Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in a country town of Wentworth, New South Wales, which is historical in the sense that where our town is that is where our two great rivers meet,

the Murray and the Darling. When I was nine months of age my parents moved to another country town about one hundred miles away called Balranald, also in New South Wales and they took me with them. I was the youngest of four children and that remained the case,

my mother didn’t have any more children after me. When I became school age being of Catholic faith my parents sent me to St Joseph’s Convent School in Balranald, where I remained until I was fifteen years of age.

I didn’t not have the opportunity to go to a secondary school, as in those days none were available anywhere nearby. After that I took a temporary job working in a post office and in a chemist during certain hours. At the post office I worked the manual telephone

for some considerable time and I was also the postman, messenger boy, telegram boy, I was generally what they used to say in a shearers shed, a roustabout. After that I took jobs on various properties, sheep properties mainly.

I was also working in the Sunraisier area around Mildura fruit picking and later on working in the fruit packing sheds. Whilst on one of my return visits to Balranald in 1940,

I volunteered for service in the Australian Imperial Force [AIF], but I was refused entry on the grounds that my blood pressure was too high at twenty years of age. However whilst I was in the Mildura area I received a call up for military service. On this occasion the doctor

who examined me said, “Your blood pressure is high”, and I thought, “Not again”, because I was very keen to join. He said to me, “Have you had a few beers today?” And I said, “Yes sir, I have”, and that had been the truth because I had had quite a few beers, not a lot but enough to upset the equilibrium shall we say.

He said, “That is probably the cause, so in this case I will pass you”, so that was how I entered the army. I was then drafted into the 22nd Battalion and I was at Bonegilla near Albury for some time, we were called onto parade one day and we were told,

at this stage Japan had not entered the war, “Volunteers were being asked to form a battalion which is yet to be named”, and it was later named the 39th Battalion. There were a number from each unit that volunteered enough to make up battalion force.

We then trained at Darley camp near Bacchus Marsh, after about three months at Christmas we left for Sydney where we stayed for a short time before boarding the Aquitania and sailing to where we didn’t know where because

we weren’t told. That was Christmas, Japan had just entered the war about three weeks before. We were taken to Port Moresby and the harbour there is so shallow and the Aquitania being such a big ship was churning up mud and we all had to be taken in on small craft

to shore. From there we marched seven miles which was and still is called Murray Barracks where we stayed until we were sent out to where tents were quickly erected and we lived in tents.

We were sent from there out to a placed called Bootless Head where we had been given no training what so ever. The first real fright from the Japanese came when we got word that our own Australian intelligence had broken the Japanese code and that a big fleet of ships

were sighted in the Coral Sea headed they believe for Port Moresby. Fortunately due to the breaking of the code the Americans were able to sent aircraft carriers, planes and everything there and destroyed what is believed about twenty thousand Japanese and that avoided the threat to Port Moresby.

The major experiences when we were told that we were to go over to garrison to a village named Kokoda. The Japanese had not landed on any New Guinea soil,

but whilst we were on the way we had heard word that our advanced companies, A and B Company had contacted Japanese who had landed at Gona, they were in very vast quantities. Our troops were very depleted and they fought big battles there and when the rest of us left we marched over the Owen Stanley Ranges which became known as the Kokoda Track or the Kokoda Trail.

We did not know that our advanced troops were in battle with the Japanese until we got word along the line from the native carriers that the Japanese were there. As we advanced further we could hear the mortar and we could hear the machine gun fire, so we knew for sure that we were going to be in battle very soon.

After the war every ex service man or women I think experience the same difficulty not knowing what to do. Returning to Sydney and life after five and a half years to find nothing is almost as difficult as leaving it almost five and a half years previously. My first job that I took was mail sorting

at the general post office in Melbourne, I found that wasn’t for me. I then tried the railways and that didn’t not work out. Then I took a job at Henderson Spring Works doing office work, Henderson Spring Works at that time was in North Melbourne and maybe still there.

After that I met a lady who was to become my wife and I was eligible for soldiers settlement in farming. I chose to do it of course in dairy farming and was later allocated a soldiers settlement log.

At Numurkah which is about twenty miles on the north side of Shepparton. That was where we farmed for about thirty years. We leased the farm to begin with for six years, then sold it and then worked in an electrical shop for another twelve years in Numurkah

before leaving there and coming here to live in Lara in retirement.

I was born in Wentworth New South Wales where the Murray and the Darling rivers meet. It is also very famous for its old jail, I was not in it. At nine months of age my parents moved to Balranald New South Wales and my father worked

on a sheep property there. The prison is still a famous showpiece to this day.

My mother came from Bendigo Victoria, my father was born in Echuca in the year 1884, when Echuca was the busiest river port in Australia. He told me there were seventy two

hotels and nine breweries at that time. He said he must have been born in a dance hall or a pub because there was nothing else in Echuca and as I said there were four of us children.

My father’s father had ringed barked a lot of trees on the property at Wingello and by the Fawkner in New South Wales, he worked there and after that he was working on sheep stations for the rest of his life.

My mother didn’t go to work she was what is commonly termed a “house wife”. One of the highlights of my early days was a great air man who you may have heard of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and had made epic flights in a plane,

a Fokker called the Southern Cross. He came to my hometown of Balranald and was taking up joy rides. My mother and I went up on that flight and I think we were up in the air for about half an hour. The plane was considered huge at the time and I think it only occupied about twelve people, it was one of the highlights

of my young career which is one that I will never forget. I also lived through the Depression years when I was very young and my memories of those are very vivid.

My father fortunately was in a happier position than some although his wages were

reduced he was able to retain his job. This may seem odd to a lot of young people who would not understand. In those days when you worked on a sheep station you were given the opportunity to be what is called “found” or “find yourself” in other words you can take a certain wage and all necessary

foods would be provided for you. If you opted the other way and took a higher wage and brought the food yourself, most opted to be what was called “found”. They were very generous with the food at the stations so much so that we had so much food

at home that we were able to help. I’m not saying this is a moralistic or a modest way but we were able to help many, many families who were less fortunate than us, which was one of the good things. The Depression years were very, very difficult and very hard. Most of us boys who went to school

had patches all over our pants but we were not embarrassed because everybody was in that same situation. In fact we had so many patches that the patches became the pants. I believe they were good times to live through but hard in many, many ways. But even though I may have failed the test it was a great

background for young people to have to live the hard way and it was a very, very good stepping stone to maturity I believe. Whilst I don’t wish that on the young people of today I wish that something similar would happen to make them understand that they have to be good citizens.

They were the Depression years that I remember them. The other thing that I remember in New South Wales anyway was people didn’t get a check in the mail as they do now for a social service payment you had to line up in a queue at the police station on a nominated day per week. You would be given what was called a “chit”, a piece of paper

where you could go to a nominated grocer in the town and get the groceries that you were allowed, no liquor, and no cigarettes, just groceries. With clothing I’m not sure what that was but I think there was another one that allowed for some clothing. It was very humiliating and then we had to get into a queue.

I remember I lived in the era when the Sydney Harbour Bridge was built and that was a man named John Thomas Lang was premier of New South Wales at that time. He was the first one

to institute child endowment. When the Sydney Harbour Bridge was completed, I think in 1932, he as premier of the state was to cut the ribbon to open the bridge. There was a neo fascist organisation in New South Wales at that time

called the “New Guard”. One of its members a Captain de Groot, before Lang had the opportunity to cut the ribbon with the gold scissors de Groot went along on his horse called the Charger in those days and he cut the ribbon before Lang had the opportunity to do so.

That bridge remains today to be perhaps with the Opera House one of our greatest spectacles in Australia, so I remember those eras very well indeed. Hard but good in other ways, because companionship

was something that was brought to the fore. We had none of the vandalism and none of the burglaries, none of the disregard for human life amongst one another in civilian life that we have today in many cases.

Yes many, many people. In fact practically all I think from memory, about seventy percent of the population in the country towns, and there would have been more in the cities, who were on sustenance of some sort anyway. Incidentally during that era the State Bank of New South Wales

went broke and people’s monies were frozen for some considerable time until the situation was rectified and they were about to get their money back. Another dramatic even that happened in those days during the reign of Lang as premier of New South Wales. The

New South Wales Governor was an Englishman, as all Governors and Governor Generals had to be in those days. Lang refused to pay high interest on a debt to England and as a result of that the Governor of New South Wales Sir Philip Game dismissed him and

his government from office. That was the only time that it had ever been done until the Governor General Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam and his government from office. They are the only two occasions where that type of thing has ever happened and very, very doubtful that that will ever happen again.

I was very very young at the time and I don’t know a lot about it but it was an organisation. I think it was founded by a man named Campbell whose christian name I have forgotten, but he had a fairly solid sort of a following.

He was never ever likely to become the government, but he was something similar to what the communist government was out here in a sense, more of an anarchist type of a group who were rebelling against the elected government, that is about my memory of them. If my father was here he would be

able to tell you a lot more. They were turbulent times and I think the only thing that brought that Depression really to an end was the Second World War. Where there was no money previously to be found for anything, it was absolutely astonishing where the money

came from when the war started. Men who had been unemployed for so long, young men were very soon to be seen to be returning to their hometowns in uniform the first time they had had a job

of any sort for a long, long time.

My father was refused entry to the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] because he had what they called “fallen arches”,

flat feet and it was nearly all trench warfare in those days, and because of that he was refused entry to the AIF. His brother who became a member of the AIF and he fought in France and Gallipoli he became

quite a scholar really, even though he had a very poor education. He went back to Europe and taught in many countries, even spoke many other languages.

No, because when he came back

he took his discharge in Fremantle Western Australia and we did not hear from him again until a girl in 1951 wrote to me because she had read the Melbourne Sun in which the birth of one of the children was mentioned,

we had this birth notice put in. She saw the name spelt the same as hers and she wrote to me from Perth to see if there could be any connection and she told me who her paternal grandmother. She said her father often spoke of relatives in the eastern states

and she gave me more detail, which matches perfectly. So I was able to write to her and tell her that I was her first cousin, so that contact has remained ever since. So I never ever knew that uncle because he had passed on by then.

All the topics of the time, of course in those days we were under completely British rule, although we had our own government but we were still part of the British Empire. We were not taught much about Australian civics at all,

on our own parliament or local government. Only about English history and the Westminster System, but not so much how it worked for us but how it worked for them, the House of Commons and the House of Lords and we went way back into the English History. It was all very interesting, but a little different to our own situations as far as we were concerned.

We used to receive a very good education really in a broad sense. I was taught by nuns and they were of course very, very dedicated to their job.

The Sisters of Mercy who taught me.

Not overly strict, but if you did seem to be doing the wrong things yes you got the cane, they were not people who you would detest in fact you became to love them very dearly. They were people who were dedicated to their

faith and to the teaching of children.

Yes I think they may have been. They might have been more lenient on me than they should have been because I wasn’t a very good pupil and I think I lacked concentration a lot and did a lot of talking

when I shouldn’t have, things that I regretted later. Yes I remember my days there as being very happy ones.

Very important, to me personally do you mean?

The first king I remember, the first monarch of England in my time I think was George the Fifth and everything was done for Britain, or the mother country as those people called it.

The British Empire at that time controlled the world of the third surface and controlled the shipping too. The old song from many years was “Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves”, as they did until after the Second World War.

In some ways I believe the British Empire was good in the sense that particularly in some African countries where it controlled them. When they were given their independence they were in a worse situation because

black man exploited black man, particularly the richer and more intelligent one, the greedy ones exploited its fellow man than the British did, even though the British were guilty of many sins. There was no other empire, all the other empires had gone, the

Roman Empire had disappeared, every empire had disappeared but the British Empire was the sole remaining empire until independence was granted to so many countries, I think around about 1948.

Catholics.

Yes and of course that was for very good reasons because the peasants in Ireland, most of them leased properties and the landlords were absent and they were given very, very hard times.

It was before my time of course.

Yes the uprising happened during the First World War, the uprising saw lots and lots of cruelties to the Irish.

They had been down trodden and they decided that enough was enough and that was when they rose against the British. The latter came about the partition of Ireland where we had the north and the south part of that was one country controlled by Britain.

There were many countries and many books written on it, one was the “Great Shame” written by Tom Keneally, a book that gives a pretty good history of it all. We will get back to Catholics and the war. After the First World War

in job advertisements in newspapers, there were many advertisements where there were job vacancies but afterwards there would be, “Catholics need not apply”. So there was great animosity but I can’t remember any of that really happening in this country, not in my time.

As I grew into manhood I know some of my very best friends were memories of the Masonic Lodge, so we never really saw the very severe bigotry in this country but it did happen in the

British Isles. We have become much more understanding and enlightening, fortunately now Northern Ireland or the IRA [Irish Republican Army] have ceased their attacks on Britain for now anyway and that has helped a lot.

I don’t want to sound in any way partial in these things, but as far as Catholics in the war was concerned many many Catholics from these countries and other countries from the British Isles contributed very largely. My own wife had

3 brothers involved, 2 were pilots who were both killed and another brother was in the AIF in the Middle East and he came back from there but in a pretty bad way. Catholics were not in anyway innocent about fighting for

King and Country in either war.

My first job was working part time at a chemist shop, every town in those days of

any size had its own newspaper, which was printed weekly, and I worked at the newspaper office after school, but the chemist in those days all medicine came in bottles and bottles were washed and used again. I was a bottle washer and delivering prescriptions to people and all that type of thing.

Later as I told you earlier I worked at the post office and I was there for some time. I worked on the manual exchange, which is pretty hard to understand for anybody who is young these days. It was more of a complicated system, you had to have all plugs and this one, and you had to learn it.

Not really, in what sense?

No, very little, something that nobody ever wanted to spoke about.

In fact that is still true of the soldiers of World War II. But in recent years people have been asked to speak more about that than the soldiers of the First World War did because the children must be educated on these matters and quite a few of us from the

local RSL [Returned and Services League] sub branches, including myself, have gone to schools on Anzac Day and explained to them a number of things that happened. Not in anyway praising war or anything like that but trying to explain how necessary it was to

do these things. Not because people like killing or wounding only that it was absolutely necessary and tell them what theatre of war you were involved in. The last one I did the teacher said that he had learnt as much as the children did, because he didn’t know anything about that either

because he was too young. In fact he would have hardly been born if in fact he was born.

Yes I did, not a lot because I lived in a small country town,

but I do know one man who lost his arm and he was a boundary rider on a station and he used to roll his own cigarettes, it’s amazing what he could do with 1 arm. Open the tin, get a cigarette paper and put the cigarette paper on his lap, get the tobacco out

and roll the tobacco with one hand and then he’d put that on the cigarette paper and just go like that, and he’d have rolled a beautiful cigarette and then he’d just lick it with his lips. Sometimes adversity though whilst not desirable can be the mother of invention.

No I don’t think so, I don’t think that it was very thought that war was being glorified. There was a false notion that got around that when soldiers, even to this day, but when soldiers meet at a reunion probably once a year

when old friends get together. That they would go over the old war days and do it all again, completely untrue, those things are never really mentioned, that’s good friendship from the good times is what they’d think about. It’s good to see an old mate and have a beer, no it’s not glorified in any way.

In fact most of us with any compassion at all, and I hope that I had that and many others, think of the enemy and their families being just as unfortunate as we and our families were because they too were only fighting for a cause that they were told to believe in.

We were taught at school that all wars up to that time had been over trade and I believe that is still true today.

The human cost of war is always tragic and during the First World War the wounded were not compensated nor was there adequate compensation, even though there were many many promises made and many many promises

broken by governments. The worst promise I’ve ever seen broken in war and this when I was in New Guinea. The native carriers who brought up the supplies, ammunition and they had dreadful mountains at the Owen Stanley Ranges, the Kokoda Trail,

not only that they carried out the wounded in the most difficult places across the track. There were only perhaps from here to that little table, one slip and you were gone. They did this and I saw them doing it constantly and perspiring like mad and they were told that they would be compensated.

It’s the shame of every government from Chifley to the present one that they have not received compensation whatsoever. They only asked for a little bit, but they didn’t get that, they got nothing. That is to the ever lasting

discredit of the continuous government.

Not a great deal. There must have been contacts, my wife’s father was a solicitor in Echuca in those years

and many years before and he had a copy or was given a copy of “Mein Kampf”, the book that was written by Hitler. My wife’s father’s name was mentioned in it and his address, so they must have had contacts. We didn’t learn a lot about the rise

of Hitler because I think what we have got to understand is when the First World War ended Germany was faced with enormous war admiration bills, which they found impossible to pay.

I’m not defending the rise of Nazism, I’m only speaking about a possible cause of it. The people were poor, they were being crippled by the enormous more repayment debts. That was when Hitler became into being and rebelling against this sort of thing

and that was when he got the following behind him. People say today that he only had a certain amount behind him but he must have had an enormous amount, but we didn’t really know. When Chamberlain went over there in 1937 to 1938 he said, “There will be peace in our time”, because he believed he had

made an agreement with Hitler, but how mistaken he was.

Seemed very far away. I think it’s in all these things, we had the Middle East, the Jews and the

Palestinians had been fighting as long as I can remember, certainly since 1948 when they made the Jews that. We regarded that as their own backyard and just leave it alone, let them sort it out but it’s not that way anymore. The whole world has got to sort it out.

Yes the English and the French and in fact all those Europeans who fought Germany in the First World War.

What you have to remember

at that time and in these present wars it’s noticeable that anybody who has oil, any country that has oil is the envy of countries that do not have it, because that’s the commodity that is required in this industrial world.

Germany didn’t have oil, Britain didn’t at that time, the main oil fields are where they still are and that’s why there is so much going on over there in my belief. All the wars that are going on now and it is what we have been told

comes down again to trade.

To me it seemed a long time because I used to see men going to RSL meetings

and I thought, “Gee they are old men”, because we thought old were men forty years of age when we were young, they were pretty old men, if they lived to sixty, “Gee how did they live that long?”. To my parents and other people in that vintage

said that it was a very short time because I think it was only twenty five years or something wasn’t it? 1918, twenty one years later, it is a very short space of time. We didn’t have then many war in between like what they call smaller wars,

they had been going on all the time. The poverty and the slavery in these countries were going on all the time, anybody that wasn’t involved in it personally seemed to ignore it because it wasn’t in their backyard.

In my day when I was young we’d go to the local memorial, people would go up and the church services, we usually had a church service in the morning for those that wished to attend. Then we’d

go to the memorial around about eleven o’clock from memory. Very few did I hear speak anything about the war, even those who had been there because they were reluctant to do so. Perhaps they were frightened of sounding in modest or some reason like that. Usually somebody

would speak about what had happened since the war, or before and the sadness that had happened during the war. It would usually end up with some man singing, women didn’t seem to have much say in things then, a man would sing probably, “God Save The Queen”, or, “Advance Australia Fair”,

it was a popular song then, “Advance Australia Fair”. Then of course it was a dull day from then on, there was no sport, nothing, it was a complete day of sadness or a reflection. There was no such thing of ending at midday and then sport or football for

the next part of the day. Which I think was a little bit silly because having paid your respects earlier in the day you should be free to go on and do other things if you wished. I think that was a very good move, doing away with it being a sombre day all day.

Gallipoli we heard more of, I did anyway, but Gallipoli was heard more of than the battles in France. Gallipoli was as I remember it, it was a very, very badly planned organisation. Winston Churchill

got quite a lot of the blame, he went for a long time that man, in the First World War he was Lord of the Admiralty and it was, I have been told, on pretty good authority that he was the one and it was his strategy that planned it.

The thing is if that attack on the Turks in the Dardanelles had have been a success it would have shortened the war considerably, but the intelligence was not good. The Turks were aware of what was going to happen and they were just waiting for them and our own men became just sitting ducks on the water.

Many got off and fought on land, but it was a great tragedy and a great mistake. The pity of it was we were fighting such good people, they aligned themselves with Germany but they were on our side in the next war so war is a funny thing. The Japanese were on our side in the First World War.

They were short of minerals, they needed materials which they had to buy from Australia or somewhere who had the materials and paid through the nose, this again is where trade comes into it.

Yes they were, but they wouldn’t suit the teenager of today, but we lived a different lifestyle. I had happy memories of my friends and I didn’t even think of driving a motor car when I was nineteen or twenty. In fact if your parents had one they were very fortunate to have one.

Smoking, girls rarely smoked until they were older, you didn’t see young girls smoking or young boys really. We use to play sport a lot.

As I said, a lot of my days were spent just working in local jobs and out on the wide open spaces which I have many happy memories and that was one of the reasons I went back farming after the war.

Yes I think so and

you thought that it was a claim to manhood. The other reason was that not many could afford it, cigarettes were only about six pence for a packet of ten. The main attraction we had in cigarettes was in those days every packet of ten cigarettes

brand had a card in with a footballer, a picture of them, Victoria League it was in those days, you would be trying to get as many cards as you could. Marbles was another that was played regularly, with boys. If you went with that many marbles in a bag you started the day and you finished up winning

and you had a bag full of marbles this big, that was your pride and joy, you would count them and count them again to see how many you had won, unbelievable because today if they want something in their hand they watch television. I’m not crying at the people today for doing that because that is the way that society has advanced and you can’t stop progress, in fact it is progress but you can’t stop change.

I don’t know how boys today would relate their younger days when they go into manhood, because they lived in a different era with different devices. We had some hard times, but I learnt

to love the country life and I would have never ever had of settled in the city again. I did for some years after the war and I worked at Henderson’s which I think I mention for some years. The city was not really for me.

Freedom and the good country air.

You got to know nearly everybody else in the area. The first radio I had when I lived out in the country on my own was a mantle radio and it was about

three feet long by about a foot wide. It was powered by a pack of enormous dried cell batteries, all the batteries were about this big, ten of them and nobody would do that today. Radio in many ways has advanced of course, but

one wonders how much, because when the war had started we bought for thirteen pounds a big console radio about this high with a big powerful speaker and it had short wave and medium wave. We could listen clearly to Radio Berlin and during the day time

Lord Haw Haw. An American William Joyce I think was his name but because of his voice he was called Lord Haw Haw and he was the traitor and he was on Radio Berlin crying to the allied forces all the time, clearly. Tokyo Rose later when Japan came into the war you could hear her from Tokyo,

so radio was pretty good.

A very clear memory. I just had my nineteenth birthday the month before and I was working on an orange orchard and

I remember being woken by my employer that night, I was sleeping in a shed apart from their house. He came into me and woke me and said, “It has just come over the radio that Britain has gone to war with Germany”,

and I said, “Oh my God”. The next morning Robert Menzies addressed the nation at about twelve o’clock and I remember his words very clearly. “Last night Britain declared war on Germany,

and it is my melancholy duty”, these were his words, “It is my melancholy duty to inform you that we as a member of the British Empire are also at war with Germany”.

It was then that the government called for people to put money into war bonds, war savings accounts, money seemed to come from all sorts of places where it was never evident before. So that was what had financed the war effort. Menzies continued as prime minister for a time

and then he went to the British War Cabinet and he spent a lot of time over in England as a member of the Allied War Cabinet, America at this stage were not in the war. Eventually he did come back to Australia but he was defeated on the floor of the house

as Prime Minister. His party was put out and that was when the Curtin government was elected and he proved to be one of our very great prime ministers. His treasurer even greater, Ben Chifley, he financed the war effort, he had been a train driver and he an amazing

financial knowledge.

Probably about a few months because we saw these men who were unemployed, well many of them anyway were coming back in uniform.

Some were not allowed to go to war because they were considered to be in protected industries, if you were a farmer you had to provide food for the war effort so your job was to remain there and many other industries were considered protected. Women were also called up later in the war, not so much for war service,

because they did not appear for war service, but they appeared in many army units like the Australian Women Army and so on but they had to go and work in canneries that sort of thing, they were paid but they were instructed by the government. It was forced labour, not slavery but they had to do those things and probably worked in clothing factories.

Rationing came in later and you had to have coupons for butter, sugar, tea and clothing. It didn’t affect me because I was in the army for the five and a half years,

so I missed most of it. But for those who remained it must have been pretty tough.

Perhaps truthfully a feeling of adventure more than great loyalty, I would think a combination of both but I think adventure was the dominating one.

I knew there was always the possibility, I was going into infantry so there was a greater risk they’re of being killed or wounded more than any other

land force. I also wanted to see the world or see what I could of it. There were so many others that you knew were joining. I don’t think I remember everybody saying, “You should go to the war”, because you were a coward, I don’t think that was ever said.

But it was during the First World War, I believe people were handing white feathers to people, white feather being the symbol of a coward, but fortunately I don’t remember any of that happening at all but it was I believe in the First World War. I think they were the two reasons.

Yes, I joined up with friends. I attempted to join the Australian Imperial Force which was a volunteer force in 1940, but my local doctor who was also the local army doctor, he refused my admission

because of my high blood pressure. But I got a call up to citizen military services which was in this country of Australia only. The doctor knew I still had high blood pressure but he put that down to me having a few beers too many so I was allowed through.

In those days even when I was called up, troops could not be sent out of this country unless they volunteered. I had volunteered but I was refused, it was only when they called for volunteers and they formed the 39th Battalion we had volunteered to leave the country not knowing where we would be going.

Japan had not entered the war then.

I had lost my older sister a few years before who was twenty four and she had a young family. My brother

who was three years older than me, he was a diabetic and also suffered from high blood pressure and was refused military service. My surviving sister was away doing her nursing training so they would have preferred me to have not done that.

Yes I would say so. If I can get away from my own occasion that involves me. My wife had an older brother who had decided to join the air force and became a pilot and did his training in Calgary in Canada and

later went to Europe. He was flying as the captain of a Wellington which is a bomber and that was lost between Gibraltar and Malta and the bodies were never found or the wreckage of the plane. They were missing and believed killed to this day.

Her younger brother who then had turned eighteen said to his father, “Dad I want to join the air force, I want to become a pilot”, and his father said to him, “Bill what about joining another part of the service? We have already lost Max in the air force”, but he was determined on it so he did his training and he too became a pilot, he was a Spitfire pilot and he was lost just before the war

ended. His body was found drowned and he never made it out of his plane, he was flying with a target for military practice and that target failed his plane and Spitfires I understand are notoriously hard to get out of, so he went down either in the third or fourth, so he was the second one.

Her third brother did join the AIF and he was in the Middle East he survived but came back in a pretty nervous state. My own situation wasn’t so bad when you compare others, mine was pretty good. They are the only ones that I know of but there would be many more like that.

Fortunately I had been in that area for some time, in the Mildura area and I knew quite a lot of them so we began as mates, it was an adventure it was something knew. We hated leaving our loved ones.

I think the loyalty was one angle of it, but for many perhaps including myself it was the lesser angle of adventure for a younger wanting to see more of the world. In those days if you travelled 60 miles you had gone an awful long way.

You were taken in, I think they made a uniform to suite all sizes, only one size and that had to suit everybody. The shorts they gave you

were big huge shorts and they were called “Bombay bloomers”. Big heavy army boots which we weren’t accustomed too particularly those of us who had worked in offices. Strict routine, discipline from the word go which many of us had not been accustomed too.

Marching, drill, standing to attention when called upon.

For the initial training we were sent to Bonegilla and it still is I think a training camp very close to Albury. We were presented with to use,

we weren’t given them as gifts in that sense, but we were given to use in training 303 rifles and they were used in the First World War. Everything that they had in the form of armourments and ammunition was all the same that was used in the First World War, nothing new had been devised. I think they had

the idea that the First World War was the war to end all wars and that was the end of it. They had bayonets attached and we were provided with steel helmets again the same as the First World War. Slouch hats the same as the First World War

and little forage caps which I don’t know if they had them in the First World War. They were used mostly if you were going out in the evening and that type of thing. Dances were fairly common in the towns but you had to wear your big heavy military boots, even to a dance. If the poor girl got her foot stood on it would

really hurt. We were trained around that area but when the 39th Battalion was formed, when we went to Darley, some similar training was done there until we embarked,

which turned out to be Port Moresby but we didn’t know where we were going.

There were sandbags put

up which were imaginary soldiers and you had to charge and bayoneted them. Then there was firing on rifle ranges to see how accurate you could be with your shooting. I had machine guns, very, very few machine guns. There was the Lewis and Vickers machine gun, again

from the First World War. They were the only two machine guns and even they were in short supply, so we got a little bit of training with them and the rifles. Lots of drills, lots of marching. Very much the same thing happened when we went to Darley.

Very strange, very strange indeed. If you get close to the target or the bull’s eye you’d feel a bit proud of yourself after a while, that you were able to achieve that. I never really gave it a great deal

of thought of what would happen in action and you had to shoot at people, I think you just hoped that that wouldn’t occur. But when it did occur you realised that you either had to shoot that person or he may shoot you and you were ready,

you accepted the end you could be dead at any moment. There was very little training and when you got to New Guinea and our camp was at a placed called Bootless Inlet there was even less training, practically nothing. What we were doing was we were putting up

barbed wire around the beaches so that if the enemy landed it would stop them but there was no actual training at all. One of the other reasons was the mosquitoes were in such droves and we were all going down with malaria, but you could only stay out of your mosquitoes nets

for a short time, it was just unbearable.

Yes they told you to imagine that the sacks were imaginary people so you just put the bayonet in and withdrew the bayonet.

It’s what little boys might do when they are playing but when it becomes real it’s a nasty feeling in your mouth. Most of the training and a lot of the other training that was done in New Guinea, if you could call it training but it was not training at all. It was going in and unloading ships

that had come in. If I could break off here and tell you about one particular ship that came in. A ship called the Badoey [MacDhui?] it was owned by the Burns Philp Company and Burns Philp was a very very big trading company in the Pacific area and in fact it was called the “Octopus of the Pacific”.

One of its big ships came in and there was a dreadful shortage of matches in Papua New Guinea and the ship came in filled with matches. We had no protection what so ever at Port Moresby, no aircraft would come over we didn’t have any fighter planes at the time we had nothing.

The ship came in and I think I mentioned earlier that Port Moresby has a very shallow harbour and the ships can’t get into port so light craft had to go out and unload them onto their craft. This is what had happened. I think there were about thirty or forty of us from the

39th Battalion that was out there to unload the ship and another chap and I we were on the end of the line to go out to the small craft. One of our captains by the name of McCloud said, “You two on the end you stay in here and you have the coppers boiling for a cup of tea for when we come back and look after

everybody’s gear”, so that was our job and out they went. They weren’t out there very long and they got onto the ship and started unloading onto the craft and over came about five Japanese bombers, not a thing to go up and intercept them, they had them all to themselves and they just rained the bombs

on the ship. Fortunately there were lots of near misses but there were also some bombs that did hit the ship. It sunk it to one side and I couldn’t see properly because the water wasn’t deep enough but we lost about nine who were killed on that one. Captain McCloud the one that told the other chap and I to stay back he was killed and eight others from memory. The crew for some reason I don’t why stayed on that ship and

the Japanese came back the next day and bombed it again and quite a number of them were killed the next day. That remained there and its still there that ship on its drifted down a bit further, its not exactly where it was then, its not sunken because it cant sink because of the depth of the water.

That’s a monument to one of the things that is there. That was the sort of training if you could call that training.

About six weeks at Bonegilla and another three months at Darley, Bacchus Marsh.

Some were quite good and some were quite officious, got promotion and it got to their heads the same as some officers, broadly however pretty good.

I had a good time, you can always make jokes or see humour in something if you wish to

and that’s what we did and we usually had a pretty good time. The food was pretty hard to take to at times and it wasn’t like what we had had at home but you got use to that and that got pretty good in the end too.

Very much under supplied. Those guns that they had were only left

overs from the First World War. The gun that will come into play later on was the Bren gun and the light machine guns which you just used in your hand to spray bullets. The Tommy and Owen gun they came into play later but they were never heard of then. When we first

went there we didn’t see a Bren or Tommy gun when we went to New Guinea, it was later on only when we were in actual fighting that we were provided with a limited amount of Tommy, Owen and Bren guns.

Ammunition seemed to be fairly plentiful during training,

there was one ammunition factory and they just kept on making bullets and then they started to make more guns, the same type of gun that was used in the First World War.

They got along pretty well.

When you met a Sydneysider or a New South Wales Welshman and when you got talking football there wasn’t much common there because they didn’t know much about Australian Rules and the Australian Rules people didn’t know anything about rugby union, rugby league or soccer. But as Australians we had much in common and we made many great friendships. Friendships that had to break up after

the war because we all had our own different paths to go. There were the wedding bells that broke up lots of those things.

Yes the first six weeks and we thought it was quite good and it was all

a novel to us, something very new, some had come from offices, some from farms, every walk of life, so it was. I think one of my biggest deflations I think I was twenty and this was at Bonegilla and

we were given a days leave and a train was going to Melbourne that day and we were told that there was a buffet car on it. I thought, “This will be great I haven’t had bacon and eggs for ages. I might be able to get some bacon and eggs”. I went into the buffet car with a young attractive waitress and by this time I was twenty

and I’m a mature adult now, I’m thinking to myself and she just came up and looked at me and said, “Yes baby face what can I do for you?” I said, “Nothing”, but I was sadly deflated, but I enjoyed the bacon and eggs.

The average age there I suppose was about twenty to twenty one, however it has been stated by historians in all the books that have been written about the 39th Battalion on the Kokoda Track that the average age was eighteen and a half.

I knew some who were eighteen or younger but many of them were not permitted to go up into the battle because they were considered too immature, but that was the average age. I was one of the older ones and I had my twenty second birthday on the Kokoda Trail but there were some older and some younger than me.

I didn’t know anybody who had lied because nobody had said that to me, but I think there would have been somebody. I could never understand it, if you lied about your age going for a motor licence you were in severe trouble. If you lied about you’re age going into the army nobody

seemed to mention it, the air force and navy I suppose. I never knew anybody who said that they had lied about their age but there probably were some.

I don’t remember anything like that, I was just drafted to an infantry battalion, the 22nd Battalion which was in at Bonegilla. The 39th Battalion was a totally Victorian battalion, so many were required from each battalion,

so a number of us volunteered from each battalion and that was enough to form another battalion. Our role was not really to be in active service, it was to be a militia garrison to wherever we were going and you didn’t know where.

We found out that it was to be New Guinea but at that time we didn’t know. Why they did this because most of our troops were committed to the Middle East and to be able to sent troops from the mainland of Australia to anywhere the troops

had to volunteer to do that because they could not be conscripted at the time. We were given time, we weren’t asked to volunteer at that moment we were given warning but we had a certain time to make up our minds and most made up their minds.

I thought that we might have been going to India at the time which was a bit of a hot spot which was still Australian mandated territory but it was not part of the mainland which troops couldn’t be sent unless they volunteered.

No a militia battalion, we did our fighting on the Kokoda Trail and later in Buna, Gona and Sanananda on the beach heads as a militia battalion. I don’t think we were given the opportunity to transfer to the AIF, which I did and many others did do, but the fighting was

over by that time. So we fought as a militia unit.

They hadn’t come into the war, they didn’t come into the war until some months after that. December 7th I think was the attack on Peal Harbour 1941 and I was at Bonegilla prior to that

so we knew nothing about that, there was nothing to know because it hadn’t happened.

To Darley, Bacchus Marsh.

Yes for more training for about three months and the Japanese came into the war while we were there.

At that time they hadn’t gone very far but soon after that they were making striding advances despite all protections. Singapore was suppose to be an impregnable force but it turn out to be a fallacy. Britain lost battleships, I think the Repulse, the Renowned and the Prince of Wales

over in that area, there were huge loses sustained. Then of course our 8th Division were sent there and we know what happened there and there were an enormous amount of prisoners taken. The Japanese were just like an absolute machine and were just relentless and they were experts

in jungle warfare and in raining conditions and camouflage. In fact they were very very good soldiers, they were not the small little men that we believed there were quite a lot of well sized, or medium sized Japanese and some tall ones.

Not immediately no, I don’t think so. Not until they started to get to the stage where they were getting close to Australia. When they dropped in on East Indies, which is now Indonesia, we knew they were there and they were very close there, very close indeed.

If the Coral Sea Battle had not been won by the Americans and the destruction to all their ships and boats in that area they were headed for Port Moresby. Port Moresby had absolutely nothing, just a few of us untrained soldiers.

We had no aircraft, there were no defences so they would have just swamped all over that country. There were already airstrips there so they would have used them quickly to attack Australia. That was why their ships couldn’t go that by sea because

they failed in the Coral Sea. Incidentally their code had been broken, that’s how they knew, by the Australian intelligence that was based in Townsville, by the Japanese code. So the Americans were alerted and that was when they came onto the scene and created havoc on the Japanese. They decided then that their next move

would be to take Port Moresby by coming from the other side, by landing on the other side of the island at Gona, Buna and Sanananda and that area and attack by going over the Owen Stanley Ranges.

Prepare a little bit, I think shock was the first thing because at that very time there was a Japanese ambassador or similar had gone to America to sign a peace deal

with America. While that was being done or just after the Japanese launched this severe attack. Their intelligence must have been pretty good because they did it at a time when an almost total American fleet was moored in Pearl Harbour. That was when they made

it by amphibious aircraft and aircraft carriers. I think that just shook everybody, they couldn’t believe it. It was a bit like what was to happen later with the Twin Towers, nobody could believe that that could have happened, and nobody believe that the other would have happened, how the total American fleet would be destroyed by a surprise attack.

He was supposed to be signing a peace deal with them.

No because most of our troops were committed to over there

while they were fighting a severe war. Germany was also winning and going ahead in leaps and bounds, they looked like even taking England. So we knew any assistance from there would be wishful thinking.

It was only during the Kokoda Campaign and then when it was clear that the Japanese were advancing on Australia that Curtin made his call to the president himself, “Please come to our aid we need you”. And that was when the Americans forces came over then.

At the risk of sounding immodest the American soldier was no where near as good as the Australian one. It was generally believed that it took about six American soldiers to equal one Australian soldier. They just didn’t seem to have what it took.

From there we went by train to Sydney and we boarded the Aquitania at Woolloomooloo Harbour and then proceeded onto Port Moresby.

No we weren’t told at all. That was the thing about the army nobody ever seemed to want to tell you anything.

We took a long time to get there, much longer than needed because the reason being the shortest way over was believed to have been infested with Japanese submarines. So to try and avoid that they took a longer way and took seven days even going over when we were about half way there was a scare.

We had an enormous escort, Australian cruisers we didn’t have any battle ships because there weren’t any, cruisers, sloops, frigates and destroyers, we had about seven warships escorting us. The alert went one day and the smoke signals went up and they started to fire depth charges

they believed that there was a Japanese submarine there and if there was we didn’t see it and we didn’t hear anymore about it, so eventually we just carried on and finally got there.

After that scare we didn’t.

I think we just thought about other things.

We did a bit of drill on deck, sat around and leisure and talked. A lot of the time was taken up by meals. They would call you into meals at certain sittings,

the first one might start at midday for lunch and the next one probably wouldn’t be until half past one and then two o’clock depending on which one you were in, so a lot of time was taken up there. My God it was hot in the decks underneath, the heat, the heat was something dreadful and it wasn’t any better when we got to New Guinea anyway.

No. We didn’t think that we were going to fight at all, they just said that there was a garrison. We weren’t told anything as I told you, when we did get there we were told that

later on some of us would be going to do garrison at Kokoda.

No there didn’t seem to be, not the ones that I mixed with anywhere. With five thousand troops on there you only saw a fraction of them. There didn’t seem to be,

they weren’t exactly blaze about it but nobody seemed overly concerned. It wasn’t until the real pressure came.

Yes we played two up that was the main game. It was a long walk around the ship because it was a pretty big ship.

If you left this point and by the time you walked around it and got back around to this point again you would have walked one mile, so that would give you some idea of the size of the ship.

No beer, they took the beer off at Woolloomooloo and they were angry about it they saw them unloading

all the barrels of beer, so we didn’t get a drink and we didn’t get a drink over there either. It was a long time until we were rationed, it was about every three months we would be given a couple of bottles of beer but they were always hot.

Yes I think we got closer but we only saw the ones that we mixed with we didn’t see all the others, we would just see them roaming around the deck but we didn’t know them. There were other troops on it as well as the 39th Battalion but a battalion is about nine hundred men but there were

quite a lot of other troops on it. There was hospital, field ambulance, they did a wonderful job the field ambulance. Hospital tents were going up everywhere because everybody got dysentery, nearly everybody got dysentery or severe diarrhoea as soon as we got there. Plus many were going down with malaria straight away

and there was nothing provided, there were no provisions.

I didn’t see anything like that but I could understand how it would happen in the bounty days because oh my god how awful, the

conditions must have been terrible.

Finally we arrived there and we were taken in on small craft.

Yes at Port Moresby harbour a very shallow one, not a pretty harbour but its very shallow. Then we all had to march out with our gear, about six or seven miles somewhere.

I hated it, I hated the look of it I thought, “Oh my God is this were we are going to be?”. There were two modern hotels there but none of them had any beer, a pub without beer there were two of them there because the ships weren’t coming and they weren’t bringing it in anymore.

We marched out to a big complex, Murray Barracks and its still there with big galvanized iron sheds and I think it was named after a former administrator of Papua New Guinea. Whilst we were there a Japanese bomber did come over

and I think it was more of a reconnaissance one night because no bombs were dropped. One of the things that we used to watch when we were out at Bootless Inlet was the old Catalina flying boat, have you heard of the Catalinas? They were slow, nineteen mile an hour was their full speed but they’d load up with bombs

and go and bomb the Japanese on some nearby island. They’d take about three or four attempts to get off the water because of the bomb load. Finally they’d get off after about three or four tries and they’d just skim along and then they’d go out of sight. I flew back on one from Manila in the Philippines to Moratai

which was part of the Netherlands East Indies, slow and noisy and of course landing on the water is a strange feeling too.

Strange, you’d come in and you’d see the sea underneath you and then it came down and it lands and skims along the water and then there were launches there to take us in.

“Oh my God Father is this the dreadful place that we have to stay at”. We didn’t like it very much at all. It was a little bit better when we got off the ship and came into town but

we couldn’t get a beer, there were pubs with no beer. The war had affected it so much even by then that the ships weren’t coming in with anything.

It looked like a big country town, a fair sized country town there were some modern buildings,

there was one called Steam Ships, Burns Philp had a building there a fairly modern trading building. There were two hotels, Hotel Port Moresby and the other one I can’t think of its name. Mostly older type homes,

its so long ago about sixty two years ago, it’s a long time ago and its hard to remember now but that is about as best as I can remember it. We didn’t spend a lot of time in Port Moresby we were always outside about twenty miles out.

I haven’t been back since. Is that what you meant?

Yes it was, there were no culture shocks because the dark people didn’t look that different to our dark people except their hair was a fuzzy wuzzy hair.

When you go to places like Bangkok that’s when you get the culture shock because they are different, I’ve never been to Ceylon so probably there too.

They would be there now. The natives were very nice quiet people, they were all in their different tribes

and they just lived in their pings and what have you with gardens and I believe there are still people like that but it’s very dangerous as well.

No not at all but the youth are very dangerous there now, even up on the Kokoda Track its dangerous there, criminal elements go up there robbing the travellers.

I didn’t seem them and I didn’t notice any of them there, they would have been very small units if there were. But as I was saying earlier there were five thousand troops on the ship on the Aquitania and there would be only about nine hundred to one thousand of us, so there must of have been lots of others. A lot of those would have been hospital staff,

administrative staff, field ambulance and even light horse people went over, and engineers, artillery men and that type of thing. It wasn’t right for certain types of war that jungle hilly country it was only suitable

mostly for mortars, infantry even machine guns were difficult you could spray a machine gun but you really didn’t know who or where you were shooting at.

No not at all, not straight away, but soon afterwards the Japanese came over bombing and strafing with Zeros. We went and lived for a time at a place called Murray Barracks which was a very short stay before we moved out to another place called the Seven Mile Aerodrome and I think that is the main airport now.

Our army had what you’d call spotters, they were people who lived in trees up in high advantage points anywhere and the Japanese had taken Salamaua and our guys would watch what was happening and we’d get a message on pedal radio

saying, “Twenty two Zeros”, or whatever, “Just left Salamaua and heading for Port Moresby estimated time of arrival twenty minutes”, about the twenty minutes to be sure. In the morning they’d get behind the sun so they’d have the sun behind them so it would be difficult for them to see them so they would come down low.

All we had was old Lewis machine guns to try and keep them at bay so we had very little defences really.

Yes, but not heavy casualties there because the heavy casualties were to come later.

Yes at the Seven Mile Drome for a time and then we moved on to what is called Bootless Bay by some or Bootless Inlet by other and we were there for

many months until the Coral Sea Battle and we all had to not relocate but alert ourselves that the Japanese were really in the area. Then we got word that we were to move to this place that we had never heard of called Kokoda.

Our advance parties, A and B Company were the first ones to go over and when they got to Kokoda they found the Japanese had landed not very far away from a place called Gona. Gona, Sanananda, Buna were all on the beach or close to one another and it was in that area that they landed and

the Japanese attacked Kokoda. Our very depleted troops forced them from Kokoda and then the Japanese regrouped and more reinforcements arrived and they countered attack. It was believed there was approximately a few

hundred Australian men attacking the Japanese at that time and there were about ten thousand Japanese. I was in C Company 13th Platoon C Company and we followed A and B Company over the Owen Stanley Ranges. This is a very, very difficult trek because the highest point is somewhere around eight thousand feet

and then the decent is as bad as the accent, slippery, muddy and wet terrible conditions. We heard word from native carriers that the Japanese were in conflict with our advanced Australian troops and then as we carried on further we could hear the mortars

and the machine gun fire and we knew that very soon we too would be in battle with the Japanese. We marched to a village called Deniki, Deniki is at the very end of the Owen Stanley Ranges and then it becomes flat country and not very far away about a couple

of kilometres or more away you could see the village of Kokoda. Then the Japanese attacked us near Deniki and they made a very, very severe attack when it was raining, they loved the rain to launch their attacks. They screamed hideous noises all the time as they were coming up the hill,

they gave us the order to retreat which we did. They kept coming and we kept fighting counter battles with them as we retreated and this went on for weeks. We had very, very little food, our clothing was only our shorts and shirts which was what we had when we left

and they were all tattered and grimy and we were all in an awful state and we all lost a terrible lot of weight of course. However we halted the Japanese advance fortunately until our troops arrived from the Middle East. Curtin the prime minister of the day ordered the troops because the situation was so bad in New Guinea that our troops from the

Middle East all be returned to Australia and then sent on some jungle training and then sent onto New Guinea, which they did and they helped us. The big battle happened at a place called Isurava and that’s where the war monument is now at Isurava.

Yes that’s when the 2/ 14th joined in and the 2/ 21st and the 2/ 27th, but the

2/ 14th were the first there and that’s where Bruce Kingsbury of the 2/ 14th won a Victoria Cross. That was awarded post service because he was killed in that action, that was a very, very big battle and that was the siding battle on the Kokoda Trail. We the 39th Battalion,

and I might seem immodest in saying this, what we did we did delay their advance for so long that there supplies were running low, sickness was setting in with them as it was with us, but we delayed their advance until the 2/ 14th and the other units of the AIF arrived from the Middle East.

Then the great push went on to push them back, back right back. After Isurava we were relieved, but the fighting was still so intense that our commanders volunteered the 39th Battalion to go back and resume fighting, which we did for a period of time.

Then we were relieved and we came back to a rest place at the foot of the Owen Stanleys. We went into a further training camp and this time we did do some vigorous training and we were there for a few weeks. We were called onto parade one day, I think it was a Sunday and we were told we were to fly back

not walk back and go into battle again which we did. Not all the 39th went back because some were not well enough to go back and some had volunteered to go into some other units. There were quite a lot of us that went back and we landed at a place called Popendetta, which was just an airstrip then cut out of kuni grass.

From then we went on to fight the Japanese as they were being pushed back towards the beach heads.

Bootless Bay and some call it Bootless Inlet.

The Battle of the Coral Sea took place while we were there and we were all alerted because by that time the Japanese were still advancing. It was after that that the Japanese warships and aircraft

arrived on the scene.

The first equipment we had was all First World War armourments, 303 rifles and bayonets,

Lewis and Vickers machine guns and the machine guns were a very limited supply. While we were in battle on the Kokoda Track we were brought a few Bren guns which we didn’t know how to operate

and we asked how to operate them and they said, “You will find out when you are in battle how to use them”, and that was what happened and they too were a very limited supply. Later on we were given sub machine guns, Tommy and Owen guns and they too were in very limited supply as was ammunition. The ammunition all had to be brought up by native carriers,

huge weights on their backs, the poor men I don’t know how they did it and then they carried out the wounded as well over these pessimist areas right along the Kokoda Track and it was a very, very hazardous and actually cruel thing to ask them to do, but they did it and they did it gallantly.

If it had not have been for them I don’t know how we would have survived. As I stated earlier they received no reward what so ever from the government, from the Chifley government to the present one. They have never been remunerated or even thanked properly in any way. Most of them have gone know there maybe a few old men surviving.

We had driven past a place called Roma Falls and the trucks couldn’t go any further then, it was about Owens Corner I think where we started our walk,

if you could call it that. It was more of a climb, it was more slip and slide and we were using sticks to help us along, sticks that we got from the jungle along the way. The heat was terrible, the humidity was awful and we passed little waterfalls

along the way along the track, but we were not allowed to have a drink of water because they said that would harm us and we had to carry on. It was six days forced marching before we got to where we met the Japanese. To give you some idea of how bad it was. The next time we flew over the Owen Stanley Ranges

to the airstrip that was at Popendetta, which was further even and that took twenty minutes in what was then a very slow old aircraft.

Extremely humid,

but the nights got very cold, it was very cold at night. After the first night I think it was we were all more or less forced to have a drink of over proofed rum. I didn’t mind that because I enjoyed a drink but I wasn’t accustomed to drinking rum, but it warmed us up. There were some who

on religious grounds didn’t drink alcohol and some refused, which was their right. They said that they weren’t making any rules of their religion, this is medicine and you must have it to fortify you. I remember only doing it one night and it’s a pity it wasn’t every night.

I will mention our padre or priest and he could have been of any religion and this one happened to be a Catholic priest, he was a missionary of the Sacred Heart and he had a mission in Milan Bay which had been attacked and taken by the Japanese

some time just before Kokoda. Somehow I don’t know, but he got to Port Moresby and he was appointed Chaplain of the 39th Battalion and his name was Father Norbert Earl an Australian and one of the

greatest people that I have ever known and a very wonderful man. I myself am a Catholic and I had the pleasure of service mass for him many, many times during that campaign. He was seen frequently in the heat of fire risking his own life and kneeling under trees hearing the confessions

of men who could have been dead the next second, he was indeed a wonderful person. It was said on him that, “He owned nothing yet he owned the world”, so I thought I just give a tribute to that man in passing.

Indeed a man of the world,

but yet a very colourful person but not overly religious he was just everybody’s, a man’s man in other words.

I don’t remember any Seven Day Adventist because

I think they do have a immunity from war because of their religion, some religions do and I’m not sure about them, I don’t remember any of them. There are some religions that do not

participate in wars,

there were some on conscientious objector’s grounds.

I didn’t know of any.

Did you know anything about the 39th Battalion before you started interviewing people?

That was my experience on the Kokoda Trail.

Very little because our commanders themselves knew very little, they were getting no support from the high command in Australia, they didn’t seem to understand our position at all. They made promises that aircraft would come and help us but none arrived,

not for a long, long time, none arrived certainly during the Kokoda campaign. The rations were very, very poor and very inadequate and like I said before the only way we could get them to begin with was by natives. Later on they introduced what they called a “biscuit bomber”, biscuit bombers were

called that because they found a place called Myola along the Owen Stanleys which was a fairly flat area and the bombers were able to come in, open their doors and drop food down by parachute. They were called biscuit bombers because some of the food in it was called

dog biscuits, eaten by humans and they were dreadful biscuits. They had corned beef which was commonly called “bully beef” and any other basic supplies, except for bread, we didn’t see any bread and that was all dropped out of a plane. At least fifty percent or probably more was always smashed by the time it was rescued.

Ammunition the same, it was dropped by the same method too later. Prior to that the Papuan natives had to carry that up on their backs and it must have been a crippling burden for them.

Not at all. The only thing we had heard was, by this time the Japanese had taken Singapore, Malaysia and those who had escaped from those areas told us

that at night if you hear someone using a common name like, “Where is Corporal White?”, they’d answer because that would be an English Japanese who was trying to find your position and he’s chosen a common name hoping there would be a corporal White or Private Smith there,

used a common English name. You were told not to answer because once they had found your position all hell would break loose and this did happen later.

More or less yes, we were told that by an officer later.

Yes.

There was confidence in the sense that

everybody suck by one another, we created our own confidence and we had formed great comradeship and mateship. Our first officer commanding a very young man named Turtle Owen. We had older officers in Australia and they went to New Guinea but it wasn’t very long before they were all brought back to the mainland and new

officers were appointed to our battalion in New Guinea. The first one killed was a man named Lieutenant Colonel Owen and he was only thirty two years of age I think. The battle of Isurava, an officer was brought back, he had been an

officer of one of the AIF battalions in the Middle East and he became our Lieutenant Colonel officer, he was Lieutenant Colonel Honner, a highly respected man and a great soldier and a man who won the affection of the troops very readily. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honner, he was quite a famous name later.

In his later years he was appointed ambassador to Ireland and the Holy Sea and he was highly respected in all walks of life and a great soldier. He too was treated like rubbish by our higher command. They did not know our drastic situation and they really didn’t seem

to care, it was very, very badly planned, everything by the high command back here. They took very, very eminent men such as brigadiers, major generals, men who were great strategists they took them from their posts and just put others there who were not

as nearly as brilliant.

Some had them, there were very few mortars but some did have them and supplies were very limited. I think they just thought that when we went there that the Japanese

weren’t going to attack there, they seemed to have that view. The high command back here men such as General Macarthur and General Blamey. In fact they both openly criticised the 39th Battalion and then had to retracted it later because

it was proved in battle what we could do. Again I seem to be immodest all the time but I think I do say it with good reason because I know what happened.

Yes I suppose it was in the sense that it was too hot to wear anything else other than shorts and shirts and military boots. Perhaps in hindsight boots with better grips on them would have been better but then they got clogged with mud anyway so there wasn’t much more that you could do.

It was just unbelievable and I don’t think that anybody, very few people have been over the Kokoda Track, very few white men. There was one part where they had made stairs and they were commonly called the “Golden Stairs”. They were put there

by some people earlier in the scene by some Australians to help them when they were surveying going over the Kokoda Trail, it was nothing to do with war. What it did was instead of helping it made it infamously worse because it rained so much

and they became so coated with mud that they became slippery and they were almost impossible to climb. That was only for a section but the rest of the track was itself absolutely dreadful. I don’t think you are supposed to climb over it, but we did.

Just forced marching,

our officers just forced us to keep on marching, all we had was sticks. For every yard or two you’d go you’d slip back that far, that was the climb. There were false crests and you thought that you got to the end of the peak and that was only a false crest because you’d go down a little while

and there was another one even worse in front of you. We used to look at those Owen Stanley Mountains when we were at Bootless Bay and say, “Look at those”, but we never ever thought that we’d be fighting battles on them, or over them. People do

it now just for holidaying and sightseeing, but they do it under very different conditions and in smaller stages.

That particular year I understand was the wettest year in forty years that that area had experienced.

Yes the wettest in forty years so we were told.

There was not much that you could do about it. We had what they called ground sheets, which were things that you could lie on and they were waterproofed, but they only covered a little bit.

We just suffered with it, we just had to get wet and dry out.

Daily and many times a day as a rule, heavy showers and that was what I said earlier, every time it rained, particularly in the daylight, you could expect a severe attack from the Japanese, heavily camouflaged.

Yes in many ways. They were experienced in those conditions in the jungle from Malaysia, Singapore and even the Philippines, everywhere they had been and taken it was all similar sort of conditions. Although they didn’t have the mountainous terrain this was the one that had beaten them here.

The Australians persistence and tenacity in not allowing them to do what they had done before. The conditions of those mountain ranges were not meant for men to climb and fight over.

If you were to climb over them you did it at a sort of leisurely sort of pace and then rested but there was no time for rest in this situation.

Yes.

A great deal of fear knowing that life could be snipped out at any moment. At Deniki when it rained heavily one time the Japanese must of had more reinforcements

we had heard later. They massed an enormous attack on Deniki, a Corporal a man named Charlie Bennett they placed a young man who was only about eighteen, they had a sentry place just off the trail.

He said, “Right you two stay here”, it was just after he had posted us here that the Japanese launched this enormous attack. They were screaming and it sounded dreadful and of course they were firing their machine guns madly. I said to this young man who was with me,

“I don’t want to sound overly devout here but all cowards turn to God”. I don’t believe I was a coward it was just in fear as he was and everybody else was, because we knew they had the overwhelming odds against us. I knew he too was a catholic and I said to him, “Jerry for God’s

sake lets start saying some prayers”, I said, “Lets start the rosary”. I think we got through, we had no beads, we just did it on our fingers when this corporal raced over and said, “For God’s sake get out, drop everything, leave your guns, leave everything and just run”, because he said, “They are going to overtake us in a minute”.

We got out, we all fled as quick as we could, the Japanese had cut all that area off in the next couple of minutes, so we would have been either killed or taken prisoner, I don’t think they took any prisoners so I think we would have been killed. I don’t want to sound overly devouted about that sort of thing but this is exactly what happened and to say less I wouldn’t be telling the truth.

Yes.

They were awful sort of hideous sounds they must have been trained to do that when they attacked, it’s to frighten the enemy I suppose, that was the whole idea of it. It might have been something to do with their religion I don’t know.

It was terrifying, but at the same time you had to hold yourself just the same because you just went to water you wouldn’t have been any good you had to be ready to defend yourself. As I said to you we knew they were there and we were overwhelmed by them as far as numbers were concerned. They did all have machinery,

they had all up to day machinery, they had good weaponry.

No we had experienced it along the way with minor skirmishes further along the way with them.

Yes before Deniki.

On one occasion we

thought they were Americans, there were three men approaching us on the track. They were so tall and then we could see that they were Japanese by their features. We didn’t go and contact then straight away but they saw us too, they were camouflaged,

they were hidden and got away, there were skirmishes and they were fighting there. We couldn’t see one another there actually face to face, they could see our faces but we couldn’t see theirs. Further along the way there were mortar attacks and mortar attacks from the Japanese were common. I saw two men

who were great friends and I think it was at a place that I had mentioned earlier standing there, two men from Ballarat, Joe Riley and Jim O’Donnell, they came into it together they had been friends before the war. They were standing there talking to one another and suddenly a Japanese mortar fired from probably half a mile away who knows,

landing between them and both were killed instantly. That was the thing that you had with mortars you didn’t have to be in the actual fighting against the Japanese, you were always in danger of a mortar attack. They didn’t quite know where it was going to land either they were firing them at random, sometimes as in that case it landed in a very vital spot.

Which they would have hoped but they would never have known the result.

There were three Japanese who were there but they ran away and we didn’t know what happened to them. They were probably on a patrol trying to seek out where we were and they’d go back and report our whereabouts to their commander.

Snipers were another thing, that were a real problem.

Yes and at Deniki too, they just went up in trees. They were worse over in the beach heads which we will get to later perhaps. Even when we get past Kokoda or to Kokoda we were on flat country.

They were heavily camouflaged, quite motionless, you usually didn’t see them, just a shot at a man who was severely wounded or killed.

I didn’t see it happen, but I know people it happened to. I came back on the same hospital ship with a man who had

been hit by a sniper and he was very, very badly wounded, very seriously wounded, the bullet went right down his back to his hips. He lived afterwards, he recovered but he was very ill for a long time.

In a pretty disjoined sort of a way really. We didn’t know what was going on ahead of us.

The only bit of communication they had was little land lines over telephone communication with cables and they were very inadequate. There was really no way of knowing what was happening you just had to find out when you got there. Deniki was the start of the Japanese

pushing us back towards the other side of the Owen Stanleys. It was also the beginning of their defeat because the further they had to come the less their supply lines were being eroded. They too had lots of wounded and dead but more importantly their

ammunition and food supplies were being disrupted, they were running out of both. Whilst they were pushing us back they were loosing the battle really. At Isurava that was the beginning of the end for them but

it was a long, long end, they fought all the way.

That would have been at one of the villages on the way over I’ve just forgotten. There were a lot of villages fairly close to one another,

Dobodura, Efogi there were many of them.

Yes on the way to Deniki. Most of it would have been done at Deniki though as far as I was concerned and more so when we get to the beach heads.

The worst fighting I saw and was involved in was at Deniki and then later at Isurava.

I’ve told you some of it. One man I remember quite well he was on the

top of a hill that went down to the open country and the Japanese were swarming up and I remember him singing out to us, “All of you get out I have got a heap of grenades here, I will keep throwing grenades down into them”, which he did do, he kept throwing grenades down and I don’t know how many he destroyed or injured but he must of done a lot. These were hand grenades and you take the pin out and throw it

and when it explodes shrapnel goes everywhere. I don’t know what happened to that man but I’m almost certain he would have been killed or taken prisoner. He was a man who I believe should have won a Victoria Cross, I have forgotten his name but he did a magnificent job.

Single handedly holding them for some time,

even if he killed another there were hundreds more to take their place, he would have been overwhelmed in the end. We got there and we just had to keep fighting a running battle as we were being chased back. That was when General Blamey made his infamous insult and his

words were, “It’s the rabbit that runs that gets shot not the shooter who stays and holds his ground”. We had no option to do what we did, otherwise we would have all been annihilated had we stayed there in the one place and trying to fight them. They just kept bringing in reinforcements by ship.

Just a few days.

They make a lot of noise and they also

look grotesque in their uniforms and their cap that they were. I suppose that was the worst culture shock that you could have to somebody who is not used to it.

No, I had never seen a Japanese and most of us hadn’t. They were not the sort of people that visited Australia, I don’t know why but they didn’t. Later on we saw them in droves as tourists after the war,

but they didn’t seem to come to Australia at all. All the people that I spoke to said that they had never seen a Japanese before.

Yes we were, it’s not like fighting an Englishman or even a German whose features are the same

as your own.

Much like they did I suppose, but seeing one actually in the flesh is different to seeing even one in a picture. Taller, most were taller than we had expected, we believed, we were told

that most of them were small, a very slight stature but not all were, some were small but there were quite a few medium sized to even tall ones. They were relentless in their fighting, it was never say die with them, they never gave up,

numbers didn’t seem to matter to them there were plenty of them.

This young man and I were told to leave that post and get out so we ran over and joined the others and got out then.

Then we did sporadic fighting as we went along until we consolidated at another place, but all the while it was just sporadic fighting, stay a while fight and then you’d go further on we had no alternative. If the 2/ 14th had not arrived when they did followed by the other units from the Middle East the AIF units that had come back

we most certainly would have been annihilated because they were just over powering us all the way. It was only at Isurava where a massive battle took place.

All the way to Isurava.

Not that I know of, I may have with machine gun fire but I would not know.

The actions were mainly looking for snipers, trying to pick out a person up in the trees. The other actions that were involved were

mainly if you heard a noise in the jungle and you felt sure it wasn’t any of your troops then you sprayed machine gun fire in there. Very seldom did you see a result because there was too much foliage and they were covered in jungle, they were camouflaged.

By this time we had Bren guns, but that was about one in

every ten to fifteen men would have a Bren gun the others just had rifles.

Their main machine gun seem to be what was commonly called a “Woodpecker”, it was called a woodpecker because it made the sound of a woodpecker makes, peck, peck, peck a slow sort of a sound, that was

their main machine gun. They had sub machine guns, lighter machine guns as well but we never got to see them of course. We couldn’t determine what they were.

Very bad and very difficult.

As I said they were very heavily camouflaged, they looked much like the jungle itself, they were a very very cunning fighter.

They were good at weaving and if you looked like getting close to them

they would quickly get out of your way in the jungle. They were very good in that sense. I never actually had a hand to hand combat with one to tell you the truth, such as bayonet to bayonet, that never happened to me, but I was very close to it never the less.

We were told not to go into bayonet encounters. It wasn’t the country for it because it was jungle. The 2/ 14th I do believe when they arrived did go into a bayonet encounter with the Japanese and they lost quite a lot of men as a result of it. Whilst we had the bayonets attached

very rarely were they used because mostly you didn’t get that close to them, you got within light machine gun range or even a 303 rifle range. Only if you went into where they had

what they called a “fox hole”, where you got in and that mainly came at the beach heads later.

There is all those things combined.

The discomfort for one, your vision wasn’t as good because your eyes were always getting wet all the time. Slippery, your hands would be slippery handling the weapons, it’s a combination of factors that makes it much more difficult if the conditions were fine.

As far as the fear goes that was mentioned earlier, you wouldn’t be human if you weren’t afraid. You lose that after a while, you just stand yourself to the fact that “This is war and I could go and I could be wounded seriously at any time”. I don’t think it’s a matter of bravery I think it’s a matter of accepting

what the harsh reality is.

I saw one Japanese prisoner taken that was all, I didn’t see any others. I don’t know whether they took any Australian prisoners the Japanese.

When you are fighting particularly in terrain like that and you have got a track that is only as wide as from here to that wall, what are you going to do with the prisoners? It’s very difficult isn’t it? I know of no Australians that were taken prisoner there, only killed or wounded.

I only saw one Japanese taken as a prisoner. I saw many prisoners later in other places where I was in prisoner camps but that wasn’t in New Guinea that was in other areas.

What they would do is send one man out if they weren’t sure of what your position was, they’d send one man out and ask a question in English using a common name.

He might say, “Is private Smith there?” Well you know how many private Smiths there would be. Somebody might say, “Yes I’m here sir”, thinking its one of their own officers calling and with that the Japanese would fire. Then that would let all his own troops know that’s where the

enemy is, here they are. Once they heard the one shot they would know that that was it and it was a prearranged thing. You were never allowed to light a match at night, not that we had any really, but if you did you were not allowed to light a match. You were not allowed to hardly speak to one another it all had to be in whispers.

There was no smoking certainly not at night anyway.

Yes. It wasn’t so much the sniper that would call out it would be somebody on the ground heavily camouflaged with whom you wouldn’t see but often this was at night anyway. Supposing you were one of the Australian troops

and say I’m a Japanese, they might only be able to speak one word or one sentence in English or taught. I’d say, “Is Private Sergei there?” And Sergei might put his hand up thinking it’s an Australian officer asking him and he’d say, “Yes sir I’m here”, he’s given his position away quickly hasn’t he?

Follow up with an attack by a number of troops with machine guns, probably some mortars and grenades, but mainly machine guns. But they too couldn’t see as far as hand to hand battle went, it’s very difficult to see as well as the terrain being bad.

At night they were mostly quick skirmishes, sort of hit and run type of thing. They too couldn’t see at night, particularly with the terrain and you couldn’t see and you could stumble and break your neck. So night fighting was not common as a rule

only in that quick hit and run sort of an instance. But they might call out, “Is Private Sergei there?” And Sergei would put his hands up and say, “Yes sir I’m here”, well then Sergei has gone up.

Yes it was deteriorating too.

Absolutely, sleep, we were running short on everything. The footwear had worn out, the soles had worn out, your feet were getting in a very bad way with tinea and dermatitis and some were getting ulcers.

This would have been happening to the Japanese too of course, but we didn’t hear about that. There were no real winners but we were the losers to begin with, but eventually they were the losers because there

plan from what we can gather having talked to Japanese people since. I haven’t talk to them but our unit the 39th Battalion after the war were hosted by the very men who fought against us in Japan. They told us that their instructions were

to get over the Owen Stanley Ranges and over the Kokoda Track within a matter of days and then take Port Moresby, but it didn’t work out. They expected no resistance, they didn’t know that any Australian were there at all.

The carriers were absolutely wonderful, they did walk at night with the wounded under the most dreadful conditions. One slip and you could be down falling fifty or one hundred metres

or more. Remarkably I didn’t hear of any of them doing that, there were four carriers to a stretcher. They seemed to do it relentlessly and they did the same of course with the huge weights of ammunition and also

huge weights of food, blankets or whatever that they might have had to bring up. I don’t know whether they even got a thank you from the higher authorities.

They were treated well by the troops and we were very fond of them and I think they became very fond of us too, but of course we couldn’t speak to one another.

We had one officer who had been a plantation owner there and he had been in New Guinea for many years and he spoke pigeon English very well and he was able to converse with them. They were a very fine type of a person.

We did get some amusement out of it When we first came across them we saw them coming back from work the women were carrying all the tools of trade over their shoulders and the men were marching behind them, the women did all the work. The other thing we couldn’t believe when we first saw it was women coming up,

their breast were nothing and they expected everybody to except that, there was nothing wrong with it. They would have a baby prior to this and they would have a pig going to town suckling on the breast. Pigs were often swapped for children.

That was their life. They had their own tribes too, different tribal wars amongst one another.

Yes in the earlier stages I believe so they were forced too by the Japanese. Of course they wouldn’t have known who was right and who was wrong either. The Japanese did force them to

carry their equipment and do various things for them. They were very good servants to the Australians, particularly the stretcher bearers and the same people who carried ammunition. Often they would bring the ammunition up on there

backs, over this tiring never ending razor back ridge of mountains, up and down. It’s slippery, wet and muddy it was terrible and they’d do all that. When they got there and delivered their load they would be carrying wounded out on the way back to the

hospital at Port Moresby. I can’t speak highly enough of them and they were wonderful people.

I never saw that happen, I don’t thing so I don’t think anybody would have ever treated them badly. Somebody termed them “fuzzy wuzzy angles” and that was exactly what they were, they were just lovely people. I’m sure that no

Australian soldier would have ever treated any of them badly. They had our utmost respect and admiration.

Yes.

Not very well at all. The first one that we had to bury was one of our own men who was shot by mistake by one of our own men. He had gone out at night,

he had left a little bit of a tent and I think he just went out to relieve himself and got a bit lost on the way back in the dark and he was coming back. One of his own friends said, “Who goes there?” And this fellow was a bit of a joker and gave some sort of a funny response and with that

the other fellow had a Tommy gun and he just opened fire and shot him badly in the stomach with several bullets. We buried him the next morning, we dug a hole with bayonets because we didn’t have any shovels or spades or anything like that, that was the first one that I saw, later I was to see others.

It was a very emotional and upsetting thing. You really didn’t have too much time to be too emotional because the blasted Japs wouldn’t let you do that they didn’t give you time.

At Isurava, or near Isurava.

We just couldn’t believe it because again we didn’t get any information, we didn’t know that we were getting reinforcements or getting help nobody told us. Suddenly we saw these Australian soldiers, I thought, “My God where have these come from?” Then we found out that they were the soldiers that had been brought back from the Middle East. They didn’t come straight to us,

they were trained in Australia for a time in jungle warfare in Queensland before they were sent over, that was one of the most wonderful sights that we had ever seen seeing them. If it hadn’t have been for them, the Japanese were overrunning us, it was a withdrawal but it was a loosing one.

A typical Australian soldier, nice big well built man and we said to them, “My God where did you come from?” And they said, “We are the 2/ 14th and we have just come from the Middle East”. I said, “We knew you were in the Middle East but we didn’t know that you were coming here”, and he said, “We didn’t know either”. They were brought back from the Middle East much against the wishes of the British government who wanted to retain them there.

They were brought back and did a short course in jungle warfare and came over and how timely it was.

Absolutely, they had been in the Middle East and then to Queensland, they were fit of course they hadn’t been in any fight since the Middle East.

He must have been brilliant in many ways but I think from all the writings I’ve read since he was very much dominated by MacArthur and

he even criticised his own forces very severely, particularly those of us that were militia. That was when he made the comment about, “It’s the rabbit that runs that gets shot not the shooter who stands his ground” and that was taken very, very badly. The AIF who came to New Guinea to join us on the Kokoda Track,

there was all this business about the AIF and chocos, meaning the chocolate soldier, and that proved to be very wrong and the AIF were the first to admit that. They complimented and congratulated us on the job we had done before they came. They were the compliments that Blamey made so he was not at all popular

with the Australians, not any group of Australians as far as I know, nobody liked Blamey. He had wonderful commanders in New Guinea, brigadiers, major generals, he just sacked them and put others in their place, others who were no where near as competent.

I think it was when we were along the track somewhere and Blamey had come along, I didn’t hear him say it but others told me that he said it and I have read it many times somewhere since. Peter Broom wrote a book called “Those Ragged Bloody Heroes”, you might have heard of it, I did have that book too but I have lent it out.

Peter Broom writes about that in his book that Blamey made these statements. He made other statements too, Colonel Honner, our Colonel he said that he met Blamey during the battles. Honner went back to Port Moresby because he had to go back and meet

MacArthur, MacArthur and Blamey had come to Port Moresby and he had to leave the front and go back to see them. He said, “Where have you been Honner?” He said, “You’ve been in Brisbane all the time and you have just come here have you?” He said, “No sir, I haven’t just come here. After coming back from the Middle East I took command of the 39th Battalion

and that is my present job”. He said that he just treated him very shabbily and he said that he said frankly he didn’t know what was going on and he didn’t give a damn. He wasn’t held in the highest esteem and not even from his contemporaries I don’t think.

Not really because he was suppose to have had a high rank in the First World War, but not as high a rank but apparently he wasn’t held in high esteem by his peers then either. But because he was a trained soldier and had a high rank in the First World War. As soon as the 1939 war broke out

he was promoted to a higher rank and given a big command. He was never apparently a popular man anywhere.

Not any more, he angered me at the time when he made those remarks but you get over those things.

Anger never did anybody much good did it? I’m not even angry with the Japanese. I never really was, they were told what to do, they believed their mission was the right one, same with the German soldiers, same with any opposing soldier. They believe the cause they are fighting for is the right and just cause just as we believed.

No I don’t know of any who were actually there, but he had addressed a gathering. It wasn’t the 39th but he referred to the 39th Battalion.

It’s probably somewhere in that book that Sergei [interviewer] just took out.

I don’t think he regarded Australians generally as

very good soldiers. I think that he just thought that he had the numbers and he was going to do everything. He did have the numbers too because he needed them, most of us in the Australian forces considered that the Australian soldier was about six times as good as an American.

I didn’t have any really personally. They did come and fight at Buna and Gona but they weren’t on the Kokoda Trail. I was wounded near Gona and that was when I left the scene then and I had to because I was

brought over on the hospital ship. The Americans did come into the scene there but from all the books I’ve read again they were no where near as good as the Australians and they took mass amounts of them to do the same thing. I don’t decry them because after the war I

was in Moratai at the time and the war had just ended and they asked for volunteers to go to Manila in the Philippines to do the records of the prisoners coming out of Japan.

No we knew that the English were very heavily involved with the Germans because that was still a goer, that ended in May 1945. The Asian war we knew they were heavily

involved and that was why Churchill didn’t want Australia brought back because they were still fighting a pretty severe war over there.

They went straight into action.

They did what we thought was full hearty thing in a way they rushed in with bayonet attacks, they were right in the open desert where you can see the enemy. Here they went into it and did loose quite a lot but never the less.

They were fresh troops and we were tired and we were all just skin and bone and we all had lost an enormous amount of weight. For instance I was over eleven stone when we went up and I was eight stone five when we came out and nearly ever man had the same story to tell.

They were fresh troops, fresh, keen and eager to go. Of course it wasn’t only the 2/ 14th they were the first but of course there were others the 2/ 16th, 2/ 21st. There was a brigade I think that came back and by this time the Japanese were tired and sick too,

but they still never gave in. The force of numbers from the fresh Australian troops with fresh supplies of ammunition forced the Japanese right back.

We weren’t told anything, they would have been doing there training I understand to prepare them for jungle warfare but we didn’t know they were coming not a murmur until we saw them there,

we were on the Kokoda Trail near Isurava and I thought, “Oh my God who is this? Where did they come from?”

No they didn’t because we had been in the actual fighting and had been in it for weeks, we didn’t have anything more to learn about actual jungle warfare, we had done it in the actual flesh you might say.

Camouflage seems to be the number one thing, watch for movements, something that might seem like moving grass or leaves.

Well you know then if that happens it’s probably not the wind it’s a person behind those leaves or the grass. It’s very hard to detect that particularly if they are motionless and it’s the same as the countryside surrounding it.

We weren’t taught anything, the lack of training was existent but the training was non existent. The whole thing was a slip shot affair right from the start and the Japanese were trained.

I was never ambushed. I did get close to it but I was never ambushed. I don’t know what you would do in that situation. When you are ambushed normally nobody gets out of it, you are just gone and they just shoot you or take you prisoner.

It is a situation that I would not have liked to have been in. While we were still on the Kokoda Trail I remember three of us were sent over the mountain side from Deniki to do a patrol. We had seen nothing and we were carrying a blanket on our back to say over night

just in the jungle. Suddenly we came across some clear country and there was this little fire still burning. There was rice tins and milk tins with Japanese writing on them still opened so we knew the Japanese had been there just before us, I could have been only minutes before. It was a matter then of

who saw one another first, whether they saw us or whether we saw them. We didn’t contact them but it rained so heavily that the blankets got thoroughly wet and there is nothing like it. We just had to discard them and that again giving away and if the Japanese came along they would have known that we had been there before

because of the discarded blankets. We got back to our lines and got back and joined the others safely and that was at Deniki, that was before the final surge of the Japanese up the hill and that was when we had to withdraw.

Yes you just had to, some got sick

and got malaria and Dengue and other tropical diseases. I was in a pretty fit condition when we went in I wasn’t afterwards but I was able to with stand a lot of it and it depended on your physical health when you went into it, whether it was good or not so good.

Yes we did. I remember saying to one man, “Where did you come from?” And he said, “We are the 2/ 14th, we have just arrived, we have been in Queensland”, and I said, “Thank God for you, we need you, we never needed you as badly

as we needed you now”, and it was then that the fighting went on. The 39th were relieved then, once the 2/ 14th and the other battalions arrived, but the fighting became so heavy at Isurava that we returned to the scene and continued to fight with them

for about a week. Until we were relieved again and this time we went back to a rest camp right at the foot hills of the Owen Stanleys.

Yes we did and of course you had to do this in between the blasted

Japanese firing, but yes we told them what to expect. They already knew some of it, that was their first meeting with the Japanese and they knew what the countryside was like, because it was a very, very steep up and down climb to Isurava so they knew that part of it. They were told that there was a lot more to go and that it might even be worse.

We did give them a broad outline of it. But of course our commanders would have done that too, our commander Lieutenant Colonel Honner and other commanders would have informed their commanders of the conditions surely , what to expect.

No I still had the 303, most of us just had 303s

and the occasional Bren gun. Later I did have an Owen gun and at times a Tommy gun but that was later on.

After having been relieved

and having more drill at this training camp that had been erected, only tents. We thought that our fighting days were finished but we were called on parade and informed by our commanding officer that we were all to return to the scene of battle.

This time we would not be walking over the Owen Stanleys but instead we would be flying over. We did, we went over in this old Douglas, they called them “biscuit bombers” later, they are pretty slow. As slow as they were we flew over to Popendetta to the other side of Kokoda in twenty minutes where it took six days

to do even less than that by foot. We were taken from there to Popendetta, not all the 39th were there because some were unable to return through sickness and wounds from Kokoda Trail. Some had gone to other units,

they had been posted to other units in the belief I think that the 39th fighting days were over. We were told that and we went and this time we had to encounter the Japanese where the place was infested with them. Again this time it was a different type of warfare because

there were no hills, terrible jungles there was mosquitoes with malaria, dengue and again the old camouflage came in because although there were no hills it was jungle just the same.

There was a place called Embogo River, it wasn’t very far from Gona, but it was in the Gona area. Through the night it rain terribly this night and

it was in swampy country and I had an Owen gun, I didn’t have a rifle but it was a gun about that long a sub machine gun. We had a very exhausting day and nights before that despite the heavy rain I must have fallen asleep

early in the morning. A friend of mine who was with me and he had fallen asleep and he was leaning on my shoulder asleep. I opened my eyes and in front of me no further from me to the camera there is a Japanese

in front of me in a squatting position with a bayonet attached to his rifle. I got such a shock to see it when I opened my eyes he was that close to me so I hit the other fellow and woke him up and I said, “Hey Jim there’s a bloody Jap”, and he said, “Well just shoot the bastard”.

When I said that the Japanese himself must have gone to sleep because he too was exhausted. When I said that instead of him putting the bayonet in my throat or shooting me like he could have so easily have done he just fled into the jungle, he just jumped up and fled. I picked up the Owen gun out of the water, I didn’t know if it would fire after being in the water so long, but it did fire immediately and

I sprayed bullets in the direction in which he went. I will never know to this day whether I killed or wounded that man, but I really hope and trust that I didn’t because he let me off so I hope that I let him off too. One good turn deserves another

so that ended my days of fighting. After that we went further in and the Japanese were sort of in a horseshoe around us,

not every good tactics I think, but we were forced to go into the middle of this horseshoe to fight them. One Japanese came out with a machine gun, you could see him quite clearly and he started firing and he would have been a suicide one and he had to let the other ones know where we were. Later on there were a few of us just standing there with our guns

at the ready and I thought that someone had hit me in the shoulder with the butt of a rifle. It spun me around and the next thing I felt was pain, severe pain and then blood everywhere. I realised then I must have been hit by a bullet.

Fortunately there was one of our first aid man nearby and he rushed over and I said, “What’s happened to me?” And he said, “They have got you and I think it is a machine gun bullet, it’s still in there, its in the shoulder”. Our doctor was not far away and he had morphine

so he administered morphine immediately. I was able to walk, so I walked out and later on some distance further, out going towards Popendetta where we had to go and board the plane, again there was another man and he administered morphine again. Then I think I had it a third time before I got on the plane. Went back to a

big hospital all made out of tents. This very nice surgeon came out and greeted us, then I was taken by stretcher into the hospital. He came to me later and said, “We have to operate”, and he said, “Because the bullet hasn’t come out, its still in there”. I said, “Oh is it?” And he said, “Yes”.

I said, “That’s what my first aid man thought. He thought it was still in there. I have a very stiff neck as well. It’s very stiff and it’s still stiff and I can’t understand why”. He said, “We will have a look”. I went and had the operation and it was all chloroform in those days and I felt terribly ill when I came out, more from the chloroform than anything I think.

I felt something around my wrist like a bandage so when I felt a bit better I examined it and there was something in it. I opened it up and here was the bullet in the bandage around my wrist.

It wasn’t a bandage, it looked like a bandage but he just put it around there to enclose the bullet. I said, “Doctor thank you very much. But can you understand why I have a stiff neck and why it was sore?” He said, “Yes I can tell you now, when I x-rayed

this part we thought there was a safety pin in the sling. We took the safety pin out and the x-ray still showed something in there. It is the bullet”. What happened was it went into the shoulder, it must have been almost I think spent because it went right up into the shoulder and veered right up and landed right against the vertebra and he said, “That is was why I

had the stiff neck, because the bullet is right there. He said, “I can tell you that if it had been the diameter of a cigarette paper or more you wouldn’t be here, you would have been dead immediately”. So how fortunate was I? I stayed there for about a week or something and I was then put onto

the hospital ship the Manunda.

It just went in there and it’s all healed up now and that’s where they operated to take it out.

I was put onto the hospital ship

and taken to the Tamworth army hospital in New South Wales. This time it wasn’t tents, it was a building and a lady masseuse worked on it every morning and every night just with two fingers, they didn’t have any of the modern

treatments because I had lost the use of my arm completely and I couldn’t lift it at all. After six weeks it had vastly improved. By the end of three months I could lift it right up and that was through her manipulation with her fingers. Then I went into recuperation

for another six weeks again at Tamworth and I left there and I was down graded to B Class for military service, I’m not fit for the infantry anymore or any duties like that. I was sent to records office in Melbourne which was then Myers,

Lonsdale Street. Myers Lonsdale store and they had vacated it for the army during those years and I worked there for about twelve months. When I was again sent away but this time again in records but to Queensland

to begin with to Warwick, and I spent some time in Townsville. Later when the Asian war was nearing its end we were sent to a place called Moratai which was then part of the Netherlands East Indies near Indonesia. By this time I had fully recovered of course long before.

The war ended while I was there on my birthday which was a good birthday present. A couple of weeks after the war had ended they asked for volunteers to go to Manila to do the records of the prisoners of war coming out of Malaysia, Singapore and Japan itself.

To begin with it was, the initial seconds was but the pain set in later, it was really only minutes before the pain really arrived. By the time I had got to the doctor down the track that was when I really needed the morphine which was an enormous help.

Yes I immediately lost the use of my arm, I couldn’t raise the arm.

It was because once that happens to you, you don’t know if that is going to permanent, but thank God that was not to be so.

I didn’t think I was going to die, I didn’t have that feeling and I didn’t feel ill within myself, but I felt pain. They had put my arm up in a sling but I couldn’t have done it myself, somebody there did it, the

first aid man probably put it into a sling and that was the way that I walked out. That was a hazardous thing in itself because we had to walk over swollen rivers and creeks, over logs but there were a few of us so one helped the other.

No but I knew it came from the back.

It wasn’t as though I was running like Tom Blamey said the Japanese were sort of a horseshoe all around that area and it was somebody from that side of the horseshoe, he would never have known that he did it of course because I think it was fired from some distance away. The bullet must have been almost

spent by the time it hit me otherwise it would have gone straight through. When it did veer thank God it had reached its end then because that was where it stopped.

I didn’t go to ground at all. I said, “My God, who hit me with the butt of a rifle?”

Then I realised it wasn’t that at all. It spun me around and that’s why I thought it was the butt of a rifle. It was such a hell of a place, it was terrible that was the worst fighting I had seen or had ever been involved with. When I was going out there were other men being brought in

and I’m walking out with my arm in a sling and they didn’t know how bad the injury might be and it didn’t matter how bad it was I was still alive. They were saying to me, “You lucky bastard”. Well I was lucky, in pain but lucky.

Yes there was a lot of blood from the wound, but not from up here because that was not opened, that was only opened in the hospital, the blood was coming from the shoulder.

He could see it was a bullet but he didn’t know that it was up here he didn’t know that it had remained in, he thought

that it just had remained in this area but he gave me morphine straight away. He said, “Are you in pain?” And I said, “Yes I am now doctor”, but for the first few seconds I wasn’t, but it felt like this sudden jolt spun me around and then after a few minutes the pain arrived. He said, “Have you still got it?”

And I said, “Yes indeed I have”, and he said, “Right I’ll give you morphine”, he gave me morphine and then I had more. I survived pretty well actually and I was one of the lucky ones, and I thank God that I got out of it so lucky. I had my extract in there from that very day when I was wounded.

Yes.

Very good of course they weren’t like modern hospitals you’d have maybe ten people on each side, beds close together, but the nurses were very good.

They just rubbed your back with mentholated spirits for bed sores they do different things today no doubt. The smell in the hospital was not good and that wasn’t the hospitals fault, many of the wounded men who couldn’t get attention and the gangrene was there, became septic.

They were still using maggots in those days to get the bad blood away and leeches were being used too to suck the blood. They had the leeches underneath the bandage, the wound and the maggots, but the smell was pretty unpleasant.

Yes they were.

It did seem strange to me because I had never come across that sort of thing.

On that day it was the 12th December 1942 when I was wounded that my medical extract shows that on that day the 39th Battalion was ten men killed and twelve men wounded so I was very lucky to have not been one of the ten.

Yes.

Yes and that is one of the things that you did miss because very often you don’t catch up with them later because even though the unit all came from Victoria in the first place. When reinforcements came they came from other states often so even though you might have gotten to know the men there

when the war ended and we were all discharged they went to their various states back home and you went to yours. A lot of them we have kept in contact with. The units usually have an association and we had one and the name of the newsletter is called “The Good Guts”. In those days the good guts

meant the real truth, this is the good guts and it is still to this day called “The Good Guts”. It comes out quarterly and a lot of it now is administered by sons or daughters of the men who took part, which is good.

No I don’t think anybody wrote to me while I was in hospital, only my own family but I was back in Australia and spent three weeks in hospital before my family were informed that I had been wounded, that’s how long it took.

They already knew,

they received a telegraph saying, “The administer of the army regrets to inform you”, fortunately it wasn’t death.

My mother had died while I was in New Guinea, my mother died before we went into battle at a place called Bootless Bay so

I didn’t get to see her again. My father, brother and sister it was great seeing them.

I handled it alright because I knew

my mother had been ill for some time when I was in New Guinea, I had been there I think about nine months when I got word to say that she had died. I didn’t know about it but I found out later that perhaps I could have applied for and received compassionate leave, but I didn’t know that such things existed then.

I wouldn’t have seen her, but I might have gotten back for her funeral perhaps. She was my mother and that is all that matters to me now, and I would have loved to have seen her before she died but that wasn’t to be.

Not really because my mother had had a reasonably long life for those days, she was fifty eight and I knew her health was not good and had not been for some years. The men I saw who were killed were just in their very prime years so that was the sad part about it. Mind you

I felt sorry for the Japanese too, I saw a sight that I thought that I would never ever see and I don’t ever want to see again. Just before I was wounded near Gona, he was an Australian with a bulldozer, I don’t know how they got it there they must have brought it in by ship and brought it over by land.

All these dead Japanese were piled up, they were as high as that ceiling or higher and in a dome shape all down like this, all these Japanese. Their faces all fly blown and it was an awful sight and the smell was absolutely over powering and it was dreadful. I thought “Oh my God

isn’t it awful”, and then I thought, “They were all somebody’s sons, husbands and brothers”, and I just couldn’t get it out of my mind for a long, long time. I did eventually but I didn’t have the feeling,

“Isn’t it good to see them all dead?” That was not the way I was taught and that’s not the way I wanted to be, they were wrong and their government was wrong.

Yes many did,

some might not have, some might have thought otherwise but I knew many who did think the same. We often wondered whether the Japanese kept records of their people in the same efficient way as the Australian services did,

they might never have know what happened to them, where they died or whatever. I remember on one occasion just going back a little bit before battle when we were in Bootless Bay somebody with an anti aircraft gun shot down a Japanese

Zero fighter plane. We saw that pilot bail out, saw the parachute come down in the distance so we went out in parties to try and find him. We were out there for about two days I think and we were in two different parties and the arrangement was that if anybody found any

trace of him or the plane they were to fire a shot and this was before the Japanese were there on land. On the second day we heard a shot fired so we went to where they were. The aircraft was in an old dry creek bed and it had ploughed right into the side, but no sign of the Japanese and they couldn’t find him at all anywhere.

We walked around a bit further and somebody spotting in a tree, it must have been sixty foot high the heights they get too, and we saw this little bit of white material, they had an axe and they chopped the tree down and there was the parachute. He had landed in the three obviously and taken it off himself and wounded it all up to try and conceal it and left it there.

What happened to him we never knew and we never found him. I think some of those people, not now he would be dead from old age but they could have been wondering around in those jungles not even knowing that the war was over, that’s a funny thing, it wasn’t funny but it was one of those things that occurred.

Yes I’m happy he got away just as I was happy about that other man who could have put a bayonet into my throat because within a split second he could have shot me, but he didn’t do that either. Perhaps he got as big a fright as I did.

I thought, “Oh my God, I thought that I would never see a sight like this”, and then I saw all the fly blown faces and everything, “Oh God isn’t it awful?” And that’s when I thought that all these people were somebody’s son,

somebody’s husband, somebody’s boyfriends or fiancés, they had families and I’m glad that their families can’t see it and never will.

More than any time and even before.

What I did was I went back and said a prayer for them and hoped that I could get it out of my mind as quickly as I could and that took a long, long time. I had nightmares about it for some time, particularly with the Japanese along side there, with the bayonet almost against me.

I think my saving grace there was that I think he too had gone to sleep from shear exhaustion on his haunches and I think I woke him up and I think he got as big a fright as I did.

About three hundred odd,

then there were many more in creeks and God knows what and the smell was something awful, there were many more that weren’t scrapped up. Then there was our own dead as well but they were not put into a heap like that.

No I don’t think there was any other way to do it. It had to be done for health reasons. He would have had an awful job the man who did that, dreadful, he would have never been able to get that out of his mind I don’t think. He would have scrapped them all up into a heap and then he had to dig the hole and push them all into the hole.

I think it would have been something that he would have carried to his grave, he didn’t do anything wrong, he was absolutely right, but there would have been an awful thing and you would hope in many ways that you would lose your memory.

Yes I would say that that was the worst thing, except seeing your own men shot individually and die. As a mass thing, yes that would be the worse sight that I ever saw.

Yes.

Perhaps a couple of years. I remember waking up, there were Japanese along side of me, the same that I have told you about, him waking up and I would be screaming out in bed. It took a couple of years I suppose.

There would have been many men who would have had worst experiences than me I’m sure. You don’t want anybody connected with you or anybody else to go through anything like that and to see those sights. The poor people in those places, God things must be terrible over there.

Yes.

Records again, doing records of the people who are up there serving in units on the Atherton Tablelands and the units of those who

are about to go over and launch an attack on Borneo. It was then that we were sent to Moratai to do the records of the 7th and 9th Division who were about to launch the attack on Borneo. I can assure you with our records from my experience and I had some years of it

after I was down graded from the infantry, they were very, very good indeed. In fact you become so familiar with it that if somebody mentioned a man’s name and you did the records for him you could name him and tell him his number and almost what his latest actions were.

They were done very well.

Everyday action, what their movements were, what units they were in, where they had been transferred to, when they had been hospitalized, what the ailment was all that type of thing. In fact we knew more about the man than he knew himself.

My own records show the same thing.

From their own companies, from their own units who would send that in into the records office in their own states. But every unit kept its own company

records and those records were forwarded onto the records office of their state. They were very comprehensively done and it was very well done.

How I would compare one against the other?

We are talking about two completely different things aren’t we?

My record in the army,

I cant make any judgment on it myself I just tell my story not because I would gladly tell it its only because it is for the benefit of those who might wish to know and learn something from these things. But as far as my success in that field went I will just leave that for others to judge.

In records I think I made a fairly good fist of catching onto that job.

Yes I was happier because I knew that my life was not in danger not from the enemy anyway. That was where I finished but it was

six months after the war ended before we came back to Australia from Moratai and then I was discharged.

Most important. It’s all done on computer now of course but in those days it was all just handwriting with a nib too there were no ballpoints.

You just took extracts of what they brought in, there would be a bundle of extracts that were brought in from the units and they would be transferred into the ledger, all written in.

I don’t think most of them would have known,

I didn’t bother saying anything about it. They could have looked up your record if they wished and seen that. I happened to be in records office at one time with two of my fellow workers sharing the same tent most of the time in New Guinea and they got into the same section in the unit as me

and they ended up in the records officer after I did. They too had been down graded from infantry service so that was good that I was able to catch up with them. But as far as the others knowing I don’t think unless they bothered to go to the trouble and look it up they wouldn’t of known what you had done. If they had

have said, “What unit were you in before you came here?” Then I would have gladly told them.

Yes absolutely.

They were not all medical records, but they were an important part of it but even if you were transferred, supposing you were in no man’s land and you have been waiting to be transferred to a unit and you would go to what they would call a “staging camp”. That means just a place where you stay there until they decide what they will do with you well even that would be recorded. That you were at such and such a staging camp

and then if you were transferred out of there to another one then that would have that in it. I’ve got my own records and many others got theirs too, they were amazed to read and they had forgotten a lot of what had happened, it was interesting to read your own record.

They didn’t know

we weren’t allowed to tell them anything. If you did write a letter you had to be as cautious as you could in not given any information to the enemy. Then the sensor, who usually was your unit commander, he would read the letter which you had written and he’d get the scissors and cut all the important parts out that he thought.

So when they received the letter at home the letter I believed became like a paper doilies, it was almost unreadable. I was not allowed to tell my father about Kokoda then or afterwards. You could write it but if you did it would have been all cut out.

Yes it did. What we looked forward to most was mail, and it was always disappointing if not terribly disappointing for those people sometimes myself included when the mail was read out and there was no mail for you. I was one of the fortunate ones because my family did keep in regular contact with me.

Sometimes we didn’t get any mail for two or three months and when you were on the front line and fighting you didn’t get any at all. I think some of the people were effected more than the soldiers themselves were the parents and the brothers and sisters

at home who did not know where there loved one was. Actually if he might be killed or wounded not for sometime because it took so long for the army, air force or the navy to get the message across to the people. They must have gone through

an awful period of time as far as worrying was concerned.

Yes I told my own family and they know all about it,

they have asked me and they said, “We want to know”, and that’s why they will be very interested to see this interview. I said, “But there are two thousand being done”, and they said, “Yes but we don’t want to see the others we only want to see yours”.

Yes I did only my own family mainly.

Yes they wanted to listen but don’t forget my wife and I we weren’t even married until 1948 and we had seven children, so its only within the last forty years that I’ve talk to her, or less than that I’ve talked to the older

ones about it. They all know now, the whole seven now know my story but there are a million other stories too that they haven’t heard from other people, not a million, I’m exaggerating there but you know what I mean. Everybody who saw front line fighting was actually involved in combat have their own story to tell haven’t they?

This is the end of the Japanese war?

It happened when I was there on the 15th August and we just received word, the first word we received was that an atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima in Japan, with devastating results.

Truman had given them about two or three days to decide whether they would capitulate or a second one would be dropped. Unfortunately they didn’t capitulate and the second one was dropped and then they did capitulate. That was sad and it was a dreadful thing, I think it was the only thing that brought that war to an end,

but it’s a pity it had to be brought to an end that way. I’ve talked to prisoners of war of the Japanese who told us that they had to dig their own graves because they were going to be killed anyway. The Japanese guards were very cruel, it

is the old story though, “Man is animal if you let it him be or if he wants to be”. Most men are good but there is an element that aren’t, but that’s the same in every element of society. Whether it be in the army, air force, navy or just simply in civilian life.

I couldn’t believe it and I still can’t believe it, I couldn’t believe that it could be so disastrous. Until we went to the Philippines to do the records of the prisoners coming out we met quite a number of the prisoners.

I was talking to one man and he said, “When they flew us out yesterday, they gave us the choice of flying over the ruins of Nagasaki or flying out another way if we didn’t want to see it. A lot of us chose to fly over Nagasaki because we couldn’t believe what we had heard”. He said, “I can tell you that it was even worse than

I had imagined. All that was standing was the remains of a charred tree, the rest was just completely gone, a whole huge city was just complete rubble, to see that from the air was really something”. He said he didn’t see Hiroshima because they didn’t fly over that one, but it would be similar.

Yes, but not as much as the last one did because I as a soldier was involved with the last one. It’s an interesting thing that you talk about that because I know a Dutchman who now lives in this town

but he was employed by Shell and as was his father in a very big capacity and quite an executive role I think. The Netherlands East Indies as the name suggests is part of the Netherlands Empire if we can call it that.

When the Japanese took all that country they were imprisoned as civilian prisoners of war. He said, “They were there in the prisons until the Japanese war ended when they were released”. He said, “When I went back to Holland the people said, ‘Yes but the war

ended long ago”, and he said, “No it did not. Their war did”. They regarded the war being over once the Europe war ended, but the other one was still carrying on. He said once the war had ended for them that seemed to be it.

Do you mean after it ended?

No not really. There were so many countries that needed help at that time too, I think the

thing that saved Australia to begin with of course was to bring the Australian troops back to help Australia as far as New Guinea was concerned. Truman wanted to send the American troops here to help with the war in the Pacific

and that was really something. We couldn’t have done that, they would have overwhelmed us and if they had have done it one way they would have done it another. They tried at the Coral Sea Battle as I stated earlier and they failed there and their mission was over land and thank god they failed again there.

I don’t think MacArthur had a great regard for Australian troops anyway, he seemed to think it was his little world and

he would do what he wanted. I think Blamey was very subservient to him, Blamey could have exercised more authority over his own troops rather than giving into MacArthur as much as he did. I don’t hold either of them in high regard, I’m not an expert but is only my layman’s opinion.

I don’t know I wasn’t here.

There were only a few of us there, a few troops and we were delighted that it had ended. We couldn’t even talk to anybody back home about by telephone or anything there was nothing like that.

Yes.

For my wife it was pretty much so because she had lost two brothers in the air force and for her she was glad that it was over for everybody’s sake, nothing can be joyous if you have lost anybody particularly two who were so dear to her.

Came back to Sydney by boat on an American liberty ship and then from Sydney we went by rail to Melbourne.

No they weren’t in Moratai, we went to Moratai

to Manila in the Philippines to do their records to interview them as they came out and try and find out what they could tell us. Because the records were not known after they were made prisoners of war, because the Japanese didn’t sent any extracts naturally, to our records office so we had to find out as best as we could

from them personally in interviews.

My wartime service ended really when I came back on the liberty ship to Sydney and then by rail to Melbourne.

Then I went to Royal Park in Melbourne for discharge having served approximately five and a half years in the army. Our clothes were very, very hard to get because of the rationing during the war years, they were still very hard to get and I had a job to get any civilian clothes at all that would suit me. I finished up getting a

set of clothes that looked awful and that was all that I could get, baggy sort of a suit. So it wasn’t real easy settling in again but I did.

I think I might have mentioned that I worked at the post office but the last job I did before I did something else was I worked at Henderson’s Spring Works in North Melbourne in the office whilst there I met the girl who was later to become my wife fifty six years ago tomorrow, we have been married fifty six years tomorrow.

After the war the government of the day, before the end of the war they had planned it for those ex soldiers the same as the airmen who wanted to go onto the land they had sheep and

dairy properties. What was a farm of six hundred and forty acres, this is in the irrigation country but they had no irrigation then it was dry land. The farmer was offered a

market price for his land but he could keep two hundred acres if he so desired, leaving four hundred and forty acres being bought by the government for soldier settlement. Most people opted to do that most land owners so that they still had some land. With it came the added bonus that irrigation water would be available for them because they were putting in a big channels right through the area.

In 1951 we received one of those blocks which had to be paid for over a period of fifty years or something at a very low interest and it was there that we went. It was only with a few cows to begin with. We spent

about thirty five years in that area before leaving for here. Prior to that I should of said when we first got married we moved to Coolac which is not far from here in the old language about seventy miles and two of our children were born while we were there and the other five were born while we were at Numurkah.

I heard you talking about Numurkah, did you interview somebody there?

Do you remember the people?

Prisoners of war?

That’s interesting.

Yes and in a different way.

The Kokoda one to begin with was on a very steep mountain side with jiggered rocks

and if you fell you could hurt yourself badly. Plus the fact that the enemy was more difficult to see in some ways. The gap was about as wide as from here to that table in many parts and of course if he hid on the other side it was difficult. It was also difficult on the other one but the big difference was

you were fighting on flat country, on the beach heads. It was not by any means better because it there were swamps and it rained and rained and it was riddled with malaria and dengue fever, it had all the things that you don’t want plus the Japanese.

Having done both of them I think the worst conditions probably were in Gona, Buna and Sanananda beach heads and that was where the Japanese were at their worst, because they knew that was their last stand and they were going to fight to the end and fought hard.

In many ways it was. I think the Japanese were ashamed to go back to their country as vanquished, they wanted to be the winners for pride alone and that’s why they fought so tenaciously I think in the end. Even though they knew, they must have known the game was up.

It is very hard to compare the two because I think we might have lost more men on the Kokoda action, I’m not sure, that book tells us but both were very, very bad and its very hard to equate them but I’d say the conditions with the mosquitoes and the swamps that was worse

than the Kokoda Track.

Yes.

Yes.

We were desperate to win but we weren’t being so desperate being pushed back at Deniki.

Yes that was desperate.

Absolutely.

The most would be survival, either kill or be killed that would be the greatest motivation I would say.

Yes when it gets to that stage you would be, things that you would never dream of doing in a normal period.

Not that I did anything that was wickedly bad other than trying to defend myself. I can see that happening and getting to that stage.

No I don’t think so, I know no cruelty to the Japanese and I know of no

cruelty to the Germans I have never heard of anything like that. The reverse side is the prisoners of war tell us that the Cards were very, very cruel, not all, some always give others a bad name don’t they? No I never saw any evidence that Australian soldiers were cruel to anybody.

No there was no cruelty there, they were cruel to themselves but with their dead they just piled them up as barricades right on the beach so they could fight right to the last straw and used dead bodies as shields. The smell must have been awful,

whether they did it for their own skins for fear that they would be punished when they got home or whether they did it for the emperor I don’t know.

I would say that the Japanese were a better jungle fighter from what I saw, he had been trained in the jungle, in the jungles of Malaysia and I suppose the Philippines, that was where they had jungle training schools too. They were trained better but we adapted never the less, the Australian soldier adapted very quickly to become as good at that type of fighting as the Japanese soldiers did,

but not to begin with.

That’s right. The 53rd Militia Battalion was very, very unfortunate in the name that it got, it was there at the same time as we were.

They were very young untrained men who were virtually conscripted. They were taken with practically no notice and put on ships and sent over there with virtually no training and their officers were not properly trained either. We didn’t know they were even there

until after Isurava on our way out an officer told us. He addressed us and said, “Your name, the 39th Battalion, is ringing loud and wide throughout the Commonwealth of Australia, and they are singing your praises everywhere”, and he said, “Not so for the 53rd Battalion who has let us down very badly”. I wasn’t very happy about that comment,

because they were only young men, much younger than us and they were in the main and I think they were gripped by fear. There officers were not very well trained and they were not very good leaders apparently from what I can gather.

Again the high command back in Australia didn’t know what was going on

and they didn’t give a damn. They just let everything flow on, they would have know all about the 53rd Battalion and that is wasn’t going well, they should never have been there really.

I didn’t say that they did but that is what our officers told us,

we didn’t even know that they were there because they were fighting on a different flank, they were in a different area to where we were. It was a sad story actually about the 53rd Battalion and I feel very sorry for them. I don’t believe that they were cowards and that they deliberately let anybody down. They were more or less like the press gang of England when they use to just go on the streets and take

people and put people on the ships, they were like that, they went with no training what so ever.

We seemed to adapt better and I don’t know way, I think there was a little bit more maturity of age. There were some in the 39th Battalion that were very young but there were also older and the older ones were able to

influence and guide and set an example to the younger ones. Where as the 53rd to my understanding were comprised of very young people.

Yes I remember that name.

Yes.

Yes. Because they take you in the war up to forty five years of age, you were accepted as long as you were medically fit

up to forty five years of age was an acceptable age.

Yes I think when it came and the pressure was on they’d just say, “Keep your cool”, and they’d calm you down in a sort of a way that only

a more mature person can do. It may not be actual words I might be by just example or some of the influence they can use on you.

Yes, or older brother to younger brother or something like that.

It was the sort of a war I think our Kokoda Track lasted around about seven weeks I think, but that is not the sort of a war that could go on any longer. If you weren’t ruined by warfare by bullets you would be ruined by physical health conditions. In those places you fight the elements as much as you do the enemy

so you are fighting two wars. I suppose that is common of the desert too, you are fighting the sand and the heat as well as the enemy. With the 53rd Battalion I can only tell you what I have read about them because I never came in contact with any of them over there

although they were there at the same time. They went around on a different flank, they fought on a different flank to the actual trail they found another way that you could get around and that’s where the 53rd were doing their fighting. I’ve heard stories of how they ran and they did some might call it cowards but I would call it

youth, being far too youthful. Not mature enough in anyway to be able to be pushed into a position that they were, I think that applied to their officers too.

Yes

they were, and I think they planned everything very well. Getting away from New Guinea for a moment, Singapore was suppose to be an impenetrable fortress and nobody could ever take Singapore, so we were told, but the Japanese proved that they were wrong.

They used a different tactic to the others to what was ever thought of so yes they were very professional, very ruthless and in many cases very cruel, but certainly professional.

Yes.

I wasn’t able to go

because I was dairy farming at the time and also it was going to be too costly. A party of the 39th Battalion at the invitation of our former foe, the very ones that we fought against.

General Horii was the commander, they had different names but I talked to those that went over there and of course they couldn’t speak one another’s language but they had a translator and they said that they were treated wonderfully well by the Japanese.

General Horii he himself drowned trying at Buna trying to cross a flooded river on a horse.

He and the horse both drowned and he was their commander, it was somewhere near Gona or Buna where that happened.

Yes I did speak to our own people, they said it was a very, very friendly gathering

and it was as though they had never been at war. They exchanged pleasantries and dined together, they ate Japanese food of course. They said that it was a very, very pleasant experience and one that they never regretted doing.

That war was folly,

if the word love was used and practiced there would never be war, because you’d come to an agreement where it would never get to that stage. Wars have been going from time in the morel haven’t they?

From year one and before that. Way back in history there is war after war after war and some wars went for a hundred years, they have achieved nothing.

I think they are quite a good race of people,

as I said earlier given any nationality, their head and let them be what they like and the animal can come out in them, not more so in the Japanese as in any other. I think they are quite a good race of people who were lead into that war by militarists.

I think I know why the militarists did it because they were short of commodities, they have very good inventive brains and they are very clever but they had no raw materials. So they tried to get the territories that had them and Australia was one such as our steel and other countries for their oil.

It’s not the first time that somebody has tried that one. I think any nation under the sun or whatever their leaders who lead them into things not the people themselves.

No I think that it was the turning point that saved Australia from occupation by the Japanese, I think people see that for what it was. Many people didn’t know many things about the Kokoda Trail but now they do know

a lot about it and they have been taught a lot at the schools the younger people. When we have our Anzac Day services it’s surprising how many young people are coming to them not to glorify war but to remember the things that have been done. I think

they see that in much the same way as the older generation did about Gallipoli, not on the same par generation wise. One generation saw Gallipoli as a big sacrifice that the Australian soldiers made for their country the younger generation see Kokoda much

the same. Is this the same sort of story that you have got from some of the other blokes from the 39th Battalion that you have interviewed?

Yes.

And that also depends on the questions that you ask too?

I think it matured me quite a bit. I didn’t hold any grudge

or any anger against the Japanese, not even the ones who we were in close contact with during the war. No I didn’t hold any grudge or anger against them. As I said earlier they were fighting for a cause that they believed to be right but we were fighting for one that we believed to be right.

I cant see how anger or revenge or anything like that can help in anyway. In fact it only does more damage to the person who might even think of having some revenge. There is an old saying, “The hater is always more unhappy than the hated”.

After I did for some time and finally it went. I think when men came back and continued to lead

a lonely life and live on his own and not get married or do anything like that then I think he broods a lot about it. Once you get married you have responsibilities and then when children come along you have other things to think about so you have got to get it out of your mind and eventually you do. That is the way

that I have experienced it.

No I don’t say they are my strongest memories I think of my childhood memories were strong in my memory and things have happened during the Depression yes, so they are my strongest memories I think,

I remember them more vividly than I do the war years. I don’t say that they aren’t strong they are strong and vivid.

Yes my war memories but so are my childhood memories and I prefer to think about them than I do about the other one.

If you allow it to take its course the war years would be.

Yes you have to suppress in favour of the other ones and my married years with fifty six years of marriage is no mean feat is it?

No, you will get me into trouble.

Yes.

Pretty open but we weren’t together we were in different sections so sometimes something might happen to somebody I don’t see, people who happened to be with me were not with me at that time. We do see one another regularly but we don’t discuss the war we just discuss modern day things and things since the war.

We might talk about some particular character during the war who was a bit humorous or something like that. I will tell you who was in the 39th and I knew him there, you might remember him he was a comedian here

Syd Heylen he was a comedian and he was on channel nine and on various shows and he was always a funny man there. He was one of those people who always kept the morale up, he was never sad, always humorous. That is the type of person that you need, in tense situations

you have got to have somebody like that, somebody who is able to smile himself and make you smile.

Yes when they got old enough to be interested I did. Most haven’t read that book because it is very heavy for them

and it’s even very heavy reading for even the adult layman who doesn’t know the area so it’s very heavy reading, great for those that have been there.

One asked me the other night, “How close were you in actual combat with

hand to hand fight?” Well I think I’ve actually answered that question for you. I didn’t actually do hand to hand combat but was close to it. The man who wrote that book was incidentally a member of our battalion. There are two other good books and one is “Those Ragged Bloody Heroes”,

and that was supposed to be us. We were ragged, whether we were heroes is for somebody else to judge, but we certain were ragged. Because we were wearing the same shirt and shorts for about seven weeks and our feet were rotting off our feet. There is another one that he’s printed and it’s about New Guinea. There is a funny thing here when I went to the library

the other day I saw this book there on the shelf and there was a lady along side of me and she would have been in her forties and she was unknown to me. I said, “I would like to order that book up there when it’s available please”, and I said, “That big one, it’s got the name on the back of it there”. And he said, “What’s the name of it?” And I said, “I can’t tell you because the lady along side of me”,

and she heard me and she answered for me and she said, “That Bastard Of A Place”. That’s the name of the book written by Peter Broom, it’s about New Guinea. It was very accurately titled because that is exactly what it is and she answered for me.

Yes.

That’s a war.

I think that was probably the dirtiest war of all, the dropping of napalm

was an absolute disgrace and burning all those innocent people. That was when they claimed that there was a communist sleeping under every bed. But that seems to have disappeared, the communist threat,

if it ever was a threat. They had their ideology and that is what I completely disagree with, but whether they were a threat to the western world I have great doubts about.

That was during the war years or soon after wasn’t it?

That was lost that referendum, the belief of those who voted against banning them was that if they were banned they would do more harm underground than they would out in the open. It’s a little bit like

the head of McDonalds in Australia being appointed to the Diabetes Foundation, now there is much objection to that because many are saying, “Why promote to people who are creating the big bellies on children with their food than they did to the diabetes board?” But you are not going to stop the children going there,

so why not have him on your side providing more nutritious foods than they are now? That’s not quite related, but something to the communist one if you can see what a potential enemy is doing it’s better than not being about to see what he is doing.

You must have been very young when that referendum came out, you wouldn’t have been round.

But you have heard about it no doubt.

In many ways we live in a better world since the war as far as electrical appliances and all sorts of things are concerned but I don’t say that we live in a happier one. Even though our parents and our ancestors

generally had to work hard and tough I think they might have been in many ways happier and I thank God for such a long existence.