a rider, despatch rider on a cycle out in front of him and one behind him. And from his bonnet there was a Union Jack flag which must have been about two feet-odd long and a foot deep. So that the most idiotic

coolie would know that that was a very important person. And he came. Ten minutes later three Japanese bombers came over. And they bombed that house. Now the luck, incredible luck the two outer planes dropped their bombs and blew up the lawn on both sides of the house. The centre

plane they had six bombs. Each of them six bombs blew up the lawns each side of the house. The centre plane dropped its bombs. Three of them blew up the ground in front of the, up to the house. Two of them blew up the lawn beyond the house. And the last one entered the ground at the junction of the

wall, in the ground and penetrated under the very room that the three Generals were in and failed to explode. Now we had a lot of dud bombs from the Japanese. But of all the luck, those 18 bombs that were dropped, the one to not to explode was the one that went straight under the very room that Bennett, Percival and Wavell were in.

See that was the type of fifth column that, we knew nothing, and that had happened under the very noses of the British for years and years. And so that anything we did the Japanese knew about it. We were at, I was running a what we called, a Report Centre at Jemaluang. Which is just inside just in from the coast at Mersing on the east coast. And I was,

we were getting messages, signals from the front line and we were re-directing them to our headquarters back in Johore Bahru. And we had sentries out all over the place. And every night a patrol would go out and check. And so every evening one of the officers would sit down and think, what will be the password tonight?

And on this particular night they thought, oh Bondi. So everybody was told Bondi was the thing. The patrols went out. And 10 minutes later Tokyo Rose was on the radio talking to the Australian boys at Mersing and Jemaluang, “Now be careful tonight boys, Bondi’s the password.” Now that was

10 or 15 minutes after it had been dreamed up in our line. And there was Tokyo Rose knew about it. And so there was, oh great shock. There was a new a new password you know, and another patrol went out. And of course the problem was that the patrol would come up to where the sentry was who would say, “Halt, who goes there?” And they’d say, “Patrol.” “What’s the password?”

“Bondi.” Well there could be in the bushes, at the jungle, within hearing distance, a Malay. Who would immediately get a message through to somebody. Tokyo knew about it, and as I say 10, or most 15 minutes after that was created Tokyo knew, Rose was talking about it in Tokyo.

It was quite incredible that the British knew nothing about these sort of things. And so that the other thing, going back to the British absolute certainty that the jungle was absolutely impenetrable, there were of course running north and south and across to Ayer Hitam and Mersing there were roads. The British set up pillboxes,

machine gun pillboxes on the roads. Because that was the only way that anybody could come down. They couldn’t come down through the impenetrable jungle. And so what the Japanese would do, they sent a patrol down the road, five or four of their main troops, and the British would open up with their guns on the pillbox which told the Japs exactly where it was. So the Japs would leave a

platoon, perhaps a dozen men to fire machine guns on this pillbox. And the rest of the perhaps 2, 3, 4, 500 Japanese soldiers simply parted and went straight through the jungle, the impenetrable jungle. And time and time again those British soldiers in the pillboxes found themselves being attacked from the rear where the Japanese had come down and come round. So it was then

a matter of either jump out and run for your life or be killed or taken a prisoner of war. Because of this insane attitude that the jungle was absolutely impenetrable. Whereas we went over there, the AIF got over there. The 2/30th Battalion for example, went into camp, I think at Gemas. They went, arrived

in Malaya, they went into camp one day, the next day they were out in the jungle. And they would send somebody out and he would pin a notice or something in a tree. And then a platoon or so would be given a map reference for that. And they had to go through the jungle and find that and then come back to camp in the morning.

And there would be another one set up and after lunch they went out to find that through the jungle. But the British had never been in the jungle. So that they were hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. And yet all this went on under the very noses of the British. Who apparently didn’t know anything about it. And another aspect, a little wide afield. The Japanese had

charted the coast from Singapore to Japan. They had charted every rock. And when I was taken to Japan in the Awa Maru it clung to the coast so close, coast so close that you could throw a tennis ball onto the ground. And if there was a little bay, only a little bay or perhaps a little beach in here

and that ship never went from headland to headland it crept into the bay. And at times that ship was on its beam ends in the surf swell. And it would come out and go round the headland, and sometimes it would obviously go out a bit further because they knew that there were rocks there. They knew intimately every foot of the way along that coast. And I suppose I’m lucky.

We were, it was a whole convoy. But the Awa Maru was the prize ship. And one day we were going along and a torpedo blew up on the rocks. We were so close in shore that the torpedo blew up on the rocks. Well there was all hell to pay. We were all herded into the hold which was shut from

the outside so we knew if the ship went down we’d go down with it. But and they were dropping depth charges. And we all thought well this is the end. You know we … But apparently the only explanation must have been that that was a lone submarine who had one torpedo left. And he fired it at the Awa Maru but it blew up on the rocks because the Awa Maru

was so close to the shore. And I think there were no packs of submarines, Allied submarines at that time because we went to Japanese at the time the big attack went in on the Philippines. So all the armoury armaments and submarines would have been engaged over there and not picking up ships on the way. Like they picked up the Oryoku Maru in September, we went up

in January. And got through. We were I think, the only ship that made it. The Allies sunk it on the way back to Singapore. And strangely enough, somehow or other, all our Korean guards were on that ship. And they weren’t when we arrived in Mogi in Kyushu they weren’t they were treated like rubbish. They weren’t even allowed to step foot on the wharf. They were

they were herded back on the… They were half way down the, some of our chaps saw this, we were leading off and they were half way down the gangplank and some of the Japanese soldiers came along and there was a great roaring and they all scampered back. But they all survived the sinking of the Awa Maru on the way back. And they all faced war trials war crime trials and were all hanged for

the way they treated us. But the other, that’s my theory about why Malaya was so quickly fallen … And the only time that that they got a setback in Malaya was when they met the Australians at Muar, the Battle of Muar. And they were held up. They had

everything. And Yamashita later on, I quote, I’ve got it here. Yamashita in his book ‘A Scholar Must Hang’, he made the following comment on the Battle of Muar. And I quote “This led to the most savage action of the whole campaign,” end quote. And then later he wrote, quote, “In all fairness the survivors …”

See we had to pull out after we held them up for a week. And then we were told every man for himself and to get out. So later he wrote, “In all fairness, the survivors, Australia, however, can feel proud because in a week-long battle without the heavy tanks or air support they had held up the whole of my army. This section throughout the whole of my timing for the Singapore

invasion,” end quote. So the Battle at Muar by the Australians saved Australia from invasion by the Japanese. Because he, Yamashita admitted later on that his tactic was, and he sent the cream of the Imperial Japanese Army, the 5th Imperial Guards Division, sent them down by sea and they landed at Muar. And the idea was that they would cut

straight across and cut off all the Allied forces that were in the north and so that his forces could race through Singapore, there’d be nothing left to hold him up in Singapore, race through Java, through Port, through New Guinea and attack the east coast of Malaya. And I have, up there if you want to see it, a plan of his attack from Port Moresby and Lae, he was going to attack the east coast of Australia.

But the Australian forces, the 2/19th and the 2/ 29th, they both lost about 700 men. Out of these battalions there’s only 1000-odd men in a battalion and they lost over 700 in that and the remains of them got out through the jungle when they were told to do so. And I was at Battle Headquarters with General Bennett and Colonel Thire.

And one of the interesting things when the battle commenced, their signallers of course destroyed their secret codes, their codes. And then one of the signallers at Battle Headquarters came up to the General and said we’re getting signals from Muar but it’s not our signal.

They know, as you would possibly know, it’s the same as we could recognise somebody’s writing as against somebody else’s. They recognise and they said we’re getting signals. Perhaps the Japanese have overrun them and are using our signal equipment. And so then came one of the, possibly the strangest interlocution, a message went out,

“Who do you drink with?” And the message came back saying who it was. And they said well that’s his mate. And a message went out, “Where do you drink?” And he named a hotel in Sydney. The other one said well it must be him although it’s not his touch. It must be because if the Japs have got him and ask him where he could say you know, whoop-whoop or anything. But, so we accepted that it

was the signaller with the forces fighting at Muar. Where incidentally Colonel Anderson won the VC [Victoria Cross]. And so they asked then for supplies to be dropped to them, of medicines and ammunition. And we had only two or three poor old Brewster Buffaloes left that hadn’t been blown out of the sky.

And we realised, and the Japs had plenty of aircraft, and this was of course all in open English which we knew the Japs were listening to as well. And so we organised with the air force to drop the, and they said right we’ll drop supplies, ammunition and medical supplies at dawn tomorrow morning. So then

how do we tell the Muar battlers that the planes were coming over at dawn the next morning because they would have been met. With the Japanese listening into this they would have been met by the Japanese fighters and that was the finish of it. And Colonel Thire came up with it and he said, “Send a signal, ‘look up at sparrow far’.” He said, “That’ll trick the Jap for long enough.” And so

next morning at dawn these planes lumbered over dropped their thing, dropped a few bombs on the Japs who were only 500 yards away. And finally, after nearly a week, General Bennett gave the order for them to break off and every man could get out if he could. And the wounded that could not walk were left

under the protection of the Red Cross. And they said well, you know, they’ll be all right, the Japs will take them but they’ll look after them under the Red Cross. What happened was when the Japs made another attack and there was no one there because they’d all withdrawn but the wounded were in the ambulances, they were all hauled out they were tied up with wire.

They were, some of them were used as bayonet practice. And then they were all sprinkled with petrol and set on fire. They massacred the lot. Under the Red Cross. There was one, Ben Hickney, who was able on the edge of it, to get himself, although he was badly wounded he got out, he got into the long grass got away. And naturally he

finally had to give himself up. The Chinese looked after him but at great risk to themselves but he finally had to give himself up and he went into Pudu Jail and finally into Changi. But it wasn’t, he was not, naturally he was sensible enough not to divulge this massacre because that would only cause more problems. But later on Ben Hickney was able to

tell the story of that massacre. That’s the sort of war we fought. Now any questions.

We were well prepared. And we were not hampered by this idiot thought that the jungle was impenetrable. We fought in the jungle as well we could. But against tremendous odds. You see we had,

let’s say the Allies, their air force for example. There were Brewster Buffaloes 90 miles an hour top speed. There were Wildebeests torpedo bombers, carry a large load of bombs, they were 90 miles an hour. And there were some Hudsons about the same speed. And they went up and the air force, and the Hudsons were the old type where you opened the window. And so the air force

sent them up with air force personnel in them and dropping bombs out the open window. They were up against Japanese Navy Zeroes and Army 86ers with a speed of 300 miles an hour. So what chance did a lumbering Brewster Buffalo at 90 miles an hour have against a, they were a Messerschmitt type of aircraft. And

on that point when we were at Johore Bahru and the campaign had started, we were given top secret material gathered by British Intelligence. And the thing said every Japanese soldier was

short of stature, five foot nothing. And usually short sighted. The air force consisted and there were, even in this most secret document there were drawings of Japanese aircraft which so help me, were equivalent to the World War I biplanes. And

the air force was very poor. The pilots were very poorly trained. And if the lead pilot was knocked out then the whole formation would be scattered and useless. Now this is top secret intelligence issued by the British. And we sent that out.

These Japanese, short sighted five foot Japs. And you wonder what the effect on the morale was at Endau and Mersing on the east coast when the Japanese finally attacked that point, and the 2/20th Battalion of ours came up against these, every Japanese soldier was a battle hardened veteran over six foot high. And we had been

told they were five foot nothing. And that was the sort of idiocy that the British went on with. And as I said, there was no cooperation between the army, navy, air force and the civilian population. And there was a Brigadier, I think a Brigadier of the engineers who went to Sir Shenton

Thomas, the Governor of Singapore and asked for permission to put down barbed wire entanglements as a defensive measure along the northern coast of Singapore. And he was denied permission to do that on the grounds that it might upset the native population. And so that when the Allies were

driven back and finally landed on Singapore there was not a single defensive wire or trench or anything else. The go downs are full of the barbed wire that we should have used in that. But the civil administration said no, can’t do that because it might upset the local natives. So that the Japanese, when they attacked Singapore

Island had no defensive things to overcome they just simply raced across the Straits at the obvious shortest narrowest part of the Straits. And on that point the British sent a two-man reconnaissance

party from the Norfolks over the north-west north-east corner of the island on to the mainland. And they found absolutely nothing there. We sent, from the 2/20th, we sent two lieutenants over to reconnoitre on the northwest corner of the island across and they found the most incredible build-up of tanks,

guns, men the whole lot.

Well let’s go back to my training. See I was not an

infantry man. So I did not have to be trained in bayonet fighting and other things. My duties were to take dictation from the G1 or the General, being a movement order and type it up on a Gestetner you know, the old

wax sheets and … ? And then run it off and sent it out by Don R [Despatch Rider] to the various people. So that I didn’t really need any, what was normally thought of army training or rushing around with a bayonet. But we formed when the campaign started and

the AIF were given from Higher Command, were given the state of Johore, to protect them and control. And so that meant that we moved from Kuala Lumpur down to Johore Bahru. And we operated from there. Until the Japanese got near the border of Johore and that’s where we really went into action.

And Battle Headquarters that included me went further up to Labis and Yong Peng. And the General then conducted the battle from there. And it meant that we were, the normal I suppose, the average working day that we put in was anything from 14 to 16 hours. And

we were all exhausted. But you had to continue. I can remember one night getting a movement order from Colonel Thire and I typed it up in the dark. And then to make absolutely sure that I had not mis-read

some of the map references, we had Tilly lamps that we set over them a kerosene tin so that no light came out. But we had a little slit along the bottom which we could lift up and in that tiny little bit of light

I could put my paper underneath and read it. And on that night I can remember very strongly we had another, our defence platoon had been reorganised and we had a few men from the 2/29th I think, as a protection around the Battle Headquarters. And one of them had seen

this tiny speck of light. So out of the darkness came, “Put that bloody light out or I shoot it out.” So my army training was simply that I could type accurately and get it run off in the dark and then give it to Don Rs to take out to

the various points where the ordnance and the medical and everybody else was, to go to a certain spot. Does that cover your … ? See I personally I had a funny experience. I was only young, you see I was only 21. And working

under this awful pressure I began to, and fortunately my medical training in the militia helped a lot, and I recognised that I was going to pieces. One thing was my left thumb started to waggle. And I couldn’t stop it. And I knew that my nervous system was going to pieces. And that was too

dangerous. Because if I got any worse I would not be able to send an accurate movement order out. And so I asked to be relieved. And what Headquarters had done they we had split Headquarters into two and every man had an opposite number. So that if he was shot for example the opposite number would take over, do exactly what the former man had done.

And so I asked for my relief to come up, Merv Parkins to come up and take over. And this was relayed to Colonel Thire who said he denied, that the team was a good team was working well and he didn’t want to get anybody new in it. And so I did a couple of things. One

night, I knew the duty officer on and I wrote a letter to my brother. The first page was you know, that I’m all right and the fighting’s a long way away. You know I could hear the machine guns going but tell Mother not to worry you know, I’m all right. And then the next sheet I said I’m going to pieces and blankety-blank Thire was a blah blah blah blah oh.

I really said all the things that one shouldn’t say. And then I turned that sheet over and I finished up by saying that tell Mother not to worry and blah blah blah blah and signed it. And I wasn’t silly. I picked that up when I knew the duty officer was on and he would censor it there and then. And so I gave it to him. Well he bounded into

where I was a few minutes later and said, “Whitecross you can’t say these things. It’s a court-martial offence. The things that you’re saying about the Colonel.” And I said, “But they’re true aren’t they?” “Oh,” he said, “that’s got nothing to do with it. You can’t do that. Oh,” he said, “and I could get into trouble by bringing you back the letter that you’ve given me to censor and send off.” He said, “I could get into trouble for that.” I said, “Well I can help you on that but,” I said, “can you talk to the Colonel about my relief?”

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah.” And I took the centre page out tore it up, and of course the rest of the letter said you know that it was just a … And so he did. And the same reply came back no, the team was working well, no. Request denied. So the next morning, I came off duty the next morning, I was over, we had a camouflage tent fly and there was another

chap off duty over there. And beyond us was where the officers had their billet at the time, under the trees somewhere. And I saw one of them coming back. It was Captain Jessup. He became Mayor of Lane Cove after the war. But Jessup was coming back. And he had to pass these, my tent fly and much to my mate’s absolute surprise

when he didn’t realise what was going on, but when Jessup got into hearing range I let fly. Oh the blankety-blank Colonel and the blah blah blah blah blah. Oh it went on and on. And Jessup spun in there and said, “Whitecross I heard that.” I said, “Did you?” I said, “It’s true isn’t it?” He said, “You can’t say things like that. You can be sent off to a battalion.” I said, “Right, right good.” I said, “I’ve got my gear here. I can be out ready to go to a battalion, you tell me which battalion

and I’ll go. In two minutes I can go. You tell me which battalion to go and I’ll go, right.” He said, “Oh. I’ll talk to him.” So away he went. Ten minutes later he came back and said, “Whitecross, Parkins will be brought up tonight and you’ll go back to Rear Headquarters.” And that was astonishing. You see you couldn’t move during the daytime because the Japanese aircraft would blow you off the road. Which they

did and, well they didn’t blow us off the road they riddled the truck I was in. It didn’t hit anybody luckily on one occasion. And they didn’t upset the engine. So we scrambled out of the ditch and back and away we went. So everything was done at night. And so this Merv Parkins was going to come up at night and I would go back to Rear Headquarters in the in the same truck. And I got back to Rear Headquarters and immediately collapsed

from exhaustion. I woke up in the morning I went outside and it was absolutely incredible. There was the sky. Now I hadn’t seen the sky for over a month. I realised then the awful oppression, oh. And the relief, there was the sky. Oh. It was and oh everything was oh away, home away from home. The cooks cooked good meals

and you used to help yourself. Where we were at a Battle Headquarters moving quickly our Advance Headquarters didn’t know where we were at times. Rear Headquarters had no idea where we were. And so that sending us up rations and things was a bit of a thing. I spent three days on one occasion with an open tin of marmalade jam which at the time I didn’t like, and a packet of army

biscuits. And I lived on that for three days. Until somehow or other word got through of where we were and up came up a Dixie full of horrible stew. But it was better than an army biscuit dunked into a tin of marmalade jam. And well, within a couple of days I recovered. And on the third day I was really enjoying this, oh wonderful. I get a signal from

Battle Headquarters to take a section onto the island and set up a Battle Headquarters at Bukit Tinggi. And that was a funny thing. I took the three ton office truck and a crew. And I was given, in the signal I was given the house. You see the army used to just commandeer a house. And

I was given where the house was and all the rest of it, in the signal. And so I rolled into this house, into this garden and I thought that’s funny that door’s open. So I went down to the house and there was a woman in the house with a little tiny baby. And I said to her, “Madam aren’t you aware that this house has been commandeered by the army?” And she said, “No.” I said, “Where’s your husband?” She said,

“I don’t know. He’s away with the Malay volunteers but he said he’d be back about midday.” And I said, “All right.” I said, “I’ll set up in your garden,” I said, “there’s a big tree I can get my truck under it. And there are other trees there,” I said, “the men can get under those and we can operate in your garden until things work out.” And I did that. And

about midday rushing through the gate came a car and the poor man, his eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw this great army truck and all sorts of things in his house. And I went across to him and said, “I’m sorry but you know this house has been commandeered by the army.” And oh he raced into the house in five minutes he and his wife and baby, away they went, I don’t know what happened to them. But then we were able to

move into that house and set it up as a Battle Headquarters. And at one time, a couple of days later, see the Japanese were told where we were. And that was shelled. That, and there’s nothing more devastating than to hear a shell coming in and getting louder and louder and you’re quite sure it’s going to land in the small of your back. And

I come off duty on one occasion there and there was a well with a corrugated iron surround. Oh very swish it was. And I went up peeled off my stinking perspiration clothes hauled up a bucket of water and poured it over myself as the first shell came in.

So there I was stark naked flat on the concrete that was around the well. And every time I got up to grab my pants another shell would come in. And the corrugated iron around that well became like a colander with the shrapnel punching holes all through it. But I was down low and every time I got up another idea, another shell and

back down I’d go again. Finally I thought they’ve got to stop. Because there were four guns. I recognised that there were four guns. And I thought well, they’ve got to stop because their barrels will be getting red hot. Because they were, as fast as they could put a shell in they were firing it and sure enough a little while later. And I tell you I leaned what fear was. And a little while later the guns stopped and I

got my pants. And I galloped across, somebody had dug a slit trench and my mate Mac was in it. And that made all the difference to have somebody, otherwise I was on my own and with Mac oh everything … And so we sat in that slit trench because it had been dug through the clay and we played noughts and crosses on the thing while

shells came in. And we had our heads down low enough that the shrapnel went over the top of us. There was one man killed. He was in the house next door and one of the shells went a bit stray and hit that house and he got killed. And then when we moved out of there the Japs raised their sights a bit and were shelling

over Bukit Tinggi and onto a crossroads. Now those shells must have been only 10 or 12 feet high over the drop of that Bukit Tinggi mountain. So that loading the trucks it was, looking back on it, quite funny. Chaps would be carrying some heavy object and a shell would come and they’d bend down and then practically crawl. Because the shells were whistling over our heads and dropping down.

And then we called for our truck. It was not up there. Our driver was Terry. Terry, I forget his other name now. He died at the 14 kilo camp in Burma. But he got his truck up. And we that’s where we got down and

the next stop was Hollands Road which we talked about. But we were at Bukit Tinggi on the 8th of February when the Japanese actually launched their attack across the straits onto the island. And I was caught up in that with messages, everything was in a state of

flux. Of course the poor old AIF, each battalion had a front of something like 6000 yards. And as the Japs came across the machine gunners mowed them down, and all they did was climb up and be shot and climb up over the growing mound of bodies. Until the machine gunner had to cease firing

‘cause his barrel was red hot and ceased to function. Oh he scrambled back and set up again and that’s where the Japanese got on to Singapore Island and were headed for Tengah Air Force base, airport, aerodrome. So it was and then we, from Hollands Road we got down to Tengah Barracks and set up in Tengah

Barracks. The British were somewhere else. And that was another lucky occasion for me. We had built, or somebody had dug an air raid trench under a tree. And a shell came through that tree. And it practically demolished the tree but it didn’t explode. Now if it had been there

if it had exploded I wouldn’t be talking to you now. It crashed down branches everywhere and it landed on the padangs, the playing field. And it dug a trench right across the and finished up in the gutter 3 or 400 yards away. And a couple of us got off duty I think the next day and we walked, there was this trench that the shell had dug

and there was the shell big shell lying on the ground. And my mate made a step towards it and I said, “Wait a minute don’t touch it.” I said, “It came through that tree, it didn’t explode but any touch it might go off.” So and there was a couple of us came off duty, and there was a shower ablutions block just up

20 or 30 yards away and so right, and that was absolutely wonderful I mean the heat was fantastic. Over 90 degrees on the old Fahrenheit scale. All the time. And you were, you know, pretty busy so that you were sweating like mad. And the thought of a cold well with cold water was absolutely wonderful. And I was walking up the road

to this ablutions block and a mortar bomb, I heard it coming, a mortar bomb landed quite close to me. And you know, a piece of shrapnel luckily. I had my steel helmet on and clang! And I saw it land on the road in front of me. And there it is and we had at that time

no thought of surrender or prisoner of war or anything like that. And I thought gee that’d be a good souvenir to take home. So I went to pick, well I did start to pick it up. ‘Course it was red hot. Ahh. And then, it was Hec Holdorth and Keith Clark and I. We got into this ablutions block. Oh splashing cold water oh beautiful. And in came

a whole barrage of mortar bombs. Well if you can imagine a funnier sight than three naked bodies flat out on the floor each with his tin hat on, that was all we had on, until that shelling finished up. And at that point I can remember Headquarters, Australian Headquarters sent over reinforcements.

And at one stage, at that very spot we got, a messenger came across and said, “Stand to. The Japs are putting in a smokescreen and they’ll attack through those trees just up there.” So I got out of the truck and I had a telephone with a 40 foot wire attached to it. So I reached the

slit trench and jumped into it. And then the phone went and I was busy on that. And of course I had my rifle all ready. I thought well I’ll get one or two of them as they come. And then I realised, on this phone, I realised there was another chap had jumped in it, was a fairly long trench another chap had jumped into it. And I looked at him and I said, “Who the hell are you?” “Oh,” he said,

“I’m Div Headquarters.” I said, “Like hell, I’ve never set eyes on you.” “ No,” he said, “I’m a reinforcement.” I said, “Oh.” And then the phone went again and I was on that and the next time I looked at him he had his rifle in one hand and the magazine in the other. And he was putting it in. And I said, “What the hell are you doing?” And he said, “Oh,” he said, “I got

this off the rifle somehow but,” he said, “I can’t get it back again.” I said, “Haven’t you had any training?” And he said, “No.” So he got a five-minute crash course on loading his rifle. I said, “How much ammunition have you got?” “Oh,” he said, “this is full, that’s all.” And I had, when the whistle went with this, we expected this attack to come through the smokescreen.

I had picked up about four bandoliers of 303’s and they were pretty weighty but … So I said, “Look,” and I took one of them off and I gave it to him. And I said, “Look,’ and I showed him how to put the magazine in and then press it down and put an extra one up into the bridge so that you had 11 shots in, more than 10. And then I said, “Holy mackerel.” I said, “Put your bayonet on.” His bayonet was still hanging on his … I said,

“Fix your bayonet for God’s sake.” And I said, “Look when they come through,” I said, “never mind about aiming your…” I said, “just fire, they’ll come in as a body,” I said, “just fire at them.” And I said, “When they come try and get one with your bayonet.” “Oh.” And so that was it. What we found out was that it wasn’t a smokescreen at all, it was just the smoke from the incredible barrage of mortar bombs. And

we were still there when, that must have been about the Friday, we were still there when the surrender came through. See the Australians never surrendered. We were surrendered by Percival and the British High Command. We actually wanted to continue, it was a hopeless thing, but we wanted to continue fighting but we had orders that we had been surrendered and that’s all about it.

But, and that night, Sunday night which finished it all, I was in the room… Bennett gave me an order of the day to send out to the troops about 9 o’clock, half past 9 at night, the surrender was come into force at half past 8. And he gave me this order of the day, thanking the troops for their loyalty and work etcetera, and wishing them

well. And I ran it off and gave it to the signals people to send out. And it was the last I saw of Bennett ‘cause he and Charles Moses and Lieutenant Walker they got away. But the rest of the officers were in the room and somebody brewed up a jug of coffee and they put some rum in it, so coffee royal. And

somebody said, “Where’s Willie?” Now Willie to them was Sir Wilfred Kent-Hughes, later on the Right Honourable Sir Kent-Hughes. I’ve got his book there signed by him. “Oh, oh, Willie’s not here.” And a few minutes later he came in. He was a wonderful man. And somebody said to him, “Where have you been?”

He said, “I went outside in the dark on my own and I wept.” That was the end of it. He was a marvellous man. His book was written in classical iambic pentameter. And it just reads like an ordinary book. And he wrote that while he was in

in Manchuria, Manchukuo because the Japs sent all the senior officers up north away from us. Which is another thing that Bennett was decried by Blamey who hated his guts anyway. And Bennett was tried on the grounds that he should have stayed and helped his men. Which was the most stupid thing that you could think of. Because

every officer of the rank of Colonel and above was segregated from the men. And that party in April or May, we surrendered in February. April or May that party was sent off, they finished up Formosa, they went further up and they finished up in Manchuria. So that this argument that Bennett should have

stayed and helped his men… One, even if he stayed in Singapore he was segregated from the men and there was no way, in actual fact he and the other senior officers were despatched up, way out of, up into Manchuria. Or as the Japs called it Manchukuo. So that’s it. You might be interested in my thoughts on the atomic bomb.

A lot of people have decried the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were inhuman and all the, so many people were killed. Firstly you’ve got to realise that they ended the war. That’s one thing in their favour. Secondly if you work it out, in Hiroshima there were about

60,000 people killed. Say that was in August. If you go to the end of the year 60, 70,000. In Nagasaki 30,000 people were killed by the bomb that dropped on Nagasaki. So you know you’re talking about a couple of hundred thousand people.

Now if the war had gone on for another few weeks, see that stopped the war. I and the others were taken round to Nagasaki and we were to be transhipped at Okinawa. But the ship we were on got down, clear, beautiful, clear day, and Okinawa was somewhere over the horizon.

We were so far away from it. But we were travelling up between lines and lines of shipping. Which went line after line as far as you could see, there were hundreds. Some you could recognise as being destroyers or frigates or something, others were the most incredible, one that I remember even looked like a tin box floating, goodness only knows what that was. So that was the

invasion fleet. Being ready the Allied High Command had decided to attack Kyushu in November of ’45. And this was the beginning of the units for that. Amongst other things they, and it’s in writing somewhere they anticipated the attack on Kyushu

as the Allies, 1,000,000 killed in action. And untold numbers of wounded. And the medical section said that they would make sure they had a hospital ship standing by and there would be beds for 135,000 wounded. And they would be evacuated as soon as possible to either other now friendly islands or the mainland so that there would be always, off the invasion point,

135,000 beds for the wounded. Now if you go to Manchuria, the Russians had because the war had ended in Europe and the Russians had rushed a million and a half men, backed by every conceivable field artillery piece and guns and planes,

had rushed them across. The Japanese Army in Manchukuo was 1,000,000. And if they would have fought like they did in Guam and other places they would have fought to the last man. So that the ‘killed in action’ up there would have been 1,000,000 Japanese and possibly 1,000,000 Russians. So that if you leave it at that point

you’ve got something like 3 or 4,000,000 killed in action as against a couple of hundred thousand that the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs killed. And what the Allies did not know, but found out later after the surrender by Japan, and if you like I’ve got the transcript of the Emperor’s thing there. But after the war ended

of course the Allies gathered up all the papers and documents and things and they found out there, that apart from the Japanese Imperialist Army which you’re supposed to fight they had made arrangements for three, nearly three and a half million civilians to fight. And they, I’ll just I’ll quote it. They

were given a hastily prepared document, little handbook which they, which was called, sorry I can’t find the right page.

Sorry about that. Can you stop that while I find this?

… were enlisted. Now the Allies didn’t know that because it was all done by telephone or whatnot. See we, our forces could listen to the radio

and decipher what they said. So all this was done either by telephone or direct thing. “And the civilians, many of the eager schoolchildren were trained with hand grenades, swords, halberds, fire hooks and bamboo spears. Their training manual was a hastily printed crudely illustrated and I quote ‘People’s Handbook of Resistance Combat’ which showed them

how to make a Molotov cocktail called a flame bottle, by the Japanese, and hurl it at a United States tank. They were also told to rush the tank and blow it up with a satchel of explosives. And if they did not have explosives climb a hill and push rocks down on the top of the tanks”. Oh. So that

what that meant was that, oh and they were told to use anything from kitchen knives to anything they could get hold of. And they, the army, going back to the army, and I quote these were directives sent

out from Japanese High Command, “During the decisive battle the sick and wounded would not be evacuated to the rear but would keep on fighting and annihilating the enemy force. There will be no retreat. Men are to stand and die.” End quote. Quote, “Nursing and tending to comrades is not allowed. Units shall not retreat. Every unit of the operational force

should be a fighting unit. Even the rear logistic and medical units shall be prepared for fighting. Soldiers without weapons shall take the arms from dead soldiers. Wounded soldiers and patients shall accompany troops during the march and participate during the decisive battle. Dropping out shall not be permitted.” So that there were 13.3 million males

aged 15 to 59 who were recruited to fight. Now that meant that in an invasion the Allied troops would have had to go into every house, in every village, in every town, and into every room, in every house, in every village, and kill the civilian there because they had been ordered by the Emperor, and he’s divine you know,

to fight with sickles or weapons and other things, they said to use scuffle to attack the invader from the rear. And so that it would have meant to protect their rear, the Allied Forces would have to kill every civilian that they came across. It would have been the greatest bloodshed of the world

if those atomic bombs hadn’t been dropped. And yet people, even Rutherford who split the atom was a violent anti-bomb person. But those bombs that were dropped saved the lives of millions. They saved my life by six hours. Because the Emperor made his statement.

He never surrendered, he never said he surrendered. He said he accepted the terms of the Chinese, United States, Britain and Russian requirements. Which required him to be unconditional surrender but he never said so. He went on and on at great length.

We had in our Camp 17 which was one of, if not the largest POW camp in Japan in Kyushu, in Omuta Kyushu, and early in August workmen came in to the camp and they erected pillboxes on each corner of the big parade ground.

And they weren’t to keep anybody out of their thing because all of the gun ports faced in. And the Emperor made his, let’s call it surrender statement at noon on the 5th of August and we were to be annihilated at 6 o’clock that night. So that Amaguchi,

one of the Japanese interpreters …

No I haven’t. No. No, I haven’t I’m not aware of that at all.

What do they call them? Deep thinkers …

Well that’s true enough but I’ve never heard the phrase before. As we said before, the 6th and 7th Division were young chaps who had gone through the Depression didn’t have a job and joined the army. Apart from, well that was an income, apart from the excitement of whatever happened. Then there was a long, quite a long delay

when things were going very poorly for England that they decided to enlist the 8th Division. And that’s, as I said, they were mainly well I think it was a good description, they gave it a lot more thought than the chaps who joined the 6th Division. Because a lot of them, one of my close

friends, Billy Lovell he was an architect. And he had his own business. But he gave that away and joined up. And there were a lot like him. Morris Macdonald, or Uncle Mac as we used to call him, he was a bit older than most of us. He had a thriving art business, he was a good artist and that sort

of thing pervaded the whole of the of the Division.

That’s right. Well that, and that was smartly knocked on the head when one of the lady reporters perhaps was foolish enough

to come over, or was asked to come over and see the playboys. And they asked her what battalion she’d like to go to and I think she said the 2/30th. Well that was the battalion that went out every morning and ploughed through the jungle for several miles and back in and had their meal, and out again. And so they said well if you, and I think they did this early in the piece, they said, “If you want to see what we’re doing

you come with us all the time.” And so she did, that damn near killed her. Because she was ploughing through the jungle with them. And when night time came there was not much energy left for anybody to go playboying around. If you were on leave then you caught up on your sleep and you weren’t so exhausted and then

you might go to, let’s see there was Anzac House and there was the Union Jack House, I think. Union Jack for the British troops, and we could go there too if we wanted to. But you could get a meal there and drinks if you wanted them. So chaps would go there if they were on leave. And they were, oh they were very disciplined. Because the

night that Japan actually invaded Singapore and Patani and Kota Bharu I was in the Union Jack Club. And I think it was the Military Police or something came to the door and shouted everybody back to barracks? And those English blokes they just simply dropped their knife and fork and jumped to their feet and out.

And a group of us said, “Well they’re not going to get anywhere in a minute or two.” So we finished our meal and went back to the, where we had our transport and then went back to camp. Where we, it was a small group of which I was one of them, packed up their gear and went up to Jemaluang as I told you before and operated a Report Centre up there.

But it was just a bit ridiculous for the chaps in Singapore to leap to their feet and go back to barracks when the fighting was 300 miles north. So they were, we thought it was a sensible thing to finish our dinner and go back to camp and see what was going on. I mean we didn’t,

we didn’t wait about. We went back.

Mm?

Oh I think that was pretty, by the time we got there it was very obvious that Japan was coming down through Thailand, Cambodia and Thailand.

So if there was anybody going to attack Singapore it was the Japanese. But no, that was fairly obvious. But then we had, as we said before, we had this wonderful secret intelligence on the, how easy the Japanese were to, you know, they probably just … And most of the British civilian

people there they considered that as gospel up to the, practically the last minute. Because one of our medical officers. Roly Richards was absolutely tired out and he had met a doctor, British doctor up there.

And he went to his home where his servant said no, the doctor was in town, told he was at the Adelphi Hotel so Roly went in all dirt and you know, he hadn’t had a decent bath for days, and he saw this chap and said, “Look you know can you come and give me a hand?”

I’ve got so many wounded you know. And the chap said, “Oh don’t be silly,” you know and, “the Japs won’t come down here,” you know. “Come and have a drink,” you know … That was their English civilian attitude that they let’s say they accepted what they’d been told that the Japs weren’t worth considering as a fighting division. They forget about them and push them aside

So that was the general thought of the English in Singapore. It was quite amazing.

Well one of the problems, well with the troops we didn’t have much to do with them because we had our own areas of defence and all that. The ones we did have problems with were the British MPs [Military Police].

We got in places like Kuala Lumpur, there was no mosquitoes, there was no malaria in the city. It was all cleaned out. You had to be careful if you went 10 miles out of the, into the jungle from Kuala Lumpur. But the orders were, and we had these ridiculous rather fold up trousers that became shorts

and then you and your sleeves were supposed to be rolled down at sundown. And so there was a constant problem with English Military Police. Say put your, roll your sleeves down, roll your sleeves down and we’d tell them where to go. And certainly there was the great Battle of the Eastern. The Eastern was the big hotel

in Kuala Lumpur. And I went down, I was sent down to Kota Bharu on the very day that this event occurred. And leading down to the Great Eastern was a, oh more than an alleyway. But a few of our blokes on the side and a few English blokes on the other side trading insults across the thing.

And so our chaps, a few more of our chaps arrived and a few more English arrived. And finally there was quite a number. And nobody ever found would say who flung the first punch but they got crowded into this area so that they were not on each side, they were more or less pushed together. And that started the greatest fight

of all time. And they practically, well it went into the hotel. And they practically demolished the hotel. ‘Cause it was all cane furniture and stuff and that was picked up and bashed over somebody’s head, and I don’t know how much it cost the army but the army had to, I think they came to an arrangement with the English Forces and the Australian Forces, they paid half each

to re- reconstruct the hotel from the damage that was done by what was known as the Great Eastern fight. So there was some opposition between the troops. But only on leave you know, out in the field it was a different matter.

Oh possibly within half an hour of them landing at Kota Bharu. See they landed at Patani and Singora which is up in Thailand above the border and Kota Bharu is in the on the Malayan side of the border. Well the message came down very quickly. Radios weren’t a great help in the heavy jungle but on long trips like that we got

information pretty well almost instantaneously as to what was happening up, just 300 miles away.

Didn’t hear much about that because we were out in the field and you didn’t get newspapers, and

we knew that the [HMS] Prince of Wales and the [HMS] Repulse had been sunk. That was a bit of a shock to everybody but the rest of the outside Malaya news was pretty short. Because as I say there were no newspapers or and if there was a radio it was used for official purposes and not for picking up

world wide news, anything like that. So although you could, I got very friendly with a Mr Moore who was the headmaster of the Malay Boys Trade School. And he was just down the hill from our Headquarters building. And the powers that be decided, oh sometime in

probably November that they would start a an AIF Hockey Association. And somebody knew that I had played hockey and so I was delegated to form the AIF Hockey Association which meant finding my own team in Headquarters and going into Singapore and buying all the hockey sticks and pads and whatnot.

And I went down and saw Mr Moore who was the, as I said, the headmaster of the school and it had a padang, a playing field which we wanted to use to play hockey on. And he agreed very smartly. And in addition we took over his school because well, we played hockey for a while and then

the Japanese attacked up in the north and that’s when we split Headquarters into two. So that everybody had a partner. And I got to know Mr Moore even more because we were occupying the, well some of the chaps were occupying his schoolrooms. Fact Lockie Easton,

was a great crash from him one time and a cobra had fallen out of the roof, out of the ceiling and fallen all over his typewriter. And that was, he of course wrenched his bayonet out and despatched the cobra. And the other officers were there nearby went in and said oh,

oh so I picked it up. Unfortunately I picked it up just behind really on his neck. And as I picked it up it was obviously you know, I worked this out later, obviously my pressure on his neck and of course his hood came out. You’ve never seen a room cleared so quickly it was more than Olympic standards. And then we went back in again and examined it

and this time I picked it up on my bayonet and I took it next door to Mr Moore. And I said, “Look at this.” “Oh yes,” he said “a small snake.” Then he said, “Oh, oh,” he said, “that’s a cobra.” I said, “Yeah it fell out of your roof.” “Oh,” he said, “years since I’ve seen cobras around here.” And I said, “Well they’re still about,” because one of the signallers had come back from a day out somewhere or other and we had

soldiers boxes we called them, with all our gear in it and that had to be locked at night on the, but he came back this signal bloke came back, and poking out from under his box was a little tail obviously a little snake. So he whipped out a pair of pliers and grabbed the thing. And those boxes are quite heavy. But in his case it rose up. And he found

himself on the end of a Hamadryad, a King Cobra. So he yelled for his mates and they came in and they despatched the cobra finally. So I said this to Moore I said, “We found more cobras in our camp up the hill.” And he said, “That’s amazing.” He said, “The last time that we had any problem here,” he said, “must have been 50 years ago. A tiger took one of

the one of the Prime Minister’s servants in the area.” We were in the palace, not of the sultan but of the old Prime Minister of Johore. Big two or three-storey building. And he said a tiger took a, but that was oh it was 40 or 50 years ago, but he was quite surprised to find that he had cobras in his roof, of his

schoolroom. But he had a very large radio. And I’ve never come to terms with it. Because I used to go down there on his invitation, to dinner at night if I was off duty. And he’d say go in the next room from the dining room and you’ll pick up the Australian radio. And his daughter used to come in

and operate the great big radio. And what concerned me was that I would be working in the office, let’s call it Div Headquarters and I would get messages from the front line which now 2 or 300, 200, 250 miles up.

And one of them I remember was that the Japs had crossed the Slim River. And that was straight direct as, I suppose, a secret report to Div Headquarters and I got it. And then 20 minutes later I went down to dinner with Moore. And when I went in he said, “Oh gee,” he said “the Japs have crossed the Slim River.” And I could never understand how

he knew. And there were several cases of that and I pondered a lot on whether to raise it with our General or G1. But I didn’t, I thought no it might create more problems because he was married to a Malay, a cousin of the Sultan’s. And so he was well connected. And so I never did anything about it. I don’t know what happened to him in the finish.

But that was you know, messages came through fairly quickly.

Oh. We finished up

in, be June or July of 1941. That’s the closest my memory will take it. Because the first action the Australians were involved in was the ambush put in by the 2/30th Battalion at Gemas. There was a bridge there. And the Gemencheh River. And

the engineers came along and mined the bridge. They did such a good job of it and then a couple of platoons were in the jungle let’s call it, and the road came, there was quite a deep defile from the bridge. And so they mined the bridge. And while, and that afternoon

two obvious Japanese officers came down dressed in sarongs but you know they were pretty obvious. And they inspected the bridge. But the engineers had done such a good job they didn’t see the explosives. So they went back. And a couple of hours later the first troops, first Japanese troops came across the bridge and they let about 100

or so through for the next platoon to deal with. And then they blew the bridge. And of course that meant that the heavy concentration of the Japanese Army was caught on the other side of the river. And the 2/15th had a battery of guns. Oh five miles back. But the Commanding Officer of the 2/30th didn’t like

using radio. He had the opinion, not a bad one, that if he used radio they’d be able to sight in on him. Well he had them put in signal wires back to him. Because the idea was that when the bridge was blown the word would go back he was five or six miles back. And the artillery

would open up on the furthest bank. But of course the problem with that was that the line, telegraph wire lines were laid virtually along the side of the road and obviously the first Jap that crossed there and saw them and cut them. So that unfortunately, with this incredible build up of Japanese troops on the far side of the river

the artillery never opened up. And they just simply dispersed and some went across the river in the west and others went across the river in the east. And finally the platoon that was holding the ambush had to withdraw because the Japs were through the impenetrable jungle. But that was the first action that the Australians were involved in.

Oh yes that was one time when we were moving from one point to another. And down the road which was a long straight road. And I looked up and saw three Japanese planes and I noticed that they were circling

round and they were coming in behind us and we were on this straight road. So I called to an orderly who was in the front of the truck, I said tell, I think it was Terry, “Tell Terry to stop we’re going to be machine gunned any tick of the clock.” And it was Archie Henderson, and poor old Archie couldn’t get round the truck and onto the

roof of the cabin because we had a big camouflage net over there. He said, “I can’t reach him.” I said, “Put one up the spout and go that’ll …” So he jammed a bullet up his rifle and fired that. Well that brought the driver to, and we all piled out of it and into the deep drainage system beside the road just as the planes came down and strafed the truck, it was full of holes. But none of us were

hit. And the truck was still serviceable. So as they took off, you know, over us, we scrambled back and in and zoom off we went. So we, it was after that, we decided or somebody decided that you just could not move on the roads in daylight because the Japs had complete control of the air. Because our poor old Brewster Buffaloes they were shot out of the air very quickly.

So, but it’s the sound of bullets whistling within feet of you, you don’t forget it. I was in Cuba one time when that exactly happened near me but that’s another long story.

Well. I suppose we could say we hoped it wouldn’t but we knew right from the start that the jungle was not impenetrable that that an idiotic idea that the British had. And I suppose we were too busy once the fighting got into our defence area, we were too busy fighting

that to worry about Singapore. We just battled on without much thought I suppose. It was, nobody said oh they’re going to, they’re going to take Singapore that wasn’t in our thinking. We just got all our troops across the causeway.

And there again the British were quite crazy. The causeway as you would know, crosses the straits. And we had the explosives. And [Australian General] Gordon Bennett argued fiercely with Percival that he wanted to blow the whole causeway up. It’s nearly a mile long. But Percival for some reason

refused to allow that. But finally with Bennett’s screaming anger he agreed that 40 or 50 feet of the logs and whatnot at the northern end of the causeway could be blown up. Well that held the Japanese up for I suppose about two or three hours. Because going back

to the Malayan Fifth Column, the area is interlaced with small creeks, small rivers, all with bridges over them. And we actually found, and in one case somebody was doing a bit of scouting near a bridge and into the jungle and came across a stack of timber.

All cut to replace the bridge that the Malays and the Jap- under the Japanese knew that we were going to, would blow it anyway. But it was all ready there. And again there was another, there was another bridge near a timber yard. And in the corner of the timber yard we found another batch of timber that precisely enabled the Japanese, the Japs

to rebuild a blown bridge in a matter of hours. So it was all very difficult with virtually a population that was on the side of the Japanese. And whilst we burnt or blew up these piles of timber that we found we knew that there were dozens and dozens of other ones that we

didn’t find that were used. And it was the same with the causeway. The Japanese engineers had that, see they had tanks running over it within a few hours. See we, they had a lot of tanks but we didn’t have a single tank in Malay. The Allies didn’t have a single tank. But, and that was one aspect of the Battle of Muar. There was a bend in the road

near where the fighting was going to or taking place. And we had one gun from the fourth anti-tank gun. And they got word somebody went up and there was a look out. And there were six tanks coming down the road. And there was this bend. And the gun was at the end of the road,

end of the straight bit of road. And they waited until they got a signal that the last sixth tank had come round the bender and then they took that out. They fired on that one, just disabled it. So that the others couldn’t get back. And by that time the lead tank was practically simply yards away from the gun. And they destroyed those six tanks. One chap got a Military Medal

out of that. They went up the drain every road had a pretty drain beside it for the rainy season. But they went up climbed onto one of the there were two tanks I think. Climbed onto the tank, opened up the top and dropped a hand grenade in. One of them got slightly wounded but they did a good job. That put the tanks out of action.

But the Battle of Muar went on as we’ve talked about that anyway.

Well possibly being on Divisional Headquarters we were the first to know about it. But we were,

it wasn’t discussed with our GOC [General Officer Commanding]. It was all done by Percival who originally sent up the Japanese Yamashita, demanded their surrender and Percival sent one of his senior officers up to the Ford factory at Bukit Tinggi where Yamashita had set up his headquarters and Yamashita wouldn’t buy that at all. He told him

he needed the GOC in there. So they had to go back to Fort Kenny dig Percival out of his deep bunker and march back up the road to Bukit Tinggi where the surrender took place. And what we found out later if we had hung on for another few days the Japanese would run out of supplies. But we

didn’t know that. And in any case thousands and thousands of refugees had poured into Singapore. And the Japanese just simply shelled Singapore. And the reckoning was that there were 27,000 casualties per day in the last five or six days before Singapore fell. But it had to go because the water supply there was the

MacRitchie Reservoir on Singapore Island. But that was overrun by the Japanese anyway. But the main supply of water to Singapore city came from dams or something a bit up country in Johore. And came across the causeway in great big pipes. So that and in any case what water was available in the city most of it was

running to waste being the pipes were being blown up by the constant shelling from the Japanese so the fall of Singapore was in the long run absolutely inevitable. We put, the AIF put a defensive perimeter around the Botanical Gardens and we were going to fight to the last there. And at that same day

one of our staff officers got a telephone call from one of the British officers with the information that there were hundreds of Australian deserters wandering around Singapore business centre. And our chap said, “Don’t be silly we know where every man is and every man’s in his post.” It’s not, they’re not Australians,” and this chap said, “Yes they are,

they’ve got the slouch hats, the uniforms, the lot, they’re Australians.” And our chap said, “No.” He said, “You go back and have a look at them and come back and tell me the colour of their boots.” And the English bloke said, “Oh what rot,” and he said, “you go and so-and-so bloody well do it.” And so he did and he came back and he said they’re wearing black boots. And our chaps said, “Yeah they’re British.” He said, “Even before the Boer War,

no Australian Army man has ever put anything on his feet except tan boots.” He said, “Those black boots are English.” And the point was that again the idiocy, they were reinforcement the 18th Division. English 18th Division. And they were destined, they had trained

and they were destined for the desert. And at the last day or so they were diverted and sent to Singapore. And of all the idiocy, the men were all on one ship and all their equipment was on another. And that ship was sunk as it got into Keppel Harbour the Japanese bombers had simply sunk it. So that the men got ashore with nothing.

But they were fitted out at the Australian Ordnance Depot. So they were wearing Australian hats and Australian uniforms because of the idiot nonsense of putting personnel on this ship and all their equipment and everything else on the other. So that if one went, you know, you had a lot of equipment and no one to run it or if the equipment went was sunk you had a lot of men without a gun.

It was you know, some of these things I’m sure a lot of people would find hard to believe but that’s what happened.

Oh. Well, anger, hatred no. It’s in the past. Anger yes, because

30 years after the fall of Singapore you see, you have a secret office, Official Secrets Act all that stuff is held in secret for 30 years. And then it was released. And in that there were statements and reports by Wavell about, particularly about these

marauding deserters that were wandering around Singapore and he blamed the Australians for that and there wasn’t an Australian near them, they were all British. And that annoyed everybody. Very bitter about that. Because we were holding the line as I say, we had a perimeter around the Botanical Gardens which would have saved Singapore for a time. And yet here’s Wavell

reporting that all these hundreds of Australians were deserters and looting and Lord knows what. When he knew absolutely nothing about the, he’d popped into Singapore he’d have a little talk to Percival and out again and he came back to the meeting with Percival and Bennett and out again. He never went near the fighting, he didn’t know what was going on. But his reports

were damning. Just as damning as they were wrong. So it was a poor show.

… there would be no looting. And I didn’t see this but a couple of my mates did who were on a working party in Singapore. Only a week or two after the war, after the fall of Singapore. And a Kempei Tai [Japanese secret police] officer was stalking up

Orchard Road and they saw him stop and he went into a shop. And up to where are we …

Nothing at all. See under the Geneva Convention

prisoners of war have certain rights and they’re to be fed on the same ration scale as the capturing powers home forces and they weren’t to be, POWs, quite improper, not allowed for them to work on any project as a help

to their enemy and their, well of course the Japanese said that they, whilst they had agreed to the fine point, while they had agreed to the Geneva Convention it had never been ratified by their government. So the Geneva Convention went out the window. As to their supply of decent food, supply of medical support and under,

there’s a whole list I’ve got it somewhere of what the capturing power can do with POWs. And the chaps in Europe they didn’t lose they only lost about 3% and that of all POWs taken, and that was from normal forces. Whereas we lost 37%. And they in

Germany they got Red Cross parcels. I’ve never seen a Red Cross parcel. And they got medical attention, they got the lot. Whereas in our case what we, I think we’ve been through this, that the Japanese were receiving medical supplies from the International Red Cross and the Red Cross parcels but we never saw them. They took them and used them and what they

didn’t want themselves they threw away. Which of course is very hard to understand. It’s impossible to understand the Japanese mentality. Because men were sick and not able to work on projects which they wanted desperately to finish and they were too sick to work, but the Japanese had the wherewithal to treat them to get them back on their feet and out on the working job.

But instead of that they threw it out, away in the jungle. And I think we’ve been through it, that Morris Barclay and I decided to join the Japan Party on the grounds that we would get away and there would be proper senior officers organising things in Japan rather than first class privates who had the power of life

and death and all these frightful things that went on down there could not go on in Japan because there would be International Red Cross, there would be neutral people there and the things that went on in Burma and Thailand could not go on in Japan. But we were wrong on every count. And whilst they, our doctors implored them for medicines the result, the

answer was always we haven’t got it. And yet when the war ended and we busted open medical supplies, busted open a lateral, just only 40 yards below the surface and there was a lateral in there 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, 8 feet high and that was absolutely jam packed with every conceivable medicine. And yet

men were dying of pneumonia, men were dying in camp at the rate of couple a day. And the rest of them were too sick to stand up. And they simply had to leave them in camp. Whereas they had, the Japanese had the medicines to give to us and they would have got the blokes back on their feet and out working to get this desperately need coal. And yet they had the medicines,

and instead of giving them to us where we would be cured and get out to work for them, they didn’t. They locked them up what they didn’t use themselves they locked up in a lateral, the same with clothing. Clothing went absolutely to pieces. But every time they didn’t have any. And we had Ned Coulter in my room. He was coal mining in bare feet for six months because his footwear

just simply went finally went to pieces. And, but the Japanese didn’t have any. Didn’t have any clothing. I had cobbled together a jacket because I bent over one time and acid out of my battery down in the mine ran across my back. Well apart from leaving a mark across my skin it also, the next day my jacket just simply fell in two.

But they didn’t have any clothing. And yet when we opened up, forced open a great hut in the Japanese section of the camp after the war ended, there was this hut jammed pack full of every conceivable item of clothing. Boots, socks you know, the lot, everything. But they just put it in there and locked it up. So it’s not possible

to understand the Japanese mentality in that. Because they were, and we had, there was one time we went to the mine for our shift and oh everybody was on edge. And we were all lined up I said, “What the hell’s going on?” And in came a Kempei Tai officer. And he sort of acknowledged the salutes and the

bows and the scrapings that went on and then he got up harangued everybody, director to the Japanese foreman, the buntai joes in the mine. And his dialect and the speed at which he spoke I couldn’t follow him except every now and then I could understand 600 tons. And I said to one of the others

later, he then stalked out. And I said to one of the others, “What was all that about?” And he said, “Well the buntai joes have been forced to produce 600 tons of coal per shift because they need it so badly.” And then from then on you know, we’d been driven very hard before that but it was murder after that. Because every buntai

joe got a, they’d give each one depending on where he worked he got a number of tags. And on every skip that held two and a half tons of coal he would put wire on, wire one of these tags on it. So that when it went down and was tipped over and went up on an endless belt to the surface the fact that that particular

buntai joe’s ticket slip was on it that was all so that they could see at the end of a shift how many skips he’d sent off. Well before that visit we had a pretty tough time but after it was worse. They wanted practically twice as much of desperately needed coal. While they had, as I say, men sick in camp and they had the medicines to cure them

but never the twain did meet. So to try and understand the Japanese is not possible. Because their thinking is quite ridiculous. For something like the building of the railways they desperately wanted to do that. They had the medicines to get more men out working but they didn’t give them to us. In Japan they desperately wanted coal. And there was

so many sick men in camp and they had the medicines to cure them and get them out working. So you can’t follow that sort of reasoning.

I think sheer bastardry. You see the Japanese mentality is that if the Emperor says do something then it’s done. And if the Emperor says

you fight then you do. You fight if you’re faced with a dozen of the enemy and you’re on your own and have run out of, you still stand there and fight until you’re shot. You don’t, you don’t surrender. No way. But we had surrendered so we were the lowest of the low. And I think one of the,

this is my own personal thought that we had such a bad time in Japan that I think the guards that we had in Japan, they had been what you might say relieved or transferred from the regular army to looking after POWs. It was like saying to somebody you go and look after the

pig pen and you keep it clean and get in amongst the pigs. That was the sort of thing. So that all the guards were cranky and bitter and anger and they took it out on us. That’s a theory that I’ve got because at times there was no reason for the way that they treated us. In fact it operated against them. So that

there must be another reason for the way they treated us. And I think that was it, they were cranky and bitter at being relieved from whatever they had done and sent into purgatory looking after these despised prisoners of war.

Not really.

You put a uniform on and you’ve got no control over what happens after that. So you’ve just got to accept. No I it was unfortunate, it was a pity it was all sorts of things but it was just one of those things that we had no control over so you can’t, I don’t think you can feel shame over something that

you didn’t do, was done to you perhaps, but you wouldn’t have a feeling of shame about it. I think that’s my thought about it anyway.

Oh that was pretty early in the piece.

We, in May of 1941 from Changi the first party was sent away. A Force. And that was the chaps, said that they were going, food was running short in Singapore and so 3,000 men would be sent away to a better place with plenty of food and all the rest of it. So A Force

went away. And very early, see that was early in the piece we got up as far to as far as Tavoy on the west coast of Burma. And the Burmese were so helpful and so kind to us. It was an 18 mile march from the boat out to the aerodrome to Tavoy itself the town.

And on the way the Burmese gave us fruit, they gave us cigars they made all, they make, I never knew it before but they make thousands of cigars and cheroots in Burma. They gave men those cheroots, they gave them, in fact some gave them money. They gave me a pineapple. And they gave my mate a pineapple which fortunately because we didn’t get anything to eat for another 24 hours so the pineapples

came in handy. But they were so friendly. And the Japs bashed them like hell. And yet while they were bashing one poor Burmese down here another one up the other end you know 20 yards away was in amongst us handing out things until the Japs caught him and bashed him. So with that sort of attitude about six or eight men from the 4th Anti Tank

Regiment decided to escape. And of course the Japanese in Tavoy we learned later on were expecting 100 prisoners. And they got 1,000. So that for the first few days we were at the aerodrome but nobody apparently in, the Japanese, nobody had any orders what to do with us or anything else. So it was and I wandered around, I wandered out of camp, I went over to a temple, all sorts of

things in that two or three days. And so these chaps decided that they’d escape. And they’d get up into the hills and the Burmese, the friendly Burmese would look after them. So they did. They went off one night and they were re-captured at midday next day. And they were shot. Every one of them was simply executed without, although Brigadier Varley and Colonel Anderson argued

violently that this was not in accordance with the rules of war and etcetera. But it didn’t matter. Their answer was that we had been ordered not to escape and we had broken a Japanese order. And the penalty for breaking a Japanese order was death. So we learned pretty soon after being taken a prisoner of war we learned pretty soon of the, of what

we might expect. And it was the same we, a lot of quite a number of men were executed for one thing or another. So we learned pretty quickly.

The language barrier was one of the worst one of the most difficult things. Very few,

some Japanese officers spoke English. But only in dire extremity would they speak English to us although they understood it. So that, and 90% of the Japanese we came in contact there had no idea of speaking English. And so the language barrier was a tremendous burden. Because

a Jap would ba ba ba ba ba and … Well he obviously wanted something but what it was we didn’t know. And there was a case at Tavoy. Another chap and I were and what we did, which was very good. Every working party that went out, an Australian officer went with them. And he sort of acted as a buffer between the Japs and us. And often he’d finish up getting a bashing as well as us.

But on this occasion there was a barrier mound of earth with a hole in it. So that water could come across the drome and through this thing. And the Jap yammer yammer yammer yammer yammer. And we didn’t know what he was talking about. But from his signs and waving of his hand and whatnot I said to the lieutenant

I said, “He wants us to shift that bank up so that the outlet is further up that way.” And he said, “No, no I don’t think so it’s actually the other way.” “Oh.” So finally it was quite, we had to do something. So I picked up my shovel and the lieutenant said, “No dig it out here and put it down there.” Well I started to dig. Well the Jap nearly went mad.

And it’s still a wonder I’m still here today. Because he wrenched the spade out of my hand and threw it back. Well I ducked and it went over my head. If it’d have hit me it would have killed me. And it was, he wanted it moved up this way. We thought or the officer thought he moved it that way. So that sort of thing went on and on all the time. And those interpreters,

Yamaguchi in Japan also known as Riverside Joe, he’d spent most of his life in New York. And he knew they knew the things that we wanted and the things that we liked and that were the things that they wouldn’t or didn’t do for us or give us. They were very cunning. They, some of them knew that we wanted our mail from home. So

in the whole three and a half years I got one letter from home although they were sent virtually every week. But the Japanese simply piled them up in a warehouse and wouldn’t give them to us. Because they knew that those letters meant a lot to us. So that was, but the language barrier was one of the more difficult points of the whole thing and we were in A-Force we were very lucky

that an English officer was assigned to us. It was an Australian force entirely except for this one English captain. And he spoke Japanese and understood Japanese better that 90% of the Japanese we came in contact with. Which was quite incredible. I’ve got ideas. I became very friendly with him. Captain Drow. Bill Drow.

He’s still alive. We get a letter from him. I taught him shorthand and up in Burma. And for a long time every letter I got from him at home here the first paragraph would be in shorthand. And the last paragraph would be in shorthand and then he broke that down and the ‘Dear Roy’ was in shorthand and whatnot so, and I visited him in England he lived in Somerset at that time. He lives now still in Somerset.

And I get a letter from him occasionally which he’s still going strong But he understood the Japanese and he spoke better Japanese than most of them did. I was with him one time in his hut and a Jap came up and they had given us some cattle you know skin and bones, but it was more or less a bit of meat.

And the problem was where to put them. And the Jap kept referring to, Bill Drow told me this later on, he kept referring to these the space which is surrounded by a fence to keep the cattle in. And Bill Drow said all right we’ll build a corral.

The Jap didn’t understand that. He said that in Japanese. So there was an altercation. So Bill Drow dived into his gear and pulled out a Japanese dictionary and flipped it over. And showed the Jap that what a corral was. But the Jap didn’t know that his language, of his own his own language, didn’t go that far that he knew what a corral was, he referred to it as the

space surrounded by a fence in which to keep the cattle in. Rather than saying we’ll build a corral. That sort of thing. Well so the language was a, but in Japan see, we were in A-Force we were perhaps lucky or something we didn’t have to speak Japanese. We learned to count. But that was about all.

One with difficulties we had Bill Drow to iron them out. And the rest of it doesn’t matter. But when we got to, when my group got to Japan practically none of us spoke more than a word or two of Japanese, we never had to. But down the mine, the mine foremen they had no idea of speaking English and they weren’t going to even try.

So that we and there had been a group of Australians in Japan in the mine for 18 months before my party arrived. And they were all fluent in Japanese. And one of the very few sensible things that the Japs did when they put together a party of four to work in a mine lateral, and they called us the new Australians and they called the ones that had been there 18 months the old Australians. So two new Australians

and two old Australians. And so we’d be working and God I remember the first time it happened. The Jap pointed to me and ba ba ba ba. And I said to one of the old Australians I said, “What did he say?” He said, “He wants you to go up to the winch man and find out the time.” Ask, and to do, and strangely enough, one of the odd things all the bundai joes

and level superintendents and whatnot none of them wore watches. The only one that had a timepiece was the winch man who hauled the skips of coal from the lower levels up, they were all, but he was the only one apparently that was allowed a watch. And so when I said to my mate what did he say? He said he wants you to go up to the winch man and find out the time. And he said, “To do that you say to him ima nunsi

deska?” Now ima is now and nunsi is time and the ka is an interrogative, we raise the voice if we ask a question they don’t. It’s all the same but a K A at the end of it makes it into an interrogation. So ima nunsi deska. The des is sort of a present proposition that now we would sort of

translate as now what time is it? But ima nunsi deska. Ima nunsi deska. Ima nunsi deska and I had more than five 500 hundred yard or more up to where this winch man was. And I got up to him and I said, “Ima nunsi deska?” And he looked at his watch and said, “Skoshi mati hudsiti.” So I said,

“Huh?” So he said, “Ima nunsi deska,” no he said, “skoshi mati hudsiti.” “Oh,” I said, “skoshi mati hudsit, skoshi mati hud..” I just kept repeating this to myself I didn’t know what it meant ‘til I got back to our group and I said, “Skoshi mati hudsiti.” Oh ah ah ah. And I said to one of our blokes, “What the hell does that mean?” “Well,” he says, “skoshi mati is a short time. And huditi is eight o’clock.”

Eight hours. So what it boils down we would say a short time before eight o’clock. But and in that way we learned Japanese. By the end of the war we were all quite fluent. Well not for a deep philosophical discussion. But enough to get by oh, and in two or three months we had picked up all the mining terms. So that was, but then another six months the at the end of the war

I was fluent well, we all were fluent enough to talk to Japanese. Of course, we were it’s amazing when the war ended the Emperor said amongst other things, he said those who were our enemies are now our friends. Well that was the funniest thing. Because one of the interpreters came into camp a day or two

after this announcement, we were still in the camp we weren’t quite sure, we knew the war was over but whether it was over that Japan would repatriate us over, repatriate us home or we didn’t know. And one of the interpreters, the Japanese interpreter came in and the first, which was fortunate for us, the first bloke he came into was a big hulking American who had worked two and half years in the cookhouse.

So he was well fed. I mean if you get a pound of rice after serving 500 men what do you do with it? Well you eat it, it’s not possible to spread around. So he was a big bloke. And this little bloke came up and said, “Ima watashi-wa anadi des tommadachya.” You and I are now friends. And the American started a

haymaker behind him and he lifted that Jap off his feet and he laid him unconscious on the ground. And I bet if that Jap was still alive and that was reported to him he would not know why that American hit him. Because the Emperor had said those who were our enemies are now our friends. And he came up and he said “we are now friends”. And all he got was a punch under the jaw.

You hoped for the best and you got into trouble anyway. You see no matter what you did the, and we were breaking their organisation, their

rules and regulations. And particularly in Japan that was the, oh critical time, there was literally hundreds of regulations. And you couldn’t live in the camp for an hour without breaking some of them. And the Japs were very cunning. They would hide around the corner of a hut. And you would go up there and you didn’t salute him.

See he was hidden round the hut. And we had to salute every guard. And if you didn’t salute him you got a terrible bashing. And they used to simply hide around the edge of a hut or somewhere or other that was one of the things. We had our heads shaved and if a guard could pull you up anywhere in the camp and go through he’d go through your pockets if you had a shirt

you know, he’d go through, he’d go through everything. And he’d take your hat, your miner’s cap off and if he could find enough hair to get between his fingers oh you got a terrible bashing. And were sent to the, they had a barber shop. Or barber in the camp. And you had to go and get your head shaved and then report to the guardhouse to show them that you did and you’d get another bashing

with them. At the end of the war or when the end of the war was coming I had a feeling that the war was going to end very shortly. I mean there were B-29 bombers overhead every hour all the time. And I had this feeling that the war was going to finish and so I let my hair grow a bit. And all my mates said, “Get your head shaved you’ll get a bashing

you know?” And I said no the war’s going to end before they do that. And when we got to, there’s photos there of me with Chips Smallwood, with a name like Smallwood obviously you’re called Chips. And he and Billy and I got a photo there. And I’m the only one with a little bit of, little oh half an inch of hair. But oh, that sort of thing.

Paper and pens and pencils they were a death trap. And I saw one time I was in a hut in Japan and the camp Commandant came along. And there was an English bloke coming the other way and he stopped and gave the bow and the salute and everything else to the to Fukahara

And then Fukahara went to, started to go though his pockets. And he put pulled out tiny little you know, those little tiny notebooks? But down the spine there’s a pencil with a metal top. And he was putting it back into the English bloke’s pocket when he saw that.

And I was watching this. And he … Well. He said to the Englishman, “Why have you got this?” And God I felt sorry for the Pommie. He went white. He said, “Oh I helped the shoti joe.” And Fukahara looked at his cap and of course the shoti joes had two red

rings around their miner’s cap. And he said “You are not a shoti joe.” And he said, “No, no, I help, I help, I help with the canteen and whatnot.” Oh. So he was pushed into Fukahara’s office. And I was still in that hut when he came out and he was covered in blood. And he’d obviously, he’d put his hand up

and he had blood all over him and he’d got hit. The next day I was down for more treatment in that hut, it was a, let’s call it a dispensary and I saw his body taken out. So it was as easy as that. They well, they enjoyed killing you. Particularly if the Kempei Tai got into you. They took three or four days they beat you to death. And they did that

four or five times in the few months that I was in that camp. But getting back to the Kempei Tai. They were incredible. As I explained to you two blocks away a single Kempei Tai got a frightful salute and scream and there were the civilians down on their hands and knees with their foreheads well and truly pressed into the ground. And

so having that and they could take your life and nobody would even ask them why. Nobody. And perhaps one of the wonder points of my time when the war ended, three or four days later Billy Cole and I decided we’d go walkabout in Kyushu the and you could see the other POW camps of course.

Everything was burned out except a building and you knew that was a POW camp because the Allies worked out where they were and they didn’t bomb them. And we were away for two or three days. And coming back we came back to a, I think it was called Sita or something, Sita in the northern part of Kyushu. And there was a train at the and of course we could

speak Japanese but couldn’t read it or write. And of course the, often time without number they would tell us on the railway there’ll be a train in a minute you know. But there was no train they tell you anything just to annoy you. And so I said to, obviously a porter or something, I said, “This train does it go to Omuta?”

And he said, “Yes.” And I being very clever I thought that Nagasaki was south of Omuta. So that if the train went to Omuta it went on south to Nagasaki. So I said, “Does it go to Nagasaki?” And he said, “No.” I thought well this is the same thing you know, they’ll tell you one thing and

I talked to another one there same thing. I thought no the bastards they’re just trying to upset me by telling me one thing and it’s another. And I looked down the, looked down the platform and there was a kemp tai captain standing down the thing. So I screamed, “You!” And everybody turned round.

And I pointed to him and I said, “Come!” And he came up. And I said, “When you speak to me you stand to attention.” And he did, pop. Now that was a man that a week before could have taken my head off and nobody would have asked him why. So it gave me, oh let’s say supreme pleasure to say to him when you speak to me you stand to attention. And he promptly did. And I said to him, “This train it go

It goes to Omuta?” And he said, “Hai.” And I said, “Does it go on to Nagasaki?” Well he said, “No.” “Oh,” I said, “you so and so and so and so and so.” I could swear quite well in Japanese. And he was sensible enough he said let us go to the stationmaster. Oh. Oh. So down we went climbed up the stairs across the bridge over the rail tracks down to the

stationmaster’s office. And there he showed me and this is 10 o’clock at night, he showed me the map of the and so help me about 5 miles south of Sita where we were the line branched and went off to Nagasaki and went on to Omuta and Tagashika. Oh. And while that was going on I looked out the window and the train was disappearing.

So I said to the stationmaster, “When is the next train to Omuta?” And he said, “4 o’clock in the morning,” and this is 10 o’clock at night. So I went back to Billy and I said, “4 o’clock in the morning, I’m going to sleep.” And we had picked up a rifle at that stage, it didn’t have any ammunition. Billy said, “Don’t be silly.” I said “No.” I said, “If we get into trouble and point that rifle at somebody we are the only ones that know it’s got no ammunition in it, so it’s worth having.” So he said, “Well I’m not going to.”

I said, “I’m going to stretch out and go to sleep.” I said, “Nobody will touch us.” “Oh,” he said, “they might.” So he sat up with the rifle over his knees. And 4 o’clock the next morning, oh train come in by that time, there were literally hundreds of people civilians wanting to go south. And oh there was by this time about six or eight Australians that had been doing what Billy and I had been doing and we walked down the train and you couldn’t

put another inch in. They were even on the buffers of the engine and on the roof of the carriages. And walking down we came to the guard. And there was this very important man he had a whole carriage to himself nobody in it. So he was roughly pushed aside and in we went. And he got very upset about that. So he was told to shut up. And then we found out, somebody found out that the end of the

carriage there were a great pile of parcels. With all big Japanese characters on and no doubt their address for these parcels whatever. Never did worry about what was in them. But somebody looked at them and said God they’re wrapped up in newspaper and it’s in English. And so oh we undid the twine round it. And of course the guard the poor old guard was having a fit. And he came

racing up ooh you know …

Oh of course. But before we could we realised that it just wasn’t possible.

And if you stepped outside the camp perimeter you were likely to be shot. So that it, once we got up into Burma if you wanted to escape the only place to go was India. Now you’re talking about 1,000 miles. Through hostile country and the Japanese had put a price on our head

that any villager who found us and told the Japanese that we were you know, there, he got a prize that made him a millionaire. So that we had we had three men from Thanbyuzayat. Bell was one of them. Got their names somewhere. They did.

And they got about 100 miles. And before that one of them, Dickinson I think he went down with malaria and the arrangement between them was that if one of them got sick well he fell out and the others carried on. And they got about 100 miles before some Burmese told the Japanese that they were there. And

the Japanese or the local police or something they shot one man, killed him at the spot. The other man had a shot through the arm which smashed his arm. And he was brought back to Thanbyuzayat where he was instantly condemned to death. And our people wanted to dress his arm because it was all festering and he said no

no keep those bandages you’ve got for somebody that can get something out of it he said, I went into this with my eyes open. And so he they dug a grave he walked across to it. And he was shot. So that originally I knew a little bit about cholera and I had seen a map of that area. See the British had surveyed

that line to near Bangkok to Bampong which is near Bangkok. And the map that I saw had an absolute empty space in the middle of it. And across that was marked cholera area. So that it was decided that you couldn’t maintain a working force

in that area. And I thought and I knew enough about cholera to know it was a 99% fatality if anybody got it I thought well if things get bad and cholera hits us then I’ll try and escape. But by the time we got up into the cholera area I had realised that it just was not possible. The distance and

you would have to get something to eat which meant that you would have to contact Burmese natives and you only had to have one as these three found, to tell the Japs and you were shot. And all the arguments against shooting them, against prisoners of war, against Geneva Convention and all that, the Japanese just simply

ignore that. And their argument or their statement was that the men had been ordered not to escape and they had broken the Japanese order. And to disobey a Japanese order the punishment was death. And that was so, for their own men, you see in many ways, well I say in some ways they treated us like they

treated their own men. If a junior person disobeyed a senior person oh he could be shot. For disobeying an order. So that, well we were even worse off so we only had to blink wrongly and we got shot. So you just, the idea of escaping was an ever constant one but it was utterly impossible.

No one escaped. There was one man, his name was Williamson. And he was an Englishmen. And he went round the bend. When we were on the railway only about 30 kilometres out the beginning of the railway. And he walked out of the camp and that night one of the Burmese came into the camp, at great risk to his own life

and told our officers that this chap was with them in their camp, in their area. And so Colonel Anderson and Bill Drow the next night at great risk, went across to the village. And they saw the man there and the head man

of the village said we will look after him because he’s been touched by the gods. See he was mental. And they did. How they did it goodness only knows but they hid him from the Japanese, they looked after him. And I saw in the paper here when I got home after the war or very shortly after the war there was a tiny paragraph in the paper to say that

this Englishman, Williamson had escaped from Burma as a prisoner of war and had just arrived in England, having picked up a ship in oh somewhere, Bombay or Calcutta or somewhere. And so that was a year or two after the war. And Bill Drow, who we’ve mentioned, Bill Drow he was

sent out to Batavia as, it was then to the British Embassy there as a special officer. And he on his leave he came down to Sydney. So a whole group of us who knew him, we set up a reunion. And I said to him, “You know that Williamson he escaped, he got away with it.” And Bill said, “Oh no.” He said he was kept

in that village, looked after and he said when the war ended they took him down to the coast and put him on a ship and sent it, went north to where he picked up a boat and went home. And by that time his mental state had had sort of stabilised. But he was reported, he claimed that as I say, that he had escaped. But he went to this village. And strangely

enough they looked after him. But you see once you got out to around about the 60 kilo camp 60 kilos out, you got into virtually uninhabited country because with the cholera in that area nobody could live. Although trade people came through it and they apparently knew, this is going back hundreds of years, they apparently knew a bit about cholera ‘cause we found

they always camped on the top of a hill. And we found the shreds of their prayer flags up on the top of the hill as they went though. And a place like Kanchanaburi I’ve seen one report that said that Marco Polo was there on one of his trips around to the Great Khan when it was a seaport. Well the Kwai Yai,

Kwai Yai River comes down and brings a tremendous amount of silt down so that the city remained where it was but the coastline extended out and is now some miles and miles from the sea. But it’s a very old town Kanchanaburi. And some of the buildings still have the stone carvings of anchors and coils of rope. Fascinating place. But at one time hundreds

of years ago it was on the coast. So … how did that come up? I don’t know.

Well. Not speaking the language was a problem but

very quickly we learned what they wanted. And a party went out and hacked a 30 foot wide track through the jungle and then our work was 20 or 30 feet away from the line of the railway to be, we dug up the soil and carried it across and made an embankment. See that …

It’s there. You see and then when that was built four or five feet high unfortunately the group that I was in, the Japanese named it as the number one rail laying party. Which meant that we

laid the sleepers and the rails. And spiked them. And that was a very difficult job because what they did they would have two four-wheel bogies. And between, nothing between them except they laid on them the, perhaps half a dozen 20 foot lengths of rail. And then on top of those on each end they put

the teak sleepers. And teak is very heavy. And they had a diesel engine thing at the back that could run on the road or on the rails. It was fitted with these double wheels. And it was at the end and it pushed it up. So that the first time it would come up and we would unload and lay the sleepers down. And when they were all laid down then

we would lay hands on a rail and run it off and as the last chap as it left the bogey he yelled and we all dropped it and jumped. A 20 foot length of heavy rail is very heavy. And if your foot was on the sleeper when it came down it would not very tidily but it would amputate that part of your foot.

And then we would lay the other one down. Then we’d pull them up pull those line rails up to the, put a fish plate in there with a quick bolt through it. And then the train let’s call it would go up that 20 foot length and the same thing would go on we’d unload the rails again because the sleepers would go way up ahead and

then the 20 foot lengths of rail were manhandled off the bogies. And then think, possibly the hardest part those bogies had to be manhandled off the rails onto the side and they were heavy. You’ve got four heavy railway wheels. But they were manhandled off. And the train then picked them up and went back

to base. And they were then another trainload would be built. And that would come up and be repeated time and time and time again. And sometimes you were lucky, we were lucky. On curves the Japs we were the number three branch. There a number five branch which worked down in

Thailand. And typically of the Japanese they had no connection really with each other. But our group had what we called a Jim Crow. Now that is a great heavy massive thing to bend the rails. It had two hooks on it that you put over the rail and it came in and here you had a

a spiral that went against the rail. And as you pushed in naturally the rail bent. And so you got a bend. And when it was according to the Jap the transport people when it was right they then we did the other one and that … But down on the number five branch I only read quite recently that they

had awful trouble with this railments because they had no way of bending the rails. So that a corner, a bend would be made up of straight pieces of rail straight sections of rail. So that nine times out of 10 the train would come to where the it would just leap off the track. But

we helped upset the railway as much as we could. Our sabotage was pretty good. Often we built a few high bridges whereas on the Thailand side it was terribly rough country. Nothing but gorges and things and they built bridge after bridge. Which was terrible work. But we had a couple of bridges which we built.

And we would, provided there was no Jap near, heaven help you if they if he caught you, but we would drive the spikes in to hold the rail through the sleeper. But if you drove it in and bent it over and drove it a bit and bent it back again then it looked as it if was right. But when the weight of the train came on that it opened up. And the rail could slide. And the

train came off the rails. And we did that on bridges. And of course the bridges were built up. And the top of them, what we called the stringers, the top was finally a 12 inches by 12 inch wooden blocks, wooden beams. And across those you if you stood on one of them there was nothing but another one three feet away over

there. A lot of men lost their lives being knocked off or falling off bridges. And a so they built that up to these two stringers then they laid the sleeper across them. But what we had done in many cases was make that rail on the top of the bridge so that it widened up. And the train, the engine with a great bonk

got off the rails and finished up on the sleepers. Well it sometimes took us a couple of days or more to jack that engine up, belt the rails back under the wheels and let the train let the engine back down on it when they would quietly very carefully and then we had to re-spike that thing but we held the line up

for a long time with things like that. And another trick we had where one beam would be covered by another one, there were in our group, there was always no matter you wanted electrical anything you always had somebody who knew what to do. And he would go away when we’d got to a point of building the timber rails timber bridges, he would go and get a nest of white ants.

And bring them back and make sure he got the queen. And we would very quickly, and only when the Jap was a fair way away, we would scoop out a bit and we’d put the nest of white ants in and down we’d go you see. Now on the Thailand side they were even better. They often had beams that they put a

a spike through. So it had a drop on it and a bolt. But what the Japs didn’t know was that nine out of 10 of those they were cut in the middle. So you had two pieces that looked as if they were all right, there was the top and there was the bolt underneath it. But those two, and this is what happened time and time again when a train went over it they would move and the train would plonk

onto the sleepers. And this procedure had to go on to jack it up and put it back and that was a terrible job. But no, that was building the railway. We oh, very quickly we got to know exactly what they wanted. And we would dig up the soil and take it and pack it down and make the embankment for the sleepers and rails to go on.

But …

Oh yeah.

What sort of injuries? I don’t know. No doubt a few just got hernias.

But there weren’t so many weren’t so many injuries on the line, it was mainly sickness they got as malaria, beriberi, pellagra. Dysentery. Gastroenteritis.

Be and sometimes we’d get that from eating what the Japs gave us. The Japs had no idea of, and they would send up, at times they’d sent up boxes of meat. Well they were, came up by road truck along the tiny rough track beside the or near the embankment. And sometimes you could smell that meat

coming when it was half a mile away. And so then it went to the cookhouse where the cooks would carefully wash the bits of meat. And then the doctor, the medical officer would inspect it. And decide whether it was edible or not. And you know, give it a good boiling and you know it’ll be right. Well sometimes it was all right but sometimes it was

past all edibility. And everybody would go down with stomach troubles. But, and that happened, the best example happened in Japan. Of course the rations in Japan were substandard starvation anyway. But every now and then they would give us bits of meat.

And the famous time was when they, when a whale, see we were right on the on the edge of the gulf right on the 10 feet from the edge of the camp, was the water. And apparently a whale had got stranded I think it had been there for some time before the Japs realised it. And so it was chopped up and we got the whale meat. Well. We were in such a state that no matter what it was you ate it.

And that night was the only night that the shift didn’t go out. Because, oh 20 minutes after eating this stuff there were men collapsing everywhere there were men vomiting and diarrhoea and complete collapse. And they just couldn’t send the, nobody could stand up. So that night the shift didn’t go out.

But other times it was, we got snails or not, well we got snails and ate them ourselves. But seaweed and all sorts of strange things. You name it whether it was dog or snake or what and you we could catch it we dressed it and ate it. Or …

Mm.

Oh yes the Japs always wanted more men than were capable of going. And that was the one of the frightful difficulties of the doctors. Because they would say

these men in the hut are too sick to work. And the Japs wanted more men. So they would go into the hut and argue with the our medical officer who would say this man is too sick to go out. No, he’s not, yes he is, not, he’s not. And in the finish the Japanese were so insistent that as they put it

the doctors put it, they had to play God. They had to send out men who were very ill but there were others who were even more so. So that often they would send out men and we brought them back dead. And so the doctors’ responsibility of being forced, the Japs might say we want another 10 men.

Oh it got to a point where nothing could be done except provide them with 10 men. And the doctor of course would have got a slapping before that. And then the doctor had to decide that man, that man and that man. Knowing full well that they were too ill to work but

had to go out and sometimes we brought them back dead. Because they just simply died out on the on the job. So it was a very an incredibly difficult time for the doctors. To work with virtually nothing. And then be put in a position of sending men out to work who were obviously unable to work. And they paid the price for it. So it was a hard

time for the doctors.

Yes it is. And one hymn that I that always upsets me is ‘Abide With Me’. ‘Cause we went out

working one day and of course you worked a 14, 16 hour day. And we’d come back to camp at night. And normally we would start singing on the way back, it helped. But on this occasion one of the men died out on the job and we had to carry his body back in the dark.

Slipping and sliding in the mud. And nobody wanted to sing. And the Jap in charge said all men sing. And somebody said no not tonight, we couldn’t. So he promptly got a bashing. And the Jap demanded again all men sing. And another chap said no and he got bashed. And then somebody,

I don’t know who, we never found out who it was, somebody in the group started to sing ‘Abide With Me’. And that has affected me ever since. Every time I hear that that hymn I could break down. Because it was, well that’s how it was.

You couldn’t do anything about it. But it that remains with you.

Early in the piece while we still had let’s say health and strength we used to put on concerts. In the first two or three months up in Tavoy for example. And we would amuse ourselves by picking teams out of each section

and we’d have a quiz. Somebody had an encyclopaedia or something. And we had a signals officer with us. Jacobs and Jake would sit down and work out a series of questions. And then they were put as a normal quiz you know. And

they were quite funny. We had one chap Caddy, what was his first name? He came from Melbourne. Anybody who asked him what he finished up at school he very proudly told them that he was a failed MA [Master of Arts] from Melbourne University. And he was in my section. So we thought, well he’d be a good man

in our team. So we put him in our team. And one of the questions was what is a farthingale? And with every confidence Caddy said, “Farthingale, oh yes, that’s a four-masted barque that used to trade from the Caribbean up to New Orleans carrying this that and the other thing and it had a top gallant and a flying top gallant sails which made good time.” And

the quizmaster said, “No. A farthingale is a lady’s hooped crinoline under..” when they wore the crinoline went over and then the dress went over the top of it. But Caddy’s absolute confidence you know. And he oh practically got down to the timbers of the ship. So

we said he’s no good. And there were two or three and the schoolteachers were hopeless, that was amazing. There were two or three public servants amongst our group and we put them in and we did quite well with them. But the teachers were, oh they were a funny lot. They always had an answer no matter what was put to them. And we had one bloke perhaps, I’m not, better not mention his name,

he was a high school teacher. And we were working together in Saigon and I said to him, “Tell me what is the Calculus?” I said, “I never went that far in school,” so I didn’t… I said what is the Calculus? He really couldn’t tell me. He said oh, oh, I think the best he got to he said you can measure a bouncing ball by it.

And I said well that doesn’t tell me much. But he always had the answer. And the next time we moved into another hut somewhere I was sleeping right opposite him. And he had a group that always gathered round him. And on this occasion one of them said oh no, in politics he said what’s the Cabinet?

And without a moment’s hesitation with every confidence he said well that’s what they keep, it’s a big, we call it a cupboard. What they keep the Parliamentary papers in, and that’s the Cabinet. Well I’d been in Premier’s Department and in and out of Parliament and doing all sorts of things I laughed. Then it was

pure laughter. I listened to him with those questions and he always came out with an answer. And some of them were absolutely incredible. And met another couple of schoolteachers they were much the same. And then a sequel to that was after the war when I came home I went to University. And one night one of the bright students, I hated those bright students ‘cause I was not bright.

But one of the students asked the lecturer something and the lecturer said I don’t know. I, oh that was a shock to the system. I mean schoolteachers and no less a university lecturer asked a question and he says he doesn’t know. And he said well I’ll look it up and next lecture I’ll tell you. And so certainly on the following week I think it was

he lectured once a week I think, he came in and before his lecture started he said somebody down here asked me so and so and so and so, don’t ask me now what it was, asked me so and so and so and so and the answer is that it’s blah blah blah, and he gave and he said that covers the thing, but if there are if you want more detail and he gave the titles and authors of about three economic books to for this chap to look it up. But

It was a I tell you it was a shock to my system for a university lecturer to say I don’t know. Whereas the teachers that we had with us oh they knew everything they always had an answer. Nine times out of 10 it was wrong but that didn’t matter. So my consideration of teachers went down a bit after seeing a few of those. But particularly that chap who

the Cabinet was a cupboard. That was really something.

Oh … oh no we they had we normally had a padre with us and they got a

a proper Christian burial. And what they, and as I said, in every group there was always somebody who was an expert. And we had in our group and I suppose every other group was the same, we had an engineering officer from the engineers. And they planned or plotted where the grave was by using

compass bearings and along the railway line there were kilo pegs. So they would in, what became the cemeteries, they would take a sighting on that kilo peg and a sighting on one down there so that after the war the [Commonwealth] War Graves Commission would go through, and although the camps had disappeared,

by using the accurate measurements which the engineers had made, they could exhume the bodies and they finished up in the, well there’s a war graves camp in war graves cemetery in Thanbyuzayat. There’s another one in Kanburi which is 100 miles out from Bangkok. I think everybody

who died in Japan was ultimately, they were cremated in Japan. And they, the Japs gave us a little, oh I suppose you’d call it heavy cardboard boxes into which we put the ashes. And they finished up, the War Graves Commission collected all those and there’s a large, there’s a photo

of it there a large war graves cemetery at Hortagaya which is just five miles outside Yokohama. So oh no, every, well when I say every man got a proper Christian burial that is not exactly right. When we were in the depths of the cholera problem men were dying so quickly that the only thing

we could do was to dig a deep hole and then put firewood in it and the bodies were really hard, to use the word, toss, but the bodies were thrown into that and cremated. And so they do not have any grave. They become the Unknown Soldier known only to God. But otherwise

they got a proper Christian funeral.

I was … ?

Oh only when the railway was finished and joined up at Konkoita.

And then there being no further use for us we went back down to Tamarkan. Which is near Kanburi on the Kwai Yai River. And S Force and H Force which had worked on the Thailand end of the line, the remnants of those they lost about two-thirds of their party the remnants of those

were taken by ship back to Singapore to Changi. My group, a number three branch a lot stayed in Tamarkan and that is where they formed the Japan Party that Morris Barclay and I went on. We got on that thinking that it would be better, things would be better in Japan than they were down in the jungle.

And some of my mates said what, are you mad you don’t know what’s what. I said well neither do you. I said anything could happen from here on. And unfortunately I was right because parties were sent back up ‘cause the Allies started to bomb the line from India and parties from Tamarkan were sent back up into the jungle

to repair the line …

And that is about a 90% death rate.

I know one chap in my unit can’t give you his name he recovered from cerebral malaria. But he was mentally damaged.

And he …

Well the trip was difficult. The ship we were on was actually a good ship. It was the pride of the Japan Lines. But we were herded into a hold

where no one could lie down without somebody else sitting up or standing up. And so that was very difficult. And particularly as we got further north the weather, we went in wintertime in January. And then we, when we got ashore we were ploughing through snow. Coming straight from the tropics it was a

a bit much. But then we were put on a train, it was Moji we arrived at Moji and were then that night put on a train to Omuta. And we had no idea, weren’t given any idea of what we were going to do in Japan. But when we got off the train somebody saw a couple of Japanese men go by and they had

helmets with miners lights. And so you might say immediately we knew that we were going to work in a mine. And we got into the camp and virtually everything we had except the clothes we stood up was confiscated. We weren’t allowed to have a piece of paper we weren’t allowed to have a pencil or a pen. We weren’t allowed to have, oh a knife was a, no,

no you couldn’t have a knife. Oh everything. And there was a Lieutenant Hough an Australian lieutenant in the camp. And he said to us look whatever they’re telling you to give he said give it to them. Because if they find it later on you might pay for it with your life. So do that. Well I took a couple of risks. I had a wad of paper that was, don’t know where I got that from

it was naval signal pad. And I hid that behind a barrel in the mess, up where we, mess hall where we were being stripped of everything. Because I had chronic diarrhoea and there weren’t any trees in the camp you know and I later on successfully retrieved that. And I kept a knife blade. And I kept a razor

blade. So I could shave myself instead of going to the place in camp where they shaved you. It was all very well if you were the first one there but with your beard that was full of coal dust and fine rock dust the blade soon became you know, that when they ran it through they hauled the hairs out by the roots. So I, and I

hid them. We were in, we were put into a hut. And that had the tatami mats on the floor. They’re mats that are six feet long and three feet wide. And the construction of the huts was such that there wasn’t really any underpinning, very little. And these mats were just spread out so that you could pick up a mat and then and put things on the timber

underneath and I kept it under there. I kept because they sometimes gave us stuff, like they’d give a whole section an inch of cheese. Now it’s very difficult to cut an inch of cheese into 10 people’s without a knife. So I kept that knife blade for that reason.

But it was so cold. And we got there, of course off the ship we were weren’t able to bathe on the ship, one it was too cold and secondly it wasn’t possible anyway. And so we were all sent off to the bathhouse. And the Japanese bathhouse is a great tank of water. Do you know the system of Japanese bathhouses? Where you dip the water

out and you thoroughly wash yourself and then you get into the tub into the bath. So we went for that. And then we went to, we were put into these huts. And what the Japanese were very cunning, they recognised that chaps who were friends

all made a tight group. So we had been in Japan a day or two when, and we were all numbered. And what they did then, they lined us all up and there were 10 rooms in a hut. And there were two huts for my section. So man number

one went into that hut, man number two went into that hut man number three went in- and so on they broke up these groups. Well that suited Morris Barclay and I because we had got in late by subterfuge into the Japan Party. Morris had a mate in the orderly room. And two chaps fell off the Japan Party a day or so before it left Tamarkan.

And he was able to take their names out and put our names in. And what happened was with this one man here and the next man there and the next man there and we finished up in the same room. My number was 1477 senuraken anijanabun and Morris Barclay was senuraken anijani juku. I was 1477 and he was 1479. So we were in the

same hut. But the guards were the worst that we had struck. One chap who had been in Japan for 18 months was overheard of all the luck, he was overheard by a Jap who understood English down in the mine.

And this chap, Peter Runge, Runge anyway, Peter, I think Peter Runge? He said to one of the newcomers he said, “The trick here is,” he said, “whatever you do don’t stop working.” He said, “But don’t work too hard or you’ll kill yourself. But just keep working but don’t stop.” And that was enough for Runge to be bashed up when he got topside he was reported

to the Kempei Tai who bashed him. He was dragged into camp where he was knelt down on the concrete floor in sub-zero weather and he was just simply bashed. And our doctors went to Fukuhara Camp Commandant and pleaded with him to let Runge get up because they said kneeling down in this sub-zero weather

the blood in his legs would congeal and he would get gangrene in his legs. But didn’t worry the Japs one little bit. And after about 10 days Runge was at last released. And he was carted off to the hospital where Ian Duncan, Doctor Ian Duncan who’s dead now but used to live at Five Dock and we became very good friends,

and he operated to try and get the gangrenous parts off. But he couldn’t do it. And the way I found out about what had happened was, I was in the dispensary one day. ‘Cause you used to get whether it was the diet or the lack of diet or whatnot, you used to get pains in your fingers and then

you’d get pains in your wrists and then you’d get pains in your elbow. And by the time you got pains up in your joints there you really couldn’t work. And so at that point you could go to the dispensary and I think they had salicylic acid. And they’d give you that and that would quieten down the pain and allow you to move again. And I was down in that. And one of the guards, we called him the Sailor, most of them

had we didn’t know their proper names they had all nicknames. And the Sailor came in and he was carrying a cardboard box. And he called a couple of his mates over and they all looked in and oh laugh. I thought what can be in that box that’s so funny? And they were all laughing like mad and ohh it was a big joke for some reason. Until one of them stooped in and lifted up

two legs. They’d been amputated just below the knee by Captain Duncan. And this is, again it’s impossible to understand the Japanese mentality, they wanted every man to work. But Runge overcame his amputations. And the Japs then allocated

one of the big Americans to be with him day and night and if he wanted to go to the mess hall or the latrine or anywhere this big chap piggybacked him there because he had no legs. And to finish that story off. He survived and had got two artificial legs which sometimes,

he was a great friend of Ian Duncan’s who had done the operation and he was, and I met him too. But sometimes it would chafe on the thing and be very painful. And that man he was I suppose, typical of active men. He had two children and they were grown up adults before they knew their father had two artificial legs. He never told them. Didn’t tell too many people I knew about it but not very many

others. But that was the sort of thing that went on in Camp 17.

I don’t know. It was possibly a desire

to live. A desire of don’t let the bastards get you down. I got into trouble. Morris Barclay had a piece of towelling which he shouldn’t have had. The order had been given for these pieces to be destroyed but he was in hospital with pneumonia when that order came out. And when he got out of hospital

and staggered we practically carried him to the mine and carried him back. And I opened up his bag one night when he got back, and there was a piece of this illegal material. And so I got rid of it. I took it and put it in a rubbish bin outside the kitchen where some animal of an American must have found it. And he took it to

the Japs. And it had Morris’ number on it and my Burma number 2544. And Morris was sent for. But because my initials and 2544 didn’t, they sent Morris back to the hut. And we’d been on night shift so we were trying to sleep. And then a runner came up and they wanted both

of us down to Fukuhara’s office. So I said to Morris I said, “Look they’re going to bash us for this. But,” I said, “if they bash you they’ll kill you because you’re just out of hospital.” You know that I had to practically help him down to the Jap headquarters. I said you’re so weak from your time in hospital with pneumonia. I said, “Well tell them it’s got nothing to do with you

and they can give me a kicking and that’ll save you.” Well they did more than that, we were fortunate. I said the interpreter was there of course with Fukuhara, and I said, “This man has nothing to do with this, it’s all mine.” So Morris was dismissed. And then I had a difficult time. The interpreter started it by kicking my

shins. Now it was wintertime. Still hovering around about the zero mark. And he was wearing wooden gitas about that thick. And so a few kicks from him shifted all the skin off my shins. And I could feel the blood running down into my shoes, into my boots whatever I had on. And then they quizzed me they said,

“How could I do this?” And I said, “Well we all had these things in Burma,” we were given them in Burma. And nobody raised any query about them. And oh God that was no good it was Imperial Japanese Army material that we had and we shouldn’t have had it. And so I said, desperately trying to think of something to say

and I said, “Well we had Korean guards and they overlooked it.” I knew there was no love lost between the Japanese and the Koreans. Oh God that seemed to do it. And because I was still standing up, that was an offence apparently. So I was made to lean down, to kneel down. And Fukuhara then took his belt off and flogged me with it over the head. So that

he shifted most of the flesh off my head and my right eye was deep in a thing. And then I was taken down to the guardhouse the aso. And I was stood there. And they made me take all my clothes off except my trousers. And it was 30 degrees. So I was, and if I moved oh the interpreter came in

and said, “Do not move an eyelid or you will be punished.” And I said to him, “Yes sir.” I said, “How long will I be here?” “Oh,” he said, “I shall do what I can for you.” I said, “Thank you.” And from his kicking I could still feel the blood running down my legs. So then the Japanese camp sergeant-major came in and looked

at me and I had my cap on, and one of the hundreds of rules you had to wear your cap absolutely straight on your head. Well my cap had come off during this flogging. And when I put it on again it wouldn’t fit and I thought oh God I’ll get bashed again for that. But this camp sergeant major studied me for a while and I thought well what can he do to me now? And then he

he turned and said something to the guard. And the guard came over to me, and of course this was very early and I didn’t speak a word of Japanese. So he sign language so I was able to go into the cell behind me where my clothes had been thrown and put them on. And I was then taken up to the dispensary and one of the American medical orderlies dressed

the worst of the, where the chunks of flesh had been torn out of my head and cheeks and whatnot. And I said to him, “Look prise that,” Round where, my eye was just a slit now, it was, I had a face like a balloon. I said, “Have a look if you could see my eye.” And he did that. And he said well it looks as if it’s not, it hasn’t

burst but it’s badly injured. So I said all right. So for the next 10 days to cut a long story short I was flung into the cell every night where I nearly froze to death, and every day I was taken out with the Dutch section who were working on a coal dump which had caught fire and what they were doing was digging trenches out to the sea

to let the seawater in to put the fire out. And that was terrible work because one it was freezing weather. But as soon as you opened up the rock it burst into flame. So that your back was frozen stiff with the wind and your front was cooked by the heat from the fire and the coal. So and I was there for 10 days.

And then I was released. But my eye, including every part of it was full of blood. I mean the swelling went down but it was, and the Japanese if they could see something that was all right. A gash on the arm got you a day off work. But a double pneumonia they couldn’t see that so you went out to work and practically died next day, didn’t matter.

And I had this blood filled eye. And I used to put on a great performance ‘cause I had to see the Japanese doctor, and Ian Duncan, our doctor, and sort of ask for days off work. And because I had this that he could see it and I had, while I was in the aso

there was another American in that who taught me quite a lot of Japanese. To the extent that I could say to this so-called doctor, we afterwards found out that he wasn’t a doctor at all. He was a second year dental student. But he had the power of life and death where medical things were concerned. But I was able to tell him that my eye was very bioki. And I couldn’t see which I could, actually I

I could see, my sight was coming back. But the fact that the eye was full of blood that was sufficient. And I didn’t go back to work for three weeks on that ground and while I was 10 days in the guardhouse Morris Barclay had sold everything he had. He had traded away, we got a cigarette issue

if you worked which you paid for. But there had become a habit in the camp that you could buy food for cigarettes. And some men, so addicted to nicotine that they would sell their ration of rice for two or three cigarettes or something. Well Morris had traded away everything, traded away his

cigarettes for food. How he did it I don’t, he had a tremendous brain because he wasn’t allowed pencil and paper. And yet every time, and he was working, every time he came in he knew exactly the bloke to go to and say this is the third day of the shift you owe me a ration of rice and he’d get it. And then next night he’d come in and he’d go to another bloke and he’d say this is the fourth night of the shift you owe me a ration of rice and he’d bring that in so that I virtually,

through Morris’ activities, I practically had double rations. Which pulled me though. Because I was rather desperately low. And Morris’ actions saved me. Then in June Morris went down with another attack of pneumonia. And he also apparently

from beriberi, beriberi affects your heart, it’s normally medically called cardiac beriberi and he’d had it badly and his heart gave out and he died in June the 7th of ’45. So that was, gives you an idea of Camp 17. But the Japanese are strange. Now I had some correspondence a year or two ago now from an

American pilot who had been in Vietnam for a couple of missions and he now worked as a pilot for Japan domestic lines. And on one occasion he was down in Kagashima and he’d been so many hours flying that he now had to have a rest over for something or other, pilots do this, have to do this though I think. And he was down and he thought, he had read my book, he married a, he came out here

somehow and he married a an Australian girl. And he got hold of a copy of my book in Brisbane. And on this occasion he thought oh he was so close to Omuta he’d go up and see if he could find the campsite. He thought that’d be interesting. So he went up, he couldn’t find it. So he said to somebody, I forget now who, where was the POW camp during the war? Oh no there was no POW camp. So

he said well the … So he went to the Mitsui mine where we worked. And he thought well it’s a long time ago but their records would indicate that with a big mine that worked the coal mine, a big camp there that worked the coal mine. So he went to the Mitsui mine headquarters and asked he got the same answer. There was

no camp in Omuta no POW camp in Omuta. And I don’t know where he went then, he said in his letter, he said he went to the national headquarters I don’t know whether that meant that he went to the Tokyo Municipality or what but he went higher and higher up. And always he got the same answer there was no … And I think the only reason was that four men in the time that I was there, four men had been murdered

in the camp by the guards. And I think they were trying to cover that up by saying there was no POW camp there at all. So that was, but it was a bad camp.

Perhaps I haven’t. It’s something that’s very hard for people to understand but

it only needs a word or something to bring back the memories to me. I can’t get rid of it. I wish I could. But we’re all much the same. And of course immediately after the war you wouldn’t know about it, but immediately after the war the medical opinion was that we were told we were ordered to

forget about the war and get on with our, you know, get on with stuff. And our family and friends were asked by the army not to discuss our experiences at all. Whereas nowadays you know, you hit your thumb with a hammer and you get counselling and guidance and goodness only knows what. Well I had, this was typical of so many, I had one friend since died, Les Bond

who later on confided to me that from the day he arrived back in Sydney for four years he never drew a sober breath. He took to alcohol to try and erase the thing but he couldn’t do it. But others took to drugs. Lot took to alcohol. There was only one and that’s Charlie Beazley who shot himself and survived that but don’t know of

any who actually committed suicide. But we all carry the problems and they do affect us, there’s no doubt about that.

When I got home you mean? Well I was lucky. See I had a job. I was in the public services. So I went back to work.

I also went to university and I also got married. So that I had more on my mind than I could comfortably deal with and I think that helped me through. I otherwise you know I it would get me down like it got Les down he couldn’t … But I had a very busy time

with marriage and building, getting a house built and going to university and as an evening student and going to work in the daytime. So I was had a full very full life.

Yes because it, well it’s like now they agree with something happens to you,

you get counselling and guidance and you talk it out. But we were denied that the medical opinion of the time was against that attitude. So we had to bottle it up. And there were times when it overcame us. I can remember going to a cinema one night and my wife and the

overture before the film started, happened to be Grieg’s ‘Rustle of Spring’. And I had to leave the theatre. Had to leave and I got outside and cried. But nobody could understand you know, we were all nuts, we were all silly. But those sort of things I can handle them now up to a point. But immediately after the war it was not

possible. And …

Hm?

Morris Barclay was a beautiful pianist. And in Saigon the French people persuaded the Japs to allow them to send in some musical instruments. And amongst them was a piano. And Morris played beautifully without music or anything else. And he played that several times at

concerts in the Saigon camp. So it was a very close thing to me. No it was a difficult time. And I made an error in Fourth Year at the university, I made an error I didn’t read one of the questions in Economics 4. I didn’t read one of the questions carefully enough.

And from the lectures that we’d had I was quite sure that a certain aspect would appear in the annual examination. So I boned up on that. And the question said and I read it, what’s the, oh one of the old economists said quote blonk blonk blonk bonk blonk quote.

And I thought that’s crazy. That’s exactly opposite to what he, that I’ve been boning up on that. And this is absolutely opposite that so I must have got it all wrong. So I struggled through the rest of the paper. And it’s about the only time that I have come very close to crying in public. After that exam

got onto the tram to come back to Macquarie Street to work. And read the exam paper again. The question was if so and so said whatnot comment. Well you would have got 100% if you’d put rubbish or even worse than that use the, because it was just opposite to everything but I missed that word if. If he said so and so, comment. And the comment

could have you know half a line. This was opposite to everything he believed in everything he taught full stop. I could have been 100%. But I missed that little word if. And my daughter when she went to university I drummed that into her, I said, “When you get to the annual exam you read the paper, you read the exam paper.” I said, “I know you’ve got three hours and you need every minute of it

but it’s worth reading the exam paper.” Read every question. Understand every word in every question. Because I said I did a year, and then I had a great fight with Rowley Richards who was a doctor that looked after me in Burma. And we’re still good friends. And he said, “Well Roy you’ve got to give it up.” He said, “You’ve tried you’ve given it a good go but,” he said, “your health won’t stand it, you’ve got to give it up.

And I said, “Like hell.” I said, “I’ve spent four years and I’m not going to throw them away.” I said, “I’ll carry it.” See as an evening student you did two subjects a year. But if you failed one you could carry that and do three subjects, I said,” I’ll carry it.” “No you won’t,” he said, “you can’t do it. I won’t be responsible for you.” Oh we argued we fought. And finally we came to a compromise that I would do nothing else at the university that year except repeat

Ecs 4. That must have been 1951, 1950, 51. And I, we did, I did that. I just, of course that was a dream. You know I was just learning what I’d already learned all the, and then I went back and finally graduated in 1952 or 3 I don’t know, I did, my certificate’s up there, it’s got the date

on it I forget. But …

It was very difficult. Because we had, we all had nightmares every night. And see without explaining it,

as we were ordered not to, without explaining to them they could not, your wife could not understand why and she complained bitterly that I was grinding my teeth at night when in the midst of a terrible nightmare. And she seemed to overlook the fact that she had to launder my pyjamas practically every day because I had to keep another set of pyjamas by the bed because I sweated

with a bad nightmare and my pyjamas you could wring them out. So I’d get up and clean myself up and get my dry pyjamas and go back and that went on every night for a long, long time. I was a member of the POW Association. Oh let’s see

it must be 20 years ago now. The Association had to fold up because nobody had the capacity to keep it going. But we had a meeting one time and we used to adjourn to the end, we met up in Clarence Street not there any more. But we had a bar down the end, and after the meeting we used to go and have a drink. And one of the chaps came round to me and he said, “Whitey,” he said, “do you have nightmares?”

And I said, “Of course I do.” And I said, “So do you and it’s worrying you.” And he said, “Yeah,” he said, “but it’s 30 years.” And I said, “I don’t care how long it is,” I said, “we all have them. You’re not going…” and I suddenly realised he thought he was going mental going you know … And I said, “You’re not going mental, you’re the same as I am.” So I banged my glass on the on the bar table and I said to the others, I said, “Right-oh fellows tell me who

does not have any nightmares?” And they all looked at me as if I was crazy. So I said right. And I said to this bloke, “You see? We all have nightmares. You’re exactly like the rest of us. You’re not going mad. It’s perfectly normal. We have nightmares.” I still have them occasionally. But not every night as it, as after the war. So that’s a blessing. Because they were shocking those nightmares.

Well we won’t go into that.

Well it’s just what happened. Long time ago.

I don’t think so.

Is that all me on tape what we’ve been talking about? Oh I thought that they’d been switched off. No I don’t think so. I think now that apart from, Veterans’ Affairs is doing a very good job. Some years ago it wasn’t that way. I think mostly the same old thing came up that

the personnel in the Department of Veterans Affairs, none of them had been a an ex-serviceperson. And certainly none of them had any conception of what we went through as POWs. And we had a battle on our hands. Because we set up and originally the committee that I was on with two doctors and a couple of ex-POWs

and one another, one was a retired Deputy Commissioner for New South Wales. So he knew DVA [Department of Veterans’ Affairs] procedures and whatnot. And we had a very grim task when we had somebody would come in and tell us what was the matter to get that across to DVA that he should have a pension for it. And some

of them had extraordinary stories. Which they, and one, just to give you one quick example. An air force chap came in ‘cause we, after a while we, that committee was set up to deal with ex-POWs. And then we said to hell with that we’ll deal with any ex-serviceman who wants to come in and discuss his problems with this expert committee.

And we had an airman come in. And he said oh he he’d been forced to come in because his wife had heard about this committee and had demanded that he come in and see us. And so we said yes well, you know, what’s the problem? And the problem was that he was in a

depressed condition most of the time and somebody said why? And these doctors that were on that committee they’d all been regimental medical officers. And it was quite incredible they somehow sensed the right question to ask. And so they said to this chap something or other about what, what

seems to bother you then? And the story …